Section 20 of 74 - Table of Contents
--Ryefield, Mr Best said brightly, gladly, raising his new book, gladly,
brightly.
He murmured then with blond 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. Argal, 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.
God 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 IN MO
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 if he has not loved the mother?
--The art of being a grandfather, Mr Best gan murmur. L'ART D'ETRE GRAND
...
--Will he not see reborn in her, with the memory of his own youth added,
another image?
Do you know what you are talking about? Love, yes. Word known to all men.
Amor vero aliquid alicui bonum vult unde et ea quae concupiscimus ...
--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 to 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's 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 he 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 like 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! was responded from the doorway.
Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?
ENTR'ACTE.
A ribald face, sullen as a dean's, Buck Mulligan came forward, 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 DU VERLACHST WIRST DU NOCH DIENEN.
Brood 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.
Glo--o--ri--a in ex--cel--sis De--o.
He lifts his 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 brightly. The chap that writes like
Synge.
Mr Best turned to him.
--Haines missed you, he said. Did you meet him? He'll see you after at
the D. B. C. He's gone to Gill's to buy Hyde's LOVESONGS OF CONNACHT.
--I came through the museum, Buck Mulligan said. Was he here?
--The bard's fellowcountrymen, John Eglinton answered, are rather tired
perhaps of our brilliancies of theorising. I hear that an actress played
Hamlet for the fourhundredandeighth time last night in Dublin. Vining
held that the prince was a woman. Has no-one made him out to be an
Irishman? Judge Barton, I believe, is searching for some clues. He swears
(His Highness not His Lordship) by saint Patrick.
--The most brilliant of all is that story of Wilde's, Mr Best said,
lifting his brilliant notebook. That PORTRAIT OF MR W. H. where he proves
that the sonnets were written by a Willie Hughes, a man all hues.
--For Willie Hughes, is it not? the quaker librarian asked.
Or Hughie Wills? Mr William Himself. W. H.: who am I?
--I mean, for Willie Hughes, Mr Best said, amending his gloss easily. Of
course it's all paradox, don't you know, Hughes and hews and hues, the
colour, but it's so typical the way he works it out. It's the very
essence of Wilde, don't you know. The light touch.
His glance touched their faces lightly as he smiled, a blond ephebe. Tame
essence of Wilde.
You're darned witty. Three drams of usquebaugh you drank with Dan Deasy's
ducats.
How much did I spend? O, a few shillings.
For a plump of pressmen. Humour wet and dry.
Wit. You would give your five wits for youth's proud livery he pranks in.
Lineaments of gratified desire.
There be many mo. Take her for me. In pairing time. Jove, a cool ruttime
send them. Yea, turtledove her.
Eve. Naked wheatbellied sin. A snake coils her, fang in's kiss.
--Do you think it is only a paradox? the quaker librarian was asking. The
mocker is never taken seriously when he is most serious.
They talked seriously of mocker's seriousness.
Buck Mulligan's again heavy face eyed Stephen awhile. Then, his head
wagging, he came near, drew a folded telegram from his pocket. His mobile
lips read, smiling with new delight.
--Telegram! he said. Wonderful inspiration! Telegram! A papal bull!
He sat on a corner of the unlit desk, reading aloud joyfully:
--THE SENTIMENTALIST IS HE WHO WOULD ENJOY WITHOUT INCURRING THE IMMENSE
DEBTORSHIP FOR A THING DONE. Signed: Dedalus. Where did you launch it
from? The kips? No. College Green. Have you drunk the four quid? The aunt
is going to call on your unsubstantial father. Telegram! Malachi
Mulligan, The Ship, lower Abbey street. O, you peerless mummer! O, you
priestified Kinchite!
Joyfully he thrust message and envelope into a pocket but keened in a
querulous brogue:
--It's what I'm telling you, mister honey, it's queer and sick we were,
Haines and myself, the time himself brought it in. 'Twas murmur we did
for a gallus potion would rouse a friar, I'm thinking, and he limp with
leching. And we one hour and two hours and three hours in Connery's
sitting civil waiting for pints apiece.
He wailed:
--And we to be there, mavrone, and you to be unbeknownst sending us your
conglomerations the way we to have our tongues out a yard long like the
drouthy clerics do be fainting for a pussful.
Stephen laughed.
Quickly, warningfully Buck Mulligan bent down.
--The tramper Synge is looking for you, he said, to murder you. He heard
you pissed on his halldoor in Glasthule. He's out in pampooties to murder
you.
--Me! Stephen exclaimed. That was your contribution to literature.
Buck Mulligan gleefully bent back, laughing to the dark eavesdropping
ceiling.
--Murder you! he laughed.
Harsh gargoyle face that warred against me over our mess of hash of
lights in rue Saint-Andre-des-Arts. In words of words for words,
palabras. Oisin with Patrick. Faunman he met in Clamart woods,
brandishing a winebottle. C'EST VENDREDI SAINT! Murthering Irish. His
image, wandering, he met. I mine. I met a fool i'the forest.
--Mr Lyster, an attendant said from the door ajar.
-- ... in which everyone can find his own. So Mr Justice Madden in his
DIARY OF MASTER WILLIAM SILENCE has found the hunting terms ... Yes? What
is it?
--There's a gentleman here, sir, the attendant said, coming forward and
offering a card. From the FREEMAN. He wants to see the files of the
KILKENNY PEOPLE for last year.
--Certainly, certainly, certainly. Is the gentleman? ...
He took the eager card, glanced, not saw, laid down unglanced, looked,
asked, creaked, asked:
--Is he? ... O, there!
Brisk in a galliard he was off, out. In the daylit corridor he talked
with voluble pains of zeal, in duty bound, most fair, most kind, most
honest broadbrim.
--This gentleman? FREEMAN'S JOURNAL? KILKENNY PEOPLE? To be sure. Good
day, sir. KILKENNY ... We have certainly ...
A patient silhouette waited, listening.
--All the leading provincial ... NORTHERN WHIG, CORK EXAMINER,
ENNISCORTHY GUARDIAN, 1903 ... Will you please? ... Evans, conduct this
gentleman ... If you just follow the atten ... Or, please allow me ...
This way ... Please, sir ...
Voluble, dutiful, he led the way to all the provincial papers, a bowing
dark figure following his hasty heels.
The door closed.
--The sheeny! Buck Mulligan cried.
He jumped up and snatched the card.
--What's his name? Ikey Moses? Bloom.
He rattled on:
--Jehovah, collector of prepuces, is no more. I found him over in the
museum where I went to hail the foamborn Aphrodite. The Greek mouth that
has never been twisted in prayer. Every day we must do homage to her.
LIFE OF LIFE, THY LIPS ENKINDLE.
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