Conversations with James Joyce by Power Arthur

Author:Power, Arthur [Arthur Power]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781843513094
Publisher: The Lilliput Press
Published: 2012-08-24T16:00:00+00:00

VII

Like everybody else Joyce was very interested in the Bywaters and Thompson case of which the English papers were full in December 1922, even The Times giving it a detailed report. Bywaters, a young ship’s steward, had known a Mrs Thompson for seven years and was always writing letters to her when he was away on his voyages, letters which she destroyed. But he kept hers, in which she suggested ways of poisoning her husband, letters which were produced at the trial, and which damned her.

Tragic though the whole affair was, it was not without its humorous side. Mrs Thompson used to get her husband up in the night to drink his ground-up electric light bulb. In one of her letters to Bywaters, read at the trial, she said: ‘I was buoyed up with hope of the light bulb and used a lot of big pieces … Would not the stuff make some small pills coated with soap, and dipped in liquorice, like Beecham … I know I feel I shall never get him to take a sufficient quantity of anything bitter.’ In another letter she said: ‘I used the light bulb three times. At the third time he found a piece so I have given it up until you come home.’

Bywaters was a fine clean-looking young man of whom I saw a photograph in the paper as he was being led into the Old Bailey, the detectives ushering him in with the exaggerated care of a mother for her only child, to judgment and death. I do not know why one has such pity for them, but I suppose it is because it is the age-old battle between youth and love against convention; though why they did not decide to run away together is hard to understand. It seems that she had a good job, and was afraid that if she ran away with Bywaters she would have had to live on his small pay, a fear which seems rather exaggerated, for in the first place she might not have lost her job; and in the second place, since she was such an efficient businesswoman she would probably have got another one without much difficulty. But evidently she made up her mind that in order to remain respectable she must have her husband die. Bywaters seems to have been a simple sort of boy, gallant and chivalrous, according to his behaviour at the trial, when he seemed anxious to take the blame and did all he could to protect her: an over-sexed and unbalanced young man completely under her influence, who during his voyage brooded over what she had written to him. Something of his state of mind can be gathered from his collection of newspaper cuttings, some of which she sent him and others of which he had collected himself, cuttings such as: ‘The Poisoned Curate’, ‘Women who Hate Men’, ‘The Battle of the Calves and Ankles’, ‘Chicken Broth Death’, ‘The Shadow Marriages’, and so forth. No doubt he would have been willing to run away with her, but she insisted on murder.

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