James joyce, p.26
James Joyce, page 26
19. Gorman, James Joyce, 36. Gorman describes the poem as ‘a violently written attack on Timothy Healy’, which would partially account for the ascription of the title ‘Et Tu Healy’. Joyce seems to have been aware of the title: the enigmatic phrase ‘(Et Cur Heli!)’ appears in Finnegans Wake (73.19). Perhaps it was a punningly classicising title conferred by his father.
20. R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life, vol. 1, The Apprentice Mage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 116.
21. Bradley, James Joyce’s Schooldays, 9.
22. Bradley, James Joyce’s Schooldays, 80; Igoe, James Joyce’s Dublin Houses, 40.
23. Ellmann, James Joyce, 34; S. Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 40; Igoe, James Joyce’s Dublin Houses, 19, 40.
24. P 1.336–44.
25. P 1.345–46.
26. P 1.591–94.
27. P 1.593–94; Bradley, James Joyce’s Schooldays, 63–64.
28. P 1.695–715.
29. P 1.100–102, 1.281–83.
30. I owe to Edmund Epstein the idea of making the computation; see Epstein, Ordeal of Stephen Dedalus, 36. However, my calculation leads to a different result from his. He dates the reverie on Parnell’s death to 9–10 October. If one co-relates the dating to the infirmary scene itself, Epstein’s count, which suggests a relation to Parnell’s funeral on 11 October rather than his death, has the problem that Stephen could scarcely have remained so long in ignorance of the fact of Parnell’s death.
Hans Walter Gabler undertakes the same exercise in ‘The Christmas Dinner Scene, Parnell’s Death, and the Genesis of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, James Joyce Quarterly 13, no. 1 (Fall 1975): 27–38. Gabler (‘Christmas Dinner Scene’, 33) errs in taking this number pasted inside the desk to relate to the days to Christmas, whereas Joyce makes clear it is the days to the start of the Christmas holidays (‘Soon they would be going home for the holidays’ (P 1.10); ‘But the Christmas vacation was very far away’: (P 1.15). In Gabler’s account (‘Christmas Dinner Scene’, 33), the seventy-sixth day before Christmas is 9 October. He then situates Stephen’s ‘dream or vision’ to the night of 10–11 October, so that ‘Stephen’s return to life from a sickness-to-death (as he imagines it) are synchronized to take place during the same morning [as the return to Ireland of Parnell’s body] of 11 October 1891’ (‘Christmas Dinner Scene’, 34). This is all unnecessarily contrived and wrong, primarily because the novel conveys that Stephen in the infirmary feverishly overhears the news of Parnell’s death.
31. P 2.1167–68.
32. Brother Michael is based on Brother John Hanly, who had charge of the Clongowes infirmary; see Bradley, James Joyce’s Schooldays, 59–60. Bradley notes that Jesuit brothers did not wear clerical collars at the time, as did Jesuit priests and scholastics, and dressed effectively as laymen. This is why Brother Michael is referred to as having ‘a queer look … a different kind of look’ (P 1.568–60). Stephen registers that Brother Michael addresses the prefect—a senior pupil—as ‘sir’. Joyce was attentive to the matter of clerical collars, as his treatment of the swathing of Fr Keon’s collar in ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’ in Dubliners was to attest. Frank Callanan, ‘The Parnellism of James Joyce: “Ivy Day in the Committee Room”’, Joyce Studies Annual 2015 (2015): 78–79.
33. The deployment of prolepsis is cunningly presaged several pages earlier in the anticipatory narrative of the joyous departure from Clongowes at the end of term, albeit based on what ‘the fellows had told him’ (P 1.20).
34. Mr Casey’s account implies, without explicitly stating, that Parnell was present at the meeting. I have not been able to find a report of a Parnellite meeting in Arklow, attended by Parnell or not. It seems that Joyce invented the Arklow meeting in Parnell’s native county of Wicklow.
35. P 1.1058–60.
36. P 1.936–45.
37. P 1.991–1007.
38. P 1.1069–73.
39. P 1.1107–8. This is one of the two occasions, both in a private setting, in Joyce’s fiction where Stephen Dedalus finds himself almost embarrassedly moved by high rhetoric. In the ‘Aeolus’ episode of Ulysses, the older Stephen finds himself moved when J. J. O’Molloy (like Mr Casey, a stricken man) intones Seymour Bushe’s invocation of Michelangelo’s Moses in his peroration in the Childs case: ‘Stephen, his blood wooed by grace of blood and gesture, blushed’ (U 7.776).
40. P 1.1114–21.
41. P 1.1138–51.
42. P 2.366–70. Of his attempting to write a poem to Parnell on the obverse of a rent demand, Margot Norris has written luminously, ‘Stephen’s art however much it strives to epiphanize itself and thereby transcend its material and social context, is literally inscribed in the textuality of Ireland’s political economic life’ (Joyce’s Web, 19).
43. S. Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 65–66.
44. Curran, Under the Receding Wave, 25. There is remarkably little record on the subject of the gender divide, primarily on account of the restricted franchise. My late friend and colleague Gregory Murphy informed me that on the mention of Parnell’s name, his grandmother went into a sulk, and his grandfather, a clerk in the Guinness brewery, raised his hat.
45. In this instance Ellmann wrote, ‘Joyce has described the Christmas dinner in 1891, when his father and John Kelly raged and wept over Parnell’s betrayal and death, and Dante Conway, full of venomous piety, left the table. The argument was so acrimonious that the Vances heard it along the street. Probably the evidence of Ulysses can be trusted that Mrs. Conway left the house for good four days later’ (James Joyce, 34). This referred to the fact that in Ulysses it is stated that ‘Mrs. Riordan (Dante), a widow of independent means, had resided in the house of Stephen’s parents from 1 September 1888 to 29 December 1891’ (U 17.479–80). Ellmann cited a 1953 interview with Eileen Vance for the penultimate sentence. The final sentence disregards the recollection of Stanislaus which put her departure somewhat later in time and did not relate it to a political falling out: ‘In Blackrock the disintegration of our family set in with gathering rapidity. Dante left us and went to live with other friends’ (My Brother’s Keeper, 66).
46. Joyce writes of Stephen in the novel, ‘It was his first Christmas dinner and he thought of his little brothers and sisters who were waiting in the nursery, as he had often waited, until the pudding came’ (P 1.30).
47. Gabler, ‘Christmas Dinner Scene’, 28–31.
48. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 7 February 1905, Letters II 79.
49. P 1.344.
50. P 1.628–35.
51. See chapter 13, ‘Reading Ireland from Exile’; and Frank Callanan, ‘James Joyce and the United Irishman, Paris 1902–3’, Dublin James Joyce Journal 3 (2010): 51–103.
52. Rodgers, Irish Literary Portraits, 55.
53. W. B. Yeats, ‘Modern Ireland’, in Irish Renaissance: A Gathering of Essays, Memoirs, Letters and Dramatic Poetry from the ‘Massachusetts Review’, ed. Robin Skelton and David R. Clark (Dublin: Dolmen, 1965), 20.
54. He wrote for newspapers, notably in his book reviews for the Dublin Daily Express in 1902–3, and his Irish pieces for Il Piccolo della Sera in Trieste in 1907–12. As a young man in Paris he had hoped to become the Paris correspondent of the Irish Times, but succeeded only in publishing a single piece, an interview with a French competitor in the motor derby, the Gordon-Bennett race, published in the paper on 7 April 1903 (OCPW 77–79). Joyce wrote to his mother, ‘It would be quite easy for me to send any kind of news to that intelligent organ-motor news, dead men’s news, any news: for I have all the Paris newspapers at my disposal’. Joyce to May Joyce, 8 February 1903, Letters II 27. On his first return to Dublin in 1909, he was prepared to pose as a correspondent of Il Piccolo della Sera and paid a number of visits to the offices of the Evening Telegraph on which he would draw for the ‘Aeolus’ episode of Ulysses. Ellmann, James Joyce, 288–90.
55. Vincent Deane, Daniel Ferrer, and Geert Lernout, eds., The ‘Finnegans Wake’ Notebooks at Buffalo (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004).
56. OCPW 196.
57. FW 568.16.
58. F.S.L. Lyons, Fall of Parnell, 167–68; Callanan, Parnell Split, 67–71.
59. Pall Mall Gazette, 1 January 1891. I have not succeeded in finding a citation of Davitt’s remark in an Irish newspaper. The interview is mentioned in the Evening Telegraph of 2 and 5 January 1891, but without the ‘Irish good humour’ quotation.
60. PSW 103.
61. When Francis Sheehy-Skeffington’s biography of Davitt was reviewed in Sinn Féin, the reviewer (probably Griffith) took exception to the author’s assertion that Davitt had put the issues of the Split ‘without rancour’: ‘The references to the leader he had deserted as one of “Cromwell’s breed”, “the Cromwellian”, and his allusions to the woman in the case, are, we presume unknown to the guileless writer of this book, or else he is ignorant of the meaning of the word “rancour”’ (20 June 1908).
62. Gorman, James Joyce, 217; see Ellmann, James Joyce, 338. Whatever was thrown at Parnell, it was not quicklime.
63. National Press, 8 October 1891; United Ireland, 17 October 1891; Callanan, T. M. Healy, 409.
64. FW 131.20–21.
65. Kenny-Devitt correspondence, 18 October 1891, Clongowes Archives, quoted in Bradley, James Joyce’s Schooldays, 61.
66. FW 594.7.
67. See, for example, T. M. Healy’s Why Ireland Is Not Free: A Study of Twenty Years in Irish Politics (Dublin: Nation office, 1898), which is a ferocious polemical account of the political career of John Dillon put together largely from newspaper sources.
68. Daily News, 20 December 1890.
69. Daily Chronicle, 17 December 1890.
70. Callanan, Parnell Split, 187–91.
71. Callanan, T. M. Healy, 258–59.
72. Marcus Bourke, John O’Leary: A Study in Irish Separatism (Tralee: Anvil, 1967), 195–99.
73. Katharine Tynan, Twenty-Five Years: Reminiscences (London: Smith, Elder, 1913).
74. W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955), 210–11.
75. Katharine Tynan, The Middle Years (London: Constable, 1916), 25.
76. R. B. O’Brien, Charles Stewart Parnell, 2:253–56; see also 336.
77. Katharine Tynan, Memories (London: E. Nash and Grayson, 1924), 105. See also R. B. O’Brien, Charles Stewart Parnell, 2:253.
78. Tynan, Memories, 418.
79. O’Leary to editor, 30 November 1890, Freeman’s Journal, 1 December 1890.
80. O’Leary to editor, 12 December 1890, Freeman’s Journal, 13 December 1890.
81. O’Leary to honorary secretaries of the Parnell Leadership Committee, Freeman’s Journal, 10 March 1891.
82. O’Leary to editor, Freeman’s Journal, 14 and 15 September 1891. See also Callanan, Parnell Split, 251–52.
83. O’Leary to editor, 28 October 1891, Freeman’s Journal, 29 October 1891. Dillon’s speech, in Dundalk, is reported in Freeman’s Journal, 26 October 1891.
84. Joyce, ‘Il Fenianismo: L’ultimo Feniano’, Il Piccolo della Sera, 22 March 1907, in OCPW 138–41.
85. Daily News, 22 December 1890.
86. U 7.802.
87. Joyce’s allegorical depiction of Ireland as a toothless old woman is better treated as a discrete image with a different line of descent.
88. Callanan, Parnell Split, 238–59.
89. McGee, IRB, 195–211.
90. F.S.L. Lyons, ‘James Joyce’s Dublin’, 20.
5
‘Christ and Caesar’
THE ORIGINS OF JOYCE’S THESIS OF THE ‘TWO MASTERS’
The National League is all at sixes and sevens; the Catholic Church alone remains erect in the midst of the Irish chaos. Its bishops in council are the nearest approach to an Irish Senate that is to be found in Ireland; its priesthood constitute a more intelligent, respectable, and public-spirited body than the retinue of nominees who were decorated with the affix M. P. at the good pleasure of Mr. Parnell.
—W. T. STEAD, JANUARY 18911
But I cannot hide from myself the fear and danger lest the completeness of Mr. Parnell’s overthrow may imperceptibly lead to the substitution of clerical supremacy for his personal supremacy.… The priests have done well and gloriously so far.
—JOHN FRANCIS TAYLOR, JULY 18912
IN HIS 1912 article ‘L’ombra di Parnell’, published in Trieste, Joyce summarised the course of the Split from the Parnellite perspective: ‘He was deposed by the Nationalists obeying Gladstone’s orders. Of the eighty-three deputies, only eight remained faithful to him. The Irish press poured the phials of their spitefulness over him and the woman he loved. The peasants of Castlecomer threw quicklime in his eyes. He went from county to county, from city to city, “like a hunted hind”, a spectral figure with the signs of death upon his brow. Within a year he died of a broken heart at the age of forty-five.’3 The parliamentary arithmetic was wrong: twenty-six members of the party remained in the committee room; forty-five departed. Joyce was perhaps confusing the outcome with that of the 1892 general election, in which nine Parnellites were returned against seventy-two anti-Parnellites. What Joyce described as the ‘elastic quality of Gladstone’s liberalism’ was what Parnell had concluded at the outset would ‘only yield to force’, in the socio-political sense. If he had a sceptically realistic understanding of what he called ‘the history of Anglo-Saxon Liberalism’,4 Joyce regarded Gladstone’s portentous moralising with amused contempt. His suspicion of Liberal professions of disinterested altruism would set him apart from his more credulous contemporaries in University College.
The locus classicus of Joyce’s ‘two masters’ thesis of the twin subjection of Ireland to British government and to the Catholic Church—to secular empire and ecclesiastical imperium—is in the opening ‘Telemachus’ episode of Ulysses. The Englishman Haines, who professes Liberal sentiments, at least in relation to Ireland, is pressing Stephen on the subject of his religious belief, eager to establish that he is not a believer:
—After all, I should think you are able to free yourself. You are your own master, it seems to me.
—I am a servant of two masters, Stephen said, English and an Italian.
—Italian? Haines said.…
—The imperial British state, Stephen answered, his colour rising, and the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church.5
In his response, Haines screens out the reference to the dominion of the Church, which he doesn’t understand: ‘I can quite understand that, he said calmly. An Irishman must think like that, I daresay. We feel in England that we have treated you rather unfairly. It seems history is to blame.’6 Stephen, however, is now thinking of the Church, and of the words of the Nicene Creed: ‘The proud potent titles clanged over Stephen’s memory the triumph of their brazen bells: et unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam.’7
Haines’s statement that ‘it seems history is to blame’ is an exoneration of the British state, but it also offers a false exculpation of the Irish for their submission to the Catholic Church. Stephen will not exempt his countrymen from historical responsibility. The term ‘masters’, with the connotation of servitude, was intended to carry a charge of demeaning acquiescence by the Irish people in the masterdom of the Church. But what gives it its rhetorical force is Joyce’s use of the first person. He is also a servant of two masters. It seems unlikely that here Stephen is assuming a sacrificial burden: rather he seems to be acknowledging that he comes out of an enfeebled Catholic nationalist tradition, but one that does bear on him personally (‘his colour rising’). With the idea of servitude comes the imperative of revolt, connecting with William Blake’s idea of the twin oppression of priest and king. In the ‘Circe’ episode later in the novel, Stephen, more heroically than he intends, in the presence of the two British soldiers taps his brow and says, ‘But in here it is I must kill the priest and the king.’8
The origins of Joyce’s ‘two masters’ thesis and its duality lie in Gladstone’s intervention in the Split sustained by the Catholic Church. Though a once and future prime minister, Gladstone was not in office at the time of Parnell’s fall in 1890–91 and so could not really be considered to represent ‘the Imperial British State’. Irish deference to Gladstone’s Liberal party was uncoerced and voluntary, as was Irish allegiance to the Catholic Church. While therefore the ‘two masters’ thesis related to the fact that the two standing structures of authority in Ireland were those of the British state in Ireland and of the Catholic Church—an equation offensive in itself to most nationalists—it carries in Joyce’s writing the resonance of the Split. In Joyce’s abhorrence of the confluence of thought of the nonconformist conscience in Britain and the Catholic Church in Ireland during the Split, it is possible to discern the distant origins of Joyce’s intimation of the coincidentia oppositorum, that opposing ideas may touch, which was of importance in his later thinking on politics and history.
