John Sullivan: 'long to lung over us, high topseasoarious!'

'Just out of kerryosity howlike is a Sullivan? It has the fortefaccia of a Markus Brutas, the wingthud of a spreadeagle, the body uniformed of a metropoliceman with the brass feet of a collared grand ....Hats off, primi assoluti! Send him canorious, long to lung over us, high topseasoarious!'   

From a Banned Writer to a Banned Singer*

Here's Joyce describing the voice of his favourite singer,  the Cork-born Franco-Irish tenor John Sullivan, king of powerful high notes.  Although he liked to compare his own voice with John McCormack's lyric tenor, Joyce felt that Sullivan's heroic tenor soared above both of them. Mutual admirers, Joyce and Sullivan were close friends and drinking companions. In the Wake, the singer appears as 'Jean Souslevin' (John under the wine/vine).

Joyce first learned of Sullivan in a letter from his brother, Stanislaus, who met the singer in Trieste, and found him reading A Copy of A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man.  This predisposed Joyce to like Sullivan. When he later heard him sing, in Tannhauser at the Paris Opera in October 1929, he was overwhelmed by Sullivan's powerful voice. Joyce developed an obsession with promoting the singer, who he felt had been unfairly treated by the opera establishment.

'J.J. is now all Sullivan....What wirepulling!....He does no other work apparently – has done none for a month, than to boost Sullivan in whom he sees what he would like to have been. Each new arrival at the house has to hear the story of the mistreatment of Sullivan at great length.'

Stuart Gilbert Diary 29 December 1929, Reflections on James Joyce, 1993, p15

Joyce,  47 years old when he first heard Sullivan, was going through a mid-life crisis. He discovered the singer while he was suffering from a serious writing block – partly caused by a deterioration in his eyesight and also by the closure, for economic reasons, of transition. He no longer had an outlet for his writing, and could not face the huge effort of beginning the still unwritten Book Two of the Wake.

'I have been sleeping sixteen hours a day for the past three weeks incapable
of thinking, writing, reading or speaking.'  

To Harriet Shaw Weaver, 22 November 1929, Letters 1, 286

John Sullivan

'When I ceased contributing to transition I felt a sudden kind of drop as I was determined not to try to attack the second part in such an ill-equipped state....In this frame of mind I first heard Sullivan singing and for the last four and a half months I have been working incessantly to try to get him past the Italian ring which protects the London, New York and Chicago opera houses.....All this involved a tremendous amount of telephoning, interviewing, newspaper hunting, theatre-going, entertaining and being entertained.....No doubt I may have...made myself ridiculous in the eyes of soberthinking people, but I do not care very much, for it is incomparably the greatest human voice I have ever heard, beside which Chaliapine is braggadocio and McCormack insignificant. On one of the evenings he sang when Miss Beach and Miss Monnier were present I said...that since I had come to Paris I had been introduced (ie by them) to a great number of recognised geniuses, without specifying names, in literature, music, painting and sculpture, and that for me all these persons were...perhapses, but that there was no perhaps about Sullivan's voice....I have always insisted that I know little about literature, less about music, nothing about painting and less than nothing about sculpture; but I do know something about singing I think.'

To Harriet Shaw Weaver,  18 March 1930, Letters I 290-2

I recently had the pleasure of having lunch with the Joycean Arnold Goldman, a near Sussex neighbour of mine. Arnold told me about a documentary he made in 1972 for Radio 3 about Joyce's Sullivan obsession. He interviewed Lucie Léon, Maria Jolas, Philippe Soupault and Nino Frank who talked about this extraordinary time in Joyce's career. 

Shortly before her death, Lucie Léon, wife of Joyce's assistant Paul Léon, told Arnold that they didn't share Joyce's enthusiasm for Sullivan's voice:

'Joyce had brought us the two O'Sullivan records that he liked best – one was Celeste Aida and the second one was the famous aria out of William Tell. We heard that over and over again, because when Mr Joyce used to come here to work, after work was over, he would say, 'Supposing we hear a little Sullivan,' and we would put on the Sullivan records. Now I have a confession to make. The Sullivan voice was so big and so booming – we never told Mr Joyce, but we put a sweater and a muffler into the machine so that at least the voice would become a little smoother.' 

''Send him Canorious' – Arnold Goldman writes about James Joyce's 'Sullivanising'',  The Listener, 3 August 1972.

'Wilhelm Tell and Celeste AIda on the phonograph made even more noise than Sullivan did on the stage, and we played them exclusively for Joyce. He would sit drinking in ''the voice'' from the depths of the huge dilapidated leather armchair which we kept around the house because I liked it and because Joyce regarded it as 'the only comfortable chair in the house.''

Lucie Léon, James Joyce and Paul L. Léon: The Story of a Friendship, 1950. p21

'Don't you think the most important thing in a tenor is that he should sing loud?' 

Joyce quoted by Victor Gollancz, Journey Towards Music: A Memoir, 1965, p23

Here's one of the records Joyce made the Léons play.

ARNOLD IN GUILLAUME TELL

 

'Joyce once remarked, 'I have been through the score of Guillaume Tell, and I discover that Sullivan sings 456 G's, 93 A flats, 92 A's, 54 B flats, 15 B's, 19 C's and two C sharps. Nobody else can do it.''

Herbert Gorman, James Joyce 1941, p 343

Arnold in Rossini's William Tell is one of the most demanding tenor roles in opera. In 1829, when Rossini wrote it, it was usual for tenors to sing high notes using a falsetto 'head voice'.  But in 1837, Gilbert-Louis Duprez, a young French singer, caused a sensation when he sang the highest notes in full 'chest voice'.  After Duprez, everyone expected tenors to use their chest voice (although Rossini thought that Duprez sounded like a capon having its throat cut!).

Gilbert-Louis Duprez by Disdéri

Here's the tenor Carlos Barcenas, who also sings Arnold, showing the two ways of singing a high C.

'Tenor high C’s are scattered throughout the opera literature. Sometimes tenors transpose the aria down slightly or drop an octave, other times they fake it and edge into falsetto voice, where it is easier to sing. Just as often, they hit it, and hold it, and that moment is one of the most exciting in an opera house. It is moments like those when opera, in addition to the aesthetic joys and emotional satisfactions, can seem like a spectator sport or a circus high-wire act.'

Daniel Wakin 'The Note that Makes us Weep' in the New York Times

Those were the moments that James Joyce went to the opera for, and Sullivan always provided them. Listen to him here, singing Arnold's big aria.



As part of his Sullivanising campaign, Joyce got friends to write articles in the newspapers. You can read an entertaining one, by the irish poet Thomas MacGreevy, online: He describes witnessing a 'charming French tenor' attempting the role of Arnold, and finding it so demanding that 'he had to go to bed for three weeks after.'

'The next time the opera was sung Sullivan took the role of Arnold — and without cuts or transpositions. It is said to include heaven knows how many B flats and C naturals and actually two C sharps. But the extraordinary thing about Sullivan's taking of these notes was that he sang them without any sign of effort whatever, with full musical tone, and as if he could, if he chose, go as much higher as any Rossini that ever was, might want him to.... '

Thomas MacGreevy, 'A County Kerry Operatic Tenor', The Irish Statesman, 1 February 1930
 
Here's Sylvia Beach, who organised a Sullivan 'claque' for Joyce at these Tell performance:

'He attended every performance of Guillaume Tell, applauded Sullivan exuberantly from his seat in the front row, and got up to call him back many times. The little old lady ushers with their black lace caps joined in the applause, Joyce having tipped them so generously that they would have applauded anybody, and Joyce's friends all over the house formed a 'claque'....Joyce filled the theater with Sullivan's admirers, and of course with his own admirers....
 Joyce's rather excessive technique at the Paris Opera began to do more harm than good, I fear. For one thing, it got on the nerves of the director...Sullivan was alarmed when he found himself practically eliminated from the programs. We would call up the box office and book seats for Guillaume Tell, maybe a whole box. But we made it clear that it was Sullivan we wished to hear as Tell. And if we were told it was not to be Sullivan, we canceled the booking. This happened so often that the box office got riled and stopped answering the telephone.
  With Joyce, Sullivan's cause became an obsession, and the more he failed the more he persisted in his efforts. Mrs Joyce grew so tired of it that she forbade the mention of Sullivan's name at home.'

Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare and Company,  p190

Leon Edel has a vivid description of what it was like to be a member of the 'claque'. I like this especially because it's a rare account of Joyce being observed as a public celebrity, by someone who didn't then know him personally:

Leon Edel

'I saw James Joyce for the first time at the Paris Opera in 1929. I went to the opera because I knew he would be there and I wanted to have a good look at him.  From my eighteenth year, when I had obtained a copy of the banned Ulysses, he had been my personal cultural hero ....My reason for going to the opera, aside from curiosity about Joyce himself, was to respond to a call he had issued through Miss Beach. Odysseus wanted all hands on deck to applaud an Irish tenor called John Sullivan....At any rate, Joyce was organising an informal claque, and I made myself a member of it. We paid for our own tickets. I remember I went to the box office the morning the seat sale opened, and waited a couple of hours in line to obtain a good cheap seat. My student's purse contained only a few francs, but we were not to clap for our supper....After all I was to have not only the singing of Sullivan (who had to be good, if Joyce said so) but a glimpse of the Great Man himself. It was well worth the price of a couple of Latin Quarter meals....I arrived early and watched from my advantageous position....And then suddenly, at the last minute, he was there; I saw him walking down the left aisle....The first glimpse was a bit of a shock; Joyce walked like a blindman. He looked straight ahead of him, with the rigidity of sightlessness and leaning on his cane...He was immaculately dressed – black tie, boiled shirt, and the famous latinquarter hat....John Sullivan finally appeared. He was in elaborate costume and had a tenorial embonpoint. Joyce didn't let him get out a single note. He began to applaud as soon as Sullivan was sighted, and we obediently joined and stopped the show. Sullivan had his recognition then and there, as if it were the final curtain....As a matter of fact, he did have a fine voice, but it had sung better days....He could go up very high; he sustained the notes beautifully. He was however a stiff, heavy, overcostumed figure on the stage....It was when Sullivan had finished his first aria that I heard Joyce – clear, bell-like high. The banned writer sang out, right up to the chandelier, 'Bravo! Bravo!' I can hear him still....We brought down the house....Sullivan must have had more applause than he'd ever reaped in all his life; and always there came that splendid lyrical 'Bravo!' which seemed to soar high, high up to the great frescoed ceiling. At the end, Joyce stood at his seat waving and cheering as if he were leading conquering troops to a great victory.'

Leon Edel, 'The Genius and the Injustice Collector: A Memoir of James Joyce' in  The American Scholar Vol. 49, No. 4 (Autumn 1980)

   

COVENT GARDEN

On Twitter, Patrick Hawe posted a letter written by Joyce's 'biografiend',  Herbert Gorman, to the Dublin journalist Patrick Corrigan. He talks about Joyce's efforts to get Sullivan a booking at London's Royal Opera House in Covent Garden.

Oliver St John Gogarty (the model for Buck Mulligan) claims that Joyce did get Sullivan a booking to sing at a Royal Command Performance in Covent Garden. According to Gogarty, it was judged a failure (though Gogarty also calls Sullivan 'Denis' and describes him as Irish-American):

'Before half the first act was over, Their Majesties graciously rose and left the royal box and Covent Garden. What an outrage and insult both to Ireland and America! ....Joyce consequently came rushing from Paris. He entered Covent Garden Theatre in the middle of a performance and asked to see the manager. He was abusive and loud-mouthed. Margaret Sheridan was told to calm him; but he would listen to no entreaties. 'You call this an opera? It is a W.C. (water closet),' he shouted. I am indebted to Miss Sheridan for this account'

Oliver Gogarty, Intimations, 1950 (from the Music in the Works of James Joyce website)

Sullivan and Joyce

When Joyce died in 1941, Le Petit Parisien carried an interview with Sullivan in which he paid tribute to his biggest supporter:

 

'On the way to Montmartre, near a wood fire, a man deeply in thought rereads letters, relives souvenirs. It is John Sullivan, the celebrated tenor; unforgettable interpreter of Guillaume Tell, friend of the author of Ulysses....John O'Sullivan sighs, revives the fire that threatens to die, and remembers with emotion: 'To help a friend, he would have neglected his own work for years....The world lost a great writer, but nobody lost more than me. I will never see my friend again.''

Le Petit Parisien, January 1941, quoted by Francois Nouvion, Asile Hereditaire: The Life and Career of John Sullivan, 2012


In my next post, I will share the most outrageous publicity stunt in Joyce's whole Sullivan campaign...



*Tim Finnegan has put the whole text, with notes, of From a Banned Writer to a Banned Singer, on his excellent origins of Finnegans Wake blog here.

Marcia Farquhar reads 'Yes'

Here's a new film, by Tracy Drew, of the artist Marcia Farquhar reading the closing pages of Ulysses, the thoughts of Molly Bloom before she falls asleep. It was filmed at Tanya Peixoto's wonderful bookartbookshop in Pitfield Street, London. This is the place to go for artists' books and small press publications, especially books like these beauties from Atlas Press. 

The bookshop is also the headquarters of the London Institute of 'Pataphysics, Alfred Jarry's 'science of imaginary solutions' which is why you can see a painting of Jarry on the wall in the film's opening.

There's a tradition in the bookshop that Marcia performs the complete final chapter of Ulysses on Bloomsday. Tanya provides Banbury cakes (in honour of Bloom's gift to the seagulls by the Liffey).

Wait. Those poor birds.
He halted again and bought from the old applewoman two Banbury cakes for a penny and broke the brittle paste and threw its fragments down into the Liffey. See that? The gulls swooped silently two, then all, from their heights, pouncing on prey. Gone. Every morsel.
Aware of their greed and cunning he shook the powdery crumb from his hands. They never expected that.

Lisa and I have been fans of Marcia's work ever since 2005, when we came upon her performing her Punch and Judy show, 'The Cabinet of Horribly Violent Glove Puppets', at the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill.
 

This gave us the idea to become Punch and Judy for our 2012 Christmas card. 

Marcia's work often involves story telling, which she is able to do spellbindingly and at epic length,.  For the 30th anniversary of the National Revew of Live Art, in Glasgow in 2010, we saw her give a 30 hour talk, 'ruminating about the events of the last 30 years'.

Here she is, 28 hours in, wearing an 'arte povera' homemade fur ball.  

She played records on a dansette, including 'Puppet on a String', illustrating a story about trying to get Sandie Shaw's autograph. Later, she put on the Pistols 'God save the Queen' while talking about Stuart Brisley who would play the National Anthem repeatedly at the ICA, to annoy audiences who were then expected to stand for it.  

'There are hours of anecdotes, spattered with a thousand quotable lines ('I was accused unfalrly of being a shaman and went into a lavatory and cried', and, referring to Stuart Brisley, 'He's the one who sat in offal and vomited from the top of a tower')'

Dorothy Max Prior, Total Theatre, Summer 2010

Someone brought in a load of balloons from another performance and gave them to her.  

Lisa suggested, 'We could stamp on them!'
Marcia replied, 'Or we could suck them!'

Which she then did....

She didn't think it was working and said, 'Perhaps it's not helium!' - which came out in a squeaky voice.

At the very end,  she played 'God save the Queen' again, and we all stood and cheered.

'Farquhar's stage presence is difficult to pin down. Her performances aren't about stories or props, but a magical charisma that radiates between the past she describes and the audience in the here and now.'  Mary Patterson

Here's a photo I took at another performance, 'Recalibrating Hope', at the Chelsea Theatre in 2015, which Lisa reviewed here. 

Until the end of this month, CGP London is celebrating Marcia with Difficuλt, the first 'non survey of her work.' Tracy Drew's Yes film is part of The Dog's Bolex, a group of videos made in collaboration with artist film-makers, which are being shown in the gallery.

'Works from Farquhar’s extensive ‘repertoire’ from the 1980s to now will be re-imagined, nestled alongside recent and new work created for the occasion. Actions and performances will occur throughout the show, the artist will most certainly be present; appearing to show and tell as the tour guide of her own relics via spontaneous actions, situations, interruptions and habitations on Fridays and Sundays throughout the exhibition.'

We saw one of Marcia's performances at CGP yesterday, when we found her resurrecting the disused fountain of the park lido for an audience of pataphysicians and passers by.

  
Here she is in an ascension pose 

'Fountain' was inspired by the old knitted doll toilet roll covers, by Winnie in Samel Backett's Happy Days, and the fact that she likes to spout.

 A high wind was blowing, and Marcia hates heights.

She said, as a young woman, she didn't understand Happy Days until her mother told her, 'I do - I'm up to my waist already!'

 
Read all about Difficuλt here.

At Trinity Church I Met My Doom

Here's a glimpse of the lost world of Victorian Music Hall. Tom Costello, in 1934, performs 'At Trinity Church I Met My Doom', a song he made famous in 1894. 

Joyce gives us his own version of this on p 102 of Finnegans Wake.  

Sold him her lease of ninenineninetee,
Tresses undresses so dyedyedaintee,
Goo, the groot gudgeon, gulped it all.
Hoo was the C. O. D.?
Bum!

At Island Bridge she met her tide.
Attabom, attabom, attabombomboom!
The Fin had a flux and his Ebba a ride.
Attabom, attabom, attabombomboom!
We’re all up to the years in hues and cribies.
That’s what she’s done for wee!
Woe!

it's only when you hear the music that you can understand the line 'Attabom, attabom, attabombomboom!' It's the orchestra's sinister accompaniment to the line 'At Trinity church I met my doom'. Listen to it at 1.13 above. 'Bum!' is another note in the song.

The song was written by Fred Gilbert, better known for 'The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo', which makes four appearances in the Wake.  Constantine Curran remembered Joyce singing the Monte Carlo song on Sunday evenings in 1903-4 at the Sheehys.

'His acquaintance with the Dublin music-hall and with the repertoire of the entertainers who ran one-man shows was prodigious. I find in letters passing between us in 1937 that his interest in Ashcroft, Wheatley, Val Vousden the elder, Percy French, and their peers was still unquenched, and that I could ransack the music shops for them and the libretti of old Dublin pantomimes without satiating it. This appetite was independent of their special value to him as raw material. His father had a quite exceptional familiarity with all this vernacular undergrowth of song...'

Costantine Curran, James Joyce Remembered, 1968, p42  

Joyce might have seen Costello perform his song at Dublin's main music hall, Dan Lowrey's Empire Theatre of Varieties in Sycamore Street. It's now the beautiful Olympia Theatre.

'They passed Dan Lowry's musichall where Marie Kendall, charming soubrette, smiled on them from a poster a dauby smile. 

Going down the path of Sycamore street beside the Empire musichall Lenehan showed M'Coy how the whole thing was.' 

'Wandering Rocks'

Tom Costello had an outlandish stage costume, seeming to comprise one enormous right buttock, though in the film he says 'No wonder I've got the hump'. You can see it in this print from the V&A.

Copyright of the V&A

Looking at him you feel tempted to respond on behalf of his wife: 'You're not much of a catch yourself!'

Copyright of the V&A

I found another version of the song in the libretto of the 1894 pantomime of Cinderella at the Theatre Royal Brighton.  Here it's been turned into a duet between Baron and Baroness Hardup. I love the description of the ugly sisters at the end.

In the Wake, the song marks a shift of subject in the middle of Book One. The opening chapters deal with the fall and disgrace of HCE. On p102, Joyce brings on his wife and defender, Anna Livia Plurabelle, who is also the River Liffey. Hers is the second part of Book One.

Just before the song, we say goodbye to HCE, who is now entombed:

'let him rest, thou wayfarre, and take no gravespoil from him! Neither mar his mound!...But there’s a little lady waiting and her name is A.L.P. And you’ll agree. She must be she. For her holden heirheaps hanging down her back....Then who but Crippled-with-Children would speak up for Dropping-with-Sweat?' 102.20
 
This is followed by the song, which introduces Anna Livia.

SOLD HIM HER LEASE OF NINININENITEE

Sold him her lease of ninenineninetee,
Tresses undresses so dyedyedaintee,
Goo, the groot gudgeon, gulped it all.
Hoo was the C. O. D.?
Bum!

She sold him her lease of 9-9-90 - 999 years?  There's also HCE's guilty stammer in 'ninenineninetee' and 'dyedyedainty'.

Her hair, let down, dyed and dainty.  This is Anna Livia's famous 'saffron strumans of hair...that was deepdark and ample like this red bog at sundown.' 203.24. 

'First she let her hair fal and down it flussed to her feet its teviots winding coils.' 206.29

Anna's hair was modelled on that of Livia Schmidt (Svevo), which you can see a photograph of in the Museo Sveviano in Trieste.

Livia Svevo, courtesy of Museo Sveviano, Trieste

Joyce told an Italian journalist that Livia Svevo had given both her name and her hair to the heroine of his book: 

'They say I have immortalized Svevo, but I've also immortalized the tresses of Signora Svevo. These were long and reddish-blond. My sister who used to see them let down told me about them. The river at Dublin passes dye-houses and so has reddish water. So I have playfully compared these two things in the book I'm writing. A lady in it will have the tresses which are really Signora Svevo's.'

This is quoted by Ellmann, who gives the source as 'a clipping in Signora Livia Svevo's papers'.  So the Dublin dye houses are there in 'dyedyedaintee'.  

Has anyone else found a reference to these dye works staining the Liffey red?

Goo, the groot gudgeon, gulped it all.

Hoo was the C.O.D.

That's Joyce's version of this bit of the song:

I like a lamb believed it all 

I was an M - U - G

'Goo' is Anglo-Irish slang for a fool. Gudgeon are fish easy to catch, and so in slang a gudgeon is someone easily duped. C.O.D. is cash on delivery, but cod is also a fish and slang for playing a trick on someone.  HCE is a male fish swimming up the female river, gulping its water/hair and also a great fool easily duped.

In the original song, the lyric goes 'Like to salmon I was speared'.

This allows me to share one of my favourite quotes about the Wake, from Robert H Boyle:

'Fish and fishing, fly-fishing in particular, constitute the major theme in the ''Wake,'' as Joyceans call it. The evidence that I have discovered is so overwhelming that the ''Wake'' must be considered as belonging in great part, albeit a bizarre part, to angling literature.' 'You Spigotty Anglease?' The New York Times

Island Bridge was orginally Sarah's Bridge, after the Countess of Westmoreland

At Island Bridge she met her tide.

Island Bridge is the point where the Liffey becomes tidal. In her final monologue, as she flows out of Dublin, Anna Livia meets the sea at Island Brdge:

'Sea, sea! Here, weir, reach, island, bridge.' 626.07
 
Attabom, attabom, attabombomboom!
The Fin had a flux and his Ebba a ride.
Attabom, attabom, attabombomboom!

The Fin and his Ebba are HCE (Finn MacCool and a fish) and ALP, and there's the ebb and flow of the river. Maybe also suggestions of HCE having diarrhoea (flux) and ALP having sex (a ride).

Apart from matching the rhythm of the song, Joyce here is paying tribute to Ebba Atterbom, who translated A Portrait into Swedish in 1921.  Her Swedish wikipedia article quotes Joyce's song.

Ebba Atterbom, from wikipedia.

According to Bodils' blog, Joyce and Atterbom exchanged several letters, in which he pretended to misunderstand her first name and called her Edda, after the old Norse poems.

We’re all up to the years in hues and cribies.
That’s what she’s done for wee!
Woe!

We're up to our ears/ the years in hue and cries - the mob chasing HCE – and cry babies in cribs - ALP's 111 children.

The internal bulletin of the Royal Irish Constabulary

I'd love to read any other interpretations of this song.

The chapter over, we turn the page and find the Anna Livia section beginning with this lovely invocation:

'In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!'  104.01

 

We get the song again elsewhere in the Wake.

'At Baggotty's Bend He Bumped His Bride.' 71.12 ('His Bride' is missing in the published text)

 

'A Trinity judge will crux your boom. Pat is the man for thy.' 326.04

 

'at Kennedy's kiln she kned her dough, back of her bake for me, buns!' 498.19

 

'in trinity huts they met my dame, pick of their poke for me' 548.12

'On limpidy marge I've made me hoom. Park and a pub for me.'  624.15