Category: Daily Dispatch

June 16 is Bloomsday, the date on which the events in James Joyce’s novel “Ulysses” are supposed to have taken place in 1904. The day is marked by celebrations world-wide, as Joyceans get together to reenact, eat, play music, drink and of course read.

I have been semi-secretly trying to work my way through Joyce’s magnum opus for the past nine months, which is why I have not been posting very much about books, an aspect of myself I had intended to share as part of the purpose of this page. I am generally a fairly prolific reader.

I say semi-secretly, because I always found “Ulysses” to be an extraordinarily pretentious book, and I’d rather walk around with it in a brown paper bag than come across as the kind of person who would flaunt that he is reading “Ulysses.”

Joyce inspires in me, as I’m sure he does in many, an uncomfortable mix of admiration and annoyance. I suppose, in the lexicon of the day, we are frenemies. Do I think he was a genius, as many assert? No. Do I think he was an extraordinarily clever man, who worked very hard to achieve his vision? Yes – though I don’t claim to be an authority on the matter. There’s no questioning his talent.

This is my third crack at “Ulysses,” which I had attempted for the first time in high school. This time I’ve had assistance in the form of ample notes and an enlightening seminar at the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia. I think I do have a better understanding of Joyce’s purpose, thanks to the Rosenbach’s excellent instructor, Carol Loeb Schloss, who will be taking up her new post at the University of Pennsylvania in the fall. That said, I still find Joyce to be infuriating, at times, though I have to admit my fury is now tempered with respect.

I always wondered, how could Joyce betray the exquisite prose he produced in “The Dubliners,” with its beautiful story, “The Dead,” for the inscrutable hieroglyphs of his later work? It’s been years since I’ve read “The Dead,” but it is so powerful, it has stayed with me. I may re-read it tomorrow, to mark the 100th anniversary of “The Dubliners,” which was published on June 17, 1914.

I have dabbled in other readings alongside “Ulysses” to take a break from the grind. For as impressive a puzzle as the book can be, the truth is, for me anyway, it is not very compelling. There is nothing in it to make you want to pick it up again. Undoubtedly, there are those would disagree. However, when I do pick it up, there is also plenty of cleverness to admire, until I’ve had my surfeit of cleverness at the expense of pleasure.

One of the side-readings I’ve escaped to also happens to be one of my favorite books, “The Crock of Gold,” by Joyce’s fellow Dubliner James Stephens. This is my third reading of “Crock,” which unlike “Ulysses” I never feel the urge to hurl across the room.

Stephens shares with Joyce a virtuosic mastery of language, but his primary concern is to entertain, inspire warmth through his insights into the human condition, and even to make the reader laugh, which he does so frequently. If you’re a person, like me, for whom a staggering accretion of whimsy and even nonsense can teeter over into profundity, then this is the book for you.

The story concerns two philosophers who live together in the woods with their termagant wives (there is much in the book concerning the complexities of friction and affection between the sexes). One of the philosophers inadvertently gets mixed up with the theft of a crock of gold from a local warren of leprechauns. The leprechauns are furious, but largely hindered in their attempts at revenge, on account of the philosopher’s wife being related to a powerful fairy folk. Creatures of Irish and Classical mythology abound, and the ending is as joyous as a vibrant spring day.

Conveying Stephens’ magic would be impossible without quoting the author himself, whose powers of observation fall somewhere between Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde. He has Twain’s ability to milk a laugh and Wilde’s talent to make the most incongruous observation ring true.

Here’s the enthralling opening:

“IN the centre of the pine wood called Coilla Doraca there lived not long ago two Philosophers. They were wiser than anything else in the world except the Salmon who lies in the pool of Glyn Cagny into which the nuts of knowledge fall from the hazel bush on its bank. He, of course, is the most profound of living creatures, but the two Philosophers are next to him in wisdom. Their faces looked as though they were made of parchment, there was ink under their nails, and every difficulty that was submitted to them, even by women, they were able to instantly resolve. The Grey Woman of Dun Gortin and the Thin Woman of Inis Magrath asked them the three questions which nobody had ever been able to answer, and they were able to answer them. That was how they obtained the enmity of these two women which is more valuable than the friendship of angels. The Grey Woman and the Thin Woman were so incensed at being answered that they married the two Philosophers in order to be able to pinch them in bed, but the skins of the Philosophers were so thick that they did not know they were being pinched. They repaid the fury of the women with such tender affection that these vicious creatures almost expired of chagrin, and once, in a very ecstasy of exasperation, after having been kissed by their husbands, they uttered the fourteen hundred maledictions which comprised their wisdom, and these were learned by the Philosophers who thus became even wiser than before.”

If the sexism rankles, well, there’s plenty of sexism by today’s standards, but none of it is mean-spirited and the women get plenty of moments to shine. It’s as if the book were written by the world’s most mischievous couple’s therapist.

Here’s a characteristic example of Stephens’ philosophical free association, from much later in the book:

“She taught that a man must hate all women before he is able to love a woman, but that he is at liberty, or rather he is under express command, to love all men because they are of his kind. Women also should love all other women as themselves, and they should hate all men but one man only, and him they should seek to turn into a woman, because women, by the order of their beings, must be either tyrants or slaves, and it is better they should be tyrants than slaves. She explained that between men and women there exists a state of unremitting warfare, and that the endeavour of each sex is to bring the other to subjection; but that women are possessed by a demon called Pity which severely handicaps their battle and perpetually gives victory to the male, who is thus constantly rescued on the very ridges of defeat. She said to Seumas that his fatal day would dawn when he loved a woman, because he would sacrifice his destiny to her caprice, and she begged him for love of her to beware of all that twisty sex. To Brigid she revealed that a woman’s terrible day is upon her when she knows that a man loves her, for a man in love submits only to a woman, a partial, individual and temporary submission, but a woman who is loved surrenders more fully to the very god of love himself, and so she becomes a slave, and is not alone deprived of her personal liberty, but is even infected in her mental processes by this crafty obsession. The fates work for man, and therefore, she averred, woman must be victorious, for those who dare to war against the gods are already assured of victory: this being the law of life, that only the weak shall conquer. The limit of strength is petrifaction and immobility, but there is no limit to weakness, and cunning or fluidity is its counsellor. For these reasons, and in order that life might not cease, women should seek to turn their husbands into women; then they would be tyrants and their husbands would be slaves, and life would be renewed for a further period.”

When recommending “The Crock of Gold,” I often add that the prose contains enough quotable material to fill a small Bartlett’s.

Joyce, who was a superstitious man, made Stephens, his friend, whom he believed was born in Dublin on the same date (they were actually born a week apart), promise that if he were to die before the completion of the task, that Stephens would take up the manuscript of “Finnegan’s Wake.” The two writers couldn’t be more different, but that’s how much Joyce believed in Stephens’ ability (or at any rate, how much he trusted in providence).

Because of my love of “The Crock of Gold,” I have hunted down and read many of Stephens’ other books, all in the days before the internet would have made such a search a snap. It’s inconceivable to me that he is now almost completely forgotten, except perhaps as a footnote to scholars of Irish literature. Walk into an Irish pub, and there will be pictures of Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, for crying out loud, before you will find one of James Stephens, who is one of the most Irish of writers.

That said, none of his other books quite recapture the magic of “The Crock of Gold.” If memory serves, “Deirdre” and “Irish Fairy Tales” share characteristics, but other books, like “Mary, Mary” (a.k.a. “The Charwoman’s Daughter”), are wistful, charming snapshots of domestic life. Stephens was also involved in the Irish nationalist movement and wrote about the Easter Rising of 1916 (“The Insurrection in Dublin”), at which he was present. I realize now I haven’t read any of these books in years.

I see “The Crock of Gold” was reprinted only last month by John Murray. I can’t vouch for the quality of the reissue. If you’re able to get a hold of a second-hand copy of a cloth edition with the color plates by Thomas Mackenzie, you’d be doing yourself a favor. (Arthur Rackham was originally assigned, but died before he could undertake the project.) Evocative woodcuts also open each chapter in the better editions. Do NOT read this as an e-book.

“The Crock of Gold” was actually quite popular in its day. Stephens was equally well-known as a poet, and you may encounter some of his verse from time to time in older anthologies. Truthfully, his prose is as poetic as anything written in stanzaic form.

Samuel Barber set some of the poems as songs. Here is “The Coolin” from Barber’s choral work, “Reincarnations.”