James Joyce and Adolf Hitler: 'heal helper! one gob, one gap, one gulp and gorger of all!'

Hitler was on Time's cover many times, Joyce just twice

'The weather is not good, and worst of all the newsboys keep careering round the streets shouting out about 'L'Autriche'. I am afraid poor Mr Hitler-Missler will soon have few admirers in Europe apart from your nieces and my nephews, masters W. Lewis and E. Pound' 

28 July 1934 Letters III, 311

That's a letter from Joyce to Harriet Shaw Weaver from Spa in Belgium. Four days before, the Austrian Nazis had staged an unsuccessful coup in which they assassinated Chancellor Dolfuss. So Joyce calls Hitler 'Hitler-Missler' - a play on hit or miss.

In 1931, Wyndham Lewis had written sympathetically about Hitler before he came to power, even describing him as a  'Man of Peace'!  As for Ezra Pound, he told Yeats that all modern statesmen were scoundrels 'except Mussolini and that hysterical imitator of his, Hitler.'

Here's another letter, written in 1935 when the Joyce children were away from Paris, Giorgio in the USA and Lucia in Ireland:

'What can I honestly ask them to come back to? Paris is like myself a haughty ruin or if you like a decayed reveller. And any time I turn on the radio I hear some British politician mumbling inanities or his German cousin shouting and yelling like a madman. Perhaps Ireland and the U.S. are the safe places. And perhaps this is where the gas is really going to be turned on. Well so be it. The motto under my coat of arms, however, is: Mors aut honorabilis vita.'

To Harriet Shaw Weaver, 1 May 1935, Letters I, 376 

'Death or an honourable life' really is on the Joyce Coat of Arms.

Though Hitler missed toppling the Austrian government in 1934, he succeeded in 1938. 

On 17 March, four days after German troops marched into Austria, the Joyces were at a St Patrick's night party at Paul Léon's in Paris. Carola Giedion-Welcker described the conversation:

'The political sky in Europe seemed to be growing steadily darker, and so the discusion touched, of course, on National Socialist Germany, whereupon fears, suspicions, and curses were voiced by several of those present.  James Joyce had assumed a calm, pensive attitude, but suddenly he began to talk and declared in his objective and cool manner that Hitler was surely a historical phenomenon of colossal force that wouldn't be easy to cope with. The detached and emotionless way in which he spoke, as though referring to a personal adversary, particularly bothered the women present. Nora Joyce, who had listened to him intently, now suddenly jumped up, and while Joyce continued his calm, interested analysis of Hitler's personalty from the point of view of its immense force and drive, she grabbed her knife, which she had just been using on a poulet de bresse, rushed forward to him, and shouted, 'Jim, another word about that devil and I will murder you!''  

'Meetings with Joyce', Portraits of the Artist in Exile, p270

Ellmann gives some extra detail: 

'For some years he had referred to Nazi Germany as 'Hitlerland', and no-one could have been less attracted than he to the frenzied personality of the Fuehrer. But he cultivated disengagement and remarked one night at dinner at Paul Léon's. 'Isn't this Hitler a phenomenon? Think of getting a whole people behind you.' Nora picked up a knife and said, 'You stop that Jim.''

Ellmann, p708

Austrian Anschluss left Czechoslovakia like a helpless animal, waiting to be gobbled up by German jaws.

Germany prepares to gulp down Czechoslovakia

It's easy to think that James Joyce, who spent the whole of World War One living in his imagination in Dublin in 1904, had no interest in contemporary events. But Finnegans Wake was not like Ulysses. Its material came from stories in the daily newspapers, radio news and conversations. Joyce said, 'Really it is not I who am writing this crazy book. It is you, and you, and you, and that man over there, and that girl at the next table.'  

In 1938, everybody was talking about Adolf Hitler, and this fed into the book Joyce was writing. So let's go Nazi hunting in Finnegans Wake.

NAZIS IN FINNEGANS WAKE

 
In May 1938, Joyce revising the Shem the Penman chapter, added a reference to Hitler. The speaker is Shaun, partly based on Wyndham Lewis:

'our liege, tilyet a stranger in the frontyard of his happiness, is taking, (heal helper! one gob, one gap, one gulp and gorger of all!) his refreshment' 191.07
  
That's based on the Nazi salute, 'Heil Hitler! Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer' (Hail Hitler! One people, one empire, one leader)

Adaline Glasheen, discussing this line in her 3rd Census, found Ezra Pound here too: 'the name Ezra means 'helper''.

Hitler would be 'the gorger of all'. 

At the same time, Joyce added a reference to Hitler's autobahns to the first watch of Shaun, in which he's a postman describing his work:

'I am now fed up be going circulating about them new hikler's highways' 410.07.

 

Elsewhere Joyce gives us versions of another Nazi salute, 'Sieg Heil!' ('Hail Victory'):

'Seek hells' 228.06

People who hail victory in war are seekers of hells.

'Hide! Seek! Hide! Seek! Because number one lived at Bothersby North and he was trying to. Hide! Seek! Hide! Seek! And number two digged up Poors Coort, Soother, trying to. Hide! Seek! Hide! Seek! And nomber three he sleeped with Lilly Tekkles at The Eats and he was trying to. Hide! Seek! Hide! Seek!'  372.35

'hail! woa, you that seek!' 128.23

'hoveth chieftains evrywehr, with morder' 131.07

Guth Earthsapho posted this to fwread, finding a reference to murder and the Wehrmacht, founded in 1935, in 'evrywehr'. The line was added to the questions chapter in 1937-8.

THE NAZI MIDWIVES CONGRESS

Here's a sentence which Joyce added to the HCE section of the Questions chapter, also at Galley stage:

'took place before the internatural convention of catholic midwives and found stead before the congress for the study of endonational calamities' 128.26

I discovered from the Wellcome Collection website that the Nazis hosted an international congress of midwives in Berlin in 1936.

'The 1936 Congress...was held in Berlin, and hosted and attended by the German government. While the Fuhrer was not able to personally attend, Hitler sent messages and various government ministers gave speeches exhorting the Congress to address the primary issue – in the government’s eyes – of the falling birth rate, and of the need for all countries represented to take urgent action and “promote motherhood”. The issue reporting this Congress includes a rather chilling fold-out photograph taken of the proceedings, showing fully uniformed SS and other Nazi government ministers addressing the Congress, made up of European midwives from Belgium, The Netherlands, France, and Great Britain.'

Lesley Hill, 'The International Confederation of Midwives', Wellcome Collection blog.
You can see a picture of the congress on Kristina Gaddy's blog. Gaddy has written an article on Nanna Conti, the leading German midwife, an active Nazi. Here she quotes Lynne Falwell, author of Modern German Midwifery:

'Conti would become known as the woman who changed midwifery forever in Germany. She brought together the long-sought changes midwives had been fighting for. The Nazis, as it turned out, were also fans of hers, prompted no doubt by their desire to increase birth rates of ethnic Germans and improve national health. "Midwives were a way to get into the homes and make sure they were proper Aryan homes,” Fallwell says. The midwives could go into homes and make an assessment on behalf of the party. Were there miscarriages or abortions? Did a newborn have a birth defect? For the social control of the country, midwives were essential.'

Anna J Peters describes the 1936 Congress:

'In the afternoon the midwives talked about their rights and duties in their home countries, and in the evening they were welcomed at a reception given by the home secretary, Wilhelm Frick (1877–1946). In his speech, Frick openly explained that Germany’s interest was to promote “valuable genes” and to avoid “inferior” offspring.'

'German Midwifery in the Third Reich' in Susan Benedict and Linda Shields (eds) Nurses and Midwives in Nazi Germany, 2014, p.183

'endonational calamities' is a fitting description of Nazi rule. 'Endo' means 'within' in Greek – the Nazis created international calamities as well as those within a nation. When I told Raphael Slepon of fweet about the congress, he pointed out that 'endonational' also suggests 'endometrial - of the endometrium (the inner lining of the womb.'

GOTH STEPPING

And here's a reference to goose stepping.

'Such was the act of goth stepping' 332.10

The Goths were one of the Germanic peoples who overwhelmed the Roman Empire. It would have made more sense to nickname Germans Goths rather than Huns (an Asiatic people).

A THREAT FOR A THROAT

 

For much of 1938, Joyce was writing the final book of Finnegans Wake. Rereading this recently with fwread, the online reading group, I've been struck by repeated ominous shadows of encroaching war.  

On page 598 there's a menacing reference to Nazi Germany's 'Strength through Joy'.

'And your last words todate in camparative accoustomology are going to tell stretch of a fancy through strength towards joyance, adyatants, where he gets up. Allay for allay, a threat for a throat.' 598.23

'allay for alley' is 'an eye for an eye' - the principle of retribution, and a play on the German für alle (for all) so a threat for every throat. This was added to the text in the second typescript, spring-summer 1938.

Strength through Joy

On the next page we have gathering clouds, panicstricken humanity, 'the fog of the cloud in which we toil'  and 'bomb the thing's to be domb about it':

'Cumulonubulocirrhonimbant heaven electing, the dart of desire has gored the heart of secret watersthe poplarest wood in the entire district is being grown at present, eminently adapted for the requirements of pacnincstricken humanity and, between all the goings up and the whole of the comings down and the fog of the cloud in which we toil and the cloud of the fog under which we labour, bomb the thing’s to be domb about it' 599.27

The 'fog of war' is a phrase associated with Carl von Clausewitz: 'War is the realm of uncertainty; three quarters of the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty.'

A few pages on, we greet the arrival of Shaun the Post:

'Here's heering you in a guessmasque, latterman!' 603.02

He's got a gasmask!  During the Munich crisis, in September 1938, 38 million gas masks were distributed to the British public. Joyce added this phrase to the text in November 1938.

'In the summer of 1938 we felt an anxious awareness of Hitler on one side and Mussolini on the other....Paris was no longer the City of Light.  The festive times were over.  The dimness in the streets made us feel the dispiritedness of the citizens. Our concierge gave us a list of things were were to take to the basement with us in case of bombardment, and the municipality was advising people who did not have to stay in the city to go elsewhere during the emergency. Simple people were asking, 'Where is Czechoslovakia? Do we have to go to war for people there?'
    To Joyce, disturbed by thunderstorms and timid of dogs, the menace of war must have been hardly endurable. He and Nora decided to leave Paris....
    Then came Munich, and a shamefaced relief was evident, at least at first, among the sojourners in Paris. The Joyces came back to the city. When Joyce telephoned me he mentioned the settlement. 'Give him Europe!' he said angrily.'

Padraic Colum Our Friend James Joyce p226-230

THE SPIRIT OF APPEASEMENT

 

When we reached page 610, introducing the Patrick and the Druid section, Philip Franklin pointed out Joyce's use of the word 'appeasement' in this description of cycles of history:

'So that when we shall have acquired unification we shall pass on to diversity and when we shall have passed on to diversity we shall have acquired the instinct to combat and when we shall have acquired the instinct of combat we shall pass back to the spirit of appeasement?'  610.33

I had a look at the Digital Archive and discovered that this sentence – the only clear English one on the page – was added to the Galleys between November 1938 and January 1939.
At that stage, the Germans, with the agreement of Britain and France, had occupied the Sudetenland - the area of Czechoslovakia with a large German population – but they hadn't yet broken the Munich agreement. It was only in March 1939, when Germany seized all of Czechoslovakia, that appeasement was discredited. Britain and France gave a guarantee that they would fight if Hitler invaded his next target, Poland.

Before March 1939 appeasement was a positive word - it meant 'making peace'.  From the OED:

1920 W. S. Churchill Let. 24 Mar. in World Crisis (1929) IV. xvii. 378 Here again I counsel prudence and appeasement. Try to secure a really representative Turkish governing authority, and come to terms with it.
1936 A. Eden in Hansard Commons 5th Ser. CCCX. 1446 I assure the House that it is the appeasement of Europe as a whole that we have constantly before us.
1938 Times 3 Oct. 13/2 The policy of international appeasement must of course be pressed forward... There must be appeasement not only of the strong but of the weak... With the policy of appeasement must go the policy of preparation—preparation not so much for war as against war. 

A DREAM OF JOYCE AND HITLER

My favourite contribution to the online discussion came from Jack Pacer, who shared a dream:

'I'm not sure how seriously to take this, but years ago, after seeing a page from the manuscript of ALP at the British Museum, I had a dream about James Joyce. He had a fat pink face and wore no glasses. He said to me: "The key to Finnegans Wake is in the last chapter, based on something Hitler said. Of course I despise him but one must use what comes to hand."'  

JAMES JOYCE SINGS THE MARSEILLAISE 

 

Richard Ellmann has a wonderful story of Joyce in La Baule, just days after war broke out in September 1939:

'During these shattering days when La Baule was filling up...with refugees, Joyce renewed his friendship with Dr Daniel O'Brien....One night, they went together to a large restaurant with dancing at La Baule. It was close to where the French and British soldiers were encamped and two or three hundred of them having crowded into the place, they began to sing the 'Marseillaise'. Joyce joined in the singing, and gradually his voice caught the soldiers' attention. They turned and stared at him, and then a group hoisted him onto a table so he might sing it all over again. As O'Brien later recalled, 'You never saw such an exhibition of one man dominating and thrilling a whole audience. He stood there and sang the 'Marseillaise' and they sang it again afterwards with him, and if a whole German regiment had attacked at that moment, they would never have got through. That was the feeling. Oh Joyce and his voice dominated them all!''

(from a 1958 interview with O'Brien by Adeline Glasheen)

Wouldn't we all love to have seen that?! It reminds me of the famous Marseillaise scene from Casablanca.

Ellmann also discovered that Joyce, using contacts in the French Foreign Office, helped around 16 people escape from Nazi territory to Ireland and America.  Like Rick in Casablanca, he joined the struggle.

After I posted this, John Coyle told me that there is a precedent to the scene in Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion (1937). 

This makes me sad to have the turgid 'God save the Queen' as my country's national anthem.

 

'A HEROIC ACT OF DEFIANCE' AGAINST FASCISM

After posting this yesterday, I found a great article by Sean Ledwith, posted on the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of WW2.  He argues that Finnegans Wake, which was also 80 last year, is an anti-fascist masterwork:

'Bernard Benstock persuasively makes the case that Joyce regarded himself as the equivalent of the Irish monks who, at the onset of the Dark Ages of the early medieval period, sought to preserve the culture of the classical world as the forces of barbarism and darkness, in their eyes, closed in on civilisation. The astonishing breadth of allusions and references from the cultures of the world that Joyce draws on in the Wake is testament to his conviction that diversity and pluralism are essential to the flourishing of human beings and, implicitly, that the intolerance and racism of the far right represent a modern barbarism which must be resisted....Phrases and vocabulary from some seventy languages have been identified in the book, along with a cornucopia of references to virtually all the major world religions, including Confucianism, Hinduism, Taoism and the Eddas of Scandinavia....The fact that Joyce, who was practically blind by 1939, chose to deploy his encyclopaedic and labyrinthine knowledge of the varieties of human belief in such a gargantuan exercise can be seen as a heroic act of defiance in the face of an oncoming nightmare. It is not unreasonable to argue that Finnegans Wake is the ultimate literary clarion call for what we now call multiculturalism..... As fascism rears in hideous head again in our time, with its visceral politics of hate, the message of the Wake about the essential unity of the human race is emphatically worth another look.'

'Finnegans Wake, fascism, and the essential unity of the human race ' Culture Matters 
3 September 2019

 

(The only thing wrong with this is Bernard Benstock's view of Irish monks in the 'Dark Ages'. As Dr Ann-Marie D'Arcy said on twitter, 'News Flash, we never had a 'Dark Ages', we had an Early Medieval Renaissance')

 
This point was first made in 1967 by James Atherton:

'Joyce is saying that mankind is one. We are “humble indivisibles in this grand continuum” (472.30). It is customary, or was until a year or so ago, to speak of Joyce as entirely uninterested in politics. He was an ardent pacifist; he saw the world as a single family. Can we not also see it as one in which it is time the boys grew up and stopped fighting? If so the Wake is not a “crazy book” but a work of importance for all of us.'

'The Identity of the Sleeper' A Wake Newslitter Vol IV no 5, October 1967

Snow Falling at the Gresham Hotel

 

Snow on the windowsill of the Gresham Hotel

In January 2016, Lisa and I had tickets to see Aidan Gillen performing 'The Dead' at the Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin. This was the perfect time and place to see greatest story in world literature. The theatre is a short distance downriver from 'the dark, gaunt house on Usher's Island' where the story takes place; the performance was also at the same time of year – Epiphany week – as the Misses Morkan's annual dance; and Gillen's been one of our favourite actors for more than twenty years, ever since we saw him play Skinny in Jez Butterworth's Mojo at the Royal Court.

I booked a room in the only possible place to stay – the Gresham Hotel, where the story ends with Gabriel and Gretta Conroy, and the snow falling outside the window.

'A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight....'

Clearly, we needed to end the day watching snow falling outside the window, but the forecast was for rain. The obvious solution was to bring our own snow with us. So I bought some 'magic snow' from my local garden centre.

I think this is what folklorists call 'pseudo-ostention' - acting out a myth in real life. There's a lot of this around Joyce. It's hard to explain just how much pleasure Joyce lovers get from re-enacting his fictions in Dublin.

We arrived at the Gresham on Friday afternoon.

'...as they stood at the hotel door, he felt that they had escaped from their lives and duties, escaped from home and friends and run away together with wild and radiant hearts to a new adventure'

But we could see that it was very different from the hotel in the story. We learned that the original Gresham burned down in 1922 during the Battle of Dublin, in the first week of the Civil War. 

The Gresham in flames in 1922

The hotel had been a victim of the same kind of vandalism now threatening Joyce's House of the Dead!  
  
The Gresham was rebuilt in 1927, and this what the foyer looks like today.

'The porter led them along a corridor and opened a door...'

But we had a room at the back, overlooking the rooftops of Dublin, and luckily there was a window we could open.

Lisa at the window in the Gresham Hotel

After unpacking we walked down to Usher's Island, to visit the House of the Dead, which was sadly closed.

It's a miracle that the building is still standing. It's all thanks to Brendan Kilty, the Dublin barrister who bought it in 2000, and saved it from falling down. He rebuilt the back wall, replaced the missing roof, and restored the interiors of the rooms where Joyce's short story takes place.

We were able to visit the house on the centenary Bloomsday in 2004, when I took this photograph of the stairway. Gretta stands here, listening to Bartell D'Arcy singing 'The Lass of Aughrim', while Gabriel looks up from the hall below.

For four years, Kilty staged re-enactments here of the Morkans' Christmas dinner. But in 2012, he filed for bankruptcy, and the house has been closed up ever since.  It was sold to developers in 2017, who are now planning to destroy this interior by converting it into a 56 room hostel.

In the evening, we went to Lanigan's Pub, a regular for stage folk from the Abbey Theatre nearby. At the bar, we found Karl Shiels, another great Irish actor, and artistic director of the pub's Theatre Upstairs. When we told him we were going to see 'The Dead', he said he'd read from it the previous year at the memorial for Barney McKenna of the Dubliners. Karl said he'd had to cut the text, which got him into trouble with 'the head of the James Joyce society.' 

We first met Karl here in 2013, when we were in Dublin with our Brighton friend, Tim Crouch, who had a show on at the Abbey.  Karl, standing outside the pub with a friend smoking, wore a t-shirt with a picture of a republican blanket protester and the words of Francie Brollie's H-Block song. He said he hoped we didn't mind his anti-British shirt. 

Quick as a flash, Tim replied, 'That's ok. I'm wearing my Oliver Cromwell underpants!'

Karl and his friend cracked up.

Writing this today, I was shocked and saddened to learn that Karl died earlier this year. 

'One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.' 

Karl burned brightly. His Irish Times obituary described him as 'a streak of lightning through the world of Irish drama.'

Karl outside Lanigans in 2013

On Saturday morning, we visited Books Upstairs on D'Olier Street. I asked the bookseller if he knew anything about a new statue of Joyce standing on a sundial. He'd never heard of it, but looked it up online and found it was at the Merrion Hotel. We told him our reasons for being in Dublin, which led to the following conversation.

Me: We're staying at the Gresham, where Gretta and Gabriel stay.
Bookseller (to Lisa): I hope you won't have any revelations for him later!
Me: I've got some fake snow to throw out of the window of the hotel. Except I've learned it's not the original hotel.
Bookseller: We got rid of that one in 1922.
Me: So I'm throwing fake snow out of a fake hotel in honour of two imaginary people!
Bookseller: Sounds pretty authentic to me!

The sundial statue at the Merrion

After visiting the new statue, which I've posted about before, we went to the Library Bar to meet our Dublin friends, Olga, Kevin, Alfreda and Ciaran, who were coming to the matinee of the play with us. Everyone was excited at the prospect of seeing Aiden Gillen.

Lisa, Kevin, Olga, Ciaran and Alfreda at the theatre

Then we were off to the Smock Alley to see the play. I loved this programme note from the company.

'Although many of the stories in Dubliners are about the relationship between the living and the deceased...none perhaps achieve quite the same sense of universal connection as 'The Dead'. The story seems to reveal more of itself each time one reads it, growing older with you, speaking with renewed relevance at every age. For most writers such a story would be the crowning glory of their whole career. Yet when one considers how young Joyce was, merely warming up for his subsequent achievements we can only stand dumbfounded before his sheer talent....

  So it's our privilege to welcome you to join us tonight as once again we visit the Morkans' Christmas party. And travel with Gabriel and Gretta Conroy down the Quays to the Gresham Hotel, and off across Ireland in a snowstorm like no other, and out into the universe, and into eternity.'

The stage was set

Here's Lisa's description of the opening, from our diary.

Gillen performed the 16,000 word story at a brisk pace.  I loved the way he handled the comic episodes with Browne, the conflict with Miss Ivors, and Gabriel's 'fever of rage and desire' after the party finishes. 

But I missed Gabriel's compassion ('Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes') and the breakdown of his egotism at the very end. Here's Peter Crawley's review in the Irish Times:

'The epiphany of Joyce’s story, a realisation that Gabriel hardly knows his wife, himself, or the feeling of overwhelming love, may be one of the most remarkable expressions in literature, a discovery that is dumbfounding but not bitter. Here, Gillen actually seethes through the whole exchange, as though it were nothing but female taunts ('I think he died for me') against a lusty, bruised male ego. It becomes an excessively poisonous interpretation, venomous to those last transfixing words.'

Feargal Murray's music was beautiful, though I was disappointed he didn't play any of the melodies in the story.  He probably thought it too obvious to give us 'The Lass of Aughrim'.

Like Gretta and Gabriel, we got a cab which took us along the Quays and then across the Liffey on the O'Connell Bridge. But instead of stopping at the Gresham, we carried on north to Glasnevin cemetery, where dwell the vast hosts of the Dublin dead.

Joyce's parents in Glasnevin

'My father and mother had many friends in Bray and in town, and at about Christmas time and the New Year they often went up to dances in Dublin and stayed overnight at a hotel, as the Conroys do in 'The Dead'.' Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother's Keeper

 

Right by Glasnevin is John Kavanagh's, the Gravediggers, Ciaran's family pub. It's our favourite pub in Dublin and it was the obvious place to go after seeing 'The Dead'.

At the Gravediggers after seeing 'The Dead'

Someone commented that this picture looks like an Aer Lingus ad. If only we could live in one...

Ciaran at the bar

At one point we were joined by a couple of the Undead - the pub is on various horror tours.

The lovely Guinness flowed and by the end of the evening, we were as screwed as Freddy Malins in Joyce's story. We poured ourselves into a taxi and headed back to the Gresham. 

I have two blurred pictures of a hand throwing the fake snow out of the window into the Dublin night.

But is it Lisa's hand or mine? Probably Lisa's, but neither of us can remember.

A last diary entry from Lisa...

The snow still lay on the windowsill, proof that our mission had been accomplished.