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?