07 September 2022

Aisy Now, You Decent Man

 


Enniscorthy (RFW 022.01–022.08)

This short passage of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is essentially a repetition of an earlier passage—RFW 019.24–021.12—in which Tim Finnegan’s “corpse” was entreated to remain supine during his wake and not to be walking abroad ... sleep well:

Now, be aisy, good Mr Finnimore, sir. And take your laysure like a god on pension and don’t be walking abroad ... steep wall.

First-Draft Version

The first draft of this passage consisted of just one sentence, to which Joyce later added three words (with your knees). This was originally part of a single fifteen-line paragraph that ran from And would again could whispering grassies wake him (RFW 019-18) to Finn no more! (RFW 023.02):

Aisy now, you decent man, and lie quiet and repose your honour’s lordship! (Hayman 60)


Hayman 60:12-31

In the final published text, these fifteen lines had grown to four-and-a-half pages (three-and-a-half in The Restored Finnegans Wake), spread over seven paragraphs. This particular sentence was placed in its own paragraph. In early 1937, when Joyce was correcting the galley proofs for Finnegans Wake, he inserted an entirely new paragraph of six lines after it (Ito 1, 5-6).

The Four Old Men

In our discussion of the earlier passage, we wondered whether the men who hold Finnegan down are the Twelve or the Four. Most Joycean scholars seem to favour the former, whereas I am inclined to see the hands of the Four Old Men at play. The present passage would seem to support me, as it explicitly names four individuals:

  • Ezekiel Irons Joyce borrowed this name from a parish clerk and fisherman in Sheridan Le Fanu’s novel The House by the Churchyard, which is one of the key texts for Finnegans Wake (Atherton 110-113). Adaline Glasheen believes that this is Johnny MacDougal, the Old Man of Connacht:

Irons, Ezekiel (“God strengthen you”)—villainous parish clerk in LeFanu’s ... The House by the Churchyard. Here also one of the Four ... probably Johnny MacDougal ... who is the Iron Age. (Glasheen 136)


The House by the Churchyard, Chapelizod

  • Dimitrius O’Flagonan This name was borrowed from a drinking song, Enniscorthy, by Robert Jasper Martin, which Bloom recalls in Ulysses:

McCarthy, Demetrius O’Flanagan—subject of a song. He took the floor at Enniscorthy. (Glasheen 177)

In the opening verse of the song, we are told that Demetrius O’Flannigan McCarthy was the pride of balls and parties and the glory of a wake (Pomeranz 53). As Enniscorthy is in Leinster, he may represent Luke Tarpey. The O’Flanagans, however, originally hailed from Connacht, while the MacCarthys were of Munster stock. Cork (cork that cure for the Clancartys) is in Munster.

Danis Rose & John O’Hanlon suggest an allusion to the seleucid Emperor Demetrius II Nicator, but I fail to see any relevance (James Joyce Digital Archive).


Enniscorthy

The two remaining names were concocted from a Russian expression, suggested, perhaps, by the presence of Dimitrius, a common name in Russia (Дмитрий, or Dmitriy):

Russian: Vechnyi pokoi, na vechnuyu pamyat, Eternal peace, for eternal memory [ie RIP].

  • Pat Koy While noting the Russian allusion, Adaline Glasheen suggests a possible reference to Pat Hoy, a friend of Joyce’s father John Stanislaus Joyce (Glasheen 157). She also notes that Here he is one of the Four.

  • Pam Yates Pam is a girl’s name, so could this really be one of the Four Old Men? Glasheen suggests a reference to William Butler Yates (Glasheen 312).

In Finnegans Wake, the Four Old Men are usually accompanied by Johnny MacDougal’s donkey. Is he here? If he is, I don’t see him. Could he be Wramawitch? Hardly, as witch suggests that the speaker is referring to ALP, sleeping by her husband’s side.


HCE and ALP in Bed

Interpretation

This short passage should present even the novice reader of Finnegans Wake with few difficulties. In the dramatization of the Irish-American ballad Finnegan’s Wake, which was resumed a few pages ago, we have reached the point where some drops of whiskey—Irish: uisce beatha, water of life—are spilt on Tim Finnegan’s lips, bringing him back to life. But this is Finnegans Wake, not Finnegan’s Wake, so he must be coaxed back to sleep.

Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson believe that the Twelve are restraining him. They also note that it is the overheard items of news that cause Tim to stir, not whiskey spilt during a riot, though one of the men who hold him down suggests otherwise:

[At this last bit of news the old giant stirs mightily. The men of the company settle him firmly.]

“Easy, easy now, you decent man! Hold him, gentlemen, hold him! It’s our warm spirits he’s sniffing. Cork up that bottle, O’Flagonan! Fetch here, Pat Koy, give a hand!” (Campbell & Robinson 54)

John Gordon’s analysis runs along the same tracks:

There is news aplenty, all of it dull or dismal stuff. That news (plus the usual improper interest in the daughter-as-temptress) spurs our hero to try once more to rise, only to be forced down again by one of the drinkers who assumes—such is the ubiquity of projection in the Wake—that he has been aroused by the smell of liquor on someone’s breath. (Gordon 120)

On his blog, Gordon adds:

27.24-5 ... In a scenario based on the song “Finnegan’s Wake,” smelling the whiskey (spirits)—on their breaths, from their containers—is rousing him back to life: the last thing anyone wants. So one of the party is ordered to cork up his bottle. (John Gordon)

Although the general purport of this passage is clear, there remain a few unresolved morsels that resist digestion:

  • with your knees Joyce added these words to the first draft. Do they imply that the sleeping man—Tim Finnegan, or the landlord of the Mullingar House—is stirring in the bed and prodding his wife with his knees. One online annotator, Tim Finnegan, comments: not to awaken his bedmate? ... are the knees somehow the startingpoint of his trying to rise? cf praying on knees?


Portobello

  • You swamped enough since Portobello to float the Pomeroy. Portobello is a district in Dublin City, beside the Grand Canal. It was named for Portbelo in Panama, which was captured by Admiral Edward Vernon in 1739, during the War of Jenkins’ Ear. Pomeroy is a town in County Tyrone. The sentence seems to mean: “You’ve drunk enough whiskey to float a ship as big as the Pomeroy.” But was there ever a ship called the Pomeroy? And why Portobello? In one of her footnotes to Chapter II.2, Night Lessons, Issy writes: Pomeroy Roche of Portobello, or the Wreck of the Ragamuffin (RFW 224.F5). An Italian online annotator, Orlando Mezzabotta, has this analysis:

So, let us start from Portobello. That’s Italian. It means “beautiful (bello) haven (porto)”. From “haven” to “heaven” the step is short, so that we are entitled to see in the “beautiful heaven” an image of Eden, which, by the way, is itself a “beautiful haven” as well. Let us now consider “Pomeroy”. It hints at French Pommeraye (orchard of apple-trees): thus one further hint at the Garden of Eden; which brings us directly to the “fall”, or the “wreck” against a rock (French roche). The “wreck” that we find connected to Ragamuffin. (Mezzabotta 2)

  • Wramawitch The Russian context suggests Abramovich, a Russian name meaning “Son of Abraham” (Isaac? Ishmael?). Witch, however, suggests that the allusion is to ALP, or one of her avatars.

  • misties ... misches ... mystries Is there some pattern here? A Viconian cycle?


Boris Godunov

Boris Godunov

The prevalence of Russian in this short paragraph may seem baffling. As I mentioned above, it could be due to nothing more mysterious than the association of ideas: Dimitrius can hardly have failed to remind an opera lover like Joyce of the False Dmitriy in Modest Mussorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov. Several years later, when Joyce was drafting the Butt and Taff episode—How Buckley Shot the Russian General—for Chapter II.3, The Scene in the Public, he took some details of Russian history from Stephen Graham’s biography of Boris Godunov, which was first published in 1933. Joyce, it seems, gave a copy of this book to his son Giorgio as a Christmas present in 1933, or possibly 1935 (Kenny 270).

According to Thomas J Kenny, who discusses this book in an article that appeared in the Journal of Modern Literature in 1977, Joyce drew upon Graham’s text when composing the final draft of the short passage we are now studying:

The most elaborate reference to the new Dimitri occurs near the start of Finnegans Wake. Here a voice wants the dead Finnegan to lie still although the thought of women and the smell of liquor seem to rouse him ... [RFW 022.03-08] ... “Spooring” means some kind of excitement, possibly sexual, that threatens to wake Finnegan [German: spüren, to sense, to feel the effect of]. The address to “Dimitrius O’Flagonan” is closely connected to the “cure for the Clancartys!” Joyce had mentioned this clan in a book review of 1903. To conclude his article, he has an old man ask rhetorically, “The Clancartys was great men, too. Is there any of them living?” [Joyce 2000:66] The voice does not want “Dimitrius” to share the fate of extinction which the Clancartys apparently suffered. The word “fetch” is repeated again in the paragraph, recalling “fetch along within hail” [RFW 266.01]. Skrabanek has identified “fetch neahere, Pat Koy! And fetch nouyou, Pam Yates!” as a Slavonic funeral prayer transliterated from “vechnyi pokoi, na vechnuyu pamyat (eternal peace, for eternal memory).” Freed from extinction and eternally remembered, Dimitri acquires a mysterious existence like that “moist moonful date man aver held dimsdzey death with” [RFW 268.11-12]. “Lumbos” suggests a “limbo” from “where mystries pour kind on.” “Kind” is both mankind and “Kind”, German for child. Dimitri is as real as human hopes for improvement. “So be yet!” incorporates “soviet,” a hypothetical improvement on the Tsars, within man’s ever-present hope for the future, as “the voice of Alina [Alma in RFW] gladdens the cocklyhearted dreamerish for the magic moning” [RFW 475.26-28]. The words and phrases Joyce has taken from Graham’s Boris Godunof have played an important part in the construction of the episode. (Kenny 274-275)

I can’t say that I find any of this convincing. It is true that Joyce added this paragraph as late as 1937 (Ito 1, 5-6), around the time he was writing the Butt & Taff episode. As Geert Lernout has pointed out, the preceding two-line paragraph was drafted and revised in late 1926, several years before Graham’s book was published (Crispi & Slote 57, 60, 485). But other than the mention of Dimitrius, there is nothing in these lines that suggests any connection with Graham’s book.

And that’s as good a place as any to beach the bark of our tale.

References

Image Credits

Video Credits

  • Enniscorthy: Peterchrisp, © Charles Peake & Company, Clothworkers Concert Hall, University of Leeds, 15 July 1987, Fair Use

  • Passages from Finnegans Wake: © Mary Allen Bute (director), Fair Use

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