by Rick Gekoski
James Joyce, aged six, dressed up as a sailor boy. Three years later he would rebrand himself as a poet.
– Really, Simon, you should not speak that way before Stephen. It’s not right.
– O, he’ll remember all this when he grows up, said Dante hotly – the language he heard against God and religion and priests in his own home.
– Let him remember too, cried Mr Casey to her from across the table, the language with which the priests and the priests’ pawns broke Parnell’s heart and hounded him into his grave. Let him remember that too when he grows up.
– Sons of bitches! cried Mr Dedalus. When he was down they turned on him to betray him and rend him like rats in a sewer. Low-lived dogs! And they look it! By Christ, they look it!
– They behaved rightly, cried Dante. They obeyed their bishops and their priests. Honour to them!
– Well, it is perfectly dreadful to say that not even for one day in the year, said Mrs Dedalus, can we be free from these dreadful disputes!
In the following chapter, away at school at Clongowes, Stephen recalls the incident, and its effect on him:
He saw himself sitting at his table in Bray the morning after the discussion at the Christmas dinner table, trying to write a poem about Parnell on the back of one of his father’s second moiety notices. But his brain had then refused to grapple with the theme and, desisting, he had covered the page with the names and addresses of certain of his classmates.
That seems right, the child’s brain refusing to ‘grapple’ with what is, after all, his father’s passion, not his own. Stephen’s first poem in A Portrait is written years later, in early adolescence, and the haunting villanelle ‘Are You Not Weary of Ardent Ways’ has nothing of the second-hand about it. It describes the ‘rude din’ of adolescent desire, not of ‘this century’, and there are no metaphorical Eagles quaint-perched in their aeries on the crags of Time.
But it was the nine-year-old Joyce who, in 1891, composed the eulogistic verses that his younger brother Stanislaus later referred to as ‘the Parnell poem’. (Joyce later sanctioned the Latinate title of ‘Et Tu, Healy’.) Stanislaus, to whose imperfect memory we owe the three lines with which I began, described the poem as ‘a diatribe against the supposed traitor, Tim Healey, who had ratted at the bidding of the Catholic bishops and become a virulent enemy of Parnell, and so the piece was an echo of those political rancours that formed the theme of my father’s nightly, half-drunken rantings’.
Stanislaus reports that John Joyce, delighted by his son’s production, ‘had it printed, and distributed the broadsheets to admirers. I have a distinct recollection of my father’s bringing home a roll of thirty or forty of them.’ He also remembered that, in the (largely destroyed) thousand-page first draft of A Portrait, later published under the title Stephen Hero, ‘my brother referred to the remaining broadsheets, of which the young Stephen Dedalus had been so proud, lying on the floor torn and muddied by the boots of the furniture removers’ when the family moved from Blackrock in 1892.
Stannie’s memory was confirmed by John Joyce himself, who when asked whether the broadsheet really existed by the bookseller Jake Schwartz, of the Ulysses Bookshop in Holborn, responded: ‘Remember it? Why shouldn’t I remember it? Didn’t I pay for the printing of it and didn’t I send a copy to the Pope?’ But repeated inquiries to the Vatican Library by bibliographic busybodies since that time have not unearthed this copy of the poem. Presumably it was thrown out – can they really preserve every insignificant titbit, much less one in praise of an adulterer and sinner, that is sent in for the Pope’s approval? – but it’s a beguiling thought that it might still be there, in some drawer or other.
When you are in search of treasure – surely the animating archetype of collecting and dealing – you have to search the caves, to hunt for the rare and desirable. I began collecting as a boy, laid down a lifetime pattern of wanting and hunting, of desire, frustration and occasional satisfaction. When I was seven, in 1951, Topps (a company previously best known for making Bazooka bubblegum) began issuing baseball cards, and I, like all of my friends, was immediately obsessed by them. For a nickel you got five cards and a flat piece of gum that was unchewably stiff, nastily over-sugared and invariably thrown away. The ideal was to own all of the twenty-five players on your team – mine was the Washington Senators, though I switched allegiance to the Brooklyn Dodgers when we moved to Long Island in 1954. Topps knew how to get you hooked: most of the cards were common, but the most desirable ones were issued in much smaller quantities. We boys would buy and buy, yearning to fill our gaps. At Topps there must have been an avalanche of nickels rolling in.
I needed the Senators’ first baseman, Mickey Vernon, my favourite player, who led the American League in batting in 1953. His card was scarce. I bought and bought, leafed avidly through the five cards: wrong teams! Wrong players! No Mickey. I offered remarkable enticements to a friend who had one, and who taunted me with it. Knowing how much I yearned for my hero – in owning the card you magically incorporated the person – he declined, reckoning he’d get a better deal in the future. I cajoled, pleaded, ranted. No dice. I could visit Mickey but not acquire him. (At six, I wrote my first short story, a scrappy couple of sentences in crayon, which must have taken all of fifteen minutes to compose. It was called A Friend for Mickey. I was unaware of the relationship to my later compulsion.)
To outflank my mean friend, whom I was soon to drop, I went to a shop, where the choices were as wide as the prices were intimidating. The only dealer I knew sold used comics and baseball cards in tiny premises on Long Island. I remember a podgy, red-faced old man (most men were old) in a soiled Yankees shirt, with lank grey hair and a bored expression. I don’t remember if he had acne, but memory requires it, so I have given him some in deference to that archetypal nerd in The Simpsons, Comic Book Guy. On those interminable hot summer days Dad would drive me to the shop and watch benignly as I prowled about in the stifling gloom. Dust mites floated in the air, making me feel that I was under water like my fairground goldfish (Mickey), as I peered into glass cases at the rarities, or flicked through the commoner cards in the hope of finding one I needed.
Dad didn’t collect anything himself – he had a large number of books, but they were casually put together rather than compulsively assembled – but he was amused by my ardour, and when we got back to my grandparents’ bungalow, where we spent the summers, he would spend a few minutes with me as I installed my acquisitions in my collection. I shocked Granny Pearl by spending five dollars on a rare card that I’d been wanting for ages. I kept it on my bedside table for a week, and showed it off to envious friends, before putting it in the White Owl cigar box that Poppa Norman had given me, and forgetting about it. I’d been offered one or two tempting trades, but declined to part with my treasure except in a straight swap for a Mickey, which would have been fair. No deal. I regularly and intemperately accused Topps of unfair practices, which was right: manipulation of the market meant manipulation of me. Make something virtually unobtainable and any real collector will immediately yearn for it. Scarcity engenders need. Hunger is like that.
Collecting of this childish sort fades, in most boys, after adolescence. My stamp collections and Lionel trains went onto my closet shelf, from which they eventually, mysteriously, disappeared; my Topps cards in their cigar box, too, simply went away. I never regretted the loss of the stamps and trains, but the 1952 Topps became highly collectable in later years, and I must have had some valuable ones. (I don’t remember if I had a 1952 Mickey Mantle rookie card, but they are worth up to $150,000 today.) And that, of course, is why they are valuable, as boy collector after boy collector shelved them, and myriad Moms threw them out in a clear-up as the erstwhile fanatic went to college and entered that collecting latency period from which few emerged. Collecting is one of those boyish things that get put aside. There’s something nerdy, something Comic Book Guy-ish, about an adult playing with train sets, picking up stamps with tweezers, searchi
ng still for a Mickey Vernon. No, if you return to collecting as an adult, it is more often art, or furniture, rugs or ceramics perhaps. Or books, though not many go that route. There are not many book collectors, and almost no one understands them.
I don’t know how I turned into a rare book dealer. It snuck up on me. My unappetising acquaintance the baseball card dealer hardly served as a role model – no one entering that dusty room could have thought, ‘I want to be like him, that’s just the job for me!’
You couldn’t, in those days, train as a book dealer, and though there are now MA courses in the subject, I can’t imagine they are worth doing. You learn the trade willy-nilly, by trial and (mostly) error. Because you pay for your mistakes, buying the wrong thing, or the right one at the wrong price, you learn quickly. During my time writing my D.Phil. at Oxford, I haunted the local used bookshops, and it became a kind of challenge for me to see if I could pay for my holidays by scouting – also called being ‘a runner’ (as in ‘De Camptown Races’, ‘gwine to run all night, gwine to run all day’) – and selling my purchases at a profit to members of the book trade. I had never heard, then, of Et Tu, Healy, or I would have looked.
It is a confirmation of both the obscurity and the intrinsic uninterestingness of Et Tu, Healy that there has been virtually nothing written about it. No sustained consideration, no single article, just a few passing mentions, most of them decades ago. There’s just not enough material to work on, even in the Joyce industry, where thousands of articles have been published about (almost) every possible topic. In my years as a university lecturer, when I occasionally taught courses on Joyce, I had no interest in Et Tu, Healy, lost or found. What did it matter? But I once contemplated writing a bibliomystery, as they are called, about a Russian diplomat and bibliophile who is being blackmailed because he is gay, and in order to raise the money composes a forgery of Et Tu, Healy, which he offers to the University of Texas for a million dollars. I never got further than that, though I liked my prospective title of Et Tu, Borys better than my half-imagined plot.
Et Tu, Healy is not a ghost (a book the publication of which has been announced, but never produced) in the strict bibliographic sense, but it’s close enough for me. I encountered a real one as William Golding’s bibliographer – a project that neither he nor I much enjoyed – when I discovered that there should have been an American printing of his first book (Poems, published in England by Macmillan in 1934), though no copies have been located. But there is something ambiguous about bibliographic ghosts. How can you tell, quite, if a book has been announced and never printed, or announced, printed and then lost?
Joyce’s bibliographers, John Slocum and Herbert Cahoon, list Et Tu as item 1A: the very first of Joyce’s books and pamphlets. (Indeed of Joyce’s first four ‘A’ items, three are broadsides, including The Holy Office (1904) and Gas From a Burner (1912).) Given that Slocum and Cahoon is the first point of call for bibliographic queries about Joyce, it is disappointing how wrong they are about Et Tu, Healy, of which they cite seven lines, the three with which I began, plus the following four:
My cot, alas that dear old shady home
Where oft in youthful sport I played,
Upon the verdant grassy fields all day
Or lingered for a moment in thy bosom shade.
The authority for this attribution would appear to be Stanislaus’s Recollections of James Joyce, but reference to that text makes it clear that Stannie is distinguishing these unprepossessing lines from those of the Parnell poem, not including them in it. In a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver in November 1930, Joyce himself cites the quatrain, which he says he is going to use in Finnegans Wake in a game of Angels and Devil (here represented by Shawn), ‘who maunders off into sentimental poetry of what I actually wrote at the age of nine’. There is something touchingly appropriate in the clumsiness of the phrase, from which a word or two seem to have been omitted. The game, and the poem, Joyce tells Miss Weaver, are soon ‘interrupted by a violent pang of toothache after which he throws a fit’, which may represent an act of literary self-criticism.
No, the Parnell poem is different from, and better than, ‘My Cot Alas’, even if they were written at much the same time. I do not think Joyce’s category ‘sentimental poetry’ would have included Et Tu, Healy, which is written in an altogether different register. So we must reduce what we know of that text by more than half: our ghost is getting ghostlier.
There is usually a lag between an author’s death and the arrival on the market of significant letters, inscribed books and manuscripts. The mother lode – material held by the author himself, his closest friends and family – often takes decades to emerge, having been passed down the generations until someone decides that the choice between some old letters or manuscripts and a manse in Provence is a no-brainer. Recent sales of such Joyce material have realised prices sufficient to throw in a modest yacht as well.
After three decades during which almost no significant Joyce manuscript material emerged, all of a sudden there has been such a quantity of it – letters, inscribed books, working notebooks, whole chapters of Ulysses, draft material for Finnegans Wake – that a newcomer might have supposed such sales were common, or that an assiduous forger had secreted himself in a Martello tower to produce it. Between 2004 and 2010 the National Library of Ireland, which previously lacked any significant Joyce manuscripts, spent over 10 million Euros on manuscript material for both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Descendants of Stanislaus Joyce, John Quinn (the New York lawyer and collector who purchased a manuscript version of Ulysses from Joyce in the 1920s) and Joyce’s friend and amanuensis Paul Leon have all sold material that alters our understanding of Joyce’s achievement. In addition, manuscripts emerging from a Paris bookseller have thrown new light on the history of the composition of both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. And I am told that T. S. Eliot’s library – which has been visited by only a handful of scholars – contains fourteen previously unrecorded letters from Joyce to Eliot.
The more material that is discovered, the more that is likely to emerge. There is a magnetic pull when new discoveries are announced and rewarded: it makes people search their attics that little bit more thoroughly, and reconsider whether now might just be the right time to sell. Might the recent glut of Joyce material, and its attendant publicity, not unearth that elusive copy of Et Tu, Healy? What if it showed up in some disregarded bureau, or interleaved in some old atlas or Dublin directory? Surely if there is one – surely there is one – it must be in Dublin somewhere.
In my world, when you’re talking ghosts you’re talking money. By now you’ll be wanting to know how much a copy, if found, would be worth. My business is based on trading in unique material, and I should be able to figure this one out. What of previously lost pieces which have been found? In 2006 Bernard Quaritch Booksellers offered for sale the only known copy of Shelley’s anonymous pamphlet the Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things, previously assumed to be a ghost. Oddly enough, it too was written in support of a beleaguered Irish figure, a journalist called Peter Finnerty, who had been imprisoned for libel for denouncing the Foreign Secretary, Lord Castlereagh, for abusing Irish prisoners.
The price? Quaritch were asking a million dollars, the archetypal roundness of which suggests that they were arbitrarily assigning a value – like my forger Borys – not attempting accurately to calculate one. If it had been priced at $875,000, it would give one more confidence, carry an authority and suggest some specific computation, however spurious. What about other obscure pieces of juvenilia? There is Evelyn Waugh’s The World to Come: A Poem in Three Cantos, printed when he was thirteen (£50,000?), and Edith Wharton’s Verses, published when she was sixteen ($150,000?), but both are known in a few copies, and neither author compares to Joyce in market terms. Perhaps the comparison should be with other Joyce works? A nice example of the hundred signed copies of the first edition of Ulysses is now worth £250,000. Majestic in its Aegean blue, this is the most desirable issue
of the most important book of the century. Is Et Tu, Healy worth more than that? It isn’t as beautiful, or as important, but it’s rarer. It’s a ghost.
Who’d buy it? I can think of a couple of private collectors, The National Library of Ireland would surely be interested, the University of Texas might stump up, and sometimes buyers emerge at auctions, mysteriously, and then retreat grasping their treasure into the obscurity from which they had momentarily emerged. At the Sotheby’s auction of material from Stanislaus Joyce’s family, someone – not one of the usual Joyce collectors – paid £240,800 for one of the erotic letters that Joyce wrote to his wife, Nora (‘my wild-eyed whore’), in 1909, pining with desire during a brief separation. Nobody knew who the buyer was, though rumours suggested Michael Flatley, the Riverdance hoofer, who is known to be building a library. Would he – if it is he – find an Et Tu, Healy even more exciting than his erotic letter?
But until confronted with a copy, he couldn’t really say. No one could, not exactly. Books, like pictures, are valued by both hand and eye: they need to have some kind of visceral appeal, some crackle and pop, which Jeanette Winterson nicely calls the ‘psychometry of books’. Perhaps the mystique might evaporate when an actual copy emerges and is seen for the trifle that it really is?
Let me ask around: if a copy came up at auction, how much do you predict it would fetch? (Though even this doesn’t necessarily determine how much it is worth, because many items bought at auction are resold quickly and at a profit.) What would Tom Staley make of it? He is Director of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin, the greatest repository of modern literary material in the world, and himself a Joycean. His opinion would partly determine what a copy fetched, even if he wasn’t the buyer.