Riding the Yellow Trolley Car

by William Kennedy

  This is a fragment of Finnegans Wake, a book which intimidates everybody. Unlike the committed Joyceans, I doffed my hat to its corpus long ago and moved on, planning to make other visits when I grew up or old or wise or crazier. At times, sections of it resurrected my spirit without rational explanation. The strange words alone, plus perhaps my reverence for them, reverence built on faith rather than reason, touched some inner region Joyce meant to touch in his readers and I responded emotionally to things I understood only in fragments.

  Wake scholarship, then, was a source of awe, for these scholars had not only read all those incredible words; they went ahead and snippeted them up for digestion by others. They were connoisseurs of the arcane and esoteric, privy to the answers to the riddles of the sphinxes and the jokes of the cavemen.

  And so with trepidation I entered the workroom of the Wakers, a classroom packed with fifty people, mostly middle-aged or middle-aging, only one recognizable as a student. There was a Jesuit in mufti with a black Smith Brothers beard, an old man with a white Hemingway beard, an effectual blonde, a dozen longhairs, a dozen straights in ties and coats, a pair of elderly women, one with a floppy hat, both of whom turned out to be old friends of the hero’s. Many of the scholars knew one another and a few were renowned as Joyceans—Vivian Mercier, Father Robert Boyle, Nathan Halper, Bernard Benstock, and, chairing the action, Fritz Senn of Zurich, editor of A Wake Newslitter, a periodical, devoted totally to Joyce’s masterful puzzle.

  I entered on a discussion of the Wake’s puns. Did they come clear when you read them aloud? someone asked. Yes, said one man. No, said another. Only sometimes, said a third, for there are puns which are purely visual and not pronounceable. The use of doodles was discussed, and our ignorance of the semantics of dead languages. Making up glossaries of Wake words, someone suggested, is a sterile exercise unless we simultaneously derive human value from the work. Ah ha, said a lady, this is an either/or attitude, and why do we have to have one? We work with induction and deduction in every other field. Someone cited Hart’s Law, a creation of Wake scholar Clive Hart, that when you’re reading the Wake and suddenly something hits you, you should go with it. Yes indeed, said a lady. I trained as a cryptanalyst and a basic rule was don’t sit there and fiddle. Make a wild guess. The intelligent guess is so important. What you should do, someone else said, is to let it all flow past you, like Bach, and just feel it.

  It is about a dream, someone said. But even if it’s not about a dream, it works as if it were a dream. Making an inspired leap opens doors into other situations. It isn’t a lock where you have a key and therefore have total comprehension. Wait, said another man, I know somebody who thinks it is a lock and if you have the key it will all open up. Personally, said another man, I think it’s more like a key and you have to find the lock.

  The words, a woman suggested, are complex, and if we get through them to the ideas behind them, perhaps we will find that those ideas are equally complex. I read it twice without help, said a man, and couldn’t understand it and I was furious. A book should communicate. But then I began to read the commentators. Yes, said another man, we go to doctors and each one of them has a different diagnosis, but most ailments are self-curing. The point is that everybody who reads it says something different. Yes, but they also say that about Hamlet. The discovery of the Joyce notebooks in Buffalo was thought to be a breakthrough, said a man, but they turned out to be no help at all. You have to be Irish to understand it? Wrong. You have to know Shakespeare? Equally wrong. You just have to be a reasonable man. Listen, said one man, Finnegans Wake is a conscious work of art. It’s less of a dream than the Buffalo notebooks. We’ve forgotten that one of the main points is the polarity of Shem and Shaun, two ways of approaching everything. We’ve always talked about the identities of contraries. One of the things it’s giving us is multiple points of view at once. That’s right, we lack a theory about Finnegans Wake but we all laugh at it. Yes, and we read it and sometimes it is all clear and sometimes it’s nothing to us, but if you can get his association of ideas, his symbolic code, then you receive it. Wait a minute, a woman said, a graduate student told me every time her baby cried she read him a page of the Wake and he stopped crying. He was absolutely satisfied with the surface alone.

  The two-hour session had no long or boring papers. It was a lively interchange among people who respected one another because of friendship or literary reputation or knowledge of Joyce. Wakers had more fun than Ulysseseans, playing games, whistling up meanings, cracking jokes, needling each other. No solemnity here. The impenetrability of the Wake was reinforced, and yet anyone’s burden of ignorance would have been lightened a few straws by the session. For vast though the scholarship may be on the book, here were the specialists, people who’ve given great portions of their careers to the study of it, talking about how to read it, as if it were published last year instead of in 1939.

  I sat through two other Wake sessions, all lively and full of wit, centering largely on the difficult Chapter Nine, but rambling everywhere, like the book itself: how Joyce used Macbeth, Wilde, Blake, Freud. What did heliotrope mean in Chapter Nine? The speculation was vast, ingenious. One questioner suggested considering the heliotrope as an eagle, the only bird that can look at the sun and is therefore a symbol of Saint John and therefore the visionary and author of the Apocalypse.

  Said Fritz Senn: “We have erred. We have not dealt with subjects of equal importance. It’s possible we’ve overlooked an entire dimension. I would like to suggest that when we get together again groups split off and devote all their time to something like heliotrope.”

  Like so many, Senn looks for the big key to the book’s riddle and is impatient with scholarship that is clearly ingenious in decoding sections of the Wake but that doesn’t get nearer any larger meaning. He was equally impatient with Nathan Halper, whose plea to the group was to treat the Wake as a “humanistic document,” and not an endless puzzle.

  “I quite agree with him,” Senn said when we talked after the last session, “but hasn’t that been present here in our meetings somehow? To babble about humanity doesn’t help me.”

  How would he assess the status of Wake scholarship?

  “I’ve been discouraged. I’m waiting for more enlightenment. Halper says we have enough but it doesn’t satisfy me. There’s no way of measuring how far we’ve gone in linear terms. We’ve been moving on a plane and it should be a cube.”

  A quarter century ago an Irish critic wrote that any book in plain English that attempted to deal comprehensively with the Wake would have to be far longer than the Wake itself, for its author would have to “decant a quart of old wine from each of Joyce’s pint bottles.”

  Did Senn see such a book coming to pass? Probably. “But there will always be a new theory that says the old theory is going in the wrong direction. It’s the game we play. It makes us go on.”

  What Joyce knew intimately was Dublin. And no true Joycean goes there without exploring some segment of it relevant to Joyce’s work. A map of the city, marked out with all the principal points Joyce described in Ulysses, is part of the kit bag symposiasts are given for their twenty dollars. For those more concerned with the man, the covers of the symposium’s program were given over to photos of the façades and address plates of sixteen houses where Joyce lived, fourteen of them still standing and visitable.

  By what I presumed to be an accident, but which I would like to think was something mystically richer than that, I stopped at a street corner, looked up, and saw the sign ECCLES STREET. I quickly found number 7, where the Blooms lived. It was one of four row houses, gone now but part of their façades still erect, including, at number 7, two boarded-up windows, the doorway nailed over with corrugated aluminum, a black iron picket fence in front, and the chalky discoloration where the 7 used to be. The bedroom door from number 7 is now installed at The Bailey, the Dublin pub. Grass and weeds grow just beyond the doorstep in the now vacant lot that was once the house. What remains was ma
rked long ago by a reverent Joycean or two: over the absent door, erratically printed in now faded black paint, and also carved on a horizontal board, is the name “Molly Bloom.” There is also the mark of, perhaps, an anti-Joycean: the word “shit,” the only legible item among the faded bits of graffiti.

  It is probably psychically confusing to visit a house in memory of people who lived there but never actually existed. And yet such is the detail available about the Blooms and how and where they lived that they have a bygone reality equivalent to our dead relatives’. Through this use of the real in service of the fictional, said one symposiast, Joyce “canonized the obsession with being Irish—the whole love of place, of knowing a particular street in Dublin and talking all night about it.”

  Darcy O’Brien, a Joycean from Pomona College, recently wrote in the Joyce Quarterly of his meeting with a Dubliner who’d been twenty years in the British navy and who was reading Ulysses for the twenty-fifth time: “He would become terribly homesick and he found that reading Ulysses was as close to being home as he could get.… The thing that brought him back to the book again and again was the authenticity of its Dublin speech and atmosphere.”

  Dubliners have a special sense of place that seems to relegate the rest of Ireland to the back porch, like Bugs Baer’s line that after you leave New York everyplace else is Bridgeport. A woman in Galway told me she felt Dubliners were snobs: “They think the sun, moon, and stars shine on the durrrty, contammynated Liffey,” she said with considerable vehemence.

  I felt the Dublin sense of place one night when, flushed with Joycean detail, I toured an area in the center of Dublin that led into what was the old Kips, the vast brothel area, no longer functioning and some of it long gone, that Joyce used for his Nighttown episode in Ulysses.

  It was after the 11:00 P.M. closing hour but a friend and I found an oasis and after a few discreet knocks we entered a room where two dozen people were drinking and the talk was still of place—a noted pub where Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh, and other writers drank under a stained-glass window in what was known as the pub’s Intensive Care Unit.

  We were drinking in the place where a noted poet had sat upstairs by a window to observe the passing of John F. Kennedy’s motorcade in 1963, his purpose to write of it. But the poet went on the nod and when the pub owner saw him dozing she shook him and said if he didn’t stay awake he’d lose his place, for others wanted it. Then someone told her he was a poet and she went back and apologized and said it was all right if he slept as long as he was by the window when the motorcade went by. For as everybody knows in Ireland, poets can feel things without actually seeing them.

  The evening was literary enough to satisfy any visitor with expectation of the Dublin pub tradition, and it was redolent of Joyce without being scholarly. Then the conversation veered back to the late Paddy Kavanagh and how he came into a pub one morning and asked the question:

  “Were you here last night?”

  “I was,” said the bartender.

  “Was I?” asked Paddy.

  I bought Kavanagh’s collected poems the next day, found the one about Joyce, his response to all that the symposium stood for in the mind of Irish literary chauvinists. He called it “Who Killed James Joyce?” Some excerpts:

  Who killed James Joyce?

  I, said the commentator,

  I killed James Joyce

  For my graduation.

  What weapon was used

  To slay mighty Ulysses?

  The weapon that was used

  Was a Harvard thesis.

  How did you bury Joyce?

  In a broadcast symposium.

  That’s how we buried Joyce

  To a tuneful encomium.…

  Who killed Finnegan?

  I, said a Yale-man,

  I was the man who made

  The corpse for the wake man.

  And did you get high marks,

  The Ph.D.?

  I got the B. Litt.

  And my master’s degree.

  Did you get money

  For your Joycean knowledge?

  I got a scholarship

  To Trinity College.…

  Leslie Fiedler, in his Bloomsday address (June 16, the day on which the events in Ulysses occur) to the Joyceans in 1969, cited an incident which parallels the poem. It happened at The Bailey, where a group of Joyceans were gathered for drink and talk and a young Irishman suddenly rose up and told them: “I am an illegitimate grandson of James Joyce, and I want to tell you that he would spit on every one of you.”

  Said Fiedler: “Ah, the young man was wrong, alas, since I fear that Joyce would have approved rather than spit upon even what is worst about us and our deliberations.… He would have relished the endless pilpul, the Talmudic exegesis, in which the sacred is profaned without any feelings of guilt. He would have rejoiced, after all, at the soulless industry which has grown up around his tortured and obsessive works.”

  Fiedler then was knocking what he described as the scholarly Stephen Dedalus element in Joyce and Joyceans, and not the Bloom element—comic father, harassed Jew, self-appointed prophet—which he exalted.

  His 1973 speech at mid-symposium Fiedler called “Joyce Against Literature,” the title suggesting we could expect new shafts at the Stephenesque scholar, which Fiedler clearly was trying to unbecome. His subject was, again, Ulysses, which, he said, “straddles and crosses a border which maybe never existed at all … the line between belles lettres and schlock.”

  He spoke of Ulysses as a dirty book with ambivalent cultural pretensions. “It’s easy to grant that it was an attack on Caesar and Christ,” he said, “but we find it difficult to conceive that it was also an ambivalent attack on Flaubert and Henry James”—that is, on the notion of high culture. He cited Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, her celebration of the flesh interwoven with an anti-literature stance: she dismisses Rabelais and Defoe, Joyce’s favorites.

  “Is Joyce using Molly to make fun of literature or is he making fun of Molly?” Fiedler wondered. “Joyce gives you the choice, always.” But Joyce ended the book with her, and he ended on the note of her “yes” to fleshly impulses, and this contributed to Fiedler’s conclusion on Joyce that “clearly as he would like to sustain the elitism—the artist as secular priest, and have his work pored over by exegetes for centuries,” what Joyce really was was a “crap lover.”

  “He was a coprophile … a peeper at ladies pissing in the bushes,” and also the purveyor of his own most obscene fantasies, “in short, a pornographer.” He ticked off the porn that Bloom peruses, Fair Tyrants, by James Lovebirch, The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, Tales of the Ghetto by Sacher-Masoch, Sweets of Sin, books by a writer named Paul de Kock. None of it was hard-core porn, Fiedler said, but softer stuff. “I like to think Joyce would have liked Russ Meyer’s films.”

  Fiedler talked of Ulysses as “metaporn”—Joyce imagining Bloom imagining Molly reading the porn—porn at a second remove. He talked also of Joyce’s use of old soap-opera fiction, The Lamplighter and Mabel Vaughan, and added that he’d read all those nineteenth-century books which Bloom and Gerty McDowell knew and Joyce parodied, and gave this too as part of his justification for calling Joyce a coprophile.

  “What I felt I had to do [in this speech] is throw the counterweight. If you don’t know those books of the 1870s, then you don’t know what he’s doing.” Fiedler’s arguments were dense with substantiation of his viewpoint, his speech electric, his delivery manic, his appearance—rotund, gray-bearded, red-faced—somewhere between a sated satyr and a Jewish Santa Claus. The speech and rebuttal lasted two and a half hours, a high point in the symposium and the only time anyone seemed genuinely angry. Rebuttal was hostile. One man found the speech “pernicious.” Many felt Fiedler was belaboring, grossly, what they already knew. His antiliterature thunder, his remark that he would rather be a Philistine than Matthew Arnold, made high art seem ridiculous, someone said.

  He answered such attacks with his ambivalence. He
hadn’t argued that Joyce was either/or, but rather that he was both: an elitist as well as a pornographer, an Arnoldian as well as a crap lover. Fiedler himself wanted to close the gap between high and popular art.

  Harry Staley, a Joycean from State University at Albany, New York, observed on the way out: “I don’t take the aristocracy seriously, and I told Her Majesty that just the other day.”

  The Joyce legend attenuates. It grows closer to the day when there will be nobody alive who will remember the real man except through the haze of childhood. No literary legend has been better documented in this century, most notably in the great biography by Richard Ellmann. Yet the desire to know everything about his life, even after you feel you’ve already heard it all, persists. This was the case with the reminiscence of Mme. Maria Jolas, who, with her husband Eugene, founded transition, the Paris-based magazine in which the Wake appeared first as Work in Progress. The Jolases were close to Joyce and much of what she had to say had been reported in Ellmann’s book. But her presence gave the recollections a force no biography could match and so her words became a high point of the symposium.

  Madame Jolas was an honorary participant at the symposium, along with Dr. Carola Giedion-Welcker, an art critic who knew Joyce in Switzerland near the end of his life. Frau G-W too reminisced, briefly, about the man.

  I also talked privately with Joyce’s niece, Mrs. Bozena Delimata (daughter of Joyce’s sister Eileen), who was close to Joyce’s daughter, Lucia. What the three women revealed were random footnotes to the Joyce legend, footnotes to remind us (and the tendency was to forget) that Joyce was not a disembodied mind but a frail, drinking, singing, anguished, vulnerable, isolated, and introverted family man awash in heavy trouble as well as indomitable genius.