James joyce, p.14
James Joyce, page 14
She became unconscious the day before she died and remained so to the end. I was with her for over an hour the day she died and I think she knew me. She got her sickness in this accursed hole. But this perhaps for the best, as she was too sensitive and highly-strung to endure the troubles of this wretched world. She is with her Mother who idolized her, and has left me to linger on, a broken hearted old man, but only for a very short time now until I will follow my darling Maime and my ‘doatie darlie’ to where partings are known. I am now most anxious to die, having lost the only one (except you) who loved me.—I must thank you Jim, for your kind and sympathetic letter and remittance and the beautiful wreath. Everything was carried out as it should be and as you would wish. So much for the past—now the present has been made so unbearable to me by the callous, unnatural treatment I am receiving from my three daughters, that I am resolved to leave Dublin and them on the 1st prox. Since my poor baby died they have left me alone, and refuse to even take a walk with me. Everyone here, as in the last house we stayed in, crys [sic] shame on them for their cruel conduct towards their father.176
Stanislaus, in his memoir of his brother, wrote that Mabel was ‘the last victim of our family life’.177
Father and son met for the last time on Joyce’s final visit to Ireland in 1912. By that time John Stanislaus had forgiven Joyce his elopement with Nora. Years later in Paris, Joyce recounted to Louis Gillet that he and his father subsequently went for a walk in the country and went into a public house in Rathfarnham. John Joyce sat down at the piano and played and sang to Joyce ‘Di Provenza il mar’, the aria of Alfredo Germont’s remorse-stricken father about the dying Violetta in La Traviata, to signify that he had repined of his objection to his son’s elopement with Nora.178 The sixty-year-old John Stanislaus had not lost the faculty of the redemptive gracious gesture. Nora had the quiet triumph of reporting back to Eileen in Trieste that ‘I was delighted to have your Father every time he would look at Lucia wept copiously all about Jim with your father.’179 John Stanislaus Joyce supported and counselled his son in the final crisis over Dubliners and introduced him to his solicitor George Lidwell, though Lidwell exhibited a lawyer’s caution overlaid by personal conservatism of taste.
That they were never to see each other again had remarkably little impact on their relations. The memory of the father continued deeply to inform the writing of the son, and the father’s intense affection for the son never abated. Joyce wrote to Ezra Pound on his father’s death, ‘He loved me deeply, more and more as he grew older.’180 John Stanislaus had not taken up his son’s invitation in 1910 to visit Trieste.181 Joyce had decided against a return visit to Dublin to see his father, and deployed the stratagems of exile in which he was expert to rationalise his decision.
Joyce’s friend Constantine Curran left a portrait of the old man, which he wrote in the disconsolate setting of Joyce’s exhausted possibilities in Dublin before his departure:
He was a man of unparalleled vituperative power, a virtuoso in speech with unique control of the vernacular, his language often coarse and blasphemous to a degree of which, in the long run, he could hardly himself have been conscious. A notable singer, with a wide knowledge of Italian opera, he would hold the attention of any room all night if there was a piano at which he could sit, play and sing. He could fascinate indefinitely with stories told with consummate art, one neatly fitting into another. And these stories would be of a perfectly drawing-room character till suddenly, as if taken unawares, he would slip into the coarse vein and another side of his nature and vocabulary be revealed.182
John Stanislaus Joyce cut a faintly archaic figure, somehow at odds with the recently acquired gentility of nationalist Dublin in the Edwardian era. Piaras Béaslaí recalled someone identifying John Stanislaus Joyce to him. He was ‘a familiar figure, a real “man about town” with his monocle, spats and airs of faded gentility, he seemed to be treated with respect by everyone who knew him.’183 This was John Stanislaus Joyce as ‘the swaggerest swell off Shackvulle Strutt’ on the third page from the end of Finnegans Wake,184 managing a decline that contrived to be at once precipitous and extraordinarily protracted.
There was no longer an extant Joyce household, and John Stanislaus migrated from one cheap hotel or boarding house to another.185 His health was deteriorating, and through the good offices of his loyal friend Alfred Bergan he found lodgings in 1920 with the Medcalfs, a Protestant family, at 25 Claude Road, between Whitworth Road and the railway line in Drumcondra, a suburb of northern Dublin. Mary Medcalf had been a nurse, and faithfully tended to her elderly lodgers. In his notes on Joyce, Curran wrote that Joyce’s father was treated as one of the family ‘and largely reformed. The day after his arrival they had to take out his clothes to the garden to burn them. They were infested with lice.’186 He stayed for over a decade, until his death.187 His room overlooking the back garden was a shrine to his favourite son. There he received a remarkable succession of visitors, mostly friends or disciples of Joyce.188 Joyce even prevailed on John Sullivan, the Cork-born tenor established in France, favoured by Joyce over John McCormack, to call on his father while on his first engagement in Dublin in April 1930.189 Joyce’s most remarkable contrivance to overcome the distance that separated them without actually coming to Dublin was to despatch in 1924–25 a journalist to interview his father.190 John Stanislaus was indulgent towards the progeny who had ignored his advice: ‘I often told Jim to go for the Bar, for he had a great flow of language and he talks better than he writes. However he has done very well’.191
In 1923 James Joyce commissioned the Irish painter Patrick Tuohy to paint his father’s portrait. Tuohy was the son of a distinguished doctor who had tended the Joyces, and the grandson of J. M. Tuohy, the parliamentary correspondent of the Freeman’s Journal at the time of the Split.192 It was a late supplement to the strikingly Parnellite matrix of associations of John Stanislaus Joyce. Tuohy had called on Joyce in 1922 with a letter of introduction from James Stephens. Joyce chose Tuohy to paint his father’s portrait over others proposed by Arthur Power, saying something about having known his father.193 Tuohy duly attended on his sitter in Drumcondra. His portrayal of an intense, quizzically staring John Stanislaus Joyce in old age is a minor masterpiece. Stanislaus Joyce wrote to his brother in Paris in 1924, ‘His portrait of Pappie is a wonderful study of that little old Milesian. I am especially glad that Tuohy is not that irritating kind of painter that sees in his sitter only a type. The likeness is striking.’194 Joyce’s characterisation of the portrait as ‘splendid’ transcended filial indulgence,195 if Thomas McGreevy’s description of it as ‘the greatest portrait painted since Cezanne’ could hardly be stood over.196 The portrait attracted a good deal of attention on its exhibition in the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin in 1924,197 and Joyce was invested in its success in something like the way in which he was invested in the singing career of John Sullivan. A supplement to the family portraits, it doubles as the phantasmal carte de visite of an absent son who swiftly reclaimed it. It presided over the other portraits in Joyce’s successive Paris apartments.198 Gisèle Freund, who created a brilliant photographic chronicle of Joyce in Paris, later wrote, ‘Joyce, who possessed an almost mystical belief in blood ties, in the father-son relationship that pulsated through all his creative work, derived a strange pleasure from posing beneath the portrait of his own father.’199
In 1926, Joyce commissioned Tuohy to do a pencil portrait of his mother from a photograph.200 Tuohy proposed painting Joyce himself, and Joyce agreed. This proved strangely protracted and a little fraught,201 and elicited this comment from Joyce: ‘Never mind my soul. Just be sure you have my tie right.’202 Joyce wrote to Harriet Shaw Weaver in mid-1924 that he was glad she liked the portrait: ‘I like the folds of the jacket and the tie.’203 Tuohy’s portrait of Joyce is a comparatively rare rendering of the artist no longer young but still in his prime in his early forties, entre deux ages. There is something lacking, and Joyce did not like the portrait. It was not exhibited at the 1925 Paris Salon as had been intended.204 Tuohy embarked on a second portrait which Joyce considered to be a failure.205 Tuohy’s fiercely austere artistic promise was to be cut short by his death by his own hand in New York in 1930 at the age of thirty-six.206
FIGURE 2.3. Portrait of John Stanislaus Joyce by Patrick Tuohy, 1924. Source: 16.6, James Joyce Collection, The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York.
John Stanislaus always wrote to his son on Joyce’s birthday. He ended his 1925 missive with the statement, ‘I am still what is left of me, your fond and loving father’.207 He died on 29 December 1931.208
The fact that Joyce had not returned to see his father across the span of almost two decades remains striking. He wrote to T. S. Eliot in a fleeting moment of seeming misgiving of his grief at his father’s death: ‘He had an intense love for me and it adds anew to my grief and remorse that I did not go to Dublin to see him for so many years. I kept him constantly under the illusion that I would come and was always in correspondence with him but an instinct I believed in held me back from going, much as I longed to.’209
Joyce’s decision not to come to Dublin to see his father owed much to his strategising of exile. Joyce did not consider that what a return visit to Ireland would achieve warranted compromising the political acquis of his absence from Ireland since 1912. He may have reasoned that the benefits of a return visit did not bear sustained scrutiny. It would have gratified his father but, knowing his father, could have become messy, as well as engendering an expectation of further visits. They had, after all, managed to observe the protocols of Joyce’s exile without impinging on their compact of affinity, if also without strengthening it. Louis Gillet wrote, ‘Without writing to one another, neither being a great letter-writer, they always found a way to correspond and exchange news about themselves. Above all, they felt bound by a common complicity and a connivance of nature which dispensed with formulas and further explanations. They understood each other by hints, even without words.’210 The conflict was resolved finally by Joyce’s confidence in the unconditionality of his father’s love. It was not misplaced.
1. Robert McAlmon, Being Geniuses Together, 1920–1930, rev. ed. (San Francisco: North Point, 1984), 27.
2. Colbert Kearney, ‘The Joycead’, in Coping with Joyce: Essays from the Copenhagen Symposium, ed. Morris Beja and Shari Benstock (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989), 58. In this biographical essay on John Stanislaus Joyce, which contrives to be both brilliantly innovative and elegant, Kearney argues that James Joyce did not actually believe ‘the Joycead’ but neither would he dismiss it with contempt: ‘Rather with an extraordinary sane generosity, he would understand why and how human beings tell each other stories to pass the time outside paradise’ (71).
3. FW 269.25–26.
4. Joyce to Harriet Shaw Weaver, 17 January 1932, Letters I 312.
5. Joyce to Harriet Shaw Weaver, 22 July 1932, Letters III 250.
6. Ellmann, James Joyce, 23. The source is Ellmann’s unpublished notes of an interview with Gillet.
7. Louis Gillet, Claybook for James Joyce, trans. Georges Markow-Totevey (London: Abelard-Schuman, 1958), 77.
8. Gillet, Claybook for James Joyce, 103. ‘I have always thought that this heroicomic individual played a leading part in the imagination of Joyce; he was one of those magnificent failures having in them abundant material for poetic creation, one of those originals from whom the artist can reprint at will a hundred copies’. Gillet, Claybook for James Joyce, 101.
9. John Wyse Jackson and Peter Costello, John Stanislaus Joyce: The Voluminous Life and Genius of James Joyce’s Father (London: Fourth Estate, 1998), 16. In A Portrait, Simon Dedalus, pointing to the portrait of his grandfather, asserts that he was condemned to death as a whiteboy (P 1.1085–86). The Doneraile area of County Cork to the northwest of Fermoy had the most affrays during the tithe war, as the resistance to the collection of tithes to support the clergy of the Church of Ireland was known. See Noreen Higgins McHugh, ‘The 1830s Tithe Riots’, in Riotous Assemblies: Rebels, Riots and Revolts in Ireland, ed. William Sheehan and Maura Cronin (Cork: Mercier Press, 2011), 89. The riots in the Doneraile area date from 1832, and so postdate the likely departure of James Joyce for the city of Cork.
10. Kearney, ‘Joycead’, 60.
11. See Jackson and Costello, John Stanislaus Joyce, 5–20. The Joyce family portraits are listed in a letter from Paul Léon to Frank Budgen, in which Léon says they are by Comerford. John Comerford (ca. 1770–1832) was a well-regarded portrait painter and miniaturist. See Walter G. Strickland, A Dictionary of Irish Artists (Dublin: Maunsel, 1913), 2:194–202.
12. Jackson and Costello, John Stanislaus Joyce, 18. According to Kearney, the Joyces who settled around Fermoy remained conscious of their origins in the Joyce country: ‘To this day the Joyces of East Cork preserve a tribal memory of their Galway ancestry and they believe, with justification, that they are descended from masons who came south in search of work. They prospered but at some stage they excited the envy or the disdain of their neighbours who composed a saying which still survives, never trust a Joyce, or Rice, or a Quirke’ (‘Joycead’, 59).
13. Maria Jolas, ‘Interview with Mr. John Stanislaus Joyce’, in A James Joyce Yearbook, ed. Maria Jolas (Paris: Transition, 1949), 163. Eoin O’Mahony, in a 1955 lecture, stated there was no kinship with O’Connell (Irish Times, 6 May 1955). O’Mahony was pre-occupied with Joyce’s Cork connections, it is said to the point of developing an elaborate theory according to which Ulysses was actually set in Cork, masked by references to Dublin locations which in fact related to the topography of Cork.
14. Stanislaus Joyce, entry for 29 March 1904, in The Complete Dublin Diary of Stanislaus Joyce, ed. George H. Healey (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971), 21. The ‘baboon-face’ is the elongated upper lip of the rural Irish as rendered by Victorian cartoonists. Stanislaus’s reference to O’Connell in this context is a little odd, in that while he was ethnically caricatured, this was not a prominent feature of it. Curran’s face fitted the stereotype even less.
15. S. Joyce, entry for 3 April 1904, in Dublin Diary, 37.
16. S. Joyce, entry for 31 August 1904, in Dublin Diary, 72.
17. Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper: James Joyce’s Early Years (New York: Viking, 1958), 44. Stanislaus’s account admittedly bears some of the impress of ‘The Joycead’.
18. S. Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 43. In his Dublin Diary, Stanislaus had only gone one generation back: ‘Pappie is the only child of an only child (his father) and therefore the spoiled son of a spoiled son, the spendthrift son of a spendthrift’ (entry for 26 September 1903, 5).
19. In ‘The Joycead’ (72n1), Kearney asserts that John Stanislaus Joyce treated James as an only child, reflected to the end in the fact that he made him the sole beneficiary of his will.
20. Kearney, ‘Joycead’, 62–63. Also see Gorman, James Joyce, 8.
21. Kearney, ‘Joycead’, 65.
22. Jackson and Costello, John Stanislaus Joyce, 25.
23. Kearney writes, ‘Before his early death in 1866 he had lost the family interests in brickmaking, building, and the sale of salt and lime’ (‘Joycead’, 63).
24. Jackson and Costello, John Stanislaus Joyce, 26–28.
25. Gillet, Claybook for James Joyce, 105. Joyce observed a certain propriety with Gillet, who professed not to have seen him drunk. The context for his comment was Joyce’s torment over Lucia. The same propriety may account for the fact that Joyce did not, as Gillet notes (102), ask him, when he was embarking on a visit to Dublin, to see his father or entrust him with a message for his father.
26. Kearney (‘Joycead’, 63) suggests that John Stanislaus Joyce had suffered from the typhus that was to kill his father.
27. S. Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 45.
28. S. Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 45.
29. P 2.1136–37.
30. Jolas, ‘John Stanislaus Joyce’, 169. The idea of Joyce commissioning an interview with his father admittedly seems somewhat strange, but it was a stratagem devised by Joyce to bridge the gap of exile. In June 1962 on the occasion of the opening of the Joyce tower, Flann O’Brien (writing as Irish Times’ diarist ‘Quidnunc’), in his ‘Irishman’s Diary’, referred to the Yearbook that contained ‘an interview with Mr. John Stanislaus Joyce which reads like the real McKay, but is known to be the work of a master-parodist’ (Irish Times, 19 June 1962). As Ellmann points out (James Joyce, 747n19), the hoax lies in O’Brien’s own claim. ‘Cruiskeen Law’, by Myles na gCopaleen (another Flann O’Brien pseudonym), curiously appeared side by side with the ‘Irishman’s Diary’ (Irish Times, 19 June 1962). O’Brien was magnificently subversive of the emergent cult of Joyce and had written the previous year (under his real name Brian O’Nolan), ‘If I hear the word “Joyce” again I will surely froth at the gob’: O’Nolan to Timothy O’Keefe, 25 November 1961, in The Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien, ed. Maebh Long (Dallas: Dalkey Archive Press, 2018), 286.
