Molly Bloom's father, a man named "Tweedy," was an officer in
the Royal Dublin Fusiliers
stationed in "Gibraltar" during her infancy and youth. In Ithaca
he is called "Major Brian Cooper Tweedy." According to
Ellmann, Joyce based Tweedy on a Dubliner who called himself
Major Powell but who in fact served only as a sergeant-major,
an important non-commissioned or warrant officer. This
ambiguity attaches to Tweedy in the novel.
Ellmann writes of Sergeant Major Powell, "He had served many
years in the army, took part in the Crimean War and was in the
Aldershot Rifles in Australia. On retiring from the service he
commuted his pension and bought a farm in Cork. He drank this
up, came to Dublin and married a woman with property. She bore
him four daughters and a son, then tired of his bullying ways
and lived separately from him. Joyce has greatly softened
Powell's character" (46n).
In Calypso Bloom remembers his father-in-law in a
generally admiring way as a self-made man who was smart with
money: "Hard as nails at a bargain, old Tweedy. Yes,
sir. At Plevna that was. I rose from the ranks, sir, and I'm
proud of it." Gifford notes that Tweedy could not
have been at Plevna, a battle fought in Bulgaria in 1877
during the Russo-Turkish War, but apparently read about it
avidly in a book that now sits on Bloom's bookshelves, Sir
Henry Montague Hozier's History of the Russo-Turkish War.
In Ithaca Bloom has trouble recalling the name of
this "decisive battle" so "frequently
remembered by a decisive officer," even though he
has remembered it readily in Calypso. He resolves
to use his "mnemotechnic" to recover the name, as he has done
once before. His memory of Tweedy as a "decisive" man coheres
with his admiration of his father-in-law's money skills.
In Circe Tweedy rises still higher in the ranks when
Bloom describes him as "Majorgeneral Brian Tweedy, one of
Britain's fighting men who helped to win our battles."
Gifford suggests that Bloom is thinking of "another Tweedie,
Maj. Gen. Willis Tweedie (b. 1836). The real-life Tweedie had
a considerable reputation as an army commander in India." It
would have been highly unusual in the 19th century for an
enlisted man to rise through the ranks to become any kind of
commissioned officer, much less a general: gentlemen and
noblemen typically began at the rank of lieutenant, while
commoners seldom rose above the rank of sergeant. It seems
quite likely that Tweedy, like Powell, was never a
commissioned officer. In Penelope Molly remembers
how she read a love letter from Lieutenant Mulvey "while
father was up at the drill instructing." This
implies that Tweedy was a drill sergeant, not a major or a
major general.
Sergeant-majors are usually warrant officers, distinct from
higher-ranking commissioned officers on the one hand and
lower-ranking enlisted men and non-commissioned officers on
the other. They occupy an important and honorific position in
the British and many other armies. The fine distinction
between warrant officers and commissioned officers, and the
confusing use of the term "major" to name officers separated
by great distances in the hierarchy (sergeant-major, major, major general), might have
given a retired officer like Powell the ability to imply a
more exalted military status than he in fact could claim, by
exploiting civilian incomprehension. Nevertheless, any
enlisted man who "rose from the ranks" to
achieve the exalted rank of sergeant-major might have been
justly proud of his accomplishment.
A little later in Calypso, as Bloom imagines
himself wandering through the exotic streets of a Middle
Eastern city, he places a version of his father-in-law in the
scene: "come to a city gate, sentry there, old ranker
too, old Tweedy's big moustaches, leaning on a long
kind of a spear." This old man too has risen through the
ranks. Apparently the places that Tweedy has seen in his days
of army service give him an exotic air in Bloom's mind.
