Bright Book of Life : Novels to Read and Reread (9780525657279)

by Bloom, Harold

—What is your nation if I may ask? says the citizen.

  —Ireland, says Bloom. I was born here. Ireland.

  The citizen said nothing only cleared the spit out of his gullet and, gob, he spat a Red bank oyster out of him right in the corner.

  · · ·

  —Are you talking about the new Jerusalem? says the citizen.

  —I’m talking about injustice, says Bloom.

  —Right, says John Wyse. Stand up to it then with force like men.

  That’s an almanac picture for you. Mark for a softnosed bullet. Old lardyface standing up to the business end of a gun. Gob, he’d adorn a sweepingbrush, so he would, if he only had a nurse’s apron on him. And then he collapses all of a sudden, twisting around all the opposite, as limp as a wet rag.

  —But it’s no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life.

  James Joyce, great artist as he is, nevertheless is beset at this point. Poldy speaks for him, yet the artist should be disengaged, on the model of Homer and Shakespeare rather than that of Dante. When Mr. Bloom returns to the tavern, the citizen Cyclops heightens the contest:

  But begob I was just lowering the heel of the pint when I saw the citizen getting up to waddle to the door, puffing and blowing with the dropsy, and he cursing the curse of Cromwell on him, bell, book and candle in Irish, spitting and spatting out of him and Joe and little Alf round him like a leprechaun trying to peacify him.

  —Let me alone, says he.

  And begob he got as far as the door and they holding him and he bawls out of him:

  —Three cheers for Israel!

  Arrah, sit down on the parliamentary side of your arse for Christ’ sake and don’t be making a public exhibition of yourself. Jesus, there’s always some bloody clown or other kicking up a bloody murder about bloody nothing. Gob, it’d turn the porter sour in your guts, so it would.

  And all the ragamuffins and sluts of the nation round the door and Martin telling the jarvey to drive ahead and the citizen bawling and Alf and Joe at him to whisht and he on his high horse about the jews and the loafers calling for a speech and Jack Power trying to get him to sit down on the car and hold his bloody jaw and a loafer with a patch over his eye starts singing If the man in the moon was a jew, jew, jew and a slut shouts out of her:

  —Eh, mister! Your fly is open, mister!

  And says he:

  —Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza. And the Saviour was a jew and his father was a jew. Your God.

  —He had no father, says Martin. That’ll do now. Drive ahead.

  —Whose God? says the citizen.

  —Well, his uncle was a jew, says he. Your God was a jew. Christ was a jew like me.

  Gob, the citizen made a plunge back into the shop.

  —By Jesus, says he, I’ll brain that bloody jewman for using the holy name.

  By Jesus, I’ll crucify him so I will. Give us that biscuitbox here.

  Joyce is subtle and Poldy is not totally accurate. If by Mendelssohn he means the composer Felix, as probably he does, rather than Felix’s grandfather Moses Mendelssohn, the eighteenth-century pioneer of Jewish Enlightenment, then he forgets or does not know that the composer was brought up without religion until he was baptized a Protestant at the age of seven. Karl Marx, himself anti-Semitic, was baptized a Lutheran at the age of eight. Saverio Mercadante was an Italian Gentile once famous for his operas. Perhaps Poldy is confusing him with Giacomo Meyerbeer, an operatic composer who was Jewish. As for the great Baruch Spinoza, he was excommunicated by the Jewish community of Amsterdam. It is generally agreed that Jesus Christ was Jewish and that his father, Yahweh, was the God of the Jews. Mr. Bloom’s interesting notion that, if Jesus had no father, nevertheless his uncle was Jewish, has its own charm.

  The furious citizen flings his biscuit tin in vain, since Poldy and the lawyer J. J. O’Molloy make their escape by motor vehicle. Joyce is as many-minded as Homer or indeed Shakespeare as he seeks to extricate himself from too close an identification with Mr. Bloom:

  When, lo, there came about them all a great brightness and they beheld the chariot wherein He stood ascend to heaven. And they beheld Him in the chariot, clothed upon in the glory of the brightness, having raiment as of the sun, fair as the moon and terrible that for awe they durst not look upon Him. And there came a voice out of heaven, calling: Elijah! Elijah! And He answered with a main cry: Abba! Adonai! And they beheld Him even Him, ben Bloom Elijah, amid clouds of angels ascend to the glory of the brightness at an angle of fortyfive degrees over Donohoe’s in Little Green street like a shot off a shovel.

  This explosion of a paragraph undergoes utter change with the transition from “brightness” to the rather Beckett-like remainder of the sentence. I am thinking of the Samuel Beckett of the marvelous Murphy (1938), a novel at once an homage to Joyce and an annunciation for Beckett. As far as I know, it was the only work by Beckett that Joyce admired, but, then, their relations were soured when Beckett wisely did not encourage the passion for him of Joyce’s daughter, Lucia, who was supposed to be mentally ill, though the nature of her illness remains in dispute.

  So vast and deep is Ulysses that I am constrained to a somewhat desperate economy, which is contrary to the spirit of the book. I choose to follow Bloom and Stephen into their descent into Nighttown in the “Circe” episode, and only then go on to the “Penelope” episode, spoken by Molly Bloom. That should allow me a brief entry into the night of the Wake.

  I begin with a wonderful but mixed memory from the autumn of 1959, when, with my wife, I attended in London a performance of Ulysses in Nighttown, adapted by Marjorie Barkentin and directed by Burgess Meredith. Zero Mostel was Leopold Bloom, dancing his way through the part on his toes, sometimes seeming airborne. I would have been gloriously happy, identifying myself with Zero, whom I had met, and thus with Poldy, except that I had an impacted wisdom tooth, which was exquisitely painful. It was drawn the next day, but I distinctly recall that when most of the cast pointed to Zero and cried out, “When in doubt persecute Bloom,” a shocking pain suddenly shot up. I was caught between ecstasy and suffering and consoled myself by remembering how many ailments James Joyce had to suffer, particularly with his eyes.

  Because of a lunatic diet, Mostel died at sixty-two, giving him just three more years than James Joyce. He remains for me a clear image of Poldy, even though he was wholly Jewish and in no way Irish. Milo O’Shea and Stephen Rea have both acted Mr. Bloom on the screen. O’Shea was quite good, but Rea was delightful. Still, too much is lost when you transfer Ulysses either to stage or to screen. It is polyphonic and transgresses the limits of the visible in favor of an audibility unmatched since Shakespeare.

  Let us break into “Circe” with Poldy trudging along in search of the intoxicated Stephen. Phantasmagoria suddenly overwhelms him:

  (The retriever approaches sniffing, nose to the ground. A sprawled form sneezes. A stooped bearded figure appears garbed in the long caftan of an elder in Zion and a smokingcap with magenta tassels. Horned spectacles hang down at the wings of the nose. Yellow poison streaks are on the drawn face.)

  RUDOLPH: Second halfcrown waste money today. I told you not go with drunken goy ever. So you catch no money.

  BLOOM: (Hides the crubeen and trotter behind his back and, crestfallen, feels warm and cold feetmeat) Ja, ich weiss, papachi.

  RUDOLPH: What you making down this place? Have you no soul? (With feeble vulture talons he feels the silent face of Bloom.) Are you not my son Leopold, the grandson of Leopold? Are you not my dear son Leopold who left the house of his father and left the god of his fathers Abraham and Jacob?

  BLOOM: (With precaution) I suppose so, father. Mosenthal. All that’s left of him.
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br />   RUDOLPH: (Severely) One night they bring you home drunk as dog after spend your good money. What you call them running chaps?

  BLOOM: (In youth’s smart blue Oxford suit with white vestslips, narrowshouldered, in brown Alpine hat, wearing gent’s sterling silver waterbury keyless watch and double curb Albert with seal attached, one side of him coated with stiffening mud) Harriers, father. Only that once.

  RUDOLPH: Once! Mud head to foot. Cut your hand open. Lockjaw. They make you kaputt, Leopoldleben. You watch them chaps.

  BLOOM: (Weakly) They challenged me to a sprint. It was muddy. I slipped.

  RUDOLPH: (With contempt) Goim nachez! Nice spectacles for your poor mother!

  BLOOM: Mamma!

  ELLEN BLOOM: (In pantomime dame’s stringed mobcap, widow Twankey’s crinoline and bustle, blouse with muttonleg sleeves buttoned behind, grey mittens and cameo brooch, her plaited hair in a crispine net, appears over the staircase banisters, a slanted candlestick in her hand, and cries out in shrill alarm.) O blessed Redeemer, what have they done to him! My smelling salts! (She hauls up a reef of skirt and ransacks the pouch of her striped blay petticoat. A phial, an Agnus Dei, a shrivelled potato and a celluloid doll fall out.) Sacred Heart of Mary, where were you at all at all?

  Poldy’s “Mosenthal. All that’s left of him” refers to Salomon Mosenthal, a nineteenth-century dramatist, and to his play Leah: The Forsaken (1886). Joyce does remarkably well at rendering the Yiddish-English of Poldy Bloom’s prudential father, Rudolph Virag-Bloom, and of his mother, Ellen’s, more Irish-inflected lament.

  In a mounting crescendo, Bloom is put on public trial, accused of nuisances, provocations, and invitations to women of all stations to misbehave with him either sexually or more explicitly sadomasochistically. The grand climax is the denunciations by very well-upholstered ladies of society:

  MRS BELLINGHAM: He addressed me in several handwritings with fulsome compliments as a Venus in furs and alleged profound pity for my frostbound coachman Palmer while in the same breath he expressed himself as envious of his earflaps and fleecy sheepskins and of his fortunate proximity to my person, when standing behind my chair wearing my livery and the armorial bearings of the Bellingham escutcheon garnished sable, a buck’s head couped or. He lauded almost extravagantly my nether extremities, my swelling calves in silk hose drawn up to the limit, and eulogised glowingly my other hidden treasures in priceless lace which, he said, he could conjure up. He urged me (Stating that he felt it his mission in life to urge me.) to defile the marriage bed, to commit adultery at the earliest possible opportunity.

  THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: (In amazon costume, hard hat, jackboots cockspurred, vermilion waistcoat, fawn musketeer gauntlets with braided drums, long train held up and hunting crop with which she strikes her welt constantly) Also me. Because he saw me on the polo ground of the Phoenix park at the match All Ireland versus the Rest of Ireland. My eyes, I know, shone divinely as I watched Captain Slogger Dennehy of the Inniskillings win the final chukkar on his darling cob Centaur. This plebeian Don Juan observed me from behind a hackney car and sent me in double envelopes an obscene photograph, such as are sold after dark on Paris boulevards, insulting to any lady. I have it still. It represents a partially nude señorita, frail and lovely (his wife, as he solemnly assured me, taken by him from nature), practising illicit intercourse with a muscular torero, evidently a blackguard. He urged me to do likewise, to misbehave, to sin with officers of the garrison. He implored me to soil his letter in an unspeakable manner, to chastise him as he richly deserves, to bestride and ride him, to give him a most vicious horsewhipping.

  MRS YELVERTON BARRY: Me too.

  (Several highly respectable Dublin ladies hold up improper letters received from Bloom.)

  THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: (Stamps her jingling spurs in a sudden paroxysm of fury) I will, by the God above me. I’ll scourge the pigeonlivered cur as long as I can stand over him. I’ll flay him alive.

  BLOOM: (His eyes closing, quails expectantly) Here? (He squirms.) Again! (He pants cringing.) I love the danger.

  THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: Very much so! I’ll make it hot for you. I’ll make you dance Jack Latten for that.

  MRS BELLINGHAM: Tan his breech well, the upstart! Write the stars and stripes on it!

  MRS YELVERTON BARRY: Disgraceful! There’s no excuse for him! A married man!

  BLOOM: All these people. I meant only the spanking idea. A warm tingling glow without effusion. Refined birching to stimulate the circulation.

  THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: (Laughs derisively) O, did you, my fine fellow? Well, by the living God, you’ll get the surprise of your life now, believe me, the most unmerciful hiding a man ever bargained for. You have lashed the dormant tigress in my nature into fury.

  MRS BELLINGHAM: (Shakes her muff and quizzing-glasses vindictively) Make him smart, Hanna dear. Give him ginger. Thrash the mongrel within an inch of his life. The cat-o’-nine-tails. Geld him. Vivisect him.

  BLOOM: (Shuddering, shrinking, joins his hands: with hangdog mien) O cold! O shivery! It was your ambrosial beauty. Forget, forgive. Kismet. Let me off this once. (He offers the other cheek.)

  MRS YELVERTON BARRY: (Severely) Don’t do so on any account, Mrs Talboys! He should be soundly trounced!

  THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: (Unbuttoning her gauntlet violently) I’ll do no such thing. Pigdog and always was ever since he was pupped! To dare address me! I’ll flog him black and blue in the public streets. I’ll dig my spurs in him up to the rowel. He is a wellknown cuckold. (She swishes her huntingcrop savagely in the air.) Take down his trousers without loss of time. Come here, sir! Quick! Ready?

  BLOOM: (Trembling, beginning to obey) The weather has been so warm.

  This robust chorus becomes a rather specialized variety of our contemporary “MeToo” pastime. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, who died at fifty-nine in 1895, was a Galician nobleman remembered now for his rather inadequate novel Venus in Furs (1870), that gives him the dubious immortality of the word “masochism,” or experiencing sexual pleasure through pain. It is reasonable to assume that Joyce gave Leopold Bloom his first name from Sacher-Masoch, who, aside from his sexual vagaries, was a benign social thinker and active philo-Semite.

  Though some of Poldy’s amiable sins derive from Joyce, I can find no evidence of sadomasochism in the long and happy relationship between Nora Barnacle and James Joyce. Why did Joyce desire so deeply ingrained an element of masochism in Poldy’s psychosexuality? It manifests itself in the acquiescence to Molly Bloom’s infidelities, particularly with the egregious Blazes Boylan. Ultimately, it achieves a horrifying splendor in Poldy’s submission to the whore mistress Bella/Bello Cohen.

  That grand phalanx of Mrs. Bellingham, the Honourable Mrs. Mervin Talboys, and Mrs. Yelverton Barry is properly headed by the Honourable Mrs. Mervin Talboys, who proclaims that our poor Poldy has “lashed the dormant tigress in my nature into fury.” He is saved by the delirious movement of “Circe”: a pageant and a parade. All of Dublin whirls by in a mad procession until, at last, Poldy is crowned as ruler of Ireland:

  THE BISHOP OF DOWN AND CONNOR: I here present your undoubted emperor president and king chairman, the most serene and potent and very puissant ruler of this realm. God save Leopold the First!

  ALL: God save Leopold the First!

  BLOOM: (In dalmatic and purple mantle, to the bishop of Down and Connor, with dignity) Thanks, somewhat eminent sir.

  WILLIAM, ARCHBISHOP OF ARMAGH: (In purple stock and shovel hat.) Will you to your power cause law and mercy to be executed in all your judgments in Ireland and territories thereunto belonging?

  BLOOM: (Placing his right hand on his testicles, swears) So may the Creator deal with me. All this I promise to do.

  MICHAEL, ARCHBISHOP OF ARMAGH: (Pours a cruse of hairo
il over Bloom’s head) Gaudium magnum annuntio vobis. Habemus carneficem. Leopold, Patrick, Andrew, David, George, be thou anointed!

  (Bloom assumes a mantle of cloth of gold and puts on a ruby ring. He ascends and stands on the stone of destiny. The representative peers put on at the same time their twentyeight crowns. Joybells ring in Christ church, Saint Patrick’s, George’s and gay Malahide. Mirus bazaar fireworks go up from all sides with symbolical phallopyrotechnic designs. The peers do homage, one by one, approaching and genuflecting.)

  THE PEERS: I do become your liege man of life and limb to earthly worship.

  (Bloom holds up his right hand on which sparkles the Koh-i-Noor diamond. His palfrey neighs. Immediate silence. Wireless intercontinental and interplanetary transmitters are set for reception of message.)

  BLOOM: My subjects! We hereby nominate our faithful charger Copula Felix hereditary Grand Vizier and announce that we have this day repudiated our former spouse and have bestowed our royal hand upon the princess Selene, the splendour of night.

  (The former morganatic spouse of Bloom is hastily removed in the Black Maria. The princess Selene, in moonblue robes, a silver crescent on her head, descends from a Sedan chair, borne by two giants. An outburst of cheering.)

  JOHN HOWARD PARNELL: (Raises the royal standard.) Illustrious Bloom! Successor to my famous brother!

  BLOOM: (Embraces John Howard Parnell) We thank you from our heart, John, for this right royal welcome to green Erin, the promised land of our common ancestors.

  (The freedom of the city is presented to him embodied in a charter. The keys of Dublin, crossed on a crimson cushion, are given to him. He shows all that he is wearing green socks.)

  TOM KERNAN: You deserve it, your honour.

  BLOOM: On this day twenty years ago we overcame the hereditary enemy at Ladysmith. Our howitzers and camel swivel guns played on his lines with telling effect. Half a league onward! They charge! All is lost now! Do we yield? No! We drive them headlong! Lo! We charge! Deploying to the left our light horse swept across the heights of Plevna and, uttering their warcry Bonafide Sabaoth, sabred the Saracen gunners to a man.