The English seaside town of Bognor has not been well-served by its name. Even a promotion to Bognor Regis in 1929, recognising a three-month stay there by King George V when he was recovering from surgery, was a limited PR triumph.
His reported response to the town’s name-change petition, “Bugger Bognor”, is much better remembered today than the official translation, as delivered by his secretary: “The King has been pleased to grant your request.”
Bognor’s claims to fame, however, also include an important role in Irish literary history as the birthplace, or one of them, of Finnegans Wake.
That book is usually said to have been written in Paris alone, unlike Ulysses which ends with the postscript “Trieste-Zurich-Paris 1914 – 1921”. But as Peter Chrisp writes in his blog on FW, there is a case for datelining the Wake: “Bognor-Paris 1922 – 1939”.
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Its English origins stem from a holiday James Joyce and his family spent there in the summer of 1923, when key elements of the notoriously difficult work fell into place.
It was an unusual trip not least because the Joyces enjoyed the services of a very distinguished chauffeur, TS Eliot. It may also have been, according to Joyce’s biographer Richard Ellmann, the only recorded occasion when Nora Barnacle referred approvingly to her husband’s occupation, if only in the context of threatening a shopkeeper.
When her sister Kathleen bought a pair of shoes, one of which split immediately, Nora went back to the shop with her and warned the recalcitrant manager: “My husband is a writer and if you don’t change them I’ll have it published in the paper.”
More typical was her reaction after another dubious purchase, a pair of white trousers that proved see-through. After ordering Joyce to take them off, she complained: “He’s a weakling, Kathleen. I always have to be after his tail ... Being married to a writer is a very hard life.”
But it was also while in Bognor that Nora told her sister: “He’s on another book again.” And even on holiday, Joyce was. Bognor is where, on gravestones in a cemetery, he found a family of Earwickers, the surname he would give to his universal protagonist in FW, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, soon conferred with ownership of a pub in Chapelizod.
It was on a Bognor beach Joyce got the idea for his seagull song, Three Quarks for Muster Mark, which would give the word quark to quantum physics and English. Bognor too was where he wrote the Wake’s comic versions of old Irish legends about St Kevin and St Patrick.
Even the trouser incident may have made it into the book, which as Chrisp notes, includes the line “not forgetting the time you laughed at Elder Charterhouse’s duckwhite pants and the way you said the whole township can see his hairy legs”.
But could there have been an Irish angle behind the visit to Bognor in the first place? Well, my occasional correspondent Vincent Altman O’Connor suspects so. Readers may recall that Vincent is a descendant of “Altman the Saltman”, a salt merchant and Irish nationalist of Joyce’s youth who has uncanny resemblances to the fictional Leopold Bloom (a subject revisited in the October issue of Village Magazine).
During a week when Irish-Jewish history was much in the news, by coincidence, I bumped into Altman O’Connor on a footpath the other night, and he also told me about Baron Albert Grant (1831 – 1899), “the most notorious Irish Jew of the Victorian era”.
Grant was born Abraham Zachariah Gottheimer in Dublin, the son of an immigrant who traded in fancy goods from a shop in Fleet Street. After the family moved to England, he grew up in London to rename himself and become a businessman of dubious reputation.
In the overheated stock market of the 1860s, according to the Dictionary of Irish Biography, Grant’s company “promoted eleven major flotations ... all of which resulted in legal disputes”.
A litany of other frauds followed – he had 89 cases pending against him at one point – the most notorious of which was his Emma silver mine in Utah. He sold £1 million worth of shares in that at £20, eventually valued at a shilling each.
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He also enjoyed a brief career as an MP, winning two elections before the second was declared void because he bribed voters. More to his credit, he earned his aristocratic title from the King of Italy for raising funds to build an art gallery. And he became a general philanthropist in later years, albeit probably as reputation laundering. Then he died at Bognor in 1899, “pursued by the bankruptcy courts to the very end”.
Whether the philosemitic Joyce visited his grave while in the town (it’s in a separate cemetery to the Earwickers), nobody seems to know. Either way, the Dublin-born fraudster had already earned a place in literature via an English writer with strong Irish links. Grant is the presumed model for Augustus Melmotte, antihero of Anthony Trollope’s classic satire of finance in the 1870s: The Way We Live Now.
