james joyce, Mr. Claud Sykes, and dissimulation

 

Mr. Claud Sykes wanders into James Joyce’s life, according to Richard Elman, in 1917 in Zurich, when he applied for a role in a movie that Joyce was supposedly making with a crook named Jules Martin. Martin’s idea was to set up a movie company, borrow money for expenses and such, and in some vague manner abscond with the cash.

Mr. Claud Sykes remained in Joyce’s life as a friend, and the typist of Ulysses, for some time.

Ellmann interviewed Sykes in the fifties. He conveys what Sykes told him. He doesn’t doubt the story that Sykes and his actress wife had somehow, in the midst of WWI, washed up in Zuric. In a bit of luck for Joyce, were hard up enough to do typing for the miserable fees he was able to pay them.

And it may well have unfolded like this.

Yet, there is another side to Claud Sykes.

Alan Burton of Brunel University has written an interesting essay on the anti-communist thrillers of the thirties, and narrows the scope to the anonymous writer, Vigilant, who wrote a number of such thrillers as well as the non-fiction book, Secrets of Modern Spying. According to book publishing records, Vigiland was  Claud Sykes. And Claud Sykes seems to have known, from experience, a few of the secrets of modern spying. For what other reason could he, really, have been in Zurich in 1917?

“An obvious suggestion is that, as an accomplished German speaker, he was in some way serving British Intelligence, perhaps one his roles being to keep an eye on the wayward Irishman Joyce who was suspect in some quarters. One is immediately put in mind of the writer Somerset Maugham who had been recruited to the wartime British Secret Service and based around French-speaking Lake Geneva only 280km distant. It could be that Sykes was yet another of those British writers of spy fiction who had served in intelligence. Maugham, of course, was a celebrated case in point, publishing the classic Ashenden in 1928, a set of stories based on his espionage activities in neutral Switzerland.”

The Sykes who was given 10 francs here and ten francs there to type chapters in Ulysses is the same Sykes who, apparently, was the son of a fairly well to do father and the grandchild of a millionaire. Peter Fishback, whose interests are in the Royal Irish Fusiliers and in James Joyce (an interesting overlap!) has written a much denser post about British intelligence in Switzerland during WWI and Sykes profile. He includes the review of Sykes Secrets of Modern Spying that appeared, in 1930, in the Illustrated London News, which featured this bit:

“In a chapter entitled "Humours of Spying," "Vigilant" shows that even Intelligence has its lighter side. One of the stories, which tells how the Germans continued to send money to a spy after he had been shot, money which English counter-spies used to buy a motor-car (they called it by the dead man's name), is a very grim joke. But nothing could be more diverting than the fate of the unfinished manuscript of James Joyce's novel, “Ulysses." This masterpiece of modern fiction was sent to the Censor, who thought it so obscure and baffling be could not believe it was a novel and despatched it to Room 40, the department in Scotland Yard where codes are deciphered. After much fruitless study, in which their best decoders failed to elicit the book's meaning, the officials decided that perhaps it was a novel after all. A man of letters was summoned, who pronounced that it "bore some faint resemblance to literature." Thus vouched for, the manuscript was set free.”

Joyce, like any writer, was always on the lookout, one might even say vigilant, for any mention of himself in the press. So he might have read this. Joyce and his wife, Fishback sez, visited Sykes and his wife in 1929. He had already received a copy of Sykes’ first “mystery”, The Nine Pointed Star – so I imagine that Secrets of Modern Spying came his way.  It must have given him some ideas – especially as there is no accounting for how the chapters of Ulysses were rerouted to the British intelligence boys in “Room 40”. As well, of course, was information about the burglaring of the Austrian consulate in Zurich. Joyce no doubt knew this consulate, from having been in contact with Austrian officials when he was in Trieste. Stories of burglary and misrouted letters certainly floated into  Finnegans Wake.

Joyce scholars have used Sykes mainly as the source of Joyce’s knowledge of the theory that Shakespeare was really the Duke of Rutland – a theory Sykes got from a book by a German named Bleibtreu, which Sykes loaned to Joyce and Joyce, in a moment of grace, gave back. Ah, loaning – a word that hangs around Joyce, a man who was continually waiting for funds and continually in need of a loan. The theory about Shakespeare ends up in Ulysses, in the section where Stephen Dedalus, a much loaned to man himself,  spins out his theory of Hamlet.

As well, Sykes and Joyce put on Oscar Wilde’s play,  The Importance of Being Earnest. Both the Shakespeare story and the Earnest story are about people who are not who they claim to be – who dissimulate. And of course Oscar Wilde was a famous and tragic dissimulator in his own life. In Syke’s case, as a British agent soaking up information for his higher ups, he really was not who he claimed to be, or at least he claimed to be not all of what he was, doubling merrily between typing on a French typewriter an Irishman’s English to reporting on any suspect Germanness among the bohemians in Zurich, one supposes. Joyce would be a suspect type in many ways, since he made up songs mocking the war and claimed himself to be a pacifist, or at least against blowing holes in the bodies of strangers with rifles and such. If Joyce read Secrets of Modern Spying in 1929 or 1930, surely this must have struck him with a certain suggestiveness.

In Joyce, suggestiveness was sucked into the great work, sooner or later. Notes were taken, conversations overheard, information gets shifted and refracted among voices that are sometimes in the ambilocative, the neither here nor there, and that are sometimes the voice of public or pubic opinion in the great scenes in FW.   

Mr. Sykes is in there somewhere.

2.

 

Joyce  loved the mix of high and low, of Thomas Acquinas and Paul de Kock. I imagine, I fantasize that Joyce, reading Sykes on counterspies, on invisible inks (and their failures) and rerouted letters, might have thought about the whole rich Catholic literature on dissimulation. That literature which touches on casuistry, on the black legend of the Jesuits. Wasn’t Stephan Dedalus called a Jesuit by Buck Mulligan in Ulysses? The subtle mind, subverting certainty, exploiting ambiguity for the sack of the good, or the church, or Art.

In the Ways of Lying: dissimulation, persecution and conformity in Early Modern Europe, Perez Zagorin traces a certain scar in Catholicism, a certain opposition, a blind argument, back to Augustine and Jerome.

In particular, their controversy circled around a passage in Paul’s epistle to the Galatians, 2:11-14. In this passage, Paul explains why he rebuked Peter in Antioch. Peter, who had ceased to observe the dietary laws, pretended, in the company of Jewish Christians in Antioch, to have remained an observer. He withdrew from the Gentiles, he dissembled – or so Paul claimed: “If thou, being a Jew, livest after the manner of the Gentiles, why compellest thou the Gentiles to live as do the Jews?”

Jerome had a rather extraordinary interpretation of this passage: he took it as an instance of Paul’s own dissimulation.  “According to Jerome, Paul’s rebuke to Peter was merely feigned, having been pre-arranged between two apostles for the benefit of both Catholic and Jewish converts.”

The theatricality of this episode, the conspiracy of it. Christianity here becomes strategy, and strategy becomes sacred. Jerome supports his interpretation by pointing to instances in the Acts where Paul also asked Gentiles to live as Jews – asking a convert to be circumcised, for instance.

Augustine, reading Jerome, couldn’t believe his eyes. He not only wrote to Jerome, asking him if he was serious, but he published his own interpretation. Jerome, that translator, was not a systematic thinker, or at least not on Augustine’s level. Augustine wrote that it was extremely dangerous “to admit that anything in the sacred books should be a lie… If once we admit in that supreme authority even one helpful lie, nothing will be left of these books.

Jerome is not known for being a liberal thinker. He was very rigid, so to speak, on the subject of female virginity. But here, here, perhaps he did think as a translator.  He, after all, translated the Bible into Latin. From the translator’s point of view, dissimulation could be much like translation. The language of the original text is, as it were, hidden under the language of the translated text. The translation is a sort of lie, a dissimulation, a silent ascent to what it does not say.

Translation as a sort of invisible ink.

Now, I have no proof that Joyce ever made these connections. Yet in the Shem the Penman sections of Finnegans Wake, there is surely some attraction to pennings and inks and dissimulations going on, some eavesdropping and counterspying. In Sykeness and in health, by the hand that holds the crayon.

Ah, dissimulation – I must write about this again.