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Kiernan’s, where Bloom is conversing with them in the
meantime. Before he squanders the “[s]weat of [his] brow”
(244), we observe him working in “Hades”: he attends
Dignam’s funeral and takes the names of the mourners. The
account of the funeral published in the
Evening Telegraph
that
Bloom reads in “Eumaeus” is shot through with errors:
Bloom’s name is stated as L. Boom, the name of the person in a
mackintosh is jotted down as M’Intosh, and M’Coy and
Stephen, who never showed up to the obsequies, are curiously
listed among the mourners (529). “L. Boom” could be a
misprint, an error not imputable to the reporter, and M’Coy
was said to be present because Bloom, at the absentee’s request,
asked Hynes to include the name; nevertheless, the mistakes
about the mysterious M’Intosh and Stephen could simply be
ascribed to carelessness or indifference. Hynes may be as clever
with the pen as O’Connor claims, yet he can hardly be called a
qualified or committed journalist: he works for a living, not
because he feels called to the vocation. Hynes may be more
politically consistent than many Dubliners; as Joyce’s depiction
reveals, however, he is as inadequate as the other journalists.
Despite Hynes’s problematic account of the funeral, he at
least does his work on 16 June 1904, yet we hardly see
Lenehan work as a journalist.
11
A sports reporter for the
Freeman
-affiliated
Sport
, Lenehan also makes his first
appearance in
Dubliners
, where he is portrayed as an idling,
unashamed, and inveterate sponger:
Most people considered Lenehan a leech . . . He
was a sporting vagrant armed with a vast stock of
stories, limericks and riddles. He was insensitive to
all kinds of discourtesy. No one knew how he
11
Joyce borrows the name from a reporter on the
Irish Times
and the
personality from a friend of his father who worked for the racing paper,
Sport
. For the sponger who inspires Joyce’s creation of his character, see
Ellmann (1982: 365-366).