No More Learning

He lifts his hands. Veils fall. O, flowers! Bells with bells with bells
aquiring.

--Yes, indeed, the quaker librarian said. A most instructive discussion.
Mr Mulligan, I'll be bound, has his theory too of the play and of
Shakespeare. All sides of life should be represented.

He smiled on all sides equally.

Buck Mulligan thought, puzzled:

--Shakespeare? he said. I seem to know the name.

A flying sunny smile rayed in his loose features.

--To be sure, he said, remembering brightly. The chap that writes like
Synge.

Mr Best turned to him.

--Haines missed you, he said. Did you meet him? He'll see you after at
the D. B. C. He's gone to Gill's to buy Hyde's _Lovesongs of Connacht_.

--I came through the museum, Buck Mulligan said. Was he here?

--The bard's fellowcountrymen, John Eglinton answered, are rather tired
perhaps of our brilliancies of theorising. I hear that an actress played
Hamlet for the fourhundredandeighth time last night in Dublin. Vining
held that the prince was a woman. Has no-one made him out to be an
Irishman? Judge Barton, I believe, is searching for some clues. He
swears (His Highness not His Lordship) by saint Patrick.

--The most brilliant of all is that story of Wilde's, Mr Best said,
lifting his brilliant notebook. That _Portrait of Mr W. H. _ where he
proves that the sonnets were written by a Willie Hughes, a man all hues.

--For Willie Hughes, is it not? the quaker librarian asked.

Or Hughie Wills? Mr William Himself. W. H. : who am I?

--I mean, for Willie Hughes, Mr Best said, amending his gloss easily. Of
course it's all paradox, don't you know, Hughes and hews and hues,
the colour, but it's so typical the way he works it out. It's the very
essence of Wilde, don't you know. The light touch.

His glance touched their faces lightly as he smiled, a blond ephebe.
Tame essence of Wilde.

You're darned witty. Three drams of usquebaugh you drank with Dan
Deasy's ducats.

How much did I spend? O, a few shillings.

For a plump of pressmen. Humour wet and dry.

Wit. You would give your five wits for youth's proud livery he pranks
in. Lineaments of gratified desire.

There be many mo. Take her for me. In pairing time. Jove, a cool ruttime
send them. Yea, turtledove her.

Eve. Naked wheatbellied sin. A snake coils her, fang in's kiss.

--Do you think it is only a paradox? the quaker librarian was asking.
The mocker is never taken seriously when he is most serious.

They talked seriously of mocker's seriousness.

Buck Mulligan's again heavy face eyed Stephen awhile. Then, his head
wagging, he came near, drew a folded telegram from his pocket. His
mobile lips read, smiling with new delight.

--Telegram! he said. Wonderful inspiration! Telegram! A papal bull!

He sat on a corner of the unlit desk, reading aloud joyfully:

--_The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the
immense debtorship for a thing done. _ Signed: Dedalus. Where did you
launch it from? The kips? No. College Green. Have you drunk the four
quid? The aunt is going to call on your unsubstantial father. Telegram!
Malachi Mulligan, The Ship, lower Abbey street. O, you peerless mummer!
O, you priestified Kinchite!

Joyfully he thrust message and envelope into a pocket but keened in a
querulous brogue:

--It's what I'm telling you, mister honey, it's queer and sick we were,
Haines and myself, the time himself brought it in. 'Twas murmur we did
for a gallus potion would rouse a friar, I'm thinking, and he limp with
leching. And we one hour and two hours and three hours in Connery's
sitting civil waiting for pints apiece.

He wailed:

--And we to be there, mavrone, and you to be unbeknownst sending us your
conglomerations the way we to have our tongues out a yard long like the
drouthy clerics do be fainting for a pussful.

Stephen laughed.

Quickly, warningfully Buck Mulligan bent down.

--The tramper Synge is looking for you, he said, to murder you. He
heard you pissed on his halldoor in Glasthule. He's out in pampooties to
murder you.

--Me! Stephen exclaimed. That was your contribution to literature.

Buck Mulligan gleefully bent back, laughing to the dark eavesdropping
ceiling.

--Murder you! he laughed.

Harsh gargoyle face that warred against me over our mess of hash
of lights in rue Saint-Andre-des-Arts. In words of words for words,
palabras. Oisin with Patrick. Faunman he met in Clamart woods,
brandishing a winebottle. _C'est vendredi saint! _ Murthering Irish. His
image, wandering, he met. I mine. I met a fool i'the forest.

--Mr Lyster, an attendant said from the door ajar.

--. . . in which everyone can find his own. So Mr Justice Madden in his
_Diary of Master William Silence_ has found the hunting terms. . . Yes?
What is it?

--There's a gentleman here, sir, the attendant said, coming forward and
offering a card. From the _Freeman. _ He wants to see the files of the
_Kilkenny People_ for last year.

--Certainly, certainly, certainly. Is the gentleman? . . .

He took the eager card, glanced, not saw, laid down unglanced, looked,
asked, creaked, asked:

--Is he? . . . O, there!

Brisk in a galliard he was off, out. In the daylit corridor he talked
with voluble pains of zeal, in duty bound, most fair, most kind, most
honest broadbrim.

--This gentleman? _Freeman's Journal? Kilkenny People? _ To be sure. Good
day, sir. _Kilkenny_. . . We have certainly. . .

A patient silhouette waited, listening.

--All the leading provincial. . . _Northern Whig, Cork Examiner,
Enniscorthy Guardian,_ 1903. . . Will you please? . . . Evans, conduct this
gentleman. . . If you just follow the atten. . . Or, please allow me. . .
This way. . . Please, sir. . .

Voluble, dutiful, he led the way to all the provincial papers, a bowing
dark figure following his hasty heels.

The door closed.

--The sheeny! Buck Mulligan cried.

He jumped up and snatched the card.

--What's his name? Ikey Moses? Bloom.

He rattled on:

--Jehovah, collector of prepuces, is no more. I found him over in the
museum where I went to hail the foamborn Aphrodite. The Greek mouth that
has never been twisted in prayer. Every day we must do homage to her.
_Life of life, thy lips enkindle. _

Suddenly he turned to Stephen:

--He knows you. He knows your old fellow. O, I fear me, he is Greeker
than the Greeks. His pale Galilean eyes were upon her mesial groove.
Venus Kallipyge. O, the thunder of those loins! _The god pursuing the
maiden hid_.

--We want to hear more, John Eglinton decided with Mr Best's approval.
We begin to be interested in Mrs S. Till now we had thought of her, if
at all, as a patient Griselda, a Penelope stayathome.

--Antisthenes, pupil of Gorgias, Stephen said, took the palm of beauty
from Kyrios Menelaus' brooddam, Argive Helen, the wooden mare of Troy
in whom a score of heroes slept, and handed it to poor Penelope. Twenty
years he lived in London and, during part of that time, he drew a salary
equal to that of the lord chancellor of Ireland. His life was rich.
His
art, more than the art of feudalism as Walt Whitman called it, is the
art of surfeit. Hot herringpies, green mugs of sack, honeysauces, sugar
of roses, marchpane, gooseberried pigeons, ringocandies. Sir Walter
Raleigh, when they arrested him, had half a million francs on his
back including a pair of fancy stays. The gombeenwoman Eliza Tudor had
underlinen enough to vie with her of Sheba. Twenty years he dallied
there between conjugial love and its chaste delights and scortatory love
and its foul pleasures. You know Manningham's story of the burgher's
wife who bade Dick Burbage to her bed after she had seen him in _Richard
III_ and how Shakespeare, overhearing, without more ado about nothing,
took the cow by the horns and, when Burbage came knocking at the gate,
answered from the capon's blankets: _William the conqueror came before
Richard III_. And the gay lakin, mistress Fitton, mount and cry O,
and his dainty birdsnies, lady Penelope Rich, a clean quality woman is
suited for a player, and the punks of the bankside, a penny a time.

Cours la Reine. _Encore vingt sous. Nous ferons de petites cochonneries.
Minette? Tu veux? _

--The height of fine society. And sir William Davenant of oxford's
mother with her cup of canary for any cockcanary.

Buck Mulligan, his pious eyes upturned, prayed:

--Blessed Margaret Mary Anycock!

--And Harry of six wives' daughter. And other lady friends from
neighbour seats as Lawn Tennyson, gentleman poet, sings. But all those
twenty years what do you suppose poor Penelope in Stratford was doing
behind the diamond panes?

Do and do. Thing done. In a rosery of Fetter lane of Gerard, herbalist,
he walks, greyedauburn. An azured harebell like her veins. Lids of
Juno's eyes, violets. He walks. One life is all. One body. Do. But do.
Afar, in a reek of lust and squalor, hands are laid on whiteness.

Buck Mulligan rapped John Eglinton's desk sharply.

--Whom do you suspect? he challenged.

--Say that he is the spurned lover in the sonnets. Once spurned twice
spurned. But the court wanton spurned him for a lord, his dearmylove.

Love that dare not speak its name.

--As an Englishman, you mean, John sturdy Eglinton put in, he loved a
lord.

Old wall where sudden lizards flash. At Charenton I watched them.

--It seems so, Stephen said, when he wants to do for him, and for all
other and singular uneared wombs, the holy office an ostler does for the
stallion. Maybe, like Socrates, he had a midwife to mother as he had a
shrew to wife. But she, the giglot wanton, did not break a bedvow. Two
deeds are rank in that ghost's mind: a broken vow and the dullbrained
yokel on whom her favour has declined, deceased husband's brother. Sweet
Ann, I take it, was hot in the blood. Once a wooer, twice a wooer.

Stephen turned boldly in his chair.

--The burden of proof is with you not with me, he said frowning. If you
deny that in the fifth scene of _Hamlet_ he has branded her with infamy
tell me why there is no mention of her during the thirtyfour years
between the day she married him and the day she buried him. All those
women saw their men down and under: Mary, her goodman John, Ann, her
poor dear Willun, when he went and died on her, raging that he was the
first to go, Joan, her four brothers, Judith, her husband and all her
sons, Susan, her husband too, while Susan's daughter, Elizabeth, to use
granddaddy's words, wed her second, having killed her first.

O, yes, mention there is. In the years when he was living richly in
royal London to pay a debt she had to borrow forty shillings from her
father's shepherd. Explain you then. Explain the swansong too wherein he
has commended her to posterity.

He faced their silence.

To whom thus Eglinton:
You mean the will.
But that has been explained, I believe, by jurists.
She was entitled to her widow's dower
At common law. His legal knowledge was great
Our judges tell us.
Him Satan fleers,
Mocker:
And therefore he left out her name
From the first draft but he did not leave out
The presents for his granddaughter, for his daughters,
For his sister, for his old cronies in Stratford
And in London. And therefore when he was urged,
As I believe, to name her
He left her his
Secondbest
Bed.
_Punkt. _
Leftherhis
Secondbest
Leftherhis
Bestabed
Secabest
Leftabed.


Woa!

--Pretty countryfolk had few chattels then, John Eglinton observed, as
they have still if our peasant plays are true to type.

--He was a rich country gentleman, Stephen said, with a coat of arms
and landed estate at Stratford and a house in Ireland yard, a capitalist
shareholder, a bill promoter, a tithefarmer. Why did he not leave her
his best bed if he wished her to snore away the rest of her nights in
peace?

--It is clear that there were two beds, a best and a secondbest, Mr
Secondbest Best said finely.

--_Separatio a mensa et a thalamo_, bettered Buck Mulligan and was
smiled on.

--Antiquity mentions famous beds, Second Eglinton puckered, bedsmiling.
Let me think.

--Antiquity mentions that Stagyrite schoolurchin and bald heathen sage,
Stephen said, who when dying in exile frees and endows his slaves, pays
tribute to his elders, wills to be laid in earth near the bones of his
dead wife and bids his friends be kind to an old mistress (don't forget
Nell Gwynn Herpyllis) and let her live in his villa.

--Do you mean he died so? Mr Best asked with slight concern. I mean. . .

--He died dead drunk, Buck Mulligan capped. A quart of ale is a dish for
a king. O, I must tell you what Dowden said!

--What? asked Besteglinton.

William Shakespeare and company, limited. The people's William. For
terms apply: E. Dowden, Highfield house. . .

--Lovely! Buck Mulligan suspired amorously. I asked him what he thought
of the charge of pederasty brought against the bard. He lifted his hands
and said: _All we can say is that life ran very high in those days. _
Lovely!

Catamite.

--The sense of beauty leads us astray, said beautifulinsadness Best to
ugling Eglinton.

Steadfast John replied severe:

--The doctor can tell us what those words mean. You cannot eat your cake
and have it.

Sayest thou so? Will they wrest from us, from me, the palm of beauty?

--And the sense of property, Stephen said. He drew Shylock out of his
own long pocket. The son of a maltjobber and moneylender he was himself
a cornjobber and moneylender, with ten tods of corn hoarded in the
famine riots. His borrowers are no doubt those divers of worship
mentioned by Chettle Falstaff who reported his uprightness of dealing.
He sued a fellowplayer for the price of a few bags of malt and exacted
his pound of flesh in interest for every money lent. How else could
Aubrey's ostler and callboy get rich quick? All events brought grist to
his mill. Shylock chimes with the jewbaiting that followed the hanging
and quartering of the queen's leech Lopez, his jew's heart being plucked
forth while the sheeny was yet alive: _Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_ with
the coming to the throne of a Scotch philosophaster with a turn for
witchroasting. The lost armada is his jeer in _Love's Labour Lost_.
His pageants, the histories, sail fullbellied on a tide of Mafeking
enthusiasm. Warwickshire jesuits are tried and we have a porter's theory
of equivocation. The _Sea Venture_ comes home from Bermudas and the play
Renan admired is written with Patsy Caliban, our American cousin.
The sugared sonnets follow Sidney's. As for fay Elizabeth, otherwise
carrotty Bess, the gross virgin who inspired _The Merry Wives of
Windsor_, let some meinherr from Almany grope his life long for deephid
meanings in the depths of the buckbasket.

I think you're getting on very nicely. Just mix up a mixture of
theolologicophilolological. _Mingo, minxi, mictum, mingere. _

--Prove that he was a jew, John Eglinton dared,'expectantly. Your dean
of studies holds he was a holy Roman.

_Sufflaminandus sum. _

--He was made in Germany, Stephen replied, as the champion French
polisher of Italian scandals.

--A myriadminded man, Mr Best reminded. Coleridge called him
myriadminded.

_Amplius. In societate humana hoc est maxime necessarium ut sit amicitia
inter multos. _

--Saint Thomas, Stephen began. . .

--_Ora pro nobis_, Monk Mulligan groaned, sinking to a chair.

There he keened a wailing rune.

--_Pogue mahone! Acushla machree! _ It's destroyed we are from this day!
It's destroyed we are surely!

All smiled their smiles.

--Saint Thomas, Stephen smiling said, whose gorbellied works I enjoy
reading in the original, writing of incest from a standpoint different
from that of the new Viennese school Mr Magee spoke of, likens it in his
wise and curious way to an avarice of the emotions. He means that the
love so given to one near in blood is covetously withheld from some
stranger who, it may be, hungers for it. Jews, whom christians tax with
avarice, are of all races the most given to intermarriage. Accusations
are made in anger. The christian laws which built up the hoards of the
jews (for whom, as for the lollards, storm was shelter) bound their
affections too with hoops of steel. Whether these be sins or virtues old
Nobodaddy will tell us at doomsday leet. But a man who holds so tightly
to what he calls his rights over what he calls his debts will hold
tightly also to what he calls his rights over her whom he calls his
wife. No sir smile neighbour shall covet his ox or his wife or his
manservant or his maidservant or his jackass.

--Or his jennyass, Buck Mulligan antiphoned.

--Gentle Will is being roughly handled, gentle Mr Best said gently.

--Which will? gagged sweetly Buck Mulligan. We are getting mixed.

--The will to live, John Eglinton philosophised, for poor Ann, Will's
widow, is the will to die.

_--Requiescat! _ Stephen prayed.

_What of all the will to do?
It has vanished long ago. . . _

--She lies laid out in stark stiffness in that secondbest bed, the
mobled queen, even though you prove that a bed in those days was as
rare as a motorcar is now and that its carvings were the wonder of seven
parishes. In old age she takes up with gospellers (one stayed with her
at New Place and drank a quart of sack the town council paid for but in
which bed he slept it skills not to ask) and heard she had a soul. She
read or had read to her his chapbooks preferring them to the _Merry
Wives_ and, loosing her nightly waters on the jordan, she thought
over _Hooks and Eyes for Believers' Breeches_ and _The most Spiritual
Snuffbox to Make the Most Devout Souls Sneeze_. Venus has twisted her
lips in prayer. Agenbite of inwit: remorse of conscience. It is an age
of exhausted whoredom groping for its god.

--History shows that to be true, _inquit Eglintonus Chronolologos_. The
ages succeed one another. But we have it on high authority that a man's
worst enemies shall be those of his own house and family. I feel that
Russell is right. What do we care for his wife or father? I should say
that only family poets have family lives. Falstaff was not a family man.
I feel that the fat knight is his supreme creation.

Lean, he lay back. Shy, deny thy kindred, the unco guid. Shy, supping
with the godless, he sneaks the cup. A sire in Ultonian Antrim bade it
him. Visits him here on quarter days. Mr Magee, sir, there's a gentleman
to see you. Me? Says he's your father, sir. Give me my Wordsworth. Enter
Magee Mor Matthew, a rugged rough rugheaded kern, in strossers with
a buttoned codpiece, his nether stocks bemired with clauber of ten
forests, a wand of wilding in his hand.

Your own? He knows your old fellow. The widower.

Hurrying to her squalid deathlair from gay Paris on the quayside I
touched his hand. The voice, new warmth, speaking. Dr Bob Kenny is
attending her. The eyes that wish me well. But do not know me.

--A father, Stephen said, battling against hopelessness, is a necessary
evil. He wrote the play in the months that followed his father's death.
If you hold that he, a greying man with two marriageable daughters, with
thirtyfive years of life, _nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita_, with
fifty of experience, is the beardless undergraduate from Wittenberg then
you must hold that his seventyyear old mother is the lustful queen. No.
The corpse of John Shakespeare does not walk the night. From hour to
hour it rots and rots. He rests, disarmed of fatherhood, having devised
that mystical estate upon his son. Boccaccio's Calandrino was the first
and last man who felt himself with child. Fatherhood, in the sense of
conscious begetting, is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an
apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten. On that
mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect
flung to the mob of Europe the church is founded and founded irremovably
because founded, like the world, macro and microcosm, upon the void.
Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood. _Amor matris_, subjective and
objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life. Paternity may be
a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love
him or he any son?

What the hell are you driving at?