James joyce, p.10
James Joyce, page 10
The nomination of candidates took place on 31 March at Green Street Courthouse, under conditions, lamented the Irish Times, ‘which deprived the proceedings of every feature of that excitement which was inseparable from nominations previous to the passing of the Ballot Act.’54 The poll and count took place on 5 April. At five o’clock the returning officers conveyed the ballot boxes to the Exhibition Palace, constructed on a part of what would later be converted to examination halls for the Royal University of Ireland, and would ultimately become the Iveagh Gardens. There the count got under way a couple of hours later. The nineteen tables were arranged in the small Alexandra Concert Hall. John Stanislaus Joyce had four men at each table, as he recalled to the journalist whom his son sent to interview him in the late 1920s:
I didn’t at all expect that we would get the two members in—I would have been satisfied if I got Brooks in but I didn’t at all expect that Lyons would get in. In the end towards the end of the count I got the rough figures and I totted them up two or three times and by Gor what was but I knew the two were returned! This was the hell of a thing for me. Our solicitor, Stephen Sheehan, a tremendous big man, he was over at a table and says I, ‘By Gor our men are in, Stephen—not one but the two of them’. Who should be sitting next to me but Sir Arthur Guinness and his cousin the Hon. David Plunkett, and the two were in evening dress. He lived at the time in Stephens Green; at the north side of it he had a house, his brother Lord Iveagh has it now. Sir Arthur asked me ‘Have you got the figures?’ ‘I have, Sir Arthur’, I replied, and he asked me how did it go. I then had the pleasure of telling Sir Arthur Guinness that he was no longer a member and I said that Maurice Brooks got so much and Lyons so much.55
Outside the count, a crowd had begun to assemble in the enclosure in front of the Exhibition Palace, ‘and it gradually assumed enormous proportions, the entire space being filled with a surging mob. It was computed that between ten and eleven o’clock there could not have been less than thirty thousand persons assembled opposite the building. There was a great deal of rough horse-play, but on the whole the people behaved with commendable good humour, and amused themselves principally by cheering or groaning for the respective candidates.’56 After he knew the result, but before the declaration of the poll, John Stanislaus Joyce left the building into the throng, sustained by his friend ‘the Baby Policeman’, who was six feet, five inches tall: ‘When I found we had the election won, I was going out but there was a great crush at the door. When the people heard the news there was the devil’s shouting and cheering.… Gallagher of the Freeman’s Journal got hold of me, when I pushed my way through the door, to get the figures.’57 This was the semi-legendary Ignatius (Fred) Gallaher who was to feature in ‘A Little Cloud’ in Dubliners, and in Ulysses. Gallaher wrote in his report for the Freeman,
About twelve o’clock a double line of police was formed from the door of the concert room to the outer door, so as to secure the passage for the High Sheriff. The scene presented was unique and unlike any declaration of the poll witnessed in this city within the memory of the oldest inhabitant. Cheers were still given for the different candidates, and there were occasional bursts of Kentish fire, which were hissed. At the last the intelligence was brought out by a gentleman on whose statements dependence could be placed, that the poll was headed by Mr. Maurice Brooks and Dr. Lyons, and that Sir Arthur Guinness was no longer member for the city. As this rumour spread it gave rise to fresh bursts of cheering.58
The ‘gentleman on whose statements dependence could be placed’ was John Stanislaus Joyce. While he could not be named because of the official secrecy of the count before the poll was declared, it was a winking acknowledgement of a source in the Dublin manner. This and a similar report in the Unionist Daily Express were the only, innominate references to John Stanislaus Joyce in the press coverage of the Dublin elections.59 John Stanislaus was the bearer of the glad tidings of the Liberal triumph. Two hours were consumed in the consideration of the large number of objections to voting papers. The official declaration of the poll came at 3.25 in the morning:
Brooks 5,763
Lyons 5,647
Guinness 5,446
Stirling 5,03960
The Conservatives had contrived to lose both the Dublin city seats. The secretary of the United Liberal Club had departed long before, proceeding from the office of the Freeman’s Journal to the Oval Bar on Abbey Street. As John Stanislaus Joyce recalled,
I had not taken a drink of any kind during the election—a whole fortnight—and I would not have one for God Almighty if he had come down especially from the Heavens. A car drove up and all around about there was shouting and cheering for the victors at that hour of the morning. My God it was three o’clock in the morning and the excitement was great and I was the hero of it all because they said that it was I that won the election.… We all went in and by God Almighty such drinking of champagne I never saw in my life. We could not wait to draw the corks, we slapped them against the marble-topped counter. The result was we were there drinking for about three hours and when we came out the question was what were we going to do at that hour of the morning. The Turkish Baths came into my mind and there I went after having any God’s quantity of champagne. Oh dear, dear, God, those were great times.61
It was exhilarating stuff. He remembered, ‘I was the cock of the walk that day and I will never forget it; I was complimented by everybody. I got one hundred guineas from each of the members’.62 In his account there was a telling slip. He said, ‘I was only twenty-two years old at the time.’63 He was thirty.
It was a famous triumph. The Freeman’s Journal, still clinging to a Home Rule Liberalism—what it referred to as ‘the patriotic union of the Liberal and Home Rule Party’64—but wary of challenging Parnell, exulted that ‘for the first time in its history Dublin has been completely rescued from the octopus-like grasp of the Tories, and has risen to its natural place as leader of the Liberal Party in Ireland’.65 The diehard Tory Dublin Evening Mail noted that the majority was small, but any majority at all was ‘a lamentable disgrace to the city’, and ‘the lowering of the franchise has added some eleven or twelve hundred voters to the electoral roll—a vast preponderance of whom are semi-paupers—a proletariat class, who are as destitute of the sense of public obligation as they are of proprietary stake in its prosperity, and who entirely outvote the respectable minority in Dublin and in Ireland generally.’66
‘Nothing that ingenuity could devise or energy accomplish has been left undone by the Liberal party to secure a victory’, the Irish Times wrote on the day of the poll. ‘Their battalions advance to the conflict with high boast and hope. The canvass on behalf of Messrs Brooks and Lyons has been carried on by hundreds of willing volunteers’.67 The Freeman’s Journal credited the United Liberal Club with the Liberal triumph in the city of Dublin.68 John Stanislaus Joyce was certainly entitled to a share of the credit, though his later boast that ‘I won the election in Dublin and I was the man that put in Maurice Brooks and Lyons, and put out Arthur Guinness … and of course Stirling’,69 was a gross, if pardonable, exaggeration. His name was not once published in the reporting of the election. This was not surprising: however significant his contribution, he was a figure in the background, whose role lay in directing the canvass on the ground. He was moreover a paid employee; he would never be one of the urban grandees such as John O’Hagan or Sergeant Hemphill who assented to the nomination of the Liberal candidates. The gratuity of £100 paid by each of the elected members served to underscore his status as a transient functionary, of whose personal services the successful candidates showed monetarily their appreciation.
On the day of the poll, the conservative Irish Times, sensing the tightness of the contest, had sought ingeniously to sway nationalist voters against the candidacy of Lyons, who did not profess to be a supporter of Home Rule in evoking Parnell’s attack on Nicholas Dan Murphy, the Liberal candidate in the Cork city constituency which Parnell was contesting. ‘The leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party assails the Whig with great vehemence, and states in plain terms that he would prefer that the Tory in Cork was returned to the Whig-Liberal’. Parnell was presaging a more active policy against what was clearly going to be a Liberal administration. The paper could ‘well understand the process of reasoning by which Mr. Parnell is influenced, and the game in its new form which requires that he should make the Liberals feel the strength of his hand’.70
Parnell did not campaign in the city of Dublin election and gave no direction to his supporters. Had he wished to, he could not have appeared to oppose Maurice Brooks, who was a member of the Irish Party. There was no love lost between Parnell and Brooks. When the Irish Party met in City Hall on 17 May 1880, it was Brooks who proposed the election of the tepidly pro–Home Rule banker William Shaw, the incumbent, as chairman, who lost eighteen to twenty-three to Parnell.71 Brooks was among the ‘intransigent Whigs’ who seceded with Shaw from the Irish Party in January 1881.72 Neither Brooks nor Lyons contested the general election of 1885, in which the Parnellite candidates on an enlarged franchise swept the four seats of the reconfigured Dublin city constituencies. The United Liberal Club seems to have faded away.73
Joyce became increasingly proud of his father’s role and prepared to take his father’s claims at face value. Explaining to Harriet Shaw Weaver about the Guinnesses in early 1925, he wrote that ‘Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness had two sons, lord Ardilaun and lord Iveagh. My father unseated the former for Dublin city. No conservative was ever returned after.’74 Joyce made two identified allusions to the Dublin city election in Finnegans Wake. Both convey the incrementalism of the political advance that the election marked, and its transitoriness. They also play on the commercial affiliations of Guinness and Stirling. The first had an evocation of the turf: ‘Though since then stirlings and guineas have been replaced by brooks and lions and some progress has been made on stilts and the races have come and gone and Thyme, that chief of seasoners, has made his usual astewte use of endadjustables and whatnot willbe isnor was.’75
In the second, Joyce wrote, ‘The grinning statesmen, Brock and Leon, have shunned the grumbling coundedouts, Sterlin and Sur Artur Ghinis’, with the marginal note on the right side, ‘PANOPTICAL PURVIEW OF POLITICAL PROGRESS AND THE FUTURE PRESENTATION OF THE PAST’.76 In the imagery that tends towards the heraldic, there is perhaps a humorous suggestion of an added motif to adorn his father’s escutcheon. The election prematurely belonged to an antique past.
The Fortunes of John Stanislaus Joyce
His role in the Dublin city election certainly did not in itself compromise John Stanislaus Joyce in the emerging Parnellite dispensation. The United Liberal Club was pro–Home Rule, and the result makes it certain that enfranchised supporters of Parnell in Dublin in 1880 voted for the Liberals, if only out of the deep-rooted hatred of Tory ascendancy in the city. If, however, John Stanislaus hoped for preferment from the Parnellites, he needed to take steps to align himself closely with the Parnellite organisation. This he did not do. Drifting into Parnellite allegiance with the vast majority of his Catholic fellow countrymen would not have sufficed. His position was formally constrained by the fact that he took up official employment within two years, but he did not seem driven by strong political conviction, or interest. Engagement in Irish politics required a steady commitment and a high boredom threshold in the long intervals between moments of political excitement, of which the Parnell Split was an instance of unusual duration. John Stanislaus was deficient in both capacities. It does not seem that he was constrained other than by decorum from political involvement by reason of his employment in the Collector-General’s Office. He was not a civil servant, though he and his colleagues liked to regard themselves as such rather than as collecting agents for Dublin Corporation and the other authorities striking rates for the county and city of Dublin.77
That he continued to boast of his role in the Liberal victory in Dublin in 1880 after the Parnellite sweep of the city in 1885 suggests a certain deafness to ambition. However vast and wide-ranging his conversational appetites, he seemed somehow disengaged from and impatient with modern Irish politics. He also lacked the substance and standing to have maintainable political ambitions. These he might conceivably have earned, but there is little to suggest that he had the capacity to do so in the cruelly efficient world of Parnellite politics. Stanislaus Joyce wrote in the wake of the Dublin city election, which took place almost four years before his birth, that ‘there was even some talk of his standing for a constituency, for he had a glib tongue and had been among the first to greet the rising star of Parnell’.78 There was little prospect of John Stanislaus having a parliamentary career, and he was tardy in greeting Parnell’s rising star, if he ever actually did so with any particular conviction. The fierce professional discipline of the Parnellite machine was scarcely his thing. He had personal relations of varying intensity with prominent Parnellites, with John Kelly, Valentine Blake Dillon, Tim Harrington, and John Clancy, but those relations were primarily social. He had also some Fenian friends, and his circle of relations was gregariously wide. He almost certainly became, with Parnell’s rise to electoral supremacy—which was not fully consummated until the general election of 1885—someone who sympathised with Parnell, but up until the Split he was passive in his support of the Irish leader. There is little to suggest that he had an active sense of political disappointment; yet somehow the coinciding of the rising fortunes of Parnell’s adherents in Dublin with his own deteriorating finances—which remained masked through the 1880s—cast a light on a discrepancy of outcomes of which he could scarcely have been unconscious. There was a long descent from the ‘great times’ of the Dublin city election of 1880 which, as his career fell apart, became the emblem of his vanished hopes of advancement. The idea that John Stanislaus’s deteriorating finances and loss of office in 1893 rendered him ‘now quite out of the running in the political life of the city’79 is an absurdity: he was never, at any point, in the running.
In 1880 John Stanislaus met and began a relationship with Mary Jane (May) Murray. She was the daughter of John Murray, a wine and spirit agent from Longford and proprietor of the Eagle Tavern in Terenure, and Margaret Theresa Flynn, who came from a musical family.80 Trained by her Flynn aunts, May was a fine pianist and had a good singing voice. John Murray opposed the match. John Stanislaus, an expert nurser of insults, never forgave him, and extended his anathema to John Murray’s two sons. His hatred of May’s line inspired his recurrent maledictions. In Stephen Hero Joyce wrote that Stephen’s mother, for all her unstinted loyalty to her husband, ‘had never been able to expiate the offence of her blood.… Mr. Daedalus hated his wife’s maiden name with a medieval intensity: it stunk in his nostrils’81. Joyce, in 1934, wrote to his son Giorgio and daughter-in-law, Helen, on the subject of Irish fairies, more malignant than the English, ‘The feminine of fairy is bean sidhe = banshee. She is a sinister spirit who follows further certain Irish families. My father said she followed his mother’s family the O’Connells.’82
John Stanislaus’s own mother, Ellen, also opposed the match, and when the marriage took place she went back to Cork. He never saw her again, and she died at Sunday’s Wells the following year.83 Her departure and demise marked a severance with his Cork past, even before the eventual loss of his Cork properties, and drove his identification with Cork further back in time.
May Joyce, for all the pious meekness frequently imputed to her, flouted her father’s wishes by continuing her relationship with John Stanislaus. The marriage took place in the Church of Our Immaculate Lady of Refuge, Rathmines, on 5 May 1880. The first child of the marriage, named John Augustine, was born on 23 November 1880, but died after a few days. The second, James Augustine Joyce, was born on 2 February 1882, the feast of Candlemas, at 41 Brighton Square West, in Rathgar.
By the time of the birth of James Joyce, the financial prospects of John Stanislaus had picked up and fleetingly appeared quite promising. On his mother’s death on 27 June 1881, he had become the owner of six properties in Cork.84 By that time, in what was probably a pay-off for his work in the Dublin city election, if one that still involved a prodigious amount of lobbying, he was nominated by the Liberal Lord Lieutenant, Lord Cowper, to fill a position as one of twelve rate collectors (‘apostles’) in the Office of the Collector-General of Rates for Dublin city and council office in March 1881 at a salary of £500 a year. He nevertheless managed to fail the not especially demanding qualifying examination in April; re-nominated, he passed in July. He entered the Office of the Collector-General at 43 Fleet Street in January 1882,85 a month before the birth of James. Emboldened by the prospect of a substantial official salary, on 2 December 1881 he made the first mortgage of his Cork properties. It was an ill-omened venture; other mortgages ensued, so that there were eleven in total, the pace of their creation picking up in the final years from 1892 to 1894.86 He was incapable of living within his means, which between his quite substantial salary and his rental income ought to have sufficed to sustain him and his proliferating offspring, four boys and six girls, born between 1882 and 1893. His expansive conception of the role of a Dublin gentleman, which extended to the generous benefaction of others, and indulgent provider for his household was not proportioned to the resources that were available to him. His drinking was both an effect of that disparity and an aggravation of it.
FIGURE 2.1. John Stanislaus Joyce, May Joyce, her father John Murray, and James Joyce, aged six, 1888. Source: 1.13, LIB-PC004, James Joyce Collection, The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York.
He had an extraordinarily wide circle of acquaintanceship in Dublin. If he was tragically burdened by his aspirations, and alert to social gradation, he was abidingly democratic in his social relations and beguilingly indifferent to the snobbery that attended the consolidation of the Dublin Catholic middle class in the 1880s. That paradox was an aspect of his nonconformity, and it would come to inform the social reach of Ulysses. His social life had two parts: the formal and semi-public social life he conducted with his wife, and his life roaming the commercial premises and bars of the city. James Joyce borrowed much of the social life of his parents to create the narrative of the marriage of Leopold and Marion Bloom in Ulysses.
