University of Virginia Library

Light on Joyce's Exiles? A New MS, a Curious Analogue, and Some Speculations
by
Robert M. Adams

Through the generosity of Mr. William Mennen, the Cornell University Library was recently able to add to its collection of James Joyce manuscripts an early version of "Ivy Day in the Committee Room"; several notebooks containing collections of materials to be used in Ulysses; a couple of pages of the first draft of "Oxen of the Sun"; and a curious manuscript containing dialogue for Joyce's only surviving play, Exiles. This dialogue was never incorporated in the printed version of the play, a fact which seems to reduce its esthetic importance, since most of the new material bears the explicit stamp of Joyce's rejection. Yet just for this reason, it has a special value for anyone interested in the genesis and control of the issues involved in Exiles.

The chance of new light on Exiles is particularly welcome because Joyce's play has so regularly baffled and frustrated admirers to whom the intricacies of Finnegans Wake seem to be mere child's play. In shape the play is a paradoxical four-cornered triangle. Its apex is a ménage similar in almost every respect to that of James and Nora Joyce and their young son Giorgio. Richard Rowan, an author, his companion Bertha, and their boy Archie, have returned to Ireland after an absence of nine years in Italy. There is a probability that Richard will be given the chair of romance literature at the university. But Bertha is subject to the menacing advances of Robert Hand, a journalist; she is also jealous of Beatrice Justice, a cousin of Robert's, for whose eyes Richard has all these years been composing his literary works. The passion of Beatrice for Richard, though fairly directly avowed in the first act, seems to break on the icy monolith of Richard's indifference. Far otherwise with the passion of Robert Hand for Bertha. He is an ardent esthete and Wildean immoralist, who pursues Bertha avidly

even after he is aware that she has been reporting the details of his wooing to Richard. Richard, loth to infringe on Bertha's freedom, allows her — indeed, almost forces her — to keep an assignation with Robert, of which, naturally, they are both intensely aware that he is intensely aware. Next day Robert writes a largely laudatory article about Richard, protests innocence of any wrong doing, and retires to Surrey. Beatrice, having expressed friendship for Bertha, fades out of the play; and Richard, professing to Bertha that he will never know what happened between her and Robert, nonetheless asserts his renewed attachment to her, based on "the deep wound of doubt" which his soul has suffered.

Certain of the broad aspects of this action have their roots, it is known, in biographical circumstances. Robert Hand the journalist derives a good deal of his past history from Oliver Gogarty the original of Buck Mulligan, and his interest in Bertha from Roberto Prezioso, a Triestine journalist of whose attentions to Nora Joyce, James was actively jealous (Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 327). Robert's action in writing a newspaper article expressing reserved praise of Richard Rowan derives from a similar action (in 1907) by Thomas Kettle, Joyce's schoolfellow (Ellman, JJ, p. 271). Like Richard and Bertha, Joyce and Nora returned briefly to Ireland in 1912, 8 years after leaving it; at the time of their first departure, Nora like Bertha had been an innocent girl, socially and intellectually much the inferior of her lover. Joyce had aspired in 1909 to the chair of romance literature at the National University, and Kettle had offered to help him toward the post. In all these matters, the broad outlines of the story were suggested to Joyce by his own personal history, and there are a number of lesser details which show how pervasively his personal situation was present in the world of the play.[1]

But the reader's problems with Exiles are primarily problems of motivation, not of episode; they are, in fact, traceable to a persistent, pervasive haziness as to what the characters are doing, or think they are doing, to one another. We do not know for sure that Richard wants the

chair of romance literature; we do not know whether Robert wants him to have it, or why. We may be certain that if Richard loves Beatrice Justice (as Bertha vigorously insists he does), it is in a pretty remote and theoretical way; but how does this love, or any other consideration involving Miss Justice, contribute to the conclusion? What is, in fact, the nature of this conclusion? It is clear that the departure of Robert represents the end of a threat; but the end of the play is by no means the triumph of true love. Richard says it is not. It is not in the darkness of belief that he now desires Bertha; he desires her "in restless living wounding doubt," and proposes (resisting all counsels of despair) to reestablish his ménage on that basis. There is a preliminary problem here as to what he is talking about; there is a further question whether, when we understand him, we can prevent him from seeming a Narcissistic prig. On all these scores, Exiles represents an outstanding piece of unfinished Joycean business; and, though we cannot expect it to clear up at a stroke, new light must be sought when and where it becomes available. The new MS, I believe, contains some.

This new MS is odd in its appearance, as well as in its contents. It comprises 22 sheets of graph paper, in size about 3¼ by 4 inches, stapled loosely together in clusters. To judge from their single perforated edge, they would seem to have been torn out of a pocket note-pad. Joyce's early training in writing on the call slips of the National Library evidently resulted in a permanent sympathy for the 3x5 card. In an unusually firm, clear hand, with no changes or corrections whatever, Joyce wrote on 37 of the 44 sides of these slips the following fragments of dialogue for his play. They are here reproduced by courtesy of the Society of Authors, literary executors for the estate of James Joyce, and copyright by them.

From Act II

Fragment #1

Richard

But in such a way — like thieves — at night — in such a place. It is not for people like us. It is not for me nor for her: it is not even for you.

Robert

Yes, you are right. You are so young and yet you seem to be her father and mine. I have acted like a common man.

Richard

When I met her first she was eighteen and since that time I have watched. I have felt her soul unfolding. Sometimes I turn to look at her in our room. I mean when I am writing. She is lying on the bed reading some book I have given her — Wagner's Letters or a novel of Jacobsen. She

is struggling with sleep. You say I am like her father. Do you know what I feel then when I look at her?

Robert

What?

Richard

I feel as if I had carried her within my own body, in my womb.

Robert

Can a man feel like that?

Richard

Her books, her music, the fire of thought stolen from on high out of whose flames all ease and culture have come, the grace with which she tends the body we desire — whose work is that? I feel that it is mine. It is my work and the work of others like me now or in other times. It is we who have conceived her and brought her forth. Our minds flowing together are the womb in which we have borne her.

Fragment #2

Richard

You spoke of our boyhood. Since our boyhood together, our ways have been different.

Robert

(Sighs) Ah, yes.

Richard

You have taken the smooth path, accepting ironically everything in which you disbelieved and building for your body and for that function of it which I suppose you call your soul a peace of prudence, irony, and pleasure.

Robert

Are those things bad?

Richard

I have not chosen them.

Robert

I know that. As it was in my character to choose them it was in yours to reject them.

Richard

I have lived without prudence, risking everything, destroying everything in order to create again.

Robert

You will. I feel that you will.

Richard

I have done something already. I have destroyed and recreated in my own image a woman.

Robert

Bertha?

Richard

I carried her away with me into exile and now, after years, I carry her back again, remade in my own image. And this I did for you.

Robert

For me?

Richard

Yes, for you who risked nothing and lived prudently.

Robert

(Smiling weakly) It is a queer kind of present, Richard, like the giver. You see of course that I have no intention of accepting it. No, you have made her new and strange. She is yours. Keep her.

Richard

Because you are generous enough to allow me? p. 72

Fragment #3

Robert

Then it was not jealousy you felt. p. 70

Richard

I felt what I tell you — longing.

Robert

No hatred of me? But how?

Richard

And for all I know jealousy, as you call it, may be this longing.

From Act III

Fragment #4

Bertha

No, thank you, Brigid. Just a cup of tea will do.

Brigid

Or a bit of toast? p. 91

Bertha

No, thanks.

Brigid

Maybe it was them greengages yesterday upset your stomach, ma'am. They upsets some people that way.

Bertha

I suppose so.

(Brigid goes out)

Fragment #5

Bertha

I wish I had never met you.

Richard

You would like to be freer now than you are. pp. 103-04

Bertha

Yes.

Richard

(Pained) So that you could go to that house at night more freely to meet your lover.

Bertha

(Putting her arms about his neck) Yes, dear. I wish I had never met you. I wish you were my lover waiting for me there.

Richard

Or he?

Bertha

(Shaking her head) You, dear. I want to love you over again. I want to forget you. (Kissing him) Love me, Dick. Forget me and love me.

Richard

Have you forgotten me for him?

Bertha

No: I remember you. You have a different way of giving yourself to a woman — a more beautiful way than he has. (She smooths back his hair) Dick, never embrace her the way men do.

Richard

Her? Who?

Bertha

Beatrice. Never do. Let her remember you always as I can see you now.

Richard

And if she does, will you not envy her?

Bertha

No. I want her to remember you always and to think of you. But not like others. Because she is a fine kind of person too.

Fragment #6

Robert

Jealousy. Not that of common men, of course. (With a smile) That of Richard Rowan.

Richard

I effaced myself. I gave you both your freedom. I tried to feel for you and for her, to consider you both. I had only to forbid her: and I did not. I had only to say a tender word to her of — of our own past life: and I did not. I left you both free.

Robert

For our sakes?

Richard

For my own sake, do you think?

Robert

Would you have left us free then — nine years ago?

Richard

You met her often then with me and without me.

Robert

Would you have allowed us the same freedom then? Answer me that.

Richard

If she had desired you then I should have left her to you. She did not.

Robert

(Quietly) No, she did not. If she had, you would not have left her to me. At least that is not exactly the way to put it.

Richard

(Simply) No?

Robert

She would not have been yours to leave but mine — then. Am I right?

Richard

(Turns toward him) Yes.

Robert

(Waves his hand) That is past. But I ask you, knowing that she was yours then, would you then have given us the freedom you gave now — for our sakes?

Richard

Then no.

Robert

(Bends across the table) Then no. Because then only one woman was in your heart. That is why.

Richard

You think that now . . .?

Robert

Yes, I do think it.

Richard

Has Bertha told you?

Robert

I saw it without being told. I know you and I know (he points with his thumb over his his shoulder) my interesting if somewhat melancholy cousin. p. 109

(He leans back in his chair, smiling. Richard rises slowly and walks to and fro, his hands at his back.)

Fragment #7

Robert

(After a long silence) Appearances are against me.

Richard

You mean I judge by them?

Robert

I mean you cannot enter into my mind. It is I who have won freedom for myself.

Richard

Speak out your mind. What freedom?

Robert

I will. Of us two it is I who am free. I have never really believed, not even as a boy. I have never wept, as you did, for my sins. I do not know what sin is. I have never believed in truth of man or woman. I have never been true myself. To what or to whom since all is chance and change? I

have freed myself within and without. I care nothing for human or legal bonds or laws or moral prejudices. I do not even care to make my life fit my ideas. I live by what I disbelieve in. I do not even feel the excitement of revolt against it. And that is my greatest freedom. It is you, Richard, with all your talent, who are still the slave.

Richard

(Shaken but calm) How well I know the tempter's voice!

Robert

(Nearer) The voice of reality. She was not free even last night. The shadow of her fear of you was over her. You have not healed your soul. You have wounded it — a deep wound of doubt which neither her words nor mine can heal completely.

Richard

Is it not at least as noble to fight on in doubt as in faith?

Robert

It may be nobler. I still admire the noble friend in you and love him all the more since I see that he also is the victim of a delusion.

Richard

Delusion! Because I believe in myself — and in her?

Robert

Because, Richard, I see that your type is not, as you wish to believe, the type of the humanity which will come after us.

Richard

But you are that type — is that your delusion?

Robert

I am not — wholly.

Richard

Who then?

Robert

Perhaps — your son. Your creedless lawless fearless son.

Richard

(Slowly) Archie! . . . . And you?

Robert

I am his godfather.

(He takes his hat from the table.)

Richard

(Repeats) Perhaps.

Robert

I said perhaps because he is yours. I could say almost surely if . . . .

Richard

If . . .?

Robert

(With a smile) If he were mine.

Fragment #8

Bertha

(Putting her arm about his waist) I have been true to you, Dick, have I not? pp. 110-11

Richard

(Smiling) You know that best yourself.

Bertha

(Averting her eyes) I have been. Very true. I gave you myself. You took me and you left me.

Richard

Left you!

Bertha

You left me: and I waited for you to come back to me.

Richard

(Disturbed) Yes, I know what you mean.

Bertha

O, Dick, those long evenings in Rome, what I went through! Do you remember the terrace on the top of the house where we lived?

Richard

Yes.

Bertha

I used to sit there, waiting, with the poor child playing with his toys, waiting until he got sleepy. I could see all over the city, the sun setting and right under me the river, the Tevere. What is it called in English? I forget.

Richard

The Tiber.

Bertha

Yes. It was lovely, Dick, only for I was so sad. I was alone, forgotten by you and by all. You had grown tired of me because I was too simple and uneducated for a person like you. I thought my life was over and yours too.

Richard

It had not begun.

Bertha

And I used to look at the sky, so beautiful, without a cloud, and at the city you said was so old. It was all something high and beautiful. But it made me cry.

Richard

Why, dear?

Bertha

Because I was so uneducated. I knew nothing about all those things. And still I was moved by them.

Fragment #9

Richard

I suffered too.

Bertha

But not like I did, Dick.

Richard

Yes. I know what you felt. That I was giving to another the finer part of myself and only what was gross to you.

Bertha

I could not bear that. I tried to understand everything in your strange character. But that no.

Richard

I saw it in your eyes, a vague fear, the fear of life. I heard it in your voice, your wonder. You were asking yourself what was this thing in life, in love itself; and you were praying almost in your heart that it might not come, even that life or love might die before it came.

Bertha

(Pointing to her breast) In there, dear. In my heart I felt something breaking. That you saw in my eyes.

Richard

(Seizing her hands, kisses her passionately) O, how I loved you then! My little bride! My little bride in exile!

Bertha

Am I useful to you in your life, dear, in something?

Richard

(Laughing, shakes his head) No quite useless!

Bertha

Ah, tell me! I want to know.

Fragment #10

Bertha

When you said goodnight to me I knew by your voice you wanted to be alone. I felt so sad then, Richard. Your lips when you kissed me were so soft and cold. I could not speak to you as if the world were between us. And when I was in bed, alone in the room, in the silence and saw the little lamp burning on the washstand I thought of my girlhood.

Richard

(Tenderly) Tell me more, dearest.

Bertha

I thought I was in the room I used to sleep in when I was a girl, that I had never been in a man's arms, that I was still innocent and young. I was innocent when I met you first, Richard, was I not?

Richard

(Touching her sleeve with his lips) Always, always.

Bertha

I thought I was in that room and I could see it, the little oil-lamp burning quietly near my bed, and on the wall I could see the picture of Robert Emmet that used to be on the wall. You know? In a green uniform, with his hat off, with dark eyes. Then . . .

Richard

Then?

Bertha

Then I thought of Robert. I felt you were gone away and would never come back to me. I felt you were not thinking of me but of her and perhaps he was. I felt lonely for someone.

Richard

How did you think of him?

Bertha

His name, his eyes, and how his voice is when he says my name. I was glad to think that he sleeps alone: and I said his name to myself softly thinking perhaps he might hear me someway.

Richard

(Walks to and fro a little in silence, then standing near her) Bertha!

Bertha

What?

Richard

Did you feel then that you were beginning to love him? Tell me the truth.

Bertha

(Simply) No. I loved you.

Richard

Even then?

Bertha

I felt I had lost you. I could not understand why. It was useless to think what it meant. You were lost for me.

Fragment #11: unplaceable

Richard

What you wished has taken place — and what I wished. In this cage when events were in our power we cannot blame them.

Some of the phrases in these fragments will be familiar to readers of Exiles, and one extended passage (fragment #8) can be discovered, almost verbatim, in the concluding dialogue of Richard and Bertha. Most of the other fragments can be located, hypothetically and approximately, within the structure of the play, either by the characters who are engaged in conversation, by the attitudes they display, by the circumstances of their discussions, or by verbal parallels with the final

text. Except for the final fragment, which is too short to locate any-where in the play, I have arranged them in a provisional order. None seem to relate to the first act, three relate to the second, and all the rest to the third. Wherever a phrase carries over to the final text of the play, I have added a marginal page-reference to the Viking 1951 edition, with foreword by Padraic Colum.

The two fragments which, according to this estimate of their position within the play come first, are the most interesting of the manuscript. In both of them, Richard Rowan explains to Robert Hand (speaking with more intimacy and greater confidence of being understood than he ever displays toward Robert in the final text) that he is the creator of Bertha. He has destroyed her, he says (not without a touch of arrogance), and recreated her; he has borne her in the womb, nurtured and fostered and created both her mind and "the grace with which she tends the body we desire." He is not only her father but also, with his fellow culture-heroes, her mother. This is of course a familiar and beloved metaphor of Joyce's; it is the deepest and most intimate human connection he can envisage. But Richard Rowan's creation of Bertha has also an echo of a larger and more ambitious enterprise. He claims to have created a woman and perhaps a work of art; it seems probable that in his own mind, and in Joyce's as well, he has created, i.e., forged, something like the conscience of his race, which he is now testing against Robert, the gay deceiver. To forge such a conscience was the resolve of Stephen Dedalus, at the end of the Portrait; the applicability of the notion is reinforced by Joyce's habit of referring to Nora as "Ireland" or "his little Ireland," and given extra dimension by an important phrase of Stephen's, in Ulysses, to the effect that Ireland must be important because it belongs to him (p. 629). It is a revealing and important paradox which Joyce adopted from Mallarmé that "tout existe pour aboutir à un livre"; in some sense, Bertha is undergoing precisely this interesting metamorphosis. If the forging of Bertha's consciousness be taken as microcosmically equivalent to the recreation of the Irish conscience, a major part of the play then centers on the pun implicit in the word "forge." To what degree has Richard shaped Bertha's mind, to what degree has he faked it? A secondary question, more difficult of resolution, involves the extent to which Richard can claim to have done all this "for Robert." It is possible that he is thinking of Robert under the aspect of an audience for his literary work; but would this imply a categorical equation of artistic appreciation with the act of adultery? I should hope not. Very likely we shall want to suppose that Robert is here being treated as a type, not an individual;

perhaps only as a quality of mind. The contemptuous emphasis on prudence would tend to identify him with Bloom, as Richard identifies naturally with Stephen. But the fragment is by no means clear. We are probably on safer ground in noting an additional emphasis laid on the notion of exile in both these fragments. It is a notion puzzlingly unexplored in the play proper. Richard and Bertha have been abroad for nine years, but the theme of exile has little apparent bearing on the conflict of Richard with Robert for the possession of Bertha. Now we see that Bertha is a new creation of Richard's, that Robert is not pursuing an old flame but trying to deprive Richard of that one substitute Ireland which he has himself created (and which has, reciprocally, made a man of him: p. 100); and now the theme of exile takes on a relation to the play's central conflict which was never made explicit in its final version. Robert is trying to re-exile Richard, to uncrown him in the kingdom of his imagination. The deep wound of doubt from which Richard is suffering at the end of the play thus transcends the mere matter of whether Bertha has in fact acted, or wanted to act, adulterously with Robert; it is a question of extraordinary rights which he has usurped over her soul, of a situation where he is both Adam and God the Father, while Bertha is Eve, and Robert the Tempter. At the root of Richard's predicament is that ancient paradox reduced to a nutshell by Milton: can a human creature really be created "sufficient to have stood though free to fall"? The wound of doubt which assails Richard may involve, among other things, the question whether he had any right to assume the position of God the Father vis à vis Bertha; it would, understandably, be inflamed by the discovery that he is slipping into the same position vis à vis Beatrice, and would culminate in the act of mental abdication with which the play in fact concludes.

But, curious as they are in relation to the psychology of Joyce and no doubt of Richard Rowan, the passages were quite properly excised from the finished play. All episodes involving a man's attempt to remake a woman according to some learned ideal of his own invite the sort of mockery that reverberates through L'Ecole des Femmes, and Richard Rowan is easy enough to laugh at, as the play stands. The anger of Bertha at being manipulated by Richard in her relation to Robert may derive from her consciousness of owing so much to him — as his resentment of her derives from a contrast of her innocence with his experience. And, I venture to think, her odd, provocative indifference to Robert's wooing (as well as her calm, detached recital of its episodes to Richard) may well survive from a stage in the drafting of

the play when the idea of her being a "made" personality bulked larger than it does in the final version.

Fragment #5 explains something which is mildly enigmatic in the text, as the play's text is printed. Richard accuses Bertha of wanting to be free so that she can meet her lover. Speaking in intense passion, she cries "To meet my lover! My lover! Yes! My lover" — and bursts into tears. Richard tries to comfort her, but she declares that he is a stranger to her; and at this point, Robert enters and she departs. The softer version of this scene, represented in the fragment, makes clear this somewhat theatrical misunderstanding; he thinks that the words "your lover" mean Robert Hand to her; she knows that they mean Richard himself. Her fidelity to Richard is therefore more firmly established than the final text ever allows it to be; and the paradox of their wishing to forget one another in order to love one another more freshly reaches back from Bertha's last speech to establish itself as a basic theme of the drama. It is the virginity of the soul that she wishes to recover. On the other hand, her feeling that with Richard this virginity is only to be recovered by an act of oblivion contrasts interestingly with Robert's assurance (p. 106 of the text) that only the dream he shared with Bertha during "that sacred night of love" is a real element in his life. These spiritual acrobatics, carried on by her two rhetorical lovers, place Bertha in a somewhat puzzling position; she is in a fair way to being overwhelmed with willful acts of remembering and forgetting. At the same time, this fragment shows us that Bertha's reconcilement with Beatrice is not meant to be the mere surface sympathy of women in trouble; indeed, it adds an extra dimension to the matter of remembering when we see how Bertha's jealousy of Beatrice imperceptibly converts into a desire to have her remember Richard. It is almost as if remembering were a substitute for possession — a point which may well have future implications.

Fragments #6 and #7 I have assigned to that scene in the third act wherein Robert confronts Richard. Both fragments clearly take place after, and make reference to, Bertha's assignation with Robert, with which Act Two concludes. The central point of Fragment #6 is the revival and apparent confirmation of Bertha's charge that Richard is really in love with Beatrice Justice, for whose eyes and judgment he has been writing all these years. Miss Justice, recently jilted after a secret engagement by Robert Hand, her first cousin, is the daughter of a Protestant convert (or pervert, as one will) residing in Youghal, is a Protestant herself, and a lifelong convalescent. In brief, she is intricately entangled in the circumstance of the play and only slightly

integrated with its action. If Richard is really in love with her, the impression is very ill conveyed. She is clearly fascinated by him, and says so (p. 19) almost at once; her eagerness to give Archie his music lesson, though she has forgotten to bring any music (p. 29), points in the same direction. Though secretly — why secretly? — engaged to Robert Hand (whose type she scarcely seems to be), she has been acting — also secretly — as Richard's literary confidante for nine years, that is, since before the breaking of her engagement. But Robert evinces no awareness of this, offers no explanation for the breaking of his engagement, and, though ready to accuse Richard of loving Beatrice, does not see or say that this affects him except as it liberates Bertha. Miss Justice is evidently a diaphanous as well as a puzzling person, whether one takes her as representative of something outside the play, or as an artifact designed to elicit certain effects within it. The extra emphasis laid on her relation to Richard by this fragment calls attention to the extraordinary number of loose ends in her character, and to our sense of how little is resolved in her relations with Robert and Richard. She reaches a sort of understanding with Bertha, but allows the abortive declaration to Richard (by which he is still greatly disturbed at the end of Act III) to fade off without any effort at resolution; and she takes no position on the Richard-Robert dispute beyond the nice, pathetic wish that they shall get along together. The fragment suggests that Joyce's third act once tried to have Robert and Richard work out between them their relations to enigmatic Miss Justice, but that the puzzle proved too intricate for dramatic effectiveness, and so Miss Justice was allowed to fade quietly out of the play. Her relation to the action has some undramatic aspects to which we will recur later on.

Fragment #7 confirms a suspicion that the basic theme of the play is a conflict over the past and the future, between the principled person who remembers and the unprincipled person, who forgets. In notes for the play, reprinted by Colum (p. 117), Joyce listed as one of his problems the fact that "Archie, Richard's son, is brought up on Robert's principles"; the notion is spelled out here in the three adjectives "creedless, lawless, fearless," so that there is no mistaking the point which is represented in the text chiefly by Archie's eagerness to drive the milkman's horse. Thus Robert's relation of godfather to Archie reinforces a thematic point; and the departure of these bold, free spirits (p. 110) — perhaps to carry on the work of the next generation — leaves Richard and Bertha to explore the wound of doubt and remembrance for which the only healing salve is oblivion.

Fragment #8, closest to an extended passage of text, differs from it in making Bertha confess a cultural backwardness, scarcely compatible with the perusal of Wagner's Letters and the novels of Jacobsen (Fragment #1), but no doubt accurate in its relation to Nora Barnacle Joyce. The special quality of Fragment #9 is a sliding series of imperceptible metamorphoses. Richard's notion that he has been "giving another the finer part of myself and only what was gross to you" must point toward his intellectual correspondence with Beatrice, his physical relation with Bertha. Bertha's jealousy of Beatrice becomes, puzzlingly, "a fear of life," and the memory of how he "broke her heart" with this fear rouses Richard to a paroxysm of affection. But when she tries to draw from this circumstance the pathetically mild comfort that she is of some use to him in his work, he puts her off with an irony. A major element in the scene is apparently Richard's cruelty toward Bertha, the element of sadism within his apparently masochistic jealousy. This is a good deal for an audience in an actual playhouse, confronted with a passing spectacle, to grasp; it also detracts sharply from our sympathy with Richard, and, no doubt on these scores, the scene was reduced almost to the point of elimination from the play.

Finally, the special interest of Fragment #10 is scarcely artistic at all, since almost every trace of it has been eliminated from the finished script. But it does show how those association-patterns which Joyce worked out in the notes toward the play (dated 12 and 13 November, 1913; Colum, pp. 117-118) were first intended to find application. Bertha's innocence and girlishness, associated with the naiveté of Irish political life and the naturalness of Irish rural existence, were to appear within the play as memories of childhood scenes. Bertha was evidently to be a character deeply rooted in the Irish soil, as Robert and Richard clearly are not. Indeed, she is a forerunner of Molly Bloom in representing the earth itself; in fulfillment of this notion, her colors are pale green, lavender, and cream, and she moves in what Robert perceptively describes under the imagery of a lunar cycle. The delicate sensuality of this presentation was evidently muted to make way for the intricate dialectic of the later acts; and so these materials dropped out of the play.

Before trying to say what all this adds up to, one should probably take account of a buried piling on which Joyce's play seems to have been constructed; this is Scribe's libretto for Meyerbeer's opera, Robert le Diable. As a piece of stagecraft, Scribe's piece is a juvenile shocker in the lowest traditions of Victorian melodrama. The main features

of its action may be summarized, with brutal but merited abruptness, as follows: Robert, duke of Normandy, has been exiled to Sicily by his ungrateful compatriots; and the story is told that he is the son of Bertha, daughter of a prince of Normandy, by no less a lover than the devil. Robert is in love with Isabella, princess of Sicily, whose hand he hopes to win with the aid of his dear friend, Bertram. Bertram, however, is not really a very good friend; he entices Robert into a dice game where he loses all his armor, and then when Isabella re-arms him, Bertram tells our simple-minded hero that the Prince of Grenade, his chief rival, has sent him a challenge. While Robert is seeking the Prince in a bosky dell nearby, the tourney is held, Robert is absent, and the Prince of Grenade wins the hand of Isabella. Bertram now offers to lead unsuspicious Robert to a magic branch which he must sacrilegiously pluck from the tomb of Saint Rosalie in an abandoned nunnery. Unaware that the nuns whom he sees are evil spirits, and that the nunnery is a haunt of devils, Robert plucks the sacred branch and uses its magic to force his way into the bedroom of Isabella. But her eloquent pleas recall him to his better nature, he resigns his evil power by breaking the branch, her guards awake from their magic sleep, and Robert is led off to prison. Finally, in Act V, Bertram confesses that he is really the devil, and so Robert's father; the Prince of Grenade was only one of his agents, and so can be made to disappear at command. Bertram assures Robert that he will have no rival for the hand of Isabella if he enlists in the diabolic camp. Seduced by this offer, Robert is about to opt for hell and Isabella when Alice, his half-sister, arrives, bearing their sainted mother's will. Read, it proves to be a warning against the devil. Robert repents, Bertram disappears in a thunderclap, the Prince of Grenade is repelled by the powers of holiness from the Cathedral in Palermo where Isabella is waiting impatiently for a husband — any husband — and the curtain falls on a vision of the Cathedral, Isabella and the pious populace at prayer, with an empty seat beside her, destined for Robert.

Aside from the names Robert and Bertha, two or three points of narrative similarity with Exiles strike the eye immediately. Scribe's Robert is in exile and he grieves that he could not perform his final filial duties for his dying mother. The theme of false friendship is central to both plays; Bertram, like Robert Hand, professes freedom to change, freedom from law, creed, and principle. In pursuit of this freedom, he seeks to betray his friend (and also to destroy his son), while professing sincere affection for him. An air sung by this most

interesting and ambiguous devil in Act V sets forth his odd double motivation: He is both self-seeking and self-sacrificial, this unusual devil; and the crucial turn of his relation with his friend-son concerns Isabella, the princess whom Robert has learned to love in exile. Alice, who in the opera is Robert's half-sister, may well correspond to Beatrice who in the play is Robert's first cousin. To be sure, there is a sort of uncertainty in Joyce's play over who really is the devil; Robert seems to be the spirit of clever negation, and in Fragment #7 Richard refers to him as the Tempter; but in Scribe's script, it is the friend of Robert who is really the devil. Does this imply that in Joyce's play the final effect is a reversal of roles, with Richard becoming the devil that Robert has been wrongly accused of being? There are some grounds for arguing the matter (we have seen, in one of the fragments, Richard taking on some of Robert's sadism; and we know that the role of Satan was one which appealed to Joyce from earliest days: cf. Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother's Keeper, p. 3); to put the matter at its mildest, the final effect in both pieces is of an unusual confusion, if not interchange of roles. One notes that even God, in Scribe's piece, is ambiguous; his gift of love to Bertram may be an act either of benevolence or vengeance.

It would be idle to draw attention to these slightly strained similarities without conceding immediately the enormous differences between Joyce's play and Scribe's script. The similarities are largely skeletal, admittedly. But this is precisely the way in which Joyce enjoyed adapting old pieces, as inversion and parody are ways in which he altered the tone and content to suit his own temperament. And even in a local context, the parallel may explain an occasional odd feature of Joyce's play. For example, Richard, while walking on the strand overnight, reports emphatically that he has heard demons jabbering out there; this is just the period in the opera when Robert visits the haunted nunnery. Even parallels which seem superficially absurd may have definite symbolic import; for example, it is mad to suppose that Joyce intended to suggest that Robert is really the son of Richard and Bertha (as Robert in the opera is really the son of Bertram and Bertha); yet, within Exiles, there is undeniably a certain amount of teasing byplay over Archie, who is Richard's son and Robert's godson, whose temper in its bold gaiety and unbelief is Robert's, and who, like Robert-le-Diable, is a bastard. This teasing is reinforced and augmented in Fragment #7. It is surely a conscious irony of the play that Richard, in rejecting the conventions for which Robert (despite his disbelief) stands, has begotten another Robert.

But though the parallel with Scribe renders less odd some passages and concepts in Joyce's play which would otherwise be very odd indeed, I do not by any means put it forward as the "clou" to Joyce's puzzling and intricate drama. In some ways, it renders the play even more indigestible than it was before, notably by adding a supernatural dimension to it. The cold arrogance of Richard Rowan is Promethean, even Luciferian; what then does it mean that Miss Beatrice Justice is infatuated with him? Conceding that her patronymic has some symbolic import, just what is it? Robert Hand, departing to visit his cousin in Surrey, makes some point of referring to him, not as John, but Jack, otherwise "Doggy" Justice. This can scarcely be other than contemptuous mockery; just as in Act III, the fishwoman's cry from offstage, "Fresh Dublin bay herrings!" is used to deride Robert's final assurances and protestations of friendship for Richard. But if justice is being derided in Joyce's play, what principle is being upheld? The indications are very carefully mixed. Joyce attached importance to

details as slight as Bertha's cream gloves and Beatrice's glasses;[2] but he did not render very distinct the final adjustments — sentimental, spiritual, ideological — of the ladies to the gentlemen, or of the ladies and the gentlemen to one another. This indecision is so carefully sustained, and bulks so large in the play, that it can scarcely be other than deliberate; hence one looks in vain, either in Scribe or Ibsen or any other formal source, for resolutions of an irresolution which is functional to the specific drama of Exiles. What we need is a better definition of the play's issues than we have yet had. I do not flatter myself that I have such a definition up my sleeve, but some things can perhaps be attempted.

Let us begin with the simpleminded observation that Richard and Robert have names beginning with the same letter, as do Bertha and Beatrice. Without committing ourselves permanently to the thesis that each alphabetic pair represents a single personality, let us consider the possibility. The relation existing between Shem and Shaun, in Finnegans Wake, is a sort of paradigm for the one I would propose between Robert and Richard, Bertha and Beatrice. Shem and Shaun are of course perfectly distinct characters, indeed, they are elaborately distinguished; but the more lines of cleavage one establishes between them, the more one feels that they are complements, not disparates. Their very differences serve to unite them. They are mirror-images of one another, positive and negative prints of the same picture. Both include important elements of Joyce himself, as well as of their father, HCE. So it is in several important matters with Robert and Richard. Robert is a journalist, Richard an artist; but Joyce was both. Richard is arrogant, Robert ignoble; and Joyce thought of himself as both. Richard appeals to Bertha through his strength and strangeness, Robert through his weakness and familiarity; and Joyce's relation with Nora encompassed both contraries. Richard is the father of Archie, but Robert is his godfather, that is, his spiritual prototype. In almost all its details the relation between Bertha and Richard is that between Nora and James Joyce; yet Robert is allowed to describe Bertha's face, in a metaphor which recurs several times in Joyce's letters to Nora, as "a wild flower blowing in a hedge" (p. 32). Robert, a hard-burning Paterian esthete, professes ardent and lawless passion for the beautiful;

Richard is the creator of that beauty which Robert adores. The list of antinomies could be extended indefinitely.

As Joyce could scarcely have been unaware, this pair of contrasting characters, divided irreconcilably between the acquisitive and ethical stadia, is a regular feature of the Ibsen drama; seen through a multitude of different personae in different dramas, it is the single essential difference between Peer Gynt and Brand. On these terms, Joyce's drama falls into a clear, though unresolved and necessarily inconclusive pattern. The severe and demanding mind of Richard Rowan, Shelleyan in its extra-humanitarian focus, finds people of interest as they belong to it; the docile and well-trained mind of Robert Hand expresses its resentment before a superior power by inflicting the deep wound of doubt. Robert's mind falls into its natural relation to Richard's when it coöpts without acknowledgmement his phrase from Duns Scotus (pp. 68, 108); it takes its natural revenge in the too-obvious and too-easy assurances (pp. 106-107) that nothing has happened. The issue between the men is less sexual possession of a woman than two contrasting ways of seeing Ireland and the world; which of them, they agree in asking, is the "type of the future"? In this conflict, they are predestined destroyers of one another's assurance. As between Beatrice, who is spiritual love in the Dantesque form always rather unsatisfactory to Joyce, and Bertha, who is the sacramental ignorance of earth as well as a work of Richard's art, opposition is less acute. Beatrice is almost absorbed into Bertha in the final benediction, as prudence and justice, the copybook virtues, give way to a darker, more passionate relation, that between the artist and his creation.

Though rather sad things happen when we try to turn the play into a fullblown Spenserian allegory, there may be some advantage to the notion that neither Robert Hand nor Beatrice Justice is quite intended to represent a three-dimensional person. If each is in the nature of an imago, conjured up by the opposite partner out of the strains and tensions of a devouring, demanding relationship, their limitations as theatrical personages may be easier to accept. The watery insubstantiality of Beatrice, the somewhat stagy wickedness of Robert, may then be meaningful; their kinship and their broken engagement are less realistic details than symbolic attributes of a temperament, an order of reality, perhaps a social discipline. Youghal, ancient seat of English power in England, was a center of that doggy justice to which prudent Robert, at the end of the play, is prudently turning. Beatrice is to remember Richard, as Robert swears to remember Bertha, because in this way the relation of Richard and Bertha (who in their "infidelities"

have really only been seeking themselves) can be enriched and completed. In their direct relation to one another, on the other hand, Richard and Bertha must perpetually forget in order perpetually to rediscover. So conceived, the play deals with what Freud in one of his most brilliant paradoxes described as the participation, in every sexual relation, of four persons. The fact that Richard resolves to hold Bertha, not in the security of assurance, but in the bonds of a restless living wounding doubt, bears witness to a new inwardness and a new passivity on his part. The infidelity he fears and partly courts is an inescapable consequence of his word finding flesh, of incarnation; in the new relation, he will no longer be God the Father, but rather Joseph the cuckold, perhaps the child in the womb. Having made him a man, Bertha must now cherish him as a child; having created his work of art, the artist must now suffer it to create him. Biographically, Joyce's need to be enveloped and mothered was as deep as his need to dominate; and Richard Rowan mirrors his creator faithfully in this respect. Though armored in his vocation, Richard is forever vulnerable in his creation, from which, in the conscious mind, he is forever alienated. But, dismissing English-Protestant moralities and immoralities, he seeks the unconscious, intuitive communion of blood and doubt with which the play closes.

To describe Exiles in these schematic terms is to oversimplify it, of course, even to destroy its peculiar energy; for Richard Rowan's ultimate doubt is involved in the play's total structure. He is afflicted with a doubt of Bertha, of Robert, of Beatrice, of himself, and probably of Archie; the spectators who have followed with anything like sympathy this alarming descent into anguish can scarcely be allowed to feel secure in the possession of this or any other final esthetic truth about the spectacle. It is hard to see how Angst can be credibly portrayed unless it is in some rather direct way created. As the characters play cat and mouse with one another, the author plays the same game with the reader-viewer. There are, thus, elements in the play which no trim outline will accommodate, autobiographical and associative details which no possible formal pattern can relate or explain. To entangle and defeat the conscious mind in order to release its deeper levels of passion and perception is the pattern of Exiles, as of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Without a sense of long frustration, there would be none of sudden liberation. But I doubt that we are in imminent danger of destroying the play through understanding it too early or too well.

One last set of considerations arising from the bibliographic peculiarities of the manuscript. The remarkable cleanness of the script, which

contains no erasures, insertions, or alternative readings, suggests that we have, not a primitive version of the play, but a set of relatively late variations on its themes. Within their limits, the dialogues are complete and consecutive; there is nothing tentative or exploratory about them. They involve both mechanical stage business ("them greengages") and significant analyses of important thematic relations. Joyce's notesheets and workshops, which exist in profusion for Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, never have so tight and tidy an appearance as these bits of dialogue. If we suppose that Joyce wrote Exiles by allowing the dialogue to flower almost without conscious control from a central situation, and by then paring down or rounding off excrescences to form an acting script (this would be in line with his compositional procedures elsewhere), is it not possible that two separate forms of the play came to exist? One would be the script as acted and printed; the other — fuller, more personal, and less tightly woven into dramatic shape; created as fetish, as self-analysis, as personal confession, but not as a work of art — would be represented by the fragments of MS at Cornell. The one is a public, the other a private version of the same play. On these terms, would not the "private" version have special authority as a gloss on the "public" one? It might serve, particularly, to show that the artist never asserted that absolute autonomous rule over his materials which entitles us to suppose that all conflicts within the work of art can and should be resolved. On these terms, Exiles is a drama written for two stages simultaneously, and so compromised ab ovo. It can't be understood with the mind alone; one of its modes of truth is autobiographical, and for this mode of understanding we shall always and inevitably lack essential materials.

Notes