Chapter
7
169,
170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195
In
this chapter Shaun satirises his brother Shem, including (importantly) various
personality traits and events from James Joyce’s life: his blindness and exile
from
P.
169
Shem
is short for Shemus, like Jim is for James [Joyce].
There are a few who maintain he came from a respectable line (a mixture of
Vikings and pirates, and became an in-law [brother] to the respectable de Trop Blogg [Shaun]) but every honest man knows that his life
won’t bear close scrutiny. From a mixture of truth and rumour, it is possible
to conceive of what this hybrid looked like.
Shem
had a close-cropped skull, not ‘four-eyes’ but eight, a whorl for a nose, a
numb arm [from writing], a few hairs only on his head and lip, a goatee of
three barbells hung from a plough-like chin, had one shoulder higher than the
other, huge ears… [i.e. was so ugly and evil] …and
young Master Shem’s first words in the
P.
170
…to
his brothers and sisters there was the first riddle of universe, ‘When is a man
not a man?’ and offered a prize of a crab apple [as per the Garden of Eden], as
it was for them a time before mints or money. One said ‘when the heavens quake’
[thunder], a second ‘when a Bohemian lisps’ [babbling] , a third said ‘when he
is hungry and determined’ [age of heroes/man?], and next said ‘when he dies’ [Viconian cycle], another ‘when he is drunk’, and another
said ‘when he is married’, another ‘when papa fathered the nation’, one of
wittiest said, ‘when he ate the apple and seemed so shaken’, and another said
‘when he’s old and grey’, and still another ‘when the dead awaken’, and another,
‘when he is under-sized’, another ‘when he has no manners’, and one said ‘when
pigs fly’. All were wrong, and Shem took the prize, the correct answer being
‘when he is a Sham’ [i.e. a Shem].
Shem
was a sham, which was noticeable in the food he ate. He preferred tinned salmon
to fresh salmon or trout, and often would say no jungle pineapple tasted as
good as the fruit in a can. No inch-thick steak or leg of mutton or pork, or
breast of goose with stuffing in …
P.
171
..gravy was to be given to that broken-hearted youth [greek-hearted jew = Stephen?]. He
wouldn’t touch roast beef. See what happens when you mate a merman with a swan?
He even ran away to Europe, saying he’d far sooner be poor there than bear
Isn’t
that awful? Talk about low. It oozed out from this black beetle in the photo
the Tullock-Turnbull girl took of this national
apostate [or apostle] , as he tried to escape to
P.
172
…of
a fruit shop, and she knew he was a bad man just from his walk.
(John’s
butcher is a different sort of food shop. He fattens kills, flays, hangs, draws, quarter and pieces. [Vegetarians? ] should be excommunicated.)
At
around that time, many expected he would die early from disease, or do himself
in, and his many debtors expected to hear of his death, but though heavily in
debt even then he couldn’t stay true to type. He wouldn’t burn himself or throw
himself into the river Liffey, he wouldn’t explode himself and refused to suffocate
himself. With devil’s leave the fraud even diddled death. Instead he cabled his
brother from his Neapolitan asylum: ‘Here today, gone tomorrow, we’re broke. Do
something’. The answer he got was ‘Inconvenient.’
You
see, chaps, but the long and short of it was his bardic
memory was low. He treasured every crumb of overhead speech [in the bar], but
if, during some mundane conversation, something was said about his evil
practices, such as ‘Pray, what is…
P.
173
…the
meaning of that continental expression, the one that sounds like “canaille?”’
or ‘Did you ever happen to stumble upon a young nobleman answering to the name
of “Low Swine”’, [i.e. alluding to Shem’s eavesdropping] he was not a bit sorry
and would pull a face, put a pencil in his ear, and begin to tell all the
intelligentsia (lawyers, merchants, politicians, and members of the Pure River
Society [readers of FW?!] his entire
life story [e.g. D, P, & U) ,
abusing his deceased ancestors and ranting about his famed father, and visa
versa, jeering the rotten little ghost of his papa [e.g. FW], then giving an unsolicited testimony of behalf of the absent, explaining
the various meanings of all the different foreign languages he misused [e.g. in
FW], lying about all the…
P.
174
…other
people in his story, and leaving out all the details about
himself until there was not a listener who was [not?] undeceived by the
whole recital.
He
left, because it went without saying that he disliked fighting or rows, and if
ever called in to arbitrate on an argument, this washout would slavishly agree
with the last speaker, with a lot of appeasing banter, then focus on the next
antagonist, the expression in his poor eyesight imploring him to say whether
there was anything he could do to please him, and hoping that he would fill
Shem’s always empty tumbler once more.
This
one night there was a hailstorm after his departure, and he was set upon,
kicked and hit all through the deserted village of Dublin on the Liffey by the two arguing groups, who finally decided that they
had been detained out rather late and had better be getting home, and were all
reconciled [the arguers] in a friendship, which had merely arisen from Shem’s
lowness. Again there was hope that people…
P.
175
…when
looking at him with contempt, after rolling him first in the dirt,
might pity and forgive him if he was deloused, but he was so low that he soon
sank out of sight.
The
saints had beaten the devil! Mick had beaten Nick!
Oh
fortunate casual events! Lefty – Shem – takes the angel cake [emigrates with
Nora?] while Righty – Shaun – ‘cloves his hoof’
[destroys Shem’s reputation]. The Darkies didn’t take Shem out to play nice
games, the sort that were composed by Nick [i.e. Shem], the ones that piccaninnies play all day, games for fun such as when Old
Joe kicked Dina behind, and the yellow girl kicked old Joe’s behind…
P.
176
…games
like Tom, Tom the Thunderman, [a long list follows of
children’s street games altered to relate to stories and themes in FW] …and when his team was like a rainbow [of multi-coloured
children?] around him.
Now
it is well known how on a Unity Sunday, just when the German and French war was
raging and the Irish were fighting the Black and Tans, Shem still in his
pyjamas fled for his life to Winterland [Switzerland],
pursued by the curses of all the village women, and corked himself up in his
inkbottle house, the worse for wear for booze, where he hid under his bed with
his face hidden in a dead soldiers overcoat and a hot water…
P.
177
…bottle
at his feet, moaning feebly in a monk-like monotone about how his purgatory was
more than a ‘nigger bloke could bear’; paralysed by the reports of war, his
face and trousers changing colour with every gun shot.
How
is that for low, ladies and gentlemen? Whole continents were offended by this
lowness! [U. banned in many countries…] Harems of houris
on divans (with Issy and her image among them) would
exclaim ‘
Would
anyone outside a madhouse believe it? Neither Nero nor Nebuchadnezzar ever had
such a spoiled opinion of himself as did Shem, the mental and moral defective
who was known to drink spirits in a café with that private secretary, Davy
Brown-Nowlan [Bruno of Nola], his twin with the
pseudonym Bethgelert [a dog], and once in the porch
of a gypsy’s bar (where Shem was swearing that he would repay someone four sous when his imaginary ballad was published) Shem said he
was aware of no other Shakespeare, either as the opposite of his antithesis or
precisely the same as he was himself [!], and though he was like a camp
bunny-boy face-to-face with all the teashop…
P.
178
…lions
of London up against him, [i.e. he’s in a café] in a bout of short temper he
announced that as long as he lived he would wipe all English speakers,
multi-phonetically speaking, off the face of the earth.
After
the fright he got that day [after he took a beating], though every doorpost was
smeared with first-born blood and every cobbleway
slippery with the blood of Irish heroes who were crying to the skies for other
[war volunteers], our low waster Shem didn’t have the courage to step out
amongst the throng, who were chanting from the Monster Book of Patriotic Poetry
[Bible?] about religious wars, with the fairer sex crossing the rainbow bridge
built to commemorate the ‘war-to-end war’, only then did he peep through a
telescope out through his keyhole, with an ‘eachway’
hope that conciliation may be taking place, and looking through it…
P.
179
…he
found himself staring at point blank range down the barrel of a revolver, held
by an unknown quarreller who had probably been told to shadow, then shoot Shem,
should he decide to step out and see what was happening, prior to being beaten up [or raped?] by a dozen louts.
What
in the name of the ancients and their gods was this low human type really up
to, for he seems a very bad case?
The
answer to this puzzle would be: while he had garnered some social reputation on
the basis of his family, he had fallen into alcoholism and drug addition,
becoming fixated on both his debauched past [i.e. P and U] and his
historical origins [U and FW]. This explains the honorific letters
he would inscribe after his name. It would have been entertaining to see Shem
pretending to read his uselessly unreadable Blue Book of Eccles [i.e. U] (even though the censor has forbidden
it) telling himself in the mirror that every mistake on the manuscript was a
vision more gorgeous than the one before, and getting with it a free cottage by
the sea, lots of ladies hosiery , a sewerful of wine and expensive oysters, a whole operahouse…
P.
180
…
of noblewomen throwing their clothes off before his obscene nose, when suddenly,
according to those listening to him reading [he fantasizes], he squealed the
top note in Dear Little Shamrock of Ireland (…) for a full five minutes, better
than a baritone [Joyce not a bad tenor], while wearing three plumes, green,
white and orange, on his head, a coat and dagger, a kerchief in his coat
pocket, and a cross he won from three Cardinals at a horse race; but in the
murky light and with the blotchy print and fumbling fingers etc it took Shem a
month to start the book, given he could only think of or steal one word a week
[10 years to write U, 17 for FW]. Can you beat it? Who ever heard of
such a blackguard?
Yet
he used to boast that his father was a masterbuilder
[i.e. HCE] and he himself was a law student, in exile, and used a blackboard…
P.
181
…to
teach English to some of the rich families in Germany [or Switzerland?] and
several schools, after he had settled in the capital city, but had been ordered
off their glorious premises due to his smell, which was not unlike that of an
outdoor toilet. Instead of tutoring those households to write properly, this
vulgar Shem copied all their signatures so that one day he could forge a
cheque, up until the servants turned him out, holding each other’s noses (for
no-one dared get a whiff of that polecat at close range), and informed the
police that ‘he stunk’.
(James
[Joyce or Shem] wishes to hear from wearers of female costumes and
undergarments to start a city life together. He is not employed but sits and
writes. He has a wife, but she will assist.
One
cannot even begin to imagine how low this excommunicated hypochondriac ham
really was. Who can say how many…
P.
182
…shams,
or how many forged manuscripts, were perpetrated by his plagiarist pen?
Be
that as it may, if not for the phantasm light of his glowing nose as it moved
within an inch of the page [Joyce was at times nearly blind] (and Shem pointed
at it from time to time to try teach the colours to his female pupils, but they
all cried ‘ginger’ or ‘gin’), but for its light he could never have written a
word. By its burning light and a flash of inspiration, or a flush of the
toilet, he scratched and scribbled shamelessness about everyone he ever met
even sharing a story about [a girl] urinating beside a wall with some Irish
soldiers [Circe in U], but Shem (who
was devoted to his father) would on the contrary write inaccurate portraits of
himself, describing himself as reciting old Machiavelli’s monologue, about a
handsome young man who writes love lyrics for the girls and has tenor voice and
income from Australian gold mines, well dressed and with a vaselined
and perfumed moustache.
The
aforementioned house he lived in, known as the Haunted
Inkbottle, was in Brimstone Walk,
P.
183
…every
day becoming more violent in his abuse of himself and others, and this place
was filthy. You might pose instances of the
P.
184
…war
loans, yesses [of U],
added to which, if we added all the breakages, inverted chamber pots [Chamber Music], one had a fair chance of
seeing Shem, that son of Thunder, self-exiled, shaking all night with the
horrors, and by day terrorised by an ineluctable phantom [the black panther of U or ghost of this mother in Circe, or
ghost of his father in FW?], writing
the mystery of himself [Joyce’s works are autobiographical].
Of
course, of necessity Shem cooked for himself, and had a fowl house for eggs
(fortunately these apples did not fall far from the tree) in contravention of
the Games and Poultry Act, which he poached, the whites whiter than his white
sister and the yolk a gold coin, which he ate with cinnamon, locusts, beeswax,
liquorice and moss [etc], all the while chatting about the legs of the twins Litty and Letty [Issy], his own novels, his recipes [?] (…[a
number of egg dishes are mentioned…]) all the while holed up in the Inkbottle
House that was the size of a small closet (ah, if only he’d paid attention to
the teachings of the Jesuits! [or the Four Historians
and the ass]. His stingy, corrosive…
P.
185
…
nature meant that he didn’t even need this closet, and when his publishers [of D] nudged by their legal advisers, and
with the benediction of pastor Father Falconer, boycotted him and refused him
ruled stationary, he flew off across the ocean [Joyce went to Trieste] and
there made synthetic ink and paper from his own waste. How? Let me tell you in Latin so that no-one will be
embarrassed:
[Latin
paragraph describes how Shem shat into his own hands and in an urn mixed it
with urine, then exposed to the cold, after which it became an indelible ink]
Then,
after this, conforming to the earthly edict that when the calls come one must
produce from one’s own body a certain amount of obscene matter, Shem mixed this
with gallic acid and iron ore, and with this ink
wrote over every square inch of his body, and its…
P.
186
…continuous
present tense became a marvellous cycle of history [i.e. FW] (which, he said, by reflecting on his own life, he created a
vision for all human life, full of chaos, perilous, potent, and mortal) and
with each word he wrote an everlasting
[cyclic] world like a Dorian Grey painting was created, but [Irish]
green. So on Ivy Day, the day of Shem’s last public appearance, seen circling
around a square full of a fickle crowd brandishing his pen [or bottle?], the blond
policeman who thought it contained ink was out of his depth, but right in the
main.
This
policeman, Petty Constable Sigurdson, who had been
detailed from the police station to save Shem from the mob, encountered him instead
one evening in Knock, County Mayo, on the latter’s way home from a prostitute
(he always had a little pigeon somewhere, his rainbow girl, nicknamed Maggie) as
he was coming round the corner drunk after climbing from the brothel window,
where the policeman greeted him in Danish: “How are you today, my dark sir?”
“Search me” Shem replied with false graciousness, raising his hat, with a [stolen?]
Christmas [drink] under his arm for the postmaster [Shaun] and pretty Miss [Issy] and he pranced and…
P.
187
…danced
this way and that [i.e. drunk], and skittled into
him. The blond cop, palpably of Baltic origins [i.e. Viking or English], was
astonished and puzzled over where Shem had come from and where he was going,
and at the enormous capacity of the Christmas wineskin [bottle] of whiskey Shem
held, and as he looked on in astonishment, Shem explained how he was only
bringing home two gallons for his mother.
The
cop swore. ‘What mother? Whose father? Which twins? Why only
one girl?’ But enough of this
black lowness, too base for printing. Consider that the fishermen [?] are
pulling up anchor and the seas are singing for herring their king, and time is
passing by. We cannot stay here for the rest of our lives discussing Shem the
Penman’s thirst. [What follows is a formal accusation from ‘Justice’ – Shaun,
and a response much later by ‘Mercy’ – Shem]
JUSTIUS
(to his brother): Shaun is my name and I’ll brain this bird or my musket has
gone bendy. I’m the one to bruise and abrasion!
Come
forward, no-name or no-land, and amuse me by showing me your true colours, and
you’ll be back [from exile] forever after I give you your talking to! Shem, son
of Adam, I know all your stupidity. Where have you been, out enjoying yourself…
P.
188
…
after your last deathbed confession? Put your hand in
mine and confess. Let me look at your hand: the future is looking black for you,
Shem m’lad. You will need an entire river to clean
you, a fine of forty and a pope’s bill for attendance in my confessional booth.
Let
us pray. [In confession] In thought, word and deed, why, where, where, when,
how, with whose help and how often? You were raised in this divided country,
and know all about hilarious heaven and the roaring fire of the other place,
and now you’re a nigger amongst the white bastards of this dastard country, because
you have been in two minds about gods, you hid but have been discovered, nay,
condemned, as an anarchist, egoist, heresiarch, and you have spread disunity on
the basis of your intensely doubt-filled soul. Do you hold yourself to be a god
in the manger? [e.g. J.C.] And you will neither serve
nor pray, nor let others pray? And here I must pray for the strength to
scandalise all listeners as we swim together in Shem’s
P.
189
…the
pious wish of your parents – instead contrasted the carnal pleasures of life
with the lives of saints on paper [e.g. P]
and thereby added to the unhappiness of the world, a writer! – when countless Cathleens might have surrounded you, such that the space
all around you would have been thick with accomplished women struggling to
possess you, mutely saying ‘yes’ for that most natural connection in exchange for
just a lilt of that oldest song in the world accompanied by a gold band [of marriage].
Think of the high-, heaving- bosomed heroine, what a sweetheart bride you might
have had!
Sniffer of carion and a gravedigger, you put evil into the good words
you write with, your dislocated reason foretold through your poring over burns
and blisters and through the auspices of your shadow, that raven-coloured
cloud, and by the auspices of rooks holding a parliament of fowls, foretold
death and disaster, and destruction of public records and the levelling of
cultures in a fire [WWII?], and the return of a lot…
P.
190
…the
sweet-tempered back to dust, but it never occurred to you that in making such a
stew, the more vegetables you chop and slice and peel and pound, and the
fiercer the fire, the merrier it will be.
One
more thing occurs to me. You were designed to fall in with a Plan, as all Irish
nationalists must, perform certain duties that I cannot tell you about to earn
your threepenny bit and earn from the nation its true
thanks, here in Ireland where you took your first gasp of air the same as the
rest of us, and be as popular as a menial with the rest of the faithful, but
you slackly shirked earning your bullet and billet, and ran away from Galway to
sing your song of an alibi, a nomad amongst everyone’s laughter, by writing
masculine monosyllables of the same numerical length [?] as an Irish emigrant…
P.
191
…and
unfrocked quack of a friar, you semi-semitic, you
Europeanised African-American!
Shall
we follow this line a little longer, while our new king (Heil
Hitler! One mouth, and gorger of all!) is taking his meal?
There
grew up beside you, an out-of-work oaf one remove from the unwashed savage, who
was in your keeping, named Immaculatus, pure from
head to foot, who was well known in the highest circles, before he went even
higher, to be a spiritual physician, who in his youth was so desired that other
children asked his mother to let him come to kindergarten and to bring his
scooter along and would squeeze him like a teddy bear, and so good-looking that
he was the talk of half the town, this one you laid low one May morning because
he messed up your spelling book, or it was because he cut a pretty figure under
the gaze of your spectacles and you wanted to find out how his insides worked!
Have
you ever read about that great grandfather of our nation, Baboo,
who wanted to touch the sky with his staff, and how …
P.
192
…the
flood sank his ambition? Ever thought of that heretic Mark and the two
schismatic sisters, and how Buckley who shot the Russian General? Ever hear of
the Fox, the Wolf and the Monkey [3], or [other lessons of FW history], you blithering ape?
Malingerer
in luxury, what has Your Lowness done with all the food and funds, you schemer,
that you coaxed out of charities by bawling about your poverty, so that you
didn’t have to pledge your crown of thorns for a coat; you were so bad with
your gapeworm mouth and end-of-century malaise, which by the way is French for
syphilis [s. Some Die of Drinking Water,
‘the drip drip drip of the
syphilitic prick of the British Grenadier’]. All just to let you have your fun,
and your money, and songs, to let you have your Saturday night spree and Sunday
sleep, and holiday the day after, and grant you leave to lie about as you wish.
The simian before us has no ability to weep, but weep from your cataracts for
me, Shem the Penman! Often in the night, those prostitutes you hired hoped you
would clutch their famished hands, while on your sodden mattress you snored,
dreaming of your biblical bed companion, Ruth [Nora?], and the fleshpot wealth
of
P.
193
…
you squandered amongst the servants the bulk of your
earnings, and made them sick with the crumbs from your table? Am I not right?
Look up and take your medicine.
Let
me finish! Just a little Judas tonic to make your face go
green, Jim of the jokes [i.e. JJ]. Remember that your silence indicates
consent. Come here Mr Studious and I’ll tell you something. Do you see your
face in the looking-glass? Let me whisper something to you, otherwise the women
would call it out from the rooftops. This message has come to me through
various people. May a cross crush me if it’s not true.
Shem, you are mad!
He
points the tribal deathbone and the living are still.
Asleep. [Stone]
MERCIUS (replying to Justius’s
accusations) Lord brother! Pariah and cannibal Cain I
am, and yes, I foreswore our mother [in Circe, U] and her paps I once sucked, but you
have ever since been haunted by a sense of not being able to be what I have
become…
P.
194
…bewailing
your loss of innocence, which I could not defend, and for the combination of us
both [i.e. Cathmon–Carbery,
the hindoo etc] I am thankful from the bottom of my
heart. While the days of our youth were mixed together, and now at the last
hour, we are alone at the time when we must yield our spirits to the wind (even
though in the cycle of history it must all be done again, until that one day,
la, when you dominate once more) it has been your role to be like some
wind-blasted tree of knowledge, and mine to be a branded sheep and wastrel; you
are the one who has worn clothing as bright as the meteor and shimmering like
the horizon, while I am one who lives hidden in a coal hole, the voice of our
secret sighs, a down-and-out to whom the voices of the dead may come, ‘because
you [Shem] left me and you [Shaun] laughed at me and are forgetting me [this seems
to be ALP speaking through Shem]’; our turf-brown mummy is a-coming [r. Liffey, running with all the news, all the gossip, little
old-fashioned mummy, [as a river] ducking under bridges, rapid-shooting round
the bends…
…as happy and babbling, Anna Livia.
He
lifts the lifewand and the dumb speak. [Tree]
[Noise
of a river - ALP]