16 September 2022

Concerning the Genesis of HCE

 

H C Earwicker and the Sailor King

The Humphriad—Chapters 2-4 of James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake—begins with an expansion of the sketch Here Comes Everybody, which Joyce had originally penned in the autumn of 1923. This was the little acorn from which Joyce’s mighty oak grew. The opening pages of I.2—Book I, Chapter 2, or the Humphriad I—were the first pages of Finnegans Wake to be written, and they were originally intended to be the opening pages of the book. It was only later, in 1926, that Joyce provided the work with the preliminary or introductory chapter, Riverrun.

The story of the conception and initial expansion of Here Comes Everybody was the subject of an earlier article in this series—Here Comes Everybody.

First-Draft Version

The earliest draft of Here Comes Everybody can be read on the archived version of Jorn Barger’s website Robotwisdom. With the help of David Hayman’s A First-Draft Version of Finnegans Wake (Hayman 62-63) and Danis Rose & John O’Hanlon’s James Joyce Digital Archive, I have slightly emended Barger’s version.

Here are the first ten lines or so, which correspond to the opening paragraph of Chapter I.2:

Concerning the origin of his agnomen the most authentic version has it that like Cincinnatus he was one day at his plough when royalty was announced on the highroad. Forgetful of all but his fealty he hastened out on to the road, holding aloft a long perch atop of which a flowerpot was affixed. On his majesty, who was rather longsighted from early youth, inquiring whether he had been engaged in lobstertrapping Humphrey bluntly answered: ‘No, my liege, I was only a cotching of them bluggy earwigs’. The King upon this smiled heartily and, giving way to that none too genial humour which he had inherited from his great aunt Sophy, turned towards two of his retinue, the lord of Offaly and the mayor of Waterford (the Syndic of Drogheda according to a later version) remarking ‘How our brother of Burgundy would fume did he know that he have this trusty vassal who is a turnpiker who is also an earwicker’.

La Place de Rennes, Paris

In a footnote, Hayman confirms that this first draft was written on Restaurant de Trianons stationery (Hayman 63, fn 12). Les Trianons, 5 La Place de Rennes (now La Place du 18-Juin-1940, at the junction of the Boulevard du Montparnasse and the Rue de Rennes), was Joyce’s favourite restaurant in the 1920s. It no longer exists. (I believe the restaurant À La Duchesse Anne currently occupies the same building, though I have also heard that the building was demolished.) In a letter of 23 August 1923, Joyce tells his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver that he has begun drafting other parts in spite of the heat, noise, confusion and suffocation (Letters I, 23 August 1923).

As we have already seen, there are a few discrepancies between the three versions (Barger, Hayman, Rose & O’Hanlon). For example, Rose & O’Hanlon give origin as the original third word in the first draft, which was later emended to genesis, whereas Barger and Hayman suggest that Joyce first wrote genesis and never altered it.

Sidlesham

Joyce began Here Comes Everybody in late August 1923, shortly after returning to Paris from a holiday in Bognor, England. As we have seen, he later incorporated into the sketch some material gleaned from a tourist brochure in Bognor, A Pictorial and Descriptive Guide to Bognor, etc (Timmerman 45-48). Bognor Pier is described in this guide thus:

At the entrance to the Pier, and at other spots on the Parade, are numbers of the Wicker Traps, or ‘Pots,’ in which lobsters, crabs and prawns are taken. These traps are made by the fishermen. The withes are cut just before, or just after, Christmas, and are bought from neighbouring farmers … In shape, they much resemble the old-fashioned bee-hives. At the top is an entrance for the victim. (Timmerman 45)

St Mary Our Lady, Sidlesham

The guide also includes a description of the church and graveyard in nearby Sidlesham:

Sidlesham Church is an Early English structure worthy of notice, and an examination of the surrounding tombstones should not be omitted if any interest is felt in deciphering curious names, striking examples being Earwicker, Glue, Gravy, Boniface, Anker, and Northeast. (Timmerman 45)

Obviously, this guide provided Joyce with the surname of his protagonist. It is curious, however, that several other details from the guide only made their appearance in later drafts of Here Comes Everybody. For example, the first draft fails to mention the Glues, the Gravys, the Northeasts, the Ankers and the Earwickers of Sidlesham.

Timmerman suggests that Joyce may have drawn upon other sections of the guide when crafting later chapters of Finnegans Wake:

If Joyce used the guide, he kept it—or notes made from it—for some time ... (Timmerman 46)

The Oedipal Encounter

The first draft of Here Comes Everybody clearly delineates an Oedipal Encounter between Humphrey and a King, but note that there is not yet any indication that Humphrey is guilty of a crime in the park or that he has committed some sort of Original Sin. That comes later, near the end of the sketch. When Adam is confronted by Yahweh in the Garden of Eden, however, he is already guilty of Original Sin.

Note also that the King is already accompanied by two other men, making with them a Tom-Dick-and-Harry trio. Such trios crop up regularly throughout Finnegans Wake and generally represent HCE’s twin sons Shem and Shaun, and the Oedipal Figure, who embodies both sons in the one person. At this early stage, however, Joyce had not yet created the characters of Shem and Shaun. These two names only make their appearance early in 1924.

The Murder of Laius by Oedipus

Parentheses

The published version of this passage runs to almost fifty lines in The Restored Finnegans Wake, making it about fives times as long as the first draft. In expanding and elaborating his first drafts, Joyce’s usual habit was to bury meaning beneath layers of obfuscating minutiae, thereby making everything more obscure and difficult to understand. At this early stage in the composition of Finnegans Wake, however, his modus operandi was more like the one he employed in the writing of Ulysses: he expanded and elaborated by simply adding more details. In this manner, he enriched the tapestry without casting a dark impenetrable pall over the text. He added more meaning, rather than concealing the meaning that was already present in the first draft.

This method often resulted in the interpolation of passages within parentheses. This particular paragraph has no less than five parenthetical interruptions. This use of parentheses is a practice that Joyce never abandoned. There is hardly a page of Finnegans Wake that does not have at least one pair of brackets breaking the flow of its text. Some of these digressions are so long that they displace the main thread of the narrative. They become the focus of the reader’s attention, recasting the principal narration as the actual parenthesis.

The Crime in the Park: Original Sin

In this opening paragraph, the first parenthesis appears after just one word:

Now (to forebare for ever solittle of Iris Frees and Lili O’Rangans) ...

When Joyce first drafted Here Comes Everybody, he had already conceived the idea that his protagonist was guilt-ridden, having committed a mysterious crime in the park, the precise nature of which is never stated. But the first indication of this guilty nature is deferred until after the Oedipal Encounter with the King.

God Judging Adam

It has been suggested that he suffered from a vile disease. To such a suggestion the only selfrespecting answer is to affirm that there are certain statements which ought not to be, and one would like to be able to add, ought not to be allowed to be made. Nor have his detractors mended their case by insinuating that he was at one time under the imputation of annoying soldiers in the park. To anyone who knew and loved H- C- E- the suggestion is preposterous. Slander, let it do its worst, has never been able to convict that good and great man of any greater misdemeanour than that of an incautious exposure and partial at that in the presence of certain nursemaids whose testimony is, if not dubious, at any rate slightly divergent. (Here Comes Everybody, First Draft)

It is generally accepted that this crime is HCE’s Original Sin. The park—ie Dublin’s Phoenix Park, which lies behind HCE’s tavern in Chapelizod—represents the Garden of Eden, and HCE is Adam. And just as many Biblical scholars have interpreted the Forbidden Fruit of Genesis as a symbol for sexual concupiscence, so HCE’s crime in the park is given strong albeit obscure sexual overtones. Either he exposes himself to two young maidens—ie his schizophrenic daughter Issy—or he peeps at them when they are at their toilet. And his crime is witnessed by three soldiers—another Tom-Dick-and-Harry trio, representing his sons Shem and Shaun. These details—two chambermaids and three spies—were probably inspired by a passage in Joseph Bédier’s Le Roman de Tristan et Iseut, which Joyce is known to have read.

The first-draft of the paragraph we are now studying did not contain any allusions to HCE’s crime—they make their first appearance at the end of Here Comes Everybody, which eventually became the fourth paragraph of this chapter—but Joyce added that early parenthetical line about Iris Frees and Lili O’Rangans. Clearly, these two women represent the two nursemaids in the park:

  • Iris Frees Iris Tree was an English actress, poet and artists’ model. She was active in Paris in the early 1920s, and socialized with several of Joyce’s acquaintances, most notably the poet Nancy Cunard. He must have met her occasionally, though I have not been able to confirm this.

  • Lili O’Rangans The Orange Lily, O is a traditional Irish song of the Protestant Orange Order.

The Orange Lily (Lilium bulbiferum)

In the first edition of Finnegans Wake (1939), the first of these names appeared as Iris Trees, but in The Restored Finnegans Wake Rose & O’Hanlon have emended it to Iris Frees, noting:

Irish Free State; also (possibly accidental) Iris Tree (1897-1968), English actress. (James Joyce Digital Archive)

The Irish Free State adopted the tricolour—green-white-orange—as its national flag. Now, trees are green, lilies are white, and oranges are orange. So the names of the two nursemaids encode the colours of the flag. This suggests that Trees is relevant: the allusion to Iris Tree is not accidental.

On the other hand, it could be argued that Iris Frees represents the Irish Free State (comprising 26 of Ireland’s 32 counties), while Lili O’Rangans represents Northern Ireland (comprising the 6 remaining counties). The Province of Northern Ireland was initially dominated by the Protestant Orange Order. The orange lily (Lilium bulbiferum) is one of their symbols and The Orange Lily, O one of their traditional songs.

Note that iris and lili have the double i, with its two dots—a motif that regularly signifies Issy in the pages of Finnegans Wake. Issy is the daughter of HCE’s eyes—the dotter of his i’s. In Morse code, the letter i is represented by two dots.

Cincinnatus Receiving the Ambassadors

Cabbaging Cincinnatus

In this paragraph, HCE is compared to Cincinnatus, a legendary figure from the early history of Rome. According to the historian Livy, Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus was a poor farmer who was called from his plough to assume the Dictatorship during a crisis in 458 BCE. The Aequi and their Sabine allies were threatening Rome:

>An immense body of Sabines came in their ravages almost up to the walls of the City. The fields were ruined, the City thoroughly alarmed ... [The Senate] decided to appoint a Dictator to retrieve the threatening position of affairs. By universal consent L. Quinctius Cincinnatus was called to the office.

>It is worth while for those who despise all human interests in comparison with riches, and think that there is no scope for high honours or for virtue except where lavish wealth abounds, to listen to this story. The one hope of Rome, L. Quinctius, used to cultivate a four-acre field on the other side of the Tiber, just opposite the place where the dockyard and arsenal are now situated; it bears the name of the “Quinctian Meadows.” There he was found by the deputation from the senate either digging out a ditch or ploughing, at all events, as is generally agreed, intent on his husbandry. After mutual salutations he was requested to put on his toga that he might hear the mandate of the senate, and they expressed the hope that it might turn out well for him and for the State. He asked them, in surprise, if all was well, and bade his wife, Racilia, bring him his toga quickly from the cottage. Wiping off the dust and perspiration, he put it on and came forward, on which the deputation saluted him as Dictator and congratulated him, invited him to the City and explained the state of apprehension in which the army were. A vessel had been provided for him by the government, and after he had crossed over, he was welcomed by his three sons, who had come out to meet him ... (Livy §§ 26-29)

Cincinnatus quickly defeated the Aequi and the Sabines. After only sixteen days he resigned the dictatorship, which had been conferred upon him for six months, and returned to his plough.

Summer Time 1924

Daylight Savings and the Ides of April

We are told that HCE was “saving daylight” when the King arrived. Daylight Saving Time refers to the common practice of advancing clocks by one hour in the spring and resetting them in the autumn in the belief that the brighter mornings resulting from this practice are beneficial to society.

In Ireland, Daylight Saving Time is called Summer Time. In the opening chapter of Finnegans Wake (which was written after I.2), we read:

And we put on your clock again, sir, for you. (RFW 022.11-12)

We discussed this line in an earlier article—I’ve an Eye on Queer Behan and Old Kate. There I repeated my claim that on the First Plane of Narrative, the Nocturnal Plane, Finnegans Wake begins at 11:32 pm on the night of Saturday 12 April 1924 and ends on the morning of Sunday 13 April 1924—the Ides of April.

On Sunday 13 April 1924, at 2 am in the morning, the clocks went forward one hour as Irish Summer Time began:

SUMMER TIME ACT, 1924 ... For the purpose of this Act, the period of summer time for the year 1924 shall be taken to be the period beginning at two o’clock, West-European time, in the morning of the 13th day of April, in the year 1924, and ending at two o’clock, West-European time, in the morning of the 21st day of September, in the year 1924 (Achtanna an Oireachtais, Number 12 of 1924)

The Stirrup Cup

Foxhunt

Humphrey Chimpden’s initial encounter with the King is occasioned by a foxhunt. Later in the Humphriad, HCE himself is depicted as a hunted fox, and elsewhere in Finnegans Wake he is identified with the Irish nationalist politician Charles Stewart Parnell, who sometimes used the pseudonym Mr Fox when conducting his illicit affair with Kitty O’Shea. There is, therefore, a suggestion that the Oedipal Encounter between the two men is not a chance event. On some level, HCE was always the King’s true quarry.

Joyce’s source for the foxhunting details in this paragraph has been identified:

  • Douglas Gordon, Reynard the Fox, Quarterly Review, Volume 237, Number 473, John Murray, London (1922)

This issue of the Quarterly Review included Shane Leslie’s disparaging review of Ulysses, which had been published the same year, so it is hardly surprising that Joyce had a copy. In fact, some details from Leslie’s review also found their way into this chapter (Deane 166). Joyce also lifted some expressions from another article in the same issue: Mental Healing, a discussion by Arthur E J Legge of various books on psychology, including titles by Émile Coué and Ernest Jones (Deane 167).

John Edward Masefield

Gordon’s article is a review of John Masefield’s mock-epic poem Reynard the Fox: or The Ghost Heath Run. Gordon makes use of this opportunity to describe the habits of foxes and the observations of those who hunt them (Deane 167). Joyce borrowed the following phrases (among others) from Gordon’s article:

  • dogfox It is hard to understand why dog-foxes are so often seen about earths which contain cubs.

  • cast Some years ago a long run with a well-known West Country pack ended quite unaccountably upon a strip of sandy beach on the Dorset coast. The fox had vanished ... exhaustive casts upon the shore failed to recover the line. In the context of foxhunting, to cast means to spread out and search for a scent. It is the dogs and the hunters who cast, not the fox. Joyce must have forgotten the precise meaning of the term in the lengthy period of time that elapsed between the taking of the note and its eventual incorporation into the text of I.2 (Deane 168).

  • ladypack A late snowfall having prevented hunting, we had taken the lady-pack out for road exercise.

  • two scatterguns On a certain day [a well-known Devonshire squire] was rabbiting in one of his own woods with a couple of companions—quite an informal party, just the two guns and a dog.

  • red brother Particularly when studying cubs ... is one liable to encounter disappointment ... For, should the red mother’s suspicion once be aroused, all is over.

Pot-On-Pole

When Humphrey first approaches the King, he is:

bearing aloft ... a high perch atop of which a flowerpot was fixed earthside hoist with care. [RFW 024.22-24]

This is an accurate description of a traditional type of earwig trap that gardeners have been using for centuries to protect their flowers from these insects:

Earwig Traps

In his guise as Adam, Humphrey is the grand old gardener—as Tennyson refers to Adam in Lady Clara Vere de Vere—though catching earwigs can hardly be his occupation.

The King mistakes the earwig trap for a lobsterpot. Earwigs and lobsters both belong to the phylum Arthropoda. They might even be said to share a family resemblance, the lobster being a sort of giant earwig. Joyce borrowed both the name Earwicker and the reference to Wicker Traps, or ‘Pots,’ in which lobsters, crabs and prawns are taken from A Pictorial Guide to Bognor. The King’s question about the use of paternoster and silver doctors for catching lobster was also inspired by the tourist guide, which recommends the use of the ‘Paternoster’ (an angler’s tackle rig) for fishing off Bognor Pier. The silver doctor, which is used in fly-fishing for salmon, was Joyce’s own contribution. HCE is often identified with the Salmon of Knowledge of Irish mythology—another hint that he is the true object of the royal hunt.

Earwig, Lobster, Paternoster, and Silver Doctor

This is not the first time we have come across a motif comprising a pot on a pole. This image recurs frequently throughout Finnegans Wake in connection with HCE. Why should this particular design represent the book’s protagonist? John Gordon has probably solved this mystery. While taking a survey of the furnishings of the master bedroom in HCE’s tavern, he writes:

The most prominent feature of the bed is the bedposts, each aligned with one cardinal point of the compass ... Three other items in the room, a chamber-pot, a hat, and a bell-pull or buzzer ... The hat—generally described as a bucket-shaped affair—is whisked before our eyes in one of the book’s teases when an actress is described as speaking ‘while recoopering her cartwheel chapot (ahat!—and we now know what thimbles a baquets on lallance a talls mean)’ (59.06-7) [RFW 047.28-30]. If this means anything it means that ‘tombles a’buckets’ of 5.03 [RFW 004.28], ‘clottering down’ the bauble-topped tower there is the same thing as the thimble-shaped baquet [French, tub] on the tall lance there—that is, a hat. As such it is perhaps the primary source of the pot-on-pole insignia already mentioned, and the readiest way of accounting for it is to conclude that HCE, like many men, has hung his hat on the handiest vertical, one of his knob-topped bedposts ... (Gordon 19-20)

Four-Poster Bed with Top Hat

John Peel

After the King has dubbed Humphrey an earwigger, the following line is heard:

For he kinned Jom Pill with his court so gray and his haunts in his house in the mourning.

This is an allusion to a popular 19th-century hunting song D’Ye Ken John Peel, which immortalized the foxhunter John Peel from Cumberland, in the Lake District. The song was written around 1824 by Peel’s friend John Woodcock Graves.

Verse 1

D’ye ken John Peel with his coat so gray?

D’ye ken John Peel at the break o’ day?

D’ye ken John Peel when he’s far, far away

With his hounds and his horn in the morning?

Chorus

For the sound of his horn brought me from my bed,

And the cry of his hounds which he oft time led,

Peel’s “View, Halloo!” could awaken the dead,

Or the fox from his lair in the morning.

Verse 2

D’ye ken that bitch whose tongue was death?

D’ye ken her sons of peerless faith?

D’ye ken that fox, with his last breath

Curs’d them all as he died in the morning?

Verse 3

Yes I ken John Peel and Ruby too

Ranter and Royal and Bellman as true,

From the drag to the chase, from the chase to the view

From a view to the death in the morning.

John Peel

This song is frequently invoked throughout Finnegans Wake. It was clearly a favourite of Joyce’s.

William Ewart Gladstone

This opening paragraph concludes with another parenthetical passage:

One still hears that pebblecrusted laughter, japijap cheerycherrily, among the roadside tree the lady Holmpatrick planted and still one feels the amossive silence of the cladstone allegibelling: Ive mies outs ide Bourn.

Earlier, Humphrey was called the grand old gardener. As we have seen, this is primarily a reference to Adam, but The Grand Old Man was a nickname of the four-time British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone. This was sometimes shortened to GOM—just as Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker is shortened to HCE—which political rivals read as God’s Only Mistake. Parnell called him The Grand Old Spider (RFW 272.31). He was also known as William the Conqueror and The People’s William. Adaline Glasheen has the following to say about him in her Third Census of Finnegans Wake:

Gladstone, William Ewart (1809-98)—British prime minister, “The Grand Old Man” or “G.O.M .,” “The Grand Old Spider” (Parnell’s term), “William the Conqueror”, “The People’s William.” A Dublin actor was named Gladstone; so were certain cheap French wines. His house was Hawarden ...

In “The Shade of Parnell” Joyce describes Gladstone’s shiftiness in morals and politics (see Demerara [where his father owned more than 2500 slaves]) and the firmness Parnell showed when he nearly led Gladstone to giving Home Rule to Ireland. When Parnell was officially proved an adulterer, Gladstone ordered him deposed as leader of the Irish party. Thus, along with Tim Healy, the O’Sheas, the Sullivans, the Irish priests, the roused rabble, Gladstone figures in FW as a murderer of Parnell, a type of king-killer, god-killer. This murder is usually figured as a tree-felling (see Tree and Stone, Eleutheriodendron). To the Elizabethans, a “woodman” was a “wencher,” and, sure enough, all his life Gladstone was suspect because of his fondness for uplifting fallen women (see Peter Wright). In FW Gladstone is sometimes associated with Pigott’s forgeries.

Thus Gladstone is usually an unfriendly word in FW and applied generally to Shaun ... On the other hand, “Grand Old Man” is usually HCE (Glasheen 105)

In the book alluded to, Peter Wright wrote:

Gladstone ... founded the great tradition since observed by many of his followers and successors with such pious fidelity, in public to speak the language of the highest and strictest principle, and in private to pursue and possess every sort of woman. (Wright 152)

William Ewart Gladstone at Hawarden Castle

  • pebble crusted laughta Gladstone’s first Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Lord Clarendon dubbed him Merry Pebble—a Joycean pun on glad stone.

  • lady Holmpatrick Victoria Alexandrina Wellesley, granddaughter of the Duke of Wellington and wife of Ion Trant Hamilton, First Baron HolmPatrick, an Anglo-Irish Member of Parliament and Member of the Irish Privy Council.

  • cladstone Gladstone, contrasted with amossive [= without moss, like a rolling stone].

  • allegibelling Alleging illegibly. This Gladstone is a milestone by the roadside, but its inscription has been worn away with time.

  • Ive mies outs ide Bourn Five miles outside Bourn. French: borne, milestone. In Shakespeare’s English, bourn or bourne means boundary, and is best known from Hamlet’s phrase: “But that the dread of something after death, The undiscover’d country from whose bourn[e] No traveller returns ...”

This paragraph opened with an allusion to Iris Tree and it closes with an allusion to a roadside tree planted by Lady HolmPatrick—a holm oak, perhaps. It just so happens that trees played an important role in Gladstone’s life. Speaking at Blackpool in 1884, Lord Randolph Churchill said of him:

>For the purposes of recreation he has selected the felling of trees; and we may usefully remark that his amusements, like his politics, are essentially destructive. Every afternoon the whole world is invited to assist at the crashing fall of some beech or elm or oak. The forest laments, in order that Mr. Gladstone may perspire, and full accounts of these proceedings are forwarded by special correspondents to every daily paper every recurring morning. (Churchill 282-283)

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

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