Eliot and Joyce, the conservative deserting wide-open America for Catholicism, England and tradition, and the ex-Catholic cosmopolitan fleeing Irish narrowness, make a near pair of opposites, and between them they seem to have torn Sweeney in half. Eliot’s Sweeney is the stage Irishman of nineteenth-century prejudice in the poems “Sweeney Erect,” “Sweeney among the Nightingales,” “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service,” The Waste Land and the play Sweeney Agonistes. The Oxford professor Nevill Coghill says he asked Eliot, “Who is Sweeney?” and Eliot replied, “I think of him as a man who in younger days was perhaps a professional pugilist, mildly successful; who then grew older and retired to keep a pub.” Herbert Knust makes an earnest case that Eliot had in fact found the 1913 Dublin Texts Society translation of The Frenzy of Sweeney and that his brute is akin to the tragic king, but no evidence indicates that Eliot encountered O’Keeffe’s fairly obscure work (and it’s unlikely he could have resisted dropping learned hints about it if he had). Apparently unaware of the original Sweeney and the ironies he was wading into, Eliot seems to have chosen the name to convey a bestial, fleshy, proletarian vulgarity for a character who is man become not bird but ape.
“Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees”: lines of Eliot are permanently embedded in my memory. The slim yellow paperback of Eliot’s selected poems was the first real poetry book I ever encountered, and throughout my adolescence it stood for what poetry was supposed to be, a tight knot of impersonal erudition and description. Though college broadened my reading, it never questioned Eliot’s supremacy, and neither did I until I came back to the Sweeney poems. I was aghast that such arid snobbery and revulsion was my introduction to poetry, and this time around it seemed to overwhelm the art. In “Sweeney Erect,” Eliot writes:
(The lengthened shadow of a man
Is history, said Emerson
Who had not seen the silhouette
Of Sweeney straddled in the sun.)
He recoils from Sweeney shaving, sitting, and consorting with prostitutes; in “Sweeney among the Nightingales,” he manages to work in animosity towards a second character named Rachel Rabinovitch, an apparently Jewish prostitute, who “tears at the grapes with murderous paws.” The nightingales of the poem’s title are, in the London slang of the time, also prostitutes. In contrast to Sweeney and Rabinovitch (whose names diligent Eliot scholars read as suggesting “swine” and “ravenous bitch”), heroic civilization appears at the end of the poem, and it’s classical Greek. The nightingales “sang with in the bloody wood / When Agamemnon cried aloud” and the poem ends with their “liquid siftings” staining “the stiff dishonoured shroud,” apparently like pigeon droppings. This early Eliot seems truly odd upon reinspection, writing mostly about what he dislikes, not with the splendid wrath of a Dante but with purselipped loathing, and it began to seem that the fisher king whose groin wound laid waste the Waste Land was enthroned Eliot himself. Like Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Eliot’s Waste Land manages to appropriate Arthurian romance, a largely Celtic body of literature, while despising actual Celts.
He wrote of Ulysses that “in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity Mr. Joyce is pursuing a . . . way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.” For Eliot, the classics were a yardstick with which to measure the shortcomings of the present; for Joyce, a rhythm by which to beat out the present’s own resonant music. Oh well. Joyce is said to have thought that The Waste Land was a parody of Ulysses. He liked birds, bodies, and the plebeian, and did better by Jews and women too. His biographer, Richard Ellman, writes, “So complicated in his thought and in his prose, Joyce longed to sing; a dream of his youth was to be a bird, both in its song and in its flight.” Harold Nicolson thought the writer resembled a bird and in his diary described Joyce as “some thin little bird, peeking, crooked, reserved, violent and timid. Little claw hands. So blind that he stares away from one at a tangent, like a very thin owl.” Joyce was delighted by his wife’s maiden name, Barnacle, which implies not the shellfish themselves, but the species of Irish goose that in legend hatched from barnacles; beginning as coastal creatures clinging to a rock and ending as long-distance flyers, they make a nice emblematic Irish bird. Seabirds and geese are frequent in his work, as are birds generally. “There are sixteen geese in Ulysses,” writes Nora Barnacle’s biographer, Brenda Maddox, “and seabirds in myriad forms all through the Wake.”
Portrait of the Artist teems with birds, and its accretion of bird images has often been noted. They appear every once in a while at first, and then, well into the book, after the epiphany of the wading girl who “seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird,” real, poetic, and figurative birds begin to appear every few pages. There’s a sort of crescendo of bird epiphanies, when Stephen stands on the steps of the National Library watching the flight of evening birds and wondering “What birds were they?” He contemplates them “building ever an unlasting home under the eaves of men’s houses and ever leaving the homes they had built to wander.” Four lines about birds from a Yeats play drop in, and then our hero kindly interprets the textual birds for us: “Symbol of departure or of loneliness?” Both, naturally: departure and loneliness keep each other company.
There’s an actual Sweeney in Ulysses: the chemist Sweny who sells Bloom the lemon soap that crops up throughout the narrative, and there’s a hint of magic about the alchemical chemist. Ulysses serves as a bible or encyclopedia of Ireland, though, in that everything can be found in it, from Parnell and Casement to geese and half the streets of Dublin, to say nothing of the occasional matzoh, smutty novel, and tinned-meat advertisement. The simplest temperamental distinction between Eliot and Joyce lies in the latter’s ability to invest a cuckolded, kidneyeating, bathing, masturbating, brothel-visiting Irish Jew with a tenderly envisioned humanity. Bloom is, if not a Sweeney, at least a wanderer with something of the Wandering Jew about him, as well as Joyce’s updated Odysseus. Like Sweeney, the Wandering Jew was cursed—in the latter’s case, for failing to succour Christ as he dragged his cross to the Crucifixion—and like Sweeney he was an ambiguous figure, enhanced by his curse. Sweeney, of course, gains the ability to fly; the pedestrian Wandering Jew, immortality. He must walk the earth until Christ’s return, when he will be forgiven and go to heaven, and so he too is an exile and a restless wanderer fated to die penitent in—since this is a Christian myth—the church’s bosom. And what Sweeney has been to twentieth-century poetry, the Wandering Jew was to the nineteenth: a romantic image of the alienated artist.
But Bloom is not particularly cursed, except by his fellow man, and he’s more everyman than artist. It’s Stephen Dedalus who is not just a bird but a Sweeney, and Joyce gives him back his flight. Cunning, exile, and silence are the famous trinity he enumerates, but anguish, exile, and bird behavior suit him equally well. He is, after all, named after Daedalus, the Greek inventor of both the labyrinth and of the wings that took him and his son out of that labyrinth, and he is as anticlerical as Sweeney. In a particularly purple passage of the Portrait, he speculates on his name, seeing in it “a hawk-like man flying sunward above the sea, a prophecy of the end he had been born to serve and been following through the mists of childhood and boyhood, a symbol of the artist forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being.” Stephen Dedalus, not Leopold Bloom, because Bloom is at home in his alienation and in the perpetual exile of the Jews, and like Odysseus he is on a round trip that begins and ends at home. The possibility of making a home of exile—exile as a stable, familiar condition with landmarks and associations—emerges from Bloom in Dublin and Joyce out of it. It is Dedalus who is slated for an exile that shows no sign of a return, who represents his author and artists generally, and who rejects Bloom’s offer of his home at the end of Ulysses.
Ulysses is a narrative of homecoming
, of return from exile, adapted by a perpetual exile as a narrative of narrower scope: Bloom roams not the whole Mediterranean, but the labyrinthine streets of 1904 Dublin and ends at home, or at least a domestic semblance of it; Stephen Dedalus, however, will fly from Dublin for the continent, and for greater freedom. The Frenzy of Sweeney traces the whole route of the exile, from expulsion to penitential return, but it is the fluttering, accursed birdman who can neither stay nor go that is its lasting image.
Sweeney makes an intermediate appearance in 1939 in Flann O’Brien’s first comic novel, At Swim-Two-Birds, where narrative, narrators, and characters in subsidiary narrations all mill about and argue. Considerable portions of The Frenzy that O’Brien translated himself appear with many chatty interruptions; and the novel itself is named after a place in the earlier work. Sweeney shows up in various other guises: in a wordless play by Ireland’s Macnes theater company; in a performance titled Revolted by the thought of unknown places . . . Sweeney Astray in Amsterdam by the performance artist Joan Jonas; in translated snippets by various poets. The film director and writer Neil Jordan takes up the fascination with flight in his novella The Dream of a Beast: “Forget wings, he told me. Watch! He moved both arms as if stroking the air, stepped off the parapet and plummeted like a dead weight. I cried out in alarm, but saw his fall, of a sudden, transform into a graceful curve . . . Wings are quite useless, he said . . . all one needs to fly with is desire.”
In 1983, the same year that Jordan published this tale of metamorphosis from the human, Seamus Heaney reintroduced Sweeney with a free translation of the whole Buile Suibhne, and a year later organized much of his book of poems Station Island around the tale and its motifs of journeys, exile, and birds. Heaney calls his translation “a version” to license its freedoms of interpretation and a few excisions, and he titles it Sweeney Astray. With it he interjected Sweeney into the modern world to an extent neither O’Keeffe’s translation nor O’Brien’s version could; and with it he was not only reviving the Irish birdman for Irish literature, but redressing Eliot’s swinish Sweeney. References to Eliot appear frequently in Heaney’s prose, often to register disagreement or disapproval in such matters as the interpretation of Dante; he could not be unaware of the coincidence of Sweeneys. Eliot’s apenecked former boxer is an antipoet; but in Station Island Heaney becomes Sweeney.
The majority of the poems in Station Island through its three sections concern journeys—flying and fleeing, walking, pilgrimage, driving a car, wandering, following—and they layer together various predecessors in the literature of journeying until all the layers resonate together. Birds appear throughout, united with the motifs of travel and alienation by the metaphors Sweeney supplies. The poem begins with an anecdote about the poet exiting from the London Underground with his wife, an uneventful emergence that becomes Orpheus emerging from Hades and Hansel “retracing his route,” and such accretions of patterns persist throughout the poems. The central section, a prose explanation says, “is a sequence of dream encounters with familiar ghosts, set on Station Island on Lough Derg in Co. Donegal,” an island also known as St. Patrick’s Purgatory. The first ghost is a Traveller—an Irish nomad—from the poet’s childhood named Simon Sweeney, who appears with a lyrelike saw and advises the narrator to “Stay clear of all processions!” The introduction to his Sweeney Astray recalls that “the green spirit of the hedges embodied in Sweeney had first been embodied for me in the persons of a family of tinkers, also called Sweeney, who used to camp in the ditchbacks along the road to the first school I attended”—another restatement of who Sweeney could be.
The last ghost is none other than Joyce himself, “his voice eddying with the vowels of all rivers.” The encounter is told in the terza rima of Dante’s Divine Comedy, and as Dante made a Virgil to guide him where he wished, so Heaney creates a ghost Joyce to advise him. After all the reproachful ghosts of priests and victims of northern violence who precede him, Joyce advises about the poet’s responsibilities and the Irish relationship to English: “Let go, fly, forget.” And when Joyce speaks in Dantean meter, the masters—Homer and Virgil and Dante and Joyce, poets of wandering, seeking, and exile—fall in like a long line of travelers walking in each other’s footprints, with Sweeney flying overhead, ready to guide the third section into further motifs of what one poem calls “a migrant solitude.’
15
Grace
Sometimes it seems to me that time and memory are laid out in a secret geography that can never be mapped directly. Ireland was my third extended trip in a year, and each new landscape called up a corresponding set of dreams. By traveling across the surface of the earth, it seemed, one could begin to explore the geographies of memory, and what had been lost to consciousness could be recovered through judicious arrival in new places. In this sense, one can time-travel through conventional spatial movement, but not according to any comprehensible system. The dream map is not systematic, or maybe the dream territory is unmapped, or unmappable, but surely there have been travelers who traveled solely for the sake of the dreams to be found on strange pillows in strange lands.
In the Canadian Rockies the previous summer, a friend and a dog kept paying visits in my sleep as though their violent deaths had never happened, and the Rockies took on a strangely happy nostalgia; but that winter, I had familial nightmares in Guatemala, and it was hard afterwards to tell how much the dreams had made the place seem so ominous or if the place had made the dreams curdle instead. If every place had its resident dreams, then late-springtime Ireland was infested with former suitors, lovers, and other men, some of whom returned clear as yesterday though I had otherwise half-forgotten them. Some appeared as they seemed when I had been fondest of them, as though intervening history had been erased, and one laid all my books out in the horse pasture behind my childhood home, grass tufts surrounding each rectangle. My journey was, I said to him in a postcard, a very crowded solitude, but on this last leg of my wandering it was women who were beginning to fill up the days, women and the slippage of time.
It’s part of the slippage in time of the traveler, this dream geography, as is one’s attempt to rouse the past that gives the place its meaning. My friend Tim O’Toole visited a friend in Wicklow whose mother told him about Irish time when she was growing up. There were three versions of time, to be exact, rural, country, and official, all superimposed upon one other. Different people and different places subscribed to different versions of what time it was, and in order to be in synchronicity with them, to arrive on time, one had to know where their allegiance lay. In Tim’s story, which of the trinity of times people chose seemed to reflect the past they were tied to: whether they ran by the old time or accepted a recent or modern idea of how the clock ought to be set. Time itself wasn’t a truth but a political position, a stance in relation to the past.
Dream time, clock time, historical time. Being in Ireland always seemed like being in some past point of time, sometimes a decade or a half-century ago when it came to old-fashioned customs and unstreamlined ways of doing things, the length of memory and lack of hurry, the occasional horse-drawn cart in Dublin. I met an Irishwoman named Bride who told me her family felt snubbed that she’d left home without a good solid reason like marriage, and I thought of my own mother facing the same standard forty years earlier, a standard that had faded away in my part of the world. Bride, who had come to take a summer job in a tourist shop in Westport, was the one who casually remarked to me, Your country can’t imagine its future because it can’t remember its past, an idea it had taken me years to arrive at. But Ireland’s future wasn’t much more imaginable either, and the past came washing over it in torrents, along with my own.
It was the existence of the hermitess that seemed to throw me into the deepest past, however. Hermits! St. Anthony was a hermit until his death around A.D. 355, and he and his fellow hermits make frequent appearances in medieval painting and literature. Fictional hermits were strategically placed in deep forests (no doubt cut down si
nce) in Arthurian romances, where they succored imperiled maidens and counciled questing knights. Actual hermits and very small monastic communities had flourished in remote Irish places like the Skellig Rocks in early medieval Ireland, and some of the beehive-shaped stone buildings in which they lived and prayed are still standing. I had thought hermits died out in the Middle Ages, because by the eighteenth century German and English aristocrats who built hermitages in their landscape gardens had to hire hermit impersonators to reside in them and had a hard time keeping them to their ascetic life. I am afraid I grouped hermits with Irish Elk, as marvelous creatures who would never walk this earth again. But Sister Phyllis in Portumna had said to me, If you go to Westport, you should visit the hermitess, Sister Irene. She’s a wonderful person. And the Sisters of Mercy in their big convent in Westport smiled upon me and told me how to get there.
A Book of Migrations Page 21