John Eglinton

When Lyster leaves the office just after the chapter opens, Stephen is left alone with Eglinton and responds harshly to something he has just said––"Stephen sneered." Eglinton, in turn, asks him a question "with elder's gall." Magee was fourteen years older than Joyce, born in Dublin in January 1868. His father was a Presbyterian clergyman sent from Belfast to Dublin to convert the city's Catholics. The younger Magee did not adopt his father's religious faith, but he did retain the political convictions of most Ulster Protestants. Inveterately opposed to the nationalist movement, he responded to the founding of the Free State in 1922 by leaving Ireland for Wales and never returning.

After attending Erasmus Smith High School, where he knew William Butler Yeats, and Trinity College, where he was on financial assistance and won numerous academic prizes (rather like Joyce at Belvedere), Magee tried to make a name for himself as a poet. Vivien Igoe says that he gave it up because he was "thwarted by Yeats's success." Instead he became known as an essayist. Gifford notes that "Yeats paid him the compliment of regarding him as 'our one Irish critic'."

For one year in 1904 and 1905 John Eglinton and Fred Ryan ran a literary journal called Dana. Someone in Scylla and Charybdis, surely Eglinton, says that "Synge has promised me an article for Dana too," and soon Stephen is seen angling for favor by referring to the Irish fertility goddess who was the magazine's namesake: "— As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image." Later it becomes clear that Stephen has already had something accepted for publication. Eglinton says, "You are the only contributor to Dana who asks for pieces of silver." This detail is autobiographical: Joyce asked for, and received, a payment of one pound for the publication of his poem "My love is in a light attire." Eglinton rejected his next submission, an essay called "A Portrait of the Artist" that later would morph into the famous novel.

Perhaps Joyce's mercenary approach had something to do with the rejection, but all that Eglinton said at the time was, "I cannot print what I can't understand." The authors of the Blooms and Barnacles website (www.bloomsandbarnacles.com) note, however, that "Eglinton admitted later that he regretted rejecting this early version of Portrait, but at the time found Joyce’s short story 'pompous and self-conscious', feeling that it was 'one of those works which becomes important only when the writer has done or written something else'." Whatever complex reactions Eglinton may have had to the essay, he did reject it after publishing another work, thereby duplicating Joyce's experience with George Russell. "The Sisters," "Eveline," and "After the Races" ran in the Irish Homestead, but after hearing protests about Joyce's immorality Russell turned off the tap. It is fair to assume that the less than glowing portraits of both men in Ulysses may have been motivated in part by bitterness.

Eglinton fervently admired Russell––his biography, A memoir of AE, George William Russell, was published in London in 1937. Stephen thinks of them as a pair: "Mummed in names: A. E., eon: Magee, John Eglinton. East of the sun, west of the moon: Tir na n-og. Booted the twain and staved." Russell founded the Dublin Hermetic Society, and Eglinton became deeply involved in his branch of Theosophy. Scylla and Charybdis shows Stephen advancing a this-worldly and bawdy understanding of Shakespeare against the other-worldly and chaste proclivities of Eglinton and Russell. At one point Eglinton calls these abstract, non-biographical approaches "The highroads." The chapter also glances at one of Joyce's cruder rejections of Theosophy: "Yogibogeybox in Dawson chambers. Isis Unveiled. Their Pali book we tried to pawn." In My Brother's Keeper Stanlislaus Joyce recounts one element of this adolescent prank:

Something brought Gogarty and my brother one afternoon to the room or rooms of the Hermetic Society. I think they were looking for Russell, for the Hermetic Society was a place where young would-be mystics met under the brooding wings of 'their master dear' to read esoteric poetry, hear discourse of the Father, Son, and 'Holy Breath' and generally to discuss the dreamy and visionary short-cut to the solution of the riddle of the Universe....
The room was empty at that hour, but in a corner the two ribalds found George Roberts' travelling-bag. George Roberts, afterwards manager for Maunsel and Company, was a member or frequenter of the Society and had addressed poems to his 'master dear', but in the flesh he was then a commercial traveller for women's underwear. Gogarty found a pair of open drawers in the bag, stretched them out by tying the strings to two chairs, and by means of another chair fixed the handle of the Hermetic broom between the legs of the drawers, while on the hoisted head of it he hung a placard bearing the legend 'I never did it' and signed 'John Eglinton'. (254-55)

Russell blamed Joyce for the incident––a bit of history that no doubt informs the tensions in the library office––and at the beginning of the chapter Stephen thinks about Theosophical beliefs like the ones Stanislaus describes. When Eglinton's insulting joke about Aristotle is rewarded by seeing Russell's "smiling bearded face," Stephen thinks, "Formless spiritual. Father, Word and Holy Breath." The lewd mockery of Eglinton's chastity enters the episode when the similarly chaste Mr. Best comments on Stephen's remark that there will be no marriage in heaven, "glorified man, an androgynous angel, being a wife unto himself." Best laughs, "unmarried, at Eglinton Johannes, of arts a bachelor." Against this chaste play on the word "bachelor," Stephen's interior monologue pursues a more risqué interpretation of man being a wife unto himself. Wickedly, he thinks, "Unwed, unfancied, ware of wiles, they fingerponder nightly each his variorum edition of The Taming of the Shrew."

The picture of Eglinton as a masturbator clearly goes back to Gogarty's business with the drawers in the Hermetic Society, and Joyce brings Mulligan into the chapter in part to continue evoking this incident. As he leaves the library with Stephen, Mulligan jokes about Eglinton's asexuality: "John Eglinton, my jo, John, / Why won't you wed a wife?" And then, "He spluttered to the air: / — O, the chinless Chinaman! Chin Chon Eg Lin Ton." The photograph here may be taken to support the view that the man had no chin. Mulligan continues his pairing of chinlessness and sexlessness a few sentences later, bursting into a series of couplets on M'Curdy Atkinson "And that filibustering filibeg / That never dared to slake his drouth, / Magee that had the chinless mouth. / Being afraid to marry on earth / They masturbated for all they were worth."

The chapter encourages only very slightly the notion that Eglinton and Stephen may have certain interests and convictions in common. Like Joyce, Eglinton opposed the softheaded ideals of most writers of the Celtic Revival, arguing that Irish literature should embrace urban life and sound universal themes rather than retreating into a mythologized rural past. When Best mentions that Haines has gone off to buy a copy of Hyde's Lovesongs of Connaught he says that "The peatsmoke is going to his head." Since Eglinton's poems are distinguished by sharp, hard clarity, this may be a comment on "Celtic" vagueness. But it is equally possible that he is expressing an Ulster Protestant contempt for everything associated with rural Irish Catholics. At several points Stephen respectfully alludes to things that "Mr Magee" has said ("the new Viennese school," "a saying of Goethe's," "nature...abhors perfection"). But these are clearly efforts to draw in the hostile Eglinton and win him over to the argument about Shakespeare. In response to the last quotation Eglinton looks up happily, "shybrightly," eyes "quick with pleasure," while Stephen reflects with mercenary cunning, "Flatter. Rarely. But flatter."

All known sources yield the impression that Magee was a loner––iconoclastic, severe, and unjovial. George Moore's memoir Hail and Farewell calls him “a sort of lonely thorn tree." He seems to have been strongly shaped by his father and his Ulster Presbyterian relatives, and also by his effort to distance himself from them. When Stephen defines Shakespeare in terms of his family relationships Eglinton replies that "we have it on high authority that a man's worst enemies shall be those of his own house and family. I feel that Russell is right. What do we care for his wife and father? I should say that only family poets have family lives." Stephen thinks wryly, "Shy, deny thy kindred, the unco guid. Shy, supping with the godless, he sneaks the cup. A sire in Ultonian Antrim bade it him. Visits him here on quarter days. Mr Magee, sir, there's a gentleman to see you. Me? Says he's your father, sir. Give me my Wordsworth."

Thanks to Vincent Van Wyk for some very helpful suggestions made in response to drafts of this note.