.
-- Is it Zinfandel?
-- Say nothing, Bantam Lyons winked. I'm going to plunge five bob on my
own.
-- Tell us if you're worth your salt and be damned to you, Paddy
Leonard said. Who gave it to you?
Mr Bloom on his way Out raised three fingers in greeting.
-- So long, Nosey Flynn said.
The others turned.
-- That's the man now that gave it to me, Bantam Lyons whispered.
-- Prrwht! Paddy Leonard said with scorn. Mr Byrne, sir, we'll take two
of your small Jamesons after that and a...
-- Stone ginger, Davy Byrne added civilly.
-- Ay, Paddy Leonard said. A suckingbottle for the baby.
Mr Bloom walked towards Dawson street, his tongue brushing his teeth
smooth. Something green it would have to be: spinach say. Then with those
Ræntgen rays searchlight you could.
At Duke lane a ravenous terrier choked up a sick knuckly cud on the
cobble stones and lapped it with new zest. Surfeit. Returned with thanks
having fully digested the contents. First sweet then savoury. Mr Bloom
coasted warily. Ruminants. His second course. Their upper jaw they move.
Wonder if Tom Rochford will do anything with that invention of his. Wasting
time explaining it to Flynn's mouth. Lean people long mouths. Ought to be a
hall or a place where inventors could go in and invent free. Course then
you'd have all the cranks pestering.
He hummed, prolonging in solemn echo, the closes of the bars:
Don Giovanni, a cenar teco
M'invitasti.
Feel better. Burgundy. Good pick me up. Who distilled first? Some chap
in the blues. Dutch courage. That Kilkenny People in the national library
now I must.
Bare clean closestools, waiting, in the window of William Miller,
plumber, turned back his thoughts. They could: and watch it all the way
down, swallow a pin sometimes come out of the ribs years after, tour round
the body, changing biliary duct, spleen squirting liver, gastric juice coils
of intestines like pipes. But the poor buffer would have to stand all the
time with his insides entrails on show. Science.
-- A cenar teco.
What does that teco mean? Tonight perhaps.
Don Giovanni, thou hast me invited
To come to supper tonight,
The rum the rumdum.
Doesn't go properly.
Keyes: two months if I get Nannetti to. That'll be two pounds ten,
about two pounds eight. Three Hynes owes me. Two eleven. Presscott's ad. Two
fifteen. Five guineas about. On the pig's back.
Could buy one of those silk petticoats for Molly, colour of her new
garters.
Today. Today. Not think.
Tour the south then. What about English watering places? Brighton,
Margate. Piers by moonlight. Her voice floating out. Those lovely seaside
girls. Against John Long's a drowsing loafer lounged in heavy thought,
gnawing a crusted knuckle. Handy man wants job. Small wages. Will eat
anything.
Mr Bloom turned at Gray's confectioner's window of unbought tarts and
passed the reverend Thomas Connellan's bookstore. Why I left the church of
Rome? Bird's Nest. Women run him. They say they used to give pauper children
soup to change to protestants in the time of the potato blight. Society over
the way papa went to for the conversion of poor jews. Same bait. Why we left
the church of Rome?
A blind stripling stood tapping the curbstone with his slender cane. No
tram in sight. Wants to cross.
-- Do you want to cross? Mr Bloom asked.
The blind stripling did not answer. His wall face frowned weakly. He
moved his head uncertainly.
-- You're in Dawson street, Mr Bloom said. Molesworth street is
opposite. Do you want to cross? There's nothing in the way.
The cane moved out trembling to the left. Mr Bloom's eye followed its
line and saw again the dyeworks' van drawn up before Drago's. Where I saw
his brilliantined hair just when I was. Horse drooping. Driver in John
Long's. Slaking his drouth.
-- There's a van there, Mr Bloom said, but it's not moving. I'll see
you across. Do you want to go to Molesworth street?
-- Yes, the stripling answered. South Frederick street.
-- Come, Mr Bloom said.
He touched the thin elbow gently: then took the limp seeing hand to
guide it forward.
Say something to him. Better not do the condescending. They mistrust
what you tell them. Pass a common remark:
-- The rain kept off.
No answer.
Stains on his coat. Slobbers his food, I suppose. Tastes all different
for him. Have to be spoonfed first. Like a child's hand his hand. Like
Milly's was. Sensitive. Sizing me up I daresay from my hand. Wonder if he
has a name, Van. Keep his cane clear of the horse's legs tired drudge get
his doze. That's right. Clear. Behind a bull: in front of a horse.
-- Thanks, sir.
Knows I'm a man. Voice.
-- Right now? First turn to the left.
The blind stripling tapped the curbstone and went on his way, drawing
his cane back, feeling again.
Mr Bloom walked behind the eyeless feet, a flatcut suit of herringbone
tweed. Poor young fellow! How on earth did he know that van was there? Must
have felt it. See things in their foreheads perhaps. Kind of sense of
volume. Weight. Would he feel it if something was removed? Feel a gap. Queer
idea of Dublin he must have, tapping his way round by the stones. Could he
walk in a beeline if he hadn't that cane? Bloodless pious face like a fellow
going in to be a priest.
Penrose! That was that chap's name.
Look at all the things they can learn to do. Read with their fingers.
Tune pianos. Or we are surprised they have any brains. Why we think a
deformed person or a hunchback clever if he says something we might say. Of
course the other senses are more. Embroider. Plait baskets. People ought to
help. Work basket I could buy Molly's birthday. Hates sewing. Might take an
objection. Dark men they call them.
Sense of smell must be stronger too. Smells on all sides bunched
together. Each person too. Then the spring, the summer: smells. Tastes. They
say you can't taste wines with your eyes shut or a cold in the head. Also
smoke in the dark they say get no pleasure.
And with a woman, for instance. More shameless not seeing. That girl
passing the Stewart institution, head in the air. Look at me. I have them
all on. Must be strange not to see her. Kind of a form in his mind's eye.
The voice temperature when he touches her with fingers must almost see the
lines, the curves. His hands on her hair, for instance. Say it was black for
instance. Good. We call it black. Then passing over her white skin.
Different feel perhaps. Feeling of white.
Postoffice. Must answer. Fag today. Send her a postal order two
shillings half a crown. Accept my little present. Stationer's just here too.
Wait. Think over it.
With a gentle finger he felt ever so slowly the hair combed back above
his ears. Again. Fibres of fine fine straw. Then gently his finger felt the
skin of his right cheek. Downy hair there too. Not smooth enough. The belly
is the smoothest. No-one about. There he goes into Frederick street. Perhaps
to Levenston's dancing academy piano. Might be settling my braces.
Walking by Doran's public house he slid his hand between waistcoat and
trousers and, pulling aside his shirt gently, felt a slack fold of his
belly. But I know it's whiteyellow. Want to try in the dark to see.
He withdrew his hand and pulled his dress to.
Poor fellow! Quite a boy. Terrible. Really terrible. What dreams would
he have, not seeing? Life a dream for him. Where is the justice being born
that way? All those women and children excursion beanfeast burned and
drowned in New York. Holocaust. Karma they call that transmigration for sins
you did in a past life the reincarnation met him pike-hoses. Dear, dear,
dear. Pity of course: but somehow you can't cotton on to them someway.
Sir Frederick Falkiner going into the freemasons' hall. Solemn as Troy.
After his good lunch in Earlsfort terrace. Old legal cronies cracking a
magnum. Tales of the bench and assizes and annals of the bluecoat school. I
sentenced him to ten years. I suppose he'd turn up his nose at that stuff I
drank. Vintage wine for them, the year marked on a dusty bottle. Has his own
ideas of justice in the recorder's court. Wellmeaning old man. Police
chargesheets crammed with cases get their percentage manufacturing crime.
Sends them to the rightabout. The devil on moneylenders. Gave Reuben J. a
great strawcalling. Now he's really what they call a dirty jew. Power those
judges have. Crusty old topers in wigs. Bear with a sore paw. And may the
Lord have mercy on your soul.
Hello, placard. Mirus bazaar. His excellency the lord lieutenant.
Sixteenth today it is. In aid of funds for Mercer's hospital. The Messiah
was first given for that. Yes Handel. What about going out there.
Ballsbridge. Drop in on Keyes. No use sticking to him like a leech. Wear out
my welcome. Sure to know someone on the gate.
Mr Bloom came to Kildare Street. First I must. Library.
Straw hat in sunlight. Tan shoes. Turnedup trousers. It is. It is.
His heart quopped softly. To the right. Museum. Goddesses. He swerved
to the right.
Is it? Almost certain. Won't look. Wine in my face. Why did I? Too
heady. Yes, it is. The walk. Not see. Not see. Get on.
Making for the museum gate with long windy strides he lifted his eyes.
Handsome building. Sir Thomas Deane designed. Not following me?
Didn't see me perhaps. Light in his eyes.
The flutter of his breath came forth in short sighs. Quick. Cold
statues: quiet there. Safe in a minute.
No, didn't see me. After two. Just at the gate.
My heart!
His eyes beating looked steadfastly at cream curves of stone. Sir
Thomas Deane was the Greek architecture.
Look for something I.
His hasty hand went quick into a pocket, took out, read unfolded
Agendath Netaim. Where did I?
Busy looking for.
He thrust back quickly Agendath.
Afternoon she said.
I am looking for that. Yes, that. Try all pockets. Handker. Freeman.
Where did I ? Ah, yes. Trousers. Purse. Potato. Where did I ?
Hurry. Walk quietly. Moment more. My heart.
His hand looking for the where did I put found in his hip pocket soap
lotion have to call tepid paper stuck, Ah, soap there! Yes. Gate.
Safe!
Ulysses 9: Scylla and Charybdis
URBANE, TO COMFORT THEM, THE QUAKER LIBRARIAN PURRED:
-- And we have, have we not, those priceless pages of Wilhelm Meister?
A great poet on a great brother poet. A hesitating soul taking arms against
a sea of troubles, torn by conflicting doubts, as one sees in real life.
He came a step a sinkapace forward on neatsleather creaking and a step
backward a sinkapace on the solemn floor.
A noiseless attendant, setting open the door but slightly, made him a
noiseless beck.
-- Directly, said he, creaking to go, albeit lingering. The beautiful
ineffectual dreamer who comes to grief against hard facts. One always feels
that Goethe's judgments are so true. True in the larger analysis.
Twicreakingly analysis he corantoed off. Bald, most zealous by the door
he gave his large ear all to the attendant's words: heard them: and was
gone.
Two left.
-- Monsieur de la Palisse, Stephen sneered, was alive fifteen minutes
before his death.
-- Have you found those six brave medicals, John Eglinton asked with
elder's gall, to write Paradise Lost at your dictation? The Sorrows of Satan
he calls it.
Smile. Smile Cranly's smile.
First he tickled her
Then he patted her
Then he passed the female catheter.
For he was a medical
jolly old medi.
-- I feel you would need one more for Hamlet. Seven is dear to the
mystic mind. The shining seven W. B. calls them.
Glittereyed, his rufous skull close to his greencapped desklamp sought
the face, bearded amid darkgreener shadow, an ollav, holyeyed. He laughed
low: a sizar's laugh of Trinity: unanswered.
Orchestral Satan, weeping many a rood
Tears such as angels weep.
Ed egli avea del cul fatto trombetta.
He holds my follies hostage.
Cranly's eleven true Wicklowmen to free their sireland. Gaptoothed
Kathleen, her four beautiful green fields, the stranger in her house. And
one more to hail him: ave, rabbi. The Tinahely twelve. In the shadow of the
glen he cooees for them. My soul's youth I gave him, night by night.
Godspeed. Good hunting.
Mulligan has my telegram.
Folly. Persist.
-- Our young Irish bards, John Eglinton censured, have yet to create a
figure which the world will set beside Saxon Shakespeare's Hamlet though I
admire him, as old Ben did, on this side idolatry.
-- All these questions are purely academic, Russell oracled out of his
shadow. I mean, whether Hamlet is Shakespeare or James I or Essex.
Clergymen's discussions of the historicity of Jesus. Art has to reveal to us
ideas, formless spiritual essences. The supreme question about a work of art
is out of how deep a life does it spring. The painting of Gustave Moreau is
the painting of ideas. The deepest poetry of Shelley, the words of Hamlet
bring our mind into contact with the eternal wisdom, Plato's world of ideas.
All the rest is the speculation of schoolboys for schoolboys.
A. E. has been telling some yankee interviewer. Wall, tarnation strike
me!
-- The schoolmen were schoolboys first, Stephen said superpolitely.
Aristotle was once Plato's schoolboy.
-- And has remained so, one should hope, John Eglinton sedately said.
One can see him, a model schoolboy with his diploma under his arm.
He laughed again at the now smiling bearded face.
Formless spiritual. Father, Word and Holy Breath. Allfather, the
heavenly man. Hiesos Kristos, magician of the beautiful, the Logos who
suffers in us at every moment. This verily is that. I am the fire upon the
altar. I am the sacrificial butter.
Dunlop, Judge, the noblest Roman of them all, A. E., Arval, the Name
Ineffable, in heaven hight, K. H., their master, whose identity is no secret
to adepts. Brothers of the great white lodge always watching to see if they
can help. The Christ with the bridesister, moisture of light, born of an
ensouled virgin, repentant sophia, departed to the plane of buddhi. The life
esoteric is not for ordinary person. O. P. must work off bad karma first.
Mrs Cooper Oakley once glimpsed our very illustrious sister H. P. B's
elemental.
O, fie! Out on't! Pfuiteufel! You naughtn't to look, missus, so you
naughtn't when a lady's ashowing of her elemental.
Mr Best entered, tall, young, mild, light. He bore in his hand with
grace a notebook, new, large, clean, bright.
-- That model schoolboy, Stephen said, would find Hamlet's musings
about the afterlife of his princely soul, the improbable, insignificant and
undramatic monologue, as shallow as Plato's.
John Eglinton, frowning, said, waxing wroth:
-- Upon my word it makes my blood boil to hear anyone compare Aristotle
with Plato.
-- Which of the two, Stephen asked, would have banished me from his
commonwealth?
Unsheathe your dagger definitions. Horseness is the whatness of
allhorse. Streams of tendency and eons they worship. God: noise in the
street: very peripatetic. Space: what you damn well have to see. Through
spaces smaller than red globules of man's blood they creepycrawl after
Blake's buttocks into eternity of which this vegetable world is but a
shadow. Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the
past.
Mr Best came forward, amiable, towards his colleague.
-- Haines is gone, he said.
-- Is he?
-- I was showing him Jubainville's book. He's quite enthusiastic, don't
you know, about Hyde's Lovesongs of Connacht. I couldn't bring him in to
hear the discussion. He's gone to Gill's to buy it.
Bound thee forth, my booklet, quick
To greet the callous public.
Writ, I ween, 'twas not my wish
In lean unlovely English.
The peatsmoke is going to his head, John Eglinton opined.
We feel in England. Penitent thief. Gone. I smoked his baccy. Green
twinkling stone. An emerald set in the ring of the sea.
-- People do not know how dangerous lovesongs can be, the auric egg of
Russell warned occultly. The movements which work revolutions in the world
are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on the hillside.
For them the earth is not an exploitable ground but the living mother. The
rarefied air of the academy and the arena produce the sixshilling novel, the
musichall song, France produces the finest flower of corruption in Mallarmè
but the desirable life is revealed only to the poor of heart, the life of
Homer's Ph&Aelig;acians.
>From these words Mr Best turned an unoffending face to Stephen.
-- Mallarmè, don't you know, he said, has written those wonderful prose
poems Stephen MacKenna used to read to me in Paris. The one about Hamlet. He
says: il se promõne, lisant au livre de lui-méme, don't you know, reading
the book of himself. He describes Hamlet given in a French town, don't you
know, a provincial town. They advertised it.
His free hand graciously wrote tiny signs in air.
HAMLET
ou
LE DISTRAIT
Piõce de Shakespeare
He repeated to John Eglinton's newgathered frown:
-- Pièce de Shakespeare, don't you know. It's so French, the French
point of view. Hamlet ou...
-- The absentminded beggar, Stephen ended.
John Eglinton laughed.
-- Yes, I suppose it would be, he said. Excellent people, no doubt, but
distressingly shortsighted in some matters.
Sumptuous and stagnant exaggeration of murder.
-- A deathsman of the soul Robert Greene called him, Stephen said. Not
for nothing was he a butcher's son wielding the sledded poleaxe and spitting
in his palm. Nine lives are taken off for his father's one, Our Father who
art in purgatory. Khaki Hamlets don't hesitate to shoot. The bloodboltered
shambles in act five is a forecast of the concentration camp sung by Mr
Swinburne.
Cranly, I his mute orderly, following battles from afar.
Whelps and dams of murderous foes whom none
But we had spared...
Between the Saxon smile and yankee yawp. The devil and the deep sea.
-- He will have it that Hamlet is a ghoststory, John Eglinton said for
Mr Best's behoof. Like the fat boy in Pickwick he wants to make our flesh
creep.
List! List! O List!
My flesh hears him: creeping, hears.
If thou didst ever...
-- What is a ghost? Stephen said with tingling energy. One who has
faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of
manners. Elizabethan London lay as far from Stratford as corrupt Paris lies
from virgin Dublin. Who is the ghost from limbo patrum, returning to the
world that has forgotten him? Who is king Hamlet?
John Eglinton shifted his spare body, leaning back to judge:
Lifted.
-- It is this hour of a day in mid June, Stephen said, begging with a
swift glance their hearing. The flag is up on the playhouse by the bankside.
The bear Sackerson growls in the pit near it, Paris garden. Canvasclimbers
who sailed with Drake chew their sausages among the groundlings.
Local colour. Work in all you know. Make them accomplices.
-- Shakespeare has left the huguenot's house in Silver street and walks
by the swanmews along the riverbank. But he does not stay to feed the pen
chivying her game of cygnets towards the rushes. The swan of Avon has other
thoughts.
Composition of place. Ignatius Loyola, make haste to help me!
-- The play begins. A player comes on under the shadow, made up in the
castoff mail of a court buck, a wellset man with a bass voice. It is the
ghost, the king, a king and no king, and the player is Shakespeare who has
studied Hamlet all the years of his life which were not vanity in order to
play the part of the spectre. He speaks the words to Burbage, the young
player who stands before him beyond the rack of cerecloth, calling him by a
name:
Hamlet, I am thy father's spirit
bidding him list. To a son he speaks, the son of his soul, the prince,
young Hamlet and to the son of his body, Hamnet Shakespeare, who has died in
Stratford that his namesake may live for ever.
-- Is it possible that that player Shakespeare, a ghost by absence, and
in the vesture of buried Denmark, a ghost by death, speaking his own words
to his own son's name (had Hamnet Shakespeare lived he would have been
prince Hamlet's twin) is it possible, I want to know, or probable that he
did not draw or foresee the logical conclusion of those premises: you are
the dispossessed son: I am the murdered father: your mother is the guilty
queen. Ann Shakespeare, born Hathaway?
-- But this prying into the family life of a great man, Russell began
impatiently.
Art thou there, truepenny?
-- Interesting only to the parish clerk. I mean, we have the plays. I
mean when we read the poetry of King Lear what is it to us how the poet
lived? As for living, our servants can do that for us, Villiers de l'Isle
has said. Peeping and prying into greenroom gossip of the day, the poet's
drinking, the poet's debts. We have King Lear: and it is immortal.
Mr Best's face appealed to, agreed.
Flow over them with your waves and with your waters,
Mananaan, Mananaan MacLir...
How now, sirrah, that pound he lent you when you were hungry?
Marry, I wanted it.
Take thou this noble.
Go to! You spent most of it in Georgina Johnson's bed, clergyman's
daughter. Agenbite of inwit.
Do you intend to pay it back?
O, yes.
When? Now?
Well... no.
When, then?
I paid my way. I paid my way.
Steady on. He's from beyant Boyne water. The northeast corner. You owe
it.
Wait. Five months. Molecules all change. I am other I now. Other I got
pound.
Buzz. Buzz.
But I, entelechy, form of forms, am I by memory because under
everchanging forms.
I that sinned and prayed and fasted.
A child Conmee saved from pandies.
I, I and I. I.
A.E.I.O.U.
-- Do you mean to fly in the face of the tradition of three centuries?
John Eglinton's carping voice asked. Her ghost at least has been laid for
ever. She died, for literature at least, before she was born.
-- She died, Stephen retorted, sixtyseven years after she was born. She
saw him into and out of the world. She took his first embraces. She bore his
children and she laid pennies on his eyes to keep his eyelids closed when he
lay on his deathbed.
Mother's deathbed. Candle. The sheeted mirror. Who brought me into this
world lies there, bronzelidded, under few cheap flowers. Liliata
rutilantium.
I wept alone.
John Eglinton looked in the tangled glowworm of his lamp.
-- The world believes that Shakespeare made a mistake, he said, and got
out of it as quickly and as best he could.
-- Bosh! Stephen said rudely. A man of genius makes no mistakes. His
errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
Portals of discovery opened to let in the quaker librarian,
softcreakfooted, bald, eared and assiduous.
-- A shrew, John Eglinton said shrewdly, is not a useful portal of
discovery, one should imagine. What useful discovery did Socrates learn from
Xanthippe?
-- Dialectic, Stephen answered: and from his mother how to bring
thoughts into the world. What he learnt from his other wife Myrto (absit
nomen!) Socratididion's Epipsychidion, no man, not a woman, will ever know.
But neither the midwife's lore nor the caudlectures saved him from the
archons of Sinn Fein and their noggin of hemlock.
-- But Ann Hathaway? Mr Best's quiet voice said forgetfully. Yes, we
seem to be forgetting her as Shakespeare himself forgot her.
His look went from brooder's beard to carper's skull, to remind, to
chide them not unkindly, then to the baldpink lollard costard, guiltless
though maligned.
-- He had a good groatsworth of wit, Stephen said, and no truant
memory. He carried a memory in his wallet as he trudged to Romeville
whistling The girl I left behind me. If the earthquake did not time it we
should know where to place poor Wat, sitting in his form, the cry of hounds,
the studded bridle and her blue windows. That memory, Venus and Adonis, lay
in the bedchamber of every light-of-love in London. Is Katharine the shrew
illfavoured? Hortensio calls her young and beautiful. Do you think the
writer of Antony and Cleopatra, a passionate pilgrim, had his eyes in the
back of his head that he chose the ugliest doxy in all Warwickshire to lie
withal? Good: he left her and gained the world of men. But his boywomen are
the women of a boy. Their life, thought, speech are lent them by males. He
chose badly? He was chosen, it seems to me. If others have their will Ann
hath a way. By cock, she was to blame. She put the comether on him, sweet
and twentysix. The greyeyed goddess who bends over the boy Adonis, stooping
to conquer, as prologue to the swelling act, is a boldfaced Stratford wench
who tumbles in a cornfield a lover younger than herself.
And my turn? When?
Come!
-- Ryefield, Mr Best said brightly, gladly, raising his new book,
gladly brightly.
He murmured then with blonde delight for all:
Between the acres of the rye
These pretty countryfolk would lie.
Paris: the wellpleased pleaser.
A tall figure in bearded homespun rose from shadow and unveiled its
cooperative watch.
-- I am afraid I am due at the Homestead.
Whither away? Exploitable ground.
-- Are you going, John Eglinton's active eyebrows asked. Shall we see
you at Moore's tonight? Piper is coming.
-- Piper! Mr Best piped. Is Piper back?
Peter Piper pecked a peck of pick of peck of pickled pepper.
-- I don't know if I can. Thursday. We have our meeting. If I can get
away in time.
Yogibogeybox in Dawson chambers. Isis Unveiled. Their Pali book we
tried to pawn. Crosslegged under an umbrel umbershoot he thrones an Aztec
logos, functioning on astral levels, their oversoul, mahamahatma. The
faithful hermetists await the light, ripe for chelaship, ringroundabout him.
Louis H. Victory. T. Caulfield Irwin. Lotus ladies tend them i'the eyes,
their pineal glands aglow. Filled with his god he thrones, Buddh under
plantain. Gulfer of souls, engulfer. Hesouls, shesouls, shoals of souls.
Engulfed with wailing creecries, whirled, whirling, they bewail.
In quintessential triviality
For years in this fleshcase a shesoul dwelt.
-- They say we are to have a literary surprise, the quaker librarian
said, friendly and earnest. Mr Russell, rumour has it, is gathering together
a sheaf of our younger poets' verses. We are all looking forward anxiously.
Anxiously he glanced in the cone of lamplight where three faces,
lighted, shone.
See this. Remember.
Stephen looked down on a wide headless caubeen, hung on his
ashplanthandle over his knee. My casque and sword. Touch lightly with two
index fingers. Aristotle's experiment. One or two? Necessity is that in
virtue of which it is impossible that one can be otherwise. Argai, one hat
is one hat.
Listen.
Young Colum and Starkey. George Roberts is doing the commercial part.
Longworth will give it a good puff in the Express. O, will he? I liked
Colum's Drover. Yes, I think he has that queer thing, genius. Do you think
he has genius really? Yeats admired his line: As in wild earth a Grecian
vase. Did he? I hope you'll be able to come tonight. Malachi Mulligan is
coming too. Moore asked him to bring Haines. Did you hear Miss Mitchell's
joke about Moore and Martyn? That Moore is Martyn's wild oats? Awfully
clever, isn't it? They remind one of don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Our
national epic has yet to be written, Dr Sigerson says. Moore is the man for
it. A knight of the rueful countenance here in Dublin. With a saffron kilt?
O'Neill Russell? O, yes, he must speak the grand old tongue. And his
Dulcinea? James Stephens is doing some clever sketches. We are becoming
important, it seems.
Cordelia. Cordoglio. Lir's loneliest daughter.
Nookshotten. Now your best French polish.
-- Thank you very much, Mr Russell, Stephen said, rising. If you will
be so kind as to give the letter to Mr Norman...
-- O, yes. If he considers it important it will go in. We have so much
correspondence.
-- I understand, Stephen said. Thanks.
Good ild you. The pigs' paper. Bullockbefriending.
-- Synge has promised me an article for Dana too. Are we going to be
read? I feel we are. The Gaelic league wants something in Irish. I hope you
will come round tonight. Bring Starkey.
Stephen sat down.
The quaker librarian came from the leavetakers. Blushing his mask said:
-- Mr Dedalus, your views are most illuminating.
He creaked to and fro, tiptoing up nearer heaven by the altitude of a
chopine, and, covered by the noise of outgoing, said low:
-- Is it your view, then, that she was not faithful to the poet?
Alarmed face asks me. Why did he come? Courtesy or an inward light?
-- Where there is a reconciliation, Stephen said, there must have been
first a sundering.
-- Yes.
Christfox in leather trews, hiding, a runaway in blighted treeforks
from hue and cry. Knowing no vixen, walking lonely in the chase. Women he
won to him, tender people, a whore of Babylon, ladies of justices, bully
tapsters' wives. Fox and geese. And in New Place a slack dishonoured body
that once was comely, once as sweet, as fresh as cinnamon, now her leaves
falling, all, bare, frighted of the narrow grave and unforgiven.
-- Yes. So you think.
The door closed behind the outgoer.
Rest suddenly possessed the discreet vaulted cell, rest of warm and
brooding air.
A vestal's lamp.
Here he ponders things that were not: what Caesar would have lived to
do had he believed the soothsayer: what might have been: possibilities of
the possible as possible: things not known: what name Achilles bore when he
lived among women.
Coffined thoughts around me, in mummycases, embalmed in spice of words.
Thoth, god of libraries, a birdgod, moonycrowned. And I heard the voice of
that Egyptian highpriest. In painted chambers loaded with tilebooks.
They are still. Once quick in the brains of men. Still: but an itch of
death is in them, to tell me in my ear a maudlin tale, urge me to wreak
their will.
-- Certainly, John Eglinton mused, of all great men he is the most
enigmatic. We know nothing but that he lived and suffered. Not even so much.
Others abide our question. A shadow hangs over all the rest.
-- But Hamlet is so personal, isn't it? Mr Best pleaded. I mean, a kind
of private paper, don't you know, of his private life. I mean I don't care a
button, don't you know, who is killed or who is guilty...
He rested an innocent book on the edge of the desk, smiling his
defiance. His private papers in the original. Ta an bad ar an tir. Taim imo
shagart. Put beurla on it, littlejohn.
Quoth littlejohn Eglinton:
-- I was prepared for paradoxes from what Malachi Mulligan told us but
I may as well warn you that if you want to shake my belief that Shakespeare
is Hamlet you have a stern task before you.
Bear with me.
Stephen withstood the bane of miscreant eyes, glinting stern under
wrinkled brows. A basilisk. E quando vede l'uomo l'attosca. Messer Brunetto,
I thank thee for the word.
-- As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said,
from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist
weave and unweave his image. And as the mole on my right breast is where it
was when I was born, though all my body has been woven of new stuff time
after time, so through the ghost of the unquiet father the image of the
unliving son looks forth. In the intense instant of imagination, when the
mind, Shelley says, is a fading coal, that which I was is that which I am
and that which in possibility I may come to be. So in the future, the sister
of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that
which then I shall be.
Drummond of Hawthornden helped you at that stile.
-- Yes, Mr Best said youngly, I feel Hamlet quite young. The bitterness
might be from the father but the passages with Ophelia are surely from the
son.
Has the wrong sow by the lug. He is in my father. I am in his son.
-- That mole is the last to go, Stephen said, laughing.
John Eglinton made a nothing pleasing mow.
-- If that were the birthmark of genius, he said, genius would be a
drug in the market. The plays of Shakespeare's later years which Renan
admired so much breathe another spirit.
-- The spirit of reconciliation, the quaker librarian breathed.
-- There can be no reconciliation, Stephen said, if there has not been
a sundering.
Said that.
-- If you want to know what are the events which cast their shadow over
the hell of time of King Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, look
to see when and how the shadow lifts. What softens the heart of a man,
Shipwrecked in storms dire, Tried, like another Ulysses, Pericles, prince of
Tyre?
Head, redconecapped, buffeted, brineblinded.
-- A child, a girl placed in his arms, Marina.
-- The leaning of sophists towards the bypaths of apocrypha is a
constant quantity, John Eglinton detected. The highroads are dreary but they
lead to the town.
Good Bacon: gone musty. Shakespeare Bacon's wild oats. Cypherjugglers
going the highroads. Seekers on the great quest. What town good masters?
Mummed in names: A. E., eon: Magee, John Eglinton. East of the sun, west of
the moon: Tir na n-og. Booted the twain and staved.
How many miles to Dublin?
Three score and ten, sir.
Will we be there by candlelight?
-- Mr Brandes accepts it, Stephen said, as the first play of the
closing period.
-- Does he? What does Mr Sidney Lee, or Mr Simon Lazarus, as some aver
his name is, say of it?
-- Marina, Stephen said, a child of storm, Miranda, a wonder, Perdita,
that which was lost. What was lost is given back to him: his daughter's
child. My dearest wife, Pericles says, was like this maid. Will any man love
the daughter it he has not loved the mother?
-- The art of being a grandfather, Mr Best gan murmur. L'art d'étre
grand...
-- His own image to a man with that queer thing genius is the standard
of all experience, material and moral. Such an appeal will touch him. The
images of other males of his blood will repel him. He will see in them
grotesque attempts of nature to foretell or repeat himself.
The benign forehead of the quaker librarian enkindled rosily with hope.
-- I hope Mr Dedalus will work out his theory for the enlightenment of
the public. And we ought to mention another Irish commentator, Mr George
Bernard Shaw. Nor should we forget Mr Frank Harris. His articles on
Shakespeare in the Saturday Review were surely brilliant. Oddly enough he
too draws for us an unhappy relation with the dark lady of the sonnets. The
favoured rival is William Herbert, earl of Pembroke. I own that if the poet
must be rejected, such a rejection would seem more in harmony with - what
shall I say? - our notions of what ought not to have been.
Felicitously he ceased and held a meek head among them, auk's egg,
prize of their fray.
He thous and thees her with grave husbandwords. Dost love, Miriam? Dost
love thy man?
-- That may be too, Stephen said. There is a saying of Goethe's which
Mr Magee likes to quote. Beware of what you wish for in youth because you
will get it in middle life. Why does he send to one who is a buonaroba, a
bay where all men ride, a maid of honour with a scandalous girlhood, a
lordling to woo for him? He was himself a lord of language and had made
himself a coistrel gentleman and had written Romeo and Juliet. Why? Belief
in himself has been untimely killed. He was overborne in a cornfield first
(ryefield, I should say) and he will never be a victor in his own eyes after
nor play victoriously the game of laugh and lie down. Assumed dongiovannism
will not save him. No later undoing will undo the first undoing. The tusk of
the boar has wounded him there-where love lies ableeding. If the shrew is
worsted yet there remains to her woman's invisible weapon. There is, I feel
in the words, some goad of the flesh driving him into a new passion, a
darker shadow of the first, darkening even his own understanding of himself.
A life fate awaits him and the two rages commingle in a whirlpool.
They list. And in the porches of their ears I pour.
-- The soul has been before stricken mortally, a poison poured in the
porch of a sleeping ear. But those who are done to death in sleep cannot
know the manner of their quell unless their Creator endow their souls with
that knowledge in the life to come. The poisoning and the beast with two
backs that urged it king Hamlet's ghost could not know of were he not
endowed with knowledge by his creator. That is why the speech (his lean
unlovely English) is always turned elsewhere, backward. Ravisher and
ravished, what he would but would not, go with him from Lucrece's
bluecircled ivory globes to Imogen's breast, bare, with its mole
cinquespotted. He goes back, weary of the creation he has piled up to hide
him from himself, an old dog licking an old sore. But, because loss is his
gain, he passes on towards eternity in undiminished personality, untaught by
the wisdom he has written or by the laws he has revealed. His beaver is up.
He is a ghost, a shadow now, the wind by Elsinore's rocks or what you will,
the sea's voice, a voice heard only in the heart of him who is the substance
of his shadow, the son consubstantial with the father.
-- Amen! responded from the doorway.
Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?
Entr'acte.
A ribald face, sullen as a dean's, Buck Mulligan came forwards then
blithe in motley, towards the greeting of their smiles. My telegram.
-- You were speaking of the gaseous vertebrate, if I mistake not? he
asked of Stephen.
Primrosevested he greeted gaily with his doffed Panama as with a
bauble.
They make him welcome. Was Din verlachst wirst Du noch dienen.
Brodd of mockers: Photius, pseudomalachi, Johann Most.
He Who Himself begot, middler the Holy Ghost, and Himself sent himself,
Agenbuyer, between Himself and others, Who, put upon by His fiends, stripped
and whipped, was nailed like bat to barndoor, starved on crosstree, Who let
Him bury, stood up, harrowed hell, fared into heaven and there these
nineteen hundred years sitteth on the right hand of His Own Self but yet
shall come in the latter day to doom the quick and dead when all the quick
shall be dead already.
He lifts hands. Veils fall. O, flowers! Bells with bells with bells
aquiring.
-- Yes, indeed, the quaker librarian said. A most instructive
discussion, Mr Mulligan, I'll be bound, has his theory too of the play and
of Shakespeare. All sides of life should be represented.
He smiled on all sides equally.
Buck Mulligan thought, puzzled:
-- Shakespeare? he said. I seem to know the name.
A flying sunny smile rayed in his loose features.
-- To be sure, he said, remembering b