James joyce, p.12
James Joyce, page 12
That John Stanislaus Joyce was an ardent Parnellite in the Split is incontrovertible. It is attested to by Stanislaus Joyce and is a premise of Joyce’s fictional renderings of his father. It is consistent with the father’s friendship with John Kelly, renowned as the most disinterested of the grief-stricken adherents of the dead leader. It is also a matter of record in that John Stanislaus Joyce was admonished for having pleaded illness to campaign in the Parnellite interest in Cork at the general election of 1892.113
Ellmann includes an account of an intervention by John Stanislaus Joyce at the Leinster Hall meeting of 20 November 1890. The timing of the meeting is important. It occurred after the divorce decree and before Gladstone’s repudiation of Parnell. The meeting was a famous occasion because it marked the initial rallying of the Irish Party to Parnell, and Timothy Michael Healy’s ringing if almost imperceptibly qualified endorsement of the leader, which he was never to be permitted to forget. Ellmann refers to ‘a meeting at the Leinster Hall’ and does not quite appreciate the significance of the Leinster Hall meeting of 20 November 1890,114 not least in its sequence in the chronology of the Split. According to Ellmann, John Stanislaus cried out in the course of Healy’s speech, ‘You’re an imposter! You’re only waiting for the moment to betray him’,115 and then had to be forcibly removed.
John Stanislaus’s biographers go the lengths of identifying remarks made by Healy in his speech as a ‘skilfully obtuse’ riposte to John Stanislaus’s intervention. In their account, Healy treated the intervention as a call for Parnell’s retirement, thereby further infuriating John Stanislaus and prompting a further exchange before ‘officials were forced to drag him from the auditorium, still protesting loudly’. Such elaboration is a travesty of history. Healy’s supposed retort to John Stanislaus was addressed not to a heckler present in the hall but to the absent Michael Davitt, who had already, through his Labour World, called for Parnell’s retirement,116 and it was immediately understood as such. The account is a means of inserting John Stanislaus into the public narrative of the Split and a measure of the frustration of his biographers: the name of John Stanislaus Joyce features in the Irish press initially as a performer in concerts or dramatic recitals, and latterly principally as a person attending the funerals of politically prominent friends. They seek to bolster their narrative by stating that ‘the dramatic interruption arguably marked the high point of his political impact—years later several people, including W. B. Yeats’s painter brother Jack remembered witnessing the incident’.117 The reference they cite is Richard Kain in Dublin in the Age of William Butler Yeats and James Joyce, who writes, ‘The painter Jack Butler Yeats used to recall seeing Joyce’s father at a Parnellite rally. It must have been the great meeting in the Rotunda’.118 This refers to the meeting of 10 December 1890 in the Rotunda when Parnell returned to Dublin after the meeting in Committee Room 15; the Leinster Hall meeting was three weeks earlier.
The issue of the veracity of what Ellmann wrote remains. His citation is ‘Noted by Thomas MacGreevy on March 29, 1934, from Joyce’s conversation; miscellaneous biographical notes by Niall Sheridan.’119 In the first edition of his biography, before he knew of MacGreevy’s note, what Ellmann wrote reflected only Sheridan’s notes: ‘But his anger against Healy and “the Bantry gang” was greatest of all, and so uncontrolled that according to one tradition he went up to him at the Theatre Royal to shout in his face “You’re a traitor!”’.120 On the face of it, the claim made by Ellmann in his 1982 revised edition based on MacGreevy that John Stanislaus heckled Healy seems bizarre, putting John Stanislaus in the odd position of confronting Healy in the course of a speech in which Healy was resonantly endorsing Parnell.
Even though the Leinster Hall speech was pre-Split, and therefore antecedent to what Parnellites regarded as Healy’s unforgivable betrayal of Parnell, Healy had long been an object of suspicion to Parnellite loyalists, especially to Fenian-leaning Parnellites who detested both Healy and his kinsmen the Sullivans. There was an underlying volatility to Healy’s attitude to Parnell, not least because Parnell was never fully disposed to trust Healy. Their relations came to a head in what was a kind of unconsummated proto-Split in the Galway election of February 1886, in which Healy and Joe Biggar resisted Parnell’s imposition of William Henry O’Shea as a parliamentary candidate on the constituency until Parnell descended on Galway to impose his will.121 Many of Healy’s Irish Party colleagues thereafter dreaded a recrudescence of open confrontation between Healy and Parnell, who with grim implacability in October 1887 withdrew Healy’s brief to appear on behalf of the Irish Party at the Special Commission, an inexpressible affront to an advocate of Healy’s prominence.122 For many in the Irish Party, a fresh outbreak of hostilities seemed only a matter of time.
In Joyce’s account, as rendered by MacGreevy, John Stanislaus Joyce becomes a kind of ur-Parnellite, one who anticipated Healy’s betrayal even before the Split was engaged. It is possible this was historically true: John Stanislaus was an exceptionally shrewd judge of character and capable even in sobriety of unconventional intuitive interventions. There is also a certain psychological plausibility in the idea of John Stanislaus, passively Parnellite when the leader was at the height of his popularity in Ireland, becoming galvanised in fury by the contemplation of Parnell’s prospective betrayal by a politician whom he almost certainly already loathed. Joyce’s source for what he told MacGreevy could only be his father himself, or his friends or cronies. It is not possible to rule out categorically the possibility, but it remains improbable that John Stanislaus Joyce interpellated Healy at the Leinster Hall. The most plausible conclusion may be that at some point John Stanislaus did confront Healy, perhaps in something like the rumoured manner that Niall Sheridan had recorded; and that Joyce, with artistic license,123 but drawing on memories of opinions his father had expressed, re-situated and re-scripted the encounter. Joyce thereby gave an account of his father’s visceral rallying to Parnell’s side even before the consummation of the Split, which was strikingly congruent with what he himself had written of Parnell in ‘L’ombra di Parnell’ in 1912: ‘The sadness that devastated his soul was, perhaps, the profound conviction that, in his hour of need, one of the disciples who had dipped his hand into the bowl with him was about to betray him. To have fought until the very end with this desolating certainty in his soul was his first and greatest claim to nobility.’124
Joyce was imputing to his father, in the build-up of days to the Split, something of Parnell’s own presentiment of what was to come. The figure of Parnell was a significant element of Joyce’s renegotiation and later rendering of his relation to his father. In what he told MacGreevy two years after his father’s death, Joyce was subsuming his father’s Parnellism into the intensity of his own.
Of Joyce’s surviving contemporaries, Constantine Curran was the only one who appreciated the significance of establishing Joyce’s contemporary Irish politics. As he worked on his memoir, James Joyce Remembered, which appeared in 1968, Curran was troubled by the simplistic characterisation of Joyce’s father as a Parnellite tout court, sanctified in the first edition of Ellmann’s biography, which referred to John Stanislaus’s ‘growing and outspoken devotion to Parnell which … was already forming the mind of his watchful son’.125 On 27 January 1964, Curran met Joyce’s sister May Monaghan:
I asked her was John Stanislaus really a Parnellite. She said she often heard Parnell’s name mentioned, and always with heat but not as if there was any difference of opinion or controversy in the family. I pressed my argument further, asking was he not a Parnellite only since the ‘Split’ and because he was anti-clerical. She said he was not so very anti-clerical. Not in general but against the bishops at the Split. I argued that people were called Parnellites not because they supported him during the Split but that no one could truly be called Parnellite who had not supported him in forming his independent Parliamentary party and supported him in the land agitation. I pointed out that his first objective was to oust Whigs and nominal Home Rulers from Irish constituencies; that John Stanislaus was an election [agent] for two of these placehunters … who were successfully returned; that such a backer [?] could not be called a Parnellite or his conduct squared with Parnell. She laughed and said he just took it as a job.126
Curran had correctly intuited that John Stanislaus Joyce was that unusual creature, a Parnellite only in the Split, though he ascribed it too narrowly to anticlericalism.
There is no record of John Stanislaus’s involvement in the Split in 1890–91. As Richard Kain surmised, he may have been amid the packed throng in the Rotunda at Parnell’s great meeting on 10 December 1890, the leader’s zenith in his campaign in Ireland, or in the crowd on the quays on the emotionally charged occasion of Parnell’s return to Dublin from Thurles on 2 August 1891 after his repudiation by John Dillon and William O’Brien, which marked Dublin’s last rallying to the embattled leader.127 There is nothing to suggest that he participated in any of the three by-elections of the Split, none of which were in Dublin. He had no known experience of campaigning since the elections of 1880. He did have a relationship with Tim Harrington, the member of Parliament for the Harbour Division of Dublin, and with John Clancy, the pre-eminent figure in the Parnellite organisation in Dublin, and it is possible, but unlikely, that he was asked to render some political service. The probabilities are that he was ardent in sympathy in his social life and volubly supportive in conversations on the street or at Parnellite meetings in Dublin. His was a conspicuous personal identification with Parnell, but one that was without wider political impact.
The only record of John Stanislaus’s active involvement relates to the period of the ‘long Split’, the decade after Parnell’s death. It is a curious involvement that is hard to reconcile with the idea that he was ever an effective political activist. The leader’s death gave rise to a bitter and turbulent by-election in his Cork constituency on 6 November 1891, in which John Redmond, as the Parnellite candidate, was defeated. Stanislaus Joyce recalled in his memoir that ‘my father quitted his office without leave during an election, and travelled down to Cork to persuade his tenants to vote for “the Chief”’. Stanislaus, bad about dates, seems to have situated this close to the inception of the Split in Parnell’s lifetime.128 That is clearly wrong. Richard Ellmann, in his biography of Joyce, assumed that this related to the Cork by-election.129 It would have been understandable if John Stanislaus—who had lived in Cork until 1873—had joined his friends in the frenetic canvassing at the by-election that followed Parnell’s death. But that was not the election in which John Stanislaus participated. It transpires from the records of the Collector-General’s Office that he absented himself from his duties on grounds of illness to engage in the Cork election in the general election of June 1892, so that a temporary collector had to be assigned to carry out his duties. This is a significant difference. His participation in a campaign in the immediate aftermath of Parnell’s death might have been viewed more indulgently by his superiors and might not have attracted official censure. What John Stanislaus hoped to achieve in the general election contest is unclear. The idea that he hoped to influence his tiny cohort of remaining tenants, which he evidently advanced to his family, is as unconvincing as it was politically archaic. Given the absence of any recorded involvement in the by-election, why he should have felt impelled to campaign in the same constituency in the general election eight months later is a mystery. One is left wondering whether his superiors concluded that he had embarked on a pleasurable excursion to his native city in the rollicking ambience of a general election campaign. That was formally irrelevant: he was found to have participated in the election while he was pleading illness. It was a black mark he could ill afford given a gathering perception of delinquency around him. Against the background of a deteriorating relationship with his superiors, the formal admonition he received was not a trivial matter.130
Significantly this was something of which his family was aware at the time or soon afterwards. Of his father’s quitting his office without leave to persuade his tenants ‘to vote for “the Chief”’, Stanislaus wrote, ‘It was one of the things held against him when the office was closed down.’131
Stanislaus, admittedly a pitiless critic of his father’s fecklessness and what he portrayed not entirely convincingly as his generalised political ranting, was identifying a disciplinary infraction connected to the Split that would be held against his father, rather than positing a causal connection between his father’s Parnellism and the decline of the family’s fortunes. For Stanislaus to have known of it, assuming he knew at the time rather than much later, his father must have complained. It can only have provoked worry and alarm among his father’s dependents. The unauthorised absence had the potential to contribute to the loss of office and to reduce the only secure source of income on which the Joyce family depended. In this and perhaps in other ways, the dread of immiseration affected the Joyce household before its realisation in the serial changes of residence which began with the move from Carysfort Avenue in Blackrock north across the Liffey in late 1892 or early 1893 to Hardwicke Street, and thence to Fitzgibbon Street—respectable if not fashionable addresses—and the sharp deterioration in living standards which brought about and attended the family’s migrations in the city.132 Even in what remained of its better days, the older children of the Joyce family were denied by their splenetically voluble father the security conventionally afforded by bourgeois parental discretion.
The fallacious idea that the fall of the Joyces is related to the fall of Parnell has a seeming irresistibility, and a venerable history in what has been written about Joyce. Marvin Magalaner and Kain, in their important 1956 work on Joyce, which preceded by three years the first edition of Ellmann’s biography, advance a reductive psychological explanation for Joyce’s Parnellism through the socio-economic descent of the family: ‘The tangible results for Joyce and his family of Parnell’s shifting fortunes blend into, and become identified with, the ebb and flow of Joyce’s youthful patriotism. The outcome seems to be that Joyce finds it impossible to separate his attitude concerning his own fate from his feeling for Ireland and the symbol of Parnell.’ They characterise Parnell’s fall for Joyce as ‘a childhood wound’, from which recovery entailed Joyce’s exile from Ireland.133 The fallacious idea of an indissociable connection, at least subjectively, between the fall of Parnell and the subsidence of the fortunes of John Stanislaus Joyce received Ellmann’s imprimatur: ‘For John Joyce, the fall of Parnell, closely synchronised with a fall in his own fortunes, was the dividing line between the stale present and the good old days.’134 Colbert Kearney wrote that ‘John Joyce had begun to mortgage his property ten years before the fall of Parnell but according to The Joycead the fall of John Joyce was part of the greater fall of Parnell.’135 There is, however, no evidence that John Stanislaus himself posited an association between the fall of Parnell and his own ruin, and Joyce gave the idea no sanction. All there is is an approximate synchrony, and the high probability that his father, in the nocturnal ranting described by Stanislaus, aligned Parnell’s enemies with his own. The persistence and seeming irresistibility of a narrative in which John Stanislaus Joyce’s sharply declining fortunes and Parnell’s fall were intertwined remain striking, and the idea becomes in itself a curious late accretion to the Parnell myth. If Joyce was entirely without illusion about his father’s defects of character, his filial clemency was collusively generous. It seems reasonable to infer that Stephen Hero is autobiographical in its rendering of its author’s father. Mr Daedalus ‘knew that his own ruin had been his own handiwork, but he had talked himself into believing it was the handiwork of others.’136 He is tormented by the blasted opportunities of his life, which he somehow connects, not to the rise or fall of Parnell, but to his marriage: ‘Now that he was making for the final decades of life with the painful consciousness of having diminished comfortable goods and of having accumulated uncomfortable habits he consoled and revenged himself by tirades so prolonged and so often repeated that he was in danger of becoming a monomaniac. The hearth at night was the sacred witness of these revenges, pondered, muttered, growled and execrated.… The great disappointment of his life was accentuated by a lesser and keener loss—the loss of a coveted fame.’137
That fame had nothing to do with parliamentary honours. ‘On account of a certain income and of certain sociable gifts Mr Daedalus had been accustomed to regard himself as the centre of a little world, the darling of a little society.’138
Joyce did not have his brother’s resentment of their father and eschewed confrontation with him, reflecting the difference in his relationship to his father as the eldest surviving male child, as well as a sagacious fatalism where family relations were concerned. It seems clear, however, that a distance and coldness entered his relations with his father.139 The relationship remained nonetheless unbroken, and only came to be threatened on John Stanislaus’s side by Joyce’s elopement with Nora Barnacle in 1904. If Joyce tacitly shared his brother’s assessment of their father’s improvidence, it was one that he had come to re-balance even by the time of writing A Portrait, and consigned to the margins in his re-estimation of his father in part through the medium of their shared if disparate Parnellisms, and in the dispersed ubiquity of his rendering of his father in Finnegans Wake.
