All you are is all you got

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https://languagehat.com/obdurodon/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18275

I was over at XIX век and happened to glance at the list of Russian literature sites in the right margin, and my eye fell on the obdurately lowercase obdurodon. When I clicked through, I found an amazing collection of “Digital humanities projects,” many of them Russian-related, from The annotated Afanas′ev library (“Selected Russian fairy tales from the Aleksandr Afanas′ev collection with glosses and linguistic and cultural annotation”) to Twitter register variation (“Corpus-based study of linguistic properties of English-language tweets”). It’s well worth checking out. And “obdurodon”? Per Wikipedia, it’s “a genus of extinct platypus-like Australian monotreme which lived from the Late Oligocene to the Late Miocene”:

The holotype tooth was placed into the newly erected genus Obdurodon upon description in 1975 by American palaeontologists Michael O. Woodburne and Richard H. Tedford. They named the genus from the Latin obduro “persist” and the Greek ὀδών (odṓn) “tooth”, in reference to the permanency of the molars, a feature which is lost in the modern platypus.

So it’s a bastard formation, but if I can take “television,” I guess I can take “obdurodon.” (It’s not in the OED yet even though it’s been known and named for half a century.) I have no idea why the site is called that, but there’s an image of a pair of them at the top of the main page, and it’s quite cute.

https://languagehat.com/obdurodon/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18275

Posted by languagehat

https://languagehat.com/rebetika/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18268

I find it hard to believe I’ve never posted about rebetika, since not only do I love the music (when I was in Athens I sought out a dusty record store where I could buy some LPs I then had to lug back to New York) but the word itself is very interesting. For one thing, there’s no unanimity on how to spell it; Wikipedia has it under Rebetiko (“plural rebetika […], occasionally transliterated as rembetiko or rebetico), while the OED (entry from 2002) has it s.v. rebetika (sadly, it’s not in M-W or AHD under any spelling). Here’s the OED definition, which is quite discursive:

A style of Greek popular song, characterized by lyrics depicting urban and underworld themes, a passionate vocal style, and an ensemble accompaniment played esp. on stringed instruments such as the violin, bouzouki, etc.; (with plural agreement) the songs themselves. Also (in form rebetiko): a song in this style. Frequently attributive.

First recorded commercially in Turkey before the First World War (1914–18), rebetika is assumed to have long existed (under various other generic names) as an oral tradition in Mediterranean seaports and prisons. Following the Greco–Turkish war of 1919–22, the genre became associated with the numerous Anatolian refugees settling in Athens. Extensively recorded and performed in the 1920s and 1930s, notably by immigrants from Asia Minor, Piraeus bouzouki players, and Greek Americans, rebetika also became known in English as ‘Greek Blues’ or ‘Piraeus Blues’.

But it’s the etymology that makes it a must-post, and happily Martin Schwartz has sent me a recent article of his on the subject. First I’ll provide the OED version:

< modern Greek ρεμπέτικα, plural of ρεμπέτικο eastern-style song of urban low life, use as noun of neuter singular of ρεμπέτικος of vagabonds or rebels, probably < ρεμπέτης rebetis n. + ‑ικος ‑ic suffix.

Notes
On the further etymology, compare note at rebetis n.
The forms with ‑mb‑ arise from the influence of an idiosyncratic transliteration of the modern Greek (in which the sequence ‑μπ‑ normally represents b), originally in G. Holst Road to Rembetika (1975).

(I think of it as rembetika because I was introduced to it by that Gail Holst book, which I recommend.) Now to Martin’s “A rebetic roundup: people, songs, words, and whatnot” (published as ch. 27 of The SOAS Rebetiko Reader); I’ll quote some bits and urge you to visit the link for more:

Today the adjective “rebetika”, as used by the majority of Greeks, refers to urban Greek music of the earlier half of the 20th century, and is associated with lyrics reflecting lower class culture – drugs, thugs, drink, pimps, prisons, poverty, illness, alienation and thwarted love – although the wide range of the genre makes it describable as an urban popular music, with a déclassé aspect. Indeed, its songs, which are for the most part based on several fixed dance rhythms, played an important role in the Greater Athenian recording and nightclub scene from shortly after the 1922 Asia Minor Catastrophe well into the 1950s and to some extent later. The term “rebetika” has, to shifting degrees, been applied to two successive but overlapping chronological varieties. The first, from ca. 1923 to 1937, is characterised by musical styles, instruments, and vocal techniques continuing, or much influenced by, those of the Greeks of Turkey, chiefly of Smyrna and Constantinople, and including material of Turkish origin. The second, from the early 1930s into the 1950s, while thematically and choreographically related to the first, featured the bouzouki, an earthier singing style, and an increasingly Greco-European profile. […]

Although I am marginally a “rebetologist”, my central discipline is as an etymologist, historical linguistics being my chief academic activity. It is from this perspective, with the aid of some “rebetological” data, that I shall address the history of the terms rebétis and rebétiko / rebétika.

A preliminary notice: I use the transcription rebétika as representing the pronunciation used by most Greeks, as against the often encountered “rembetika”; in Greek spelling, μπ (mp) is necessary to indicate the sound /b/, and in this instance the μ (m) is silent, but wrongly present as a frequent transcription into Latin letters.

After dismissing some other theories (deriving it from alleged Pre-Modern Turkish rebet asker, Greek rébelos ‘a rebel,’ and Arabic ribaṭ), he continues:

The most fruitful direction for our linguistic quest is to proceed from Ancient Greek PEMB- (rhemb-, Mod. Gr. remv-) ‘to wander’, which gives re(m)b- (with-μπ-) in various Late and Modern Greek verbs and nouns referring to loafing, laziness, relaxed enjoyment, etc.; see Gauntlett 1982: p. 90, fn. 51. With the base rebet- itself is the word rebéta found in several literary attestations from 1871 onward as an argot term in Smyrna and Constantinople for ‘a lower-class neighborhood populated by criminals’ (from ‘unruly place’, as still used in 1895 by N. Georgiadis for the festivals [pane(gh)iria] in Silivri). It is interesting that when in 1918 the Constantinopolitan N. Sofron, writing sketches of everyday life in his city, took as a nom de plume Rebétos derived from rebéta in its older usage, and not from rebétis, which shows that the latter form was not yet common. For rebétis, the first occurrence (date unclear to me) seems to be in Nikolaos G. Politis’ serial ethnographic volumes called Paradoseis, in which a character named Giannis the Rebétis figures, although nothing informative is said of him, and, as we shall see, rebétis is not found again until 1923. […]

There remains the question of the newly emerged earliest literary occurrence of “rebetiko” as connected with this designation on the record labels, and the relationship of rebétis to both, which gets us back to our linguistic inquiry. Vlisidis’ material indeed disproves the idea that the term “rebetiko” on record labels was (as proposed by Panos Savvopoulos) just an invention on the part of the recording companies. As Vlisidis indicates, the record labels from 1912-1913 bearing the characterisation “rebétiko” drew on a word which was current at the time. However, Vlisidis’ further proposal, that the literary material which calls itself rebétiko/a was reflected by these discs is problematic. The underclass nature of the diction, as well as the thematics of the four poems which are called “rebétiko / rebétika”, differ dramatically from what we find for the two 1912/13 light love songs called “rebétiko” on the record labels, and also from the many subsequent recordings bearing that epithet on the label. […]

We now have enough material to offer a solution to the problem of the term rebétiko. A linguistic approach would also involve distinguishing between and then reconciling the various usages of what are in fact complexly related words, rebéta, rebétiko, and rebétis. As a mannerism first used literarily in 1912, rebétiko would be an adjectival invention, ‘pertaining to the rebéta’, i.e. ‘that which belongs to the underclass realm’. From popular magazines of the period (cf. Vlisidis), it would have been noticed by Greeks involved in the recording industry, who however took it to be derived from the verb re(m)bo etc. referring to rambles, indolent or relaxed enjoyment, the word thereby providing for the categorisation of discs a trendy-sounding designation of miscellaneous light songs, such as we find in “Aponia” and “Tiki Tiki Tak”. Toward the mid-1920s, however, with the emergence of rebétis for a member of a lower-class subculture, music pertaining to the latter world began to enter the miscellaneous industrial category, explaining the diverse and contradictory range of recordings labeled “rebétiko”.

This now calls for an account of the origin of rebétis. Politis’ obscure attestation of rebétis may reflect a temporary neologism based on one hand on rebéta (cf. Georgiadis’ 1918 rebétos) and on the other hand constituting a regular derivation with -étis from the verb root ré(m)b-, see Gauntlett 1982, pp. 90-91 for parallels; note however that such a derivation is not “undermined” by nouns with -étis yielding adjectives with -etikós vs. the accentuation of rebétiko, which precedes, and is NOT derived from rebétis. For the formation of the more conclusive 1923 attestation of rebétis by “Smyrnios”, one has, alongside a deverbal explanation of rebétis, the possibility of a “back-formation” from rebétiko ‘pertaining to the underclass realm’. Given the 1923 attestation of rebétis and its continuation by Markos in his 1933 “O Harmanis” [The drug-deprived one], Pikros’ 1925 mention of rebéta as in effect the feminine equivalent of rebétis seems suspicious; one would rather expect rebétisa (cf. ghóis [Anc. Gr. góēs] ‘sorcerer’: ghóisa ‘sorceress’ continuing the ancient fem. suffix -issa), which is found canonically in our songs. Given that rebétis itself was still only marginally attested, perhaps Pikros had misunderstood a phrase with the probably already obsolescent rebéta ‘lower-class milieu’, taking the latter as its female personification, or, in a context referring to a group of people, he misinterpreted rebétes as a plural of rebéta rather than of rebétis.

There’s much more (e.g., “It is possible that the suffixation of rebétis was supported by a traditional underclass word of the same semantic field, serétis ‘tough guy’, of Turkish origin”), but I will reluctantly stop quoting and send you to the link. I just want to add something about the difficult issue of nasal + consonant clusters and how to transliterate them. Peter Mackridge, in his excellent 1987 The Modern Greek Language (Amazon, Internet Archive), writes:

To begin with the combinations of nasal + consonant that existed in traditional demotic, some dialects always pronounced the nasal fully, others always omitted it completely, while others displayed a certain variety. Grammarians, on the other hand, have taught that these combinations should be pronounced with or without the nasal according to whether the nasal was present in an earlier version of the word […]. With the rise of literacy, however, speakers have usually treated every instance […] alike, that is, either always with or always without the nasal, according to each speaker’s idiolect. Furthermore, it cannot be expected that speakers will know the etymological origin of all the words they use.

Most scholars now seem to have settled on nasalless versions, but I confess it makes me uneasy, since I always think of the Greek script with its nasals. I also have to point out that my two bilingual dictionaries, D. N. Stavropoulos’s Oxford English-Greek Learner’s Dictionary and J. T. Pring’s Oxford Dictionary of Modern Greek, handle these words very differently; the former has ρεμπέτης ‘outcast, scamp, rebetis’ and ρεμπέτικος ‘of/from a rebetis,’ while the latter has only ρεμπέτικο ‘sort of popular song in oriental style.’ And as I look at those entries, I note the following word in each: Stavropoulos has ρεμπούπλικα ‘trilby, homburg, felt hat,’ whereas Pring has ρε(μ)πούμπλικα ‘trilby or homburg hat’ (Wiktionary has it as ρεπούμπλικα). Truly Greek is a land of contrasts.

https://languagehat.com/rebetika/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18268

Posted by languagehat

https://languagehat.com/the-dream-songs-as-epic/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18263

As I said back in 2014, John Berryman is one of my favorite American poets, and I welcome the imminent appearance of Only Sing: 152 Uncollected Dream Songs; Shane McCrae, who edited it and wrote the introduction, has a Paris Review essay about it from which I offer a few excerpts:

It has taken me years to realize that The Dream Songs is an epic—and a successful, even great one. For years, I searched for the successful traditional epic I felt certain must have been written by an American, and although I more than once encountered poems that seemed to fit the bill formally, none of them seemed an artistic success to me. Most often, they were let down by their language, which was commonly pedestrian, almost as if it were a secondary or even tertiary concern of their authors. But, of course, the language of an epic poem must be, in its way, as compressed as the language of a lyric poem—and in those moments when it is not compressed, the language must strike the reader as relaxed from compression, and loaded with the certainty of future compression. The language of The Dream Songs is always either compressed or suggestive of compression. The poem has this, and little else, in common with traditional epic.

But The Dream Songs also, of course, features a hero, as epics traditionally do—Henry. […] Henry, of course, is no Odysseus, though he more closely resembles Odysseus than all other epic heroes, with the exception of the unnamed protagonist of Dante’s Commedia (indeed, Henry strikes me as a combination of both heroes, but sitting in an armchair, sometimes a desk chair, at the end of a long day, talking, sometimes singing, sometimes shouting, in an otherwise empty room). Henry is an unheroic hero—a heroic hero has in-narrative effects upon the physical world and the people in it; Henry, for the most part, does not. When he does, the reader must take his word for it that he does; he, rather than the narrative of the epic, describes the effects he has. He is, in other words, a twentieth-century white American male, not especially remarkable, the sort of person who doesn’t establish or recover a nation, or parley with angels, or explore hell, but the sort of common person of whom nations are constituted, to whom angels were once commonly believed to minister in small ways, of whom hell was once commonly believed to be full. Henry is a hero for a disenchanted nation, from which once-common beliefs have mostly fled. He does not mourn the disappearance of those beliefs; he has held on to the beliefs he could. […]

In a 1968 interview with Berryman, Catherine Watson wrote, “Not all the songs about Henry are in the books, Berryman said, but ‘if there is a third volume, it will not take him further. It will be up to the reader to fit those poems in among the published ones.’ ” Berryman understood his epic to be complete, but he did not believe that its completeness could have only one form—although his remark does suggest that it has an established beginning and end; note the phrase, “fit those poems in among.” Only Sing collects 152 possible additions to the epic, each of which is worth reading for its own merits. […]

In November of 2023—on the anniversary, although I didn’t know it at the time, of the date on which Berryman wrote Dream Song 29—I flew to Minneapolis for a daylong visit to the Andersen Library Reading Room at the University of Minnesota. There, Erin McBrien, then the interim curator, located the boxes of Berryman’s unpublished material and patiently answered all my questions, and I photographed each of the manuscripts of the unpublished Dream Songs. The next day, I flew home and began transcribing the Songs. Doing so, I made no effort to Americanize Berryman’s spelling—he studied for two years at Clare College, Cambridge, and often favored British spelling—and I left the entirely idiosyncratic spellings and words untouched (one example of the latter: the word sieteus in the poem beginning “Hearkened Henry,” which perhaps ought to be she tells, but is, in fact, sieteus in Berryman’s typescript). I corrected only obvious typos. Once the Songs were transcribed, I had to determine how to arrange them, and I settled upon ordering them alphabetically according to first line. I could not organize them chronologically, because most of them hadn’t been dated by the poet and I didn’t want to guess—my goal was to impose as little of my own will as possible upon the organization of the Songs. […] Although it was Berryman’s practice, when collecting the Dream Songs into books, to group the Songs in numbered sections, I haven’t done so, as to do so would be to impose the will I’m trying to minimize. These Songs are put together in the way that I hope best allows—or at least allows as well as any other way—readers to “fit [them] in among” the already existing Songs, so that each reader might expand the epic according to their own wishes, thereby laying claim to their particular sense of what The Dream Songs is.

I’m trying not to add to my mountain range of physical books, but I may have to get a copy of this one. (I linked to a clip of Berryman reading Dream Song 29 here.)

https://languagehat.com/the-dream-songs-as-epic/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18263

Posted by languagehat

https://languagehat.com/fired-for-constant-savaging/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18222

Kasia Boddy (born in Aberdeen, grew up in Glasgow, studied at Edinburgh, teaches at Cambridge) has a good review essay on Dorothy Parker at the LRB (Vol. 47 No. 16 · 11 September 2025; archived); I’ll quote the beginning and let you click through if you’re interested:

Dorothy Parker​ dreaded repetition and found it everywhere. In 1919, when she was just 25 and only months into her stint as Vanity Fair’s theatre critic, she already claimed enough ‘bitter experience’ to know that ‘one successful play of a certain type’ would result in a ‘vast horde’ of copycats, ‘all built on exactly the same lines’. In quantity at least, this was Broadway’s golden age, just before radio and the movies ate up its audiences. At least five new shows opened each week and Parker sat through all the popular formulae: ‘crook plays’; Southern melodramas; bedroom farces; musical comedies; plays in which ‘everybody talks in similes’; and Westerns in which gold was ‘sure to be discovered at five minutes to eleven’.

Topical themes promised ‘novelty’ but that dwindled in the inevitable ‘follow-ups’. Parker noted a bevy of plays dealing with Prohibition, the ‘Irish question’ (‘what a rough day it will be for the drama when Ireland is freed’) and, worst of all, a ‘mighty army of war plays’ (‘I have been through so many … that I feel like a veteran’). Eventually the battlefield smoke cleared from the theatres, but the next slew of melodramas, about returning soldiers, was even more tedious. ‘Heaven knows the war was hard enough,’ she grumbled. ‘Now the playwrights are doing their best to ruin the peace for us.’

Once she had identified a formula, Parker didn’t devote much space to individual plays. Those she didn’t like could be summed up quickly – ‘The House Beautiful is the play lousy’ – while those she admired, such as Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, made her coy: ‘One is ashamed to place neat little bouquets of praise on this mighty conception.’ On the whole, she preferred ‘little, bitter twists of line and incident’ to ‘any amount of connected story’ and always had time for dog actors, swashbucklers and songs that rhymed ‘license’ with ‘five cents’. It was also easy to praise performances, whether on stage (Eddie Cantor, Jacob Ben-Ami and the ‘flawless’ Barrymore brothers were favourites) or in the stalls. Germs of short stories can be found in her descriptions of the couple who argue over Bernard Shaw’s symbols, the woman who ‘speculates, never in silence’ about what’s going to happen next, and the soldier who ‘condescendingly translated’ bits of French to his girl. ‘You heard that guy saying toujours? That means today.’

Parker was fired from Condé Nast in 1920, after some of Broadway’s biggest producers (all regular advertisers) complained about her constant savaging of their plays, and of Florenz Ziegfeld’s wife. She continued as a drama critic at Ainslee’s for another three years and then, in 1927, spent twelve months as ‘Constant Reader’, writing about books for the New Yorker and accruing what the magazine’s founding editor, Harold Ross, described as a ‘mountain of indebtedness’. ‘Her Constant Reader,’ he insisted, ‘did more than anything to put the magazine on its feet, or its ear, or wherever it is today.’

Later, Boddy goes into the biography (“Born in 1893, she was originally Dottie Rothschild, but not, she always pointed out, one of those Rothschilds”) and says of her verses “The first that earned her a cheque – for $12 – was ‘Any Porch’, published by Vanity Fair in 1915, the same year that ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ appeared in Poetry”; I was pleased to find that you can actually see that page of Vanity Fair at Google Books. And if you’re up for reading a piece on the decline of savaging, try Kelefa Sanneh’s “How Music Criticism Lost Its Edge” (New Yorker, August 25, 2025; archived).

https://languagehat.com/fired-for-constant-savaging/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18222

Posted by languagehat

https://languagehat.com/selangors-stannum-and-swarf/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18212

A reader sent me Edward Denny’s Atlas Obscura post World’s Largest Pewter Tankard, saying:

There are a few things of linguistic interest here, including a few little puns, but the paragraph that caught my eye was: “The company received a royal warrant in 1979 from the sultan of Selangor, and in 1992, the company officially became known as Royal Selangor. The stupendous stoup is now a standard suitable for a singular sovereign of stannum.”

I’m not familiar with either stoup or stannum (and haven’t yet looked them up!) but find the entirely unnecessary alliteration absurdly amusing.

A stoup is “A mug or other drinking vessel,” and stannum is the Latin word for ‘tin’ (though it very occasionally crops up in English per the OED, e.g. 1812 “Tin or Stannum,” H. Davy, Elements of Chemical Philosophy 379). I myself was taken with another unusual s-word in this paragraph:

The museum also features a 1,578-kg box of swarf–the chips and shavings left over from the factory floor–as well as the famous “lucky teapot.” As the story goes, a man was scavenging warehouses for food during WWII when he bent over to pick up a wayward melon-shaped pewter teapot. Just at that moment, a bullet wizzed overhead, and the fortunate scrounger’s life was saved. The teapot was an original design of Yong’s, and the life-saving story made it famous worldwide.

Swarf is, again per the OED (entry from 1918), “The wet or greasy grit abraded from a grindstone or axle; the filings or shavings of iron or steel. Hence, any fine waste produced by a machining operation, esp. when in the form of strips or ribbons”:

1566 No person..shall die..black, any Cappe wᵗʰ Barke or Swarfe, but only wᵗʰ Copperas and Gall or wᵗʰ Wood [variant reading Woade] and Madder.
Act 8 Elizabeth I c. 11. §3 [actually §2; see mollymooly’s comment below — LH]
[…]

1640 Fileings of iron, called swarf.
Tables Rates & Duties in J. Entick, New History London (1766) vol. II. 174
[…]

1953 There’s swarf—chips of wood, metal, etc.—grinding around in your expensive machinery and shortening its life.
Times 23 October 5/3
[…]

1973 In more ductile materials chips may remain partially bonded to each other to form continuous severely-work-hardened ribbons sometimes called swarf.
J. G. Tweeddale, Materials Technology vol. II. vi. 142

It’s also used for “The material cut out of a gramophone record as the groove is made” (e.g. 1977 “For a long-playing record, this swarf, a strip narrower than a human hair, might be half a mile long,” Times 18 April [Gramophone Supplement] p. iv/7). The etymology is “representing Old English geswearf, gesweorf, geswyrf filings, or < Old Norse svarf file-dust, related to sverfa to file.” Thanks, Andrew!

https://languagehat.com/selangors-stannum-and-swarf/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18212

Posted by languagehat

https://languagehat.com/ellmann-loved-anecdotes/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18206

Seamus Perry reviews Zachary Leader’s Ellmann’s Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker for the LRB (Vol. 47 No. 16 · 11 September 2025; archived), and I find myself enchanted — Ellmann’s book may have been the first literary biography I ever read, and just picking the hefty volume off my shelf makes me want to reread both it and Joyce. Perry begins:

Richard Ellmann’s​ biography of James Joyce was first published in 1959 to an almost unanimously enthusiastic reception. Ellmann’s editor at the New York office of Oxford University Press told him it was ‘the most ecstatic reaction I have seen to any book I have known anything about’. William Empson welcomed ‘a grand biography’; Cyril Connolly, though naturally disappointed not to find himself mentioned, nevertheless recognised something ‘truly masterly’; and Frank Kermode wrote that Ellmann’s account would ‘fix Joyce’s image for a generation’, a judgment that, as Zachary Leader rightly comments, was if anything an underestimate. Leader, himself the distinguished biographer of Kingsley Amis and Saul Bellow, has written an unusual and engaging book, half an account of Ellmann’s life leading up to the Joyce biography, and half a detailed history of the book’s composition and its subsequent place within Joycean scholarship. His admiration for the achievement is palpable and he describes the way Ellmann went about his task with the sympathetic warmth of a fellow labourer; but he is alert, as well, to some of the criticisms that have been made of the enterprise and gives them a fair hearing, so that the overall effect is a sort of primer in the possibilities and quandaries of literary biography. To write the biography of a biography already suggests a certain disciplinary self-consciousness. Ellmann emerges, Leader implies, as exemplary, the biographer’s biographer.

One of the excellences that Empson singled out was the happy chance of timing: the book ‘must be the last of its kind about Joyce’, he wrote, ‘because Mr Ellmann, as well as summarising all previous reports, has interviewed a number of witnesses who are now dead.’ The number of witnesses was in fact immense: Leader calculates that 330 people from thirteen countries are acknowledged somewhere or other in the biography and thanked for (as Ellmann says) having ‘made it possible for me to assemble this record of Joyce’s life’. He was evidently a disarming interviewer and managed to win round several crucial but initially unwilling participants, such as Sylvia Beach, the first publisher of Ulysses, and J.F. Byrne, Joyce’s best friend at university. A good deal of Ellmann’s research methodology was old-style charm. ‘He let them talk,’ one observer recalled. ‘He showed himself grateful for what they told him; now and then with a quiet question he would elicit some particular point of information, and in leaving would express his thanks again. He left them smiling and thinking, what a nice young man!’ He would write graceful follow-up letters: ‘It was very pleasant meeting you both and your charming daughter, and it is nice to know that Joyce had such good company in Zurich.’ Such a remark, Leader says with just a hint of drollery, ‘suggests the role sympathy as well as objectivity played in Ellmann’s approach’: success was sometimes a matter of ‘kindness and calculation combined’.

After some examples of Ellmann’s “tenacity of purpose,” Perry continues:

‘Ellmann loved anecdotes and good stories,’ Leader tells us, ‘and James Joyce is full of them.’ In fact, as he later recalled, the inadvertent prompt for the biography was an anecdote. Ellmann was working on his first book, a study of W.B. Yeats, and became fascinated by the story of the 20-year-old Joyce calling on the poet, seventeen years his elder, with the kindly intention of explaining where Yeats was going wrong as a writer. ‘How old are you?’ Joyce asked after a long and inconclusive discussion. Yeats gave him an approximate answer and Joyce replied: ‘I thought so. I have met you too late. You are too old.’ Ellmann was clearly enchanted: ‘As all mild men must, I was delighted by this arrogance,’ at which point he seems to have become hooked on his new subject. When he interviewed Yeats’s widow in 1945, he was keen to establish the authenticity of the tale and was delighted to find (as he thought) the story confirmed by a draft preface among Yeats’s papers which Mrs Yeats showed him. And yet, elsewhere, Yeats disputed the story, and Joyce himself dismissed it as ‘another story of Dublin public house gossip’, telling an acquaintance ‘even if I’d thought it I wouldn’t have said it to Yeats. It would have been unmannerly.’ ‘Dubliners usually make the remarks which are attributed to them,’ Ellmann says in his biography, and while it is impossible to regret that he proceeded on the basis of this most dubious axiom, you can’t help wondering how robust some of the testimony in his book really is. Empson, for example, took exception to Ellmann’s account of Joyce leaving Nora Barnacle, his intended, alone in a London park for two hours during their elopement while he called on the critic Arthur Symons. ‘She thought he would not return,’ Ellmann says. Empson considered it a libel on Nora’s character to imply that she ran away with a man of whom she could think so dimly, and he was not persuaded when he tracked down the source in the endnotes: an interview with Joyce’s sister Eva almost fifty years after the event, by which time the anecdote had acquired what he called ‘quite a high polish’. ‘This is not really a scientific way to write biography,’ Empson argued.

I said that the book’s warm reception was almost unanimous. One noisily dissenting voice was that of Hugh Kenner and part of his objection was similar to Empson’s. ‘What he asserts is so,’ Kenner says of Ellmann’s book, ‘backed by a reference to an interview with someone whose credibility we have no means of assessing.’ When a second edition came out in 1982, he returned with even more pepper, lamenting Ellmann’s gullible readiness to accept what Kenner called ‘the Irish Fact’, meaning ‘anything they tell you in Ireland’. Kenner took Ellmann’s working principle to be that ‘no good story should be rejected.’ This is hardly fair to Ellmann, who often pauses to take the measure of his witnesses. But it is true that part of the book’s appeal is precisely its character as a sort of oral history, much of it with the high polish of well- told tales. ‘A nice collection could be made of legends about me,’ Joyce wrote to his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver, and among other things James Joyce provides just that. Did Joyce’s father really say, when he heard that his son had hooked up with someone whose surname was Barnacle, ‘She’ll never leave him’? An interview with Eva is the only source. I have always liked the story of the young artist standing his ground in a newspaper office, refusing to rewrite a negative review of a new book. ‘I have only to lift the window and put my head out, and I can get a hundred critics to review it,’ the editor protests. ‘Review what, your head?’ Joyce answers. Your pleasure is barely dented when you discover that the endnote attributes the story to the memoirs of someone who was not present. […]

It’s not a surprise to learn that it was in locating Ulysses within real historical space and ‘identifying the characters’ who populate it, that Ellmann found himself ‘most exhilarated by my success’. It is true that Ellmann’s phrasing can make the business of writing a novel sound rather Frankensteinian at times: ‘If bits and pieces of Mrs Chance, Signora Santos, Signorina Popper and Matt Dillon’s daughter helped Joyce to design the outer Molly Bloom, he had a model at home for Molly’s mind.’ Ellmann’s friend Ellsworth Mason noted his ‘beaverosity’, but in his own pugnacious way raised the important question of the advantages to be gained by such heroic industry. ‘I do not think that the biographical details you have gathered, most of which were new to me, have clarified anything in my own mind about Joyce,’ he wrote to Ellmann. ‘They rather show that you have been having a fine time in Ireland.’ Well, that’s what friends are for, but still it is worth asking: does the origin of Mrs Purefoy’s name bring anything to a reading of the chapter in which she appears? It feels more like a private diversion on Joyce’s part, rather like his taking the name for the scurrilous Blazes Boylan from a very proper university contemporary who went on to become chief justice: ‘Joyce must have keenly enjoyed his little private joke,’ Ellmann says, but since it is private it is difficult to see what a reader of Ulysses has to do with it.

Ellmann himself conceded that his reader might well ‘wonder what was the point of hunting down problematic live models for the characters.’ But then, although vastly more diligent, he was hardly unusual in doing that: something about the sheer effort of verisimilitude of Ulysses seems always to have encouraged people to look for real people in it. According to Ellmann, the questions on everyone’s lips when the book appeared were ‘Are you in it?’ or ‘Am I in it?’ The conflation of art and life that irritated Mason clearly felt quite natural to its first readers. Joyce played along mischievously. He would tell friends that Molly Bloom was sitting at another table in the restaurant and ask them to guess who she was. ‘This game he continued for years,’ according to Ellmann: the guess was never right. Dr Richard Best, who appears in the chapter set in the National Library, ‘tall, young, mild, light’, was exasperated when people told him he was a character in Ulysses: ‘I am not a character in fiction. I am a living being,’ he protested. Nora Joyce, by contrast, seems to have been blithely untroubled by the idea that novel and history might occupy a shared space. When she was asked whether she was Molly Bloom, she replied: ‘I’m not – she was much fatter.’

That Ellmann shared that quotidian sense of the great novel is clear even from incidental touches: Davy Byrne’s pub on Duke Street, he says at one point, was ‘a haunt of Joyce and Bloom’, as though one might have bumped into the other. I think the effect is rather magical, but Mason, anticipating Kenner and some other more recent Joyceans, took such a cast of mind to be problematic: by bringing art and life into such close relationship, Ellmann risked abolishing the difference between them altogether. ‘You are weaving both the works and the non-works into a single, supposedly factual, fabric,’ Mason told him in a reprimanding spirit. And it is true, as several commentators have pointed out, that Ellmann does occasionally take a detail from one of Joyce’s books as evidence of the biography that we are then to understand lies behind the book, an oddly circular procedure which assumes, as Kenner said, that ‘if they got into Joyce’s fictions they were originally facts.’ For example: was Joyce miserable at school? Stanislaus said he was perfectly happy, a view corroborated by a fellow student; but Ellmann adduced the evidence of Joyce’s first novel to argue the contrary. ‘A Portrait represents him as unhappy and unwell,’ Ellmann says; but the referent of ‘him’ is Stephen Dedalus, not James Joyce, and even Leader is moved to call the slip ‘culpable’. Similarly, when Ellmann is describing the obnoxious young Joyce visiting Mullingar, he says: ‘Joyce seems to have relished buzzing the local residents with remarks like: “My mind is more interesting to me than the entire country.”’ That would indeed irritate anyone, but the only evidence of Joyce saying it seems to be a passage in Stephen Hero, the first version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which is a work of fiction: again, it is Stephen rather than James who is the buzzer in question.

There’s a passage about “sheer abundance, wonderfully exemplifying what Ellmann elsewhere said he looked for in a biography: ‘as many facts as possible, organised of course, and selected, but not transformed to illustrate a thesis’ … Ellmann, too, believed in the authority of detail: ‘What is the name of the town in which the Karamazovs live?’ was the sort of question he liked to ask his class, rather than anything more existential.” Then:

Still,​ Ellmann’s book is something besides a compendium of Joycean detail. When a journalist praised him for having ‘accumulated such a heavy mass of material on Joyce and asked, in effect, whether he had purposefully refrained from interpreting it’, Ellmann responded, ‘with a charming smile’, that ‘he had been under the misapprehension that he had interpreted it.’ What he seems to have meant was that his book put forward a reading of Ulysses – one that, once again, deviated from what might seem the modernist norm. The novel largely follows the meandering progress of Leopold Bloom through the streets of Dublin on 16 June 1904, working throughout a parallel between his humdrum adventures and the heroic antics of Ulysses in The Odyssey. The prevailing view at the time, and the one espoused by Pound and Eliot, was that the Homeric parallel was satirically intended, and Bloom ‘a debased or mock-heroic figure, a symbol of decline’. Ellmann was a fine literary critic as well as biographer, and the piece of criticism in James Joyce that has always most impressed me is his account of Joyce’s reimagining of the mock-heroic, something that could only be the work of someone who loved jokes. To say that Bloom is a modern-day Ulysses is funny: when he wags his ‘knockmedown cigar’ in the face of the bigoted nationalist in Barney Kiernan’s bar, for instance, he is a cut-price version of Ulysses brandishing his spear before the monstrous Cyclops. That juxtaposition is, indeed, a piece of mock-heroic, and the point was to comment on the shortcomings of the modern day. But then jokes, as Ellmann says, are not necessarily so simple, and the Joycean complication at work is what Ellmann calls ‘the ennoblement of the mock-heroic’. For the cigar in its way is magnificent, and Bloom’s faltering response to the prejudice he encounters genuinely heroic. Bloom may lack the ancient military virtues, but he possesses the secular qualities of ‘prudence, intelligence, sensitivity and good will’. And he is kind to animals. […]

Something of this rich Joycean mock-heroic energy gets into Ellmann’s own voice: ‘I am endeavouring to treat Joyce’s life with some of the same fullness that he treats Bloom’s life,’ he told a friend. As Leader says, it is a wonderfully witty book, and its wit comes from Ellmann’s keeping fully in mind the heroism of Joyce’s artistic life and the frequent comedy of his human shortcomings. After he is beaten up at school for preferring Byron to Tennyson, he returns home with torn clothes: ‘So his sufferings for his art began,’ Ellmann writes, which is satirical and yet not untrue. The conclusion to his first trip to Paris is similarly pitched: ‘As a last gesture he seems to have gone to a theatre and a brothel, and had himself photographed wearing a heavy, ill-fitting coat and a long-suffering look.’ He is always drily funny on the subject of Joyce’s finances: ‘James saw no reason to limit his brother’s sacrifices to genius, especially when genius had a family to support.’ And there are many variations on the subject of Joyce’s drinking: ‘He engaged in excess with considerable prudence.’ ‘Nobody seems to be inclined to present me in my unadorned prosaicness,’ Joyce complained when he began to be fêted by admirers. Ellmann is finely alert to it, and in tune with the characteristic ‘double aim’ with which Joyce regarded his own heroism. ‘May I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses?’ a devoted young man asks. ‘No,’ Joyce replies. ‘It did lots of other things too.’

The form of Ellmann’s appreciation of Joyce naturally places Ulysses, and more particularly Leopold Bloom, at the heart of the career. Once we get into the world of Finnegans Wake, the realm of the ordinary has dropped out of sight and the mixed nobility of Joycean mock-heroic is no longer easily available. Serious Joyceans, Leader reports, often cite this as a shortcoming, along with Ellmann’s more general lack of engagement with the non-realist elements of Ulysses; but I cannot regret it myself. Ellmann said, as if prophetically, that he wanted ‘to be read by amateurs as well as professionals’. The reason Ulysses appeals most is Leader’s real subject in the biographical parts of his own work, and as Ellmann emulated Joyce, so Leader, on a smaller scale, emulates Ellmann. Ellmann told Stanislaus he wanted to give ‘as accurate a picture as possible of the relatively uneventful outward life’, a task which he supposed ‘close to your brother’s own method in Ulysses’.

I too find it hard to regret Ellman’s venial failings (gullibility, a surfeit of pointless facts), since they are inseparable from what makes his book so good, and of course one can then go on to read other biographies with other slants. But I do wish he hadn’t been so ready to confuse the life with the fiction; it seems to be a hard sin to avoid, but people who write about novelists should try harder. At any rate, I look forward to the reactions of our resident Joyceans.

https://languagehat.com/ellmann-loved-anecdotes/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18206

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https://languagehat.com/wildcat-city/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18196

I’m very fond of this poem by Michael Symmons Roberts from the new TLS (which has gone over to a biweekly schedule, shock horror!), but the reason I’m posting it here is that — despite the titular reference to Mandelstam — it reminds me strongly of one of my favorite Pasternak poems, Опять весна [Spring again], which I posted about back in 2018 (with my literal prose version and two poetic translations, one by George Reavey and the other, slightly better in my opinion, by Jon Stallworthy and ‎Peter France), and I thought the resonances were worth noting. Here’s the poem:

Mandelstam Variables – VI

Wildcat city. Crouched. Coiled.
Light on a patrol car beats like a blue heart.
On the outskirts, an empty bread van
speeds home to meet the curfew.
A cuckoo, mad as befits this city,
tells the same joke on repeat
in a belltower without a bell,
– ropes cut, change-ringers dead –
but I, for one night only,
walk as I choose, unwatched, ungrounded,
along the rim of the abyss.
One day, you and I will meet,
I’ve been rehearsing for it,
a speech that will unlock it all for us,
though I fear words will fail us again.
Perhaps we’ll fill our mouths with bread,
so much that talking is impossible.
Just laugh at our gluttony.
The wildcat will doze at our feet.

The first line has a very similar rhythm and structure to Pasternak’s “Поезд ушел. Насыпь черна” [Póezd ushól. Násyp′ cherná, literally ‘Train gone. Embankment black’], and the poems have a similar rhythmic feel; “the same joke on repeat” repeats Pasternak’s theme of repetition, “along the rim of the abyss” is almost identical to “у края обрыва” [at the edge of the precipice], and “words will fail us … talking is impossible” reminds me of “Commotion, gossips’ babbling … snatches of speech” in the Russian poem. I don’t know, maybe it’s all in my mind (lately I’ve been repeating the Pasternak lines as I drift off to sleep), but I thought I’d share it. (I don’t know what Mandelstam poem or poems he might be thinking of — and now that I google “Mandelstam variables” I discover that it’s a thing in theoretical physics, so maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with the poet except for the resonance of the name.)

https://languagehat.com/wildcat-city/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18196