Ulysses Part 58

--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 h.o.a.rded in the famine riots. His borrowers are no doubt those divers of wors.h.i.+p 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. Warwicks.h.i.+re 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 n.o.bis_, 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 h.o.a.rds 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 n.o.bodaddy 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 jacka.s.s.

--Or his jennya.s.s, 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 wh.o.r.edom groping for its G.o.d.

--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 G.o.dless, 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 b.u.t.toned 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 l.u.s.tful 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 incert.i.tude, 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 h.e.l.l are you driving at?

I know. Shut up. Blast you. I have reasons.

_Amplius. Adhuc. Iterum. Postea._

Are you condemned to do this?

--They are sundered by a bodily shame so steadfast that the criminal annals of the world, stained with all other incests and b.e.s.t.i.a.lities, hardly record its breach. Sons with mothers, sires with daughters, lesbic sisters, loves that dare not speak their name, nephews with grandmothers, jailbirds with keyholes, queens with prize bulls. The son unborn mars beauty: born, he brings pain, divides affection, increases care. He is a new male: his growth is his father's decline, his youth his father's envy, his friend his father's enemy.

In rue Monsieur-le-Prince I thought it.

--What links them in nature? An instant of blind rut.

Am I a father? If I were?

Shrunken uncertain hand.

--Sabellius, the African, subtlest heresiarch of all the beasts of the field, held that the Father was Himself His Own Son. The bulldog of Aquin, with whom no word shall be impossible, refutes him. Well: if the father who has not a son be not a father can the son who has not a father be a son? When Rutlandbaconsouthamptonshakespeare or another poet of the same name in the comedy of errors wrote _Hamlet_ he was not the father of his own son merely but, being no more a son, he was and felt himself the father of all his race, the father of his own grandfather, the father of his unborn grandson who, by the same token, never was born, for nature, as Mr Magee understands her, abhors perfection.

Eglintoneyes, quick with pleasure, looked up shybrightly. Gladly glancing, a merry puritan, through the twisted eglantine.

Flatter. Rarely. But flatter.

--Himself his own father, Sonmulligan told himself. Wait. I am big with child. I have an unborn child in my brain. Pallas Athena! A play! The play's the thing! Let me parturiate!

He clasped his paunchbrow with both birthaiding hands.

--As for his family, Stephen said, his mother's name lives in the forest of Arden. Her death brought from him the scene with Volumnia in _Coriola.n.u.s._ His boyson's death is the deathscene of young Arthur in _King John._ Hamlet, the black prince, is Hamnet Shakespeare. Who the girls in _The Tempest_, in _Pericles,_ in _Winter's Tale_ are we know.