The Cad with a Pipe

'They tell the story...how one happygogusty Ides-of-April morning...ages and ages after the alleged misdemeanour when the tried friend of all creation, tigerwood roadstaff to his stay, was billowing across the wide expanse of our greatest park in his caoutchouc kepi and great belt and hideinsacks and his blaufunx fustian and ironsides jackboots and Bhagafat gaiters and his rubberised inverness, he met a cad with a pipe.'  35.01-11

This is Earwicker's encounter in the Phoenix Park with the cad with a pipe, a meeting that sets in motion the 'plot' of Finnegans Wake. The cad greets HCE, in Gaelic, and asks him the time. Earwicker takes the encounter as an attack, and fears 'being hurled into eternity right then, plugged by a softnosed bullet from the sap.' 'Quick on the draw' Earwicker pulls out his pocket watch and is about to give the time when the clock strikes midday. He then launches into a defence of his character, stammering that 'that there is not one tittle of truth, allow me to tell you, in that purest of fibfib fabrications.' 

The cad goes home and tells his wife 'as many of the bigtimer’s verbaten words which he could balbly call to memory'. She then tells an 'overspoiled priest', who is then overheard giving 'a slightly varied version' of it. And so it goes on until HCE's reputation is destroyed by a deluge of gossip.

This is based on a real encounter that Joyce's father had in the Phoenix Park, which Joyce told Frank Budgen was 'the basis' of his book. Yet there is no definitive account of what happened.  

PADRAIC COLUM'S VERSION

One version is given by Joyce's friend, Padraic Colum. In 1929, Colum helped Joyce prepare 'Haveth Childers Everywhere', for publication. This is another self-defence from HCE, where the cad reappears at the beginning:

'I protest there is luttrelly not one teaspoonspill of evidence at bottomlie to my babad....The caca cad!' 534.09,

'I see (Joyce) now standing in the middle of his apartment, laughing reminiscently because of a word that has come up. 'The caca cad!' H.C.E, cries, denouncing an accuser. 'A cad on a bicycle' had asked Joyce's father for a match in the Phoenix Park. Relating the incident when he got home, his father had used the word 'cad' abusively. But what did 'cad' mean?  A cadet, a younger son. And why should the 'younger son' amount to a term of abuse? 'A cad on a bicycle' – Joyce was in a convulsion of laughter as he repeated it. Was the comedy in the fact that his father should be enraged because a young man on a bicyce addressed him? Or was it that the dark expanse of garden a man asking for a light, the ferocious reaction of the one accosted, suggested the comic side of a myth?'

Mary and Padraic Colum, Our Friend James Joyce, 1958, p159

FRANK BUDGEN'S VERSION

Here's another version, from Frank Budgen:

'Commenting on a precis of Le Fanu's book I made for him in 1937, Joyce wrote, referring to the spot in Phoenix Park where the fierce Dangerfield struck down Sturk: 'The encounter between my father and a tramp (the basis of my book) actually took place in that part of the park.''

Joyce's 'Chapters of Going Forth by Day' in James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses, OUP, 1972, p330, 

So Colum's young man on a bicycle has become a tramp - which is why I've put a picture of W.H.Davies, the Super-Tramp, at the top. But have you ever seen a tramp on a bicycle? 

'Le Fanu's book' is Sheridan Le Fanu's House by the Churchyard, one of only four books, according to Gorman's biography, which made up Joyce's father's 'library'. 

In the book, Doctor Sturk is stunned and left for dead by Dangerfield, the book's villain. Here's the moment when Dangerfield, after the assault, finds a crowd gathered around Sturk's house:

'There was an indescribable something about the group which indicated horror and excitement. Dangerfield quickened his pace, and arrived just as the adjutant rode out.
Saluting both as he advanced, Dangerfield asked—
'Nothing amiss, I hope, gentlemen?'
'The surgeon here's been found murdered in the park!' answered Lowe.
'Hey—Sturk?' said Dangerfield.
'Yes,' said the adjutant: 'this boy here says he's found him in the Butcher's Wood.'
'The Butcher's Wood!—why, what the plague brought him there?' exclaimed Dangerfield.
''Tis his straight road from Dublin across the park,' observed the magistrate.'  

Sherdian Le Fanu, The House by the Churchyard, Chapter 53

In a later chapter, the congregation in Chapelizod church see Sturk's place empty:

'many, as from time to time the dismal gap opened silent before their eyes, felt their thoughts wander and lead them away in a strange and dismal dance, among the nodding hawthorns in the Butcher's Wood, amidst the damps of night, where Sturk lay in his leggings, and powder and blood, and the beetle droned by unheeding, and no one saw him save the guilty eyes that gleamed back as the shadowy shape stole swiftly away among the trees.'  

Sherdian Le Fanu, The House by the Churchyard, Chapter 56

This assault is in the Wake:

'dangerfield circling butcherswood where fireworker oh flaherty engaged a nutter of castlemallards and ah for archer stunned’s turk.' 80.08

Thanks to this, we know that Joyce's father's encounter took place in the Butcher's Wood, a remote part of the park in the north west, by Castleknock. It's on the left here.

Brendan Nolan, in his Phoenix Park: A History and Guidebook (2005) says that the wood was a notorious hideout of robbers. It got its name because butchers from the City markets would gather here to settle quarrels, which were fought out in ritual ways using the tools of the trade.

RICHARD ELLMANN'S VERSION

There's yet another version of the encounter in Richard Ellmann's biography. Here it becomes an actual attempted robbery, which took place when John Joyce was working as a rates collector: 

'The bravery he had once displayed in defending his collector's pouch against an assailant in the Phoenix Park was forgotten, to be remembered only in Finnegans Wake.' 

Ellmann 1982, p35

Ellmann, as so often, gives no source for his story.

JOHN WYSE JACKSON AND PETER COSTELLO'S VERSION

In their biography John Stanislaus Joyce, John Wyse Jackson and Peter Costello expand on Ellmann's story. They give some alternative versions of 'whatever it was that happened to (John Joyce) if anything did at all':

It's shame that, like Ellmann, they don't give any sources. Peter Costello repeats the story in his book The Years of Growth, where he places the robbery outside the Viceregal Lodge near the site of the Phoenix Park murders, at the bottom right on this map – quite a distance from the Butchers Wood.

So we have many different stories proliferating, and no definitive account. The funny thing is that this is exactly what happens to the story of the encounter with the cad in Finnegans Wake. The big difference is that Joyce gives us the line of transmission, as the cad's story is passed on by various rumour mongers until Hosty turns it into the scurrillous Ballad of Persse O'Reilly.

'Therewith was released in that kingsrick of Humidia a poisoning volume of cloud barrage indeed. Yet all they who heard or redelivered are now with that family of bards and Vergobretas himself and the crowd of Caraculacticors as much no more as be they not yet now or had they then notever been.' 48.04

Thanks to Ian Garvie for sharing Charles Peake& Company's performance of Hosty's ballad.