Time waits for Naumann – Frank McNally on a buried tragedy in Joyce’s Ulysses

In the Hades chapter of Ulysses, as you’ll all know, Leopold Bloom scans the deaths column of the Freeman’s Journal and reads a list of names including that of the man whose funeral he’s about to attend: “Callan, Coleman, Dignam, Fawcett, Lowry, Naumann ...”

The list did not appear in the actual Freeman’s Journal of 16th June 1904. But the fictionally immortal Paddy Dignam aside, could James Joyce have been making a point by including that strange surname “Naumann”, officially unknown in the Dublin of the time?

He could, it turns out. And he almost certainly was, according to my regular correspondent Senan Molony, a senior detective in the Joyce forensics division, who has been working on the case. According to him, the name is a deliberate allusion to a man who was not yet deceased in June 1904 but soon would be, in circumstances both sad and notorious.

The clue that Joyce was up to something here is what Senan, in an elegant metaphor, calls his “injured lapwing” technique. In this case it involved him distracting the casual reader from Naumann by having Bloom wonder about the next name on the list (Peake): “ ... what Peake is that? is it the chap was in Crosby and Alleyne’s? no ...”

Bird on the wire – Frank McNally on a great reporter’s last hurrah

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Stand and deliver — Brian Maye on the ‘gentleman highwayman’ James Maclaine

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On the case – Tim Fanning on Armagh detective James McParland and his battles with the Molly Maguires

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General selection – Frank McNally on national stereotypes, Greek (and table quiz) heroes, and a stamp of greatness

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When Joyce “flaps about Peake”, says Det Molony, “it is akin to a lapwing feigning injury in jerking away from its nest (which lapwings make on the ground) to mislead a predator. The lapwing will take flight at the last moment, but its decoy will have worked.”

Knowing exactly what the rascally author was at, however, Senan ignored the distraction and returned to the nest. There he discovered, among other things, that the surname Naumann is suspiciously unknown in the Dublin from which Joyce plundered so much journalistic detail.

Civil registration records show no one of the name dying between 1880 and 1930, and there were no Naumann births or marriages either. Indeed, Naumanns are not to be found “in any extant Irish census”. So it was not a Dublin name, included for local colour. But neither was it meaningless.

In the same paragraph, after a poetic reflection on “characters fast fading on the frayed breaking paper”, Bloom skips ahead to reading about a “month’s mind”: the traditional Catholic memorial marking the departed’s first post-funeral milestone.

He also reads a verse commemorating such an event: “It is now a month since dear Henry fled ...” Taking his cue from this, Senan projects a month forward from the original Bloomsday – to 16th July, 1904 – and the Dublin Daily Express of that date, which includes the report of an inquest headed: “Jewish Rabbi’s Suicide”.

In what the coroner called “a very sad case”, this involved a Reverend Louis Newman, from Lombard Street West, who had died in his bedroom of self-inflicted injuries while “not of sound mind”.

The Ulysses connections here are widespread, Senan points out. Giving evidence on Rabbi Newman’s mental state, for example, was a Dr Connolly Norman, irreverently referenced in fiction by Buck Mulligan: “He’s up in Dottyville with Conolly Norman. General paralysis of the insane.”

Also, as Molony adds, Lombard Street “is the very cradle of Bloom, whose father committed suicide in a bedroom”.

But there is a Dubliners link too, because the rabbi’s inquest report appeared side-by-side with another sad tale, headlined: “Sydney Parade Fatality.” This we know Joyce read – it was the event that inspired his short story: A Painful Case.

Why would he have turned Newman into Naumann? Well, for one reason, the dead rabbi was from Russia, and Russian Jews would not have called themselves by the anglicised Newman. He probably used an accented version. Hence perhaps the morgue register, available in the National Archives, “appears to show his surname as Noiman”.

And some occlusion may have been apt. Suicide was a delicate subject for Jews, at least as much as Catholics. Vincent Altman O’Connor, whose illustrious ancestor “Altman the Saltman” is a person of major interest in Joyce studies, tells me that Louis Hyman’s History of Irish Jews makes no mention of Newman’s, “even though it was the talk of Dublin”.

In any case, Det Molony rests his with the conclusion: “Naumann in Hades is a buried allusion to Louis Newman.” It’s hard to disagree.

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Speaking of buried allusions, the fact that a concert at Dublin’s James Joyce Centre is running from Tuesday to Friday this week, not Wednesday to Saturday as first planned, is a veiled reference to the deluded belief of one of the participants (me) that Ireland would be playing a Rugby World Cup final on October 28th.

The show features a suite of new and rather lovely songs by Jim Murphy and Gráinne Hunt, aka Hibsen, inspired by the 15 stories in Dubliners. I just do some talking in between.

Anyway, as they say in show business, we’re there all week (except Saturday). Perhaps another date will be added in due course to mark the month’s mind of Ireland’s defeat to the All Blacks.