Bodily shame

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The complete thought runs as follows:

They are sundered by a bodily shame so steadfast that the criminal annals of the world, stained with all other incests and bestialities, hardly record its breach. Sons with mothers, sires with daughters, lesbic sisters, loves that dare not speak their name, nephews with grandmothers, jailbirds with keyholes, queens with prize bulls.

Stephen goes on to say that sons are inherently antithetical to fathers, increasing their sufferings, opposing their wills, draining their vital energies. The idea seems to be that sexual attraction cannot operate in such a climate.

There can be no doubt about the strength of the taboo, but such pairings do happen, and one newly reported instance may hold significance for Joyce's fiction. In a personal communication, Mark Shulgasser, the partner of composer Lee Hoiby from 1979 until his death in 2011 and now executor of his estate, has recounted to me Hoiby's reminiscences of John Francis Byrne, the "Cranly" of Joyce's Portrait. In the late 1950s, Hoiby had been the lover and roommate of Byrne's son, also named John Francis, in New York City. Byrne Senior had lived in New York since 1910 and Shulgasser reports that, according to Hoiby, he "often trekked up to the young men's upper west side apartment to receive oral sex from his son, Hoiby discreetly leaving the premises to give them some privacy. Moreover, this had been a practice between father and son since Jr.s childhood!"

This is admittedly hearsay, several layers removed from hard evidence, and Shulgasser writes that "You may take it with a grain of salt if you wish," but he notes that Hoiby was not one to traffic in salacious rumors: "He was by no means a Joycean, or much of a gossip. For instance, he refused to retail lurid stories of his time as composer-in-residence for Rebekkah Harkness's ballet company, and as acolyte of Menotti and Samuel Barber, to various biographers, forgoing the opportunity to make splashy entries in the indices." It is also worth noting that Hoiby knew the father personally, having had at least one significant interaction with him. Numerous sources report that Byrne Senior once asked Hoiby to notate a melody which Joyce had composed for James Clarence Mangan's poem "Dark Rosaleen"––the translation of the Irish poem Roisin Dubh for which Mangan is most famous. Byrne had sat with Joyce while he sang the tune, and now he sang it for Hoiby. Hoiby honored his request to set it down, and years later it became the basis of his piano quartet Dark Rosaleen––Rhapsody on an Air by James Joyce (2000).

If Hoiby's report about father-son fellatio is true, it lends interesting overtones to the distinctly homoerotic scene narrated in A Portrait in which Cranly grabs Stephen's arm and asks him whether he would choose artistic exile over life with someone "who would be more than a friend, more even than the noblest and truest friend a man ever had.” Stephen is "thrilled" by Cranly's touch––a detail that might imply only intense affection but could as easily indicate sexual excitement. Both men back away from the brink: Stephen asks Cranly, "Of whom are you speaking?," and Cranly does not answer. Stephen recalls this incident in Telemachus when Buck Mulligan, clad only in a bathrobe, makes a similar overture of friendly intimacy: "Buck Mulligan suddenly linked his arm in Stephen's.... Cranly's arm. His arm.... Stephen freed his arm quietly."

The intimacy that Mulligan offers may be merely friendly, but Stephen rejects it, and in Proteus he associates it with "Wilde's love that dare not speak its name. His arm: Cranly's arm. He now will leave me. And the blame?" At several later points in the novel Stephen seems wary of men's touches, and in Eumaeus the phrase "a strange kind of flesh" signals his possible apprehension that Bloom may have sexual designs on him, as Mulligan has jokingly insinuated in Scylla and Charybdis.

These many details, beginning in part 5 of A Portrait and sustained all the way to Ithaca, tell some kind of story about Stephen/Cranly and Joyce/Byrne, but what is that story? Hoiby's report, if true, would certainly confirm a reader's suspicion that Cranly's overture to Stephen is sexual. But how does Stephen respond? If there is a sexual element to his feeling "thrilled," then perhaps he is not in any way offended, alarmed, or repelled. Cranly's attraction to him, and his reciprocal response, represent a possible life-altering course, albeit one that he does not choose. When he appears in Ulysses a year or two later (in Joyce's biological time), Stephen has gained some distance from any attraction he felt in that moment and decided that his life will be heterosexually normative (more or less––Joyce chose a lifelong female partner but distrusted marriage). He knows that he does not want a homosexual involvement with anyone, but he feels no disgust or remorse when he thinks of "Cranly's arm."

Another way of reading the thrill, more consistent with most known facts about Joyce's sexuality, would be to regard it as merely an instinctive emotional response to a close friend's gesture of devotion. Stephen does not act on the feeling in any way, whether by saying how much he would welcome such a friend or by declaring some previously unspoken feelings of his own. He responds coolly, and to the extent that he suspects a sexual design that coolness may mask some real aversion. By the time represented in Ulysses he has learned to file the incident under Undesired Male Sexual Advances, and his constant awareness of male touches––a high-gain radar, always on––shows him on guard against a possibility that Cranly introduced into his life.

If this second account is closer to the truth, then the Hoiby story may add a very dark penumbra to the proceedings. In a personal communication, Vincent Van Wyk observes that Byrne Senior must have been adept at the art of emotional manipulation that people today are calling grooming. Any abuse he committed could not have been simply rape, because the son agreed to continue playing his part long after he had begun his own adult life. A man who could talk his young son into giving him oral sex, and continuing to give it, was surely gifted in the art of convincing others that he could be just what they needed him to be.

There is an intriguing analogy here to the relationship between Joyce and Byrne Senior. Joyce valued Byrne's friendship because he could tell him anything without fear of judgment. Byrne's posture, according to Ellmann, was serenely receptive, self-effacing toleration of the confessions he was hearing––exactly what Joyce needed. In a man who later would groom his son for sex, might not such active passivity have been Byrne's way of preparing Joyce for a sexual advance? By this reading Stephen's reaction to Cranly's touch has changed by the time of Ulysses. He now sees it as somehow predatory. Since the book was published before Byrne's son was even born, Joyce could hardly have known just how far he would go to satisfy forbidden sexual desires. Nevertheless, he introduces the horror of father-son incest in Scylla and Charybdis, a chapter in which Stephen thinks of Cranly four times (out of seven total mentions in the novel) and in which he suspects Mulligan of wanting to make him a "catamite." If some uncanny insight is implied by this fact, there is no fathoming the astral planes from which Joyce might have derived it.

These many evocations of homosexual desire centered on the figure of Cranly gain one final expression in the novel. Long after their college days, Joyce visited his friend Byrne at 7 Eccles Street, and in Ithaca Stephen visits the fictional inhabitant of that house, Leopold Bloom. In a personal communication Senan Molony notes how suggestive it is that the two men stand together under the night sky with their penises in hand. Stephen's refusal of Bloom's invitation to stay the night and become a member of the household may reflect a recognition that Bloom is fantasizing about having him sleep with his wife––a conclusion easy to infer from the disturbingly pimplike way in which he shows the young man a picture of Molly in Eumaeus. But the reluctance may center too on sexual apprehensions about Bloom himself. Stephen imagines him as a "Vampire" when he awakens on the streets of Monto, and his impression of "strange...flesh" in Eumaeus communicates a New Testament abhorrence of homosexuality.

Concerned that publishing Shulgasser's report about the Byrnes might cause distress to any surviving relatives, and uncertain about just how much insight into Ulysses might be gained by doing so, I paused for one month before beginning a draft of this note. My decision to write it has been prompted by a growing sense that the incestuous relationship, if indeed it occurred, resonates far more strongly in the novel than simply as a bizarre cosmic echo of Stephen's joking about such incest in Scylla and Charybdis. Although the report seems credible, the truth may never be known with certainty. Byrne Senior was a skilled cryptographer, and he titled his autobiography Silent Years, so he was no doubt good at keeping secrets. Readers of Joyce should weigh the known facts, consider their possible relevance to Joyce's novels, and make up their own minds about the people involved.

It is not easy to locate information about Byrne Junior. The Dictionary of Irish Biography (www. dib.ie) says only that Byrne Senior "was married and had at least one daughter." But there was a son, born in 1929 and named for his father. According to a brief biography in Anesthesiology 132.6 (June 2020), in adulthood this man "designed window dressing for Manhattan department stores." In 1968 he married the operatic and Broadway soprano Patricia “Pat” Neway, who had sung “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” in the original Sound of Music, and who, according to Shulgasser, also "originated leading roles in two of Hoiby's early operas, The Scarf (1958) and Natalia Petrovna (1964). She retired from the stage after her marriage, although her great success as Magda in Menotti's The Consul had led some to call her 'the American Callas'."

John Junior and Pat retired to a home in East Corinth, Vermont, where he died on 29 November 2008 after 40 years of marriage. Responding to a 2009 blog post about Neway at www.theatreaficionado.com, nosferaustin writes, "Patricia Neway is very much alive and living, as mentioned before, in VT. Her husband, the late John Francis Byrne, died late last year. He was my great-uncle." Neway herself has since died. I have found no record of any children born to the couple.