Celtic Fringes

On 29 August 1904, having just failed to consume a midnight dinner - for which he had “no appetite,” and which had merely made him feel “sick” - Joyce explained himself to Nora Barnacle:

I spoke to you satirically tonight but I was speaking of the world not of you. I am an enemy of the ignobleness and slavishness of people but not of you. Can you not see the simplicity which is at the back of all my disguises? We all wear masks.(1)

Earlier that month, having been roused to new appetites by the loving stimuli of Nora, Joyce had found himself in a position to write “satirically” and produced, in short order, “The Holy Office,” a broadside taking the form of forty-eight tetrameter couplets. The verses had been penned in direct response to the invitation of C.P. Curran, the editor of St Stephens, the unofficial literary magazine of the Royal University, to contribute to the periodical. However, on receipt of Joyce’s manuscript, Curran (aka “cautious Con”), was bemused and, fearful of scandal, immediately informed Joyce that the journal could make no use of this “unholy thing.”(2) Nevertheless, as a sign of appreciation for the time and trouble the Dubliner had taken, Curran sent him a small sum of money.

Joyce, in fact, had already been making alternative arrangements for the publication of the poem and, on 14 August, the Dublin Printing Company sent him the galley proofs of the verses for correction; he returned them forthwith. However, the final copies would then languish in the printshop for several months after Joyce’s departure with Nora, for Pula, and, thereafter, Trieste; the firm simply refused to release the texts until the bills for the work it had undertaken had been paid. By December, despite (or owing to) the news that he was to become a father as soon as the following summer, Joyce was pressuring Stanislaus to help him pay the outstanding amount of 10s/6d on his behalf, and on account of two reasons: “there is money [coming],” and also (and not least) because “I think the Holy Office is so clever.”(3)

In the event, the debt was never paid, and the broadside would only be circulated in June 1905, when Joyce, now living in Trieste, obtained from a local printer there fifty copies, which he sent back to Stanislaus, at considerable expense, and with full instructions for their distribution: “Put copies of ‘Holy Office’ into different envelopes and deliver with the flaps closed, and addresses upon all interested [...] You will find addresses in directory.”(4) Joyce’s detailed instructions to Stanislaus were sent in a series of four postcards dated from 27 May to 11 June 1905; and Stanislaus, ever his “brother’s keeper,” carried out his commission, to the letter. The recipients of Joyce’s broadside were numerous, consisting of friends and acquaintances, as well as members of Dublin’s literati, the self-styled “Golden Dawn,” a movement which had followed the “Celtic Twilight” as sure as day follows night. The envelopes were delivered to, among others, Richard Best, John Byrne, Vincent Cosgrave, Colum Cousins, Con Curran, William O’Leary Curtis, John Elwood, Oliver St John Gogarty, Thomas Keohler, G.A. McGinty, George Moore, George Roberts, George Russell, Frederick Ryan, Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, James Starkey, and J.M. Synge. Though also targeted in the broadside, W.B. Yeats, Annie Horniman, and Lady Gregory were not included on the distribution list; perhaps, given their importance, they existed only ex-directory.

In Ellmann’s assessment, “The Holy Office” was Joyce’s “first, overt angry declaration that he would pursue candour while his contemporaries pursued beauty,” that frankness emerging in a central sequence devoted to the denunciation of an entire generation of Dublin writers, anticipating his notorious dismissal of contemporary Irish writing, a few months later, as “ill-written, morally obtuse formless caricature;” and, eventually, his scatological ridicule of it in Finnegans Wake as the “cultic twalette” (FW 344.12), which implies both private functions and public convenience.(5) Yet the denunciation of “the mumming company” names no names, and simply takes the form of an extended construction in which any solidarity that might ever have existed with the figures in question, is now negated, so that even that very preposition of connection, “with,” is itself withheld:

But I must not accounted be
One of that mumming company
With him who hies him to appease
His giddy dames' frivolities
While they console him when he whinges
With gold-embroidered Celtic fringes
Or him who sober all the day
Mixes a naggin in his play
Or him whose conduct “seems to own”
His preference for a man of “tone”
Or him who plays the ragged patch
To millionaires in Hazelpatch
But weeping after holy fast
Confesses all his pagan past
Or him who will his hat unfix
Neither to malt nor crucifix
But show all that poor-dressed be
His high Castillian courtesy
Or him who loves his Master dear
Or him who drinks his pint in fear
Or him who once when snug abed
Saw Jesus Christ without his head
And tried so hard to win for us
The long-lost works of Eschylus. (ll. 23-46) (6)

As is by now well known, this sequence commences with a direct allusion to the opening lines of Yeats’s 1892 poem, “Address to Ireland in the Coming Times,” which had asserted so imperatively: “Know that I would be accounted be / True brother of a company / That sang, to sweeten Ireland’s wrong.”(7) As a youth, Joyce had first developed a deep respect for Yeats, and in May 1899 had even refused to sign the letter submitted by fellow Catholic students of the Royal University critical of the dramatist’s The Countess Cathleen. But the fracture was already beginning to manifest itself in 1901 in Joyce’s essay, “The Day of the Rabblement,” which the University College magazine St Stephen’s refused to print and so Joyce therefore published privately that autumn. Though he lauded there The Wind among the Reeds as “poetry of the highest order,” and The Adoration of the Magi as a work which “shows what Mr. Yeats can do when he breaks with the half-gods,” the poet’s “treacherous instinct of adaptability” was now endangering his achievements, so much so that in Joyce’s later article, “The Soul of Ireland,” written in March 1903, only a prose work, The Celtic Twilight, would be singled out, and described as Yeats’s “happiest” book, on account of its “delicate scepticism.”(8)

The animus, it seems, had stemmed from Yeats’s decision to stage exclusively Irish drama at the Abbey Theatre, a policy deriving, partly, as a result of his being carried away by the shadowy glens of Synge, that kind of dramatist who “sober all the day / Mixes a naggin” in his play,” and who, Joyce felt, thus only paid lip service to the powerful spirits of the Western World.(9) Certainly, Yeats’s rejection, in 1904, of Joyce’s translations of a pair of Hauptmann plays for possible performance at the Abbey, on the grounds that “we must get the ear of our public with Irish work,” confirmed to Joyce that Yeats’s “instinct of adaptability” was now inclining towards esoteric insularity.(10)This is illustrated in the allusion in “The Holy Office” to the “gold-embroidered Celtic fringes,” which materially, may have been either the extravagantly decorative costumes worn by actors treading the Abbey boards, or the gilt ornamentations by Althea Gyles on the books Yeats had published in the late 1890s; and metaphorically, simply the outer limits of Celtic aesthetics, tending towards the occult.(11) Furthermore, Joyce was concerned that Yeats, though surrounding himself with “giddy dames” - Lady Gregory, Annie Horniman, and of course, Maud Gonne MacBride - was not as liberated, politically or sexually, as he had claimed, and despite his celebrations of paganism, he was still constrained by the prudish Anglo-Irish morality which, Joyce felt, held him tight.

Although Yeats was the most prominent member of the Celtic Twilight group to be attacked, Joyce reserves his strongest antipathy, at the other end of the passage, for George Russell, Æ, whose Divine Vision had just appeared, and who had just secured Joyce, (or more precisely, “Stephen Daedalus”), a berth for “The Sisters” in the Irish Homestead. “A.E.I.O.U.” (U 9.213), Stephen reminds himself in “Scylla and Charybdis;” but here the hand that was feeding Joyce’s ambitions was not so much shaken, so as to honour a debt of gratitude, but bitten.(12) In November 1904, a letter to Stanislaus began: “About Russell: I have written to my printer in Dublin and am to release ‘Holy Office’ in a week;” the urgency was the knowledge that Æ, when hearing of Joyce and Nora’s departure for the Adriatic, had informed Stanislaus that “a touch of starvation” would do his brother good.(13) Hence, Æ is depicted as that visionary,

who once when snug abed
Saw Jesus Christ without his head
And tried so hard to win for us
The long-lost works of Eschylus. (ll. 43-46)

Joyce may be alluding here to the opening lines of an 1897 essay, “The Hero in Man,“ in which Æ observed that

There sometimes comes on us a mood of strange reverence for people and things which in less contemplative hours we hold to be unworthy; and in such moments we may set side by side the head of the Christ and the head of an outcast, and there is an equal radiance around each.(14)

Æ’s philosophical posit is hereby rendered phantasmagorical, while in the second couplet, Joyce transforms into a mere bagatelle Russell’s attempts to extend the canon of Greek drama. The text printed in Trieste omits the ligature Æ from Eschylus, perhaps to subtly preclude Russell’s claiming any inherent connection with the dramatist whom he once singled out for his “stupendous deities.” Rather than stupendousness, there is, for Joyce, mere stupidity.(15)

Filthy Streams

Between these bookends - Yeats and Russell - Joyce’s broadside against the “mumming company” moves through the Celtic Revival’s usual suspects. Indeed, “The Holy Office” clearly anticipates Joyce’s depiction in “Scylla and Charybdis” of Dublin’s literary scene (as it was later imagined to have been) on 16 June 1904, where the characters Æ and John Eglinton “mummed in names” (U 9.352), the sound of this verb naturally leading on to the holy atmosphere in the library’s musty meeting room: “coffined thoughts around me, in mummycases” (U 9.409). For Joyce, performing his secular version of the Catholic Church’s “Holy Office” in 1904, acting both as confessor and inquisitor, the perception was merely of paralysed reputations, costive creativity, blocked heads.(16)

Take, for instance, the skit of Oliver St. John Gogarty, “whose conduct ‘seems to own’ / His preference for a man of ‘tone’, ”the punctilious inclusion of his quoted words designed to draw attention to his sneering superciliousness, and may even allude to a phrase in a poem that the medic may have written few months earlier: “When the sun shines on Mary’s hair / The splendour seems to own / That solid rays of sunlight there / Are blended with the brown.”(17) Thereafter, another presence from the Library on Bloomsday, Magee (aka “John Eglinton”), who would later be depicted there as “urbane ... glittereyed ... [with] rufus skull” (U 9.1; 27)) is sketched here as quietly keeping his counsel, and everything else, for that matter, under a hat he refuses to remove, so as to merely dazzle all with his “Castilian” formalities; all except Joyce, naturally, whose nickname for him, “stiffbreeches,” implied merely continence.(18)

Also present in this section is Padraic Colum, that “Irish messenger boy genius,” who had, a year earlier, been given a writing grant by Thomas F. Kelly, a millionaire American then resident in a wealthy village south west of Dublin; the very same magnate who had, almost simultaneously, rejected Joyce’s request of £2000 to fund for a Continental style daily newspaper, whose title, The Goblin, the Dubliner had even already registered.(19) Starkey, (aka “Seumus O’Sullivan”) is passed over quickly as “one who drinks his pint in fear,” a small beer of a man; and, last, but by no means least, George Roberts (whose literary aspirations at the time were so firmly underwired by his job as a travelling salesman of ladies underwear),(20) one “who loves his Master dear,” a clear allusion to the opening of his poem “From the Peaks”:

Dear Master, you have led me to the high white peaks ;
Held by your sustaining still I climb ;
But the thought of the warm valley in my heart bespeaks
Its memories all odorous of thyme.(21)

That poem was one of those chosen by Russell for inclusion in his New Poems, published in early 1904, which also featured verse by Colum and “O’Sullivan;” thus Ellmann suggests that its salutation was an act of devotion to Æ.(22) However, the real “Master” for Roberts, and for all the other contributors is surely Yeats, whose Celtic Twilight had, in 1902, been newly revised. For as well as the scent of “thyme” that Roberts discerned, an odour of the crepuscular, of the “cultic twalette” also hangs heavily over Æ’s selection.(23)

After this long indictment, a sentence stretched over twenty-four lines, Joyce turns towards the definition of his own role:

But all these men of whom I speak
Make me the sewer of their clique.
That they may dream their dreamy dreams
I carry off their filthy streams
For I can do these things for them
Through which I lost my diadem,
Those things for which Grandmother Church
Left me severely in the lurch.
Thus I relieve their timid arses,
Perform my office of Katharsis.
My scarlet leaves them white as wool.
Through me they purge a bellyful. (ll. 47-58)

The sheer vapidity of “dreamy dreams” is intended, once more, to satirize the contents of New Songs, a collection whose content seems to exist in a twilit world, on the edge of dream, a region clearly mapped out in the conclusion to George Roberts’s “Earth and the Infinite”: “In dreamy rivers flowing Sleep / Unveils the vast mysterious deep.”(24) For where the poets of New Voices regarded themselves as speaking for a twilit Celtic aesthetic, Joyce smelt only bog water, and night soil; “the special odour of corruption” floating over his Dublin.(25) Already in “The Holy Office,“ Joyce was proud to regard himself as “the sewer of their clique, “the triple pun of which announces that, firstly, he knew (as Gogarty once claimed) that he was “no gentleman,“ but merely an attendant at a meal who superintended the arrangement of the table, the seating of the guests, and the tasting and serving of the dishes; that, secondly, he had bound the cult of Irish together, if only in opposition to him, stitching its membership up, to the point of blasphemy, as confirmed years later in the Wake’s “coathemmed gusset sewer” (FW 320.14), a goddammed gutter sewer; and, finally, flowing out from that, he becomes an outlet for the Celtic Twilight, draining away their organic waste, their “filthy streams.”

Thus, “dreamy dreams” runs on, without stop, into the next lines, there to be collected by the rhyme of “filthy streams,” which, in turn, Joyce treated and recycled into the notorious description, of the “stream” of Stephen’s conscious confessions: “His sins trickled from his lips, one by one, trickled in shameful drops from his soul festering and oozing like a sore, a squalid stream of vice. The last sins oozed forth, sluggish, filthy” (P 144). Here, the stream emerges from the mouth; earlier, however, another orifice - the anus - was more fundamentally significant, since it was one which facilitated a public act of excretion, memorably framed by the impolitely feminine rhyme: “Thus I relieve their timid arses, / Perform my office of Katharsis.”

Here, in the summer of 1904, we find Joyce’s own sense of himself as a completed creator. Robert Kellogg has suggested, plausibly, that “Joyce’s Holy Office as an artist was, according the poem, to serve as a Holy Orifice, conveying the cloacal wastes which the idealistic niceties of his contemporaries forbid them from noticing.”(26) Certainly over the next two decades, up to and including Ulysses, contemporary commentators also noticed his fascination with sanitation, most famously, H.G Wells: “Mr. Joyce has a cloacal obsession. He would bring back into the general picture of life aspects which modern drainage and modern decorum have taken out of ordinary intercourse and conversation.”(27) Other reviews of A Portrait echoed this obsession: “Mr. Joyce is a clever novelist, but we feel he would be really at his best in a treatise on drains;”(28) “Mr. Joyce plunges and drags his readers after him into the slime of foul sewers.”(29) The same odour hangs over other, later works. Reflecting on the broader Catholic tradition Ulysses displayed and eschewed, an anonymous reviewer observed: “This vision of human beings as walking drain-pipes, this focussing of life exclusively round the excremental and sexual mechanism, appears on the surface inexplicable in so profoundly imaginative and observant a student of humanity as Mr. Joyce.”(30)

Maud Ellmann has suggested that such images of drainage, sewers, and cloacae reappear throughout the early criticisms of Joyce, because his readership generally understood that he “depicts the subject as a drainage-system, absorbing and recycling the leftovers of others.”(31) And yet any drainage system needs to be set in motion by a process of loosening and liquefaction, a process brilliantly caught by Wyndham Lewis, in his famous description of the world of Ulysses:

So rich was its delivery, its pent-up outpouring so vehement, that it will remain, eternally cathartic, a monument like a record diarrhoea. No one who looks at it will ever want to look behind it. It is the sardonic catafalque of the Victorian world. ... So he collected like a cistern in his youth the last stagnant pumpings of Victorian anglo-irish life. This he held steadfastly intact for fifteen years or more - then when he was ripe, as it were, he discharged it, in a dense mass, to his eternal glory. That was Ulysses. ... The motif of the house-drain is once and for all put in its place, and not mentioned again.(32)

Wyndham Lewis describes here the matter of sanitation lying behind Ulysses: a work more than (but never other than) a collection of “stagnant pumpings,” held intact in a “cistern;” and then, when the time was ripe, discharged, en masse, both as a work of public responsibility to a city, but also as a private function, so that, finally, the tired “motif” of Joyce as the “house-drain” was purged, in a process that Pound famously termed as “the katharsis of ‘Ulysses’”: “here was the JOB DONE and finished, the diagnosis and cure was here. The sticky, molasses-covered filth of current print, all the fuggs, all the foetors, the whole boil of the European mind, had been lanced.”(33) However, the content of Finnegans Wake would suggest otherwise, especially when the self-portrait of the artist, Shem - a “disinterestingly low human type, this Calumnious Column of Cloaxity” (FW 179.12) - begins to write, and it emerges that his ink has been compounded out of the waste materials he has collected from his own toilette - “(highly prosy, crap in his hand sorry)” (FW 185.17) - from his own arse, holy orifice that it always was to him.(34)

Because of this reputation, Shem is forced into exile on the Continent: “he winged away on a wildgroup’s chase across the kathartic ocean and made synthetic ink and sensitive paper for his own end out of his wit’s waste” (FW 185.05-08), the word “kathartic,” once thawed out from exposure to the Arctic, recalling the act of Katharsis that Joyce lays claim to in “The Holy Office,” and also, even, the unwritten story, “Catharsis,” that he planned in Rome at the same time that the germ of Ulysses came about. It would seem that in the same way that the “mumming company” of the Celtic Revival pushed Joyce into an position where he had to live by his wits, in “silence, exile and cunning” (P, 247), so Shem is forced to emigrate - just like the “Wild Geese,” those Irish soldiers who left to serve in continental armies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries(35) - and thereafter live on his own “wit’s waste,“ and “for his own end, “where the “end” is both a fundamental point of vocation and evacuation.

The Poets' Grammar Book

The self-aggrandizing opening of “The Holy Office” sees Joyce naming himself as “Katharsis-Purgative,” and invoking an ancient Greek antecedent:

Myself unto myself will give
This name, Katharsis-Purgative.
I, who dishevelled ways forsook
To hold the poets' grammar book,
Bringing to tavern and to brothel
The mind of witty Aristotle. (ll. 1-6)

Joyce announces that he has cleaned himself up, so as be able to lay his hands upon, if not lay claim to, the “poets’ grammar book;” and that the presiding genius of this performance was Aristotle, the Greek philosopher whom he once described as “the greatest thinker of all times,” not least because “Everything, in his work, is defined with wonderful clarity and simplicity.”(36) In the brief, but highly charged account of the poem she offers in her magisterial The Upheavals of Thought, Martha Nussbaum observes succinctly that Aristotle “was the name Joyce provided for the intellectual basis of his art;” and that the

title describes both what Joyce opposes - the dogmas of church authority, which stand between humans and the acceptance of their humanity - and also what he proposes to carry out in his art - a holy sacrament of Aristotelian purgation, in which the censorious metaphysics of the Irish Catholic Church will be carried away by the cleansing sewer-pipes of Joycean literary frankness.(37)

Nussbaum’s first published book was an edition of Aristotle’s De Anima, and so it’s unsurprising that she is so moved by the energy of Joyce’s position, but also, by its crudeness, since she observes that, like most classically trained people of his time, Joyce was raised to think that “purgation,” a physical evacuation of the body, was what Aristotle meant by katharsis, a position with which she disagrees, suggesting instead that it should also be taken to mean clarification.(38) She observes, nevertheless, that Joyce “gets good mileage” out of the idea, not least because the process of katharsis leads him to a new aesthetic of simplicity; or, as Ellmann put it, in this “splendid attack” on those for whom “cruelty masqueraded as high-minded moralism, and timid onanism masqueraded as purity,” “the scatology only enhances the pride” of the self-appointed figure who delivers the denunciation: “Katharsis-Purgative.”(39)

In the first critical biography of Joyce, Herbert Gorman, too, reflected on the role that Aristotle played in the development of Joycean aesthetics:

He was System, co-ordination, rationalization. ... Joyce with the gigantic fetish of exactitude ever before him and an intense concern for the unities, with his worship of Ibsen and his scorn for the empty twilight of Irish theatre, naturally found in Aristotle a firmer base from which to spring that the quicksand of Romanticism left by the backwash of the Nineties.(40)

Yet those opening lines to “The Holy Office” hardly draw attention to this sense of precision, but rather entertain the possibility that Aristotle is merely “witty,” a puzzling adjective which has been explained away by reference to Joyce’s familiarity with dictionary resources, especially Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary, where he may found a Saxon source.(41) Indeed, given the philosopher’s broad approach to the question of poetry it is worth considering whether the “grammar book” could ever possibly be an “Aristotelian” volume; and, syntactically, since both the pronoun, “I,” or the “book” could be referred to by the present participle, “bringing,” then either speaker or text could be the agent that connects “brothel” with “Aristotle,” beyond their mere feminine rhyme. Mason and Ellmann proposed that the speaker and the text are one and the same, since “Joyce collected the solecisms in the works of his eminent contemporaries,” but that hardly seems a weapon powerful enough to cause such satirical offence.(42) Given that the position of the apostrophe implies plural authorship and authority, who else might have contributed to the “poets’ grammar-book” invoked here?

Joyce visited the Continent for the first time in December 1902, travelling to Paris ostensibly to pursue a place at the prestigious Collège de Médecine. After spending Christmas back in Dublin, where he announced to Yeats that he was now abandoning his intention to become a physician for the sake of literature, he returned in late January the following year, taking up residence, as before, at the Hôtel Corneille, 5 rue Corneille, in the quartier Odeon. The day following his arrival, Joyce applied for and obtained, an admission card for the Bibliothèque Nationale; it was valid until the end of June. It was a valuable acquisition since the library gave him warmth, and a suitable place to work. After dashing off a number of reviews, most notably, “The Soul of Ireland,” his attack on Lady Gregory and her ilk, his mind turned to the simultaneous study of relatively unknown artists: one a Greek classic, Aristotle, and the other an English classicist, Ben Jonson, a writer whose aggressive self-image as “the Poet” would offer Joyce the prototype of a negotiator between Aristotle and brothel, between the “Heaven” of truth and the “Hell” of other people, between classicism and modernity, between costiveness and purgation.(43)

According to Frank Budgen, Jonson was one of only four writers whose works Joyce had devoured in their entirety - Defoe, Flaubert, and, of course, Ibsen, were the others - and, if this claim is to believed, it seems likely that this reading project was undertaken in Paris that spring.(44) In late March, in the course of a letter that described, parenthetically, his chronic malnourishment - “(I do not know if I am getting lean or not. But, I can assure you have a most villainous hunger)” - Joyce told his mother:

I read every day in the Bibliothèque Nationale and every night in the Bibliothèque-Sainte-Genevieve ... I never go to the theatre - as I have no money. I have no money ether to buy books ... I am at present up to the neck in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, and read only him and Ben Jonson (a writer of songs and plays). Gogarty wrote to me a day or two [ago] and tells me that “John Eglinton” said the other day (Stannie will tell you who he is) “There is something sublime about Joyce’s standing alone.” My book of songs will be published in the spring of 1907. My first comedy about five years later. My “Esthetic"  about five years later again. (This must interest you!)(45)

The italicized modal there, pitching the sentiment between enthusiasm and desperation, is especially poignant, as if only the sketching of a career plan could ever win over his mother’s scepticism. It’s striking that, at the heart of this prospectus, which looks way beyond Chamber Music and sees at least as far as A Portrait, are the constant figures of Aristotle and Jonson, that constancy perhaps strengthened by the Poet’s own veneration of the Greek as “the greatest philosopher the world ever had.”(46)

Joyce is keen to suggest to his mother, too, the reputation he has gained, in Dublin literary circles - or at least those frequented by Magee - for his purity of moral purpose, and aesthetically for his “standing alone.” It was a quality that he set out in “The Day of the Rabblement,” where he maintained that “the artist, though he may employ the crowd, is very careful to isolate himself.”(47) That singular pose is struck again in the conclusion of “The Holy Office:”

Where they have crouched and crawled and prayed
I stand, the self-doomed, unafraid,
Unfellowed, friendless and alone,
Indifferent as the herring-bone,
Firm as the mountain ridges where
I flash my antlers on the air. (ll. 83-88)

Yet despite this assertion, Joyce was never alone in this elevated position; as well as Aristotle, over the next few years Jonson, too, would continue to support the Dubliner’s lofty self-image. “Old artificer” that he ever was, “old Ben” (U 9.45) would stand Joyce “forever in good stead,” showing him, at the very least, the means to achieve self-assertion through an aggressive command of the public realm.(48) Contemporaries of Jonson regarded him as a split personality, a high-minded but self-conceited satirist, who attacked the “ignorant and guiltie mouthes” of potential detractors;(49) at the same time, he was a “staring Leviathan” with a face “puncht full of Oylet-holes, like the cover of a warmingpan” and possessed of “such a terrible mouth, that [his] beard’s afraid to peep out.”(50)

Coincidentally, in the last section of “The Holy Office,” Joyce, too, figured himself as “Leviathan, “setting himself against “Mammon,” another familiar Jonsonian target.(51) Perhaps also distantly recalled in the closing lines of Joyce’s broadside is the rousing conclusion to Jonson’s second “Ode to Himself,” also forming part of Poetaster, in which the Poet proclaimed his own credo, to sing "high, and aloofe, / Safe from the wolves black jaw and the dull asses hoofe” (H&S IV, 324); while the final couplet of “The Holy Office,” “And though they spurn me from their door / My soul shall spurn them ever more,” is a diluted version of Jonson’s claim, in the same passage, that his opponents always “know, I dare / To spurne or baffull ’hem; or squirt their eyes / With inke or urine. Or I could doe worse” (H&S IV, 322), though, perhaps, no worse than the use, by contemporary printers, of their own urine as a moistening agent which ensures that some trace of the digestive process actually transferred onto the pages of Jonson’s Works.(52)

Stanislaus felt that Joyce’s decision to approach “systematically” all the works of Ben Jonson [was] a curious choice when one bears in mind that he “read only when moved by interest in a writer or a subject and never for purely cultural reasons.”(53) Stanislaus was right to be puzzled, especially since Joyce’s interest in Jonson, unlike the other three writers whose complete works he had read, was never addressed explicitly. Yet perhaps some sense of the attraction can be divined in the phrases “Katharsis-Purgative” uses to describe his own “peripatetic scholarship.” That, of course, denotes an Aristotelian cast of mind, “peripatetic” (derived from “peripateo”) being the term applied to the philosopher, owing his practice of strolling around the Lyceum as he lectured; but the adjective, “peripatetic,” while suggesting Joyce’s peregrinations in Dublin and Paris, might also imply the social mobility of Jonson, the itinerant ease by which he, the stepson of a Westminster bricklayer, moved from theatre to court, from tavern to country house, all the time stressing the example of the ancients, but never losing sight of his own preference: an avowed classicist who would, on the one hand, champion principles of order and decorum and, on the other, declare himself yet unwilling “to conclude a Poets liberty within the narrowe limits of lawes, which either the Grammarians, or Philosophers prescribe" (H&S VIII, 641).

Certainly, biographers of Jonson have been honest, too, about the “plenary indulgences” which the Poet seems to have enjoyed, not least from that tribe of younger followers, the surrogate “Sons of Ben,” who dined with him regularly, and partook of his “joy at table,” set out in such poems as “To Penshurst” or “On Inviting a Friend to Supper,” which famously laid down the house rules:

How so ere, my man
Shall reade a piece of VIRGIL, TACITUS,
LIVIE, or of some better booke to us,
Of which wee’ll speak our minds, amidst our meate;
And Ile professe no verses to repeate. (H&S VIII, 65)

The Poet assures his guest that, despite the meal’s classical accompaniment, will not be tempted to recite his own verses at supper, “repeate” anticipating a later sense of the verb, to imply that such lines might only emerge flatulently anyway, as a belch. Jonson’s sense of appropriate table manners finally developed into the authoritative Leges Convivales, a set of dining-club rules carved in marble over a chimney in the Apollo Room at the Old Devil Tavern at Temple Bar where the Sons of Ben held their regular meetings.(54) Thus, such “joy at table” was also balanced by a life ruled by “common sense,” not least in terms of language, which, as Jonson famously indicated, most shows a man. That linguistic obsession, had led him, late in his career, after a series of strokes had hampered both his mobility, and his creativity, to compile The English Grammar, “For the benefit of all Strangers, out of his observation of the English Language now spoken, and in use.”(55) A veritable “Poet’s Grammar Book;” and one that Joyce may well have recalled from his reading of Jonson’s complete works in the spring of 1903.

Purge a Bellyful

Three weeks before Joyce wrote to his mother from Paris, Synge had visited him there, and subsequently wrote up his impressions for Lady Gregory, who had kindly asked him to look up the precocious Dubliner as a favour to Yeats. Synge reported to her that found an impoverished student, but not a poor one: “He seems to be pretty badly off, and is wandering around Paris rather unbrushed and rather indolent, spending his studious moments in the National Library reading Ben Jonson.”(56) Unbrushed, but not as “dishevelled” as he once might have been, as opening lines of “The Holy Office” would attest.

Synge’s is a poignant and revealing vignette: though wan and hungry, the twenty-one year old Joyce was being sustained, day and night, by the greatness of Jonson’s writing, manifested not simply in “old Ben’s” eminence and ability, but also, in terms of the sheer bulk, his collected works, running to nine volumes in the standard text of the day, Gifford’s 1816 edition, textually, at least, almost a century old when Joyce was consulting it.(57) T.S. Eliot claimed that any understanding of Jonson must commence with “intelligent saturation in his work as a whole.”(58) In early 1903, Joyce undertook precisely that immersion, and the content of the commonplace book he kept during his sojourn, the famous Paris Notebook, shows that indeed, he was reading Joyce’s works “systematically.” Thus, on eight separate pages of the mathematical cahier he had bought from a local papeterie, he transcribed passages from Jonson’s plays, as he worked through Gifford’s edition.(59) He seems to have begun with a later volume, containing the Masques (or, as Joyce spelt them, “masks”) since the first quotation from Jonson is Aurora's speech from the conclusion of The Vision of Delight (1617):

I was not wearier where I lay
By frozen Tithon’s side, to-night;
Than I am willing now to stay,
And be part of your delight.
But I am urged by the Day,
Against my will, to bid you come away.(60)

The quotation, naturally, sets indulgence against duty, the latter winning out, “against my will,” and the distant memory of first line emerging in Stephen’s journey across Dublin to the Royal University in A Portrait:

passing a grimy marine dealer’s shop beyond the Liffey he would repeat the song by Ben Jonson which begins:
I was not wearier where I lay.
His mind when wearied of its search for the essence of beauty amid the spectral words of Aristotle or Aquinas turned often for its pleasure to the dainty songs of the Elizabethans. (P 176)

Once again, Aristotle and Jonson are seen to exist in close proximity, just as they had, for Joyce, before him, on desks in the Bibliothèque Nationale; and further, if beauty could not be found in the truth of philosophy, it might more easily be found in Elizabethan “dainty songs.”

“The Vision of Delight” appears in the seventh volume of Gifford’s edition, and so this would seem to have been the first of the series which he consulted. Thereafter, commencing with the first volume, Joyce read the plays according to the editor’s chronological ordering, and, once under way continued to be attracted by the many songs which spangle Jonson’s dramatic works. Thus, on 4 recto, he recorded three lyrics from Cynthia’s Revels, an early “comical satire,” first performed during the reign of Elizabeth: “Thou More Than Most Sweet Glove,” “Now Each One Dry His Weeping Eyes” and “Queen and Huntress.” On the next page, on 5 recto he copied out two poems from Poetaster, “If I Freely May Discover” and “She Should Be Allow’d Her Passions,” both plays featuring in the second volume of Gifford’s edition. A pair of songs from Volpone were transcribed on 7 recto, “Had Old Hippocrates, or Galen” and the famous lyric of seduction, “Come, My Celia, Let Us Prove,” along with a couple from Epicoene, “Still To Be Neat,” and “Modest And Fair, For Fair And Good Are Near,” both plays forming volume 3 of Gifford’s set. The fifth volume furnished excerpts from The Devil is an Ass (“Do But Look On Her Eyes”), two set pieces from The Staple of News, the first of which Joyce termed a “Madrigal,” and the second “A Saraband;” and, finally, a song from The New Inn: “It Was A Beauty That I Saw.”(61)

It is striking that Joyce recorded almost entirely lyrics from Jonson’s dramatic works - though, after all, he described the Poet parenthetically to his mother as “a writer of songs and plays,” rather than verse - and, of those that he transcribed, most take the form of couplets; but, then again, that was Jonson's preferred form.(62) Yet other than the sheerly beautiful, it’s unclear what drew him to such “dainty songs,” rather than Jonson's more satirical output. J.B. Bamborough, in the most thorough account of the relation between the two writers, has suggested: “It may well be that Jonson’s example helped him to discipline a natural lyric diffuseness and achieve a greater precision and clarity of style though it would be difficult to distinguish Jonson’s influence from that of the other Elizabethan lyricists and madrigalists, of whom Joyce was very fond.”(63) Certainly, while later reviewers of Chamber Music have certainly heard Jonson’s tones - Ellmann claiming that he Joyce read him to “improve his own technique,” and even suggesting the “When the shy start goes forth in heaven” is based on Jonson’s lyrics, and Kenner hearing “a lost precision of phrase and rhythm,” namely the “silver rhetoric, alloys and all” of Ben Jonson, a figure “who contains the whole tradition of gentleman-poets since Horace” - contemporaries such as Padraic Colum were discerning a broader background noise: “What comes vividly to my mind when I think of James Joyce is some melody - some strain of song ... perhaps it is a lyric of Ben Jonson’s that I hear repeated in Joyce’s modulated voice: ‘still to be neat, still to be drest / As, you were going to a feast.’” These are verses from Epicoene which Joyce had, in fact, transcribed into his notebook, and in which Jonson, in the course of praising “sweet neglect” of natural appearances, dismisses “th’adulteries of art” (H&S V, 167).(64)

Gorman, the first critic to attempt a definition of the mechanism of the relationship between Jonson and Joyce, confidently listed a number of possibilities: the earlier writer displayed “sinewy qualities and classical exactness;” the “precision” of “an Aristotelean exactness, a lyric impulse and a disciplined humour.”(65) Above all, there was a veritable “solidity” about Jonson that was attractive, the abstract noun recalling Eliot’s famous pronouncement that “the superficies of Jonson is solid. It is what it is; it does not pretend to be another thing.”(66) That hard unpretentiousness might be seen in Jonson’s famous lines “Come My Celia Let Us Prove,” a translation of Catullus which first found its way into the mouth of Volpone, as he sought to seduce the innocent girl:

Why should we deferre our joyes?
Fame, and rumor are but toyes.
Cannot we delude the eyes
Of a few poore houshold-spies?
Or his easier eares beguile,
So remooved, by our wile?
’Tis no sinne, loves fruit to steale;
But the sweet theft to reveale:
To be taken, to be seene,
These have crimes accounted beene. (H&S V, 82)

As a means of seduction, the lines are well-proved, the sound of Catullus framed in “the easy play of an English sensibility,” so that the Roman poet’s opening, “Rumoresque senum severiorum,” becomes, in Jonson’s characteristic reshaping, “a few poor household spies,” thereby turning the reproach of impotent old men into the compulsions of domestic voyeurism. In Dublin’s Joyce, Kenner, in articulating a connection between Joyce and Jonson’s “ironic elegance,” observes that the Poet’s “façade of aristocratic poise and insolence depends on his careful adjustment of Horatian and Catullan epigrammatic nicety to the linguistic gestures of a Broadside’s conventions, a harridan’s court, and a groundling’s stage;”(67) and it was an adjustment that Joyce made, too, in “The Holy Office.” The tremulous rhythms of Jonson's lines can be strongly felt in the broadside's octosyllabic couplets, but despite the common adjective, “sweet,” the terms of Joyce's seduction - “The ‘dare not’ of sweet maidenhood / That answers my corruptive ‘would’,” (ll. 59-60) secured as it is by that unflinching rhyme - are less dishonest than Jonson’s “sweet theft.”(68) Finally, however, the poems share a sense of cool calculation, Jonson’s last words, “crimes accounted been,” clearly heard again in Joyce’s “I must not accounted be.” The lines in “The Holy Office” allude, of course, to Yeats’s “Address to Ireland in the Coming Times,” but, as he transcribed the song into his notebook in Paris, Joyce might also have heard a deeper Jonsonian echo; a rumble from the belly.

In a showy passage that Joyce himself is likely to have read and authorised, Gorman attempted to take us further into the experience of the artist’s studies during that spring in the French capital:

Having breakfasted on chocolate or merely a few gulps of fresh air, Joyce would saunter across the Seine, glancing with longing at the huge Norman armoires in the windows of the antiquaries and the display of iron rings in Arnou’s shop on the Rue Racine, and so up the drab Rue Richelieu to the Bibliothèque Nationale, that cold mausoleum of dead minds, where he would pass part of the day reading the works of Ben Jonson. During this winter he digested the complete works of that hard-minded intellectual Elizabethan worthy. After his meagre dinner he would saunter across the Boulevard Saint-Michel to the Bibliothèque Sainte-Genevieve and forget his loneliness in a perusal of Victor Cousin’s translation of Aristotle.(69)

Powerfully communicated here is that feeling of starvation, physical and intellectual, that the young Joyce suffered in Paris, a hunger that could only be sated by a writer whom Swinburne famously described as “Broad-based, broad-fronted, bounteous, multiform;” a writer whose extraordinary abundance - plays, poems, masques, translations, criticism - Joyce devoured and “digested;” and a writer whose very corporeality he drew on a few years later, in Rome, when he described one of his banker colleagues there as “like Ben Jonson with a big belly.”(70) Reflecting on the concentration on Aristotle and Jonson in Paris, Gorman proceeds to observe, archly, that Joyce's “mental pabulum was not unusual,” a phrase which alludes to Mr O’Madden Burke’s comment in “Aeolus” (U 7.622);(71) but, in the context of a discussion of Jonson’s influence, the word is acutely chosen, since he frequently regarded reading as a digestive process, and wrote famously in Timber:

The third requisite in our Poet, or Maker, is Imitation, to bee able to convert the substance, or Riches of an other Poet, to his owne use. To make choise of one excellent man above the rest, and so to follow him, till he grow very Hee: or, so like him, as the Copie may be mistaken for the Principall. Not, as a Creature, that swallowes, what it takes in, crude, raw, or indigested; but, that feedes with an Appetite, and hath a Stomacke to concoct, devide, and turne all into nourishment. (H&S VIII, 63)

Such a philosophy of reading matter, of “mental pabulum,” Joyce would bring to the lunch table in “Lestrygonians,” and to the maternity hospital in “Oxen of the Sun.”

Jonson’s seeming obsession with digestion and excretion, and their relationship to his own, and others’, literary creativity has attracted much comment from twentieth-century scholarship, of which Edmund Wilson’s essay of 1948, “Morose Ben Jonson,” is perhaps the crudest example.(72) Keen to diagnose Jonson as an “anal erotic” (despite the poet’s “enjoyment of tavern life and his great reputation for wit”), Wilson duly listed as major characteristics of that newly identified Freudian type which coincided with The Poet’s life and his work: “orderliness,” leading to “pedantry;” “parsimony, which may become avarice” and “obstinacy, which may become defiance,” which co-existed with a fixation on symbolic substitutes for faeces, such as money. More specifically, in Jonson’s case, the neurosis manifested itself in “his learning is a form of hoarding,” “the habit of collecting words,” “the exhibition of stored away knowledge to compel admiration;” and, finally, and most grievously, a “gratuitous cruelty” seen in “the sadistic character” of his practical jokes, too. His sniffy conclusion that Jonson’s work exhibits “the peculiar coarseness” and “strained falseness” typical of a “constipated writer well primed with sack” secured the point: he was fixated upon “the contents of his alimentary tract.”(73)

Certainly, this account of Jonson’s costiveness carries some force, even now, but offers little explain the plenitude or variety of his work, running as it did to almost a dozen volumes in the edition under Wilson’s scrutiny; nor does it account for the riot of corporeal generosity exhibited by Bartholemew Fair, say, which “celebrates not only the anus, but is a paean to every orifice, every bodily fluid, every quiddity of man’s nature.”(74) And it was the explicit nature of this process of bodily evacuation, via orifices, that Joyce seems to have been drawn to; a sense of katharsis that was purely medicinal, and physical, and which carried none of the consolations of Aristotelian philosophy. Wilson was well aware of this, when he stated that Joyce

may be said to have followed Jonson’s example - failing, sometimes, from faults like Jonson’s - rather, perhaps, than to have exploited to better effect any special aspect of Jonson’s work. Joyce, too, hoarded words and learning and attempted to impress his reader by unloading his accumulations; he, too, has his coprophilic side ... is defiant and arrogant, self-consciously resistant to pressures, and holds himself apart and aloof.(75)

The comparison is negative, as might be expected, but it misses the point that for both artists, the “unloading” of “accumulations” was the art of their necessities. Thus, Joyce announced in “The Holy Office” that “My scarlet leaves them white as wool / Through me they purge a bellyful,” (ll. 57-58) which suggests that either Joyce’s notoriety has caused the blood to drain from their bodies; or that his robes of judgment render them sheepish. The second line of the couplet frames the mechanism of purgation, the means by which the “cultic twalette” might be flushed out, but that preposition, “through,” is coy about the exact process by which this might take place, suggesting either metaphysical agency, or physical passage.

That double vision, moving between metaphysical and physical, can be traced in Jonson, too, specifically in the “Induction” to Every Man out of his Humour (1599), where Asper - a satirical alter ego for Jonson - is quite prepared to administer cathartics to the assembled company: “Th’are more infectious than the pestilence: / And therefore I would give them pills to purge, / And make ’hem fit for fair societies” (H&S III, 434). Before long, Jonson is literalizing this, depicting the process of purgation on stage, as in the finale of Poetaster, when Crispinus vomits up Latinate words so as to be cured of his literary pretensions. In Bartholomew Fair (1614) Jonson depicts catharsis still more generally, to the extent that one overlarge woman, Ursula, urinates on the ground, another, Mistress Overdo, vomits publicly, while a third, Win Littlewit, after having eaten roast pork, is caught short, and suddenly taken by an urge to defecate in a public place.(76) For Wilson, this might be merely a “letting-go,” an “outpouring for outpouring’s sake” which he claimed, characterized the play, but for Jonson it was a question of responsibility, as Boehrer has suggested: “[his] preoccupation with excretory processes should arguably be viewed as culturally paradigmatic rather than individually neurotic.”(77) That excretory paradigm emerges clearly in Catiline, when Cicero issues a familiarly Jonsonian edict: “Purge the citie / Draw drie that noysome and pernicious sinke / Which left, behind thee, would infect the world” (H&S V, 508). But it is in “On the Famous Voyage,” a poem in which according Wilson, the “malodorous side of Jonson was given its fullest and most literal expression” that this paradigm shift can be seen.(78) The poem, which narrates a journey made by two London gallants in a boat up the polluted Fleet Ditch, an open sewer leading from Bridewell to Holborn, is, at 216 lines, by far the longest poem in Jonson’s Epigrammes; it is certainly the most scatalogical too, not least when it picked over the after-effects of purgation:

At this a loud
Crack did report it selfe, as if a cloud
Had burst with storme, and downe fell, ab excelsis,
Poore MERCURY, crying out on PARACELSUS,
And all his followers, that had so abus’d him:
And, in so shitten sort, so long had us’d him:
For (where he was the god of eloquence,
And subtiltie of mettalls) they dispense
His spirits, now, in pills, and eeke in potions,
Suppositories, cataplasmes, and lotions. (H&S VIII, 86)

As a result of this explosive bowel evacuation, the outcome of katharsis, blobs of mercury, a noted purge, recommended by Paracelsus, and usually used to relieve constipation, as well as syphilis, are depicted here lying mixed up with excrement. Thus, the “god of eloquence” is defiled; “so shitten,” as was Jonson himself.(79) Richard Helgerson has observed that, just as the wandering heroes of this mock-epic poem brave the filth, so the Poet braves the folly and corruption of court and city; but then he adds, acridly: “But youcan’t splash around in the sewer without getting dirty.”(80) Yet Jonson realised that in order to speak for himself, he needed to soil the hand with which he wrote.

Swinburne dismissed the poem as revolting to English sensibilities. “Coprology,” he sniffed, “should be left to the Frenchmen ... It is nothing less than lamentable that so great an English writer as Ben Jonson should ever have taken the plunge of a Parisian diver into the cesspool.”(81) What Swinburne - and Wilson after him - failed to countenance, but what Joyce well understood and had assimilated from having immersed himself in Jonson’s works in Paris, was that the earlier writer’s obsession with bodily functions, private and public, his unsqueamish treatment of the links between the alimentary and the literary, his preoccupation with evacuation, and his relish of “the odour of corruption” emanating therefrom, were less psychological shortcomings in need of urgent treatment, than dimensions of a satire intended to drain the impurities from the metropolis, by means of a “Holy Office.” Or, to be more precisely Joycean, an orifice wholly designed to drain off the “filthy streams” from cultural environments that, owing to “ignobleness and slavishness,” had been blocked for a generation.