The Dream of H.C.Earwicker?

A scene from Passages from Finnegans Wake 

'The Dream of H.C. Earwicker' is the title of Edmund Wilson's review of Finnegans Wake, published in The New Republic on 28 June 1939, and later reprinted in The Wound and the Bow. 

Wilson was the first critic to argue that Joyce's book represented Earwicker's dream, at first in a 1929 article:

'The hero of the night's sleep in question is, we gather, a man named H. C. Earwicker, a Norwegian or descendant of Norwegians, living in Dublin....We are introduced, at the very beginning, into Earwicker's drowsing consciousness...'

Edmund Wilson, 'James Joyce', The New Republic, 18 December 1929

Wilson based his theory on the earliest chapters of the book which had been published in transition. At this time, Joyce hadn't written books two and four.  The article, reprinted in Axel's Castle in 1931, influenced many later readers.

In his 1939 review, Wilson added detail to his theory, arguing that the book had a 'realistic foundation' which he described at length:

'Let me try to establish some of the most important facts which provide the realistic foundation for this immense poem of sleep.  The hero of Finnegans Wake is a man of Scandinavian blood...Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, who keeps a pub called the Bristol in Dublin.  He is somewhere between fifty and sixty, blond and ruddy, with a walrus moustache, very strong but of late years pretty fat. When embarrassed, he has a tendency to stutter...he is married to a woman named Ann, a former salesgirl, who is more or less illiterate and whose maiden name seems to have begun with Mac. They are both Protestants in a community of Catholics, he an Episcopalian and she a Presbyterian...It is a Saturday night in summer, after a disorderly evening in the pub....Earwicker has been drinking off and on all day and has perhaps gone to bed a little drunk. At any rate, his night is troubled. At first he dreams about the day before....'

Having decided that the book is happening in Earwicker's sleeping mind, Wilson complains that a Dublin publican could not be having a dream like this!

Edmund Wilson

'We are continually being distracted from identifying and following Earwicker, the humble proprietor of a public house, who is to encompass the whole microcosm of the dream, by the intrusion of all sorts of elements – foreign languages, literary allusions, historical information – which could not possibly be in Earwicker's mind....We are in the first place asked to believe that a man like H.C.Earwicker would seize every possible pretext provided by his house and its location to include in a single night's dream a large number of historical and legendary characters. And is it not pretty far-fetched to assume that Earwicker's awareness of the life of Swift or the Crimean War is really to be accurately conveyed in terms of the awareness of Joyce, who has acquired a special knowledge of these subjects? Also, what about the references to the literary life in Paris and to the book itself as Work in Progress, which take us right out of the mind of Earwicker and into the mind of Joyce?'

Where were we 'in the first place asked to believe' any of this?

I read all this as a convincing argument that Finnegans Wake is not the dream of Earwicker.

Much of Wilson's description* of the Earwickers is taken from Bk III chapter 4. This leads to another complaint about Joyce's incompetence as a writer:

'In Finnegans Wake we are not supplied with any objective data until the next to last chapter....It seems to me a serious defect that we do not really understand what is happening till we have almost finished the book.'

*Wilson has taken the name of the pub, the Bristol, from the Prankquean episode: 'And where did she come but to the bar of his bristolry'. 21.33. In fact, the Wake pub is more usually the Mullingar Inn.

'A WHOLE HOUSEHOLD DRIFTING ON THE WAVES OF SLEEP'

Wilson's argument was quickly accepted by many Wake readers. In 1931, the French critic Louis Gillet had argued that Joyce's Work in Progress was a collective dream by all the characters:

'The author has placed the characters of his poem in a pub on the river's bank....and these characters represent all human history!....The world and its history become the dream of these characters....The last part, drafted but still unknown, I believe will relate the family's sleep and dreams....a whole family, a whole household drifting on the waves of sleep.'

'James Joyce and his new novel', 15 August 1931

In 1940, Gillet revised his opinion, accepting Wilson's argument. He even added to the book's 'objective data' with a picture on the dreamer's bedroom wall:

'It goes without saying that the action is nil, reduced only a ghost of action occurring in the mind of a sleeping man. This slumbering hero is a Dublin pub-keeper, proprietor of a tavern of low repute in the vicinity of Phoenix Park. We learn on page 559 that in the room where he sleeps there is a framed colour-print of St Michael and the dragon....The man's name is Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker.'

'The extraordinary adventure of James Joyce', 15 December 1940

A BRANCH TAPPING ON A WINDOW

The Earwicker dream theory was further developed in 1944 with Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson's A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake. They invented a branch tapping on the sleeping Earwicker's window, intruding on his dream. This is first mentioned in a footnote to the word 'Tip' in the Museyroom scene:

'The repetition throughout Finnegans Wake of the word 'tip' finally turns out to be a dream transformation of the sound of a branch knocking against HCE's window as he sleeps beside his wife in the upper room. This branch is the finger of Mother Nature, in her desiccated aspect, bidding for attention.'

A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Viking Press, 1964, p 41

They don't explain how or where Tip 'finally turns out' to be a branch. 

The branch is not mentioned again until they reach Book III Chapter 4, the chapter which gave Wilson his 'objective data'. Here Campbell and Robinson have made Wilson's summer dream a midwinter one.:

'It is the morning after the night of the winter solstice. A dry leaf still clinging to the tree outside the window has been scratching at the panel; and this sound has drawn the inexhaustible dream from the depths of the psyche...'

A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Viking Press, 1964, p 325

I find this baffling, for the 'Tip' motif does not appear anywhere in this chapter (You can read all 39 appearances of this motif in fweet).  The only mention of a leaf is the description of the sleeping Issy as 'like some losthappy leaf' (556.19).

 

THE DATE OF EARWICKER'S DREAM

Let's call this approach, which assumes that Joyce has created a level of waking reality outside the dream, the 'branch tapping on a window'.  

In  'The Date of Earwicker's Dream', a baffling essay published in Twelve and a Tilly (1966), Nathan Halper argued that Earwicker's dream was taking place on a particular date in history. He decided on 18 March 1922, a Holy Saturday near the Spring equinox.

Halper presents his arguments as a series of numbered assertions.e.g.

'15...The phrase felix culpa keeps running through Earwicker's drean, This is from the hymn Exultet....

  This hymn is chanted on Holy Saturday'

Yet Halper can't resist including evidence which undermines his theory: Finnegans Wake refers to events which happened after 1922 and many dates apart from 18 March.

'2...It is not easy to believe that, in the 1920s, he was working on a dream that was going to be dreamed in 1930. Nor is it likely that, once he settled on a day, he kept revising it, moving it into the future, altering it, year by year, every time he thought of a new allusion....

11. If, at some moment, Mr Earwicker is thinking of a particular day, this – by itself – does not make it the day on which he happens to be dreaming....It is conceivable that...(Joyce) has managed to hint at every day of the year. 

12. This is only partly for the purposes of misdirection.

  He has a second reason. It is every dream and he's taking steps to show that it happens every night.

  The universal, however, has its home in the particular.

  It is a specific dream.  He is taking pains to give it a specific night: a house in which its universality may most efficiently reside'....

15 It is a week-end in Lent.  The year is 1922.

  There are indications in the text that confirms this period. But when we have looked for signs that it's one day rather than another, we have not been so successful.

  They should be there for the finding – I have looked for them again.

  A would-be Holmes, I have sought a print, a scent, a twig that has been bent, a match that has been dropped.'

ANTHONY BURGESS

In 1965, Anthony Burgess adopted Wilson's Earwicker dream theory and Campbell and Morton's branch at the window:

'We are primarily in a bed above a bar in Chapelizod, Dublin, on a Saturday night, with a dry branch tapping or tipping at the window, and we must never let ourselves forget it. In the final chapter we are not allowed to forget it. The fact that we we have to look at the near-end of the book to find out where the dreamer is dreaming does not imply that the whole thing is badly made or that Joyce is withholding anything from us. Finnegans Wake is cyclical like a riverrun, and we can enter the river at any point we wish.'

Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader, 1965, Hamlyn Paperback edition, 1982, p219 

Here Burgess is defending Joyce from Wilson's criticism, 'It seems to me a serious defect that we do not really understand what is happening till we have almost finished the book'.

A year after Here Comes Everybody, Burgess published A Shorter Finnegans Wake, in which he now argued that the dreamer's real name was not Earwicker but Porter, a name used in Bk III 4.

'His name is, as far as we can tell, Mr.Porter....Mr. Porter and his family are asleep for the greater part of the book. It has been a hard Saturday evening in the public bar, and sleep prolongs itself some way into the peace of Sunday morning. Mr. Porter dreams hard, and we are permitted to share his dream....Sleeping, he becomes a remarkable mixture of guilty man, beast, and crawling thing, and he even takes on a new and dreamily appropriate name – Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker.'

A Shorter Finnegans Wake,  Faber, 1966, p7

Wilson, Gillet and Burgess base their arguments on a belief that the penultimate chapter is more 'real' than the rest of the book. This is the book's most visual chapter, with a mass of physical detail missing elsewhere. But that doesn't make it more real.  Here's how the bedroom setting, including Gillet's picture on the wall, is described on p558-9:

'Scene and property plot. Stagemanager’s prompt. Interior of dwelling on outskirts of city. Groove two. Chamber scene. Boxed. Ordinary bedroom set. Salmonpapered walls. Back, empty Irish grate, Adam’s mantel, with wilting elopement fan, soot and tinsel, condemned. North, wall with window practicable. Argentine in casement. Vamp. Pelmit above. No curtains. Blind drawn. South, party wall. Bed for two with strawberry bedspread, wickerworker clubsessel and caneseated millikinstool. Bookshrine without, facetowel upon. Chair for one. Woman’s garments on chair. Man’s trousers with crossbelt braces, collar on bedknob. Man’s corduroy surcoat with tabrets and taces, seapan nacre buttons on nail. Woman’s gown on ditto. Over mantelpiece picture of Michael, lance, slaying Satan, dragon with smoke. Small table near bed, front. Bed with bedding. Spare. Flagpatch quilt. Yverdown design. Limes. Lighted lamp without globe, scarf, gazette, tumbler, quantity of water, julepot, ticker, side props, eventuals, man’s gummy article, pink.'

This is not a real room but a stage set, with many of the words taken from William George Fay's Short Glossary of Theatrical Terms, 1930 (see the list in fweet).  The casement is fitted with argentine, 'a material used on the stage as imitation of glass for windows' (Fay).

When the action begins, we see HCE and ALP in their most grotesque incarnations. There is also the sense that we are watching a film, with a closeup of the lead players.

'Closeup. Leads.
Man with nightcap, in bed, fore. Woman, with curlpins, hind. Discovered. Side point of view.....Male partly masking female. Man looking round, beastly expression, fishy eyes, paralleliped homoplatts, ghazometron pondus, exhibits rage. Business. Ruddy blond, Armenian bole, black patch, beer wig, gross build, episcopalian, any age. Woman, sitting, looks at ceiling, haggish expression, peaky nose, trekant mouth, fithery wight, exhibits fear. Welshrabbit teint, Nubian shine, nasal fossette, turfy tuft, undersized, free kirk, no age. Closeup. Play!' 559.20-30

This is the source of Wilson's 'objective data', and the reason why he says that Earwicker is a blond and ruddy Episcopalian and Anna a Presbyterian. But HCE here is wearing a wig and stage makeup. Armenian bole is 'a fine red powder used on the stage to give the appearance of sunburn on the skin' (Fay). So he is playing a blond and ruddy Episcopalian. 

Although this stage publican version of HCE is called Mr Porter, elsewhere in the chapter he is called Albatrus Nyanzer, Honuphrius 'a concupiscent exservicemajor' and Humperfeldt - names just as real or unreal. 

POINT-OF-VIEW

The biggest problem with the Earwicker dream theory is that we never see anything in the book from his point-of-view. Apart from the 'Haveth Childers Everywhere' section (532-554), when we hear his voice in a seance, he is either being investigated by the narrators (the 'we' voice of most of Book One) or discussed by other characters, such as the washerwomen in Anna Livia Plurabelle. 

'And the cut of him! And the strut of him! How he used to hold his head as high as a howeth, the famous eld duke alien, with a hump of grandeur on him like a walking wiesel rat.' 197.01

In the Porter chapter, we see him through the eyes of the four old men, and their first sight as they enter his bedroom is of his bare buttocks as he lies on top of his wife. His backside is also Dublin's Phoenix Park.  See my earlier post, Dublin's Phoenix Park as a Giant Male Arse.  The scene is described by the second old man, Marcus Lyons:

'The straight road down the centre (see relief map) bisexes the park which is said to be the largest of his kind in the world. On the right prominence confronts you the handsome vinesregent’s lodge while, turning to the other supreme piece of cheeks, exactly opposite, you are confounded by the equally handsome chief sacristary’s residence.' 564.10-15

Did you ever have a dream in which you were inspecting your own arse? An arse which was also a park?

'A MYTH OF SLEEPING LIFE'

If Joyce intended the book to be Earwicker's dream, he would surely have said so, since he discussed his book at length over many years. Apart from conversations, formal interviews and letters providing glosses, he oversaw a book of explanatory essays, the Exagmination and an authorised biography by Gorman with a lengthy account of his aims. See my post Joyce describes Finnegans Wake.

He often talked about his book as representing a dream, without mentioning a dreamer.

'Work in Progress? A nocturnal state, lunar. That is what I wanted to convey: what goes on in a dream, during a dream.'

Jaques Mercanton, 'The Hours of James Joyce', in Portraits of the Artist in Exile (ed Willard Potts), pp 209-221

'One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutandry grammar and goahead plot.'

To Harriet Shaw Weaver, 24 November 1926, Letters Vol 3, p146 (Selected Letters p.318)

'[Finnegans Wake] would have the gigantic dimensions of a Myth and yet it would be contained within the fleeting instants of a dream. It would be a Myth of sleeping life as Ulysses had been a Myth of waking life'

Herbert Gorman, James Joyce, Bodley Head, 1941, p.331

'I want to describe the night itself. Ulysses is related to this book as day is to night....There are, so to say, no individual people in the book – it is as in a dream, the style gliding and unreal as the way it is in dreams. If one were to speak of a person in the book, it would have to be of an old man, but even his relationship with reality is doubtful.'

Ole Vinding, 'James Joyce in Copenhagen', in Portraits of the Artist in Exile, pp 149

This last quotation is an explicit rejection of Wilson's claim that Finnegans Wake has a 'realistic foundation.' 

FINN MACCOOL AS THE DREAMER

It's a shame Joyce didn't say more about  'an old man'. But it may relate to the only published remark in which he ever mentioned a dreamer, given here by Ellmann:

'Joyce informed a friend later, he conceived of his book as the dream of old Finn, lying in death beside the River Liffey and watching the history of Ireland and the world – past and future – flow through his mind like flotsam on the river of life.'

Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, OUP 1982, p544

Clive Hart gives a slightly different version of this story, as well as its source:

'Mrs Adaline Glasheen reports that Dr O'Brien, a friend of Joyce's, told her in conversation that Joyce had told him 'that Finnegans Wake was 'about' Finn lying dying by the River Liffey with the history of Ireland and the world circling through his mind.''

Clive Hart, Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake, Northwestern University Press, 1962 p81

This comment must date from 1938-9, when Joyce became friends with Dr Daniel P O'Brien of the Rockefeller Foundation. He spent a lot of time with Joyce in La Baule in September 1939, following the outbreak of the war.

Perhaps Vinding's 'old man' is Finn MacCool.

If Joyce saw the book as a dream of old Finn, it would be after November 1926. That was when his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver asked him to write a piece about the Giant's Grave at Penrith, inspiring the opening chapter. Here's Danis Rose's great description of Joyce's reaction to Weaver's commission:

'Joyce was electrified: here exactly was what he needed to give spin to his work in progress: the notion of HCE as a (sleeping) giant interred in the landscape and, beyond that, of a man assumed dead but sleeping....And with MacCool came the ballad-hall Tim Finnegan with his hod....With his fall off the wall came the first Fall, Adam and Eve and all their descendants down to Mr and Mrs Porter shagged out in their bed. In a word, Miss Weaver's fortuitously brilliant idea gave Joyce the notion for a chapter, or prelude, that was destined to become the common picture of Finnegans Wake: a giant dreaming of falls and walls, a babble of tongues, a tale of howes and graves and burrows and biers.'

Danis Rose, The Textual Diaries of James Joyce, Lilliput Press, 1995, p.95

Joyce had already written most of books one and three by this time.  

This Finn idea may even have come to Joyce at the very end of writing the book. In 'Finn MacCool and the Final Weeks of Work in Progress'  (A Wake Newslitter October 1980) Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon showed that Joyce took most of his notes on Finn in 1937-1938. 

Joyce talked a lot about Finn MacCool in the opening months of World War Two:

'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....the most curious comment I have received on the book is a symbolical one from Helsinki, where, as foretold by the prophet, the Finn again wakes, and volunteer Buckleys are hurrying from all sides to shoot Russian generals....'

Eugene Jolas, 'My Friend James Joyce', 1941 in Sean Givens (ed) James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism, Vanguard Press, 1948, p17

Perhaps Joyce discovered that the giant was his dreamer after he finished writing the book!

In a letter to J.S.Atherton, Weaver rejected the Earwicker dream theory:

'I own that The Skeleton Key, though extremely useful in many ways, has its irritating features – at least it has to me.  The authors seem to me to read unwarranted things into the book. Their ascription of the whole thing to a dream of HCE seems to me nonsensical....My view is that Mr Joyce did not intend the book to be looked upon as the dream of any one character, but that he regarded the dream form with its shiftings and changes and chances as a convenient device, allowing the freest scope to introduce any material he wished - and suited to a night piece.'

quoted in The Books at the Wake, Southern Illinois University Press, 1959 p17

The idea of a mythological giant being the dreamer would also allow him 'the freest scope to introduce any material he wished'.

EVERYONE'S DREAM

J.S.Atherton came up with my favourite dreamer theory, in a brilliant lecture, 'The Identity of the Sleeper', which he gave at the very first James Joyce Symposium, at the Gresham Hotel, on Bloomsday in 1967.

'I do not wish to deny any of the theories which have been put forward as to the identity of the dreamer: they are all true up to a point. For, as I see FW it is everyone’s dream, the dream of all the living and the dead. Many puzzling features become clear if this is accepted. Obviously we will hear many foreign languages: Chinese will be prominent if we know Chinese; German if we know German, and so on....It is the universal mind which Joyce assumes as the identity of the dreamer; he, of course, is writing it all down but everyone else contributes.'

I've posted the whole lecture here in 'Who is Dreaming Finnegans Wake?' 

For more on Joyce's belief in a Universal Mind see 'Finnegans Wake as Magical Evocation'.

For an argument that challenges Atherton's universal mind, see John Bishop's 1986 Joyce's Book of the Dark,  the most recent version of the single dreamer theory.  I am more persuaded, and inspired, by Atherton's idea, but I recommend PQ's four part review of Bishop's book in his excellent Finnegans, Wake! blog.

Festy King

Frank McNally had a great 'Irishman's Diary' in the Irish Times last week, in which he revealed that the CNN news anchor, John King, traced his family back to Connemara, and had a grandfather called Festy King and a grandmother who was a Joyce.

 Irish Post 11 November 2020

'The forename 'Festy' is itself peculiar to Connemara. It’s short for the Latin Festus, which was often used for males christened in honour of the local saint, Feichin (whose name can be problematic in English)....There is at least one famous Festy in literature too, and he was a 'Festy King' to boot. That was the name given by another Joyce – James – to the defendant in a mysterious court case described at length in Finnegans Wake. Like everything about that book, unfortunately, the events involved are hard to follow. Even with his magic wall, John King might struggle to make sense of them.'

Frank McNally, 'A week of number-crunching with Alan Turing, John King, and Sam McConkey', Irishman's Diary, Irish Times, 11 November 2020

Festus in Latin means joyful, which is also thought to be the origin of the Irish surname Joyce. 

Father Ted fans will know at once why 'Feichin' or 'Fechin' can be problematic in English!

You can read St Fechin's life here

Festy is such a rare name that until recently most Wake scholars thought that Joyce must have made it up. When I first read the book I assumed Festy King was a title rather than a name. In 1969,  F.X.Mathews explored its many possible meanings:

'Perhaps Joyce, with his fondness for American dialect, intends feisty and fisty, apt epithets for the redoutable 'testifighter' (92.4)....Others suggest themselves. Faust King?  Feast King? feste: Festy King is literally king of the feast that is Finnegans Wake. Shem, in the image of Glugg, is the disillusioned poet who had hoped to become a 'feastking' (231.2) in his own right. But the real feastking is of course Shaun, who characteristically partakes of food while his brother scribbles.... Closely allied with the concept of the feast is a second implication. From the time we learn of the great 'mamafesta' (104.4) of ALP we are aware that Joyce is using the root word fest as part of a series of complex puns. The sons manifest the parents...'

F.X.Mathews, 'Festy King in Finnegans Wake', James Joyce Quarterly Vol. 6, No. 2 (Winter, 1969).

THE REAL FESTY KING

Vincent Deane is a brilliant genetic critic and literary detective, who has tracked down many of Joyce's notebook sources in newspaper archives. Among many other Deane discoveries was Joyce's use of the Thompson and Bywaters murder case, which I've posted about here. I took this photo of him last year, talking at the Finnegans Wake at 80 conference in Dublin.

Deane made the wonderful discovery that there was a real Festy King trial, which Joyce read about in the Connacht Tribune of 20 October 1923. It involved two Festy Kings, father and son and, like John King's ancestor, they came from Connemara. 

Bill Cadbury describes Deane's discovery:

'In addition to the plaintiff, Pat O'Donnell, there are two Festy Kings, father and son, as well as a number of other Kings, including a Simon King, whose name Joyce notes and uses. Also reported are two trials concerning altercations at different fairs between Pat O'Donnell and the Kings. In one trial Pat appeals his conviction for attacking the Kings. In the other, the one on which Joyce took notes, the Kings and a certain Peter Naughton are accused of attacking Pat, who they say stole some sheep.'

'The March of a Maker' in How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake, p79

Here are the quotations that Joyce used, as given in the James Joyce Digital Archive. I found these by clicking on the blue hyperlinks in the first draft version here.

'FAIR DAY FIGHTS / COMEDY AND TRAGEDY AT CLIFDEN SESSIONS

'Mrs. Naughton swore that she was at the fair with a pig. She saw O'Donnell beat Simon King. Peter Naughton came to his assistance.'

'THE DEFENSE
Mr. Pat King, answering Mr. Connolly, said he lived at Myrus. He remembered the fair day at Kilkerrin. He met Festy King senr., and Festy King junr., while he was talking to them he heard a shot and saw O'Donnell arrested. Crossexamined by Mr. Ward: Did you hear that Festy King was arrested?
— I did.
— Did you hear for what reason?
— No.
— Is it not a wonder you did not find out or look after your uncle?
— I had a bullock to look after (laughter).
Festy King deposed that he saw O'Donnell arrested. He gave terrible abuse to the soldiers.
Mr. W: Did you fire a stone on the occasion?
— I did not.
— On your oath, did you not strike O'Donnell with a stone?
— On my oath, before God and his honor, I did not fire a stone either before or after I was born up to this day (laughter).'

APPEAL AGAINST DISTRICT JUSTICE'S DECISION.
Anne O'Donnell deposed that she was at the Kilkerrin fair on the day mentioned. She saw P Naughton strike Pat O'Donnell on the head. She saw Simon King strike him on the head also. Festy King struck him with a stone on the back. They called his mother a drunkard and called himself a son of an idiot...
Festy King senior., was recalled and closely examined by his honor, after which his honor remarked that this witness's last evidence differed from his first direct statement, and he was largely deciding the case on his contradictory evidence. He would give a decree for £10 and costs.'

The easiest way to see Joyce's use of this story is by reading the second draft of the Festy King trial from the Joyce Digital Archive, where the text is still in clear English:

'little headway was made when a countryman, Festy King, who gave an address in Joyce's country in the heart of a wellfamed poteen district, was subsequently brought up on an improperly framed indictment of both counts. It was attempted to show that King rubbed some dirt on his face as the best means of disguising himself and was at the fair of a Monday attended by large numbers with a pig when the animal ate some of the doorpost, King selling it because she ate a lot of the woodwork of her sty in order to pay off arrears of rent. An eyewitness said he personally was pleased to remember the fifth of November which was going to go down in the annals of history and that one thing which particularly struck a person of his observational powers was that he saw or heard Pat O'Donnell beat and murder another two of the Kings, Simon & Peter, between whom bad blood existed but it turned out in crossexamination that where the ambush was laid there was not as much light as would dim a child's altar and to the perplexedly uncondemnatory bench the first King of all, Festy, as soon as the outer layer of dirt was removed at the request of the jury declared through his interpreter on his oath and before God and all their honours that he did not fire a stone either before or after he was born up to that day and this he had the neck to supplement in the same language by postasserting that he would impart that he might never ask to see sight or light of this world or the next world or any other world if ever he up with a hand to take or throw the sign of a stone at man, sheep or salvation army either before or after being baptised down to that most holy and blessed hour.'

Connemara, from an 1880 map of Connaught

Here's an 1880 map of Connemara. The Festy King trial took place in Clifden the capital. Note the 'Joyce Country'.

Vincent Deane also discovered that Joyce had reused phrases from other stories in the same issue of the Connacht Tribune. The phrase 'improperly framed indictment' is from a story titled ''Lamentable': A Missing Mirror':

'At Galway Criminal Quarter Sessions at Wednesday, before his honour, the Recorder. … The Recorder said in every properly framed indictment there was a second count for receiving. That was the regular form.'

The vivid phrase 'as much light as would dim a child's altar' is from another story, 'Lighting the Railway Station':

'At the request of Mr. Greene it was decided to write again to the railway company with a view to getting the railway premises lighted by electricity. Mr. Greene remarked it was a shame that people coming off the train at night had to grope their way in the dark at the railway station for there was not as much light there as would dim a child's altar (laughter).'

Festy King's pig that ate the doorpost is from yet another comical story, 'Cheap Jacks':

'Mr. Greene also referred to an order formerly made by the board that sheep or pigs were not to be allowed on the sidewalks on fair days. After the last fair a trader complained to him the woodwork in front of her house was eaten away by a pig, and when she complained to the owner the only satisfaction she got was that the same pig ate the door of the pigsty at home, and that was the reason she sold it (laughter). ~'

In the final version, Festy's pig is called the 'gentleman ratepayer' (86.27) because a pig was known as the 'gentleman that pays the rent'. 

Tenniel's cartoon of the 'gentleman who pays the rent'

I like to think of James Joyce, sitting in the Victoria Palace Hotel in Paris, scouring the Connacht Tribune for reports of pigs and fights at Connemara fairs. He did feel a personal connection with the area, for this was the ancestral homeland of the Joyces. The region is still called the Joyce Country.

I visited the Victoria Palace Hotel in 2018

'HIS BRYTHONIC INTERPRETER'

The big difference between the Connacht Tribune story and the Wake version is that Joyce's defendant is an Irish speaker, on trial in an English court, the Old Bailey. Ironically, the court has supplied him with an interpreter who speaks the wrong kind of Gaelic! He speaks Brythonic, the Gaelic of Wales, Cornwall and Brittany. Festy should have been given a Goidelic (Irish, Scottish and Manx) speaker.

'Pegger Festy, as soon as the outer layer of stucckomuck had been removed at the request of a few live jurors, declared in a loudburst of poesy, through his Brythonic interpreter on his oath, mhuith peisth mhuise as fearra bheura muirre hriosmas, whereas take notice be the relics of the bones of the story bouchal that was ate be Cliopatrick (the sow) princess of parked porkers, afore God and all their honours and king’s commons that, what he would swear to the Tierney of Dundalgan or any other Tierney, yif live thurkells folloged him about sure that was no steal and that, nevertheless, what was deposited from that eyebold earbig noseknaving gutthroat, he did not fire a stone either before or after he was born down and up to that time.' 91.01-13

The uselessness of the interpreter is shown here by the words in the third line which look Gaelic. They are English, and pronounced as 'with best wishes for a very merry Christmas'.

After proclaiming his innocence, Festy King clumsily tries to make the sign of his Roman Godhelic (Goidelic and Roman Catholic) faith, which causes the court to erupt in laughter. 

'Here, upon the halfkneed castleknocker’s attempting kithoguishly to lilt his holymess the paws and make the sign of the Roman Godhelic faix, (Xaroshie, zdrst!— in his excitement the laddo had broken exthro Castilian into which the whole audience perseguired and pursuited him olla podrida) outbroke much yellachters from owners in the heall (Ha!) in which, under the mollification of methaglin, the testifighter reluctingly, but with ever so ladylike indecorum, joined. (Ha! Ha!)' 91.33

This echoes the frequent public laughter reported in the Connacht trial reports. The patricular source is another Connacht Tribune news story, identified by Mikio Fuse and Robbert-Jan Henkes, this time from 24 May 1924:

'At Galway District Court, before Mr. Sean Ford, Edward Connelly and John Keller were charged with firing into the residence of Mr. J. Bristley, stationmaster, Moycullen, smashing the windows and otherwise damaging the house. ... “Do you remember the statement you made and that you were on your oath?” asked the justice, and the witness replied “It was all lies,” at which there was some laughter in which the witness joined.  The justice remonstrated with the witness, reminding him that he was in a court of justice and not a concert room. He said it was a disgraceful thing that a youth of sixteen should take an oath and then swear that everything that he had sworn was untrue.'

The Maamtrasna Murder Trial

In revising the text, Joyce changed 'a countryman, Festy King' to 'a child of Maam, Festy King' (85.22). This points to a darker source, the Maamtrasna murder trial of 1882, the year of Joyce's birth. This ended in the wrongful hanging for murder of another Joyce Country man, Myles Joyce. The five victims were also Joyces. 

Myles Joyce was tried in Dublin, in English, which he did not speak, communicating with difficulty through an interpreter who spoke an unfamiliar Donegal dialect. Like Festy King, Myles Joyce gesticulated in a desperate attempt to be understood. 

Here's part of James Joyce's own account of the trial in 'Ireland at the Bar': written in 1907 for Il Piccolo della Sera:

Prison photograph of Myles Joyce

'Several years ago a sensational trial was held in Ireland. In a lonely place in a western province, called Maamtrasna, a murder was committed. Four or five townsmen, all belonging to the ancient tribe of the Joyces, were arrested. The oldest of them, the seventy year old Myles Joyce, was the prime suspect. Public opinion at the time thought him innocent and today considers him a martyr. Neither the old man nor the others accused knew English. The court had to resort to the services of an interpreter. The questioning, conducted through the interpreter, was at times comic and at times tragic. On one side was the excessively ceremonious interpreter, on the other the patriarch of a miserable tribe unused to civilized customs, who seemed stupefied by all the judicial ceremony.

The magistrate said: ‘Ask the accused if he saw the lady that night.’ The question was referred to him in Irish, and the old man broke out into an involved explanation, gesticulating, appealing to the others accused and to heaven. Then he quieted down, worn out by his effort, and the interpreter turned to the magistrate and said: ‘He says no, your worship'.

‘Ask him if he was in that neighbourhood at that hour.’ The old man again began to talk, to protest, to shout, almost beside himself with the anguish of being unable to understand or to make himself understood, weeping in anger and terror. And the interpreter, again, dryly: ‘He says no, your worship.’

When the questioning was over, the guilt of the poor old man was declared proved, and he was remanded to a superior court which condemned him to the noose. On the day the sentence was executed, the square in front of the prison was jammed full of kneeling people shouting prayers in Irish for the repose of Myles Joyce’s soul. The story was told that the executioner, unable to make the victim understand him, kicked at the miserable man’s head in anger to shove it into the noose.'

In 2018, Myles Joyce received a Presidential pardon.

The Four Waves of Erin: Nora takes Dictation

On 29 May 2002, the National Library of Ireland announced that it had bought an archive of previously unknown Joyce manuscripts from Alexis Léon, son of Joyce's friend and helper Paul Léon. One of its treasures was an early Finnegans Wake sketch, which the library has posted online. The big surprise is that this sketch is in Nora’s handwriting (with corrections later added by Joyce). 

Yes, in 1923 Joyce, suffering with eye troubles, was dictating passages from his new book to his wife, who had never shown any interest in his writing. What did she make of it?

The pages were also displayed in 2022 at the MoLI in Dublin.  I was surprised by how big the paper was.

copyright National Library of Ireland

copyright National Library of Ireland

It was lovely to find this piece in the museum, because the main exhibition for the centenary, curated by Nuala O'Connor, was a celebration of the mutual devotion of the Joyce family.

The piece dates from the very beginnings of Finnegans Wake and was probably composed between late March and June 1923, when he was unable to read or write due an attack of conjunctivitis followed by an eye operation. Despite this, he was still creating new material in his mind.

This is a first version of what would become the Mamalujo episode, the first part of the Wake to be published, in the transatlantic review in 1924. Unlike the later version, written in a rambling repetitive exhausted style, to express senility, this sketch is concise and lively. It also doesn't read like a first draft but a finished careful composition.  In writing about senility, Joyce drew on his astonishing powers of memory.

Illustration by John Vernon Lord from the Folio edition

To set the scene, this is a continuation of Tristan and Isolde sketch, the big love scene set on a ship (above), which ended with the mocking song of the seabirds circling above. In a cinematic shift of perspective, we move down into the sea where we find four ancient men, as blind as Joyce, listening in to the big kiss of the lovers. They are senile Irish historians and also waves of the sea, ancient voyeurs clinging to the Irish sea ferries and 'peering with glaucomatose eyes through the cataractic portholes of honeymoon cabins'.

Here is the text as dictated. In going through it beneath, I'll quote Joyce's revised version.

THE FOUR WAVES OF ERIN

'The Four Waves of Erin also heard, leaning upon the staves of memory. Four eminently respectable old gentlemen they looked got up in sleek holiday toggery for the occasion, grey half tall hat frock coat to match fathomglasses and soforth, you know, for all the world apart from the salt water like the fourth viscount Powerscourt at the royal Dublin societies annual horseshow. 

They had seen their share: the capture of Sir Arthur Casement in the year 432,      Coronation of Brian by the Danes at Clonmacnois, the drowning of poor Mat Keane of Dunlearery, the scattering of the flemish armada off the coasts of Galway and Longford, the landing of St Patrick at Tara in the year 1798, the dispersal of the French fleet under General Boche in the year 2002. 

And such was their memory that they had been appointed extern professors to the four chief seats of learning in Erin, the Universities of killorcure, killthemall, killeachother, killkelly-on-the-Flure, whither they wirelessed four times weekly lectures in the four modes of history, past, present, absent and future

Saltsea widowers all four, they had been many ages before summarily divorced by their respective spouses (with whom they had parted on the best of terms) by a decree absolute issued by Mrs Justice Smashman in the married male offenders court at Bohernabreena, one for inefficiency in backscratching, two for having broken wind without having first made a request in writing on stamped foolscap paper, three for having attempted hunnish familiarities after a meal of decomposed crab, four on account of his general cast of countenance. 

Though that was ever so long ago, they could still with an effort of memory and by counting carefully the four buttons of the fly of their trousers recall the name of the four beautiful sisters Brinabride who were at the moment touring the United States.

Yet were they fettlesome anon, lured by beauty often would they cling tentacularly to the sides of the Northwall and Holyhead boats and the Isle of Man tourist steamers, peering with glaucomatose eyes through the cataractic portholes of honeymoon cabins or saloon ladies' toilet apartments. 

But when those jossers aforesaid, the Four Waves of Erin, heard the detonation of the osculation which with ostentation Tristan to Isolde gave, then lifted they up round Ireland's shores the wail of old men's glee.

Highchanted the elderly Waves of Erin in four-part Palestrian melody, four for all, all one in glee of grief of loneliness of age but with a bardic license, there being about of birds and stars  quite a sufficient number.

This was their way

A birdless heaven, seadusk and one star,
Low in the west
And thou, poor heart, loves image, faint and far,
Rememberest

Her clear cold eyes and her soft lifted brown
And fragrant hair,
Falling as through the silence falleth now
Dusk from the air.

A why wilt thou,
A why wilt thou remember these,
A why,
Poor heart, repine,
If the dear love she yielded with a sigh
Was never thine!'

THE FOUR WAVES OF ERIN 

At this stage, Joyce has not yet named his four men, later called Matt Gregory, Marcus Lyons, Luke Tarpey and Johnny MacDougall, and collectively Mamalujo.

Nora first wrote 'The Four Waves of Ireland'. The change to the poetic 'Erin' is in Nora's handwriting, so Joyce may have decided on this while he was dictating.

As ‘waves of Erin’, the four are magical waves, drawn from Irish myth, which would roar a warning in times of danger. There were three of them but Joyce has made four:

‘The Three Tonns or Waves of Erin are much celebrated in Irish romantic literature. They were Tonn Cleena in Glandore harbour in Cork; Tonn Tuaithe outside the mouth of the Bann in Derry; and Tonn Rudraidhe in Dundrum Bay off the County Down. In stormy weather, when the wind blows in certain directions, the sea at these places, as it tumbles over the sandbanks, or among the caves and fissures of the rocks, utters an unusually loud and solemn roar, which excited the imagination of our ancestors. They believed that these sounds had a supernatural origin, that they gave warning of the  deadly danger, or foreboded the approaching death, of kings or chieftains, or bewailed a king's or a great chief's death.’

P. W. Joyce’s A Social History of Ancient Ireland, Vol II p.525

Later in the piece they become radio waves, wirelessly broadcasting history lectures. The waves' cries also inspired their 'wail' at the end, 'lifted up round Ireland's shores'.

Joyce later told Eugene Jolas that his aim was 'to build many planes of narrative with a single esthetic purpose'. This creation of old Irishmen who are also waves was the first piece he composed with multiple planes.

'leaning upon the staves of memory'

The four who have endured through all of human history, live in their hopelessly muddled memories, the walking sticks that support them. They are like Swifts Struldbrugs in Gulliver's Travels.

'They have no remembrance of anything but what they learned and observed in their youth and middle-age, and even that is very imperfect; and for the truth or particulars of any fact, it is safer to depend on common tradition, than upon their best recollections. The least miserable among them appear to be those who turn to dotage, and entirely lose their memories...' 

'Four eminently respectable old heladies'

Joyce dictated 'gentlemen', but then changed this to 'heladies'. One of the symptoms of senility running through Mamalujo is confusion about sexual identity.  He also changed 'spouses' to 'she-husbands'. This shows the beginning of the new style, where the narrative voice is not just describing senility but also expressing it.

'got up in sleek holiday toggery for the occasion...'

'TOG: a coat; to tog, is to dress or put on clothes; to tog a person, is also to supply them with apparel, and they are said to be well or queerly tog'd, according to their appearance. 

TOG'D OUT TO THE NINES: a fanciful phrase, meaning simply, that a person is well or gaily dressed. 

TOGS, or TOGGERY: wearing-apparel in general.'

James Hardy Vaux, A New and Comprehensive Vocabulary of the Flash Language, 1819

'Togs' is 16th century vagabond's cant, and is short for 'togeman' meaning coat. The OED suggests that the 19th century spread of the word may be linked to its similarity with toga.

'grey half tall toque tailormade frock coat to match fathomglasses'

Joyce added 'tailormade' and changed 'hat' to 'toque', echoing 'toggery'.  They are formally dressed in Victorian frock coats and grey toques, but 'sleek' and 'grey' also makes me think of seals. 

He's invented the word 'fathomglasses' - perhaps opera glasses for looking through, or measuring, the fathoms of water. In the Wake, this became 'they had their fathomglasses to find out all the fathoms.' 386.16

'and soforth, you know'

This creates a conversational feel, as if we are being buttonholed for an anecdote. It's similar to the earlier Roderick O'Connor sketch which includes 'you say yourself', 'wait till I tell you' and 'what do you think he did sir'.

'for all the world apart from the salt water like the fourth viscount Powerscourt...'

Apart from the salt water, they look like the Irish peer, Richard Wingfield, 4th Viscount Powerscourt (1762–1809). The family was well known in Dublin, with its townhouse, Powerscourt House on South William Street (now a shopping centre). Here he is - imagine him on his way to the Dublin horse show with salt water pouring off him!

'...or North the auctioneer at the royal Dublin societies annual horseshow.'

North the auctioneer is one of Joyce's additions to the dictated text. This is James H North the auctioneer and estate agent, whose business was at 110 Grafton Street – not far from Powerscourt House.   From Thom's 1904 directory.

It's now the Dublin Trading Company.

I bought this on ebay.

I expect John Joyce, with his many changes of address, had personal dealings with the company.

The Royal Dublin Society horseshow, one of the highlights of the Irish social and sporting calendar, dates from 1864. It was even held in August 1920, at the height of the war of Independence, when this cartoon appeared in the Sunday Independent.

It was cancelled in 2020-21, for the first time since 1940, due to Covid.

Here's how the passage expanded (and made more confused) appeared in Finnegans Wake.  Joyce has added more central Dublin locations and changed North's surname to Tickell, but added his real initials.

I drew the map was I was a student in 1983.

He's also increased the gender confusion, making the statue of Daniel O'Connell 'Mrs Dana O'Connell' and 'Battersby Sisters' from another Dublin auctioneer and estate agent, Battersby Brothers of 39 Westmoreland Street. Here they are in Thom's 1904 Directory.

Here's a 1970 photo from the Dublin City Council Photographic Collection. The Atrium Lounge now stands here.

Leopold Bloom thinks of these auctioneers while walking down Eccles Street in the Calypso episode of Ulysses:

'Number eighty still unlet. Why is that? Valuation is only twentyeight. Towers, Battersby, North, MacArthur: parlour windows plastered with bills.'

Another nice addition, made in 1938, fifteen years after the original sketch, is 'tailturn' making 'tailturn horseshow'. This combines the turning tails of the Dublin show horses with the Tailteann Games in County Meath. This was an ancient festival, which died out following the Anglo-Norman invasion – Joyce added 'angler nomads' at the same time. It was revived by the Irish Free State in 1924, when the new games were held in Croke Park Dublin. Like the horse show, it took place in August.

JOYCE CREATES 1132

'They had seen their share.. the capture of Sir Arthur Casement in the year 1132 Coronation of Brian by the Danes at Clonmacnois the drowning of Pharoah F Phitzharris in the (proleptically) red sea. The drowning of poor Mat Keane of Dunlearery the scattering of the flemish armada off the coasts of Galway and Longford, the landing of St Patrick at Tara in the year 1798, the dispersal of the French fleet under General Boche in the year 2002.'

Since they are waves of the sea, their muddled memories are mostly of maritime events, such as landings, invasions and drownings.  When Joyce dictated this piece, the first date was 432 - the year of St Patrick's arrival in Ireland. So there were two famous dates - 432 and 1798, the year of the French, and one absurd date - 2002. 

Yet how extraordinary that Joyce should have chosen 2002 - the year that the National Library announced it had bought the manuscript!

Sean Murphy has commented:

'The computer on which I was viewing the Wake manuscript also contained images of the Léon cache, titled 'Joyce Papers 2002'. Perhaps, you may say, Joyce was clairvoyant as well as mischievous, or possibly this is a matter of absolutely no import, or perhaps again there is a more peculiar game in play . . .'

Joyce then made a momentous change, crossing out the 4 of 432 and writing 11. Yes, this is the moment he created 'the only real date in Finnegans Wake' (Anthony Burgess).

The darker pencil is James' Joyce's handwriting. National Library of Ireland

It's possible Joyce was thinking of the law of falling bodies - 32 feet per second per second, which is on Bloom's mind in Ulysses. But his reason for making this change may have simply been to add an additional layer of confusion. In their senility they haven't even chosen an important date to remember. In the rewrite, Joyce made this the key date of the chapter, and later the whole book.

'the capture of Sir Arthur Casement in the year 1132'

In April 1916, Sir Roger Casement, was captured after being set ashore from a German submarine in Banna Strand in Tralee Bay, County Kerry. The old men have probably confused him with Sir Arthur Guinness (or Sir Arthur Wellesley).

'Coronation of Brian by the Danes at Clonmacnois'

Here the old men have almost got some facts right.  Brian Boru, who defeated the Danes at the Battle of Clontarf in 1014, was educated at the monastery of Clonmacnoise by the River Shannon in County Offaly. The monastery was associated with the kings of Connacht who were often buried here.

'the drowning of Pharoah F Phitzharris in the (proleptically) red sea'

This was added by Joyce to the dictated text, squeezed in, in a darker pencil, at the very bottom of the page (see above). The name suggests James Fitzharris, nicknamed Skin-the-Goat, the cabman who drove the Phoenix Park assassins, and who keeps the cabman's shelter in Ulysses. The 'Ph' spelling of his name goes with 'Pharaoh'.

The old men may have muddled his horse-drawn cab with the pharaoh's chariot.  I think the Red Sea is 'proleptic' (anticipatory) because its name anticipates bloodshed – the stabbing of Burke and Cavendish in the park.

F.A.Bridgman, Pharaoh's Army Engulfed in the Red Sea

Last year I found Fitzharris's grave, which is also a memorial to the Invincibles, in Glasnevin.

'The drowning of poor Mat Keane of Dunlearery'

This is Nora's misspelling of Matt Kane. He was a close friend of Joyce's father, and he really did drown in 1904 off Kingstown, which was called Dunleary before 1821, and given its old name, with the Irish spelling Dún Laoghaire in 1920. It's fitting that the old men only know the early name.

Kane was the original of Martin Cunningham in Dubliners and Ulysses. Joyce attended his funeral and used it as the basis for Paddy Dignam's – so Martin Cunningham in Ulysses is attending his own funeral.

National Library of Ireland

I like 'Dunlearery' but it may be another of Nora's mistakes.

In Dubliners, we learn why, apart from drowning, he is called 'poor Mat Keane':

'His own domestic life was not very happy. People had great sympathy with him, for it was known that he had married an unpresentable woman who was an incurable drunkard. He had set up house for her six times; and each time she had pawned the furniture on him.

Everyone had respect for poor Martin Cunningham.'

Here's his grave, which I photographed last year. It mentions his appearance in Uysses. It's a shame it doesn't include Finnegans Wake!

Here's the Freeman's Journal report, which shows that it was a massive funeral. 

When Joyce rewrote the passage, he used the fictional name, and brought in the pharaoh's Red Sea:

'and then poor Martin Cunningham out of the castle on pension when he was completely drowned off Dunleary at that time in the red sea'

Here's the final transformation of the passage in Finnegans Wake, where he has become Merkin Cornyngwham - combining Martin Cunningham with Mark of Cornwall.

See also Casement's transformation into a Lady Jales Casemate and the reappearance of those Dublin auctioneers, now Queen Baltersby off the White Ship, wrecked in 1120.

'the scattering of the flemish armada off the coasts of Galway and Longford'

In 1588, the Spanish Armada was scattered by storms off the west coast of Ireland. The joke here is that County Longford, in the middle of Ireland, is landlocked.

As for flemings, The Annals of the Four Masters has this entry for the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in 1169.

'The fleet of the Flemings came from England in the army of Mac Murchadha to contest the kingdom of Leinster for him: they were seventy heroes, dressed in coats of mail.'

The word 'flemish' suggests phlegm, which later inspired the old men's 'phlegmish hoopicough' at 397.24

'the landing of St Patrick at Tara in the year 1798 the dispersal of the French fleet under General Boche in the year 2002'

St Patrick had his duel with the High Druid at Tara, the subject of another 1923 sketch.

There were two failed French invasions of Ireland, in 1796-7 and 1798. Here's a Gilray cartoon showing the first one.

Boche was a mocking nickname for the Germans used by the Allies during World War I. It is thought to be a shortened form of the French portmanteau 'alboche', derived from Allemand and caboche ("head" or "cabbage").  In his rewrite, Joyce changed the name to 'Madam-general Bonaboche', bringing in Bonaparte, and then 'Motham General Bonaparte' (388.21)

UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS

'And such was their memory that they had been appointed extern professors to the four chief seats of learning in Erin, the Universities of killorcure, killthemall, killeachother, killkelly-on-the-Flure, whither they wirelessed four times weekly lectures in the four modes of history, past, present, absent and future' 

Here's the first suggestion that the old men represent the four provinces of Ireland. Kill is Irish for church but the echoes of killing suggest the Irish Civil War, and Joyce's own fears that he risked being shot if he visited the Irish Free State.  

The word before 'professors' is hard to read - it may say 'extern' (ie external) or  'exterm'. A professor living in the sea would have to be external!

The four province idea was more fully developed in the transatlantic review version, where we also get to hear their individual voices as wireless broadcasts cutting in. Here the four are radio waves as well as waves of the sea.

The old men's 'modes of history' are grammatical tenses, with the comical addition of 'absent' - suggested by the different meanings of the word 'present' (now and in this place). Originally, they included the future, hence the date 2002. Joyce cut this and the date in his rewrite – the old men live in the past. 

GROUNDS FOR DIVORCE

'Saltsea widowers all four, they had been many ages before summarily divorced by their respective shehusbands (with whom they had parted on the best of terms) by a decree absolute issued by Mrs Justice Squelchman in the married male offenders court at Bohernabreena, one for inefficiency in backscratching, two for having broken rerewind without having first made a request in writing on stamped foolscap paper, three for having attempted hunnish familiarities after a meal of decomposed crab, four on account of his general cast of countenance.'

I love these grounds for divorce. Did they make Nora respond with a joke about her own possible grounds for divorce?  She had more to complain about than 'inefficiency in backscratching'.

'by a decree absolute'

The final decree ending a marriage after a decree nisi showing legal requirements have been met.
cf Bloom in Eumaeus: ' Then the decree nisi and the King's Proctor to show cause why and, he failing to quash it, nisi was made absolute.'

Here Joyce added 'rere' to 'wind', making 'rerewind'. 'Mrs Justice Squelchman' was originally 'Squashman' - but the meaning is the same, a fearsome female judge squashing men.

This passage reminds me of the 'several highly respectable Dublin ladies' accusing Leopold Bloom of sending them improper letters.

'MRS BELLINGHAM Tan his breech well, the upstart! Write the stars and stripes on it!
MRS YELVERTON BARRY Disgraceful! There's no excuse for him! A married man!'

Bohernabreena is a townland in County Dublin beside the River Dodder. 

'Bohernabreena in old times was Boher-na-Bruighne or 'the road of the court' or 'great mansion', one of the five great palaces or breens, houses of universal hospitality, for which Ireland was famed.'

William Domville Handock', History of Tallaght, 1899

The inspiration for this divorce section was probably Swift's Struldbrugs.

'If a Struldbrug happen to marry one of his own kind, the marriage is dissolved of course, by the courtesy of the kingdom, as soon as the younger of the two comes to be fourscore; for the law thinks it a reasonable indulgence, that those who are condemned, without any fault of their own, to a perpetual continuance in the world, should not have their misery doubled by the load of a wife.'

In the expanded version, the sense that we are reading grounds for divorce is harder to follow.

'hunnish familiarities after eating a bad crab in the red ocean' 

Like Boche, 'hunnish' is WW1 slang for the beastly and underhand behaviour of the Germans.

On the day Joyce sent the sketch to Harriet Shaw Weaver, he learned of the death of his old Belvedere schoolfellow, Richard Sheehy.  Joyce, who believed that his writing had prophetic power, wrote to Weaver:

'It is strange that on the day I sent off to you a picture of an epicene professor of history in an Irish university college seated in the hospice for the dying etc after 'eating a bad crab in the red sea' I received a paper from Dublin containing news of the death at the age of 41 of an old schoolfellow of mine in the hospice for the dying, Harold's Cross, Dublin, professor of law in the University of Galway....More strangely still his name (which he used to say was an Irish (Celtic) version of my own) is in English an epicene name being made up of the feminine and masculine personal pronouns – Sheehy. It is as usual rather uncanny.'

Letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, 23 October 1923, Letters Vol I

Did he also prophesy the 1991 discovery that eating a bad crab can cause brain damage and lasting memory loss?

A 2015 story in Scientific American

FOUR BEAUTIFUL SISTERS

'Though that was ever so long ago, they could still with an effort of memory and by counting accurately the four periwinkle buttons of the fly of their knickybockies recall the name of the four beautiful sisters Brinabride who were at the moment touring the United States of Africa.'

Joyce dictated 'counting carefully the four buttons of their trousers' and later added 'accurately', 'periwinkle', the childish 'knickybockies' and 'of Africa'.

As waves of the sea, they have had briny brides, sister sea nymphs. But 'name' rather than 'names' suggests that all they can remember of their wives is their maiden surname. The idea that their wives are 'at the moment touring the United States of Africa' sounds like a senile delusion.

There are echoes of Brinabride elsewhere in 'Mamalujo'.

'in 1132 Brian or Bride street' 388.11
'O, come all ye sea nymphs of Dingle beach to cheer Brinabride queen from Sybil surfriding'. 399.03

This then became a Wake motif:
'An auburn mayde, o’brine a’bride, to be desarted' 13.26

'—Sold! I am sold! Brinabride! My ersther! My sidster!
Brinabride, goodbye! Brinabride! I sold!' 500.21
'the bride of the Bryne' 595.05

In the senile rewrite, the sense of this passage was lost - as well as 'touring the United States of Africa'.

'not forgetting about shims and shawls week, in auld land syne (up) their four hosenbands, that were four (up) beautiful sister misters, now happily married, unto old Gallstonebelly, and there they were always counting and contradicting every night‚ tis early the lovely mother of periwinkle buttons, according to the lapper part of their anachronism (up one up two up one up four) and after that there now she was, in the end, the deary, soldpowder and all, the beautfour sisters...' 393.14

THE FOUR AS VOYEURS

'Yet were they fettlesome anon, lured by the immortal rose of Wombman's beauty. Often would they cling tentacularly about the ship's waists of the Northwall and Holyhead boats and the Isle of Man tourist steamers, peering with glaucomatose eyes through the cataractic portholes of honeymoon cabins or saloon ladies' toilet apartments.' 

The four are voyeurs, trying to peer, despite glaucoma and cataracts, through the portholes of the ships crossing the Irish Sea –  which explains why they are here beside the ship carrying Tristan and Isolde from Ireland to Cornwall.  

Expanding the dictated text, Joyce changed 'lured by beauty to 'lured by the immortal rose of Wombman's beauty'. 'The immortal rose of woman's beauty' sounds like a phrase he's read in a magazine. 

copyright National Library of Ireland

He also rewrote 'cling to the sides of', as the vivid 'cling tentacularly about the ship's waists of.' The low mid section of a ship is its 'waist'. We see the old men now as cephalopods.

1920 illustration from St Nicholas's magazine

'Fettlesome' is an invented word. 'Fettle' (state) is most commonly used in the phrase 'fine fettle'. Fettle is also an Old English word for a belt, which may link with their clinging to the ships.

Again, much of the original sense was lost in the rewrite:

'And after that so glad they had their night tentacles and there they used to be, flapping and cycling, and a dooing a doonloop, panementically, around the waists of the ship...'394.12

'like a foreretyred schoon-masters, and their pair of green eyes and peering in, so they say, like the narcolepts on the lakes of Coma, through the steamy windows, into the honeymoon cabins, on board the big steamadories, made by Fumadory, and the saloon ladies’ madorn toilet chambers lined over prawn silk and rub off the salty catara off a windows and, hee hee, listening, qua committe, the poor old quakers, oben the dure, to see all the hunnishmooners and the firstclass ladies'   395.06

THE WAIL OF OLD MEN'S PLANXTY

The passage ends with their wailing musical lament as, hearing the big kiss of Tristan and Isolde, they are struck by 'grief of loneliness'.

'But when those jossers aforesaid, the Four Waves of Erin, heard the detonation of the osculation (cataclysmic cataglotism) which with ostentation (osculum cum basio suavioque) Tristan to Isolde gave, then lifted they up round Ireland's shores the wail of old men's planxty.

Highchanted the elderly Waves of Erin in four-part Palestrian melody, four for all, all one in glee of grief of loneliness of age but with a bardic license, there being about of birds and stars and noise quite a sufficient quantity.

This plashed their wavechant'

Joyce has made several changes, including adding Latin terms for kisses and changing 'glee' to 'planxty'. A glee is a three or four-part acapella song, but it also suggests gleeful and this is a lament. One theory is that 'planxty' derives from the Latin 'plancus' (lament).

Josser. 'A simpleton; a soft or silly fellow. So, in flippant or contemptuous use, a fellow, an (old) chap' (OED)
The pervert in 'An Encounter' is called a 'queer old josser' and he also has green eyes.

Palestrina

'four-part Palestrian melody'

Joyce loved the music of Giovanni da Palestrina (1525-1594), who wrote many motets, hymns and madrigals for four voices. He told Frank Budgen, 'In writing the mass for Pope Marcellus, Palestrina did more than surpass himself as a musician....He saved music for the Church.'

'This was their way' became 'This plashed their wavechant' - sadly lost in the final version.

The old men's final song is a version of 'Tutto e Sciolto' (All is Lost), a poem of nostalgic regret , inspired by a failed romance with a student, which Joyce wrote in Trieste in 1914, and which he published in 1927 in Pomes Pennyeach. Did Nora know anything about the background to this poem?

On rewriting 'Mamalujo', Joyce wisely decided to drop this personal poem and write a more suitable song - in which each of the old men in turn, and in a different Irish accent, fantasises about Isolde.

See my post Four Irish Accents.