Joyce's notes 4

Richard has fallen from a higher world and is indignant when he discovers baseness in men and women. Robert has risen from a lower world and so far is he from indignation that it surprises him that men and women are not baser and more ignoble.



ROBERT, nods: Yes, you won. I saw your triumph.

RICHARD, rising suddenly: Excuse me, I forgot. Will you have some whisky?

ROBERT: All things come to those who wait.

RICHARD goes to the sideboard and fills out a glass of whisky from the decanter and brings it with a small carafe of water to the table.

RICHARD, lolling back on the couch: Will you add the water yourself?

ROBERT, does so: And you?

RICHARD, shaking his head: Nothing.

ROBERT, holding his glass: I think of our wild nights long ago, our nights of revelry and talk and carousing.

RICHARD: In our house.

ROBERT, raising his glass: Prosit!



When Richard left the church he met many men of the same type as Robert.



Problem: Archie, Richard's son, is brought up on Robert's principles 



Beatrice has had an interview with her mother before she enters in the first act.



Bertha alludes to Beatrice as her ladyship.



N.(B.)- 12 Nov. 1913
Garter: precious, Prezioso, Bodkin, music, palegreen, bracelet, cream sweets, lily of the valley, convent garden (Galway), sea.
Rat: Sickness, disgust, poverty, cheese, woman's ear, (child's ear?)
Dagger: heart, death, soldier, war, band, judgment, king.



N.(B.)- 13 Nov. 1913
Moon: Shelley's grave in Rome. He is rising from it: blond she weeps for him. He has fought in vain for an ideal and died killed by the world. Yet he rises. Graveyard at Rahoon by moonlight where Bodkin's grave is. He lies in the grave. She sees his tomb (family vault) and weeps. The name is homely. Shelley's is strange and wild. He is dark, unrisen, killed by love and life, young. The earth holds him.
Bodkin died. Kearns died. In the convent they called her the man-killer: (woman-killer was one of her names for me). I live in soul and body.
She is the earth, dark, formless, mother, made beautiful by the moonlit night, darkly conscious of her instincts. Shelley whom she has held in her womb or grave rises: the part of Richard which neither love nor life can do away with; the part for which she loves him: the part she must try to kill, never be able to kill and rejoice at her impotence. Her tears are of worship, Magdalen seeing the arisen Lord in the garden where he had been laid in the tomb. Rome is the strange world and strange life to which Richard brings her. Rahoon her people. She weeps over Rahoon too, over him whom her love has killed, the dark boy whom, as the earth, she embraces in death and disintegration. He is her buried life, her past. His attendant images are the trinkets and toys of girlhood (bracelet, cream sweets, palegreen lily of the valley, the convent garden). His symbols are music and the sea, liquid formless earth, in which are buried the drowned soul and body. There are tears of commiseration. She is Magdalen who weeps remembering the loves she could not return.