The art in lighting a fire
Jorn Barger
Father Darlington's lighting the fire using candle ends.
I've never been comfortable with the nuances in Joyce's version (PoA5)--
it seems as if he's cheating, rather like a suburbanite dumping a whole
can of starter fluid on the grill, and then acting smug at seeing it
start up quickly...?
But in Byrne's version, he feels it explicitly as an act of _intimate_
trust: "I felt sure that there was no one else in the college... in
whose presence he would light the fire as he did."
Candles were comparatively expensive, and Darlington is squandering them
disgracefully... yes? Where any normally economical person would take a
little more trouble to arrange the kindling, and save the candles for
better uses?
I'm digesting Byrne a bit at: http://www.robotwisdom.com/jaj/byrne.html
but the eventual purpose of that page will be to host Byrne's
cryptographic challenge, which ought to be easily crackable using
computer power, by now. (If anyone can scan it in from the book, I'll
proofread it.)
This project was set off because yesterday someone announced they'd
cracked an old cypher of Edgar Allen Poe's:
http://www.nandotimes.com/noframes/story/0,2107,500285318-500450085-5029
35451-0,00.html
--
http://www.robotwisdom.com/ "Relentlessly intelligent
yet playful, polymathic in scope of interests, minimalist
but user-friendly design." --Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
Jorn Barger
> I'm digesting Byrne a bit at: http://www.robotwisdom.com/jaj/byrne.html
> but the eventual purpose of that page will be to host Byrne's
> cryptographic challenge, which ought to be easily crackable using
> computer power, by now. (If anyone can scan it in from the book, I'll
> proofread it.)
I'm withdrawing that offer, because a careful reading of Byrne's
appendix convinces me there's no hidden message at all-- the encrypted
texts are _all_ supplied alongside, and the only way he expected to
reward a codebreaker was identifying which few words from the last of
these he'd _repeated_ at the end.
Ellmann's footnote [e64] strongly implies the coded message was secrets
about Joyce, but I think even Ellmann sensed this was ambiguous, because
his phrasing actually waltzes around a firm assertion.
Just so as not to make this message purely negative, here's a way-messy
slightly-Byrne-related dating-puzzle for CM xvii. Full specs at:
http://www.robotwisdom.com/jaj/dedalus.html
On 15Aug JAJ wrote Nora, "I offended two men today by leaving them
coolly..."
Soon after, we can assume, he wrote:
Because your voice was at my side
I gave him pain,
Because within my hand I held
Your hand again.
There is no word nor any sign
Can make amend--
He is a stranger to me now
Who was my friend.
And 12 days later, on 27Aug, Gogarty wrote, clearly referring to the
'Holy Office' poem: "I have broken with Joyce... His want of generosity
became to me inexcusable. He lampooned Yeats, AE, Colum, and others to
whom he was indebted. A desert was revealed which I did not think
existed amid the seeming luxuriance of his soul." (Who is Gogarty to
protest _lampooning,_ though?!?)
[e167] fudges the chronology here in a way that's all too characteristic
of Ellmann, when examined closely: he 'paraphrases' that OG had
_decided_ to break with Joyce on 27Aug, thus allowing Ellmann's Joyce to
trustingly relocate to the Tower, and Gogarty to pull the rug from under
him with no warning... but this makes the (predated) letter-reference
totally inexplicable!
Everyone agrees OG had occupied the Tower by 17Aug. Joyce had been back
at McKernans since mid-July at least, but knew he could stay there only
until 31Aug-- but the pre-27Aug break with OG meant he could no longer
expect to relocate to the Tower on that date.. so he (in fact) drifted
for nine days (Cousins', Murrays', O'Callaghan's) before Gogarty
relented (temporarily).
But the 15Aug letter and the poem state very plainly that the cause of
the break was JAJ's coolness due to Nora, not his ungenerosity in the
poem!??
Curran had rejected the Holy Office poem on 08Aug, and the printers had
sent a proof for correction on 14Aug... but Joyce never got any copies
from the printer because he couldn't pay.
[e162] quotes a 19Aug 1904 letter to JAJ from Byrne in Wicklow (where
Ellmann claims he was spending the summer). The letter refuses a
requested loan (friendlily) but it also clearly protests the satire of
'Holy Office'. If the loan was requested by mail, the poem was (almost
surely) included in the same mail, so Byrne seems impossible as one of
the 'offended two'... but we can guess from the 19Aug date that Joyce
didn't start ciculating copies until after Curran had said no.
(Byrne at [jfb64] claims to remember JAJ bringing him the poem in person
at 100 Phibsboro road-- near JSJ's Cabra house if I read the maps right.
But it seems unlikely in that case that JFB would respond to the poem
(and the loan-request) by letter several days later-- so more likely
Byrne misremembers. If the surviving copy of the poem was never _folded_
this could disprove it was ever mailed, though. JAJ might have handed it
over and left coolly, making Byrne one of the two-offended, and the
other likely a wholly separate occasion. But Ellmann again says Byrne
was away for the season.)
So it seems likely that Gogarty was one of the offended-two, that OG had
seen the poem by the 15th, that JAJ knew OG was seriously offended by
that date, but that from Joyce's point-of-view the problem was his
(JAJ's) lack of interest in discussing the poem, or his rudeness in
delivering it to OG, in person on the 15th, and then departing suddenly
without explanation...? (Did OG yell after him, "You can forget about
the Tower if you're going to act that way!" ...?)
I have to wonder, too, if the 2nd offended man wasn't Trench, so that
OG's 15Aug rage may have had a strong element of I-blow-him-out-about-
you-and-you-put-your-hoof-in-it...? (Or instead of Trench, was the 2nd
some other Holy-Office target that OG was trying to flatter? The
recognisables were: Yeats, Gregory, Synge, Colum, Eglinton, Roberts,
Starkey, AE. OG lists Yeats and AE first. Brazenly enough, Joyce
actually approached almost all these names for travel money in early
October-- Yeats flat-out refused (in a friendly way, though), but AE,
Colum and Roberts are undocumented I think. A debt to AE is acknowledged
in Ulysses, but dated to June of course. Starkey supplied toiletries
from his father's shop.)
Also, 'Eveline' was published in the Homestead on 10Sept, so Joyce had
to have been thinking about asking Nora to leave with him at least a
week before that date. (The mysterious travelling-actor idea was around
22Aug, but that couldn't have included Nora, surely?)
So we can picture the poem (CM xvii) being written as the end of August
was approaching, with the mid-July plan of a year at the Tower to finish
SH suddenly palpably bollocksed by the falling-out with OG... and the
alternate plan of exile just then coming into focus?
Jorn Barger
> And 12 days later, on 27Aug, Gogarty wrote, clearly referring to the
> 'Holy Office' poem: "I have broken with Joyce... His want of generosity
> became to me inexcusable. He lampooned Yeats, AE, Colum, and others to
> whom he was indebted. A desert was revealed which I did not think
> existed amid the seeming luxuriance of his soul." (Who is Gogarty to
> protest _lampooning,_ though?!?)
I've been turning over the lines from 'Holy Office' that are identified
with Gogarty:
Or him whose conduct 'seems to own'
His preference for a man of 'tone'
I dunno why 'seems to own' is in quotes-- probably it appears in one of
OG's poems from that period.
But 'man of 'tone'' I've just scored a bulls-eye on:
Ulick O'C devotes chapter six to Joyce, and chapter seven to...
Arthur Griffith (admirer of Wolfe Tone)
AG was a frequent guest at the Tower in 1905, and UOC says AG was the
one human being Gogarty never made fun of. UOC dates their friendship as
early as 1899 when OG started writing for AG's United Irishman, and says
they remained very close until AG's death in 1922.