James joyce, p.20
James Joyce, page 20
If Joyce was far too sceptical to share his father’s sentimental indulgence towards the Fenians, he approached Fenianism in a matter-of-fact way while considering its methods outmoded: in his non-fiction in his early Italian exile, he was starkly objective about Fenianism as a revolutionary force in nineteenth-century Ireland. He was impatiently bored—and perhaps a little disappointed—by the conventionality of Joseph Casey. Among the scores of characters that John Stanislaus Joyce had given to him, Joe Casey was certainly not the least significant. He was in his Parisian ‘exile’ the most ostensibly exotic. Joyce repatriated him into the mundane universe of Ulysses. Casey’s exile was more in time than space: ‘They have forgotten Kevin Egan, not he them. Remembering thee, O Sion.’138
1. Joyce to Harriet Shaw Weaver, 17 January 1932, Letters I 312.
2. C. P. Curran, Joyce notebook, 124; Curran, Under the Receding Wave, 56.
3. SH 61.
4. U 12.199–200.
5. Freeman’s Journal, 14 April 1896.
6. NAI, CSB/Irish National League 1/112. [At the time of writing, the National Archives of Ireland held the Royal Irish Constabulary’s Crime Special Branch files relating to their surveillance of the Irish National League.—Eds.] See also Margaret O’Callaghan, British High Politics and a Nationalist Ireland: Criminality, Land and the Law under Forster and Balfour (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994).
7. NAI, CSB/Irish National League/183.
8. Freeman’s Journal, 14 April 1896; United Ireland, 18 April 1896.
9. Irish Daily Independent, 14 April 1896.
10. John McGrath, ‘John Kelly’, Evening Herald, 15 April 1896; United Ireland, 18 April 1896.
11. United Ireland, 18 April 1896.
12. United Ireland, 18 April 1896.
13. Evening Herald, 14 April 1896.
14. R. B. O’Brien, Charles Stewart Parnell, 2:299.
15. Daily News, 23 December 1890. Barry O’Brien, also under consideration as a candidate, gave in his biography of Parnell an account of his own role. Parnell had cabled to him to come to Ireland, which O’Brien understood to be a request that he stand in North Kilkenny. Parnell, having decided that Vincent Scully would be the candidate, refused to let Joseph Kenny wire O’Brien not to come. When O’Brien arrived, he asked Kenny, ‘ “And what does Parnell expect me to do now?” - “He expects you”, said the Doctor, “to come to Kilkenny to help Scully”. And we both laughed.’ R. B. O’Brien, Charles Stewart Parnell, 2:299–300.
16. Insuppressible, 3 January 1891.
17. John McGrath, ‘His Last Campaign: Creggs, and the Final Departure (Two Interviews)’, United Ireland, 7 October 1893; Callanan, Parnell Split, 180–81.
18. McGrath, ‘His Last Campaign’.
19. Callanan, Parnell Split, 181.
20. FW 594.7–8.
21. Adaline Glasheen’s misreading of the Christmas dinner scene as a purely Irish brawl between Dante and John Casey, emblems of ‘perverted Catholicism and perverted Nationalism’, is due in part to her belief that Casey was a Fenian, and her misconception of what that entailed: Adaline Glasheen, ‘Joyce and the Three Ages of Charles Stewart Parnell’, in A James Joyce Miscellany, 2nd ser., ed. Marvin Magalaner (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1959), 155. Joyce in A Portrait does not render Mr Casey a Fenian. The fact that it is not explained why he was imprisoned leads some readers, including the editors of the Norton Critical Edition, to infer that ‘his hand has been crippled by forced labour during imprisonment for revolutionary activities’ (P 24n1). John Kelly’s serial incarcerations were for what might now be described as acts of civil disobedience, and Mr Casey is clearly characterised throughout as a Parnellite and not a Fenian. The distinction is subtly maintained in his attack on the patriotic record of the hierarchy, which begins, ‘Didn’t the bishops of Ireland betray us in the time of the union’, where ‘us’ means the (admittedly pre-Fenian) Irish, and goes on to refer to the bishops and priests denouncing ‘the fenian movement from the pulpit’ (P 1.1101–7).
22. NAI, CSB/12730/s.
23. Freeman’s Journal, 26 October 1891.
24. Daily Express, 14 April 1896.
25. United Ireland, 7 October 1893.
26. Costello, Years of Growth, 135–36.
27. Evening Herald, 14 April 1896; Irish Daily Independent, 14 April 1896.
28. Irish Daily Independent, 18 April 1896.
29. In A Portrait, Mr Casey, when talking to Mr Dedalus about an episode in which a hotelkeeper they knew had been ‘manufacturing’ champagne for some customers, succumbs to what is described as ‘a fit of laughter and coughing’ and ‘his fit of coughing and laughter’ (P 1.763, 772–73).
30. Irish Daily Independent, 17 April 1896.
31. Evening Herald, 14 April 1896.
32. NAI, CSB/1162/s.
33. Evening Herald, 16 April 1896; Irish Daily Independent, 17 April 1896. The newspaper reports listed among the attendance ‘J J Joyce’ or ‘John G Joyce’. It is unclear which referred to John Stanislaus Joyce, and probably too much to think that the two names were misspellings of the names of Joyce père et fils. John Stanislaus Joyce’s own grave lies close to that of Kelly.
34. S. Joyce, entry for 26 September 1903, in Dublin Diary, 9; Irish Daily Independent, 17 April 1897.
35. S. Joyce, entry for 26 September 1903, in Dublin Diary, 9.
36. S. Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 34–37.
37. S. Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 35–36. Stanislaus concludes he must have been four at the time of the incident, which would date it to the latter part of 1888.
38. Why did Joyce assign to John Kelly the surname Casey when Patrick Casey was a friend of his father, and he had come to know Joseph Casey in Paris? One would not pose the question were it not for the fact that Joyce was extremely attentive, to the point of intricate game playing, in his assignation of surnames in his fictional writings. While it could still be an odd coincidence, it is faintly possible that Joyce was ascribing to John Kelly, who was not a Fenian, the virtues of selfless perseverance in the cause of Parnellism, in which the Casey brothers in their Fenianism were notably deficient, so that the true revolutionary was the Parnellite John Kelly.
39. P 1.738–40.
40. We will never know whether Mr Casey’s account of spitting tobacco into the eye of an anti-Parnellite harridan at the meeting in Arklow ‘not long before the chief died’ (P 1.1013–14), a meeting that did not take place if attended by Parnell, is based on an account of John Kelly of an incident of the Split or was invented by Joyce. It has a certain verisimilitude, which could reflect either historicity or Joyce’s artistry. The fact that Mr Casey’s much interrupted telling of the ‘story about a very famous spit’ is provoked by Dante Riordan’s reference to her religion being ‘insulted and spit upon by renegade Catholics’ does not seem to advance the issue (P 1.958, 963).
41. P 1.1013–14.
42. P 1.990–94.
43. P 1.777.
44. SH 56. It is plain that in the novel Mr Casey is treated as more or less a member of the Daedalus household. The immediately preceding sentence is, ‘People at home did not seem opposed to this new freak of his.’
45. SH 100. Mr Casey is again rendered as a supernumerary member of the Daedalus household.
46. U 16.426–28. The reference is noted in Glasheen, ‘Joyce and the Three Ages’, 178–79. Don Gifford gets this wrong, by introducing the confusing presence of John Keegan Casey: the poem was written by John Keegan. Gifford, Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’, with Robert J. Sheridan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 540.
47. There is a second reference to the poem in the sentence in Ulysses which serves as a decoy: the sentence invokes the lines, ‘Does anybody hereabouts / Remember Caoch the Piper’. Likewise, the fact that the reference to Casey and the poem comes from Bloom rather than Stephen—or Simon—Dedalus increases rather than diminishes the force of the proposition that Joyce is making a finely wrought association between his relation to Kelly and the boy of the poem’s relationship to Caoch O’Leary.
48. There is also something not easily defined to do with the idea of return in the poem applied to Joyce’s relationship to Kelly. When Joyce wrote the ‘Eumaeus’ episode, it was getting on for twenty years since he had drawn on the character of John Kelly for Mr Casey in Stephen Hero, from which derived Joyce’s immortalisation of Kelly in A Portrait.
49. Ellmann, James Joyce, 43–44. Ellmann includes an anecdote from an interview with a David Charles. It was necessary to hang a convicted man. Clancy ‘having no stomach for the job, betook himself to London, confiding all the preparations to Bergan’s equally reluctant hands.’ Ellmann, James Joyce, 43. Bergan received a letter from an English barber offering his services as a hangman, which described his skill in fastening and pulling nooses, which found its way into the ‘Cyclops’ episode of Ulysses.
50. My account draws on Chief Superintendent John Mallon’s riveting 1892 biographical profile of John Clancy in the National Archives of Ireland and is also greatly indebted to Owen McGee’s The IRB: The Irish Republican Brotherhood from the Land League to Sinn Féin (Dublin: Four Courts, 2005), which tracks the neglected career of Clancy. That neglect owes much to the fact that Clancy, who began as an adherent of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, ended his career as a supporter of John Redmond’s Irish Party, and something also to an historiographical neglect of Dublin municipal politics.
51. John Mallon, biographical profile of John Clancy, 1 July 1892, NAI, CBS/5314S (actually numbered 5379S). For Mallon, see Donal P. McCracken, Inspector Mallon (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009); and O’Callaghan, British High Politics.
52. Mallon, biographical profile of John Clancy.
53. Mallon, biographical profile of John Clancy.
54. Freeman’s Journal, 19 November 1890. ‘From that day to this his respect and admiration for Mr Parnell had grown in direct ratio as time passed on’.
55. McGee, IRB, 117–18; see also 139.
56. Freeman’s Journal, 30 January 1915.
57. McGee, IRB, 176.
58. Mallon, biographical profile of John Clancy.
59. Mallon, biographical profile of John Clancy.
60. Freeman’s Journal, 30 January 1915.
61. McGee, IRB, 196–205.
62. Mallon, biographical profile of John Clancy.
63. Irish Times, 30 January 1915; Callanan, Parnell Split, 252–23; McGee, IRB, 210.
64. McCracken, Inspector Mallon, 170.
65. Cited in McCracken, Inspector Mallon, 166.
66. McGee, IRB, 225–26.
67. Owen McGee, ‘John Clancy’, DIB 2:521.
68. McGee, IRB, 283, 287–88. The unique political position of Clancy, and what might be called his mastery of the transitional, is reflected also in his support for the appointment of Tom Clarke to a clerical post in the corporation. Owen McGee, Arthur Griffith (Dublin: Merrion, 2015), 48.
69. McGee, ‘John Clancy’, 521.
70. McGee, Arthur Griffith, 48. See Paul Bew, Land and the National Question in Ireland, 1858–1882 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1978).
71. Freeman’s Journal, editorial, 30 January 1915. Confronted by the deepening disaffection with the Irish Party, the embattled Freeman’s Journal, recalling his youthful adherence to the IRB, sought a little desperately to draw the moral of Clancy’s extraordinary parcours across his long political life: ‘To him the principles and the practice of the little group of modern “hillsiders” who, in their most characteristic utterances, mingle abuse of the Leader of the Irish people and the Irish Party with their admiration of the German Emperor, must have been simply detestable. For pinchbeck revolutionaries he could have only entertained contempt. He was one of the genuine extremists, the men who stood by Ireland and her leaders now, because, having well-nigh spent themselves in the sowing of the field, they wish to see the harvest gathered in.’ Clancy’s intelligent deployment of his status as ‘one of the genuine extremists’ is the redemptive leitmotif of his mercurial career.
72. Irish Independent, 30 January 1915.
73. ‘An Appreciation’, Freeman’s Journal, 30 January 1915.
74. Freeman’s Journal, 1 February 1915 (‘J. Joyce’).
75. S. Joyce, entry for 31 August 1904, in Dublin Diary, 78.
76. Freeman’s Journal, 30 January 1915.
77. McGrath, ‘His Last Campaign’; Callanan, Parnell Split, 180–81. John Clancy is not to be confused (as he is in Jackson and Costello, John Stanislaus Joyce, 165) with his fellow Parnellite John Joseph Clancy, a King’s Counsel and parliamentarian who held the seat of Dublin County North from 1885 to 1918, when he was swept out on a two-to-one margin by a virtually unknown Sinn Féin candidate.
78. M. McDonnell Bodkin, Recollections of an Irish Judge (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1914), 174–75.
79. R. B. O’Brien, Charles Stewart Parnell, 2:291.
80. Suppressed United Ireland, 13 December 1890. McDonnell Bodkin’s account closely matched this (Recollections of an Irish Judge, 174–75).
81. R. B. O’Brien, Charles Stewart Parnell, 2:293–97.
82. U 16.1333–39.
83. Insuppressible, 15 December 1890; Insuppressible, 5 January 1891, letter of James O’Connor to the editor; Jackson and Costello, John Stanislaus Joyce, 162–63.
84. U 10.996–1005. In Dubliners the whiff of corruption is more marked. In ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’, Mr Henchy says of the candidate Tierney, ‘He’s not a bad sort … only Fanning has such a loan on him’ (D 109). Whatever the expression comes from, which is uncertain, it is chosen to convey by its secondary meaning a financial relationship between Tierney and Fanning, hinted at elsewhere in the story but not quite explained. In ‘Grace’ Mr Cunningham draws Mr Kernan’s attention in the Jesuit church to ‘Mr. Fanning, the registration agent and mayormaker of the city, who was sitting under the pulpit beside one of the newly elected councillors’ (D 149). Fanning only becomes ‘long John’ in Ulysses.
85. U 10.1006–30.
86. Daily Express, 11 December 1890.
87. U 13.1106; Jackson and Costello, John Stanislaus Joyce, 146–47.
88. U 11.725–26. The Mat Dillon of Ulysses is not coextensive with Matthew Dillon; see Luca Crispi, Joyce’s Creative Process and the Construction of Characters in ‘Ulysses’: Becoming the Blooms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 140–50.
89. U 18.428–29.
90. Brian Jenkins, The Fenian Problem: Insurgency and Terrorism in a Liberal State, 1858–1874 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), 148–49, 206–7; K.R.M. Short, The Dynamite War: Irish-American Bombers in Victorian Britain (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1979), 7–11.
91. Ellmann, James Joyce, 125.
92. S. Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 47; already noted in relation to John Stanislaus Joyce.
93. Patrick Maume, ‘Patrick Casey’, DIB 2:413.
94. Owen McGee, ‘Eugene Davis’, DIB 3:80.
95. McGee, IRB, 126; Irishman, 26 March 1881.
