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3 6 6 J A M E S I 1914 ]in Two Gallants/ when he is depicted accurately as longing to marry arich girl. For this purpose Hart paid court for a time to the daughter ofJoseph Nagle, one of the three brothers who kept a big public house inEarl Street; but nothing came of it. He knew a great deal about racingand was fond of writing doggerel; his greatest day was that, still recalledby Dubliners, when he 'tipped the double' in verse; that is, he predictedthe winners of both the Lincolnshire Handicap and the Grand NationalSteeplechase.Not long after this triumph he went downhill, and spent his later daysin 'knocking around on the hard.' He continued to write verse; Joycegives one of his successful productions, a limerick, in the Aeolus episode.*Yet, as if to belie his reincarnation Ulysses, Joyce includes MichaelHart in a list of Bloom's friends who are now dead.Joyce's surface naturalism in Ulysses has many intricate supports, andone of the most interesting is the blurred margin. He introduces muchmaterial which he does not intend to explain, so that his book, like life,gives the impression of having many threads that one cannot follow. Forexample, on the way to the funeral, the mourners catch sight of ReubenJ. Dodd, and Mr. Dedalus says, 'The devil break the hasp of your back.'This reaction seems a little excessive unless we know that Dodd had lentmoney to Joyce's father, and that the subsequent exactions were the efficientcause of Mr. Dedalus's irritation. In the Circe episode Mulligansays, 'Mulligan meets the afflicted mother,' a remark based upon a storycurrent in Dublin that Gogarty, returning home late one night duringhis medical course, staggered up the steps of his home on Rutland Square,reciting a station of the Cross at each step until, as he reached the top ofthe stairs and his worried mother opened the door, he concluded, 'Gogartymeets the afflicted mother.' Stephen's allusions to 'The Tinahelytwelve' and 'Cranly's eleven true Wicklowmen to free their sireland' refer* Most of Hart's poems had to do with attempts to get money and credit; one was entitled,'On Looking for the Loan of a Tanner [sixpence]'; another dealt with his effort to obtaina pint of stout at Darden's Public House:One day I asked a pint on tickFrom Mr. Darden, whoIn lordly accents told me'Twas a thing he didn't do.In Fanning's I owed threepence,In Bergin's one and four,In McGuire's only sixpenceFor they wouldn't give me more.When makes* is gone and nothing's leftTo shove into the pawn,I ramble up to Stephen's GreenAnd gaze on Ardilaun.t("Makes are halfpence. \Ardilaun is the statue of a member of the Guinness family,who made porter.)

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