"Break the news to her gently," a phrase heard as Stephen
imagines students in their rooms at Oxford, alludes to a
popular song of the 1890s, though there are two candidates.
This reference in Telemachus is the first of many
instances in which the strains of popular songs from the
streets, music halls, and
drawing rooms waft through the verbal textures of Ulysses.
Together with the more exalted strains like operatic arias,
they provoke lingering aural resonances in the mind of any
reader who knows the tunes. One cannot adequately “read” the
novel without hearing these many melodic
allusions.
The allusion may be to
Charles K. Harris' Break the News to Mother (1897).
The composer of After the Ball, the first song to
sell five million copies in sheet music, Harris wrote the
sentimental and patriotic Break the News to Mother
during the Spanish American War. When a new war came along
twenty years later to renew patriotic fervor, his enormously
popular song was revived to beat the drum once more. According
to the publisher, it became the #2 hit of World War I, second
only to George M. Cohan’s Over There.
Harris’ song tells the story of a young man who responds to
his captain’s call to run through enemy fire to retrieve a
fallen flag. He “Saved the flag but gave his young life, / All
for his country’s sake,” and as he is dying he gasps the words
of the chorus:
Just break the news to Mother, she knows how dear I
love her
And tell her not to wait for me, for I’m not coming home;
Just say there is no other can take the place of Mother
Then kiss her dear sweet lips for me, and break the news
to
her.
“From afar a noted Gen’ral” witnesses the brave deed and comes
to see the man who did it, only to find that it is his own son,
an under-age boy whom he thought “safe at home.” The boy says,
“Forgive me, father, for I ran away," and the Chorus repeats.
Thornton, and Gifford and Seidman after him, cite Harris’
song as the likely source of Stephen’s phrase, but as Thornton
notes, several "slightly different" versions of the song
circulated. The closest analogue, not cited by any of the
commentators, is a song from earlier in the 1890s that Harris’
composition apparently updated. This song, whose lyrics
were apparently written by Edward B. Marks, tells a very
similar tearjerking tale in which the heroism is supplied by
firefighters. A young hero has given his life to rescue a
small child, and now lies dying:
Break the news to mother gently,
tell her how her brave son
died;
Tell her that he did his duty, as in life he ever tried.
Treat her kindly, boys, a friend be to her when I’m dead and
gone,
Break the news to mother gently, do not let
her weep or
mourn.
Stephen's inclusion of the word "gently" may indicate that he
is thinking of this version. Elizabeth C. Axford’s Song
Sheets to Software, 2nd ed. (2004) attributes its 1892
composition to Joe Stern, but other publications say it was
written by Will H. Fox.
