The Death of a Joyce Scholar

by Bartholomew Gill

  “Such persons are asked to call—

  “And so forth. Got that, Bernie?”

  McKeon hunched his shoulders. “Dunno. Don’t think so and since you and me are the only two in the entire shambles who know how to spell, you may be out of luck.”

  Said Bresnahan, “What was that bit after, ‘who saw a Fiat…?’”

  “‘Five hundred,’” Ward supplied, “‘with a learner’s sticker in the vicinity that night. Such persons are asked—’”

  “I know, I know—don’t you think I got that?” she snapped.

  Ward straightened the knot of his tie and looked away.

  Something else now occurred to McGarr—McKeon’s playful misuse of the phrase “bullock-befriending bard,” which McGarr had read in his brief pass at Ulysses on the night before. “You’ve read the book, Bernie?”

  McKeon clutched his chest. “Me? Never say that. Ever, not even in jest. Please, Chief. If it got out, I’d have nobody to consort with who wasn’t wearing a Brown Thomas suit.”

  “And guzzling Perrier,” somebody said.

  “Ballygowan Spring Water,” said another.

  The laughter was general, shared even by Ward, and they were nearly out the door when Delaney asked McKeon, “Congelifract? How is that spelled?”

  “What—do I look like the OED? I got a tenner says it’s a word.”

  Said Sinclaire, who was himself a bit of a toff and on good terms with everybody, including Bresnahan: “Ornery Euphuistic Dick.”

  “Beats the pants off hard-boiled any day of the week.”

  “But on Bloomsday.” Sinclaire had attended Trinity College for a short time before the need to support a growing family had forced him to emigrate. Only recently returned to Ireland, he had accepted a much less senior post than he had occupied in Australia, and McGarr found him a valuable addition to his staff. He now decided to take him along as companion and witness.

  SEVEN

  MCGARR HAD BEEN PASSING BY, walking through, and in his own way admiring the graceful Georgian buildings at the foot of Dame Street for much of his life. Perhaps because the hubbub of the surrounding city made its way over the tall walls only as a dull roar, perhaps because of the care that had been taken in siting buildings, Trinity College communicated a sense of tranquillity that had often made him take a seat on one of the many walkway benches or to enter the library and browse.

  To McGarr it always seemed at first a spacious plane upon which a few academic and dormitory buildings had been placed casually, until their type and number became apparent. Here was a theater and there a chapel and an exam hall, two other libraries, a buttery, a student activities building, tennis courts, a campanile—all arranged with a harmony that rather denied the fact that the urban campus was really quite small.

  It had something to do with the scale of the buildings, the insistence upon open green areas, and even with the excellence of its plantings. As Sinclaire and he passed a busload of tourists who were being led toward the library and its Book of Kells, McGarr’s eyes passed over a noble, ancient oak, a beech tree, flowering shrubs and gardens. Doubtless thinking him a professor, some of the tourists turned for a second glimpse of Sinclaire, tall and thin and regular featured, with silver hair that he let flow over his collar.

  “How many years were you here?” McGarr asked him.

  “Five terms. A year and two thirds. After we got married I tried to carry on, but Sheila was by then very pregnant and couldn’t work, and times then were hard, and—”

  McGarr knew. Even though he himself had been a good student and—short and wide, with deceptive speed—an even better footballer, he had had no chance of attending any place like Trinity. With his father a Guinness Brewery worker and happy to be that, McGarr had known from an early age that he would be allowed as much education as the family could afford and that he would work thereafter. The fifth son, he managed to complete school, but he did not know to this day if he would have had the courage to suffer three years confinement in the Trinity library.

  In vainglorious moments McGarr liked to think that in his own small way he was a man of action, and he surmised now—following Sinclaire into a dark entry in a mid-campus building—that he had served himself better by choosing a career that satisfied him, if not always totally, then at least continuously for so many years. The prospect of having become a bank manager or a business executive—to say nothing of a university professor, a doctor, or a solicitor—was one he found chilling.

  As was the Trinity office that Fergus Flood had shared with Kevin Coyle. It was dark. The interior shutters, designed to block winter drafts, had been pulled nearly closed. Beyond, McGarr could see stout iron bars striping the windows.

  Explained Flood, “They keep the rugby balls from shattering the glass, but today I haven’t really felt like switching on the lights.”

  Beneath the window McGarr could see a rugby pitch with players at the farther end.

  “I will now, if you prefer…”

  McGarr waited until Flood stood up from behind the desk before saying that what they had come for required another sort of light.

  Flood was a sturdily-built man of middling height whose body had begun to run to fat. He was dark with a dark beard which, closely shaved, made his cheeks look blue in the dim light. His hair was thinning, and his forearms, exposed by a short-sleeved shirt, were thick and hirsute and powerful-looking. In spite of the heat, he was wearing a bow tie. His face was round, slightly fleshy, but appeared pleasant.

  McGarr sat with his back to the window, in the chair that he supposed Coyle had occupied. The desk it served had nothing on it or in it. McGarr opened the drawers and checked.

  Said Flood, “Been like that since I can remember. An excrescence. Once Kinch—it’s what I called Kevin—tried to have it removed, but they wouldn’t let him. Said they had no other place to store it. Kinch kept everything in his head. Remarkable mind in every way—conceptually, analytically, creatively. And his memory…” He cast a hand to a wall that was filled to the top of the tall ceiling with books. “All mine. If Kinch had need for a book, there was always the library. One look as a refresher was all he required, and he had it. Chapter and verse.”

  Sinclaire eyed McGarr, who, blinking once slowly, cautioned him to wait. He had the feeling that Flood was not a man who should be challenged. He made his living, after all, revealing kinds of mysteries, and it was as though he had been sitting there, waiting for them. As far as McGarr could determine, walking down the hallway, there was nobody else in the building; it was tomblike and funereal in the dim office.

  “Three days ago. No, four now,” Flood looked up at Sinclaire, whose face could scarcely be seen in the shadow of the bookcase, then at McGarr, who was silhouetted against the room’s only light source, as though for corroboration, “Kinch was in great form entirely.” It was the cliché for good spirits. Flood settled back in the desk chair and clasped his elbows; he was speaking down at his chest and so appeared jowly and mannered.

  “His book would be out Monday next, and already the prepublication reviews that some assiduous editor had made sure all the ‘friendly’ critics would issue were praising it as a masterpiece. Kinch had always had a problem with reviews—never really believing them when they were good, crediting them all too much when they were bad, which they rarely were. It had something to do with his working-class background. You know about that, do you?”

  Neither McGarr nor Sinclaire answered. Flood was speaking, and they’d let him continue until he had no more to say.

  “Father was some sort of navvy at the Guinness Brewery. A great pack of kids, and Kinch somewhere in between and ignored and afflicted with a brilliant mind and, I’d say, even a touch of genius that would have destroyed him, had he remained in that setting.” Flood glanced up, as though having suddenly realized something.

  McGarr wondered if his own father, who was still alive and had spent forty-seven years in the brewery, had known Coyle Senior. It did much to expl
ain Kevin Coyle’s having followed McGarr’s investigations in the papers; and his widow’s us.

  McGarr himself had his own us; it included priests and politicians from his own Synge Street Christian Brothers School, footballers who wore the colors of his own former sides, Gardai who had passed through the Murder Squad before moving on to other positions. He imagined now that he would have included the young professor from the Liberties among his own, had he known him. He now felt a certain pride that Coyle, who had shared his own background in so many ways, had been so well regarded by the world.

  “Anyway, it was as though Kinch could never quite believe he was who he had become, or appreciate really the many good things that kept happening to him. I’ve often thought it was what made him such an incisive critic of Beckett and the novel of incompetence.” Flood looked from Sinclaire to McGarr. “His basic insecurity could manifest itself destructively in all the…women and in his impecuniousness and periodic drinking bouts. Some essential self-doubt. Self-loathing.”

  It was the second time McGarr had heard mention of the novel of incompetence, and he made note to have Flood explain it. He also wondered if Flood, like Coyle’s own wife and her “sister,” Mary Sittonn, were suggesting that Coyle in some way had welcomed or encouraged his own demise. Or had deserved it.

  “Shall I go on?” Flood asked. “This isn’t the sort of thing you’ve come for. You want facts, and I hate to be so lugubrious, so elegiac, but it’s just that in my own way I loved Kevin Coyle very much, and I’m utterly shattered that he’s dead.”

  Love? Did one Dublin man say he loved another man, even when the subject of that affection was dead? Not in the Dublin that McGarr’s us knew. “Women?” he asked.

  Flood’s brow glowered. “Yes—I’m afraid there was that too. It’s what I first thought when I read where he had been found, though I believe there’s some discrepancy about that as well.” Again the eyes tried to find Sinclaire and McGarr. “A woman named Catherine Doyle lives there near the eastern entrance to the Prospect Cemetery,” he went on. “She was—is—the editor of his new book, as much as anybody might have been Kevin’s editor. Actually, I read the book in manuscript form, and it was I who recommended it to her.” There was pride in that statement. “The rest you’ll have to get from her.”

  “We’d prefer it from you,” said Sinclaire.

  “Oh”—from the clasped elbows a hand shot out—“that they were lovers, as much as Kinch could be the lover of anything but his own particular experience, I should imagine. I have no proof, but I think if you ask her, she’ll admit it. What with his doubts about his own worth and all the inner turmoil that it brought, Kinch was a man in desperate need of…corroboration. I’m only guessing at this, you understand, but from the little he said of it, I gathered that, like most Irish fathers, his own had either been always working or”—he turned his head to McGarr, as though he would understand—“‘out,’ as it were. If they saw him Sundays, they were lucky.

  “As I was saying, since Kinch had only his mother, who was the one who pushed him, it would follow that as a man he would turn to women for acceptance. Even the wife, Katie, is nothing if not matronly. And was from my first meeting her—how many?—fourteen, fifteen years gone now.”

  McGarr didn’t know if what he was feeling was indignation or something else, but suddenly his ears were red. Flood may well have been describing McGarr’s own family. Like most Irish families that McGarr had known at the time, an understanding that amounted almost to an unwritten contract existed among his father and mother and the parents of the other children he knew.

  Father went off to a ten-hour workday, six days a week. His wife or one of his children, when old enough, would carry his hot dinner to his place of work in a pail at noon. After work he would return home for tea. When he arrived, it would be waiting for him on the table; his wife would serve him. By that time the children had already eaten and been put to bed, or were otherwise out of the way. Father and Mother would speak of pressing matters; an individual child might be called in for censure or praise. Father might then read a newspaper or visit with his children, but the pub and the company of his mates claimed the rest of his evenings, which were short five nights a week. The “second-most-necessary institution,” as Noreen had scathingly put it, was closed for most of Sunday.

  It was also Sunday when the family saw him, briefly, while attending church, a sports match or race meeting, then for a sit-down dinner that consisted of a joint of beef, mutton, or pork. They might venture out together to the house of a relative or to a park or the strand. Everybody understood that, given work and the institutions of urban society, this was the way of things. And like a clock, you could have kept time by Father’s movements.

  Granted the pub was pernicious for some, but it was then, as now, mainly a social institution. Drunkenness was frowned upon, and few who drank heavily held down jobs or lived long. Coyle’s father—as McGarr understood James Joyce’s had been—might have been one of those, but he suspected not. At the time in Dublin, a Guinness job of any sort had been a respectable working-class occupation that was “husbanded” with respect, especially by any man with a large family.

  And finally, if McGarr’s own profession had taught him anything, it was that one man’s reasons—if there were any—for pursuing women, were seldom the same as another’s, and could scarcely be reduced to a lecture-hall formula.

  But Flood was still speaking.

  “I’m sure his wife knew all about it. There’s a curious ‘sisterhood’—to use their term—among some young women these days. I hear them talking at home—I have a daughter, you see—and my students here in college. Formerly it was ‘each woman for herself,’ as it were, in pursuit of or”—did he smile? He did “—retreat from a man. Now it strikes me as if they’re rather calculating and clinical the way they—women, I mean—get together and…divide up a man, or at least look upon men categorically. For…use and little else.”

  All from a man who had been speaking minutes before of manly love.

  “And then I know Catty Doyle, and Katie herself.”

  Which was the point of the remark, McGarr suspected, thinking of how most men of his experience had been speaking of women in a categorical manner for as long as he could remember and as recently as the hour before in his Dublin Castle office. He wondered if the battle lines in the war between the sexes were now being more closely drawn, or if Kevin Coyle, independently dependent genius-egotist that he had been, had become the point of a struggle that was at once literary, academic, marital, and sexual.

  Plainly they did not know enough, and Flood had said his piece with his thrust at the “sisters.” The professor now leaned back in the desk chair.

  “Thursday. Bloomsday. Can you tell us what you know of Mr. Coyle’s activities?” asked Sinclaire.

  Flood’s eyes shied toward McGarr, as though he had expected the questions to come from him. “We had every class of thing going on. Jammed, we were, and knew we’d be, right from the ungodly hour of half past six in the morning to closing and beyond, it would seem from what transpired.”

  Dublin, McGarr was now hearing, and he wondered if Flood, whose surname could be seen on the fronts of shops and pubs citywide, was one of us too.

  “‘Joggin’ for Joyce’ and ‘The Molly Bloom Marathon’ the first event was called. A ten-K hoofing extravaganza for men and women, which because of traffic, had to begin at half past six. It traced much of the route of Ulysses through Dublin, ending at the site of the former Nelson’s Pillar in O’Connell Street. The newspapers asked if Kinch, who even looked like Joyce, and could play the Stephen Dedalus character from the book better than anybody I’ve ever seen, could be there for the start. Perhaps you saw the photo—striped blazer, boater, ashplant walking stick in one hand and the starter’s pistol raised in the other.”

  Now that Flood had mentioned it, McGarr realized he had; he had thought the whole thing banal.

  “We caught a bit of breakfast
at the house of a kindred spirit there in Sandycove, and when we got back outside, we had over five hundred people waiting for us. By my count, which was partial, and did not include the eighty-two on our Bloomsday tour.”

  McGarr thought of Ward and the letters he’d have to write.

  “A carnival it was. But then”—Flood’s dark eyes flicked up at Sinclaire and then turned to McGarr—“barristers have their venue down at the Four Courts, surgeons in the Richmond and the Rotunda and in Holles Street hospitals. We, poor word mongers that we are, have only Ulysses—thank Homer and Joyce—to make the most of, and ‘Shames Choice,’ as he called himself in the Wake, condemned no aspect of the city. It was all the ‘raw clay’ of experience to him, to be molded to any purpose including his own. Or mine and Kinch’s.”

  There was a pause while Flood gathered himself. Behind him McGarr heard the thump of a foot on an inflated bladder and the scrunching of cleats through short grass. Somebody shouted, several other somebodies cheered.

  “As you know,” he began, almost too casually, “Ulysses is the story of the peregrinations of two men through Dublin on a June day in 1904. It begins at eight in the morning at the Martello Tower in Sandycove, where the character Dedalus was living with Buck Mulligan and an Englishman named Haines.”

  “Stadely ploomp Book Molligan,” McGarr corrected silently and smiled, thinking of Noreen.

  “As usual Kinch began what amounted to his daylong soliloquy there, recanting the opening of the book while perched on a rampart of the tower. But you’ll remember the day was stunning, all fair skies and sunlight, and Kinch warmed to his task. Some years he seemed to hate it. Out of sorts and surly, he only mumbled through the day. But this year—maybe it was the new book or something personal or the weather—he was brilliant. He chanted the text. He sang it, pointing out across the bay when he mentioned Howth.”