When I went about the task of including a short chapter on how Joyce used Percy French’s ballads in a general biography on the shockingly overlooked Percy French, little did I know that it would draw me into the most obscurely difficult book ever written and alter the course of my research dramatically, but a series of clues and suspicions, which would escape people without an in-depth knowledge of French, that he dominates Joyce’s final novel led me inexorably into the tortuous labyrinth of Finnegans Wake and, in the end, there were more reference than I could include but, when I stumbled upon the reference at the end of Chapter 3 to the passing of a giant at Liverpool, juxtaposed with two of Moore’s melodies, this was a Eureka moment.
There can be little doubt that Joyce acquired a copy of Chronicles and Poems of Percy French by French’s sister Emily, published two years after French’s sudden death in 1920 in Liverpool. Emily is critically candid; that despite being a celebrity her brother died in poverty and, this is reflected in Joyce’s corruption ‘Liverpoor’.
Highly critical of Percy’s carelessness in matters financial and the impact of that on his family, she died in 1935 and did not live to know that French was actually owed a fortune in royalties when he died and, the fraction that was restored to his family in the 1940s was sufficient for their lasting material comfort. French parodied numerous Moore’s melodies mainly in The Jarvey and they act as codebreakers and signifiers throughout the rest of the Wake:
French can be considered the singular Finnegan of the cosmic Finnegans of Joyce’s final novel. Since I wrote the book, I decoded another clencher in the portmanteau word in the last three lines of Finnegans Wake ‘Bussoftlhee’ which unscrambles as the ‘Buss of ethel,’ The ‘Kiss of Ethel.’ Ethel was French’s tragic first wife, so active on The Jarvey. The word ‘ethel’ crops up in corruptions all over the Wake.
It is forgotten today that French did a large amount of literary work, much of it in The Jarvey, which runs to 1,700 pages. Like much of French’s diverse oeuvre, including his exceptionally clever nursery rhymes rewritten in the style of the classical poets so, too, The Jarvey (January 1889-January 1891) has never been mined by historians or Joyceans. It is a treasure trove of illustrated poems, parodies, sketches, opera reviews, social columns, numerous stories and contains sardonic, droll and sometimes caustic political commentary usually as letters.
Parnell, who was at the height of his political fame is lampooned. The setting up of an ‘Irish Punch’ by the experience publisher RJ Mecredy was bound to raise eyebrows in an Ireland striving towards Home Rule and albeit French intended to never put ‘the red above the green’ or to ‘run upon anyone’s corn’ the task was impossible. Despite its glamour editing The Jarvey was a poisoned chalice. Mecredy, publisher of The Irish Cyclist since 1886 had an agenda in setting up an ‘Irish Punch’ and he made French the editor because of his wide connections. It can be reliably concluded that the offensive letters in earlier versions of The Jarvey were clearly penned by Mecredy.
Many are perplexed that French has been subjected to official neglect in the south of Ireland and his daughter said in her memoir of 1995 that he was ‘under a cloud’ in the Republic. The reason for this official omerta was likely the mischievous treatment of Parnell in The Jarvey and The Freenman’s Journal, where Joyce’s father had powerful allies, led the charges. Hence Joyce’s contradictory and ambivalent treatment of French in the Wake where he seesaws between scurrilous rants to celebratory reverence. The Jarvey with its gentle humour and its lavish illustrations, mainly by Richard Caufield Orpen helped by French’s fiancé Ettie (Ethel) Armitage Moore, from a highly influential family in Northern Ireland, records a glorious, innocent, fin-de-siècle Dublin and that too is lamented with final poignance in Finnegans Wake.
French turned the magazine increasingly into a literary journal, the few nods to politics in the last ten months were serialised comic stories about the Earl of Essex, Strongbow and Cromwell. Joyce dubs French a writer of ‘annoying letters’ and ‘scurrilous ballads’ as ‘Magrath’s thug.’ Magrath can only be a coded reference to Mecredy. Chunks of The Jarvey and other works by French - his operas: Strongbow, The Knight of the Road, Noah’s Ark and Freda and the Fairies have been incorporated into Finnegans Wake.
Persse O’Reilly’s ballad, the Sean Van Vocht, brogue and French’s ‘sez she’ and ‘Dear Dirty Dublin’ are all themes for Joyce. In The Next Landing of The French, French, punning on his own surname, presented himself as The Sean Van Vocht. Early in the Wake lectures are spread by a jarvey called Hosty interchangeably with Jehu (a penname of French’s) on an Irish Jaunting Car. French pioneered ‘lantern lectures’ in Dublin.
The structure of the Wake mirrors The Jarvey as the main characters are given a slew of pseudonyms. Because French was increasingly writing The Jarvey himself as time went on, he adopted numerous pseudonyms to conceal this, the main ones are: In chapter 11 of the Wake, this is given away when it the hero is said to ‘conceals under various names but, he is always Persse O’Reilly’ (French?)
The tragic death of French’s first wife Ethel aged only 20, one day after her first wedding anniversary and days after giving birth to their first child, rippled through the incestuous musical circles in Dublin and is reflected all over the Wake, often as a requiem for herself and French as Joyce obviously recalled her beautiful drawings in The Jarvey and her social reviews in the Chit Chatters columns. French’s meeting of his second wife in his second comic opera, the doomed Strongbow, is also woven into the Wake.
That French used nursery rhymes in his stage performances is now forgotten. The Wake draws on The Jarvey, playbills, The Irish Cyclist, concert programmes and other sources. French’s stories on Cromwell, Napoleon and Strongbow are strong motifs in the Wake as is Noah’s Ark. French’s song Phil the Fluter’s Ball is thematic. But the hero and dead giant also refers to French’s song The Fortunes of Finnegan, about another indestructible giant.
The tensions in Dublin around music and politics gathered a furious potency in the Parnell years and the very adverse experience of Houston Collisson, French’s musical partner in Birr on a solo musical tour in 1906/7. The umbrage taken to French’s harmless song Wait for a While Now Mary indicates a core objected to their entertainment and Collisson, who was himself of nationalist sympathies, bemoaned that just because they had ‘Trinity accents’ they were branded ‘castle satellites’ and ‘shoneens.’ French wrote his own version of Moore’s Let Erin Remember as When Erin Wakes – a nationalist song and Collisson won the Feis Ceoil for it, in the best musical setting of a song in 1900. This too crops up in Joyce’s final novel. That the objections to French and Collisson was gratuitous and sour grapes is without question.
Despite its cosmic span, Finnegans Wake is a nostalgic lament for the Dublin of Joyce’s boyhood, of The Jarvey itself, where a gentle, humorous, indeed stylishly unique record of Edwardian Dublin is preserved and, in the end, despite all the ambivalence, Joyce is aligned with Percy French and can be said to be his comic heir but, however truculently torn he was about him, by putting so much of him into the Wake, can only be the highest accolade.
The Anna Livia Plurabelle monologue with its polyphonic sweep does reference French and his first wife Ethel with moving frankness at the very end and that has to amount to something huge: Something so newly discovered that it is yet to be fully explored about Joyce’s swan song. The Jarvey may have been a thorn in Joyce’s side, but, as Europe was falling into the grip of Nazism as he concluded Finnegans Wake in Paris in 1939 it is no surprise that Joyce looked back with anguish and heartbreak on the vanished Dublin sealed immortally in The Jarvey’s pages. All associated with it had passed too, untimely into the corridors of death: Ethel (d.1891) French and Collisson (d.1920) and Mecredy (d.1924). Ironically, it would not be long before Joyce followed there himself, at the relatively young age of 59.
Sounds of Manymirth on the Night’s Ear Ringing: Percy French (1854-1920) His Jarvey Years and Joyce’s Haunted Inkbottle by Bernadette Lowry is available in Hampton Books, Donnybrook, Books Upstairs and Hanna Rathmines and from carmeneblana@gmail.com or www.carmeneblana.com
