James Joyce, the dancing years

Apart from being the greatest prose writer in world literature, a cinema pioneer, and a bronze medal winning tenor singer, James Joyce was also a dancer.

In this post, I've collected, and illustrated, descriptions of Joyce dancing over the last two decades of his life. He danced long before this, but I can only find tantalising clues about these earlier dances e.g.

'Joyce brought his Roman visit to an orgiastic close. One night he got drunk with two mailmen and went with them to dance on the Pincio'. Ellmann, p.241

'LIQUOR WENT TO HIS FEET'

Dance for Joyce was an accompaniment to drinking.   Helen Joyce, his daughter-in-law, said of him, 'Liquor went to his feet, not to his head.'

Finnegans Wake mentions Joyce's drunken dancing, in this lively description of Shem the Penman reeling home after a bender, a prancing prince of fandangos:

'reeling more to the right than he lurched to the left....like a prance of findingos, with a shillto shallto slipny stripny, in he skittled.' 186.25-187.01

THE SAILOR'S HORNPIPE

On the opening page of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,  young Stephen dances a sailor's hornpipe while his mother plays the piano. Perhaps this was James Joyce's first dance.

'His mother had a nicer smell than his father. She played on the piano the sailor’s hornpipe for him to dance. He danced:

Tralala lala,
Tralala tralaladdy,
Tralala lala,
Tralala lala.'

Uncle Charles and Dante clapped.'

Two of the earliest photos of Joyce, aged six, show him wearing a sailor's suit.  The one with his mother is described in 'The Dead':

'Her photograph stood before the pierglass. She held an open book on her knees and was pointing out something in it to Constantine who, dressed in a man-o-war suit, lay at her feet.'

There's a memory of this early dance in Finnegans Wake, in the children's games chapter. Shem, now a boy called Glugg, makes a running entrance dressed as a sailor ('gotten orlop in a simplasailormade') and dances a hornpipe to the same rhythm. 

Try singing it:

He’s a pigtail tarr
and if he hadn’t got it toothick 

he’d a telltale tall of his pitcher on a wall 

with his photure in the papers for cutting moutonlegs and capers, 

letting on he’d jest be japers and his tail cooked up.  

232.36-233.04

A Sailor's Hornpipe from the 1915 Swedish film, Modern Dances,  posted on YouTube by Walter Nelson

'THE RITUAL ANTICS OF A COMIC RELIGION'

The first good description of Joyce dancing comes from Frank Budgen, his regular drinking partner in Zurich during World War One:

'On festive occasions and with a suitable stimulus, beribboned and wearing a straw picture hat (Autolycus turned pedant and keeping school, Malvolio snapping up unconsidered trifles) Joyce would execute a fantastic dance. It was not a terpsichorean effort of the statuesque Isadora Duncan variety, but a thing of whirling arms, high-kicking legs, grotesque capers and coy grimaces that suggested somehow the ritual antics of a comic religion.

   'You look like David,' I said, 'leaping and dancing before the ark'.....'

Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses, OUP, 1972, p194-5

What could Joyce's 'coy grimaces' have looked like?

'August Suter made six figures in stone for the Amsthauser in Zurich. I stood for one of them, and even in the frozen stone the likeness persists. It always amused Joyce vastly to see this over-lifesize stone effigy resembling me gazing sternly down upon the free burgesses of Switzerland's commercial capital; and whenever a few of us on the way to the Usteristasse passed under that gaze at a late hour, he would execute his comic ritual dance in honour of the stone guest, to whom would be poured out suitable libations.' 

Budgen, ibid

A dance beneath Budgen's statue

August Suter's brother Paul, interviewed by Ellmann, is another source for Joyce's Zurich dancing days:

'When the mood came over him, he might suddenly interrupt a Saturday afternoon walk in the fashionable Bahnhofstrasse by flinging his loose limbs about in a kind of spider dance, the effect accentuated by his tight trouser-legs and wide cloak, diminutive hat, and thin cane....

   (Joyce's) favourite statue in Zurich was one for which Budgen had served as a model.... and often late at night he would say to a group that included Budgen, 'Let's go and see Budgen,' and would conduct them to the statue....Sometimes he would honour this idol with his spider dance.

   An especially gay party took place within an office of the hated consulate. The restaurants having closed, Budgen invited Joyce and Suter to come to the rooms of the commercial department, where they sat round on the carpet....At the party's height Budgen stood on top of the money-safe and performed an Indian belly-dance, while Joyce performed his spider-dance on the carpet below. None of them remembered how or when they got home.'

August Suter wrote a memoir of Joyce, which includes a description of a drinking session at the consulate:

'We made our way to the British consulate and into Budge's office where we drank the wine we had brought with us. Paul Suter was not equal to the strain and was sick on the carpet.. Budgen enlisted all our help to clean the carpet by means of hot water.....Afterwards Budgen carried Joyce, a bit under the influence, home on his back, as he had done before.'

August Suter, 'Some Reminiscences of James Joyce,' Portraits of the Artist in Exile, p.63 

I wonder if this was the same party.

'IT'S THE SATYR ON A GREEK VASE!'

After the Joyces moved to Paris in 1920, Budgen was replaced as Joyce's main drinking and dancing partner by Robert McAlmon.  In her diary, Helen Nutting described them both dancing at Joyce's birthday party at 2 Square Robiac in 1928:

'Antheil was asked to play old English music, and Joyce and McAlmon danced quietly in the back parlor, improvising rhythmic movements, McAlmon on negro themes and Joyce Greek so that Adrienne exclaimed, 'Mais regardez done ce Joyce; il est tout a fait Grecque. C'est le satyre sur un vase Grecque!' ('But look at Joyce; he's totally Greek.  It's a satyr on a Greek vase!') and it was so, skipping, delicate, with a clean line.'

Quoted by Ellmann, James Joyce, p599

As with his writing, Joyce liked to include comic parody in his dances. In dancing like a Greek satyr, Joyce was parodying the style of Raymond Duncan, who was Lucia Joyce's dance teacher. 

'This tendency to invent dance figures he must have passed on to his daughter Lucia, who made the most promising beginnings in the art of dancing.'

Frank Budgen, ibid.

Joyce and Lucia must have talked about dancing a lot, judging by this letter he wrote to her in 1931

'I send you the programme of the Indian dancer Uday Shankar. If he ever performs at Geneva don't miss going there. He leaves the best of the Russians far behind. I have never seen anything like it. He moves on the stage floor like a semi-divine being. Altogether, believe me, there are still some beautiful things in this poor old world.'

Joyce to Lucia, 15 June 1931, Letters I, 341

You can see Uday Shankar (Ravi's older brother)  dancing on YouTube.

Joyce's young friend Arthur Power has more information about Joyce's low opinion of the Russian ballet. They went to see a 1920 performance of Massine's revival of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring:

'The Russian ballet was all the rage, and I remember one of the early performances of 'Sacre du Printemps' during which an uproar broke out in the audience....When I asked Joyce how he liked the ballet he shrugged his shoulders and told me he did not much care for it.  He went once but never again. He thought the merit of the ballet exaggerated, an opinion so strange, and to me incomprehensible, that I doubted if I had heard him correctly.'

Conversations with James Joyce, Lilliput 1999, p119

 

Joyce is also known to have gone to the avante-garde Swedish Ballet, choreographed by Jean Borlin. In her autobiography, Laughing Torso (1931), Nina Hamnett describes meeting him in the bar during an interval and introducing him to Rudolph Valentino.

'They were the last people in the world who I should think would have met in the ordinary way and they were both speechless.'

 

They should have communicated through dance. Imagine Joyce and Valentino doing a tango....

'A BAT OUT OF HELL'

Herbert Gorman, Joyce's official biographer, gives us another dance from Paris in the early 1920s:

'With closer friends he let himself go and one of them has a memory of Joyce in a voluminous cloak skimming like a bat out of hell in a fantastic dance over one of the ancient bridges that crossed the Seine while the midnight stars shone down on Paris.'  

James Joyce, 1941, p280-281

'HE FANCIED HIMSELF VARIOUS KINDS OF DANCERS'

In his very funny autobiography Robert McAlmon describes a late 1920s St Patrick's Night party at the Trianon, Joyce's favourite restaurant.

'Joyce sang songs...and I broke loose with my 'Chinese Opera'. Joyce wanted me to sing it, and I did. It is the corncrake and the calliope wail of a Chinese virgin in a snowstorm, not understanding where she got her newborn babe, and the neighbour's son claims it is not his inasmuch as he never saw her before. This is a performance that has had me thrown out of several bars and most respectable households and the police of various stations know it well.
   Later, when we left, Joyce wanted to climb up the lamppost. He fancied himself various kinds of dancers, tap, Russian, and belly. Nora was there however, and protest as Mr Joyce might, she got him into a taxi, and, despite his bitter wailings and protestations, drove him home.'

Being Geniuses Together, Doubleday and Co, 1968, p345-6

BALLERINO JOYCE

Nora's disapproval of her husband's dancing is also recorded by Stuart Gilbert in his diary:

'January 2, 1930

On New Years Eve at 10:00 a party at J.J.'s. Present: Pat and Mary Colum, Mr and Mrs Huddleston....At 2.30, Joyce very gay and dancing a jig to 'Auld Lang Syne'; Mrs Joyce, indignant, compels all to leave. She thinks 'he is making a fool of himself' – but I disagree; he is a nimble dancer. If Joyce had not been a writer he'd have been a meistersinger; if not a singer, a ballerino.'

Reflections on James Joyce: Stuart Gilbert's Paris Journal, University of Texas Press, 1993, pp16-17

'HE SAID HE HAD INVENTED HIS OWN DANCE'

Ole Vinding, who met the Joyces in Copenhagen in 1936, has a similar story:

'We sat down for a glass of buttermilk at ''Josty'', and Joyce wanted to tell about the hell he always raised at parties. He said that he had invented his own dance and Mrs. Joyce remarked drily: 'If you can call flinging your legs over your neck and kicking the furniture to pieces 'to dance'!'

  'Well Nora, I do dance! I know the rules of dancing and request that the floor be cleared – that's the least I can do. I once went to a New Year's party with some friends and won first prize for my costume of a beggar, a real clochard. I dressed up in a diplomat's coat that was old and way too short; underneath I wore a blue shirt and, naturally, I wore yellow gloves. In this getup I was introduced to a very solemn young man. He greeted me somewhat ceremoniously but I was in the middle of a dance, so I cut a little caper and answered hastily, 'Enchanté', whereupon I forgot my new acquaintance, whose name I didn't even catch. That was Armand Petitjean*, my energetic commentator! He was the oldest at the party, age-old. The hostess wasn't particularly happy with my behaviour and the next day called on the old-young man to hear what impression I had made on him. He answered laconically: 'Yes, as usual, Mr Joyce had more interest in the expression than in the impression!'

  He laughed, enjoying the memories of those times when he let himself go.'

'James Joyce in Copenhagen', Portraits of the Artist in Exile, p150-1

*Armand Petitjean wrote a study of Finnegans Wake while he was still a teenager. Joyce described it as 'amazing' but it remains unpublished. His relationship with Joyce featured in an exhibition in Luxembourg in 2022.

'JUGGLING CLOWN'

In the 1930s, Joyce was often in Zurich, visiting his eye surgeon. His closest friend here was the art critic Dr Carola Giedion-Welcker. She describes a Zurich evening in the Doldertal with Joyce and Professor Bernhard Fehr.

 

'The discussion turned to light kinds of music, while Professor Fehr began playing dance tunes. After executing an original waltz step – more with himself than with me,  Joyce then took the stage as solo dancer, belaboring the inside of his stiff straw hat with wild jumps and kicks so that in the end, after these rhythmical and astonishingly acrobatic exercises, he was left with only a straw wreath in his hand, which he triumphantly held aloft and then as a finale placed on his head.

  The grotesque flexibility of his long legs, which seemed to fill the room, and the bizarre grace with which he executed all movements of this strange dance, made him appear part juggling clown and part mystical reincarnation of Our Lady's Tumbler, who would like to have continued the performance endlessly, urged on by the constantly changing musical variations of the tireless piano player.'

Carola Giedion-Welcker, 'Meetings with Joyce', Portraits of the Artist in Exile p 273-4

 

'THE SUPPLENESS AND AGILITY OF A DANCER'

Even when Joyce was not dancing, he could remind others of a dancer in the grace of his movements. Here's Jacques Mercanton describing a visit to Joyce on Good Friday in 1938:

'I found him installed in his bedroom, half-reclining in a chaise longue, Stuart Gilbert seated near him at a table.  They were going over a passage that was 'still not obscure enough,' as Joyce said....His face looked very soft that day, with an almost feminine softness, a bit red under the grey hair. He joked, slid over the bed with the suppleness and agility of a dancer, asked me to serve the tea...'

'The Hours of James Joyce', Portraits of the Artist in Exile, p.214

'A FEW OF HIS INTRICATE STEPS'

In the summer of 1938,  Eugene Jolas correctly guessed the title of Finnegans Wake, winning Joyce's offered prize of 1,000 francs. Joyce turned white, but then expressed his emotions with a dance.

'One morning I knew it was Finnegans Wake, although it was only an intuition. That evening I suddenly threw all the words into the air. Joyce blanched. Slowly he set down the wineglass he held. 'Ah, Jolas, you've taken something out of me,' he said, almost sadly. When we parted that night, he embraced me, danced a few of his intricate steps, and asked: 'How would you like to have the money?''

 

Eugene Jolas, 'My Friend James Joyce',  in Givens (ed) James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism, Vanguard, 1948.

 

'PAS SEUL WITH HIGH KICKING EFFECTS'

Joyce had a tradition of dancing on his birthday, 2 February. On 28 January 1939, he wrote to Viscount Carlow:

'I am still very exhausted but I shall try to be better by Thursday though I am afraid the traditional pas seul with high kicking effects associated with that birthday feast will be beyond my power this year of grace.'

(Thanks to Patrick Hawe for sharing this quotation on Twitter)

In fact, he did manage to dance after all. Herbert Gorman, Joyce's official biographer, ends his book with an account of the 1939 party, which also celebrated the arrival of the first copy of Finnegans Wake:

'Presently Joyce himself is singing, his fine tenor clouded, perhaps, by the years, but his artistry and his obvious enjoyment making up for the inevitable inroads of time. He sings the old songs that he loves and is not allowed to rest until he has rendered 'Molly Bloom'. That accomplished to the hilarious satisfaction of all, Joyce must have another glass of wine. He evidences some restlessness and his friends know what is imminent. It is the time for dancing. 

    No one who has not seen Joyce dance can have any idea from a brief description what his terpsichorean talents are like. To enlivening music he breaks into a high fantastic dance all by himself, a dance that is full of quaint antics, high kicks, and astonishing figures. He dances with all his body, head, hands and feet and the evolutions through which he goes, eccentric but never losing the beat of the music, are calculated to arouse suspicion in the beholder that he has no bones at all. Others join in the dances and he weaves wild and original patterns with them. When the music stops he sinks contentedly into a chair. The festival has been a success. 

    It is after midnight when the moment for parting (delayed as long as possible) comes. Joyce stands by his door bidding good night to his guests, and as they depart down the stairs and into the night they glance back and see standing above them the tall lean figure of a great gentleman and a great writer.'

Herbert Gorman, James Joyce, 1941

A LAST DANCE 

Maria Jolas told Richard Ellmann about the last time she saw Joyce dance.  It was Christmas 1939, and he was a sick man, in pain from his stomach ulcer. 

'Christmas dinner began sadly enough; Joyce scarcely ate anything, only drank white wine, bending before his glass as if overwhelmed....At the evening's end he had a sudden explosion of gaiety, and began to dance on the narrow stairs to the tune of an old waltz. He approached Maria Jolas and said, 'Come on, let's dance a little.' There was so little room, and his sight was so bad, that she hesitated. 'Come on then,' he said, putting his arm around her, 'you know very well that it's the last Christmas.' After the dance he had to be quieted down to permit the guests to leave.'

Ellmann, p 729

Isn't it a shame that, with all the statues there are of Joyce, not one shows him dancing?

Joyce dancing, by the British painter, poet and publisher, Desmond Harmsworth

James Joyce, Wine Lover

'Mr Bloom ate his strips of sandwich, fresh clean bread, with relish of disgust, pungent mustard, the feety savour of green cheese. Sips of his wine soothed his palate. Not logwood that. Tastes fuller this weather with the chill off.
   Nice quiet bar. Nice piece of wood in that counter. Nicely planed. Like the way it curves there.....'

'Wine soaked and softened rolled pith of bread mustard a moment mawkish cheese. Nice wine it is. Taste it better because I'm not thirsty....
  Mild fire of wine kindled his veins. I wanted that badly....
  Glowing wine on his palate lingered swallowed. Crushing in the winepress grapes of Burgundy. Sun's heat it is.'  

Leopold Bloom's burgundy in Davy Byrne's pub must be one of the most famous glasses of wine in literature. Thanks to Ulysses, rivers of the stuff flow through Davy Byrne's, especially on Bloomsday when the Joyce pilgrims gather there.  Burgundy was also served on the Ulysses Express, a Bloomsday train ride we took in Dublin in 2014.

Doesn't reading Bloom's thoughts make you want to pour yourself a glass of burgundy? And yet Joyce didn't even like the wine! When his friend Carola Giedion-Welcker told him that she liked burgundy, he asked her, 'Do you drink beefsteak?' (Ellmann, 1982 455)

One of Joyce's great gifts as a writer was empathy – experiencing (even tasting) the world through other minds.
 

FENDANT DE SION

 

'White wine is like electricity. Red wine looks and tastes like a liquefied beefsteak.'       

James Joyce only drank white wine, and his all-time favourite was a Swiss one, called Fendant de Sion. Sion is the capital of the Swiss Canton of Valais, so Joyce refers to the wine both as Fendant de Sion and Fendant de Valais. I learn from the Alpine wines website that the name 'Fendant' comes 'from the French verb 'fendre', meaning 'to split', which is what the Chasselas grape does if squeezed. A typical Fendant wine is fresh and fruity, with a refreshing prickle, and will be quite dry, with delicate fruit and racy mineral flavours, with hints of smoke and gunflint on the nose, and a touch of bitterness on the finish.'

Ellmann describes how Joyce discovered the wine in Zurich, and gave it a nickname:

'Several evenings were spent in tasting various crus, until one night drinking with Ottocaro Weiss, who had returned from the army in January 1919, he sampled a white Swiss wine called Fendant de Sion. This seemed to be the object of his quest, and after drinking it to his satisfaction, he lifted the half emptied glass, held it against the window like a test tube, and asked Weiss, 'What does this remind you of?' Weiss looked at Joyce and at the pale golden liquid and replied, 'Orina' (urine). 'Si', said Joyce laughing, 'ma di un'archiduchessa' ('Yes, but an archduchess's). From now on the wine was known as the Archduchess'.

Ellmann, James Joyce, 1982, p455   

It was natural for Joyce to think of an archduchess in a conversation with Ottocaro Weiss. Both of them had come to Zurich from Trieste. This was part of the Austro-Hungarian Hapsburg Empire, which was teeming with archduchesses.

Three archduchesses: Immaculata (known as Mac), Elisabeth Marie (the Red Archduchess) and Margaretha

'I cannot begin to give you the flavour of the old Austrian Empire. It was a ramshackle affair but it was charming, gay, and I experienced more kindnesses in Trieste than ever before or since in my life'

Joyce to Mary Colum, quoted by Hebert Gorman, James Joyce, p143

Here's Joyce, on the left, drinking the Archduchess with the British artist Frank Budgen.

Joyce (left) and Budgen in the Pfauen, by Budgen

Budgen has another story about how the wine got its nickname:

 'The Pfauen restaurant-café...was Joyce's favourite and our general rendezvous.... The white wine at the Pfauen was excellent. I never saw Joyce drink red wine unless white was unobtainable, and then he did it with a bad grace. It is one of the few things on which he is rigidly doctrinaire. When I asked the reason for his preference he said: 
  'White wine is like electricity. Red wine looks and tastes like a liquefied beefsteak.'
A Fendant de Sion in carafe was the speciality of the house. It was supplied by Mr. Paul Wiederkehr, who was a pupil of Joyce and also the inventor of that very drinkable temperance beverage Bilzbrause, now no longer obtainable, I understand, for love or money. The colour of Fendant is a pale greenish amber, and its taste suggests an earth rich in copper ore. 
   'Er schmeckt nach Erz,' said Paul Suter. ('It tastes like ore.') 
   And Joyce, staring thoughtfully and with malice behindthought, at the yellow-tinted contents of the carafe, said slowly: 'Erzherzogin.' ('Archduchess.') And Erzherzogin it was and remained. Under this guise, or by her Italian title more affected by the Triestine Dubliner, this imaginary arciduchessa has had many a brimming cup raised and lowered in her Minnedienst.
  The waitress knew our simple wants, and supplied them without unnecessary questions and responses. First came the carafe of Archduchess, and then followed two Brissagos already aglow.'

James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses, 1934

Brissago is a brand of Swiss cigar

You can see a picture of the Pfauen restaurant on the Zurich James Joyce foundation website, where it says that  'Pfauen is now part of the Mövenpick restaurant chain. (A peacock sign is all that remains of the inn from Joyce’s time. The interior has been completely renovated).'
 

Budgen made this record in 1961

Joyce often mentioned the Archduchess in his letters to Budgen:

'Paul (Suter) was with us at the Pfauen restaurant where we did honour to the golden wine named by him who writes 'The Archiduchess' because....'

To Frank Budgen 19 June 1919, Letters p.126
 
Later that year, Joyce briefly returned to Trieste, where he complained to Budgen about missing the Archduchess:

'Not a flat to be had. Prices very high....No wine here like the archduchess....And as for Ulysses – it is like me – on the rocks.'

To Frank Budgen,  7 November 1919, Letters p.130

'There are in Mr Owen's room about 40 or 50 copies of Verbannte*. Could you...sell them (for yourself I mean) whenever anyone comes in and drinks my health in Her Most Excellent Excellency's the Archduchess's most excellent piss (Pardon! Fendant de Valais).'

To Budgen, undated (late 1919), Letters p. 131

*Verbannte was the German title of Joyce's play, Exiles.

August Suter

Luckily for Joyce, he was able to reunite with the Archduchess after he moved to Paris.  The Swiss sculptor August Suter,  brother of Paul, tracked down a Swiss estaminet on the Rue St Honoré which stocked the wine:

'Joyce loved Zurich, the Fendant wine that he drank there, and he used to say to Budgen later in Paris: 'I am dining with Suter tonight and I hope there will be Fendant!' (I was precautious enough to discover a supply of it in a Swiss restaurant in Paris.)'

August Suter, 'Some Reminiscences of James Joyce', Portraits of the Artist in Exile, p.63 

Thomas MacGreevy recalled visiting the Swiss pub in Paris with Joyce. They would buy Fendant there, which they would then take to Les Trianons, where Joyce ate almost every night in the 1920s. Yes, he used to take his own wine to Paris restaurants! He was such a big tipper that the owners didn't mind.

'The two men would go to an estaminet or small Alsace-style pub on the rue Saint-Honoré that was owned by a Swiss. This was where Joyce would buy a bottle of one of his favourite wines – the Swiss Fendant de Sion. While they waited for the wine, the two stood at the counter and Joyce ordered aperitifs - a Dubonnet for himself and a light mandarin curacao for MacGreevy....Carrying the wine the two would make their way to the Trianons restaurant to join Nora, arriving around a quarter to nine. The wine would be consumed with the meal, which would be followed by a liqueur.'

Conor Fennell, A Little Circle of Kindred Minds: Joyce in Paris, 2011, p 199 

THE ARCHDUCHESS IN FINNEGANS WAKE

In the Wake, Shaun the Post describes Shem the Penman (Joyce) drinking himself sick on Fendant de Sion. At the end, look for the urinating Archduchess, here named Fanny Urinia:

O! the lowness of him was beneath all up to that sunk to! No likedbylike firewater or firstserved firstshot or gulletburn gin or honest brewbarrett beer either. O dear no! Instead the tragic jester sobbed himself wheywhingingly sick of life on some sort of a rhubarbarous maundarin yellagreen funkleblue windigut diodying applejack squeezed from sour grapefruice and, to hear him twixt his sedimental cupslips when he had gulfed down mmmmuch too mmmmany gourds of it retching off to almost as low withswillers, who always knew notwithstanding when they had had enough and were rightly indignant at the wretch’s hospitality when they found to their horror they could not carry another drop, it came straight from the noble white fat, jo, openwide sat, jo, jo, her why hide that, jo jo jo, the winevat, of the most serene magyansty az archdiochesse, if she is a duck, she’s a douches, and when she has feherbour snot her fault, now is it? artstouchups, funny you’re grinning at, fancy you’re in her yet, Fanny Urinia. 171.12

The Wake is full of rainbows, and so the wine here has become rainbow coloured (rhubarbarous maundarin yellagreen funkleblue windigut diodying). 

if she is a duck, she’s a douches

deoch an dorais: parting drink; duchess; douche (shower)
feherbour: Fehér Bor is Hungarian for white wine.

The peeing Archduchess is easier to spot in the first draft (edited by David Hayman)

 

THE WRONG WINE?

 

Fritz Senn in Dora Garcia's film, 'The Joycean Society'

Fritz Senn and the Joyceans of Zurich have always drunk Fendant de Sion at their celebrations. In 1968, Senn introduced the wine to the New York Joyceans of the Gotham Book Mart, where he'd been invited to speak:

'During the break, Joyce's wine, the Fendant de Sion, was served, as part of the ritual. Mind you, this was mid-June in New York, and the wine had been kept at room temperature and was served in Styrofoam cups. Strange looks were exchanged at the odd taste of the author who was being celebrated.'

Christine O'Neill (ed.), Joycean Murmoirs: Fritz Senn on James Joyce p28

The question of Joyce's favourite wine led to a disagreement between Senn and Stephen Joyce, the great man's grandson and administrator of his estate. In 1985, Stephen Joyce, giving a speech at a Joyce exhibition in Barcelona, told Senn they'd been drinking the wrong wine!:

'I was...blamed for perpetrating the mistaken view that Joyce, during the First World War, had favoured the Swiss wine, Fendant de Sion.  The correct authorised wine is a Neuchâtel variant. This, of course, has always been known, since the white wines of the western part of Switzerland...are similar in taste...At any rate the Fendant de Sion has become the standard for our ritual libations.'

Joycean Murmoirs p204

Stephen Joyce repeated the claim at a press conference he held in the James Joyce Pub Zurich on his grandfather's birthday in February 2004:

'Joyce preferred to drink a Neuchâtel wine (we were wrong about the Fendant); proof is that Joyce considered it a good omen that two blood donors for his transfusion before the final operation were from Neuchâtel.'  

Joycean Murmoirs p 208

In fact, Joyce only drank the Neuchâtel in later years. Here's the Zurich art critic, Carola Giedion-Welcker,  a close friend of Joyce from 1928:

'Wine played an important part in his life. It did not burdon him but elated him....The Vallois wine, which he baptized 'Erz-Herzogin' (archduchess) because of its earthy taste (erzgeschmack), and later the Neuchâtel, which he called a 'true Midsummer Nights dream', would always effervesce through those evening gatherings.'

'Meetings with Joyce' in Portraits of the Artist in Exile, p264  
  
Did Joyce not tell her the urine story? 

CUVEE JAMES JOYCE

 
In 2004, to celebrate the hundredth Bloomsday, Provins Valais, the biggest Swiss wine producer, launched  'Cuvée James Joyce'.  Mary Dowey, wine critic of the Irish times, reviewed it:

'I haven't ploughed through Finnegans Wake to find Joyce's endorsement of Fendant de Sion, a white wine made from the Chasselas grape. I'll focus instead on the liquid in the rather flashy commemorative bottle released by Provins Valais. Fendant de Sion Cuvée James Joyce 2003 is a light, refreshing mouthful with a pleasant, lemony tang - not a bad summer buy at around 10.95.'

'The Red Baroness', Irish Times, 15 May 2004
 
Julie Hunt tells us what happened next:

'The idea was vetted and cleared by lawyers in Ireland before production started, to ensure that there was no breach of copyright. This did not prevent the highly litigious lone administrator of the Joyce estate, the author’s grandson Stephen Joyce, from trying to put the cork back in the export plan.
  After 18,000 bottles had already been sent off to the emerald isle, Joyce secured an injunction in the Swiss courts blocking further sales. Provins Valais entered a counter plea claiming damages. 
  The interim injunction was overturned at the beginning of June, leaving the author’s only surviving relative another 30 days to appeal.'

'Swiss winemakers pay tribute to Joyce'. Swissinfo.ch

Later, a Swiss court ruled against the Joyce estate.  But there's no sign of Cuvée James Joyce on the internet, sadly not even a picture of its 'flashy commemorative bottle'.

In 2020, two years after I wrote the above, Glenn Johnston (@johnstonglenn) shared this picture on Twitter.

Patrick Hawe (@PatrickHawe) replied with this. 

Thanks Glenn and Patrick!

I'll leave the last word to Frank Budgen, from the moving obituary he wrote for Joyce on hearing of his death in 1941:

'I shall go to Zurich if I am alive when this war is over, and I shall take the No.5 tram up the Zuri'berg, and I shall stand before a mound of earth, but I shall not look for Joyce there. I shall hail him across the Bahnhofstrasse as jauntily, shortsightedly, he saunters lakeward. I shall bump into him as with coat collar turned up and coat belt tight he turns a windy corner in Niederdorf. I shall hail him: 'Hullo there,' as he comes into the Pfauen café, spectacles gaily glittering and a wisp of Ulysses sticking out of his breast pocket, to take his place on the other side of a litre of Fendant.'

Frank Budgen, 'James Joyce', Horizon IV, February 1941. 

Joyce's grave in Zurich, from Dora Garcia's film,' The Joycean Society'