Ulysses, James Joyce [early readers .TXT] 📗

court wanton spurned him for a lord, his dearmylove.

Love that dare not speak its name.

—As an Englishman, you mean, John sturdy Eglinton put in, he loved a lord.

Old wall where sudden lizards flash. At Charenton I watched them.

—It seems so, Stephen said, when he wants to do for him, and for all other and singular uneared wombs, the holy office an ostler does for the stallion. Maybe, like Socrates, he had a midwife to mother as he had a shrew to wife. But she, the giglot wanton, did not break a bedvow. Two deeds are rank in that ghost’s mind: a broken vow and the dullbrained yokel on whom her favour has declined, deceased husband’s brother. Sweet Ann, I take it, was hot in the blood. Once a wooer, twice a wooer.

Stephen turned boldly in his chair.

—The burden of proof is with you not with me, he said frowning. If you deny that in the fifth scene of HAMLET he has branded her with infamy tell me why there is no mention of her during the thirtyfour years between the day she married him and the day she buried him. All those women saw their men down and under: Mary, her goodman John, Ann, her poor dear Willun, when he went and died on her, raging that he was the first to go, Joan, her four brothers, Judith, her husband and all her sons, Susan, her husband too, while Susan’s daughter, Elizabeth, to use granddaddy’s words, wed her second, having killed her first.

O, yes, mention there is. In the years when he was living richly in royal London to pay a debt she had to borrow forty shillings from her father’s shepherd. Explain you then. Explain the swansong too wherein he has commended her to posterity.

He faced their silence.

To whom thus Eglinton:

 

You mean the will. But that has been explained, I believe, by jurists. She was entitled to her widow’s dower At common law. His legal knowledge was great Our judges tell us. Him Satan fleers, Mocker: And therefore he left out her name From the first draft but he did not leave out The presents for his granddaughter, for his daughters, For his sister, for his old cronies in Stratford And in London. And therefore when he was urged, As I believe, to name her He left her his Secondbest Bed. PUNKT. Leftherhis Secondbest Leftherhis Bestabed Secabest Leftabed.

 

Woa!

AMPLIUS. IN SOCIETATE HUMANA HOC EST MAXIME NECESSARIUM UT SIT AMICITIA INTER MULTOS.

—Saint Thomas, Stephen began …

—ORA PRO NOBIS, Monk Mulligan groaned, sinking to a chair.

There he keened a wailing rune.

—POGUE MAHONE! ACUSHLA MACHREE! It’s destroyed we are from this day! It’s destroyed we are surely!

All smiled their smiles.

—Saint Thomas, Stephen smiling said, whose gorbellied works I enjoy reading in the original, writing of incest from a standpoint different from that of the new Viennese school Mr Magee spoke of, likens it in his wise and curious way to an avarice of the emotions. He means that the love so given to one near in blood is covetously withheld from some stranger who, it may be, hungers for it. Jews, whom christians tax with avarice, are of all races the most given to intermarriage. Accusations are made in anger. The christian laws which built up the hoards of the jews (for whom, as for the lollards, storm was shelter) bound their affections too with hoops of steel. Whether these be sins or virtues old Nobodaddy will tell us at doomsday leet. But a man who holds so tightly to what he calls his rights over what he calls his debts will hold tightly also to what he calls his rights over her whom he calls his wife. No sir smile neighbour shall covet his ox or his wife or his manservant or his maidservant or his jackass.

—Or his jennyass, Buck Mulligan antiphoned.

—Gentle Will is being roughly handled, gentle Mr Best said gently.

—Which will? gagged sweetly Buck Mulligan. We are getting mixed.

—The will to live, John Eglinton philosophised, for poor Ann, Will’s widow, is the will to die.

—REQUIESCAT! Stephen prayed.

 

WHAT OF ALL THE WILL TO DO? IT HAS VANISHED LONG AGO …

 

—She lies laid out in stark stiffness in that secondbest bed, the mobled queen, even though you prove that a bed in those days was as rare as a motorcar is now and that its carvings were the wonder of seven parishes. In old age she takes up with gospellers (one stayed with her at New Place and drank a quart of sack the town council paid for but in which bed he slept it skills not to ask) and heard she had a soul. She read or had read to her his chapbooks preferring them to the MERRY WIVES and, loosing her nightly waters on the jordan, she thought over HOOKS AND EYES FOR BELIEVERS’ BREECHES and THE MOST SPIRITUAL SNUFFBOX TO MAKE THE MOST DEVOUT SOULS SNEEZE. Venus has twisted her lips in prayer. Agenbite of inwit: remorse of conscience. It is an age of exhausted whoredom groping for its god.

—History shows that to be true, INQUIT EGLINTONUS CHRONOLOLOGOS. The ages succeed one another. But we have it on high authority that a man’s worst enemies shall be those of his own house and family. I feel that Russell is right. What do we care for his wife or father? I should say that only family poets have family lives. Falstaff was not a family man. I feel that the fat knight is his supreme creation.

Lean, he lay back. Shy, deny thy kindred, the unco guid. Shy, supping with the godless, he sneaks the cup. A sire in Ultonian Antrim bade it him. Visits him here on quarter days. Mr Magee, sir, there’s a gentleman to see you. Me? Says he’s your father, sir. Give me my Wordsworth. Enter Magee Mor Matthew, a rugged rough rugheaded kern, in strossers with a buttoned codpiece, his nether stocks bemired with clauber of ten forests, a wand of wilding in his hand.

Your own? He knows your old fellow. The widower.

Hurrying to her squalid deathlair from gay Paris on the quayside I touched his hand. The voice, new warmth, speaking. Dr Bob Kenny is attending her. The eyes that wish me well. But do not know me.

—A father, Stephen said, battling against hopelessness, is a necessary evil. He wrote the play in the months that followed his father’s death. If you hold that he, a greying man with two marriageable daughters, with thirtyfive years of life, NEL MEZZO DEL CAMMIN DI NOSTRA VITA, with fifty of experience, is the beardless undergraduate from Wittenberg then you must hold that his seventyyear old mother is the lustful queen. No. The corpse of John Shakespeare does not walk the night. From hour to hour it rots and rots. He rests, disarmed of fatherhood, having devised that mystical estate upon his son. Boccaccio’s Calandrino was the first and last man who felt himself with child. Fatherhood, in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten. On that mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect flung to the mob of Europe the church is founded and founded irremovably because founded, like the world, macro and microcosm, upon the void. Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood. AMOR MATRIS, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life. Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?

What the hell are you driving at?

I know. Shut up. Blast you. I have reasons.

AMPLIUS. ADHUC. ITERUM. POSTEA.

Are you condemned to do this?

—They are sundered by a bodily shame so steadfast that the criminal annals of the world, stained with all other incests and bestialities, hardly record its breach. Sons with mothers, sires with daughters, lesbic sisters, loves that dare not speak their name, nephews with grandmothers, jailbirds with keyholes, queens with prize bulls. The son unborn mars beauty: born, he brings pain, divides affection, increases care. He is a new male: his growth is his father’s decline, his youth his father’s envy, his friend his father’s enemy.

In rue Monsieur-le-Prince I thought it.

—What links them in nature? An instant of blind rut.

Am I a father? If I were?

Shrunken uncertain hand.

—Sabellius, the African, subtlest heresiarch of all the beasts of the field, held that the Father was Himself His Own Son. The bulldog of Aquin, with whom no word shall be impossible, refutes him. Well: if the father who has not a son be not a father can the son who has not a father be a son? When Rutlandbaconsouthamptonshakespeare or another poet of the same name in the comedy of errors wrote HAMLET he was not the father of his own son merely but, being no more a son, he was and felt himself the father of all his race, the father of his own grandfather, the father of his unborn grandson who, by the same token, never was born, for nature, as Mr Magee understands her, abhors perfection.

Eglintoneyes, quick with pleasure, looked up shybrightly. Gladly glancing, a merry puritan, through the twisted eglantine.

Flatter. Rarely. But flatter.

—Himself his own father, Sonmulligan told himself. Wait. I am big with child. I have an unborn child in my brain. Pallas Athena! A play! The play’s the thing! Let me parturiate!

He clasped his paunchbrow with both birthaiding hands.

—As for his family, Stephen said, his mother’s name lives in the forest of Arden. Her death brought from him the scene with Volumnia in CORIOLANUS. His boyson’s death is the deathscene of young Arthur in KING JOHN. Hamlet, the black prince, is Hamnet Shakespeare. Who the girls in THE TEMPEST, in PERICLES, in WINTER’S TALE are we know. Who Cleopatra, fleshpot of Egypt, and Cressid and Venus are we may guess. But there is another member of his family who is recorded.

—The plot thickens, John Eglinton said.

The quaker librarian, quaking, tiptoed in, quake, his mask, quake, with haste, quake, quack.

Door closed. Cell. Day.

They list. Three. They.

I you he they.

Come, mess.

STEPHEN: He had three brothers, Gilbert, Edmund, Richard. Gilbert in his old age told some cavaliers he got a pass for nowt from Maister Gatherer one time mass he did and he seen his brud Maister Wull the playwriter up in Lunnon in a wrastling play wud a man on’s back. The playhouse sausage filled Gilbert’s soul. He is nowhere: but an Edmund and a Richard are recorded in the works of sweet William.

MAGEEGLINJOHN: Names! What’s in a name?

BEST: That is my name, Richard, don’t you know. I hope you are going to say a good word for Richard, don’t you know, for my sake.

(Laughter)

BUCKMULLIGAN: (PIANO, DIMINUENDO)

Then outspoke medical Dick To his comrade medical Davy …

STEPHEN: In his trinity of black Wills, the villain shakebags, Iago, Richard Crookback, Edmund in KING LEAR, two bear the wicked uncles’ names. Nay, that last play was written or being written while his brother Edmund lay dying in Southwark.

BEST: I hope Edmund is going to catch it. I don’t want Richard, my name …

(Laughter)

QUAKERLYSTER: (A TEMPO) But he that filches from me my good name …

STEPHEN: (STRINGENDO) He has hidden his own name, a fair name, William, in the plays, a super here, a clown there, as a painter of old Italy set his face in a dark corner of his canvas. He has revealed it in the sonnets where there is Will in overplus. Like John o’Gaunt his name is dear to him, as dear as the coat and crest he toadied for, on