Guiltless of Much Laid to Him

Guiltless of Much Laid to Him (RFW 027.37-030.19)

In Finnegans Wake, James Joyce tells the same story over and over again. This repetitiousness, which mimics the repeating patterns of life and death as described by Giambattista Vico’s philosophy of history, is aptly illustrated by the tale recounted in the last eleven pages of Book I, Chapter 2 (the Humphriad I). HCE’s infamous encounter with a cad with a pipe in the Phoenix Park is one of the better known interludes in Finnegans Wake, and the events it sets in motion will continue to resound for the balance of the novel. But this tale is little more than a variation on HCE’s roadside encounter with the King and the subsequent events precipitated by that brush with royalty, which were recounted in the first four pages of the same chapter. This is the Oedipal Event all over again.

History Repeating Itself

First-Draft Version

In the first draft, this passage runs to a dozen or so lines, which Joyce later expanded after his usual practice. In The Restored Finnegans Wake the encounter with the Cad with a Pipe fills about two-and-a-half pages:

Guiltless he was clearly for so once at least he clearly declared himself to be. They tell the story that one fine spring morning some years after the alleged misdemeanour whilst crossing the fair expanse of the park he met a cad with a pipe. The latter accosted him to ask if he could say what it was o’clock that the clock struck. Earwicker halting drew his enamelled hunter, and told the cad it was twelve to the minute adding however that the accusation against him had been made as was well known by a creature in human form who was several degrees lower than a snake. In support of his words the honest goliath tapped his chronometer and pointed to [the] overgrown milestone as he said solemly: I am prepared to stand on the monument any day at this hour to declare before the deity and my fellows that there is not a tittle of truth in that purest of fabrications. The cad thanked him and repeated the words that same evening at his fireside where he was smoking reflectively after having eaten some peas and vinegar, a dish he much fancied. (Hayman 64, slightly emended)

Richard Ellmann was one of the first to draw attention to the homoerotic overtones of HCE’s encounter with the Cad:

Before the end of the year [1923] most of the first part of the book—made up of eight chapters—was sketched out. It was an introduction of the dramatis personae: Earwicker, his wife Anna Livia Plurabelle, and their three children. Earwicker’s original sin, never precisely described, occurred in the Phoenix Park and involved exhibitionism, or voyeurism, with two nursemaids as accomplices, and three soldiers (imported perhaps from the Circe episode of Ulysses) as witnesses, quite possibly themselves involved in the offense through promiscuity with the girls or homosexuality with each other ... [Footnote: Earwicker himself does not appear to be altogether innocent of this tendency. When the cad with a pipe asks him the time, he replies that it is 12 noon ... The question and answer are homosexual argot (so used in Jean Genet’s Journal du voleur), the question being tantamount to a proposition, the answer (denoting erection) to consent. (Ellmann 555)

Jean Genet

Jean Genet’s Journal de voleur [The Thief’s Journal] was published in 1949, ten years after the publication of Finnegans Wake, so it was not Joyce’s source for this bit of homosexual argot:

D’une main tremblante je lui touchai maladroitement la cuisse, puis ne sachant comment poursuivre j’employai machinalemant la formule qui me servait à aborder les pédés timides:

—Il est quelle heure? dis-je.

—Hein? Regarde, je marque midi.

Il rit.

Je le revis souvent. (Genet 203)

[With trembling hand, I touched his thigh awkwardly; then, not knowing how to proceed, I automatically used the formula which has served me well when approaching shy queers.

—What time is it? I asked.

—Eh? Look, I make it midday.

He laughed.

I often saw him again.]

The overgrown milestone to which HCE points is of course the Wellington Monument in the Phoenix Park, an obviously ithyphallic symbol. It also resembles the gnomon of a sundial, by which the time may be told.

The Ides of April

In the first draft of this section, Joyce sets HCE’s encounter with the Cad with a Pipe on one fine spring morning, but this was later emended to one happy-go-gusty Ides-of-April morning. It is surely significant that the fateful incident takes place on this very specific date. We are even told that it was HCE’s birthday. In the calendar of ancient Rome, the Ides of April was the 13th of April. The festival of Cerealia was celebrated around this time. In a book in which Joyce’s watchword is keep black, keep black! (the concluding words of the preceding section) why does he make as clear as daylight the date of HCE’s memorable encounter?

Spring

In the thirteenth article of this series—A Working Hypothesis—I defended the thesis that on what I call the Nocturnal Plane of Narrative, Finnegans Wake begins at 11:32 pm on 12 April 1924 and ends on the morning of the 13th. A brief revision of that argument would not be out of place here.

The First Plane of Narrative – Nocturnal

Is there a narrative plane in Finnegans Wake that corresponds to the real world, the world of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus? I believe there is. This is the plane Joyce was referring to when he made the following statement to Ole Vinding in Copenhagen in 1936:

Ole Vinding

There are, so to say, no individual people in the book—it is as in a dream, the style gliding and unreal as is the way in dreams. If one were to speak of a person in the book, it would have to be of an old man, but even his relationship to reality is doubtful. (Vinding et al 180-181)

On the opening page of the book, this old man goes to sleep in his four-poster bed, in the master bedroom, on the first floor, at the rear of the Mullingar House. The precise moment he falls asleep—punctuated by the word fall (RFW 003.14)—is 11:32 pm on Saturday 12 April 1924. He sleeps, more or less soundly, for about eight hours and wakes up the following morning on the last page of the book. The precise moment of his awakening is punctuated by the words a way (RFW 493.07).

The number 1132 pops up all over Finnegans Wake. Clive Hart was the first—I believe—to suggest that the book begins at 11:32:

The whole book ... begins at the magical hour of 11.32 a.m. ... (Hart 71)

Hart’s analysis here is relevant to my second plane of narrative—the Diurnal—which I believe begins at 11:32 in the morning. But what I have been calling the first plane of narrative—the Nocturnal—begins at 11:32 at night.

As for the date—Saturday 12 – Sunday 13 April 1924—there are several scraps of evidence scattered throughout the final text and Joyce’s notebooks in support of this. In the Roman calendar 13 April was the Ides of April:

They tell the story ... how one happy-go-gusty Ides-of-April morning ... (RFW 027.39-028.01)

The other spring offensive on the heights of Abraham ... (RFW 062.28)

A Cad with a Pipe

One of the oft-recurring motifs in Finnegans Wake is ALP’s Letter. This document frequently symbolizes the entire book itself. For example, when the Letter is referred to as The Suspended Sentence (RFW 084.30-31), we are to understand that this also applies to Finnegans Wake itself:

The book really has no beginning or end. (Trade secret, registered at Stationers Hall.) It ends in the middle of a sentence and begins in the middle of the same sentence. (Letters I, 8 November 1926)

During the lengthy and piecemeal drafting of the book, Joyce first conceived of the Letter as a postcard, as we learn from the following note in one of the earliest of the Finnegans Wake notebooks, Scribbledehobble:

on the N.E. slope of the dunghill the slanteyed hen of the Grogans scrutinised a clayed p.c. from Boston (Mass) of the 12<sup>th</sup> of the 4<sup>th</sup> to dearest Elly from her loving sister with 4½ kisses (Connolly 75, VI.A: 271(c))

It is true that the final version of this passage speaks not of a postcard dated 12th April, but of:

a goodishsized sheet of letterpaper originating by transhipt from Boston (Mass.) of the last of the first ... (RFW 088.20-21)

But I’m going to assume that Joyce changed the date from the actual one to a symbolic one (So the last wi ll be first, and the first wi ll be last) because he did not want to make things too easy for the reader. In the first draft of this passage, Joyce actually emended the date to the eleventh of the fifth. This seems to be a simple disguise of the true date, arrived at by subtracting 1 from the 12 and adding it to the 4.

One last point about the date. 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)

In Finnegans Wake the following telling remark occurs:

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

A Waterbury Pocket Watch (1890)

Personal dates were important to Joyce. He set Ulysses on the day of his first date with Nora Barnacle, and took pains to have it published on 2 February 1922, his own fortieth birthday. 13 April turns up more than once in the Joycean canon. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, one of Stephen’s entries in his diary is dated 13 April:

13 April: That tundish has been on my mind for a long time. I looked it up and find it English and good old blunt English too. Damn the dean of studies and his funnel! What did he come here for to teach us his own language or to learn it from us? Damn him one way or the other! (Joyce 1916:297)

Handel’s Messiah had its world première in Dublin on 13 April 1742, and Catholic Emancipation was passed into law on 13 April 1829, when an Irishman, the Duke of Wellington, was Prime Minister. But if this particular date held any special significance for Joyce, I am not aware of it.

John Gordon has suggested that the more familiar Ides of March (15 March), on which Julius Caesar was assassinated by his alleged son Brutus, is the true date on which HCE’s reputation is assassinated, but that this has undergone Freudian dream-distortion:

The dream-censor forces rush back ... The displacement continues: the phrase ‛ides of March’, for instance, with its parricidal overtones, is adjusted one month over to the harmless ‛ides of April’. (Gordon 125)

John Stanislaus Joyce

Oedipal Encounters

As we saw in an earlier article, one of the principal sources for HCE’s Oedipal Encounter—whether with the King or with the Cad—was an event in which Joyce’s father, John Stanislaus Joyce, was allegedly accosted by an undesirable in the Phoenix Park. This incident quickly passed into mythology and was so altered in the retelling that it is now impossible to say with any degree of certainty what, if anything, actually happened. In one version, a young “cad on a bicycle” asks Joyce for a light. In another version, Joyce heroically fights off an assailant (or two), who wish to relieve him of the day’s takings—Joyce being at the time a rates collector. On his Joycean blog From Swerve of Shore to Bend of Bay, Peter Chrisp has collated several different versions of this apocryphal tale that have gained currency.

Why this particular anecdote resonated so strongly with Joyce is anybody’s guess. Perhaps he was aware from the start of its possible Oedipal overtones. Or perhaps he could not help associating the incident with the Phoenix Park Murders, which also cast a long shadow over Joyce’s youth. John Stanislaus’s biographers John Wyse Jackson & Peter Costello have suggested that Joyce even saw in it a farcical rerun of the Phoenix Park Murders (Jackson & Costello 141). Joyce also connected it to the Fall of Man, with the park standing in for the Garden of Eden, and the allusions to the luciferant and snake completing the picture.

But it was not only the father who provided grist for his son’s mill. As a young man, Joyce himself had several memorable encounters that may also lie behind HCE’s meeting with the Cad with a Pipe. Two of these involved members of the Yeats family. In some of these encounters, Joyce was the accoster : in others, he was the accosted.

One of these incidents took place in 1904, when Joyce was living with Oliver St John Gogarty and Samuel Chenevix Trench in the Martello Tower at Sandycove. Early one day, a penniless Joyce and Gogarty were walking in the direction of the city centre:

Joyce saw him first, a tall figure coming rapidly in our direction. I looked and recognized “old Yeats,” the father of the bard. He was out for his morning constitutional. As he came nearer he appeared an uninviting figure, old, lean and very tall. His dark eyes burned brightly under shaggy eyebrows. “It is your turn,” Joyce whispered. “For what?” I asked. “To touch.” Reluctantly, and with trepidation, I spoke to the old man, whom I hardly knew. “Good morning, Mr. Yeats, would you be so good as to lend us two shillings?” Savagely the old man eyed me and my companion. He looked from one to the other. At last he broke out: “Certainly not,” he said. “In the first place I have no money; and if I had it and lent it to you, you and your friend would spend it on drink.” He snorted. Joyce advanced and spoke gravely. “We cannot speak about that which is not.” But old Yeats had gone off rapidly. “You see,” said Joyce, still in a philosophical mood, “the razor of Occam forbids the introduction of superfluous arguments. When he said that he had no money that was enough. He had no right to discuss the possible use of the non-existent.” (Gogarty 87)

John Butler Yeats

A more memorable encounter was Joyce’s first meeting with the son, William Butler Yeats. This took place in October 1902, a couple of years before Joyce had his brush with the father. Yeats was thirty-seven years old and the undisputed leader of the Irish Literary Movement. Joyce, who was twenty at the time, was later to characterize accounts of the meeting commonly retailed by the press as another story of Dublin public house gossip (Ellmann 101).

Yeats preserved a detailed record of the meeting. It had been his intention to use it as the preface to his collection of essays Ideas of Good and Evil, but he changed his mind, and it remained unpublished until Richard Ellmann included it in his biography of James Joyce. It is worth quoting in full, bearing in mind its significance for Finnegans Wake:

I had been looking over the proof sheets of this book [Ideas of Good and Evil] one day in Dublin lately and thinking whether I should send it to the Dublin papers for review or not. I thought that I would not, for they would find nothing in it but a wicked theology, which I had probably never intended, and it may be found all the review on a single sentence. I was wondering how long I should be thought a preacher of reckless opinions and a disturber who carries in his hand the irresponsible torch of vain youth. I went out into the street and there a young man came up to me and introduced himself. He told me he had written a book of prose essays or poems, and spoke to me of a common friend [George Russell, or AE, who had described to Yeats his own memorable encounter with Joyce].

Yes, I recollected his name, for he had been to my friend who leads an even more reckless rebellion than I do, and kept him up to the grey hours of the morning discussing philosophy. I asked him to come with me to the smoking room of a restaurant in O’Connell Street, and read me a beautiful though immature and eccentric harmony of little prose descriptions and meditations [Joyce’s Epiphanies]. He had thrown over metrical form, he said, that he might get a form so fluent that it would respond to the motions of the spirit. I praised his work but he said, ‛I really don't care whether you like what I am doing or not. It won’t make the least difference to me. Indeed I don’t know why I am reading to you.’

Then, putting down his book, he began to explain all his objections to everything I had ever done. Why had I concerned myself with politics, with folklore, with the historical setting of events, and so on? Above all why had I written about ideas, why had I condescended to make generalizations? These things were all the sign of the cooling of the iron, of the fading out of inspiration. I had been puzzled, but now I was confident again. He is from the Royal University, I thought, and he thinks that everything has been settled by Thomas Aquinas, so we need not trouble about it. I have met so many like him. He would probably review my book in the newspapers if I sent it there. But the next moment he spoke of a friend of mine [Oscar Wilde] who after a wild life had turned Catholic on his deathbed. He said that he hoped his conversion was not sincere. He did not like to think that he had been untrue to himself at the end. No, I had not understood him yet.

I had been doing some little plays for our Irish theatre, and had founded them all on emotions or stories that I had got out of folklore. He objected to these particularly and told me that I was deteriorating. I had told him that I had written these plays quite easily and he said that made it quite certain; his own little book owed nothing to anything but his own mind which was much nearer to God than folklore.

I took up the book and pointing to a thought said, ‛You got that from somebody else who got it from the folk.’ I felt exasperated and puzzled and walked up and down explaining the dependence of all good art on popular tradition. I said, ‛The artist, when he has lived for a long time in his own mind with the example of other artists as deliberate as himself, gets into a world of ideas pure and simple. He becomes very highly individualized and at last by sheer pursuit of perfection becomes sterile. Folk imagination on the other hand creates endless images of which there are no ideas. Its stories ignore the moral law and every other law, they are successions of pictures like those seen by children in the fire. You find a type of these two kinds of invention, the invention of artists and the invention of the folk, in the civilization that comes from town and in the forms of life that one finds in the country. In the towns, especially in big towns like London, you don’t find what old writers used to call the people; you find instead a few highly cultivated, highly perfected individual lives, and great multitudes who imitate them and cheapen them. You find, too, great capacity for doing all kinds of things, but an impulse towards creation which grows gradually weaker and weaker. In the country, on the other hand, I mean in Ireland and in places where the towns have not been able to call the tune, you find people who are hardly individualized to any great extent. They live through the same round of duty and they think about life and death as their fathers have told them, but in speech, in the telling of tales, in all that has to do with the play of imagery, they have an endless abundance. I have collected hundreds of stories and have had hundreds of stories collected for me, and if one leaves out certain set forms of tale not one story is like another. Everything seems possible to them, and because they can never be surprised, they imagine the most surprising things. The folk life, the country life, is nature with her abundance, but the art life, the town life, is the spirit which is sterile when it is not married to nature. The whole ugliness of the modern world has come from the spread of the towns and their ways of thought, and to bring back beauty we must marry the spirit and nature again. When the idea which comes from individual life marries the image that is born from the people, one gets great art, the art of Homer, and of Shakespeare, and of Chartres Cathedral.’

I looked at my young man. I thought, ‛I have conquered him now,’ but I was quite wrong. He merely said, ‛Generalizations aren’t made by poets; they are made by men of letters. They are no use.’

Presently he got up to go, and, as he was going out, he said, I am twenty. How old are you?’ I told him, but I am afraid I said I was a year younger than I am. He said with a sigh, ‛I thought as much. I have met you too late. You are too old.’

And now I am still undecided as to whether I shall send this book to the Irish papers for review. The younger generation is knocking at my door as well as theirs (Ellmann 102-103)

William Butler Yeats

It is significant that Yeats himself recognized the Oedipal overtones in his encounter with the young man.

In Joyce’s definitive biography, written by Herbert Gorman in collaboration with the author, the interview with Yeats is mentioned briefly but without elaboration:

He had gone to visit W. B. Yeats and Yeats is reported to have complained, “Never have I encountered so much pretension with so little to show for it.” Yet Yeats was friendly and willing to advise Joyce about the literary life. The two men met seven or eight times. Indeed, there have been false reports about the relations of the two men that might lead one to think that there was an element of contempt on the part of the younger for the older. This was never so. Joyce realized that Yeats had grown up in an earlier aesthetic atmosphere (William Morris, etc.) in which he had no part, but he never undervalued Yeats’s great contribution to letters. (Gorman 80-81)

According to Ellmann, both men later denied that Joyce had ever said to Yeats, You are too old for me to help you. Even later, however, Joyce conceded that he said something of the sort, but that the words were never said in the tone of contempt which is implied in the story (Ellmann 101 fn).

Incidentally, it was being shown W B Yeats’s account of his first meeting with James Joyce that first sparked Richard Ellmann’s desire to write a new biography of Joyce (Ellmann ix).

Yet another fateful encounter in a park may have worked its way into the matrix out of which Finnegans Wake would one day be born. It took place in 1922, on the eve of the publication of Ulysses:

Just before Ulysses was to appear Joyce and Nora were walking with Miss Barnes in the Bois de Boulogne when a man brushed by and mumbled something she did not catch. Joyce trembled and went white. To Miss Barnes’s question he said, ‛That man, whom I have never seen before, said to me as he passed, in Latin, “You are an abominable writer!” That is a dreadful omen the day before the publication of my novel.’ (Ellmann 524)

Finally, there is the encounter that Joyce used as the basis of one of the short stories in his Dubliners, namely The Encounter. This occurred in 1895, when James was thirteen and his brother Stanislaus ten:

James mitigated his exemplary behavior a little toward the end of this term by persuading Stanislaus to play truant for a day from Belvedere. The two brothers planned an expedition along the strand as far as the Pigeon House—the public power plant which serves Dublin. On the way, as Stanislaus recalls, they ran into the homosexual whose talk and behavior were described later in Joyce’s story ‛An Encounter.’ He evoked the dangerous, slightly shameful adult world into which Joyce was about to penetrate. (Ellmann 47)

This encounter can hardly be described as Oedipal, but it shares the same homoerotic overtones as HCE’s encounter with the Cad.

If we seek other models in literature or in history for HCE’s encounter with the Cad, we will not be disappointed. Hamlet meeting the ghost of his own father is surely relevant (Gordon 125), as is the fatal duel Daniel O’Connell fought with John D’Esterre. Opening the Bible, we have David’s encounter with Goliath, which is explicitly referenced by Joyce’s first draft (the honest goliath). But I leave the reader to pursue such leads for himself.

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

References

Thomas Edmund Connolly (editor), James Joyce’s Scribbledehobble: The Ur-Workbook for Finnegans Wake, Edited with Notes and an Introduction, Northwestern University press, Evanston, Illinois (1961)
Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, New and Revised Edition, Oxford University Press, Oxford (1982)
Oliver St John Gogarty, It Isn’t This Time of Year at All! An Unpremeditated Autobiography, Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut (1954)
John Gordon, Finnegans Wake: A Plot Summary, Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, New York (1986)
Herbert Gorman, James Joyce: A Definitive Biography, John Lane, The Bodley Head, London (1941)
Clive Hart, S tructure and Motif in Finnegans Wake, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois (1962)
David Hayman, A First-Draft Version of Finnegans Wake, University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas (1963)
John Wyse Jackson & Peter Costello, John Stanislaus Joyce: The Voluminous Life and Genius of James Joyce’s Father, St Martin’s Press, New York (1998)
Jean Genet, Journal du v oleur, Gallimard, Paris (1949)
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, B W Huebsch, New York (1916)
James Joyce, Stuart Gilbert (editor) & Richard Ellmann (editor), The Letters of James Joyce, Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3, Viking Press, New York (1957, 1966)
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, Faber & Faber Limited, London (1939, 1949)
James Joyce, James Joyce: The Complete Works, Pynch (editor), Online (2013)
Danis Rose, John O’Hanlon, The Restored Finnegans Wake, Penguin Classics, London (2012)
Giambattista Vico, Goddard Bergin (translator), Max Harold Fisch (translator), The New Science of Giambattista Vico, Third Edition (1744), Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York (1948)
Ole Vinding, Helge Irgens-Moller (translator), Brookes Spencer (translator), James Joyce in Copenhagen, James Joyce Quarterly, Volume 14, Number 2, Joyce Reminiscences Issue, Pages 173-184, The University of Tulsa, Tulsa, Oklahoma (1977)

Image Credits

Plan of the Phoenix Park, Dublin: M‛Lagan & Cumming (lithographers), Edinburgh (1912), Public Domain
Spring: Lawrence Alma-Tadema (artist), The Getty Center, Los Angeles, Public Domain
John Stanislaus Joyce: Patrick Tuohy (artist), State University of New York at Buffalo, Public Domain
John Butler Yeats: John Butler Yeats (artist), National Gallery of Ireland, Public Domain
William Butler Yeats: Alice Broughton (photographer), New York (1903), Public Domain

Finnegans Wake - A Prescriptive Guide

20 September 2022