One thinks of Homer
One
thinks of Homer
In Brief
In Scylla and Charybdis Mulligan recalls Stephen's
abrasively honest review of Lady Gregory's Poets and
Dreamers and asks him, "Couldn't you do the Yeats
touch?" Exaggerating Yeats's effusive comment on another work
by Gregory, he gushes, "The most beautiful book that has come
out of our country in my time. One thinks of Homer." (He is
heard repeating the first of these sentences in the jumble of
voices at the end of Oxen of the Sun.) This passage is
remarkable for its continued mockery of Yeats (Mulligan has already done
so in Telemachus), its implicit hostility to
Anglo-Irish customs and connections, and its ungracious
attitude toward literary patronage. More interesting than any
of these, though, is the sly way it glances at the coming
arrival of Ulysses on the literary stage.
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Lady Gregory helped Joyce by recommending him as a
journalistic reviewer of books, but that was nothing compared
to the substantial assistance she gave to Yeats, thirteen
years her junior and considerably less affluent. After meeting
him in 1896 she gave him money, loaned him more, put him up in
her house at Coole Park for months on end to give him
uninterrupted writing time, commissioned his father John
Butler Yeats to paint portraits of Irish writers, bought
paintings done by his brother Jack Yeats, and doled out gifts
to Æ
and other close acquaintances.
Yeats reciprocated by supporting Gregory's own literary
efforts. At first, she recalled, he "was slow in coming to
believe I had any gift for writing, and he would not encourage
me to it, thinking he made better use of my folk-lore
gatherings than I could do.” But when she published a
collection of legends translated from the Ulster cycle, Cuchulain
of Muirthemne: The Story of the Men of the Red Branch of
Ulster (1902), Yeats agreed to write a preface and
declared at its outset, "I think this book is the best that
has come out of Ireland in my time. Perhaps I should say
that it is the best book that has ever come out of Ireland;
for the stories which it tells are a chief part of Ireland's
gift to the imagination of the world––and it tells them
perfectly for the first time." Yeats said nothing of the epic
magnificence of "Homer," but Mulligan only slightly
exaggerates what he did say: "When she has added her
translations from other cycles, she will have given Ireland
its Mabinogion,
its Morte
d'Arthur, its Nibelungenlied."
The Celtic Twilight held little allure for Joyce; nor did the
mutual congratulations of the writers of the Irish
Literary Revival. In the library chapter he shows
Stephen being skeptically regarded by people like A.E.,
excluded from the literary salon taking place later in the day
at George
Moore's house, and generally disesteemed. Class no doubt
played a part in this antipathy: most of the Revival writers
were Anglo-Irish Protestants. Moore, born into a landed
family, converted from Catholicism in 1903. Gogarty,
born into an upper-middle-class Catholic family, thrived at Trinity
and spent a term at Oxford. Yeats, Æ, Synge, Hyde, and
Gregory were all raised in the Protestant faith. Although
Joyce benefited from Yeats's kindly assistance on several
occasions, he manages to make Yeats's urbane graciousness
toward his own patron sound like sycophantish toadyism in
Mulligan's mocking mouth. But there is something more than
resentment operating in his echo of the Preface to Cuchulain,
strong as that unsavory element may be.
Earlier in Scylla and Charybdis Stephen has listened
to his fellow writers buzzing with excitement about which of
them may publish something to rival Don Quixote: "I liked
Colum's Drover. Yes, I think he has that queer
thing genius. Do you think he has genius really? Yeats
admired his line: As in wild earth a Grecian vase.
Did he? I hope you'll be able to come tonight. Malachi
Mulligan is coming too. Moore asked him to bring Haines. Did
you hear Miss Mitchell's joke about Moore and Martyn? That
Moore is Martyn's wild oats? Awfully clever, isn't it? They
remind one of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Our national
epic has yet to be written, Dr Sigerson says. Moore is
the man for it. A knight of the rueful countenance here in
Dublin. With a saffron kilt? O'Neill Russell? O, yes, he must
speak the grand old tongue. And his Dulcinea? James Stephens
is doing some clever sketches. We are becoming important,
it seems."
Irish literature truly became important in 1922 with the
publication of its "national epic," Ulysses, a book
whose title invites the comparison that Mulligan ridicules: "One
thinks of Homer." Comparisons to Homer are a perilous
business, as Charles Hughes Terrot discovered after he wrote a
line in Common Sense praising Robert Southey: "Thou
shalt be read, when Homer is forgotten." Lord Byron, an
inveterate despiser of Southey's verse, brilliantly replied:
"Southey will be read when Homer is forgotten. And not till
then." Mulligan aims to perform a similar takedown of Yeats
and Lady Gregory, but Joyce conceals in his hyperbolic
sentence a nod to the nature of Ulysses and a
prediction that he will prove to be the greatest Irish writer,
greater than Moore, Yeats, or Synge, someone to rank beside
Homer, Cervantes, and Shakespeare.
