At Trinity Church I Met My Doom

Here's a glimpse of the lost world of Victorian Music Hall. Tom Costello, in 1934, performs 'At Trinity Church I Met My Doom', a song he made famous in 1894. 

Joyce gives us his own version of this on p 102 of Finnegans Wake.  

Sold him her lease of ninenineninetee,
Tresses undresses so dyedyedaintee,
Goo, the groot gudgeon, gulped it all.
Hoo was the C. O. D.?
Bum!

At Island Bridge she met her tide.
Attabom, attabom, attabombomboom!
The Fin had a flux and his Ebba a ride.
Attabom, attabom, attabombomboom!
We’re all up to the years in hues and cribies.
That’s what she’s done for wee!
Woe!

it's only when you hear the music that you can understand the line 'Attabom, attabom, attabombomboom!' It's the orchestra's sinister accompaniment to the line 'At Trinity church I met my doom'. Listen to it at 1.13 above. 'Bum!' is another note in the song.

The song was written by Fred Gilbert, better known for 'The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo', which makes four appearances in the Wake.  Constantine Curran remembered Joyce singing the Monte Carlo song on Sunday evenings in 1903-4 at the Sheehys.

'His acquaintance with the Dublin music-hall and with the repertoire of the entertainers who ran one-man shows was prodigious. I find in letters passing between us in 1937 that his interest in Ashcroft, Wheatley, Val Vousden the elder, Percy French, and their peers was still unquenched, and that I could ransack the music shops for them and the libretti of old Dublin pantomimes without satiating it. This appetite was independent of their special value to him as raw material. His father had a quite exceptional familiarity with all this vernacular undergrowth of song...'

Costantine Curran, James Joyce Remembered, 1968, p42  

Joyce might have seen Costello perform his song at Dublin's main music hall, Dan Lowrey's Empire Theatre of Varieties in Sycamore Street. It's now the beautiful Olympia Theatre.

'They passed Dan Lowry's musichall where Marie Kendall, charming soubrette, smiled on them from a poster a dauby smile. 

Going down the path of Sycamore street beside the Empire musichall Lenehan showed M'Coy how the whole thing was.' 

'Wandering Rocks'

Tom Costello had an outlandish stage costume, seeming to comprise one enormous right buttock, though in the film he says 'No wonder I've got the hump'. You can see it in this print from the V&A.

Copyright of the V&A

Looking at him you feel tempted to respond on behalf of his wife: 'You're not much of a catch yourself!'

Copyright of the V&A

I found another version of the song in the libretto of the 1894 pantomime of Cinderella at the Theatre Royal Brighton.  Here it's been turned into a duet between Baron and Baroness Hardup. I love the description of the ugly sisters at the end.

In the Wake, the song marks a shift of subject in the middle of Book One. The opening chapters deal with the fall and disgrace of HCE. On p102, Joyce brings on his wife and defender, Anna Livia Plurabelle, who is also the River Liffey. Hers is the second part of Book One.

Just before the song, we say goodbye to HCE, who is now entombed:

'let him rest, thou wayfarre, and take no gravespoil from him! Neither mar his mound!...But there’s a little lady waiting and her name is A.L.P. And you’ll agree. She must be she. For her holden heirheaps hanging down her back....Then who but Crippled-with-Children would speak up for Dropping-with-Sweat?' 102.20
 
This is followed by the song, which introduces Anna Livia.

SOLD HIM HER LEASE OF NINININENITEE

Sold him her lease of ninenineninetee,
Tresses undresses so dyedyedaintee,
Goo, the groot gudgeon, gulped it all.
Hoo was the C. O. D.?
Bum!

She sold him her lease of 9-9-90 - 999 years?  There's also HCE's guilty stammer in 'ninenineninetee' and 'dyedyedainty'.

Her hair, let down, dyed and dainty.  This is Anna Livia's famous 'saffron strumans of hair...that was deepdark and ample like this red bog at sundown.' 203.24. 

'First she let her hair fal and down it flussed to her feet its teviots winding coils.' 206.29

Anna's hair was modelled on that of Livia Schmidt (Svevo), which you can see a photograph of in the Museo Sveviano in Trieste.

Livia Svevo, courtesy of Museo Sveviano, Trieste

Joyce told an Italian journalist that Livia Svevo had given both her name and her hair to the heroine of his book: 

'They say I have immortalized Svevo, but I've also immortalized the tresses of Signora Svevo. These were long and reddish-blond. My sister who used to see them let down told me about them. The river at Dublin passes dye-houses and so has reddish water. So I have playfully compared these two things in the book I'm writing. A lady in it will have the tresses which are really Signora Svevo's.'

This is quoted by Ellmann, who gives the source as 'a clipping in Signora Livia Svevo's papers'.  So the Dublin dye houses are there in 'dyedyedaintee'.  

Has anyone else found a reference to these dye works staining the Liffey red?

Goo, the groot gudgeon, gulped it all.

Hoo was the C.O.D.

That's Joyce's version of this bit of the song:

I like a lamb believed it all 

I was an M - U - G

'Goo' is Anglo-Irish slang for a fool. Gudgeon are fish easy to catch, and so in slang a gudgeon is someone easily duped. C.O.D. is cash on delivery, but cod is also a fish and slang for playing a trick on someone.  HCE is a male fish swimming up the female river, gulping its water/hair and also a great fool easily duped.

In the original song, the lyric goes 'Like to salmon I was speared'.

This allows me to share one of my favourite quotes about the Wake, from Robert H Boyle:

'Fish and fishing, fly-fishing in particular, constitute the major theme in the ''Wake,'' as Joyceans call it. The evidence that I have discovered is so overwhelming that the ''Wake'' must be considered as belonging in great part, albeit a bizarre part, to angling literature.' 'You Spigotty Anglease?' The New York Times

Island Bridge was orginally Sarah's Bridge, after the Countess of Westmoreland

At Island Bridge she met her tide.

Island Bridge is the point where the Liffey becomes tidal. In her final monologue, as she flows out of Dublin, Anna Livia meets the sea at Island Brdge:

'Sea, sea! Here, weir, reach, island, bridge.' 626.07
 
Attabom, attabom, attabombomboom!
The Fin had a flux and his Ebba a ride.
Attabom, attabom, attabombomboom!

The Fin and his Ebba are HCE (Finn MacCool and a fish) and ALP, and there's the ebb and flow of the river. Maybe also suggestions of HCE having diarrhoea (flux) and ALP having sex (a ride).

Apart from matching the rhythm of the song, Joyce here is paying tribute to Ebba Atterbom, who translated A Portrait into Swedish in 1921.  Her Swedish wikipedia article quotes Joyce's song.

Ebba Atterbom, from wikipedia.

According to Bodils' blog, Joyce and Atterbom exchanged several letters, in which he pretended to misunderstand her first name and called her Edda, after the old Norse poems.

We’re all up to the years in hues and cribies.
That’s what she’s done for wee!
Woe!

We're up to our ears/ the years in hue and cries - the mob chasing HCE – and cry babies in cribs - ALP's 111 children.

The internal bulletin of the Royal Irish Constabulary

I'd love to read any other interpretations of this song.

The chapter over, we turn the page and find the Anna Livia section beginning with this lovely invocation:

'In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!'  104.01

 

We get the song again elsewhere in the Wake.

'At Baggotty's Bend He Bumped His Bride.' 71.12 ('His Bride' is missing in the published text)

 

'A Trinity judge will crux your boom. Pat is the man for thy.' 326.04

 

'at Kennedy's kiln she kned her dough, back of her bake for me, buns!' 498.19

 

'in trinity huts they met my dame, pick of their poke for me' 548.12

'On limpidy marge I've made me hoom. Park and a pub for me.'  624.15  

The sentence it took Joyce twelve years to write

'The Suspended Sentence' 106.13

On 8 November 1926, Joyce wrote to Harriet Shaw Weaver.

'The book really has no beginning or end. (Trade secret, registered at Stationers Hall.) It ends in the middle of a sentence and begins in the middle of the same sentence.'  Letters 1, 246

'Many indications aside from the fact that the book begins in the middle of a sentence point out that its design is circular, without the beginning, middle and ending prescribed for chronological narratives.'

Elliot Paul, 'Mr Joyce's Treatment of Plot', transition 9, December 1927 

Although Joyce came up with this idea in 1926, when he wrote the book's opening, it wasn't until twelve years later that he completed the sentence with the ending.

Here's the end, which is the beginning of the sentence. It's spoken by Anna Livia Plurabelle, the River Liffey dying as she merges with the sea: 'A way a lone a last a loved a long the...'  With the repeated 'a' and 'l' we expect a 'p' to follow, to complete the initials of Anna Livia Plurabelle. And there it is, at the bottom of the page! 

I learned from Dirk Van Hulle's article, 'The Lost Word' (in How Joyce wrote Finnegans Wake p455) that Joyce originally wrote 'A way a lone a lost a last a loved a long the', but, when the book was published, the words 'a lost' got lost!

Joyce wrote this in the winter of 1938, and it was his own farewell to writing. 

In 1942, Joyce's assistant, Paul Leon, recalled the day that Joyce wrote the book's ending:

'Among the innumerable critical reviews that I have gone through, I recall no mention of a point which, it seems to me, should strike us immediately: and that is the fact that the amazing postscript which concludes the work ends on an unfinished sentence, with the article 'the'; and the noun that follows this article is the first word of the book, that is to say 'riverrun'....This postscript had probably been carried in its completed form for many years in the prodigious brain that engendered it. The first version, which was only about two a half pages long, was written in one afternoon, in December 1938. It was a veritable deliverance. Joyce brought it with him when we met that evening for his usual half-past eight rendez-vous in Madame Lapeyre's pleasant bistrot, on the corner of the Rue de Grenelle and the Rue de Bourgogne...'

'In Memory of Joyce', Poésie No V (1942), reprinted in James Joyce Volume 2: The Critical Heritage, (ed Robert Deming)

In fact, one critic, Harry Levin, did notice that the book was circular, in his 1939 review.

Madame Lepeyre's bistro is now the Cafe Resto au Coin de La Rue

We know what Joyce read to Léon thanks to Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon's magnificent James Joyce Digital Archive, which gives all the drafts - read the first one here. The first version of the final sentence began as this:

'A bit beside the bush and then a walk along the'

On the third typescript, Joyce crossed out 'A bit beside the bush...' (moving it back to become 'We pass through grass behush the bush.') and replaced it with 'A way a lone a lost a last a loved a long the'. 

The last words were prefigured in Joyce's great short story 'The Dead':

'How pleasant it would be to walk out alone, first along by the river and then through the park!'  

Joyce talked about his final 'the' with Louis Gillet:

'In Ulysses, to depict the babbling of a woman going to sleep, I had sought to end with the least forceful word I could possibly find. I had found the word 'yes', which is barely pronounced, which denotes acquiescence, self-abandon, relaxation, the end of all resistance. In Work in Progress, I've tried to do better if I could.  This time, I have found the word which is most slippery, the least accented, the weakest word in English, a word which is not even a word, which is scarcely sounded between the teeth, a breath, a nothing, the article the.'

Louis Gillet, Stèle pour James Joyce, Marseille 1941, pp.164-65, quoted in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce 

John Bishop has suggested that the final word indicates the 'imminent appearance of the definite – the definite 'article 'the' –the solid and defined word of conscious waking reality.' (Introduction to the 1999 Penguin). That's a brilliant idea, but it seems to me to be contradicted by Joyce's own reading of 'the' as 'the word which is most slippery'.

Jim Le Blanc has written a whole essay on that final 'the', which he describes as 'a finger pointing at nothing...Our attention is misdirected away from the finger itself... However, we are also led to regard the 'the' itself, as a cat, say, or an infant might stare at an extended index finger without seeking anything further in the space beyond its semiotically suggestive tip.'  

'The Closing Word of Finnegans Wake' Hypermedia Joyce Studies

Edmund Lloyd Epstein has a nice reading of the end.

'The last phrase in the Wake is the most perfect iambic pentameter line ever penned....The whole phrase may mean: 'Away, alone at last – and loved! – along the river ran'. Like Coleridge's Alph the sacred river. ALP runs 'through caverns measureless to man', through the pathways of death and resurrection, back to Howth Castle and Environs, at the beginning of the book.  
  Then with the phrase, 'a loved', the tide turns, the river begins to flow backward. TIME stops and SPACE commences, as the great act of love begins again.' 
                                                                                        A Guide through Finnegans Wake

I'm not sure what some of that means. Why does the tide turn specifically at 'a loved'? How does TIME stop and SPACE start? But I think he's captured the feeling of the end.

THE OPENING

This sentence is completed by the book's opening, which Joyce came up with in late 1926 (though some of the phrases were added ten years later):

So we begin, with the river bringing us back to HCE, the male protagonist of the book who is also the city of Dublin. We've also switched from ALP's voice to a guidebook narrator, who uses formal words like 'commodious' and 'environs'.



'riverrun' is a great and suggestive opening word. Here's what Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson had to say about it:

''Riverrun' is more than a clue to the circling plan of Finnegans Wake; it characterizes the essence of the book itself. For, in this work, both space and time are fluid; meanings, characters, and vocabulary deliquesce in constant fluxion.'   

The Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake.

People have also read into the word the Italian 'riverranno': (they will come again); the French 'rêverons' (we will dream) and 'reverrons': (we will see again, we will meet again); and the German 'erinnerung' (remembrance). It's also an echo of Coleridge's 'Where Alph, the sacred river, ran' and 'Reverend' (615.12), the opening of Anna Livia's letter which is delivered at the very end of the book. 

In his Latin translation of the Wake, Adam Roberts came up with the imperative 'flumenflue', ('river flow'): 'In this opening line Joyce is ordering his river to flow (ordering in more than one sense).'  The title Finnegans Wake can similarly be read as a command. 

The river flows past our first parents, Adam and Eve, which is also a real church on the south bank of the Liffey. The church is dedicated to the Immaculate Conception - 'Adam and Eve's' is the popular name, because it was built on the site of the Adam and Eve Tavern, where the Franciscans secretly said mass in penal days. So it can also stand as the tavern, a central location in Finnegans Wake.

Joyce has reversed the names, making 'Eve and Adam's', perhaps because we are going backwards - we are brought back from the sea at the end to the river in Dublin, and we are moving from Anna Livia to HCE.

  
'a commodious vicus of recirculation' suggests 'vicious circle', the cyclical theory of history of Giambattista Vico, and Dublin's Vico Road which runs beside the sea on the south side of Dublin bay.

'The Vico road goes round and round to meet where terms begin.' 452.21 

Joyce's old headmaster, Father John Conmee, uses the words 'commodious' to describe roads in his Old Times in the Barony (remembered in Ulysses):
 

 

'The Book of Doublends Jined' 20.13

 

That's a description of Finnegans Wake as the book of double ends joined, and Dublin's giant - the fallen Finn McCool who crashes to the ground to become the city of Dublin, with his head at Howth (which means 'head') and his feet in the Phoenix Park.

This idea, and the whole opening chapter, was inspired by a pamphlet about a 'giants' grave' at Saint Andrew's Church, Penrith, sent to Joyce in 1926 by Harriet Shaw Weaver. Joyce had suggested to her that she 'might 'order' a piece' for his book. She wrote:

'Here followeth my 'order'...Kindly supply the undersigned with one full length grave account of his esteemed Rhaggrick O'Hoggnor's Hogg Tomb as per photos enclosed...there is a short monograph inside the church which says that the grave was reputed to be that of a hero king (of Scotland, or Northumbria) whose name I misremember, but it began with O...Such is my order for this book.'

Letter to Joyce , 1 October 1926

The monograph, by the Reverend James Cropper,  was called A Short Historical Sketch of S Andrew's Church, Penrith.

Danis Rose describes Joyce's excited reaction to the order:

'Joyce was electrified: here exactly was what he needed to give spin to his work in progress: the notion of HCE as a (sleeping) giant interred in the landscape and, beyond that, of a man assumed dead but sleeping. Even better, he now had the notion of resurrection of the old by the new and cyclicity (Fin, again)....Everything hung together on the fulcrum of one word: Finn. And with MacCool came the ballad-hall Tim Finnegan with his hod (who now makes his appearance for the first time) and with him, his half-erected wall (by extension the unfinished tower of Babel). With his fall off the wall came the first Fall, Adam and Eve and all their descendants down to Mr and Mrs Porter shagged out in their bed.  In a word, Miss Weaver's fortuitously brilliant idea gave Joyce the notion for a chapter, or prelude, that was destined to become the common picture of Finnegans Wake: a giant dreaming of falls and walls, a babble of tongues, a tale of howes and graves and burrows and biers.'   

Danis Rose, The Textual Diaries of James Joyce, p.95

We can follow the development of the opening thanks to the fact that Joyce sent all his manuscripts to Harriet Shaw Weaver, who gave them to the British Library.  They've been published as The James Joyce Archive, by Garland Publishing, and as online transcriptions by Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon in the James Joyce Digital Archive.

Here's Joyce's first pencil sketch of the opening, from October 1926.

At this stage, the opening is just 'Howth Castle and Environs!' and there's no indication that it's part of a bigger sentence. The exclamation mark reminds me of the opening of the Aeolus episode of Ulysses, where Dublin tram destinations are shouted out.

The hoarse Dublin United Tramways Company timekeeper bawled them off:
–Rathgar and Terenure!
–Come on, Sandymount Green!

Joyce then wrote a second pencil draft, in November, getting rid of the exclamation mark and adding 'brings us back to'. So, at this stage, he'd probably decided to end the book with the River Liffey.

On the page to the left of this in his notebook, Joyce drew a huge E, his symbol for HCE, lying on its back.

Joyce wrote to Harriet Shaw Weaver that 'the sign in this form means HCE interred in the landscape' (Letters 1,254). It looks just like the 'giant's grave' in Penrith!

  
The sign also resembles the Chinese letter word 'shan' which stands for 'mountain' . HCE is a mountain as well as a city (Joyce told Eugene Jolas, 'Time and the river and the mountain are the real heroes of my book'; HCE is 'a man that means a mountain' 309.04).  Joyce used this sign (which appears at 6.32) as his title for the chapter.

He shows it the other way up at 119.17, where he describes it as 'the meant to be baffling trilithon sign m' (a trilithon is a megalithic structure with three stones).  

In December, Joyce sent Harriet Shaw Weaver his version of the opening, with an explanatory key, which you can read here. He signed and dated it.

Joyce drew a little map of Dublin to explain his idea. It shows Dublin stretched out on the left and the Liffey on the right.

Here's yet another late 1926 fair copy where, for the first time, we get the word 'river', corrected to 'riverrun'.

When the opening was published in transition, in April 1927, it looked like this. 

Note how deeply indented the word 'riverrun' is on the line. It's almost in the middle of the page, giving a clear sense that we are in the middle of a sentence. It's a shame that this indentation was lost when the book was published. The ampersand of 'Howth Castle & Environs' was also changed to 'and', weakening the HCE initials.

The additions of 'by a commodious vicus of recirculation' and 'past Eve and Adam's', shown above, were made in 1936, for the printers of Finnegans Wake. Note Joyce's spelling of 'commodious', mistakenly changed to 'commodius' by the printer. With the loss of 'lost' and the ampersand, that means that there are three misprints in this sentence it took twelve years to write.

The very last part of the sentence 'from swerve of shore to bend of bay', was added, in Paul Leon's handwriting, to the page proofs on 20 November 1938.

A still from the 1982 RTE documentary The World of James Joyce.