Awfully good
Awfully
good
In Brief
After Martin Cunningham makes Bloom feel like an outsider by
qualifying the remark that "We have all been" victimized by
moneylenders like Reuben J. Dodd––"Well, nearly all
of us"––Bloom jumps in to "speak with sudden eagerness
to his companions' faces": "That's an awfully good one that's
going the rounds about Reuben J and the son." There is nothing
even slightly funny about this "awfully good" story. Bloom is
humiliated both by volunteering so eagerly to tell it and by
being prevented from doing so. The events were actual but they
happened in 1911, so Joyce altered chronology just as he
altered Dodd's ethnicity.
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In a long footnote to his biography of Joyce, Ellmann reproduces a mocking article, simultaneously jocular and outraged, from the 2 December 1911 issue of Jim Larkin's newspaper The Irish Worker. It carried the headline "Half-a-Crown for Saving a Life":
On August the 26th of this year a solicitor named Reuben Jas. Dodd jumped into the Liffey close to the Butt Bridge. Whatever his motive––suicide or otherwise––we care not. After swimming around to cool himself he became exhausted; a life-buoy was thrown him, but he was unable to help himself. A docker who was passing at the time hearing the commotion, asked "what's up?" "Man drowning," was the answer, and without a moment's hesitation he jumped in and brought Dodd, solicitor, to the steps, where another docker and a carter lifted Dodd up the steps on to the quay wall. The inevitable policeman then appeared, and Dodd was taken to Jervis street Hospital, and from there to the house of detention. The father of this Dodd, solicitor, was walking up and down the quay whilst this episode was being enacted, and as a matter of fact had been talking to his son, Dodd, solicitor, previous to him deciding to test the recuperative benefits of Anna Liffey. Now, what of the man who rescued Dodd, eh? He is only a common docker named Moses Goldin, who during the last few years saved some twenty lives. Goldin has a wife and four children to keep. He has been suffering from pulmonary trouble for some time past, brought on by the exposure he submitted himself to in his successful efforts to rescue life. Dodd was taken to hospital on a motor car. Moses Goldin, who saved his life, walked home to his slum. His poor old mother, who minds his children whilst the other heroine––his wife––goes out to earn a few shillings in a sack factory, went out to a publican close by to borrow a shirt so that Goldin might change his clothes. Owing to want of attention Goldin had to go to hospital; whilst lying there his wife lost a day's work and wages amounting to 1s., and went and saw Mr. Dodd, senior. After some delay he condescended to see her, and very kindly told Mrs. Goldin that her husband should have minded his own business. After other fatherly advice he gave Mrs. Goldin 2s.6d. to assist her. Goldin lay in hospital some weeks. He lost his health and wages and got 2s.6d. for saving Dodd, solicitor (38).After a few more of these polemical sentences, the article concludes, "Mr. Dodd thinks his son is worth half-a-crown. We wouldn't give that amount for a whole family of Dodds." The writer's reasons for despising Dodd senior (assuming they have some basis in fact) would seem to justify the scorn that Cunningham, Power, and Dedalus feel for the man. But there is not a hint of antisemitism in the newspaper article. The Dodds almost certainly were not Jewish, and the writer of the piece does not insinuate that they were. On the other hand, the name Moses strongly suggests that the heroic dockworker was Jewish. The only hatred expressed in the article is working-class resentment of selfish, arrogant people like the Dodds, those shamefully privileged "solicitors."
James Joyce attended the Jesuit-run Belvedere College with the younger Dodd (they intensely disliked one another), so he must have known that the family were not Jewish. But his father's bitter grievance against Dodd's father gave him reason to include the tightfisted moneylender in the novel, and his choice of a Jewish protagonist gave him reason to make the usurer Jewish, eliciting antisemitic comments from Bloom's Catholic companions. Bloom responds by rushing to report a story that humiliates the younger Dodd and vilifies the older one. The detail of telling it "to his companions' faces" marvelously conveys his dilemma of appealing to an unsympathetic audience, and his uncharacteristically British diction ("That's an awfully good one....Isn't it awfully good?") suggests the falsity of his manner as he flails about struggling to curry favor.
As it turns out, his narration is "thwarted...rudely" by Martin Cunningham, who finishes telling the tale and delivers the punchline in which Dodd gives "the boatman a florin for saving his son's life." Joyce here reduces the half-crown (2s.6d) to a florin (2s), and Simon Dedalus continues the reductive process, improving on the newspaperman's joke ("We wouldn't give that amount for a whole family of Dodds") by drily remarking that two shillings is "One and eightpence too much." This passage in Ulysses is just as grimly hostile as the character assassination in the newspaper, and antisemitic to boot. Through it all Bloom makes small squeaking efforts to be heard, like a small child clamoring for the attention of older boys: "— Yes, Mr Bloom said. But the funny part is..."; "— Isn't it awfully good? Mr Bloom said eagerly." It is not his best moment.
§ The
account of Dodd's near-drowning and rescue joins other such
stories in Ulysses. In Telemachus Stephen
distinguishes himself from Mulligan's lifesaving aquatic
heroics: "I'm not a hero, however." In Proteus
he asks himself, "Would you do what he did? A boat would be
near, a lifebuoy. Natürlich, put there for you. Would
you or would you not?" At the end of that chapter he imagines
people pulling a drowned man's corpse out of the bay into a
boat, framing it as a kind of secular resurrection.
The recollection of Dodd's adventure in Hades stands
in for the actual drowning death of Matthew
Kane which provided a genesis for the Paddy Dignam
funeral (Kane, who died while swimming in Dublin Bay, also
gave Joyce a model for Martin Cunningham). In Wandering
Rocks Lenehan and M'Coy recall how Tom Rochford ventured
down into a sewer pipe to rescue workers from the gas that was
suffocating them: "He's a hero." And in Circe the dead
and buried Paddy Dignam becomes associated with Tom Rochford
as he "worms down through a coalhole." Rochford
imitates his action as he "executes a daredevil salmon leap
in the air and is engulfed in the coalhole."
These various stories of rescuing drowning people provide a
counterpoint to the novel's many metaphorical suggestions of
drowning: the "bowl of bitter waters"
that links the suffering of Stephen's cancer-ridden mother to
the life-taking bay, the sea of debts into which
Stephen himself (like his father) is sinking, the dire poverty
of Milly Dedalus and her sisters ("She is drowning. Agenbite.
Save her. Agenbite. All against us. She will drown me with
her, eyes and hair. Lank coils of seaweed hair around me, my
heart, my soul. Salt green death"), the alcoholism
afflicting all of Dublin. Ulysses is a book in which
people are struggling to keep their heads above water, often
unsuccessfully.
