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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
In the introduction to his definitive edition of Chamber Music (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1954) William York Tindall has shown us clearly that Joyce's poems are not so clear nor so “slight” as we once thought they were. One of the most enigmatic is “Tilly,” the opening poem of Pomes Penyeach. The best poem in that disappointing book, it has, like the rest of Joyce's work, one of its sources in Joyce's biography; and in part we can recover this source from Stephen Hero, the first attempt at A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. “Ruminants,” a hitherto unprinted early version of the poem, provides interesting insights into Joyce's technique as a versifier, and a study of the meaning of “Tilly” in relation to the Portrait, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake is fascinating for the dim light it throws on Joyce's progressively indirect and intricate handling of his themes.
1 Harry Levin, e.g., says of the Chamber Music poems: “They are slight, elusive, formal, above all musical” (The Portable James Joyce [New York: Viking Press, 1949], p. 627).
2 Stephen Hero, ed. Theodore Spencer (New York: New Directions, 1944). Quotations from Stephen Hero are from this edition; those from “Tilly” and the Portrait are from The Portable James Joyce, mentioned above; those from Ulysses are from the Modern Library edition; and those from Finnegans Wake are from the Viking Press edition. The longer works are designated SH, P, U, and FW.
3 St. Paul, whom Joyce knew, is adequate authority for this sense of bond, as in Galatians iii.28, “There is neither Jew nor Greek: there is neither bond nor free: there is neither male nor female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus.” He is also an appropriate authority here, for he is discussing the notion of the mystical body of Christ, which may be recalled in the poem: “I am the vine; you are the branches; he that abideth in me, and I in him, the same beareth much fruit: for without me you can do nothing. If any one abide not in me, he shall be cast forth as a branch, and shall wither, and they shall gather him up, and cast him into the fire, and he burnetii.”
4 James Joyce (New York: Rinehart, 1948), p. 174.
5 P, pp. 471 ff. Stephen is translating St. Thomas Aquinas.
6 Quoted by the kind permission of Miss Harriet Shaw Weaver, Joyce's literary executrix, and the Lockwood Memorial Lib. of the Univ. of Buffalo.
7 Joyce uses the word wintry three times in the Portrait. All three uses are in Stephen's childish and feverish dream of going home, when he becomes ill at Clongowes (p. 260). When Stephen becomes a man, later in the Portrait and in Ulysses, he puts away some childish things, including the word wintry.
Exactly why Joyce chose to set the poem in winter at all is, of course, an intricate question. But one reason may have been that although he—or, at least, Stephen Dedalus—liked cows in summer, he could not abide them in winter: “But when autumn came the cows were driven home from the grass: and the first sight of the filthy cowyard at Stradbrook with its foul green puddles and clots of liquid dung and steaming bran troughs sickened Stephen's heart. The cattle which had seemed so beautiful in the country on sunny days revolted him and he could not even look at the milk they yielded” (P, p. 309).
And it is tempting to speculate in relation to both “Tilly” and the Portrait that Joyce, who had read everything, had read Thomas Mann's Tonio Kroger when it was first published in 1903. Mann's book begins, “Die Wintersonne stand nur als armer Schein, milchig und matt ...”; its subject is a betrayal very similar, as we shall see, to that of Stephen by Cranly, and it is presented in similar terms. Tonio wants Hans (his Cranly) to read Schiller's Don Carlos (in which the king is betrayed by the one man he counted his friend), but Hans says, “Ach, nein ... das lass nur, Tonio. ... Ich bleibe bei meinen Pferdebiichern, weisst du. Famose Abbildungen sind darin.” And then Hans turns traitor, addressing Tonio by his last name and symbolically stealing his best girl, Inge.
8 This subtle change is apparently one of the last which Joyce made in the poem. The manuscript of the poem now in the possession of Mr. John Hinsdale Thompson of Columbia, Missouri, who has kindly permitted me to quote it, reads:
This manuscript differs from the printed version of “Tilly' at only three (perhaps only two) points—the full stop at the end of line 2 (the difference which is uncertain), the in in line 3, and the His in line 4. One of the two typescripts accompanying the manuscript reads the mark at the end of line 2 as a comma, the other as a full stop. Both typescripts substitute a comma for the in of fine 3. One of the typescripts has been corrected in pencil (probably not in Joyce's hand), changing His in line S to The.
I have not yet been able to determine when “Ruminants” became “Tilly.” There is only one manuscript of each poem, according to John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon (A Bibliography of James Joyce [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1953], pp. 143–44) which preceded the publication of Pomes Peny-each in 1927. These two manuscripts are printed here for the first time. Both are inscribed “Dublin 1904” in Joyce's hand; and if Gorman is right in saying (p. 174) that Joyce considered “Tilly”—rather, that is, than “Ruminants”—for inclusion in Chamber Music, “Tilly” must have been composed between 1904 and 1906.
9 He is also, of course, John the Baptist, Satan, and possibly St. Joseph. See ray article, “The Sacrificial Butter,” Accent (Winter 19S2). Tindall, in his introduction to Chamber Music, says of “Tilly,” “This poem ... concerns Joyce's relationship with his father or brother and the rest of the family at Cabra.” This is true to the extent that Stephen's family and Cranly are accomplices in trying to tempt Stephen from his artist destiny, and no doubt the drover here is a “condensation” of many. But the primary reference, as we shall see, is to Cranly and, considering “Tilly” as a poem à clef, to his prototype, Mr. J. F. Byrne.
10 New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1953, pp. 216–217.
11 Ibid. The entire chapter, “Country-life in Wicklow,” is interesting as a commentary on Cranly, as he shows himself forth in the Portrait and in “Tilly” to the young aesthete.
12 The arms of betrayer and betrayed are discussed in detail below.
13 Through the ludicrousness of this passage, we can see not only Juliet's garden, the gardens in which the Stephen of the Portrait pursues his Mercedes, and the gardens which fill the poems of the troubadours, but also the superbly romantic garden in which Gretta Conroy's Michael Furey catches his death in “The Dead.”
14 It is clear, then, why only Stephen, the creative “hero,” carries an ashplant in the Portrait and Ulysses. But it is possible that Joyce got the idea for the ashplant-tom bough relation between Stephen and Cranly from J. F. Byrne, who says that during his university days he carried “occasionally ... a stout ash plant, which was one of several I had uprooted long before in Carringmore” (p. 70).
15 The Golden Bough (New York: Macmillan, 1951), p. 130 and passim.
16 That Joyce, early or late, knew Frazer, or at least knew what Frazer knew, is clear from the metamorphoses of H. C. Earwicker in Finnegans Wake and from many passages in that book. For example, “We have wounded our way on foe tris prince till that force in the gill is faint afarred and the face in the treebark feigns afear. This is rainstones ringing. Strangely cult for this ceasing of the yore” (FW, pp. 278–279). Cf. “They have waved his green boughs o'er him as they have torn him limb from lamb” (FW, p. 58).
17 See W. Y. Tindall, “Dante and Mrs. Bloom,” Accent (Summer 1951), pp. 88–89.
18 Modern Man in Search of a Soul, trans. W. S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1933), pp. 21, 22.
19 Cf. the contemplative analysis of the problem of modern symbolism in Glenway Wescott's The Pilgrim Hawk: “[The hawk] might have been a baby, and he a lover, or was it the other way around?” (Harper, 1940, p. 16).