When McCarthy took the Flure in Enniscorthy

I bought this (initialled by the composer!) from the Sheet MusicWarehouse

You may travel all through Europe, and then round by Chesapake; 

You may meet with many warriors, but don't make a mistake, 

For the pride of balls and parties, and the glory of a wake, 

Was Demetrius O'Flannigan McCarthy. 

'Twas late he went to breakfast, and 'twas late he went to bed; 

If you took up a thermometer, at lasteways so 'twas said, 

The quicksilver started bubblin' when they placed it near his head, 

And the steam was like a rainbow round McCarthy. 

Thermometers are not safe around McCarthy

Chorus. 

Miss Dunne said they did crowd her thin, 

Miss Murphy took to powther thin, 

For fear the boys might say that she was swarthy; 

And the sticks they all went whacking, 

And the skulls, faith, they were cracking, 

When McCarthy took the flure in Enniscorthy. 

Dan Murphy gave a party, well and all the boys were there; 

McCarthy, full of whiskey hot, at once there did repair, 

When a dog came and ran away with Miss Muldooney's hair;

'Twas that that roused the dander of McCarthy. 

He was dancing the mazurka, that's what all the ladies said; 

The fright shook all the false teeth out of poor ould Murphy's head, 

And he danced with Miss Mullarkey till they stretched her out for dead, 

Faith, she couldn't hould a candle to McCarthy. 

When they'd gargled all the whiskey, faith, a desp'rate row arose; 

McCarthy, sure, he levelled them; he fought them to a close, 

Till he walked upon the masther of the ceremonies' nose; 

'Twas that that played the mischief with McCarthy. 

The master of the workhouse, well, he knocked a peeler down, 

Who fell upon an alderman who came from County Down, 

And Presbyterian minister and the clerk now of the Crown, 

Were dancing like the divii on McCarthy.

Oh! boys, there was the element, of that you may be sure; 

Some were carried home on shutters, yes, and some upon a door, 

And the eyes and ears and noses were like marbles on the floor, 

with the fragments of the man they call McCarthy. 

Says Dan Murphy, Thanks to Providence, the ball at last is done, 

If you want to smash your furniture and have no end of fun, 

Or if you want your two eyes to be knocked straight into one, 

You need only give a ball and ax McCarthy. 

Here's a largely forgotten song by Robert Jasper Martin.  I have a recording of it made at the Clothworkers Concert Hall, University of Leeds on 15 July 1987, by Charles Peake (my old tutor) and Company. It was from a show called 'Song in Finnegans Wake'. After I posted it to Soundcloud, Tim Finnegan put the recording on youtube with lyrics. Let's have a sing along!

Martin composed the song in 1888 for the burlesque 'Faust up to Date', at the Gaiety Theatre London. It was sung by the English actor and comedian, Edwin Jesse Lonnen, who was playing Mephistopheles, on this very stage.

The Gaiety Theatre on the Strand (from wikipedia)

The critic of 'The Theatre' wrote, 'An excellent Mephistopheles is found in Mr. E. J. Lonnen, who plays with immense spirit, and gains a nightly encore for his songs, "I shall have 'em by-and-by", and "Enniscorthy" (written for him by R. Martin)'.

The composer, Robert Jasper Martin (1846-1905) was the brother of Violet Florence Martin (the Ross half of Somerville and Ross of the Irish RM), who wrote about him in her 1917 book, Irish Memories. He was the Anglo-Irish landowner of Ross Castle, Oughterard, which you can read about here. After going bankrupt, Martin became a journalist and songwriter in London. His speciality was stage Irish comic songs, usually sung by Lonnen in Gaiety Theatre burlesques.

Ross was a Tory who believed that the Irish were unfit for home rule. His songs often involve massive punch-ups by drunken Irishmen. In 'Ballyhooly' (above), the Temperance Brigade of Ballyhooly in Cork end up in the county jail for drunkenness ('When the temperance brigade do go out upon parade/ there's not a sober man in Ballyhooly'). The song featured in the 1886 Gaiety Burlesque, 'Monte Cristo Jnr'. 'Ballyhooley' proved so popular that Martin was nicknamed 'Ballyhooly Bob'.

James Joyce was very fond of 'Enniscorthy', which appears repeatedly in his writing. In Ulysses, Bloom remembers the song, in Lotus Eaters, when he's thinking about cricket:

'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. Donnybrook fair more in their line. And the skulls we were acracking when M'Carthy took the floor.'

Donnybrook fair, which appears five times in the Wake, was so notorious for brawls that the name became slang for any kind of uproar.

'And what is more glorious, there's naught more uproarious
Hurrah for the humours of Donnybrook Fair' 

ENNISCORTHY IN THE WAKE

 

The song has eight appearances in Finnegans Wake.  The first is in the opening wake episode, when the mourners are telling Tim Finnegan, revived by the whiskey, to stay in his coffin. One of the mourners is Demetrius O'Flannigan McCarthy himself, who is told to stop drinking:

'Aisy now, you decent man, with your knees and lie quiet and repose your honour’s lordship! Hold him here, Ezekiel Irons, and may God strengthen you! It’s our warm spirits, boys, he’s spooring. Dimitrius O’Flagonan, cork that cure for the Clancartys! You swamped enough since Portobello to float the Pomeroy.' 27.25

Demetrius O'Flannigan becomes Dimitrius O'Flagonan, because he's had too much to drink already. Cork that bottle!

We next meet McCarthy in Book 1 Chapter 4:

'And, incidentalising that they might talk about Markarthy or they might walk to Baalastartey or they might join the nabour party and come on to Porterfeud' 91.13

Here Joyce is combining McCarthy with the chorus of another of Martin's comic songs, 'Killaloe', written in 1887. This appeared in another Gaiety burlesque, 'Miss Esmeralda', based on Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris (It's impressive that, no matter the subject of the show, Martin could shoehorn a comic Irish song in somewhere! ) It was sung again by E.J.Lonnen, as Rollo the Monk, (below). 'Killaloe' lives on as the Regimantal Quick March of the British Royal Irish Regiment, which you can hear on youtube.

The song, which has a similar rhythm to 'Enniscorthy', describes what happens when a 'Frinch Mossoo' (Monsieur) makes the mistake of trying to teach the people of Killaloe in County Clare to speak his language.

Well I happened to get born at the time they cut the corn, 

Quite contagious to the town of Killaloe: 

Where to tache us they’d a schame, and a Frinch Mossoo he came 

To instruct us in the game of parlez vous. 

I’ve one father, that I swear, but he said I had a père, 

And he struck me when I said it wasn’t true,

And the Irish for a ‘jint,’ or the Frinch for ‘half a pint,’

Faith we larnt it in the school at Killaloe.

You may talk of Boneyparty, 

You may talk about Écarté,

Or any other party, and ‘comment vous portez vous!’ 

We larnt to sing it aisy, that song the Marsellasy,

Boolong, Toolong, the continong, we larnt at Killaloe … 

‘Mais oui,’ Mossoo would cry, ‘well, of course you can,’ says I, 

Non, no – ‘I know,’ says I with some surprise; 

When a boy straight up from Clare heard his mother called a mère, 

He gave Mossoo his fist between the eyes. 

Says Mossoo, with much alarm, ‘Go and call for Johnny Darm,’ 

‘There’s no such name,‘ said I, ‘about the place,’ 

‘Comment,’ he made reply, ‘Come on, yerself,’ says I, 

And I scattered all the features of his face.

Oh boys, there was the fun, you should see him when ’twas done, 

His eyeballs one by one did disappear, 

And a doctor from the south took some days to find his mouth 

Which had somehow got concealed behind his ear. 

Then he swore an awful oath, he’d have the law agin us both, 

And thin he’d lave both Limerick and Clare; 

For he found it wouldn’t do to tache Frinch in Killaloe, 

Unless he had a face or two to spare

On to the third appearance of 'Enniscorthy', in the Questions and Answers chapter, in the long list of acts attributed to HCE:

'made up to Miss MacCormack Ni Lacarthy who made off with Darly Dermod, swank and swarthy' 137.02

As an old man Finn MacCool hoped to marry Grania (daughter of Cormac MacArt), but she eloped with the young handsome Dairmuid. This line echoes the song with 'Lacarthy'; and 'swarthy'.

Next to the Shem chapter, in the list of children's games:

When his Steam was like a Raimbrandt round Mac Garvey. 176.18

That's an echo of 'the steam was like a rainbow round McCarthy'. The late Karl Reisman related this to Marcus Garvey. You can read his detailed interpretation here.

We get an echo of the rhythm in Joyce's major restatement of Wake themes in the opening of the Stories chapter:

'That the fright of his light in tribalbalbutience hides aback in the doom of the balk of the deaf but that the height of his life from a bride’s eye stammpunct is when a man that means a mountain barring his distance wades a lymph that plays the lazy winning she likes yet that pride that bogs the party begs the glory of a wake while the scheme is like your rumba round me garden' 309.06

Here we have a Viconian cycle (fear of thunder creating religion, marriage, death, ricorso or return). There are echoes of both 'the pride of balls and parties and the glory of a wake' and 'the steam was like a rainbow round McCarthy'. Try singing the last bit to the original tune!

Ten pages later, the Norwegian captain refers to the song:

'— I shot be shoddied, throttle me, fine me cowheel for ever, usquebauched the ersewild aleconner, for bringing briars to Bembracken and ringing rinbus round Demetrius' 319.05

The 'ringing rinbus round Demetrius' refers again to 'the steam was like a rainbow 'round McCarthy', which must have been Joyce's favourite line in the song.

The next appearance is during Jaun's sermon, where he is attacking Shem:

'the diasporation of all pirates and quinconcentrum of a fake like Basilius O'Cormacan MacArty?' 463.22

'For the pride of balls and parties, and the glory of a wake, was Demetrius O'Flannigan McCarthy' and King (Basileus) Cormac MacArt again.

Here's the eighth and final appearance, during the séance chapter, where another wild social gathering is being described:

'— All our stakes they were astumbling round the ranky roars assumbling when Big Arthur flugged the field at Annie’s courting.
— Suddenly some wellfired clay was cast out through the schappsteckers of hoy’s house?
— Schottenly there was a hellfire club kicked out through the wasistas of Thereswhere.
— Like Heavystost’s envil catacalamitumbling. Three days three times into the Vulcuum?
— Punch!'

514.05

Big Arthur is HCE and Annie is ALP. The 'wellfired clay' is the 'missfired brick' (5.22) suggested as the cause of Tim Finnegans fall. 'Heavystost's envil catacalamitumbling' is HCE as Hephaestus/ Vulcan thrown out of heaven. Again, try singing that first line.

Martin's songs are little sung now, perhaps because of the stereotypical image of the drunken brawling Irish. Yet isn't 'Finnegans Wake' itself guilty of the same stereotype?:

Then the war did soon engage
T'was woman to woman and man to man
Shillelagh law was all the rage
And a row and a ruction soon began

It's a tradition also kept alive by the great Shane MacGowan, in songs like The Boat Train, The Sick Bed of Cuchullain and The Body of An American.

But fifteen minutes later
We had our first taste of whiskey
There was uncles giving lectures
On ancient Irish history
The men all started telling jokes
And the women they got frisky
By five o'clock in the evening
Every bastard there was pisskey

Is it time for a 'Ballyhooly Bob' Martin revival? 

Our Annotated Wakes

'Finnegans Wake for Fritz Senn is what we do with it. But it is also what it does with us. We produce a wake by the way we steer, but we also steer by the Wake that we produce.'

Finn Fordham, Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake

One thing that many of us do with our Wakes is write all over them. This copy belongs to Danis Rose, co-editor of the 2014 Corrected Text.  Houyhnhnm Press put the photo on their website to show that Rose has put a lot of work into the book. Here he's not just annotated references and foreign words but corrected the misprints. You can see that he's made  'camiflag' at 339.13 plural with the addition of a red 's'.

This picture circulated all over social media after a Twitter prankster posted it claiming it was Susan Sontag's copy. Here's a witty comment from Eric Jarosinski's Nein Quarterly (A Compendium of Utopian Negation).

You can tell a lot about someone by the way they annotate their Wakes. Some readers, like Rose, write boldly in ink. Others write in pencil, showing a subservient attitude to the text, or perhaps the sense that their readings might change. Some annotated Wakes are wild and free, with pages covered with a 'riot of blots and blurs and bars and balls and hoops and wriggles and juxtaposed jottings linked by spurts of speed' (118.28). Other annotaters, like Roland McHugh, are neat and well organised:

'I began to annotate my copy of FW. I transferred information to it in very small writing, using a mapping pen. I could actually get two lines of writing between every two FW lines, and I used twelve different colours of ink to specify different languages.'   

Roland McHugh, The Finnegans Wake Experience, p56
 
McHugh and Rose are both intentionalists - they want to find out what Joyce consciously intended when writing his book. Many of their annotations give the sources of his quotations, as revealed by his notebooks. In The Index Manuscript, Rose defines the Wake as 'an ordered aggregate of elements each of which can be identified with a unit entered in one of the notebooks....Without a knowledge of the referents these structures are ultimately vacuous and induce in the reader mental exhaustion (through the strain of supplying forced referents).'

By 'supplying forced referents', Rose means reading the Wake creatively. Many readers, like Clive Hart, John Bishop and John Gordon, create their own meanings. McHugh quotes a letter from Clive Hart in which he attacks the intentionalist approach: 'For all we know, JJ may have intended FW to be a cookery book. Who cares what he thought? What are the book's intentions?'

Last September, the excellent James Joyce Gazette posted the picture of Rose's book on Twitter as the first in a series of annotated Wakes, using the hashtag #FWownnotes. The Gazette invited readers to  'Share pics of your personal copy of FINNEGANS WAKE … annotated!'

The second annotated Wake the Gazette shared belongs to the Spanish artist Dora Garcia.  She's added post-it notes to her Wake. In 2013, Garcia made The Joycean Society, a documentary about the Zurich Wake group, which has been reading the book continuously since 1986. Her Wake shown here was displayed in her 2014 exhibition, Of Crimes and Dreams, based on her residency in the Montperrin Psychiatric Hospital in Aix-en-Provence.  

These pages come from pages 228-9 in the children's games chapter. The area highlighted in yellow on the right page has Joyce's wonderful alternative comic titles for the central episodes of Ulysses: 'Ukalepe. Loathers’ leave. Had Days. Nemo in Patria. The Luncher Out. Skilly and Carubdish. A Wondering Wreck. From the Mermaids’ Tavern. Bullyfamous. Naughtsycalves. Mother of Misery. Walpurgas Nackt.'

Isn't 'Had Days' a great title for Hades? – Joyce's chapter about the dead of Dublin. Another brilliant one is Bullyfamous - Polyphemus the Cyclops - the Citizen as the famous bully! 

Below is Marshall McLuhan's Wake from the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library website. He was a respectful pencil annotator, and there are only a few annotations on the page displayed. But he was also a creative reader. In 1968, in War and Peace in the Global Village, he argued that the book's ten thunderwords each represent one of the  technological stages of human history. His son Eric later developed the theory in a book The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake. It's shame the library doesn't show a page with one of those thunderwords. I bet it would be covered with annotations.

The next one comes from the copy annotated by another creative reader, the German experimental writer and translator Arno Schmidt (1914-79). It's from the website of the Zentralbibliothek in Zurich.

A facsimile of Schmidt's annotated copy was published as a book in 1984, with 100 copies given free to public research libraries. I found this one on the Indiana Bloomington website.

Looking up Schmidt, I found an entertaining description of his Wake work, from a paper by Friedhelm Rathjen:

'Schmidt's readings of the Wake have left virtually no traces in Joyce scholarship, and the reasons are quite obvious: being a strongly original writer himself, Schmidt imposed his own eccentric conceptions of the literary work of art on Joyce rather than looking for Joyce's conceptions,and, moreover, Schmidt tried to overcome his “anxiety of influence” by wilfully disparaging Joyce's character, the professional Joyce exegets, and in part also Joyce's works, especially certain aspects of Finnegans Wake. According to Schmidt, the scene of Finnegans Wake is laid in Trieste rather than Dublin, and the whole book deals with nothing  else but the rivalry of James and Stanislaus Joyce over Nora Barnacle.'

Friedhelm Rathjen, 'Thorne Smith in the Wake: Arno Schmidt's Neglected Recommendation'

Imposing 'eccentric conceptions' on Joyce is a good description of the creative approach. Joyce wanted his readers to do just this. He told Adolf Hoffmeister 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.'

I was delighted to find this next Wake shared by the Joyce Gazette. It belonged to Karl Reisman, another creative reader. Until his death in 2014, Karl was a regular contributor to the online page-a-week Wake reading group, fwread.  Its archived postings, painstakingly collected by Karl, can be read on fweet, where there's a page dedicated by Raphael Slepon to his memory.

Karl was an anthropologist, whose main interest was in African, Caribbean and African-American folklore and language.  He argued that the Wake uses 'Creoles and other languages to subvert the fundamental bases of European culture and language dominance.'

In this page from the Anna Livia chapter, Karl found echoes of the Middle Passage and the presence of Jamaican Creole and Haitian Voodun. I love the fact that all of Karl's annotations here have an African theme. He sometimes reminded me of Charles Kinbote in Nabokov's Pale Fire, who relates everything in John Shade's poem to the kingdom of Zembla. But Karl, unlike Kinbote, was well aware of what he was doing. After one particularly ingenious interpretation, he commented, 'I admit this is going pretty far, and I do not really claim Joyce knew this or did it  – but it would fit nicely. And is not impossible.'

You can read Karl's fascinating discussion of this on his website here along with several other articles.
 
After the Joyce Gazette issued the invitation, readers started to come forward.  The first was Susie Lopez, who's an American artist living in Dalkey.  She's been turning her Wake into a beautiful work of art. Here's a climactic passage in the middle of the Séance chapter (Bk 3 III). I love what she's done with the SILENCE on the right page. 

She's covered her pages with waves, trees, leaves and many other images. Have a look at Susie's astonishing work by following her on Twitter.

Peter O'Brien has been doing something similar with his Wake, which he shared in the Globe and Mail in June 2018. Describing this page from the Anna Livia chapter, he said, 'As I looked at this page, I kept seeing the words “her” and “she,” so I decided to play with them. This section of the book references hundreds of rivers, so I’ve underlined each one, and then painted a small section of the Rio Grande here'.

Here's a wild and dynamic Wake from @Marcello Fanfoni, which he tweeted in 2016 after finishing the opening page. Good luck with the rest of it Marcello!

For a comparison, here's how the Polish visual artist, Jakub Wróblewski, has annotated the same opening page, after printing it on a much bigger piece of paper. With the scholar Katarzyna Bazarnik, he's been turning Joyce's book into a film, 'First We Feel Then We Fall', which you can read about here. The need to visualise the book means that lots of Jakub's annotations are lovely little drawings.
 

After I shared these annotated Wakes to the Blotty Words Wake reading group, Frances McCormack commented, 'NO! What a destructive, horrible thing to do. I would never do that!'

She then added, 'Just kidding!' and shared her own copy. Here are her annotations to the Museyroom section. I like her question at the top, 'Is there a narrator?'

Frances says, 'I've had my copy 24 years, and I keep writing more and more on it. It's falling apart, and it's been chewed by kittens too!'

So far, there are more than twenty annotated Wakes to look at on twitter. I've only had room for a few here.  One of the Wakes, which belonged to the poet and short story writer, Delmore Schwartz, can be viewed in its entirety thanks to the Beineke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, who have digitised it. 

This Wake is so fascinating that I have looked at it here in a separate post.

The Beinecke Library also shared pictures on twitter of Thornton Wilder's Wake. Wilder is one of the few writers to have been influenced by Joyce's book. His play, The Skin of Our Teeth, was so similar in theme to the Wake that Campbell and Robinson accused him of plagiarism. Compare his neat orderly annotations with the chaos of Schwarz's.  Read about the Wilder papers at Yale here.

 
I'll finish with my own Wake. When I started reading it, in 1981, you could only buy the Faber paperback, which has much smaller pages than the hardbacks. I wanted to be able to write between the lines, like my tutor Charles Peake, whose battered heavily annotated copy was a source of envy to me.

I'd been reading it for a couple of years when my sister's boyfriend Michael tracked down a Faber hardback for me.  So I had to go back and start again. Yes, I've annotated the Wake twice!

The yellowed colour of the paperback on the right is another reason you need to find a hardback copy. Its spine is also broken and the pages are falling out.

I ended up with minute handwriting, and I now need a magnifying glass to read my own notes.

I'd love to see many more annotated Wakes, such as the copies owned by Robert Anton Wilson, Anthony Burgess, Samuel Beckett, Fritz Senn, David Hayman, Clive Hart, William York Tindall, Joseph Campbell, Philip K Dick, Charles Peake, Adaline Glasheen,  J.S.Atherton, Finn Fordham, John Bishop, E.L.Epstein, Matthew Hodgart, Petr Skrabanek, John Gordon, Jack P Dalton, Robbert-Jan Henkes, Luca Crispi, Erik Bindervoet, Vincent Deane and all the rest of you Wakeans out there.

If you've written on your Wake, you can share a picture of it on twitter by posting it to @JJ_Gazette.