The Frothy Freshener: James Joyce's Guinness Slogan

'When it came to writing slogans James Joyce proved himself no slouch.
He suggested replacing ‘Guinness is Good for You’ with ‘Guinness –The Free, The Flow, the Frothy Freshener!’

That's a claim made on a wonderful advert for Guinness printed in the Irish Times on Bloomsday in 1982,  Joyce's centenary.  I was one of hundreds of Joyceans in Dublin for the celebration, and I bought a copy of the paper.

1982 was the year that Dublin, at long last, embraced James Joyce. The Irish Times Bloomsday editorial said:

'When Joyce came to publish his books, the censorious Ireland of the 1920s and 30s looked away disappprovingly, insofar as it paid any attention at all. However amends are now being made, as is right. Joyce by his writings paid great honour to the city of his birth, and the compliment should be returned.'

One of the Dublin institutions making amends was the Guinness brewery. They put on a big Joyce exhibition, 'Wine of the Country', which took a 'James's gape at Guinness and Dublin'. The exhibition was named after a nickname for stout in the Cyclops episode of Ulysses. We're in Barney Kiernan's pub, where Joe Hynes is buying a round:

-- Give it a name, citizen, says Joe. 
-- Wine of the country, says he. 
– What's yours? says Joe.
-- Ditto MacAnaspey, says I...
-- Three pints, Terry, says Joe

Here's the narrator's first taste of the lovely pint:

-- Health, Joe, says I. And all down the form.
Ah! Owl! Don't be talking! I was blue mouldy for the want of that pint. Declare to God I could hear it hit the pit of my stomach with a click.

The Guinness advert has another quotation from the same episode. Terry the barman is bringing a 'pony' (a half pint) to Little Alf Bergan.

-- Hurry up, Terry boy, says Alf. 
Terence O'Ryan heard him and straightway brought him a crystal cup full of the foaming ebon ale which the noble twin brothers Bungiveagh and Bungardilaun brew ever in their divine alevats, cunning as the sons of deathless Leda. For they garner the succulent berries of the hop and mass and sift and bruise and brew them and they mix therewith sour juices and bring the must to the sacred fire and cease not night or day from their toil, those cunning brothers, lords of the vat.

Bungiveagh and Bungardilaun are Edward Guinness, Lord Iveagh, who ran the brewery, and his older brother Arthur Guinness, Lord Ardilaun.
 
The exhibition, which I visited on Bloomsday, recreated a Dublin pub bar of Joyce's day (using bits of counters rescued from defunct pubs, like Barney Kiernan's) and an iron fireplace where the canvassers in 'Ivy Day in the Committee Room' set their bottles of stout, waiting for them to open with a 'Pok!' (Has anyone ever managed that trick?). There was also a fine performance of Joyce readings by the Dublin actor Dermot Lynskey.

Dermot Lynskey at the exhibition, from his website

 

JOYCE'S GUINNESS SLOGAN 

In 2011, Catherine Gubernatis Dannen investigated the background to Joyce's Guinness slogan in the brewery's archives. Here's her conclusion:

'After examining materials in the Guinness archive and talking with the archivist, I have concluded that there is no basis for Guinness's claim that Joyce wrote his own advertising slogan about Guinness stout....In a year of stagnant sales and bad public relations, Guinness took advantage of the publicity generated by Joyce's centenary to advertise its product to foreign customers and to repair its relationship with the public.'
 
Catherine Gubernatis Danne, 'The Facts and Fiction Behind "the Free, the Flow, the Frothy Freshener": The Guinness Company and the Story of Joyce's Lost Ad', JJQ, Vol. 48, No. 4, Joyce's Lives (Summer 2011), pp. 712

In fact, the proof that Joyce wrote this slogan is in Finnegans Wake. The 'frothy freshener' appears in the 'Haveth Childers Everwhere' episode, published as a book by Babou and Kahane in 1930 - just a year after the first 'Guinness is Good For You' ad came out.

In this speech of self-justification, HCE lists his great achievements as a city builder, all done out of love for his river-wife Anna Livia Plurabelle. One achievement is brewing Dublin stout:

'I brewed for my alpine plurabelle, wigwarming wench, (speakeasy!) my granvilled brandold Dublin lindub, the free, the froh, the frothy freshener, puss, puss, pussyfoot, to split the spleen of her maw'  553.25

Joyce wrote 'froh', which is German for merry, rather than the 'flow' in the Guinness version. HCE says 'free, froh...frothy' because he has a guilty stammer.

Dublin is paired with lindub because the Irish for stout is 'leann dubh' meaning 'black ale' (spelled 'lionn dubh' in the 1920s). Here's the entry from Dineen's 1927 dictionary (thanks to Eric Rosenbloom):

LIONN [Lin]
{genitive} LEANNA, {plural} {idem} -NTA, LEANNTAÍ and LEANNANNA {masculine} and {feminine}, liquid, liquor, any lisueous substance;
drink, ale, strong beer, wine (Wind,);
a humour of the body, lymph, phlegm, bile, choler; LIONN DUBH, porter, stout, {also, alias} black humour, melancholy (LIONNDUBH, {genitive} -UIBH, {plural} {idem}, and LEANNTA DUBHA)

The name Dublin itself comes from dubh linn 'black pool'. This was where the Poddle stream met the River Liffey to form a pool. So Dublin and Guinness Porter are related linguistically as well as geographically! 

Joyce liked his slogan so much he repeated it:

'his groundould diablen lionndub, the flay the flegm, the floedy fleshener (purse, purse, pursyfurse, I'll splish the splume of them all!)' 72.34

When Joyce was getting 'Haveth Childers Everywhere' ready for publication, he was helped by his old University College friend Padraic Colum, who remembers the time in Our Friend James Joyce:

 'What did my contribution to this production amount to? I typed pages. From time to time I was asked to suggest a word that would be more obscure than the word already there. Joyce would consider my offer, his eyes, their pupils enlarged behind glasses, expectant, his face intent, his figure upstanding. ' I can't use it,' was what he would say five times out of six...' 

Mary and Padraic Colum, Our Friend James Joyce, 1958 p.158

Joyce thanked Colum by putting him in the episode:

   — The S. S. Paudraic's in the harbour.  (550.07)

Colum's book was probably the source for the 1982 Guinnesss ad slogan story:

'He actually believed that, on one level anyway, his later work had a public appeal. ''My brandold Dublin lindub, the free, the froh, the frothy freshener' - that really is a good slogan for the Dublin brew, Guinness', and Joyce was actually disappointed that Guinness did not use it instead of the commonplace 'Guinness is good for you.' But maybe they will appropriate it some time – 'the free, the froh, the frothy freshener.'  'Lindub', Dublin scrambled, is the Irish for black ale.' 

Mary and Padraic Colum, Our Friend James Joyce, 1958, p.156

'Maybe they will appropriate it sometime' 

They did, Padraic, they did!
  
Joyce's disappointment that Guinness didn't use his slogan can only mean that he suggested it to them, or that he expected them to discover it for themselves when Haveth Childers Everywhere was published. Either way, Guinness didn't invent the story as a publicity stunt.
  

JOYCE AND ADVERTISING

It's easy to see why Joyce would have wanted to write an advert for Guinness. He was always fascinated by advertising, and he saw how it was shaping modern life. Joyce made his hero Leopold Bloom an advertising canvasser, a man who contemplates 'the infinite possibilities hitherto unexploited of the modern art of advertisement' with its 'magnetising efficacy to arrest involuntary attention, to interest, to convince, to decide.' (Ithaca)

Here's the most famous ad in Ulysses, from a recreation of the Evening Telegraph published by Split Pea Press in 1990. The slogan was invented by Joyce.

While writing the Wake, Joyce read the Irish and British papers daily, taking notes for his book. He was often more interested in the ads than the news stories. The very first notebook for the Wake includes newspaper ads for Bird’s Egg Substitute cake-meal (‘a tin with a purpose’), for Hustler soap and for the Colgate Shaving Stick (See Robbert-Jan Henkes great article on the Wake's origins here).

So Joyce would have been interested when Guinness launched their first ever advertising campaign in 1929, with the slogan 'Guinness is Good for You'. He might even have taken it as a challenge.

Soon after, John Gilroy's colour posters appeared.

 

This Guinness slogan makes three appearances in Finnegans Wake:

'Ghinees hies good fir yew.' 16.31 
('for you' in the published text is a misprint)
'Guinness’s, may I remind, were just agulp for you' 190.07
'We have highest gratifications in announcing to pewtewr publikumst of pratician pratyusers, genghis is ghoon for you.'  593.17

In 1936, John Gilroy launched a new campaign, inspired by watching a sea lion performing balancing tricks at a circus. The new slogan, created by Dorothy L Sayers, was 'My goodness, MY GUINNESS'

Joyce put that into the Wake too.

'O my goodmiss! O my greatmess!' 237.07
'another guidness, my good, to see' 345.22

 

 

WHEN GUINNESS WAS FROTHY

Here's a perfect pint of Guinness, from John Kavanagh's ('the Gravediggers') by Glasnevin cemetery. It has a creamy rather than a frothy head.

This thick creamy head was created in 1959, when Guinness brewer Michael Ash had the revolutionary idea of adding nitrogen to the draught beer. Nitrogen's tiny bubbles create a head so dense that bartenders can now draw a shamrock on top. After 1959, Guinness ads described the keg version as 'creamy'.

When Joyce wrote his slogan, Guinness had to be poured from two barrels, a method still used in the 1970s to pour plain porter, a weaker version of the stout (celebrated by Flann O'Brien's 'a pint of plain is your only man'). Here's a film showing the last pints of plain poured in Befast, in 1973. These have frothier heads, with bigger bubbles, than modern pints.

This froth could also be called foam, as in 'a crystal cup full of the foaming ebon ale' quoted above. Twice in the Wake, Joyce calls Dublin beer  'foamous'.

'Danu U’Dunnell’s foamous olde Dobbelin ayle.' 7.12
'Ser Artur Ghinis. Foamous homely brew, bebattled by bottle, gageure de guegerre.' 272.26

I learn from the James Joyce Digital Archive of Wake drafts that Joyce originally wrote 'the foamy freshener' before choosing the livelier 'frothy'. Maybe he should have thought of 'the foamous freshener'?

Anyway, Joyce was right to call Guinness 'frothy', and as for 'freshener', here's a 1937 Guinness poster.

Did someone remember Joyce's suggestion?

I think that Joyce's 'frothy freshener' was a very effective slogan. Since I started looking into this subject a couple of weeks ago, I've drunk nothing but Guinness; and every time I've ordered a pint, I've remembered the words 'the free, the froh, the frothy freshener'.

Slainte!

A pint in Davy Byrne's 13 June 2015

Sentenced to read Finnegans Wake forever!

'The best way to approach Finnegans Wake is in a group.  It has to be stalked like a wild animal, and you need a hunting party.' Robert Anton Wilson

'What a terrible book this is!'
'We're all going to go to hell as a result of reading this!'
'We'll all meet there.'
'We'll meet again.'
'Some of us would say: we may go to hell but I want to get to the end of this.'
'That might be the sentence! Sentenced to read Finnegans Wake forever.'

This comes from Dora Garcia's lovely film, 'The Joycean Society,' which she posted on Vimeo (though sadly it's no longer available there). It's a documentary about the Zurich Finnegans Wake reading group, founded and led by Fritz Senn (above). Ever since 1986, the members have been meeting once a week to read and discuss the Wake. They reached the end after eleven years but, because Finnegans Wake is circular, they had to go straight back to the beginning. They were 'sentenced' by the unfinished final sentence of the Wake. Like me, they're now on their third lap!

None of the people in the film is identified until the list of names in the closing credits, but I recognized Fritz Senn who, with Clive Hart, started the Wake Newslitter in March 1962. The very first 'Litter' begins with the words, 'Finnegans Wake needs to be read communally.'

The readers are mostly male, and in their 70s, and the film is partly about growing old together and with a book.  In an interview, Garcia said that she 'filmed the readers of the Zurich James Joyce Foundation as incarnating one of the most notorious episodes in Finnegans Wake: Mamalujo—the four old men endlessly discussing the text. When they stop reading the text, the world will collapse.'

She's probably thinking of two different episodes here - the Mamalujo episode is a treatment of collective senility, but doesn't have any discussion of a text. That happens in the Hen chapter, whose Professorial narrator says:

'Look at this prepronominal funferal, engraved and retouched and edgewiped and puddenpadded, very like a whale’s egg farced with pemmican, as were it sentenced to be nuzzled over a full trillion times for ever and a night till his noddle sink or swim by that ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia.' 120.09-17

The Joycean Society members are the closest thing to Joyce's ideal readers 'suffering from an ideal insomnia'. They've accepted his outrageous challenge, expressed to Max Eastman: 'The demand I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works.'

As Dora Garcia says in her interview, it takes a particular type of reader to accept this demand.

'The Joycean Society is only tangentially a film about Finnegans Wake; its central subject is the people who read Finnegans Wake, the readers. Such a book engenders a very particular type of reader. I have never known of any other book that creates such a specific, distinct, dedicated population—an irreverent community, a brotherhood without any hierarchies. The society created by the Wake is one of the most fascinating aspects of the text. Many idées reçues about language, literature and reading explode into pieces with readers of the Wake: there are no authorities, just people who devote a lot of time to the text; it is not really written in English, therefore English native speakers are in no better position to read it.'

We see them working their way, word by word, through  part of the great 'Anna Livia Plurabelle' chapter. They're reading pages 211-12, which is a list of presents given by Anna Livia to all her children. The camera takes us right into the group, with faces, hands and pages shown in close-up.

I wondered why they don't use the internet.  I thought, why aren't they googling or consulting fweet?

Then it struck me that they are sitting in a James Joyce library, with an amazing collection of materials at their fingertips.  

The group discussion is intercut with an interview with a professional academic Joycean (right). You might assume he's a member of the reading group. In fact, he's Geert Lernout, the Belgian genetic wakean, who's based in Antwerp. Lernout talks about the extraordinary way in which Joyce composed the book, 'harvesting' phrases from other sources.  He shows us examples from the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on Dublin, used by Joyce in his Haveth Childers Everywhere section, where HCE as the City of Dublin, speaks.

Lernout points out that Joyce's notes (left) are not in his handwriting. This is because, at the time (March 1930), he was too blind to read or take notes. He had to listen to an assistant read the article. Joyce would then seize on a phrase, which another assistant wrote down. Joyce's helpers at the time were Stuart Gilbert, Helen Fleischman, Padraic Colum and Paul Léon. In his Paris Journal, Gilbert recalls working with Joyce with five volumes of the Britannica spread out on the sofa.

This reminds me of Richard Brown's description of Finnegans Wake as 'a theatricalised parody of the eleventh Britannica, which was often his first point of reference in composing the Wake.' James Joyce: A Post Cultural Perspective p 113.

Lernout's genetic approach is very different from that of the Zurich readers, who focus on interpretation. What both share is a sense of Finnegans Wake as a sacred text, and a slightly baffled awareness that they have become addicted to it. Lernout says, 'Joyce programmed it in such a way a that he invites you to that kind of religious fervour, where you turn it into a holy book....I'm not describing it as dangerous...Of all possible pathologies, it is one of the most benign ones.'

The Zurich Joyce group also look like they're reading a sacred text. They remind me of Talmudic scholars and, at the end of their session, they even sit in silence, as if in prayer.

While they  sit in silence, we hear church bells in the distance, a reminder of the passing of time. I thought of the Zurich spring festival of Sechseläuten, whose bells ring several times in the Wake: 'Pingpong! There's the Belle for Sexaloitez.' 213.18.  It was Fritz Senn who identified this in 1960, in his first ever article on the Wake ('Some Zürich Allusions in Finnegans Wake', The Analyst, Vol. II, 1960-1965, XIX (Dec. 1960). Were the bells really ringing or did Garcia add them?

Fritz Senn is also interviewed (left) and, like Lernout, he describes reading Finnegans Wake as 'a more harmless kind of addiction than drugs or alcohol.'

Senn talks about the value of the group reading as a form of therapy:

'I am not saying this just ironically, it is also a therapy group, it does something… and I think it can be more helpful than some therapy you have to pay for….Maybe reading Finnegans Wake is a substitute for people who usually are not very successful in life, like me. At least you can interact with a text. If we were happier we would be bankers or have an emotionally full life. I think, and I am here along almost Freudian lines, that culture is a sort of substitute for pleasures that are denied to some of us for many reasons.'

Fritz Senn also discusses the reading group in his 2007 book Joycean Murmoirs (ed Christine O'Neill), where he reveals how trying it often is for him to be in charge of it.

'To be in charge of a bunch of keen-witted, enthusiastic Wake readers, whose offerings are not always strictly relevant, is not without its strain on human forbearance....I vacillate from chagrined intolerance to a resigned awareness that the multivocal muddle of Wake glosses is, after all, caused by the nature of what we are trying to understand. A group reading taxes the brains of each exponent: at every moment one has a baffling text in front of one's eyes that leads to dispersed associations, one deliberates what one might contribute, and simultaneously someone (at least some one!) is always speaking. It is no wonder that the outcome is acoustic and intellectual chaos.'

Declan Kiberd has a fascinating interview with Fritz Senn on his podcast, which you can listen to here.

At one point, the film takes us outside the book-lined room to the snow-covered Zurich cemetery, where Joyce lies buried beneath a bronze statue by Milton Hebald. There are resonances here of the end of 'The Dead', with snow falling 'upon every part of the lonely churchyard where Michael Furey lay buried.'

While the camera moves around the snowy scene, we listen to the group talking about an article in the TLS, which claims that the way to tell someone is really dead is to blow tobacco smoke up their anus.

Joyce's statue fixes the camera with an inscrutable gaze.

The Joycean Society is regularly shown in galleries and at film festivals. For more information see this page from Auguste Orts.