James joyce, p.24
James Joyce, page 24
That lovely land that always sent
Her writers and artists to banishment
And in a spirit of Irish fun
Betrayed her leaders, one by one.
’Twas Irish humour, wet and dry,
Flung quicklime into Parnell’s eye.60
What is significant is Joyce’s deployment after an interval of twenty years of a comment Davitt made to the Pall Mall Gazette immediately after the episode. That comment had not been republished or adverted to in the interval. It was evidently a source of offence to well-informed Parnellites in 1891. They never forgave Davitt his attacks on Parnell in the Split: bitter oral memory and the newspaper source merged.61
Joyce did not forget Castlecomer. In 1939, two years before his own death and suffering from severely compromised eyesight, he pointedly added to the proofs of Gorman’s biography at the point it dealt with his final departure from Ireland a note explaining his failure to return to Ireland thereafter: ‘Having a vivid memory of the incident at Castlecomer when quicklime was flung into the eyes of their dying leader, Parnell, by a chivalrous Irish mob, he did not wish a similar unfortunate occurrence to interfere with the composition of the book [Finnegans Wake] he was trying to write.’62
The second reference takes its cue from the twinned editorials that appeared in the National Press the day after news of Parnell’s death reached Dublin. The first article was pretty ferocious, but the second, entitled ‘Let Dissension Cease’, contained the most stinging provocation. Two sentences stood out: ‘With the death of Mr. Parnell the last pretext for faction died. All honest lovers of their country may shake hands over his open grave.’63 The National Press editorials had a much wider impact than Davitt’s interview with the Pall Mall Gazette. They achieved an instant notoriety, but again were never republished or quoted beyond the contemporary newspaper controversy they engendered. Half a century later, Joyce incorporated in Finnegans Wake a plangent reworking of Healy’s sentence: ‘We strike hands over his bloodied warsheet but we are pledged entirely to his green mantle.’64 Like Davitt’s comment, Healy’s phrase was seared in Joyce’s memory.
The issue of Joyce’s access to newspapers in 1890–91 arises. Joyce did not have anything approaching continuous access to newspapers at this time. He may have had some limited chance access to newspapers in Clongowes. Curiously the Jesuit provincial Fr Timothy Kenny received complaints that the scholastics and others in Clongowes were discussing ‘divorces and other indelicate subjects’, and much given to reading the Pall Mall Gazette,65 but Joyce certainly did not get the benefit of their indiscretion. His principal reading of the papers has to have taken place at home, in the vacations or after he was taken out of Clongowes at the end of 1891. It is the episodic nature of his access to newspapers that suggests that his knowledge of the newspapers of the Split was later supplemented by consulting the National Library or some other public library in which back numbers of newspapers were available. If Joyce was interested in establishing for himself what transpired in the course of the Split, the only source available to 1898 was the contemporary newspapers. There was nowhere else to go in the absence of a published narrative of the Split in Ireland. Richard Barry O’Brien’s biography of Parnell, when it appeared in 1898, while important for Joyce’s understanding of Parnell’s personality, did not capture the terrible escalatory rhythm of the Split, nor did it address Joyce’s need to apprehend with exactitude the anti-Parnellite onslaught. Joyce somehow felt the pulse of the Split (‘hunt me the journeyon’)66 through a self-acquired knowledge that could only have come from newspapers. Consulting newspaper files was not at the time an uncommon practice in Dublin,67 and the idea that Joyce read some of the newspapers in 1890–91, and did so more comprehensively thereafter, is not particularly controversial and is consistent with the curiosity and sceptical disposition of the youthful Joyce. The implications, however, are far reaching. Joyce’s cross-referencing of what he had been told to a textual source is a significant moment in his intellectual development. He may have been encouraged to read the newspapers by his father and John Kelly, but to the extent that his purpose in doing so was to substantiate what they had told him, it was an enquiry that he pursued in his own right. Joyce thereby became electively an adherent of Parnell from a precociously young age.
As already discussed, A Portrait presents a highly stylised fictional account of Joyce’s acquisition of a Parnellite allegiance in boyhood that is consistent both with the subsequent development of his Parnellism and with his attitude to his father. In A Portrait, Mr Casey is the ardent Parnellite. Mr Dedalus takes his side, but his utterances are mainly boisterously anticlerical in the manner of John Stanislaus. Joyce’s rendering of the stop-start rhythm of the argument is superb. Mr Dedalus detests Dante Riordan and administers a couple of calculated fillips to keep the controversy going. His detestation of Dante, and enjoyment of argument, prompts him to subvert the role of the Christmas paterfamilias that he had adopted at the outset for Stephen’s benefit. The end of the Christmas dinner scene is so perfect that we do not fully register the note of incredulousness in Stephen’s looking up to find that ‘his father’s eyes were full of tears’. It is as if, at least up to that point, Stephen is unsure how seriously to take his father’s support of Parnell. Stephen remains through the dinner unsure which side is right. He is weighing what is said. He makes up his mind thereafter. It is only the next day when he makes an unsuccessful attempt to write a Parnell poem—signalling that his Parnellism has a bearing on his development as an artist—that we know Stephen has embraced the cause of the dead leader.
It is not merely that the idea that Joyce’s youthful identification with Parnell is pious filial mimesis is wrong. What is rendered in A Portrait is a moving beyond the father. The refusal to take his father’s siding with Parnell on faith and his insistence on exercising his own judgement on the basis of whatever information he could garner is a calculated gesture of independence that is itself Parnellian. From it derives the fierceness and tenacity of Joyce’s Parnellism. The point of origin of Joyce’s Parnellism is vividly if liberally fictionalised in A Portrait.
The setting in time of the Christmas dinner scene afforded a strategic vantage point. Joyce had not set eyes on, nor had he stood and cheered, the Irish leader, but his boyhood was directly touched by his passing. Joyce prized the sense that he stood in a generationally distinctive relation to the dead leader, and marshalled with characteristic remorselessness the imaginative perspective it gave him. He was to perfect a technique of writing about Parnell scrupulously co-related to the indirection of his own experience of the Split, in which he approached Parnell through his myth rather than hazard the frontal portrayal of the leader he had never seen. His retrieval of Parnell’s persona through myth and the traces of memory merges biography with the elusive proximities of a ghost story.
The Christmas dinner scene gave explosive expression to Joyce’s Parnellism. At the time of its publication (in serial form in 1914 in the Egoist, and as a book in 1916–17), Irish politics was finally changing phases. It might have been thought that Parnell was safely dead, entombed beneath alternating layers of recrimination and panegyric. With the publication of A Portrait, the Split, as if out of nowhere, flared into life in all its rawness. Joyce had been thwarted in the publication of ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’, which he had written in Rome in late 1905 and which is concerned with an election in Dublin when the Split still had faint, if fast-fading, traces in municipal politics. With the Christmas dinner scene, Joyce contrived in some degree to redress the loss of the contemporary impact of ‘Ivy Day’. He redirected the course of the posthumous Parnell myth in taking it back almost to its origin, stripping out its bland post-1900 commemorative accretions. The Parnell chapter was not closed after all.
T. M. Healy and the Newspaper War of the Split
The issue of Joyce’s relation to newspapers has a particular significance because historically the Split was a newspaper war of words. The instrumentality of Parnell’s defeat was journalistic. In a way that was and remains unprecedented in Irish politics, the sound and fury of the Split was transmitted by newsprint. It is the role of newspapers that gives the Split its ambiguous modernity. In North Kilkenny the correspondent of the Liberal Daily News wrote,
Nothing in this struggle has more forcibly struck me than the eagerness of the people to ascertain the truth. Electioneering literature is not wasted upon them. Neither wind, nor rain prevents them from coming out of their houses by the roadsides to pick up—or perhaps chase the circulars and copies of newspapers thrown to them by passing cars. You may see at every hamlet or wayside smithy, and at almost every shop door, a group of two or three or more in earnest debates over its leaflet or journal. The longer this goes on the fainter grows Mr. Parnell’s prospects of victory.68
Entering the fray in Ballinakill, Dr Tanner, an anti-Parnellite parliamentarian of near-lunatic eccentricity, from his brake ‘produced a great bundle of copies of Suppressed United Ireland which he scattered broadside amongst the assembled multitude’.69 Newspapers were of the first importance in the Split, as Parnell’s seizure of United Ireland, Healy and his associates’ starting of Suppressed United Ireland (which became Insuppressible), and the later establishment of the National Press demonstrate.
The anti-Parnellites had the advantage in the newspaper war, and that advantage grew as the Split progressed. Parnell’s campaign was somewhat archaic: it comprised his campaigning across the country, the reporting of his speeches in the Freeman’s Journal, and the Parnellite press vaunting in extravagant and often stilted rhetoric his merits as the indispensable leader of Irish nationalism. It was, moreover, difficult to scale back the grandiose tenor of the campaign as Parnell encountered defeats in Ireland in succession to that in Committee Room 15.
Healy proved a remorselessly innovative master of the demotic in the newspaper war. He assailed what he depicted as Parnell’s egotism, his disregard of the Liberal and clerical allies of nationalism. He created a savagely revisionist caricature of Parnell as a leader whom he accused of a rapacious selfishness that reflected his Anglo-Irish landlord origins. His idiom had a supremacist ‘nativist’ edge that stopped just short of overt sectarianism and anticipated the chauvinism of D. P. Moran’s Leader a decade later. His virulence had a terrible freshness to it. His attacks on Parnell’s relations with Katharine O’Shea were savagely personalised; these he sought to justify as a proportionate retaliation for what he condemned as Parnell’s persistence in preferring his personal interests over those of the Irish people. Healy’s purpose was to destroy the lingering residue of deference towards Parnell and to embolden displays of open disrespect for him. His attacks culminated in his denunciation, in the controversy over the Paris funds that followed Parnell’s death, of Katharine Parnell as ‘a proved British prostitute’, which elicited the oblique intervention of Gladstone to restrain him.70
Newspapers drove the Split and are the principal source for the course it took. They are central to the problem of interpreting nationalist public opinion. The evidence, such as it is, suggests a reflexive allegiance to Parnell on the part of the people until they were persuaded otherwise. It is not possible to identify a popular anti-Parnellism that existed independently of and was not mediated through the anti-Parnellite press. Seemingly spontaneous demonstrations of opposition to Parnell, such as occurred frequently in the Carlow election, faithfully adopted the motifs of the National Press. Healy’s rhetoric shaped rather than shadowed the popular response to Parnell in the Split. His lethal phrasemaking entered public consciousness. It served as a primer for anti-Parnellite spokesmen; was adopted by parish orators, lay and clerical; and pervaded the anti-Parnellite provincial press. The consequences overran the Split. Healy had contrived to invest the repudiation of Parnell with a vehemence and a finality it did not possess. Those nationalist voters, probably numerous, who aligned themselves with the anti-Parnellite cause reluctantly, and on the pragmatic grounds that Healy also urged, were implicated in his rhetorical strategy.71
Healy’s journalism was touched by genius. His newspapers taunted the Parnellite press with the inferiority of their communication skills. The sub-editorials of Insuppressible and the National Press carried running critiques of the utterances of Parnellite spokesmen, editors, and journalists, setting their invariant grandiloquence of utterance against the slide in their champion’s fortunes. These commentaries were stingingly acute and droll, and reflected an intimate knowledge of the business and personalities of Irish journalism. They intermittently erupted into comic full-blown editorial pastiches of the rhetoric of Parnellite nationalism. These were exuberantly developed. It is a curious irony that Joyce’s most accomplished precursor as a parodist of Irish nationalist rhetoric was Timothy Michael Healy.
The convention among Parnellites was not to utter Healy’s name, and Joyce’s references to him before Finnegans Wake are sparse. One effect of Healy’s idiom on Joyce was to tighten still further the laconic Parnellism of his aphorisms on Ireland and Irish nationalism, and to sharpen his emphasis on the spareness of Parnell’s idiom. Healy’s journalism further served to inoculate Joyce against the sullen humour of Moran’s Leader, which so many of his contemporaries in University College were to find irresistible. By the time Joyce came to write Finnegans Wake, Healy had acquired a new persona as Governor-General of the Irish Free State from 1922 to 1928. That prompted a different approach. Healy’s name appears with some frequency in the Wake, but—Joyce’s revenge—it indelibly signified the negative of Parnell’s. The recurrent nativist idiom in the Wake of accusation, hunting down, and persecution owes more than a little to Joyce’s attentive reading of the National Press.
The Parnellism of John O’Leary
The ambience of Joyce’s father’s circle of friends was Parnellite, and Joyce learned from newspapers of Parnell’s other prominent followers. Of these, the only supporter outside his father’s circle who might be surmised to have influenced his Parnellism is the Fenian leader John O’Leary (1830–1907), the most forceful defender of Parnell who had not been an adherent before the Split. In his letters to the Freeman’s Journal, O’Leary sounded a scornfully individualistic, almost Carlylean, note that Parnell’s partisans in the Irish Party aspired to but rarely attained.
When he returned to Dublin from exile in Paris in January 1885, O’Leary remained a member of the supreme council of the IRB and initially held aloof from Parnellism. He had always been opposed to the linking through the Land League of political nationalism with agrarianism, and following his return, his principal involvement in political controversy was his outspoken opposition to the Plan of Campaign (which his enemies ascribed to his ownership of property in the town of Tipperary).72 When he met Parnell on his return to Ireland, the two disagreed.73 O’Leary was not opposed to Home Rule but, as Yeats recalled, he ‘had a particular hatred for the rush of emotion that followed the announcement of Gladstone’s conversion, for what was called “The Union of Hearts” and derided its sentimentality. “Nations may respect one another”, he would say, “they cannot love”.’74
O’Leary was sixty at the time of the divorce crisis and broken by the death of his sister. Katharine Tynan wrote that ‘the Parnell struggle was just the distraction the old Chief needed. It made him young again’.75 O’Leary told Barry O’Brien, ‘I did not trouble myself much about the matter, until the Grand Old Man [Gladstone] interfered’. The divorce case had been nothing to him: ‘It was for the Grand Young Man [Parnell] to get out of his scrape as best he could. I was not going to trouble my head about him, but when the Grand Old Man interfered, that gave a new aspect to the affair. It then became a question of submitting to the dictation of an Englishman, and for the first time I resolved to support Parnell.’76
The Split brought O’Leary back into active politics.77 He had a clear conception of Parnell’s commanding ability, and he dismissed the political capacity of the collective anti-Parnellite leadership. Temperamentally averse to sanctimoniousness, he scorned what he regarded as Irish cringing in the face of British moralising. Tynan recalled him roaring, ‘Good God in Heaven.… Did any sane country ever throw over a leader for gallantry?’78 While his interventions were not many, they were direct, cutting, laconic, and superbly in character. His first letter was published in the Freeman’s Journal on the morning the Irish Party assembled in Committee Room 15:
I say as plainly as I can that Mr. Parnell is the only man who has shown the capacity to lead, to use his own phrase, ‘within the Constitution’. To talk of putting the leadership in commission, with your Justin McCarthys, Arthur O’Connors, and the like, is simply silly. The people want a man and not a committee. Mr. Parnell is, in my opinion, no more immaculate as a politician than as a man, but he is not only the fittest man intellectually to lead, but, so far as we know the only fit man, and it would be simply stupid and cowardly to abandon him because Mr. Gladstone screeches and his followers howl. We have been breaking most of the Commandments for years in Ireland, with all the aid possible from Mr. Gladstone and many other Englishmen, but when it comes to a breach of the Sixth (seventh), English morality is at once up in arms. We must suffer because the English sin, but they must at least allow us to refuse ‘to compound for sins we are not inclined to by damning those we have no mind to’.79
Two weeks later as the Kilkenny election got under way, O’Leary weighed in to support Parnell’s candidate with an attack on the manifesto of the anti-Parnellites:
The seceders, secessionists, kickers, backsliders, or whatever else a not grateful country may choose hereafter to call them, alleged, for what reason I could never make out, that their defection was based on Mr. Parnell’s manifesto; but if they did not like it, they could deny its force and fervour. There was a man—whether a good or a bad one is beside the question—behind it. But what is behind the manifesto of the now notorious forty-five? Simply an old woman, or possibly several, for a more nerveless, boneless, sapless production I never remember to have read. These gentlemen had apparently nothing to say, and they have said that nothing very ill.80
