Thomas W. Lyster, "the quaker librarian," was an actual
Dubliner who served as director of the National Library from
1895 to 1920. At the time represented in the novel he was 49
years old. In 1883 Lyster published a scholarly translation of
Heinrich Düntzer’s Life of Goethe—hence the
reference that Joyce's character makes to Wilhelm Meister
and the truth of "Goethe's judgments" at the beginning of Scylla
and Charybdis. His highminded spiritualism flags him as
an argumentative antagonist for Stephen, though he never
opposes the young man's assertions.
Gifford notes that "the oddity of his religious faith made
him the object of suspicion and considerable mockery." Joyce's
narrative seems to participate to some extent in this mocking
curiosity: it refers to Lyster as "the quaker
librarian" fully a dozen times (compared to only
two instances in which an attendant addresses him as "Mr
Lyster"), and twice as "Quakerlyster" (in Scylla
when Shakespearean character tags are printed above speaking
parts, and again in Circe). Stephen focuses on his
piety—"The quaker's pate godlily with a priesteen in
booktalk"—and wonders about his spiritual
motivations: "Alarmed face asks me. Why did he come?
Courtesy or an inward light?"
In addition to the librarian's exotic faith, the episode
irreverently calls attention several times to his "pate,"
which is strikingly "bald," and to his large
ears. But it also shows the man's "friendly and
earnest" nature. Lyster is unfailingly wellmeaning
and helpful, repeatedly jumping up from the discussion to help
the library's patrons (including Bloom) and never descending
into the nastiness toward Stephen that Eglinton and Mulligan
display. The narrative in Scylla sometimes
associates the countenance and the kindness, as when it calls
Lyster "bald, eared and assiduous" or says
that "The benign forehead of the quaker librarian
enkindled rosily with hope."
In the first chapter of his memoir As I Was Going Down
Sackville Street, Oliver
Gogarty has some fun with the librarian's shiny dome,
but describes Lyster as "a lovable man" possessed of some
whimsical wit. Over the course of six or seven pages Gogarty
recalls the librarian talking about his daily duties. Lyster
speaks of the "direction" that students require, lest they
become ensnared by dangerous
authors like Nietzsche. He prescribes a Kipling poem for
an engineering student looking for a mathematics text,
Browning for bank clerks, Paracelsus for medical students. He
helps a Catholic priest in "his struggles with the Fiend, his
wrestlings with visions of lingerie, or rather with the
thoughts which a lady's underclothing gave rise to." He
invokes Greek terms to combat Christian heresies. His concern
is to take readers into "the higher realms and romantic
fields," putting them in touch with "the Universe," the
"starry bourne." Of whom does he remind Gogarty? "I have it!
Plato, of course."
Gogarty's portrait makes Lyster seem less passive and
retiring than Joyce's does. But from both texts one receives
the same impression of highminded spirituality. Avatar of
Plato or not, the librarian certainly keeps company with the
Platonists against whom Stephen sharpens his Aristotelian
dagger definitions.