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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN
MUSIC AND LITERATURE

Music and Sound in

the Life and Literature
of James Joyce
Joyces Noyces
Gerry Smyth
Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature

Series Editors
Paul Lumsden
City Centre Campus
MacEwan University
Edmonton, AB, Canada

Marco Katz Montiel

Facultad de Letras
Pontifical Catholic University of Chile
Santiago, RM - Santiago, Chile
This leading-edge series joins two disciplines in an exploration of how
music and literature confront each other as dissonant antagonists while
also functioning as consonant companions. By establishing a critical
connection between literature and music, this series highlights the inter-
action between what we read and hear. Investigating the influence music
has on narrative through history, theory, culture, or global perspectives
provides a concrete framework for a seemingly abstract arena. Titles in the
series, both monographs and edited volumes, explore musical encounters
in novels and poetry, considerations of the ways in which narratives appro-
priate musical structures, examinations of musical form and function, and
studies of interactions with sound.

Editorial Advisory Board

Frances R. Aparicio, Northwestern University, US
Timothy Brennan, University of Minnesota, US
Barbara Brinson Curiel, Critical Race, Gender & Sexuality Studies,
Humboldt State University, US
Gary Burns, Northern Illinois University, US
Peter Dayan, Word and Music Studies, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Shuhei Hosokawa, International Research Center for Japanese Studies,
Japan
Javier F. León, Latin American Music Center of the Jacobs School of
Music, Indiana University, US
Marilyn G. Miller, Tulane University, US
Robin Moore, University of Texas at Austin, US
Nduka Otiono, Institute of African Studies, Carleton University, Canada
Gerry Smyth, Liverpool John Moores University, England
Jesús Tejada, Universitat de València, Spain
Alejandro Ulloa Sanmiguel, Universidad del Valle, Colombia

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15596
 Gerry Smyth

Music and Sound

in the Life
and Literature
of James Joyce
Joyces Noyces
Gerry Smyth
Liverpool John Moores University
Liverpool, UK

Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature

ISBN 978-3-030-61205-4 ISBN 978-3-030-61206-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61206-1

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
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 Introduction and Acknowledgments

Lovely Voices and Longing Hearts

You asked me to write you a long letter but really I hate writing—it is such
an unsatisfactory way of saying things.
James Joyce, letter to Nora Barnacle, 29 September 1904
The lovely voices came to me across the water, and my heart was filled
with such a longing to listen that with nod and frown I signed to my men
to set me free.
Homer, The Odyssey, 199

This book had its genesis in or around January 1979, on the top deck of
a packed No. 46a bus travelling from Belfield Campus on Dublin’s south-
side towards the city centre. In the streets outside it was cold, dark and
foggy. The windows were dripping with condensation, making it diffi-
cult to guess where we were. The bus crawled at a snail’s pace through
the early evening rush hour. Inside, the grey faces drew deeply on their
Majors and Carrolls Number 1s, sending desperate jets of smoke out into
the general fug. Looking back, it seems closer in some ways to the setting
of Ulysses than to the post-Tiger, Covid-ravaged city of 2020.
Stamping out my own fag, I settled down to scan my notes from the
morning’s lecture on Dubliners. I found Joyce’s writing compelling—I
especially loved being able to traverse the same cityscape as the characters
in his stories. The sense of something vital pulsing beneath the veneer of

v
vi INTRODUCTION AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

language was (and remains) thrilling. The process of studying this writing,
however, I found difficult to the point of alienation. The logistics were
not great, for one thing: four long bus journeys a day; enormous lecture
theatres where everyone seemed to know someone else; the deadening
financial grind. In some senses the scepticism with which I had already
started to battle in the preceding months has continued to assail me ever
since: Writing? Really? You study it, like? Really?!
My mother wanted me to be a teacher—wasn’t that what ‘English’
was for, after all? There were two other options. A real job: nine months
pumping petrol at Smith’s Garage on Harcourt Street, and a stint stacking
shelves at Superquinn Knocklyon, convinced me that such was not for me.
The other was music. In a band, playing gigs, writing songs, I had already
committed to the politics of post-punk popular music in a way that I could
never (so I believed) commit to an understanding of Joyce’s writing, or
the scholarly process which addressed itself to that writing.
As I sat on the bus from Belfield that winter evening in 1979, I wrote
the words of a song which was not only about James Joyce but tried also
to utilise some of the techniques and ideas to which I had been intro-
duced in my time as a First Year Arts student at UCD. It was a brutal
song—never even made rehearsal. Band mates grinned, but there was a
palpable sense in the room that something was changing, or had already
changed. Something had indeed: the principle of a connection between
the professional and the personal areas of my life had been broached. And
in some ways that principle has informed every choice I’ve made ever
since—including the choice to leave Dublin. Literature and music, work
and leisure, criticism and creativity, the university office and the concert
hall, Dublin and … anywhere else: my ‘work’ in the forty years since
that bus ride has been a search for connections between the first and the
second elements in these binaries.
James Joyce was always going to figure in this quest—in the first
instance, for the reasons alluded to above: the glamorisation of Dublin,
and the fascinating power of the writing. But there was another reason,
coming into focus over a number of years and a number of research
projects. Joyce, it turns out, was immersed (to the point of obsession)
in music—the music of the past and the music of his own day. He seri-
ously considered a singing career, and his regret at the choice he eventu-
ally made, as well as the frustration he felt towards writing as a means of
communication, were lifelong. That frustration accounts in some degree
for Joyce’s determination to incorporate music into his writing as both
 INTRODUCTION AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii

thematic constant and formal device. Music is everywhere in Joyce; even

when the characters are not performing it or listening to it or discussing
it, the author is deploying musical principles in order to achieve effects
not readily available in other forms of writing.
Literature, music, Dublin, exile: for anyone (including the scholar)
interested in this matrix of practices and relationships, Joyce is inevitable.
To be clear: I’m not comparing myself to Joyce, or my experience with his;
I’m remarking the way in which patterns of experience echo in time and
space, and probably echo quite resonantly in circumstances of temporal
and spatial proximity. This book is about Joyce’s attitude towards music,
his understanding of its cultural history, its role in his own artistic devel-
opment, and his consistent deference towards music as a privileged field
of human understanding. As I discover more about Joyce I discover more
about myself, refracted through his choices and experiences; as I listen
for his voice, I am better able to articulate my own. I write in order to
learn; I try in order to fail better. To pretend otherwise in this day and
age, to hold forth once again in the voice of the authoritative critic, is
to comply with a system that is, I firmly believe, against Joyce, against
music, against literature, against life.
As with all my music-related research, I struggle to define a set of
methodological practices or theoretical principles which might comprise
a discipline. In previous studies I have affiliated with the musicologist
Lawrence Kramer’s description of ‘a full, open engagement with music as
lived experience, experience rendered vivid and vivified by a host of over-
lapping cultural associations’ (2003: 134). I have been equally engaged by
Jacques Attali’s radical reclamation of ‘noise’, and his contentious claim
that ‘Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to
understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing. It is
not legible, but audible’ (1985: 1). The emergence of Sound Studies has
emboldened me to elevate ‘the audit’ alongside ‘the gaze’ as an equally
important mode of cultural analysis. And underpinning all this is the real-
isation (in the words of evolutionary psychologist Victoria Williamson)
that ‘[we] are the most musical animal this planet has ever seen. In this
sense, our musical lives provide a unique glimpse into what it means to
be human’ (2014: 6).
These strike me as important insights, but they’re in no danger (at
least in my mind) of coalescing into a field or a discipline, or even a
method. What these and similar propositions enable, rather, is an open,
receptive, nomadic approach to the consideration of music as a factor of
viii INTRODUCTION AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

perennial significance in a range of human practices and products. I like

music and reading and finding out about history, and I like finding echoes
and patterns between these different practices. Music may be (as Leopold
Bloom suspects) just the manipulation of abstract numerical values; but
it’s many other things besides. Music’s omnipresence in human affairs
means (for me) that there should in theory be no limit to the ways in
which one might approach it, hear it, understand it, enjoy it.
I’ve often wondered (as others have) why Joyce chose Odysseus rather
than Orpheus as his mythological avatar. It may be because Odysseus is a
listener rather than a performer—someone for whom the beauty of music
sets off powerful emotions, emotions which in turn embolden him to
pursue freedom beyond the bonds which detain him. Music, as Odysseus
discovers, is absorbing, powerful, dangerous and potentially liberating.
Therein lies the reason for its perennial presence in cultural history; and
therein, perhaps, lies the reason for Joyce’s instinctive incorporation of
music as an ineluctable presence within his own work.

∗ ∗ ∗

I would like to thank the members of the international Irish Studies

and James Joyce Studies communities with whom I have collaborated on
various projects in recent years: Joe Brooker, Eoin Byrne, Richard Barlow,
Caroline Elbay, Fiorenzo Fantaccini, James Gallacher, Scott Hamilton,
Derek Hand, Liam Harte, Keith Hopper, Marjorie Howes, Raphaël Ingel-
bien, Marco Katz Montiel, Carol Kessinger, Sebastian D. G. Knowles,
David Llewellyn, Vic Merriman, Elena Canido Muiño, Neil Murphy, John
O’Flynn, Michael Pierse, Shaun Richards, Loredana Salis, Hedwig Schwall
and Gul Turner.
Thanks as always to the wonderfully supportive staff of the Department
of English at Liverpool John Moores University.
My gratitude to the cast and crew of Murder Ballads, which played
with such success at the Edinburgh International Fringe Festival in August
2019: Laura Connolly, Thomas Galashan, Ellie Hurt, Natasha Patel,
Rebecca Sharman and Tom Wilson.
Thanks also to the staff of the Liverpool Arts Bar for their generosity
and for making such a spectacular contribution to the Liverpool arts
scene.
Thanks to the members of (Not) The Full Shanty—LJMU’s Shanty
Choir: Ryan Byrne, Lushiqi He, Jane Hogarth, Janine Melvin, Joe Moran,
 INTRODUCTION AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix

Maryjane O’Leary, Andrew Sherlock, Jade Thompson and Lucinda

Thomson.
Thanks to the members of the Hoylake Album Club: Jim Barnard, Jo
Croft, Cath Milverton, Joe Moran, Gavin Crompton, Wyn Crompton,
Fiona Hardman, Tom Singleton, Lucinda Thomson, Corina Thompson,
Ian Thompson and Michael Woodage.
Thanks to Michelle Witen for providing an endorsement for this book,
and to Harry White for support and inspiration.
The final sections of this book were written during lockdown for the
Covid-19 pandemic and the global movement for Black Lives Matter.
What an extraordinary unifying and divisive time it’s been! I would like
to thank all the people—friends and strangers—who supported me, in
one way or another, during uncertain times. In particular I would like to
thanks my immediate family for helping to establish an environment of
love and solace: my children and stepchildren Duncan, Holly, Esther and
Lizzie, and my wife Stacey.
 Praise for Music and Sound in the Life
and Literature of James Joyce

“The intimacy between music and fiction has long been a preoccupation
of Joyce scholarship, but this intimacy is deepened to a surpassing degree
in Gerry Smyth’s brilliant new study of Joyce’s musical reliances. This
book is, among much else, an acutely-aware retrieval of Joyce’s musical
soundscapes, a cultural history in miniature of musical meaning during
Joyce’s formative years as a writer and a sequence of virtuoso readings
which extends from Joyce’s early poetry to Finnegans Wake. The result is
a book in which Joyce’s lived experience nimbly consorts with his artistic
originality through the vital conduit of music itself. In that enterprise,
the nature of Joyce’s auditory imagination is sensitively and generously
reconceived. It is also wonderfully contextualized, not only in relation to
Joyce’s literary inherences (the chapter on George Moore is a tour-de-
force), but also in relation to the everyday collisions of sound and sense
which meant so much to Joyce himself.”
—Harry White, Professor of Music, University College Dublin, Ireland

“Like Joyce’s musical interests, this book covers a variety of topics—

from previously unidentified musical allusions, to sound studies, to evolu-
tionary studies, to aesthetics, to spatial considerations, to music history—
presenting a study that is both far-ranging and immensely impactful
on the fields of musical and Joyce studies. Smyth’s uniquely personal
understanding of Joyce’s utilization of music brings together a seemingly
disparate set of elements to show that intertextual repetition, soundscapes

xi
xii PRAISE FOR MUSIC AND SOUND IN THE LIFE AND LITERATURE …

and allusion dovetail unexpectedly in Joyce’s works. Smyth’s application

of his concepts onto Dubliners and Ulysses is particularly impressive and
he has a gift for distilling important and previously undetected elements
of music history onto Joyce’s works. This is an important addition to the
wealth of criticism on Joyce and music.”
—Michelle Witen, Junior Professor of English and Irish Literature,
Europa-Universität Flensburg, Germany
 Contents

Part I Reading and Writing

1 Joyce and Music a Critical Fantasia 3

1 Three Lives 4
2 Music and/as Language 7
3 Listening to the Novel 11
4 Real People 14
5 Aesthetics 17
6 Joyce as Composer? 21
7 Joyce’s Missing Music 24
8 Popular Music 27
9 Playback Technology 31
10 Space and Place 34
11 Musical Joyce 38
References 38

2 Here Comes Everybody! Remembering Joyce’s Music 41

1 I 42
2 II 43
3 III 46
4 IV 51
5 V 52
6 VI 54

xiii
xiv CONTENTS

7 VII 56
8 VIII 58
9 IX 59
10 X 60
11 XI 61
References 62

3 ‘Not About Something … that Something Itself’:

Musical Joyce and the Critics 65
1 I 65
2 II 68
3 III 73
4 IV 77
5 VI—Modernism 81
6 VII—Irish Studies 83
7 VIII—Word and Music Studies 86
8 IV—Genetic Criticism 88
9 Conclusion 91
References 92

Part II Listening

4 Echo and Repetition in Chamber Music 97

1 Introduction 97
2 On Repetition 103
3 Joyce and Repetition 105
4 Poetry and Repetition 110
5 Chamber Music 115
References 120

5 Joyce, George Moore and the Irish Wagnerian Novel 123

1 I 123
2 II 124
3 III 126
4 IV 129
5 V 131
6 VI 134
 CONTENTS xv

7 VII 137
References 142

6 Listening for the Music of What Happens: The

Education of Stephen Dedalus 145
1 I 146
2 II 147
3 III 150
4 IV 156
5 V 160
6 VI 163
References 164

7 Another Listen to the Music in ‘A Mother’ 167

1 I 168
2 II 169
3 III 172
4 IV 174
5 V 176
6 VI 179
7 VII 181
8 VIII 183
References 184

8 A Shout in the Street: Listening to the City

in ‘Wandering Rocks’ 187
1 Introduction 188
2 Sound: Methodological Reflections 191
3 ‘Wandering Rocks’, Simultaneity and Spatial Form 195
4 The Soundscape of ‘Wandering Rocks’ 198
5 Conclusion 209
References 209

9 ‘But Low, Boys Low, He Rises’: Joyce, Sea Shanties

and the Irish Atlantic 213
1 Introduction 214
2 The Shanty—An Irish Musical Form? 215
3 Navigating the Irish Atlantic 218
xvi CONTENTS

4 Joyce and the Shanty Tradition 223

5 Shanties in Joyce’s Work 226
6 Conclusion 236
References 237

References 239

Index 253
 PART I

Reading and Writing

 CHAPTER 1

Joyce and Music a Critical Fantasia

Abstract This chapter is comprised of ten sections, each considering a

different musical issue bearing upon Joyce’s musical imagination. They
are: (1) Three Lives (Éamonn Ceannt, Ina Boyle and John McCor-
mack); (2) Music and/as Language (issues relating to music and human
evolution); (3) Listening to the Novel (the impact of music on fiction
after the late nineteenth century); (4) Real People (some of the histor-
ical persons incorporated into Joyce’s work); (5) Aesthetics (debates
concerning aestheticism, decadence, realism and modernism in the 1890s
and 1900s); (6) Joyce as Composer? (the state of music in the Ireland
of Joyce’s youth); (7) Joyce’s Missing Music (the absence of Turlough
O’Carolan and Irish traditional music from Joyce’s musical reservoir);
(8) Popular Music (Joyce’s love of music hall); (9) Playback Technology
(the rise of the record player and its impact on modern musical practices)
and (10) Space and Place (the locations where Joyce’s music is made and
heard).
FANTASIA. The word is Italian for ‘fancy’, and its musical application is
to any kind of composition in which form takes second place in deference
to the demands of imagination or even of mere wilfulness—or, indeed, to
any kinds of composition for which no other name happens to occur to
the composer.
Percy A. Scholes, The Oxford Companion to Music (1938), p. 309

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to 3

Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
G. Smyth, Music and Sound in the Life and Literature of James Joyce,
Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61206-1_1
4 G. SMYTH

[For Joyce] music was a language and perhaps even something more.
It was an atmosphere, a condition of thought, an aura beyond all words,
which nevertheless was to be found in the words, grouping them, guiding
them, giving them breath of life. For Joyce, a sentence was not severable
from its melodic qualities, for they alone gave existence to it. Attention
has been drawn many times to this fact and the remark has become trite:
Joyce’s art is primarily musical. It was for Joyce that the divine rule of
Verlaine’s Art Poétique appears to have been dictated: De la musique avant
toute chose …
Louis Gillet, Claybook for James Joyce, (1941), p. 110 (original
emphases)

1 Three Lives
Three lives, three modes of Irish identity, three music-makers.
Edward Kent was born on 21 September 1881 in the village of
Ballymoe in Co. Galway. The family of nine moved to Ardee in Co.
Louth when father James, a policeman in the Royal Irish Constabulary,
was transferred. On his retirement in 1892 they moved again, this time
to Dublin.
Kent’s strong Catholic upbringing and interest in history primed him
for politicisation. He took a clerical job with Dublin Corporation, but
his primary energies were devoted to the cause of Irish independence.
In 1899 he joined the Gaelic League, which had been founded a few
years earlier (1893) with Douglas Hyde as its first president. Kent became
fluent in Irish, Gaelicised his name to Éamonn Ceannt and became a
dynamic force in the League’s cultural programme.
In February 1900 Ceannt, along with the cultural activist Edward
Martyn founded the Dublin branch of Cumann na bPíobairí (The Pipers
Club). The uilleann pipes (originally known as the Union bagpipe, or
sometimes just the Irish pipes) is ‘one of the world’s most distinctive
multi-reed instrument’ (Ó hAllmhuráin 1998: 74). It evolved from a
simpler design in the early eighteenth century, and its strong national
credentials made it a popular choice for nativist musicians, among the
diaspora as well as in the major cities across the island. The Dublin Club
was in fact a cradle of nationalist sentiment, with Ceannt among its most
active and ardent agents.
Ceannt was treasurer of the Dublin Pipers Club until he retired
following his marriage to the club’s secretary Áine Brennan in June 1905.
In the same year he was elected a member of the League’s governing
body, although he was already beginning to question what he considered
 1 JOYCE AND MUSIC A CRITICAL FANTASIA 5

to be its abbreviated remit. The following year he won a gold medal for
his playing at An Oireachtas ; two years later, as a member of the Catholic
Young Men’s Society, he performed in Rome for Pope Pius X.
By 1906, the Pipers Club was in financial difficulties.
The following year Ceannt joined Sinn Féin.
In 1911 the club was in a ‘moribund’ condition.
In 1912 Ceannt was sworn in as a member of the Irish Republican
Brotherhood.
The last entry in the minute book (dated 14 October 1913) is a request
relayed by Éamonn Ceannt for pipers to play at Pádraig Pearse’s Irish-
language school St Enda’s.
Earlier the same year Ceannt had joined the Irish Volunteers and was
one of the principal architects of its successful gun-running operation.
On the morning of 8 May 1916 Éamonn Ceannt was executed by
firing squad at Kilmainham Gaol for his role in the Easter Rising.
During the twentieth century the uilleann pipes emerged as one of the
most popular and most recognisable of traditional Irish musical instru-
ments. Na Píobairí Uilleann Teoranta, based in Henrietta Street in
Dublin, continues to thrive in the present day.1

∗ ∗ ∗

Ina Boyle was born in Enniskerry in Co. Wicklow on 10 March 1889 to

a well-to-do Protestant family. Her clergyman father William engaged a
governess to provide Ina and her sister with lessons on violin and cello.
Her obvious talent warranted further investment, so she continued her
studies with Samuel Myerscough, and also took correspondence classes in
composition with the Irish composer Charles Wood, whose other pupils
included Ralph Vaughan Williams and Herbert Howells. Other acclaimed
teachers were Percy Buck (later knighted), non-residential professor of
music at Trinity College between 1910 and 1920, and Charles Kitson,
organist and choirmaster at Christ Church Cathedral as well as professor
of music at University College.
By now Boyle had decided that she wished to embrace the life of the
composer—a decision which seemed to be justified when she won first
and second prize for original composition at the Sligo Feis Ceoil of 1913.

1 The information on piping included in this section is drawn from Vallely (1999). See
also https://pipers.ie/.
6 G. SMYTH

The Great War, as well as a decade of civil unrest in Ireland, curtailed

her progress, although her orchestral rhapsody The Magic Harp (1919)
was selected for performance by the London Symphony Orchestra at the
Royal College of Music. It’s a brooding piece of late Romantic Victoriana
which makes absolutely no concessions at all to continental modernism;
nor, despite the harp reference, does it contain much in the way of a
recognisably ‘Irish’ tonality.
Between 1923 and 1937 Boyle travelled regularly to England to take
lessons’ with Vaughan Williams—actually more like friendly inquiries
about her current compositions and encouragement to keep faith with
her calling. Boyle seems to have been unlucky with her family’s health—
she was obliged to care for both her parents and her younger sister
for much of their lives—and this also stymied her career development.
She continued to compose, however, although the majority of this
work—chorales, song-cycles, string quartets, tone poems, operas as well
as three ballets—remained unperformed. Her papers languished in the
Manuscripts and Archives Research Library of Trinity College until, under
the impetus of restorative feminism, a Lyric FM documentary of 2010
and a Trinity exhibition of 2013 went some way towards reviving her
reputation. Ita Beausang’s 2018 biography finally enabled us to hear
another of the lost voices of modern Irish history.

∗ ∗ ∗

John McCormack was born in Athlone, Co. Westmeath on 14 June 1884,

the fifth of eleven children to immigrant Scottish parents. Throughout
his youth and teenage years he sang in church choirs and in concerts. In
1902 McCormack auditioned for the newly formed Palestrina Choir in
Dublin’s Pro-Cathedral where its director Vincent O’Brien, recognising
an extraordinary talent, accepted the young man.
McCormack’s first taste of the fame that he was to so enjoy came in
May 1903 when he won the gold medal in the tenor section of the Feis
Ceoil . (The same prize had been won two years earlier by a well-regarded
Dublin tenor named Augustine ‘Gus’ Boylan—Costello 1992: 192.) It
was during these early days in the city that he made the acquaintance
of a slightly older Dubliner whom he encouraged to consider a singing
career. The bronze medal that JJ won in the following year’s Feis had a
resounding afterlife in his imagination, in his work, and in his attitude
towards McCormack himself.
 1 JOYCE AND MUSIC A CRITICAL FANTASIA 7

With money generated through recording and sponsorship, McCor-

mack moved to Milan to study with one of Italy’s premier singing
teachers, Vincenzo Sabatini. His professional operatic début came on 13
January 1906 when he sang the title role of Pietro Mascagni’s L’Amico
Fritz (1891). McCormack promptly married his Irish sweetheart—Lily
Foley, also a singer, whose career mysteriously stalled at this point.
Thereafter McCormack’s star commenced a spectacular career across
the musical heavens of the twentieth century. With Europe conquered
he headed for the home of the new technologically driven mass media.
Overnight celebrity was achieved with his performance in La traviata
(at rival New York opera houses, and alongside different divas) in
November 1909. He had already commenced what was to be an incred-
ibly successful recording career, aided in no small measure by his ability
to perform repertoire from opera, art song, popular song and folk ballad.
Besides making him a household name around the world McCormack’s
subsequent career as a concert singer made him a very wealthy man.
McCormack took American citizenship in 1919, and divided the
remainder of his life between homes in Kildare and California. His final
concert appearance was at London’s Albert Hall on 27 November 1938
(he continued to record), before retirement to a Dublin suburb where he
died on 16 September 1945.
McCormack is remembered as a consummate professional tenor,
possessed of superb breath control, immaculate diction and purity of tone,
all presented with great charm and charisma. More unusual (in the light
of the egregious cult of the twentieth-century superstar) was his ability
to enjoy a life lived largely. JJ’s profuse admiration for McCormack (as
described, for example, by Sylvia Beach: 1959, 186–7) remained tinged
with jealousy.2

2 Music and/as Language

Charles Darwin struggled to find a coherent place for music in his theory
of evolution by natural selection. In both The Descent of Man (1871)
and The Expression of the Emotions (1892), Darwin offered pretty weak
responses to account for the power of music in human affairs, writing (in
the first):

2 For the material included in this section see the entry by Ian Fox for ‘John
McCormack’ in White and Boydell (2013), II, 645–6.
8 G. SMYTH

But if it be further asked why musical tones in a certain order and rhythm
give man and other animals pleasure, we can no more give the reason than
for the pleasantness of certain tastes and smells… As neither the enjoyment
nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least use
to man in reference to his daily habits of life, they must be ranked among
the most mysterious with which he is endowed. (2013: 559–60)

And in the second:

Music has a wonderful power … of recalling in a vague and indefinite

manner, those strong emotions which were felt during long-past ages,
when, as is probable, our early progenitors courted each other by the aid
of vocal tones. (1892: 229)

Darwin’s speculations with regard to music—in particular his guess

‘that musical sounds afforded one of the bases for the development of
language’ (2013: 572)—emerged in time as an important issue in its
own right, with generations of researchers from a range of disciplines
developing theories which continue to be updated and refined.3
How Musical is Man? (1973) is the title of an influential study
by the English musician, ethnomusicologist and social anthropologist
John Blacking. Based on extensive research among the Venda people
of South Africa, Blacking was interested in music as an articulation of
what he referred to as ‘humanly organised sound’—which is to say, a
phenomenon that emerges as a function of the biological, physiolog-
ical, mental, social and cultural evolution of the species. All music, to
quote Louis Armstrong, is folk music inasmuch as it’s created, organ-
ised and listened to by ‘folk’. True, it’s created, organised and listened
to in different contexts; and true also that it has over the course of
modern history been profoundly stratified into complex styles, genres,
disciplines, etc. But it’s precisely this historical and formal sense of music
that Blacking rejects or brackets, for ‘it is the activities of Man the
Music Maker’ in his view, ‘that are of more interest and consequence
to humanity than the particular musical achievements of Western man’
(1973: 4).

3 Darwin puts in two appearance in Ulysses (1993: 388, 669), and one in the Wake
(252).
 1 JOYCE AND MUSIC A CRITICAL FANTASIA 9

Blacking’s study has many fascinating implications, but none more than
the one which places music at the centre of human evolutionary experi-
ence. This is the idea picked up and developed by Steven Mithen in his
book The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind
and Body (2006). Mithen adduces a range of evidence—archaeological,
neurological, palaeoanthropological, linguistic, etc.—to propose music as
the basis for a form of pre-linguistic communication inherited by our
early ancestors from one of our competitor hominid species, Homo nean-
derthalensis. This form of communication he refers to as ‘Hmmmmm’,
which stands for

Holistic, manipulative, multi-modal, musical and mimetic. Its essence

would have been a large number of holistic utterances, each functioning as
a complete message in itself rather than as words that could be combined
to generate new meanings. (172)

‘Hmmmmm’ is not a ‘language’ as such, but a means of utilising the

body’s sound-productive capacities to organise and modify reality in ways
that will aid the survival of the individual and the community of which
they form a part.4 Although lacking grammar and the denotative principle
which characterises modern compositional language (this sound means or
stands for this thing), ‘Hmmmmm’ was an extremely subtle and flex-
ible system. Its evolutionary significance extends beyond mere survival,
however, as one of its functions was to foster the development of a
sophisticated emotional life among practitioners. ‘Hmmmmm’ provided
our ancestors with the beginnings of a means both to identify and to
express emotions. And although it was in time (a very long time—tens of
thousands of years) superseded by compositional language, according to
Mithen it’s the deep-seated memory of this intense emotional life—before
we possessed the abstract means to refine and articulate it—that subsists
within all subsequent musical phenomena.
One problem with the idea of music as an expression of the emotions is
its vagueness: what sound, or combination of sounds, expresses ‘jealousy’,
for example, or ‘anger’, or ‘love’? Music is a socio-historical phenomenon,
as Blacking averred; but it’s also intensely subjective—you and I will hear

4 An echo of this form of communication may still be heard in modern speech directed
towards children or pets which, according to one psychologist, ‘has been reported in
every known language tested to date’ (Williamson 2014: 23).
10 G. SMYTH

and respond to different things in the same piece of music, and we can
never be sure if the responses it generates or the meanings we attribute
to it have any basis in common experience.
This was a problem that the English musicologist Deryck Cooke
attempted to solve in his book The Language of Music (1959). By ‘music’,
Cooke was referring to a very specific discourse: the tradition of art
music that had emerged in Europe from about 1400. ‘Composers’, he
suggested, ‘have always been bound by certain expressive laws of the
medium, laws which are analogous to those of language’ (2001: 15).
‘Music’, he went on,

is, in fact, ‘extra-musical’ in the sense that poetry is ‘extra-verbal, since

notes, like words, have emotional connotations; it is, let us repeat, the
supreme expression of universal emotions, in an entirely personal way, by
the great composers. (33)

Cooke’s thesis is that genius composers learn the emotional language

embedded within the system of tonality that evolved in Western Europe
after the medieval period, and they use this language to express the ‘uni-
versal emotions’ of the species in endlessly subtle and complex ways. This
is not a vague assertion: in a series of chapters the author methodically
takes his reader through the intervals that comprise the twelve notes of
the western scale, attributing gradated responses of pleasure and pain to
each. Thus he talks about the ‘straightforwardly and contentedly joyful’
major third (64); the ‘longing’ (69) characterising minor and major sixths
as they await harmonic resolution; the ‘mournful’ and ‘melancholy’ minor
seventh (74); and so on.
‘Music’, Cooke concludes, ‘is primarily and basically a language of the
emotions, through which we directly experience the fundamental urges
that move mankind, without the need of falsifying ideas and images—
words or pictures’ (272). Music shares with the other arts (literature and
painting, for example) a desire to express a human response to the mystery
of life; it remains first among equals, however, insofar as its language
intuitively ‘speaks’ to a much more primordial level of our consciousness.
Cooke’s hope, that his extremely tentative steps would signal the
beginning of a great research project to understand the ‘grammar’ of
musical language as it related to human emotion, has by and large failed
to be realised. His principal insight, however (shared with the other
researchers mentioned here)—that music was locked into the story of
 1 JOYCE AND MUSIC A CRITICAL FANTASIA 11

human evolution in fundamental ways—has proved enduringly influen-

tial, and underpins all the critical discourses that attempt to account for
its ubiquitous presence in human cultural endeavour.

3 Listening to the Novel

In 2008 I published a book entitled Listening to the Novel: Music in
Contemporary British Fiction, in which I suggested that:

Music has played an important role in the development of the novel in

Britain since the early eighteenth century. Anyone even passingly familiar
with the history of that particular literary form will probably already be
aware that music represents a significant consideration for many of the
authors who have contributed to the tradition. A reader fully sensitised to
the role and representation of music is bound to encounter it throughout
the canon of British fiction. (1)

Part One consisted of two chapters, the first a long theoretical exposition
of different aspects of what I referred to as ‘the music-novel’: music as
inspiration; music as metaphor; and music as form. The second chapter
took the form of an overview of ‘British’ fiction between Lawrence
Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1760–67) and Anthony Burgess’s Mozart and
the Wolf Gang (1991), analysing a number of indicative examples: Pride
and Prejudice (1813) by Jane Austen, Wuthering Heights (1847) by
Emily Brontë, Middlemarch (1871–2) by George Eliot, Jude the Obscure
(1895) by Thomas Hardy, Howards End (1910) by E. M. Forster,
Point Counter Point (1928) by Aldous Huxley, and Absolute Beginners
(1959) by Colin MacInnes. These analyses were undertaken in order to
demonstrate

that the music-novel is not a marginal practice—simply one of any number

of ‘special interest’ ways of approaching literary history; the suggestion
here, rather, is that music has been fundamental to the evolution of
the modern British novel, and therefore it remains fundamental to the
understanding of that discourse down to the present day. (59, original
emphases)

The point holds, I think: music is present in one form or another in

a significant proportion of the fiction that has ever been published.
How could it not, given the novel’s basis in human experience, and
12 G. SMYTH

the enduring centrality of music to that experience? It’s true that the
music-centred novel represents an important sub-genre in its own right;
but even when the narrative has no ostensible connection with music,
we find it loitering in the margins of the text: an overheard radio, a
remembered melody, a popular reference, a whistled phrase. Like all
‘marginal’ phenomena, on examination such references actually turn out
to be essential aspects of the fictional world created by the author and of
the characters populating that world.
My research for Listening to the Novel discovered a concentration
of musicalised fiction during the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries.5 All the literary arts felt the pull, but for writers of fiction, as
Timothy Martin has pointed out, ‘the affiliation with music was particu-
larly strong’ (1991: 145). There are many reasons that night be adduced
to account for this, but one of the most obvious must be the emergence
of the tendency known as ‘literary Wagnerism’. In fact, Wagner’s powerful
influence touched all the arts in the decades after his death in 1883, but
it’s in literature, and particularly in the novel, that we discover a curious
engagement with many of the great composer’s formal, thematic and
aesthetic concerns. One of the most committed of literary Wagnerians was
Gabriele D’Annunzio, whose regard for music was such that he famously
incorporated into the political programmes that were to dominate his later
career. JJ’s fellow student Con Curran insisted that D’Annunzio (rather
than Ibsen) was the greatest influence on his friend’s artistic development
(1968: 105ff); and Stanislaus Joyce reported that his brother considered
the Italian’s Il Fuoco (translated as The Flame of Life in 1900) to be ‘the
highest achievement of the novel to date’ (1958: 154).
Literary Wagnerism was among other things a multi-national
phenomenon, as was the general fascination with music which it gener-
ated. Besides the Italian D’Annunzio, this phenomenon was adapted in
exemplary fashion by two of the most music-obsessed novelists of the
period: the German Thomas Mann, and the Frenchman Marcel Proust.
Mann’s ‘Tonio Kröger’ (1903) is a story about music, certainly, but it’s
also a story whose telling looks to adapt some of the formal aspects
of musical discourse for literary ends. It was the narrative, Mann later

5 JJ reviewed a lost example of the musical novel entitled A Ne’er Do Well, about
a gypsy violinist, for the Daily Express in September 1903. He criticised the use of a
pseudonym (although started publishing under the name of Stephen Daedalus less than a
year later), and was offended at the novel’s ‘pretentiousness’ (2000: 81).
 1 JOYCE AND MUSIC A CRITICAL FANTASIA 13

claimed, in which he ‘first learned to employ music as a shaping influ-

ence in my art’ (quoted in Brown 1948: 212). That ‘shaping influence’
was evident in two particular instances: the attempt to organise the narra-
tive in terms of sonata form, and the attempt to develop character with
reference to the Wagnerian principle of ‘leitmotif’.
Like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ‘Tonio Kröger’ is a form
of Künstlerroman focusing on key moments in the artistic evolution of
a central male character. As in JJ’s novel, this evolution is represented in
terms of the relationship between an artistic sensibility which needs to be
free of bourgeois restrictions, and a bourgeois sensibility which, although
in some respects inimical to true art, nevertheless provides the human
material (emotions, characters, situations) from which effective art must
be made. And as with JJ’s work, music—all music, any music—comes to
represent a kind of primordial life-force: the sonic articulation of what it
means to be alive with a body that feels, a mind that thinks and a spirit
that yearns.
For Marcel Proust, music was locked into the key category of
memory—one of the defining faculties of the species, and thus one of
the keys to the emotional evolution of the individual consciousness. Of
equal importance with the famous ‘madeleine’ is the ‘little phrase’ that
the eponymous hero of Swann’s Way (the first of the seven-volume
series) discovers is from a sonata for piano and violin by an uncelebrated
composer named Vinteuil. The narrator goes into great detail to explain
the manner in which Swann first experienced the little phrase, the effect it
had on him at the time, and the meaning it came to have for him when,
unable to identify the composer or locate the score, he was obliged to
rely on memory to keep it alive in his imagination.
Proust is relentless in his attempt to detail Swann’s precise emotional
response to every recurrence of the little phrase; and yet there always
seems to be something more, something that cannot be said. There’s
always, in other words, a tacit melancholy residing in the gap between
the music itself, the memories it invokes, and the meanings ascribed to
it. Such would appear to be one of the key insights that music provides
the modernist novelist: the existence of states of consciousness which are,
apparently, beyond the ability of language to render. With Proust in mind,
Alex Aronson writes:

[A] sequence of sounds played or sung at a certain pitch or rhythm or a

change from major to minor key are found to evoke a variety of associations
14 G. SMYTH

and memories, frequently, though not always, related to sense impressions

received in the past. It is this complex interrelationship between the musical
experience and the mental process it initiates that stimulates the novelist
to investigate the twilight where the encounter between music and human
consciousness takes place. (1980: 21)

Proust’s response to and use of music was different in certain key respects
to that deployed at different times by Mann and JJ. The latter, while
intuiting music’s specialist role in relation to the subject’s emotional life,
seemed to possess a keener sense of its socio-historical function than
either of his continental contemporaries. In his 1912 lecture on ‘Realism
and Idealism in English Literature’ JJ posited an opposition between the
realist tendency in literature (as represented by the likes of Daniel Defoe)
and what he referred to as ‘the magical artifice of music’ (2000: 173).
His own writing was clearly not realist in the sense inherited (via a whole
tradition of nineteenth-century English fiction) from Defoe—hence its
amenability to music at both a thematic and (more radically) a formal
level. And yet, ‘the magical artifice of music’ was always tempered in JJ’s
work by an implicit acceptance of its groundedness—sometimes, even a
suggestion of seediness; its appeal was as much to the body as to the heart
and the mind.
What all these modern writers shared, however, was ultimately of more
significance than their differences: an implicit appreciation of the power
of music as an aesthetic category (in terms of example and influence) at a
particularly volatile stage of literary history.

4 Real People
In 2016 Vivien Igoe published a wonderfully useful book based on the
simple premise encapsulated in its title: The Real People of Joyce’s Ulysses:
A Biographical Guide. The book is a treasure trove of the personalities
woven by JJ into the fabric of his fiction. Some of these personalities are
properly named and historically recognisable; some are thinly disguised,
often by a change of name; some are mere composite echoes of the types
who made up the daily life of the city in the opening years of the twen-
tieth century. Taken as a whole, they reveal two important aspects of
JJ’s work: first, nostalgia for the city he had abandoned, and (in Con
Curran’s words) for the ‘voices from a Dublin that was slipping away’
(1968: 96); and second, the commitment with which he approached the
 1 JOYCE AND MUSIC A CRITICAL FANTASIA 15

task of converting his own life experience into the stuff of art—a task in
which nothing and no-one was insignificant.
As might be expected, music features throughout Igoe’s book, as there
are ‘[there] are 48 people named in Ulysses connected with various forms
of entertainment’ (2016: 315). All the major personalities and refer-
ences are present: the Dublin-born composer Michael Balfe (19–20),
for example, whose operas The Siege of Rochelle (1835), The Bohemian
Girl (1844) and The Rose of Castille (1857) recur throughout the text;
or the tenor John McCormack (184) who enjoyed (or endured) such a
prodigious afterlife in JJ’s literary imagination.
Despite this, Igoe is of the opinion that ‘[cultural] life in Joyce’s
Dublin was rather limited … [and the] musical life of the city was even
more limited and elitist. On the occasions when there were celebrity
concerts’, for example,

they were given on weekday afternoons, which ensured that the vast
majority of the population could not attend. The opera seasons always
included such old reliables as The Bohemian Girl , The Lily of Killarney,
Martha and Carmen. Lovers of grand opera were poorly catered for.
Ordinary Dubliners appreciated the concerts given by Irish artists in the
Rotunda and the Antient Concert Rooms, where in 1904 James Joyce
shared the platform with John McCormack. (315)

The limited nature of the city’s professional musical provision during JJ’s
tenure is true to an extent, but it’s not the full story. Stephen, Bloom
and Molly are obsessed with memories of, and references to, this public
musical discourse; but much of the time it’s in the text’s minor, seemingly
throwaway details that the full extent of JJ’s rich musical inheritance is
revealed. Thus we learn, for example, that the Invincible Joe Brady ‘was a
good singer and member of the choir in the Franciscan Capuchin church’
(37) near North Anne Street where he lived. Or: the poet Lizzie Twigg—
linked by Bloom with his wife Molly and his ‘mistress’ Martha in terms of
female curiosity (152–3)—published a volume entitled Songs and Poems
in 1904, a few years before JJ’s own ‘song-cycle’ Chamber Music (1907).
Much of the time it’s the story behind the story that confirms both the
extent and the complexity of the musical environment within which JJ
came into his artistic maturity.
JJ never made it to the United States, but like everyone else in the early
twentieth century he was influenced by America’s burgeoning popular
16 G. SMYTH

culture, itself facilitated by a technological revolution which would lead

in short time to the phenomenon of mass media. The Bohee brothers
(James and George) mentioned by Bloom in ‘Circe’ (1993b: 421) were
black Canadian minstrels who moved to London in 1882 where they
made a living as teachers, agents and performers. The instrument in which
they specialised—the banjo—was coming into vogue at this time; at one
point the elder brother James had the future Edward VII as a pupil. The
Bohees entertained Dublin in August 1894 with comical ditties (such
as ‘Someone’s in the Kitchen with Dinah’) performed on their custom-
built banjos. In ‘Circe’ Bloom’s memory of the performance becomes
conflated with his hallucinogenic projections of Molly’s sexuality.
In ‘Eumaeus’ Bloom tells Stephen that he ‘infinitely preferred the
sacred music of the catholic church to anything the opposite shop could
offer in that —line such as those Moody and Sankey hymns’ (614). Here,
Bloom is attempting to impress Stephen with his knowledge of the Euro-
pean sacred music tradition, and to distance himself from a tradition that
is questionable in terms of its modernity, its Protestantism, and its associ-
ation with the new world. In fact, Ira D. Sankey was an American gospel
singer and hymn writer who worked closely with the evangelist Dwight L.
Moody in a series of revival campaigns in the United States, Sweden and
Britain during the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Despite the
fact that he was a white northerner, his unique singing style has proved
enduringly influential in the gospel genre down to the present day.6
Singers abound in Ulysses , most of them now obscure. The Arthur
Barraclough mentioned by Richie Goulding in ‘Sirens’ (266) came to
Dublin from London in 1868 to teach music and singing, and was the
author of a useful book for singers entitled A Guide to Italian Pronun-
ciation. Another of Goulding’s tenors is the Englishman Walter Bapty
(269), who also fetched up in Dublin where his rich tenor voice was
well regarded; he was active in the city’s musical societies (including
the Dublin Glee and Madrigal Union), and also contributed to the
cultural revival of the 1890s. Irish singers are represented by the likes of
Bartholomew M’Carthy (75) and Barton M’Guckin (193)—from whose
conflation the character of Bartell D’Arcy was created; the baritone Leslie
Crotty (69–70) who sang with the Carl Rosa English Opera Company;
and the amateur bass Christopher Dollard who sat on the council of

6 Ruth H. Bauerle notes thirty-three references to nineteen different spirituals in

Finnegans Wake (1993: 184–5).
 1 JOYCE AND MUSIC A CRITICAL FANTASIA 17

the Irish Academy of Music (87). And then there are the Italians, such
as Antonio Giuglini, who ‘was a great favourite in Dublin’, but whose
‘career ended in 1864 due to insanity’ (120); the bass Luigi Lablache
who made his Dublin début in 1841 in Bellini’s I Puritani (168); and
the minor royal Giovanni Matteo Mario, ‘one of the best-known tenors
of the nineteenth century’ (200), and one of whose signature roles was
that of Lyonel in Flotow’s Martha.
JJ idolised the tenor, and seems to have regarded the other vocal
categories as support as best. Divas could be especially distracting; never-
theless, female singers do make their way into Ulysses , such as the
American soprano Minnie Hauck (138) who sang the title role of Carmen
in the Empire Palace (the future Gaiety Theatre) on many occasions; the
English popular entertainer Marie Kendall (163) who on 16 June 1904
was going on stage (at that same theatre) just as Mr Leopold Bloom
was making his way towards Sandymount Strand for some private enter-
tainment; and the ‘Swedish Nightingale’ Jenny Lind (174) who had a
Professional Singer’s Soup named after her. My favourite, however, is
Martha J. Dubedat, a soprano and music teacher from Dublin, a memory
of whom prompts one of Bloom’s occasional humorous sallies: ‘May I
tempt you to a little more filleted lemon sole, miss Dubedat? Yes, do
bedad. And she did bedad’ (167).
JJ’s Dublin was a small Victorian city, blighted by poverty at the
lower end, and possessed of a limited cultural provision for its aspira-
tional middle and professional classes. Yet it was a city in which music,
apprehended in the broadest possible terms, pervaded the day-to-day life
of its citizens. And it’s only natural that this fact should be reflected in a
story which attempts to capture that life in all its lived intensity.

5 Aesthetics
Music figured powerfully and ubiquitously in the aesthetic debates that
animated Western intellectual life towards the end of the nineteenth
century. This is the life with which the aspiring artist Stephen Dedalus
is obliged to engage as he attempts to forge a viable literary method
from the unpromising environment in which he finds himself. Stephen’s
response, as evidenced in A Portrait of the Artist, ‘is perfectly consonant’
(Harkness 1984: 38) with the aesthetic tradition associated with the Pre-
Raphaelite movement, with decadent writers such as Oscar Wilde and
Algernon Charles Swinburne, and most resonantly with the influential
18 G. SMYTH

cultural theorist Walter Pater. When Stephen uses the musical metaphor
of a ‘chord’ to describe the way in which his apprehension of Sandymount
Strand ‘harmonised’ with reality (2008: 140), he is in fact trafficking with
the clichés of late Victorian English aestheticism.
Pater was responsible for the famous proposition that ‘[all] art
constantly aspires towards the condition of music’ (1910: 35)—a fuller
version of which is contained here:

It is the art of music which most completely realises this artistic ideal, this
perfect identification of matter and form. In its consummate moments, the
end is not distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject
from the expression; they inhere in and completely saturate each other; and
to it, therefore, to the condition of its perfect moments, all the arts may
be supposed constantly to tend and aspire … Therefore, although each art
has its incommunicable element, its untranslatable order of impressions,
its unique mode of reaching the ‘imaginative reason’, yet the arts may be
represented as continually struggling after the law or principle of music, to
a condition which music alone completely realises.7

Wilde concurred, writing: ‘Music is the perfect type of art’ (1923: 163).
The idea is ancient, but given a new gloss here in light of the social
and political anxieties facing late Victorian England: the fact that it is
(apparently) non-denotative means that music is what it is. Without the
distraction of reference to the ‘real world’, its matter is identified with
its form; its subject and its form of expression ‘completely saturate each
other’. This is music’s innate ‘condition’—the condition towards which
all the other artistic media (including, one presumes, literature) must
aspire in their quest for truth and beauty. Such ideas, moreover, will have
beneficial social, political, economic and even educational implications if
transposed into a practical programme (Deutsch 2015: 48–9). Music, in
short, can energise our better selves, inspiring the listener to find a balance
between the competing forces in their own life.
Pater’s model of music is questionable on a number of fronts. Every
time a composer names a piece of instrumental music they are implying

7 Pater 1910: 138–9. JJ seemed to be channelling this idea when he remarked to Arthur
Power that ‘judging from modern trends it seems that all the arts are tending towards
the abstraction of music; and what I am writing at present [Finnegans Wake] is entirely
governed by that purpose’ (1974: 132).
 1 JOYCE AND MUSIC A CRITICAL FANTASIA 19

a connection with the real world. Programmatic music, apparently deter-

mined to reflect or engage with reality, had been growing in influence
throughout the nineteenth century—witness the growing popularity of
the ‘symphonic poem’ after Liszt. We’ve already encountered Deryck
Cooke, who argued that western art music does in fact represent a
highly sophisticated referential discourse. Then there’s the issue of vocal
music—especially when utilised in that most successful of nineteenth-
century musical forms: opera. And finally, there’s what one might refer
to as a universal human ‘will-to-reference’–the ingenuity with which we
invariably infer meaning even when none is apparent.
It seems clear that Pater was referring to a form of ‘pure’ or ‘absolute’
music that had come into vogue a century or so earlier with the ideas of
a generation of German Romantic philosophers such as Schiller, Schlegel
and Goethe. ‘The idea of absolute music’ (as explained by Carl Dahlhaus
in his book of that title) emerged in opposition to an evolving bour-
geois sensibility which insisted on ‘function’ as a determining criterion
in all judgements, aesthetic or otherwise. Against ‘function’, Romantic
thinkers argued that text-led forms (song, opera, oratorio, chorale, etc.)
were all debased to some extent, for they deflected the listener’s atten-
tion from the contemplation of ‘music alone’ (in Peter Kivy’s influential
formulation) onto the contemplation of meanings generated by linguistic
and other non-musical means.
Besides these English and German contributions to contemporary
aesthetic debate, there was an influential strand which, emerging from
the mid-century work of Charles Baudelaire, dominated the field of
French poetry during the early decades of the Third Republic. Stéphane
Mallarmé was only the most radical of those writers whose admiration
for music was shot through with jealousy at its reputation, and who were
openly covetous of its power. Mallarmé was a prominent figure within
the Symbolist movement which came to connote a series of recognisable
beliefs and prejudices, many of which concern ongoing debates regarding
music and its relationship with language. One such prejudice concerned
what contemporary poets regarded as the tragic fall of language in the
modern world, and its compromised status as a medium for poetic expres-
sion. Dahlhaus talks about the Symbolists’ ‘disgust with language that is
threadbare and “besmirched” because everybody uses it every day’ (1991:
148). Related to this was a conviction (shared with Pater) that form in
art was everything; form, that is to say, was not just the passive vessel in
which meaning was transported from the artist to the consumer; it was,
20 G. SMYTH

rather, the place where truth—insofar as it could be apprehended at all by

the human mind—resided.
As a poet anxious about the condition of his medium, Mallarmé’s
problem was twofold. Firstly, there was the widely held, still influential
notion of language’s debasement before music, and the latter’s boast
(or at least the boast made on its behalf) of being able to access truth
in a way that the former never could. Faced with this assault upon the
artistic medium to which he was dedicated, it’s little wonder that the
poet felt ambivalent towards the power of music; for even as it offered
him an example of a consummate art form to which he could aspire,
music—certainly the ideas surrounding the role and function of music in
human society—seemed determined to prevent him from emanating that
example.
Secondly, there was the Wagnerian recruitment of poetry for musical
ends, and his creation of an art form which, in its manipulation of music,
language, movement and gesture, created emotional effects that language
alone (so it was claimed) could not approach. In some senses, Wagne-
rian music drama represented the end of art; precisely because it was
(or aspired to be) ‘total’, it left nothing to say, no space for mystery
or intuition or creative misreading. In that sense, it was implicated
(despite its seemingly impeccable Romantic credentials) in an ongoing
Enlightenment project to ‘dominate’ nature by means of the rational
manipulation of knowledge, power and representation; in that sense,
moreover, Wagnerian opera was culpable in the eyes of a poet such as
Mallarmé who was drawn away from the notion of ‘totality’ by both
temperament and aesthetic conviction (Bucknell 2001: 31). At the same
time, Mallarmé’s dream of a poetry that blended musical and linguistic
effects itself represented a kind of ‘total’ art in which all the binaries
informing contemporary aesthetic debate—emotion and thought, music
and language, body and consciousness, sound and meaning, etc.—would
achieve consummate balance. The key difference seems to be this: whereas
Wagner’s notion of ‘total’ art evolved as part of a search for truth that
could be known, the ideal for Mallarmé appeared to be an art that
embodied a truth which could be maintained as an ideal but which could
not be known.
Symbolism a la Mallarmé represented the search for some kind
of accommodation between music’s formal properties and language’s
ineluctable will-to-reference. Underpinning this search lay a suspicion
that silence might in fact be the ultimate truth that the human mind
 1 JOYCE AND MUSIC A CRITICAL FANTASIA 21

could know. This quest, when combined with ideas emerging from figures
such as Pater and Wagner, released powerful energies within European
culture—energies which eventually fed into the structure of feeling known
as modernism, and which contributed seminally to JJ’s evolving aesthetic
imagination.

6 Joyce as Composer?
Could JJ have been a composer? And if so, to what style of music would
he have been drawn? What genres would he have essayed? Would, for
example, his avowed preference for singing over music have pulled him
in the direction of popular opera rather than symphonic forms—more
Puccini than Debussy?
Wagner remained the colossus of late nineteenth-century art music,
but he was as significant for the reactions he stimulated as well as for
the example he set. This bifurcated response was apparent in the work
of composers such as Richard Strauss, whose operatic version of Wilde’s
Salomé premiered in 1906 to audiences split along a dividing line between
awe and horror. The work of the other contemporary Viennese master,
Gustav Mahler, on the other hand, seemed in some senses the culmi-
nation of a Romantic tradition that had been launched a century earlier
by Beethoven. When England—‘the land without music’—finally joined
the party with a generation of inspired composers pioneered by Edward
Elgar, it was by and large to this Romantic tradition that it aspired.
Present at the Austrian premiere of Salomé were Arnold Schoen-
berg, Alexander Zemlinsky and Alban Berg—each of whom was to be
prominent in the revolution that overtook art music in the following
decades.8 Schoenberg was responsible for the development of the assault
on traditional tonality known as ‘serialism’—a system of composition
based on an adaptable theme comprised of the twelve notes of the
traditional chromatic scale. Despite the fact that at least some of its
effects (atonality, for example) were anticipated by arch-Romantics such
as Liszt and Wagner, serialism represented only the most radical response

8 Alex Ross (2008: 4) speculates that another of the century’s great opera lovers might
also have been present at the Graz performance: Adolf Hitler. JJ saw Salomé in Trieste in
1909; the fact that his piece for Il Piccolo della Sera (2000: 148-51) focuses on Wilde’s life
rather than Strauss’s avant garde treatment led Allan Hepburn (2013: 190) to question
the extent of JJ’s musical range.
22 G. SMYTH

to what was widely perceived as the exhaustion of the classical ideal.

Composers from different national traditions experienced the revolution
differently and responded to different aspects: the Hungarian Béla Bartók,
the Russian Igor Stravinsky, the American George Gershwin, the Finn
Jean Sibelius—even, whisper it, the Englishmen Ralph Vaughan Williams
and Benjamin Britten. Considered together the work of these composers
comprises a tradition of musical modernism; and as with the literary and
artistic modernisms which it paralleled, the challenging nature of musical
modernism rendered it marginal in respect of residual discourses (realism,
Romanticism) which remained strong and popular.
In his book The Keeper’s Recital: Music and Cultural History in
Ireland, 1770–1970 (1998), Harry White described ‘[the] neglect of
music in the reanimation of ideas which have so transformed our compre-
hension of the Irish mind within the past twenty years as an outstanding
failure of Irish cultural history’ (1). At the same time as he was indicting
the contemporary critical community, White was looking to expose the
historical status of music in Ireland which had created such a situa-
tion in the first place. Ireland’s engagement with the debates energising
international art music during the early twentieth century, he finds, was
negligible—the principal reason being a literary hegemony that was itself
locked into a political narrative of decolonisation. After all, if contempo-
rary cultural critics ignored Irish art music it was because that same music
had played so insignificant a role during the nation’s formative period
in the decades after the death of Parnell. The cultural revival, to put it
plainly, was by and large a literary and theatrical prospect—organised in
terms of both the (Celtic) image and the (Gaelic) counter-image of W. B.
Yeats. In this story, as White puts it, music remained ‘a neglected source
of creative endeavour in the revival except in one respect: its metaphorical
resonance as a symbol of the literary imagination’ (97, original emphasis).
Ten years later, White refined this thesis by focusing on ‘music and the
Irish literary imagination’—proposing that art music functions ‘not simply
as a striking absence but as a vital presence in the Literary Revival and in
contemporary Irish literature (2008: 3). The effect of the cultural revival
of the nineteenth century, he argued, was that ‘the verbal understanding
of music (and of Irish music in particular) as the unheard melody of the
literary imagination attained far more significance than music itself’ (6).
Even as the educational and institutional organisation of music was disre-
garded, in short, the idea of music thrived ‘as a vital symbol of the creative
 1 JOYCE AND MUSIC A CRITICAL FANTASIA 23

imagination’—a concept serving literary (especially poetic and dramatic)

ends.
JJ sits oddly in relation to this thesis; he’s the only case study in White’s
study considered principally in terms of his fiction. But JJ, it turns out, was
writing a form of opera rather than traditional fiction—or rather, ‘Joyce’s
fiction fills the void created by the failure of opera not only in Ireland but
in England throughout his lifetime … The musical works on which he so
memorably depends’, White goes on,

have an a priori essence, and as iconic symbols of culture, of consciousness,

and of the past itself, they attain new significance in literature. This means,
in short, that the operas of Joyce’s formative years, as in the so-called ‘Irish
Ring’ (comprising The Bohemian Girl , Martha, and The Lily of Killarney)
inhere in literature and not in music. They produce fiction (by way of
Wagner) and not operas. (155)

Thus, ‘“Sirens” is vocal rather than instrumental and operatic rather than
fugal’ (166). ‘Cyclops’, with its focus on the significance of the voice
operating in different musical modes (recitative, aria, chorus), is a kind
of ‘verbal opera’ (169)—‘it speaks’, White laments, ‘where opera might
otherwise sing’ (181). And in this reading, Finnegans Wake represents
the final, logical move in a career-long tendency: White quotes Timothy
Martin to the effect ‘that whereas Ulysses borrows from music, Finnegans
Wake aspires to be music’ (181). The thesis in respect of JJ is summed up
thus:

If opera meant more to Joyce than any other art, this was because it
represented to his imagination that synthesis of music and speech which
he sought and found in his own fiction … Joyce discovered afresh
the fundamental premise of opera—that music gives dramatic life to
language—through the agency of a soundworld he himself had to invent.
(185–6)

Might JJ (or J. M. Synge, for that matter) have been a composer had the
late nineteenth-century Irish musical infrastructure been more developed,
better organised, better supported? Possibly; despite his dismissal of what
he referred to as ‘mathematics for ladies’ (quoted in Ellmann 1977: 5),
neither the author himself nor his fictional avatar Stephen Dedalus nor
sceptical critics such as Ellmann can definitively say that, had social and
educational circumstances been otherwise, JJ would always have preferred
24 G. SMYTH

literature over music. But the milieu from which JJ emerged was one in
which the energy which should have gone into the formation of a viable
art music tradition was displaced into a tremendously vibrant literary
tradition. Whether you consider this a loss or a gain depends on where
you stand—institutionally, artistically, temperamentally. In some senses it’s
possible to maintain that modern Irish cultural history has been warped
by its literary riches; the price of an unrivalled pantheon of writers may
have been the lack of a more balanced artistic tradition in which each
of the arts—with their peculiar ways of articulating human experience—
is enabled to develop. On the other hand, we have been left with the
work of a writer whose obsession with music pushed the boundaries of
literary discourse in extraordinarily original directions, and whose experi-
ments with voice and consciousness continue to resonate into the present
day.

7 Joyce’s Missing Music

In Picking Up Airs: Hearing the Music in Joyce’s Text, Ruth Bauerle
included an appendix entitled ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So: Musical Delusions
in Finnegans Wake’ (1993: 198–201), in which she identifies the presence
of apparent allusions to songs which post-date the text in which they are
included. For example: when JJ writes ‘leave you biddies till my stave is a
bar’ (2012: 457), Bauerle hears a pre-echo of the American popular song
‘Beat Me Daddy, Eight to the Bar’ released in 1940—the year after the
Wake’s publication.
Many things about JJ’s impression of the Dublin of his youth ain’t
necessarily so: he seems to have completely ignored, for example, the
presence of his university’s choral union whose predominantly Gaelic
repertoire was, according to Arthur Clery (1920: 56), extremely popular
with the student body. Likewise, he downplayed his college acquain-
tance with the singer, folklorist and future Director of Broadcasting for
2RN, Seamus Clandillion. What other musical practices and personages
did JJ inadvertently overlook or deliberately ignore? It might be inter-
esting to adopt a counterfactual perspective—the music with which JJ
perhaps could (or even should) have engaged in his work but apparently
didn’t. Of the many candidates for such a role, two strike me as of poten-
tially enlightening critical interest in the present context; the Irish harping
tradition represented by Turlough Carolan; and the Irish music style (or
attitude) that would become known as ‘traditional’.
 1 JOYCE AND MUSIC A CRITICAL FANTASIA 25

Carolan (1670–1738) took to the life of itinerant musician after being

struck blind by smallpox as a teenager. For a turbulent half century (which
included the Revolutionary Wars of the late seventeenth century, when
parts of the country were laid waste by standing armies and pitched
battles) he roamed the upper midlands with a guide, a horse and a harp.
Many of the tunes associated with him were composed in honour of
the individuals who facilitated his peripatetic lifestyle. After his death
Carolan’s compositions began to be collected—work energised in part
by the antiquarian ethos of the First Celtic Revival of the late eighteenth
century. Carolan’s music came in time to serve as the basis of the national
harping repertoire; and his was the animating presence behind the Belfast
Harp Festival of 1792, which represented an attempt (unsurprisingly
contentious) to salvage as much of that repertoire as possible.
In the century which followed, Carolan’s work was fully incorporated
within a multi-stranded research programme focused on music as central
to the validity of Irish cultural history. As part of this programme the
harp itself was repurposed as the seminal symbol of Irish independence—
something to which JJ alludes when he incorporates it within the complex
symbology of ‘Two Gallants’ (1993a: 46). It’s interesting to note that the
performer on this occasion plays the melody of Thomas Moore’s ‘Silent,
O Moyle’—itself a dubious ‘improvement’ of an earlier ethnic melody
which predated the Belfast Harp Festival. There’s no echo of that earlier
connotation in JJ’s story, however, which seems to suggest that he was
unaware of, or chose not to engage with, the complex cultural politics at
stake.
The point is that Carolan represents a presence within Irish cultural
history possessed of an ability to speak to some of JJ’s most pressing
aesthetic concerns. Apart from one apparently nebulous mention (but
aren’t they all?) in Finnegans Wake (2012: 369), however, his name—
and more puzzlingly his presence—is absent from the oeuvre. Here
was a successful, influential Irish musician—a composer, performer and
songwriter—predating the compromised career of Thomas Moore. Here
was an Irish artist, troubled by blindness, obliged to fall back on ‘the
ineluctable modality of the audible’ (1993b: 37). Here, crucially, was
a living lifeline to a form of culture—an intriguing blend of ethnic
and cosmopolitan influences—not fully compromised by either English
colonialism or Irish nationalism. Here, in short, was a missed opportunity.
If Carolan represents an intriguing absence in JJ’s work, so too does
the phenomenon of ‘Irish traditional music’—by which I mean the vocal
26 G. SMYTH

and instrumental music that first emerged from Ireland’s oral, Gaelic-
speaking culture in the early modern period. ‘It is music’, so says the
definition from the Irish Traditional Music Archive, ‘of a living popular
tradition’:

While it incorporates a large body of material inherited from the past, this
does not form a static repertory, but is constantly changing through the
shedding of material, the composition of new material, and the creative
altering in performance of the established repertory … Being oral music,
it is in a greater state of fluidity than notation-based music. Versions of
songs and tunes proliferate, skilled performers introduce variations and
ornaments as the mood takes them, and the same melody can be found in
different metres. (quoted in Vallely 1999: 402)

Other characteristics include its dependence on generational transfer;

its ideological grounding in amateur performance; the importance of
regional style; its origin in rural life as well as its flourishing in urban
milieux; the primary status of solo performance; an emphasis on complex
melody over and against harmonic accompaniment; its dispersal across
a range of spaces; its basis in memory (both personal and commu-
nity) rather than textuality; the preponderance of short-form sub-genres;
the modal origins of much of the music; the gradual emergence of
a discourse of virtuosity; and the predominance of string, wind and
free-reed instruments.
The road to modern ‘traditional music’ has been long, difficult and
contentious. As soon as it began to be collected in the early eigh-
teenth century the form was linked to a discourse of national identity;
thus was initiated the problems of nomenclature, definition and authen-
ticity which have haunted it ever since (Davis 2006). As the research
became more assiduous, so the stakes became higher and the contro-
versies more pointed. By the late nineteenth century, when JJ would
have first encountered it, the music was resolutely ‘national’ (just on the
brink of becoming ‘traditional’), and irreversibly locked into a discourse
of cultural nationalism. It was at the same time categorically distanced
from the concomitant English ‘folk’ revival, which was characterised by its
critics (including Irish cultural theorists such as Douglas Hyde) as an arti-
ficial reconstruction on the part of middle-class intellectuals rather than
the authentic product of a living oral tradition.
 1 JOYCE AND MUSIC A CRITICAL FANTASIA 27

Bartell D’Arcy’s performance of ‘The Lass of Aughrim’ in ‘The Dead’

represents JJ’s fullest engagement with the ‘the old Irish tonality’ (1993a:
187). Intimately enmeshed with the author’s evolving aesthetic imagina-
tion as well as his relationship with Nora Barnacle, this particular ballad
appears to be introduced towards the end of the story in order (as Terence
Brown writes) ‘[to set] in opposition the music with which an Irish
Catholic middle class at the turn of the century could feel comfortable
and a music which speaks for a more vital, dangerous territory of the
national consciousness’ (1998: 39). Curtailed in performance, however,
and delivered by a typically temperamental bel canto tenor, it’s difficult
to see how such an opposition might hold. My impression, rather, is that
JJ wished to invoke the power of a form of Irish music from which both
personal taste and upbringing had distanced him.9
When it began to be recorded by a number of exiled virtuosi (such as
Patsy Touhey, Paddy Killoran and Michael Coleman) at the outset of the
twentieth century, traditional music emerged as a genuinely popular Irish
form. It’s in that medium that the exile JJ might have encountered it, and
might have given serious thought as to its implications for his own music-
inspired fiction. As with Carolan, there’s plenty of food for thought: a
vernacular culture which flirted seriously with the idea of an authenticity
grounded in regional style; complex musical structures in which rhythm
and complex melody are foregrounded; an improvisatory aesthetic which
rejected the prescriptions of textuality with all its connotations of order
and control; the grounding of technical virtuosity in a communitarian
ethos; most suggestively, perhaps, the dialectic of place and art whereby
the former enables the latter even as it is in some crucial senses created by
it.

8 Popular Music
Besides English folk music, another ‘foreign’ genre which suffered the
disapproving gaze of revivalist ideologues was ‘music hall’. This institu-
tion emerged and thrived in the second half of the nineteenth century
as the latest in a long line of English popular cultural practices—pleasure
gardens, song-and-supper rooms, pub-based concert rooms, penny gaffs.
Driven by changes in the wider socio-economic organisation of English

9 See my chapter ‘Music in James Joyce’s “The Dead”: Sources, Contexts, Meanings’
(2009), 32–50.
28 G. SMYTH

society, these combined with a range of new popular musical pastimes

(such as the brass band movement and the rise of popular choral music)
to establish a fully fledged commercial song industry, and to push the
issue of popular musical entertainment to the top of the contemporary
cultural agenda.
Music hall catered primarily for the working and lower-middle classes,
and its musical staples were comic and sentimental songs. It was being
condemned as early as the 1860s in terms which will be familiar to anyone
who has ever embraced a youthful subculture:

Nothing is listened to now-a-days but the so-called ‘comic songs’ and, in

sober earnestness, we must express our astonishment that human beings
endowed with the ordinary gift of reason should be found to go night
after night to witness such humiliating exhibitions. It is quite impossible to
name anything equal to the stupidity of these comic songs, unless, indeed,
it be their vulgarity. (quoted in Roud 2017: 360)

In his book on Music Hall and Modernity (2004) Barry J. Faulk has
suggested that music hall was at its most popular and most influential
in the quarter century running up to the First World War. He suggests
further that the contemporary debates which emerged in relation to
music-hall witnessed ‘the first flowering of the now-pervasive paradox
in which celebrations of popular culture as authentic confirm the need
for professionals to discover, interpret, and defend what makes it so’
(21).10 One of the most assiduous of these ‘professionals’ was Arthur
Symons who JJ had met in London (on his way through to Paris) in
December 1902. Symons recommended Chamber Music to the London
publisher Elkin Mathews, and produced a complimentary early review of
the volume. Symons was also one of the first intellectuals to take the music
halls seriously. Engaging with contemporary discourses of class and sexu-
ality, his interventions proposed a re-ordering of received notions of taste,
desire and cultural value. His theories in turn overlapped with contem-
poraneous aesthetic debates relating to the emergence of the aesthetic
sensibility which came to be known as modernism.

10 A similar pattern may be observed in relation to English ‘folk song’: self-appointed

and self-aggrandising intellectual elites take it upon themselves to identify ‘authentic’
vernacular song, to assess its role in relation to the contemporary cultural landscape,
to devise and organise methodologies for its preservation, and to lobby for its future
deployment. See Boyes (2010).
 1 JOYCE AND MUSIC A CRITICAL FANTASIA 29

As indicated above, Ireland endured a somewhat fractious relation-

ship with popular English entertainment. Dan Lowrey’s Music Hall on
Dame Street (relaunched in 1897 as the Empire Theatre of Varieties),
for example, was popular with sections of the working and middle classes
who had not (yet) felt the pull of national destiny. As with opera, much
of the talent was sourced from England, as evidenced in stories such
as ‘Counterparts’ and ‘The Boarding House’. While some (such as Mrs
Kearney in ‘A Mother’) could just about tolerate ‘doubtful’ (1993a: 123)
material, for others, rejection of the music halls was a necessary move
within a larger process—the process (in Douglas Hyde’s resonant words)
of ‘de-anglicising Ireland’.
JJ (as later recalled by Frank Budgen) was of a generation ‘associ-
ated with Dan Leno, Harry Randall, Tom Costello, Gus Elen, Arthur
Roberts and the other music-hall giants of that time’ (1972: 195). Con
Curran wrote of Joyce’s prodigious ‘acquaintance with the Dublin music-
hall and with the repertoire of the entertainers who ran one-man shows’.
He also remarked his friend’s interest until the end of his life in writer-
performers such as ‘Ashcroft, Wheatley, Val Vousden the elder, Percy
French, and their peers’ (1968: 42). A survey of the material referenced
in Song in the Works of James Joyce by Matthew J. C. Hodgart and Mabel
P. Worthington (1959) reveals the presence of nearly fifty music-hall
songs. Many of these are obscure passing references in Finnegans Wake—
dredged from JJ’s musical memory in order, no doubt, to nuance a pun or
reverberate a connotation. It’s in Ulysses , however, that music hall is incor-
porated most influentially as part of the soundscape of turn-of-the-century
Dublin; two songs in particular stand out.
The origins of ‘My Girl’s a Yorkshire Girl’ are contested. One account
has it that it was written by C. W. Murphy and Dan Lipton and first
performed in 1899 by the English music-hall star Vesta Tilley—born
Matilda Alice Powles in 1864, future Tory MP for Blackpool but at the
time a famous and well-loved male impersonator. (She also crops up in
Finnegans Wake: 12, 526.) Another source tells us that it was written by
Fred Godfrey and popularised in 1908 by Charles Whittle—whose other
hit ‘Let’s All Go Down the Strand and Have a Banana’ features twice
in the Wake (38, 145). There’s also a possibility that the original singer
was another famous male impersonator, Florrie Gallimore, whose success
prompted a short film entitled My Girl’s a Yorkshire Girl in 1909. This
may have been a comic dramatisation of the action described in the lyric,
in which two ‘young fellows’ realise they have been dating the same girl,
30 G. SMYTH

only to discover when they seek her out that she is in fact already married
The melody was also adopted as a march for the 1st Battalion Duke of
Wellington Regiment.
All these elements have a bearing on JJ’s usage of the song in
Ulysses . To begin with, his fastidiousness with regard to detail makes the
earlier date (1899) more likely. It’s also interesting to note the associ-
ation with two famous male impersonators. Gender swapping (men as
women, women as men) was a popular element of music-hall discourse,
contributing to qualities of camp and ‘queerness’ that were to have a
powerful afterlife in twentieth-century popular entertainment. Having a
woman, who is dressed as a man, sing about her ‘girl’ plays with notions
of normative heterosexuality; and this has implications for the gender
discourses with which JJ organises the economy of sexual desire in his
novel. There’s also the fact that the story about infidelity contained in the
lyric clearly parallels the situation of Molly Bloom—‘though her retinue
of lovers is not limited to two’ (Bowen 1974: 159). The association with
the British military, finally, hints at the context of political domination
which haunts the text.
‘Those Lovely Seaside Girls’ was also associated with Vesta Tilley. It
was published in London in 1899, with words and music by Harry B.
Norris, who also composed Tilley’s biggest hit, ‘Burlington Bertie’. With
more than twenty thematic references throughout the text, this song
pervades Ulysses , standing (according to Zack Bowen) as ‘one of the major
musical motifs of the novel’ (1974: 85). Having been ‘earwormed’ by
a letter from his daughter Milly, ‘Seaside Girls’ becomes closely iden-
tified in Bloom’s mind with his rival Blazes Boylan. The association
might also derive from the similarity (as noted by music-hall historian
Ulrich Schneider) between Vesta Tilley and Boylan in terms of clothing
(1993b: 98). The song also samples one of the novel’s recurring themes:
Bloom’s endless fascination with femininity—up to and including their
undergarments. With its typical end-of-the-pier humour, ‘Seaside Girls’
encapsulates a strand of English popular culture that persisted well into
the twentieth century.
Despite his acquaintance with music-hall aficionados such as Arthur
Symons and T. S. Eliot, JJ’s relationship with the form was never ‘pro-
fessional’ in the sense described by Faulk. He indulged, rather, a genuine
love for the form—a love, Ruth Bauerle suggests, ‘surpassed only by his
Another random document with
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Ring
bonanza
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
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you are located before using this eBook.

Title: The Ring bonanza

Author: Otto Binder

Release date: August 6, 2022 [eBook #68700]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Better Publications, Inc, 1947

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RING

BONANZA ***
THE RING BONANZA
 By OTTO BINDER

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Startling Stories, July 1947.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The rings of Saturn stretched like a level sheet in all directions,
though actually composed of millions of tiny bodies. Homer Timkin
carefully braked with the nose rockets till he floated motionlessly with
respect to the ring's own rotary motion around its primary. Then he
eagerly donned his vac-suit.
Had he struck it rich this time? Through his binoculars, a moment
ago, he had seen the glint of one small jagged lump among the ring
debris—and it had glinted like gold or silver. There was vast treasure
among the rings, if one could find it....
In his vac-suit he used his reaction pistol to propel him down toward
the glinting mass. In his eagerness, he almost failed to see the other
ring body which now hurtled up, pursuing its own independent orbit
within the grander sweep of the rings.
Timkin braked with his reaction pistol only in time to let the marauder
lumber past, scraping his foot. He let out his breath with a hiss. That
had been close. Many a ring prospector never returned to the Titan
docks, because of some such accident as this, creeping up on you
unawares.
More than prospecting in earth's out-of-the-way spots had ever been
it was a hazardous occupation among Saturn's rings. But it had its
enticing rewards and lures. Some prospectors returned with a load of
precious metals or uncut virgin diamonds that made them rich for
life.
Timkin reached the glinting body he had previously spied. It was
irregular in shape, some five feet in its greatest diameter. And it had
a yellow tinge in the soft light shed by huge Saturn over his shoulder.
Timkin permitted himself wild hope as he chipped off a piece with his
belt pick. He held the chip up to his glassine visor, squinting at the
grain.
His face fell slack.
"Fool's gold!" he muttered, flinging the piece away in a small fury.
It was just pyrites, worth a few cents a pound in the market and not
worth the hauling. Timkin sat down on the miniature worldlet and
cursed all the gods of luck and ill luck. He had been out a month
now, and no bonanza. Of course, it had been so for the past ten
years. Each year the old prospector hoped for his big find, and each
year he only eked out a precarious living, picking up odd bits from
the rings.
He looked with bleary eye over the plane of the rings, stretching
vastly in all directions. Timkin was not young any more. His lean
spare body could not stand the rigors of space much longer. His
leathery, seamed face showed the strain of countless near-escapes
from death. If he didn't strike it rich this trip he'd have to retire—poor.
He'd be one of those derelicts, haunting the Titan docks and
mooching meals.
He shuddered.
Hopelessly, he watched the endless parade of the rings. By far the
most of their expanse was just worthless rock. Then he saw a jet
black lump not far off. It was coal. Timkin grinned mirthlessly.
Coal had been used as an industrial fuel and chemical storehouse
some 200 years ago. Today it was no more than a curiosity in
museums. That was his luck—spotting things in the rings that would
barely pay the expenses of his trip.
As he sat he also saw a whitish mass further along—fossil bones.
And nearby, a dully shining angular object, probably a bit of
machinery.
Sighing, Timkin got up. "Got to make expenses," he muttered. "Might
as well collect those odds and ends."
His reaction pistol took him to the lump of coal. It was four feet in
diameter but in weightless space it was no strain for Timkin to push it
toward his ship and stow it through the back lock into the hold.
Then he went back for the space-bleached bones. Theory had it that
there had once been a moon of Saturn within two-and-a-half
diameters of the giant planet. Gravitational stresses had then
exploded the moon into countless fragments, which took up the
same orbit after spreading out and thus came to be the unique rings.

Seemingly, there had once been life, and civilization, on the

destroyed moon. Fossil bones, once buried within the moon's crust,
now floated within the ring debris—and bits of machinery of some
vanished and unknown race. There was no oxygen or moisture in
space to rust them and thus the metal remained perfectly preserved
through eons of time.
Timkin looked musingly at the bones, as he shoved them to his ship.
They made up part of the skeleton of an ancient creature that
possibly resembled an earthly tiger. The Saturn Archeological
Museum would pay five SS-dollars for this—Solar System Dollars,
the standard currency. Not too bad.
Finally, Timkin got the bit of machinery. It consisted of a broken
portion of a huge cogged wheel with dangling wires and bits of other
enigmatic mechanical devices. Timkin wondered just how advanced
the people had been who once inhabited the first moon. That was
something even the experts didn't know with the few poor clues they
had collected.
For a moment, Timkin's imagination wandered. He pictured life on
the first moon, before the debacle. Towering cities—humming wheels
—busy, industrious people. Then, abruptly, their world cracking
apart, into a billion bits. And now only this remained ... the rings of
Saturn.
As Timkin brought the broken wheel to his ship he took one last look
around and saw another museum item. It had circled in slow
gyrations and come into view from the back of his ship. Timkin got
that too, perhaps the most intriguing find of the lot, for it was a stone
with mysterious "writing" on it. The museum had quite a collection of
such stones, evidently parts of temples or buildings.
Seemingly the people of the first moon had inscribed most of their
stone walls with their writings. But these writings had never been
translated. They were a riddle that baffled the best archeological
minds of the System.
He also put this carved stone in the hold.
"Huh," he grunted. "I'm just a scavenger for the museum, that's what
I am."
Timkin looked over the things crammed in his hold, gleaned from the
rings for a month. Their total value would possibly pay for the trip
with a few SS-dollars to spare. Yet one find of gold or precious stone
and he would dump the whole mess out and be far the richer.
Growling to himself, Timkin took off his vac-suit and went to the
controls. He debated. He still had food and fuel enough for three
days before he had to return to the Titan docks. What should he do?
"I'm going to the Crêpe Ring," he finally told himself. "I had no luck in
Rings A and B, so why not try C just to play it out to the finish?"
Timkin had started, a month ago, at the outer ring—Ring A. This
portion of the rings had an outer diameter of 171,000 miles and
extended inward toward Saturn for 11,100 miles.
Then there was a separation of 2,200 miles between rings A and B
named Cassini's Division when first seen through earthly telescopes
centuries ago.
Ring B was 145,000 miles, outer diameter, and some 18,000 miles
wide. Another space of 1000 miles and then came Ring C or the
Crêpe Ring, 11,000 miles wide. So had the rings of Saturn
distributed themselves, under the laws of gravitation, when the first
moon exploded ages before. The first moon had not been large, for
the total mass of all the rings was estimated at no more than one-
quarter of earth's moon.
Timkin urged his old rattletrap Jetabout up from the plane of the rings
till he had a clear path before him and then jetted straight toward
mighty Saturn, which hung in the sky like a bloated, vari-colored
marble.
He crossed the narrow empty space between Rings B and C and
finally cruised over the outer edges of the Crêpe Ring. Saturn was
only 17,000 miles distant and Timkin could feel the faint tug of its
powerful gravitation.
"Now," Timkin said between set teeth, "let's see if I have any luck.
I've got three days to nose around through the Crêpe Ring,
searching. I know there's gold or diamonds ahead ... if I can just
stumble on them."

As he slowly cruised above the Crêpe Ring, with his binoculars to his
eyes, Timkin munched a sandwich and now and then took a swig of
coffee. In all their explorations of other worlds earthmen had never
found any beverage better than time-honored coffee, though the
Martians tried hard to sell a green-tinted product called tukka.
Timkin's hand gave a little jerk, and his binoculars wavered.
Watching him one would have thought he had spied something
exciting—like gold. But it was something else, almost equally as
startling....
"Another Jetabout!" Timkin murmured. "Gave me a start, seeing it so
suddenly."
It was a rare event when two wandering Jetabouts happened to
cross paths in the vast area of the rings, almost like two explorers in
the heart of Africa meeting each other. Timkin grinned humorlessly.
"Another chump!" he thought. "He wouldn't have a bonanza, or he'd
be streaking back for Titan. He's cruising and looking for something
like me."
Timkin flashed his heliograph, reflecting the light of Saturn, at the
other ship. An answering greeting flashed back. Timkin watched it as
it kept going on its course and slowly faded into distance. He felt less
lonely for a moment.
Timkin went back to his scanning of the ring bodies with his glasses.
He saw another lump of coal but was too wearied at the thought of
donning his vac-suit for it, and let it go by under him. It was not till a
minute later that he snapped to attention. For now he remembered,
belatedly, that he had also seen a yellow glow near the black coal.
"Day-dreaming, that's what I was!" he yelled, hastily braking and
spinning the Jetabout around. "If that was gold, and I don't find it
again, I'll...."
It was not easy to backtrack in the rings, and find a certain spot you
had passed over. The rings were constantly in motion, in their orbit
around Saturn. And each body in the rings had its own private
motion in respect to the others. Some gyrated fantastically around
others.
A huge body might in turn exert enough gravitation of its own to hold
smaller bodies in its grip, and force them to become its "moons." And
these satellites then perturbed nearby bodies, causing them to
weave and shuttle within the ring.
In short, any body in the ring might shift position enough in the space
of a minute or two to be lost forever.
Timkin shot back to the coal lump. Yes, the coal lump was there, not
having a complicated private motion. But where was the yellow lump
that his blind eyes had seen—and ignored? There were a hundred
other little bodies around the coal lump and to look them all over one
by one....
Timkin's heart sank to its lowest ebb before suddenly he saw the
yellow glint again. Then, thankfully, he shot the Jetabout over it and
hovered, locking the controls. Minutes later in his vac-suit he was
propelling himself down to the yellow lump via reaction pistol.
"It's only fool's gold, of course," he told himself to calm his wildly
racing pulse. "Just think of it as fool's gold, so you won't be
disappointed again. Or it could be cheap copper. So don't get excited
—yet."
Timkin reached the yellow body, fumbled with his pick and finally
chipped off a piece. He noticed it sheared off under the hard pick,
rather than chipped. He dared to hope it was soft gold. And when he
held the bit to his visor....
"Gold!"
He said the one word quietly. Then he sat down on the lump,
shaken.
"Gold," he repeated. "I hit it—gold! My bonanza! My dream for ten
years!"
It was minutes before he could control his shaking nerves and allow
the warm glow of exultation to spread through him like wine, giving
him new strength. He arose and, like a bird, made a circle around
the lump, using his reaction pistol. He estimated its weight as a
thousand pounds, earth measure. Then he stopped to stand on it
again, a king on an island.
"Of course, it ain't pure gold," Timkin told himself. "But it looks like
about fifty percent pure. They say the first moon before it exploded
didn't have many seas to dissolve and thin out ore deposits. So I can
figure about five hundred pounds of gold. At the pegged rate of
thirty-seven SS-dollars an ounce...."
Timkin's head was too light and buzzy to reach the total.
"But I'm rich," he exulted. "Filthy rich. Gold is even more valuable
today than it used to be on earth in the old days."

Timkin was right. Contrary to all fanciful and unfounded predictions,

gold had never lost its value. True, the nations of earth had all gone
off the gold-standard in the 20th century and for a while gold was a
forgotten metal, buried in vaults.
But then it came into its own as one of the most non-corrodable
metals. When space travel came into being, an alloy of gold became
the standard coating for all equipment used on other worlds, some of
which had noxious atmospheres that could rust iron or copper in
days to worthless dust.
But gold in its alloy-hardened form defied the worst other worlds had
to offer. Thereupon gold became a metal of commerce and its value
rose even higher than its one-time value as a money standard.
And so, with his find of gold, Homer Timkin was as suddenly wealthy
as any Spanish explorer of the New World, back in earth's past.
"It's sure going to be a pleasure," crowed Timkin, "to drag this lump
of gold back to Titan!"
"Yeh, it is—for me!"
Timkin jumped at the sound of the voice behind him, coming out of
nowhere. He turned, gaping, to see another man in a vac-suit slowly
approaching, with a reaction pistol. Timkin could see the newcomer's
Jetabout now, parked alongside his own. Timkin had been too
engrossed in his find to see the approach of the ship.
"Huck Larsoe!" said Timkin in recognition for he knew all the other
prospectors back at the Titan docks.
"Yeh, Timkin," returned Huck Larsoe, grinning. "I was the Jetabout
that passed you a while ago. Just before you went out of my sight, I
saw your ship suddenly scoot on a backtrack. That spelled a find to
me! So I turned and came back, and followed you up."
Timkin didn't like it. Huck Larsoe was a younger man and filled out
his vac-suit with a powerful, hulking body. His stubble of unshaven
black beard formed an unkempt fringe to the hard-bitten face that
peered out of the visor. There was something in his cold grey eyes
that froze Timkin. There was such a thing as claim-jumping here in
the lawless territory of the rings.
"You sure struck it rich," Huck Larsoe went on. "But maybe you didn't
hear me before. I said it was lucky—for me!"
"Y-you can't take this from me," Timkin began, his voice tinny as it
came out of the chin-transmitter to impinge on the radio vibrators at
Larsoe's ears. "It's mine! I found it!"
"Sure, you found it," agreed Larsoe. "But I'm taking it away from you,
see?"
"No!" shrilled Timkin. "That's plain robbery—piracy! I'll tell the police
back at Titan."
Larsoe leered. "And what witnesses have you got? You and me are
the only two humans around here for 50,000 miles. It'll be your word
against mine back at Titan. If I say I found it myself and you're trying
to cut in on it they'll have to believe me. Because I'll have the gold."
Timkin had no weapon. The reaction "pistol" was not a weapon at all,
merely a device for moving in space by means of short, harmless
rocket blasts. He struggled against the bigger man. Larsoe laughed
as he gave the slighter man a shove that sent him spinning off the
lump and almost into another ring body with jagged edges.
 Larsoe laughed as he gave the slighter man a shove.

Then, still laughing, Huck Larsoe shoved the mass of gold to his own
ship, his reaction pistol streaming red flame behind him. He turned
his mocking face.
"I ain't even going to kill you, Timkin, like I could. No need going to
the trouble. It's still your word against mine, back at Titan. You ain't
got a ghost of a chance to prove this is your find."
Slowly Timkin rocketed back to his own ship. He watched Larsoe
stow the gold in his hold and cast out a mess of fossil bones, lumps
of coal, bits of machinery and pieces of carved stone.
"Here, Timkin," Larsoe chortled. "You can have this other junk of
mine now. It'll help you pay for your trip, anyways. See? I ain't such a
bad guy at heart."
And with a mocking laugh, Larsoe slipped into his cabin lock. A
moment later his ship rocketed away and was lost in black space,
leaving a broken old man behind.
Timkin floated beside his ship for long bitter minutes without the
energy to do anything. Ten years of searching and hope wasted—ten
years of hardship and toil. Fate had at last rewarded him with a
magnificent bonanza—and then had kicked him in the teeth.
Timkin was on the verge of madness. For a moment he thought of
opening his reaction pistol wide, gunning straight for the ring bodies
and seeking peace and eternal rest there.

But then, shudderingly, he brought himself back to sanity. The will to

live triumphed as it did in all living creatures in the universe. He
looked at the stuff which Larsoe had cast from his ship, which was
slowly drifting away, scattering.
Rousing himself, Timkin began collecting it and stowing it in his hold.
No need to let the stuff go, even if it was a mocking gift from the
hated thief. He still had to make a profit on the trip.
Timkin held one carved stone in his hand for a moment, staring at its
ancient writings. It was a triangular piece and seemed to have two
sets of writing on it. To keep his mind from plunging into black
despair Timkin tried to picture again the ancient civilization of the first
moon.
But a slight huddled figure sobbed aloud at the controls as the
Jetabout left the rings and aimed for Titan.
At the Titan docks two days later Homer Timkin was calm and
resigned. There was nothing he could do. No use to put in a
complaint against Huck Larsoe, to the police. As Larsoe had said, it
was one man's word against another's. With no witnesses the legal
battle could only end with Larsoe the winner.
Sighing, Timkin hired a rocket truck and piled the museum stuff
aboard and drove to the center of Titan City. Here the Saturn
Archeological Museum reared, stately and imposing on its marble
pillars.
Timkin drove to the service entrance and rang the bell. An elderly
man answered and flashed a smile of greeting.
"Well, Timkin again," he said. "Back with another load of relics from
the rings? I take it you didn't hit any bonanza then, eh?"
"Well, I—" Timkin stopped. No need to go into his story, and
broadcast his shame and misery to the universe. "No, Professor
Blick. No bonanza. But I've got a load of stuff for you to look over for
your museum."
Professor Blick, adjusting his thick glasses, came out and looked
over each item as Timkin took it off the truck.
"Our prices are still standard, Timkin," he said. "Two SS-dollars for a
specimen of coal. Three for fossil bones. Five for bits of machinery.
And ten for the carved stones."
"Why," asked Timkin curiously, "do you pay more for the stones than
anything?"
"Because if they could speak they would tell us far more about the
ancient civilization of the first moon, than any of the other items. We
have a sizeable collection now. We can't translate the writing yet. But
some day we're going to find the Rosetta Stone that will give us the
clue and open up the whole vast story."
"Rosetta Stone?" Timkin was puzzled.
The professor went on conversationally.
"Yes. You see, back on earth many centuries ago, the archeologists
of that time also found carved writings—the ancient records of the
Egyptians. And they too were a riddle.
"But one day a stone was found with not only Egyptian heiroglyphics
on it but another language! The text on this stone had been written in
Egyptian and then copied in the other language. And that second
language—ancient Greek—was known! So this enabled all the
Egyptian writing to be translated and...."
The professor's voice stopped, with a queer gurgle. Timkin stared.
He had just handed him the triangular stone which had been among
Larsoe's "gifts."
"Timkin!" screeched the professor. "This is it! This stone has two sets
of writing on it. One is the unknown script of the first moon. And the
other is—oh, thank the stars!—it's early Rhean, which is a language
we know!"
It was all rather confusing for Timkin after that. The professor bawled
at the top of his voice and more men came rushing out. They all fell
to talking as if the greatest event in the history of the universe had
taken place. Timkin hovered on the outskirts of the group, forgotten
for the time being.
But then all the men turned to him. They looked at him as if he were
some king or some awesome potentate from another star.
"And there, gentlemen!" said Professor Blick, waving at him, "is the
man who brought the stone back!"
Timkin was in an agony of embarrassment as one by one the
archeologists came up and shook his hand silently with reverent
respect in their eyes.
"Professor," pleaded Timkin when this ordeal was over. "I—I want to
get away. Just pay me for the stone, and let me go. If it's so
important to you, maybe you could up the price a little, eh? Maybe—
uh—a hundred dollars?"
Timkin was amazed at his own audacity.

The professor looked at him queerly, almost pityingly, and said

slowly, "One hundred dollars? Timkin, you don't realize the value of
this stone. The museum will make you out a check for one hundred
thousand SS-dollars!"
Timkin stood stunned, unbelieving.
The professor smiled.
"Yes, that's what I said—one hundred thousand. If we could afford it,
we'd pay you ten times that. Actually, you see, the stone is priceless.
The check will be sent to you. You can go now, Timkin."
Timkin drove the rocket truck back, in a dream, and passed a red
light. The traffic cop wrote a ticket.
"That'll cost you twenty-five dollars, bud," he growled.
Timkin burst out laughing and kept laughing all the way back to the
garage. He was fined 25 dollars. It would have been an economic
tragedy before. Now it was a joke. He could pay a hundred fines like
that and still laugh.
The next day, when the check arrived at his room, Timkin knew it
was not a dream. The amount was 150,000 dollars. They had even
upped the price voluntarily.
Timkin went out, with the check in his pocket, and headed for the
Spaceman's Nook. He had one more piece of unfinished business to
do. He knew he would find Huck Larsoe there and saw him at a
corner table. Strangely he seemed depressed, not at all like a man
who had just brought in a fortune in gold.
"Hello, Huck!"
Larsoe looked up sourly as Timkin sat down cheerfully.
"Listen, punk, you got nothing on me," he growled.
"I know," said Timkin. "But why so glum? What did you get for my—
pardon me, your—gold bonanza when you cashed it in?"
Larsoe smashed his fist down on the table, spilling his drink.
"Don't talk to me about that blasted bonanza!" he roared. "You know
what it was? It was just plain rock with a film of rich gold ore over it.
A fake! A flop! I just got enough out of it to pay expenses and that's
all."
"Too bad," Timkin grinned, feeling his cup running over.
"Oh, don't go gloating," said Larsoe. "I still put one over on you. I
took the thing away from you, didn't I?"
"Sure," agreed Timkin. "But you gave me something back which was
worth—"
At this moment, Larsoe sat up, as something came over the tavern
radio, working through the hum. An announcer was saying....
"—biggest news of the day! The Saturn Museum has just announced
the find of a carved stone, from the rings, which will allow them to
translate all the hitherto unknown writings of the first moon! And in
honor of the man who brought it back from the rings, they have
named it—the Timkin Stone!"
Timkin was shocked himself. His name would reverberate down
through the ages now, attached to a stone as famed as the Rosetta
Stone of earth!
But the effect on Huck Larsoe was like that of a knife in his heart. He
turned slow, stunned eyes to his companion.
"Th-the Timkin Stone?" he mumbled. "What—"