Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) was an important and capable
administrator in the office of England's Royal Navy.
Throughout the first decade of the Restoration he kept a
voluminous diary in which he recorded observations not only of
hugely consequential events like the Great Plague of 1665, the
Great Fire of London in 1666, and naval war with the Dutch in
1665-67, but also personal details as trivial as his sexual
adventures, the frequency of his bowel movements, and the
burial of his prized Parmesan cheese to protect it from
advancing flames. The diary records private confidences,
employing shorthand abbreviations as well as hilariously
transparent foreign-language code words for illicit sexual
matters. However, Pepys evidently also wrote with an eye to
posterity: before his death he wrote out a fair copy, had it
bound in six volumes, catalogued it in his library, and
supplied a cheat sheet for the shorthand. Since its
publication in several 19th century editions, educated people
have known it as an important work of English prose.
Content-wise, most of Joyce's paragraph feels consistent with
its model. The six long sentences describing a terrible
drought and a sudden thunderstorm are perfectly in keeping
with the Diary––Pepys is always interested in the
weather. He also likes observing people, and Joyce's narrator
manages to drop no fewer than 21 names while mentioning
various other unnamed people. Clothing is another frequent
topic in the Diary. A "cut bob" and "dance
cloaks of Kendal green" play no part in its vocabulary,
but, as Gifford observes, "This sort of sartorial observation
is characteristic of Pepys's style." However, the interest in
prediction displayed later in the paragraph seems incongruous.
Joyce's narrator says that Bloom's dream of his wife wearing
pants is "thought by those in ken to be for a change,"
and in the final sentence he mentions "a prognostication" and
"a prophetical charm": "yet those in ken say after wind and
water fire shall come." Pepys is keenly attuned to
change––he perpetually assesses the state of his career, his
body, his marriage, the navy, the goings-on at court––but to
my knowledge he does not dwell on magical predictions,
prophecies, or occult interpretations of dreams. I will return
to this incongruity at the end of the note.
In the letter to Frank Budgen in which he described his
work-in-progress on Oxen, Joyce mentioned "a
diarystyle bit Pepys-Evelyn." John Evelyn (1620-1706), a
friend of Pepys, compiled his own diary beginning in 1640 and
continuing until his death. It was first published in 1818, an
event which led to the first publication of Pepys's diary
several years later. Most annotators of Ulysses
(Gifford, Johnson, Slote) take Joyce at his word and purport
to hear the influence of both men, but to my ear only Pepys's
freshly immediate observational style sounds in the diary
paragraph. The more polished and composed prose of Evelyn (he
made entries less frequently, often reworking observations
first recorded much earlier) seems absent. Slote cites two
phrases ostensibly taken from Evelyn––"those in ken,"
meaning "those in the know," and "a brace of shakes,"
from Evelyn's "a brace of bullets"––but the use of two common
expressions hardly amounts to a style. J. S. Atherton's
judgment strikes me as largely accurate: "there is no sign of
Evelyn" (Critical Essays, 324).
I do not entirely agree, however, with what this perceptive
critic says about Pepys. He assumes that Joyce knew his diary
only from the excerpts in Peacock's anthology: "the Pepys
imitation is barely recognizable. Joyce's failure arises from
his reliance here on Peacock who edited the Pepys extract
ruthlessly; by expurgating and by beheading, curtailing and
dividing sentences he produced a jerky effect quite unlike
Pepys's smooth discursiveness.... Joyce's version exaggerates
the looseness of sentence structure provided by Peacock's
mutilations, probably without realizing that the chief
characteristic of Pepys's style was a careful integration of
subordinate phrases and clauses into the main body of a
sentence" (324). Joyce's paragraph begins in "tolerable
Peacock-Pepys mode" without really sounding like Pepys,
Atherton says, but it increasingly veers into anachronistic
vocabulary, much of it drawn from Defoe's age half a century
later. These observations contain some truth, but they
overstate the case and have perhaps discouraged readers from
seeing just how extensively Joyce engages with Pepys's
writing.
On the question of style, the "jerky effect" is neither
totally absent in Pepys's writing nor incompatible with his
"smooth discursiveness." Pepys does integrate subordinate
clauses into many of his sentences, but not to an
extraordinary degree. His writing is really more paratactic
than hypotactic, and his entries typically start in a quite
jerky way with adverbial or prepositional phrases that omit
subjects, verbs, or both: "Up by 5 a-clock and, blessed be
God, find all well"; "To the office and there had an
extraordinary meeting"; "Long in bed––till raised by my new
taylor"; "To Gresham College, there to show myself"; "Abroad
to my ruler's of my books"; "Up pretty early"; "Dined at
home." Joyce has chosen not to imitate the countless "Up" and
"To" openings, but he leads with similarly abrupt,
grammatically incomplete phrases: "So...Dignam laid
in clay," "Hard to breathe," "There Leop.
Bloom of Crawford's journal sitting snug," "Bloom
there for a languor he had but was now better." In both
writers' prose, subordinate clauses share space with rough
effects.
It is true that Joyce takes huge liberties with vocabulary.
Some of his words and phrases come from other historical
periods. Evelyn and Pepys frequently get about London by "coach,"
but as Atherton notes they do not write about traveling by "chair"
or "fiacre," nor do they speak of a woman's "hub"
or a fisherman's "heavybraked reel." Relying on the
work of Robert Janusko, Slote and his collaborators identify
many expressions taken from other writers: "fifty mile or
thereabout" (Daniel Defoe); "the seed won't sprout"
(George Savile); "sadcoloured" (Izaak Walton); "tofts"
(Henry Hallam); "clean consumed" (Raphael Holinshed); "dry
flag" (Savile); "wind sitting in the west"
(Walton); "poring up" (Defoe); "as the night
increased" (Walter Raleigh); "smoking shower"
(Walton); "what in the earth" (Defoe); "crush
a cup of wine" (Romeo and Juliet); "big of her
age" (Defoe); "pleading her belly" (Defoe); and "queerities"
(Richard Steele).
A greater amount of Joyce's vocabulary comes from Pepys's
diary, though, and he has been reading far more than Peacock's
two excerpts. The phrase "stunk mightily," which he
applies to rural fields, comes from a description of a plague
victim in that anthology, and "skittish," applied to
Milly, characterizes an active young nobleman in the same
excerpt. The phrases "for aught they knew" and "likely
brangling fellows" were probably inspired by "her
husband, for aught I see, a likely man" in Peacock's other
excerpt. But many other details, hitherto unremarked by
critics and annotators, come from other parts of the Diary.
Mrs. Purefoy's "hub" is of a linguistic piece with Bannon's "coz,"
a shortened form of "cousin" that Pepys uses often. The words
"bargeman," "sprinkle," "faggots," "lightnings,"
"cloaks," "scholar," "dame," "slippers,"
"stools," "shrewd," "twelvemonth," "sacrament,"
and "refreshed" all appear in the Diary.
Joyce's "fellows" are common there, as are publications
like Myles Crawford's "journal," Malachi's "almanac,"
and George Russell's "gazette." Phrases like "all
this while," "poor body," "catched up," "put
to it," "Lady Day," "infinite great," "very
heavy," "very high," "a change," and "great
stroke" all come from the diary. Pepys speaks of "ten
of the clock" several times, "This evening"
often, and "thence" constantly.
Some of these unrecognized echoes of Pepys seem especially
overt. Theodore Purefoy, fishing off Bullock Harbour, is said
to be "dapping on the sound," recalling Pepys's
frequent references to "the Sound"––the common English name
for the Öresund strait between Denmark and Sweden. Saying that
something is "a mere fetch without bottom of reason"
likewise echoes his many nautical references to the bottoms
(i.e., keels) of things: "the bottom of the quarrel," "the
bottom of the business," "the very bottom of every man's
thought," "to have known the bottom of it," "the bottom of my
business," "see to the bottom of all my accounts." More
consequentially, Molly's "pair of Turkey trunks" may
well have been suggested by Pepys's many references to the
burgeoning English trade with that country: "the Turkey
Company," "Turkey merchants," "Turkey ships," "a brave Turkey
carpet." In one passage Pepys says he has moved "chairs in my
chamber, and set them above in the red room, they being Turkey
work." Might not these red-friendly chairs have prompted Joyce
to give dame Moll "red slippers" to go with her Turkish
pants?
Pepys's mention of "the Right Hon. John Lord Barkeley," "the
Right Honourable the principal officers," "my Lord Chief
Justice Keeling," "my Lord of Oxford, Justice in Eyre," and
similar people show up in Joyce's "the Rt. Hon. Mr Justice
Fitzgibbon," and one such reference to a titled person has
clearly inspired his opening words. Pepys writes, "My Lord
Chief Justice Hide did die suddenly this week, a day or two
ago, of an apoplexy." Joyce's paragraph begins, "So
Thursday sixteenth June Patk. Dignam laid in clay of an
apoplexy..." Echoing "of an apoplexy" can hardly
be a coincidence: another phrase from the same sentence, "did
die suddenly," pops up in Nausicaa when Gerty
MacDowell thinks that Mr. Dignam "died suddenly and was
buried, God have mercy on him, from a stroke." (For many
centuries, the term apoplexy was used for any sudden loss of
consciousness leading to death. In the late 19th it began to
be applied exclusively to hemorrhagic strokes. Joyce appears
to be aware of both usages.)
As for the very un-Pepys-like concern with prediction later
in the paragraph, one possible explanation is that Joyce's
attention has begun to drift to his next major stylistic
model: Daniel Defoe. Defoe was strongly interested in
predictions, prophecies, dreams, visions, and ghostly
apparitions, even while maintaining an empiricist skepticism
about the human mind's capacity to fathom such things. Quite a
few bits of Defoe-like language are sprinkled throughout the
Pepys paragraph, and it seems possible that toward its end it
begins a transition to the mind-set of the following one.
(That paragraph too refuses to stand still, shifting somewhere
in the middle from the style of Defoe to that of Jonathan
Swift.)
