grist to our millery
On 4 October 1922, just as Joyce was giving thought to his next work, an event occurred that was to have a lasting impact on the writing of Finnegans Wake. Shortly after midnight a man and a woman were walking home from Ilford Station in the northeast of London. Percy Thompson, a shipping clerk, and his wife Edith had been enjoying a night out at the Criterion Theatre in Piccadilly. They were accosted on Belgrave Road by a youth. An altercation ensued. A knife was drawn. The younger man dealt Percy Thompson a mortal wound and ran off.
A twenty-year-old merchant seaman called Frederick Bywaters was identified by Edith Thompson as the killer and was quickly arrested. When the police searched his room they found among his belongings more than sixty love letters addressed to him by Mrs Thompson. On the foot of this discovery she too was arrested and both lovers were charged with the murder of Percy Thompson.
Their joint trial opened at the Old Bailey on 6 December 1922—the same day that the Irish Free State came into existence. Bywaters insisted that he had acted alone, but the love letters were produced in evidence to prove otherwise. In the incriminating correspondence, Edith Thompson had made it clear that she felt trapped in a loveless marriage and saw her young lover as a way out of it. She mentioned failed attempts on her part to bring about her husband’s death. She also referenced newspaper articles involving women who had successfully murdered their husbands. On more than one occasion she encouraged Bywaters to take decisive steps and bring matters to a head.
This scandal and the ensuing criminal proceedings captured the public imagination. The case was closely followed by both sections of the British press. The country’s leading broadsheet, The Times, limited itself for the most part to the legal niceties of the case and subsequent appeals. It was critical, however, of the sensational coverage which the tabloids gave the case, describing the excitement fomented by them as unhealthy and calling their publicity campaign a grave discredit to British journalism (Rowbotham et al 134). The tabloids meanwhile debated the ins and outs of the case and took sides in what had become a cause célèbre. The Daily Mirror and the Daily Sketch took the view that Bywaters was an innocent youth who had been led astray by an older, more experienced femme fatale. The Daily Express and the News of the World, on the other hand, portrayed Thompson as a bored young housewife with a vivid imagination and an obsession with romantic fiction, an unhappily married woman who fantasized about killing her dull husband and running off to sea with her youthful lover but who never had any real intention of acting out these fantasies.
Edith Thompson was advised by her attorney not to take the stand, but she disregarded his advice. It was a fatal miscalculation. Her testimony was at times contradictory. She was more than once caught in a lie, and her histrionic demeanour did not help her cause. Her claims that the accounts of poisoning her husband or of mixing broken glass into his food were fictions intended to impress her paramour did not convince the jury. On several occasions, when asked to account for an incriminating passage in one of the letters, she could only reply: I have no idea.
On 11 December 1922, after a trial which had lasted only six days, Frederick Bywaters and Edith Thompson were found guilty of the murder of Percy Thompson. They were both sentenced to death by hanging. The Court of Criminal Appeal heard and dismissed their appeals on the twenty-first. Bywaters was hanged at Pentonville Prison on the morning of 9 January 1923. Thompson was hanged at Holloway Prison at the same time.
The attitude of both press and public shifted dramatically in the wake of the guilty verdicts and death sentences. Almost one million people signed petitions for the reprieve of Bywaters organized by the Daily Sketch and the Daily News, while the News of the World and the Daily Express petitioned for the reprieve of Thompson. Bywaters was widely praised for the philosophical demeanour he showed in the face of death and for his repeated attempts to exonerate his lover. His last words were: They are hanging an innocent woman. Thompson attracted sympathy from the general abhorrence the public felt at the idea of a woman being hanged, whether she was guilty of murder or not. She was carried to the scaffold in a state of collapse.
From his vantage point in Paris, James Joyce too had been closely following the Bywaters case. The scandal fascinated him. He filled several pages of one of his notebooks with newspaper quotes (the Daily Sketch was his principal source) and discussed the case with his friends (Power 74). When an account of the trial was published in 1923, he procured a copy and proceeded to mine it for more quotes. He came down clearly on the same side of the debate as the News of the World and the Daily Express: Edith Thompson was a woman of imagination but not of action : if her love letters were enough to convict her of murder in a court of law, then no writer of fiction was safe from the scaffold. One might as easily convict Nabokov of paedophilia, or Defoe of piracy.
The very name Bywaters may have piqued Joyce’s interest. It could be analysed—after a fashion—as a combination of the Old Norse root -by, meaning town (as in Whitby, for example) and water. In Finnegans Wake the male and female protagonists would come to be identified with Dublin City and the River Liffey respectively. Joyce had already done something similar in Ulysses, where the watery element symbolizes the feminine principal and the rocky element the masculine. This is not actually the correct etymology of the name Bywaters, but in a book like Finnegans Wake association is everything, whether justified or not.
Joyce’s use of the Bywaters case in Finnegans Wake was first noted in the 1970s by two pioneers of Wakean studies, Clive Hart (Hart 7) and Adaline Glasheen, but it was not until scholars began to study the Finnegans Wake notebooks that the true significance of the case was recognized (Deane 165 ff). We now know that Joyce’s interest was not restricted to the winter of 1922-23. In fact more than eight years elapsed before he began to compile extensive notes from Filson Young’s account of the trial. These notes are to be found mainly in Finnegans Wake notebook VI.B.33. Others can be found in notebooks VI.C.5 and VI.C.6, which Joyce’s secretary Madame France Raphaël compiled from unused notes in two other notebooks, VI.B.10 and VI.B.33.
What was it about this foreign scandal that fascinated Joyce so much?
Hear, O hear, Iseult la belle! Tristan, sad hero, hear!
Stripped of its accidents, the Bywaters case conforms to one of the oldest archetypes in the history of storytelling: the adulterous love-triangle, in which a married woman takes a young lover, with the inevitable tragic consequences. Joyce could not have failed to note the similarities between this true story and the courtly romance of Tristan and Isolde. This tragedy, which Richard Wagner’s opera of 1865 had restored to popular consciousness, tells of the doomed love of an Irish princess for the nephew of her husband King Mark of Cornwall.
The courtly romance of Tristan and Isolde may derive from Celtic prototypes that have figured prominently in Irish storytelling for millennia. In Irish mythology there are two traditional tales that hang from similar adulterous triangles:
In the Ulster Cycle of legends, or the Red Branch Cycle, the tale is known as Loingeas Mac nUisleann (The Exile of the Sons of Uisneach), or Deirdre of the Sorrows.
In the Fenian Cycle, the corresponding tale is known as Tóraíocht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne (The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Gráinne).
Whatever the true origins of the story, history and literature are replete with variations on the same themes of cuckoldry, exile, betrayal and adulterous love. Homer, Mallory, Dante and Tolstoy—to name but four—could have provided Joyce with striking examples from the field of literature, while Charles Stewart Parnell and Kitty O’Shea did provide him with a powerful example from the closely related fields of history and politics.
The tragic tale of Tristan and Isolde involves a triangle in which an Irish princess is loved simultaneously by two men: her elderly husband, King Mark of Cornwall, and Mark’s young nephew, with whom she has an adulterous affair. The relationship between the two men is essentially that of father and son. This in turn complicates Isolde’s relationship to both: she is at once the wife and the daughter of the older man : the lover and the sister of the younger. It is not surprising that Joyce was drawn to such a potent mix of the innocent and the illicit, especially one associated with common familial relations. The oedipal and incestuous elements are crucial.
Problem ye ferst, construct ann aquilittoral dryankle
The love triangle can take a number of different forms, two of which are prominent in Finnegans Wake: the Isosceles Triangle and the Oedipal Triangle.
In the first of these, the two male vertices are either equals of one another or mirror images, while the object of their love stands at the apex of the triangle. The rivals compete on a level playing field, and their opposition may be construed as a sibling rivalry—even in cases where they are not actually brothers. The Knight’s Tale in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is a fine example of the Isosceles Triangle.
In the Oedipal Triangle, on the other hand, the relationship between the two men is more akin to that of a father and his eldest son. The older man is in possession of the woman at the outset, but the younger man rises up, confronts him, defeats him, usurps his power and takes his place in the woman’s bed. The ancient Greek myth of Oedipus is the prototype of this triangle.
The romance of Tristan and Isolde incorporates both forms of love triangle. The principal one—Isolde, Tristan and Mark—is a variant of the Oedipal Triangle. There is, however, a subsidiary Isosceles Triangle involving Isolde, Tristan and Melot (King Mark’s courtier, who secretly loves Isolde). The situation is further complicated by the fact that there are two Isoldes in the tale: Isolde of Ireland and Isolde of the White Hands. The latter is Tristan’s actual wife, who treats him coldly. In Finnegans Wake, both roles are subsumed by the character Issy. There is, thus, another isosceles triangle, with Tristan at the apex and the two Isoldes at the base—a mirror image, as it were, of the other isosceles triangle.
Joyce had already begun to think of Tristan and Isolde before he had quite done with Ulysses: some of his earliest notes on the tale, probably compiled in 1922, relate the characters of the Odyssey to those of the romance:
His notes in the contemporaneous VI.B.10 show that he had also begun to relate the Odyssey to Tristan. In that notebook we find ... a sequence of notes that take us to what appears to be the center of Joyce’s earliest plan. On that page we find first a list of writers who had used or were presently rewriting “Tristan,” and second a comparison of the two Isoldes with Penelope and Calypso:
It is entirely possible that Joyce was contemplating using the Tristan tale much as he had the Odyssey, as a template for his new novel. (Hayman 57-58)
But Finnegans Wake was not his first work to draw inspiration from this ancient tale. A Painful Case, one of the short stories in his cycle Dubliners, also reworks the familiar triangle and was consciously, if somewhat tenuously, modelled on the legend. In that story the protagonist Mr Duffy chooses to live in Chapelizod, a small village on the western outskirts of Dublin, because it is as far away from the city as he can get while still regarding himself as a citizen. But Joyce had a literary motive of his own when he domiciled his adulterer in this particular spot, the name of which means Chapel of Isolde. Tradition has it that this was the location of Isolde’s residence before her marriage to King Mark:
Chapelizod, the chapel of Izod, or Isolde, was the residence of that auburn-haired and passionate Irish princess, immortalized in Malory’s romance and Wagner’s opera. (Chart 315-316)
Joyce is known to have consulted David Alfred Chart’s The Story of Dublin while writing both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Another source he probably knew was John D’Altons The History of the County of Dublin (1838):
The name of Chapelizod is certainly very ancient ... Yet, in these searching days, it were presumptuous to draw upon the reader’s credulity so far as to detail here the romantic story of King Arthur’s round table and “la belle Isode,” the catastrophe of which would, in accordance with the Book of Howth, suggest the derivation of this place from the founding of fair Isod’s chapel in the village in the year 519. (D’Alton 543)
Joyce’s only surviving stageplay, Exiles, also features the familiar triangle. The Wagnerian overtones of this drama have been noted by the critics, though the only explicit reference to Tristan and Isolde occurs not in the play but in the Notes by the Author. These were only discovered after Joyce’s death and first published by Viking Press in 1951. See David Hayman’s discussion of Exiles in The “Wake” in Transit (Hayman 56-92). In Hayman’s words, the story of Tristan and Isolde provided Joyce with the first spark and the most persistent flame of his inspiration for Finnegans Wake.
In Ulysses Tristan and Isolde are included in a list of Irish heroes and heroines of antiquity, alongside Captain Nemo and the first Prince of Wales. Joyce used the German form of their names that Wagner had made familiar. Other forms include _Trystan, Drystan, Tristran, Tristram, Tristrem, Drustanus, Iseult, Yseult, Esyllt, Iseut, Iseo, Isode, Ysonde, Isoude, Isotta, etc.
Notes compiled by Joyce throughout the transitional period between the publication of Ulysses and the initial drafting of Finnegans Wake bear witness to his continuing interest in the tale. Curiously, his principal source for the story was neither Wagner’s opera nor any of the medieval texts, but a much more recent retelling: Joseph Bédier’s “prose-poem” Le Roman de Tristan et Iseut. Bédier was a philologist, and his work was an attempt to reconstruct the original narrative of the romance, albeit in contemporary French. Joyce’s library in Trieste, which he left behind when he moved to Paris in June 1920, contained an undated copy of this work as well as an English translation from 1910 by Florence Simmonds (Ellmann 97-134). As I mentioned in an earlier article in this series, he read this book while working on Exiles in 1914, but his close study of the text was probably undertaken in the summer of 1923 (Barger 127-138). By then he had already begun to draft sketches for his new novel.
It would appear that, between the completion of Ulysses early in 1922 and the composition in March 1923 of the first passage for the gestating work, Joyce’s preparations were largely exploratory and recuperative, a long and elaborate fishing expedition. (Hayman 8)
It seems, then, that after several months of fishing for a theme, Joyce finally came to a decision of sorts. In Ulysses he had rewritten the Odyssey : in Finnegans Wake he would rewrite Tristan and Isolde. This explains why the novel is set in Chapelizod, Mr Duffy’s chosen residence. But it leaves many other things unexplained: Joyce may have set out to update the medieval romance when he began to draft the book in 1923, but the finished work that he delivered to the publishers in 1939 is more than that. Much, much more.
And that’s as good a place as any to beach the bark of our tale.
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References
Jorn Barger, A Preliminary Stratigraphy of “Scribbledehobble”, in Andrew Treip (editor), Finnegans Wake: Teems of Times, European Joyce Studies, Volume 4, Pages 127-137, Rodopi, Amsterdam (1994)
Joseph Bédier, Le Roman de Tristan et Iseut, Édition Henri Piazzi et Cie, Paris (1900?)
David Alfred Chart, The Story of Dublin, J M Dent & Co, London (1907)
John D’Alton, The History of the County of Dublin, Hodges and Smith, Dublin (1838)
Vincent Deane, Bywaters and the Original Crime, in Andrew Treip (editor), Finnegans Wake: Teems of Times, European Joyce Studies, Volume 4, Pages 165-204, Rodopi, Amsterdam (1994)
Richard Ellmann, The Consciousness of Joyce, Oxford University Press, Oxford (1977)
Adaline Glasheen, Third Census of “Finnegans Wake”, University of California Press, Berkeley (1977)
David Hayman, The “Wake” in Transit, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York (1990)
James Joyce, Exiles, Penguin Books, London (1973)
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, Faber & Faber Limited, London (1939, 1949)
Arthur Power, Clive Hart (editor), Conversations with James Joyce, Millington, London (1974)
Danis Rose, John O’Hanlon, The Restored Finnegans Wake, Penguin Classics, London (2012)
Judith Rowbotham, Kim Stevenson, Samantha Pegg, Crime News in Modern Britain: Press Reporting and Responsibility, 1820-2010, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke (2013)
Florence Simmonds (translator), The Romance of Tristram and Iseult—Translated from the French of Joseph Bédier, William Heinemann, London (1910)
Filson Young, The Trial of Frederick Bywaters and Edith Thompson, Notable British Trials Series, William Hodge and Company, Limited, Edinburgh (1923)
Image Credits
Freddy Bywaters, Edith Thompson and Percy Thompson: Associated Newspapers Limited, Public Domain
Tristan and Isolde (Henry James Draper): Herbert James Draper (artist), Paisley Museum and Art Galleries, Renfrewshire Council Collections, Public Domain
Transcript of Finnegans Wake Notebook VI.B.10.15: David Hayman, The “Wake” in Transit, Page 58, Fair Use
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