A Ghost Story

‘Et Tu Healy’ is not a ghost (a book for which the publication has been announced, but is never produced) in the strict bibliographic sense, but it’s close enough for me. How can you tell, quite, if a book has been announced and never printed, or announced, printed, and then lost?

Given that Joyce’s bibliographers, Slocum and Cahoon, are the first point of call for queries of this kind, it is disappointing how wrong they are about ‘Et Tu Healy’, of which they cite seven lines, the three with which I began, plus the following four:

My cot alas that dear old shady home
Where oft in youthful sport I played
Upon thy verdant grassy fields all day
Or lingered for a moment in thy bosom shade.

The cited authority for this attribution is Stanislaus Joyce’s Recollections of James Joyce, but reference to that text makes it clear that he was distinguishing these unprepossessing lines from those of ‘the Parnell poem’, not including them in it. In a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver in November of 1930, Joyce himself cited this quatrain, which he said he was going to use in Finnegans Wake in a game of Angels and Devils (here represented by Shaun), who ‘maunders off into sentimental poetry of what I actually wrote at the age of nine.’ There is something touchingly appropriate in the clumsiness of the phrase, from which a word or two seem to have been omitted. The game, and the poem, Joyce told Miss Weaver, were soon ‘interrupted by a violent pang of toothache after which he [Shaun] throws a fit,’ which may represent an act of literary self-criticism.

I do not believe that Joyce’s category ‘sentimental poetry’ would have included ‘Et Tu Healy’, which is written in an altogether different register than ‘My Cot, Alas’, so we must reduce what we know of that text by more than half: our ghost is getting ghostlier.

After three decades during which almost no significant Joyce manuscript material emerged, all of a sudden there is such a quantity of it – letters, inscribed books, working notebooks, whole chapters of Ulysses, draft material for Finnegans Wake – that one wonders if an assiduous forger has secreted himself in a Martello tower to produce it. A lag between an author’s death and the arrival on the market of important letters, inscribed books and manuscripts is not unusual. The mother lode – material held by the author himself, his closest friends and family – often takes decades to emerge, having been passed down the generations until someone decides that the choice between some old letters or manuscripts and a retreat in Provence is a no-brainer. Recent sales of such Joyce material have realized prices sufficient to throw in a modest yacht as well.

In the last six years the National Library of Ireland, which previously lacked any significant Joyce manuscripts, has spent over £10 million on manuscript material for both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Descendants of Stanislaus Joyce, John Quinn (the New York lawyer and collector who purchased a manuscript version of Ulysses from Joyce in the 1920s) and Joyce’s friend and amanuensis Paul Leon have all sold material that alters our understanding of Joyce’s achievement. In addition, manuscripts emerging from a Paris bookseller have thrown new light on the history of the composition of both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, and I am told that T.S. Eliot’s library – which has been visited by only a handful of scholars – contains fourteen previously unrecorded letters from Joyce to Eliot.

There is a gravitational pull when new discoveries are announced and rewarded: it makes people search their attics a little more thoroughly and reconsider whether it might just be the right time to sell. Could the present glut of Joyce material, and its attendant publicity, unearth that elusive copy of ‘Et Tu Healy’? What if it showed up in some disregarded bureau, or interleaved in an old atlas or directory? If there is one – surely there is one – it must be in Dublin somewhere.

In my world when you’re talking ghosts you’re talking money. But who’d buy it? I can think of a couple of private collectors, but until confronted with a copy, one couldn’t really say. Books, like pictures, are valued by both hand and eye: they need to have some kind of visceral appeal, some crackle and pop, which Jeanette Winterson nicely calls their ‘psychometry’. Perhaps the mystique might evaporate when an actual copy emerges and is seen for the trifle that it really is.

But let’s suppose one was found. There would be a fuss, as the proud new owner showed off his or her treasure, though by a neat irony the text could not be printed in its entirety due to the assiduous protectiveness of the Joyce estate. The old eagle in his aerie overlooking the world is not, in this instance, the ghost of the late Parnell, but Steven James Joyce, the author’s grandson, and guardian of all things Joycean. So protectively litigious is he that even Sotheby’s, when they illustrate a Joyce manuscript, have been required to blur the image discreetly, as if it were a model’s pubic hair in an old-fashioned nudie picture.

Word would get out, and I would find a way to see and read it, the result of which, surely, would be the diminishing of my interest in the poem, a stripping of its black tulip numinosity – the banishment of my ghost. Bookselling fetishizes objects, but usually they are more or less worth the fuss. But ‘Et Tu Healy’? Fetishization one hundred, object zero. This fact, for surely it is that, locates something that lurks disturbingly at the heart of my way of life, for when you are in search of treasure – surely the animating archetype of collecting and dealing – you have to enter the caves, push aside the bears, root about among the bones. There is excitement here, but also something psychically dangerous, which, on its occasional outbreaks, produces a sense of futility so intense that I find it incapacitating.

Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary defines a ghost as the outward manifestation of an inner fear. This is fair enough: we are frightened of death, and those spooks in sheets are the objective correlative of our terror. As they hover in the night, hoo-ing and woo-ing, we are reminded of the evanescence of human life, its short span, the long emptiness to come. ‘Et Tu Healy’ plays a similar role in my life, and is similarly charged: the rattling of its baby chains engenders a spasm of anxiety in me, as if my book-dealing life has been dedicated to futile pursuits and meaningless goals. Has there been something unworthy about it, snuffling about for trifles?

Perhaps if ‘Et Tu Healy’ rejoined the world, I might look it in the eye, make an adjustment in our long relations, and rid myself of my embarrassing obsession. What would we be left with? Just a rare piece of paper, a poem written by a little boy and published by his proud father, transformed too quickly from a touching memento to a scrap under the removal men’s boots. Lovely thing in its way, with its loss built into its very nature, and once found thoroughly forgettable. Just the only known copy of ‘Et Tu Healy’ – nothing haunting about that. Perhaps then that quaint aerie perched on the crags of time would trouble me no more, though if that were to happen I would, curiously, rather regret it.

Being haunted by a lost scrap and occasionally tormented by a repetitive inner melody is a small price to pay for the delight of the chase, however futile. That excitement is strong enough to resist its shadow, and the continued loss of ‘Et Tu Healy’ suits me just fine. The delicate tendrils that attach ‘Et Tu Healy’, my father and me require a subterranean ground to thrive, and are nourished in the poem’s absence. It can be a bad mistake, if you are a collector, making the unconscious conscious; if a copy were located, something of him, and me – and of us together – would be endangered.

I hope it never gets found.