James joyce, p.25
James Joyce, page 25
In March 1891 O’Leary wrote a public letter agreeing to become a member of the Parnell Leadership Committee: ‘I have written more than once, since the commencement of the crisis, in words as strong as I could find, that I went straight for Parnell and dead against the Davitts, Healys, Tanners, and the like; and straight I mean to go with him as long as he goes for an Irish Parliament with independent powers, and that will be, I hope, for the rest of his life, if necessary’. He added, ‘I condemned many things he said and did in the past, and I condemn them still, but I have ever held that in him, and in him alone, rested all our hopes from constitutional action. He made that Parliamentary Party which now stupidly and traitorously strives to unmake him.’81
Three weeks before Parnell’s death, O’Leary defiantly asserted the consonance of support for Parnell with his Fenian convictions: ‘If Mr. Parnell were dead tomorrow, I and men like me, who are above and before all things Irish nationalists, should never dream of following the party of clerical dictation and compromise with England. We go with Mr. Parnell so far as he goes, and insofar as he goes, for Irish freedom.’82
O’Leary’s prominent presence, along with that of James Stephens, in the cortège at Parnell’s funeral symbolised the Split’s complex Parnellite-Fenian entente. With Parnell’s death, the fractiousness of the Split entered a new phase and O’Leary drew back. His final intervention was a scathing riposte to an attack by John Dillon, which ended, ‘I say no word upon the present political crisis, as I believe that the least said is soonest mended just now. Need, more need, there is for thinking, and need for acting too; but for talking there seems to me little if any need, save for newspaper contributors or professional agitators, and I belong to neither of these classes.’83
O’Leary died fifteen years later on 16 March 1907, aged seventy-six. A week later, on 22 March, Il Piccolo della Sera in Trieste carried an article by Joyce, ‘Il Fenianismo: L’ultimo Feniano’. In the piece, Joyce recalls the old man he had attentively observed on the Dublin quays: ‘He could often be seen walking along the river, a venerable old man dressed mostly in light clothes, with a flowing head of white hair, almost bent double with age and suffering; he would halt before the darkened shops of the antiquarian book sellers and then, having made his purchase, he would return along the river.’ In this, the first of his articles the Triestine paper carried, Joyce was concerned principally to describe the position of Fenianism in nineteenth-century Irish politics and its relationship to the contemporary Sinn Féin. To emphasise the obsoleteness of old-style Fenianism—the death ‘perhaps marked the disappearance of the last actor in the turbulent drama that was Fenianism’—he overstated the isolation of O’Leary’s later years and suppressed the rich coda to O’Leary’s career which followed his return to Ireland from Paris. The only allusion to Parnell was indirect, veiled in the flourish with which the article ended: ‘Now that he is dead, his compatriots escort him to his tomb with a great show of pomp, because the Irish, even when they break the hearts of those who sacrifice their lives for their country, never fail to show a great reverence for the dead.’84
The perspective on the Split that Joyce adopted was typically that of Parnell himself. He was largely indifferent to what members of Parnell’s party had to add. There are, however, affinities to O’Leary’s Parnellism. O’Leary’s idiom resembled that of John Stanislaus without the profanity and, like John Stanislaus, it was only in the Split that he rallied to Parnell. His interventions were marked by an old-fashioned sense of honour and plain speaking, and a certain pride of bearing. He gave terse public expression to what Joyce was hearing from his father and John Kelly.
It is likely that O’Leary’s proud, spare idiom had some effect on Joyce, and in one instance this may have a particular salience. A corollary of O’Leary’s romantic individualism was that, in turning on Parnell, the majority of the Irish Party had shown an inconstancy and an emotional febrility that was unmanly, whence his characterisation of the anti-Parnellite manifesto as the product of ‘simply an old woman, or possibly several’. The image was not unique to O’Leary—in Kilkenny during the by-election Parnell himself had referred to ‘all the old women and humbugs in England who are taking this opportunity of airing their virtue all over the country’85—but it is characteristic of him. Whatever its origin, the image was carried over into Joyce’s writing in the denigratory feminising of T. M. Healy. In the Dubliners story ‘A Mother’, it is the pointedly named Miss Healy who professes to support and then reneges on Kathleen Kearney in the concert. In A Portrait it is an old woman who mouths Healy’s catchcries against Parnell, into whose eye the usually benign Mr Casey spits the tobacco he is chewing. In the ‘Aeolus’ episode of Ulysses, J. J. O’Molloy refers to Gerald Fitzgibbon, then a lord justice of appeal, sitting with T. M. Healy on the Trinity College Estates Commission. ‘He is sitting with a sweet thing, Myles Crawford said, in a child’s frock.’86 Joyce’s satiric transgendering and infantilisation of Healy harks back to a specific Parnellite idiom of the Split.87
The respect for O’Leary that Joyce’s Trieste article attested to, and their common Parnellism in the Split, is significant in constituting a link between Joyce and Yeats through the medium of Parnell. Yeats was politically a disciple of O’Leary and publicly associated with him: they collaborated in the establishment of the Young Ireland League, a Parnellite front in all but name, in September 1891.
The issue of O’Leary’s possible colouring of Joyce’s Parnellism also raises the question of whether the Split influenced Joyce’s attitude to Fenianism. Parnell in the Split was accused by the anti-Parnellites and the clergy of engaging in an ‘appeal to the hillsides’. Determined to reassert his leadership, Parnell had no intention of compromising his commitment to constitutional nationalism.88 He was, however, heavily dependent on the support of Fenian activists and maintained close relations with leading Fenians through the course of the Split.89 Some of Parnell’s younger adherents were drawn to Fenianism after his death, but Joyce did not follow this trajectory. Though historically sympathetic to Fenianism—his receptiveness owed something to the influence of his father—he remained sceptical of physical force.
Joyce and the Posthumous Parnell Myth
Joyce’s nationalism departed from the contemporary norm of a child’s acceptance of an Irish nationalist family identity. It was an elective Parnellite nationalism engendered in the Split and its immediate aftermath. He embraced nationalism just as its prevailing form had sundered. His nationalism was not petrified at the moment of Parnell’s death. It was informed by a fluid critique which owed much to the disillusionment wrought by the politics of the long Split from 1890 to 1900.
The fact that Joyce grew to adolescence and adulthood in an Ireland dominated by the memory of Parnell is often taken to suggest that it was unremarkable that he should have been touched by Parnellite allegiance. This ignores, as well as the electiveness of his identification with Parnell, the fact that the posthumous Parnell myth was a frail construct. Joyce was quick to realise that the means by which Parnell was remembered did him little justice. By about the mid-1890s Joyce came to disavow as futile and un-Parnellian (i.e., lacking fidelity to Parnell’s character and political principles) the conventional modes by which Parnell’s political legacy was fostered and his memory commemorated. Joyce’s was a critical, dissentient strain of Parnellism after Parnell. He stood virtually alone.
What tends to be missed is that for Joyce the Split was a lost opportunity for modernisation. The victory of the anti-Parnellites was for Joyce, as both a nationalist and a contemporary European, a reactionary reflux. In rejecting the opportunity to achieve the aspiration of an ancient nation, the Irish had also refused modern European statehood. It was these considerations rather than a fetishisation of the Parnell of the fall that inspired and maintained Joyce’s unsparing indictment of his countrymen’s repudiation of their leader.
F.S.L. Lyons diagnosed in Joyce ‘a bad case of arrested Parnellism’.90 This could be taken as an argument that Joyce’s espousal of Parnellite allegiance was self-indulgent and lacking in realism in its refusal to accept both the political constraints created by the massive repudiation of Parnell in 1891 and the anti-Parnellite ascendancy that defined the configuration of Irish politics in the quarter century following. But it is consistent with the radicalism of Joyce’s critique of the Split that he should have refused to accept a conventionally constricted conception of what was politically realistic in the wake of Parnell’s defeat. Joyce did not have to conform to the constraints to which a politician was subject. He was unforgiving towards his countrymen in a way that no Parnellite politician could afford, and that few of Parnell’s contemporary adherents who were not politicians had the stamina to be. That unforgivingness was Joyce’s political and intellectual homage to Parnell.
It has also been suggested that the overthrow of Parnell afforded Joyce a lifelong opportunity to rail against the Irish proclivity for treachery and betrayal and a pretext to disengage from Irish politics. This reflects a failure to take seriously what Joyce wrote on political subjects and on Ireland.
If there is anything enigmatic in Joyce’s relation to Parnell and to the Split, it is its persistence. Joyce had already interiorised aspects of Parnell’s views and persona—as if defensively—and he could have left it at that. He could have left it as a childhood experience. Any purpose he may have had as a boy to vindicate the dead leader did not last; it survived into his maturity only in a radically different form. Joyce’s Parnellism is consistent across his life, but there is nothing inevitable or linear in his development of themes and motifs relating to Parnell or deriving from the Split.
What is certain is that Joyce did not set out to proselytise his contemporaries on behalf of Parnell or the Parnellite cause. As a student in University College, Dublin from 1898 to 1902, his Parnellism as an active principle was in abeyance and he veiled the intensity of his imaginative engagement with Parnell. The Parnellite cause seems to have slipped into the realm of the archaic, in the sense of being perceived to lack contemporary political salience, and to have had little bearing on Joyce’s prospective future as an artist as he then conceived it.
This changed. Joyce’s Parnellism regained traction. His experiences in his own life, and the course of contemporary Irish politics, reaffirmed his identification with Parnell. Joyce in exile became exaggeratedly receptive to even faint stirrings of Parnell’s memory, as if easily persuaded that Parnell was not after all forgotten. Most of all, he subsumed his Parnellism into his fiction.
Politically the outcome of the long Split after almost a decade of recrimination was the reunion of Parnell’s fractured party in 1900, premised on consigning the Split to history. The negotiation of the emotional and intellectual residues of the Split was finally extruded from the political domain into the imaginative. What was to endure was the radical recasting of the relationship between the literary and the political in Ireland. There was to be an extraordinary rendering of Parnell’s myth and of the Split in the writings of W. B. Yeats and Joyce, but no political relancement of Parnell’s cause and memory.
1. Ellmann, James Joyce, 55. Other mentions of Joyce’s boyhood relationship to Parnell are more bland and the precise basis for what is asserted left unstated. Thus Louis Gillet, who knew Joyce in Paris in the late 1920s and 1930s, wrote, ‘But Joyce could not forget the memory of Parnell. The figure of this tribune and powerful agitator, today three-quarters forgotten, was the first to impress his young years. He had been the hero of his childhood. Joyce used to hear about his exploits as about those of Napoleon: both had been giants who made England shudder.… When Parnell died, victim of intrigues and pharisaism, Joyce was ten—one never gets over one’s first impressions’ (Claybook for James Joyce, 98–99). Gillet seems to have an intimation, in referring to Parnell as the ‘victim of intrigues and pharisaism’, that his comparison with the childhood impact of Napoleonic lore on a French child does not quite work.
2. The oddity of Stanislaus’s political and religious perspective was not readily picked up by non-Irish readers. T. S. Eliot twice read the text, which Faber and Faber published. He was dismayed, and in some degree distracted, by Stanislaus’s dismissal of religious belief, but captured something of the dogged obtuseness of ‘this positive, courageous, bitter man’, who had died on Bloomsday 1955, three years before the publication of the memoir: ‘Where James, in political and religious matters, was indifferent or merely mocking, Stanislaus manifests a sometimes appalling violence’. T. S. Eliot, preface to S. Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 12.
3. Richard Ellmann, who edited the text, wrote in his introduction, ‘The book’s title, My Brother’s Keeper, summed up his painful service and his sense of bondage, and something else as well. When he referred to it himself, he would give the title and then add, smiling wryly, “You know … Cain”’. Ellmann, introduction to S. Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 15. After Cain has murdered his elder brother, Abel, God asks him where his brother was. Cain answers in the Tyndale Bible, ‘I know not; am I my brother’s keeper?’ (Genesis 4:9).
4. S. Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 49.
5. S. Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 65.
6. S. Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 172–73.
7. S. Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 173.
8. S. Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 173
9. S. Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 172–73. Stanislaus’s own perspective on the Split was as unsparing as his brother’s, but as a socio-cultural critique of his male countrymen: ‘Their sudden revulsion of feeling and malignant outcry against their former idol, Parnell, when he became the protagonist of as genuine a love drama as modern history affords, could hardly have happened in any other country in Europe. Love gets a cold welcome in Ireland unless it is obedient to priestly control before marriage, and, through the confessional, after marriage too. Unmarried mothers had better be dead than alive in the greenest of isles’. S. Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 163–64; see also 234. It was not that James Joyce did not share these views of Stanislaus, but they serve to highlight how determinedly political his treatment of Parnell and the Split was. Stanislaus’s ruminations on this subject were an improvement, at least at the level of serviceable aphorism, on what he had written in the year of his brother’s death: ‘Joyce exhibited a character trait so common among Irishmen that it could be called the Irish paradox—faithfulness to one woman and at the same time a profound hostility towards women in general’. S. Joyce, Recollections of James Joyce, 26; see also 11. This was probably written before his book; S. Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 24.
10. S. Joyce, entry for 14 September 1904, in Dublin Diary, 94–95.
11. Joyce to Harriet Shaw Weaver, 8 November 1916, Letters I, 99; see Ellmann, James Joyce, 749. Joyce seems both reasonably confident and relieved that there were no extant copies.
12. S. Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 64–65. These are the only lines that Stanislaus quotes of the Parnell poem and are all that survive. John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon, in A Bibliography of James Joyce, 1882–1941 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953), 3, claim to quote a further four lines, beginning, ‘My cot alas that dear old shady home’, that are taken from Joyce’s letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver of 22 November 1930 (Letters I, 295). As Stanislaus makes clear, these lines—parodied in Finnegans Wake (231.5–9)—are from contemporaneous juvenile poetry by Joyce ‘in the style of the drawing-room ballads to which he was accustomed’ (S. Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 65), and are not from the Parnell poem. Ellmann (James Joyce, 33) strangely adopts the Slocum and Cahoon error. The surviving fragment of the Parnell poem as recalled by Stanislaus is more vivid and suffers by the false accretion. Stanislaus, who was apparently unaware that ‘dear old tumtum home’ had found its way into the Wake, explained, ‘The lines I have quoted have stuck in my memory because “the dear old shady home” and the blandly appropriated “quaint-perched aerie” were standing jokes between us as late as when we were living at Trieste’. S. Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 65.
13. S. Joyce, Recollections of James Joyce, 6. The suggestion of Stanislaus Joyce that the Hynes poem in ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’ is ‘more or less in the same style’ is suspect. Succumbing to the temptation of reimagining the rest of the lost Parnell poem through that recited by Hynes in ‘Ivy Day’, he missed the subtlety of the story, and the fact that his brother’s implacable critique of how Parnell was commemorated extended to his own first published work. [See chapter 12, ‘Writing Dubliners in Exile’.]
14. OCPW 194.
15. Ellmann, James Joyce, 33.
16. Backus, Scandal Work, 18–19.
17. In a sub-leader entitled ‘The Cry of the Banshee’, United Ireland wrote, ‘As one looks through Irish poetry it is impressive and mournful to see how much of the best of it consists of dirges at the biers of dead leaders.… The wail of the banshee seems to be the inevitable close to every Irish period of hope; it is never silent for a generation’ (24 October 1891).
18. S. Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 65; Costello, Years of Growth, 109. John Stanislaus Joyce’s claim, made many years later to the bookdealer Jacob Schwartz, to have paid for the poem’s printing and despatched a copy to the pope (Ellmann, James Joyce, 33n) led to successive enquiries of the Vatican Library, one of which I recall making myself twenty years ago. The lost broadsheet is the holy grail of Irish bibliophiles. The solicitor Ciaran Mac An Aili told me that his friend and fellow book collector Captain Tadhg MacGlinchey, founding director and publisher of the Irish University Press, had a dream in which he found Joyce’s Parnell poem among a cache of Victorian music sheets.
