Travesties: The Henry Carr Trouser Saga

Joyce lovers have an absolute treat on offer right now in the West End of London. Yer man himself is being beautifully brought to life by the Dublin actor Peter McDonald (right), who looks like a more handsome version of Joyce.

This is Patrick Marber's revival of Tom Stoppard's 1974 comedy Travesties. It sold out almost instantly at the Menier Chocolate Factory, but has now transferred to the beautiful Apollo Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue. We caught a Saturday matinée last month.

Stoppard's play was inspired by reading Richard Ellmann's account of the wonderful Henry Carr Trouser Saga of 1918. Carr was a junior official at the Consulate at Zurich, cast by Joyce as Algernon Moncrieff in his production of 'The Importance of Being Earnest'.
 
After the production, Carr told Joyce that he expected to be paid for a pair of trousers he'd bought for the part. Joyce answered that these were not a costume but could be worn as everyday clothing. Carr then called Joyce a cad and a swindler and threatened to wring his neck if he met him on the street.

From the theatre programme

Joyce sued Carr for libel and for the price of five tickets sold by Carr. Carr countersued for the cost of the trousers....Everybody lost.

Joyce later got his revenge, three times. He mocked Carr in an October 1918 poem, 'New Tipperary' (left).

He also put him into Ulysses, as the most foul-mouthed character in the whole book – the English soldier who assaults Stephen Dedalus in the Circe episode:

PRIVATE CARR (With ferocious articulation.) I'll do him in, so help me fucking Christ! I'll wring the bastard fucker's bleeding blasted fucking windpipe!

His third revenge was to get Herbert Gorman to put the whole story, at great length, in his 1941 authorised biography. This bit was almost certainly written by Joyce himself:

'It became noticeable to the entire company that Carr's behaviour towards Joyce was one of veiled indefinable hostility, an insolence unreasonable and unwarrantable in a young man of no particular talents towards one who was older and far more experienced in life and certainly of greater and more recognized achievement.'

Stoppard was excited to learn that two other revolutionary figures were also in Zurich at the same time as Joyce – Lenin and Tristan Tzara, the leading Dadaist. The problem was that their dates don't quite match. In 1918, when Carr was fighting Joyce about his trousers, Lenin was already in power in Russia.

The solution was to filter the story through the recollections of the fantasising amnesiac 80 year-old Henry Carr, who places himself at the centre of events, and also muddles up the plot of Wilde's play with his encounters with the others. 

So Carr and Tzara play the roles of Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff, while Joyce, appearing at one point in a dress, is Lady Augusta Bracknell. We learn that his middle name really was Augusta.

TZARA: I say, do you know someone called Joyce?
CARR: Joyce is a name which could only expose a child to comment around the font.
TZARA; No, no, Mr Joyce, Irish writer, mainly of limericks, christened James Augustine, though registered, due to a clerical error, as James Augusta, a little known fact. 

 
Carr, both young and old, is beautifully played by Tom Hollander, who has to begin with a challenging twelve minute circling monologue in which he attempts to shape his memories of Joyce and the others. 

CARR:....now then – Memories of James Joyce...It's coming.
  To those of us who knew him, Joyce's genius was never in doubt. To be in his presence was to be aware of an amazing intellect bent on shaping itself into the permanent form of its own monument – the book the world now knows as Ulysses! Though at the time we were still calling it (I hope memory serves) by its original title, Elasticated Bloomers.
  (Joyce was) a complex personality, an enigma, a contradictory spokesman for the truth, an obessive litigant who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognised – in short a liar and a hypocrite, a tightfisted, sponging, fornicating drunk not worth the paper, that's that bit done.' 

TROUSER OBSESSION 

A delightful running joke has Carr as trouser-obsessed.

CARR: Ah yes...the war, always the war....I was in Savile Row when I heard the news, talking to the head cutter at Drewitt and Madge in a hounds-tooth check slightly flared behind the knee, quite unusual. Old Drewitt, or Madge, came in and told me. Never trusted the Hun, I remarked. Boche, he replied, and I, at that time unfamiliar with the appellation, turned on my heel and walked into Trimmett and Punch, where I ordered a complete suit of harris knicker-bockers with hacking vents.

CARR:  Oh, what nonsense you talk!
TZARA: It may be nonsense but at least it's not clever nonsense. Cleverness has been exploded, along with so much else, by the war.
CARR: You forget that I was there, in the mud and blood of a foreign field, unmatched by anything in the whole history of human carnage. Ruined several pairs of trousers. Nobody who has not been in the trenches can have the faintest conception of the horror of it. I had hardly set foot in France before I sank up to the knees in a pair of twill jodhpurs with pigskin straps handstitched by Ramidge and Hawkes. And so it went on – until I was invalided out with a bullet through the calf of an irreplaceable lambswool dyed khaki in a yarn to my own specification. 

Stoppard perceptively noticed that Joyce, though a dandy like Carr in many ways, made up his own rules about how to dress.

Joyce in mismatched jacket and trousers (Beinecke Library, Yale Univ).

JOYCE: I have only one request to make of you –
CARR: And I have only one request to make of you – why for God's sake cannot you contrive just once to wear the jacket that is suggested by your trousers??
(It is indeed the case that Joyce is now wearing the other halves of the outfit he wore in Act One)
JOYCE (With dignity): If I could do it once, I could do it every time. My wardrobe got out of step in Trieste, and its reciprocal members pass each other endlessly in the night. Now – could you let me have the twenty-five francs? 

This 1904 photograph shows that Joyce was wearing mismatched trousers long before Trieste.


THE ARTIST IN SOCIETY

At the heart of the play is a debate about the role of the artist in society.  Carr and Lenin (Forbes Masson) think that the artist has a social responsibility, and both hate modern art:

CARR & LENIN: Expressionism, futurism, cubism...I don't understand them and I get no pleasure from them.
CARR: That's my point. There was nothing wrong with Lenin except his politics.

TZARA: You could have spent the time in Switzerland as an artist.
CARR (coldly): My dear Tristan, to be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zurich, in 1917, implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed the eyes of Narcissus.

Lenin argues that literature should play a practical role in creating a Socialist society, and that it should be free from the individual expression of men like Tzara and Joyce.

LENIN: Today, literature must become party literature. Down with non-partisan literature! Down with literary supermen! Literature must become a part of the common cause of the proletariat...We want to establish and we shall establish a free press...free from bourgeois anarchist individualism!

Joyce was the ultimate anarchist individualist, as he said himself in his 1916 poem 'Dooleysprudence':

Who is the tranquil gentleman who won’t salute the State
Or serve Nebuchadnezzar or proletariat
But thinks that every son of man has quite enough to do
To paddle down the stream of life his personal canoe?

It’s Mr Dooley,
Mr Dooley,
The wisest wight our country ever knew
‘Poor Europe ambles
Like sheep to shambles’
Sighs Mr Dooley-ooley-ooley-oo.

The bigger debate is between the conceptual artist,Tzara, who says that 'a man may be an artist by exhibiting his hindquarters', and Joyce, the master magician and creative craftsman. McDonald brings a stillness and authority to the role of Joyce, contrasting with the dancing grace and gaiety of Freddie Fox's Tristan Tzara.

TZARA: Your art has failed. You've turned literature into a religion and it's as dead as all the rest, it's an overripe corpse and you're cutting fancy figures at the wake. It's too late for geniuses! Now we need vandals and desecrators, simple-minded demolition men to smash centuries of baroque subtlety, to bring down the temple and thus finally, to reconcile the shame and the necessity of being an artist! Dada! Dada! Dada!
(He starts to smash whatever crockery is to hand; which done, he strikes a satisfied pose. JOYCE has not moved) 

Freddie Fox as Tzara

JOYCE: You are an over-excited little man, with a need for self-expression far beyond the scope of your natural gifts. This is not discreditable. Neither does it make you an artist. An artist is the magician put among men to gratify – capriciously – their urge for immortality. The temples are built and brought down around him, continuously and contiguously, from Troy to the field of Flanders. If there is any meaning in any of it, it is in what survives as art, yes even in the celebration of tyrants, yes even in the celebration of nonentities. What now of the Trojan War if it had been passed over by the artist's touch? Dust. A forgotten expedition prompted by Greek merchants looking for new markets. But it is we who stand enriched, by a tale of heroes, of a golden apple, a wooden horse, a face that launched a thousand ships – and above all by Ulysses, the wanderer, the most human, the most complete of all heroes – husband, father, son, lover, farmer, soldier, pacifist, politician, inventor and adventurer. It is a theme so overwhelming that I am almost afraid to treat it. And yet I with my Dublin Odyssey will double that immortality, yes by God, there's a corpse that will dance for some time yet and leave the world precisely as it finds it – and if you hope to shame it into the grave with your fashionable magic, I would strongly advise you to try and acquire some genius and if possible some subtlety before the season is quite over. Top o'the morning Mr Tzara!
(with which JOYCE pulls a rabbit out of his hat, puts the hat on his head, and leaves, holding the rabbit.)

Tristan Tzara

Stoppard is clearly on Joyce's side here, though, reviewing the original production in 1974, both Kenneth Tynan and Michael Billington took issue with the idea that Ulysses left the world 'precisely as it found it'. Tynan wrote, 'So much for any pretensions that art might have to change, challenge, or criticize the world, or to modify, however marginally, our view of it.' Billington asked, 'How can Ulysses be said to have left the world as it found it? Is changing people's consciousness and extending the range of the novel not as much a way of affecting the world as passing a piece of legislation?' Billington makes the same point in his review of the revival.

 

A JOYCEAN PLAY

 

Travesties is Joycean in spirit. Like Ulysses, it switches from style to style, from a scene in limericks, to Shakespearian pastiche and a history lecture.  There's a duet between Clare Foster’s Cicely and Amy Morgan’s Gwendolen which parodies the 1922 vaudeville song 'Mr Gallagher and Mr Shean'.  In a nice touch from Marber, they are accompanied by Joyce playing a guitar just like the real instrument he owned in Zurich, now in the Martello Tower, which you can see being played here.
 

Amy Morgan (Gwendolen) and Clare Foster (Cicely)

There's also a section written in the schoolbook catechism style of the Ithaca episode of Ulysses:

JOYCE: What, reduced to their simplest reciprocal form, were Tzara's thoughts about Ball's thoughts about Tzara, and Tzara's thoughts about Ball's thoughts about Tzara's thoughts about Ball?
TZARA: He thought that he thought that he knew what he was thinking, whereas he knew that he knew that he knew that he did not.  

What, reduced to their simplest reciprocal form, were Bloom's thoughts about Stephen's thoughts about Bloom and Bloom's thoughts about Stephen's thoughts about Bloom's thoughts about Stephen?
  He thought that he thought that he was a Jew whereas he knew that he knew that he knew that he was not.
  

AND WHAT DID YOU DO IN THE GREAT WAR?

Act One ends with a beautiful speech from Carr.

Well it was a long time ago. He left Zurich after the war, went to Paris, stayed twenty years and turned up here in December 1940. Another war...But he was a sick man then, perforated ulcer, and in January he was dead...buried one cold snowy day in the Fluntern cemetery up the hill.
  I dreamed about him, dreamed I had him in the witness box, a masterly cross-examination, case practically won, admitted it all, the whole thing, the trousers, everything, and I flung at him –'And what did you do in the Great War?' 'I wrote Ulysses,' he said. 'What did you do?'
  Bloody nerve.
(BLACKOUT)

The original source for this is Frank Budgen :

'The Abbé Sieyès, asked what he did under the terror, replied: 'J'ai vecu.' Joyce, if asked what he did during the Great War, could reply: 'I wrote Ulysses''

James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses, 1934

That's such a well-known quotation that many people imagine that it really was said by Joyce. 

Picture from the Mission Impossible: Ulysses blog

After the original production, Stoppard was excited and alarmed to get a letter from a Mrs Noel Carr, who wrote, 'I was totally fascinated by the reviews of your play – the chief reason being that Henry Carr was my late husband until he died in 1962.' 

Stoppard learned that Carr had been badly wounded in 1916, and had spent five days lying in no-man's land, until he was taken prisoner by the Germans. He was then treated in a monastery before being sent as an exchange prisoner to Switzerland, where he encountered Joyce. You can see why a man who had been through those horrors would see the author of 'Dooleysprudence' as a cad.

Mrs Carr sent Stoppard this 1917 photograph of a trouser-free Carr, in his Black Watch uniform, which Ellmann printed in the second edition of his biography of Joyce.

Travesties is on at the Apollo Theatre until the end of April, and there are tickets for as little as £20. What a bargain!
 

 

 

A damn good one about comets' tails

'To me, this chapter of Ulysses has been a substantial part of the novel's attraction. I love the movement of the characters around the city. I love that Joyce put actual people in actual places. I love the ordinary momentum of an ordinary afternoon. And if literature is ever to teach us anything, this is where Ulysses teaches us how ordinary and ordinarily mobile and natural life is, and how thrillingly and grippingly it can be rendered into art. More, as they say, next week.'

These are Frank Delaney's magnificent final words in Cavalcades and Comets Tails, his Rejoyce podcast of 15 February 2017. Frank was talking about the Wandering Rocks episode, which he had only recently started, after the long dry slog of Scylla and Charybdis.

Sadly, there was to be no next week.

Apart from missing Frank's insights, our big loss is the chance to listen to a beautiful weekly reading from Ulysses, working through the book a page at a time. But there is one way we can carry on the project, thanks to the 1982 RTE radio production which is on Youtube. If you start listening at 31.37 minutes in, you'll reach the point where Frank began his final podcast. The RTE production has the advantage of sound effects (such as Nosey Flynn's sniffling).

The last Rejoyce left us hanging in the middle of Lenehan's anecdote to M'Coy, which made me want to complete it here.  

Lenehan and M'Coy walk through Merchants Arch, by the Liffey's Ha'penny Bridge, where they see Bloom browsing the books.

A still from Joseph Strick's film of Ulysses

They went up the steps and under Merchants' arch. A dark-backed figure scanned books on the hawker's cart.
-- There he is, Lenehan said.
-- Wonder what he is buying, M'Coy said, glancing behind.
-- Leopoldo or the Bloom is on the Rye, Lenehan said.
-- He's dead nuts on sales, M'Coy said. I was with him one day and he bought a book from an old one in Liffey street for two bob. There were fine plates in it worth double the money, the stars and the moon and comets with long tails. Astronomy it was about.

Lenehan and M'Coy watch Bloom

The book M'Coy's talking about is Robert Ball's The Story of the Heavens (1890), which we came across earlier, when Bloom sees the timeball on the Ballast Office.

The Ballast Office Timeball from The Joyce Project

'Timeball on the ballast office is down. Dunsink time. Fascinating little book that is of sir Robert Ball's. Parallax. I never exactly understood. There's a priest. Could ask him. Par it's Greek: parallel, parallax.'

It's also in the catalogue of Bloom's books in Ithaca:

The Story of the Heavens by Sir Robert Ball (blue cloth).

This catalogue gives us all the chance to collect Bloom's library. I picked up a copy of Ball's book second hand, for £1.50, many years ago, so I will share the pictures of those comets with long tails.

Talk of comets' tails inspires Lenehan to begin his story:

Lenehan laughed.
-- I'll tell you a damn good one about comets' tails, he said. Come over in the sun.
They crossed to the metal bridge and went along Wellington quay by the river wall....
-- There was a big spread out at Glencree reformatory, Lenehan said eagerly. The annual dinner you know. Boiled shirt affair. The lord mayor was there, Val Dillon it was, and sir Charles Cameron and Dan Dawson spoke and there was music. Bartell D'Arcy sang and Benjamin Dollard.
-- I know, M'Coy broke in. My missus sang there once.
-- Did she? Lenehan said.....
-- But wait till I tell you, he said. Delahunt of Camden street had the catering and yours truly was chief bottlewasher. Bloom and the wife were there. Lashings of stuff we put up: port wine and sherry and curaçao to which we did ample justice. Fast and furious it was. After liquids came solids. Cold joints galore and mince pies.
-- I know, M'Coy said. The year the missus was there...
  
That's where Frank left us, cliff-hanging.  The story continues.

Lenehan linked his arm warmly.
-- But wait till I tell you, he said. We had a midnight lunch too after all the jollification and when we sallied forth it was blue o'clock the morning after the night before. Coming home it was a gorgeous winter's night on the Featherbed Mountain. Bloom and Chris Callinan were on one side of the car and I was with the wife on the other. We started singing glees and duets: Lo, the early beam of morning. She was well primed with a good load of Delahunt's port under her bellyband. Every jolt the bloody car gave I had her bumping up against me. Hell's delights! She has a fine pair, God bless her. Like that.
He held his caved hands a cubit from him, frowning:
-- I was tucking the rug under her and settling her boa all the time. Know what I mean?
His hands moulded ample curves of air. He shut his eyes tight in delight, his body shrinking, and blew a sweet chirp from his lips.
-- The lad stood to attention anyhow, he said with a sigh. She's a gamey mare and no mistake. Bloom was pointing out all the stars and the comets in the heavens to Chris Callinan and the jarvey: the great bear and Hercules and the dragon and the whole jingbang lot. But, by God, I was lost, so to speak, in the milky way. He knows them all, faith. At last she spotted a weeny weeshy one miles away. And what star is that, Poldy? says she. By God, she had Bloom cornered. That one, is it? says Chris Callinan, sure that's only what you might call a pinprick. By God, he wasn't far wide of the mark.
Lenehan stopped and leaned on the riverwall, panting with soft laughter.
-- I'm weak, he gasped.
M'Coy's white face smiled about it at instants and grew grave. Lenehan walked on again. He lifted his yachtingcap and scratched his hindhead rapidly. He glanced sideways in the sunlight at M'Coy.
-- He's a cultured allroundman, Bloom is, he said seriously. He's not one of your common or garden... you know... There's a touch of the artist about old Bloom.

M'Coy doesn't find this story funny or entertaining, which is why, after putting on a brief show of smiling, his face grows grave. M'Coy identifies with Bloom, looking up to him as more successful version of himself. He's been an advertising canvasser, like Bloom, and his wife is a singer too, as he reminds everyone he meets. Here's how he's described in Dubliners:

Mr. M'Coy had been at one time a tenor of some reputation. His wife, who had been a soprano, still taught young children to play the piano at low terms. His line of life had not been the shortest distance between two points and for short periods he had been driven to live by his wits. He had been a clerk in the Midland Railway, a canvasser for advertisements for The Irish Times and for The Freeman's Journal, a town traveller for a coal firm on commission, a private inquiry agent, a clerk in the office of the Sub-Sheriff, and he had recently become secretary to the City Coroner. Grace

So listening to Lenehan's story, M'Coy puts himself in the position of Bloom.

Lenehan realises his mistake, which is why he scratches his head and glances sideways at M'Coy. He then tries to repair the damage by speaking seriously of Bloom as a cultured all-round man.

All this is done with immense subtlety by Joyce, showing not telling, leaving it to the reader to work out the underlying interplay of emotions.  

There's wonderful irony in the next section, where we find that Bloom, this cultured all-round man, is browsing pornography!

He read where his finger opened.
-- All the dollarbills her husband gave her were spent in the stores on wondrous gowns and costliest frillies. For him! For Raoul!
Yes. This. Here. Try.
-- Her mouth glued on his in a luscious voluptuous kiss while his hands felt for the opulent curves inside her déshabillé.
Yes. Take this. The end.
-- You are late, he spoke hoarsely, eyeing her with a suspicious glare. The beautiful woman threw off her sabletrimmed wrap, displaying her queenly shoulders and heaving embonpoint. An imperceptible smile played round her perfect lips as she turned to him calmly.
Mr Bloom read again: The beautiful woman.
Warmth showered gently over him, cowing his flesh. Flesh yielded amid rumpled clothes. Whites of eyes swooning up. His nostrils arched themselves for prey. Melting breast ointments (For him! For Raoul!). Armpits' oniony sweat. Fishgluey slime (her heaving embonpoint!). Feel! Press! Crushed! Sulphur dung of lions!
Young! Young!
 

Sweets of Sin is one book you won't be able to track down, because Joyce is believed to have invented it.

PARALLAX

 

Robert Ball explains Parallax

'Timeball on the ballast office is down. Dunsink time. Fascinating little book that is of sir Robert Ball's. Parallax. I never exactly understood. There's a priest. Could ask him. Par it's Greek: parallel, parallax.'
Lotus Eaters

'Agendath is a waste land, a home of screechowls and the sandblind upupa. Netaim, the golden, is no more. And on the highway of the clouds they come, muttering thunder of rebellion, the ghosts of beasts. Huuh! Hark! Huuh! Parallax stalks behind and goads them, the lancinating lightnings of whose brow are scorpions.' 
Oxen of the Sun 

'our system plunging towards the constellation of Hercules: of the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars.'  
Ithaca

My old tutor, Charles Peake, in his brilliant book James Joyce: The Citizen and the Artist has a good discussion of parallax:

'The word 'parallax' (which Bloom failed to understand) recurs as a pointer to the nature of the book's vision and method; figuratively it means the apparent change in the nature, position or size of an object as a consequence in the nature, position and concerns of the observer or point of observation. The sense of the relativity of experience dominates Joyce's vision in Ulysses, and its representation made necessary the sudden and emphatic changes of manner and convention.'

This is why Joyce used so many different styles in the book, and why he shows the same events from multiple perspectives. So the shift of perspective from Lenehan describing Bloom as 'a cultured allround man' to Bloom reading a pornographic novel is a parallactic one.

The Glencree dinner, which Lenehan associates with Molly Bloom's breasts, is also remembered differently by both Bloom and Molly. Bloom recalls it as a happy time in his marriage:

'The Glencree dinner. Alderman Robert O'Reilly emptying the port into his soup before the flag fell, Bobbob lapping it for the inner alderman. Couldn't hear what the band played. For what we have already received may the Lord make us. Milly was a kiddy then. Molly had that elephantgrey dress with the braided frogs. Mantailored with self-covered buttons. She didn't like it because I sprained my ankle first day she wore choir picnic at the Sugarloaf. As if that. Old Goodwin's tall hat done up with some sticky stuff. Flies' picnic too. Never put a dress on her back like it. Fitted her like a glove, shoulder and hips. Just beginning to plump it out well. Rabbit pie we had that day. People looking after her.'  

And Molly Bloom in her final monologue thinks of Lenehan 'making free' with her after the Glencree dinner (reminded by Boylan's anger at his loss of money on the horse Lenehan tipped). She also recalls the tasty chicken, the lecherous glances of the Lord Mayor, Val Dillon, and she regrets not stealing the silver cutlery:

'swearing blazes because he lost 20 quid he said he lost over that outsider that won and half he put on for me on account of Lenehans tip cursing him to the lowest pits that sponger he was making free with me after the Glencree dinner coming back that long joult over the featherbed mountain after the lord Mayor looking at me with his dirty eyes Val Dillon that big heathen I first noticed him at dessert when I was cracking the nuts with my teeth I wished I could have picked every morsel of that chicken out of my fingers it was so tasty and browned and as tender as anything only for I didnt want to eat everything on my plate those forks and fishslicers were hallmarked silver too I wish I had some I could easily have slipped a couple into my muff when I was playing with them then always hanging out of them for money in a restaurant for the bit you put down your throat we have to be thankful for our mangy cup of tea itself as a great compliment ' 

The National Portrait Gallery has this photograph of Molly's dirty-eyed big heathen, Valentine Blake Dillon. He was Lord Mayor of Dublin in 1894-5, when the Glencree dinner took place. He had died just three months before Bloomsday 1904.