The Coach With the Six Insides

Here's Jean Erdman, the choreographer and dancer, dancing the role of Biddy the Hen in The Coach With the Six Insides, her 1962 musical comic stage adaptation of Finnegans Wake.

Erdman, who died in May 2020, at the age of 104, was the wife of the mythologist Joseph Campbell, co-author of The Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake.  A great dancer and choreographer, she began in 1938 as the soloist of the Martha Graham company. After forming her own company in 1944, she collaborated with John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Maya Deren. As a choreographer, she created total theatre, mixing spoken words, music, dance and visual art.  The Jean Erdman company continues today, and its website has filmed recreations of her dances.

Here she is as Medusa, from an unfinished film by Maya Deren. This reminds me of James Joyce dancing 'like a satyr on a Greek vase'.

 

An extract from The Coach With the Six Insides was filmed for television in 1964, and here it is, from YouTube, posted by Repetition compulsion. It begins with an interview, in which Erdman explains why dance and Finnegans Wake were made for each other.

'All the language is rhythmic and poetic, it has many layers of meaning....The language of movement, which can carry images quickly...doesn't bind you down to defining things.'

I love the dances, by Jean Erdman, in which she performs all the various aspects of Anna Livia Plurabelle. Her guiding belief was that 'a choreographer should create for each new dance a style of movement intrinsic to its subject'. You can see this in the different ways she dances the lively bouncing hen and Kate the weighed-down crone. The four actors speak the text extracted from various parts of the book, and also use mime. I like the way they arrive on stage, driving their coach.  

 

Joyce, who was himself a celebrated dancer, would have approved (See my post James Joyce: The Dancing Years).

 

There are similarities with Mary Manning's play and Mary Ellen Bute's film, also based on The Skeleton Key, and also creating a new plot by selecting passages from across the Wake. The main difference is that Earwicker doesn't appear in The Coach With the Six Insides – perhaps because it's all taking place inside his dreaming mind.

This is where the title comes from:
 

'You have jest (a ham) beamed listening through (a ham pig) his haulted excerpt from John Whiston’s fiveaxled production, The Coach With The Six Insides, from the Tales of Yore of the times gone by before there was a hofdking or a hoovthing or a pinginapoke in Oreland, all sould'  359.22

There's a record of the show, with Teiji Ito's wonderful music, which you can listen to on Jean Erdman's bandcamp page. Ito is better known for his scores for Maya Deren. See 'Teiji Ito on Maya Deren' on YouTube.

Campbell wrote an explanation of the story for a 1964 theatre programme (which you can download from the University of Hawaii here). Here he goes even further than The Skeleton Key in finding a daytime existence for the dreamer. So he says that The Coach With the Six Insides was 'the title of a television drama seen on the tavern bar a few hours before the dream.'

 

See my post The Dream of H.C. Earwicker? for the background to this dreamer theory, which dominated early readings of Finnegans Wake.

 

I've also found a New York Times interview with Campbell and Erdman, by David Sears, from 1982, when the piece was being revived for Joyce's centenary.
 

Campbell: 'I was working on the 'Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake' years before. And I suppose that's what got into her system. But it was her idea to make it a dance, really. It was originally going to be a solo, you know. Then she seemed to get so excited about the language and the fun of what Joyce was doing with language that she couldn't think of just having a dance. So the next step was to bring in actors.'

'But the dance was never dropped,' Miss Erdman adds. 'Originally it was the dance of Anna Livia Plurabelle. She's Finnegan's wife, but she really embodies all women of every kind. And it was going to be an evening of those images: the young girl, the daughter, the old crone, the seductive Maggies, the wife, the river and the rain, Belinda the hen. Those were the main ideas, anyway - all Anna Livia. And in each one I was searching for movement themes that would shape the body. These were abstract themes all coming together in one feminine principle, but they were also independent characters. Then I showed them to Teiji Ito, our composer, and he decided on what wonderful sounds to use -such instruments as Japanese flutes, bells, shells, marimbala, accordion and violin.'

From adding music and dialogue, characters and mime passages, the 'Coach' turned into a series of vignettes through which the dance sequences were strung like Joyce's 'perils before swain.'
 

'Anna Livia is the River Liffey,' explains Mr. Campbell. 'When you're south of Dublin, it starts out like a little dancing girl. Then it flows north a little bit and starts turning eastwards, running through the suburbs of the city. She's now a mother of a family near Phoenix Park. When it turns and goes through the city, it sweeps off all of the filth like a scrubwoman taking it out to the sea. The River Liffey is all of those stages at once, all of the time, so that when she's a little girl she's also the old woman. And when she's the old woman the dancing girl is still there.'

'And that's why I wanted to dance her,' adds Miss Erdman. 'Joyce makes that river his female principle. She activates the book, urges her hero-husband on to greater deeds, tempts him to do too much and then fall. She puts him together again, like Humpty Dumpty, and starts him out. And when she dies, she just flows out into the ocean and up into the rainfall.'

Rising and falling, crucifixion and ascension, motifs occuring throughout the mythologies of the world, have here been translated in dance terms through Mr. Campbell's guidance.

'All dance is based on the truths of gravity, so we have to recognize a world dance from that point of view,' his wife continues. 'In East Indian dance, the body stands on the ground, articulating with the arms around a center. But it's not asking to conquer gravity at all. This is in direct opposition to European dance, which has an entirely different mythology. There you find the impulse to jump, the rebound, the constant yearning toward an infinite point. It is a relationship to an outside deity, not from within.'

'That's where Joyce comes in,' says Mr. Campbell, developing her theme. 'He accepts man in all his nastiness, brutality and everything. He takes you into the abyssal nightmare of time in the 'Wake,' only to show you mercy afterwards. And that saves mankind. It's the resurrection, or if you wish, reincarnation. Romans, Chapter 11, Verse 32, you know, and that's a number occurring throughout the book over and over again - 1132.
 

'And at the end the river meets the ocean to come back as the rain,' his wife exclaims. 'The old crone is so wonderful to dance, because she's so full of her weight. But then she becomes possessed with the spirit of this whole thing, that crazy 'I'm out on the town now' kind of thing! And she's suddenly doing wild jigs. She becomes a totally different person.

''You know I have to laugh when I think it's really the people who don't know the book at all, or the language or anything like that, who usually end up having the most fun with this show.' Miss Erdman says. 'They don't feel responsibility for understanding it, so they are then free to totally understand.'
 

'I think you're right there, Jean,' Mr. Campbell admits. 'But we're all like that, really, because you can't get to the bottom of Joyce after all. You just have to have fun with him and float along with that wonderful river.'

'In that wonderful 'Coach,' ' she adds, with a wink and a knowing smile.

 

 

 
 

Happy New Year Wakeans!

Your Questions for James Joyce

Joyce ponders his answers

In my last post, I asked for your questions about Finnegans Wake to take back, via Time Machine, to James Joyce in Paris.

There are some great questions here, and they're all so varied. No question was repeated. 

I was reminded of Joyce's comment that his book could 'satisfy more readers than any other book because it gives them the opportunity to use their own ideas in the reading.'

The Time Machine (Alfred Jarry model) is cranked up and running, and I'm about to set off, aiming for 34 Rue de Vignes, Paris, on 4 May 1939, publication day.

Here are the questions for Mr Joyce.

Steve Carey:

Are we to assume the prior administration of some kind of truth serum? JJ seems to have been particularly averse to being 'worked out.' If so, I’d ask: what would you wish your reader to know from reading your book?

HenHanna:

I could ask... but Joyce rarely gave simple , straight Answers,
-- Or did he sometimes ?Did he ever give Super-helpful , simple , straight Answers
to Carola G-W,
to Mercanton , ....... ?

In fact, he did give straight answers to questions about Finnegans Wake.

Calum Gibson: 

Did he know he was writing a book that most people would find extremely difficult to read?

(This is one Joyce answered. He told Adolf Hoffmeister, 'I don't think that the difficulties in reading it are so insurmountable. Certainly any intelligent reader can read and understand it, if he returns to the text again and again.')

Neil Burns:

Would you, do you think, knowing that this soundscape novel, being not accepted, generally by those not willing to engage with the text, in a meaningful way, forget the whole project or did you need to get it out of your literary system?

Rob Hardy from fwread (the page a week group) asked:

There are just too many questions about this enormous enigmatical work - I'd be embarrassed to ask for any sort of explanation.

But wouldn't it be fun to let him know that all these years later there were still scads of people puzzling through? And that some of them are using a thing called e-mail ("Speak to us of Emailia," saith the big book) internationally to read together one page a week?

Some asked philosophical questions.

Gavan Kennedy:

Is there a reality beyond 'the reality of experience'?  
 

Bruce Stewart:

'My question would be simple. “Do you believe in the individual human soul, Mr Joyce?” He would probably answer, I do not think I have the right or the means to express my philosophical opinions except through (“sauf que”) the elaborate means of my experimental art.” Ou seja.'

Others had specific questions about the structure of the book.

Alex Gregoire:

With III.1, I’d want to get him more solidly on the record about the backwards stations. How much time do we have with him? I’ll bring a few bottles of Swiss Piss & we’ll make a Saturday of it.

Tim Finnegan:

How are Books One and Three symmetrical?

Lars Johansson:

Is your book supposed to take place on a single night, or series of nights, and if so, on what specific date or dates?

Can you tell me more about the character of Sigurdsen (or whatever his name is). Is he both servant and police man or two different persons? What was the inspiration to him?
And also more about Magrath and father Michael

Walt Heenan asked about HCE's 'crime':

Did he actually do it? And if I could get him to elaborate a bit, then what in the hell, exactly, was it that he done?....Should we acquit him or convict him? 

Graziano Galati:

I guess I would ask:Are HCE and family a red Herring of sorts? Are you not just really completing the portrait? 

Bernadette Gorman, author of Sounds of Manymirth on the Night's Ear Ringing, a new book about Percy French and Finnegans Wake, asked:

What was his problem and obsession with Percy French and why did he so carefully fillet his library of all the Percy French material he manifestly consulted? Also why did he spend months in the UK in 1923 the year after The Chronicles of PF were published? Another question, did he raid his father's files on the Chapelizod distillery, carried from rented house to rented house and did he discover that it was the Chapelizod Distillery that Percy French lost his considerable savings in? In a word, did John Joyce rob Percy French?

Bernadette also responded to the Magrath question above:

"Parsee French writer of annoyingmost letters and skirriles ballets who is Magrath's thug and smells cheaply of Power's spirits and he is not fit enough to throw guts down to a bear..." Some mouthful straight from the mouth of JSJ surely? So who is Magrath???

Dr Anne-Marie D'Arcy, Joycean Medievalist, asked: 

Well, I'm pretty sure of the significance of the date 1132, and attendant dates, so I would ask him about the influence of Edmund Hogan, Daniel Binchy, E.K. Rand, E.R. Curtius and M.L. Laistner on its evolution ...

Bozo Monkey Bear:

interesting game. i would ask if he intended to make the physical book a simulacrum of the globe and how he conceived of the idea and how he managed to get north and south pole exploration references around pages 314 and 628/3 (given printing technology back then it doesn't seem like that was an easy task)? i'd also be interested in how the procession of the equinoxes and other "deep time" elements figure into the work (ala pq's interest in these elements)?

Robert Reister:

I would ask him to elaborate on the “coach with six insides”, tesseract, associations please ?

('The Coach with the Six Insides' appears at 359.24. HCE's 'existence as a tesseract' is at 100.35)

Vincent Altman O'Connor:

"Mr Joyce, why did you visit the graveyard at Sidlesham Church? Were you looking for a particular grave? Who is buried in the environs of Bognor (of all places) that might be of interest to you?" ("Whisht owadat! I was looking for the grave of a famous Dubliner but, well..!")

(The first person to identify this Dubliner will be treated by me to Coddle & Pint in the Gravediggers next Bloomsday.)

Vincent later gave his answer to this one.    

Paul Devine quoted Samuel Beckett's essay in the Exagmination:

 
“You cannot complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something. It is that something itself.”
Did Samuel Beckett discuss this with you, Mr Joyce?

Clint Carroll:

Peter, I'd love to ask Joyce how he muscled through his doubts or troubles while writing this special monster of a book. Mr. Joyce, how did you keep the engine running, the soul floating above water, and the intellect humming for almost two decades? Song? Drink? Prayer? Love? Stubbornness? Belief? Hope? Fun(n)?

What word, line, and/or passage delighted you the most as you wrote it or it occurred to you?

Tim Cotton:

If you had your time over again, what changes would you make in your literary trajectory?

Robert K Blechman:

Since you wrote Ulysses as the first meta novel, was Finnegans Wake intended to be the first post-meta novel?

Diego Pacheco:

Back in the ear1y days, what was it like reading Finnegans Wake in a reading group setting? You (J.J.)seem to believe in the life of soul(s) substance and monad(s) coherence after death. How does Finnegans Wake describe Brunian monadic existence existencially and transpersonally? Did you pick universe building or did universe buildung pick you?

(J.J.) Is your last unwritten novel woven into Finnegans Wake yet to be extricated?

Mary Adams:

Not directly about FW, but could I ask if he remains persecuted by nightmares? I want to help free him. 

El Tel:

Were you on drugs when you wrote it?

Brian Hodge:

How did you get away with the the biggest literary con job for all these years?

Marcin Kedzior:

Could we go for a walk by the river, and maybe you could tell me about the sounds along the way. 

Philip Franklin:

My question relates to JJ creating an act of magic, and assumes he keeps up with recent developments*:

What's your view, Mr Joyce, on the fact that a current well known Irish writer writes a fictional biography of a writer who was more or less a contemporary of yours, and then goes on and calls it The Magician?

I'm in the middle of the Colm Toibin book, and in fact Thomas Mann and JJ have always been paired in my head, from the following experience. When I went to college in the sixties we were asked to read in the summer beforehand the Magic Mountain, in German. Not an easy task. When we got there the professor who had set the reading suggested we should now try something else of the same vintage - Ulysses. Which took me 40 years to get through, with the centenary of Bloomsday providing the final push.

*I will have to take a copy of Colm Toibin's The Magician in the Time Machine back to 1939 to explain this question to Mr Joyce. 

JKB Pacer:

'Lots of possible questions about plot and structure, but one major one: Who dies?' 

Michael Quinn:

'What is wrong with you?' 

What would you ask James Joyce?

 

I have some questions for you Mr Joyce

Suppose you could time travel back to Paris in the 1930s, and ask James Joyce to explain Finnegans Wake. What questions would you ask him?

He loved talking about his Work in Progress, as it was called until publication, but the people who interviewed him hadn't read the published book, and they didn't ask the questions we would ask now.  I've collected his statements in an earlier post, James Joyce describes Finnegans Wake.

Here are a few I would start with.

Is there a dreamer? Who is it?

What did you mean when you told Frank Budgen that your father's encounter with a tramp in the Phoenix Park was the 'whole basis' of your book?  What actually happened with your father and the tramp?

You also told Frank Budgen, in 1939, that the St Patrick and the Druid sketch was 'the indictment and defense of the book.' Did you have any idea that of that when you wrote it in 1923?

You started the project in Nice in October 1922, taking notes from newspaper ads e.g. Bird's substitute cake meal ('a tin with a purpose'). What did you think you were doing?

Why is so much of the book, even everyday phrases, recycled from newspapers and books? Did you want us to find your notebooks and track down all those sources?

Did you believe that in writing the book you were performing a work of magic?

What is the significance of the date 1132?  

Joyce invents 1132, from the National Library of Ireland

 

How much of the book takes place in the Mullingar House in Chapelizod, where this plaque can be seen?

 

Who are the 'we' who narrate the opening chapters of Book One?

Who is the 'I' who narrates the opening of Book Three? Is it really the old men's donkey?

How did you learn to write pidgin English in a Bognor guest house?

What's making all the 'tip' sounds in the Museyroom on pages 8-10?

What's making all these BENK! BINK! noises on page 379

Explaining the Phoenix Park Nocturne on p244, you told Jacques Mercanton that here ‘two little birds, male and female, release their little prayers, the two dots on the i's.'

Do you often use letters as pictures like this?

You also told Mercanton that you were following a 'method of working according to the precise laws of phonetics, the laws that rule over all languages'. What did you mean?

You told Max Eastman that in writing of the night, you couldn't use words in their ordinary connections: 'Used that way they do not express how things are in the night, in the different stages – the conscious, then semi-conscious, then unconscious.'  

Where do these different stages appear in the book? Is the Porter chapter, where there's more visual description, closer to waking?

Why and when did you abandon the title Finn's Hotel and rename it Finnegans Wake? 

Why did you drop your plan to make the fourth Shaun chapter 'all about roads, all about dawn and roads'?

Who is the late archdeacon J.F.X. Preserved Coppinger?

What did you mean when you told C.K.Odgen, explaining 'Hircus civis eblanensis', that 'the first man of Dublin was a he-goat'?

A Glass of Goat's Milk (1909)

When you got the chance to correct the text in 1939, why didn't you correct the real misprints instead of adding all those commas?

Richard Ellmann says that you 'spent a week in November (1929) explaining to James Stephens the whole plan of Finnegans Wake.'  What did you tell him?

What would you ask Mr Joyce?

The Cult of Water

Here's a spooky film for Halloween, Wake Lovers.

This film, made by the Central Office of Information in 1973, traumatised a whole generation of British children who saw it on television. Writing in Fortean Times, Bob Fischer, who was one of them, calls them the 'haunted generation'.  

'The bloody thing used to come lurching out of the ad breaks during Tiswas without any warning: one minute they'd be cheerily trying to sell you Connect 4 or this week's Look In, the next you'd be confronted by a cowled child-killer with Donald Pleasance's voice, gloomily intoning about how 'the show-offs are easy … but the unwary are easier still' and triumphantly warning, his voice laden with echo: 'I'll be BACK-ACK-ACK-ACK!'....I can remember the effect it had on me: it remains, unequivocally, the most scared I have ever been by anything. I was so scared that it continued to haunt me, years after they stopped showing it. Working on my university newspaper, I was granted an interview with Pulp. I wasted my allotted hour talking not about their music, but The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water, which they'd recently mentioned in passing in the NME. In fairness, they seemed keen to talk about it as well. 'I know it sounds like acid bollocks,' their guitarist Russell Senior offered, 'but me and Jarvis once went down the River Don in Sheffield, throwing money in the water to appease The Spirit.''

Alexis Petridis, 'Danger! The World's Scariest Films!' The Guardian, 30 March 2012

OFFERINGS TO WATER GODDESSES

By throwing coins into the River Don, Jarvis Cocker and Russell Senior were continuing a custom which goes back to the Bronze Age.  The finest Celtic metalwork has been found in our rivers, especially the Thames, Trent and Welland. 

After the Roman conquest, watery offerings were restricted to shrines with sacred pools, like Bath, where the goddess Sulis Minerva was worshipped at a hot spring.  

Last week I visited Carrawburgh fort on Hadrian's Wall, where there was a shrine to another water goddess, Coventina.

There was a sacred spring and pool here, Coventina's Well, excavated by the landowner John Clayton in 1876. He found 13,487 Roman coins, though only six can now be seen in his museum. Astonishingly,  the antiquarian John Collingwood Bruce melted most of them down, and had them cast into an eagle weighing 6.5kg. A local told me that there was an old man living nearby who, as a boy, was given handfuls of Roman coins here. He used them as skimming stones in the lough (unconsciously returning them to the goddess).

My friend and neighbour, David Bramwell, who grew up beside the River Don in Doncaster, was another 1970s child traumatised by the Lonely Water film.  

'I’ve wrestled all my life with thalassophobia – the fear of large bodies of water – and wanted to confront this fear. In the last ten years I went down a rabbit hole researching water cults, sacred springs and wells. I wanted to pay my respect to water. I also became interested in the idea of following a river back to its source. I knew if I was going to make this journey as a pilgrimage it’d have to be along the river Don where I grew up, to search for its lost water goddess and to trace its biological and metaphorical death and resurrection over the millennia. When I discovered that Sheffield adopted Vulcan – the Roman god of fire and forge – as its mascot in the 1800s, the story began to catalyse as a mythic battle of the sexes: goddess of water vs god of fire. During the industrial revolution Danu was the equivalent of a princess locked in a tower and being force-fed MacDonalds for 200 years.'

From a 2019 interview with David in Folkhorrorrevival.

Vulcan on Sheffield Town Hall

In 2017, David made a radio programme, Danu – Dead flows the Don, for the Radio 3 series Between the Ears. It included his compositions and the sounds of the river recorded with hydrophones.  There were interviews with Alan Moore, discussing hydromancy; John Heaps, a Sheffield steelworker recalling throwing cyanide into the river in the 1970s; and the Sheffield folklorist David Clarke quoting a sinister rhyme about the River Don:

'The shelving, slimy river Dun
Each year a daughter or a son.'

I recommend David Clarke's article, 'Dead Flows the Don', which is online here.

The programe also featured a Sheffield witch, Anwen, who runs a shop called Airy Fairy.  She tells David to travel to the source of the Don, to make amends to the river goddess, Danu.

In 2018, David expanded the material from the radio programme to make a stage show, The Cult of Water, which he performed by candlelight for the Brighton Festival.  Using film and sound recordings, he took the audience on a psychogeographical journey, back in time, up the river to its source. 

You can now get the text as a booklet, illlustrated by Pete Fowler, published by Rough Trade Books and the Museum of Witchcraft.

'Can Bramwell face his demons and unravel the symbolic mysteries of our ancient ancestors? Who is the mysterious Vulcan? And will there be a pie and a pint waiting for him at the end of it all?'

DUBLIN AND ANNA LIFFEY

Watching David's show in 2018, I was struck by the parallels between David's story and Finnegans Wake.  Joyce's main characters are a male city, Dublin, married to a female river, Anna Liffey.  The main difference is that in Finnegans Wake, the two elements are balanced.  The river and the city each have their say in the book.  Anna Livia speaks at the very end, from pages 615-628, and we move from the river at the end back to the city in the opening.

Anna Liffey on the Custom House

In one of the book's greatest sections, Haveth Childers Everywhere (532-554), HCE as Dublin describes how he 'waged love' on the river (547.07), leading her from Leixlip, and casting bridges over her to adorn her.

'I cast my tenspan joys on her, arsched overtupped, from bank of call to echobank' 547.29

There were ten bridges over the Liffey when Joyce was writing. There are now twenty-one I think.

'...and I gave until my lilienyounger turkeythighs soft goods and hardware (catalogue, passim) and fine ladderproof hosiery lines (see stockingers' raiment) and cocquette coiffs (see Agnes' hats) and pennigsworths of the best of taste of knaggy jets and silvered waterroses and geegaws of my pretty novelties and wispywaspy frocks, trancepearances of redferns and lauralworths' 548.18

Even the city's brewing of Guinness is an act of love for the river: 

'I brewed for my alpine plurabelle, wigwarming wench, (speakeasy!) my granvilled brandold Dublin lindub, the free, the froh, the frothy freshener, puss, puss, pussyfoot, to split the spleen of her maw' 553.25

Joyce could write this lovesong because Dublin, unlike Sheffield, never had heavy industry.  His favourite whiskey was Jameson's, which he believed tasted of the River Liffey. He told Gilbert Seldes, 'All Irish whiskeys use the water of the Liffey; all but one filter it, but John Jameson uses it mud and all. That gives it its special quality.' Joyce sent Seldes an Easter present of a bottle of Jamesons with a card inscribed, 'James Joyce presents Anna Livia's fireheaded son.' (Ellmann 592)

Imagine Haveth Childers Everywhere rewritten as the voice of industrial Sheffield/Vulcan describing his relationship with the Don!

'Choked by the coal industry at Mesborough, polluted from the heavy steelworks of Rotherham and Sheffield, the Don is diverted to soothe Vulcan's hellish heat.'  

The Cult of Water

After I told David about HCE and ALP, he wrote a new Wake section for the show, which follows his arrival at the river's source.

In 2019, David toured The Cult of Water, taking it to Doncaster, Sheffield, Liverpool, London and various festivals. Each performance ended with a Q&A focusing on the stories and history of the local river. So, in Brighton, he talked about our lost river, the Wellesbourne. In Liverpool, he was joined by the poet Eleanor Rees talking about the folklore surrounding the River Mersey^. In London, the folklorist Chris Roberts talked about the capital's lost rivers.  

He should take the show to Dublin and have a Q&A on the Liffey!

David has a new Guardian article on walking the Don, which you can read here: 'The post-industrial river, called South Yorkshire’s answer to Apocalypse Now by Jarvis Cocker in the 1970s, today boasts great trails and clean waters.'

FROM SWERVE OF SHORE TO BEND OF BAY

The Cult of Water has now had yet another incarnation, as a 2021 album of David's music and songs based on the show. This also marks the twentieth anniversary of his band, Oddfellow's Casino.

 

Here's 'From Swerve of Shore to Bend of Bay', from The Cult of Water, opening with the voice of Alan Moore.

Finn's Hotel

I took this photo when visiting Sweny's in 2013

This is the beginning of South Leinster Street, Dublin.  It's a terrace that forms the south wall of Trinity College, and is just over the road from Sweny the chemist. High up on the redbrick wall, you can see a ghost sign 'Finn's Hotel'. 

Thom's Dublin Directory 1904

Nora Barnacle was working as a maid here in the summer of 1904, when she first met James Joyce and walked out with him to Ringsend, probably on 16 June.

 

Today, the Lincoln's Inn pub, down the road at 19 Lincoln Place, has a sign on its glass door: 'This was the original front door of Finn’s Hotel – Nora Barnacle worked here in June 1904.'  The pub now offers Joyce's Stout ('don't worry, folks - this dry Irish stout is far from being as complex as its name sake'), Bloomsday Lager and Nora's Red Ale, all made by the Wilting Quill brewery of Lexington Kentucky. 

From the Lincoln's Inn facebook page

Thom's Dublin Directory shows that 19 Lincoln Place was Michael Fanning's pub in 1904.

Even if this wasn't Finn's Hotel, it's nice to see it commemorated here.

'A STRANGE HOUSE': RETURN TO FINN'S HOTEL 1909

In 1909, Joyce returned to Dublin to open the first Irish cinema, the Volta Electric Theatre on Mary Street. He was accompanied by four Italian business partners, Nicolo Vidacovich, Antonio Machnich, Giuseppe Caris and Giovanni Rebez. 

Joyce booked the Italians rooms in Finn's Hotel, probably because it was cheap and central. It also gave him the opportunity to visit the hotel and see the room where Nora had slept.

'Today I went to the hotel where she lived when I first met her. I halted in the dingy doorway before going in I was so excited. I have not told them my name but I have an impression that they know who I am. Tonight I was sitting at the table in the dining-room at the end of the hall with two Italians at dinner. I ate nothing. A pale-faced girl waited at table, perhaps her successor. The place is very Irish. I have lived so long abroad and in so many countries that I can feel at once the voice of Ireland in anything. The disorder of the table was Irish, the wonder on the faces also, the curious-looking eyes of the woman herself and her waitress....A strange land, a strange house, strange eyes and the shadow of a strange strange girl standing silently by the fire, or gazing out of the window across the misty College park. What mysterious beauty clothes every place where she has lived!'

To Nora, 19 November 1909, Selected Letters, p178

'The Four Italians have left Finn's Hotel and live now over the show. I paid about £20 to your late mistress, returning good for evil. Before I left the hotel I told the waitress who I was and asked her to let me see the room where you slept in. She took me upstairs and took me to it. You can imagine my excited appearnce and manner. I saw my love's room, her bed, the four little walls within which she dreamed of my eyes and voice, the little curtains she pulled aside in the morning to look out over the grey sky of Dublin, the poor modest silly little things on the walls over which her glance travelled while she undressed her fair young body at night.'

To Nora, 11 December 1909, Selected Letters, p187

In 1912, Nora visisted Ireland, and stayed in Finn's Hotel where 'in contrast to her husband's lachrymose visits to the shrine she experienced a small triumph at being guest instead of chambermaid.' (Ellmann, JJ, p323)

 

FINN'S HOTEL IN FINNEGANS WAKE

This is the cover of the Spring 1989 issue of A Finnegans Wake Circular, which contains 'The Name of the Book', a brilliant piece of detective work from Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon.  You can download the whole run of the FWC from Ian Gunn's magnificent Joycetools page, set up in honour of Clive Hart.

Rose and O'Hanlon present conclusive evidence that Finnegans Wake was originally titled Finn's Hotel.

Joyce told his official biographer, Herbert Gorman, that he came up with the book's title at the very beginning of the project, in Nice in October 1922:

'Joyce, full to bursting with his new project, did not actually begin to put down notes and stray phases for the work until the autumn when he was enjoying the warm skies and Mediterranean sunsets at Nice. It is interesting to note that he had the title for the book in mind at this time and confided it to his wife. She a miracle among women, kept the title to herself for seventeen years although many a sly and curious friend attempted to trap her into revealing it.'

Herbert Gorman, James Joyce, 1941, p333

Sharing this secret with Nora would be a romantic gesture if the book was named after the hotel. Imagine her indifferent reaction to being told he was writing a book called Finnegans Wake!

Rose and O'Hanlon imagine the scene.

'When Joyce had thought of the book's title to be, he said to Nora: Nora, the name of this new book of mine - are you ready? - is Finn's Hotel. But this is to be strictly between the two of us. You are not to breathe a word of it to a sinner. Can you promise me that, a cuishla'

 

Rose and O'Hanlon's evidence for this comes from Joyce's notebooks, his letters to Harriet Shaw Weaver, and the text of Finnegans Wake itself.

In Joyce's notebook VI.B.25, written in Bognor Regis, in 1923, we first find the name of the hotel.

 

'Finn's Hotel.' VI.B.25, 81
'Finn's Hotel I House that Finn Built' VI.B.25.82
'Finn's Hotel I ... /they rifle wardrobes' VI.B.25. 82

 

In later notebooks from 1923-4, the name of the hotel appears several times, often as initials. F.H. can now become any public building.

'all tongues in F.H./ tower of babel' VI.B.6.102

'parl in FH' VI.B.2.42
'FH W[omen] talk from various stages (the centuries) children play in the courtyard. It becomes barracks, hospital, museum.' VI.B.2 2f
'Flying House (FH)' VI.B.2.94  

'Kitty O'Shea=FH' VI.B.20.48  

In February 1924, Joyce came up with a square sign, which he now used to stand for a public building instead of F.H. Here are some typical uses, from Roland McHugh's Sigla of Finnegans Wake.

 

 

The key evidence that the name of the hotel was also the book's title comes from Joyce's letter of 24 March 1924 to Harriet Shaw Weaver explaining his sigla system.

 

 

A GUESSING GAME WITH MISS WEAVER

 

According to Ellmann, when Joyce met Weaver in London in April 1927, he 'suggested that she try to guess the title of the book.' (Ellmann 597). This was part of his campaign to involve her in his book, which she disapproved of.

  

Two notebook entries refer to a competition to guess the name of the house/title. 

 

Jane Lidderdale and Mary Nicholson, HSW's biogaphers, and Ellmann describe the guessing game that followed, selectively quoting the letters. They leave out some key evidence, in the mistaken belief that the book's title was always Finnegans Wake.

Here's the whole guessing game, from the letters section of the Digital Archive (which includes unpublished letters from the Weaver papers in the British Library). The square siglum is represented by []:

HSW by Man Ray

16 April 1927. JJ: ‘I think I have done what I wanted to do. I am glad you like my punctuality as an engine driver. I have taken this up because I am really one of the great engineers, if not the greatest, in the world besides being a musicmaker, philosophist and heaps of other things. All the engines I know are wrong. Simplicity. I am making an engine with only one wheel. No spokes of course. The wheel is a perfect square. You see what I am driving at, don’t you? I am awfully solemn about it, mind you, so you must not think it is a silly story about the mouse and the grapes. It’s a wheel, I tell the world. And it’s all square.’ 

 

16 April 1927. HSW: 'A Wheeling Square...Squaring the Wheel.' 

 
28 April 1927. JJ to HSW: 'What name or names would you give []?'

12 May 1927 JJ to HSW: 'I shall use some of your suggestions about [] of which you have a right idea. The title is very simple and as commonplace as can be. It is not Kitty O'Shea as some have suggested, though it is in two words. I want to think over it more as I propose to make some experiments with it also....My remarks about the engine were not meant as a hint at the title. I meant that I wanted to take up several other arts and crafts and teach everybody how to do everything properly, so as to be in the fashion.' 

 

(This letter recalls Joyce's note 'Kitty O'Shea=FH' VI.B.20.4)

 
19 May 1927 HSW: 'One Squared'

31 May 1927 JJ: 'As regards the title, ‘one squared’ can be used in the ‘math’ lesson by the writer of Part II if he, or she, is so ‘dispoged’. The title I projected is much more commonplace and accords with the J J & S and A.G.S. & Co sign and it ought to be fairly plain from a reading of w. The sign in this form means H.C.E. interred in the landscape.'

13 June 1927 HSW: 'Dublin Ale'

23 June 1927 JJ: 'Your guesses get nearer but [] is the name of a ‘place where’ not a ‘thing which’ or a ‘person who’. 

28 June 1927 HSW: 'Ireland's Eye…Phoenix Park…Dublin Bay'

10 July 1927 JJ: Ireland's Eye (ey = island in Danish) is an islet off Howth Head. Phoenix Park is rather close but it is a place not built by hands — at least not all — whereas [] is.

26 July 1927 JJ: 'Two of your guesses were fairly near the last is off the track. The piece I am hammering at ought to reveal it.'

14 August 1927 JJ: 'As to 'Phoenix'. A viceroy who knew no Irish thought this was the word the Dublin people used and put up a monument of a phoenix in the park. The Irish was: fionn uisge (pron. finn ishghe =clear water) from a well of bright water there'

N.D. August 1927 HSW: 'Finn MacCool'

30 August 1927 JJ: 'This is to … tell you that the first word of your guess is right with an apostrophe ‘s’ so I suppose you can finish it.'

 

17 September 1927. HSW: 'Finn's Town, Finn's City'.

 

The key letters are those of 23 June, 10 July and 30 August (the first and third previously unpublished). They reveal that the title of Joyce's book was in two words,  'a place', in Dublin, 'built by hands', whose first word was 'Finn's'.  He did not reply to her final two guesses, which were very close.

The obvious solution is Finn's Hotel.

Here are Rose and O'Hanlon:

 

'Had Miss Weaver known in richer detail the minutiae of Joyce's early life, or had Joyce wished to continue the game, she would perhaps have finally guessed right, with unknown consequences for the title-page of the book that was published nearly twelve years later' 

 

THE QUIZ CHAPTER

 

Joyce's game with Harriet Shaw Weaver inspired question 3 in the Quiz chapter, written in July-August 1927. Here Shem asks Shaun the title/ name of the house.  On the manuscript, Joyce drew his square siglum next to this question, showing that its subject was the title of his book.

3. Which title is the true-to-type motto-in-lieu for that Tick for Teac thatchment painted witt wheth one darkness, where asnake is under clover and birds aprowl are in the rookeries and a magda went to monkishouse and a riverpaard was spotted, which is not Whichcroft Whorort not Ousterholm Dreyschluss not Haraldsby, grocer, not Vatandcan, vintner, not Houseboat and Hive not Knox-atta-Belle not O’Faynix Coalprince not Wohn Squarr Roomyeck not Ebblawn Downes not Le Decer Mieux not Benjamin’s Lea not Tholomew’s Whaddingtun gnot Antwarp gnat Musca not Corry’s not Weir’s not the Arch not The Smug not The Dotch House not The Uval nothing Grand nothing Splendid (Grahot or Spletel) nayther Erat Est Erit noor Non michi sed luciphro? 

Answer: Thine obesity, O civilian, hits the felicitude of our orb!  139.28-140.07

Shaun gets the answer wrong, mistakenly believing that he's been asked for the Dublin motto rather than a title. The introduction to the chapter alerts us to his mistaking a name for a motto:

'He misunderstruck and aim for am ollo of number three of them.'  126.08

Shaun couldn't have given a right answer without giving away the title of the book, which Joyce still wanted to keep secret in 1927, when the chapter was published in transition.

This question, with its list of wrong answers which are places, businesses, pubs and hotels,  only makes sense if the right answer is a place/business/pub/hotel.  The correct answer to this question must be Finn's Hotel.

With 'Wohn Squarr Roomyeck' Joyce has included one of Miss Weaver's guesses, 'one squared', combined with his 1925-1931 Paris address, 2 Square Robiac.  Other wrong answers are real places where the Joyces stayed, such as Antwerp.

'Antwerp I renamed Gnantwerp, for I was devoured there by mosquitoes.' To HSW  24.9.26.

'Grand nothing Splendid (Grahot or Spletel)'

Joyce stayed at the Grand Hotel in Antwerp from 17-20 September 1926, when he was bitten by the mosquitoes. 

After retitling his book, Joyce could have rewritten the question, to include song titles ('which is not Miss Hooligan's Christmas Cake, not Enniscorthy, not Phil the Fluter's Ball...'). But he left his text as a palimpsest, revealing earlier versions of his plan.

The cover of Rose and O'Hanlon's article quotes page 514, where the title is concealed and revealed.

 

 

Finn's Hotel was a great title for Joyce's book, since it combines the name of a mythical Irish giant with a modern Dublin 'very Irish' hotel.  It suits a book in which the last high king of Ireland appears as a publican, Tristan as a football hero, and Iseult as a film star flapper.  Like the square siglum, it serves as a container, where any material could be placed.

WHEN DID JOYCE CHANGE THE TITLE?

 

The big mystery is when and why Joyce changed the title to Finnegans Wake. And how did Nora react when he told her that his book's title no longer commemorated their courtship? 

When I posted this on twitter, Sam Slote shared an intriguing note made by Joyce in mid–late 1926.

'name K.O./ w of b of J’s f’s w / describe — f'.  VI.B.15.99

Sam says, 'The 'w of b' is not clear, but J's f's w = Joyce's Finnegan's Wake (with apostrophe)'

Late 1926 was the very time that Joyce introduced the song into his book, in the opening chapter.

But if he was thinking of using Finnegan's Wake as a title in 1926, he had changed his mind by 1927, when he had his guessing game with Harriet Shaw Weaver and wrote the Quiz chapter.

Rose and O'Hanlon argue that the earliest dateable reference to the song as title is from 1937:

 'It was in the Summer of [1937] at a time when he was revising the galleys of Part III, that we find the earliest (to date) datable - and yet not entirely undebatable - reference to Finnegans Wake qua title. On galley 199,17 just before ".i .. ' . . o .. l", Joyce added the phrase: "Name or redress him and we'll call it a night!", the second part of which he derived from page 2 of notebook VI.B.44 (which he was compiling around this time). The phrase appears to betoken a signal for a change of a name and/or of an address. (''Finn's Hotel", one should note, is both.) It may be, also, that he had (at least for a moment) intended to change the line that followed - ".i . .'s .o .. l" - for we find on page 45 of that same notebook (VI.B.44),18 after one misformulated and deleted attempt the cryptonym:
.i..e.a. ' .. a ..
That is "Finnegan's Wake", with its consonants and one vowel out, and the really curious thing about it is that it still retains the apostrophe. The final disapostrophised version can only have come later.'

Around the same time, in June 1937, Joyce had a long conversation about his book with Jan Parandowski.

''Perhaps you have heard that I am writing something...'
'Work in Progress.'
'Yes, it doesn't have a title yet. The few fragments which I have published have been enough to convince many critics that I have finally lost my mind, which by the way they have been predicting faithfully for many years.....

I saddened at the thought of the exhausting, obstinate toil that Joyce had put into his book, which had no other chance than to be regarded by both his contemporaries and posterity as a genial caprice....His last work seems to me a wrecked ship, incapable of delivering its cargo to anyone....
Such, more or less, was the burden of my silence, from which I could not rouse myself. Joyce was whistling thoughtfully some sort of tune that I did not recognize. I asked, 'What is that you are whistling?'
'Oh, it's one of those old, old ballads from the music hall; it ends: 'Isn't it the truth I've told you, /Lots of fun at Finnegan's wake.''
He repeated the last verse again. I didn't know at the time that it contained more or less the hidden source and the very title of his curious work. '

Jan Parandowski, 'Meeting with Joyce', in Portraits of the Artist in Exile (ed Willard Potts), pp 160-2

EUGENE JOLAS WINS 1,000 FRANCS

 

Around the same time, Joyce revived his title guessing game, offering a cash prize of 1,000 francs, which was a big sum in the late 30s. The final winner was Eugene Jolas, who later explained how he guessed the title:

'Some six months before Work in Progess was scheduled to apear, there was an amusing incident in connection with its title, then known only to Mr and Mrs Joyce. Often he had challenged his friends to guess it. We all tried: Stuart Gilbert, Herbert Gorman, Samuel Beckett, Paul Léon, and I, but we failed miserably. One summer night, while dining on the terrace of Fouquet's, Joyce repeated his offer.  The Riesling was especilally good that night, and we were in high spirits. Mrs Joyce began to sing an Irish song about Mr Flannigan and Mrs Shannigan. Joyce looked startled and urged her to stop. This she did, but when he saw no harm had been done, he very distinctly, as a singer does it, made the lip motions which seemed to indicate F and W. My wife's guess was Fairy's Wake. Joyce looked astonished and said 'Brava! But something is missing.' For a few days we mulled over it. One morning I knew it was Finnegans Wake, although it was only an intuition. That evening I suddenly threw all the words into the air. Joyce blanched. Slowly he set down the wineglass he held. 'Ah, Jolas, you've taken something out of me,' he said, almost sadly. When we parted that night, he embraced me, danced a few of his intricate steps, and asked: 'How would you like to have the money?' I replied: 'In sous'.  The following morning, during my absence from home, he arrived with a bag filled with ten-franc pieces. He gave them to my daughters with instructions to serve them to me at lunch. So it was Finnegans Wake. All those present were sternly enjoined not to reveal it, and we kept it a secret until he made the official announcement at his birthday dinner on the following February second.'

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

  

Oh to time travel back to the terrace of Fouquet's on that summer night in 1938. I would walk up to Joyce's table and say, 'The title is Finn's Hotel!' What would he have said? How would Nora have reacted?

Harriet Shaw Weaver, who was the source of the money for the cash prize, only found out the name of the book when she saw the proofs for the title page on 4 February 1939.

A pint of Joyce's stout at the Lincoln's Inn, June 2022