The character repeatedly called "Mr Best" in Scylla and Charybdis never receives a first name in the narrative, though he himself tells readers what it is: "That is my name, Richard, don't you know. I hope you are going to say a good word for Richard, don't you know, for my sake." Richard Irvine Best, "R. I." or "Best" to his friends, became the assistant director of the National Library of Ireland in 1904. By that time he was beginning to make a name for himself as an eminent scholar of ancient Irish mythology and philology, but in Joyce's portrait he seems like a young and negligible attendant on the more august personages of George Russell, John Eglinton, and Thomas Lyster. Best was not pleased with the way Joyce rendered him, and complained about it much later in a BBC interview.

Born to Protestant parents in Derry in 1872, Best was educated at a grammar school called Foyle College in Derry but did not attend any university. Some inherited money allowed him to quit his job in a bank and travel to Paris, where he became friends with John Millington Synge. Synge recommended that he attend the lectures of Henri d'Arbois de Jubainville at the Collège de France, and Best later translated and annotated Jubainville’s Le Cycle Mythologique Irlandais et la Mythologie Celtique (1884). Early in the library chapter, Best approaches Eglinton to tell him that Haines has left to buy Hydes's Lovesongs of Connacht and to say, "I was showing him Jubainville's book." Given the fact that the translation was published in 1903, it seems likely that Best has been showing Haines his English version of the scholarly work. Later in the chapter he is seen "raising his new book," which could be this recently published translation but alternatively might be the "notebook" that he is seen carrying about. 

Best first appears at the moment when Stephen and John Eglinton are discussing "schoolboys." In a bit of narrative legerdemain, he pops into view just then as a living, breathing illustration: "Mr Best entered, tall, young, mild, light. He bore in his hand with grace a notebook, new, large, clean, bright." These two sentences appear to echo the account of the young man that George Moore offered in the tell-all memoir Hail and Farewell (1911-1914) that he published after leaving Dublin for London: "A young man with beautiful shining hair and features so fine and delicate that many a young girl must have dreamed of him at her casement window, and would have loved him if he had not been so passionately interested in the infixed pronoun." Joyce, like Moore, presents Best as a delicate young man––even though Joyce was only 22 at the time presented in the novel and Best was 32.

(Nor was he uninterested in women. He married accomplished pianist Edith Oldham in 1906 and remained with her until her death in 1950. The Blooms and Barnacles website (www.bloomsandbarnacles.com) notes that the couple "helped to establish the Feis Ceoil music competition in 1896. Best saw great promise in young Joyce as a tenor and encouraged him to enter the competition. Best and famed singer John McCormack spent several evenings preparing the young Artist for his performance. Joyce competed in the 1904 Feis Ceoil, where he shared the stage with McCormack. Best would be punished for his generosity by inclusion in one of the most famous novels of the twentieth century.")

Joyce's Best is "amiable," "unoffending," "innocent," "smiling"––and more than a little dim. He shows no trace of Eglinton's malice toward Stephen, but on the contrary seems eager to help move the conversation along. Even when doing so, however, his contributions feel childlike and undiscerning. He gets "the wrong sow by the lug" in response to Stephen's theory of father-son atonement, and in general struggles to follow the lecturer's logic. When Stephen refers to Shakespeare being seduced in a cornfield, Best does offer an apt Elizabethan corrective. But in fact there is nothing to correct––the word "cornfield" is used in the song he quotes––and the narrative undercuts him with adverbs:

     — Ryefield, Mr Best said brightly, gladly, raising his new book, gladly, brightly.
      He murmured then with blond delight for all:

           Between the acres of the rye

           These pretty countryfolk would lie.

Other observations are less apt. Best admired Oscar Wilde, and his fictive avatar mentions Wilde's biographical study of Shakespeare: "— The most brilliant of all is that story of Wilde's, Mr Best said, lifting his brilliant notebook. That Portrait of Mr W. H. where he proves that the sonnets were written by a Willie Hughes, a man all hues." Lyster interjects, "For Willie Hughes, is it not?"––a significant change of prepositions! Best seems barely to register the significance: "— I mean, for Willie Hughes, Mr Best said, amending his gloss easily. Of course it's all paradox, don't you know, Hughes and hews and hues, the colour, but it's so typical the way he works it out. It's the very essence of Wilde, don't you know. The light touch." (Stephen's unspoken comment is annihilating: "a blond ephebe. Tame essence of Wilde." Greek ephebes were 18-20 years old. Best is not.)

Best was fluent in French, and his character's most interesting contributions to the Shakespeare discussion come from his familiarity with that language and culture. When Russell mentions Mallarmé, Best recalls "those wonderful prose poems Stephen MacKenna used to read to me in Paris. The one about Hamlet. He says: il se promène, lisant au livre de lui-même, don't you know, reading the book of himself." This perceptive response to Shakespeare's prince anticipates the sublime solipsism that Stephen will later attribute to the playwright: "He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible. Maeterlinck says: If Socrates leave his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend. Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves."

Another apt French contribution to the Shakespeare theory is comically accidental. When Stephen extends the father-son logic of Hamlet into the ways the playwright represented "his daughter's child" in the late romances, Best thinks of L'art d'être grandpère, a book of children's poems by Victor Hugo: "— The art of being a grandfather, Mr Best gan murmur. L'art d'être grand..." By itself the allusion seems largely irrelevant, but by making Stephen cut into Best's irrelevant association and slice off his final syllable, Joyce lets him coin a resonant motto for Stephen's psychobiographical aesthetic. Making magnificent drama out of the painful materials of one's sexual and familial life, as Shakespeare did, is "the art of being great."

Joyce brings Best back for an encore in Circe "in hairdresser's attire, shinily laundered, his locks in curlpapers." The reference to what Moore called the man's "beautiful shining hair" is intended also to evoke his merely aesthetic preoccupation with beauty, divorced from any intellectual heft, because as Best recounts how he has been giving Eglinton a makeover he commits another literary blunder: "I was just beautifying him, don’t you know. A thing of beauty, don’t you know, Yeats says, or I mean, Keats says."

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John Hunt 2024