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'

 

James Joyce in Nice

Here's a picture of a plaque unveiled on the wall of the Hotel Suisse in Nice in July 2013.  I found it on the Riviera Buzz website, which reported:

'Joyce had stayed at the hotel in October 1922, where he started working on the novel that was to become Finnegans Wake, a work that was to take up 17 years of his life.
   The unveiling was attended by the Mayor of Nice, Christian Estrosi, the Irish Ambassador to France, Paul Kavanagh, Bono, Pierre Joannon, the Irish Consul General on the Côte d’Azur....
    Messrs. Estrosi and Kavanagh officially unveiled the plaque. This has also been a busy couple of days in France for Bono, as he headed to Paris yesterday to be made commandeur de l’ordre des arts et des lettres in Paris.'

Here's a picture of the dedication ceremony from the Irish Times. 

At the ceremony, Bono made a speech in which he said, 'What U2 tries to do in music and words, (Joyce) could do with just words.' Yes Bono really did say that!  Here's the proof.

Now watch John Cooper Clark asking, 'Who stole Bongo's trousers?'

The Hotel Suisse was one of those grand seaside resort hotels that Joyce spent so much of the 1920s and 1930s staying in.  He was there from mid October to 12 November 1922. Oh to be able to go on a Joyce trail around the seaside hotels of Europe!  (You can do it if you have the money - Danis Rose has listed all his hotel addresses in the James Joyce Digital Archive)

The story that Joyce began Finnegans Wake here was news to me. Ellmann covers the holiday briefly, and makes no mention of him starting a new book:

'The weather suddenly turned inclement, and the rain and windstorms had a deleterious effect upon his eye. He had to consult Dr Louis Colin, who applied five leeches to drain the blood from the eye....The holiday...was a failure.'  

Ellmann 1982, p537

I'd always believed that the Wake began in Paris the following year. Joyce wrote to Harriet Shaw Weaver on 11 March 1923:
 

'Yesterday I wrote two pages – the first I have written since the final Yes of Ulysses'
 
Letters I p 202
  
In fact, Joyce had done a lot of preparation before writing those two pages....

THE NICE NOTEBOOK

 

'I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors and paste man'

Joyce to George Antheil, 3 January 1931, Letters 1, 297

Joyce told his official biographer, Herbert Gorman, that he began collecting notes for the book in Nice in the autumn of 1922:

'Joyce, full to bursting with his new project, did not actually begin to put down notes and stray phrases for the work until the autumn when he was enjoying the warm skies and Mediterranean sunsets at Nice. It is interesting to note that he had the title for the book in mind at this time and confided it to his wife. She a miracle among women, kept the title to herself for seventeen years although many a sly and curious friend attempted to trap her into revealing it.'

Herbert Gorman, James Joyce, 1941, p333

All the evidence suggests that Joyce's title at the time was not Finnegans Wake but Finn's Hotel.

What this note taking meant was revealed by Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon, in their article 'A Nice Beginning: On The Ulysses/Finnegans Wake Interface', published in European Joyce Studies 2, (1990).  They begin with a 1929 questionnaire sent to Joyce by Frank Crowninshield, editor of Vanity Fair:

'How long has Joyce been at this new book?'
'7 years. Since October 1922. Begun at Nice.'

In a brilliant piece of detective work, they were able to date one of Joyce's notebooks to his stay in Nice.  It's an unruled children's exercise book, now in the University of Buffalo, known as VI.B.10.  A facsimile has been published by Brepols, but it costs 85 euros.

 
The earliest entries in the notebook are lists of Ulysses corrections, which Joyce had been collecting for months. Vincent Deane, editor of the notebook, told The Irish Times what happened next:

'He started doing some corrections in a child’s copy book. After a page or two, he complains of boredom, and begins taking notes from newspapers, harvesting material for later. This is where he drops Ulysses. He found writing a new book a more interesting use of his time. It’s like a photograph: you see James Joyce sitting in the hotel, facing the Baie des Anges, taking notes from the Daily Mail and The Irish Times, and he’s launched.' 

From the All Things Riviera website

 
Deane identified the sources of many of the notes as articles in The Irish Times, The Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Sketch, Evening Standard, Illustrated Sunday Herald, Sunday Express and Sunday Times. Joyce received these every day from Ireland and England.

'BEAVER!'

The key dating evidence comes from this note:

'King Beaver redwhiskered 
policeman on a
green bicycle'

The source of this is a letter in the Irish Times about the game of Beaver,  a new craze which began in England in early 1922. Points were scored by spotting a passer-by with a beard or moustache and shouting 'Beaver!' or 'Walrus!'. Read about the game in the Saturday Gallery blog, where I found these cartoons.

Charles Grave's cartoon from Punch 1922

The Irish Times letter was from a Beaver player (Douglas from Dundalk) defending the game against an earlier letter attacking it:
  
'One need neither howl nor shout nor in any way offend the feelings of those who flaunt face-fungus in the form of either a 'Walrus' or a 'Beaver'....a 'Royal Beaver' is a man afflicted with a full outfit of face-fittings – to wit, beard and moustache – while a 'King Beaver' is a red-whiskered policeman riding a green bicycle.'

Irish Times 20 October 1922 

Joyce read this soon after it was published, for he refers to it in a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver from Nice, on 8 November.  She had told him that she believed that her house was being watched by a plain clothes policeman. Joyce replied: 'That solitary detective is an interesting figure. Is he what the English call a King Beaver, that is an Irish constabularyman with red whiskers, riding a red bicycle?' (Letters III, 193)

This became a running joke for Joyce in his letters to Weaver.

'I am sure you are anxious to be away in Cheshire. King Beaver will never find you there.'

25 November 1922

'I am wondering whether your odyssey round London has been undertaken in the hope of surprising detective-sergeant King Beaver curled up asleep round a lamppost'

8 December 1922

John Kettelwell's book on the game, which you can read online, has this picture of a Red King Beaver.

These newspapers were full of news of the Irish Civil War, raging in late 1922, but Joyce chose to ignore all the political stories. He preferred bizarre quirky items, like a 'redwhiskered poilceman on a green bicycle'.

H.M.Bateman cartoon in Punch 1922

Robbert-Jan Henkes describes the sort of stories that caught Joyce's bloodshot eye:

'Joyce took notes from the cooking sections for making apple pies and syllabubs, he made a list of London churches, took down quite a few golf terms scattered throughout the notebook, he noted words and phrases from ‘Our Ladies Letter’ section, facts about bats, expressions like ‘search me’, ‘pon my Sam’, ‘I bet you,’ and ‘holybones’, he took words from advertisements for per­sonnel (‘Youth wanted’), advertisements for Bird’s Egg Substitute cake-meal (‘a tin with a purpose’), for Hustler soap, for the Colgate Shaving Stick, for the Schoolgirl’s Weekly Magazine; one of his favourite pastimes is finding out of the way surnames from the births, marriages and deaths sections, possibly for his future characters.'

'Before King Roderick Became Publican in Chapelizod', Genetic Joyce Studies, Spring 2012

When Joyce was taking these notes, he can have had little idea of the sort of book he was going to write. Perhaps he saw his notes as 'the bread of everyday life', the raw material for his art.

'I am trying … to give people some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own'  

quoted by Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother's Keeper

From March 1923, when he finally started writing the new book, he quarried the notebook for phrases, images and names. In fweet you can find almost 300 uses of this one notebook.
 
Joyce remembered beaver beards when he wanted to describe an unattractive older man from the point-of-view of a young woman. So, in the Tristan episode, Isolde views old King Mark with distaste as 'the tiresome old hairyg orangogran beaver' 396.16

And there's this footnote, written by Issy, which also refers to King Mark of Cornwall ('Cormwell'): 

'If old Herod with the Cormwell’s eczema was to go for me like he does Snuffler whatever about his blue canaries I’d do nine months for his beaver beard.' 260.F2

The phrase 'flaunt face fungus' from the newspaper letter may also have inspired the description of the huge beard grown by the Cad (mixed up with the Scottish explorer, Mungo Park):

'the large fungopark he has grown!'  51.20

Another VI.B.10 note, 'walrus', from the same story, gave Joyce the walrus moustache of the king who gives HCE his name:

'Our sailor king, who was draining a gugglet of obvious adamale, gift both and gorban, upon this, ceasing to swallow, smiled most heartily beneath his walrus moustaches.' 31.11

HCE also has a 'whallrhosmightiadd' (56.07) and a 'walrus whiskerbristle for a tuskpick' (71.03)

Here's a typical page from the notebook, reproduced in the Brepols' Reader's Guide to their edition.

VI.B.10.034

At the top here, Joyce has made notes about theatre superstitions:

'stage superstition 
no title with 'golden' 
not say tag 
Macbeth bad 
not whistle 
not quote Hamlet 
no peacock's feathers' 

The source of these notes is 'Actors less Superstitious' an article in The Daily Mail of 18 November 1922 (identified in McHugh's latest edition of Annotations).

Three of these later found their way into Finnegans Wake

'I will ask you not to whisple, cry golden or quoth mecback'  412.21

Underneath there is this set of notes

'dear delightful firelit hours
shortest of culottes
woolback satin
sickabed'

These come from the 17 November 1922  'Woman and the Home' column in the Irish Times:

'Since our sense of order is satisfied by having 'things to match', there is a nightdress, a petticoat, and the shortest of 'culottes', embroidered with white heather ... The dear delightful firelit hours can be doubly appreciated if one is the possessor of a becoming negligée. In wool-back satin or velveteen this garment need not be inordinately expensive, ... Short negligées, for those who are sick-a-bed and inclined to be luxurious, can be fashioned of scraps of georgette and lace'
 
(quoted by Gert Lernout, 'Joyce as a Reader')

From this, Joyce took the word 'sickabed', which he used in the 'Mamalujo' episode, his treatment of senility:

'he was dead seasickabed (it was really too bad!) her poor old divorced male, in the housepays for the daying at the Martyr Mrs MacCawley’s'  392.06.

You can see that the word 'sickabed' has been crossed out in the notebook.  Joyce did this to stop him using entries more than once.

This is a very strange way to write a book! 

FATHER BERNARD VAUGHAN'S PORTABLE ALTAR

'Fr Bern. Vaughan granted privilege of portable altar'  VI.B.10.013.e

This notebook entry comes from an obituary of the famous Jesuit priest, Father Bernard Vaughan, in the Irish Times.
 
'As a mark of special favour in 1916 Father Vaughan received a letter from Pope Benedict XV, congratulating him upon his jubilee in the priesthood and granting him the privilege of a portable altar.' 

Irish Times 1 November 1922

I found Pope Benedict's letter about the altar in C.C. Martindale's biography of Vaughan.

Beginning the Wake, Joyce gave Father Bernard Vaughan's portable altar to his own priest figure, St Kevin, making it a combination altar and bathtub!: Procreated on the ultimate ysland of Yreland in the encyclical yrish archipelago, come their feast of precreated holy whiteclad angels, whomamong the christener of his, voluntarily poor Kevin, having been graunted the praviloge of a priest’s postcreated portable altare cum balneo...  605.04  A portable altar from Father Carota's Traditional Catholic Priest blog Unlike many of the other stories Joyce took notes from, it's easy to see why he was interested in Vaughan's obituary.  The priest had fascinated Joyce for decades. Here's a 1906 letter to Stanislaus:

'Father B.V. is the most diverting public figure in England at present. I never see his name but I expect some enormity.'

Joyce to Stanislaus, 10 October 1906, Letters II, 182

Vaughan was the model for the grotesque worldly priest in 'Grace':

'In 'Grace', in which the preacher...chooses a difficult text and deals with it like a self-confident charlatan, he used as his model for the preacher of the sermon, Father Purdon, the figure of Father Bernard Vaughan, a very popular evangelist in those days, whose name was frequently in the newspapers and who had appeared to crowded congregations also in Dublin. He was a Jesuit, a member of an old English family, and a vulgarian priest in search of publicity. Besides preaching from his legitimate stage, the pulpit, he used to deliver short breezy talks from inappropriate places, such as the boxing ring before a champion match. My brother's contempt for him is evident in the choice of name with which he adorned him, Father Purdon. The old name for the street of the brothels in Dublin was Purdon Street.'

Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother's Keeper, p 225

Vaughan meets an Iroquois chief in Canada

'He came to speak to business men and he would speak to them in a businesslike way. If he might use the metaphor, he said, he was their spiritual accountant.'

'Grace'

‘He willingly used trade expressions – he liked to say that he belonged 'to the firm that defied all competition,' and was for ever talking about 'delivering the goods'.

C.C.Martindale, Bernard Vaughan S.J., Longmans 1923 p.57

Father Vaughan in China. Did he get his portable altar out?

Vaughan also appears in Ulysses, where the genteel Father John Conmee thinks about his habit of using cockney dialect in his sermons:

'Yes, it was very probable that Father Bernard Vaughan would come again to preach. O, yes: a very great success. A wonderful man really.....Father Conmee walked and, walking, smiled for he thought on Father Bernard Vaughan's droll eyes and cockney voice. 

—Pilate! Wy don't you old back that owlin mob? 

A zealous man, however. Really he was. And really did great good in his way. Beyond a doubt. He loved Ireland, he said, and he loved the Irish. Of good family too would one think it? Welsh, were they not?'

'Wandering Rocks'

Bloom thinks about the same sermon:

'Father Bernard Vaughan's sermon first. Christ or Pilate? Christ, but don't keep us all night over it.'

"Lotus Eaters'

So with Vincent Deane's identification of the 'portable altar', we can now say that Father Bernard Vaughan SJ makes an appearance in Dubliners, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake!

From the Linenhall Library Postcard Collection

Well done Nice for putting a plaque on the Hotel Suisse! Isn't it time Paris started placing a few plaques on the addresses where Joyce actually wrote the Wake?