Who Were the Real Men in the Library from "Scylla and Charybdis"?

This post is a part of an occasional series on the real people behind the characters in Ulysses.

Ulysses’ ninth episode, “Scylla and Charybdis” centers Stephen Dedalus’ heroic defense of his theory on Hamlet in the National Library, pitting our young Artist against several of Dublin’s literary elite, including Æ Russell, Richard Best and John Eglinton. James Joyce, like Stephen Dedalus, was desperate to break into the early twentieth century Dublin literary scene. Æ was the first person to ever publish Joyce, printing three of the young Artist’s stories in the Irish Homestead until he was overwhelmed with the volume of complaint mail. Joyce asserted himself to Eglinton and Best as well in hopes of ingratiating these well-connected literary figures with his youthful genius. We’ve discussed Joyce’s contentious relationship to Æ, so let’s take a moment to examine the biographies of the real Best and Eglinton and how Ulysses could never be the same without them.

Richard Irvine Best

Between his ill-fated sojourn to Paris in 1902-3 and his self-imposed exile beginning in late 1904, Joyce spent a period trying to find his place in Dublin’s literary world. In those days, the National Library of Ireland was a place where common folks and prominent intellects might rub elbows in the Reading Room, and so, Joyce tried his best to impress the library staff, and through them, get attention on his writing. Not a bad plan. In 1904, Thomas Lyster was the director of the Library and Richard Best was the assistant director. Lyster was supportive of Joyce’s early writing career, but as we’ll see, he and Best had a more complicated relationship.

Best had no formal university education, but he had distinguished himself as a self-taught scholar of Irish mythology and the Irish language, with his skills as a linguist sought after by such Celtic Revivalist luminaries as John Millington Synge and George Moore. Among Best’s accomplishments was his well-regarded translation of Henri d’Arbois de Jubainville’s book, The Irish Mythological Cycle and Celtic Mythology, the book that so dazzled Haines in Ulysses:

“—I was showing him Jubainville’s book. He’s quite enthusiastic, don’t you know, about Hyde’s Lovesongs of Connacht. I couldn’t bring him in to hear the discussion. He’s gone to Gill’s to buy it.”

On top of this, Best and his wife, Edith Oldham, helped to establish the Feis Ceoil music competition in 1896. Best saw great promise in young Joyce as a tenor and encouraged him to enter the competition. Best and famed singer John McCormack spent several evenings preparing the young Artist for his performance. Joyce competed in the 1904 Feis Ceoil, where he shared the stage with McCormack. Best would be punished for his generosity by inclusion in one of the most famous novels of the twentieth century.

The problem was, Joyce and Oliver St. John Gogarty, the real-life model for Buck Mulligan, had a reputation for ruthlessly mocking their acquaintances. No one was safe from their unrelenting taunts and pranks, and earnest Best was a prime target for their obnoxiousness, with Best’s portrayal in Ulysses as the ultimate outgrowth of this youthful mockery. Best is portrayed as a boyishly handsome intellectual lightweight in Ulysses, prone to mixing up pertinent details about various literary figures despite his stature at the National Library and fond of the phrase “don’t you know.” His introduction in “Scylla and Charybdis” bounces and rhymes like a children’s storybook, and is then pointedly buttressed with the phrase “that model schoolboy”:

“Mr Best entered, tall, young, mild, light. He bore in his hand with grace a notebook, new, large, clean, bright.
—That model schoolboy, Stephen said, would find Hamlet’s musings about the afterlife of his princely soul, the improbable, insignificant and undramatic monologue, as shallow as Plato’s.”

Best contributes little to the Shakespeare discourse that dominates the episode and sometimes veers away from the topic at hand entirely. His comments frequently reveal his lack of depth on the subject of literature, particularly Shakespeare. For instance, as Stephen introduces how Shakespeare named his villains after his own brothers, Best comments back:

“BEST: That is my name, Richard, don’t you know. I hope you are going to say a good word for Richard, don’t you know, for my sake. (Laughter)”

Richard, of course, is the name of one of Shakespeare’s most villainous villains. It’s ambiguous whether the laughter in the stage direction is supporting Best’s jest or if it’s at his expense.

Another prime example of the fictionalized Best’s shallow intellect is his commentary on the story The Portrait of Mr. W.H. by Oscar Wilde. In this story, Wilde suggests an identity for the Mr. W.H. to whom Shakespeare dedicated his sonnets. Best completely botches his own interpretation on Wilde’s story and is instantly corrected by Lyster:

“—The most brilliant of all is that story of Wilde’s, Mr Best said, lifting his brilliant notebook. That Portrait of Mr W. H. where he proves that the sonnets were written by a Willie Hughes, a man all hues.
—For Willie Hughes, is it not? the quaker librarian asked.”

Best then replies with a floundering word salad:

“—I mean, for Willie Hughes, Mr Best said, amending his gloss easily. Of course it’s all paradox, don’t you know, Hughes and hews and hues, the colour, but it’s so typical the way he works it out. It’s the very essence of Wilde, don’t you know. The light touch.”

Best’s portrayal in Ulysses is also notably gay-coded, with much attention paid to his delicate, boyish features. Richard Ellmann remarked in his biography of Joyce that the Artist was annoyed by Best’s “prissiness”, which I interpret as homophobia on Joyce’s part. Joyce clearly saw Best as effeminate and as a ripe source for comedy in Ulysses. For example, in the passage quoted above, the narration describes Best thusly:

“His glance touched their faces lightly as he smiled, a blond ephebe. Tame essence of Wilde.”

“Ephebe” is a Greek term for a male adolescent. The use of Greek implies homosexuality (in the same episode in which Mulligan accuses Leopold Bloom of being “Greeker than the Greeks” to imply homosexuality)and is reinforced by the reference to Wilde. Nowadays, we might call Best a twink, but alas, that word hadn’t been invented yet. More insidiously, there is also an implication of pederasty in Best’s portrayal. Mulligan, in his usual irreverent and mocking manner, suggests Shakespeare may have engaged in sexual abuse:

“—Lovely! Buck Mulligan suspired amorously. I asked him what he thought of the charge of pederasty brought against the bard. He lifted his hands and said: All we can say is that life ran very high in those days. Lovely!”

Best responds:

“—The sense of beauty leads us astray, said beautifulinsadness Best to ugling Eglinton.”

As far as I’m aware, no such allegations were ever made against Best. This seems to me to be a lazy, homophobic joke on Joyce’s part. The depiction of Best as stereotypically gay is heightened in his brief appearance in “Circe”, where he is portrayed as a beauty-obsessed stylist to John Eglinton. He also confuses Yeats and Keats for good measure:

“(He corantos by. Best enters in hairdresser’s attire, shinily laundered, his locks in curlpapers. He leads John Eglinton who wears a mandarin’s kimono of Nankeen yellow, lizardlettered, and a high pagoda hat.)
BEST: (Smiling, lifts the hat and displays a shaven poll from the crown of which bristles a pigtail toupee tied with an orange topknot.) I was just beautifying him, don’t you know. A thing of beauty, don’t you know, Yeats says, or I mean, Keats says.”

It seems excessive to me that a man pushing forty, as Joyce was when he wrote Ulysses, would spend so much effort roasting a man he hadn’t spoken to in at least a decade. Joyce didn’t seem to have much respect for Best’s scholarly work; scholar William Sayers suggests this is because even though Best was a brilliant linguist and an expert on Irish grammar and syntax, he “was not much of a reader, not interested in modern letters, and gives little display of the intellectual curiosity that Joyce prized.” A friend of Best’s, Terence de Vere White, noted in a reminiscence that Best did confuse the poets Browning and Burns on at least one occasion. Whatever Best's limitations were, It’s still staggeringly petty to portray him under his real name as a literary buffoon in a novel.

Regarding Best’s sexuality, there was quite a bit of gossip around Best’s marriage as there was an age gap between Best and Edith Oldham; he was 34 and she was 41 when they wed. Their union was widely viewed as a marriage of convenience that boosted both of their careers but produced no children. The commentary on Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway’s cold marriage can be interpreted as commentary on Best’s marriage as well.

Needless to say, Best and Joyce were not on good terms in 1904 when Joyce left Dublin for good. Joyce had initially accosted Best as a way of making contacts in Dublin’s literary circles, much in the same way he had with Æ, hanging around the Library and getting to know Best and the other librarians. As with Æ, Joyce had quite a confrontational and critical approach with Best, which the librarian quickly tired of. Joyce sought out Best on his 1909 visit to Dublin, once again accosting him in an unplanned meeting at Bewley’s Cafe, ostensibly to study Best for his pending portrayal in Ulysses. Best found the encounter troubling and off-putting.

I don’t know how Joyce hoped Best might react to his portrayal in Ulysses, but my speculation is that he thought Best would have a laugh and enjoy being lampooned. After the novel was published, Joyce sent a copy to Best in Dublin, though Best claimed he never read it. It’s clear that Best was deeply insulted by his portrayal in Ulysses. He found Joyce’s portrayal degrading and chafed at being asked about it in a BBC interview in the 1940’s. In response to being asked about his appearance in Ulysses, he shot back:

“I am not a character in fiction. I am a living being.”

In private correspondence, Best opened up a bit more:

“People are entitled to criticise. I don’t object to that. But I object to being described as a fool. Joyce makes me say don’t you know all the time. I may say it sometimes… but I object to being described as a fool, don’t you know.”

It’s clear that Joyce’s portrayal wounded Best’s sense of pride. Best is certainly not portrayed in a dignified light in “Scylla and Charybdis”, but he is portrayed as a caricature of his actual attributes. The worst insults are the ones that contain at least some truth, and it seems this funhouse mirror version of Best offended him for decades. In fact, I think wounded pride may be the source of Joyce’s slight from the beginning. Young Joyce desperately wanted the approval of older men like Best, and at least in Best’s case, he failed to receive it. Best acknowledged later in life that he had discarded all of his correspondence with Joyce as he hadn’t expected the young man to amount to much. Perhaps this feeling came through in their interactions and Joyce, the master grudgeholder, exacted revenge in the way he knew best.

John Eglinton

The National Library of Ireland, November 2023

John Eglinton was the pen name of essayist and librarian William Kirkpatrick Magee. In 1904, along with his friend Fred Ryan, Eglinton founded a new literary journal called Dana. Eglinton was trying to make a name for himself as a writer, but had grown discontent with the dominant style of W.B. Yeats and the broader Celtic Revival. Yeats’ focus on folklore and the Irish language were of no interest to Eglinton, who felt “... a national drama or literature must spring from a native interest in life and its problems and a strong capacity for life among the people.” Additionally, Eglinton felt frustrated that the current wave in Irish literature was “to promote an artificial and sentimental unity in Irish life by carefully ignoring all those matters as to which Irishmen as thinking and unthinking being hold diverse opinions.”

Eglinton had a reputation as a solitary figure, frequently likened by his peers to American Transcendentalists like Henry David Thoreau or Ralph Waldo Emerson. George Moore described Eglinton as “a sort of lonely thorn tree” in his memoir, Hail and Farewell. Eglinton is hard to place within the usual factions of Dublin’s literary and political communities in those years. He was raised by a Presbyterian minister and grew to be an avid theosophist. He was strictly sober and celibate, and he disliked imagination, believing it interfered with reason. Yeats described Eglinton as “in permanent friendly opposition to our national literary movement.” Sinn Fein founder Arthur Griffith decried his “barbarous fetish of cosmopolitanism” as Eglinton was not sympathetic to Irish independence and moved permanently to Wales in 1923. Despite this, he founded Dana with Ryan in order to promote independent thought and was generally embraced by the Dublin literary scene. This curmudgeonly iconoclast and eventual exile, defiant of Yeats and Griffith, seems like an excellent role model and confidant for another irritable upstart who occasionally annoyed W.B. Yeats - a young James Joyce.

Our Young Artist consciously sought out Eglinton in his typical fashion: accosting him unexpectedly on the street and asking a series of intense philosophical questions. Eglinton was impressed with Joyce’s sharp wit, and though the two developed a mutual rapport, it’s hard to say they were ever truly friends. It’s at this point that Joyce and Gogarty’s toxic friendship reared its head once more. Though Joyce clearly sought Eglinton’s favor and was interested in Eglinton’s responses to his early poetry, his childish bullying impulses got the better of him. Joyce and Gogarty regularly mocked Eglinton’s temperance and celibacy, with Joyce even penning a rude limerick mocking Eglinton’s abstemious lifestyle:

There once was a Celtic librarian
Whose essays were voted Spencerian,
His name is Magee
But it seems that to me
He’s a flavour that’s more Presbyterian

Eglinton took this all in stride and was mocked as “stiff breeches” in return. Joyce’s brother Stanislaus held very little regard for Eglinton, describing in a letter how:

“Magee is a dwarfish, brown-clad fellow, with red-brown eyes like a ferret, who walks with his hands in his jacket pockets and as stiffly as if his knees were roped up with [hay ropes].”

Eglinton’s greatest sin in 1904 was rejecting a short story of Joyce’s for inclusion in Dana. Entitled “A Portrait of the Artist,” you can probably guess what it was eventually expanded into. Stanislaus’ unflattering description was attached to his recollection of Eglinton rejecting his brother’s work. Stanislaus elaborated:

“The paper… was rejected… because of the sexual experiences narrated in it…. Magee has an antipathy for Jim’s character, I think…. I think his mission in Ireland is to prove to his Protestant grandaunts that unbelievers can be very moral and admire the Bible. He is interested in great thoughts and philosophy, whenever he can understand it.”

Eglinton admitted later that he regretted rejecting this early version of Portrait, but at the time found Joyce’s short story “pompous and self-conscious”, feeling that it was “one of those works which becomes important only when the writer has done or written something else.” While we might be likely as Joyce fans to side with Stanislaus and defend our favorite writer, it’s worth remembering that Joyce himself went back and revised this story himself. I also think that Eglinton is correct about the final version of Portrait, which may have been forgotten in time if not for its connection to Ulysses.

To Eglinton’s credit as a literary tastemaker, he did publish Joyce’s poem “My love is in light attire” in Dana in August 1904. Joyce also demanded payment of a guinea for this contribution to literature and was reportedly one of the only contributors to successfully extract a payment from Eglinton. In turn, Joyce and Gogarty broke into the Dublin Hermetic Society one night in 1904 and vandalized the “yogibogeybox in Dawson chambers,” as it's described in “Scylla and Charybdis.” The gruesome twosome strung up a pair of ladies underwear and attached a note reading “I never did it,” attributed to John Eglinton. Æ was furious and blamed Joyce alone for the transgression. When Joyce and Gogarty’s friendship finally imploded, Joyce wound up storming out of the Martello Tower and walking back into central Dublin in the middle of the night. Joyce walked to the National Library where Eglinton found him, exhausted, soaked by rain and emotionally distraught, when he came to open the Library for the day. Eglinton recalled:

“... he seemed to wish for somebody to talk to, and related quite ingenuously how in the early hours of the morning he had been thrown out of the tower, and had walked from Sandycove.”

Eglinton fared better than Best in the pages of Ulysses. He is portrayed as prickly and argumentative, but sharp and well-read at the same time. He is never afraid to challenge Stephen and sticks to the topic at hand, adding to the discussion rather than diverting from it like the fictionalized Best. He’s the most interested in Stephen’s Hamlet theory, and Stephen is keenly aware of Eglinton’s “basilisk” eyes delivering judgment. Stephen is ultimately unable to sway Eglinton’s beliefs on Hamlet and Aristotle. Eglinton, unlike Best, Lyster or Æ, is able to deliver several clever remarks and is really the only one who can keep up with Stephen. Eglinton also gets in some sick burns against the triad of Celtic Revival boogeymen (Yeats, Best and Haines), such as quipping that “the peat smoke is going to [Haines’] head.” Let's be real - this is the real way into Stephen’s good graces.

Eglinton didn’t share Best’s revulsion at being portrayed in Ulysses. While Best maintained that the library scene depicted in “Scylla and Charybdis” was total fantasy, Eglinton pushed back, as quoted in de Vere’s article:

“‘I remember,’ he wrote to Best, ‘that in reading Ulysses, as I once had to do, I had a curious feeling that I had taken part in some sort of talk about Hamlet, though the setting of the discussion in the Library was quite fanciful.’”

Eglinton received far worse in terms of Joyce’s harassment than Best, it would seem, but Eglinton had thicker skin, or at least more patience for an immature young man trying to find his place in the world. He doesn’t seem to have taken Joyce’s obnoxious behavior personally as Best did, finding it in his heart to remember Joyce fondly:

“Withal, there was something lovable in Joyce, as there is in every man of genius: I sensed the mute appeal of his liquid-burning gaze, though it was long afterwards that I was constrained to recognise his genius.”

Who Were the Real Men in the Library from "Scylla and Charybdis"?

Richard Irvine Best

John Eglinton

Further Reading:

Poetry in Ulysses: Medical Dick and Medical Davy

Ulysses & The Odyssey: Scylla & Charybdis