Revisiting Molly's Lovers

Revisiting Molly’s Lovers Luca Crispi James Joyce Quarterly, Volume 51, Number 2-3, Winter-Spring 2014, pp. 489-493 (Article) Published by The University of Tulsa DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jjq.2014.0010 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/628344 Access provided by University College Dublin (1 Jan 2018 20:52 GMT) NOTES Revisiting Molly’s Lovers Luca Crispi University College Dublin O ne of the most intriguing new manuscripts that the National Library of Ireland acquired as part of its “Joyce Papers 2002” collection is an early proto-draft of “Ithaca” (NLI MS 36,639/13).1 It is a fascinating snapshot of Joyce’s conception of the episode in mid-1921, about six months before Ulysses was published.2 While the discovery of this very basic version of “Ithaca” will certainly prompt many other critical debates in the years to come, I want to focus on the seemingly straightforward question that suddenly appears without any logical or narrative connection to the text blocks around it: “He [Bloom] smiled?” This very basic question and answer lead to what Hugh Kenner has called “the most famous list in Ulysses” (U 17.2132-42).3 Prompted by the note “Boylan thinks he’s the first,”4 Joyce wrote this initial version of the answer: “It amused him that each man fancied himself the first to enter the breach whereas he was the last of a series. . . .” Based on the final tally of Molly’s twenty-five alleged lovers in Ulysses, Kenner writes that she was “long regarded as a hardened adulteress, a misconception which deprives Bloomsday of its special tang. Its conceptions were nearly forty years being challenged” (142). He then makes his own list of gallant men who have worked doggedly since at least 1959 to vindicate Molly’s reputation—Richard Ellmann, Robert M. Adams, and David Hayman5—and concludes: “No, this is a list of past occasions for twinges of Bloomian jealousy, and there is no ground for supposing that the hospitality of Molly’s bed has been extended to anyone but her husband and Boylan” (144 n1, 143). As the answer continues, Joyce adumbrates an illuminating initial list of Molly’s purported lovers on the NLI proto-draft that supports Kenner’s observations and provides more ample ground for understanding the context of the “Bloomian jealousy” that some readers recognize when confronted by the indecorous catalog in Ulysses. It reads: “through Penrose, —— —— —— —— Bloom, Holohan, Bodkin, Mulvey —— —— —— ——.” This is little more than a conceptual note that Joyce must have elaborated on in one or more missing manuscripts before the question and answer next appear on the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript.6 It is telling that, already at this stage, Joyce names Penrose first in the series, especially since both James Joyce Quarterly, Volume 51, Number 2-3 (Winter-Spring 2014), pp. 489-497. Copyright © for the JJQ, University of Tulsa, 2016. All rights to reproduction in any 489 form are reserved. James Joyce Quarterly 51.2-3 2014 Leopold and Molly make it clear that the weak-eyed young man did little more than catch a momentary glimpse of her as she emerged half-dressed from the bath (U 8.177-79, 18.572-75). From the start, the list’s trajectory suggests that it was never intended as an accurate enumeration of Molly’s lovers, few as they actually are. The list’s unreliability is confirmed by the fact that Penrose’s name is followed by four long dashes that are typical of Joyce’s writing practices at particularly early stages of composition. They are merely reminders to fill in more names in a subsequent manuscript. Conversely, it is surprising that Bloom’s name appears next, since he is excluded from the list in all the subsequent versions and most obviously in Ulysses. He is the one member of the series who does not need to be listed. Furthermore, while it seems clear why Lieutenant Stanley Gardner’s name does not appear on the list—the narrator knows that Bloom does not know about him—Blazes Boylan’s name is noticeably absent from the accounting at this stage; this is especially puzzling since a note about him was probably the impetus for the entire question-and-answer sequence. Joyce continues the provisional collection of lovers with “Holohan” and “Bodkin,” neither of whom are included in the final version of the list, and these names take the list in a decidedly unexpected direction. Although they are simply placeholders at this stage (and not much different from the dashes, since they too make their unnoticed exits before the litany of men appears in Ulysses), they clarify Joyce’s ideas about the list in a way that is not evident in any other version of the text in manuscript or print. Presumably the first man is Hoppy Holohan who is a recurring character in Dubliners and even has a bit part in Ulysses. On the one hand, his name in this context might suggest that Joyce had already determined that the list would include a few unlikely Dubliners on whom the narrator wants to cast spurious suspicions that serve to impeach Molly’s past. On the other, there is also “a gentleman named Holohan” (SL 158) who was a minor figure in Nora Barnacle’s life in Dublin as well, and since the following two names are also closely tied to Nora, it seems clear that Joyce probably had this person in mind when he compiled the early version of the list of Molly’s lovers. While we may never know anything more about the context of these events, Joyce mentions Holohan in a crucial 7 August 1909 letter from Dublin that he wrote to Nora, who had remained in Trieste with their children: Is Georgie my son? The first night I slept with you in Zurich was October 11th and he was born July 27th. That is nine months and 16 days. I remember that there was very little blood that night. Were you fucked by anyone before you came to me? You told me that a gentleman named Holohan (a good Catholic, of course, who makes his Easter duty regularly) wanted to fuck you when you were in that hotel, using what they call 490 a “French letter.[”] Did he do so? Or did you allow him only to fondle you and feel you with his hands? (SL 158) With this biographical context in mind, it would be difficult to think of a more revealing name for Joyce to use (even as a placeholder) in the prototype list of men accused of intimacy with Molly. Like many names on the list in Ulysses, Holohan was simply someone “who wanted to fuck” Nora (my italics); the rest are all presumably products of Joycean jealousy. Then the name Bodkin also connects the list with the story of one of Nora’s first boyfriends. Much of what we know of him comes from a transcription of the recollections of Molly’s “closest friend in Galway,” Mary O’Holleran, that Ellmann records in his biography: Nora knew another boy whom she was very fond of his name was Michael (Sonny) Bodkin he was going to the University College here he was a very handsome young man with a beautiful head of black wavy hair he was a great admirer of Nora but she was too young and afraid to be seen with the boys. (JJII 158) In a further biographical twist to the many ways in which Joyce creates the characters in his fiction, Ellmann also notes that Nora told her sister that she was attracted to Joyce “because he resembled Sonny Bodkin” (JJII 243). As is well known, this is the same Michael Bodkin who served in part as the inspiration for Michael Furey in “The Dead.” To fill out the pair of Nora’s Galway lovers, Joyce also included Harry Mulvey, who plays the part of Molly Tweedy’s first lover in Gibraltar,7 but, as we learn in “Penelope,” they never shared a bed: “how did we finish it off yes O yes I pulled him off into my handkerchief pretending not to be excited but I opened my legs I wouldnt let him touch me inside my petticoat because I had a skirt opening up the side I tormented the life out of him” (U 18.809-12). The name is followed by another series of four dashes, thereby indicating that Joyce wanted the series to proceed “and so each and so on to no last term” (U 17.2141-42). The answer to this provocative question becomes much more elaborate, hypothetical, and abstract in the Rosenbach manuscript. By that stage, all the original suitors were dropped, except Penrose who still leads the charge, and the number of Molly’s lovers has reached a staggering two dozen, ranging from the generic “unknown gentleman in the Gaiety Theatre” to the much more troubling “Blazes” Boylan (U 17.2137-38). Joyce must have compiled this unlikely cortege as he revised one or more missing manuscripts, but, once it appears on the Rosenbach manuscript, the list remains virtually unchanged until the publication of Ulysses. The most notable difference between the early version and the one in 491 James Joyce Quarterly 51.2-3 2014 Ulysses is that Joyce christened Boylan “Edward” in the Rosenbach “Ithaca” manuscript, and that remained his proper name for the next six months. He only became the “Hugh” we know in Ulysses in the episode’s first proof level,8 and, at that time, Joyce finally gave him his middle initial “E.” (possibly to maintain an oblique trace of the Edward that he had removed) after he had revised the episode’s third and final proof levels at the end of January 1922 (U 17.2141). There is no manuscript record of this final change, which indicates that Joyce must have sent a note or telephoned the printers to ensure that the precise addition was made. So much for the other names that he only acquired just days before Ulysses appeared: he is always “Blazes Boylan” to the Dubliners in Ulysses. This is an exemplary instance of the generally unstable nature of characters’ names (and often their identities) in the book. NOTES 1 All references in this essay to the "Ithaca" proto-draft are to NLI MS 36,639/13, p. [11r]. The “Joyce Papers 2002” are entitled NLI MSS 36,639/01-19. Peter Kenny prepared an initial catalog of all the collection that is available on the National Library of Ireland’s website, and, copyright permitting, high-resolution scans of this manuscript can also be accessed on the Library’s website catalogue; see <http://catalogue.nli.ie/Record/ vtls000357810#page/1/mode/1up>. Joyce compiled this “Ithaca” manuscript as he continued to write “Penelope” and was beginning the long and arduous process of revising the various typescripts and first printers’ proofs for the earlier episodes of the novel. The NLI “Ithaca” proto-draft is a relatively unusual manuscript in that it consists of integral, but non-sequential, question-and-answer text blocks (hence it is not yet a draft of the episode). Although Joyce had already conceived the “mathematical catechism” style of the episode before he began gathering the texts in this manuscript (SL 278), this is not a cohesive text as we know it from any subsequent version of the episode. He was clearly not concerned with establishing the narrative line at this stage. Presumably, he was confident that he could rearrange the material to suit the episode’s limited action later. Instead, it seems that this manuscript served as an intermediary repository of previously written and new material from which he subsequently harvested question-and-answer text blocks as he wrote the following manuscripts of the episode. In this regard, it is closer to an extradraft storehouse of texts such as Joyce later used to write some segments of Finnegans Wake. A contextualized version of this note appears in my Joyce’s Creative Process and the Construction of Characters in “Ulysses”: Becoming the Blooms (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2015), pp. 264-66. 2 The first mention of “Ithaca” once Joyce arrived in Paris is in his 24 November 1920 letter to John Quinn: “I must have a few months’ leisure after January to write the Ithaca and Penelope episodes which, however, have been sketched since 1916 and are very short in comparison with the Circe episode” 492 (LettersIII 31). For further information about the genesis of “Ithaca,” see the following letters from Joyce to Harriet Shaw Weaver: “I have almost finished the first part and have written out part of the middle and end. I hope to finish it [Ulysses] in 1918” (10 October 1916, LettersII 387), and “A great part of the nostos or close was written several years ago and the style is quite plain. The whole book, I hope (if I can return to Trieste provisionally or temporarily in October) will be finished about December after which I shall sleep for six months” (12 July 1920, SL 266). 3 Hugh Kenner, “Ulysses,” rev. ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987), p. 142. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text. 4 British Library ADD MS 49975, f. 24v, and see JJA 12:74. Also see Phillip F. Herring, ed., Joyce’s “Ulysses” Notesheets in the British Museum (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1972), p. 422. This is Herring’s “Ithaca” notesheet 2, entry 59. 5 See JJI 388; Robert M. Adams, Surface and Symbol: The Consistency of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1962), p. 37; and David Hayman, “The Empirical Molly,” Approaches to “Ulysses”: Ten Essays, ed. Thomas F. Staley and Bernard Benstock (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1970), pp. 113-14. 6 See the color photo-facsimile reproduction of this manuscript page in “Ulysses”: A Facsimile of the Manuscript, intro. Harry Levin, preface Clive Driver, vols. 1-3 (New York: Faber and Faber, with the Philip H. & A. S. W. Rosenbach Foundation, 1974), Rosenbach “Ithaca” Blue MS, 2:27. 7 Joyce based some aspects of Molly’s relationship with Harry Mulvey on Nora Barnacle’s early romance with William Mulvagh in Galway—see JJI 164-65 and JJII 158-59—but altered and transformed the elements he needed for his fiction. 8 This manuscript is the Ulysses Placard III-12.i, which Joyce emended in mid-to-late December 1921; see JJA 21:125. Limping in Edenville Patrizia Grimaldi-Pizzorno Universita Degli Studi di Siena W hy is Gerty MacDowell lame? One might at first suggest that the solution to the riddle of Gerty (“But who was Gerty?”—U 13.78) can be found in Dante Alighieri’s Purgatorio, Canto XIX, where an ugly woman with deformed feet, who symbolizes the sins of the flesh, appears to Dante in a dream.1 The woman is both lame and maimed, defective in speech and vision and sickly pale, but she is progressively transformed into an apparently beautiful and seductive singing siren by the dreamer’s gaze.2 Yet Gerty is not merely a "femmina balba . . . e sovra i piè distorta."3 The persona of Dante’s siren who led mariners astray in mid-sea and turned Ulysses from his destination by her song is no conclusive solution to the riddle.4 And Gerty does not sing but, like a cancan dancer, exposes herself when she leans 493