In Lotus Eaters, as Bloom pursues alternatives to
pondering his wife's upcoming assignation with Boylan—dreaming
about Ceylon, lusting after an unknown woman
who is above his social station, reading flirtatious correspondence—the
world around him seems to be trying to remind him of his
cuckolding, in a maniacal, hallucinatory version of Freud's
"return of the repressed." Trying to tune out the annoying
M'Coy, he unrolls his newspaper and sees an ad for Plumtree's Potted Meat,
announcing that without it home is incomplete. He tells M'Coy
about Molly's impending concert tour in Belfast and M'Coy asks
him, "Who's getting it up?" Bloom answers evasively that
"There's a committee formed. Part shares and part profits."
Slightly later, a song verse floats into his mind about a
woman who "didn't know what to do / To keep it up." All
these details knock on Bloom's skull to remind him that is not
getting it up and Boylan will.
The direct answer to "Who's getting up?" would be Hugh Boylan. He is, to use less
colloquial language, organizing the concert tour. But
this term too drips with latent sexual suggestion, as the men
in Cyclops make clear:
— He knows which side
his bread is buttered, says Alf. I hear he's running a concert
tour now up in the north.
— He is, says Joe. Isn't
he?
— Who? says Bloom. Ah,
yes. That's quite true. Yes, a kind of summer tour, you see.
Just a holiday.
— Mrs B. is the bright
particular star, isn't she? says Joe.
— My wife? says Bloom.
She's singing, yes. I think it will be a success too.
He's an excellent man to
organise. Excellent.
Hoho begob says I to myself
says I. That explains the milk in the cocoanut and absence of
hair on the animal's chest. Blazes doing the tootle on the
flute. Concert tour....That's the bucko that'll organise
her, take my tip. 'Twixt me and you Caddareesh.
Bloom's effort to avoid thinking about Boylan's organ (which, it
turns out, is quite large and will be potted multiple times)
lead him to tell M'Coy about a "
committee" that will
operate by "
Part shares and part profits." But this is
scarcely better, as it suggests that he will be sharing his wife
with another man in a kind of
ménage à trois. This
thought clearly lingers in his subconscious awareness because as
he speaks to a domineering version of his wife in
Circe,
he implores her, "I can give you... I mean as
your business
menagerer... Mrs Marion... if you..." Double entendres and
Freudian slips seem to lurk in every possible linguistic
representation of Molly's business arrangement, at least when
Bloom feels himself fixed by unsympathetic stares. As he tries
to explain Mrs. Dignam's financial situation to the men in the
bar, language bites him once again:
You see, he, Dignam, I
mean, didn't serve any notice of the assignment on the company
at the time and nominally under the act the mortgagee can't
recover on the policy.
— Holy Wars, says Joe,
laughing, that's a good one if old Shylock is landed. So the
wife comes out top dog, what?
— Well, that's a point,
says Bloom, for the wife's admirers.
— Whose admirers? says
Joe.
— The wife's advisers, I
mean, says Bloom.
Bloom allows little of this into the conscious thoughts
represented in the book, but the imagery is running wild at
some subconscious level. It climaxes
in Circe in the hallucination of Boylan arriving at
Eccles Street and finding Mrs. Marion naked in her bath, ready
to be fucked. In Lotus Eaters, yet one more off-color
phrase taps on the doors of consciousness. Having shaken off
M'Coy and read Martha's letter, Bloom thinks of Martha and
Mary (the latter a version of his wife's name) and recalls
some verses that he once heard "two sluts" bawling out in the
rain:
O, Mairy lost the pin of her drawers.
She didn't know what to do
To keep it up
To keep it up.
"It? Them," thinks Bloom, puzzling at the grammatical
inconsistency. But for a reader, "it" refers to something other
than Mary's drawers.
Scholars have never identified an actual song that Bloom is
thinking of, but the Special Collections unit of the
University of Miami library records a copy of sheet music
titled "O Mary lost the pin of her drawers," held in Box 5 of
the James Joyce sheet music collection (ID # 182956). However,
my request to see the music produced only the report that "the
sheet music was not in place, only a reference form about the
piece with very little coded information." I hope that this
resource may eventually pop up.
