James joyce, p.1
James Joyce, page 1
JAMES JOYCE
James Joyce
A POLITICAL LIFE
FRANK CALLANAN
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON & OXFORD
Copyright © 2026 by Frank Callanan
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Editorial: Ben Tate, Josh Drake
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Jacket image: Courtesy of the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York
—O, don’t ask me such questions, Madden. You can use these phrases of the platform but I can’t.
—But surely you have some political opinions, man!
—I am going to think them out. I am an artist, don’t you see? … How the devil can you expect me to settle everything all at once? Give me time.
JAMES JOYCE, STEPHEN HERO
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations ix
Foreword xi
Editors’ Preface xxiii
Acknowledgements xxix
Abbreviations xxxi
PART I. IRELAND 1
Introduction 3
1 The Shade of Parnell 17
2 John Stanislaus Joyce 44
3 Four Friends of the Father 113
4 The ‘Dead King’ 152
5 ‘Christ and Caesar’: The Origins of Joyce’s Thesis of the ‘Two Masters’ 195
6 Joyce in University College, Dublin 256
7 Four Friends from University College 287
8 ‘The Language of the Outlaw’ 354
9 Moving towards Exile: Encountering Literary and Radical Dublin, 1902–4 399
PART II. EXILE 473
Introduction 475
10 The Politics of Stephen Hero 483
11 ‘Professing to be a Socialist’ 510
12 Writing Dubliners in Exile 542
13 Reading Ireland from Exile 590
14 The Triestine Joyce 630
15 Joyce’s Triestine Lectures and Articles, 1907–10 662
16 Exile Affirmed 712
17 ‘The Society of Jewses’: Gestating Bloom 766
18 Passing into Silence 810
Coda 849
Bibliography of Secondary Sources 853
Index 871
ILLUSTRATIONS
1.1. Charles Stewart Parnell
1.2. Timothy Michael Healy
2.1. John Stanislaus Joyce, May Joyce, her father John Murray, and James Joyce, aged six
2.2. Joyce coat of arms
2.3. Portrait of John Stanislaus Joyce by Patrick Tuohy
6.1. University College, Dublin graduation class 1902
7.1. Francis and Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington
7.2. Thomas Michael Kettle
7.3. James Joyce and college friends George Clancy and John Francis Byrne, 1900–1901
7.4. John Francis Byrne
8.1. Sketch of John Francis Taylor by James Walker
9.1. Arthur Griffith
11.1. Guglielmo Ferrero
14.1. Ettore Schmitz (Italo Svevo)
14.2. Silvio Benco
15.1. Myles Joyce
16.1. Giorgio and Lucia Joyce, with kitten, in Trieste, about 1910
16.2. ‘The Shade of Parnell’, Sinn Féin, 15 January 1910
17.1. Synagogue of Trieste
17.2. James Joyce’s sketch of Leopold Bloom
18.1. Joyce with guitar in Zurich
FOREWORD
Robert Spoo
‘… but hunt me the journeyon, iteritinerant, the kal his course, amid the semitary of Somnionia.’1
THESE STRANGE, reverberant words from Book IV of James Joyce’s last work, Finnegans Wake, haunt and hunt through the pages of Frank Callanan’s James Joyce: A Political Life as a knelling doom and a recurring promise. The doom relates to the tragedy that befell the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, Charles Stewart Parnell (1846–1891), when, on what had seemed the verge of a consummated Irish Home Rule bill, revelations of his years-long affair with a married woman, Katharine O’Shea, split the Irish party and unleashed a remorseless political hunting that hastened the deposed leader’s death (one meaning of ‘hunt me … amid the semitary’). The promise relates to Callanan’s intention to probe fully the Parnellian themes and motifs of Finnegans Wake and thereby link up the birth of Joyce’s political consciousness in 1890s Ireland with its full maturation in the war-menaced Europe of the late 1930s. Though tantalising elucidations of the Wake appear throughout this volume, and there is a moving analysis of the ‘hunt me’ passage in its Coda, Callanan’s own untimely death prevented him from completing Joyce’s political biography as he had envisioned it. Yet he left behind this large, luminous work, which takes the story from Joyce’s early Dublin years up to his departure from Trieste in 1915. And unfinished though it is, this book is quite simply the most penetrating and eloquent account of Joyce’s politics that has ever been published.2
I first met Frank Callanan when his friend, the Irish Supreme Court Justice Adrian Hardiman, put together a lunch for the three of us at the Lord Edward in Christchurch Place, Dublin, in 2007. I had met Justice Hardiman a few days earlier, aware of his reputation as an eminent judge and barrister, but I was surprised to learn that he was also a Joyce scholar; he in his turn knew that I was a Joyce scholar but was surprised to discover that I was also a lawyer. Hardiman and Callanan had both taken degrees in history at University College Dublin before preparing for the law. When I met him, Callanan, a barrister and senior counsel, had already written a much-admired history of the hounding of Parnell by political and religious forces (The Parnell Split, 1890–91) and a provocative biography of Timothy Michael Healy (1855–1931), the supporter of Parnell who turned against him in the party Split and became one of the masters of the hunt that brought him down.3 Our triangulated lunch in 2007 was a leisurely, talk-filled affair, spirited in all senses, in that large upper room of the Lord Edward with its great bay windows. Law, politics, history, Joyce—these and other themes wound in and out. Justice Hardiman’s bright baritone cut through the dim air, learned, witty, with cadenzas of mimicry of politicians and lawyers. Callanan’s lower, slower voice parried with carefully chosen ironies and unhurried judgements. It was a three-hour lunch to remember.
This was shortly before Callanan began publishing his articles on Joyce that would grow into the present volume, so I was not fully aware at the time of the depth of his Joycean engagement. I knew that Justice Hardiman was assembling a volume that would become Joyce in Court: James Joyce and the Law, published posthumously as an uncompleted project with the assistance of Luca Crispi, who is also among the preparers of the present volume. Hardiman’s book follows law in its various forms through Joyce’s life and writings—thus both Joyce in court and the court in Joyce—and argues that history, law, and the evidentiary problems that attend both as truth-seeking apparatuses are critical for understanding him. Joyce in Court contends that the Irish author was profoundly ‘sceptical about the motives and practices of society’s enforcers, uniformed or otherwise’, and that this scepticism was ‘rooted in his concrete experiences as a very young man and in his heritage of historical memory’.4 Among the events that Hardiman identifies as shaking the young Joyce’s confidence in a solid world of fact and fairness was the persecution of Parnell and the subsequent failure of parliamentary politics as a conduit of Irish independence. The long political futility that followed the 1890 Split gave ‘past events’, Hardiman argues, ‘a personal, social and political resonance in Ireland which time would have eroded anywhere else’.5 Both Callanan and Hardiman locate in the Parnell calamity a for mative disturbance that contributed to Joyce’s later sceptical, anti-teleological engrossment with themes of incompleteness, betrayal, doubt, and political and social injustice.
No one was better qualified than Callanan to write of the political wounding and awakening that Joyce experienced as a boy of eight or nine years when Parnell was toppled from power. Callanan asks a question that is rarely asked about writers in quite this way: What was the primal scene that hurt Joyce into politics? His answer, richly unfolding through the pages of this book, is that the young Joyce’s intellectual precocity, his unusual alertness to injustice, and the complex patterns of his home life made him peculiarly receptive to the Parnell Split and its precipitated result. This is no simplistically assigned cause but rather a careful tracing of a rare political sensibility in the shaping contexts of biography, history, and literary self-representation. Yet, for all the details he assembles, Callanan never loses sight of the unique trauma inflicted by Parnell’s fall. The effect of the Dreyfus Affair on Marcel Proust is not comparable, because Proust was in his twenties when Alfred Dreyfus was wrongfully convicted and sentenced to imprisonment on Devil’s Island. In 1890–91, Joyce was closer to the age of the young protagonist of À la recherche du temps perdu, for whom a mother’s withheld goodnight kiss has ‘staggering consequences’,6 not unlike the aftershocks Callanan locates (though in a political register) in Joyce’s personal and textual revisitations of the Parnell Affair.
There is something Proustian in the opulent architecture of Callanan’s account of Joyce, as well as in his story of the young Irishman’s search for lost political time. ‘The depth and directness of the impact of the Split on Joyce as a child’, writes Callanan, ‘was unusual and left him with a sense of temporality different from that of his contemporaries’.7 Yet it was not a mother’s withheld affection but a father’s uninhibited political passion that figured in Joyce’s Parnellian initiation. Dissenting from other scholars, Callanan argues that John Stanislaus Joyce had not been an active supporter of Parnell until the Split stimulated his ardent sympathy for the embattled leader. This impulsive political gallantry affected his young son deeply, Callanan contends, and is registered directly in the Christmas dinner feud over the recently deceased Parnell in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and, less directly, in Finnegans Wake’s themes of fall and redemption that pay distant homage to John Stanislaus’s brief rise to political heroism. Callanan offers a startlingly original interpretation of Joyce’s father that is attentive to that figure’s remarkable composition: Fenian anticlericalism, humorous sentimentality, restless sociability, a faintly archaic remoteness from the Irish nationalism of his moment. The political eccentricity of John Stanislaus reasserted itself in his son’s untimely political temporality, his ‘recusant Parnellism’.8 Yet the father’s sudden Parnellite intensity burned less visibly in the son’s brooding allegiance.
Callanan is too theoretically restrained to invoke concepts such as primal scene, family romance, or any overt Freudianism in describing the young Joyce’s exposure to the fall of Parnell. Yet we may accept Callanan’s subtle invitation to consider the psychological impact of politics, as well as his careful rehabilitation of a practice—perhaps too hastily discredited by Hugh Kenner and other critics9—of looking to Joyce’s fictions as qualified resources for recovering elements of his life. The core transgressions of which Parnell was vociferously accused were adultery, debauchery, and theft of public funds; his opponents—especially Healy—were savage in their taunting denunciations and their threats to repeat them wherever Parnell showed himself in public.10 In A Portrait, the young Stephen Dedalus is exposed to this scandal talk during the political detonations of his home life; and when he returns to school after the Christmas holiday, he hears more scandal when rumours circulate that the misdeeds of certain boys—homosexual petting and theft of cash are hinted—are causing the priests of the school to impose a harsh, punitive discipline on the entire student body.11 When Stephen himself is unfairly punished by one of the Jesuit masters, he takes his complaint to the school’s rector and obtains a measure of justice. Though his victory is a personal one, it is also, in its way, a heroic blow struck for all his schoolfellows, who cheer him when he comes from the rector’s office.12 The cluster of motifs—charges of sexual indiscretion and theft, priestly interference, generalised injustice—suggests that Stephen has been unconsciously emulating his father’s anticlerical Parnellism and avenging the dead leader’s victimisation, perhaps even becoming a local Parnell leading his fellows out of the priest-ridden house of bondage. Such a reading is consonant with Callanan’s tracing of the familial and psychological roots of Joyce’s own early Parnellism.
Callanan notices something that has escaped many scholars: the slow, patient intentness with which Joyce absorbed the Irish political scene as a young man. This was Joyce’s ‘induction into the Irish political’.13 The word ‘induction’, appearing several times in this book, suggests something formal, almost ceremonial, in the political development of Joyce, a candidacy for which he carefully prepared himself. Callanan offers other formulations for this process: Joyce’s ‘acquisition of a fealty to Parnell as a boy’; his ‘early engagement with the Split’; his ‘slow filtration of the political’.14 Joyce’s self-conscious political formation contributed to his enigmatic manner at University College Dublin and to the silence and cunning of his voluntary exile on the Continent a few years later. This political incrementalism contrasted with the spasmodic commitments of others. ‘I distrust all enthusiasms’, the young Joyce remarked of Irish nationalist fervour.15 Politics should be compared and correlated before being internalised. ‘By thinking of things you could understand them’, concludes the young Stephen Dedalus.16 Years later, working as a temporary and reluctant teacher, Stephen calls himself a ‘learner rather’ who distrusts ‘those big words … which make us so unhappy’.17
Parnell remained a potent though latent idea for the young Joyce: ‘His Parnellism as an active principle was in abeyance’, Callanan notes, ‘and he veiled the intensity of his imaginative engagement with Parnell’.18 So we might add ‘incubation’ to ‘induction’ in describing Joyce’s acquired political thought. His scrutiny of Italian politics from his vantage in Trieste—socialism, revolutionary syndicalism, anarchism, irredentism—exhibited an almost Thomistic fastidiousness of purpose and organisation. He was never apolitical, according to Callanan, even when he seemed to have removed himself to regions of artistic independence. After his politically charged journalism and lecturing of 1907–12, Joyce’s political reticence was the ‘codification of a principle of authorial extra-textual silence’.19 ‘Extratextual’ is the key word here, for the texts from A Portrait to Finnegans Wake engage and contest the political again and again, even as they render Parnell more and more obliquely, as an inhabitant of popular imagination rather than a historical figure.
This obliqueness was critical for Joyce’s return to Parnell in his fictions. He had ‘resolved’, Callanan writes, ‘not to portray Parnell directly but to catch him in the mirror of his myth in contemporary Ireland’, ‘taking his cue from public invocations of Parnell’s memory’.20 Thus, the Parnell that Joyce rendered was a residue in the devout popular mind, a figure both cultic and Celtic. This strategic indirection, this avoidance of a frontal presentation, curiously allowed Joyce to rediscover an intimacy with a figure that had long been submerged in the latency of his political novitiate. Parnell could now be approached in the sunlight, but it would be his long shadow that Joyce would depict, a shadow in the double sense of ghost and trace. (‘L’ombra di Parnell’, translated as ‘The Shade of Parnell’, is the title of a 1912 article that Joyce wrote for a Triestine newspaper.)21 Though he was suspicious of features of the Parnell cult that were ‘funerary’ and ‘morbidly exorbitant’,22 he rendered these, too, in his fictions: in the poignant doggerel of Joe Hynes’s poem ‘The Death of Parnell’ in ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’; and in the myth of Parnell’s empty grave and expected return, as glimpsed in the ‘Hades’ and ‘Eumaeus’ episodes of Ulysses. These lugubrious imaginings were part of the received Parnell and so were entitled to inclusion among Joyce’s textual voices.
