Joyce’s earliest drafts for Finnegans Wake were written in vivid English with only a few puns.
A few very early manuscript pages, lost since 1923, have been quietly published by the Library of Ireland. My reconstruction below is different from Danis Rose’s, who sees it as a book of separate short stories he calls “Finn’s Hotel” (so far published only at an absurd price).
It portrays first the perfect romantic courtship of Tristan and Isolde, followed by the viewpoints of four very old men who are spying on their kissing, and finally the couple’s difficulties making their relationship work (echoing Joyce and Nora Barnacle, right down to a close paraphrase of her famous copybook letter).
It’s even likely Joyce intended the abrupt closing line to reconnect with the abrupt opening, as with the finished Finnegans Wake.
As slow their ship, the sea being slight, upon the face of waters moved by courtesy of God that handsome brineburnt sixfooter Gaelic, rugger and soccer champion and the dinkum belle of Lucalizod quite charming in her oceanblue brocade and an overdress of net darned with gold well in advance of the newest fashion exhibits bunnyhugged scrumptiously when it was dark whilst they dissimulated themself on the eighteen inch loveseat behind the chieftaness stewardess's cabin whilst also with sinister dexterity he alternately rightandlefthandled fore and aft, on and offside her palpable rugby and association bulbs.
These paragraphs were known in manuscript, and survived into the final text in barely recognisable form. [more]
'dinky' (meaning small) was slightly better known than "dinkum" meaning genuine
"overdress" has a secondary meaning, as does "darned"
sheer overdresses
dissimulated/ disposed/ posed
colors: blue, gold
measures: sixfooter, eighteen inch
She, after a cough, murmurously then gave her firm order for tootsweet if he wouldn't please mind some though not too much of the six best national poetry quotations reflecting on the situation so long as it was a stroke or two above it's a fine night and yon moon shines bright and all to that, the plain fact of the matter being that being a natural born lover of nature in all her moods and senses, by the light of the moon, of the silvery moon she longed to spoon before her honeyoldmoon at the same time drinking in long draughts of purest air serene and revelling in the great outdoors.
'tootsweet' was a recent witticism
colors: silvery
measures: six, a stroke or two
By the Light of the Silvery Moon (1909) ♬
That mouth of mandibles vowed to pure beauty promptly elocutionised to her a favourite lyrical bloom bellclear in iambic decasyllabic hexameter:
-- Rollon thoudeep andamp anddark blueo ceanroll!
humans have one 'mandible' aka the lower jaw (many other species have two)
colors: blue
measures: iambic decasyllabic hexameter
Byron's pentameter is lengthened by 'and damp' towards Homer's (dactylic) hexameter
Lady, it was just too gorgeous for words, the whole sensation. The sea, of a lovely tint embellished by the best charms of nature, with its wellmannered wavelets (the dirty horrid rude ones from the Belfast and Lagan Lough neighbourhood being very properly locked up in cubbyhole) looked really awfully pretty at the mid hour of night and more especially he being emphatically the right man in the right place, the weather conditions could not possibly have been improved upon.
the Lagan river flows into Belfast Lough
"My Lagan Love" ♬
measures: mid hour
Joyce later annotated these Issy-sentences as hypotaxis, in contrast to T's parataxis.
Praises be to fair sea. Her rôle was to roll onthedark blueo ceanroll that rolled on round the round roll that Robert Roly rolled round. Breathtaking beauty, Ireland's bonniest, she did but gaze while from his altitude of onehundredandthirtytwo lines his deepseapeepers gazed O gazed O dazedcrazedgazed into her darkblue rolling ocean orbs.
roly-poly? Roderick O'Conor had been "heeltapping round his own right royal round rollicking table" since March. There might also be an echo of Kevin's concentric circles (since April): Issy-on-ocean around Robert around a 'round roll'. Or, Issy around Tristan?
a line can be either 1/12 inch (times 132 = 11 inches) or 1/40 inch (3.3 inches)
colors: blue, blue
measures: onehundredandthirtytwo lines
-- Thanks ever so much she sighed, thrilled by that olive throb of his nude neck, and ever so much again for that tiny quote. It sort of made everything ever so much more delightful. How perfectly sweet of you!
colors: olive
Nothing if not amorous, he, rosecrumpler, thrilldriver, sighinspirer, having prealably dephlegmatised his guttur of that ticklish frog in the throat, his useful arm getting busy on the touchline due south of her western shoulder, uttered what was to follow with grand passion from his toploftical voicebox:
-- Isolde!
cf "having prealably dephlegmatised his guttur of that ticklish frog in the throat" with "after a cough" above
French 'préalable' = previous
'guttur' is Latin for throat
"south... western" (it seems natural to map up-down onto north-south, but is near-far somehow east-west too? does it matter which way they're facing?)
By elevation of eyelids t'ward her dear coolun that She invoked insinuated desideration of more declaration.
coolun (his long fair hair) 493.35 "They know not my heart, O coolun dearast!"
He was instant and he declared:
-- Isolde! O Isolde! Sister soul and hand! When theeuponthus Sir Tristan binoculises his most unwitting ego most subconsciously senses the deprofundity of multimathematical immaterialities whereby in the pancosmic urge the allimmanence of That Which Itself is Itself Alone exteriorates on this here our plane in disunited solid, liquid and gaseous bodies in pearlwhite passionpanting intuitions of reunited selfhood in the higherdimensional selfless Allself.
Latin 'instans' = eager
parataxis
speaks of himself in 3rd person
(sounds like he's trying and failing to sublimate an orgasm)
is this his inauthentic speech like Nora's copybook below?
colors: white
Hear, O hear, all ye caller herring! Silent be, O Moyle! Milky Way, strew dim light!
♬Caller Herring
Silent, oh Moyle, be the roar of thy water
simultaneously sublime, and subtly suggestive of semen (strewing moyles of milky herring)
Right here a pretty thing happened. When her flattering hand of pure diversion mayhap had jessaminely at the just right moment shut his duckhouse the vivid girl, deaf with love, (you know her, that angel being, one of passion's fadeless wonderwomen! You dote on her! You love her to death!) with a queer little cry reunited milkymouthily his her then their disunited lips when, tonguetasting the golden opportunity of a lifetime, quick as greased pigskin the Armorican champion with one virile tonguethrust drove the advance messenger of love flash past the double line of eburnean forwards rightjingbangshot into the goal of her gullet.
flattering/fluttering
jessamine = various flowers whose scent resembles jasmine
Duckhouse is rarely a surname, a duck house is like a henhouse. If his mouth is the house, his tongue must be the duck...?
FW2 would move that comma after the parens
"reunited" means it's not their 1st kiss
"double line" = top line plus bottom line
colors: golden, eburnean (white)
Now, I am just putting it direct to you as one manowoman to another, what the blankety blank diggings do you for example candidly suppose that she, a strapping young modern old ancient Irish princess a good eighteen hands high and scaling nine stone twelve paddock weight in her madapolam smock with nothing under her hat but red hair and solid ivory not forgetting a firstrate pair of bedroom eyes of most unholy hazel cared at that precise psychoanalytical moment about tiresome old King Mark that tiresome old milkless ram with his duty peck and his bronchial tubes, the tiresome old ourangoutan beaver in his tiresome old twentytwoandsixpenny shepherd's plaid trousers?
"manowoman" = androgynous Mamalujo already? or man of-woman-born?
what the dickens
six feet tall, 138 pounds = slim (she's the same height as "sixfooter" Tristan?)
"nothing under her hat but hair" = dumb
red hair from Livia Svevo? [cite]
colors: red, ivory, hazel
measures: eighteen hands, nine stone twelve, twentytwoandsixpenny
"milkless" = impotent/sterile?
"beaver" = bearded?
$150 pants today sounds expensive?
Not as much as a pinch of henshit and that's the meanest thing now was ever known since Adam was in the boy's navy. No, heaven knows, far from it, if the unvarnished truth must be told at the very first blush lovingly she lovegulped her American's pulpous propeller and both together in the most fashionable weather they all went off a lulliloving a dither me die me dandy O after which, believing in safety first, before the regulation ten seconds were up volatile Brittany considerately allowed his farfamed sparking plug chokegrip to relax and precautiously withdrew the instrument of rational speech from the procathedral of amorous seductiveness.
measures: a pinch, ten seconds
'since Adam was a boy'
"fashionable weather" (normally you'd expect the best weather to be the most fashionable, but eg decadents might prefer gloom. fashions and weather both change frequently.)
-- I'm right glad I ran on to you, Tris, you fascinator you! Miss Erin said, when she had won free, laughing at the same time delightfully in dimpling bliss, being awfully bucked by her gratifying experience of the love embrace from a highly continental bigtimer the like of him possessed of a handsome face well worth watching with an interesting tallow complexion from which great things very expected as a film star for she fully realised that he was evidently a notoriety in the poetry department as well for he never saw her to drink an orange but he offered to bring her a porringer and to cut a long story short taking him by and large the onliest boy of her choice meant pretty well everything to her just then, her beau ideal of a true girl's friend with red blood in his veins neither big ugly nor small nice.
tallow/sallow?
"great things very expected" (she's so eager she's tripping over her words???)
colors: tallow, orange, red
(i'm hearing Nora's earliest, illformed attraction to JAJ)
Over them the winged ones screamed shrill glee: seahawk, seagull, curlew and plover, kestrel and capercailzie. All the birds of the sea they trolled out rightbold when they smacked the big kuss of Trustan with Usolde.
[manuscript]
"they smacked" = birds saw? (or is 'they' here T&I?)
kiss → kuss; Tristan → Trustan; Isolde → Usolde (i → u)
below: he → un; his → uns
So sang seaswans:
-- Three quarks for Muster Markcolors: red
Sure he hasn't got much of a bark
And sure any he has it's all beside the mark
But O Wreneagle Highflighty wouldn't un be a sky of a lark
To see that old buzzard whooping about for uns shirt in the dark
And un hunting round for uns speckled trousers around by Palmerston Park.
Hohohoho moulty Mark
You're the rummest old rooster ever flopped out of a Noah's ark
And you think you're cock of the wark.
Fowls, up! Tristy's the spry young spark
That'll tread her and wed her and bed her and red her
Without even winking the tail of a feather
And that's how that chap's going to make his money and mark!
"red her" = take her virginity
The Four Waves of Erin also heard, leaning upon the staves of memory. Four eminently respectable old heladies they looked, got up in sleek holiday toggery for the occasion: grey half tall toque, tailormade frock coats to match, fathomglasses and soforth, you know, for all the worlds' apart from the salt water like the fourth viscount Powerscourt or North the auctioneer at the Royal Dublin Society's annual horseshow. They had seen their share: the capture of Sir Arthur Casement in the year 1132, the Coronation of Brian by the Danes at Clonmacnois, the drowning of Pharaoh Fhitzharris in the (proleptically) red sea.
colors: grey, red
a later version of this Mamalujo section also survived into the published text [more]
The drowning of poor Mat Keane of Dunlearery, the scattering of the flemish armada off the coasts of Galway and Longford, the landing of St Patrick at Tara in the year 1798, the dispersal of the French fleet under General Boche in the year 2002. And such was their memory that they had been appointed lectern professors to the four chief seats of learning in Erin, the universities of Killorcure, Kill-them-all, Killeachother, Killkelly-on-the-Flure, whither they wirelessed four times weekly lectures in the four modes of history, past, present, absent and future.
[manuscript]
Saltsea widowers all four they had been many ages before summarily divorced by their respective shehusbands (with whom they had parted on the best of terms) by a decree absolute issued by Mrs Justice Squelchman in the married male offenders court at Bohernabreena, one for inefficiency in backscratching, two for having broken rerewind without having first made a request in writing on stamped foolscap paper, three for having attempted hunnish familiarities after a meal of decomposed crab, four on account of his general cast of countenance.
Bohernabreena parish (bother na brúine = road of the fairy hostel; pronunced bornabreena)
Though that was ever so long ago they could still with an effort of memory and by counting accurately the four periwinkle buttons of the fly of their knickybockies recall the name of the four beautiful sisters Brinabride who were at the moment touring the United States of Africa.
colors: periwinkle (mauve)
Yet were they fettersome and lured by the immortal rose of Wombman's beauty, often would they cling tentacularly about the ships' waists of the Northwall and Hollyhead boats and the Isle of Man tourist steamers, peering with glaucomatose eyes through the cataractic portholes of honeymoon cabins or saloon ladies' toilet apartments. But when those jossers aforesaid, the Four Waves of Erin, heard the detonation of the osculation (cataclysmic cataglottism) which with ostentation (osculum cum basio ?necuom suavioque) Tristan to Isolde gave, then lifted they up round Ireland's shores the wail of old men's planxty:
[manuscript]
Highchanted the elderly Waves of Erin, in four-part Palestrian melody, four for all, all one in glee of grief of loneliness of age but with a bardic licence, there being about of birds and stars and noise quite a sufficient quantity.
This plashed their wavechant:
Thus?
A birdless heaven, seadusk and one star,(any evidence JAJ set his to music? barbershop quartetstyle???)
low in the west
And thou, poor heart, love's image, faint and far.
Rememberest
Her seacold eyes and her soft foamwhite brow
And fragrant hair,
Falling as through the silence falleth now
Dusk from the air.
A why wilt thou remember these.
A why,
Poor heart, repine,
If the dear love she yielded with a sigh
Was never thine!
colors: white
[manuscript]
Isolde, her longfamous lashes butterflykissing his near and farfamous cheek, felt him sweeter than cherry or plum, than candy kisses or Lipton's fruitcake, than the hawthorn valley in the first fortnight of May, than the finest band music going, than lovely thick with the sleep. She murmured googooeyes:
colors: plum?
[fdv] lovely sleep → "lovely [what?] thick with the sleep"
-- My precious since last we parted it seems to me that I have been continually in your company, even when I close my eyes at night. I am continually seeing you, hearing you, meeting you in different places so that I am beginning to wonder whether my soul does not take leave of my body in sleep and go to seek you and what is more find you or perchance this is only a phantasy. Tell me Daniel, my precious darling.
A close paraphrase of Nora’s 1904 ‘copybook letter’: “it seems to me that I am always in your company under every possible variety of circumstances talking to you walking with you meeting you suddenly in different places until I am beginning to wonder if my spirit takes leave of my body in sleep and goes to seek you, and what is more find you or perhaps this is nothing but a fantasy.” (since no one has found the copybook, isn't it likelier this was original to NB? is JAJ slightly misremembering it rather than purposely tweaking it?)
so "Daniel" here is probably meant as a random name the copybook had used!? (in "Stephen Hero" the Sheehys are called the 'Daniel's)
He, her whitehaired doughboy, hero of tens of serums, carrier of the ovum, Kisser of hundreds, blocker of thousands, ejaculater of jugfuls, loudly sniffled, his nasal voice falling in strange ineffectual dropkick, so, in the language of diplomacy:
-- Mais pourquoi es-tu andrée dans ma fie, Henritte S, je ?croyais mon âme déjà morte
entrée dans ma vie
colors: white
measures: tens, hundreds, thousands, jugfuls
She lifted her head, her eyes supremely satisfied. For now she knew full well that he was a loveslave for life and she rather gathered from his persiflage that she was the one and not that mousy mop with the golliwog curls, Katiagnes O Halloran.
[manuscript]
He, the gentleman, was sadvisaged. First he was a martyr to indigestion, rather liable to piles procured by sitting on stone walls where he contracted a stubborn cough while revelling in the beauty of nature and over and above that by medical advice of Dr Codd he had been lowering daily potions of extract of willow bark to keep off the Hibernian flu. With feverish pallor indicating ?strong action of the higher seas on a teetotal stomach he beheld the holy ghosts of his undergradual loves, Henriette atop of the haycock, Nenette de l'Abbaye behind the taproom dor, Marie Louise all fun and fleas, tipsy Suzanne catch as catch can, and last but not least the rawboned housekeeper of the local parish priest Ghupthly, he pastloveyed her with a blackedged expression.
the Mookse sits on a stone too
cf "while revelling in the beauty of nature" with par 2 above: "natural born lover of nature... revelling in the great outdoors"
"lowering" = swallowing???
willow bark extract = aspirin, more or less
he's just absentmindedly used the name of a former lover, Henriette, for her
colors: black
-- Smiling Johnny, pleaded she gynelexically, do you care for meemee just a weeny mossel?
Offsong and partially selfstrangled tried to reply he:
"Smiling Johnny"
-- Yes, lady, I am not worthy. You little know. Why were we born in two different places? Wherefore have we met yesterday so to speak? Why this strangulation, this yearning for a bonum arduum as distinguished from a bonum simpliciter? Will you accept a portion of my divided heart? Well away, alas, for death in, with, for and on account of my well beloved I mutely yearn.
-- O, can that sobstuff! My own loverman must not talk like that, answered the bold puss impatiently after her waiting patiently all through the damned old dinner of burnt loinchops and ignoble potatoes with everybody talking from soup to nuts about loinchops and mash and the pig's arse and cabbage the day before and they saying it wasn't a patch on the silversides boiled cowbeef of the ?stecondary day before that again and the potroast with purpletop swedes and equally ignoble colicflower without a morsel of appetite when a plain bottle of porter and a gooseberry tart would have done her.
[manuscript]
oxnoble potatoes
in a pig's arse
silversides
purpletop swede turnips
colors: silver, purple
Love she wanted, the biggest obtainable, true new blind bottomless highspeed stunning staggerhumanity caveman love at first sight, the universal super jewel for which reason she again kissed him and he, being an inborn gentleman with a gift of blushing as well as of backgammon, counterkissed because it was his one maxim in this life that if a lady, for example, happened to have a ?libido a bite of a piece of Stilton cheese and he happened, for pure argument' sake, to have a quarter of a pound or so of ?fectneim gorgonzola in his pocket why he'd just simply put his hand in his pocket, don't you know, and well he'd just give her the cheese, don't you see, to take a bite off.
"again kissed"
measures: quarter of a pound
However first and foremost, before testing her triangle to prove whether she was as the newspapers reported a virgo intacta, he asked her whether she had ever indulged in clandestine fornication with or without contraception.
-- No, Nein, Never in God's world, his almost aunt sang whilst she adhered to that big left shoulder of his, My privates innocent as the undriven snow. By the axecleft of my notch! By the hair of my dearest parents! By the inviolable devil of Ben Bulben! By the fresh water ?pullan ?herring [no] plunderer has ever wandered, has ever beheld the hundred ?women of my ?underland.
caller herring?
measures: hundred
here the new discoveries reconnect to the known material:
Her mournful embracer pointed to the sidereal host. By them he bade her swear, them that were and are and shall be the silently strewing, the strikingly shining, the twittingly twinkling and as he uranographically remarked the lamplights of lovers in the Beyond.
Up they gazed skyward to stardom while in his girleen's ear that loveless lover sinless sinner breathed:
[manuscript]
[Gaunt in gloom
The pale stars their torches
Enshrouded wave
Ghostfires from heaven's far verges faint illume
Arches on soaring arches,
Night's sindark nave
Seraphim
The pale stars awaken
To service till
In muted gloom each lapses, muted, dim
Raised when she has and shaken
Her thurible
And long and loud
To night's nave upsoaring
A starknell tolls
As the bleak incense surges, cloud on cloud,
Voidward from the adoring
Waste of souls]
{-- How gentlemanlike am I, Issy. I never hurt the feelings of another?
-- And, ?Tris, what a sweet nature is mine, is not it? It wasn't exactly anything he said or it wasn't anything he actually did but all the same it was something about him like the way he was always sticking his finger into his trousers pocket and then sticking it into his eye like a borny baby, the great big slob or the once she dropped her ittly ittly hankyfuss and the way so graceful he picked it up with his near hoof and footed it up so politefully to her ittly ittly nibblenose. She was tearing.}
eyes watering?
-- Go away instantly, she roared, you scum!
-- Perfect, he said, you bloody bitch.
He took French leave of her and circulated as bidden. Before many instants had passed she let out a whistle. Hearing his name called most sagaciously he ceased to walk about and turned on her, his look now charged with purpose seemed to say.
-- Curse your stinking putrid soul to hell, you thing, and all belonged to you
-- No, come back, she ?ogled. Forget me not. I do so want you!
-- It is perfect, her all but nephew said.
Having already stopped he turned and circulated in reverse direction and presently halted vis a vis his soon to be aunt who welcomed him as she said:
-- How nobly you have responded to our call, loyal one.
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