110. While England Slept by Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill was not above re-titling his works to suit the Yanks. In 1938, Putnam’s, his American publishers, cabled him to ask for an alternative title for Arms and the Covenant, a volume of his collected speeches. Churchill suggested The Years of the Locust, but the cable operator garbled the message and it arrived as The Years of the Lotus. Putnam’s were puzzled. They knew that the lotus was a plant famous for its soporific properties, and, in an attempt to give a sense of this, settled on While England Slept. This was an inspired choice in the climate of German rearmament, and the book went on to be a best-seller. It also had one unexpected consequence: in 1940 the young John F Kennedy, searching for a title for his graduate thesis on the build-up to war, called it Why England Slept (i.e. 'Why' not 'While').

Consulted:
Lockhart, Robert Hamilton Bruce: Your England‎ (1955)

109. The Ring and the Book by Robert Browning

In June 1860 Robert Browning was browsing at an open-air flea-market in Florence. Among the cheap picture-frames and dog-eared prints he came across a battered yellow book. He bought it for one lira — eightpence in English money at the time — and took it home. It proved to be a compendium of legal documents relating to a celebrated murder case of 1698, put together at the time by a lawyer called Francesco Cencini. The picture that emerged from the documents was tragic, squalid and...rather entertaining.

In 1693 Count Guido Franceschini, a 50-year-old nobleman of Arezzo, in somewhat reduced circumstances, decided to take a bride to bolster his fortune. He settled on the 13-year-old Pompilia Comparini, a Roman girl with a small dowry. Pompilia hated her aged, dissolute husband, and after four years of cruelty she decided to run back home to her parents, aided by a young priest who had befriended her, Giuseppe Caponsacchi. The couple were overtaken by Guido at Castelnuovo and arrested on a charge of flight and adultery. It was soon discovered that Pompilia was pregnant — whether by Guido or Caponsacchi it was never discovered — and she was given into the care of an order of nuns for her protection. In December 1697 she was delivered of a baby boy, and went back to live with her parents. Meanwhile Guido was gnashing his teeth, and on January 2 1698 travelled to Rome with four accomplices and murdered the Comparinis, fatally wounding Pompilia, who died four days later. Guido and his bravoes were arrested, tried and sentenced to death, despite an appeal to the Pope.

Such was the story that Browning gleaned from the various depositions and letters of the yellow book. He realized that he had a subject worthy of an epic poem, but before he could do anything with it, tragedy of his own struck: his wife Elizabeth died in June 1861. Browning left Italy for England with his young son, unable to remain at the house, Casa Guidi, where he had enjoyed such a happy married life. The story of the yellow book remained untouched. Browning tried to interest other poets in developing the story, among them Tennyson, but there were no takers. Finally, in 1864, he began himself to work solidly on the poem.

He decided on a poetic structure that mirrored the yellow book. It was to consist of twelve chapters, each reflecting a particular viewpoint as found in the trial material. The finished poem, The Ring and the Book, included superb portraits of Guido, lecherous and unctuous, and fresh from torture on the rack; Pompilia, dying and sad, telling how she had been sold to a hideous old man who had taken her as she was playing with her toys; Caponsacchi, full of scorn for the legal profession that had failed to protect a child; and the Pope, struggling to come to judgement amid the political and moral complexities of the case. The whole was a staggering 21,000 lines long, took Browning four years, and had to be published in four volumes. It was the quintessential High-Victorian epic, and made his reputation.

But the yellow book was only half the title. The ‘ring’ was a gold circlet of Etruscan design, stamped with the letters AEI — Greek for ‘evermore’ — that had belonged to his wife Elizabeth, and which Browning kept on his watch-chain after her death. The poem opens, in a memorable address to the reader, with the ring:

Do you see this ring?
‘T is Rome-work, made to match
(By Castellani’s imitative craft)
Etrurian circlets found, some happy morn,
After a dropping April; found alive
Spark-like ‘mid unearthed slope-side fig-tree roots
That roof old tombs at Chiusi...

Browning goes on to explain the significance of the ring. It is a symbol of the process of poetic composition. Just as the gold of the ring has been allowed to emerge from the ore surrounding it, so has the story been shaped and rounded from the yellow ore of the yellow book. But a ring is more than a ring. It symbolizes marriage, and the marriage that Browning has in mind is not just the doomed and criminal marriage of the Franceschinis, but his own dead marriage to Elizabeth. Elizabeth seems to breathe everywhere in the poem. As Browning’s friend Alexandra Orr put it: ‘Its subject had come to him in the last days of his greatest happiness. It had lived with him, though in the background of consciousness, though those of his keenest sorrow. It was his refuge in that aftertime, in which a subsiding grief often leaves a deeper sense of isolation.’

Until The Ring and the Book, Browning did not have a wide readership. After its publication in 1868 he was acclaimed as a genius, and earned enough with it to secure himself financially. The Athenaeum, which until that point had been hostile to him, declared The Ring and the Book to be ‘the most precious and profound spiritual treasure that England has produced since the days of Shakespeare.’ The reasons for this were to do with the great dramatic achievement of the poem, certainly, but also to do with Elizabeth’s death. Elizabeth was celebrated above all for the poetry which expressed her love for Robert (see this blog on Sonnets from the Portuguese), and now Robert was to be celebrated for his own hymn to Elizabeth. It was the evocation in his title of one of the most famous love-stories of the nineteenth century that earned him his final, belated recognition.

Consulted:
Gosse, Edmund: Critical Kit-Kats (Heinemann, 1896)
Taplin, Gardner B.: The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (John Murray, 1957)

108. Fam and Yam by Edward Albee

Edward Albee is most famous for his play Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf (see this blog’s post on the title here). Fam and Yam was an earlier piece, written in 1958 when Albee was completely unknown. It is a ‘young man’s play’ (in more ways than one), only a few pages long, written while Albee was still finding his feet in the theatre.

It tells the story of an encounter between two unnamed playwrights, a Famous American Man (‘Fam’) and a Young American Man (‘Yam’). Yam goes to Fam’s penthouse apartment to interview him and is impressed by its luxury: it has ‘white walls, a plum-coloured sofa, two Modiglianis, one Braque, a Motherwell and a Klein’. Yam begins by praising Fam, then tells him of an article he wants to write about the venality of theatre producers, the corruption of agents and managers, and the witlessness of audiences. Fam starts laughing. He encourages Yam to go ahead by all means. What he doesn’t realize is that Yam is suggesting what Fam might say in his interview, and in fact putting words into his mouth. All of these attacks are going to be presented as if they are by Fam himself. The penny finally drops when Yam phones him from the lobby. Then ‘[Fam’s] face turns ashen...his mouth drops open. One of the Modiglianis frowns...the Braque peels...the Klein tilts...and the Motherwell crashes to the floor.’

The play stemmed from an interview Albee did with William Inge (the author of Bus Stop and numerous other Broadway hits) in around 1958. Inge was then at the height of his fame and Albee was unknown: Albee, pretty clearly, was the ‘Yam’ of the title and Inge was the ‘Fam’. The interview was respectful enough but the play, written about the interview, was a different matter. It represented Inge as an insecure establishment bore (though ‘Yam’ hardly comes off better). Inge was deeply hurt, and wrote to a friend: ‘God, what a smug little creature he must be, to write as though perfectly assured about his own future prestige.’

But if Albee was perfectly assured, he was right. The 1960s were his decade, and Inge, abandoned by theatre-goers and overcome by depression, took his own life in 1973.

Consulted:
Gussow, Mel: Edward Albee: A Singular Journey (1999)

107. The Hothouse by Harold Pinter

Harold Pinter originally conceived of The Hothouse as a sixty-minute radio play. He summarized it thus in 1958:

The play is set in a psychological research centre. One department of this establishment is engaged in conducting tests to determine reactions of the nervous system to various stimuli. The subjects for these tests are drawn from volunteers who are paid an hourly rate for their services, in the interests of science. The play will demonstrate the indifference of this particular department (in the persons of the doctor and her assistant — also female) to the human material on which it bases its deductions. It will demonstrate the excesses to which scientific investigation can lead when practised by adherents dedicated to the point of fanaticism.

This scenario substantially survived in the finished stage-play, which is set in a government rest-home where the patients are given electric shocks. The ‘heat’ of the hothouse suggests both the electric shocks and the sexual and emotional arousal of both torturers and tortured.

But the theme and title came from Pinter’s own turn in the hot-seat in 1954, when he submitted himself to medical experiments for cash. He recalled to Michael Billington:

I went along in 1954 to the Maudsley Hospital in London, as a guinea-pig. They were offering ten bob or something for guinea-pigs and I needed the money desperately. I read a bona fide advertisement and went along. It was all above board, as it seemed. Nurses and doctors all in white. They tested my blood-pressure first. Perfectly all right. I was put in a room with electrodes. They said, “Just sit there for a while and relax.” I’d no idea what was going to happen. Suddenly there was a most appalling noise through the earphones and I nearly jumped through the roof. I felt my heart go...BANG! The noise lasted a few seconds and then was switched off. The doctor came in grinning and said, “Well, that really gave you a start, didn’t it?” I said, “It certainly did.” And they said, “Thanks very much.” There was no interrogation, as in the play, but it left a deep impression on me. I couldn’t forget the experience. I was trembling all over. And I would have been in such a vulnerable position if they had started to ask me questions. Later I asked them what it was all about and they said they were testing levels of reaction. That mystified me. Who exactly were they going to give this kind of shock-treatment to? Anyway, The Hothouse was kicked off by that experience. I was well aware of being used for an experiment and feeling quite powerless.

Consulted:
Billington, Michael: Harold Pinter (1996)

106. Pamela by Samuel Richardson

Pamela Anderson, Pamela Stephenson, Pam Shriver, Pam Ayres...none of them would have existed without Samuel Richardson. Why? Because with his epistolary novel Pamela (1740) he popularized the name, and started a Pamela craze that lasted well into our own century. Pamela was so successful that it became one of the world’s first total branding enterprises: there were Pamela prints and engravings, Pamela waxworks, Pamela fans (for cooling maiden cheeks), racehorses called Pamela, Pamela murals, Pamela sermons, Pamela stage-plays, Pamela playing-cards and Pamela operas.

But Richardson himself owed a debt to, of all people, Sir Philip Sidney (see this blog's post on Astrophil and Stella). Pamela was the heroine of Sidney’s Arcadia, a pastoral romance in prose dating to 1590. Sir Philip, it seems, invented the name, cobbling it together from the Greek pan and mela — ‘all honey’.

Richardson had more than a tangential connection to Sir Philip. His day-job – before Pamela and his smash-hit follow-up Clarissa really took off and made him rich - was as a printer, and in this capacity he produced an edition of the Arcadia in 1724-5. He drew from it not just the name of the heroine, but several plot devices: both Pamelas are imprisoned, both resist attempts on their virtue, and in the final crowd-pleaser both reap the eventual reward of their honey-like sweetness and virtue.

One anecdote about Samuel Richardson, from Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791), is not related to the title but I find it irresistible. It is as follows:

One day at his country-house at Northend, where a large company was assembled at dinner, a gentleman who was just returned from Paris, willing to please Mr. Richardson, mentioned to him a very flattering circumstance — that he had seen his Clarissa lying on the King’s brother’s table. Richardson observing that part of the company were engaged in talking to each other, affected then not to attend to it. But by and by, when there was a general silence, and he thought that the flattery might be fully heard, he addressed himself to the gentleman, ‘I think, Sir, you were saying something about —’, pausing in a high flutter of expectation. The gentleman, provoked at his inordinate vanity, resolved not to indulge it, and with an exquisitely sly air of indifference answered, ‘A mere trifle, Sir, not worth repeating.’ The mortification of Richardson was visible, and he did not speak ten words more the whole day. Dr. Johnson was present, and appeared to enjoy it much.

Consulted:
Boswell, James, Life of Johnson (1791)
Sabor, Peter (ed., intro.), Richardson, Samuel: Pamela (1992)
Sabor, Peter; Keymer, Tom: 'Pamela' in The Marketplace (2005)
See also this blog's post on Shamela.

105. Rhymes to be Traded for Bread by Vachel Lindsay

Vachel Lindsay was one of the great poets of American egalitarianism – an early twentieth-century Whitman. He got his start through a suggestion from his art teacher, Robert Henri. In March 1905 Lindsay was urgently in need of money, and asked Henri if he would ever cut it as an artist. Henri tactfully replied that he would do better trying to sell his poetry. Lindsay, either in desperation or inspiration, rushed off some copies of his poems and took them out in the streets of Manhattan, those most ‘world-sharpened and business-bitten avenues’ of New York. Pricing them at two cents per poem, he earned 15 cents on the first day (one doctor paid 5 cents for two poems) — and was elated. After binding his oeuvre into the collection Rhymes to be Traded for Bread, he began a series of tramps all over America bartering recitals for food and shelter. His first trek was in the spring of 1906, ranging on foot from Florida to Kentucky, traversing some 600 miles, selling poetry readings as he went. He undertook a similar tramp in the spring of 1908, this time from New York to Ohio, and again in the summer of 1912. He became famous, read for Woodrow Wilson and his cabinet, was praised by Yeats, and published several further collections.

Consulted:
Masters, Edgar Lee: Vachel Lindsay; A Poet in America (1969)

104. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway's first major novel began its textual life in 1925 as a short story entitled ‘Cayetano Ordonez’ (the name of the bullfighter who provided the model for the fictional Pedro Romero). All the characters were based on Hemingway’s friends, people with whom he had travelled in France and Spain: Brett Ashley was the real-life Lady Duff Twysden, Mike Campbell was Pat Guthrie, Bill Gorton was Donald Ogden Stewart and Robert Cohn was Harold Loeb. In early drafts the main character (Jake Barnes) was even called ‘Hem’. The relationships between the main characters — particularly Hem’s (Jake’s) unfulfilled love for Brett, Brett’s affairs with Cohn, Mike and Romero, and Hem’s antipathy to Cohn — were all closely modelled on life. ‘I’m tearing those bastards apart’, Hemingway wrote to a friend in September 1925 as he was struggling with the book. ‘I’m putting everyone in it and that kike Loeb is the villain.’ And yet just after the title page Hemingway, the butter unmelted in his mouth, noted: ‘No character in this book is the portrait of any actual person.’

As the story lengthened the title was changed to Fiesta: A Novel (which became its European title), and then, shortly before publication, The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway was a great user of quotations in titles, and The Sun Also Rises came from Ecclesiastes:

What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.

Hemingway gave the quotation in full as the epigraph to his book, counterposing it with an off-the-cuff remark from Gertrude Stein, which subsequently became as famous as (or more famous than) Ecclesiastes: ‘You are all a lost generation’. Hemingway meant to contrast the two quotes, containing as they both did the word ‘generation’, and later said that his purpose in so doing was to set the current generation of flawed humanity against the enduring power of the earth itself, the earth which ‘abideth forever’.

There is perhaps another nuance in The Sun Also Rises. It should be remembered that the central tragedy of the book is the genital wound of the hero, Jake Barnes. Jake, it has been pointed out by more than one commentator, rather closely parallels the ‘Fisher King’ in TS Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, published three years earlier in 1922. Jake’s sexual incapacity is reflected in the decadent and morally sterile environment of Europe after the spiritual cataclysm of the First World War. Jake finds equilibrium only when he is fishing. Whether or not Eliot was a conscious influence, Jake’s wound does symbolize the inability of any of the characters to find real meaning in their lives. It is because of Jake’s wound — which Hemingway implies is a wound to his penis rather than just to his testicles — that Jake and Brett are unable to consummate their love for one another. Jake is instead forced into helping Brett seduce Romero. So if the book is closely autobiographical, and Jake is Hem, and Hem is Hemingway, where does that leave us?

On July 8, 1918, while serving as an ambulance driver on the Italian Front at the end of the First World War, Hemingway was seriously injured by a trench mortar, receiving over 200 separate shrapnel wounds to his lower body. His scrotum was pierced twice, and had to be laid on a special pillow while it recovered. His testicles were undamaged and his penis intact. He had not lost his penis. But he knew a man who had:

Because of this I got to know other kids who had genito urinary wounds and I wondered what a man’s life would have been like after that if his penis had been lost and his testicles and spermatic cord remained intact. . . . [So I] tried to find out what his problems would be when he was in love with someone who was in love with him and there was nothing that they could do about it.

Jake has all the desires of a man but is never able to consummate them. The horror of such a wound represented the greatest of all horrors, and in The Sun Also Rises Hemingway was consciously confronting it. The fundamental act of masculinity, sexual penetration, is denied Jake, and the whole of the rest of masculinity which, for Hemingway, flowed from it — the bulls, the fights, the boxing, the hunting, the drinking, the bullshitting — is rendered pointless, a dreadful joke. It had so very nearly been a joke on Hemingway. He made the sexual connotations of the title clear in a letter to F Scott Fitzgerald in late 1926, saying he was going to insert a subtitle in the next printing of the novel: ‘The Sun Also Rises (Like Your Cock If You Have One).’

Consulted:
Berg, A. Scott: Max Perkins, Editor of Genius (Hamish Hamilton, 1979)
Bruccoli, Matthew J: Scott and Ernest (Random House, 1978)
Corral, Carmen: ‘The Textual History of The Sun Also Rises’ (Sigma Tau Delta Convention, St Louis 1999,
http://www.bama.ua.edu/~sigmatau/texts/sun.html)
Meyers, Jeffrey: Hemingway (Macmillan, 1985)

103. Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust

This is not the story of À la recherche du temps perdu, as such, but the story of its English translation, Remembrance of Things Past. In 1920 Charles Kenneth Scott-Moncrieff began the Englishing of Proust's magnum opus, and after several false starts decided to give it a title from Shakespeare’s Sonnet No. 30:

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste [...]

The Shakespearian quotation (however beautiful) did little to render Proust’s title, and the intrusion of the words of a foreign author must have seemed to Proust like a blow in the face (rather as if a Frenchman had translated Great Expectations by giving it a title from Balzac). Proust wrote to Scott-Moncrieff to protest, saying that the translation missed the ‘deliberate amphibology’ of the French, and particularly mentioned the inadequacy of ‘things past’ as a substitute for ‘temps perdu’ (a phrase significantly mirrored in the title of the last volume, Le Temps retrouvé: ‘temps perdu’ can mean either ‘time lost’ or ‘time wasted’). The Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English by Olive Classe puts the matter thus:

In fact that title [Remembrance of Things Past] seriously distorts Proust’s intention, diverting the prospective reader’s attention away from the work’s subject, largely a series of minute analyses of feelings to which a particular view of the function of memory is central. The distraction is especially important, because writers were already beginning to explore imaginatively the phenomena of indeliberate mental associations, before Freud had published anything of importance, and before World War I made obviously urgent the examination of the corporate psychologies of Western European cultures.

But Proust’s protests were ignored. It was only in 1992 that the title was more accurately rendered as In Search of Lost Time.

Consulted:
Carter, William C.: Marcel Proust: A Life‎ (2002)
Classe, Olive: Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English (2000)

102. Something Happened by Joseph Heller

Something Happened (1974) was Heller’s second novel, published 13 years after the brilliant success of Catch-22. It tells the story of Bob Slocum, a fearful company man with a loveless marriage, a brain-damaged child to look after at home, and a predilection for office affairs with secretaries who call him ‘Mr Slocum’ in bed.

Asked about the genesis of the title, Heller said: ‘Something Happened turned up in the fall of ’63 when I was walking with George Mandel past Korvettes or Brentano’s [in Manhattan] and a kid came running past and yelled over his shoulder to another, “Hey, come on, something’s happened” — some sort of traffic accident I guess it must have been.’ Heller didn't run after the kid to find out, but the idea of 'something' happening - the fictionalized version of this ‘traffic accident’ - provided the dramatic ‘something’ that happens at the end of the book (it involves traffic, but it would be unfair to reveal more; suffice to say it is an ending of nightmarish proportions). It dismayed critics who had expected more of the clowning of Catch-22, and established a new, bleaker voice for Heller.

Consulted:
Sorkin, Adam J., ed: Conversations with Joseph Heller‎ (1993)

101: Ulysses by James Joyce

I managed to get my copy of Ulysses through safely this time. I rather wish I had never read it. It gives me an inferiority complex. When I read a book like that and then come back to my own work, I feel like a eunuch who has taken a course in voice production.
— George Orwell, letter to Brenda Salkeld, 1933

In 2006 the poet laureate Andrew Motion recommended that all schoolchildren read Ulysses as part of their essential grounding in English literature. One can see why. To read Ulysses is to realize that the whole of twentieth-century literature is little more than a James Joyce Appreciation Society. Among the many writers who would have been different, or even nonexistent, without Ulysses, are Samuel Beckett, Dylan Thomas, Flann O’Brien, Anthony Burgess, Salman Rushdie, Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, Philip K. Dick and Bernard Malamud (to name but a few). Even a writer as unlikely as George Orwell deliberately echoed the ‘Circe’ episode of Ulysses in the play scene of A Clergyman’s Daughter. Joyce’s hectic layering of styles, his unstoppable neologizing, his blurring of viewpoint, his love of parody and imitation, his obscenity, his difficulty, obscurity and outright incomprehensibility was the beginning of the high modernist style in world literature. Andrew Motion was right in seeing Ulysses as fundamental. But in another way his suggestion was absurd. Ulysses is not a book for children. It is barely even a book for adults. The paradox of Ulysses is that one needs to read it to understand twentieth-century literature, but one needs to read twentieth-century literature to build up the stamina to read Ulysses.

The problem starts with the title. Early readers of Ulysses, exhilarated and appalled after 800 pages, were often still left thinking ‘Why Ulysses?’ Ulysses is barely mentioned. (The name is mentioned four times, twice in passing as a proper name, Ulysses Grant and Ulysses Browne, and twice as a brief mention among other heroes and notables. David Lodge in The Art of Fiction wrote that the title, as a clue to the allegorical nature of the book, was ‘the only absolutely unmissable one in the entire text’.) The solution, as we now know, after a century’s worth of scholarly investigation and Joyce’s own prompting, is that the book is an intricate allegory of the Odyssey (the hero being latinized from Odysseus to Ulysses). Ulysses is divided into eighteen parts, or ‘episodes’ as Joyce scholars call them, each written in a different style and with a different Odyssean name, though the names themselves are not given in the text. The names are:
‘Telemachus’,
‘Nestor’,
‘Proteus’,
‘Calypso’,
‘Lotus Eaters’,
‘Hades’,
‘Aeolus’,
‘Lestrygonians’,
‘Scylla and Charybdis’,
‘Wandering Rocks’,
‘Sirens’,
‘Cyclops’,
‘Nausicaa’,
‘Oxen of the Sun’,
‘Circe’,
‘Eumaeus’,
‘Ithaca’ and
‘Penelope’.
Each episode is assigned, tacitly, a colour theme, a dominant organ of the body, an hour, a setting and other characteristics, though many of these remain a matter of scholarly dispute. The action takes place in Dublin on a single June day (June 16 1904) and its three main characters are Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus and Molly Bloom, who represent Ulysses, Telemachus and Penelope. Other characters and places also have their Homeric counterparts.

The problem is that one can know all of this and still be left thinking ‘Why Ulysses?’ The choice of the Odyssey seems somewhat arbitrary. Why not Oedipus Rex as a background text? That way Bloom could be Oedipus, Molly Jocasta and Dedalus Tiresias (or someone else). Ulysses is not so much a novel as a symbolic system, rather like a clock or a computer programme. Underlying the final, visible product, the time-telling or the computer display, is a corresponding machinery, the cogs or the binary code. Why did Joyce choose the Odyssey for his code?

The answer is that it could hardly have been anything else. Joyce was from an early age deeply in love with the Odyssey. ‘The character of Ulysses has fascinated me ever since boyhood,’ he wrote to Carlo Linati in 1920. As a schoolboy he read Charles Lamb’s Adventures of Ulysses, an adventure-yarn version of the story which presents, in Lamb’s words, ‘a brave man struggling with adversity; by a wise use of events, and with an inimitable presence of mind under difficulties, forcing out a way for himself.’ Joyce said later that the story so gripped him that when at Belvedere College (he would have been between the ages of 11 and 15) he was tasked to write an essay on ‘My Favourite Hero’, he chose Ulysses. (The essay title ‘My Favourite Hero’ actually appears in Ulysses, on page 638 of the World’s Classics edition .) He later described Ulysses to Frank Budgeon as the only ‘complete all-round character presented by any writer...a complete man...a good man.’

Unsurprisingly therefore, this ‘complete man’ surfaced as early as Joyce’s first major prose work — Dubliners of 1914. Joyce had originally planned that it include a short story called ‘Ulysses’, the plot of which was based on an incident which took place in June 1904. Joyce was involved in a scuffle on St Stephen’s Green, Dublin, after accosting another man’s lady-companion, and was rescued and patched up by one Albert H. Hunter. Hunter, according to Joyce’s biographer, Richard Ellmann, was ‘rumoured to be Jewish and to have an unfaithful wife’ (in both of these respects a prototype for Leopold Bloom). In 1906 Joyce wrote to his brother Stanislaus: ‘I have a new story for Dubliners in my head. It deals with Mr Hunter.’ In a letter written shortly afterwards he mentioned its title: ‘I thought of beginning my story Ulysses but I have too many cares at present.’ Three months later he had abandoned the idea, writing: ‘Ulysses never got any forrader than its title.’ The incident with Hunter was only written up later, in Ulysses itself, in a passage at the end of episode fifteen in which Bloom rescues Dedalus ‘in orthodox Samaritan fashion’ from a fight. The idea of Ulysses as symbolic hero — and as a title — was therefore present as early as 1906. Its centrality to the early plan for Dubliners was revealed in a conversation with Georges Borach:

When I was writing Dubliners, I first wished to choose the title Ulysses in Dublin, but gave up the idea. In Rome, when I had finished about half of the Portrait, I realized that the Odyssey had to be the sequel, and I began to write Ulysses.

The figure of Ulysses could not therefore have been less arbitrary. He existed as a thread through all of Joyce’s prose works from ‘My Favourite Hero’ onward. He was there in embryo in Dubliners, was being considered halfway through A Portrait of the Artist, and burst out in his full, final and inevitable form in the work that bore his name. It was only after publication of Ulysses in 1922 that Joyce was free of his ‘favourite hero’, and could allow his literature to expand to its ultimate extent. The book that came after Ulysses was Finnegans Wake, a work not tied to one hero but inclusive of all heroes, not tied to one myth but including all myths, and using not one language but all languages.

Consulted:
Ellmann, Richard: James Joyce (Oxford University Press, 1959)
Ellmann, Richard: Selected Letters of James Joyce (Faber, 1975)
Joyce, James: Ulysses (introduction and notes by Jeri Johnson, Oxford World’s Classics, 1993)
Owen, Rodney Wilson: James Joyce and the Beginnings of Ulysses (UMI Research Press, 1983)