So Thursday sixteenth June

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Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) was an important and capable administrator in the office of England's Royal Navy. Throughout the first decade of the Restoration he kept a voluminous diary in which he recorded observations not only of hugely consequential events like the Great Plague of 1665, the Great Fire of London in 1666, and naval war with the Dutch in 1665-67, but also personal details as trivial as his sexual adventures, the frequency of his bowel movements, and the burial of his prized Parmesan cheese to protect it from advancing flames. The diary records private confidences, employing shorthand abbreviations as well as hilariously transparent foreign-language code words for illicit sexual matters. However, Pepys evidently also wrote with an eye to posterity: before his death he wrote out a fair copy, had it bound in six volumes, catalogued it in his library, and supplied a cheat sheet for the shorthand. Since its publication in several 19th century editions, educated people have known it as an important work of English prose.

Content-wise, most of Joyce's paragraph feels consistent with its model. The six long sentences describing a terrible drought and a sudden thunderstorm are perfectly in keeping with the Diary––Pepys is always interested in the weather. He also likes observing people, and Joyce's narrator manages to drop no fewer than 21 names while mentioning various other unnamed people. Clothing is another frequent topic in the Diary. A "cut bob" and "dance cloaks of Kendal green" play no part in its vocabulary, but, as Gifford observes, "This sort of sartorial observation is characteristic of Pepys's style." However, the interest in prediction displayed later in the paragraph seems incongruous. Joyce's narrator says that Bloom's dream of his wife wearing pants is "thought by those in ken to be for a change," and in the final sentence he mentions "a prognostication" and "a prophetical charm": "yet those in ken say after wind and water fire shall come." Pepys is keenly attuned to change––he perpetually assesses the state of his career, his body, his marriage, the navy, the goings-on at court––but to my knowledge he does not dwell on magical predictions, prophecies, or occult interpretations of dreams. I will return to this incongruity at the end of the note.

In the letter to Frank Budgen in which he described his work-in-progress on Oxen, Joyce mentioned "a diarystyle bit Pepys-Evelyn." John Evelyn (1620-1706), a friend of Pepys, compiled his own diary beginning in 1640 and continuing until his death. It was first published in 1818, an event which led to the first publication of Pepys's diary several years later. Most annotators of Ulysses (Gifford, Johnson, Slote) take Joyce at his word and purport to hear the influence of both men, but to my ear only Pepys's freshly immediate observational style sounds in the diary paragraph. The more polished and composed prose of Evelyn (he made entries less frequently, often reworking observations first recorded much earlier) seems absent. Slote cites two phrases ostensibly taken from Evelyn––"those in ken," meaning "those in the know," and "a brace of shakes," from Evelyn's "a brace of bullets"––but the use of two common expressions hardly amounts to a style. J. S. Atherton's judgment strikes me as largely accurate: "there is no sign of Evelyn" (Critical Essays, 324).

I do not entirely agree, however, with what this perceptive critic says about Pepys. He assumes that Joyce knew his diary only from the excerpts in Peacock's anthology: "the Pepys imitation is barely recognizable. Joyce's failure arises from his reliance here on Peacock who edited the Pepys extract ruthlessly; by expurgating and by beheading, curtailing and dividing sentences he produced a jerky effect quite unlike Pepys's smooth discursiveness.... Joyce's version exaggerates the looseness of sentence structure provided by Peacock's mutilations, probably without realizing that the chief characteristic of Pepys's style was a careful integration of subordinate phrases and clauses into the main body of a sentence" (324). Joyce's paragraph begins in "tolerable Peacock-Pepys mode" without really sounding like Pepys, Atherton says, but it increasingly veers into anachronistic vocabulary, much of it drawn from Defoe's age half a century later. These observations contain some truth, but they overstate the case and have perhaps discouraged readers from seeing just how extensively Joyce engages with Pepys's writing.

On the question of style, the "jerky effect" is neither totally absent in Pepys's writing nor incompatible with his "smooth discursiveness." Pepys does integrate subordinate clauses into many of his sentences, but not to an extraordinary degree. His writing is really more paratactic than hypotactic, and his entries typically start in a quite jerky way with adverbial or prepositional phrases that omit subjects, verbs, or both: "Up by 5 a-clock and, blessed be God, find all well"; "To the office and there had an extraordinary meeting"; "Long in bed––till raised by my new taylor"; "To Gresham College, there to show myself"; "Abroad to my ruler's of my books"; "Up pretty early"; "Dined at home." Joyce has chosen not to imitate the countless "Up" and "To" openings, but he leads with similarly abrupt, grammatically incomplete phrases: "So...Dignam laid in clay," "Hard to breathe," "There Leop. Bloom of Crawford's journal sitting snug," "Bloom there for a languor he had but was now better." In both writers' prose, subordinate clauses share space with rough effects.

It is true that Joyce takes huge liberties with vocabulary. Some of his words and phrases come from other historical periods. Evelyn and Pepys frequently get about London by "coach," but as Atherton notes they do not write about traveling by "chair" or "fiacre," nor do they speak of a woman's "hub" or a fisherman's "heavybraked reel." Relying on the work of Robert Janusko, Slote and his collaborators identify many expressions taken from other writers: "fifty mile or thereabout" (Daniel Defoe); "the seed won't sprout" (George Savile); "sadcoloured" (Izaak Walton); "tofts" (Henry Hallam); "clean consumed" (Raphael Holinshed); "dry flag" (Savile); "wind sitting in the west" (Walton); "poring up" (Defoe); "as the night increased" (Walter Raleigh); "smoking shower" (Walton); "what in the earth" (Defoe); "crush a cup of wine" (Romeo and Juliet); "big of her age" (Defoe); "pleading her belly" (Defoe); and "queerities" (Richard Steele).

A greater amount of Joyce's vocabulary comes from Pepys's diary, though, and he has been reading far more than Peacock's two excerpts. The phrase "stunk mightily," which he applies to rural fields, comes from a description of a plague victim in that anthology, and "skittish," applied to Milly, characterizes an active young nobleman in the same excerpt. The phrases "for aught they knew" and "likely brangling fellows" were probably inspired by "her husband, for aught I see, a likely man" in Peacock's other excerpt. But many other details, hitherto unremarked by critics and annotators, come from other parts of the Diary. Mrs. Purefoy's "hub" is of a linguistic piece with Bannon's "coz," a shortened form of "cousin" that Pepys uses often. The words "bargeman," "sprinkle," "faggots," "lightnings," "cloaks," "scholar," "dame," "slippers," "stools," "shrewd," "twelvemonth," "sacrament," and "refreshed" all appear in the Diary. Joyce's "fellows" are common there, as are publications like Myles Crawford's "journal," Malachi's "almanac," and George Russell's "gazette." Phrases like "all this while," "poor body," "catched up," "put to it," "Lady Day," "infinite great," "very heavy," "very high," "a change," and "great stroke" all come from the diary. Pepys speaks of "ten of the clock" several times, "This evening" often, and "thence" constantly.

Some of these unrecognized echoes of Pepys seem especially overt. Theodore Purefoy, fishing off Bullock Harbour, is said to be "dapping on the sound," recalling Pepys's frequent references to "the Sound"––the common English name for the Öresund strait between Denmark and Sweden. Saying that something is "a mere fetch without bottom of reason" likewise echoes his many nautical references to the bottoms (i.e., keels) of things: "the bottom of the quarrel," "the bottom of the business," "the very bottom of every man's thought," "to have known the bottom of it," "the bottom of my business," "see to the bottom of all my accounts." More consequentially, Molly's "pair of Turkey trunks" may well have been suggested by Pepys's many references to the burgeoning English trade with that country: "the Turkey Company," "Turkey merchants," "Turkey ships," "a brave Turkey carpet." In one passage Pepys says he has moved "chairs in my chamber, and set them above in the red room, they being Turkey work." Might not these red-friendly chairs have prompted Joyce to give dame Moll "red slippers" to go with her Turkish pants?

Pepys's mention of "the Right Hon. John Lord Barkeley," "the Right Honourable the principal officers," "my Lord Chief Justice Keeling," "my Lord of Oxford, Justice in Eyre," and similar people show up in Joyce's "the Rt. Hon. Mr Justice Fitzgibbon," and one such reference to a titled person has clearly inspired his opening words. Pepys writes, "My Lord Chief Justice Hide did die suddenly this week, a day or two ago, of an apoplexy." Joyce's paragraph begins, "So Thursday sixteenth June Patk. Dignam laid in clay of an apoplexy..." Echoing "of an apoplexy" can hardly be a coincidence: another phrase from the same sentence, "did die suddenly," pops up in Nausicaa when Gerty MacDowell thinks that Mr. Dignam "died suddenly and was buried, God have mercy on him, from a stroke." (For many centuries, the term apoplexy was used for any sudden loss of consciousness leading to death. In the late 19th it began to be applied exclusively to hemorrhagic strokes. Joyce appears to be aware of both usages.)

As for the very un-Pepys-like concern with prediction later in the paragraph, one possible explanation is that Joyce's attention has begun to drift to his next major stylistic model: Daniel Defoe. Defoe was strongly interested in predictions, prophecies, dreams, visions, and ghostly apparitions, even while maintaining an empiricist skepticism about the human mind's capacity to fathom such things. Quite a few bits of Defoe-like language are sprinkled throughout the Pepys paragraph, and it seems possible that toward its end it begins a transition to the mind-set of the following one. (That paragraph too refuses to stand still, shifting somewhere in the middle from the style of Defoe to that of Jonathan Swift.)