A Night In The Catacombs E-Book

David M. Kiely

• Herausgeber: The Lilliput Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 370

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 1995

Beschreibung

In this gathering of ten stories, beginning and ending over Dublin's River Poddle, David M Kiely merges history with fiction to illuminate mysteries that have baffled literary scholars for generations. Could the interlocutor in Minot's Tower reveal the precise nature of Dean Swift's dementia? What odd adventures befell Goldsmith on his European excursion? Did Wolfe Tone's brother provide a source for Maria Edgeworth's novels? What was George Moore's reaction to his extraordinary portrait by Manet? Was James Joyce's secret visit to Dublin nurturing an incipient Work in Progress? Were Somerville and Ross in extra-mundane communion? It is a measure of the skill of Kiely's writing – grounded in historical detail, brilliantly observed, stylistically various and exact – that these questions seem not implausible. His findings are often wry, occasionally irreverent, morbid and even brutal, but the reader is left in no doubt that the writers in this work have earned Ireland a special place in the literature of English-speaking peoples. Among the stories we find Brendan Behan, master of ceremonies, carrying out a grotesque experiment in a Fitzwilliam Street drinking den in 1947; the nine-year old Sean O'Casey encountering Maud Gonne and her menagerie; a post-coital Wilfrid Blunt and Lady Gregory discussing the rights of small nations; the madness of Dean Swift explored in a vision in St. Patrick's bell-tower. 'A Night in the Catacombs' is an extraordinary début collection of fictions.

Leseprobe

A Night in the Catacombs

David M. Kiely

The Lilliput Press

Contents

Title Page

The Day the Rhododendrons Bloom’d

To Love a Stranger

A Night in the Catacombs

A Rhyme to Arabi

“Maedeliefje of Eyndhoven” or The Travelling Flautist

Johnny and the Tall Lady

An Hibernian Tale, Taken from Facts

Tally Ho and Away We Go!

The Drowned Man Fished out of the Drink

Hanging

Copyright

The Day the Rhododendrons Bloom’d

At about three in the morning in the summer of 1923, two fishing boats met at a point in the Irish Sea, some sixteen miles due east of Dublin. One of the vessels was Welsh and had departed the little fishing town of Rhosneigr that afternoon. It carried the usual complement of captain and crew of three. By the light of the stars (there was no moon that night) one of those crewmembers was seen to leave the Welsh boat and spring sprightly aboard the Irish vessel. A big leather suitcase was thrown after him. As soon as the transfer was made, both boats turned full rudder. The skipper of the Irish fishing trawler stared uneasily at his passenger.

“Welcome aboard, Professor,” he said without enthusiasm.

“Sank you,” answered the other in a strong Middle-European accent.

He was a thin man and the bulky fisherman’s clothing sat awkwardly upon him. Beneath his dark cap a pair of rimless spectacles gleamed and a full beard covered half his face. He looked curiously about him, swaying unsteadily on the rolling deck. The captain cursed behind his own beard and hoped to blazes the coast guardsman in port was drunk by now or, even better, sleeping it off somewhere out of harm’s way; he doubted that his passenger would pass muster as a crewman. But twenty-five pound notes bulged in his wallet and there would be twenty-five more waiting when they docked.

“Get that case below,” he told one of the men. “Stow it where it’ll not be noticed.”

“Please be careful,” said the passenger, “zat it is not amongst ze fishes. I do not vish to smell as a fish seller tomorrow.”

The captain grunted.

Sixty minutes later the engine was closed down and the boat glided silently between the arms of the harbor wall at Howth. There was no activity on the wharf at that hour; the other trawlers creaked in their moorings, and the skipper steered his vessel to his own. When it bumped against the dock he leaped onto the stone and made the boat fast on a squat iron capstan; the leather suitcase was thrown to him. The passenger disembarked. He looked about him and the captain saw him fill his nostrils with air. Then he turned his head to the south and muttered some words. The captain was not a well-traveled man and his knowledge of languages was scant; he did not recognize the tongue. He could have sworn it bore some resemblance to his native Gaelic but he put this down to his imagination and his nervousness. The only word he thought he understood was “rhododendrons.”

“Quiet now,” he said. “Your man’s waitin’ down beyond.”

The professor nodded and picked up his suitcase. Together they set off in the direction of the harbor town, keeping as much as possible to the shadow of the wharf buildings. They reached the railway station. A solitary motor car was parked in its forecourt: a Citroën. The driver’s door opened and a man wearing a wide-brimmed hat emerged. Money changed hands. The skipper left without a backward glance, one half of his mission completed. The driver turned to the professor and pumped his hand.

“Welcome back, James,” he said.

James Joyce woke later that morning when the first birds sang in the treetops of Donnybrook. It was a beautiful summer morning: the sort of morning you experience in a city that is not built for summer—such a morning takes it by surprise, so to speak. It was just the sort of morning Joyce would have chosen, given the opportunity. It was of good omen, he thought.

He stared at the ceiling, seeing only an expanse of off-white; if there were cracks there (which Joyce doubted, knowing his host) he did not see them. His left eye throbbed, but he was prepared to ignore it. His nose drank in the smells of Dublin: the musty odor of the sheets and the room itself; a smell of Catholicism, of chaste-unchaste bodies that had been in this room at times and had left their auras on the furnishings as surely as a tom-cat marks its territory. He had been in many other rooms in other towns, in other countries, that smelled the same, but knowledge and old prejudices made this room special: Joyce smelled a part of himself.

He closed his eyes again and allowed those post-sleep images to rise: the ones that were important. No Irish Free State, de Valera, civil war, brutality, barbarism, a return to new values. Joyce’s images were of an older Ireland, an older race, predating the present one. Finn Mac Cool. Finn of the dark night of Ireland’s and the world’s past, who stuck his thumb in the roasting salmon and acquired a knowledge of future things.

There was a light tapping on the bedroom door and Joyce said, “Entrez!”

Stephen (for we shall call him Stephen) stood in the opening. “I thought I’d find you awake,” he said, knowing of Joyce’s insomnia.

“Time enough for that,” Joyce answered cryptically, but Stephen was used to his friend’s sometimes recondite humor. “A lovely day for it.”

“The water’s on, if you’d like a wash. I’m making a bit of breakfast for us.”

Joyce nodded appreciatively to the blur. He heard motorcars pass on Morehampton Road and the sound of a child’s laughter. He went to the bathroom; some time later he presented himself in the big kitchen, where the smell of frying eggs and bacon mingled with the smoke of Stephen’s Woodbine cigarette.

“Will you be wearing the beard?” Stephen asked.

Joyce rubbed his chin. “When we go out,” he said. “You have no idea how much that bloody thing itches when you’re not used to one.”

“I would, if I was you,” Stephen cautioned. “There’s enough people in this town’d like to spit in your face or worse if they saw you. Look what happened to Skeffington and Clancy; and Oliver Gogarty was lucky to get away at all.” He filled Joyce’s plate from the frying pan. “It’ll be a while more before we’ve lived Ulysses down, I’m sorry to say—especially the Republicans. You were denounced from every Catholic pulpit in the country, you know. As far as most people are concerned, you’re the world’s most notorious purveyor of pornography.”

“Don’t apologize, Stephen,” said Joyce. “It was to be expected. Besides, the Irish aren’t the only ones. Even Paul Claudel returned the copy I sent him. If I hadn’t signed the bloody thing already, then I could have given it to someone more appreciative.”

Joyce filled his fork with egg and bacon. He ate two mouthfuls then lit one of Stephen’s cigarettes. Breakfast was over.

“Provincialism,” he announced, “will be the death of this country yet. Look at Yeats and Lady Gregory: their idea of a cultural heritage is the ignorant patois of a toothless farm laborer. Now I know not all of us have had the benefit of classical learning; but they have, and that’s why they should know better. I have enormous respect for Yeats as a poet, yet he still seems blinkered by a past that never existed; his mythology is so narrow that it can only turn in on itself in the end—and vanish up its end.”

Stephen laughed with his mouth full. “Enough of slagging Yeats,” he said. “Tell us about the new book.”

Joyce allowed a plume of smoke to wreathe the remains of his breakfast. He puffed lightly on the cigarette, not inhaling.

“Work in Progress,” he said. “I’ve started it at long last. Christ knows when I’ll finish it.”

“Work in Progress,” said Stephen, “is not much of a title.”

“Work in Pregross,” Joyce smiled, “was conceived in passion and will be berthed in pain.” His eyes twinkled myopically and hugely behind the thick lenses, the left lens a pale violet in color. His red-brown hair, still damp from his bath, was brushed forward and parted to one side. “It will be the dream of a Dubliner but, at the same time, a history of the human race, from preconsciousness to the future, and back again.”

“Will it be anything like Ulysses?” Stephen asked, lighting a Woodbine.

“Yes and no,” said Joyce illuminatingly.

Later, they strolled down Morehampton Road in the direction of the Grand Canal. Joyce, though his features were unrecognizable behind the false beard, looked the other way whenever a lorry carrying soldiers passed them. Yet it seemed that Dublin had recovered well from the “Troubles,” as the civil war, lately ended, was euphemistically known. Housewives, employed and unemployed men sauntered, walked and hurried. A cart laden with scrap metal overtook the two friends on Leeson Street Bridge, the horse dropping steaming turds in its wake, the carter singing the praises of the Pride of the County Down.

“How long will it take to write?” Stephen asked.

Joyce laughed, showing his gleaming, newly acquired dentures. “Longer than the last one.” They walked on. “No, really, Stephen, I honestly don’t know. I do believe it may be the last book I’ll ever write.…’

“Always the pessimist.”

“Ah, no,” said Joyce, “that’s not what I meant at all. What I meant was: this book will do things with language that have never been done before—by me or anybody else. And when I’ve done them, there won’t be anything else to do. I’ll have used up all that’s inside me. I’m at the end of English.”

“I think,” said his friend, “you’re too hard on yourself, as usual.”

They came to the south gate to the park known as St. Stephen’s Green. Its paths and well-tended lawns were already thronged with families and others, out early to avail themselves of the warmth of the bank holiday morning. Beyond the trees rose the façade of University College, founded by Cardinal Newman, where Joyce’s literary career had begun, with the publication of an appreciation of Henrik Ibsen’s work. James Joyce knew he was seeing this and his native city for the last time. There was no need to return again; the city was locked in his soul and his memory.

“Work in Progress,” he told Stephen, “will be a summation of my writing to date. It will draw upon it like the sea draws on the Liffey for her life. But when Anna Livia and all the great rivers of the world have flowed into the sea, Anna will have died, only to be reborn from the womb of the mother.”

He paused for a moment or two on the humpback bridge that spanned the duck pond. “But don’t imagine I know how the story ends. I do not. In the same way, I have no idea how the story of Ireland will end: what sort of republic will grow from the madness of the civil war. “There is division hither homeward.”

“But I carry the book in my head, and I have carried it there for many years. Everything that I have written to date has been nothing more than a preliminary exercise; a Fingerübung: the foundations and the walls and the roof. But this book will be the house within the house, wherein the dream is dreamed.”

“I wish I could follow you,” said Stephen, shaking his head.

The pair left the park and crossed the thoroughfare to Grafton Street, Dublin’s most elegant shopping precinct. They arrived presently at Bewley’s Oriental Café, whence the aroma of freshly roasted coffee beans drifted out into the street. Stephen ushered Joyce into its wood-paneled interior, where society matrons sipped from fragile cups and sated their mid-morning appetites with little cakes. The place was noisy with the rattle of plates, and smoky with the cigarettes and cigars of reluctant spouses. Stephen ordered two Brazilian coffees. Joyce nodded gravely to a broad woman wearing an even broader hat at the next table. Her answering smile was small, and she resumed remonstrating with her daughter on some vague point of conduct.

“I vill put it more simply, Herr Doktor,” said Joyce, his voice risen to a thin tenor and sounding like that of a Zürich psychoanalyst, much to the amusement of the daughter, a plain girl of sixteen or seventeen with a long nose and prominent teeth. “H.C. Earwicker, ze hero, can be compared wiss Fregoli. Ziss man iss ze owner off a public house in Chapelizod. He iss ze father off a girl und two boys, Shem und Shaun, und hce dreams off zem und his problems. Ziss, my dear Stefan, iss ze story on ze simplest level.”

At the mention of Chapelizod, both mother and daughter had abandoned their one-sided conversation, and sat sipping tea, ears pricked in Joyce’s direction. He had taken a cigarette holder from his waistcoat pocket, and he pressed a lighted Woodbine into it. He grinned mischievously, reveling in his role as visiting academic, secure in the knowledge that few would recognize him. Stephen egged him on.

“I’ve always been fascinated by dreams,” he said, a little too loudly.

“Ah, dreams,” sighed James Joyce, the “r” thick and glottal. He waved the cigarette holder in the air. “Dreams contain vat my Kollege Herr Jung calls ze archetypes. He hass established zat all human beinks share ze same vuns. Ziss iss because zese archetypes are rooted deep in ze collective consciousness. Ze man vill dream of ze Anima, a female figure zat symbolizes ze repressed bisexual urges of ze dreamer. Ze woman, on ze other hand, vill dream of ze Animus, vizz all ze phallic—”

“Sir!” cried the large woman, very red of face. “I should appreciate it if you did not talk about such disgusting things in public, especially not in front of my daughter!”

Stephen muffled a giggle in his hand. Joyce turned to the woman and puffed on the cigarette, eyes blinking rapidly.

“I do not understand, madam,” he said, his face wearing a hurt expression. “I am merely discussing a scientific matter vizz my learned friend here. Ze question of dreams is vun of great importance to medicine. Ze penis, you see, plays such a vital role in—”

“I do not want to hear it, sir!” snapped the woman, raising her voice more. Heads turned in the coffeehouse. “Keep your German filth for your own country.”

“I am not Cherman, madam,” Joyce protested. “I am Sviss!”

The fine distinction was lost on the large woman. “German, Swiss; it makes little difference,” she told him. “I think your language most unsuitable. Most unsuitable.”

Stephen, on seeing the astonished faces of the café patrons, drained his coffee-cup, picked up the bill, and led his friend by an elbow from the table. Outside in the bright sunlight both broke into loud laughter. They continued arm in arm along the street, beneath the belettered awnings of the stores, smiling and doffing their hats to the more comely ladies. Joyce paused at College Green, his back to Trinity College. He stared shortsightedly at the roadway and struck the ground with his white, ashplant cane. He cocked an ear as though listening intently.

“What is it, James?” Stephen asked.

“The water. Do you not hear the water?”

His friend shook his head in mystification.

“We are standing,” said James Joyce, “directly above the river Stein. It flows beneath Clarendon Street and west of Grafton Street, turns at the bank and joins the Liffey almost opposite the Custom House.” The poet grew excited and several heads turned. “Did you know that,” he went on, “under the streets and pavements of Dublin there are more than eighty miles of watercourses? Rivers! Mile after mile of underground rivers. All flowing darkly to the Liffey and the sea:

“In Xenodub did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where ALP the sacred riverran

Through caverns measureless to man,

Down to the City Quay.”

“Just think,” continued the poet, as they strolled past the Bank of Ireland and along Westmoreland Street, “of all those underground streams and rivers: the subcutaneous veins and arteries of the metropolis, flowing for generations, yet unseen—and unknown to generations. The lifeblood of Dublin.”

O’Connell Bridge, connecting the two halves of the city, greeted them. Sackville Street stretched beyond: the street that had seen death and destruction during the abortive Rising of Easter Week, 1916. Black gaps still marred it left and right. The poet’s poor eyes strained to see the statue that guarded its southern entrance: that of Daniel O’Connell, the great statesman and indefatigable campaigner for the repeal of the Union. Four winged entities at his feet defended the provinces of Ireland.

The River! Joyce leaned over the parapet and looked down with eyes that saw less than his memories. The estuary was at ebb; green and brown slime and weed clung to the stone banks below the high-water mark. Stephen thought that the river smelt evilly. His friend inhaled deeply, almost in trance.

“Anna Livia Plurabelle,” he said reverently. “Mother of all waters. Giver of life and Guinness.”

“I take it,” said Stephen, “she figures prominently in the new book?”

Joyce nodded. “How could she not? The book is about Dublin, and Dublin could not exist without Anna Livia. She gives life to a daughter and two sons, Shem and Shaun, who, being brothers, are naturally rivals.”

“Naturally,” said Stephen, watching two quarreling gulls skim low over the brown and lazily flowing water, their screeching loud and vicious.

“Have you ever wondered,” James Joyce asked almost absently, “why cities built on rivers have very much in common? Dublin on the Liffey, London on the Thames, Paris on the Seine, Vienna on the Danube, Cologne on the Rhine, Rome on the Tiber. The river gives life, true, but the river also creates division, not infrequently a north-south divide. No one engineers this divide; it seems to occur almost by an act of nature.

“Take Dublin: two universities, the parliament, government offices, the wealthy of the city—all established on her south bank. Why, I ask you?”

Stephen shrugged. “Birds of a feather, I suppose,” he said. He glanced at Joyce: lean body propped against the bridge, elegant in his well-tailored suit and spats, the full, false beard incongruous under the Borsalino hat. His weak eyes were half shut against the harsh light of the noon sun. “Or have you a better explanation?”

“It is the duality of things,” said Joyce slowly. “The one becomes the two, of necessity. Two of a kind represent all that kind, in all places and at all times. Names may change, but the principle remains the same. We perceive them as different entities but to history they are the same two entities: Cain and Abel. A further complication arises when Cain strives to become Abel, and Abel Cain. This they will always do, because each seeks, in reality, to become the other. The greater the polarization, the greater the tendency toward union.”

“I think I see what you’re getting at, James,” Stephen said. “One coin, two faces. It’s an interesting thought. But what happens when a third entity comes along?”

“Ah, then we have genuine movement. The opposites, being of equal strength, have held each other at bay, preventing movement, preventing change. But then comes the daughter, the third castle of Dublin, the river in flux. She is needed to renew the cycle, which goes on to repeat itself in a new guise, in a new era.”

“And this will all be contained in Work in Progress?” Stephen asked.

“Oh,” said Joyce with a smile, “that is only half the story; the story from Anna Livia’s point of view. The other is just as import-ant. Perhaps more so.”

Stephen watched a tram cross the bridge. Its open upper deck was a blaze of mothers and children in their Sunday best. A cyclist attempted to cut in front of it; to his consternation, his wheels caught in the tracks, and the tram braked with a jangle of bells and screams from the passengers. Joyce turned at the sounds, not understanding.

“You can tell me all about it presently,” Stephen said to him. Over the little surprise I’ve arranged.”

“White Chianti!” exclaimed James Joyce, holding the glass of pale gold liquid to the light and peering into its depths. “A surprise indeed. You know, I never drink wine until the sun goes down, but today … today …’

“Larry,” said Stephen, indicating the proprietor of the pub in Middle Abbey Street where they sat at a table by the window, “got it through a friend of a friend. It won’t taste the same as it would in la bella Italia, but I hope you enjoy it.” He raised his own glass. “Here’s to the new book.”

Joyce sipped the wine and closed his eyes in satisfaction. “It certainly makes an improvement on what we have to put up with in Bognor,” he said. “But anything’s better than Bognor.…’

“What does Nora think of the place?”

“She and Lucia like it well enough,” said Joyce. “Nora’s sister is with her, but I think she misses Paris, all the same. I know I do.”

Stephen topped up the poet’s glass from the bottle. “I’d like to hear more about Work in Progress.”

James Joyce stroked his false beard and lit a cigarette. He smoked it leisurely, sipping his wine at frequent intervals. His companion knew better than to rush him, and set himself instead to studying the pub’s other occupants. They were a mixed bunch: a hard core of regulars stood shoulder to shoulder with daytrippers, fathers enjoying a respite from their loved ones. Much of the talk concerned the cessation of hostilities that had taken effect in May; the “Irregular’ faction, the IRA, had given up the struggle against those who had signed the infamous treaty, by which the Irish Free State had forfeited sovereignty over six of the counties of Ulster.

The war had been bitter; more bitter even than the fight for independence subsequent to the Rising of 1916. Brother had fought brother, and had murdered almost indiscriminately. More than four thousand people, including many noncombatants, had perished in the conflict. With the approval of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, seventy-seven prisoners of the pro-Treaty forces had been executed.

A short, beefy fellow wearing a straw boater and a handlebar mustache called for a fresh round of drinks, and announced in a Kerry accent: “My cousin told me that they chained nine prisoners to a pole like kippers, so they did. Then they put a mine under ’em and blew the whole shebang to kingdom come.” Heads were shaken in dismay.

What had the struggle been about? The partitioning of the country was one of the immediate causes; more important was the fact that Dublin’s parliamentary representatives were obliged to swear an oath of allegiance to the British monarch. Yet many insisted that civil war, independent of these grievances, was inevitable, owing to the reticence of leaders of both factions to allow the common people of Ireland to decide their own destiny in a democratic way.

The poet had no ears for the recriminatory conversation at the bar. “There was a farmer in County Wicklow called Michael O’Keeffe,” he began. He sipped some Chianti. “A small farmer: he kept ten head of cattle, a few pigs and a fairly sizeable flock of sheep. It was from the last-mentioned that he made most of his livelihood.

“Toward the close of a particularly harsh winter, O’Keeffe and his two sons tended the lambing ewes. The farm was situated high against the slope of the Great Sugarloaf, and the snow still lay thickly on the ground. O’Keeffe and his sons delivered sixteen lambs the first day—hard work, as you can imagine, their hands and faces frozen by the cold.

“All went well, up to a point; Michael O’Keeffe himself delivered four bouncing baby lambs, which were licked dry by the mothers before the wet of the afterbirth froze on their little fleeces. The fifth proved more difficult. The ewe, smaller than the rest, lay panting and drooling wide-eyed in the snow, and O’Keeffe knew that she was in considerable pain. One of his sons helped him move the animal into a comfortable position. Her contractions had started, but the uterus had failed to open. Michael O’Keeffe fed her a teaspoonful of poteen, a remedy that is commonly used in such cases. It did not help. The contractions stopped, then started again, with no sign of the lamb. O’Keeffe was afraid that he might lose the mother, so he sent one of his sons to fetch the vet as soon as the man could come, and left the ewe in order to see to the others.

“When the vet arrived some two hours later, there was no change in the little ewe’s condition.

“‘I can give her something to put her out of her misery,’ the vet said. ‘It’s plain to see she’ll not survive the birth.’

“But Michael O’Keeffe was having none of it, and he urged the vet to examine her internally. Inserting his fingers into the uterus, the vet worked them past the mouth of the womb. The little ewe bleated in protest. Presently the vet withdrew his hand and said, ‘Now I know what the trouble is. There’s two of them.’

“‘What, twin lambs?’ exclaimed Michael. This was a situation he seldom encountered, and certainly not in a ewe of this size.

“‘I felt two heads,’ said the vet. ‘They’ve probably got their legs entangled with one another.’

“‘Isn’t there anything we can do?’ O’Keeffe asked.

“‘I’d say a little prayer, if I were you,’ answered the vet and the farmer wondered whether he was serious. ‘In the meantime, I’ll try to get one of them presentable at least.’

“The vet worked his fingers once more into the ewe, and pushed and prodded. All to no avail. Another hour went by and the sky began to darken. Michael was about to give up all hope and allow the ewe to be put down, when suddenly a small black head and a pair of white forelegs appeared.

“‘Good girl!’ Michael cried. ‘That’s the one anyway.’

“Then, to the men’s surprise, a second tiny head appeared: a white one.

“‘That’s it,’ said the vet ruefully. ‘They’re trying to come out together. It’ll be the death of her, Michael, I’m afraid.’

“O’Keeffe shook his head sadly, convinced that the vet had spoken the truth. Next moment, the ewe gave a little cry and a single body emerged: a lamb having two heads, one black, one white.”

Joyce, storyteller par excellence, had been recounting the tale with complicated movements of his bony hands, each gesture illustrating the parturient struggles of the ewe and the reactions of the men in a manner that rivaled the best mime artists of the Parisian theater. Stephen was captivated.

“Jayziz!” he gasped. “A monster!” He refilled their glasses and signaled to the barman for a fresh bottle. “I saw a picture once of a two-headed dog, but I thought it must have been a hoax; the thing was stuffed anyway.”

“A hoax? Not necessarily,” Joyce told him. “It happens more often than you’d imagine. But such freaks of nature survive for a couple of hours at the most. This one, however, was different.”

“It was plain and downright stupidity,” announced the little man in the straw boater, “for O’Connor’s Irregulars to occupy the Four Courts. Caught like bloody rats in a trap, so they were. Now if that was me, I’d have deployed my men around the city and taken control of the barrackses. Or I’d have gone for Collins in the Castle.”

“Right you are, Brendan,” agreed another. “Collins had only about three thousand men in Dublin at the time. If O’Connor and Mellowes had attacked, instead of barricading themselves in, they’d have wiped the floor with them.”

The new bottle of white wine arrived. James Joyce lit another cigarette; Stephen filled the poet’s glass.

“Glou glou,” said Joyce. “The sound of sacramental wine being poured at a mass.” He said it without humor: a matter of fact, an observation. A group of youths passed by outside in the bright sunshine, singing surprisingly well in unison. The poet smiled broadly, upon hearing their song.

“Well, go on,” Stephen urged. “What became of the lamb?”

“Michael O’Keeffe was greatly disturbed,” continued Joyce. “More than that; he was a highly superstitious man. The ewe died within minutes of giving birth, and this increased his fears. The vet, on the other hand, was intrigued by the whole thing, and he offered to buy the strange creature, perhaps to make a scientific study of it; who can say? O’Keeffe refused. Although he was in awe of the two-headed lamb, it none the less held a certain fascination for him. They argued about it throughout the remainder of the day, the vet insisting that the animal would die anyway and be of no further use to the farmer. He departed the O’Keeffe farm that evening, promising to look in the following day.

“The monster, being motherless, required sustenance from another quarter. Michael O’Keeffe tried to have it suckled by other ewes, but each in turn rejected it. He therefore entrusted it to one of his daughters who, despite her own fear, took pity on the poor, deformed creature. She fed it milk obtained from a ewe, taking care to hold the bottle to each of the little heads in turn.

“Next day, the vet called as promised. The lamb had survived the night, and lay sleeping in the kitchen before the hearth. The vet had brought his notebook with him, and proceeded to make entries, no doubt with the intention of writing a paper at some stage. O’Keeffe’s daughter then began to feed the animal, beginning with the left—the white—head. That went well. But when it came to the turn of the black head, the white one cried out in protest, and the lamb sprang from her arms and raced insanely about the kitchen, seeking escape. They caught it, and once more the daughter tried to give the bottle to the black head. The white one protested again and attempted to push the black head to one side. This happened twice more. Finally the vet said: ‘Never mind. Since they both share the same body, it doesn’t make much difference which head you feed; the milk will go into the one stomach.’

“Nevertheless, when the vet returned to the farm the following day, he was surprised to find the creature still alive. He examined the monstrous thing and observed that it had grown thinner.

“‘I don’t understand it neither,’ said O’Keeffe. ‘She’s been taking the bottle every few hours, but if you ask me, she’s only growing weaker. The milk doesn’t seem to be doing her any good at all.’

“The vet’s diagnosis confirmed this. He left to make his calls and returned that evening. The creature lay before the hearth, panting and making small, nervous movements with its legs. All four eyes were closed. It was obvious that the lamb was at death’s door.

“‘Let me take it with me, Michael,’ the vet said.

“O’Keeffe shrugged. ‘What are going to do with it?’ he asked.

“‘I don’t know yet,’ said the vet. ‘It’s doomed anyway. Maybe I’ll have the poor thing stuffed and put on show in the college in Dublin. They’ll give you a good price for it, at any rate, so you’ll not be out of pocket for the ewe you lost.’

“This seemed a sensible idea, so the vet wrapped the lamb carefully in an old coat, and brought it to his practice in Kilternan. His partner was there when he arrived, and he marveled at the creature, urging the vet to lay it on the table in the surgery. The vet told him of its history.

“‘If it’s going to die in any event,’ said the partner, ‘would you mind if I conducted an experiment on it?’

“‘What sort of experiment?” the vet asked, remembering his promise to Michael O’Keeffe.

“‘If you ask me,’ explained the partner, ‘the body is rejecting all food because the white head refuses to allow the other to be fed. What if we were to remove one head? My guess is that that would save the creature.’

“The vet frowned. What the other said made some sense; it was known that the body—both animal and human—could, at times, reject the food given it, leading to starvation and sometimes death. He had never before performed an operation of such complexity. What, he wondered, would the outcome be, should he and his partner be successful? Glory and fame in the veterinary circles of Dublin—and perhaps London—would be theirs. He acceded.

“‘Which head do we excise?’ he asked.

“‘The weaker one,’ replied his partner without hesitation. ‘The black one.’

“And that is what the surgeons did. Having administered a weak anesthetic, they cut off the black head at the shoulder, the operation and the subsequent stitching lasting several hours. They put the severed head in a jar of alcohol, and retired for the night.

“The following morning, the men found the lamb alive and well, and apparently none the worse for the amputation. The creature accepted nourishment and was placed in a basket to convalesce. A week later they removed the bandages, and the lamb, despite its lopsided appearance, was as fit and healthy as any normal specimen of its kind. It had grown considerably, and its snow-white head measured almost one-and-a-half times the size of the black one preserved in the jar.

“The vet was delighted with the success of the venture, and set off to Michael O’Keeffe’s farm to inform him of events, taking the lamb with him. But, far from being pleased, O’Keeffe flew into a fit of rage, accusing the vet of dishonesty and treachery.

“‘I don’t want the bloody lamb!’ he roared. ‘She looks normal enough, except for that piece out of her where the other head used to be. But I haven’t a hope of selling her in the market in that state.’

“The vet had no option but to pay the farmer for the lamb. When it had grown, he brought it to the slaughterhouse, where he received more than he had paid for it. The paper he wrote together with his partner was turned down by the veterinary college, and all that remained was the little black head in the jar of alcohol.”

Stephen shook his head. “And that’s in the book?” he asked.

“Ah, the book!” said Joyce mischievously. “I’d quite forgotten about the book. Do you not think,” he added, accepting another glass of wine, “that it’s far too nice a day to spoil with talk of writing and philosophy?”

Stephen slapped his knees. “You’re right,” he said. “And here I was forgetting you deserve a little bit of a holiday, away from your labors. What would you like to do, James? Are you hungry?”

“Just think,” said somebody at the bar, “what might have happened if the Brits hadn’t gone and shot Jim Connolly.”

“Would that have made any difference?” asked another.

“I’m damned sure it would’ve. If Connolly and MacNeill’s Volunteers had waited with the Rising—or even if they’d staged another one, later, at the beginning of 1918, when they wanted to introduce conscription—then we’d have caught the English at a bad moment. Our lads at the front—apart from the Unionists, of course—would have mutinied. So would a lot of the ordinary Brits, and the French too. Even the Germans might have laid down their arms, because they were just as sick as everybody else, fighting a rich man’s war for him. There’d have been a general rising of the proletariat, so there would.”

“In which case, you wouldn’t be standing here drinking pints on a bank holiday,” said the man in the straw boater, “but shoveling shite down at the docks like everybody else.”

“I can ask Larry to do us a couple of pies, if you like,” said Stephen. The poet nodded absently; Stephen gave the order and refilled their glasses. If Joyce had vowed to forget or forgo philosophy, then his promise was short lived. He turned his eyes to the smoke-browned ceiling and creased his high brow.

“The book,” he said “is about a dream dreamt by Finn Mac Cool, as he lies dying in Dublin, his head at Howth and his feet in the Phoenix Park. Finn is the Adam Cadmon, the celestial being on whom Man is modeled, and to whose state of perfection Man must aspire.”

“Isn’t that the Cabbala?”

“In a sense, yes. The Cadmon’s journey begins at the feet, in the world of Malkuth, in the Park—”

“Just a minute, James. This is going a bit too fast for me, you know. What in God’s name is the world of Malkuth?”

Joyce spread his hands and made circular motions in the air, the turbulences causing the cigarette smoke and dust motes to spiral and dance in the rays of sunlight from the pub window. The beard, spectacles and dark suit lent him a rabbinical appearance. His speech seemed to change accordingly.

“Imagine,” he said, “ten glowing spheres, from here … to here. They are positioned in such a way that four form a central column, with the remaining six arranged three on each side. This is the Cabbala or Tree of Life.”

“I know of it,” said Stephen.

“Then you will know that these spheres are the Sephiroth which make up the plan of the Universe. This one at the top is the Sephirah of Kether, the Crown, the head of the Cadmon. Beyond it are the three veils. The Sephirah here at the base is called Malkuth, the Kingdom. It is the first rung on the ladder which Finn must climb.”

The publican placed two steaming steak and kidney pies in front of the guests; Stephen pressed two coins into the man’s hand. Joyce appeared not to have noticed the publican or the pies.

“So,” he continued, “in order for Finn to climb to Kether, he must construct pathways between the spheres: twenty-two in all, numbered eleven to thirty-two. At the same time as he constructs his pathways upward, his universal self is engaged in creating a path from Kether to Malkuth. Therefore between them they are building the Temple of the Universe. Do you follow me?”

“With difficulty,” said Stephen, swallowing a mouthful of pie, “but yes, I believe I follow you.”

“The pathway from Kether, the One, leading to Chokmah, the Two, is path number eleven. When Kether becomes Chokmah, unity becomes duality. The fourteenth path, leading from Chokmah to Binah, is called the Path of the Empress. It is ruled by Venus, goddess of love, and Binah is the feminine principle: the Great Sea.

“In the meantime, Finn has constructed the pathway from Malkuth to Yesod. This pathway is numbered thirty-two and is called the Universe. The first worlds he encounters left and right are Hod and Netzach. He carries Hod to Netzach by means of the pathway known as the Tower. But, once in Netzach, he can return to the Middle Pillar only along the pathway known as Death.”

“So he dies?”

“He does, but he is born again on the gallows tree of the Hanged Man, pathway number twenty-three.”

The poet lit another cigarette, his steak and kidney pie un-touched. He stared straight ahead, and his friend knew that his weak eyes were seeing neither the bar nor its occupants.

“Do I take it, then,” Stephen asked, “that this new book of yours is based on the Cabbala?”

“You could,” Joyce replied. “It’s a feast at which the Cabbala is present. A feast of mankind. ‘There are rituals of the elements and feasts of the times. A feast for fire and a feast for water; a feast for life and a greater feast for death!’”

“This all sounds a bit morbid to me,” Stephen remarked.

Joyce cackled merrily, the high-pitched sound causing some of the other drinkers to turn and stare.

“Not at all! Not at all!” cried the poet. “It is a joyous book. It celebrates the joys of life.”

“I think you’re being punny again, James,” said his friend with a smile.

“Ah, but isn’t the pun the highest form of wit?” Joyce replied. “To play with words is to exploit the analogous nature of both life and language. Is Leben not Nebel until the poet shows otherwise? “Is a God to live in a dog?’ Every word carries the seed of its opposite. And every word is an analogy of every other word, just as every one thing is an analogy of every other thing. That is why my book is a mountain into which I will tunnel from all directions, gathering nuggets as I go.”

“And speaking of going,” he said then, rising somewhat unsteadily to his feet, “shouldn’t you and I be doing that? Here I am doing what I said I would not: philosophizing, while out there Dublin is enjoying herself.”

The poet reached for his cane. “Give me your arm, good Stephen,” he said, “and we will disport ourselves amongst the holidaying throng. To sit in a smoke-filled public house on a day like today is little short of sinful.”

“Amen to that,” said his friend, noticing that the second bottle of white wine was now all but empty. He gave Joyce his elbow and they went out into the bustle of Middle Abbey Street. There was indeed a holiday atmosphere in the city. Ragged children hop-scotched happily on the pavement. One little boy detached himself from his playmates and waylaid the men.

“Gizza penny, misther,” he ordered.

Joyce reached into his fob and handed the child three copper pieces. The boy was immediately set upon by the other children. They were still fighting over the coins when Joyce and Stephen turned into Sackville Street. Motorcars, omnibuses, trams and horse-drawn vehicles thronged the broad thoroughfare. A rich odor of droppings rose from the roadway and gutter; Joyce sniffed appreciatively.…

“Poetry,” Minnie Powell declared, “is a grand thing, Mr. Davoren. I’d love to be able to write a poem—a lovely poem on Ireland an’ the men o’ ninety-eight.”

Davoren looked up from his typewriter, surprised to hear these words from a simple dweller of the tenement.

“Oh, we’ve had enough of poems, Minnie,” he told the girl, “about ninety-eight, and of Ireland, too.”

Minnie’s pretty face fell. “Oh,” she exclaimed, “there’s a thing for a Republican to say!” She moved to the window. “But I know what you mean: it’s time to give up the writing an’ take to the gun.”

James Joyce moaned loudly. His friend looked at him in surprise; he was aware of faces staring in their direction.

“Is something the matter, James?” he whispered.

The poet’s eyes were shut behind his spectacles. He waved a hand limply.

“It’s not the sentiment expressed,” he told Stephen, “but how she expresses it: the almost childlike naïveté cloaking the bellicosity of the words. What is her name? She will go far.”

“Gertrude Murphy.”

“Gertrude!” repeated James Joyce with feeling. “Dear Spear, to shake ’neath the beard of the Bard. A worthy foil for Arthur Shields.”

The two friends sat in the front row of the Abbey Theatre, Joyce being unable to follow the action of the play from a greater distance. The house was full, and Stephen had considered himself fortunate to have been able to obtain tickets for the double bill: Lennox Robinson’s Crabbed Youth and Age and Sean O’Casey’s The Shadow of a Gunman. Dublin’s most famous theater had braved the rigors of the civil war: in October of the previous year, players and audience had been trapped in the house until early morning, when snipers’ bullets clove the air in the street outside. The Republican movement had attempted to shut down all Dublin’s cinemas and theaters at the beginning of 1923, but the gallant Abbey had defied the order. They had played under the protection of soldiers of the Free State Army on St. Patrick’s Day.

Joyce was in his element, delighted to be back in the place where W.B. Yeats, J.M. Synge and Lady Gregory had suckled and weaned the Irish literary theatre movement. He followed every word, every gesture of the two performances, making noises of appreciation at frequent intervals. When the curtain fell on The Shadow of a Gunman and the players had taken their third curtain call, Stephen heard him say, half to himself:

“‘Remember all ye that existence is pure joy; that all the sorrows are but as shadows; they pass and are done.’”

“Dublin,” James Joyce said, “is the seventh city of Christendom, and the second city of the Empire. It also ranks as third in Europe for the quantity and quality of its brothels. And one of the finest is to be found in Mountjoy Square.”

“I bow to your superior knowledge,” said Stephen coolly, not entirely impressed by the sight of dilapidated Georgian houses, once grand, now filthy tenements housing Dublin’s poor, their scalloped fanlights missing panes of glass, and the grime of generations on doors and sills. Mountjoy Square.