TIMES SQUARE/Brendan Glacken: There were some interesting revelations in a recent Weekend article about James Joyce, and the odd couple with whom he spent the night before the original Bloomsday in June 1904.
However, I am not a Joycean. A few years back I stood for nearly half an hour in one of those early Ulysses draughts on the corner of Clare Street and Merrion Square and caught a chill that was nearly the death of me, no word of a lie, coughing non-stop for three weeks afterwards and a wonder to God I did not come down with pneumonia.
No: Dubliners was a powerful achievement for a young writer but after that it was all downhill, in my view.
Anyway. According to the authors of the Weekend piece (Paul Stephenson and Margie Waters), Joyce spent "Bloomseve" of 1904 in the Sandymount home of James Cousins, a poet and playwright, and his wife Gretta, a musician and suffragette (even then, the artist needed two strings to the bow).
It seems that the Cousins were "pioneer vegetarians and mystical theosophists" and when they married, they agreed to abstain from sex. Gretta in particular found herself "degraded" by this demand of nature and "certain of the techniques of nature" connected with it.
James and herself believed they would not be "purified or redeemed" until the evolution of form substituted "some more artistic way of continuance of the race".
Did you ever hear the like?
However, the attitude of the Cousins to sexual intercourse and the "techniques of nature connected to it", while comical, is completely understandable. To any normally adjusted person, the aesthetics of the thing are grotesque. Even the mildly fastidious cannot but be embarrassed at the ever-evident fact that the beasts in the fields and the slugs in the garden do not have any more (or less) "artistic way" of reproduction.
The authors of the article poke a little bit of fun at the non-kissing Cousins, but one can only imagine the hilarity and scorn which the expression of their antiquated beliefs would provoke today. Worse: think of the false sympathy which the Cousins would evoke in today's sex-obsessed society.
In the first place, their supposed dilemma would be taken up by the media. Psychologists would be called in to explain to the Cousins the sad errors of their ways and provide thoughtful and utterly patronising advice. Their parenthood and their childhood (sacred areas to anyone with any self-respect) would be picked apart in an entirely invasive manner in an effort to source the origins of their supposed repression.
Fighting and screaming, they would next be taken to a "sex therapist" who would no doubt initiate their treatment with a dreary, jargon-filled talk on the joys of non-penetrative sex (entirely forgetting that the Cousins are probably the world's leading experts on this subject).
They would be encouraged to get in touch with their feelings, which would undoubtedly mystify them. Then they would be obliged to hold hands for three weeks or until they needed to sign a cheque for the treatment, whichever came first.
Finally they would be encouraged to remove their clothing and discover each other's erogenous zones (one-inch Ordnance Survey maps provided for a small fee) at which point the Cousins might well make a bolt for freedom, and some non-Western country, where regarding sex and sexuality, some sanity yet remains.
Still, you would be left wondering what went on when the Wednesday night "At Home" session ended in the Cousins household on June 15th, 1904; and what sort of conversation James Joyce held the following evening with Nora Barnacle, when he walked out with her for the first time.
- Were you anywhere interesting last night, Jim?
- Oh, you know, Nora, over with the Cousins at Dromard Terrace.
-You have cousins in Sandymount?
- Their name is Cousins. No doubt they are cousins to some. Confusion falls like darkest duncoloured, rain on Rahoon.
- Are they nice people, then?
- Don't be talking, woman: the highest adepts bathed in waves of voluptcy of the very purest nature.
- I'd love to meet them sometime. Isn't it a grand night Jim?
- The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.
- Give us an oul' hug Jim- g'wan, put your arms around us.
- The only arms I allow myself to use: silence, exile and cunning.
- D'ye know what it is, Jim, you're as daft as those Cousins.