'This way to the Museyroom!'

Thomas Wolfe in 1937, photographed by Carl van Vechten

On 22 September 1926, James Joyce visited the battlefield of Waterloo. We know all about this visit because, by a lucky chance, the 25-year-old Thomas Wolfe was also on the tour bus. Wolfe was a big fan of Joyce's, but was too shy to talk to him. Straight after the visit, he wrote an excited description of the day to his lover, Aline Bernstein.

'I took the day off and went to Waterloo in a bus – the first trip I've made. There were seven or eight of us – two or three English, two or three French, and your old friend* James Joyce. He was with a woman about forty, and a young man, and a girl. I noticed him after we had descended at Waterloo – I had seen his picture only a day or two ago in a French publisher's announcements: he was wearing a blind over one eye. He was very simply – even shabbily – dressed. We went into a little café where the bus stopped to look at the battle souvenirs and buy postcards: then we walked up what was once the Sunken Road to a huge circular building that had a panorama of the battle painted around the sides;'

Elizabeth Knowell, (ed)The Letters of Thomas Wolfe p114


*Aline Bernstein had put on a production of Exiles the previous year, and had visited Joyce in London to pay royalties.

The circular panorama building, with the mound behind

 
Here's part of the panorama, a 110m-long canvas painted by Louis Dumoulin in 1912, to commemorate the centenary of Waterloo. It shows a key moment in the battle - Marshall Ney's charge against the English infantry squares around Wellington.

Could this panorama be in Finnegans Wake?:

'the whole panoromacron picture.' 318.09

'— A lambskip for the marines! Paronama! The entire horizon cloth!' 502.36

Back to Thomas Wolfe, who now describes visiting the 40 metre-tall lion mound, built by King William I of the Netherlands to mark the position where his son, Prince William of Orange, was wounded in the battle. The 'young man' referred to here is Giorgio Joyce:

'then we ascended the several hundred steps up the great mound which supports the lion and looks out over the field.  The young man, who wore horn-rim spectacles, and a light sporty-looking overcoat, looked very much like an American college boy: he began to talk to me going up the steps – I asked him if he knew the man with the eye blind. He said he did, and that it was Joyce. I commented briefly that I had seen Joyce's picture and read his book; after this the young fellow joined me at every point.'

 'Walking back down the road to the café, I asked him if Joyce's sight was better – he said it had greatly improved. He said that Joyce was working on a new book, but thought it impossible to say when it was finished. We went back to the café – they sat down at a table and had tea – the young man seemed about to ask me to join them, and I took a seat quickly at another table, calling for two beers. They all spoke French together – he told them all about it, and they peeked furtively at me from time to time – the great man himself taking an occasional crafty shot at me with his good eye. As they had tea, they all wrote postcards. As they got up to go into the bus, the young man bowed somewhat grandly to me – I don't blame him; I'd be pleased too. I judge the people are Joyce's family – he is a man in his middle forties – old enough to have a son and a daughter like these. The woman had the appearance of a thousand middle class French women I've known – a vulgar, rather loose mouth; not very intelligent looking. The young man spoke English well, but with a foreign accent. It was tragic to see Joyce – one of the gods at the moment – speaking not one word of the language his fame is based on. The girl was rather pretty – I thought at first she was an American flapper.'
 

James and Lucia Joyce in Ostend in 1924, from Bob Cato and Greg Vitiello's Joyce Images

'Joyce was very simple, very nice. He walked next to the old guide who showed us around, listening with apparent interest to his harangue delivered in broken English, and asking him questions. We came home to Brussels through a magnificent forest, miles in extent – Joyce sat with the driver on the front seat, asked a great many questions. I sat alone on the back seat – it was a huge coach; the woman sat in front of me, the girl in front of her, the young man on one side. Queer arrangement, eh?
  Joyce got a bit stagey on the way home, draping his overcoat poetically around his shoulders. But I liked Joyce's looks – not extraordinary at first sight, but growing. His face was highly colored, slightly concave – his mouth thin, not delicate, but extraordinarily humorous. He had a large powerful straight nose – redder than his face, somewhat pitted with scars and boils.
  When we got back to Brussels, and stopped in front of the bus office. the young man and two women made a little group, while Joyce went inside. The young man was looking at me, and I was swimming in beer. I made a dive for the nearest place, which was under a monument: they are more respectable here than in Paris.
  Anyhow it was too good to spoil: the idea of Joyce and me being at Waterloo at the same time, and aboard a sight-seeing bus, struck me as insanely funny. I sat on the back seat making idiot noises in my throat, and crooning all the way back through the forest.
  I think they really might have been a little grand about it if they had known they were discovered. But they were just like common people out sight-seeing.'

The Joyces in 1924, from Joyce Images

What jumps out of this letter to me is the description of Joyce climbing a great mound on the battlefield of Waterloo. Just two months later, he wrote the opening chapter of Finnegans Wake, which contains a visit to the 'Willingdone Museyroom', which is located beneath a mound!

'a proudseye view is enjoyable of our mounding’s mass, now Wallinstone national museum, with, in some greenish distance, the charmful water-loose country and the two quitewhite villagettes who hear show of themselves so gigglesomes minxt the follyages, the prettilees! Penetrators are permitted into the museomound free.'  7.36-8.05

This 'museomound' sounds like a mixture of the Waterloo battlefield panorama building and lion mound with the Wellington monument in the Dublin's Phoenix Park. It's also another version of the 'orangeflavoured mudmound' (111.34), where Belinda the Hen discovers the letter. Joyce came up with the mudmound before visiting Waterloo, but he must have been struck by the coincidence of finding a mound on the battlefield commemorating a Prince of Orange!  (He'd also called the mound 'the orangery' at 110.27).

The Wellington Monument in the Phoenix Park

 
What follows is the voice of the janitrix, Kathe, describing the contents of the Museyroom, where the battle of Waterloo is re-imagined as another version of HCE's sin in the park. HCE becomes 'Willingdone on his same white harse'. The three soldiers become the 'lipoleum boyne' (bringing in another William of Orange and the Battle of the Boyne). The two girls are called 'jinnies'.  Joyce drew a plan of the battle in his manuscript.

Note the word 'tip' written to the right centre

You can read the text of the Museyroom, and annotations here in fweet. To give you a feel of the style, here's the opening, from Joyce's fair copy of 29 November 1926.

Is this the 'harangue' of the 'old guide' who showed the Joyces and Thomas Wolfe around the battlefield? Did the guide ask for a 'tip'?

A ROYAL DIVORCE

J.S.Atherton discovered that 'Willingdone on his same white harse' was inspired by Joyce's memories of seeing W.G.Wills once popular play A Royal Divorce, about Napoleon and his two wives, at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin. It toured for years with the actor manager W.W.Kelly playing Napoleon to his wife's Josephine. 

Here's Napoleon caught between his two wives - a scene you can see in sigla form in Joyce's diagram, with HCE facing two 'jinnies' (shown as the upside down T's - isolde's sigla). Though HCE is 'Willingdone' rather than Napoleon.

Is that the mound in the middle?

'the truly catholic assemblage gathered together in that king’s treat house of satin alustrelike above floats and footlights from their assbawlveldts and oxgangs unanimously to clapplaud (the inspiration of his lifetime and the hits of their careers) Mr Wallenstein Washington Semperkelly’s immergreen tourers in a command performance by special request with the courteous permission for pious purposes the homedromed and enliventh performance of problem passion play of the millentury, running strong since creation, A Royal Divorce.' 32.23

The 'king's treat house' is the Gaiety Theatre, in South King's Street.

J.S.Atherton, who tracked a manuscript copy of the play down, describes the play's astonishing final tableau of the Battle of Waterloo:

'A backcloth showing the scene of Waterloo was pierced with holes which were  intermittently lit up to represent the firing of cannon. In front of this models of cavalrymen were wound forward on glass runners while 'Pepper ghosts' of cuirassiers produced by a sort of magic lantern, fell dramatically to their death in the clouds of white smoke that filled the stage. In the foreground on a big white horse, rode Napoleon, or sometimes - apparently when Mr Kelly wanted a rest - Wellington. It made no difference to the play who was on the horse as nothing was said.'  

The Books at the Wake.