Complete Works of James Joyce Read online

  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-André-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.

  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: Wil
liam 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!

  — Pretty countryfolk had few chattels then, John Eglinton observed, as they have still if our peasant plays are true to type.

  — He was a rich country gentleman, Stephen said, with a coat of arms and landed estate at Stratford and a house in Ireland yard, a capitalist shareholder, a bill promoter, a tithefarmer. Why did he not leave her his best bed if he wished her to snore away the rest of her nights in peace?

  — It is clear that there were two beds, a best and a secondbest, Mr Secondbest Best said finely.

  — Separatio a mensa et a thalamo, bettered Buck Mulligan and was smiled on.

  — Antiquity mentions famous beds, Second Eglinton puckered, bedsmiling. Let me think.

  — Antiquity mentions that Stagyrite schoolurchin and bald heathen sage, Stephen said, who when dying in exile frees and endows his slaves, pays tribute to his elders, wills to be laid in earth near the bones of his dead wife and bids his friends be kind to an old mistress (don’t forget Nell Gwynn Herpyllis) and let her live in his villa.

  — Do you mean he died so? Mr Best asked with slight concern. I mean...

  — He died dead drunk, Buck Mulligan capped. A quart of ale is a dish for a king. O, I must tell you what Dowden said!

  — What? asked Besteglinton.

  William Shakespeare and company, limited. The people’s William. For terms apply: E. Dowden, Highfield house...

  — Lovely! Buck Mulligan suspired amorously. I asked him what he thought of the charge of pederasty brought against the bard. He lifted his hands and said: All we can say is that life ran very high in those days. Lovely!

  Catamite.

  — The sense of beauty leads us astray, said beautifulinsadness Best to ugling Eglinton.

  Steadfast John replied severe:

  — The doctor can tell us what those words mean. You cannot eat your cake and have it.

  Sayest thou so? Will they wrest from us, from me, the palm of beauty?

  — And the sense of property, Stephen said. He drew Shylock out of his own long pocket. The son of a maltjobber and moneylender he was himself a cornjobber and moneylender, with ten tods of corn hoarded in the famine riots. His borrowers are no doubt those divers of worship mentioned by Chettle Falstaff who reported his uprightness of dealing. He sued a fellowplayer for the price of a few bags of malt and exacted his pound of flesh in interest for every money lent. How else could Aubrey’s ostler and callboy get rich quick? All events brought grist to his mill. Shylock chimes with the jewbaiting that followed the hanging and quartering of the queen’s leech Lopez, his jew’s heart being plucked forth while the sheeny was yet alive: Hamlet and Macbeth with the coming to the throne of a Scotch philosophaster with a turn for witchroasting. The lost armada is his jeer in Love’s Labour Lost. His pageants, the histories, sail fullbellied on a tide of Mafeking enthusiasm. Warwickshire jesuits are tried and we have a porter’s theory of equivocation. The Sea Venture comes home from Bermudas and the play Renan admired is written with Patsy Caliban, our American cousin. The sugared sonnets follow Sidney’s. As for fay Elizabeth, otherwise carrotty Bess, the gross virgin who inspired The Merry Wives of Windsor, let some meinherr from Almany grope his life long for deephid meanings in the depths of the buckbasket.

  I think you’re getting on very nicely. Just mix up a mixture of theolologicophilolological. Mingo, minxi, mictum, mingere.

  — Prove that he was a jew, John Eglinton dared,’expectantly. Your dean of studies holds he was a holy Roman.

  Sufflaminandus sum.

  — He was made in Germany, Stephen replied, as the champion French polisher of Italian scandals.

  — A myriadminded man, Mr Best reminded. Coleridge called him myriadminded.

  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 t
he 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.