"not yet, though vennisoon after" - when to read 'Finnegans Wake'

It is a truth universally acknowledged that, for all except a select band of devotees, in 'Finnegans Wake' James Joyce bequeathed as his parting gift to the world a book that is essentially unreadable. Yet any list of the world's great books would include Joyce's 'book of the dark' alongside his book of the day, "Ulysses". To its admirers it is the greatest book of the twentieth century; to others it remains a mystery as yet unexplored.


It is complex, deliberately made so, as Joyce expanded and revised earlier drafts, creating ever richer neologisms and portmanteau words and incorporating words from a variety of languages. It is the multiplicity of meanings and interpretations contained in each phrase (and often word) that makes 'Finnegans Wake' the magical work it is. This, in turn, has led to a veritable industry of commentators, annotators and critics who have subjected the book to possibly the most detailed examination ever accorded to a modern work of fiction.


This process began even before the book was published in its final form by Faber and Faber in 1939, as a result of the publication in the journal 'Transition' of extracts from what was then called 'Work in Progress'.


These extracts in fact comprise the bulk of the work and were published in 17 installments between April 1927 and May 1938, Joyce having commenced his 'Work in Progress' in 1923, the year after 'Ulysses' was published. 'Transition', published by Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company contained alongside 'Work in Progress', work by other leading modernists, such as Gertrude Stein, Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters and even Franz Kafka.





Sections of the work were also published in individual booklets by private presses, such as the Paris based Black Sun Press and the New York Crosby Gaige. Copies of these, especially the signed ones, can be very expensive. The first of these was 'Anna Livia Plurabelle' (1928), the last (and most elaborate, including a hand coloured initial letter by Joyce's daughter, Lucia) 'Storiella as She is Syung' (1938).





Only two years after the first appearance of 'Work in Progress' in 'Transition' Joyce encouraged a group of friends to publish their responses to it. Thus it was that in 1929, Shakespeare and Company published 'Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress', containing articles by, amongst others, Samuel Beckett (to whom Joyce dictated parts of 'Work in Progress' as his eyesight failed) and William Carlos Williams, surely the only occasion on which a spirited defence of a book has been published ten years before the actual book was published. A significant number of Joyce's letters to his friends also contain explanations of various parts of his text.


But then everything about 'Finnegans Wake' defies the usual conventions; it is one of those works like 'Tristram Shandy' and 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' that changes the landscape of literature. For a start, since its original publication, successive editions have maintained essentially the same pagination, from Page 3 through to 628, enabling references in critical works to page and line numbers to have universal application. This is similar to the Bible, with its generic Book, Chapter, Verse references and, in my mind, 'Finnegans Wake' is Joyce's sacred book, since into it he poured not only his own life experience, but a view of life that is both universally valid and profoundly sympathetic. Joyce's writing style, in this work, has all the characteristics of a dream, with characters undergoing transformations both to heroic archetypes and to geographical features. But the identity of the dreamer is not certain.

Who are the characters? Essentially a family living in a public house in Chapelizod, on the banks of the Liffey west of the centre of Dublin, at which house, a party has assembled for the wake of one Finnegan, a builder who fell from a ladder. The family are the publican, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (HCE), his wife Anna Livia Plurabelle, their twin sons Shem and Shaun and daughter Issy. But these characters represent all of humanity.

HCE is the archetypal flawed man, who has committed some sort of indiscretion in Phoenix Park, from which event much of the book's narrative action (such as it is) is derived. But he is also the mythical hero of his race, Finn MacCool, and a builder of cities and civilisations. His geographical counterpart is Howth Head, where the Liffey meets the Atlantic.

Anna Livia is all women and has her counterpart in the 'rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of' the River Liffey, Dublin's passage to the sea. She is a subject of gossip amongst the washerwomen down at the river but is the well spring of all life.

Shem 'the Penman' is the writer and artist (possibly Joyce), Shaun 'the Post' is the practical son (possibly Joyce's brother Stanislaus), deliverer of messages, while the lively Issy is every daughter.

Through these characters in their multiple avatars Joyce presents a view of all history, geography and literature. Finnegan's fall is Earwicker's fall is humanity's fall. Joyce was Influenced by the Italian philosopher Vico's theory of history as repeating cycles (successive ages of gods, heroes and humans followed by a period of chaos before the cycle repeats) and this cyclical pattern occurs thoughout the book, evidenced also by the first sentence of the book being the continuation of its final sentence.

I (perhaps like many others) read selected parts of 'Finnegans Wake' before attempting the whole book (which I have now done). To help I assembled a collection of, what have become standard 'companions' to the 'Wake'. Perhaps the best known of these is 'A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake' by Campbell and Robinson (1944), which contains analysis and a paraphrase of its text.


My own favourite is James Atherton's 'The Books at the Wake' (1959), which is a detailed study of the literary sources Joyce used. These include Skakespeare (every play is incorporated), Swift, Lewis Carroll, The Bible (every book) and the Koran (all 114 suras). But Joyce also built in references to his favourite books, such as Le Fanu's 'The House by the Churchyard' and Thomas Moore's 'Irish Melodies' (all first lines and titles of the melodies are used). Atherton lists several hundred separate works which can be found in the 'Wake', including the 11th edition of the 'Encyclopedia Brittanica', which Joyce plundered for river names and other geographical and historical references.


Louis Mink's 'A Finnegans Wake Gazetteer' (1978) includes references to the thousands of place name references, arranged both in linear form (i.e. in order of the text) and alphabetically.


Add to these Clive Hart's massive 'Concordance' and McHugh's 'Annotations', which provides page by page analysis of every word requiring it, and you would be as well equipped as any previous reader.





There is a wonderful book edited by Burns and Gaylord entitled 'A Tour of the Darkling Plain'.


This contains letters exchanged between Thornton Wilder and Adaline Glasheen over the period 1950 to 1975, in which they share their love of 'Finnegans Wake' and attempt to solve its mysteries. Glasheen went on to produce the wonderful 'A Census of Finnegans Wake' (1956), which lists the hundreds of characters, fictional and historical, who appear in the work, with suitable annotations. She later expanded this in second and third editions.

So, when to read 'Finnegans Wake'? Perhaps, as Joyce wrote it at the end of his writing life, it is best read late in your own reading life. It is the work of a mature mind at the very height of its powers.


And perhaps now is exactly the right time, as a New Edition of 'Finnegans Wake', the product of many years work on the manuscripts, has just been published in a sumptuous edition by the Houyhnhnm Press, Dublin. This has some 9,000 'corrections' from the previously published version and is perhaps the last word on the text. It will be available in Penguin shortly.

Why read it? Because hidden away you will find (as on page 328, line 29), lines that take your breath away:

"In the buginning is the woid, in the muddle is the sounddance and thereinofter you're in the unbewised again, vund vulsyvolsy.".

For a succint statement of life (and death) that is about as good as literature can get.


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High Barn Books - Stella reports on the first ten years

It could have been the 14th, or possibly 15th September 2001 when we first thought of it. We know now to call this ‘post 9/11 Britain’ and although the shocking twin towers collapse seemed to have nothing to do with the conception of High Barn Books, maybe we were in a way ready for something new.

We had gone to York Book Fair and picked up some books we had bought from a local bookseller. Being heavy and expensive to post it seemed sensible to go and get them while we were so close. We ended up at the house of Jeffrey Stern - quite a stunning property in itself, but even more so given the books inside - and the books outside in his substantial outhouses. Jeffrey had a radical idea. He thought we should become booksellers.


Actually this wasn’t so radical. I don’t think that any of our friends at the time would have thought it at all strange that we should go into the business. We had been collecting books since we were married in 1970 and one look at any room in our house would show that it had grown from a collection to, well, a BIG collection.


I don’t say it’s an obsession as that somehow implies piles of books in corners of every room. We have made an effort to keep the size of our book collection down to the size of the place we live - which means we either have to limit our book collection or keep buying somewhere bigger. No prizes for guessing which we did. But then suddenly it became obvious that some books we had begun to collect weren’t as interesting as they used to be. And we had new interests, new collections to build up. When Jeffrey suggested becoming sellers it immediately became apparent to us that we had some books to sell already. He thought about 300 books was enough to start selling and we felt that we had that many we could pull out of our own collection without missing them too much.


So then we had the drive home. Could we do it? Yes. What should we call it? Rabbit Lane Books? Gressingham Books? Stelandjohn’s Book Emporium? But of course High Barn Books was the one and only name in the end. 3 strong monosyllables standing firm like a solid 19th century 3-decker novel and a bit of alliteration into the bargain. We already had a company and we weren’t too sure if we could slot High Barn Books under the same umbrella. As soon as we got home we searched the internet to see if there was another High Barn Books. Assuming that the High Barn B and B in Sussex, and High Barn recording studios in Essex wouldn’t even notice, we felt confident that we had the only High Barn Bookstore in the world. And a call to our accountant on Monday morning confirmed that we could have one company that sold second hand books and were nuclear safety consultants.


Next thing was to sort out some books and catalogue them. There seemed many frightening things to tackle about starting up a new business from scratch - not least the technology of putting things up on the internet rather than downloading them from it. I had a fair amount of knowledge of databases and so we could hash something together that way, and to my amazement I could upload to abebooks using the software we already had.


But describing books seemed to be the most frightening of all. Terrified of doing something wrongly, my first attempts consisted of cutting and pasting other booksellers’ descriptions and then changing them slightly so that they sounded like the book we were trying to sell. After a few days of this I cautiously wrote my own. Now nearly 30000 books later I can’t quite remember what I was so nervous about.


Meanwhile, on the financial front, John was busy buying nice new account books and arranging for new bank accounts in the name of High Barn Books. We had the target of getting the business going by 1st January 2002 - a 3 month margin to sort out all the ins and outs of our new venture, but we achieved our first upload to Abebooks on 25th October 2001. But of course our most important milestone was that first book sale, ‘The Legacy of England’ (Batsford) to the memorably-named Vince Prank.


By the following May we had 1000 books online and had sold nearly 200 books and so the business grew. We picked up books along the way from charity sales, library sales, and through friends we bought collections of unwanted books, mostly locally, though some further away. Some we could put into the boot of the car, and for some we hired a decent sized van. Somehow it just grew.


Problems of shelving our stock were relieved from time to time by bits of shelving acquired here and there over time and this entailed finding tiny bits of free wall space to put them. Now we think we have as much shelving as the house can stand, but there are also books in the garage and some in boxes. But by and large our current stock of nearly 6000 books is about the maximum we can manage here alongside our own collection and the business ticks over well at that level.


In 2001 bookselling on the internet wasn’t new - but it was, compared to now, in relative infancy. Bookselling, unlike most remote selling, lends itself perfectly to the internet. Book buyers have long been able to translate the arcane language of booksellers. Such fragments as cold. ill. or a.e.g, are easily translatable (coloured illustrations, all edges gilt) to your average bookbuyer as booksellers have been using these for years in catalogues.


Bookbuyers don’t just peer at dusty bookshelves in dustier bookshops, spectacles raised to their eyebrows, tattered sports jackets with leather elbow patches, their sit-up-and-beg bikes with wicker baskets poised to take flight with brown paper covered packages perfectly tied up with string. Sometimes they sit by their fires, pipes in hand eagerly perusing book catalogues, phones poised to ring up the bookseller to catch their latest ‘find’. So once the internet became available more widely, it was almost inevitable that some bright spark would put books up there.

Amazon, early on the scene, appeared to the internet all guns blazing to sell new books in 1995 and more discreetly, the Advanced Book Exchange in 1996. Advanced Book Exchange had the idea of matching sellers of unwanted books to buyers who wanted them. Little is left of that idea, though buyers who are looking for particular volumes can add a want and both buyers and sellers get lists of matches. But times change and Advanced Book Exchange turned into a worldwide market place and became Abebooks - with some uncertainly as to whether it should be A-B-E books or Abe as some brother of Cain who has wondered into the book of lost consonants. By 2001 Abebooks was still king of the second hand bookselling business and although they charged commission, they felt that the link between seller and buyer was paramount. It may be only 10 years later, but there have been some dramatic changes since then.


But High Barn Books keeps on going - soon to be in its second decade. We have had our own website for many years, and our packing is second to none. Our average sales are slightly above average and we enjoy what we do. The ebook may be threatening, louring above all booksellers, but we are positive. The look, feel, touch, smell of a real book will never be a phase that will pass.


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In the Matter of J Robert Oppenheimer

I have just finished reading the fourth volume in a remarkable history of nuclear weapons by the Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Rhodes. Along the way I have studied the story of the man called the 'father' of the bomb, the brilliant and enigmatic J Robert Oppenheimer and have paid two visits to Los Alamos, the weapons factory high on a mesa in New Mexico where Oppenheimer and his colleagues created the ultimate weapons of mass destruction surrounded by the breathtakingly beautiful New Mexico mountains.


The story begins with "The Making of the Atomic Bomb", which describes the period from the discovery of fission in 1938 through the brilliantly creative period that saw Fermi and his colleagues create the world's first self-sustaining chain reaction in a graphite uranium pile in a University of Chicago squash court to the dropping of the bombs on Japan in 1945.

The squash court in Hyde Park, Chicago is long gone, but the site is commemorated by a Henry Moore scupture.


I say "brilliantly creative" about this period because as an intellectual achievement the harnessing for warlike (and peaceful) purposes of the energy of the atom's nucleus stands as towering evidence of the ingenuity of man. It is fashionable now to look on the scientists at Los Alamos as having struck some sort of Faustian pact to wrestle the secrets out of the atom, but in truth they were passionately concerned with defeating Nazi Germany, many of the European emigrees to Los Alamos having had to flee from the tyranny in their homelands. And for the great Richard Feynman and others it was simply one of the best times of their lives.

The second volume, "Dark Sun" describes in great detail the development of thermonuclear weapons after the Second World War, both in Russia under the brilliant Igor Kurchatov and at Los Alamos. The leaking of secrets to the Russians during the war, famously by Klaus Fuchs (a favourite at Los Alamos and later Head of Theoretical Physics at Harwell in the UK), accelerated the Russian programme, but they would have got there anyway. Many, including Oppenheimer, argued against further nuclear weapons development after 1945, but by then the politicians had set their sights and missiles against Stalin's USSR and there was no stopping the insane build-up of nuclear weapons on both continents.


This theme is continued in "Arsenals of Folly", which focusses on the attempts at arms limitation and the pivotal role played by Mikhail Gorbachev in negotiations, with an initially sceptical United States, to reverse the build-up of arms. This book also tells the story of the provocative military exercise "Able Archer" in 1983, in which the Americans rehearsed pretty well every stage of launching missiles against Russia short of actually doing it. Rhodes tells us how very close Russia came to being provoked into launching its own counter-attack, mistaking this exercise for the real thing.

The final volume, "Twilight of the Bombs" is more hopeful, though the perils of proliferation of nuclear weapons are discussed, including South Africa (who voluntarily abandoned its nuclear weapons programme after testing a nuclear bomb - the only nation to do so), North Korea and Iraq, where Rhodes presents in detail the story of the missing WMD.


But to return to Oppenheimer. The best biography is "American Prometheus: the Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer" by Bird and Sherman.


There is also a wonderful book by Jennet Conant, "109 East Palace" that tells the story of the house in Santa Fe that became the gateway to Los Alamos during the war years and its wonderful gatekeeper Dorothy McKibbin, hand-picked by Oppenheimer to "process" new arrivals to the secret city. East Palace is a lovely street leading off the historic Santa Fe Plaza and it is difficult to imagine the thousands of physicists and engineers passing down the street to cross the portal to their self-imposed exile on the mesa.


Oppenheimer is commemorated at Los Alamos by a statue of himself with General Groves, the army officer in overall charge of the project, and his house still stands on Bathtub Row.





Oppenheimer had always had a poetical, mystical side and it is not surprising that his friends included humanists, artists and intellectuals of every political persuasion, many of them communists. It was one of these, Haakon Chevalier, who, as reported by Oppenheimer some time later to General Groves at Los Alamos, had sounded Oppenheimer out in 1941 about passing information about the bomb to Russia, through a contact he knew. Chevalier, in his own account, denies any such request and he remained mystified as to why it was ever reported.


Oppenheimer's accounts of the request (which, if it happened, clearly horrified him) were always vague and contradictory and this, more than anything else led to his ultimate humiliation in 1954, when his security clearance was removed by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) who deemed he was an unacceptable risk. This, and also, his arguments against further nuclear weapon development after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His resistance to the hydrogen bomb, although shared by many of his scientific colleagues, would be seen by the FBI, CIA and others, in the days of Joseph McCarthy, the fanatical Wisconsin Senator, as attempts to sabotage American defence in the face of the Communist threat.

In late 1953, Oppenheimer had travelled to London to deliver the BBC Reith Lectures, again arguing for a more enlightened approach to world security and dialogue with communists. He followed this up by continuing to Paris to stay with Haakon Chevalier and his wife, well aware that his every move and telephone call were being monitored by the FBI.


This was perhaps the final straw for an America gripped by the fear of the Red Menace and Oppenheimer was summoned in early 1954 to a hearing in front of the Personnel Security Board of the AEC. The transcript of this hearing, largely contained in Michael Wharton's "A Nation's Security", makes gripping reading, reminiscent of Arthur Miller's "The Crucible". A majority of two to one panel members recommended removal of his security clearance, a shameful betrayal by a nation of one of its most brilliant and loyal citizens.

It was the Kennedy administration that finally sought to rectify this dreadful wrong by offering Oppenheimer the prestigious Enrico Fermi Award, of $50,000 for public services. President Lyndon Johnson presented Oppenheimer with his award on December 2nd 1964. Oppenheimer died three years later, to his death remaining an enigma.

Having lived through the period of the cold war and discussion of deterrence and "mutually assured destruction", I would share Richard Rhodes' closing thoughts as he ends his magnificent quartet of books. In summary, these are that nuclear weapons must never be used and that as long as any nation state possesses nuclear weapons, other nation states will seek to acquire them. Both Neils Bohr and Oppenheimer saw clearly that nuclear bombs were not weapons in the military sense but instruments of genocide and control over the means to produce them must be exercised at a supra-national level. In the end the only rational conclusion is that total verifiable global elimination of such weapons is the only safe future.



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Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Dublin's Prince of Darkness

Those fortunate enough to have read the excellent anthology "Fifty Years of Ghost Stories" during childhood will have soon encountered two stories by J Sheridan Le Fanu, the man M R James considered the supreme writer of ghost stories - 'The Familiar' and 'Green Tea'. In the former, the unfortunate Captain Barton is pursued to his death in his own bedroom by a vengeful revenant; in the latter the Reverend Jennings is haunted by a monkey, the appearance of which is attributed to excessive consumption of green tea, and driven to suicide. Both are powerful stories and these alone would place Le Fanu high amongst writers of supernatural fiction.

However, add to these the unforgettable 'Carmilla', most frightening of all vampires, and 'Schalken the Painter', in which the terrified Rose Velderkaust, forced into marriage to a repulsive stranger by her uncle in return for a large dowry, returns from her wedding night to reveal she has been married to a dead man and Le Fanu is seen, as M R James noted, to be absolutely in the first rank of ghost story writers. I read most of these stories in 1960's in the Dover editions edited by E F Bleiler.





However, for those seeking Le Fanu's stories of the supernatural for the first time I would turn to the three volumes edited by Jim Rockhill and published by the Ash-Tree Press. In addition to forming a comprehensive set of the ghost stories, the Ash-Tree Press books are themselves beautifully produced and a delight to read and handle.






Le Fanu's powers as a ghost story writer reached their peak in "In a Glass Darkly", published in three volumes in 1872, the year before his death. This includes 'Green Tea', 'Carmilla' and, another of my favourites, 'Mr Justice Harbottle', in which a hanging judge is subjected to his own frightful supernatural judgement by one of his victims.


In addition to his short stories and minor writings Le Fanu wrote fourteen novels, the most celebrated being "Uncle Silas" and "The House by the Churchyard". As was customary for the time, the novels were generally first serialised in the popular magazines - "All the Year Round", "Dublin University Magazine", "Temple Bar".


"Uncle Silas" picks up a recurring theme in Le Fanu - vulnerable young women entrusted to the care of people who wish them harm by (not always) well-intentioned fathers, mothers or brothers. In "Uncle Silas", it is her dying father who, seeking to be reconciled with his estranged brother, passes Maud Ruthyn into the 'care' of her uncle, who plots her murder in order to inherit her fortune. In "Checkmate" it is Alice Arden's brother who attempts to force her into marriage with the villainous Mr. Longcluse. However, the ultimate betrayal is found in my personal favourite - "The Rose and the Key", in which it is her own mother who commits Maud Vernon to an asylum, again in pursuit of her daughter's fortune. The tension mounts remorselessly as Maud slowly realizes that the country house she thought she was visiting is, in fact, a lunatic asylum and sees her desperate attempts to escape taken as further proof of her madness.


The original three volume editions of the novels are now impossibly scarce and, commensurate with their rarity, very costly. I do have the first two volumes of "The Tenants of Malory" and that, I fear is as close as I will get.





However, single volume editions published later in the nineteenth century can be found and those published by Downey and Company form a particularly attractive set.





New editions of other novels also appear from time to time, sometimes under Irish press imprints.








A set of Collected Works in 51 volumes was produced by the Arno Press of New York in 1977, but to date I have only located two of the three volume novels, both ex University of Arizona.

Paperback editions of the more popular novels and short stories have been produced in recent years by, amongst others, Alan Sutton, Nonsuch Publishing and Wordsworth Editions.









"The House by the Churchyard" is justly famous, not only for its complex plot and wonderful evocation of Chapelizod, but also for the fact that the young James Joyce found a copy of the book in his father's library and later used elements of its plot and descriptions in "Finnegans Wake". In Le Fanu's work a crime is committed in Phoenix Park and this is mirrored in "Finnegans Wake" by Earwicker's encounter with the two women at the same location, which event brings about his fall and loss of reputation.

In addition, there are three references to "The House by the Churchyard" in the Wake that show how much Joyce admired Le Fanu's novel; these appear as 'Lefanu (Sheridan's) Old House by the Coachyard', 'The old house by the churpelizod' and (in Dutch) 'De oud huis bij de kerkegaard'. Having stood outside the house in Chapelizod, which was the inspiration for Le Fanu's work, on a cold grey December afternoon, I can well imagine what ghosts the building conjured up in the author's mind.


It was M R James in 1923, who cemented Le Fanu's reputation by his editorship of "Madame Crowl's Ghost and other Tales of Mystery", to which he added a useful prologue and an excellent bibliography. MRJ also contributed the introduction to the OUP World's Classics edition of "Uncle Silas". In recent years there has been a welcome increased interest in Le Fanu, spearheaded by Brian J Showers at the Swan River Press, Gary W Crawford via the on-line journal "Le Fanu Studies" and Jim Rockhill.

Le Fanu, the son of a Church of Ireland priest was born in 1814 in Dublin, where he spent much of his life - from 1856 to his death in 1873 living in No. 70 on the fashionable Merrion Square.



From 1861 he edited the Dublin University Magazine, in which many of his works first appeared and to which he began contributing in 1838, with the short story 'The Ghost and the Bonesetter'. Affected by the early death of his wife, Le Fanu was attracted to the writings of the Swedish philosopher Swedenborg, whose visions of Heaven and Hell may have influenced Le Fanu's work. Indeed, the popular image of the mature Le Fanu is of a tormented recluse emerging from his house on Merrion Square late at night to wander the streets of Dublin, pursued by the phantoms of his own nightmares. This does not quite square with the life of a busy editor and man of letters, but I do like to think that Le Fanu's ghost still paces the silent city streets deep into the night when all human traffic has ceased. And even in broad daylight, I have felt a shiver when walking along Aungier Street and remembering the 'strange disturbances' that afflicted a house on that Dublin street in Le Fanu's story.




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