'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.

 
 
   

At the Gaiety

On Sunday, our last day at Dublin Theatre Festival,  Lisa and I went to the Gaiety Theatre to see the matinee of Waiting for Godot. The Gaiety is one of the most beautiful theatres in the world, with a stunning interior by Frank Matcham. It was also James Joyce's favourite theatre, and it appears in almost all his books. Just as the Mullingar House is the principal pub in Finnegans Wake, the Gaiety is the book's main theatre.

We've been to the Gaiety once before, in 1987, to see Niall Toibin in Borstal Boy. Toibin, who has spent most of his life impersonating Brendan Behan, did a brilliant job, catching the North Dublin accent and the suggestion of a stammer. Have a listen to Toibin reading the end of Borstal Boy, from his album, 'Being Behan'. Back in 1987, we were annoyed by the audience, who burst into applause every time Toibin swore.

The Gaiety is a major Dublin institution, and the palm prints of the performers who've played there are cast in bronze on the street outside. Here's Milo O'Shea, who played Leopold Bloom in the film of Ulysses.

Here's the great Ronnie Drew of the Dubliners.

The Godot production was by Gare St Lazare, who specialise in Beckett. They usually stage one-man shows by the brilliant Conor Lovett, who speaks Beckett's prose in the most natural way. We went to a post-show talk by him in Brighton in May when he said that, if he could write, he would write just like Beckett.

Lovett's Vladimir formed a great comic double-act with Gary Lydon's Estragon. By the way,

A Gaiety pint to suspend my disbelief

Lydon is the spitting image of Brendan Behan! I also loved Gavan O'Herlihy's American accented Pozzo and Tadgh Murphy's astonishing Lucky, whose long speech got the Gaiety audience applauding again. But this is no place to be reviewing Samuel Beckett, except to say that his career was a reaction against James Joyce. He told his biographer, James Knowlson:

'I realized that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, [being] in control of one’s material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realized that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding.'

In the theatre programme, the director, Judy Hegarty Lovett quoted the physicist Richard P. Feynman, to describe her feelings about the play:

'I can live with doubts and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it's more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong...I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is so far as I can tell. It doesn't frighten me.'

That strikes me as even more applicable to Finnegans Wake. When you read Joyce's book, you are certainly 'lost in a mysterious universe'.

The Gaiety was built in 1871 by the Gunn brothers, Michael and John. There's a bust of John Gunn on the stairs, but it's Michael who appears repeatedly in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. He was a friend of Joyce's father, John Stanislaus, who often took his family to the Gaiety. In the Wake, Gunn is another identity for the hero, HCE, appearing as 'Mr Makeall Gone' (220.24) and 'Daddy Gunne' (104.08) among others.

The theatre is also named many times, and is described in detail on page 32: 'that king's treat house of satin alustrelike above floats and footlights...' (a play on the address, South King's Street).

The Gaiety has always been famous for its Christmas pantomimes, and in Ulysses there are memories of seeing Turko the Terrible and Sinbad the Sailor there. One of Stephen Dedalus's most touching memories of his recently dead mother is of her laughing at the Gaiety pantomime:

'She heard old Royce sing in the pantomime of Turko the Terrible and laughed with others when he sang:

I am the boy
That can enjoy
Invisibility.'

W.G.Wills' A Royal Divorce, about Napoleon and Josephine, was another play the young
Joyce saw at the Gaiety and never forgot. It starred the actor manager, W.W.Kelly as Napoleon, with his wife playing Josephine. J.S.Atherton, who tracked a manuscript copy of the play down, describes its astonishing final tableau:

'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.

This scene is re-enacted in Finnegans Wake ('This is the Willingdone on his same white harse....This is the Willingdone hanking the half of the hat of lipoleums up the tail on the buckside of his big white harse' pages 8-9) and referred to many times elsewhere in the book.

In his library, Joyce owned a copy of an 1896 booklet called the Souvenir of the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of Gaiety Theatre. The cover shows the Gunn brothers at the top, with Michael on the right.

You can read the whole booklet here. I looked it up in Raphael Slepons' wonderful 'Finnegans Wake Estensible Elucidation Treasury' website, and found that Joyce quotes from the booklet in the Wake twelve times.

J.S.Atherton also talks about Joyce's use of the booklet and the many appearances in the Wake of the actors and actresses who once performed at the Gaiety:

'Nearly all of them are now dead and many of them were not very well known outside Ireland when they were alive. But they were part of the set-up that 'made the world and how they used to be at that time in the vulgar ear...in the good old bygone days of Dion Boucicault the Elder...in the otherworld' (384.36). And Joyce recreates his 'other world' of the 'vulgarera' without any thought of making things easy for his readers to understand. In fact he seems to have decided that readers who were not prepared to study the Dublin of his youth did not deserve to understand his book.'

The Books at the Wake p151