A Ghost Story

It’s lost. All that is known of the poem are the following lines:

His quaint-perched aerie on the crags of Time
Where the rude din of this...century
Can trouble him no more.

This fragment carries a special power for me, as if I last heard it in the nursery. I seem, alas, to have set it on an internal loop to the tune of ‘Camptown Races’, that catchy chronicle of running and gambling. It drives me crazy when I can’t make it stop. Can trouble him no more! Trouble him no more! His quaint-perched aerie on the crags of Time Can trouble him no more!

There’s no sense trying to guess the author: these lines were written when he was nine years old. Kids could write like this in the nineteenth century, if they were bright and had the right schooling. Oscar Wilde turned out reams of such stuff, and not only when he was a child.

I am a dealer in rare books, and the blank spaces of this poem are an obsession of mine. I’m longing to know what opening it might have had, how it developed, and most of all what it looked like. But what I really want is to own it, this cheaply printed broadside. I’m haunted by the faint possibility of its discovery, by the unfinished business of that unpromising text. It is embarrassing, this greed, without scholarly or aesthetic dimension, in need, almost, of psychological explanation and treatment. To be the only person who owns a copy. To show it off, appear in the papers and on telly clutching it, reading its immature lines with as straight a face as possible. Howard Carter, returned from the young king’s tomb, bearing lost treasure.

In the opening chapter of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, we overhear a violent family altercation at Christmas dinner, and though the book is a novel, I have little doubt that such an event actually took place in the Joyce household. The Irish nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell had died only a couple of months earlier, and Joyce’s father was in a rage about the circumstances of his death.

In the following chapter, away at school at Clongowes, Stephen recalls the incident. ‘He saw himself sitting at his table in Bray the morning after the discussion at the Christmas dinner table, trying to write a poem about Parnell... But his brain had then refused to grapple with the theme and, desisting, he had covered the page with the names and addresses of certain of his classmates...’

But the nine-year-old Joyce did, in life if not in fiction, compose the eulogistic verses that his younger brother Stanislaus referred to as ‘the Parnell poem’. (Joyce later sanctioned the Latinate title ‘Et Tu Healy’, which may or may not be the original.) Stanislaus, to whose imperfect memory we owe the three surviving lines, described the poem as: ‘a diatribe against the supposed traitor, Tim Healy, who had ratted at the bidding of the Catholic bishops and become a virulent enemy of Parnell, and so the piece was an echo of those political rancours that formed the theme of my father’s nightly, half-drunken rantings...’

Stanislaus also reported that John Joyce, delighted by his son’s production, had it printed, and distributed the broadsides to admirers – ‘I have a distinct recollection of my father’s bringing home a roll of thirty or forty of them’ – and that, in the (largely destroyed) thousand-page first draft of A Portrait, later published under the title Stephen Hero, ‘my brother referred to the remaining broadsheets, of which the young Stephen Dedalus had been so proud, lying on the floor torn and muddied by the boots of the furniture removers,’ when the family moved to Blackrock in 1892.

Both of these memories were later confirmed by John Joyce himself. When asked whether the broadsheet really existed, he responded: ‘Remember it? Why shouldn’t I remember it? Didn’t I pay for the printing of it and didn’t I send a copy to the Pope?’ We catch the voice of a braggart here, too many ‘I’s’ and not enough ‘he’s’, the young author subsumed under his father’s shallow egotism.

Repeated enquiries to the Vatican Library by bibliographic busybodies have not unearthed this copy of the poem. Presumably it was thrown out – can they really preserve every insignificant titbit that is sent in for the Pope’s approval? – but it’s a beguiling thought that it might be there, somewhere. Perhaps it has been misfiled and disregarded, like the Salisbury Cathedral copy of the Magna Carta, which disappeared for twenty years because it had been placed in the wrong drawer. ‘Et Tu Healy’ is not merely obscure, it is intrinsically uninteresting. There has been virtually nothing written about it. No sustained consideration, no single article, just a few passing mentions, most of them decades ago. There’s just not enough material to work on, even in the avidly exegetical Joyce industry. Even in my years as a university teacher, when I occasionally taught courses on Joyce, I had no interest in ‘Et Tu Healy’, lost or found. What did it matter? As a rare-book dealer, however, my non-interest has morphed into an obsession.