1 GENETIC JOYCE STUDIES – Issue 21 (Spring 2021) Three

GENETIC JOYCE STUDIES – Issue 21 (Spring 2021) Three Missing Books in Finnegans Wake Viviana-Mirela Braslasu and Geert Lernout In the course of her work for a University of Antwerp doctorate, Viviana-Mirela Braslasu has identified three undocumented sources in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: Oliver Wendell Holmes’ The Professor at the Breakfast-Table, Dame Partlet’s Farm and Lewis Carroll in Wonderland and at Home by Belle Moses. We don’t have notebook evidence, so the following identifications are conjectural, but we tried to be as expansive as possible. We offer the identifications in the order in which they appear in the respective book, but needless to say at least some of these items may have been found by Joyce in one of the many other sources that were available to him. This is our evidence for the fact that Joyce did use the three books: In December 1923-January 1924, in the first draft of Book I, chapter 5, section 4, Joyce wrote: These paper wounds, four in type, were gradually and correctly understand (sic) to mean stop, please stop, do please stop, and O do please stop respectively, and investigation showed that they were provoked by the fork of a professor at the breakfast table. Deeply religious by nature, it was correctly suspected that such anger could not openly have been directed against the ancestral spirit of her who one openly respected by him, as our first boys’ best friend and, when it was at last noticed detected that the fourth or heaviest gash was most more frequent where wherever the script was clear and the term terse and that these were the exact places carefully selected for her perforations by Dame Partland Partlet on the dunghill, reluctantly the theory of the jabbering ape was abandoned hotly dropped and its place usurped by that odious & even now today insufficiently despised person notetaker Jim the Penman. (MS 47471b-43v, JJA 46:304) The fragment contained two direct references to Oliver Wendell Holmes’ book The Professor at the Breakfast-Table and to the children’s book, Dame Partlet’s Farm. It also alluded to Jabberwocky in Lewis Carroll’s well-known poem, The Hunting of the Snark. Having thus identified two potential new sources the challenge was not only to discover the third one— hiding behind the “jabbering ape”—but also to prove that Joyce read and harvested these three books. To do that, we started to work backwards from the “Early Notes” and the “Late Additions” Joyce prepared for the revision of the typescript of The Hen that we corroborated with Hanging Garments, notebook VI.B.7 that Joyce compiled between February-April 1925. It was only when we got to the early note ‘a grave professor at his breakfast table acutely piqued’ (MS 47482b-121, JJA 46:369) that we had a breakthrough. The ‘grave professor’ was Isa Bowman’s appellation of Lewis Carroll. Could Isa Bowman’s book The Story of Lewis Carroll Told for Young People by the Real Alice in Wonderland be the source we were looking 1 for? Everything was pointing in that direction. Nevertheless, when further working on the text and on Joyce’s early drafts, we soon discovered that this was not the source that Joyce used for the “jabberjaw ape” but Belle Moses’ Lewis Carroll in Wonderland and at Home. The biography contained ample quotes from Isa Bowman’s book. This new find was also supported by the notes in Scribbledehobble where, under Exiles (.I.) Joyce entered the following passage: Prezioso thought anniversaries silly: on the N. E. slope of the dunghill the slanteyed hen of the Grogans scrutinised a clayed p. c. from Boston (Mass) of the 12th of the 4th to dearest Elly from her loving sister with 4½ kisses […] (VI.A.271, JJA 28:089) Joyce constructed this fragment of text on some of the entries that, we think, he harvested in the missing VI.X.2: ‘anniversaries’ (PB-T 33), ‘dunghill’ (PB-T 79), ‘from Boston (Mass)’ (PB- T 84), ‘sister’ (LC 224), ‘dearest’ (LC 268), ‘loving’ (LC 174) that he identically transferred together with others that he adapted to suit his needs: ‘north and south’ (PB-T 156) reworked in ‘N. E.’, ‘slanting eyes’ (LC 96) that became ‘slanteyed’, ‘4 kisses (LC 262) turned into ‘4½ kisses’, or ‘Ellen’ (LC 59) rendered as ‘Elly’. Ellen Terry and her sister Kate were, as Belle Moses wrote, two of Lewis Carroll’s ‘prime favorites in the earlier days’ (LC 223). Thomas E. Connolly considered this fragment the ‘original scrap’ (“Introduction”1 xvii) with which Joyce had created I.5; Danis Rose called it ‘the earliest version of the Boston Letter motif, evidence that at this early date Joyce was already contemplating literary use of the notions of dungheap, hen, letter, and sisters.’ (JJA 28:xxvii) New data in the present transcription complement the scholars’ opinions and demonstrate that Joyce’s notes taken from the three sources, constitute not only the seminal idea of The Hen, the scaffold on which Joyce created I.5, but also a useful repository to be used when needed. The Professor at the Breakfast-Table Confusingly, at first, there were two Oliver Wendell Holmes, father and son. The son, briefly a member of the Metaphysical Club, then soldier on the Union side in the Civil War and for most of his long life associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, is probably the more famous, one of three most cited legal scholars in the twentieth century. In the first two decades of the century, he was especially famous for his qualified support of free speech as guaranteed in the First Amendment, sometimes in the form of minority opinions. He even became known as “the Great Dissenter.” Colm Toibin in his novel The Master suggested that as a young man the later Supreme Court judge or “that striking, walrus-mustachioed amalgam of Moses and Massachusetts” as William P. McNeill has called him, had a probably unconsummated sexual relationship with Henry James. Plagued by censorship, Joyce may have been aware of the son, but it is the father’s book that he seems to have read and annotated in detail. The son was active in law but his father, Oliver Wendell Holmes senior, had abandoned the study of law for that of medicine, after publishing very successful poetry at an early age. As a young doctor he trained in specialist hospitals in Paris and later became professor and dean at Harvard, becoming famous for his contention that careless doctors carried diseases from one 2 patient they had treated to the next, at a time when few people suspected that germs were responsible for most diseases. From early on, Holmes had published poetry and he was especially famous for his occasional pieces, many of which were written for university functions. He was a fine example of a yankee intellectual, a class of men that he himself first called “Boston Brahmin.” Next to a small private medical practice and his teaching, he had an impressive career as a writer and lecturer in the later nineteenth century vein. In the final decades of his tenure as a professor at Harvard, Holmes actively supported the Union side in the Civil War and he became involved in his friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s translation of Dante’s Divina Commedia. The Autocrat at the Breakfast-Table began as a series of whimsical essays in the new journal The Atlantic Monthly, that was edited by his friend James Russell Lowell and for which Holmes had invented the name. When these essays proved a success (contributing to the survival of the journal), the installments were collected into an instant bestseller in 1858, followed a year later by its sequel The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. Dame Partlet’s Farm Dame Partlet’s Farm belongs to a very particular eighteenth century kind of children’s literature, the genre that is most famously represented by the anonymous History of Little Goody Two-Shoes (London: 1765). These are highly moralistic rags-to riches tales in which a typically very poor woman becomes prosperous through dedication and hard work. In fact the subtitle is a full and fair description; “Containing an Account of the Great Riches She Obtained by Industry, the Good Life She Led, and Alas Good Reader! Her Sudden Death: to which is Added, a Hymn, Written by Dame Partlett, Just Before Her Death, and an Epitaph for Her Tomb Stone.” The link with the previous book is made explicitly on the first page of the introduction, which begin like this: “Dame Parlet is said to have been a very near relation of that renowned person GOODY TWO SHOES, so well known to every good child who hath read those pretty books sold at the corner of St. Paul’s Church-yard, London.” As a young widow with six children, the introduction further explains, she “brought up her children to be industrious, and always kept them clean and neat, and taught them to read, without applying to the parish for relief” (5). In fact, it was Goody who taught Dame Partlet to read: “the Bible three times quite through, from Genesis to Revelations” in addition to other devotional literature in the Anglican “high church” tradition such a Thomas à Kempis. In poetic form, this is summed up in the first stanza of the poem about her: DAME PARTLET was a widow left, With children young and poor; But by her industry obtain’d A comfortable store. (37) 3 Lewis Carroll in Wonderland and at Home Information about the American writer Belle Moses is difficult to come by and we started our search with the catalogue of the Library Congress.

Load more