The last page of Finnegans Wake

The Liffey by Edward Smyth, 1787, on the Custom House

In November 1938, sixteen years after he began Finnegans Wake by the seaside in Nice, James Joyce wrote its final pages. Anna Livia Plurabelle, the Liffey, dies as she flows into Dublin bay and merges with her father, the sea.

'I am passing out. O bitter ending! I'll slip away before they're up. They'll never see. Nor know. Nor miss me. And it's old and old it's sad and old it's sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father, till the near sight of the mere size of him, the moyles and moyles of it, moananoaning, makes me seasilt saltsick and I rush, my only, into your arms. I see them rising! Save me from those therrble prongs! Two more. Onetwo moremens more. So. Avelaval. My leaves have drifted from me. All. But one clings still. I’ll bear it on me. To remind me of. Lff! So soft this morning, ours. Yes. Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair! If I seen him bearing down on me now under whitespread wings like he’d come from Arkangels, I sink I’d die down over his feet, humbly dumbly, only to washup. Yes, tid. There’s where. First. We pass through grass behush the bush to. Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousendsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a lost a last a loved a long the'. 627.34-628.16

Read this aloud (preferably in a Dublin accent) to get the rhythm, repeated rhymes, the cries of the gulls and the 'whsh!' sounds of the sea. Here's a video from chilloutvibe to inspire you.

'I am passing out'

The final chapter is about passing from the book's night world to waking reality.

'Passing. One. We are passing. Two. From sleep we are passing. Three. Into the wikeawades warld from sleep we are passing.' 608.33

'O bitter ending'

This is the bitterness of the salty sea and Anna's bitter disillusion with HCE/Dublin.  As she moves away from the city, he/it shrinks in comparison with the vast sea.

'I thought you the great in all things, in guilt and in glory. You're but a puny.'  627.23

'They'll never see. Nor know. Nor miss me. And it's old and old it's sad and old and weary...'

Here she moves from short choppy sentences to one very long one, as if she's just been swept up by the first big wave.

There's a precurser of this on page 261, in a passage written in 1934-5:

'Hencetaking tides we haply return, trumpeted by prawns and ensigned with seakale, to befinding oneself when old is said in one and maker mates with made (oh my!)'

According to the Digital Archive, in the 1934 typescript, Joyce wrote 'when old it's sad'.  Could this phrase have inspired the book's ending?

COLD MAD FEARY FATHER

'it's sad and old and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father, till the near sight of the mere size of him, the moyles and moyles of it, moananoaning....'

Oceanus, a mosaic from the Zeugma Museum, Turkey

The cold mad father is the Greek and Roman god Oceanus, Poseidon/Neptune or the Irish sea god Manannan MacLir - suggested in 'moananoaning'.

'They are coming, waves. The whitemaned seahorses, champing, brightwindbridled, the steeds of Mananaan' 

Proteus

'Flow over them with your waves and with your waters, 

Mananaan, Mananaan MacLir...' 

Scylla and Charybdis

Above Stephen quotes a chant from George Russell's play 1907 Deirdre, in which Russell himself played the sea god. 

'moananoaning' reminds me of the keening of female mourners at an Irish wake or graveside - a tradition going back thousands of years.

Edmund Lloyd Epstein in A Guide through Finnegans Wake finds echoes of Tennyson's 'Crossing the Bar' in Anna's monologue. He traces 'moananoaning' and 'far calls' (628.13) to the first verse:

'Sunset and evening star,

And one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar,

When I put out to sea.'

'Moaning of the bar' refers to the sound made by waves crashing on a sandbar, at a river mouth or harbour entrance, when the tide is low. In the poem, Tennyson asks for a high tide 'too full for sound and foam' and a smooth sea - an easy death. 'May there be no moaning' sounds like 'May there be no mourning'.

x

'But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.'

Here Epstein finds echoes in 'you're turning' 627.02 and 'Home!' 627.24

Epstein says that this verse 'describes exactly the pilgrimage of Anna Livia; she once came out of her great father the Sea, and now she is turning again for home.'

'old it's sad and weary' and 'cold mad feary' derive from 'bold and bad and bleary' on the previous page:

'For all the bold and bad and bleary they are blamed, the seahags.' 627.25

'moyles and moyles of it'

'miles and miles' said in a Dublin accent.

The Sea of Moyle is the north channel of the Irish Sea, between Antrim and Scotland, which appears in a song by Thomas Moore.

Silent, oh Moyle! be the roar of thy water,
Break not, ye breezes, your chain of repose

Joyce described this in a letter to Giorgio as 'that part of the Irish Sea which is now called St George's Channel.' (LIII 339)

The sea is more usually called a mother and, in his first draft, Joyce included both parents:

'And its old and old it's weary I go back to you,
my cold father,
mother,
and old it's sad & weary mother
I go back to you,
my cold father
my cold mad father
My cold mad bleary father,
till the sight of him makes me saltsick
and I rush into your arms'

VI.B.47.p40 (quoted by by Rose and O'Hanlon in the JJ Digital Archive)

'-- God, he said quietly. Isn't the sea what Algy calls it: a great sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. Epi oinopa ponton. Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks. I must teach you. You must read them in the original. Thalatta! Thalatta! She is our great sweet mother. Come and look.

Stephen stood up and went over to the parapet. Leaning on it he looked down on the water and on the mailboat clearing the harbour mouth of Kingstown.

-- Our mighty mother, Buck Mulligan said.'

Mulligan is quoting Swinburne's 'The Triumph of Time', which is the source of Anna's 'I go back to you':

'I will go back to the great sweet mother,

      Mother and lover of men, the sea.

I will go down to her, I and none other,

      Close with her, kiss her and mix her with me;

Cling to her, strive with her, hold her fast:

O fair white mother, in days long past

Born without sister, born without brother,

      Set free my soul as thy soul is free.'

'The Triumph of Time'

'Swinburne's central emotional drive was the need to worship and achieve an ecstatic loss of self. As a boy he expressed this drive through encounters with the sea.'

Rikky Rooksby, Swinburne: A Poet's Life, Routledge, 1997

Elsewhere Joyce turns Swinburne into 'Swimbourne':

cf 'slept the sleep of the swimbourne in the one sweet undulant mother of tumblerbunks' 41.06

Joyce's sea is not sweet but bitter and cold as death. It makes Anna 'seasalt saltsick', like the 'bowl of bitter waters' that Stephen sees when he looks at the sea and thinks of his own mother's death.

'he saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother by the well-fed voice beside him. The ring of bay and skyline held a dull green mass of liquid. A bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting.'

'It lay behind him, a bowl of bitter waters. Fergus' song: I sang it alone in the house, holding down the long dark chords. Her door was open: she wanted to hear my music. Silent with awe and pity I went to her bedside. She was crying in her wretched bed. For those words, Stephen: love's bitter mystery.'

Telemachus

PRONGS OF THE SEA

'I rush, my only, into your arms. I see them rising! Save me from those therrble prongs! Two more. Onetwo moremens more. '

Mosaic of Neptune from Palermo

The arms are rising waves, the prongs of Neptune's trident (triple prongs) and Dublin's Bull Wall and South Wall which stick out into the sea. 

'Moremens' are mermen and 'An Mhuir Mheann', the limpid sea, another name for the Irish Sea.

Avelaval.

'Ave atque vale' - Hail and farewell, from Catullus' elegy on his dead brother. 

Paul Devine tells me that 'Hail and Farewell, Ave, Salve, Vale, from George Moore has also been cited as a possible source.'

'L'aval' is 'downstream' in French. Fweet suggests the Hebrew 'havel havalim': vanity of vanities in Ecclesiastes.

'My leaves have drifted from me. All. But one clings still. I’ll bear it on me. To remind me of. Lff!'

The flowing Liffey has been carrying autumn leaves, which are also the pages of the book that fall away as we read the final monologue:

'Soft morning, city! Lsp! I am leafy speafing. Lpf!....Only a leaf, just a leaf and then leaves....I am Leafy, your goolden...' 619.

Only one leaf is left - the final page. She carries it to remind her of life.

'So soft this morning ours.'

The first words of the monologue are 'Soft morning, city!' 619.20
'It is the softest morning that ever I can ever remember me' 621.08
'Softly so.' 624.21

There's a shift of perspective from carrying to being carried. As she hits the wide sea, she reverts to childhood, and is now herself being carried by her cold mad feary father - the sea. This brings back a childhood memory of being carried through a toy fair.

'Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair!'

 

This line is based on a memory of Maria Jolas, which she describes in the wonderful opening of A Woman of Action – A Memoir and Other Writings (2004).

''Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair!' The words are James Joyce's but the experience was mine, drawn from the well of distant recall in the course of a dinner-table discussion: how far back can memory reach?

  It was night, we were walking along the acetylene lighted dusty 'midway' of the Jefferson County Fair, on the outskirts of Louisville Kentucky. I was perched on my tall young father's broad shoulders, my legs dangling onto his chest, hands clasping his head.  Was mother with us? Were there two older children walking beside us? Was there a younger sister or a new baby at home? Perhaps, indeed, probably, but I have no recollection of their existence at that time. Dazzled by the lights, the noisy crowds, the garish booths lining each side of the road, with the broad night sky above, and,  beneath me, my father's safe shoulders, I was unaware of everything but my own bliss. Joyce used my 'ride' in a 'minor key' at the very end of Finnegans Wake, when the approach of night was leading him to seek again the warmest, surest haven he had known, that of his own father, his 'mad-feary' father's unswerving love.

  Today, with my eightieth birthday well behind me, other happy things well up to the surface....'

Maria Jolas A Woman of Action – A Memoir and Other Writings (2004) p 9

Richard Ellmann claimed the line was 'inspired by a memory of carrying his son George through a toy fair in Trieste to make up for not giving him a rocking horse' - but gave no source for the story.   

 

Adaline Glasheen, who was told the Jolas story by Hugh Kenner, provides the source of Ellmann's version:

'Dear Hugh my doesn't the world of Joycean fact slip like soap, slither like dreams. Maria Jolas says it was her toy-fair. Helen Joyce told me that Giorgio [Joyce] told her it was his toy-fair in Trieste, through which his father carried him.'

Adaline Glasheen to Hugh Kenner, 1 September 1977, Burns (ed), A Passion for Joyce: The Letters of Hugh Kenner and Adaline Glasheen, University College Dublin Press, 2008, p268

I like Maria Jolas's description of Joyce's feelings for his own father here too. Finnegans Wake can be read partly as a tribute to him. He's the main model for H.C.Earwicker who,  in Joyce's earliest notes, was simply called 'Pop'.

Joyce's VI B 3 notebook, compiled in 1923

All our fathers are included too, since Finnegans Wake is, as J.S Atherton wrote, 'everyone’s dream, the dream of all the living and the dead'. 

In 2008, when our online group first read this page, the late Karl Reisman commented:

'You know, the Carry me along, taddy is nothing like the opening of Portrait and yet when I read the end of FW I keep hearing Portrait in this line. Is that just my crazyness?'

Dominique (Cachou Le Pitou) answered:

'No Karl, not crazy, it's baby tuckoo, the moocow, and the Mississippi Hare coming for to carry us home.'

'If I seen him bearing down on me now under whitespread wings like he’d come from Arkangels, I sink I’d die down over his feet, humbly dumbly, only to washup.'

This is the most mysterious part of the ending.  Anna's mind is disintegrating, and this feels like an hallucination in which father, husband, the white waves of the sea and an angel of death are jumbled together. Angels often appear in near-death experiences.

There's also the river water sinking under the sea ('I sink I'd die') and then washing up (also wake up and worship). 'Wash up' is US slang for ending something, says the OED quoting:

'The stage manager called out: ‘What will I do with this act, Mr. Ziegfeld?’ ‘Wash up him and the bird,’ said Flo [Ziegfeld] and that was the last of the Italian and his trained canary... Hype Igoe, the World's sporting writer, heard of the incident..and in commenting..upon Frank Moran, heavy weight pugilist, advised that matchmakers ‘wash him up’. The phrase caught the sporting fancy..and has become a colloquial fixture..as a meaty synonym for finals and farewell.'

The World, 25 October 1925

I wonder if Joyce knew that.

Arkhangelsk was the chief seaport of medieval Russia. Like Dublin, it lies on both banks of a river beside a sea. A local legend, shown on its coat of arms, claims that the Archangel Michael defeated the devil here. 

'whitespread wings'

'I seen'

Anna speaks as a working-class Dubliner, like the constable in Ulysses, who tells Corny Kellaher 'I seen that particular party last evening.'  The 'him' and 'his' reminds me of Molly Bloom's monologue, where all men are simply 'he'.

I've found white wings and the sea in another poem of Swinburne:

'The keen white-winged north-easter
That stings and spurs thy sea'

'A Swimmer's Dream'

But there's also a sentimental song:

''White Wings" they never grow weary,
They carry me cheerily over the sea.
Night comes, I long for my dearie,
I'll spread out my "White Wings"
And sail home to thee.'

Maybe there's another echo of Yeats's 'who goes with Fergus?' sung by Stephen to his dying mother:

'White breast of the dim sea. The twining stresses, two by two. A hand plucking the harpstrings merging their twining chords. Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide.'

Telemachus

Any other ideas?

'We pass through grass behush the bush to.'

This part is left over from Joyce's first version of the ending:

'For I feel I could faint. Here weir, reach, island, bridge. There! That's what cockles the hearty! A bit beside the bush and then a walk along the

Paris,
1922—1938.'

As in the published version the A and L of 'along' is completed by the P of 'Paris', giving us Anna's initials - matching the HCE of the book's opening. But it's interesting that Joyce, who had written the second part of the sentence twelve years earlier, did not then know how it would begin.

On the third typescript, he crossed that ending out and moved the 'pass through grass' phrase back to this position.  He changed 'beside' to 'behush' continuing the rushing sounds of the sea and 'hush'. 

'Here, weir...' was moved back to 626.97 but 'That's what cockles the hearty!' disappeared from the text.

'Far calls. Coming, far!'

Father calls and Anna answers, "I'm coming father!'   These are also the calls of the gulls and a lighthouse (Phare in French). In our online group, Eric Rosenbloom commented, 'a word for sea in Irish is farraige, stress on 'farr'.  It's a 'feminine' noun.'

The phrase is the title of one of Toru Takemitsu's lovely 'tonal sea' pieces. Thank you Steven Eric Scribner for sharing this on Facebook.

'End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take.'

Finn is Finn MacCool, HCE as the sleeping giant of Dublin. Finn is also Fin (end).  These seven words recreate the final sentence's movement from ALP at the end to HCE (again!) on the opening page.

Joyce is giving us a clue to the book's title, still a secret when he wrote these words. 'Take' - it's an offering.

'Bussoftlhee'

But softly.

Soft again but now with Shakespearian meaning of 'wait' (or 'quiet' as in 'behush' above).

'But soft! methinks I scent the morning air' Hamlet.
'But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?' Romeo and Juliet

'But soft! ' 462.25
'Adieu, soft adieu' 563.35

A buss is a kiss, which shortly follows.

 

'mememormee!'

Remember me! and 'me me more me' - an attempt to hold on to her identity. Remembering and forgetting runs through the ending.

Balfe's 'Then You'll Remember Me' from The Bohemian Girl starts with 'other lips'.

In his introduction to the Oxford paperback edition, 'mememormee' is the only word from the final page quoted by Finn Fordham, who describes the ending as a 'death aria'.

The word recalls Dido's lament ('when I am laid in earth') from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas:

'Remember me, remember me, but ah! forget my fate.
Remember me, but ah! forget my fate.'

In Purcell's opera, the aria is followed by a chorus with more wings:

'With drooping wings ye cupids come,
and scatter roses on her tomb,
soft and gentle as her heart;
Keep here your watch, and never part'

'till thousndsthee'

'in this scherzarade of one’s thousand one nightinesses' 51.04
'And into the river that had been a stream (for a thousand of tears had gone eon her and come on her...' 159.10
'We’ve heard it sinse sung thousandtimes.' 338.01
'one thousand and one other blessings will now concloose thoose epoostles' 617.04
'A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles and is there one who understands me? One in a thousand of years of the nights?' 627.14

'Lps. The keys to. Given!'

Some readers read this as a message from Joyce that he has given us the keys to reading Finnegans Wake.

'Lps' are lips, and the keys are also a kiss - the key in a kiss given by Arrah Na-Pogue (Arrah of the kiss) in Boucicault's play. 

'in the good old bygone days of Dion Boucicault, the elder, in Arrah-na-pogue, in the otherworld of the passing of the key of Two-tongue Common' 385.02

J.S.Atherton explains the allusion in his brilliant Books at the Wake:

This is also mentioned in the lessons chapter, by Issy:

'If it’s me chews to swallow all you saidn’t you can eat my words for it as sure as there’s a key in my kiss.' 279.F06

In the earlier version there's a clearer sense of keys as a reciprocal gift of love:

'How you said you'd give me the keys of my heart. Only now it's me who's got to give...The keys to. Given!'

But the first sentence above was moved back to 626.30.

'I will give you the keys of my heart' is a line from 'The keys of heaven' ( which sounds like 'The keys to. Given!').  

In The Sleeping Beauty, the heroine is awakened by a kiss, referred to a few pages earlier in Anna's letter:

'That was the prick of the spindle to me that gave me the keys to dreamland.' 614.28

THE FINAL SENTENCE

'A way a lone a lost a last a loved a long the'

This is what Joyce wrote, but Faber's typesetters managed to lose 'a lost'!

The last words were prefigured in 'The Dead':

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

Joyce talked about that 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

For a whole essay on the final word, see Jim Le Blanc's 'The Closing Word of Finnegans Wake', in Hypermedia Joyce Studies.

But the last page doesn't end there.

Joyce liked to end his novels with a colophon ('finishing touch' in Greek) giving places of composition.  This is how A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ends, with another invocation of a mythical father.

And here's Ulysses.

With Finnegans Wake, Joyce could have written  'a colophon of no fewer than seven hundred and thirty two strokes tailed by a leaping lasso' (123.05) for he wrote the book in Nice, Paris, Bognor Regis, Tours, Saint-Malo, Ostend, Antwerp, London, The Hague, Brussels, Amsterdam, Rouen, Zurich, Le Havre, Torquay, Llandudno, Hamburg, Copenhagen and several other places –  see the list of his addresses in Danis Rose's Textual Diaries of James Joyce. 

But he needed just 'Paris' for Anna Livia Plurabelle's inititals.

The date was '1922-1938' until January 1939, when Joyce changed the second date while correcting the galleys.

'WE CANNOT IMAGINE A FITTER SWAN SONG'

Writing after his friend's death in 1941, Frank Budgen compared the ending with 'The Dead':

'The key of Ulysses is too bright, its movement too rapid for that pity and reconciliation which provide the magical end of the story, 'The Dead', to have any part in it, but that same human element expressed with yet greater artistry does return in the last pages of Finnegans Wake when Anna Livia goes forth by day, as a woman (wife and mother, representative of all flesh) to join the countless generations of the dead, as a river to become one with the god, her father Ocean....The last work of Joyce ends, as did his first, in the contemplation of the mystery of death. In both cases the rebellious pity of the human heart finds in the beauty of a constant element of nature — in the one falling snow, in the other smooth gliding water — the symbol and the instrument of reconciliation with human destiny. We had hoped for further years and other labours. We cannot imagine a fitter swan song.'

'Chapters of Going Forth by Day', James Joyce and the making of Ulysses, OUP, 1972, p 341-2

Paul Léon wrote that writing the ending for Joyce was a 'veritable deliverance':

'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)

Eugene Jolas described the 'profound anguish' Joyce felt at writing this ending:

'For Joyce himself, Finnegans Wake had prophetic significance. Finn MacCool, the Finnish-Norwegian-Irish hero of the tale, seemed to him to be coming alive again after the publication of the book, and in a letter from France I received from him last spring, he said: '...It is strange, however, that after publication of my book, Finland came into the foreground suddenly'....'Prophetic too, were the last pages of my book,...'he added in the same letter.  The last pages, that had cost him such profound anguish at the time of their writing. 'I felt so completely exhausted,' he told me when it was done, 'as if all the blood had run out of my brain. I sat for a long while on a street bench, unable to move....'
   'And it’s old and old it’s sad and old it’s sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father, till the near sight of the mere size of him, the moyles and moyles of it, moananoaning, makes me seasilt saltsick and I rush, my only, into your arms.'
  There was no turning back after these lines, my friend. You knew it well. Adew!'

Eugene Jolas, 'My Friend James Joyce',  Sean Givens (ed) James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism,  Vanguard Press, 1948, p17-18

'My daughter-in-law staged a marvellous banquet for my last birthday and read the closing pages on the passing-out of Anna Livia — to a seemingly much affected audience. Alas, if you ever read them you will see they were unconsciously prophetical!'

To Constantine Curran, 11 February 1940, Letters, p 408

Did Joyce mean that he believed he was prophesying the death of European civilization? Or did he imagine that his own life was coming to an end?

'when the approach of night was leading him to seek again the warmest, surest haven he had known' 

Maria Jolas

For a lovely creative reading of the final monologue, see Orlando Mezzabotta's 'ALP's reGrettas or HCE's Dämnerung' which is online here.

For the rest of the 'suspended sentence' (106.13) which continues on the opening page, see my post, 'The sentence it took Joyce twelve years to write'.

The last novel read by James Joyce

Here's a lovely Flann O'Brien badge from the fantastic Three Castles Burning Dublin history podcast. It was a present from my Dublin friend Alfreda O'Brien (a genuine O'Brien, unlike Brian O'Nolan – follow her on Twitter @DublinAffair).

'When things go wrong and will not come right
Though you do the best you can
When life looks black as the hour of night
A pint of plain is your only man'

That's from Flann O'Brien's first masterpiece, At Swim-Two-Birds, which was the last novel that James Joyce read.  It was published on 3 March 1939, just two months before Finnegans Wake. 

The story of how Joyce came to read the book is told in a letter of 1 May 1939 from Brian O'Nolan to Eric Gillett, literary adviser to Longmans, his publishers. I have a photocopy of the letter which Sue Asbee gave me in the early 80s, when we were both postgraduate students at Queen Mary College London.

Sue wrote on the back, 'Peter - this is copyright material! Read it with care!' But it's now been published in the new Collected Letters, so I think it's ok to share it now.

O'Nolan adds an apostrophe to Finnegans Wake. This was an easy mistake to make, since the book would not be published until 4 May.  Joyce did have the book 'in his hand as he spoke' since he'd been given an advance copy on 30 January, in time for his birthday party.

The friend who brought the book to Joyce was Niall Sheridan, who was at University College Dublin with O'Nolan. He appears as the character Brinsley in At Swim-Two-Birds, and he played a big role in the book's creation – cutting one fifth of the text according to his own account.

Here's how Anthony Cronin describes Sheridan in No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O'Brien:

It's fitting that Sheridan became a tipster. His interest in the horses features in At Swim-Two-Birds. A Newmarket racing tipster's letter ('This horse is my treble nap CAST-IRON PLUNGER') which he showed O'Nolan is quoted verbatim in the book.

In his essay, 'Brian, Flann and Myles' in Myles: Portraits of Brian O'Nolan, 1969, Sheridan records how 'Brian gleefully borrowed any material that came to hand.' 

This was also James Joyce's attitude to writing Finnegans Wake. He told Eugene Jolas, 'Really it is not I who am writing this crazy book. It is you, and you, and you, and that man over there, and that girl at the next table.'

In his essay, Sheridan describes being part of a team of writers that O'Nolan assembled to 'manufacture' the Great Irish Novel, to be called Children of Destiny. It would be 'the first masterpiece of the Ready-Made or Reach-Me-Down School’ of novel writing.' Sheridan's job was to write the book's climax, set in an All-Ireland Football Final at Croke Park. Sadly, the book never materialized.

In the Irish Times, the great Frank McNally described a talk by Dr Maeb Long which revealed that, in 1939, Sheridan wrote a story with striking similarities to The Third Policeman. Called 'A Matter of Life and Death', it featured a murder with a bashed in skull and a police sergeant obsessed with the theft of bicycles.

SHERIDAN'S VERSION

Sheridan gives his own version of his meeting with Joyce in 'Brian, Flann and Myles'.

Sheridan's 'looked forward to reading it' is contradicted by O'Nolan's 'had already read it'. O'Nolan's version is confirmed by a letter Sheridan wrote to MacGibbon and McKee when they reissued the book in 1960. Here he says he was 'amazed to find' that Joyce 'had already read it' (quoted by Cronin).

If O'Nolan's letter is correctly dated, the visit must have taken place in April not May. Sheridan has forgotten the date of his own wedding!

LAUGHING JEAN AND WEEPING JEAN

Although Joyce had not read a whole book for five years, he was familiar with Samuel Beckett's 1938 Murphy – Beckett may have read it to him in Paris.  Beckett told his biographer James Knowlson that Joyce compared the two books, calling At Swim-Two-Birds 'Jean qui rit' while Murphy was 'Jean qui pleure' (letter of 8 January 1971, in J.Knowlson (ed), Samuel Beckett, an exhibition, Turret Books, 1971, p.29).

19th century busts of weeping Jean and laughing Jean

'Jean qui pleure et qui rit' is a 1772 poem by Voltaire about changing human emotions. There's also an 1865 children's book by the Countess of Segur about two cousins, an optimist and a pessimist.

It's nice to think of the enjoyment that Joyce must have got from O'Brien's novel at such a dark time. I bet he laughed out loud when he got to the Ringsend cowboys.

'Up we went on our horses, cantering up Mountjoy Square with our hats tilted back on our heads and the sun in our eyes and our gun butts swinging in our holsters.'

'And away with us like the wind and us roaring and cursing out of us like men that were lit with whiskey, our steel-studded holsters swaying at our hips and the sheep-fur on our leg-chaps lying down like corn before a spring wind'

 

Joyce, who said in 1939 that Finnegans Wake was the dream of Finn MacCool, must also have been astonished to find that his giant was a character in Flann O'Brien's book. Finn appears on its opening page in a very Joycean passage:

'The Third Opening: Finn MacCool was a legendary hero of old Ireland. Though not mentally robust, he was a man of superb physique and development. Each of his thighs was as thick as a horse’s belly, narrowing to a calf as thick as the belly of a foal. Three fifties of fosterlings could engage with handball against the wideness of his backside, which was wide enough to halt the march of warriors through a mountain pass.'

Despite the 'no publicity' promise given to Joyce, the first paperback edition, published in 1962 by Four Square Books, carried a testimonial from the great man. It's also on my Penguin paperback.

According to Cronin, the source of the quotation is a letter from Sheridan to the publisher Timothy O'Keefe. He must have had a lot more to say about what Joyce thought of the book. It's a shame that Joyce's letters to Sheridan have never been published.

 

In his dedication, O'Nolan offered Joyce 'plenty of' 'diffidence of the author'. But his description of Joyce in the letter as 'the fuehrer' shows that his attitude to him was always ambivalent.  Here's a final story, from Beckett, quoted in Cronin's biography.

Ouch!

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