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Joyce and Company
CONTINUUM LITERARY STUDIES SERIES
Also available in the series:

Character and Satire in Postwar Fiction by Ian Gregson
Fictions of Globalization by James Annesley
Masculinity in Fiction and Film by Brian Baker
Women's Fiction 1945-2000 by Deborah Philips
Forthcoming titles:
Beckett's Books by Matthew Feldman
English Fiction in the 1930s by Chris Hopkins
Novels of the Contemporary Extreme edited by Alain-Phillipe Durand and
Naomi Mandel
Re-writing London by Lawrence Phillips
Joyce and
Company
David Pierce
Ai continuum
• •V LONDON • NEWY O R K
Continuum
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX
80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704, New York, NY 10038
www.continuumbooks.com
© David Pierce 2006
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system,
without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 0-8264-9089-1 (hardback)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Typeset by Fakenham Photosetting Limited, Fakenham, Norfolk

Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Abbreviations vii
Introduction 1
Part I Joyce and History 17
1 Joyce, Sterne and the Eighteenth Century 19
2 Joyce, Erudition and the Late Nineteenth Century 38
Part II Joyce and the City 55
3 Reading Dublin 1904 57
4 Joyce, Woolf and the Metropolitan Imagination 83
Part III Joyce and Language 101
5 The Issue of Translation 103
6 Joyce's Use of Language in 'Sirens' 116
Part IV Joyce and the Contemporary World 135
7 On Reading Ulysses After the Fall of the Berlin Wall 137
8 Joyce and Contemporary Irish Writing 149
Notes 159
Select Bibliography 163
Index 172
Acknowledgements
1 would like to thank the James Joyce reading group at the University
of Leeds for their unwitting help with several lines of argument in this
book. This is also the place to record a special debt of gratitude to
Alistair Stead and John Smurthwaite for their careful reading of several
chapters. Ursula Zeller and Ruth Frehner at the James Joyce Foundation
in Zurich also kindly commented on Chapter 6, and Peter de Voogd,
Katie Wales and Wolfgang Wight did the same for Chapters 1, 5 and
7 respectively. Rosa Gonzalez helped me out with some of the Spanish
translations. My chief debt as ever is to my partner Mary Eagleton, who
ensured that every sentence counted. This is also the place to thank
Anna Sandeman and her team at Continuum for their courtesy, care and
attention. It's been a pleasure working with them all.
Various chapters in this book arose from invitations to conferences
and special issues of journals and I would like to thank the conference
organizers, editors and publishers for permission to make use of the
same here. In particular, Franca Ruggieri should be thanked for Chapter
2 which appeared as 'Joyce, Erudition and Thomas Arnold's A Manual of
English Literature in Joyce Studies in Italy 8: Joyce and the Nineteenth Century
(ed. Franca Ruggieri) (Roma: Bulzoni, 2005). Aversion of this chapter
was read at the University of Rome in May 2005 in honour of Giorgio
Melchiori. Chapter 3 'Reading Dublin 1904' is an extensively revised
essay which began as 'Wandering Rocks' in James Joyce's 'Wandering Rocks'
(eds Steven Morrison and Andrew Gibson) (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002).
I gave a version of Chapter 5 'The Issue of Translation' as a paper at the
James Joyce International Conference held at Tulsa, Oklahoma in June
2003, which was subsequently published in the fortieth anniversary issue
of the James Joyce Quarterly (2005). Aversion of Chapter 6 appeared as 'On
Local Disturbances: Reflections on Joyce's Use of Language in "Sirens'"
in ABEI: The Brazilian Journal of Irish Studies No 7 (2005). Chapter 7 is an
extensive revision of an essay written in 1996 entitled 'Lektiire des Ulysses
nach dem Fall der Berliner Mauere' (trans Jorg Rademacher) in Jorg
Rademacher (ed.), Was Nun, Herr Bloom? Ulysses zum 75. Geburtstag Ein
Almanack (Miinster: Daedalus, 1996).
Abbreviations
D James Joyce, 'Dubliners': Text, Criticism, and Notes, (eds Robert

Scholes and A. Walton Litz) (New York: Viking, 1979).
FW James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber and Faber, 1964).
Page number is given first, followed by line number.
P James Joyce, 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Text, Criticism,
and Notes (ed. Chester Anderson) (New York: Viking, 1968).
U James Joyce, Ulysses: The Corrected Text (ed. Hans Walter Gabler with
Wolfhard Steppe and Glaus Melchior) (London: The Bodley Head,
1986). Chapter number is followed by line number.
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction
The Company of Joyce
First encounters with the work of James Joyce rarely issue in wild enthu-
siasm. In fiction surveys, Ulysses invariably comes in the top ten of great
English novels. He is on everyone's list of 'must read', but then comes
a slight doubt, for his books are often picked up and as quickly put
down again. The pages of the early editions of Ulysses, published by
Shakespeare and Company in Paris in the 1920s, had to be cut before
they could be read. Although he was an early champion of the novel,
W.B. Yeats's copy remained uncut after page 433, a sign of an initial
interest waning. I first came across Joyce as a teenager at a Roman
Catholic seminary when what he had to say in A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man was just a little close for comfort. Like Joyce, I too inscribed
A.M.D.G. (Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam, for the greater glory of God) at the
top of every assignment. The magnum silentium, the great silence between
night prayers and morning Mass, ended and began each day, as it did for
Joyce at his Jesuit boarding school at Clongowes Wood in County Kildare.
The Four Last Things (death, judgement, hell and heaven) dominated
our three-day annual retreat. The retreats tended to be given by suitably
austere English Jesuits, who would regale us with dramatic stories about
when they were padres to the forces in the Second World War and how
they would hear what transpired were last confessions of Battle of Britain
pilots. Duty, silence, obedience and behind it all fear and contact with
powerful personalities and the eternal verities. A country apart, I grew
up effectively in the same world as Joyce had done in Victorian Ireland,
and, like Joyce, I was a model pupil, devout and devoted, scholarly, with
a strong interest in sport.
It was an education away from others in the peace of the Sussex
weald. Like the neophytes we were - and I still find it hard not to write
'we', although I have lost touch with all my contemporaries - we learnt
the Church's music under the guidance of a spluttering Irish priest Fr
Desmond Coffey, who, we had no reason to doubt, was the leading inter-
national expert on Gregorian plainchant after the Benedictine monks
at Solesmes Abbey in France and Quarr Abbey on the Isle of Wight. We
attended no meetings of the Sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary, as Joyce
did on Saturday mornings, but every evening amid the Chapel's dying
light, we quietly sang the sweetest of all hymns to the Mother of mercy:
2 Joyce and Company
Salve Regina, Mater misericordiae,

Vita dulcedo et spes nostra salve.
Ad te damamus exsulesfilii Hevae.
Ad te, suspiramus gementes e.t jlenles,
in hoc lacrimarum valle.
(Hail holy Queen, Mother of mercy,
Hail our life, our sweetness and our hope.
To you do we cry poor banished children of Eve.
To you do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of
tears.)
Like Joyce, I too accepted I did not belong to this world, banished like all the
other children of Eve, in exile from our true home. We looked forward to
a world without end, filled our minds with the medieval devotional manual
The Imitation of Christ, spoke in awe of the nineteenth-century French ascetic
priest Jean Vianney, the Cure of Ars, and never stopped examining our
conscience and reciting the rosary. We wondered who was the greatest
intellect the world had ever produced, which of our teachers was the holiest,
or, more irreverently, why an Arsenal supporter had been appointed Rector,
and whether Scottish whisky or Irish whiskey was the cause of the Bishop
of Southwark's shortness of breath. Unlike Joyce, throughout my teenage
years I was never home to enjoy Christmas dinner with my family, but we
made up for it with a twelve-course, three-hour meal - a la Romana as we
thought. Every year, the Rector, lumbering into the Oratory with his squeaky
new shoes and an air of distraction, would take care to insist that our real
family was the College, a remark guaranteed to set us thinking about natural
justice and the limits of the Church's authority. As Joyce discovered, periods
of dryness followed periods of holiness, and, no matter how strong the
determination not to fall from grace, one could never be sure about the
future when it came to the spiritual life. 'The spirit is willing but the flesh
is weak'; 'there but for the grace of God go F - such expressions were a
constant accompaniment for every Catholic boy who imagined he had a
vocation to the priesthood or thought he was special. The empty chair at
breakfast often as not was a sign that we had lost another of our contem-
poraries, never to be heard of again, cast into the outer darkness before he
could entice any of us to drop our commitment to otherworldly pursuits.
When Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait feels he is flying too high spiritually,
he seeks out the smell of dung and tar or 'the odours of his own person'
(P151). Conversely, in Bella Cohen's brothel, the thought pricks him in his
drunken stupor that 'Spirit is willing but the flesh is weak' ((715:2531).
Each new academic year promised much. Freshly polished corridors,
the familiar made familiar again, and a step up to a new class. For names
of year-groups, we employed not 'lower' and 'third lines' as is the case in
A Portrait but a fully fledged conceptual matrix culminating in rhetoric:
Elements, Lower and Upper Rudiments, Grammar, Syntax, Poetry and
Introduction 3
Rhetoric. It was a period of waiting, the years spent in queues outside

the refectory, the classroom, the 'Jakes' (as we called the toilets), or the
dormitory. We were called but not yet chosen; hence for now we must
wait in line, with every expectation that one day we would get to work in
the harvest for then the harvest would be ours. Spes messis in semine, the
hope of the harvest is in the seed, was the College motto, but the only
joke we ever cracked about seeds concerned King Solomon who, with
all his wives, never lost any. The innocents that we were, we never ever
connected semine with seminary in that sense. An ejaculation was simply
a prayer. Hope, however, didn't always sustain me. My worst year was
1962-3, and in particular the period after Christmas, when, the snow
slow to clear, I felt every day like a week, every week like a month. I had
no appetite for study, for friends, or for any joint activity, and nothing
could shake me out of Coleridge's 'viper thoughts', a mood which, on
reflection, must have been a form of teenage depression. It was the same
winter in a flat in London, an hour away, that Sylvia Plath committed
suicide. So much for the swinging sixties.
The honesty of A Portrait always impressed me. Ibsen's honesty is
that of a miner, undermining bourgeois life. Joyce's is riskier for it
is closer to the record of the self. Such writing courts sentimentality if
not properly handled. It also invites the typical patronizing attitude of
those who control a society's literary and cultural outlets but, against his
scoffing contemporaries, the conscience-driven Joyce pitted himself and
his experience of the world. Drawing a line is what I did once I realized
I was not among the chosen, but Joyce was braver, re-entering his
childhood and youth as if they could be rescued from the Church. The
authenticity of some of his experiences, however, I never quite accepted.
I don't believe Stephen or Joyce would have gone with a prostitute in
his early teens. Never during my teenage years did I entertain visiting
prostitutes or red-light areas. Perhaps Joyce was more street-wise living in
metropolitan Dublin in a lower-middle-class family which was financially
on the way down. Prostitutes I still imagined wore a chain round their
ankle and, unlike the 'Monto' district in Dublin, there were no known
red-light areas in my perfectly sealed provincial world. But going with a
prostitute would threaten the sanctity of the self and risk external reality
overwhelming the carefully constructed interior scene. Voyeurism and
masturbation were the conventional recourse for the young Catholic
boy, books, magazines or in my case films. Most of my confessions were
fairly banal where sins against charity or of omission could be admitted
almost with a sense of achievement, but when I had done something I
was ashamed of, as when on holiday going to see an Ingmar Bergman
film about flagellation (which I thought might include naked women),
I would try and ensure the priest was someone who wouldn't recognize
me. Once shriven, I would proceed to negotiate with as much good grace
as I could muster the transition from confessional to pew.
4 Joyce and Company
The classical writers imagined errare est humanum, to err is human, but
Joyce was wiser. To fall is human, and Joyce, like Dostoyevsky, is a writer
for those who have fallen, a writer who never stops writing about falling
and the fall. In Joyce's first printed story 'The Sisters', the scrupulous
priest drops the chalice, a sign of his fallen state and taken as an omen
by his sisters. Like Lucifer and Icarus, Stephen Dedalus, usurped of
his inheritance and his future, returns unexpectedly from Paris and
continues on a downward course in Ulysses until, knocked to the ground
in a brothel, he is temporarily rescued by the modern-day Odysseus,
the fallen hero Leopold Bloom. With the whole of human history for
a canvas, Humpty Dumpty's fall from the wall at the beginning of
Finnegans Wake occurs at the moment the first of the thunder words
erupts. It is a God-like, meaning-defying word that captures something
of the plight of humanity after the collapse of the Tower of Babel, a
plight that begins with the childlike rumble of a consonant and a vowel
and that ends with an exclamation mark, and all enclosed within a
bracket. The bracket is itself inserted into a humorous story about the
fall of a 'wallstraight oldparr', old Parr being the celebrated centenarian
Thomas Parr (1483-1635) who was apparently charged at the age of 100
with being unfaithful to his wife and forced to do penance in front of his
parish church in Shropshire:
(bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthun-
ntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!) (FW3:15-6)
Through language and alcohol, Joyce imagined he could 'psoak-
oonaloose' himself any time he felt so inclined (7W522:34), but I wasn't
ready in my teenage years for the fallen, apostate writer to undertake
any psychoanalysis on me. I recoiled from seeing the world I believed in
scrutinized in such a detached and, I considered, profane way. Here was
someone attempting to come between my soul and my creator, and Joyce
was company I could do without. So I left Joyce on one side and read
other writers who allowed me space to enter the world on my own terms.
Only much later, after university, did I return to the author who died six
years before I was born. It took me a considerable time to catch up with
him, and by that I mean write about him. What could I say about his work
that Joyce hadn't thought himself? How could I supplement his writing,
if to supplement was the role assigned to the critic? What could I bring
except my own similar background, which he had already captured so
brilliantly?
Displacement, not identity, this is what I get from Joyce. When I moved
away from the folds of the Church, the last thing I wanted was identity. I
abandoned black clothes, double-breasted blazers, detached collars, ties
and neatness, and ceased thinking of myself as special. Brought up on a
diet of Thomist philosophy, on a way of thinking which possessed little
currency in the modern world, I had no intellectual system or mentor I
Introduction 5
could turn to. As it was for Joyce at a similar age, Latin at that time was
my second language, but who wanted to read what I had composed in
a dead language about the difference between esse (being) and potentia
(potency), a distinction that had absorbed Aristotle and Aquinas but
virtually no-one else since? Who wanted to spend any time reflecting
on the Latin adage ex nihilo nihilfit, how out of nothing nothing comes?
What was nothing when you could have everything? To combine two
quotations from T.S. Eliot and Yeats, After such knowledge, not what
forgiveness, but, the more insistent, what then? I would have liked to
have been forgiven for taking the wrong path, but I looked in vain
for someone to bless me or wish me God speed as I lit out for the new
territory. Displacement could have issued in despair, but it didn't. I sold
my trunk-load of theology books in Brighton for the paltry sum of £20,
and took to reading in modern literature to catch up on what I had
missed and to put space between an outdated philosophy and what I
assumed was a hostile new environment. When I went up to university,
the course that influenced me the most was Adrian Cunningham's
'Nineteenth-Century Religious and Atheistic Thought'.
When Joyce departed with Nora for the continent in October 1904,
he carried with him a storehouse of memories and a culture not entirely
defined by the Church. Like William Wordsworth, Joyce is one of the
great writers of memory. In one sense, memory in Joyce is all 'memem-
ormee' (FW628:14), as he puts it in the tribute to his 'cold mad feary
father' in the closing moment of his last work. But in another sense it
is his means of salvation. Through memory, he could reconfigure or
come to terms with his displacement from home, country and Church.
Moreover, following John Henry Newman, through memory he could
provide an apologia pro vita sua, the necessary justification for his own
life. With Wordsworth, memory enables the poet to attain a higher form
of unity for the self; with Joyce, it is closer not so much to recuperation
of the self as to salvation, at once looser and more intense for more is
at stake. There is no steady focus or filter as there is in Wordsworth to
recover the past. Switching consciousness is a favourite device in Ulysses,
while in A Portrait Joyce is quite merciless in pursuit of the original
experience, beginning with a very young child's perception of the world:
'his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face' (P7). Here
the colon, a highly sophisticated punctuation mark in English, registers
precisely one of the earliest stepping-stones on the way to consciousness,
where two impressions for the child are brought into active relationship
by a single mark, one dot above another.
Memory is like a room which can be entered at will and with pleasure,
full of scattered thoughts, little notebooks and filing-systems, but all the
time in Joyce it is a discourse on displacement. I, now in Trieste, Rome,
Zurich or Paris, am no longer there in Bray, Drumcondra, Dublin, or
Clongowes Wood. This is what appeals to me in Joyce, the association of
6 Joyce and Company
memory with displacement, which is never better captured than in the

final scene in 'The Dead' when the Dublin journalist Gabriel Conroy
suddenly realizes the importance of a former lover for his Galway bride
Gretta. Given the overlap between my own background and Joyce's it
might be thought I would stress the concept of identity, but I tend to flee
in the opposite direction. I rarely feel at home in any discussion centred
on identity, which, for example, reads A Portrait as a story simply about a
Catholic boy growing up or which treats Ulysses as a discourse on modern
marriage and its difficulties. If Joyce is now company, it's not because I
walk in his footsteps but because I understand what propelled him to
think of himself - rather grandly as Shem puts it - as 'self exiled in upon
his ego' (FW184:6-7). Unlike Joyce, however, I had no wish to level with
anyone.
Outline
Joyce and Company is a collection of interwoven essays on Joyce in the

company of others. Conventional wisdom places him in his own company,
perhaps with classical Homer, or in the company of the great modernists
Eliot and Ezra Pound or among his fellow Irishmen such as Yeats and
Samuel Beckett. This book draws on a somewhat wider sense of company,
one that includes the eighteenth-century Yorkshire writer Laurence
Sterne and the contemporary Irish novelist Jamie O'Neill, author of At
Swim, Two Boys (2001), the weekly magazine Tit-Bits and Thomas Arnold's
A Manual of English Literature (1897), and the fiction of Alfred Doblin and
Virginia Woolf. In the company of others, Joyce assumes some of their
colouring, displays another side to his own achievement, and at the same
time reveals something of his vulnerability and his limitations.
In keeping with Joyce's own work, this study deliberately moves back
arid forth across several fields and historical periods. Joyce was an Irish
writer on the European stage, who took what he needed from popular
and highbrow culture to write himself into the history of the modern
world. It's not simply because he's perverse that Joyce names at some
point in Finnegans Wake perhaps all the rivers of the world, for, from the
Liffey to the Limmat, the Yssel in the Netherlands to the Seine, all belong
to the river of time and to the emergence of civilization along its banks.
'Yssel that the limmat?' (/<W198:13). Is that the Sihl or the Limmat, the
two rivers which flow through Zurich and which are sometimes confused
by visitors? Isn't that the limit! Indeed. His city is Dublin but his reach is
global. The first actual reference to Dublin as a placename in Finnegans
Wake, his book of 'Doublends Jined' (FW20:16), of double ends joined,
is to Dublin in the state of Georgia in North America.
The book is structured in eight chapters under four headings Joyce
and History', Joyce and the City', Joyce and Language' and Joyce
Introduction 7
and the Contemporary World'. In the first part, Joyce is placed in the
context of two historical periods, in Chapter 1, with touch in mind,
against the eighteenth century, and in Chapter 2, the late nineteenth
century alongside the idea of erudition. In the second part, 'Joyce and
the City', I examine in Chapter 3 the portrayal of Dublin in 1904 with
particular reference to the 'Wandering Rocks' episode of Ulysses, and in
Chapter 4 I bring together Joyce and Woolf under the umbrella of the
metropolitan imagination. Chapter 5, in the third part on Joyce and
Language', affords some general observations on the issue of translation,
Chapter 6, a detailed analysis of the Overture to the 'Sirens' episode of
Ulysses. The final part is devoted to Joyce and the Contemporary World'.
Chapter 7 explores the significance of Ulysses before and after the fall of
the Berlin Wall in 1989. Chapter 8 tackles the debts contemporary Irish
writers display to Joyce. Each of the chapters, while sharply focused on
particular concerns, contributes to the argument of the book as a whole,
that Joyce is best understood in the company of others.
The book opens with an exploration of touch and with the fascination
for transgression in Joyce and his eighteenth-century predecessor Sterne.
Not a little of the humour in their writings springs from the sense of
touch, for touching presented problems at once for the good Irish
Catholic boy and for the wayward Church of England married parson. In
Ulysses, Joyce attempts a pastiche of Sterne in 'Oxen of the Sun', making
reference to 'the little picture which I have so long worn, and so often
have told thee, Eliza, I would carry with me into my grave' (Sentimental
Journey, 3):
With these words he approached the goblet to his lips, took a complacent
draught of the cordial, slicked his hair and, opening his bosom, out
popped a locket that hung from a silk riband, that very picture which he
had cherished ever since her hand had wrote therein. . . . I declare, I was
never so touched in all my life. God, I thank thee, as the Author of my
days! (U 14:752-63)
The passage is not among the best things Joyce ever attempted. 'Author
of my days' sounds distinctly unlike the eighteenth-century author, while
'had wrote therein' is plain ugly, regardless of whether or not it is cast as
imitation. But there is enough of Sterne here to signal his importance
to Joyce as a carrier of English prose style. The allusion to 'opening his
bosom' recalls John Hamilton Mortimer's A Caricature Group (1767),
a lively portrait of Sterne amid his contemporaries, where a grinning
Sterne does indeed somewhat garishly bare his chest to reveal a heart-
shaped locket. The caricature also includes a toast of what looks like a
watered-down cordial being raised by Dr Thomas Arne to the celebrated
writer who, in whatever company he found himself, would insist on
showing a miniature of his lover Eliza Draper. For the mocking Joyce, this
leads quite naturally to 'touch': T was never so touched in all my life'.
8 Joyce and Company
When he began composing Finnegans Wake, Joyce, we know from a

conversation with Eugene Jolas had Sterne in mind, for the Wake too
was an attempt 'to build many planes of narrative with a single esthetic
purpose. Did you ever read Laurence Sterne?' (Jolas, 12). Whenever
Sterne is mentioned in Finnegans Wake, he is invariably in the company
of Jonathan Swift, most famously when he is linked with other Irish
writers in a list which invokes a tradition: 'your wildeshaweshow moves
swiftly sterneward' (FW 256:13-4). Equally, Joyce was the first person
to suggest what now seems obvious, that in the scheme of things Sterne
and Swift had been assigned the wrong surnames, for Swift is stern, and
Sterne is swift. Joyce and Sterne have been frequently linked in terms
of their radical contribution to a shared literary tradition especially in
the fields of modernism and postmodernism. In the company of Sterne,
Joyce reveals a way of writing which, when it first arrives on the scene,
looks strikingly new, but which in retrospect seems to belong to a longer
tradition of writing. Such writing then reminds us of something more
central, a tradition of experimental fiction, as Joyce's question to Jolas
perhaps implies, a tradition to which we might now add the names of
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Milan Kundera
and Salman Rushdie. When Viktor Shklovsky famously remarked that
Tristram Shandy is 'the most typical novel of world literature', the Russian
Formalist, his eye trained on formalist matters rather than on historical
frames, did Sterne a service but Joyce and Sterne a disservice, for Tristram
Shandy and Ulysses are indeed the most typical novels of world literature
(Shklovsky, 57).
The following chapter on Joyce and erudition is designed to address
the building-blocks in his intellectual formation. Joyce is a difficult writer
but there is no reason to exaggerate this for today's reader. In some areas
his erudition seems less like erudition and more like an acknowledgement
of his familiarity with popular culture and of his undergraduate exposure
to manuals of English literature. With the help of the weekly magazine
Tit-Bits and Thomas Arnold's A Manual of English Literature (1897), my
aim is to suggest how some of Joyce's erudition might be traced back to
certain late-nineteenth-century contexts which have been insufficiently
noticed. Tit-Bits, which was launched in 1881, was part of the general
education and culture in the Joyce household. All kinds of fragments
surfaced in its pages: curiosities of advertising, the danger of cold baths,
betting on a certainty, big swindles, the daily life of the Chinese Emperor,
comin' through the rye and what that phrase means, a candid confession,
eccentric customers, faults of great men, the infallibility of gas meters, how
to tell a man's character by his hands, what is love, matrimonial advice,
how a lady gets on the omnibus, practical joking in the Middle Ages,
quinine as a cause of insanity, why women look under the bed.1 Leopold
Bloom seems to step out of its pages, for Bloom is the advertising agent
curious about adverts, the married man anxious to see in 'Lestrygonians'
Introduction 9
a stylish woman getting up into a carriage outside the Grosvenor Hotel,

the common man who imagines he has a practical, scientific cast of mind
reflecting on things not dissimilar to the danger of cold baths, the infal-
libility of gas meters and why women look under the bed. Tit-Bits makes
its first appearance in Ulysses in the 'Calypso' episode when Bloom in the
'Jakes' notices 'Matcham's Masterstroke', a prize-winning story by Philip
Beaufoy. In the 'Circe' episode Beaufoy re-appears to accuse Bloom of
being a 'soapy sneak masquerading as a litterateur' (U 15:822-3). I begin
with the identity of Beaufoy and move on to consider Joyce the writer in
the company of a prize-winning litterateur.
If we take popular culture seriously, there are implications here for
a discussion of Joyce and erudition. Tit-Bits, which portrays a world in
fragments waiting to be re-assembled, constitutes a project unified by
fragments - precisely how we might describe a central strand of Joyce's
aesthetic project. In the second part of this chapter, another potential
source for Joyce's work is examined, this time within the more familiar
confines of an educated context or high-brow culture. Joyce's erudition
owes something to his English teachers both at school and university,
as becomes clear re-examining the neglected textbook of one of his
university professors, Thomas Arnold, the overlooked brother of the
English poet and critic and one-time close friend of Cardinal Newman.
In the space of some 650 pages, A Manual of English Literature (1897)
affords even today a readable survey of English literature from the
Anglo-Saxons to the late nineteenth century. Arnold's brief remarks
on Sterne are not only apt but must have found a ready response in his
pupil, who, too, would go on to write in Ulysses one of the great comic
novels in the language, a novel where plot is downplayed and character
emphasized, a novel which also displays in the monologues of Bloom
and Molly 'unexpected transitions and curious trains of thought': 'His
novel Tristram Shandy is like no other ever written; it has no interest of
plot or of incident; its merit and value lie, partly in the humour with
which the characters are drawn and contrasted, partly in that other kind
of humour which displays itself in unexpected transitions and curious
trains of thought' (Arnold, 419-20).
Exploring Joyce in the company of Arnold reveals a writer who not
only responded directly to the texts in the culture but who also took
account of how those texts were being interpreted and filtered. Agenbite
oflnwit, the fourteenth-century devotional tract referred to by Stephen
in Ulysses, receives a full paragraph in Arnold. Shakespeare's 'midway'
position, midway that is between extremes, is precisely the one advanced
by Stephen in the Library episode. The reference to 'stately lines' in
Arnold's commentary on Tennyson's poem 'Ulysses' could have acted as
a cue for the opening stately lines of Joyce's own epic. If at times Joyce
sounds impossibly erudite, some of this must be ascribed to his teachers
at university, who bequeathed to him not only an historical view of
10 Joyce and Company
the subject but also something to reflect on, play with and if necessary
undermine.
The first chapter of Part II, 'Joyce and the City', begins with a series
of comparisons between Ulysses and Alfred Doblin's much-admired
novel Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Story of Franz Biberkopf (1929). Joyce and
Doblin were both involved in reading the modern city, for both realized
an essential truth about the modern city, how in the words of Peter
Fritzsche in Reading Berlin 1900 (1996) it is not so much a built city as
a 'word city'. Fritzsche concentrates in part on newspapers and street
hoardings, but, following Joyce, I survey a variety of reading matter:
titles to books, quotations from books and songs, advertisements, tram
tickets, implied reading activities such as telling the time and reading
the city through history.
One of the peculiar characteristics of Joyce's city, which is missing
from Fritzsche's analysis, is that, like writing, it is strewn with errors.
That this isn't itself a category mistake is in part confirmed by the way
Joyce described the stories that were to become Dubliners as 'a chapter of
the moral history of my country' (Letters II, 134). Unusually for a writer
on the city, the categories of both morality and epistemology accompany
or shadow his portrait of Dublin, and the two inevitably criss-cross.
Although it is often construed in terms of his temperament and person-
ality, description for Joyce in fact serves a higher purpose. As if he set
them in train himself, factual errors repeatedly surface also in the work
of later commentators and annotators, and the case of Bernard Vaughan
S.J. is instructive in this regard. My comments on Vaughan in turn lead
into some reflections on Joyce in the company of the Jesuits. The larger
critical question addressed in this chapter is how we are to interpret
Joyce's portrait of his city, and whether or not such a portrait belongs
to the Dubliners' (morality) theme of paralysis or to (epistemological)
images of a modern labyrinth.
Joyce and Woolf are two writers whose dates completely coincide,
1882-1941. Chapter 4 pairs them in a wide-ranging discussion of the
metropolitan city and the modernist imagination, beginning not with
familiar streams of consciousness but with the issue of power. Although
not often expressed in such a stark way, it is the case that forms of power
inform their work, just as on Bartholomew's contemporary maps of
Dublin and London, once noticed, what stands out are the number of
army barracks. But, while in London barracks tend to be sited near royal
palaces and state buildings, in Dublin they are not only more prominent
but positioned throughout the city. What their presence indicates is that
Dublin was a city effectively occupied by the colonial power, whereas
London was a city at the centre of an Empire not yet in decline where
power - at least at home - was exercised in more diffuse, less obvious
ways. For Joyce, it was impossible not to envisage his city as unfree; for
Woolf, this was not the case, but she chose to provide a critique of power
Introduction 11
which stressed its high visibility in terms of ritual and public life and
its pervasiveness in terms of ideology and control over private life. For
Joyce, satire was a more appropriate trope, for Woolf, irony. None of
this prevented either of them from celebrating their native cities, and I
continue by reflecting on the similarities and differences they share with
E.M. Forster and other writers on London such as Dorothy Richardson
and the neglected Irish novelist Kathleen Coyle. Neither Joyce nor Woolf
could live without their native cities. Like most exiles, Joyce, whether his
European city was Trieste, Rome, Zurich or Paris, never cut the umbilical
cord, while 'cockney' Woolf, as she described herself when marooned in
Sussex during the Blitz, rarely moved outside its sphere of influence even
when she sets her novels away from the capital.
Both writers, however, considered themselves outsiders from the order
of things, Joyce on account of Church and State - the 'two masters' that
Stephen Dedalus refers to in the opening episode of Ulysses - Woolf on
account of her class position and her understanding of the way gender
and patriarchy work against women. The disturbances in their writings
display their own character. From a background of ease, where every
connection ended in a subsequent connection, Woolf repeatedly fastens
onto things that disrupt and disturb. In Between the Acts(1941), the novel
that in one sense gives us the destination for her whole work, the author
who more often than not conveys the impression of living on borrowed
time is haunted by the image of aerial bombardment and the possibility
of an end to English history. There is little sense of premonition in Joyce,
while the patterns of Irish history, especially evident in the skirmishing in
Finnegans Wake between the warring brothers Shem and Shaun, enabled
him to retain to some extent his status as a contemporary. Equally, he
came from a family where, to adapt Woolf's famous remark from her
essay 'Modern Fiction', if they looked within they did indeed discover
life was like this, a downward spiral towards increasing penury, moonlit
flits and the pawnshop. Joyce's disturbances are 'local' in the sense that
I describe in Chapter 6 but they are also, as the argument of my book as
a whole suggests, cumulative. Even more than the compulsive Woolf, he
invested in a critique that refuses to stop when the point is made.
The first chapter of Part III, 'Joyce and Language', is concerned
with the issue of translation. The translation I have in mind is not only
linguistic translation but also Joyce's translation to Europe and the issue
therefore of language and identity. I begin, however, by touching on the
translated look of Joyce's writing. In the opening story of Dubliners, we
are confronted with 'gnomon' and 'simony', words which bear the scars
of their origins in Greek and Latin and which seem designed to stop
readers in their tracks. In his last work, Finnegans Wake, Joyce carries
this confrontation a stage or two further by asking the question which
in one sense most readers ask: 'Are we speachin d'anglas landadge or
are sprakin sea Djoytsch?' (FW 486:12-3) (Are we speaking the English
language or are speaking Dutch/German?). Languages are not only

'acquired' as Stephen Dedalus notices in his discussion with the Prefect
of Studies in A Portrait over the word 'tundish'; they are also folded into
each other in such a way that sometimes their character - also evident
when words from different languages collide - never quite beds down
into its new surroundings. As a student of European languages, Joyce
reminds us not so much of the etymological roots to modern English
in the Romance and Germanic languages or indeed in some anterior
Ur-language, as of what happens to the subject in language. It was a
lesson he learnt in childhood. The young Stephen begins confidently
enough with fixed ideas of his place in the world, graphically recorded
on separate lines in A Portrait as 'Stephen Dedalus / Class of Elements /
Clongowes Wood College / Salins / County Kildare / Ireland / Europe
/ The World / The Universe', but he is then confronted with the unset-
tling truth that God in French is Dieu.
Chapter 6, on the 'Sirens' episode of Ulysses, explores the issue of
language from a different angle. Initially, my probing takes the form
of how the company of Joyce translators tackle the sounds in a phrase
such as Tmperthnthn thnthnthn' from the Overture to 'Sirens'. The
sounds here are often detached from meaning, or their meaning is
deferred until later in the episode, or we realize that their semantic field
or phonological system is peculiar to English. With the help of transla-
tions from French, Spanish, German, Italian and modern Greek, we can
see how Joyce and Company' rightly extends beyond the Anglophone
community. In wrestling with Joyce's texts, translators remind us of
what I describe as 'local disturbances' which surround not only the
Overture to 'Sirens' but Joyce's language in general. I then complicate
my argument by suggesting a possible parallel in 'Sirens' - an episode
which is sometimes read in terms of the 1790s when the United Irishmen
attempted to break the connection with the United Kingdom and which
includes repeated pointed references to the 1798 song 'The Croppy
Boy' - between local disturbances in language and local disturbances in
Irish history.
This book closes with Part IV, Joyce and the Contemporary World'.
Can Joyce be turned to engage with the course of modern European
history? This is the question posed in Chapter 7 'On Reading Ulysses
After the Fall of the Berlin Wall'. The chapter begins with an Overture,
with a select list of references to walls in Ulysses (which for copyright
purposes I have paraphrased). If walls divide communities it's sometimes
reassuring to know that walls have other functions. On the other hand,
there's something subversive about such listing, as I discovered in
Miinster in 1997 when my Overture prompted a dramatized dialogue
between two German actors as if it were a chess match, complete with
mock aggression, an egg-timer and a desk bell. The focal point of this
chapter is a meditation on Joyce's reception in the German Democratic
Introduction 13
Republic (GDR) and how this connected with the longer view of Joyce
among the Left. What role does Joyce perform in different periods of
history and under different social systems? In a wide-ranging survey I
include a discussion of my own visits as an invited speaker to the GDR in
the 1980s, the depiction of the GDR in the post-1989 fiction of Monika
Maron, and the problem of commitment in the Southern African fiction
of Doris Lessing and Nadine Gordimer. One recourse when thinking
about 'Joyce and History' is to tie him into the contexts from which he
emerged or the traditions to which he belongs, as can be observed in
the opening two chapters and elsewhere in this book. But what emerges
from this chapter is that Joyce in the contemporary world can be read in
new circumstances with fresh insights, for there is merit in seeing him as
a Utopian writer committed to the future and the transformation of the
present as much as to the evocation of the past.
With particular reference to Thomas Kinsella's collection of verse The
Pen Shop (1997), O'Neill's gay novel At Swim, Two Boys (2001) and Aidan
Mathews's witty short story 'Lipstick on the Host' (1992), Chapter 8,
Joyce and Contemporary Irish Writing', explores the shadow Joyce casts
on contemporary writing. Two thoughts inform this chapter. One is the
towering presence of Yeats and Joyce for a later generation of Irish writers
and how that influence is handled; the other concerns the more general
predicament of belatedness and the continuing discourse on the end
of history. As I write elsewhere: 'Blind, with a bloody bandage over his
eyes, Hamm in Endgame (1958) sits in the theatre like some figure from
a forgotten outpost of an abandoned empire, an image of the darkness
now gathering to witness the endgame for the west' (Pierce 2005, 51).
Arguably, Beckett more than Joyce transformed the way we think about
ourselves and history, but this chapter explores how Irish writers find the
means to continue writing after Joyce. For O'Neill, whose novel is set in
Dublin on the eve of the Easter Rising 1916, 'after' is a sign of affiliation
whereby Joyce's world is evoked through language, milieu and character.
For Kinsella, 'after' is a temporal sign and signifies writing a generation
or so after Joyce, where the image of a black refill suggests something of
his relationship with the master. Mathews parades his debt to Joyce but
his characters have a life of their own, talking like Molly about every-
thing under the sun.
Of all modern writers the iconoclastic Joyce belongs in the company
of others. Joyce gives the impression he is not only potentially every-
where in the culture but that, as implied by the figure of 'Here Comes
Everybody' (HCE) in Finnegans Wake, he has potentially everyone in
his sights. The playful mythological figure of Finn, as the wide-ranging
survey conducted by James MacKillop (1986) indicates, crops up every-
where in placenames both inside and outside Ireland, and even if some
of that history got lost or confused or, as often happens with placenames,
corrupted, Irish fionn (white or fair) constantly taunts us. He can be
identified for example in Fingal's Cave in Scotland and, perhaps, he lent

his name to the capital of Austria, Wien or Vienna, where Finn acts as
a historical reminder of the Central European roots of the Celts before
their dispersal. More familiarly, Joyce in a daring act of appropriation,
calls him the 'erse solid man' (FW 3:20), Finn that is speaking erse,
once solid or perhaps only arse solid, and underlying the modern city
of Dublin, his head pushing up in the Hill of Howth and looking for his
'tumptytumtoes' out in the Phoenix Park. Joyce needed little persuading
that a characteristic of the protean Finn is not only playfulness but also
permanence. Finn keeps rising and he does so in different guises and
using different letters of the alphabet. Phoenix in Phoenix Park, which
itself is a corruption if seen as a bird, also contains Finn in its first syllable
in Irish, fionn uisce or clear water: it is the park of clear water rather than
the park of the fiery bird, a park that is not only the largest city park in
western Europe but one that has Finn in its name. Finn again. It is this
protean aspect, Finn always having the capacity to come again, which
is also especially marked in 'Finnegan's Wake', the nineteenth-century
Irish-American ballad about the hod-carrier who falls from a ladder
and breaks his skull. During his wake, as if to remind us of that word's
proximity to 'awake', Tim Finnegan rises again when some whiskey is
spilled over him by ill-tempered mourners. 'Bedad he revives, see how
he rises', and his reply is suitably blasphemous 'Thanam o'n dhoul
(your souls to the devil), do ye think I'm dead?' The title for Joyce's last
work recalls this ballad but, without the apostrophe, it has the look of a
statement or a threat. Take care when Finnegans, the Irish that is, wake.
Do you think we're dead?
Unlike Ibsen's last play When We Dead Awaken (1900), which was much
admired by the youthful Joyce and where Rubek the artist hero and his
former model Irene climb to the peaks of a mountain to share death
together, Finnegans Wake refuses to take the tragic path and celebrates,
as does Ulysses, not only death but also life. At the end of Ulysses, Molly
recalls memories sixteen years previously of love-making with Bloom on
Howth and giving him seed-cake, then of Gibraltar as a girl and being
called 'a Flower of the mountain', 'my mountain flower' (U 18:1602,
1606). It's a nice common touch to end on, with flowers and mountains
and the unromantic thought as Bloom proposes to her 'well as well him
as another' (£719:1604-5). In the mocking cave of the 'Cyclops', Leopold
ascends into heaven as 'ben Bloom Elijah' (U 12:1916), but Bloom also
happens to be the name of a mountain in Ireland, Slieve Bloom, and in
Irish mythology the mountain god Bloom has a daughter Coillte, who
falls in love with Blath, Lord of all the flowers. Flowers and mountains,
fathers and daughters, husbands and wives, sexual awakening, faith-
fulness and betrayal, myths and memories - all are here united in the
meandering flow of Molly's untutored thoughts. Unlike Ibsen's last act,
Joyce's mature vision, then, as is evident in the creation of his most
Introduction 15
winning characters from Bloom to HCE, from Molly to Anna Livia, is

more down-to-earth, less intense, less threatening, and at the same time
more inclusive of the whole river of humanity.
Away from rivers and mountains and universal themes, when Joyce
is set against other more specific backgrounds, something equally
interesting emerges. With Sterne, he reminds us of the continuity and
the discontinuity of history and culture; with Tit-Bits, the way popular
culture functions in his writings; with Thomas Arnold, the importance
of his professors. Joyce we know has much to teach us about life in the
modern city. Indeed, according to a recent commentator, Ulysses 'offers
a more variously ample imagining of the city than any other modern
novel' (Alter, 121). But what he teaches assumes a different complexion
when Dublin is set against Doblin's Berlin or Woolf's metropolitan
London. The difficulty he raises for translators produces its own kind
of company but, even as they seek to ensure textual fidelity, the trans-
lated look and local disturbances of his own writing in English should
never be overlooked. His relevance for the contemporary world can only
be tested against specific examples of intervention. Translation is one
example of intervention, a tangible sign of bringing into being different
communities of readers. A second example is essentially political. In
the light of 1989 the question worth addressing is Joyce's continuing
relevance to those who have abandoned politics or to those who never
entered it. A third example concerns strategies of independence. When
contemporary Irish writers make use of Joyce in their work, they disclose
ways of coming to terms with him as well as demonstrating that Joyce
hasn't said everything.
This introduction began with identity and displacement. Ironically,
Joyce's sense of displacement has ensured that he would eventually find
the company of others. There is virtually no modern or contemporary
Irish writer from Kate O'Brien to Edna O'Brien, from Flann O'Brien to
John McGahern, from Sean O'Faolain to John Banville, or from Patrick
Kavanagh to Seamus Heaney, who doesn't belong to his company. In
continental Europe, he belongs with his Triestine friend the novelist
Italo Svevo, with the post-war German experimental novelist Arno
Schmidt, with Umberto Eco, one of whose books carried the title The
Middle Ages of James Joyce (1989), and he has at least four cities anxious
to claim him. In Britain and North America and in nearly every corner
of the globe, his name stands for something. When he was buried in
the Fluntern Cemetery in Zurich in 1941, war was raging in Europe and
he had few friends to gather round his grave and mourn his passing.
However, he was not alone because, as Nora humorously quipped, he had
company from the lions in the nearby zoo. Interestingly, if he was ever
woken by those lions, Joyce, who once imagined he had spent his life 'self
exiled in upon his ego', would discover he was surrounded by writers and
professors still busy about his business.
Parti
Joyce and History

1
Joyce, Sterne and the
Eighteenth Century
Introduction
Contemporary critical theory has sought to emphasize the body. However,

this discourse is often characterized not by intimacy but by detachment,
as if the body was not a living organism, dependent on the circulation
of the blood and on oxygen to the lungs, but what one commentator has
called 'a dematerialised textual object' (Seremetakis, 123). Only rarely,
for example, are hands ever mentioned, and yet hands (more so than
legs and feet) occupy an intriguing space between the body and the
person, between the self and others, and between the human anatomy
and culture. The eyes may give us a window to the soul, but the hands,
as the gestures in Renaissance paintings constantly underscore, tell us
something as well, not least about our personal intervention in the world
and, more generally in terms of culture and history, about sense and
sensibility. With their various gestures and continual agitation 'whereof
we are ignorant or not willing them', Thomas Willis, the pioneering
anatomist in the middle of the seventeenth century, refers to hands and
arms as a 'wandering pair' (Pordage, 174). The phrase never caught on
in that sense, but, as is apparent from looking at people when they are
speaking, it might well have.
Touch in Joyce and Sterne is sentiment, sentimentality, the expression,
intensification or repression of feeling; it is closer to the erotics of the mind
than the Lawrentian sensuousness of the body; it is parody, play, satire,
innuendo; it is, as the Noli me tangere (Don't touch me) of the Gospels
reminds us, incontrovertible, a warning, but also suggestive, impossible
to ignore; it is excitable, communicative, ductile, given to lingering in the
eternal present; it is pressure, the hand, a gesture, additional, rarely simply
functional, the release of memory. In that sense there is nothing it doesn't
touch, and it is invariably the light touch which is most transgressive.
Separated by a century and a half, Joyce and Sterne act as bookends
to the novel as a form, and they continue to fascinate anyone interested
in the common ground that links or stretches across different historical

periods. If Sterne responds to the Enlightenment and to the advances
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in understanding the physi-
ology of the body, what intellectual framework or paradigm does Joyce
confront or seek to address? After insisting on the physicality of touch
and the common ground Sterne and Joyce share, this is the question
I pose in this chapter. Like Joyce, Sterne is swift, someone who, in the
words of Sterne the sermon writer, 'finds no rest for the sole of his foot'
(Sterne 1760, 12).1 Their work is full of paratextual and textual devices
such as blank and marbled pages, blue covers and signed copies, dashes
and asterisks, delayed prefaces and dropped full-stops, challenging
footnotes and obtrusive emblems, newspaper subheadings and flourishes
of one kind or another. They delight in such 'pop-up' games in writing,
games which they also play with narrative voices.
Thus the anonymous Arranger in Ulysses, who intervenes not as a
third person narrator but as a slightly unnerving, supra-personal figure,
'arranges' things, cautioning or advising the reader as for example when
we encounter in 'Sirens' the phrase 'As said before he ate with relish
the inner organs' (U 11:519-20). This particular reference the reader
first encountered some 175 pages before when in the opening lines
of 'Calypso' we learn that Bloom did indeed eat 'with relish the inner
organs of beasts and fowls' (£74:1-2).2 At one point in 'Sirens', soon after
Boylan strides into the Ormond Hotel, we read 'Not yet. At four she. Who
said four?' (U 11:352). The first two sentences alert us that we are inside
Bloom's increasingly agitated consciousness as the hour approaches
when Boylan is to make love to Molly, but who we might well ask says
'Who said four?'? It could be Bloom rummaging in his mind for some
comfort or mental distraction, but the voice sounds like the person who
earlier in the episode inserts 'O'clock' on a separate line at the end of
Boylan's exchange about the timing of the Ascot Gold Cup:
- What time is that? asked Blazes Boylan. Four?
O'clock. ([711:385-6)
'Who said four?' contains a distinctly mocking aspect to it, but it can
also be read as Joyce's direct question to the reader. Stay alert. Who said
Boylan would meet Molly at four in the afternoon? As for 'O'clock', this
sounds like a person, with his 'O' like an Irishman, perhaps an Irish
jockey in the Gold Cup, riding in the same race as 'O. Madden', the
mount of Sceptre, 'a game filly', as Lenehan, with his insistent, crude
taste, cannot help noticing for us. And it is 'O. Maddden' not O'Madden,
yet more insistence by the Arranger or Berlitz tutor to stay awake.
Sterne comes at us from a different direction and his knowingness
is invariably showy and sometimes smutty but never sinister. Who, we
might well ask, is the person in Tristram Shandy who slips in and out of
conversation with us and tells us not only what kinds of readers there
Joyce, Sterne and the Eighteenth Century 21
are in the world but also how to read the book we have in our hands,
who informs us that 'Writing, when properly managed (as you may be
sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation' (Tristram
Shandy, 125)? Is this figure Sterne as convivial host beside his fire in
Shandy Hall, Sterne as critic justifying his own work, Sterne as whimsical
narrator, Sterne as postmodernist novelist playing with the conventions
of novel writing?
However we feel about them, such pop-ups, unlike the ones that
appear in the corner of a computer screen, are an integral part of the
reading experience and are not meant to be blocked by the reader. The
sense of touch in their writings, especially in relation to transgression,
is another kind of pop-up. The aural and the visual in Joyce and Sterne
have received due recognition but the sense of touch has tended to be
neglected. In their writings touch is invariably transgressive in nature
and effect. In Ulysses Molly recalls going to Confession and telling Father
Corrigan: 'he touched me father and what harm if he did where and I
said on the canal bank' ([718:108). More high-mindedly, the narrator
of Tristram Shandy asserts that 'nothing which has touched me will be
thought trifling in its nature' (Tristram Shandy, 9). Touching protuber-
ances or areas adjacent to protuberances, whether they are noses or
Uncle Toby's wound to his groin, constitutes part of the recurring
humour or wit in Tristram Shandy, while in Ulysses, though less given to
wit, touch, too, is humorous, and often accompanied by narrative delay
as when Bloom half-formulates the thought 'All that the hand says when
you touch' (U 13:1198), or when he scurrilously thinks 'Women all for
caste till you touch the spot' ([75:104).
Like sight, touch is frequently a reciprocal affair. But while one can
see without being seen, touch involves something more or something
else. Hence the oddness of Bloom's thought that you don't know who
will touch you after death, for then the body can be touched without
you knowing it (£76:18). Some senses, as Laura Mulvey reminds us in
connection with the male gaze, are more active than others in distin-
guishing between subject and object. When the short-sighted Stephen,
who spends Bloomsday without his glasses, links eyes with touch - 'Touch
me. Soft eyes.' (£73:434-6) - touch is here being used in a transposed
way, a mode so normal we sometimes forget it is in fact a metaphorical
usage. As Sterne points out in one of his sermons, a piece of music can
touch 'the secret springs of rapture' (Sterne 1760, 34).3 Bloom is right
to concur with Mr Kernan's suggestion that the line delivered in English
at the Church of Ireland's funeral service / am the resurrection and the life
'touches a man's inmost heart' (£76:670). By contrast, in the Catholic
service, In paradisum merely sets Bloom thinking about whether In should
be translated by 'to' or 'in' (it's in fact neither, the translation being 'into'
as in the hymn 'May the angels lead you into paradise'). When Yorick
in A Sentimental Journey visits his beloved Maria, a character Sterne gave
the world in Tristram Shandy, she is 'much as my friend [Mr Shandy]

described her' (Sentimental Journey, 114) and in mourning because her
lover has abandoned her. Yorick feels her loss as real and at one point
reaches for the language of touch to guarantee the truth of the moment:
'And is your heart still so warm, Maria? said I. I touch'd upon the string
on which hung all her sorrows' (SentimentalJourney, 116).
Joyce
We can begin with the mind in the Library in Ulysses. The assembled
group are discussing paradoxes in the context of authorship. 'It's the
very essence of Wilde, don't you know. The light touch' (U 9:529-30).
Richard Best is recalling Wilde's story-essay 'The Portrait of W.H.'
(1889) and the proposition that Shakespeare wrote his sonnets for the
boy-actor Willie Hughes. Best's comment is lifted in part from Wilde
himself who has Algernon in The Importance of Being Earnest declare: 'The
very essence of romance is uncertainty' (Wilde, 255). In one of those
unsettling markers that distinguish the 'Scylla and Charybdis' episode,
the disgruntled Stephen Dedalus thinks to himself: 'His glance touched
their faces lightly as he smiled, a blond ephebe. Tame essence of Wilde.'
This is clever and puts Best in his place alongside Haines with his 'smile
of a Saxon' in that other tower (or garrison) episode 'Telemachus', but
the pun on Wilde's name, if it's not directed at Best being Wilde's tame
essence, is a little obvious, and what exactly is essence when Wilde is all
performance? Perhaps the intention on Joyce's part is for the comment
to rebound on Stephen, for Wilde is not so much tame as external, all
brilliance, someone who, as with 'the very essence', empties intensifiers
of their meaning but who also challenges us to distinguish affective and
affectatious. As for Wilde's 'light touch', in the context of Willie Hughes,
this is presumably a double entendre, perhaps unintended on Best's part
and not pursued by Stephen, but one capable of being registered by
Joyce's ideal, 'wideawake' reader, more so today in the light of O'Neill's
At Swim, Two Boys (2001), a novel which brings out the latent homosexual
theme in Ulysses and which is discussed in more detail in Chapter 8. So
Wilde's light touch is both metaphoric and literal, both witty and physical
in nature, capable of being appreciated and at the same time rejected by
polite society, a midway position that is revealing for those who have eyes
to see and blind or deceptive for those who don't.
At the beginning of the day, Molly innocently informs Bloom that
for the upcoming concert she is to sing 'La ci darem la mano' (Give me
your hand) from Mozart's Don Giovanni and 'Love's Old Sweet Song',
two songs that never stop rebounding on Bloom and his predicament
as a husband about to be cuckolded. On her own Molly is more wised
up about her part in the narrative and has little doubt that the touch
of 'la mano' by a man is both sensuous and transgressive. Part of the

pleasure for Molly derives from being touched where she shouldn't be
touched, and, somewhere, she knows, or has been told, being touched
is sinful. The reply to her priest that she was touched on the canal bank
is reminiscent of the constant innuendo in Tristram Shandy surrounding
Uncle Toby's groin injury or of jokes which confuse place and position
as in the standard joke about the pilot being asked for his height and
position by air traffic control and replying something like 'six feet two
and at the front of the aircraft'. With aeroplanes that get into difficulties,
it's essential to know height and position but there's something intrusive
about the celibate priest's inquiring into where a man placed his hand on
a woman's anatomy even if it is to determine whether the sin is mortal or
venial. When obliged by her confessor to supply details, Molly becomes
confused, and in that confusion - or, if 'canal bank' is a reference to the
female body, her linguistic slippage - she reveals for the reader not so
much her foolishness as the Church's limitations in the area of sexual
morality, especially when that conflicts with tact and what elsewhere
might be considered a leading question designed for some ulterior
motive or vicarious pleasure. Even in its most private moments, either at
the time or in the privacy of the Confessional, touch is potentially public,
so that while it is conducted between two people, a third, in the guise of
conscience, the Church, the courts or the press, is always present. There
is a necessary tension here, but the scene being described by Molly is
not a crime scene and her answer is innocent, so innocent that it lifts
the burden of guilt away from her and onto the priest, whose inquisition
would seek what amounts to a forced entry into intimate encounters
between men and women.
Molly's fascination with what is happening on the other side of the
gender fence leads her at one point to imagine what it might be like to
be a man: T wished I was one myself for a change just to try with that
thing they have swelling up on you so hard and at the same time so
soft when you touch it my uncle John has a thing long' (U 18:1383-5).
The addition of 'for a change' is a light-hearted cry against necessity as
if a sex-change could be treated like an excursion to the seaside. It is
followed by just to try', a phrase denoting experiment and an attempt
at persuasion, as if she were seeking the use of her friend's new gadget
or sex toy. In contrast with the canal bank reference, her thoughts here
are more private but whether they are a frank expression of feelings
or simply the playing out of a rolling imagination remains an open
question. This is not something she would confess in the Confessional,
but, again, touch complicates matters, for as soon as she comes to hard
/ soft she slips, her memory takes over and she recalls a delightfully
filthy children's street rhyme about 'my uncle John has a thing long ...
my aunt Mary has a thing hairy'. Molly's imagination is so graphic and
linguistically rich that it requires readers frequently to pause, as when
they encounter 'on' and not 'in'. Picture that! Bodies touch, but touch is
not so much gender-ambiguous as gender-distinct, for it promises union
but delivers separation, more so with coitus interruptus. The boundary
that Molly transgresses, therefore, is not so much a boundary but more
like a series of contradictory impulses, where touch is graphic in that it is
written down but where taboo words are translated into something else,
a substitute, that thing.
Stephen by contrast is an innocent when it comes to touch. In A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, he pines for the soft touch: 'The soft
beauty of the Latin word touched with an enchanting touch the dark of
the evening, with a touch fainter and more persuading than the touch
of music or of a woman's hand' (P244). In the shape-changing episode
of 'Proteus', the same tune can be heard again, this time a little more
insistently: 'Touch me. Soft eyes. Soft soft soft hand. I am lonely here.
O, touch me soon, now. What is that word known to all men? I am quiet
here alone. Sad too. Touch, touch me' (U 3:434-6). Like the Aeolian
harp Stephen waits passively by the Attic shore for the wind to blow and
set him tingling. The waves break and as they do so his thoughts also
alternate with the rhythm, changing from her to him, from soft eyes to
soft hand, from eyes to I, from I to all, from too to touch.
Appropriately, she has soft eyes (all eyes are this) and she belongs to the
modality of the visible, which is itself, as we have learnt from the opening to
the episode, 'ineluctable' - unless, that is, you have trouble with your eyes
like Joyce or Stephen his fictional counterpart. Later in the novel, in 'Circe',
Stephen brings a lighted match to his eye and recalls the incident in 1888
when his glasses were broken on the cinder track. The repercussions for
Stephen in A Portrait are dramatic, but here in 'Circe' his brain only just
manages to discover through the alcohol a thread for his thoughts: 'Must get
glasses. Broke them yesterday. Sixteen years ago. Distance. The eye sees all flat.
(He draws the match away. It goes out.) Brain thinks. Near: far. Ineluctable
modality of the visible. (He frowns mysteriously)' (£715:3628-31).
However, in general, the visible is ineleuctable while touch is 'eluctable'.
Sheltering the eyes, looking modestly downward, looking away, staring,
eyeing, being eyed - all these remind us that the visible, whether operating
in a world of female tease, the male gaze or male shame, is always to some
extent part of a world that is both avoidable and ineluctable. Stephen
desires she touch him for, like Bloom whose own emotional landscape
is anticipated in this scene, he too is lonely. The phrase is not Tt is quiet
here' but the even more locked-in T am quiet here'. There is nothing
'touchy-feely' about any of this, in part because identity lies elsewhere.
Touch acts as an imagined transforming agency and perhaps relates to
the word known to all men, part of a universal language. In keeping
with the overall theme of 'Proteus', Stephen's emotion is deeply felt in
personal terms but he seeks through repetition an identity with forces
larger than himself and through touch a merging with the Other.
The untouched woman, as the Bawd in 'Circe' reminds us, attracts a

higher (commercial) value: 'Ten shillings a maidenhead. Fresh thing was
never touched' (U 15:359). And, in a comment that links Jesus and the
author of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, the Nymph adds, fixing Bloom, 'You are
not fit to touch the garment of a pure woman' (U 15:3458). Bloom, on
the other hand, has already made up his own mind: 'Women especially
are so touchy' (U 6:753-4), where 'touchy' is a word that now rarely
means 'sensitive to touch' but is more likely to signify hyper-sensitive
and hence irritable, keep off, avoid, don't touch. As for Bloom himself,
'There's a touch of the artist' about him according to Lenehan, who's
always interested in whether he can touch someone for something, and
he continues: 'He's a cultured allroundman ... not one of your common
or garden' (U 10:581-3). But in the very next paragraph we read: 'Mr
Bloom turned over idly pages of The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, then
of Aristotle's Masterpiece. Crooked botched print' ([710:585). Clearly, if
we imagined Lenehan was referring to culture as high-brow we would
be mistaken, for one text concerns an ex-nun's dramatic revelations
about her Order, while the other title has nothing to do with the Greek
philosopher from antiquity but was a popular vade mecum or guide for
midwives and others in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The
phrase 'allroundman' sets Bloom in the company of Homer's polytropos,
the many-sided Odysseus, but 'touch of the artist' points in a different
direction. For Stephen, art is a high calling and it needs protecting from
what Joyce referred to in his 1901 pamphlet as the 'rabblement' (see
Mason and Ellmann 1959). When attacked by Mulligan for not toning
down an adverse review of a book by Lady Gregory, Stephen concedes
he doesn't have Yeats's capacity to dissemble: 'She gets you a job on the
paper and then you go and slate her drivel to Jaysus. Couldn't you do the
Yeats touch?' (U9:1159-61). Untouched, touchy, touch of, the (Yeats)
touch - the run would be incomplete without a reference to touched,
meaning mad. And Ulysses, a novel about touch, doesn't disappoint us
for, as Bloom suggests about Fanny Parnell and indeed the whole Parnell
family: All a bit touched' (£78:513).
Each of the three main characters in Ulysses is defined in part by touch.
Stephen is in search of a body and for him touch is intense, an intensity
which is in inverse proportion to his not finding a woman to touch
or be touched by. Molly's view of her body involves a lot of touching.
When she thinks of places like the Gaiety Theatre, her thoughts revert
to touching and not just touching but also to what happens in the
dark: 'a lot of that touching must go on in theatres in the crush in the
dark' (£7 18:1039-40). The deictic marker in 'that touching' signifies
a mixture of knowingness, fascination and proper distancing. Touch,
as Molly confirms, is part of culture. When discussing 'Penelope' with
Frank Budgen, Joyce, who rarely allowed anyone outside the family to
call him by his first name, explained that the word 'yes' signifies 'cunt',
'bottom' is 'womb' and 'because' is 'arse'. As for Molly, Ich bin der Fleisch
derstets bejaht (I am the flesh that always affirms) (Letters I, 170). Memory,
language, the body - any nature in Joyce is rarely conceived as a space in
opposition to culture. 'Cunt' is both physical and part of a world of signs
and language, linked by Joyce in 'Penelope' with obscenity and denial
but also with affirmation, the signal that most young men hope for from
a woman. Here it is two men - the same two who had been involved in
a scene of seduction with Martha Fleischmann in Zurich in 1918-19
- discussing a fictional creation and in the process reminding us that
'Penelope' belongs as much to male talk as to a woman reflecting for
herself alone.
Bloom is a mind in a body rather than a body in search of a mind as
he has sometimes been portrayed, and, like Molly, he, too, spends not a
little time reflecting on touch. For Bloom, the body occupies not so much
a private as a social space and it needs watching therefore. He is free to
think what he likes in a profoundly Catholic country but other suitors,
other bodies, invade his consciousness. He lacks Boylan's confidence
and in the appropriately named 'Nausicaa' episode reverts instead to
touching himself watching a woman lift her skirt for him. In contrast,
at the Ormond Hotel, Boylan, the man who is about to cuckold him,
'touched to fair miss Kennedy a rim of his slanted straw' (U 11:346).
To make matters worse, Bloom is conscious for much of the day of what
people are or might be thinking about him - 'greaseabloom' (greasy,
grey sea, Bloom) is one of many terms of abuse that bestrew his path in
the 'cruelfiction' CFW192:19) of'Sirens'.
There is another side to this question. As a father Bloom enjoyed
physical contact with his daughter Milly. In 'Nausicaa' - and the post-
masturbation context here is important - when he recalls her letter, his
thoughts seem to cross over from intimacy to something more decidedly
sexual: 'Dearest Papli. All that the hand says when you touch. Loved
to count my waistcoat buttons' (£713:1198). The language of flowers in
Ulysses operates more securely as part of a system of exchange, but the
language of touch, partly because of its frequently compromised and
guilty nature, operates differently. In this respect, touch has the capacity
to alter the flow of things - witness the shift here from Milly's terms of
endearment, recalled by her father from earlier in the day, to general,
evasive, thoughts about the hand touching, to a third sentence about
buttons (her mother had a thing about these) and idly counting: 'Loved
to count my waistcoat buttons.' This sequence could be entirely innocent,
but the language of touch prompts more suspicious readings. All that
the hand says when you touch.'
At its most innocent, the hand communicates through touch. It is
more than Malinowski's phatic communion, though it often is simply
that, simply another way of saying hello. The hand also possesses its
own form of communication, a sign that you belong to the same tribe.
When the customers enter the Ormond Hotel in 'Sirens', they greet
the barmaid by the hand in a show we might think today is a little too
free, a little too familiar. By contrast, the slightly flustered Miss Douce
bows to the 'suave solicitor' George Lidwell and holds out a 'moist'
hand for his 'firm clasp' ([711:562-4). Bloom, on the other hand, his
senses awakened, recalls Molly's 'cool hands' among the rhododen-
drons at Howth (U 11:582). 'All that the hand says when you touch.'
And what does it say? For everything speaks in its own way in Ulysses. As
an adolescent Stephen is 'thrilled' by Cranly's touch when he 'pressed
Stephen's arm with an elder's affection' (P 247), an incident which
is recalled in 'Telemachus' in a remark that pops out at the reader:
'Cranly's arm. His arm' (U 1:159). How we interpret this returns us to
'all that'. At one level it is Stephen associating Mulligan with a school
friend and, in an episode about dispossession, with obligation towards
his native country, but it also perhaps reminds us of something else, of
touch as delay, as a homosexual come-on, as personal satisfaction, as
a moment of resistance, as a reminder of the need for the embattled
intellect to be on guard against his contemporaries, a reminder that is
of all that the hand indeed says when you touch.
Sterne
In her essay on gender and power in A Sentimental Journey, Melinda

Alliker Rabb rightly points out that
Most of the important 'events' of the journey are enacted by hands:
exchanging snuffboxes, trying on gloves, feeling a pulse, holding a sword,
wiping away a tear, pulling a cord, pointing to Hamlet, distributing sous,
stretching out from bed, or, of course, holding a pen. (Rabb, 542)
Every woman Yorick meets in A Sentimental Journey presents him with an
opportunity to take her hand. The first occasion occurs with a woman he
encounters when hiring a carriage to take him to Paris:
The impression returned, upon my encounter with her in the street; a
guarded frankness with which she gave me her hand, shewed, I thought,
her good education and her good sense; and as I led her on, I felt a
pleasurable ductility about her, which spread a calmness over all my
spirits- (SentimentalJourney, 16-17)
The tongue-in-cheek prose is here to be relished. A 'pleasurable ductility'

is precisely what Bloom would have liked from the woman getting into her
carriage outside the Grosvenor Hotel. It is equally becoming that Yorick's
woman is not forward but, conventionally, has an attractive 'guarded
frankness'. Supposedly, it is just an ordinary encounter, implying nothing
sexual. There are no secrets either, for this is writing that eschews those
kinds of devices. What have good sense or good education got to do with
extending a hand to an unknown stranger? Yorick's motivation is plain
for the reader to observe, and his whimsical character is in keeping with
a narrative that also doesn't quite get going. Yorick does, however, have
an extended opportunity to compare the conduct of sexual mores and
advances in France. '[A]nd as I led her on, I felt a pleasurable ductility
about her, which spread a calmness over all my spirits-'. As Wilde might
well have agreed, what is touch but uncertainty, the essence of romance.
Calm is soon restored and it spreads over all Yorick's 'spirits', a word we
might agree is closer to the pagan body than to the Christian soul.
The sentence also ends in a dash. Such a punctuation mark in Sterne
is akin to a conversation marker, suggesting a pause for thought or
breath, a dramatic flourish, a twist in the narrative. Like its author, the
dash delights in concealment and mischief, and perhaps it was Sterne's
practice which in a reverse kind of way prompted Joyce to use honest
dashes instead of dishonest quotation marks. Joyce, we know, thought
inverted commas 'perverted' for they imply they aren't the author's
words; in Finnegans Wake, the 'poor joist' even imagined he was 'constitu-
tionally incapable of misappropriating the spoken words of others' (FW
108:35-6). In some editions, following Victorian editors who tended to
shield the world from obscenity, A Sentimental Journey ends not with a
blank space but with a dash or a full-stop. A blank space allows for all
kinds of interpretation, and not just the smutty. John Warner argues that
a typographical absence provides a cyclical marker to recall the text's
opening discourse on death (Warner, 120). Modern critical theory,
ever alert to gaps and aporias, can also make something of the dash, for
the dash signifies not absence but something real, 'that thing' as Molly
might have called her own vagina. Invited in to share a farmer's house
for the night, Yorick somehow manages to find himself sleeping next
to a young woman and when he reaches over in the dark it is her dash
or blank space or full-stop, her backside or end-stop, he accidentally
grabs hold of: 'So that when I stretch'd out my hand I caught hold of
the fille de chambre's'(Sentimental Journey, 125). Touch and titter, then,
dashes and ductility, empty spaces and end-stops, belong together in
Sterne's playful, pop-up world as he strikes out against the deadening
hand of mid-eighteenth-century English propriety, against those like the
Scottish Presbyterian James Fordyce who railed against 'the general run
of Novels' and their altogether improper 'scenes of pleasure and passion'
(Fordyce, 149).
Later, in Paris, Yorick stops at a glove shop and another opportunity
presents itself:
Any one may do a casual act of good nature, but a continuation of them
shews it is a part of the temperature; and certainly, added I, if it is the
same blood which comes from the heart, which descends to the extremes
(touching her wrist) I am sure you must have one of the best pulses of any
woman in the world- Feel it, said she, holding out her arm. (Sentimental
Journey, 52-3)
Yorick begins as if he were William Harvey (1578-1657) explaining
the way the body works, tracing the flow of blood from the heart to
the extremes of the body, but almost at once he becomes familiar with
his 'patient', taking her wrist and then feeling her pulse. As he touches
her wrist he discovers one of the best pulses of any woman in the world.
This is yet another recourse by Yorick to ridiculous subterfuge, ridiculous
because no-one would believe him if he claimed he was involved in
a scientific or medical inquiry and ridiculous also because one could
never obtain the evidence to prove she did indeed possess one of the
best pulses in the world. When her husband returns and discovers Yorick
holding her hand, he passes no remark; Yorick on the other hand is
bemused and puts it down to cultural difference.
Yorick is a parson, not a medical man, yet behind Sterne there was
an ongoing medical revolution which brought together not so much two
professions concerned with the well-being of the individual as a way of
thinking about the body and relationships which impacted on the two
professions in question. As Roy Porter has underlined, Sterne 'was aware
of a fresh emphasis upon nature as living and active, and the new physi-
ological importance of the nerves, organisation, sensitivity and sexuality'
(Porter 2003, 303-4). It was Thomas Willis (1621-75) who, in Cerebri
Anatome Cui Accessit Nervorum Descriptio Et Usus Studio (1664), introduced
the word 'neurology' into the language, and in other studies such as
Pathologiae Cerebri et Nervosi Generis Specimen (1667) he outlined what he
considered the origins of epilepsy and other neurological disorders.
Willis gave fresh impetus to studies in localization, in identifying,
that is, areas of the brain or nervous system which caused or housed
sensation, how laughing - to take an example which itself has its funny
side - was 'caused by the fifth conjugation of the nerves'. However, not
without some justification has George Rousseau recently claimed that the
long eighteenth century was 'the Age of Willis as much as the Age of
Locke' (Rousseau, 25), that is, an Age devoted as much to the body as
to the mind.
Willis stressed the 'corporeity' of the soul, the idea of the animal soul,
the soul, that is, which is common to both animals and humans, a soul
which also has something bodily in its make-up, something on the way to
the modern interest in 'corporeality'. At the beginning of Chapter 2 of
Tristram Shandy, as if he had been reading Willis on the animal soul and
the nervous system, Sterne refers to the HOMUNCULUS that is Tristram
in the womb and to the fear that 'his own animal spirits' might be 'ruffled
beyond description,— and that in this sad disorder'd state of nerves, he
had laid down a prey to sudden starts, or a series of melancholy dreams
and fancies, for nine long, long months together' (Tristram Shandy, 3).
The train of thought is 'curious', to invoke Arnold's word, and playful
but, like Willis, Sterne sought through a consideration of the body's
origins and pathological states not eccentricity or freakishness but order
and humanity. As Willis's translator, Samuel Pordage, notes in his 'Table
of Hard Words' (see below), man is not a 'single' but 'a curious machine',
precisely what Sterne never stops emphasizing.
Sterne's curious mind took him almost inevitably to the moment
when the body starts life, when personality traits are made therefore
or revealed, and, later, to the occasions when things go wrong for the
body. Willis's language is still imbued with a medieval vocabulary of
souls and their rank-ordering, but as a natural philosopher his mind is
decidedly turned to describing the world in its own terms. Sterne is a
system-refuser and delights in systematically undermining and showing
the limits of natural philosophy. Hence the deliberately imprecise phrase
'ruffled beyond description', which reminds us more of the person
suffering than the medical condition. Similarly with 'sad disorder'd state
of nerves', which, through the introduction of the adjective 'sad', shifts
attention from the scientist's laboratory and the professor's anatomy class
to the world outside and how people speak about such conditions and the
state of their nerves.
Willis drew on the pioneering work of William Harvey, whose discov-
eries about the circulation of the blood in the seventeenth century
introduced a scientific basis for the language of flow and made possible
among other things the great Sternean metaphor of circulation. Harvey
introduced a new paradigm, and with him, as Richard Sennett has
suggested, 'A new master image of the body took form' (Sennett, 255).
Willis shared Harvey's interest in circulation, only now it is the animal
spirits flowing through the nerves: 'Indeed, the animal spirits flowing
within the nerves with a living spring, like rivers from a perpetual
fountain, do not stagnate or stand still; but sliding forth with a continual
course, are ever supplied and kept full with a new influence from the
fountain' (Pordage, 126). As is discernible from Sterne's hymn to
Sensibility, quoted below, the image of the fountain conveys a particular
force. 'Velut aquarum rivi a perenni fonte' (Willis, 176-7), like rivers of
water from a perpetual fountain, is Willis's Latin, a language and style
that takes up into it a world beyond the body, for Willis could be writing
about a river basin for example or anticipating Sterne and the concept
of Romantic inspiration itself.
When Pordage translates Willis into English in 1681 - in this sense
'neurology' entered the language in 1681 - he often reproduces the
metaphors intact as if Willis's Latin retained the look and not just the
word-order of its first language. But whether as metaphor or translation,
the language calls attention to itself and to its potential for interpreting
the world anew:
The nerves themselves ... are furnished with pores and passages, as it
were so many little holes in a honey-comb, thickly set, made hollow, and
contiguous one by the other; so that the tube-like substance of them, like
an Indian cane, is everywhere porous and pervious. (Pordage, 127)
The image of nerves as hollow tubes recalls the continuing influence of
Galen on medical thinking, but the phrase 'like an Indian cane', 'cannae
Indicae' in the Latin (Willis, 180), is such an unexpected comparison
that it evokes almost at once not so much the body as the East India
Company and the opening up of another world in the second half of
the seventeenth century. Meanwhile, the adjectival phrase 'porous and
pervious', easier on the eye and ear than 'porosa ac pervia', has all the
qualities of arresting, poetic prose.
A Sentimental Journey, and the same can be said of Tristram Shandy, is
nothing if not about circulation and exchange, about not stagnating or
standing still. Circulation signifies an ongoing process of touching and
separating; every encounter raises the prospect of touch and circulation.
'Feel it,' as the woman interjects. As with circulation, so with touch: there
is a constant switching between the physical and the figural, just as there
is in Willis. The metaphor is pointedly grounded in the physiological
aspect, so that when Yorick feels pulses he is in touch with both his own
feelings and the life blood, animal soul or corporeity of another person.
This can be approached from another angle. Like the blood flowing
round the body from the heart or the never-ending flow of the animal
spirits through the nerves, Sterne's narrative never stops pulsating.
Think of La Fleur's delightful movements in A Sentimental Journey, his
appearance in a blue satin waistcoat with gold embroidery which had
been 'touch'd up' (another example of circulation), the agitation he
betrays in getting Yorick to write a letter for him (and the letter has
been used before), or the debonair French captain in the street showing
Yorick the way to seduce a woman. However, while the blood and the
animal spirits circulate round the body, Sterne's narratives pulsate but
provide no return, no Joycean ricorso. In this sense Sterne seems intent
on bringing his narratives into line with the pilgrim body, there in the
world, ready for encounters and exchange, conscious of frailty but not
of that overused modern word 'closure', a journey without end, to be
cherished for what life is.
Sterne's world is upheld by circulation. Interruption, the hallmark
of his work, is but a reminder of this metaphor, an interruption, that is,
in the circulation. Circulation is about changing places and the devel-
opment of a sympathetic imagination. It is appropriate that Yorick's
initial antipathy toward the mendicant monk at the beginning of A
Sentimental Journey is followed by the exchange of snuff-boxes. Exchange
and circulation remind us not of the organicist tradition which came
to fruition in the English Novel in the nineteenth century - the image
of the web in George Eliot's fiction has a representative quality in this

regard - as of something more lively, less integrated, where the pattern
is less insistent, there for the taking if you want it. What Sterne grasped
from his student days at Cambridge when his lungs filled and he 'bled
the bed full', as he informs us in his letters, was that his body was
always going to speak to him in a direct physical way (he must also have
realized he would never see old age) .4 Willis was interested in experimen-
tation and at Oxford in the 1650s he became a leading expert in both
chemistry and anatomy - one of the fullest entries in Pordage's 'Table
of Hard Words' is on urine. Sterne, too, is an investigator, but in his
case his attitude and stance is not so much experimental as responsive:
he is a great listener to his own body and he traces his feelings back to
their source in 'the eternal fountain of our feelings'. For Sterne, history
is your own heartbeat, to quote the title of a volume of verse by Michael
S. Harper.5 So the only sort of pattern he attended to in earnest was the
precarious one which led from one encounter to another. Nothing was
more fitting than to construct a European Grand Tour which, unlike
Tobias Smollett's Travels Through France and Italy (1766), never proceeds
effectively further than France, a tour which was based on nothing more
than and nothing less than a series of encounters, which has nothing to
say about the quality or circulation of the water from place to place, and
which ends in a dash or a blank space.
The importance he assigned to the idea of circulation supplied Sterne
with something else. Sterne's argument is with the materialism of his
age, not the materialism of Marx or Leopold Bloom but the mechanistic
materialism of Baron d'Holbach, the atheism as propounded by mid-
eighteenth-century Encyclopaedists in France, and the empiricism of
John Locke. For Sterne, the body is not a machine and the mind is not
a tabula rasa. Tristram Shandy takes particular delight in noticing that the
entry into the world is anything but straightforward. Thus, Tristram's
nose is cruelly squashed when touched by the forceps in the birth
canal. As with the nose so with its male counterpart, the penis. With no
chamber pot nearby in the upstairs bedroom, the housekeeper Susannah
resorts to getting her charge, the five-year-old Tristram, to urinate out
of the window, but while he is doing so the sash window, which was not
'well hung', gives way and 'Nothing is left,—cried Susannah,—nothing
is left—for me but to run my country' (Tristram Shandy, 449-50).
The moment, impossible not to visualize, is well-captured in Michael
Winterbottom's film A Cock and Bull Story (2005). Susannah would find
sanctuary with Uncle Toby, but the phrase 'for me' can perhaps also be
read as Susannah identifying with Tristram, whose phallic loss is linked
humorously by Sterne with the exercise of power in adult life.
As Sterne recognized, life is dependent not only on winding up the
clock but also on the flow of blood and the movement of the animal
spirits or 'very subtil little bodies' (Pordage, 127). It also had a life of
its own as it were, so the body was never simply nature as opposed to
culture and, moreover, it was subject to accidents which Providence
might or might not have prevented. The 'sensitive' body, the soul that
man shares with 'brutes' - as opposed to the rational soul - has invol-
untary movements or is subject to 'reflex action', a phrase that enters the
language with Cerebri Anatome. Willis was intrigued, for example, not only
by the 'wandering pair' but also by the fact that, when asleep, a person
scratches himself. Three generations later, Sterne reconfigures yet again
the relationship between the cognitive faculty of the mind and the realm
of the imagination, for, like Leopold Bloom, he understood the interde-
pendence of mind and body: 'Rumple the one, you rumple the other'
(189), as we read in Tristram Shandy. In a world of accidents, Sensibility,
not the dispassionate God of the Deists, is Sterne's natural recourse, and
the hymn to Sensibility quite naturally also includes a reference to touch
and the effect of the weather on people with a disorder of the nerves:
Dear sensibility! source inexhausted of all that's precious in our joys, or
costly in our sorrows! thou chainest thy martyr down upon his bed of
straw—and 'tis thou who lift'st him up to HEAVEN!—eternal fountain
of our feelings!—'tis here I trace thee—and this is thy divinity which stirs
within me—not, that in some sad and sickening moments, 'my soul shrinks
back upon herself, and startles at destruction—mere pomp of words!—but
that I feel some generous joys and generous cares beyond myself—all
comes from thee, great—great SENSORIUM of the world! which vibrates,
if a hair of our heads but falls upon the ground, in the remotest desert
of thy creation.—Touch'd with thee, Eugenius draws my curtain when I
languish—hears my tale of symptoms, and blames the weather for the
disorder of his nerves. (SentimentalJourney, 117)
Concluding Remarks
Joyce is not Sterne, Sterne is not Joyce. That much is certain. In Ulysses,
there are no specific references to corporeity or corporeality, to that
seventeenth-century debate that clearly interested the eighteenth-century
parson, as the spiritual world began to recede in the face of new material,
and to some extent more powerful, explanatory concepts. Porter has
rightly argued that Tristram Shandy is 'the first novel to bear the weight
of a major philosophical shift. Its comedy made the new inferiority of
Lockean and Humean man — a creature of confused subjectivity — seem
normal and even sympathetic' (Porter, 303-4). If Sterne provides a
sustained engagement with empiricism and materialism, then what intel-
lectual system does Joyce reflect, give expression to, or, more properly,
satirize? One possible answer is the medieval world that Rabelais also
satirized. Joyce, we might recall, is 'middayevil down to his vegetable soul'
(fW423:28), medieval not just down to his animal soul but to his even
lower soul, the vegetable one. It is a view which receives further confir-
mation in the 1903 notebook newly acquired by the National Library of
Ireland in which we see the young man carefully transcribing sentences
from his intellectual master St Thomas Aquinas. According to Bakhtin,
'Rabelais's task is to gather together on a new material base a world
that, due to the dissolution of the medieval world-view, is disintegrating'
(Bakhtin, 205). Change Rabelais to Joyce and medieval to capitalist and
Bakhtin's comment resonates across the centuries and through different
historical periods.
Like Rabelais, Joyce is a gatherer, an orderer, someone given to a non-
transcendent view of the universe, to the Aristotelian / Thomist view that
there is nothing in the intellect which doesn't come through the senses.
The issue is complicated not least because his Jesuit masters ensured
the medieval world was not only contemporary but also constituted a
valuable weapon in the Catholic armoury against the modern world. So
Joyce's new material base betrays both a confident attachment to and
a distrust of modernity. Like Rabelais, Joyce's sense of the grotesque
- used here not as in Southern grotesque but in its original meaning
as mixed in form, a departure from the classical viewpoint, not logical, as
when in art or sculpture a reed supports a roof - involves 'a blurring of
distinctions ... a riot of incompleted forms' (Parrinder, 8).Joyce's mixed
response stands in contrast with the Protestant clergyman Sterne, whose
satire on Roman Catholicism - as in his mockery of the form of excom-
munication or of the proposal to baptize distressed infants in the womb
by injection - is singularly confident, sharp and 'enlightened'. When 'any
thing, which he deem'd very absurd, was offer'd' (Tristram Shandy, 78),
Uncle Toby took to whistling half a dozen bars of Lillabullero, the Orange
tune guaranteed to antagonize Irish Catholics.
In attitudes to the dead and the afterlife, Joyce betrays both modern
and medieval ways of thinking. His interest in corpses and in wakes
is thoroughly Irish and traditional, but his curiosity in how the dead
are treated in different cultures also reflects developments in modern
anthropology. In Finnegans Wake, a book in its own way about the
dead, he makes constant use of Ernest Budge's Book of the Dead (1901)
concerning ancient funerary customs in Egypt. To counter the gloomy
cultural diagnosis of The Waste Land, a text which is also indebted
throughout to anthropology, Joyce finds hope in the many-layered
connection between corpses and crops: 'Life, he himself said once, ...
is a wake, livit or krikit, and on the bunk of our breadwiiining lies the
cropse of our seedfather' (/W55:5-8). This is also the place to recall the
moment when the amateur ethnographer Bloom steps into All Hallows
Church in an episode devoted to modern lotus-eaters and witnesses Holy
Communion, 'the thing', being distributed: ''Corpus: body. Corpse. Good
idea the Latin. Stupefies them first' (t/5:350—1). Joyce is intrigued by this
proximity between corpus or body of Christ and corpse, between words
from a dead language (Latin) and what implications this might have for
Christian theology. Indeed, if customs are best appreciated by outsiders,
so too is language.
For Sterne, the body has feelings and these are wired to a complex
fretwork of pulses, arteries and nerves. In one of his most lyrical passages
in Tristram Shandy, in which he comes close to a form of natural religion,
the narrator declares: 'True Shandeism ... opens the heart and lungs ...
forces the blood to run freely thro' its channels, and makes the wheel of
life run along' (Tristram Shandy, 401). In Joyce, the body is less vulnerable
and made of stronger stuff, and, in spite of his studying medicine for
a short while in Paris, his image of the body - and this also includes
the eyes - almost invariably gives the impression of being closer to
culture than nature, closer that is to Henri Bergson's emphasis on lived
experience as a counter to nineteenth-century positivism. In a famous
remark from Matter and Memory (1896), Bergson declares: 'The brain is
part of the material world; the material world is not part of the brain'
(Bergson, 4). Sterne didn't know what Joyce's generation knew, that, as
Tit-Bits Monster Table Book (1902) informs us, 'At each beat of the heart
(about 72 per minute) about 6 ozs. of blood is driven into the aorta from
the left ventricle, and the same amount driven from the right ventricle
into the pulmonary artery' and that 'The whole of the blood in the body
... passes through the heart in 32 beats' (62). Joyce could have made
more of this, but, like Bergson, he seems more interested in mind over
matter, in the Bloomian mind's capacity, for example, to compare the
dead heart to a rusty pump.
Even when the body is no longer alive, Joyce still clings to culture,
treating the dead as if they still belonged to the living rather than to the
earth or nature. It is partly for this reason that 'Hades' constitutes one of
the funniest episodes of Ulysses. When at the beginning of 'Aeolus' we read
the headline in capital letters 'IN THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN
METROPOLIS' with its allusion to the centre of the tramway 'circulation'
system, if it weren't for the previous episode 'Hades', we might spend little
time reflecting on the condition of the heart. The subheading reminds us
more of a newspaper than of the heart and more of the transposed literal
meaning of 'centre' rather than of anything connected with the body.
Conversely, when we begin 'Aeolus' with 'Hades' in mind, the HEART
resonates against the image of 'rusty pumps' and the reference to the
'breakdown' of Paddy Dignam's heart, which, significantly, takes place as
the cortege passes Nelson's Pillar. But resonance works differently in Sterne.
When we encounter 'the wheel of life', we sense the comic viewpoint has
been excluded, for Sterne, in serious mode, insists that life is dependent on
a good pair of lungs and strong circulation. When Bloom, who knows very
little about the game, is leaving the cemetery at Glasnevin after the funeral,
he (wrongly) uses a cricketing metaphor as if to put space between himself
and the dead: 'They are not going to get me this innings' (U6:1004).
In the case of Stephen, the body is opposed to the mind, for Molly the
body presents itself as a storehouse of memories and adventures, and for
Bloom it belongs to determination and is closer therefore to a rational
discourse strongly influenced by reductionism and modern forms of
associationism. In the various journeys between the body and the mind
that Ulysses constructs, there is nothing stranger than McCoy's 'medical'
inquiry of Bloom, 'How's the body?' ({75:86). However, unlike in Sterne,
there is no great 'SENSORIUM of the world' and no hymns to a higher
being, no exclamation marks in this sense. Arguably, the closest Joyce
gets to the divine is the mind which perceives the world, perhaps most
strikingly expressed in Stephen's image of the 'strandentwining cable of
all flesh' (£73:37) or 'the word known to all men'. Surprisingly, when a
survey is conducted into the use of 'lips' in their writings, it transpires
that Sterne is often better than Joyce at conveying a sensuous pressure
behind the word.
Sterne's is a more vulnerable world, but, leaving aside his eye problems,
unless we are afflicted with poor health, Joyce's is generally closer to the
one we inhabit. This is a world in which an upbeat consumerism and late
modernity have problematized the idea of free choice. Yorick enters a
shop in Paris which is not unlike someone's front room. The encounter
is personal, face-to-face, quiet. The world in Joyce is noisy, noisy with
information, with printing presses, the clatter of trams, ringing bells,
horses' hoofs, creaks on the bar floor from tan shoes. All the sounds
fit or speak, nothing is there by chance, and, as Bloom notices, some
shops have winning shop assistants and others more surly ones. Against
the anonymity of modern life, Joyce sets down a realistic marker, but it
is at a price, for it can be argued he returns us to a discourse on design
that belongs to a religious age. Dublin in 1904 is clearly not the best of
all possible worlds, but if everything fits, as my remarks on 'Wandering
Rocks' in Chapter 3 'Reading Dublin 1904' suggest, what room exists for
individual freedom or precarious encounters or social visits to characters
drawn from other novels? That tension, that openness to experience,
more often than not connected with something beyond himself, is
always there in postmodernist Sterne, but in modernist Joyce, at the
same time as we witness an increased complexity in realistic texture,
there is a narrowing down as if the Arranger couldn't let go of paring his
fingernails.
But Joyce is also a carrier, and he carries with him the eighteenth-
century interest in cultural difference, nineteenth-century forms of
reductionism or determinism, as well as the whole era of Romanticism,
and, especially in the Irish context, the ideal of nationalism. He witnesses
the emergence of modernism, the development of modern psycho-
analysis, and in the field of politics the march of Fascism. When Sterne
and Joyce are compared to bookeiids to the novel, we shouldn't overlook
the excluded middle. As the hymn to Sensibility or the image of the
trapped starling in A Sentimental Journey suggest, Sterne anticipates the

full-blown Romantic era as well as the French Revolution; Joyce inherits
that world. But in both the anticipator and the inheritor, there is a
concern with freedom, with the nature of feelings, with articulation and
with cultural norms. In novels such as Henry Mackenzie's Man of Feeling
(1770), there was an attempt to draw back from the unsettling image
of feelings as portrayed in Sterne.6 Joyce faced similar attacks from the
arbiters of taste whether that was in the columns of literary journals or in
the courts of law. What Sterne and Joyce share is a history of oppression,
an attention to the body, and an awareness of the special properties and
cultural codes inherent in touch. Whether the topic is satire and the
novel, body and mind, matter and memory, medievalism and modernity,
postmodernism and modernism, or eighteenth-century materialism and
twentieth-century consumerism, touch and its supporters still have work
to do.
2
Joyce, Erudition and the Late

Nineteenth Century
In his Introduction to The Books at the Wake, James Atherton cites a remark
by Robert G. Kelly on the nature of Joyce's intelligence: 'Whatever else
might be against him he would exceed in intelligence all his rivals. ...
He became a literary antiquarian. ... He delved into medieval tracts,
studied learned discussion of conscience (Agenbite of Inwit) by forgotten
monks, and memorised quaint old ballads suitable to his musical taste
and abilities' (Atherton 1974a, 19). Kelly supports his comments by citing
an observation made by Oliver St John Gogarty, how 'No man had more
erudition at so early an age'. Atherton questions Kelly on his assumption
that Joyce's knowledge was that recherche but to my mind he might have
gone further.
Two lines of compression or argument run through this chapter and
overlap. One concerns Joyce's erudition in general; the other is at once
more specific and speculative, and concerns his possible debt to Thomas
Arnold's A Manual of English Literature (1897). With the first, my intention
is to re-examine what is meant by erudition in Joyce, beginning with
something that doesn't in itself qualify as erudition, namely material
and excerpts from Tit-Bits, and then moving on to some general remarks
about the nature of erudition in our culture. With the second, I want
to propose that some things which sound erudite in Joyce belong to his
education at the hands of the Jesuits (which has been covered elsewhere)
and to his tutor for English at university (which has been perhaps
overlooked). As indicated in my Introduction, Joyce is a difficult writer,
but there is value in not adding to his difficulty. In his use of popular
culture or in his knowledge of English Literature - the two topics
I deal with here - he betrays he is a product of late-Victorian Ireland
where borders were in dispute and where nothing, not even erudition,
was safe.
Joyce, Erudition and the Late Nineteenth Century 39
Tit-Bits
The issue of erudition is a complex one. The annotator of a Joyce text

needs to possess considerable knowledge but s/he also needs a knack in
tracking down sources which the passage of time has obscured. On the
surface, you don't need erudition to understand or make sense of the
reference to Philip Beaufoy in Tit-Bits (this was its original spelling, not
Titbits as it appears in Ulysses) which Bloom comes across while in the
outhouse in 'Calypso'. But if you were familiar with Tit-Bits from that
period you might be persuaded that the character of Bloom steps out
of its pages, and not only his character, for, as the Physiological Table in
Tit-Bits Monster Table Book (1902) reminds us, Bloom, at 5 foot 9V£ inches
in height and 11 stone 4 pounds in weight is close to the average height
and slightly more than the average weight of an Englishman (5 foot 9
inches and 10 stone 10 pounds) at the turn of the century. Some items
in Tit-Bits magazine, such as a report in the issue for 26 August 1899
about men luring women through the columns of a newspaper, have
distinctive Bloom markings: 'A private gentleman, aged 40, of education,
wealth and more than average good looks, wishes to meet a lady of good
private means with a view to matrimony.' On inquiring further the
woman receives the reply: 'MADAM - 1 am highly honoured by your
most amiable letter, and shall be delighted to make your acquaintance.
You have all the qualities I seek in a wife, but unfortunately I am too busy
to arrange a meeting at present. Meantime I can add materially to your
fortune by my system of investment. ...' Bloom's advert is more succinct:
'Wanted, smart lady typist to aid gentleman in literary work' ([78:326-7),
and the ruse worked in Bloom's case even when he had strayed beyond
the bounds of propriety: 'Answered anyhow' (£75:65). The Tit-Bits corre-
spondent kept her money and Tit-Bits, which was generally sympathetic
to the plight of women whether single or married, added that she 'prefers
to remain single'.
Some articles such as 'Why Are Women So Addicted to Postscripts',
which appeared in Tit-Bits on 6 August 1904, the summer Joyce was
courting Nora in Dublin, are germane to this discussion, especially the
suggestion that the postscript represents not only the social position of
women, 'the necessity commonly laid upon her of obtaining her wishes
by indirect persuasion', but also 'the literary equivalent of the kiss she
blows from her finger-tips when she turns after having said farewell'. In
her reply to Bloom, Martha is both forward and direct, as if she knows
exactly the convention she is using: 'P. S. Do tell me what kind of perfume
does your wife use' (C75:58). We'll never know if other articles such as
'The Life of a Sandwich-Man' on 9 July 1887 gave Joyce ideas, in this
case for the H.E.L.Y'S advertisement which eels its way through Ulysses.
When thinking of Bloom's fondness for 'the inner organs of beasts and
fowls' (U 4:1-2), if we knew it, we might recall the advertisement for
Yorkshire Relish on 22 July 1899, relish which 'Enriches the Daintiest of

Dishes, and makes palatable otherwise unappetising food'. Or take an
item that appeared in 10 July 1886 under the heading 'Raising the Wind',
precisely the subheading that appears in 'Aeolus' (£77:995). JJ. O'Molloy,
the impoverished lawyer, is looking for a loan from Myles Crawford,
but the editor pleads poverty himself. If he could get the money, raise
the wind that is, he would: 'With a heart and a half if I could raise the
wind anyhow.' In the Tit-Bits piece, an impoverished old man is busking
in the East End but he doesn't have enough 'wind' to compete with the
cold December winds. An unknown passer-by, noticing 'the poor flutist's
efforts to raise the wind', takes up the instrument and proceeds to 'blow
out a liquid flood of melody', bidding the old man to hold out his hat
to passers-by. When the flute is returned and the old man wishes him a
share of the 'windfall', the 'rubicund Orpheus' declines. The beautifully
constructed Tit-Bits piece is a good Samaritan story, but there is little
generosity in 'Aeolus', an episode that is rich in other forms of exchange
as is suggested by references to pawnshops, Ireland's submission to Rome
or the Crown, and what the island received in return (plum-stones is
one reading of Stephen's Parable of the Plums). What the two scenes,
however, share is a chord, how a phrase can be worked repeatedly,
especially between title and story, until it yields a poetic density all its
own, until, that is, we're not sure if we're reading a story or an example
of how to write a story, rhetoric being the art of 'Aeolus'.
The format and tone of Tit-Bits must also have appealed to the author
of Ulysses. The question-and-answer format of 'Ithaca', for example,
resembles a similar format in Tit-Bits, as miscellaneous questions (taken
from a single issue) such as the following remind us: 'Which country
has the most women preachers?' or 'What is the largest sum ever given
for a mouse?' or 'Which jockeys in this country had most mounts and
wins in the season of 1900?' or 'In which city is it necessary for a man
to obtain the consent of his wife before he can go up in a balloon?' (19
January 1901). The subheadings in 'Aeolus' belong not only to tabloid
newspapers, as I mention in Chapter 3, but also to the pages of Tit-Bits.
On one page of Tit-Bits, little incidents were collected and recorded
with a heading which acted as a commentary on the story that followed.
Some headings are straightforward and informative such as 'THE
WORLD'S HOURS' or A DREADFUL ACCIDENT'. Some are tongue-
in-cheek such as 'READING QUITE UNNECESSARY' or 'BETTER
THAN ORTHOGRAPHY' (reminiscent of ORTHOGRAPHICAL in
'Aeolus'). Some are beautifully inflated such as A CRUSHING REPLY'
and 'INJURED INNOCENCE'. And some are decidedly ironic such as
'QUITE DIFFERENT' and 'SHE AGREED WITH HIM' (see 7 December
1901, 4 and 18 January 1902). One heading was 'GOOD—AND VERY
GOOD'. Which recalls 'CLEVER, VERY' (f/7:674). It is in keeping that
Joyce spoofs the convention, but without such cues to his imagination
Joyce, Erudition and the Late Nineteenth Century 41
he might not have travelled as far as he did when at the end of 'Aeolus'
he describes, thus, the weakness of the two middle-aged women who
are the focus of Stephen's Parable of the Plums: 'DIMINISHED DIGITS
PROVE TOO TITILLATING FOR FRISKY FRUMPS. ANNE WIMBLES,
FLO WANGLES—YET CAN YOU BLAME THEM?' (£77:1069-71) In
turn, the headings in Tit-Bits come to resemble those in Aeolus' as with
'A WONDERFUL EMBROCATION' (about growing cows' tails) and
'INCONVENIENT OBEDIENCE' (about a young sentry arresting his
superintendent) (31 May 1902).
If you were not a research student but familiar with the pages of
Tit-Bits, there would be a question-mark over your reading habits or
how you had spent your youth (or, more flippantly, with Bloom in the
outhouse in mind, what kind of toilet paper the family used). For Joyce's
father, 'That Titbits paper' was the only one he read for 'general culture'
(Stanislaus Joyce, 106), and Tit-Bits we learn was also read by Virginia
and Vanessa Stephen as girls in London (Squier, 13). On the other hand,
to Miriam in Dorothy Richardson's novel Backwater (1916), Tit-Bits is
simply associated with confinement whether socially or culturally: That
dreadful room with the dreadful man hiding in it and staying in bed and
reading Tit-Bits on bright Sunday mornings' (Richardson, vol. 1, 311).
For those brought up in the 1890s, then, for those who became the first
generation of Ulysses readers, the reference in 'Calypso' might well have
required no gloss, no exercise in erudition. It is later commentators who
struggle, and some, such as the late Don Gifford, through their labours
in libraries and elsewhere become erudite.
Beaufoy himself requires separate treatment. Prompted no doubt by
Stanislaus Joyce (106), Gifford and Seidman state that Beaufoy was 'A
real person who contributed (terrible?) stories to Tit-Bits in the 1890s'
(Gifford and Seidman, 81). Actually, in the 1901 Census for England and
Wales there are 151 people with the name Beaufoy (and this across the
whole country) but there is no mention of 'P. Beaufoy', so one suspects
Beaufoy, which half-rhymes with Purefoy, the name Joyce assigns to the
woman in labour in 'The Oxen of the Sun' - 'Mrs Beaufoy, Purefoy'
Bloom thinks in 'Nausicaa' (U 13:959) - is a pseudonym for a real
person(s) (that is, unless the person was outside the Census and resided
elsewhere, in France or Dublin for example). If it was a pseudonym, this
was contrary to Tit-Bits policy, which insisted that The correct name and
address of the sender must be distinctly written upon every competition,
for publication in the event of success' (Tit-Bits, 16 July 1887).
Beaufoy's address has also escaped critical attention. Gifford and
Seidman contrast Beaufoy's name with his 'fashionable' London address
(which isn't given by Joyce; the annotators infer the address from
'Playgoers' Club'). In the 23 December 1899 issue, Beaufoy's address is
given as the Strand, but in other issues the address of the Playgoers' Club
is 6 Clement's Inn or simply Clement's Inn. Clement's Inn Passsage is
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
“Markham,” she said, “you think, would then be free?”
“Well—then it wouldn’t matter particularly about Markham, what he
did,” the young man said.
Lady Markham had borne a great many such assaults in her life as if she
felt nothing: but as a matter of fact she did feel them deeply; and when a
probable new combination was thus calmly set before her, her usual
composure was put to a severe test. She smiled upon Claude, indeed, as
long as he remained with her, and allowed him no glimpse of her real
feelings; but when he was gone, felt for a moment her heart fail her. She
had, even in the misfortunes which had crossed her life, secured always a
great share of her own way. Many people do this even when they suffer
most. Whether they get it cheerfully or painfully, they yet get it, which is
always something. Waring, when, in his fastidious impatience and irritation,
because he did not get his, he had flung forth into the unknown, and
abandoned her and her life altogether, did still, though at the cost of pain
and scandal, help his wife to this triumph, that she departed from none of
her requirements, and remained mistress of the battlefield. She had her own
way, though he would not yield to it. But as a woman grows older, and
becomes less capable of that pertinacity which is the best means of securing
her own way, and when the conflicting wills against hers are many instead
of being only one, the state of the matter changes. Constance had turned
against her, when she was on the eve of an arrangement which would have
been so very much for Con’s good. And Frances, though so submissive in
some points, would not be so, she felt instinctively, on others. And
Markham—that was the most fundamental shock of all—Markham might
possibly in the future have prospects and hopes independent altogether of
his mother’s, in antagonism with all her arrangements. This, which she had
not anticipated, went to her heart. And when she thought of what had been
suggested to her with so much composure—the alteration of her whole life,
the substitution of her husband, from whom she had been so long parted,
who did not think as she did nor live as she did for her son, who, with all
his faults, which she knew so well, was yet in sympathy with her in all she
thought and wished and knew—this suggestion made her sick and faint. It
had come, though not with any force, even from Markham himself. It had
come from Sir Thomas, who was one of the oldest of her friends; and now
Claude set it before her in all the forcible simplicity of commonplace: it
would be more respectable! She laughed almost violently when he left her,
but it was a laugh which was not far from tears.
“Claude has been complaining of you,” she said to Frances, recovering
herself with an instantaneous effort when her daughter came into the room;
“but I don’t object, my dear. Unless you had found that you could like him
yourself, which would have been the best thing, perhaps—you were quite
right in what you said. So far as Constance is concerned, it is all that I could
wish.”
“Mamma,” said Frances, “you don’t want Constance—you would not let
her—accept that?”
“Accept what? My love, you must not be so emphatic. Accept a life full
of luxury, splendour even, if she likes—and every care forestalled. My dear
little girl, you don’t know anything about the world.”
Frances pondered for some time before she replied. “Mamma,” she said
again, “if such a case arose—you said that the best thing for me would have
been to have liked—Mr Ramsay. There is no question of that. But if such a
case arose——”
“Yes, my dear”—Lady Markham took her daughter’s hand in her own,
and looked at her with a smile of pleasure—“I hope it will some day. And
what then?”
“Would you—think the same about me? Would you consider the life full
of luxury, as you said—would you desire for me the same thing as for
Constance?”
Lady Markham held the girl’s hand clasped in both of hers; the soft
caressing atmosphere about her enveloped Frances. “My dear,” she said,
“this is a very serious question. You are not asking me for curiosity alone?”
“It is a very serious question,” Frances said.
And the mother and daughter looked at each other closely, with more
meaning, perhaps, than had as yet been in the eyes of either,
notwithstanding all the excitement of interest in their first meeting. It was
some time before another word was said. Frances saw in her mother a
woman full of determination, very clear as to what she wanted, very
unlikely to be turned from it by softer impulses, although outside she was
so tender and soft; and Lady Markham saw in Frances a girl who was
entirely submissive, yet immovable, whose dove’s eyes had a steady soft
gaze, against which the kindred light of her own had no power. It was a
mutual revelation. There was no conflict, nor appearance of conflict,
between these two, so like each other—two gentle and soft-voiced women,
both full of natural courtesy and disinclination to wound or offend; both
seeing everything around them very clearly from her own, perhaps limited,
point of view; and both feeling that between them nothing but the absolute
truth would do.
“You trouble me, Frances,” said Lady Markham at length. “When such a
case arises, it will be time enough. In the abstract, I should of course feel
for one as I feel for the other. Nay, stop a little. I should wish to provide for
you, as for Constance, a life of assured comfort,—well, if you drive me to it
—of wealth and all that wealth brings. Assuredly that is what I should
wish.” She gave Frances’ hand a pressure which was almost painful, and
then dropped it. “I hope you have no fancy for poverty theoretically, like
your patron saint,” she added lightly, trying to escape from the gravity of
the question by a laugh.
“Mother,” said Frances, in a voice which was tremulous and yet steady,
“I want to tell you—I think neither of poverty nor of money. I am more
used, perhaps, to the one than the other. I will do what you wish in
everything—everything else; but——”
“Not in the one thing which would probably be the only thing I asked of
you,” said Lady Markham, with a smile. She put her hands on Frances’
shoulders and gave her a kiss upon her cheek. “My dear child, you probably
think this is quite original,” she said; “but I assure you it is what almost
every daughter one time or other says to her parents: Anything else—
anything, but—— Happily there is no question between you and me. Let us
wait till the occasion arises. It is always time enough to fall out.”
CHAPTER XXXII.
Nothing happened of any importance before their return to Eaton Square.
Markham, hopping about with a queer sidelong motion he had, his little
eyes screwed up with humorous meaning, seemed to Frances to recover his
spirits after the Winterbourn episode was over, which was the subject—
though that, of course, she did not know—of half the voluminous
correspondence of all the ladies and gentlemen in the house, whose letters
were so important a part of their existence. Before a week was over, all
Society was aware of the fact that Ralph Winterbourn had been nearly
dying at Markham Priory; that Lady Markham was in “a state” which
baffled description, and Markham himself so changed as to be scarcely
recognisable; but that, fortunately, the crisis had been tided over, and
everything was still problematical. But the problem was so interesting, that
one perfumed epistle after another carried it to curious wits all over the
country, and a new light upon the subject was warmly welcomed in a
hundred Easter meetings. What would Markham do? What would Nelly do?
Would their friendship end in the vulgar way, in a marriage? Would they
venture, in face of all prognostications, to keep it up as a friendship, when
there was no longer any reason why it should not ripen into love? Or would
they, frightened by all the inevitable comments which they would have to
encounter, stop short altogether, and fly from each other?
Such a “case” is a delightful thing to speculate upon. At the Priory, it
could only be discussed in secret conclave; and though no doubt the
experienced persons chiefly concerned were quite conscious of the subject
which occupied their friends’ thoughts, there was no further reference made
to it between them, and everything went on as it had always done. The night
before their return to town, Markham, in the solitude of the house, from
which all the guests had just departed, called Frances outside to bear him
company while he smoked his cigarette. He was walking up and down on
the lawn in the grey stillness of a cloudy warm evening, when there was no
light to speak of anywhere, and yet a good deal to be seen through the
wavering greyness of sky and sea. A few stars, very mild and indistinct,
looked out at the edges of the clouds here and there; the great water-line
widened and cleared towards the horizon; and in the far distance, where a
deeper greyness showed the mainland, the gleam of a lighthouse surprised
the dark by slow continual revolutions. There was no moon: something
softer, more seductive than even the moon, was in this absence of light.
“Well—now they’re gone, what do you think of them, Fan? They’re very
good specimens of the English country-house party—all kinds: the
respectable family, the sturdy old fogy, the rich young man without health,
and the muscular young man without money.” There had been, it is needless
to say, various other members of the party, who, being quite unimportant to
this history, need not be mentioned here. “What do you think of them, little
un? You have your own way of seeing things.”
“I—like them all well enough, Markham,” without enthusiasm Frances
replied.
“That is comprehensive at least. So do I, my dear. It would not have
occurred to me to say it; but it is just the right thing to say. They pull you to
pieces almost before your face; but they are not ill-natured. They tell all
sorts of stories about each other——”
“No, Markham; I don’t think that is just.”
“——Without meaning any harm,” he went on. “Fan, in countries where
conversation is cultivated, perhaps people don’t talk scandal—I only say
perhaps—but here we are forced to take to it for want of anything else to
say. What did your Giovannis and Giacomos talk of in your village out
yonder?” Markham pointed towards the clear blue-grey line of the horizon,
beyond which lay America, if anything; but he meant distance, and that was
enough.
“They talked—about the olives, how they were looking, and if it was
going to be a bad or an indifferent year.”
“And then?”
“About the forestieri, if many were coming, and whether it would be a
good season for the hotels; and about tying up the palms, to make them
ready for Easter,” said Frances, resuming, with a smile about her lips. “And
about how old Pietro’s son had got such a good appointment in the post-
office, and had bought little Nina a pair of earrings as long as your finger;
for he was to marry Nina, you know.”
“Oh, was he? Go on. I am very much interested. Didn’t they say Mr
Whatever-his-name-is wanted to get out of it, and that there never would
have been any engagement, had not Miss Nina’s mother——?”
“Oh Markham,” cried Frances in surprise, “how could you possibly
know?”
“I was reasoning from analogy, Fan. Yes, I suppose they do it all the
world over. And it is odd—isn’t it?—that, knowing what they are sure to
say, we ask them to our houses, and put the keys of all our skeleton
cupboards into their hands.”
“Do you think that is true, that dreadful idea about the skeleton? I am
sure——”
“What are you sure of, my little dear?”
“I was going to say, oh Markham, that I was sure, at home, we had no
skeleton; and then I remembered——”
“I understand,” he said kindly. “It was not a skeleton to speak of, Fan.
There is nothing particularly bad about it. If you had met it out walking,
you would not have known it for a skeleton. Let us say a mystery, which is
not such a mouth-filling word.”
“Sir Thomas told me,” said Frances, with some timidity; “but I am not
sure that I understood. Markham! what was it really about?”
Her voice was low and diffident, and at first he only shook his head.
“About nothing,” he said; “about—me. Yes, more than anything else, about
me. That is how—— No, it isn’t,” he added, correcting himself. “I always
must have cared for my mother more than for any woman. She has always
been my greatest friend, ever since I can remember anything. We seem to
have been children together, and to have grown up together. I was
everything to her for a dozen years, and then—your father came between
us. He hated me—and I tormented him.”
“He could not hate you, Markham. Oh no, no!”
“My little Fan, how can a child like you understand? Neither did I
understand, when I was doing all the mischief. Between twelve and
eighteen I was an imp of mischief, a little demon. It was fun to me to bait
that thin-skinned man, that jumped at everything. The explosion was fun to
me too. I was a little beast. And then I got the mother to myself again. Don’t
kill me, my dear. I am scarcely sorry now. We have had very good times
since, I with my parent, you with yours—till that day,” he added, flinging
away the end of his cigarette, “when mischief again prompted me to let Con
know where he was, which started us all again.”
“Did you always know where we were?” she asked. Strangely enough,
this story did not give her any angry feeling towards Markham. It was so far
off, and the previous relations of her long-separated father and mother were
as a fairy tale to her, confusing and almost incredible, which she did not
take into account as matter of fact at all. Markham had delivered these
confessions slowly, as they turned and re-turned up and down the lawn.
There was not light enough for either to see the expression in the other’s
face, and the veil of the darkness added to the softening effect. The words
came out in short sentences, interrupted by that little business of puffing at
the cigarette, letting it go out, stopping to strike a fusee and relight it, which
so often forms the byplay of an important conversation, and sometimes
breaks the force of painful revelations. Frances followed everything with an
absorbed but yet half-dreamy attention, as if the red glow of the light, the
exclamation of impatience when the cigarette was found to have gone out,
the very perfume of the fusee in the air, were part and parcel of it. And the
question she asked was almost mechanical, a part of the business too,
striking naturally from the last thing he had said as sparks flew from the
perfumed light.
“Not where,” he said. “But I might have known, had I made any attempt
to know. The mother sent her letters through the lawyer, and of course we
could have found out. It was thrust upon me at last by one of those
meddling fools that go everywhere. And then my old demon got possession
of me, and I told Con.” Here he gave a low chuckle, which seemed to
escape him in spite of himself. “I am laughing,” he said—“pay attention,
Fan—at myself. Of course I have learned to be sorry for—some things—the
imp has put me up to; but I can’t get the better of that little demon—or of
this little beggar, if you like it better. It’s queer phraseology, I suppose; but I
prefer the other form.”
“And what,” said Frances in the same dreamy way, drawn on, she was
not conscious how, by something in the air, by some current of thought
which she was not aware of—“what do you mean to do now?”
He started from her side as if she had given him a blow. “Do now?” he
cried, with something in his voice that shook off the spell of the situation,
and aroused the girl at once to the reality of things. She had no guidance of
his looks, for, as has been said, she could not see them; but there was a
curious thrill in his voice of present alarm and consciousness, as if her
innocent question struck sharply against some fact of very different solidity
and force from those far-off shadowy facts which he had been telling her.
“Do now? What makes you think I am going to do anything at all?”
His voice fell away in a sort of quaver at the end of these words.
“I do not think it; I—I—don’t think anything, Markham; I—don’t—
know anything.”
“You ask very pat questions all the same, my little Fan. And you have
got a pair of very good eyes of your own in that little head. And if you have
got any light to throw upon the subject, my dear, produce it; for I’ll be
bothered if I know.”
Just then, a window opened in the gloom. “Children,” said Lady
Markham’s voice, “are you there? I think I see something like you, though
it is so dark. Bring your little sister in, Markham. She must not catch cold
on the eve of going back to town.”
“Here is the little thing, mammy. Shall I hand her in to you by the
window? It makes me feel very frisky to hear myself addressed as
children,” he cried, with his chuckle of easy laughter. “Here, Fan; run in,
my little dear, and be put to bed.”
But he did not go in with her. He kept outside in the quiet cool and
freshness of the night, illuminating the dim atmosphere now and then with
the momentary glow of another fusee. Frances from her room, to which she
had shortly retired, heard the sound, and saw from her windows the sudden
ruddy light a great many times before she went to sleep. Markham let his
cigar go out oftener than she could reckon. He was too full of thought to
remember his cigar.
They arrived in town when everybody was arriving, when even to
Frances, in her inexperience, the rising tide was visible in the streets, and
the air of a new world beginning, which always marks the commencement
of the season. No doubt it is a new world to many virgin souls, though so
stale and weary to most of those who tread its endless round. To Frances
everything was new; and a sense of the many wonderful things that awaited
her got into the girl’s head like ethereal wine, in spite of all the grave
matters of which she was conscious, which lay under the surface, and were,
if not skeletons in the closet, at least very serious drawbacks to anything
bright that life could bring. Her knowledge of these drawbacks had been
acquired so suddenly, and was so little dulled by habit, that it dwelt upon
her mind much more than family mysteries usually dwell upon a mind of
eighteen. But yet in the rush and exhilaration of new thoughts and
anticipations, always so much more delicately bright than any reality, she
forgot that all was not as natural, as pleasant, as happy as it seemed. If Lady
Markham had any consuming cares, she kept them shut away under that
smiling countenance, which was as bright and peaceful as the morning. If
Markham, on his side, was perplexed and doubtful, he came out and in with
the same little chuckle of fun, the same humorous twinkle in his eyes. When
these signs of tranquillity are so apparent, the young and ignorant can easily
make up their minds that all is well. And Frances was to be “presented”—a
thought which made her heart beat. She was to be put into a court-train and
feathers,—she who as yet had never worn anything but the simple frock
which she had so pleased herself to think was purely English in its
unobtrusiveness and modesty. She was not quite sure that she liked the
prospect; but it excited her all the same.
It was early in May, and the train and the court plumes were ready,
when, going out one morning upon some small errand of her own, Frances
met some one whom she recognised, walking slowly along the long line of
Eaton Square. She started at the sight of him, though he did not see her. He
was going along with a strange air of reluctance, yet anxiety, glancing up at
the houses, no doubt looking for Lady Markham’s house, so absorbed that
he neither saw Frances nor was disturbed by the startled movement she
made, which must have caught a less preoccupied eye. She smiled to
herself, after the first start, to see how entirely bent he was upon finding the
house, and how little attention he had to spare for anything else. He was
even more worn and pale, or rather grey, than he had been when he returned
from India, she thought; and there was in him a slackness, a letting-go of
himself, a weary look in his step and carriage, which proved, Frances
thought, that the Riviera had done George Gaunt little good.
For it was certainly George Gaunt, still in his loose grey Indian clothes,
looking like a man dropped from another hemisphere, investigating the
numbers on the doors as if he but vaguely comprehended the meaning of
them. But that there was in him that unmistakable air of soldier which no
mufti can quite disguise, he might have been the Ancient Mariner in person,
looking for the man whose fate it is to leave all the wedding-feasts of the
world in order to hear that tale. What tale could young Gaunt have to tell?
For a moment it flashed across the mind of Frances that he might be
bringing bad news, that “something might have happened,”—that rapid
conclusion to which the imagination is so ready to jump. An accident to her
father or Constance? so bad, so terrible, that it could not be trusted to a
letter, that he had been sent to break the news to them?
She had passed him by this time, being shy, in her surprise, of addressing
the stranger all at once; but now she paused, and turned with a momentary
intention of running after him and entreating him to tell her the worst. But
then Frances recollected that this was impossible; that with the telegraph in
active operation, no one would employ such a lingering way of conveying
news; and went on again, with her heart beating quicker, with a heightened
colour, and a restrained impatience and eagerness of which she was half
ashamed. No, she would not turn back before she had done her little
business. She did not want either the stranger himself or any one else to
divine the flutter of pleasant emotion, the desire she had to see and speak
with the son of her old friends. Yes, she said to herself, the son of her old
friends—he who was the youngest, whom Mrs Gaunt used to talk of for
hours, whose praises she was never weary of singing.
Frances smiled and blushed to herself as she hurried—perceptibly
hurried—about her little affairs. Kind Mrs Gaunt had always had a secret
longing to bring these two together. Frances would not turn back; but she
quickened her pace, almost running—as near running as was decorous in
London—to the lace-shop, to give the instructions which she had been
charged with. No doubt, she said to herself, she would find him there when
she got back. She had forgotten, perhaps, the fact that George Gaunt had
given very little of his regard to her when he met her, though she was his
mother’s favourite, and had no eyes but for Constance. This was not a thing
to dwell in the mind of a girl who had no jealousy in her, and who never
supposed herself to be half as worthy of anybody’s attention as Constance
was. But, anyhow, she forgot it altogether, forgot to ask herself what in this
respect might have happened in the meantime; and with her heart beating
full of innocent eagerness, pleasure, and excitement, full of the hope of
hearing about everybody, of seeing again through his eyes the dear little
well-known world, which seemed to lie so far behind her, hastened through
her errands, and turned quickly home.
To her great surprise, as she came back, turning round the corner into the
long line of pavement, she saw young Gaunt once more approaching her.
He looked even more listless and languid now, like a man who had tried to
do some duty and failed, and was escaping, glad to be out of the way of it.
This was a great deal to read in a man’s face; but Frances was highly
sympathetic, and divined it, knowing in herself many of those devices of
shy people, which shy persons divine. Fortunately she saw him some way
off, and had time to overcome her own shyness and take the initiative. She
went up to him fresh as the May morning, blushing and smiling, and put out
her hand. “Captain Gaunt?” she said. “I knew I could not be mistaken. Oh,
have you just come from Bordighera? I am so glad to see any one from
home!”
“Do you call it home, Miss Waring? Yes, I have just come. I—I—have a
number of messages, and some parcels, and—— But I thought you might
perhaps be out of town, or busy, and that it would be best to send them.”
“Is that why you are turning your back on my mother’s house? or did
you not know the number? I saw you before, looking—but I did not like to
speak.”
“I—thought you might be out of town,” he repeated, taking no notice of
her question; “and that perhaps the post——”
“Oh no,” cried Frances, whose shyness was of the cordial kind. “Now
you must come back and see mamma. She will want to hear all about
Constance. Are they all well, Captain Gaunt? Of course you must have seen
them constantly—and Constance. Mamma will want to hear everything.”
“Miss Waring is very well,” he said with a blank countenance, from
which he had done his best to dismiss all expression.
“And papa? and dear Mrs Gaunt, and the colonel, and everybody? Oh,
there is so much that letters can’t tell. Come back now with me. My mother
will be so glad to see you, and Markham; you know Markham already.”
Young Gaunt made a feeble momentary resistance. He murmured
something about an engagement, about his time being very short; but as he
did so, turned round languidly and went with her, obeying, as it seemed, the
eager impulse of Frances rather than any will of his own.
END OF THE SECOND VOLUME.
PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS

A HOUSE
DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF
BY MRS OLIPHANT
IN THREE VOLUMES
VOL. III.
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS

EDINBURGH AND LONDON
MDCCCLXXXVI
A HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST

ITSELF.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
Lady Markham received young Gaunt with the most gracious kindness:
had his mother seen him seated in the drawing-room at Eaton Square, with
Frances hovering about him full of pleasure and questions, and her mother
insisting that he should stay to luncheon, and Markham’s hansom just
drawing up at the door, she would have thought her boy on the highway to
fortune. The sweetness of the two ladies—the happy eagerness of Frances,
and Lady Markham’s grace and graciousness—had a soothing effect upon
the young man. He had been unwilling to come, as he was unwilling to go
anywhere at this crisis of his life; but it soothed him, and filled him with a
sort of painful and bitter pleasure to be thus surrounded by all that was most
familiar to Constance,—by her mother and sister, and all their questions
about her. These questions, indeed, it was hard upon him to be obliged to
answer; but yet that pain was the best thing that now remained to him, he
said to himself. To hear her name, and all those allusions to her, to be in the
rooms where she had spent her life—all this gave food to his longing fancy,
and wrung, yet soothed, his heart.
“My dear, you will worry Captain Gaunt with your questions; and I don’t
know those good people, Tasie and the rest: you must let me have my turn
now. Tell me about my daughter, Captain Gaunt. She is not a very good
correspondent. She gives few details of her life; and it must be so very
different from life here. Does she seem to enjoy herself? Is she happy and
bright? I have longed so much to see some one, impartial, whom I could
ask.”
Impartial! If they only knew! “She is always bright,” he said with a
suppressed passion, the meaning of which Frances divined suddenly, almost
with a cry, with a start and thrill of sudden certainty, which took away her
breath. “But for happy, I cannot tell. It is not good enough for her, out
there.”
“No? Thank you, Captain Gaunt, for appreciating my child. I was afraid
it was not much of a sphere for her. What company has she? Is there
anything going on——?”
“Mamma,” said Frances, “I told you—there is never anything going on.”
The young soldier shook his head. “There is no society—except the
Durants—and ourselves—who are not interesting,” he said, with a
somewhat ghastly smile.
“The Durants are the clergyman’s family?—and yourselves. I think she
might have been worse off. I am sure Mrs Gaunt has been kind to my
wayward girl,” she said, looking him in the face with that charming smile.
“Kind!” he cried, as if the word were a profanation. “My mother is too
happy to do—anything. But Miss Waring,” he added with a feeble smile,
“has little need of—any one. She has so many resources—she is so far
above——”
He got inarticulate here, and stumbled in his speech, growing very red.
Frances watched him under her eyelids with a curious sensation of pain. He
was very much in earnest, very sad, yet transported out of his langour and
misery by Constance’s name. Now Frances had heard of George Gaunt for
years, and had unconsciously allowed her thoughts to dwell upon him, as
has been mentioned in another part of this history. His arrival, had it not
happened in the midst of other excitements which preoccupied her, would
have been one of the greatest excitements she had ever known. She
remembered now that when it did happen, there had been a faint, almost
imperceptible, touch of disappointment in it, in the fact that his whole
attention was given to Constance, and that for herself, Frances, he had no
eyes. But in the moment of seeing him again she had forgotten all that, and
had gone back to her previous prepossession in his favour, and his mother’s
certainty that Frances and her George would be “great friends.” Now she
understood with instant divination the whole course of affairs. He had given
his heart to Constance, and she had not prized the gift. The discovery gave
her an acute, yet vague (if that could be), impression of pain. It was she, not
Constance, that had been prepossessed in his favour. Had Constance not
been there, no doubt she would have been thrown much into the society of
George Gaunt—and—who could tell what might have happened? All this
came before her like the sudden opening of a landscape hid by fog and
mists. Her eyes swept over it, and then it was gone. And this was what
never had been, and never would be.
“Poor Con,” said Lady Markham. “She never was thrown on her own
resources before. Has she so many of them? It must be a curiously altered
life for her, when she has to fall back upon what you call her resources. But
you think she is happy?” she asked with a sigh.
How could he answer? The mere fact that she was Constance, seemed to
Gaunt a sort of paradise. If she could make him happy by a look or a word,
by permitting him to be near her, how was it possible that, being herself,
she could be otherwise than blessed? He was well enough aware that there
was a flaw in his logic somewhere, but his mind was not strong enough to
perceive where that flaw was.
Markham came in in time to save him from the difficulty of an answer.
Markham did not recollect the young man, whom he had only seen once;
but he hailed him with great friendliness, and began to inquire into his
occupations and engagements. “If you have nothing better to do, you must
come and dine with me at my club,” he said in the kindest way, for which
Frances was very grateful to her brother. And young Gaunt, for his part,
began to gather himself together a little. The presence of a man roused him.
There is something, no doubt, seductive and relaxing in the fact of being
surrounded by sympathetic women, ready to divine and to console. He had
not braced himself to bear the pain of their questions; but somehow had felt
a certain luxury in letting his despondency, his languor, and displeasure
with life appear. “I have to be here,” he had said to them, “to see people, I
believe. My father thinks it necessary: and I could not stay; that is, my
people are leaving Bordighera. It becomes too hot to hold one—they say.”
“But you would not feel that, coming from India?”
“I came to get braced up,” he said with a smile, as of self-ridicule, and
made a little pause. “I have not succeeded very well in that,” he added
presently. “They think England will do me more good. I go back to India in
a year; so that, if I can be braced up, I should not lose any time.”
“You should go to Scotland, Captain Gaunt. I don’t mean at once, but as
soon as you are tired of the season—that is the place to brace you up—or to
Switzerland, if you like that better.”
“I do not much care,” he had said with another melancholy smile,
“where I go.”
The ladies tried every way they could think of to console him, to give
him a warmer interest in his life. They told him that when he was feeling
stronger, his spirits would come back. “I know how one runs down when
one feels out of sorts,” Lady Markham said. “You must let us try to amuse
you a little, Captain Gaunt.”
But when Markham appeared, this softness came to an end. George
Gaunt picked himself up, and tried to look like a man of the world. He had
to see some one at the Horse Guards, and he had some relations to call
upon; but he would be very glad, he said, to dine with Lord Markham. It
surprised Frances that her mother did not appear to look with any pleasure
on this engagement. She even interposed in a way which was marked.
“Don’t you think, Markham, it would be better if Captain Gaunt and you
dined with me? Frances is not half satisfied. She has not asked half her
questions. She has the first right to an old friend.”
“Gaunt is not going away to-morrow,” said Markham. “Besides, if he’s
out of sorts, he wants amusing, don’t you see?”
“And we are not capable of doing that! Frances, do you hear?”
“Very capable, in your way. But for a man, when he’s low, ladies are
dangerous—that’s my opinion, and I’ve a good deal of experience.”
“Of low spirits, Markham!”
“No, but of ladies,” he said with a chuckle. “I shall take him somewhere
afterwards; to the play perhaps, or—somewhere amusing: whereas you
would talk to him all night, and Fan would ask him questions, and keep him
on the same level.”
Lady Markham made a reply which to Frances sounded very strange.
She said, “To the play—perhaps?” in a doubtful tone, looking at her son.
Gaunt had been sitting looking on in the embarrassed and helpless way in
which a man naturally regards a discussion over his own body as it were,
particularly if it is a conflict of kindness, and, glad to be delivered from this
friendly duel, turned to Frances with some observation, taking no heed of
Lady Markham’s remark. But Frances heard it with a confused premonition
which she could not understand. She could not understand, and yet—— She
saw Markham shrug his shoulders in reply; there was a slight colour upon
his face, which ordinarily knew none. What did they both mean?
But how elated would Mrs Gaunt have been, how pleased the General,
had they seen their son at Lady Markham’s luncheon-table, in the midst, so
to speak, of the first society! Sir Thomas came in to lunch, as he had a way
of doing; and so did a gay young Guardsman, who was indeed naturally a
little contemptuous of a man in the line, yet civil to Markham’s friend.
These simple old people would have thought their George on the way to
every advancement, and believed even the heart-break which had procured
him that honour well compensated. These were far from his own
sentiments; yet, to feel himself thus warmly received by “her people,” the
object of so much kindness, which his deluded heart whispered must surely,
surely, whatever she might intend, have been suggested at least by
something she had said of him, was balm and healing to his wounds. He
looked at her mother—and indeed Lady Markham was noted for her
graciousness, and for looking as if she meant to be the motherly friend of all
who approached her—with a sort of adoration. To be the mother of
Constance, and yet to speak to ordinary mortals with that smile, as if she
had no more to be proud of than they! And what could it be that made her
so kind? not anything in him—a poor soldier, a poor soldier’s son, knowing
nothing but the exotic society of India and its curious ways—surely
something which, out of some relenting of the heart, some pity or regret,
Constance had said. Frances sat next to him at table, and there was a more
subtle satisfaction still in speaking low, aside to Frances, when he got a
little confused with the general conversation, that bewildering talk which
was all made up of allusions. He told her that he had brought a parcel from
the Palazzo, and a box of flowers from the bungalow,—that his mother was
very anxious to hear from her, that they were going to Switzerland—no, not
coming home this year. “They have found a cheap place in which my
mother delights,” he said, with a faint smile. He did not tell her that his
coming home a little circumscribed their resources, and that the month in
town which they were so anxious he should have, which in other
circumstances he would have enjoyed so much, but which now he cared
nothing for, nor for anything, was the reason why they had stopped half-
way on their usual summer journey to England. Dear old people, they had
done it for him—this was what he thought to himself, though he did not say
it—for him, for whom nobody could now do anything! He did not say
much, but as he looked in Frances’ sympathetic eyes, he felt that, without
saying a word to her, she must understand it all.
Lady Markham made no remark about their visitor until after they had
done their usual afternoon’s “work,” as it was her habit to call it—their
round of calls, to which she went in an exact succession, saying lightly, as
she cut short each visit, that she could stay no longer, as she had so much to
do. There was always a shop or two to go to, in addition to the calls, and
almost always some benevolent errand—some Home to visit, some hospital
to call at, something about the work of poor ladies, or the salvation of poor
girls,—all these were included along with the calls in the afternoon’s work.
And it was not till they had returned home and were seated together at tea,
refreshing themselves after their labours, that she mentioned young Gaunt.
She then said, after a minute’s silence, suddenly, as if the subject had been
long in her mind, “I wish Markham had let that young man alone; I wish he
had left him to you and me.”
Frances started a little, and felt, with great self-indignation and distress,
that she blushed—though why, she could not tell. She looked up,
wondering, and said, “Markham! I thought it was so very kind.”
“Yes, my dear; I believe he means to be kind.”
“Oh, I am sure he does; for he could have no interest in George Gaunt—
not for himself. I thought it was perhaps for my sake, because he was—
because he was the son of—such a friend.”
“Were they so good to you, Frances? And no doubt to Con too.”
“I am sure of it, mamma.”
“Poor people,” said Lady Markham; “and this is the reward they get.
Con has been experimenting on that poor boy. What do I mean by
experimenting? You know well enough what I mean, Frances. I suppose he
was the only man at hand, and she has been amusing herself. He has been
dangling about her constantly, I have no doubt, and she has made him
believe that she liked it as well as he did. And then he has made a
declaration, and there has been a scene. I am sorry to say I need no evidence
in this case: I know all about it. And now, Markham! Poor people, I say: it
would have been well for them if they had never seen one of our race.”
“Mamma!” cried Frances, with a little indignation, “I feel sure you are
misjudging Constance. Why should she do anything so cruel? Papa used to
say that one must have a motive.”
“He said so! I wonder if he could tell what motives were his when——
Forgive me, my dear. We will not discuss your father. As for Con, her
motives are clear enough—amusement. Now, my dear, don’t! I know you
were going to ask me, with your innocent face, what amusement it could
possibly be to break that young man’s heart. The greatest in the world, my
love! We need not mince matters between ourselves. There is nothing that
diverts Con so much, and many another woman. You think it is terrible; but
it is true.”
“I think—you must be mistaken,” said Frances, pale and troubled, with a
little gasp as for breath. “But,” she went on, “supposing even that you were
right about Con, what could Markham do?”
Lady Markham looked at her very gravely. “He has asked this poor
young fellow—to dinner,” she said.
Frances could scarcely restrain a laugh, which was half hysterical. “That
does not seem very tragic,” she said.
“Oh no, it does not seem very tragic—poor people, poor people!” said
Lady Markham, shaking her head.
And there was no more; for a visitor appeared—one of a little circle of
ladies who came in and out every day, intimates, who rushed up-stairs and
into the room without being announced, always with something to say
about the Home, or the Hospital, or the Reformatory, or the Poor Ladies, or
the endangered girls. There was always a great deal to talk over about these
institutions, which formed an important part of the “work” which all these
ladies had to do. Frances withdrew to a little distance, so as not to
embarrass her mother and her friend, who were discussing “cases” for one
of those refuges of suffering humanity, and were more comfortable when
she was out of hearing. Frances knitted and thought of home—not this
bewildering version of it, but the quiet of the idle village life where there
was no “work,” but where all were neighbours, lending a kindly hand to
each other in trouble, and where the tranquil days flew by she knew not
how. She thought of this with a momentary, oft-recurring secret protest
against this other life, of which, as was natural, she saw the evil more
clearly than the good; and then, with a bound, her thoughts returned to the
extraordinary question to which her mother had made so extraordinary a
reply. What could Markham do? “He has asked the poor young fellow to
dinner.” Even now, in the midst of the painful confusion of her mind, she
almost laughed. Asked him to dinner! How would that harm him? At
Markham’s club there would be no poisoned dishes—nothing that would
slay. What harm could it do to George Gaunt to dine with Markham? She
asked herself the question again and again, but could find no reply. When
she turned to the other side and thought of Constance, the blood rushed to
her head with a feverish angry pang. Was that also true? But in this case,
Frances, like her mother, felt that no doubt was possible. In this respect she
had been able to understand what her mother said to her. Her heart bled for
the poor people, whom Lady Markham compassionated without knowing
them, and wondered how Mrs Gaunt would bear the sight of the girl who
had been cruel to her son. All that, with agitation and trouble she could
believe: but Markham! What could Markham do?
She was going to the play with her mother that evening, which was to
Frances, fresh to every real enjoyment, one of the greatest of pleasures. But
she did not enjoy it that night. Lady Markham paid little attention to the
play: she studied the people as they went and came, which was a usual
weakness of hers, much wondered at and deplored by Frances, to whom the
stage was the centre of attraction. But on this occasion Lady Markham was
more distraite than ever, levelling her glass at every new group that
appeared in the recesses between the acts,—the restless crowd, which is
always in motion. Her face, when she removed the glass from it, was
anxious, and almost unhappy. “Frances,” she said, in one of these pauses,
“your eyes must be sharper than mine; try if you can see Markham
anywhere.”
“Here is Markham,” said her son, opening the door of the box. “What
does the mother want with me, Fan?”
“Oh, you are here!” Lady Markham cried, leaning back in her chair with
a sigh of relief. “And Captain Gaunt too.”
“Quite safe, and out of the way of mischief,” said Markham with a
chuckle, which brought the colour to his mother’s cheek.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
After this, for about a fortnight, Captain Gaunt was very often visible in
Eaton Square. He dined next evening with Lady Markham and Frances—
Sir Thomas, who scarcely counted, he was so often there, being the only
other guest. Sir Thomas was a man who had a great devotion for Lady
Markham, and a very distant link of cousinship, which, or something in
themselves which made that impossible, had silenced any remark of gossip,
much less scandal, upon their friendship. He came in to luncheon whenever
it pleased him; he dined there—when he was not dining anywhere else. But
as both he and Lady Markham had many engagements, this was not too
often the case, though there was rarely an evening, if the ladies were at
home, when Sir Thomas did not “look in.” His intimacy was like that of a
brother in the cheerful easy house. This cheerful company, the friendliness,
the soothing atmosphere of feminine sympathy around him, and underneath
all the foolish hope, more sweet than anything else, that a certain relenting
on the part of Constance must be underneath, took away the gloom and
dejection, in great part at least, from the young soldier’s looks. He exerted
himself to please the people who were so kind to him, and his melancholy
smile had begun to brighten into something more natural. Frances, for her
part, thought him a very delightful addition to the party. She looked at him
across the table almost with the pride which a sister might have felt when
he made a good appearance and did himself credit. He seemed to belong to
her more or less,—to reflect upon her the credit which he gained. It showed
that her friends after all were worth thinking of, that they were not
unworthy of the admiration she had for them, that they were able to hold
their own in what the people here called Society and the world. She raised
her little animated face to young Gaunt, was the first to see what he meant,
unconsciously interpreted or explained for him when he was hazy—and
beamed with delight when Lady Markham was interested and amused. Poor
Frances was not always quite clever enough to see when it happened that
the two elders were amused by the man himself, rather than by what he said
—and her gratification was great in his success. She herself had never
aspired to success in her own person; but it was a great pleasure to her that
the little community at Bordighera should be vindicated and put in the best
light. “They will never be able to say to me now that we had no Society,
that we saw nobody,” Frances said to herself—attributing, however, a far
greater brilliancy to poor George than he ever possessed. He fell back into
melancholy, however, when the ladies left, and Sir Thomas found him dull.
He had very little to say about Waring, on whose behalf the benevolent
baronet was so much interested.
“Do you think he shows any inclination towards home?” Sir Thomas
asked.
“I am sure,” young Gaunt answered, with a solemn face, “that there is
nothing there that can satisfy such a creature as that.”
“He has no society, then?” asked Sir Thomas.
“Oh, society! it is like the poem,” said the young man, with a sigh. “I
should think it would be so everywhere. ‘Ye common people of the sky,
what are ye when your queen is nigh?’ ”
Sir Thomas had been much puzzled by the application to Waring, as he
supposed, of the phrase, “such a creature as that;” but now he perceived,
with a compassionate shake of his head, what the poor young fellow meant.
Con had been at her tricks again! He said, with the pitying look which such
a question warranted, “I suppose you are very fond of poetry?”
“No,” said the young soldier, astonished, looking at him suddenly. “Oh
no. I am afraid I am very ignorant; but sometimes it expresses what nothing
else can express. Don’t you think so?”
“I think perhaps it is time to join the ladies,” Sir Thomas said. He was
sorry for the boy, though a little contemptuous too; but then he himself had
known Con and her tricks from her cradle, and those of many another, and
he was hardened. He thought their mothers had been far more attractive
women.
Was it the same art which made Frances look up with that bright look of
welcome, and almost affectionate interest, when they returned to the
drawing-room? Sir Thomas liked her so much, that he hoped it was not
merely one of their tricks; then paused, and said to himself that it would be
better if it were so, and not that the girl had really taken a fancy to this
young fellow, whose heart and head were both full of another, and who,
even without that, would evidently be a very poor thing for Lady
Markham’s daughter. Sir Thomas was so far unjust to Frances, that he
concluded it must be one of her tricks, when he recollected how complacent
she had been to Claude Ramsay, finding places for him where he could sit
out of the draught. They were all like that, he said to himself; but concluded
that, as one nail drives out another, a second “affair,” if he could be drawn
into it, might cure the victim. This rapid résumé of all the circumstances,
present and future, is a thing which may well take place in an experienced
mind in the moment of entering a room in which there are materials for the
development of a new chapter in the social drama. The conclusion he came
to led him to the side of Lady Markham, who was writing the address upon
one of her many notes. “It is to Nelly Winterbourn,” she explained, “to
inquire—— You know they have dragged that poor sufferer up to town, to
be near the best advice; and he is lying more dead than alive.”
“Perhaps it is not very benevolent, so far as he is concerned; but I hope
he’ll linger a long time,” said Sir Thomas.
“Oh, so do I! These imbroglios may go on for a long time and do nobody
any harm. But when a horrible crisis comes, and one feels that they must be
cleared up!” It was evident that in this Lady Markham was not specially
considering the sufferings of poor Mr Winterbourn.
“What does Markham say?” Sir Thomas asked.
“Say! He does not say anything. He shuffles—you know the way he has.
He never could stand still upon both of his feet.”
“And you can’t guess what he means to do?”
“I think—— But who can tell? even with one whom I know so
intimately as Markham. I don’t say even in my son, for that does not tell for
very much.”
“Nothing at all,” said the social philosopher.
“Oh, a little, sometimes. I believe to a certain extent in a kind of
magnetic sympathy. You don’t, I know. I think, then, so far as I can make
out, that Markham would rather do nothing at all. He likes the status quo
well enough. But then he is only one; and the other—one cannot tell how
she might feel.”
“Nelly is the unknown quantity,” said Sir Thomas; and then Lady
Markham sent away, by the hands of the footman, her anxious affectionate
little billet “to inquire.”
Meanwhile young Gaunt sat down by Frances. On the table near them
there was a glorious show of crimson—the great dazzling red anemones,
the last of the season, which Mrs Gaunt had sent. It had been very difficult
to find them so late on, he told her; they had hunted into the coolest corners
where the spring flowers lingered the longest, his mother quite anxious
about it, climbing into the little valleys among the hills. “For you know
what you are to my mother,” he said, with a smile, and then a sigh. Mrs
Gaunt had often made disparaging comparisons—comparisons how utterly
out of the question! He allowed to himself that this candid countenance, so
open and simple, and so full of sympathy, had a charm—more than he could
have believed; but yet to make a comparison between this sister and the
other! Nevertheless it was very consolatory, after the effort he had made at
dinner, to lay himself back in the soft low chair, with his long limbs
stretched out, and talk or be talked to, no longer with any effort, with a
softening tenderness towards the mother who loved Frances, but with whom
he had had many scenes before he left her, in frantic defence of the woman
who had broken his heart.
“Mrs Gaunt was always so kind to me,” Frances said, gratefully, a little
moisture starting into her eyes. “At the Durants’ there seemed always a little
comparison with Tasie; but with your mother there was no comparison.”
“A comparison with Tasie!” He laughed in spite of himself. “Nothing
can be so foolish as these comparisons,” he added, not thinking of Tasie.
“Yes, she was older,” said Frances. “She had a right to be more clever.
But it was always delightful at the bungalow. Does my father go there often
now?”
“Did he ever go often?”
“N-no,” said Frances, hesitating; “but sometimes in the evening. I hope
Constance makes him go out. I used to have to worry him, and often get
scolded. No, not scolded—that was not his way; but sent off with a sharp
word. And then he would relent, and come out.”
“I have not seen very much of Mr Waring,” Gaunt said.
“Then what does Constance do? Oh, it must be such a change for her! I
could not have imagined such a change. I can’t help thinking sometimes it
is a great pity that I, who was not used to it, nor adapted for it, should have
all this—and Constance, who likes it, who suits it, should be—banished; for
it must be a sort of banishment for her, don’t you think?”
“I—suppose so. Yes, there could be no surroundings too bright for her,”
he said, dreamily. He seemed to see her, notwithstanding, walking with him
up into the glades of the olive-gardens, with her face so bright. Surely she
had not felt her banishment then! Or was it only that the amusement of
breaking his heart made up for it, for the moment, as his mother said?
“Fancy,” said Frances; “I am going to court on Monday—I—in a train
and feathers. What would they all say? But all the time I am feeling like the
daw in the peacock’s plumes. They seem to belong to Constance. She would
wear them as if she were a queen herself. She would not perhaps object to
be stared at; and she would be admired.”
“Oh yes!”
“She was, they say, when she was presented, so much admired. She
might have been a maid of honour; but mamma would not. And I, a poor
little brown sparrow, in all the fine feathers—I feel inclined to call out, ‘I
am only Frances.’ But that is not needed, is it, when any one looks at me?”
she said, with a laugh. She had met with nobody with whom she could be
confidential among all her new acquaintances. And George Gaunt was a
new acquaintance too, if she had but remembered; but there was in him
something which she had been used to, something with which she was
familiar, a breath of her former life—and that acquaintance with his name
and all about him which makes one feel like an old friend. She had expected
for so many years to see him, that it appeared to her imagination as if she
had known him all these years—as if there was scarcely any one with
whom she was so familiar in the world.
He looked at her attentively as she spoke, a little touched, a little
charmed by this instinctive delicate familiarity, in which he at last, having
so lately come out of the hands of a true operator, saw, whatever Sir
Thomas might think, that it was not one of their tricks. She did not want any
compliment from him, even had he been capable of giving it. She was as
sincere as the day, as little troubled about her inferiority as she was
convinced of it; the laugh with which she spoke had in it a genuine tone of
innocent youthful mirth, such as had not been heard in that house for long.
The exhilarating ring of it, so spontaneous, so gay, reached Lady Markham
and Sir Thomas in their colloquy, and roused them. Frances herself had
never laughed like that before. Her mother gave a glance towards her,
smiling. “The little thing has found her own character in the sight of her old
friend,” she said; and then rounded her little epigram with a sigh.
“The young fellow ought to think much of himself to have two of them
taking that trouble.”
“Don’t talk nonsense,” said Lady Markham. “Do you think she is taking
trouble? She does not understand what it means.”
“Do any of them not understand what it means?” asked Sir Thomas. He
had a large experience in Society, and thought he knew; but he had little
experience out of Society, and so, perhaps, did not. There are some points in
which a woman’s understanding is the best.
The evening had not been unpleasant to any one, not even, perhaps, to
the lovelorn, when Markham appeared, coming back from his dinner-party,
a signal to the other gentlemen that it was time for them to disappear from
theirs. He gave his mother the last news of Winterbourn; and he told Sir
Thomas that a division was expected, and that he ought to be in the House.
“The poor sufferer” was sinking slowly, Markham said. It was quite
impossible now to think of the operation which might perhaps have saved
him three months since. His sister was with Nelly, who had neither mother
nor sister of her own; and the long-expected event was thus to come off
decorously, with all the proper accessories. It was a very important matter
for two at least of the speakers; but this was how they talked of it, hiding,
perhaps, the anxiety within. Then Markham turned to the other group.
“Have you got all the feathers and the furbelows ready?” he said. “Do
you think there will be any of you visible through them, little Fan?”
“Don’t frighten the child, Markham. She will do very well. She can be as
steady as a little rock: and in that case it doesn’t matter that she is not tall.”
“Oh, tall—as if that were necessary! You are not tall yourself, our
mother; but you are a very majestic person when you are in your war-
paint.”
“There’s the Queen herself, for that matter,” said Sir Thomas. “See her in
a procession, and she might be six feet. I feel a mouse before her.” He had
held once some post about the court, and had a right to speak.
“Let us hope Fan will look majestic too. You should, to carry off the
effect I shall produce. In ordinary life,” said Markham, “I don’t flatter
myself that I am an Adonis; but you should see me screwed up into a
uniform. No, I’m not in the army, Fan. What is my uniform, mother, to
please her? A Deputy Lieutenant, or something of that sort. I hope you are a
great deal the wiser, Fan.”
“People always look well in uniform,” said Frances, looking at him
somewhat doubtfully, on which Markham broke forth into his chuckle.
“Wait till you see me, my little dear. Wait till the little boys see me on the
line of route. They are the true tests of personal attraction. Are you coming,
Gaunt? Do you feel inclined to give those fellows their revenge?”
Markham had spoken rather low, and at some distance from his mother;
but the word caught her quick ear.
“Revenge? What do you mean by revenge? Who is going to be
revenged?” she cried.
“Nobody is going to fight a duel, if that is what you mean,” said
Markham, quietly turning round. “Gaunt has, for as simple as he stands
there, beaten me at billiards, and I can’t stand under the affront. Didn’t you
lick me, Gaunt?”
“It was an accident,” said Gaunt. “If that is all, you are very welcome to
your revenge.”
“Listen to his modesty, which, by-the-by, shows a little want of tact; for
am I the man to be beaten by an accident?” said Markham, with his chuckle
of self-ridicule. “Come along, Gaunt.”
Lady Markham detained Sir Thomas with a look as he rose to
accompany them. She gave Captain Gaunt her hand, and a gracious, almost
anxious smile. “Markham is noted for bad hours,” she said. “You are not
very strong, and you must not let him beguile you into his evil ways.” She
rose too, and took Sir Thomas by the arm as the young man went away.
“Did you hear what he said? Do you think it was only billiards he meant?
My heart quakes for that poor boy and the poor people he belongs to. Don’t
you think you could go after them and see what they are about?”
“I will do anything you please. But what good could I do?” said Sir
Thomas. “Markham would not put up with any interference from me—nor
the other young fellow either, for that matter.”
“But if you were there, if they saw you about, it would restrain them: oh,
you have always been such a true friend. If you were but there.”
“There: where?” There came before the practical mind of Sir Thomas a
vision of himself, at his sober age, dragged into he knew not what nocturnal
haunts, like an elderly spectre, jeered at by the pleasure-makers. “I will do
anything to please you,” he said, helplessly. “But what can I do? It would be
of no use. You know yourself that interference never does any good.”
Frances stood by aghast, listening to this conversation. What did it
mean? Of what was her mother afraid? Presently Lady Markham took her
seat again, with a return to her usual smiling calm. “You are right, and I am
wrong,” she said. “Of course we can do nothing. Perhaps, as you say, there
is no real reason for anxiety.” (Frances observed, however, that Sir Thomas
had not said this.) “It is because the boy is not well off, and his people are
not well off—old soldiers, with their pensions and their savings. That is
what makes me fear.”
“Oh, if that is the case, you need have the less alarm. Where there’s not
much to lose, the risks are lessened,” Sir Thomas said, calmly.
When he too was gone, Frances crept close to her mother. She knelt
down beside the chair on which Lady Markham sat, grave and pale, with
agitation in her face. “Mother,” she whispered, taking her hand and pressing
her cheek against it, “Markham is so kind—he never would do poor George
any harm.”
“Oh, my dear,” cried Lady Markham, “how can you tell? Markham is
not a man to be read off like a book. He is very kind—which does not
hinder him from being cruel too. He means no harm, perhaps; but when the
harm is done, what does it matter whether he meant it or not? And as for the
risks being lessened because your friend is poor, that only means that he is
despatched all the sooner. Markham is like a man with a fever: he has his
fits of play, and one of them is on him now.”
“Do you mean—gambling?” said Frances, growing pale too. She did not
know very well what gambling was, but it was ruin, she had always heard.
“Don’t let us talk of it,” said Lady Markham. “We can do no good; and
to distress ourselves for what we cannot prevent is the worst policy in the
world, everybody says. You had better go to bed, dear child; I have some
letters to write.”
CHAPTER XXXV.
Gaunt did not appear again at Eaton Square for two or three days,—not,
indeed, till after the great event of Frances’ history had taken place—the
going to court, which had filled her with so many alarms. After all, when
she got there, she was not frightened at all, the sense of humour which was
latent in her nature getting the mastery at the last moment, and the
spectacle, such as it was, taking all her attention from herself. Lady
Markham’s good taste had selected for Frances as simple a dress as was
possible, and her ornaments were the pearls which her aunt had given her,
which she had never been able to look at, save uneasily, as spoil. Mrs
Clarendon, however, condescended, which was a wonderful stretch of
good-nature, to come to Eaton Square to see her dressed, which, as
everybody knows, is one of the most agreeable parts of the ceremony.
Frances had not a number of young friends to fill the house with a chorus of
admiration and criticism; but the Miss Montagues thought it “almost a
duty” to come, and a number of her mother’s friends. These ladies filled the
drawing-room, and were much more formidable than even the eyes of
Majesty, preoccupied with the sight of many toilets, and probably very tired
of them, which would have no more than a passing glance for Frances. The
spectators at Eaton Square took her to pieces conscientiously, though they
agreed, after each had made her little observation, that the ensemble was
perfect, and that the power of millinery could no further go. The intelligent
reader needs not to be informed that Frances was all white, from her
feathers to her shoes. Her pretty glow of youthfulness and expectation made
the toilet supportable, nay, pretty, even in the glare of day. Markham, who
was not afraid to confront all these fair and critical faces, in his uniform,
which misbecame, and did not even fit him, and which made his
insignificance still more apparent, walked round and round his little sister
with the most perfect satisfaction. “Are you sure you know how to manage
that train, little Fan? Do you feel quite up to your curtsey?” he said in a
whisper with his chuckle of mirth; but there was a very tender look in the
little man’s eyes. He might wrong others; but to Frances, nobody could be
more kind or considerate. Mrs Clarendon, when she saw him, turned upon
her heel and walked off into the back drawing-room, where she stood for
some minutes sternly contemplating a picture, and ignoring everybody.
Markham did not resent this insult. “She can’t abide me, Fan,” he went on.
“Poor lady, I don’t wonder. I was a little brat when she knew me first. As
soon as I go away, she will come back; and I am going presently, my dear. I
am going to snatch a morsel in the dining-room, to sustain nature. I hope
you had your sandwiches, Fan? It will take a great deal of nourishment to
keep you up to that curtsey.” He patted her softly on her white shoulder,
with kindness beaming out of his ugly face. “I call you a most satisfactory
production, my dear. Not a beauty, but better—a real nice innocent girl. I
should like any fellow to show me a nicer,” he went on, with his short
laugh. Though it took the form of a chuckle, there was something in it that
showed Markham’s heart was touched. And this was the man whom even
his own mother was afraid to trust a young man with! It seemed to Frances
that it was impossible such a thing could be true.
Mrs Clarendon, as Markham had predicted, came back as he retired. Her
contemplation of the dress of the débutante was very critical. “Satin is too
heavy for you,” she said. “I wonder your mother did not see that silk would
have been far more in keeping; but she always liked to overdo. As for my
Lord Markham, I am glad he will have to look after your mother, and not
you, Frances; for the very look of a man like that contaminates a young girl.
Don’t say to me that he is your brother, for he is not your brother.
Considering my age and yours, I surely ought to know best. Turn round a
little. There is a perceptible crease across the middle of your shoulder, and I
don’t quite like the hang of this skirt. But one thing looks very well, and
that is your pearls. They have been in the family I can’t tell you how long.
My grandmother gave them to me.”
“Mamma insisted I should wear them, and nothing else, aunt Caroline.”
“Yes, I daresay. You have nothing else good enough to go with them,
most likely. And Lady Markham knows a good thing very well, when she
sees it. Have you been put through all that you have to do, Frances?
Remember to keep your right hand quite free; and take care your train
doesn’t get in your way. Oh, why is it that your poor father is not here to see
you, to go with you! It would be a very different thing then.”
“Nothing would make papa go, aunt Caroline. Do you think he would
dress himself up like Markham, to be laughed at?”
“I promise you nobody would laugh at my brother,” said Mrs Clarendon.
“As for Lord Markham——” But she bit her lip, and forbore. She spoke to

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MECHANICAL CIRCULATORY SUPPORT principles and applications

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Also available in the series:

© David Pierce 2006

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

ISBN: 0-8264-9089-1 (hardback)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Typeset by Fakenham Photosetting Limited, Fakenham, Norfolk

D James Joyce, 'Dubliners': Text, Criticism, and Notes, (eds Robert

The Company of Joyce

Salve Regina, Mater misericordiae,

Rhetoric. It was a period of waiting, the years spent in queues outside

memory with displacement, which is never better captured than in the

Joyce and Company is a collection of interwoven essays on Joyce in the

When he began composing Finnegans Wake, Joyce, we know from a

a stylish woman getting up into a carriage outside the Grosvenor Hotel,

language or are speaking Dutch/German?). Languages are not only

identified for example in Fingal's Cave in Scotland and, perhaps, he lent

winning characters from Bloom to HCE, from Molly to Anna Livia, is

Joyce and History

Contemporary critical theory has sought to emphasize the body. However,

in the common ground that links or stretches across different historical

the world in Tristram Shandy, she is 'much as my friend [Mr Shandy]

of 'la mano' by a man is both sensuous and transgressive. Part of the

The untouched woman, as the Bawd in 'Circe' reminds us, attracts a

In her essay on gender and power in A Sentimental Journey, Melinda

The tongue-in-cheek prose is here to be relished. A 'pleasurable ductility'

of the web in George Eliot's fiction has a representative quality in this

trapped starling in A Sentimental Journey suggest, Sterne anticipates the

Joyce, Erudition and the Late

The issue of erudition is a complex one. The annotator of a Joyce text

Yorkshire Relish on 22 July 1899, relish which 'Enriches the Daintiest of

END OF THE SECOND VOLUME.

PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS

WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS

A HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST

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