Donleavy called it his first-ever fan letter. This Æ of the 1957 blue-nosed fan letter could not be the Æ his father so admired, for that Æshuffled off twenty-two years before, in 1935, at the age of sixty-eight, having repented of his initial dismissiveness of Joyce’s Ulysses.
“And there’s no use giving you my name,” the bogus Æ declared, signing only with those two letters.
Sin not against the breath.
And what else is poetry but a struggle for breath, a column of breath, the spirit jet upon which the soul conveys its desire and its wisdom in words? Are you in possession of wisdom, Kerrigan? he asks himself, thinking how wrong he was about Licia, how he had ignored signs, imposing on himself the belief they were happy together. The sex had been great until the last year or so. Then she didn’t want as much anymore. None at all, in fact. He still loved her, decided that there were seasons to everything and congratulated himself on his wise patience, his patient wisdom in not forcing the matter, when in fact she was no doubt already getting it somewhere else. Who was her lover? The neighbor? But no, the neighbor stayed on when Licia disappeared and abducted Gabrielle. So who?
Then once when he had come home from a weeklong literary conference, suddenly she welcomed him into her bed after months of not wanting him. Once. She locked her feet at the small of his back forcing him to come deep in her. Once. And announced a week later that she was pregnant. And she was gone six weeks after that.
He foots on to Grand Canal to look at the door with the fox-head knocker at 33 Haddington Road, one of Patrick Kavanagh’s many south side residences, a poor place with a tiny broken door pane, and Kerrigan asks aloud, “Who bent the coin of my destiny that it sticks in the slot?” remembering his own father reading him Kavanagh’s “The Great Hunger” in which that question is posed, apparently thinking it applied to his life of a loveless marriage, but Kerrigan thinks now it was prophetic of his own life. Did the reading by his father of that poem to Kerrigan at the tender age of thirteen, did that very act bend the coin of Kerrigan’s own destiny so it stuck in the slot, had him running from involvement as from the smell of strange bread until he was ready to be duped by a beautiful young woman of false blue eyes?
He expects no answer and lets his oxblood-shod feet trot him past Parson’s Bookshop, now a sundries store, and down to the Waterloo and Searson’s on Upper Baggot Street. Not certain which one to visit for a pint, he visits each for a glass, finds himself mumbling Kavanagh lines into the second, which causes two persons at the bar to look with surreptitious deadpans his way. I’m not the only one in Dublin muttering to myself, thinks Kerrigan, who has seen several already in protracted conversation with themselves.
But takes his leave all the same and crosses to the Grand Canal and sits on the bench of Percy French, dead in 1920 at the age of sixty-six:
Remember me is all I ask
and yet
If the remembrance proves a task
forget.
Kerrigan blushes remembering having written an epitaph for himself. Licia chided him for being morbid, and he thought he could see fear of his death in her eyes. You are so blind, he thinks, feeling his stupidity and vulnerability and his belief that she truly loved him, as he did her.
INSTRUCTIONS ON MY DEPARTURE
When I die, please cry
Big tears from your blue, blue eyes.
Moan, No! How? Why? Then sigh.
Take from the buffet a tasty cake,
Strong beer. Marvel that I am not here.
Return to the open box and peer
At my pale, closed face, and smile,
Remembering some foolishness of mine.
Think, That old guy was okay.
He was okay. And in time, then, just go your way,
As I know you must do anyway.
His face reddens with shame now at his stupidity, his blindness, thinking that her heart would break when he died long before she, and she had tried to tell him the truth in her drunkenness in the garden that night. He put the monocle over the blind eye and surrendered to Licia’s treachery to an extreme that she must have felt he was her plaything. How cynical she must have been, how mindful of her manipulations, and he was ripe for it. She must have seen that and could not resist such a temptation, saw how she had him in the palm of her hand. In fact, he heard her say that once about a boss—Jeg har ham I mine hule hand—I have him in my hollow hand.
“You asshole,” he mutters aloud there on the Grand Canal. “Asshole!”
He crosses the lock to the other side of the canal to another bench, this one made of bronze and fitted with a long-legged, rumple-suited, life-size bronze of Patrick Kavanagh, dead himself in ’67 at sixty-two, arms crossed, legs crossed, staring through his bronze glasses into the real water of the canal, crumpled bronze hat on the bronze bench beside him, engraved with the wish to be commemorated where there is water, where a swan floats past with head low in apology and a fantastic light peers through the eyes of bridges.
Kerrigan sits and imitates the poet’s stance, watching a gray swan float past like all the questions it didn’t occur to him to ask himself, after all the blindness with which he accepted Licia’s act.
Stopping at Toner’s for a small Bunratty he is thinking again of Joyce. He has spent many hours in the company of Joyce’s prose, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, decades before, saved him from the living death of Irish Roman Catholicism and Irish-American jingoism:
I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: And I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile, and cunning.
It occurred to Kerrigan that in 1968 he turned twenty-five years old and that was the first time he succeeded in reading Joyce’s Ulysses and saw Joseph Strick’s film version of it as well as listening to Siobhan McKenna and E. G. Marshall’s excellent recording of the Molly and Leopold Bloom soliloquies.
That was also the year he sheltered a deserter from the Vietnam War in his apartment in New York, his single “concrete” act of resistance against that war. He identifies that act with Joyce, with his declaration from A Portrait of what he would no longer give allegiance to—religion, family, country—and with the hero of Joyce’s Ulysses, who was not a warrior like its eponymous Greek hero but the pacifist, mild, cuckolded, humanity-loving, passionate Jew, Leopold Bloom.
The power of Joyce’s literary stance aided Kerrigan’s escape from the jingoism that four years earlier had him, without reflection, wearing on his jacket in the chill autumn New York City streets of 1964, in the wake of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, a BOMB HANOI! button. Why he wore that button, other than an unhealthy childhood diet of John Wayne and Senator Joseph McCarthy, he did not know; but he takes some comfort in the fact that both Steinbeck and Kerouac were also confused about Vietnam, and he will as long as he draws breath be grateful to Joyce, who worked so hard to contribute intelligent visions of the world to the world.
Kerrigan has dedicated more than one June 16 to a meditation on the lives of Joyce and Nora as he followed the real path of the fictional Leopold Bloom strolling Dublin streets on his long day’s journey back to Molly’s now famous Yes. In life, on June 16, 1904, Joyce took his first stroll with Nora Barnacle. “Barnacle by name and barnacle by nature,” complained Joyce’s father about his son’s alliance with the uneducated hotel maid with whom he would spend the rest of his life. His choice of that date as the one upon which Leopold Bloom took his walk was a tribute to Joyce’s love for Nora, whom Molly Bloom (and Anna Livia Plurabelle of Finnegans Wake) so closely resemble. Since 1924, many others have also commemorated that day and those characters, year after year, in many cities of the world, celebrating Bloomsday.
Joyce and Nora lived in Zurich briefly in 1904 and again from 1915 to 1919, when the First World War forced them from Trieste. During those four years he wrote much o
f Ulysses, supporting himself on private language lessons and gifts of money. When the war ended, he left, but returned frequently to consult ophthalmologists for his failing eyes and psychiatrists regarding his daughter Lucia’s declining mental condition.
In mid-December 1940 he again fled to Zu rich, this time from France, to escape the Nazi invasion, and there he died just a few weeks later, on January 13, 1941, just before his fifty-ninth birthday, and was buried there in Fluntern Cemetery. Nora remained there with their adult son Giorgio, a singer, until she died in April 1951 and was buried in Fluntern as well; fifteen years later, their separate graves were united there.
Ulysses, to Kerrigan, is a successful artistic experiment, an innovation, that led to a new way of expressing and perceiving something of human existence, a complex fictional presentation of Western culture that functions on many levels. If one takes Homer as the beginning of Western literary history, embodying classical Greek meta phors, values, and symbols upon which the culture builds, then Joyce’s novel might be seen as the conclusion or counterbalance two and a half millennia later.
Joyce’s Ulysses parallels the ten-year journey of Homer’s Ulysses (or Odysseus, as he is known in Greek)—from the Trojan War back to Ithaca where his wife, Penelope, holding off many suitors who think Ulysses dead, and his son, Telemachus, await his return—with the story of a single day in 1904 in the life of a lower-middle-class Dublin Jew, Leopold Bloom, also living on a group of islands, who spends the day of June 16, 1904, walking around Dublin aware that his wife is at home committing adultery with a theater agent named Blazes Boylan. Toward the end of the day, Bloom meets the Telemachus equivalent in Stephen Dedalus.
The chapters of Joyce’s Ulysses roughly parallel the episodes of Homer’s epic, and the levels of meaning of the book are myriad. One of its aims is to celebrate the human body, so each chapter is also characterized by a body organ—for example, in one chapter, Bloom defecates while a church bell rings in the background, a brilliant literary response to the church’s hypocritical suppression of human bodily joy and necessity. The fact that Bloom is a pacifist everyman, a non-macho, non-nationalist humanist as an emblem of modern twentieth-century society, contrasts in a number of ways with Homer’s representation of Ulysses, a heroic warrior journeying home from battle to his faithful wife, and makes a profound and prophetic observation of the possibly increasing strains of our times—feminist, pacifist, anti-jingoist, contra-dogmatist.
Among the many other things that Joyce’s novel does is parody various writing genres, styles, and techniques, and also introduces and develops William James’s concept of stream of consciousness via an interior monologue also employed and developed by others, most notably perhaps Virginia Woolf.
Kerrigan concedes that some of the “experiments” in the book may fairly be viewed indifferently and as largely inaccessible to most readers with out critical guidance as to what Joyce is doing, but the interior monologues, most particularly those of Leopold and Molly Bloom—when he read them for the first time, then heard them orally interpreted on record—instantly changed him, brought him into a profoundly more intimate contact with his own consciousness. And there, he recognized the possibility of accessing his own deeper thought processes and the simultaneity of time as a feature of the makeup of human psychology—not academically, but practically. Society, it seemed then to him—religion, convention, conformity—severely attempted to keep each human being skull-alone with her or his own secret thoughts, fearful of expressing anything but what is sanctioned by conventional consensus thought.
Many decades after the first publication of Ulysses in 1922, stream of consciousness—or its simpler counterpart, stream of experience—is no longer considered avant garde or innovative; it is a standard feature of literary practice throughout the world and a direct reflection of how we are. So even if some experimental fiction is a challenge to read and some readers may not wish to accept that challenge, it is nonetheless an important feature of our literature, of our culture, of our lives as human beings (as opposed, say, to our lives as zombies).
But Kerrigan is convinced that not many readers with even a modicum of sensitivity—whether or not they are literature majors—would fail to be moved by the Bloom soliloquies, most notably Molly’s gorgeous celebration and affirmation of human life and sexuality on which the last sixty pages or so (depending on your edition) of the book flows, giving a view into the mind of a woman character and concluding with her resounding Yes.
To Kerrigan’s mind, people who insist that all fiction must be “realistic” have a problem seeing the difference between life and art. Which was a considerable part of the point of his Ph.D. dissertation about verisimilitude, at a lecture on which Licia was one of the faces in his audience drawing his eyes again and again, following which eight years of his life were derailed by the delusion that she loved him as he loved her. He did love her, he thinks. Or he loved who he thought she was. But she was not who he thought. He considers that the darkest piece of humor of his life—that while he was lecturing her on the illusion of the real in literature, Licia performed a practical demonstration for him of the creation of an illusion and delusion of love whose thrall lasted for eight years.
So, he thinks, she was la belle dame sans merci. Perhaps if he had looked into the stream of his consciousness, he might have seen signs. But he did not. And was left alone, palely loitering. And no birds sang. Yet he is compelled to ask himself again and again how conscious of this was she? How cynical? And the fact that he still is not certain convinces him that he is still as blind as he was the day he fell into his enchantment. She must have thought, As well him as someone else. He has status. Money. He’s not the most exciting-looking guy—could be taller, slimmer, with broader shoulders, narrower hips, long legs, not as big an ass … But he looks okay. He’ll do. Why not? And then she saw him growing older year by year, his flesh sagging, the wattles …
Kerrigan takes a long walk past the Shelbourne, where Kipling and Dickens once slept, past Stephen’s Green, and circles round to the Long Hall on South Great George’s Street, alongside Upper Stephen Street, whose curve is said to follow the edge of the Dubh Lin, the black pool for which Dublin is named and where the Vikings moored their longships in A.D. 838. Here it was that the Danes settled, founding this capital, older by two centuries than their own. On this street, according to his father, the double-dark Kerrigans lived: No doubt, he thinks, this is all myth, family myth, a father’s fictions.
Inside the Long Hall he sits behind the sixteen taps, watching his face in a fish-eye mirror by the cash register. The taps offer Guinness, Guinness, Guinness X Cold, Guinness X Cold, Kilkenny, Smithwick’s, Bulmers Vintage Cider, Carlsberg Lager, Harp, Heineken, Heineken, Budweiser, Murphy’s Irish Stout, Budweiser, Miller Genuine Draft. He sits beneath crystal chandeliers by a stained-glass bar partition. On the back bar shelf a little brass mermaid on a polished marble rock advertises Carlsberg’s Continental Lager, and a man-size grandfather clock with one hand bears a sign announcing CORRECT TIME.
Kerrigan swallows half a pint of half-and-half and wonders about the family tales of his father, persecuted ancestor fleeing to Alsace and turning pacifist and leaving Baden-Baden and Belfort for Bedford-Stuyvesant to avoid conscription in the Franco-Prussian War in 1869. Fictions, delusion, monocle over the blind eye.
He understands then the purpose of his flash decision to visit the Black Pool was a blundering toward a clarification of who he is by viewing where he had come from, but it is all blindness and blundering. He has tried to clothe himself in history and literature, but he is naked as Andersen’s emperor, fit for nothing but the pursuit of pleasure in the present moment as his time melts into the black pool of the past.
Passing the Hairy Lemon on his way to Temple Bar, he thinks of the lemony soap in his pocket and of his Associate and of giving it to her. If he ever sees her again. He steps into the Hairy Lemon to use the facilities. Moving past the bar he notes a backpacker, tall and th
in with dark-browed narrow eyes, open the satchel on his pack to pull out his wallet and, in so doing, drop a double thumb-size brown hard lump on the floor.
Kerrigan stops. “Excuse me, my friend, but I believe you dropped your lump.”
The young man’s narrow-eyed face pales. “Not mine,” he says, eyes full of white.
“I’m sure I saw it fall from your kit,” says Kerrigan, but the boy shakes his head and backs away. “Not mine I tell ya.” American.
Kerrigan bounces the clump on his palm. “You’re sure?”
“Told ya, mister. Not mine.”
Kerrigan shrugs, pockets the lump, and exits the back door with out visiting the gents’ after all. His heart is beating. He steps into the doorway of a secondhand bookshop to see if he is followed and thinks then, Why the hell did I do that?! He regrets pocketing the boy’s stash. For what reason? He should have left it on the floor. But now it is too late, so he continues across Drury.
Through Dame Court, across Dame Street, down Temple Lane, he enters the Temple Bar, where he retires to the basement, closing himself into a stall to empty his bladder and study the brown lump. He smells it, touches the tip of his tongue hesitantly to it. Then worries that it might be literal shit. But he returns it to his pocket and jogs up the stairs to breathlessly order and carry his pint out into the sunny backyard, where he takes a seat alongside a barrel.
He can’t catch his breath, can’t get air comfortably deep into his lungs. From jogging up a flight of stairs? Maybe need to cut down on the Petits. Maybe just one. No inhaling. He lights a cigar, observing the antique tin signs mounted on the walls advertising Powers Whiskey; Bagots, Hutton & Co. Fine Old Whiskey; Murphy’s/From the Wood That’s Good; Bulmer’s: Nothing Added but Time; Crested Ten: John Jameson & Son; Murphy’s Extra Stout: On Draught and in Bottle; Lady’s Well Brewery-Cork; Cantwell’s Café au Lait …
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