Section 21 of 74 - Table of Contents
Suddenly he turned to Stephen:
--He knows you. He knows your old fellow. O, I fear me, he is Greeker
than the Greeks. His pale Galilean eyes were upon her mesial groove.
Venus Kallipyge. O, the thunder of those loins! THE GOD PURSUING THE
MAIDEN HID.
--We want to hear more, John Eglinton decided with Mr Best's approval. We
begin to be interested in Mrs S. Till now we had thought of her, if at
all, as a patient Griselda, a Penelope stayathome.
--Antisthenes, pupil of Gorgias, Stephen said, took the palm of beauty
from Kyrios Menelaus' brooddam, Argive Helen, the wooden mare of Troy in
whom a score of heroes slept, and handed it to poor Penelope. Twenty
years he lived in London and, during part of that time, he drew a salary
equal to that of the lord chancellor of Ireland. His life was rich. His
art, more than the art of feudalism as Walt Whitman called it, is the art
of surfeit. Hot herringpies, green mugs of sack, honeysauces, sugar of
roses, marchpane, gooseberried pigeons, ringocandies. Sir Walter Raleigh,
when they arrested him, had half a million francs on his back including a
pair of fancy stays. The gombeenwoman Eliza Tudor had underlinen enough
to vie with her of Sheba. Twenty years he dallied there between conjugial
love and its chaste delights and scortatory love and its foul pleasures.
You know Manningham's story of the burgher's wife who bade Dick Burbage
to her bed after she had seen him in RICHARD III and how Shakespeare,
overhearing, without more ado about nothing, took the cow by the horns
and, when Burbage came knocking at the gate, answered from the capon's
blankets: WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR CAME BEFORE RICHARD III. And the gay
lakin, mistress Fitton, mount and cry O, and his dainty birdsnies, lady
Penelope Rich, a clean quality woman is suited for a player, and the
punks of the bankside, a penny a time.
Cours la Reine. ENCORE VINGT SOUS. NOUS FERONS DE PETITES COCHONNERIES.
MINETTE? TU VEUX?
--The height of fine society. And sir William Davenant of oxford's mother
with her cup of canary for any cockcanary.
Buck Mulligan, his pious eyes upturned, prayed:
--Blessed Margaret Mary Anycock!
--And Harry of six wives' daughter. And other lady friends from neighbour
seats as Lawn Tennyson, gentleman poet, sings. But all those twenty years
what do you suppose poor Penelope in Stratford was doing behind the
diamond panes?
Do and do. Thing done. In a rosery of Fetter lane of Gerard, herbalist,
he walks, greyedauburn. An azured harebell like her veins. Lids of Juno's
eyes, violets. He walks. One life is all. One body. Do. But do. Afar, in
a reek of lust and squalor, hands are laid on whiteness.
Buck Mulligan rapped John Eglinton's desk sharply.
--Whom do you suspect? he challenged.
--Say that he is the spurned lover in the sonnets. Once spurned twice
spurned. But the court wanton spurned him for a lord, his dearmylove.
Love that dare not speak its name.
--As an Englishman, you mean, John sturdy Eglinton put in, he loved a
lord.
Old wall where sudden lizards flash. At Charenton I watched them.
--It seems so, Stephen said, when he wants to do for him, and for all
other and singular uneared wombs, the holy office an ostler does for the
stallion. Maybe, like Socrates, he had a midwife to mother as he had a
shrew to wife. But she, the giglot wanton, did not break a bedvow. Two
deeds are rank in that ghost's mind: a broken vow and the dullbrained
yokel on whom her favour has declined, deceased husband's brother. Sweet
Ann, I take it, was hot in the blood. Once a wooer, twice a wooer.
Stephen turned boldly in his chair.
--The burden of proof is with you not with me, he said frowning. If you
deny that in the fifth scene of HAMLET he has branded her with infamy
tell me why there is no mention of her during the thirtyfour years
between the day she married him and the day she buried him. All those
women saw their men down and under: Mary, her goodman John, Ann, her poor
dear Willun, when he went and died on her, raging that he was the first
to go, Joan, her four brothers, Judith, her husband and all her sons,
Susan, her husband too, while Susan's daughter, Elizabeth, to use
granddaddy's words, wed her second, having killed her first.
O, yes, mention there is. In the years when he was living richly in royal
London to pay a debt she had to borrow forty shillings from her father's
shepherd. Explain you then. Explain the swansong too wherein he has
commended her to posterity.
He faced their silence.
To whom thus Eglinton:
You mean the will.
But that has been explained, I believe, by jurists.
She was entitled to her widow's dower
At common law. His legal knowledge was great
Our judges tell us.
Him Satan fleers,
Mocker:
And therefore he left out her name
From the first draft but he did not leave out
The presents for his granddaughter, for his daughters,
For his sister, for his old cronies in Stratford
And in London. And therefore when he was urged,
As I believe, to name her
He left her his
Secondbest
Bed.
PUNKT.
Leftherhis
Secondbest
Leftherhis
Bestabed
Secabest
Leftabed.
Woa!
AMPLIUS. IN SOCIETATE HUMANA HOC EST MAXIME NECESSARIUM UT SIT AMICITIA
INTER MULTOS.
--Saint Thomas, Stephen began ...
--ORA PRO NOBIS, Monk Mulligan groaned, sinking to a chair.
There he keened a wailing rune.
--POGUE MAHONE! ACUSHLA MACHREE! It's destroyed we are from this day!
It's destroyed we are surely!
All smiled their smiles.
--Saint Thomas, Stephen smiling said, whose gorbellied works I enjoy
reading in the original, writing of incest from a standpoint different
from that of the new Viennese school Mr Magee spoke of, likens it in his
wise and curious way to an avarice of the emotions. He means that the
love so given to one near in blood is covetously withheld from some
stranger who, it may be, hungers for it. Jews, whom christians tax with
avarice, are of all races the most given to intermarriage. Accusations
are made in anger. The christian laws which built up the hoards of the
jews (for whom, as for the lollards, storm was shelter) bound their
affections too with hoops of steel. Whether these be sins or virtues old
Nobodaddy will tell us at doomsday leet. But a man who holds so tightly
to what he calls his rights over what he calls his debts will hold
tightly also to what he calls his rights over her whom he calls his wife.
No sir smile neighbour shall covet his ox or his wife or his manservant
or his maidservant or his jackass.
--Or his jennyass, Buck Mulligan antiphoned.
--Gentle Will is being roughly handled, gentle Mr Best said gently.
--Which will? gagged sweetly Buck Mulligan. We are getting mixed.
--The will to live, John Eglinton philosophised, for poor Ann, Will's
widow, is the will to die.
--REQUIESCAT! Stephen prayed.
WHAT OF ALL THE WILL TO DO?
IT HAS VANISHED LONG AGO ...
--She lies laid out in stark stiffness in that secondbest bed, the mobled
queen, even though you prove that a bed in those days was as rare as a
motorcar is now and that its carvings were the wonder of seven parishes.
In old age she takes up with gospellers (one stayed with her at New Place
and drank a quart of sack the town council paid for but in which bed he
slept it skills not to ask) and heard she had a soul. She read or had
read to her his chapbooks preferring them to the MERRY WIVES and, loosing
her nightly waters on the jordan, she thought over HOOKS AND EYES FOR
BELIEVERS' BREECHES and THE MOST SPIRITUAL SNUFFBOX TO MAKE THE MOST
DEVOUT SOULS SNEEZE. Venus has twisted her lips in prayer. Agenbite of
inwit: remorse of conscience. It is an age of exhausted whoredom groping
for its god.
--History shows that to be true, INQUIT EGLINTONUS CHRONOLOLOGOS. The
ages succeed one another. But we have it on high authority that a man's
worst enemies shall be those of his own house and family. I feel that
Russell is right. What do we care for his wife or father? I should say
that only family poets have family lives. Falstaff was not a family man.
I feel that the fat knight is his supreme creation.
Lean, he lay back. Shy, deny thy kindred, the unco guid. Shy, supping
with the godless, he sneaks the cup. A sire in Ultonian Antrim bade it
him. Visits him here on quarter days. Mr Magee, sir, there's a gentleman
to see you. Me? Says he's your father, sir. Give me my Wordsworth. Enter
Magee Mor Matthew, a rugged rough rugheaded kern, in strossers with a
buttoned codpiece, his nether stocks bemired with clauber of ten forests,
a wand of wilding in his hand.
Your own? He knows your old fellow. The widower.
Hurrying to her squalid deathlair from gay Paris on the quayside I
touched his hand. The voice, new warmth, speaking. Dr Bob Kenny is
attending her. The eyes that wish me well. But do not know me.
--A father, Stephen said, battling against hopelessness, is a necessary
evil. He wrote the play in the months that followed his father's death.
If you hold that he, a greying man with two marriageable daughters, with
thirtyfive years of life, NEL MEZZO DEL CAMMIN DI NOSTRA VITA, with fifty
of experience, is the beardless undergraduate from Wittenberg then you
must hold that his seventyyear old mother is the lustful queen. No. The
corpse of John Shakespeare does not walk the night. From hour to hour it
rots and rots. He rests, disarmed of fatherhood, having devised that
mystical estate upon his son. Boccaccio's Calandrino was the first and
last man who felt himself with child. Fatherhood, in the sense of
conscious begetting, is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an
apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten. On that
mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect flung
to the mob of Europe the church is founded and founded irremovably
because founded, like the world, macro and microcosm, upon the void. Upon
incertitude, upon unlikelihood. AMOR MATRIS, subjective and objective
genitive, may be the only true thing in life. Paternity may be a legal
fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he
any son?
What the hell are you driving at?
I know. Shut up. Blast you. I have reasons.
AMPLIUS. ADHUC. ITERUM. POSTEA.
Are you condemned to do this?
--They are sundered by a bodily shame so steadfast that the criminal
annals of the world, stained with all other incests and bestialities,
hardly record its breach. Sons with mothers, sires with daughters, lesbic
sisters, loves that dare not speak their name, nephews with grandmothers,
jailbirds with keyholes, queens with prize bulls. The son unborn mars
beauty: born, he brings pain, divides affection, increases care. He is a
new male: his growth is his father's decline, his youth his father's
envy, his friend his father's enemy.
In rue Monsieur-le-Prince I thought it.
--What links them in nature? An instant of blind rut.
Am I a father? If I were?
Shrunken uncertain hand.
--Sabellius, the African, subtlest heresiarch of all the beasts of the
field, held that the Father was Himself His Own Son. The bulldog of
Aquin, with whom no word shall be impossible, refutes him. Well: if the
father who has not a son be not a father can the son who has not a father
be a son? When Rutlandbaconsouthamptonshakespeare or another poet of the
same name in the comedy of errors wrote HAMLET he was not the father of
his own son merely but, being no more a son, he was and felt himself the
father of all his race, the father of his own grandfather, the father of
his unborn grandson who, by the same token, never was born, for nature,
as Mr Magee understands her, abhors perfection.
Eglintoneyes, quick with pleasure, looked up shybrightly. Gladly
glancing, a merry puritan, through the twisted eglantine.
Flatter. Rarely. But flatter.
--Himself his own father, Sonmulligan told himself. Wait. I am big with
child. I have an unborn child in my brain. Pallas Athena! A play! The
play's the thing! Let me parturiate!
He clasped his paunchbrow with both birthaiding hands.
--As for his family, Stephen said, his mother's name lives in the forest
of Arden. Her death brought from him the scene with Volumnia in
CORIOLANUS. His boyson's death is the deathscene of young Arthur in KING
JOHN. Hamlet, the black prince, is Hamnet Shakespeare. Who the girls in
THE TEMPEST, in PERICLES, in WINTER'S TALE are we know. Who Cleopatra,
fleshpot of Egypt, and Cressid and Venus are we may guess. But there is
another member of his family who is recorded.
--The plot thickens, John Eglinton said.
The quaker librarian, quaking, tiptoed in, quake, his mask, quake, with
haste, quake, quack.
Door closed. Cell. Day.
They list. Three. They.
I you he they.
Come, mess.
STEPHEN: He had three brothers, Gilbert, Edmund, Richard. Gilbert in his
old age told some cavaliers he got a pass for nowt from Maister Gatherer
one time mass he did and he seen his brud Maister Wull the playwriter up
in Lunnon in a wrastling play wud a man on's back. The playhouse sausage
filled Gilbert's soul. He is nowhere: but an Edmund and a Richard are
recorded in the works of sweet William.
MAGEEGLINJOHN: Names! What's in a name?
BEST: That is my name, Richard, don't you know. I hope you are going to
say a good word for Richard, don't you know, for my sake.
(Laughter)
BUCKMULLIGAN: (PIANO, DIMINUENDO)
Then outspoke medical Dick
To his comrade medical Davy ...
STEPHEN: In his trinity of black Wills, the villain shakebags, Iago,
Richard Crookback, Edmund in KING LEAR, two bear the wicked uncles'
names. Nay, that last play was written or being written while his brother
Edmund lay dying in Southwark.
BEST: I hope Edmund is going to catch it. I don't want Richard, my
name ...
(Laughter)
QUAKERLYSTER: (A TEMPO) But he that filches from me my good name ...
STEPHEN: (STRINGENDO) He has hidden his own name, a fair name, William,
in the plays, a super here, a clown there, as a painter of old Italy set
his face in a dark corner of his canvas. He has revealed it in the
sonnets where there is Will in overplus. Like John o'Gaunt his name is
dear to him, as dear as the coat and crest he toadied for, on a bend
sable a spear or steeled argent, honorificabilitudinitatibus, dearer than
his glory of greatest shakescene in the country. What's in a name? That
is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the name that we are
told is ours. A star, a daystar, a firedrake, rose at his birth. It shone
by day in the heavens alone, brighter than Venus in the night, and by
night it shone over delta in Cassiopeia, the recumbent constellation
which is the signature of his initial among the stars. His eyes watched
it, lowlying on the horizon, eastward of the bear, as he walked by the
slumberous summer fields at midnight returning from Shottery and from her
arms.
Both satisfied. I too.
Don't tell them he was nine years old when it was quenched.
And from her arms.
Wait to be wooed and won. Ay, meacock. Who will woo you?
Read the skies. AUTONTIMORUMENOS. BOUS STEPHANOUMENOS. Where's your
configuration? Stephen, Stephen, cut the bread even. S. D: SUA DONNA.
GIA: DI LUI. GELINDO RISOLVE DI NON AMARE S. D.
--What is that, Mr Dedalus? the quaker librarian asked. Was it a
celestial phenomenon?
--A star by night, Stephen said. A pillar of the cloud by day.
What more's to speak?
Stephen looked on his hat, his stick, his boots.
STEPHANOS, my crown. My sword. His boots are spoiling the shape of
my feet. Buy a pair. Holes in my socks. Handkerchief too.
--You make good use of the name, John Eglinton allowed. Your own name
is strange enough. I suppose it explains your fantastical humour.
Me, Magee and Mulligan.
Fabulous artificer. The hawklike man. You flew. Whereto?
Newhaven-Dieppe, steerage passenger. Paris and back. Lapwing. Icarus.
PATER, AIT. Seabedabbled, fallen, weltering. Lapwing you are. Lapwing be.
Mr Best eagerquietly lifted his book to say:
--That's very interesting because that brother motive, don't you know, we
find also in the old Irish myths. Just what you say. The three brothers
Shakespeare. In Grimm too, don't you know, the fairytales. The third
brother that always marries the sleeping beauty and wins the best prize.
Best of Best brothers. Good, better, best.
The quaker librarian springhalted near.
--I should like to know, he said, which brother you ... I understand you
to suggest there was misconduct with one of the brothers ... But
perhaps I am anticipating?
He caught himself in the act: looked at all: refrained.
An attendant from the doorway called:
--Mr Lyster! Father Dineen wants ...
--O, Father Dineen! Directly.
Swiftly rectly creaking rectly rectly he was rectly gone.
John Eglinton touched the foil.
--Come, he said. Let us hear what you have to say of Richard and
Edmund. You kept them for the last, didn't you?
--In asking you to remember those two noble kinsmen nuncle Richie and
nuncle Edmund, Stephen answered, I feel I am asking too much perhaps. A
brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella.
Lapwing.
Where is your brother? Apothecaries' hall. My whetstone. Him, then
Cranly, Mulligan: now these. Speech, speech. But act. Act speech. They
mock to try you. Act. Be acted on.
Lapwing.
I am tired of my voice, the voice of Esau. My kingdom for a drink.
On.
--You will say those names were already in the chronicles from which he
took the stuff of his plays. Why did he take them rather than others?
Richard, a whoreson crookback, misbegotten, makes love to a widowed
Ann (what's in a name?), woos and wins her, a whoreson merry widow.
Richard the conqueror, third brother, came after William the conquered.
The other four acts of that play hang limply from that first. Of all his
kings Richard is the only king unshielded by Shakespeare's reverence,
the angel of the world. Why is the underplot of KING LEAR in which Edmund
figures lifted out of Sidney's ARCADIA and spatchcocked on to a Celtic
legend older than history?
--That was Will's way, John Eglinton defended. We should not now
combine a Norse saga with an excerpt from a novel by George Meredith.
QUE VOULEZ-VOUS? Moore would say. He puts Bohemia on the seacoast and
makes Ulysses quote Aristotle.
--Why? Stephen answered himself. Because the theme of the false or the
usurping or the adulterous brother or all three in one is to Shakespeare,
what the poor are not, always with him. The note of banishment,
banishment from the heart, banishment from home, sounds uninterruptedly
from THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA onward till Prospero breaks his staff,
buries it certain fathoms in the earth and drowns his book. It doubles
itself in the middle of his life, reflects itself in another, repeats
itself, protasis, epitasis, catastasis, catastrophe. It repeats
itself again when he is near the grave, when his married daughter
Susan, chip of the old block, is accused of adultery. But it was
the original sin that darkened his understanding, weakened his
will and left in him a strong inclination to evil. The words are
those of my lords bishops of Maynooth. An original sin and, like original
sin, committed by another in whose sin he too has sinned. It is between
the lines of his last written words, it is petrified on his tombstone
under which her four bones are not to be laid. Age has not withered it.
Beauty and peace have not done it away. It is in infinite variety
everywhere in the world he has created, in MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, twice
in AS YOU LIKE IT, in THE TEMPEST, in HAMLET, in MEASURE FOR MEASURE--and
in all the other plays which I have not read.
He laughed to free his mind from his mind's bondage.
Judge Eglinton summed up.
--The truth is midway, he affirmed. He is the ghost and the prince. He is
all in all.
--He is, Stephen said. The boy of act one is the mature man of act five.
All in all. In CYMBELINE, in OTHELLO he is bawd and cuckold. He acts and
is acted on. Lover of an ideal or a perversion, like Jose he kills the
real Carmen. His unremitting intellect is the hornmad Iago ceaselessly
willing that the moor in him shall suffer.
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