"Saut" (leap); "perilleux" (dangerous); SB
separates
the constituents of "saut peril leux" (acrobat's leap).
Samuel Beckett
The article on the
Censorship had doubled him up with Hodder & Stoughton sat
isfactions, his brother was at that very moment en train de baver
la-dessus (meaning that they were very doubtful about its propri
ety), they were living in the hope ofluring (who has been getting
at them? ) me out to Hammersmith, Norah Maguinness [for
9
221
8 September 1934, McGreevy
tillthetunercameonMon. Iprotestedtherewouldbenoharm trying but she swelled & perspired visibly on the right side of the threshold & I went off to the gallery in a pet. However I had already collected books & coat.
Since when no proofs bad cess to them & no invite thank God. Then I went to see Goldsmith. La gueule rose et grave a en mourir. He had no news ofthe verges, i. e. bad news, so I didn't apply for particulars. Richard was back at the gears en route for the Loire. 10 I said that when a man had got into the habit, as I would have seemed to, of estimating his life in terms of apprehending (the eyes closed at this first sign ofdanger & the wary wobble of the jowls) & the motive for living as the impulse to understand perhaps a little improvement on self-justification in the sphere of welfare working, the only calamity was suspension of the faculty or, worse still, the need, to apprehend & understand. He stood up:
McGuinness] was on the verge of return, goodbye.
8 September 1934, McGreevy
Some people apprehend too much, goodbye, know there's no good asking you for dinner, lunch some day, goodbye.
The covey seemed nice after the rest from him & we got
going again. I had an appointment yesterday, but had to put him
offon account ofmy eye which has been rather bad but which is
all right to-day more or less, thanks to stuping, eye-shade &
11
What a reliefthe Mont Ste. Victoire after all the anthropo
morphised landscape - van Goyen, Avercamp, the Ruysdaels,
Hobbema, even Claude, Wilson & Crome Yellow Esq. , or paran
thropomorphised by Watteau so that the Debarquement seems
an illustration of "poursuivre ta pente pourvu qu'elle soit en
montant", or hyperanthropomorphized by Rubens - Tellus in
record travail, or castrated by Corot; after all the landscape "pro
moted" to the emotions of the hiker, postulated as concerned
with the hiker (what an impertinence, worse than Aesop & the
12
Also one ofthe more endearing derivatives ofimpetigo on my lip, where there is quite a little colony of erectile tissue as I discovered during my holiday. I have hopes ofanalysis going a bit faster now. IfI could get it over by Xmas I'd be crowned.
optrex.
animals), alive the way a lap or a fist (Rosa) is alive.
Cezanne
seems to have been the first to see landscape & state it as material
of a strictly peculiar order, incommensurable with all human
expressions whatsoever. Atomistic landscape with no velleities
of vitalism, landscape with personality a la rigueur, but per
13
Ruysdael's [for Ruisdael's] Entrance to the Forest - there is no
entrance anymore nor any commerce with the forest, its dimen
14
standing ofthe term "natural" for idiot.
So the problem (as it would seem to preoccupy perhaps
the least stultified of the younger Dublin decorators, viz.
222
sonality in its own terms, not in Pelman's, landscapality.
sions are its secret & it has no communications to make. Cezanne leaves landscape maison d'alienes & a better under
15
8 September 1934, McGreevy
McGonigail [for MacGonigal]) of how to state the emotion of
Ruysdael in terms of post-impressionist painting must disappear
as a problem as soon as it is realised that the Ruysdael emotion is
no longer authentic & Cuyp's cows as irrelevant as Salomon's
urinator in Merrion Square except as a contrivance to stress the
discrepancy between that which cannot stay still for its phases &
that which can. I felt that discrepancy acutely this last time in
Dublin, myself as exhausted of meaning by the mountains, my
16
sadness at being chained to the oar of my fidgets.
And the
Impressionists darting about & whining that the scene wouldn't
rest easy! How far Cezanne had moved from the snapshot puer
ilities of Manet & Cie when he could understand the dynamic
intrusion to be himself & so landscape to be something by
definition unapproachably alien, unintelligible arrangement of
atoms, not so much as ruffled by the kind attentions of the
17
itch to animise than the etat d'ame balls, banquets & parties.
Or - after Xerxes beating the sea, the Lexicographer kicking the
stone & the Penman under the bed during the thunder - any
irritation more mievre than that of Sade at the impossibilite
18
beginning to be dehumanised as the individual feels himself more & more hermetic & alone & his neighbour a coagulum as alien as a protoplast or God, incapable of loving or hating any one but himself or of being loved or hated by anyone but himself.
19
Reliability Joneses.
Could there be any more ludicrous rationalisation of the
d'outrager la nature. A. E. 's Gully would have thrilled him. Perhaps it is the one bright spot in a mechanistic age - the deanthropomorphizations of the artist. Even the portrait
God love thee & forgive the degueulade. Ever
sf Sam
223
8 September 1934, McGreevy
The Folies Bergeres [for Bergere] was looking unspeakable but
20
TLS; 2 leaves, 3 sides; A env to Thomas McGreevy Esq, Tarbert, Limerick, Irish Free State;
pm 10-9-34, London; TCD, MS 10402/63.
1 McGreevy is in Tarbert with his mother and one of his sisters. McGreevy had deferred his holiday due to work in London; he was also worried about his mother's and his own health (McGreevy to his mother, 29 August 1934 and 23 September 1934, TCD, MS 10381/70 and /71).
2 Irish critic and poet Frederick Robert Higgins (1896-1941) advocated that Irish poets write from folk materials. In his "Recent Irish Poetry," published in The Bookman under the pseudonym of Andrew Belis, SB admired the "good smell of dung" in Higgins's poetry but placed him among the "antiquarians"; in this essay SB quoted the poem that Higgins addresses "To my blackthorn stick": "'And here, as in green days you were the perch, /You're now the prop of song"' (The Bookman 86. 515 [August 19341 235-236); F. R. Higgins, Arable Holdings: Poems [Dublin: The Cuala Press, 1933] 7-8).
SB's essay had "raised a stonn" in Dublin: according to a letter from Denis Devlin to McGreevy: "It appears Yeats was furious: it appears that Austin Clarke [. . . J will pursue Sam to his grave; it appears Seamas [for Seumas! O'Sullivan thought he might have been mentioned at least"; while Higgins was "glad 'he got off so lightly'" (31 August 1934, TCD, MS 8112/5).
3 SB had just moved from Paultons Square to 34 Gertrude Street, Chelsea, two blocks north of the World's End pub on King's Road. Mrs. Frost was from Athlone, Co. Westmeath, Ireland.
"Pipes of port" refers to a measure for 550 litres of port; "midinette" (shopgirl).
4 A"larval"pianoisonewithwoodworminthesoundingboard(EdwardBeckett). The first note of Debussy's "Jeune Fille aux cheveux de Jin" is D-flat.
5 Sanatogenwasthetradenameofglycerophosphatedcasein,aproteinsupplement advertised as a nerve tonic to increase appetite and red blood corpuscles if taken daily.
6 TheWeeklyTelegraph(1862-1951),aSaturdaynewspaperwithnationalcirculation produced by The Sheffield Telegraph, with offices in London and Sheffield.
The Cadogan Hotel. 75 Sloane Street. London SWl; The Hans Crescent Hotel and Service Flats, 1 Hans Crescent, Belgravia, London SWl.
7 GeorgesBraque(1882-1963),Frenchfauvist/cubistpainter. P[aultonsj S[quarej.
8 15CheyneGardens,Chelsea,homeofMrs. HesterDowden. N. isMrs. Neighbour (n. d. ), her housekeeper (Edmund Bentley, Far Horizon: A Biography of Hester Dowden, Medium and Psychic Investigator [London: Rider and Company. 1951144).
"Comme un pretre mis en morceaux" (like a priest torn to pieces); "cache-sexe-. i peine" (a string that couldn't even be called G).
9 InresponsetotherequestofBookman,asSBreportedtoMcGreevy,"Igroundout miserably 1800 words on Censorship for Bookman, which they will surely reject" (28 [for 27j August 1934, TCD, MS 10402/62).
224
the Umbrellas lovely.
The Editor of The Bookman from 1930 to spring 1934 was Hugh Ross Williamson (1901-1978); he was succeeded by his younger brother Reginald Pole Ross Williamson (1907-1966). The journal was in financial difficulty, so the publishers Hodder and Stoughton decided to halt publication; although the Williamson brothers then tried to buy the journal, the final issue of The Bookman was that of December 1934.
"En train de baver la-dessus" (slobbering over it). Reginald Ross Williamson lived in Hammersmith.
Irish-born painter, book illustrator, and designer Norah McGuinness (1901-1980) had studied in Paris and lived in London at this time.
10 Goldsmith has not been identified.
"La gueule rose et grave a en mourir" (all pink faced and desperately solemn). "Verges" (penises, i. e. pricks [More Pricks Than Kicks]).
Richard Aldington had spent June through early September in Austria recovering from an automobile accident, and now was driving to France.
11 "Covey," SB's usual nickname for W. R. Bion, is a variant on the slang "cove" (bloke).
Optrex was a commercial eye drop.
12 SB's reference to Mont. Sainte-Victoire by Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) is to La Montagne Sainte-Victoire au Grand Pin (Venturi 454) from the collection of Samuel Courtauld (1876-1947); it was on loan to the National Gallery, London, from March 1934 and would have been on public display through that year Uacqueline Mccomish, The National Gallery, 26 April 1994).
Dutch artistsJan van Goyen (1596-1656), Hendrik Avercamp (1585-1634), Salomon van Ruysdael (c. 1600-1670), Meindert Hobbema (1638-1709); French artist Claude (le) Lorrain (neClaudeGeleeorGellee,c. 1604-1682);WelshpainterRichardWilson(c. 1713-1782)SB may refer to English artist John Crome (1768-1821) as "Crome Yellow Esq. "
The landscape by Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721), Pelerinage ii l'ile de Cythere (1717; known as Embarkation for the Island of Cythera, Louvre 8525); since 1961 it has been suggested that the theme of the painting is actually departure from the island of Cythera (Michael Levey, "The Real Theme of Watteau's Embarkation for Cythera," Burlington Magazine 103. 698 [May 1961] 180-185; Margaret Morgan Grasselli and Pierre
Rosenberg,Watteau, 1684-1721 [Washington,DC:NationalGalleryofArt,1984]399-401). "Poursuivre ta pente pourvu qu'elle soit en montant" (follow your incline so long as it is uphill), possibly from Andre Gide, Les Faux-Monnayeurs: "11 est bon de suivre sa pente, pourvu que ce soit en montant" (It's a good thing to follow one's inclination, provided it leads upward) (Romans: redts et soties, oeuvres lytiques, ed. Yvonne Davet and Jean-Jacques Thierry. Bibliotheque de la Pleiade [Paris: Gallimard, 1958) 1215; The
Counteefeiters, tr. Dorothy Bussy [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927) 327).
SB characterizes the landcapes ofRubens in terms of Tellus, the Roman goddess of nature, in "travail" (labor). French realist painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875). In the fables attributed to Aesop (629-560 BC). animals have human
attributes. Italian baroque painter, Salvator Rosa (1615-1673).
13 "A la rigueur" Uust about, perhaps).
W. J. Ennever (1869-1947) founded the Pelman Institute for the Scientific Development of Mind, Memory, and Personality in 1989 in London; Pelmanism was a memory theory based on association which was applied specifically to language learn ing; the method was widely advertised as a means to develop the mind's latent powers.
225
8 September 1934, McGreevy
8 September 1934, McGreevy
14 SBreferstoapainting,notbySalomonvanRuysdaelbutbyJacobvanRuisdael (1628/1629-1682), Entrance to the Forest (National Gallery, London. 2563). Although identified as such in the National Gallery Illustrations: Continental Schools (excluding Italian) ([London: Printed for the Trustees. 19371 326), the attribution to Jacob van Ruisdael is now considered dubious; the painting appears as Ford in a Wood near a Church in Seymour Slive,Jacob van Ruisdael: A Complete Catalogue ofHis Paintings, Drawings and Etchings (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001) 638.
15 "Maisond'alienes"(lunaticasylum).
16 Irish landscape painter Maurice J. MacGonigal (1900-1979). Dutch landscape painter Aelbert Cuyp (1620-1691). The Halt (1667, NG! 507) by Salomon van Ruysdael includes a figure urinating against a wall on the far right side of the painting.
The National Gallery of Ireland is on Merrion Square.
17 "Manet&Cie"referstoEdouardManet(1832-1883)andhisfellowimpressionists.
SB substitutes "Reliability" for "Capability" and conflates the name ofEnglish land- scape architect Capability Brown (ne Lancelot Brown, 1716-1783) with that ofEnglish architect Inigo Jones (1573-1652).
18 "Etatd'ame"(mood).
Xerxes the Great (519-465 BC), King of Persia from 486 to 465 BC, built a bridge across the Strymon and two bridges of ships across the Hellespont; when these were destroyed by a storm, he had the sea whipped.
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) refuted Bishop Berkeley's argument "to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal" by "striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone" Games Boswell, Boswell's Life of]ohnson, Together with Boswell'sJournal ofa Tour to the Hebrides andJohnson's Diary ofa Journey into North Wales, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. and enlarged L. F. Powell, I, The Life {1709-1765} [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934] 471).
The "Penman" James Joyce feared thunderstorms: "The thunderstorm as a vehicle of divine power and wrath moved Joyce's imagination so profoundly that to the end of his life he trembled at the sound" (Ellmann,Jamesjoyce, 25).
"Mievre" (childishly vapid).
The Marquis de Sade (ne Donatien-Alphonse-Fran�ois, Comte de Sade, 1740-1814), wrote, for example, in La Nouvelle Justine ou, Les Malheurs de la vertu (1797): "l'impossibi lite d'outrager la nature est, selon moi, le plus grand supplice de l'homme" (the impossibility of an outrage against nature is, for me, man's greatest torment) (Marquis de Sade, Oeuvres completes du Marquis de Sade, VI, ed. Annie Le Brun and Jean-Jacques Pauvert [Paris: Pauvert, 1987] 281).
AE's Seascape: The Gully (Municipal Gallery ofModern Art, now the Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, no. 243) shows two female figures upon a rock, surrounded by the rush and eddy ofthe surf.
19 "Degueulade"(longpuke).
20 Manet'sUnBarauxFolies-BergerewasonexhibitattheNationalGalleryfromthe collection of Samuel Courtauld from 1 March 1934. The painting had been in such poor condition that, when shown in the Manet Exhibition in Paris (1932), it was placed in a specially designed box that controlled conditions; after two years ofrestoration by Kennedy North, it was lent to the National Gallery (Frank Rutter, "Manet's 'Bar aux Folies-Bergere,"' Apollo 19. 113 [May 19341 244-247).
226
Sunday {16 September 1934}, McGreevy
Les Parap! uies (The Umbrellas; National Gallery 3268) by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) was part of the Hugh Lane bequest to the National Gallery that was disputed because of an unwitnessed codicil that altered his bequest to the National Gallery of London in favor of the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin.
THOMAS McGREEVY TARBERT,CO. KERRY
Sunday [16 September 1934) 34 Gertrude Street London S. W. 10
My dear Tom
Glad you had such a pleasant time at Dunquin & that your
Mother is happy. I feel your holiday has been a great success so far & may it end with the beam in your mind that will make such
1
morning. Unfortunately he is only staying the week-end. But he will be telling you his plans himself. It seems on the cards that you will cross together -- 2
I am all right, belting along with the covey with great free dom of indecency & conviction. No work for myself -
I do not see any possibility of relationship, friendly or unfriendly, with the unintelligible, and what I feel in Cezanne is precisely the absence of a rapport that was all right for Rosa or Ruysdael for whom the animising mode was valid, but would have been false for him, because he had the sense of his incom mensurability not only with life of such a different order as land scape but even with life of his own order, even with the life - one feels looking at the self-portrait in the Tate, not the Cezanne chauve but with the big hat - operative in himself. 3 I can under stand the humility in terms of "there but for the grace of G. "
227
a difference to you.
Geoffrey is crossing Friday next & I am seeing him Saturday
Sunday {16 September 1934], McGreevy
or "there but for the disgrace ofthis old bastard", humility before
the doomed & the assumed, but before the panoplies of blank
ness . . . comprends pas. No doubt I exaggerate the improbability
of turning into landscape one very fine day, is that why the
Ghirlandaio Dafne means so much to me? " But from one's
own ragbag of dissociations to the pantheistic monism of the
5
stituted the devoir de discretion for the folie pour rien should be so true now: "La vie d'un homme etait une suite de hasards. Maintenant la civilisation a chasse le hasard, plus d'imprevu. "6
I must think of Rousseau as a champion of the right to be
alone and as an authentically tragic figure in so far as he was
denied enjoyment ofthe right, not only by a society that consid
ered solitude as a vice (il n'y a que le mechant qui soit seul) but by
the infantile aspect, afraid of the dark, of his own constitution.
And he knew it himself, that he would always fall for a show of
tenderness as being more like the genuine uterine article than
the face ofeven the Ile de St. Pierre: "Mon plus grand malheur fut
7
how to trim his sails between the two positions he would have
suffered less. And why not whimper under the bougie? 8 I haven't
read the Contrat, but I suppose [J! ! i� at least is an attempt to
resolve the dichotomy or make the passage between its terms
9
Metamorphoses is a saut too perilleux altogether. Alas that Stendhal's thesis that the world had lost its energy when it sub
toujoursdenepouvoirresisteraux'caresses'". Ifhehadknown
lessofagauntlet&moreofaright-of-way. Butalwaystheback ground of promeneur solitaire, micturating without fear or favour in a decor that does not demand to be entertained, & I think the freedom ample enough to allow of that would not object to Diderot's unbuttoning himself in a select public. A society that can be induced to put up with the "douceur du desoeuvrement" will put up with anything. 10
228
Sunday {16 September 1934}, McGreevy
Herewith divil the much better than nothing. Shall send a quid to-morrow or next day to await you chez Geoffrey. 11
Love ever Sam -
Haven't yet been round to see Hester. 12
ALS; 2 leaves. 4 sides; PS, upper left top margin ofside 1, written perpendicularly to the page; env to Thomas McGreevy Esq. , Tarbert, Limerick, Irish Free State; pm 16-9-34, London; TCD, MS 10402/64. Dating: pm; 16 September 1934 was Sunday.
1 Dunquin,Co. Kerry,isacliff-topvillageoverlookingtheBlasketIslands,nearthe Dingle Peninsula.
2 McGreevy returned to London from Dublin by 22 September (McGreevy to his mother, 23 September 1934, TCD, MS 10381/71). Geoffrey Thompson.
3 SBreferstoaPortraitofCezanne(1879-1882,Venturi366,inthecollectionofLord Ivor Spencer Churchill), on loan to the Tate Gallery from February 1934 to February 1935 Oane Ruddell, Tate GalleryArchive, 23 March 1994). Cezanne's Self-Portrait with Olive Wallpaper (sometimes called Cezanne chauve, 1880-1881, Venturi 365) was acquired by the Tate in 1926 through the Courtauld Fund, but is now in the National Gallery, London (NGL 4135).
4 SBwrote"<his>intermsof. "
"Comprends pas" ([! ] don't understand).
Florentine painter Domenico Ghirlandaio (c. 1448-1494) did no painting of Daphne.
SB may be referring to Apollo and Daphne (1470-1480, NGL 928), painted byAntonio Pollaiuolo (c. 1432-1498), which depicts the dynamics ofthe chase just asApollo has seized Daphne, whose arms have turned to tree branches so that she cannot be carried off by him. "Dafne" is the Italian spelling of"Daphne. "
5 TheMetamorphosesofOvid(nePubliusOvidiusNaso,43BC-AD? 17). "Pantheistic monism" is a term used by Baruch Spinoza (also Benedict de Spinoza, 1632-1677).
"Saut" (leap); "perilleux" (dangerous); SB separates the constituents of "saut peril leux" (acrobat's leap).
6 BeforeheseducesMathilde(Mlle. delaMole),Julienconsiders:"Sonpremierdevoir etait la discretion" (His first duty was to be discreet) (Stendhal, Le Rouge et le noir: chronique du XIXe siecle [Paris; Llbrairie Gamier Freres, 1925; rpt. 1928] 360; Red and Black, ed. and tr. RobertM. Adams,NortonCriticalEditions[NewYork:W. W. Norton&Co. ,1969]290). In themarginofhiseditionofLeRougeetlenoir,SBnoted:"Beyle's[']Foliepourrien· . . . isme" ([Paris: Librairie Gamier Freres, 1925] 360; see also Pilling, ed. , Beckett's Dream Notebook, 127-130; with appreciation to Mark Nixon). "Folie pour rien" (madness for its own sake).
"La vie d'un homme etait une suite de hasards. Maintenant la civilisation a chasse le hasard, plus d'imprevu" ("The life of a man was one continual train of dangers. Nowadayscivilization. . . [has]eliminateddanger,andtheunexpectedneverhappens") (Le Rouge et le noir [1928] 329; Red and Black, 265-266). SB adds the underscore of"etait. "
7 SBcitesDenisDiderot'sLeFilsnature! (1757),whereConstancesays,"]'enappelle a votre coeur, interrogez-le, et ii vous dira que l'homme de bien est dans la societe, et
229
Sunday {16 September 1934}, McGreevy
qu'il n'y a que le mechant qui soit seul" (I appeal to your heart; that oracle will answer, "The virtuous man reveres society; [only] the wicked . . . avoids it") (Le Fils nature! et les Entretiens sur "Le Fils nature! ," ed. Jean-Pol Caput [Paris: Librairie Larousse, 1970] 82; D()111a! , or the Test of Virtue: A Comedy, tr. unattributed [London: privately printed, 1767[ 47).
In the fifth promenade of Les Reveries du promeneur solitaire (1782; The Reveries of the Solitary Walker), Rousseau wrote of his visit to the island of St. -Pierre in Lac de Bienne, north of Neuchatel, Switzerland, where he took a walking tour from 12 September to 25 October 1765.
In Confessions, Book 8, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote: "Mon plus grand malheur fut toujours de ne pouvoir resister aux caresses" (It has always been my greatest misfor tune not to be able to resist flattery) Gean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres completes, I, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, Bibliotheque de la Pleiade [Paris: Gallimard, 1959] 371; Confessions. tr. Angela Scholar [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000] 362). SB adds the single quotation marks around "caresses. "
8 SBreferstothe"bougie"orcatheterwithwhichRousseauwastreatedtorelieve the painful effects of intermittent urine retention. The treatment itself was far from painless.
9 Rousseau'sDuContratsodal,ouPrindpesdudroitpolitique(1762;TheSoda! Contractor Prindples ofPolitical Right) and his novel Emile ou de ! 'education (1762; Emile or On Education). SB wrote "<reconcile the> resolve. " He wrote "<it possible for a man to> the
passage. "
10 Rousseau's meditations, Les Reveries du promeneur solitaire. "Douceur du desoeuvrement" (sweet pleasures of idleness).
11 "Divil" (Ir. colloq. , devil, e. g. "divil the bit" [nothing at all]). SB enclosed a "quid" with his letter of 18 September [1934] to McGreevy, "Chez Geoffrey" (at Geoffrey Thompson's home), 36 Lower Baggot Street, Dublin (TCD, MS 10402/65).
12 Hester Dowden.
THEEDI TOR, POETRY MAGAZINE CH ICAGO
[1 November 1934)
In the magic the Homer dusk
past the red spire of sanctuary
I null and she royal hulk
hasten to the violet lamp to the thin K'in music ofthe bawd.
230
DORTMUNDER1
{1 November 1934), Poetry Magazine
She stands before me in the bright stall sustaining the jade splinters
the scarred signaculum of purity quiet the eyes the eyes black till the plagal east shall resolve the long night phrase.
Then as a scroll, folded,
and the glory of her dissolution enlarged in me, Habbakuk, mard of all sinners. Schopenhauer is dead and the bawd puts her lute away.
MOLY2
The lips of her desire are grey and parted like a silk loop threatening
a slight wanton wound.
She preys wearily
on sensitive wild things
proud to be torn
by the grave crouch of her beauty. But she will die and her snare tendered so patiently
to my vigilant sorrow
will break and hang
in a pitiful crescent.
ECHO'S B0NES3
asylum under my tread all this day their muffled revels as the flesh breaks breaking without fear or favour wind
231
{1 November 1934}, Poetry Magazine
the gantelope of sense and nonsense run taken by the worms for what they are
ENUEG4
Exeo in a spasm
tired of my darling's red sputum
from the Portobello Private Nursing Home
its secret things
and toil to the crest ofthe surge ofthe steep perilous bridge and lapse down blankly under the scream of the hoarding into a black west
throttled with clouds.
Above the mansions the algum-trees the mountains
my head sullenly
clot of anger
skewered aloft strangled in the cang of the wind bites like a dog against its chastisement.
I trundle along rapidly now on my ruined feet flush with the livid canal;
at Parnell Bridge a dying barge
carrying a cargo of nails and timber
rocks itself softly in the foaming cloister of the lock; on the far bank a gang of down and outs would seem
to be mending a beam.
Then for miles only wind
and the weals creeping alongside on the water
and the world opening up to the south
across a lamentable parody of champaign land to the
mountains
232
{1 November 1934}, Poetry Magazine
and the stillborn evening turning a filthy green manuring the night fungus
and the mind annulled
wrecked in wind.
I splashed past a little wearish old man,
Democritus,
scuttling along between a crutch and a stick,
his stump caught up horribly, like a claw, under his breech, smoking.
Then because a field on the left suddenly went up in a blaze ofshoutingandurgentwhistlingandscarletandblueganzies I stopped and climbed a bank to look at the game.
A child fidgeting at the gate called up:
"Would we be let in Mister? "
"Certainly" I said "you would. "
But, afraid, he set off down the road.
"Well" I called after him "why wouldn't you go on in? " "Oh" he said, knowingly,
"I was in that field before and I got put out. "
So on,
derelict,
as from a bush of gorse on fire in the mountain after dark, or, in Sumatra, the jungle hymen,
the still flagrant rafflesia.
Next:
a pitiful family of grey verminous hens
perished out in the sunk field
trembling, half asleep, against the closed door of a shed, with no visible means of roosting.
233
{1 November 1934], Poetry Magazine
The great mushy toadstool
green-black,
oozing up after me,
soaking up the tattered sky like an ink of pestilence, in my skull the wind going fetid,
the water . . .
Next:
on the hill down from the Fox and Geese into Chapelizod
a small malevolent goat, exiled on the road, remotely pucking the gate of his field;
the Isolde Stores a great perturbation of sweaty heroes, endimanches,
come hastening down for a pint of nepenthe or moly or
half and half
from watching the hurlers above in Kilmainham.
Blotches of drowned yellow in the pit of the Liffey; the fingers of the ladders hooked over the parapet, soliciting;
a slush of vigilant gulls in the grey spew of the sewer.
Ah! the banner
the banner of meat bleeding
on the silk of the seas and the arctic flowers! (they do not exist)
TMSS; 2 leaves, 3 sides; enclosing letter not extant; env to The Editor, "POETRY," 232 East Erie Street. Chicago, ILL. , U. S. A. ; pm 1-11-34, London; SB's name and address at lower right margin side 1 and side 3 (only that on side 3 shown here); date stamped received Nov 8, 1934; AN on env. by other hands: /1) Efllusia; /2) The long one seems pure Joycean, but might be worth taking; /3) [in Haniet Monroe's hand[ Maybe I feel lukewarmish; ICU, Zabel Papers, Box 1/F 5. Dating; from pm.
234
{1 November 1934}, Poetry Magazine
1 Variants in this text of"Dortmunder" with respect to the version published in Echo's Bones 119]: 1. 3 "null and" replaced by "null she"; 1. 10 "Then" replaced by "then"; 1. 13 "dead and" replaced by "dead, the. "
2 "Moly"waspublishedinTheEuropeanCaravan(480)as"YokeofLiberty";variants between the 1931 version and this text: line 5, "she" corrected to "She"; line 11, "tamed and watchful sorrow" replaced by "vigilant sorrow. "
3 Variantsbetweenthistextof"Echo'sBones"andtheversionpublishedinEcho's Bones and Other Predpitates [36]: line 2. "breaks" replaced by "falls"; line 5, "worms" replaced by "maggots. "
4 "Enueg"wasfirstpublishedas"Enueg1"inEcho'sBones(1935)[12-15]. Ithadbeen submitted to Seumas O'Sullivan for Dublin Magazine by 27 November 1931 (TCD, MS 4644) and rejected before 20 December 1931. A carbon copy ofthe poem was found among the papers ofRichard Aldington, together with the poem then called "Enueg 2"; the poems came to Aldington before SB renamed "Enueg 2" as "Serena 1," that is before 4 November 1932 (ICSo, Collection 74/1/2; SB to McGreevy, TCD, MS 10402/35).
SB sent a group of his poems to Chatto and Windus (rejected 27 July 1932), to the Hogarth Press (rejected mid-August 1932), then to Rickword (mid-August 1932, with no reply), and possibly to The Bookman (16 August 1934, which rejected a poem by 27 August 1934): no manuscript versions of these submissions have been found. Then SB submitted this version ofthe poem to Poetry Magazine, on 1 November 1934.
235
1935 19/20January By 29 January
3 February
8 February 14 February 26 February
15 March
20April 4May 20May 23-31 July
1 August
By 7 August 20August
By 8 September 18 September
SB returns to London, traveling with Frank Beckett. Sends story "Lightning Calculation" to Lovat
Dickson's Magazine; it is returned immediately. Geoffrey Thompson arrives in London to assume
position at Bethlem Royal Hospital.
SB sends "Lightning Calculation" to Life and Letters. Lucia Joyce in London until 16 March.
SB attends the opening of an exhibition of paint ings by Estella Solomons, Mary Duncan, and Louise Jacobs at Arlington Gallery, London.
Modifies the title of his collection of poems to
Echo's Bones and Other Precipitates.
Easter holiday in Dublin. SB visits Jack B. Yeats. Returns to London.
SB's mother visits England: together they tour Porlock Weir, Stratford, Wells, Lynmouth, Winchester, Bath, Gloucester, and Rugby.
On his own, SB visits Samuel Johnson's birthplace, Lichfield.
Sends his poem "Da Tagte Es" to Dublin Magazine. Begins Murphy.
Sees Nuala Costello in London.
Visits Geoffrey Thompson and goes "round" the ward with him.
237
CHRONOLOGY 1935
Chronology 1935
October 2 October
13 October 2 November
December
By 25 December
Receives proofs ofEcho's Bones and Other Predpitates. Dines with Bion and attends C. G. Jung's third
Tavistock Institute lecture.
Receives Reavey's prospectus for Echo's Bones.
Acts as best man at wedding of Geoffrey and Ursula Thompson, West Lulworth.
Publication of Echo's Bones.
SB returns to Dublin. Ill with pleurisy.
238
THOMAS McGREEVY LONDON
1/1/35 Cooldrinagh [Co. Dublin]
My dear Tom
Thanks for your letter, & for sending papers. Hope the 10/
got through all right. Sorry to hear about Dilly. Have you had to move to Miss Dawkins? 1
The best days have been these spent walking with the dogs. One was specially lovely, over the fields from here across the 3 Rock & 2 Rock & back by Glencullen & the Lead Mines. It was so still that from the top of2 Rock I could hear a solitary accordeon [sic] played down near the Glencullen river, miles away. I thought of a Xmas morning not long ago standing at the back of the Scalp with Father, hearing singing coming from the Glencullen Chapel. 2 Then the white air you can see so far through, giving the outlines without the stippling. Then the pink & green sunset that I never find anywhere else and when it was quite dark a little pub to rest & drink gin in.
[. . . ]
Jack Yeats rang up on Saturday, but I was already on my way to Howth. Apparently he was exquis to Mother on the phone. I must call round. Boss is working in Harry's shop, while Harry still vacates the fort in the Langham. It seems a miracle is required, & Boss awaits it confidently. 3
Yesterday evening I received an astonishing letter from one John Coghlan, Berkeley Road, Dublin, forwarded from Chattos,
239
1 January 1935, McGreevy
in praise of the Proust which he had been reading, and inquir
ing if I had written anything else. M. P. T. K. will change his tune.
I was highly gratified, especially as it cheered up Mother. I had
things out with her, mildly & cautiously, & now things are much
more satisfactory. [. . . ] I fear the analysis is going to tum out a
failure. The heart has not been very good since coming over, &
I had one paralyzing attack at Cissie's, the worst ever. Bion is
4
a dying fire that I could not decently do more than make a
5
ceived. I must look him up however, if only to pump him on the subject of the gallery. Nobody seems to know anything
6
Irish Times. Why doesn't he go to bed with them & get rid of it
7
cially. 8
Dublin is as ever only more so. You ask for a fish & they give
you a piece of bog oak. The form & features of the Gaelic bureau crat are already highly stylicised. I have justified my visit by
9
Junge Kunst series. Do you know his work? I only did from one picture the Boss had in Germany. 10 I find it very interesting. But I think you would jib at the German canister.
240
now a dream habitue.
I found Con & Ethna in such romantic chiaroscuro over
bow & depart. Heureuse Jeunesse. Sean O'Sullivan rang up, but I was not in, or at least that was the impression he re
about it.
I suppose you saw Francis Stuart's noble quadruped in the
that way. He looks more & more like Percy Ussher.
I have been reading The Mill on the Floss. It is at least superior to Shakespeare's Histories. She seems to have under stood infancy after her fashion. The humour is seedy. What a lot Dickens took from her. The facetious columnist espe
stealing back my little Larousse.
Nancy Sinclair showed me a very nice Campendonk in the
1 January 1935, McGreevy
Apologise to Hester for my stupid note. I was laid out that day. I shall look forward to playing the Ravel. Schone Griisse to
11
Sam
ALS; 2 leaves, 3 sides; [black edged env, does not match stationery[ to Thomas McGreevy Esq, 15 Cheyne Gardens, Chelsea, London; pm 1-1-35, Dublin; TCD, MS 10402/67.
1 Hester Dowden's friend, Irish playwright and novelist Geraldine Dorothy Cummins (known as Dilly, 1890-1969), had come to stay in Hester Dowden's home, 15 Cheyne Gardens, Chelsea, London SW3, so that McGreevy was obliged to move to another house, that of George Henry Dawkins who lived at 22 Cheyne Walk.
2 SBdescribeslandmarksofCountyDublin:themountainsThreeRockandTwo Rock, which are named for their outcroppings. The town of Glencullen (1. 75 miles northwest of Two Rock, 4. 5 miles west of Bray) and the Lead Mines in Carrickgollogan, which are marked by an abandoned rock chimney (3. 75 miles west-northwest of Two Rock, and 2. 5 miles west of Bray), were on the return route to Foxrock. A descrip tion of the Scalp: 13 May [1933], n. 14.
3 "Exquis" (delightful).
Boss and Cissie Sinclair Jived in Howth. Boss was working at Harris & Sinclair,
dealers in works of art, 47 South Nassau Street; the firm was managed by Hany Sinclair.
Censorship had doubled him up with Hodder & Stoughton sat
isfactions, his brother was at that very moment en train de baver
la-dessus (meaning that they were very doubtful about its propri
ety), they were living in the hope ofluring (who has been getting
at them? ) me out to Hammersmith, Norah Maguinness [for
9
221
8 September 1934, McGreevy
tillthetunercameonMon. Iprotestedtherewouldbenoharm trying but she swelled & perspired visibly on the right side of the threshold & I went off to the gallery in a pet. However I had already collected books & coat.
Since when no proofs bad cess to them & no invite thank God. Then I went to see Goldsmith. La gueule rose et grave a en mourir. He had no news ofthe verges, i. e. bad news, so I didn't apply for particulars. Richard was back at the gears en route for the Loire. 10 I said that when a man had got into the habit, as I would have seemed to, of estimating his life in terms of apprehending (the eyes closed at this first sign ofdanger & the wary wobble of the jowls) & the motive for living as the impulse to understand perhaps a little improvement on self-justification in the sphere of welfare working, the only calamity was suspension of the faculty or, worse still, the need, to apprehend & understand. He stood up:
McGuinness] was on the verge of return, goodbye.
8 September 1934, McGreevy
Some people apprehend too much, goodbye, know there's no good asking you for dinner, lunch some day, goodbye.
The covey seemed nice after the rest from him & we got
going again. I had an appointment yesterday, but had to put him
offon account ofmy eye which has been rather bad but which is
all right to-day more or less, thanks to stuping, eye-shade &
11
What a reliefthe Mont Ste. Victoire after all the anthropo
morphised landscape - van Goyen, Avercamp, the Ruysdaels,
Hobbema, even Claude, Wilson & Crome Yellow Esq. , or paran
thropomorphised by Watteau so that the Debarquement seems
an illustration of "poursuivre ta pente pourvu qu'elle soit en
montant", or hyperanthropomorphized by Rubens - Tellus in
record travail, or castrated by Corot; after all the landscape "pro
moted" to the emotions of the hiker, postulated as concerned
with the hiker (what an impertinence, worse than Aesop & the
12
Also one ofthe more endearing derivatives ofimpetigo on my lip, where there is quite a little colony of erectile tissue as I discovered during my holiday. I have hopes ofanalysis going a bit faster now. IfI could get it over by Xmas I'd be crowned.
optrex.
animals), alive the way a lap or a fist (Rosa) is alive.
Cezanne
seems to have been the first to see landscape & state it as material
of a strictly peculiar order, incommensurable with all human
expressions whatsoever. Atomistic landscape with no velleities
of vitalism, landscape with personality a la rigueur, but per
13
Ruysdael's [for Ruisdael's] Entrance to the Forest - there is no
entrance anymore nor any commerce with the forest, its dimen
14
standing ofthe term "natural" for idiot.
So the problem (as it would seem to preoccupy perhaps
the least stultified of the younger Dublin decorators, viz.
222
sonality in its own terms, not in Pelman's, landscapality.
sions are its secret & it has no communications to make. Cezanne leaves landscape maison d'alienes & a better under
15
8 September 1934, McGreevy
McGonigail [for MacGonigal]) of how to state the emotion of
Ruysdael in terms of post-impressionist painting must disappear
as a problem as soon as it is realised that the Ruysdael emotion is
no longer authentic & Cuyp's cows as irrelevant as Salomon's
urinator in Merrion Square except as a contrivance to stress the
discrepancy between that which cannot stay still for its phases &
that which can. I felt that discrepancy acutely this last time in
Dublin, myself as exhausted of meaning by the mountains, my
16
sadness at being chained to the oar of my fidgets.
And the
Impressionists darting about & whining that the scene wouldn't
rest easy! How far Cezanne had moved from the snapshot puer
ilities of Manet & Cie when he could understand the dynamic
intrusion to be himself & so landscape to be something by
definition unapproachably alien, unintelligible arrangement of
atoms, not so much as ruffled by the kind attentions of the
17
itch to animise than the etat d'ame balls, banquets & parties.
Or - after Xerxes beating the sea, the Lexicographer kicking the
stone & the Penman under the bed during the thunder - any
irritation more mievre than that of Sade at the impossibilite
18
beginning to be dehumanised as the individual feels himself more & more hermetic & alone & his neighbour a coagulum as alien as a protoplast or God, incapable of loving or hating any one but himself or of being loved or hated by anyone but himself.
19
Reliability Joneses.
Could there be any more ludicrous rationalisation of the
d'outrager la nature. A. E. 's Gully would have thrilled him. Perhaps it is the one bright spot in a mechanistic age - the deanthropomorphizations of the artist. Even the portrait
God love thee & forgive the degueulade. Ever
sf Sam
223
8 September 1934, McGreevy
The Folies Bergeres [for Bergere] was looking unspeakable but
20
TLS; 2 leaves, 3 sides; A env to Thomas McGreevy Esq, Tarbert, Limerick, Irish Free State;
pm 10-9-34, London; TCD, MS 10402/63.
1 McGreevy is in Tarbert with his mother and one of his sisters. McGreevy had deferred his holiday due to work in London; he was also worried about his mother's and his own health (McGreevy to his mother, 29 August 1934 and 23 September 1934, TCD, MS 10381/70 and /71).
2 Irish critic and poet Frederick Robert Higgins (1896-1941) advocated that Irish poets write from folk materials. In his "Recent Irish Poetry," published in The Bookman under the pseudonym of Andrew Belis, SB admired the "good smell of dung" in Higgins's poetry but placed him among the "antiquarians"; in this essay SB quoted the poem that Higgins addresses "To my blackthorn stick": "'And here, as in green days you were the perch, /You're now the prop of song"' (The Bookman 86. 515 [August 19341 235-236); F. R. Higgins, Arable Holdings: Poems [Dublin: The Cuala Press, 1933] 7-8).
SB's essay had "raised a stonn" in Dublin: according to a letter from Denis Devlin to McGreevy: "It appears Yeats was furious: it appears that Austin Clarke [. . . J will pursue Sam to his grave; it appears Seamas [for Seumas! O'Sullivan thought he might have been mentioned at least"; while Higgins was "glad 'he got off so lightly'" (31 August 1934, TCD, MS 8112/5).
3 SB had just moved from Paultons Square to 34 Gertrude Street, Chelsea, two blocks north of the World's End pub on King's Road. Mrs. Frost was from Athlone, Co. Westmeath, Ireland.
"Pipes of port" refers to a measure for 550 litres of port; "midinette" (shopgirl).
4 A"larval"pianoisonewithwoodworminthesoundingboard(EdwardBeckett). The first note of Debussy's "Jeune Fille aux cheveux de Jin" is D-flat.
5 Sanatogenwasthetradenameofglycerophosphatedcasein,aproteinsupplement advertised as a nerve tonic to increase appetite and red blood corpuscles if taken daily.
6 TheWeeklyTelegraph(1862-1951),aSaturdaynewspaperwithnationalcirculation produced by The Sheffield Telegraph, with offices in London and Sheffield.
The Cadogan Hotel. 75 Sloane Street. London SWl; The Hans Crescent Hotel and Service Flats, 1 Hans Crescent, Belgravia, London SWl.
7 GeorgesBraque(1882-1963),Frenchfauvist/cubistpainter. P[aultonsj S[quarej.
8 15CheyneGardens,Chelsea,homeofMrs. HesterDowden. N. isMrs. Neighbour (n. d. ), her housekeeper (Edmund Bentley, Far Horizon: A Biography of Hester Dowden, Medium and Psychic Investigator [London: Rider and Company. 1951144).
"Comme un pretre mis en morceaux" (like a priest torn to pieces); "cache-sexe-. i peine" (a string that couldn't even be called G).
9 InresponsetotherequestofBookman,asSBreportedtoMcGreevy,"Igroundout miserably 1800 words on Censorship for Bookman, which they will surely reject" (28 [for 27j August 1934, TCD, MS 10402/62).
224
the Umbrellas lovely.
The Editor of The Bookman from 1930 to spring 1934 was Hugh Ross Williamson (1901-1978); he was succeeded by his younger brother Reginald Pole Ross Williamson (1907-1966). The journal was in financial difficulty, so the publishers Hodder and Stoughton decided to halt publication; although the Williamson brothers then tried to buy the journal, the final issue of The Bookman was that of December 1934.
"En train de baver la-dessus" (slobbering over it). Reginald Ross Williamson lived in Hammersmith.
Irish-born painter, book illustrator, and designer Norah McGuinness (1901-1980) had studied in Paris and lived in London at this time.
10 Goldsmith has not been identified.
"La gueule rose et grave a en mourir" (all pink faced and desperately solemn). "Verges" (penises, i. e. pricks [More Pricks Than Kicks]).
Richard Aldington had spent June through early September in Austria recovering from an automobile accident, and now was driving to France.
11 "Covey," SB's usual nickname for W. R. Bion, is a variant on the slang "cove" (bloke).
Optrex was a commercial eye drop.
12 SB's reference to Mont. Sainte-Victoire by Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) is to La Montagne Sainte-Victoire au Grand Pin (Venturi 454) from the collection of Samuel Courtauld (1876-1947); it was on loan to the National Gallery, London, from March 1934 and would have been on public display through that year Uacqueline Mccomish, The National Gallery, 26 April 1994).
Dutch artistsJan van Goyen (1596-1656), Hendrik Avercamp (1585-1634), Salomon van Ruysdael (c. 1600-1670), Meindert Hobbema (1638-1709); French artist Claude (le) Lorrain (neClaudeGeleeorGellee,c. 1604-1682);WelshpainterRichardWilson(c. 1713-1782)SB may refer to English artist John Crome (1768-1821) as "Crome Yellow Esq. "
The landscape by Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721), Pelerinage ii l'ile de Cythere (1717; known as Embarkation for the Island of Cythera, Louvre 8525); since 1961 it has been suggested that the theme of the painting is actually departure from the island of Cythera (Michael Levey, "The Real Theme of Watteau's Embarkation for Cythera," Burlington Magazine 103. 698 [May 1961] 180-185; Margaret Morgan Grasselli and Pierre
Rosenberg,Watteau, 1684-1721 [Washington,DC:NationalGalleryofArt,1984]399-401). "Poursuivre ta pente pourvu qu'elle soit en montant" (follow your incline so long as it is uphill), possibly from Andre Gide, Les Faux-Monnayeurs: "11 est bon de suivre sa pente, pourvu que ce soit en montant" (It's a good thing to follow one's inclination, provided it leads upward) (Romans: redts et soties, oeuvres lytiques, ed. Yvonne Davet and Jean-Jacques Thierry. Bibliotheque de la Pleiade [Paris: Gallimard, 1958) 1215; The
Counteefeiters, tr. Dorothy Bussy [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927) 327).
SB characterizes the landcapes ofRubens in terms of Tellus, the Roman goddess of nature, in "travail" (labor). French realist painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875). In the fables attributed to Aesop (629-560 BC). animals have human
attributes. Italian baroque painter, Salvator Rosa (1615-1673).
13 "A la rigueur" Uust about, perhaps).
W. J. Ennever (1869-1947) founded the Pelman Institute for the Scientific Development of Mind, Memory, and Personality in 1989 in London; Pelmanism was a memory theory based on association which was applied specifically to language learn ing; the method was widely advertised as a means to develop the mind's latent powers.
225
8 September 1934, McGreevy
8 September 1934, McGreevy
14 SBreferstoapainting,notbySalomonvanRuysdaelbutbyJacobvanRuisdael (1628/1629-1682), Entrance to the Forest (National Gallery, London. 2563). Although identified as such in the National Gallery Illustrations: Continental Schools (excluding Italian) ([London: Printed for the Trustees. 19371 326), the attribution to Jacob van Ruisdael is now considered dubious; the painting appears as Ford in a Wood near a Church in Seymour Slive,Jacob van Ruisdael: A Complete Catalogue ofHis Paintings, Drawings and Etchings (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001) 638.
15 "Maisond'alienes"(lunaticasylum).
16 Irish landscape painter Maurice J. MacGonigal (1900-1979). Dutch landscape painter Aelbert Cuyp (1620-1691). The Halt (1667, NG! 507) by Salomon van Ruysdael includes a figure urinating against a wall on the far right side of the painting.
The National Gallery of Ireland is on Merrion Square.
17 "Manet&Cie"referstoEdouardManet(1832-1883)andhisfellowimpressionists.
SB substitutes "Reliability" for "Capability" and conflates the name ofEnglish land- scape architect Capability Brown (ne Lancelot Brown, 1716-1783) with that ofEnglish architect Inigo Jones (1573-1652).
18 "Etatd'ame"(mood).
Xerxes the Great (519-465 BC), King of Persia from 486 to 465 BC, built a bridge across the Strymon and two bridges of ships across the Hellespont; when these were destroyed by a storm, he had the sea whipped.
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) refuted Bishop Berkeley's argument "to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal" by "striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone" Games Boswell, Boswell's Life of]ohnson, Together with Boswell'sJournal ofa Tour to the Hebrides andJohnson's Diary ofa Journey into North Wales, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. and enlarged L. F. Powell, I, The Life {1709-1765} [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934] 471).
The "Penman" James Joyce feared thunderstorms: "The thunderstorm as a vehicle of divine power and wrath moved Joyce's imagination so profoundly that to the end of his life he trembled at the sound" (Ellmann,Jamesjoyce, 25).
"Mievre" (childishly vapid).
The Marquis de Sade (ne Donatien-Alphonse-Fran�ois, Comte de Sade, 1740-1814), wrote, for example, in La Nouvelle Justine ou, Les Malheurs de la vertu (1797): "l'impossibi lite d'outrager la nature est, selon moi, le plus grand supplice de l'homme" (the impossibility of an outrage against nature is, for me, man's greatest torment) (Marquis de Sade, Oeuvres completes du Marquis de Sade, VI, ed. Annie Le Brun and Jean-Jacques Pauvert [Paris: Pauvert, 1987] 281).
AE's Seascape: The Gully (Municipal Gallery ofModern Art, now the Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, no. 243) shows two female figures upon a rock, surrounded by the rush and eddy ofthe surf.
19 "Degueulade"(longpuke).
20 Manet'sUnBarauxFolies-BergerewasonexhibitattheNationalGalleryfromthe collection of Samuel Courtauld from 1 March 1934. The painting had been in such poor condition that, when shown in the Manet Exhibition in Paris (1932), it was placed in a specially designed box that controlled conditions; after two years ofrestoration by Kennedy North, it was lent to the National Gallery (Frank Rutter, "Manet's 'Bar aux Folies-Bergere,"' Apollo 19. 113 [May 19341 244-247).
226
Sunday {16 September 1934}, McGreevy
Les Parap! uies (The Umbrellas; National Gallery 3268) by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) was part of the Hugh Lane bequest to the National Gallery that was disputed because of an unwitnessed codicil that altered his bequest to the National Gallery of London in favor of the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin.
THOMAS McGREEVY TARBERT,CO. KERRY
Sunday [16 September 1934) 34 Gertrude Street London S. W. 10
My dear Tom
Glad you had such a pleasant time at Dunquin & that your
Mother is happy. I feel your holiday has been a great success so far & may it end with the beam in your mind that will make such
1
morning. Unfortunately he is only staying the week-end. But he will be telling you his plans himself. It seems on the cards that you will cross together -- 2
I am all right, belting along with the covey with great free dom of indecency & conviction. No work for myself -
I do not see any possibility of relationship, friendly or unfriendly, with the unintelligible, and what I feel in Cezanne is precisely the absence of a rapport that was all right for Rosa or Ruysdael for whom the animising mode was valid, but would have been false for him, because he had the sense of his incom mensurability not only with life of such a different order as land scape but even with life of his own order, even with the life - one feels looking at the self-portrait in the Tate, not the Cezanne chauve but with the big hat - operative in himself. 3 I can under stand the humility in terms of "there but for the grace of G. "
227
a difference to you.
Geoffrey is crossing Friday next & I am seeing him Saturday
Sunday {16 September 1934], McGreevy
or "there but for the disgrace ofthis old bastard", humility before
the doomed & the assumed, but before the panoplies of blank
ness . . . comprends pas. No doubt I exaggerate the improbability
of turning into landscape one very fine day, is that why the
Ghirlandaio Dafne means so much to me? " But from one's
own ragbag of dissociations to the pantheistic monism of the
5
stituted the devoir de discretion for the folie pour rien should be so true now: "La vie d'un homme etait une suite de hasards. Maintenant la civilisation a chasse le hasard, plus d'imprevu. "6
I must think of Rousseau as a champion of the right to be
alone and as an authentically tragic figure in so far as he was
denied enjoyment ofthe right, not only by a society that consid
ered solitude as a vice (il n'y a que le mechant qui soit seul) but by
the infantile aspect, afraid of the dark, of his own constitution.
And he knew it himself, that he would always fall for a show of
tenderness as being more like the genuine uterine article than
the face ofeven the Ile de St. Pierre: "Mon plus grand malheur fut
7
how to trim his sails between the two positions he would have
suffered less. And why not whimper under the bougie? 8 I haven't
read the Contrat, but I suppose [J! ! i� at least is an attempt to
resolve the dichotomy or make the passage between its terms
9
Metamorphoses is a saut too perilleux altogether. Alas that Stendhal's thesis that the world had lost its energy when it sub
toujoursdenepouvoirresisteraux'caresses'". Ifhehadknown
lessofagauntlet&moreofaright-of-way. Butalwaystheback ground of promeneur solitaire, micturating without fear or favour in a decor that does not demand to be entertained, & I think the freedom ample enough to allow of that would not object to Diderot's unbuttoning himself in a select public. A society that can be induced to put up with the "douceur du desoeuvrement" will put up with anything. 10
228
Sunday {16 September 1934}, McGreevy
Herewith divil the much better than nothing. Shall send a quid to-morrow or next day to await you chez Geoffrey. 11
Love ever Sam -
Haven't yet been round to see Hester. 12
ALS; 2 leaves. 4 sides; PS, upper left top margin ofside 1, written perpendicularly to the page; env to Thomas McGreevy Esq. , Tarbert, Limerick, Irish Free State; pm 16-9-34, London; TCD, MS 10402/64. Dating: pm; 16 September 1934 was Sunday.
1 Dunquin,Co. Kerry,isacliff-topvillageoverlookingtheBlasketIslands,nearthe Dingle Peninsula.
2 McGreevy returned to London from Dublin by 22 September (McGreevy to his mother, 23 September 1934, TCD, MS 10381/71). Geoffrey Thompson.
3 SBreferstoaPortraitofCezanne(1879-1882,Venturi366,inthecollectionofLord Ivor Spencer Churchill), on loan to the Tate Gallery from February 1934 to February 1935 Oane Ruddell, Tate GalleryArchive, 23 March 1994). Cezanne's Self-Portrait with Olive Wallpaper (sometimes called Cezanne chauve, 1880-1881, Venturi 365) was acquired by the Tate in 1926 through the Courtauld Fund, but is now in the National Gallery, London (NGL 4135).
4 SBwrote"<his>intermsof. "
"Comprends pas" ([! ] don't understand).
Florentine painter Domenico Ghirlandaio (c. 1448-1494) did no painting of Daphne.
SB may be referring to Apollo and Daphne (1470-1480, NGL 928), painted byAntonio Pollaiuolo (c. 1432-1498), which depicts the dynamics ofthe chase just asApollo has seized Daphne, whose arms have turned to tree branches so that she cannot be carried off by him. "Dafne" is the Italian spelling of"Daphne. "
5 TheMetamorphosesofOvid(nePubliusOvidiusNaso,43BC-AD? 17). "Pantheistic monism" is a term used by Baruch Spinoza (also Benedict de Spinoza, 1632-1677).
"Saut" (leap); "perilleux" (dangerous); SB separates the constituents of "saut peril leux" (acrobat's leap).
6 BeforeheseducesMathilde(Mlle. delaMole),Julienconsiders:"Sonpremierdevoir etait la discretion" (His first duty was to be discreet) (Stendhal, Le Rouge et le noir: chronique du XIXe siecle [Paris; Llbrairie Gamier Freres, 1925; rpt. 1928] 360; Red and Black, ed. and tr. RobertM. Adams,NortonCriticalEditions[NewYork:W. W. Norton&Co. ,1969]290). In themarginofhiseditionofLeRougeetlenoir,SBnoted:"Beyle's[']Foliepourrien· . . . isme" ([Paris: Librairie Gamier Freres, 1925] 360; see also Pilling, ed. , Beckett's Dream Notebook, 127-130; with appreciation to Mark Nixon). "Folie pour rien" (madness for its own sake).
"La vie d'un homme etait une suite de hasards. Maintenant la civilisation a chasse le hasard, plus d'imprevu" ("The life of a man was one continual train of dangers. Nowadayscivilization. . . [has]eliminateddanger,andtheunexpectedneverhappens") (Le Rouge et le noir [1928] 329; Red and Black, 265-266). SB adds the underscore of"etait. "
7 SBcitesDenisDiderot'sLeFilsnature! (1757),whereConstancesays,"]'enappelle a votre coeur, interrogez-le, et ii vous dira que l'homme de bien est dans la societe, et
229
Sunday {16 September 1934}, McGreevy
qu'il n'y a que le mechant qui soit seul" (I appeal to your heart; that oracle will answer, "The virtuous man reveres society; [only] the wicked . . . avoids it") (Le Fils nature! et les Entretiens sur "Le Fils nature! ," ed. Jean-Pol Caput [Paris: Librairie Larousse, 1970] 82; D()111a! , or the Test of Virtue: A Comedy, tr. unattributed [London: privately printed, 1767[ 47).
In the fifth promenade of Les Reveries du promeneur solitaire (1782; The Reveries of the Solitary Walker), Rousseau wrote of his visit to the island of St. -Pierre in Lac de Bienne, north of Neuchatel, Switzerland, where he took a walking tour from 12 September to 25 October 1765.
In Confessions, Book 8, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote: "Mon plus grand malheur fut toujours de ne pouvoir resister aux caresses" (It has always been my greatest misfor tune not to be able to resist flattery) Gean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres completes, I, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, Bibliotheque de la Pleiade [Paris: Gallimard, 1959] 371; Confessions. tr. Angela Scholar [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000] 362). SB adds the single quotation marks around "caresses. "
8 SBreferstothe"bougie"orcatheterwithwhichRousseauwastreatedtorelieve the painful effects of intermittent urine retention. The treatment itself was far from painless.
9 Rousseau'sDuContratsodal,ouPrindpesdudroitpolitique(1762;TheSoda! Contractor Prindples ofPolitical Right) and his novel Emile ou de ! 'education (1762; Emile or On Education). SB wrote "<reconcile the> resolve. " He wrote "<it possible for a man to> the
passage. "
10 Rousseau's meditations, Les Reveries du promeneur solitaire. "Douceur du desoeuvrement" (sweet pleasures of idleness).
11 "Divil" (Ir. colloq. , devil, e. g. "divil the bit" [nothing at all]). SB enclosed a "quid" with his letter of 18 September [1934] to McGreevy, "Chez Geoffrey" (at Geoffrey Thompson's home), 36 Lower Baggot Street, Dublin (TCD, MS 10402/65).
12 Hester Dowden.
THEEDI TOR, POETRY MAGAZINE CH ICAGO
[1 November 1934)
In the magic the Homer dusk
past the red spire of sanctuary
I null and she royal hulk
hasten to the violet lamp to the thin K'in music ofthe bawd.
230
DORTMUNDER1
{1 November 1934), Poetry Magazine
She stands before me in the bright stall sustaining the jade splinters
the scarred signaculum of purity quiet the eyes the eyes black till the plagal east shall resolve the long night phrase.
Then as a scroll, folded,
and the glory of her dissolution enlarged in me, Habbakuk, mard of all sinners. Schopenhauer is dead and the bawd puts her lute away.
MOLY2
The lips of her desire are grey and parted like a silk loop threatening
a slight wanton wound.
She preys wearily
on sensitive wild things
proud to be torn
by the grave crouch of her beauty. But she will die and her snare tendered so patiently
to my vigilant sorrow
will break and hang
in a pitiful crescent.
ECHO'S B0NES3
asylum under my tread all this day their muffled revels as the flesh breaks breaking without fear or favour wind
231
{1 November 1934}, Poetry Magazine
the gantelope of sense and nonsense run taken by the worms for what they are
ENUEG4
Exeo in a spasm
tired of my darling's red sputum
from the Portobello Private Nursing Home
its secret things
and toil to the crest ofthe surge ofthe steep perilous bridge and lapse down blankly under the scream of the hoarding into a black west
throttled with clouds.
Above the mansions the algum-trees the mountains
my head sullenly
clot of anger
skewered aloft strangled in the cang of the wind bites like a dog against its chastisement.
I trundle along rapidly now on my ruined feet flush with the livid canal;
at Parnell Bridge a dying barge
carrying a cargo of nails and timber
rocks itself softly in the foaming cloister of the lock; on the far bank a gang of down and outs would seem
to be mending a beam.
Then for miles only wind
and the weals creeping alongside on the water
and the world opening up to the south
across a lamentable parody of champaign land to the
mountains
232
{1 November 1934}, Poetry Magazine
and the stillborn evening turning a filthy green manuring the night fungus
and the mind annulled
wrecked in wind.
I splashed past a little wearish old man,
Democritus,
scuttling along between a crutch and a stick,
his stump caught up horribly, like a claw, under his breech, smoking.
Then because a field on the left suddenly went up in a blaze ofshoutingandurgentwhistlingandscarletandblueganzies I stopped and climbed a bank to look at the game.
A child fidgeting at the gate called up:
"Would we be let in Mister? "
"Certainly" I said "you would. "
But, afraid, he set off down the road.
"Well" I called after him "why wouldn't you go on in? " "Oh" he said, knowingly,
"I was in that field before and I got put out. "
So on,
derelict,
as from a bush of gorse on fire in the mountain after dark, or, in Sumatra, the jungle hymen,
the still flagrant rafflesia.
Next:
a pitiful family of grey verminous hens
perished out in the sunk field
trembling, half asleep, against the closed door of a shed, with no visible means of roosting.
233
{1 November 1934], Poetry Magazine
The great mushy toadstool
green-black,
oozing up after me,
soaking up the tattered sky like an ink of pestilence, in my skull the wind going fetid,
the water . . .
Next:
on the hill down from the Fox and Geese into Chapelizod
a small malevolent goat, exiled on the road, remotely pucking the gate of his field;
the Isolde Stores a great perturbation of sweaty heroes, endimanches,
come hastening down for a pint of nepenthe or moly or
half and half
from watching the hurlers above in Kilmainham.
Blotches of drowned yellow in the pit of the Liffey; the fingers of the ladders hooked over the parapet, soliciting;
a slush of vigilant gulls in the grey spew of the sewer.
Ah! the banner
the banner of meat bleeding
on the silk of the seas and the arctic flowers! (they do not exist)
TMSS; 2 leaves, 3 sides; enclosing letter not extant; env to The Editor, "POETRY," 232 East Erie Street. Chicago, ILL. , U. S. A. ; pm 1-11-34, London; SB's name and address at lower right margin side 1 and side 3 (only that on side 3 shown here); date stamped received Nov 8, 1934; AN on env. by other hands: /1) Efllusia; /2) The long one seems pure Joycean, but might be worth taking; /3) [in Haniet Monroe's hand[ Maybe I feel lukewarmish; ICU, Zabel Papers, Box 1/F 5. Dating; from pm.
234
{1 November 1934}, Poetry Magazine
1 Variants in this text of"Dortmunder" with respect to the version published in Echo's Bones 119]: 1. 3 "null and" replaced by "null she"; 1. 10 "Then" replaced by "then"; 1. 13 "dead and" replaced by "dead, the. "
2 "Moly"waspublishedinTheEuropeanCaravan(480)as"YokeofLiberty";variants between the 1931 version and this text: line 5, "she" corrected to "She"; line 11, "tamed and watchful sorrow" replaced by "vigilant sorrow. "
3 Variantsbetweenthistextof"Echo'sBones"andtheversionpublishedinEcho's Bones and Other Predpitates [36]: line 2. "breaks" replaced by "falls"; line 5, "worms" replaced by "maggots. "
4 "Enueg"wasfirstpublishedas"Enueg1"inEcho'sBones(1935)[12-15]. Ithadbeen submitted to Seumas O'Sullivan for Dublin Magazine by 27 November 1931 (TCD, MS 4644) and rejected before 20 December 1931. A carbon copy ofthe poem was found among the papers ofRichard Aldington, together with the poem then called "Enueg 2"; the poems came to Aldington before SB renamed "Enueg 2" as "Serena 1," that is before 4 November 1932 (ICSo, Collection 74/1/2; SB to McGreevy, TCD, MS 10402/35).
SB sent a group of his poems to Chatto and Windus (rejected 27 July 1932), to the Hogarth Press (rejected mid-August 1932), then to Rickword (mid-August 1932, with no reply), and possibly to The Bookman (16 August 1934, which rejected a poem by 27 August 1934): no manuscript versions of these submissions have been found. Then SB submitted this version ofthe poem to Poetry Magazine, on 1 November 1934.
235
1935 19/20January By 29 January
3 February
8 February 14 February 26 February
15 March
20April 4May 20May 23-31 July
1 August
By 7 August 20August
By 8 September 18 September
SB returns to London, traveling with Frank Beckett. Sends story "Lightning Calculation" to Lovat
Dickson's Magazine; it is returned immediately. Geoffrey Thompson arrives in London to assume
position at Bethlem Royal Hospital.
SB sends "Lightning Calculation" to Life and Letters. Lucia Joyce in London until 16 March.
SB attends the opening of an exhibition of paint ings by Estella Solomons, Mary Duncan, and Louise Jacobs at Arlington Gallery, London.
Modifies the title of his collection of poems to
Echo's Bones and Other Precipitates.
Easter holiday in Dublin. SB visits Jack B. Yeats. Returns to London.
SB's mother visits England: together they tour Porlock Weir, Stratford, Wells, Lynmouth, Winchester, Bath, Gloucester, and Rugby.
On his own, SB visits Samuel Johnson's birthplace, Lichfield.
Sends his poem "Da Tagte Es" to Dublin Magazine. Begins Murphy.
Sees Nuala Costello in London.
Visits Geoffrey Thompson and goes "round" the ward with him.
237
CHRONOLOGY 1935
Chronology 1935
October 2 October
13 October 2 November
December
By 25 December
Receives proofs ofEcho's Bones and Other Predpitates. Dines with Bion and attends C. G. Jung's third
Tavistock Institute lecture.
Receives Reavey's prospectus for Echo's Bones.
Acts as best man at wedding of Geoffrey and Ursula Thompson, West Lulworth.
Publication of Echo's Bones.
SB returns to Dublin. Ill with pleurisy.
238
THOMAS McGREEVY LONDON
1/1/35 Cooldrinagh [Co. Dublin]
My dear Tom
Thanks for your letter, & for sending papers. Hope the 10/
got through all right. Sorry to hear about Dilly. Have you had to move to Miss Dawkins? 1
The best days have been these spent walking with the dogs. One was specially lovely, over the fields from here across the 3 Rock & 2 Rock & back by Glencullen & the Lead Mines. It was so still that from the top of2 Rock I could hear a solitary accordeon [sic] played down near the Glencullen river, miles away. I thought of a Xmas morning not long ago standing at the back of the Scalp with Father, hearing singing coming from the Glencullen Chapel. 2 Then the white air you can see so far through, giving the outlines without the stippling. Then the pink & green sunset that I never find anywhere else and when it was quite dark a little pub to rest & drink gin in.
[. . . ]
Jack Yeats rang up on Saturday, but I was already on my way to Howth. Apparently he was exquis to Mother on the phone. I must call round. Boss is working in Harry's shop, while Harry still vacates the fort in the Langham. It seems a miracle is required, & Boss awaits it confidently. 3
Yesterday evening I received an astonishing letter from one John Coghlan, Berkeley Road, Dublin, forwarded from Chattos,
239
1 January 1935, McGreevy
in praise of the Proust which he had been reading, and inquir
ing if I had written anything else. M. P. T. K. will change his tune.
I was highly gratified, especially as it cheered up Mother. I had
things out with her, mildly & cautiously, & now things are much
more satisfactory. [. . . ] I fear the analysis is going to tum out a
failure. The heart has not been very good since coming over, &
I had one paralyzing attack at Cissie's, the worst ever. Bion is
4
a dying fire that I could not decently do more than make a
5
ceived. I must look him up however, if only to pump him on the subject of the gallery. Nobody seems to know anything
6
Irish Times. Why doesn't he go to bed with them & get rid of it
7
cially. 8
Dublin is as ever only more so. You ask for a fish & they give
you a piece of bog oak. The form & features of the Gaelic bureau crat are already highly stylicised. I have justified my visit by
9
Junge Kunst series. Do you know his work? I only did from one picture the Boss had in Germany. 10 I find it very interesting. But I think you would jib at the German canister.
240
now a dream habitue.
I found Con & Ethna in such romantic chiaroscuro over
bow & depart. Heureuse Jeunesse. Sean O'Sullivan rang up, but I was not in, or at least that was the impression he re
about it.
I suppose you saw Francis Stuart's noble quadruped in the
that way. He looks more & more like Percy Ussher.
I have been reading The Mill on the Floss. It is at least superior to Shakespeare's Histories. She seems to have under stood infancy after her fashion. The humour is seedy. What a lot Dickens took from her. The facetious columnist espe
stealing back my little Larousse.
Nancy Sinclair showed me a very nice Campendonk in the
1 January 1935, McGreevy
Apologise to Hester for my stupid note. I was laid out that day. I shall look forward to playing the Ravel. Schone Griisse to
11
Sam
ALS; 2 leaves, 3 sides; [black edged env, does not match stationery[ to Thomas McGreevy Esq, 15 Cheyne Gardens, Chelsea, London; pm 1-1-35, Dublin; TCD, MS 10402/67.
1 Hester Dowden's friend, Irish playwright and novelist Geraldine Dorothy Cummins (known as Dilly, 1890-1969), had come to stay in Hester Dowden's home, 15 Cheyne Gardens, Chelsea, London SW3, so that McGreevy was obliged to move to another house, that of George Henry Dawkins who lived at 22 Cheyne Walk.
2 SBdescribeslandmarksofCountyDublin:themountainsThreeRockandTwo Rock, which are named for their outcroppings. The town of Glencullen (1. 75 miles northwest of Two Rock, 4. 5 miles west of Bray) and the Lead Mines in Carrickgollogan, which are marked by an abandoned rock chimney (3. 75 miles west-northwest of Two Rock, and 2. 5 miles west of Bray), were on the return route to Foxrock. A descrip tion of the Scalp: 13 May [1933], n. 14.
3 "Exquis" (delightful).
Boss and Cissie Sinclair Jived in Howth. Boss was working at Harris & Sinclair,
dealers in works of art, 47 South Nassau Street; the firm was managed by Hany Sinclair.
