James Joyce, Cricket Lover

Ranji and C.B. Fry, Joyce's boyhood heroes

'He disliked football but liked cricket, and though too young to be in the junior eleven, he promised to be a useful bat. He still took an eager interest in the game when he was at Belvedere, and eagerly studied the feats of Ranji and Fry, Trumper and Spofforth. I remember having to bowl for him for perhaps an hour in our back garden in Richmond Street. I did so out of pure goodness of heart since, for my part, I loathed the silly, tedious, inconclusive game, and would not walk across the road to see a match.'

Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother's Keeper

Yes, James Joyce wasn't only a rugby fan, he was also a cricket lover!  He inherited his love of the game from his father, and learned to play at Clongowes Wood, the exclusive boarding school he attended from 1888-91. This was right at the beginning of the Golden Age of Cricket, dominated by larger than life characters like Ranji, the cricketing maharaja and C.B.Fry, who supposedly turned down the throne of Albania and whose party trick was to leap backwards from a stationary position onto a mantelpiece (Fry was still doing this in his 70s).  Fry and Ranji both played for my home county, Sussex, and we have their names on the front of Brighton buses.  Joyce's other heroes named here were Victor Trumper, the great Australian batsman, and Fred 'The Demon' Spofforth, the fast bowler whose 1882 demolition of England at the Oval led to the Ashes.

Here's Joyce at Clongowes from the Boarding House blog. He's the little chap at the front in the middle.

Cricket was played at Clongowes from Easter to mid June, and then for three weeks in September. The sounds of the game form a repeated leitmotif, reverberating through the Clongowes Wood episode of A Portrait:

'But there was no play on the football grounds for cricket was coming....And all over the playgrounds they were playing rounders and bowling twisters and lobs. And from here and from there came the sounds of the cricket bats through the soft grey air. They said: pick, pack, pock, puck: little drops of water in a fountain slowly falling in the brimming bowl.' 

'The air was very silent and you could hear the crickets bats but more slowly than before: pick, pock.' 

'In the silence of the soft grey air he heard the cricket bats from here and from there: pock.'

'The fellows were practising long shies and bowling lobs and slow twisters. In the soft grey silence he could hear the bump of the balls: and from here and from there through the quiet air the sound of the cricket bats: pick, pack, pock, puck: like drops of water in a fountain falling softly in the brimming bowl.'

Shies were throws by fielders from the outfield. A lob was a style of underarm bowling, which died out after the First World War. 'Lobsters', like Digby Jephson, tried to hit the wicket by letting the ball drop from a great height, descending behind the batsman and hitting the stumps.

Digby 'The Lobster' Jephson, one of the last lob bowlers

Cricket also passes through Leopold Bloom's mind in Ulysses, outside Trinity College:
 

'Heavenly weather really. If life was always like that. Cricket weather. Sit around under sunshades. Over after over. Out. They can’t play it here. Duck for six wickets. Still Captain Buller broke a window in the Kildare street club with a slog to square leg.'    

A 'duck' is a batsman's dismissal for a score of zero. Square leg is a fielding position, on the left side of a right-handed batsman. A slog is a powerful shot in which the batsman hits the ball as high and far as possible, aiming to reach the boundary.  It's a risky shot to play, says wikipedia, because 'the ball is almost certainly going to be in the air for a long period of time and great technique and power is required from the batsman to actually clear the field.'

The smashing of the Kildare Street window was a famous feat in Dublin, though various cricketers were said to have been responsible. See this blog post, Breaking the Windows of the Kildare Street Club, and this piece on Captain Buller.

'YOU LOOKED LIKE AN ENGLISH CRICKETER'

Frank Budgen describes his first meeting with Joyce in his book, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses. Joyce told Budgen that he warmed to him on their first meeting because, 'You looked like an English cricketer out of the W.G. Grace period. Yes, Arthur Shrewsbury. He was a great bat but an awkward looking tradesman at the wicket.'
 

Arthur Shrewsbury

CRICKET IN FINNEGANS WAKE

Joyce's major treatments of cricket are in Finnegans Wake, which is packed with cricketing terms and the names of Golden Age cricketers. Joyce himself alerted us to look for cricket in the Wake:

'You are not Irish', he said, ' and the meaning of some passages will perhaps escape you. But you are Catholic, so you will recognize this or that allusion. You don't play cricket; this word may mean nothing to you. But you are a musician, so you will feel at ease in this passage. When my Irish friends come to visit me in Paris, it is not the philosophical subtleties of the book that amuse them, but my memories of O'Connell's top hat.'

Jacques Mercanton, 'The Hours of James Joyce' in Portraits of the Artist in Exile

Joyce's greatest delusion was that the more miscellaneous stuff he packed into his book, the more readers he would attract!

It was Ron Malings who first tracked down cricket references in a 1970 James Joyce Quarterly article, 'Cricketers at the Wake' which you can read on JSTOR.  Here's what he has to say about Thomas Lord, the father of cricket.

I like this, but it's typical of Malings, who believes that every time the word 'Lord' appears it must relate to cricket. 

From Malings, I learned that the first Australian team to visit England was made up of Aborigines, who toured England in 1868. They'd learned to play the game in cattle stations in Western Victoria, where they were employed as stockmen. Malings set out to find all the members of the Aborigine side, shown in this photo

Malings looked for words similar to their names across FW, finding Jonny Mullagh, their star player in 'He had it from the Mullah' 193.18, James Cuzens, their most gifted batsman in 'courting cousins' 466.04, and King Cole, another player, in 'Old Finncoole' 569.23. But there are much more obvious reasons for these names e.g. Old King Cole mixed with Finn MacCool. I wish the Aborigine players were in the Wake, but none of them appear in the undisputed cluster of cricketers on pages 583–4, which I'll be looking at in a separate post.

Malings reminds me of Robert Boyle, who wrote a wonderful piece on angling in FW, and argued, 'The evidence that I have discovered is so overwhelming that the Wake must be considered as belonging in great part, albeit a bizarre part, to angling literature.'

Others have investigated Joyce and cricket. There's a 1975 book by Geoffrey Keane Whitelock, Cricket in the Writings of James Joyce, which I've never seen and which is currently unavailable. David Pierce has an excellent chapter on Joyce and cricket in his book, Light, Freedom and Song: A Cultural History of Modern Irish Writing.

Luckily, thanks to Raphael Slepon's wonderful Fweet, you can track down all the cricketing references yourself online. A search on 'cricket' brings 168 elucidations.

W.G.GRACE

 

The player who appears most often in Finnegans Wake is W.G. Grace (1848-1915), the most famous Engish cricketer, who dominated the game during a long career. In the Wake, he is a version of HCE.

Grace was known, like Gladstone, as the 'Grand Old Man'. 

'Grand old Manbutton, give your bowlers a rest!' 606.35

'W.D.'s Grace' 71.19 – one of the abusive names given to HCE

'for the grace of the fields' 584.11

'wot a lout about it if it was only a pippappoff pigeon shoot that gracesold getrunner, the man of centuries, was bowled out by judge, jury and umpire at batman’s biff like a witchbefooled legate. Dupe.'  336.36

Here the shooting of the Russian General/overthrow of HCE is reimagined as a cricket match, in which W.G.Grace - 'that gracesold getrunner' (old grace run getter) is bowled out by the three soldiers. 

'man of centuries'. A century is 100 runs. Grace was the first player to score more than a 100 centuries in first class cricket. His final score, listed here, was 124.

'witchbefooled legate' – 'Leg Before Wicket'. 

A clear case of LBW

L.B.W. was a rule invented in 1744 to prevent a batsman using his pads to protect the wicket. If a ball, which would otherwise have hit the wicket, hits the batsman's pads he is found out by L.B.W., though there are several other factors an umpire has to consider, explained here by Stephen Fry.

Joyce gives us L.B.W.s elsewhere in the Wake:

'Leg-before-Wicked lags-behind-Wall where Mr Whicker whacked a great fall.' 434.10 

'Lynch Brother, Withworkers....L.B.W. Hemp, hemp, hurray! says the captain in the moonlight' 495.11

'elbiduubled' 583.27

Grace was notorious for being a 'shameless cheat' (Geoffrey Moorhouse in Wisden).  Once, when given out L.B.W., he said, 'They came to see me bat, not you umpire!'

 

'batman’s biff' – blindman's buff and the batsman biffing the ball. 

Although he was a Gentleman (amateur) rather than a Player (professional), Grace made a fortune out of the game. Here's Geoffrey Moorhouse again:

'On Grace's first tour of Australia in 1873-74 (when he was a medical student simultaneously enjoying his honeymoon) he extracted a fee of £1,500 from the organisers, which would be well over £100,000 at present values. On his second tour in 1891-92, one-fifth of the entire cost of transporting 13 English cricketers across the world, supporting them in Australia and paying them for what they did there, went into Grace's pocket. He regularly collected testimonials - one, worth £1,458, was organised by MCC so that he might buy a medical practice - and overall probably took something like £1 million in today's currency out of the game.'

Grace came up during the early 'roundarm era', and continued to bowl in this archaic style even after overarm bowling was legalised in 1864.   Here he is showing his roundarm bowling technique in 1902, from the Guardian.

HCE describes himself in cricketing terms in 'Haveth Childers Everywhere', his long speech of self-justification:

'My game was a fair average since I perpetually kept my ouija ouija wicket up.' 532.17

'with a slog to square leg I sent my boundary to Boundary Bay.' 543.03  

There's Captain Buller's slog to square leg again.

In my next post I will be looking at the famous grotesque cricketing sex passage on pages 583–4, in which Grace, Trumper, Ranji and Spofforth all make an appearance. In a piece in the Guardian, Richard Tomlinson put this in his top ten cricketing scenes in literature, writing, 'Only Joyce could have constructed a filthy sex scene out of the names of first-class cricketers.'

BENK!...BINK...BUNK...BENK BANK BONK

This strange passage is on page 379 of Finnegans Wake, at the end of the pub chapter. It comes in the middle of a long speech attacking HCE who, threatened by a hostile mob, has shut himself in his pub after closing time.

Curious about those capitalized words, which look like sound effects, I thought I'd see what the commentators had to say.  I started with the earliest one, Campbell and Robinson in The Skeleton Key:

'These capitalised syllables represent the fall of Finnegan, the rocking of a boat at the bottom of the sea of sleep, also a series of stiff punches that the prizefighters are throwing at each other; in sum, a combination suggesting the ultimate collapse and doom of HCE.'

He fell from the ladder and he broke his skull and they carried him home his corpse to wake

So they're suggesting the fall of Tim Finnegan from the wall on the book's opening page, maybe with his head making the first 'BENK' and the dropped bricks the following sounds.  The Skeleton Key authors like to bring Tim Finnegan in whenever possible.

The 'rocking of a boat at the bottom of the sea of sleep' idea made me wonder how a boat at the bottom of a sea of sleep would be able to make a 'benk' sound. And why would a boat rock at the bottom of the sea? And why would this boat suddenly appear at this point in the text? And how would it suggest 'the ultimate collapse and doom of HCE'?

And here are 'a series of stiff punches that the prizefighters are throwing at each other'. But who are these prizefighters? There's been no mention of them before in the Skeleton Key, and not clearly in FW either. Perhaps they were suggested by 'It's our last fight Megantic' (from the song 'It's Your Last Trip, Titanic, Fare You Well ').

It strikes me that all three suggestions are guesses – creative readings, presented as statements of fact. It would have been better if Campbell and Robinson had said, 'These capitalised syllables suggest to us the fall of Finnegan' etc.
 

None of the other commentators have accepted the Skeleton Key interpretations – instead they've all come up with their own creative readings, which similarly weren't taken up by other commentators.  Every creative reader makes their own Finnegans Wake. As Finn Fordham says, 'We produce a wake by the way we steer, but we also steer by the Wake that we produce.'

Anthony Burgess, in Here Comes Everybody, gave a more general reading: 'We hear dangerous noises: BENK and BINK and BUNK and BANK and BONK – falling noises, hitting noises. HCE's doom is night.'

David Hayman wrote that the sound effects were 'suggestive of stones being thrown at the pub by the clients'. I prefer that to the Skeleton Key's readings because it has been inspired by the actual situation on the page – HCE hiding from the hostile mob. It would also explain why the first sound has an exclamation mark (because of the surprise effect of hearing the first stone hitting) while the others don't. But it's a shame that Joyce didn't provide any other evidence ('Take that HCE!').

E.L.Epstein argued that the sounds combine the ringing of the 'midnight Angelus' with 'blows landing on the hump-backed scapegoat'. My problem with that is that HCE is inside the pub, protected from the mob outside. However there is a bell ringing earlier on the page at 379.08 'Bing bong!' –  the Zurich Sechseläuten festival bell, a Wake motif. Perhaps that bell, which is rung at 6pm rather than midnight, set off all these BENK! sounds. 

In the first draft, the bell's  'Beng!' goes directly before the 'BINK!' (Later Joyce switched the order of BENK and BINK)

David Hayman's First Draft Version of Finnegans Wake

The most eccentric reading is by John Gordon, who believes that HCE is lying in bed, having visions of a ghost. He sees the long angry speech from 373-80 as a shouting match between HCE and his man-of-all work, Sackerson, culminating in the slamming of shutters: 

'The figure lying in the bedroom has had enough of the weather coming in through the blown-open windowboards and has called for (Sackerson), who had 'hord from afar a piping' to come close them up. Meanwhile the roistering of the cast-out customers bodes ill for the would-be returner/haunter: they are overheard from outside 'marshalsing'...'The dumb he shoots the shopper rope. And they all pour forth' indicates that far from closing the shutters the oafish Sackerson has made things worse – perhaps he heard 'shut them up' as 'shutter open'. In the boisterous paragraph from 373.13 to 380.05, shouting master and servant are trying to make themselves understood to one another over the noisy weather, and things don't start to quiet down until, with a 'BENK!...BINK...BUNK...BENK BANK BONK' (379.27-30), the servant finally succeeds in slamming (or hammering – the sound echoes Christ being nailed o the cross) the windowboards shut...'

Gordon's book is misleadingly titled Finnegans Wake: A Plot Summary. It should be called A New Plot Applied to Finnegans Wake.

Gordon mentions none of this in his Wake blog, where he gives this reading:

“BENK!” etc: certainly, sounds of Finnegan falling from his ladder and of the pubkeeper stumbling around, but also seems to bring back the drunken (“sloop” (.30)) boat, in which some of the passengers were departing, lurching from shore to shore. Also, for a while there’s an American football game going on – another case of lurching from one collision to another....
379.30: “And we greesiously augur for your Meggers a BENK BANK BONK to sloop in:” And we graciously/greedily offer/predict for your Majesty a bunk to sleep in. Compare (.19) “Abedicate yourself,” with note. “Augur:” auger – tool for boring holes, for instance in a ship, for instance a sloop: maybe, as elsewhere in FW, the plan is to drown him, or at least submerge him permanently. (“Bunk” is the usual term for a shipboard sleeping place, and in the next line they’ll be wishing him bon voyage on the Titanic.)'

It's as if there are two John Gordons, and the Wake blogger hasn't read his book.

Joyce would probably have enjoyed all these interpretations (he said the Wake could 'satisfy more readers than any other book because it gives them the opportunity to use their own ideas in the reading').
  

FWREAD IDEAS

 

More ideas came from  FWREAD, the page-a-week reading group. Peter Reichenberg suggested that the sounds could represent the interference on HCE's pub radio.  Hen Hanna discovered that 'Google.Books shows some hits for "benk bank bonk".  I think they are old Nordic (Swed. dial.) cognates for bang (strike)  bungle (strike clumsily)'. Eric Rosenbloom wrote, 'The B-NKs struck me as the knocking of a boat that The Four are launching (or carrying away).'

I suggested that they may be the sound of HCE, as High King Roderick O'Conor, falling over inside his pub, or knocking over the glasses (an event which follows immediately after, on p 382, where 'he came acrash a crupper'). But I have no idea if Joyce intended that.

There was an an-depth interpretation from Orlando Mezzabotta, the Italian actor and Wake performer, who is the most creative reader of Joyce I know. Orlando came up with a typically brilliant interpretation which, unlike John Gordon's, is based on a close reading of the text. His is the only reading which relates the words to the surrounding text:

'Well, I myself have been quite intrigued (and still I am) by B-NK series at the end of page 379. They seem obviously to be onomatopoeic sounds.
 

But first we should note that the first sound is BENK!, with an exclamation mark (MARK: king Mark), which seems indeed a KNOCK. That is probably in relation to 379.24-26

"But of all your wanings send us out your peppydecked ales and you'll not be such a bad lot."

Now it seems that after the insults the gang  (as a matter of fact I am convinced that the paragraph beginning with "He should be ashaped..." and ending with "fear you will." p. 379 is a long monologue of Hosty's - Hosty, namely Host Jr, against his father the Host; a violent tirade very similar to the one of the "unsolicited visitor" of the end of Chapter 3 - pages 70-72); the gang, led by Hosty, seems ready to make peace, provided HCE send them savoury drinks (send us out your peppydecked ales ).

There's indeed an ironic reference to Genesis 19,5. 

'They called to Lot, Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so that we can have sex with them.'

 
Lot and "bad lot". Where "wanings" are "weanings", hinting at "children". And "ales" is "Alice"; thus: "of all your children send us  peppy Alice". Which is a further invitation to the father who does not want to listen, the deaf father [379.21  Yus, sord, fathe,], to loose to them his daughter (whom, in Genesis, Lot will have sex with).

So they want their drink/sex and they knock violently at the door:

BENK! In fact it's a sort of "BANG", with a "K" that enhances the noise.
 

And since "benk" is Norwegian "bench", that may hint also at a bench beaten against the door, a sort of ramming (the siege of HCE's castle/tavern).
 

But the B-NK series may also be a variant of Italian "bianco" (white), French "blanc", English "blank"; connected with the  "wheateny one" (379.26-27) the white flesh of the young girl, versus the browny one (rye) of servile women. A possible reference to the hen of 379.23:

"You keep that henayearn and her fortycantle glim lookbehinder."

(A lady with a glaring posterior! -- although in this case it's probably just a vulgar fat-assed woman, to underscore the difference from the jewel eyed girl: 379.24 "We might do with rubiny leeses" - lenses, eyes)

After the first, evident knock there is the series of five B-NKs in a vocalic succession (I-U-E-A-O) which is not the usual A E I O U. I don't think there is a purpose in this, unless we suppose that the "disorderly" gang does not follow the prescribed rules. I am more inclined to think that the sounds are related to specific situations.
 

First the gang addresses ALP  (that Missus with the kiddies of sweet Gorteen). I wouldn't exclude that "putty our wraughther" of 379.21 is in fact ALP, the mother. "wraughther -> wrought her" : she/her who created/wrought. And "putty" may hint at Italian "puttana", Spanish "puta". Thus: that whore of our mother! In Italy we say "Puttana Eva" (Eve, that whore!). An insult to both the parents. (b.t.w: wraughther  hints also at "wrougther - rorter :

[Australian] a small-scale confidence trickster)

The gang seems to beg the lady's pardon for the noise,  hoping not to have disturbed her:

"we sincerely hope that the Missus has not at all (at the very least) been (BINK) [note, please, "bing": the delicate, rosy (pink) banging!]  disturbed (deranged) by the noise (tittles: names, titles) we made in case she were sleeping (BUNK: bed)". Then the gang addresses HCE, calling him sarcastically "majesty" (Meggers), ramming furiously at the door, with the BENK (Norwegian: bench* - which is also Dutch "BANK"), with a thunderous BONK. They may indeed remind of the hammering of the lid of a coffin (doornail), or of the building of the barge (sloop)  which shall carry the old Viking's corpse:

To speed the bogre's barque away
O'er wather parted from the say.'

I thought about illustrating Orlando's reading, but it was too much of a challenge!

*'Benk' is also an Old English word for 'bench' and in the first draft of Anna Livia Plurabelle, Joyce described HCE 'sitting moping all by himself on his benk'.

What do you think these words represent? Please post any theories below!