’Twas Two Pisonouse Timcoves

Two Pisonouse Timcoves (RFW 031.16-033.29)

The rumours of HCE’s crimes continue to spread like wildfire among the populace. Fr Browne’s conversation with Philly Thurnston at Baldoyle racecourse is overheard by two tinkers and ex-convicts Treacle Tom and Frisky Shorty. Tom repeats a bowdlerized version of the tale in his sleep in a lodging-house in the Liberties. He is overheard by three other ne’er-do-wells: Peter Cloran, O’Mara (also known as Mildew Lisa) and Hosty. The latter, a street busker and balladeer, is inspired by what he overhears to compose a ballad on the subject of HCE and his crimes—but only after wetting his whistle at a nearby public house, The Old Sots’ Hole.

First-Draft Version

In Joyce’s first draft, this passage runs to little more than half-a-dozen lines and is quite dry and bare. Subsequent revisions fleshed out the tale with so many details that the final version occupies about one hundred lines in The Restored Finnegans Wake:

It was 2 coves of the name of Treacle Tom & Frisky Shorty off the hulks what was on the bum for a jimmyogobblin as heard this reverend gent make use of the language which he was having a gurgle along of the bloke in the specs. Now ... Treacle Tom had been absent from his usual haunts for some time previously (he was in the habit of frequenting common lodging-houses where he slept in a nude state in strange beds) but returning on Baldoyle night he repeated the tale more than once during uneasy slumber and in the hearing of a ballad monger and a drapery executive out of work for the moment and an illstarred streetsinger who had been tossing on his doss in the hope of soon finding ways & means for blowing the napper off himself when day dawned when that busker was up and afoot thrumming his square fiddle and after a visit to a public house the world was the richer for a new halfpenny ballad ... (Hayman 65-66, slightly emended)

The Liberties (1913)

Curiously, according to David Hayman’s analysis the opening sentence of this passage was not actually part of the first draft:

The following addition ([from “It was 2 coves”] to “specs”) is found on MS p. 2b. (Hayman 65, fn 22)

On the James Joyce Digital Archive, Danis Rose & John O’Hanlon clarify the matter. The first draft of this passage preceding It was 2 coves and after in the specs was written on the recto of the second of three pages of manuscript paper now catalogued in the British Library as MS British Library 47471b 1-3, while the sentence from It was 2 coves to in the specs was written on its own on the verso of the same page. If Hayman’s analysis of Joyce’s drafts is correct, the latter was added after Joyce had written the former. But if this were the case, then Joyce must have introduced Treacle Tom out of the blue, without any preamble. It would make much more sense if Joyce wrote It was 2 coves ... in the specs first.

I surmise that Joyce simply forgot to include this initial sentence when he drafted the passage, and was obliged to insert it on the verso of the correct page. We know that Joyce had already prepared this sentence for inclusion in the first draft, since there is a version of it in Finnegans Wake Notebook VI.B.11:

It was 2 coves by the / name of Treacle Tom & Frisky / Shorty what was on the / bum for a jimmyogobblin / as heard the revered / gent make use of the / language which he / was having a laugh with gurgle / along of the bloke on his own / in the blue specs (J ames J oyce D igital A rchive)

Jimmy O’Goblin is Cockney rhyming slang for sovereign, a gold coin worth one pound sterling. The Duke of Wellington’s elder brother William Wellesley-Pole introduced the coin in 1817, when he was Master of the Mint. The reverse of the coin features Saint George and the Dragon, an image that hangs on the wall of the Porter’s bedroom in III.4 (The Fourth Watch of Shaun)—though its subject is identified there as the Archangel Michael slaying Satan (RFW 435.14-15).

A Sovereign from 1912

Joyce borrowed the name Treacle Tommy from George Formby Senior’s song My Grandfather’s Clock (which, incidentally, was a Waterbury, like HCE’s watch). Frisky Shorty appeared in The Irish Times (18 November 1922) as an example of a nickname common among tramps and hobos (“knights of the road”).

Piled Buildung Supra Buildung

Joyce subsequently added so many details to his first draft that by the time Finnegans Wake was published in 1939, the story of Hosty’s Rann had become a veritable shaggy-dog story. In A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Joseph Campbell & Henry Morton Robinson summarized this section of the tale as follows:

It was a couple of coves, Treacle Tom, a crook fresh out of jail, and Frisky Shorty, a tipster fresh off the boat, that chanced to overhear the parson as he whispered. Now this Treacle Tom was a habitué of wild and wooly haunts. On a racenight, blotto after divers tots of rum, he sought bed in a cheap rooming house, Abide-With-One-Another, in the slums. There he resnored alcoholically the substance of the tale, fragmentarily, during uneasy slumber, within hearing of the three down-and-outers, Peter Cloran, O’Mara (locally know as Mildew Lisa!), and Hosty. The last of these, melancholic over everything in general, had been tossing on his cot devising ways and means of going off and putting an end to it all, for he was after having been trying eighteen months to get himself into the bed of a hospital, without success. Lisa O’Deavis and Roche Mongan [note that the names are shifting form] slept, as an understood thing, in the one sweet tumblerbunk with Hosty—and the bustling maid-of-all-works had not been many jiffies furbishing the household, when they were all up and ashuffle across the chilled hamlet of Dublin, to the thrummings of a crude fiddle, caressing with their ballad the ears of the king’s subjects, who, in their brick homes and flavory beds, with their priggish mouths all open, were only half past a sleep. After a brisk pause at a pawnbroking establishment to redeem the songster’s false teeth, they indulged in a prolonged visit to a house of call, namely, the Old Sot’s Hole in the parish of St. Cecily, not far from the site of the statue of Premier Gladstone, and here they were joined by a further fellow, casual and a decent sort, of the had-been variety. They all enjoyed a drink on the damn decent sort, and then, flushed with their fire-stuff-fostered friendship, the rascals came out of the licensed premises, and the world became the richer for a would-be ballad: Hosty’s Lay, to wit, of the vilest bogeyer but the most attractionable avatar the world has ever had to explain for. [That is to say, the group came forth with a pasquinade against HCE.] (Campbell & Robinson 60-61)

Parnell Monument, Dublin

Parnell and Gladstone

Hosty and his associates wet their whistles at the Old Sots’ Hole, at Cujas Place, in the parish of Saint Cecily, within the Liberty of Ceolmore. The Old Sots’ Hole was a real pub in old Dublin. It was frequented by Jonathan Swift. As Danis Rose & John O’Hanlon have discovered, Joyce’s source for this and other tavern names in old Dublin was Ada Peter’s Dublin Fragments:

The “Dog and Duck” inn belonged in the eighteenth century to Francis Magin, and was situated near “Pudding Row”, now Wood Quay. “The Old Sots’ Hole” was at Essex Gate, and the “House of Blazes” on Aston’s Quay still retained its sinister appellation on into the nineteenth century. “The Salmon” was situated in Thomas Street and “The Bagino” could be found in Essex Street. (Peter 93)

On racenight, Treacle Tom had patronized the Duck and Doggies (RFW 031.34).

Cujas Place, the parish of Saint Cecily and the Liberty of Ceolmore, however, are creations of Joyce. St Cecilia is the patron saint of music (Irish: ceol mór, great music), and there is a Cecilia’s Street in Dublin. In October 1902, Joyce was officially entered on the Register of the Medical School on Cecilia Street, but he abandoned his studies after a short while (Norburn 12).

The Liberties refers to certain sections of south central Dublin in which local jurisdiction was still exercised by various religious bodies, such as the Archbishopric of Dublin and the Abbey of St Thomas. Among the liberties enjoyed in these jurisdictions were the right to raise taxes and the right to try civil and criminal cases in local courts.

Cujas Library is in Paris, on Rue Cujas, a street named for a 16th-century French jurist, who numbered Joseph Juste Scaliger among his pupils. Joyce is known to have frequented the Sainte-Geneviève Library, which is located next door, during his second visit to Paris in 1903 (Ellmann 120).

Cujas Library, Paris

The Old Sots’ Hole, we are told, was:

... not a thousand or one national leagues, that was, by Griffith’s valuation, from the site of the statue of Primewer Glasstone setting a match to the march of a maker (last of the stewards peut-être) ...

In 1898, the Gladstone National Memorial Fund proposed that statues in honour of the recently deceased former Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone be erected in London, Edinburgh and Dublin. The Irish sculptor John Hughes was commissioned to create three statues of Gladstone. A spot in the Phoenix Park was earmarked for Hughes’ sculpture. In August, the proposal was debated by Dublin Corporation and it was agreed that “no statue should be erected in Dublin in honour of any Englishman until, at least, the Irish people have raised a fitting one to the memory of Charles Stewart Parnell.”

In a speech delivered in Cork on 21 January 1885, Parnell had said:

No man has the right to fix the boundary to the march of a nation. No man has the right to say to his country: “Thus far shalt thou go and no further.”

These words were inscribed on the Parnell Monument, which was erected at the top of O’Connell Street in Dublin in 1911. The statue of Parnell which adorns this monument was created by another Dublin-born sculptor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Saint-Gaudens is perhaps better known for his work in America, where he championed the ideals of the American Renaissance.

Dublin never did get its statue of Gladstone. The monument which John Hughes created for the Gladstone National Memorial Fund was erected in 1925 in the Welsh village of Hawarden, where Gladstone had lived after his marriage to Catherine Glynne. Hawarden Castle had been the Glynne family seat since the 1750s.

Gladstone’s Statue, St Deniol’s Library, Hawarden

French: peut-être, perhaps. This is possibly an allusion to François Rabelais, whose dying words were, allegedly:

Je m’en vais chercher un grand peut-être; tirez le rideau, la farce est jouée. (Motteux 14, but see France 275)

[I am going to seek a grand perhaps; drop the curtain, the farce is over.]

The Trio of Whackfolthediddlers

It is easy to identify Treacle Tom and his own blood and milk brother Frisky Shorty as Shem and Shaun. But what about the trio of whackfolthediddlers? Who are Peter Cloran, O’Mara (also known as Mildew Lisa) and Hosty? Why are the first two subsequently identified as Roche Mongan and Lisa O’Deavis? And who is the fourth member of the party, the decent sort who joins the trio during their prolonged visit to the Old Sots’ Hole?

It is tempting to identify all male trios in Finnegans Wake as Shem, Shaun, and the Oedipal Figure who embodies both Shem and Shaun. In this particular case, however, I believe there are good reasons to see all three whackfolthediddlers as the Oedipal Figure:

Hosty Latin: hostis, enemy. This identifies Hosty as HCE’s enemy, or Oedipus. Against this is the testimony of Rose & O’Hanlon, who point out that in his notes Joyce explicitly identified Hosty with Shaun (Rose & O’Hanlon 1982:39). Roland McHugh, on the other hand, saw more of Shem than of Shaun in Hosty, though he did ultimately identify Hosty as “Shemshaun” [ie Oedipus], along with the Cad, Tristan and others (McHugh 2000a:84-85, 1976:92 et passim):

A Structural Theory of Finnegans Wake (McHugh 84)

John Gordon notes that Hosty may also derive from the Latin: ostiarius janitor, porter, which would link Hosty to HCE’s Manservant Sackerson.

Peter Cloran The Kloran is the sacred book of the Ku Klux Klan. In Finnegans Wake, the KKK usually symbolizes racial conflict—here doing duty for the endless sibling rivalry between Shem and Shaun. In other words, the KKK embodies both brothers.
O’Mara Joseph O’Mara was an Irish tenor who sang the role of Tristan in Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde. In Finnegans Wake, the figure of Tristan generally represents the Oedipal figure, or Shemshaun, as McHugh calls him.
Mildew Lisa This feminine-sounding name echoes the opening words of Isolde’s Liebestod [Love Death] in Tristan und Isolde: Mild und leise [Mildly and gently].
Roche Mongan Peter Cloran’s new name alludes to James Clarence Mangan, an Irish nationalist poet. This passage contains allusions to numerous writers: Jonathan Swift, James Clarence Mangan, Thomas Osborne Davis, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Algernon Charles Swinburne, George Bernard Shaw, William Butler Yeats, Oscar Wilde, Lord Byron, Mark Twain, Henry James Byron, and O Henry. Presumably, this is because Hosty too is a writer (of scurrilous ballads). Mongán was a legendary Irish hero, regarded as a reincarnation of Finn Mac Cumhail. Adaline Glasheen explains the connection with the Ku Klux Klan:

Mongan, Roche—Mongan was a legendary Irish hero, a reincarnated Finn or Mananaan ... Roche Mongan suggests Stone ... Mountain, Georgia, on which rock the KKK was founded. Earlier, Roche Mongan is known as Peter Cloran ... and the Kloran is the Klan’s sacred book. St Roche is patron of the plague-stricken. (Glasheen 197)

This explains why Cloran is called Peter: And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it (Matthew 16:18). Roche is simply a translation of the Greek Petros. Peter was a fisher of men and Mananaan was an Irish sea god. Hence the fishy elements: Roach, haddocks [RFW 027.15], monkfish.

Lisa O’Deavis Mildew Lisa’s new surname calls to mind the Irish nationalist poet Thomas Osborne Davis. A Young Irelander, Davis wrote the lyrics for several patriotic songs, including A Nation Once Again—anticipating Hosty’s success with his ballad. Adaline Glasheen suggests an allusion to Lazarus and Dives in the Gospel parable of the rich man and the poor man at his gate. This is reinforced by the word Lazar in the preceding line.
Browne In their Chicken Guide to Finnegans Wake, which draws on their book Understanding Finnegans Wake, Rose & O’Hanlon identify Browne with Hosty. In Finnegans Wake, Browne & Nolan embodies both Shem & Shaun—ie Shemshaun. Browne & Nolan also alludes to Giordano Bruno of Nola, the philosopher from whom Joyce borrowed the concept of coincidentia oppositorum [identity of opposites], which underpins the eternal sibling rivalry of Shem and Shaun.

As usual, the melding of characters in Finnegans Wake is fluid and confusing. It is often difficult to distinguish between the four S’s—Sackerson (HCE’s elderly Manservant), Shem, Shaun and Shemshaun. McHugh himself initially identified the Cad as the Oedipal Shemshaun figure, but later came to agree with John Gordon that he was actually Sackerson (Gordon 284, McHugh 2000b:95).

So, who is Hosty? The correct answer may be: All of the above.

Joseph O’Mara

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

References

Joseph Campbell, Henry Morton Robinson, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York (1944)
Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, New and Revised Edition, Oxford University Press, Oxford (1982)
Anatole France, Rabelais, Translated from the French by Ernest Boyd, Henry Holt and Company, New York (1929)
Adaline Glasheen, Third Census of Finnegans Wake, University of California Press, Berkeley, California (1977)
John Gordon, Finnegans Wake: A Plot Summary, Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, New York (1986)
David Hayman, A First-Draft Version of Finnegans Wake, University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas (1963)
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, Faber & Faber Limited, London (1939, 1949)
James Joyce, James Joyce: The Complete Works, Pynch (editor), Online (2013)
Roland McHugh, The Sigla of Finnegans Wake, University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas (1976)
Roland McHugh, A Structural Theory of Finnegans Wake, A Wake Newslitter, New Series, Volume 5, Number 6, Pages 83-87, University of Essex, English Department, Colchester (1968)
Roland McHugh, A Structural Theory of Finnegans Wake, A Wake Newslitter, New Series, Volume 13, Number 5, Pages 94-95, University of Essex, English Department, Colchester (1976)
Peter Anthony Motteux, The Life of Rabelais (1694), in Thomas Urquhart & Peter Motteux, The Works of Francis Rabelais, H G Bohn, London (1849)
Roger Norburn, A James Joyce Chronology, Palgrave Macmillan, London (2004)
Ada Peter, Dublin Fragments: Social and Historic, Hodges Figgis & Co, Dublin (1925)
Danis Rose, John O’Hanlon, Understanding Finnegans Wake: A Guide To The Narrative Of James Joyce’s Masterpiece, Garland Publishing, New York (1982)
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)

Image Credits

The Liberties (1913): Forbes Lane, John Cooke (photographer), Public Domain
A Sovereign from 1912: Bertram Mackennal (engraver of the obverse), Benedetto Pistrucci (engraver of the reverse), © CGB Numismatique Paris (photographers), Creative Commons License
Joseph O’Mara: Alfred Ellis (photographer), The Musical Herald and Tonic Sol-Fa Reporter, J Curwen & Sons, London, (1 May 1893), Public Domain

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