James joyce, p.34
James Joyce, page 34
142. Stead, Lest We Forget, 23.
143. Callanan, Parnell Split, 71–73.
144. Joyce’s ‘own crisis of belief’ is the subject of chapter 4 of Geert Lernout’s magisterial Help My Unbelief, 94–110. My concern is narrower than Lernout’s and relates to Joyce’s critique of Catholic social power and political authority in Ireland and the deference it attracted. Lernout might well be sceptical of the idea that it is a subject that can be treated separately from Joyce’s loss of faith.
145. S. Joyce, entry for 13 August 1904, in Dublin Diary, 55.
146. Applied politically, the idea was distanced from its origins in the writings of Nicholas of Cusa and Giordano Bruno, discussed in Donald Philip Verene, James Joyce and the Philosophers at Finnegans Wake (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016), 55–72.
147. Callanan, Parnell Split, 208.
148. Padraic Colum, The Road Round Ireland (New York: Macmillan, 1937), 317.
149. Callanan, T. M. Healy, 386.
150. Callanan, T. M. Healy, 334–45.
6
Joyce in University College, Dublin
In those early days, as since, Joyce was a figure apart. It would be easy to exaggerate his apparent arrogance and reserve. If he seemed arrogant and aloof it was in self-defence. Silently or with some abrupt, devastating phrase he stood in fierce defence of his own integrity—his liberty to think differently. He was far and away the most mature of our student group. We were all conscious of it; cheerfully and disrespectfully aware that he was in correspondence with Ibsen, Arthur Symons and William Archer, and that his verse was beginning to appear in the Saturday Review, and his prose in the Fortnightly. He was just past eighteen then.
—C. P. CURRAN, OBITUARY OF JAMES JOYCE1
Somebody said that Jim was very determined. Jim denied [this], saying that like a wise man he was determined by circumstances.
—STANISLAUS JOYCE, 19042
JOYCE ATTENDED UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, Dublin from September 1898 to June 1902, from ages sixteen to twenty, receiving his certificate of graduation on 30 September 1902. With John Henry Newman as its first rector, the Catholic University had opened at 86 St Stephen’s Green in 1854.3 Following the enactment of the University Education (Ireland) Act of 1879, and the constitution of the Royal University of Ireland as a degree-awarding institution, the college became in 1882 University College, generally designated as University College, Dublin. The following year the Irish hierarchy entrusted its administration to the Irish Jesuits. Its facilities were sparse. The modern University College Dublin was not constituted until the year after the Liberal government enacted the Irish Universities Act of 1908.4
The nationalism of the Jesuit authorities, such as it was, was muted. This was in part because of the order’s dread of popular enthusiasm, in part to avoid unnecessary offence to the Conservative party, which was (incorrectly as it transpired) presumed to be more likely than the Liberals to constitute University College a full university on a statutory basis.5
At the heart of University College, Dublin was the debating society, the Literary and Historical Society (L&H), an extraordinary institution. It was an arena in which the assertion of political and barristerial ambition was typically confronted more characteristically by artistic scorn and intellectual scepticism than by left-wing dissent. William G. Fallon went so far as to say that ‘Joyce had passed unnoticed at the college until he began to take an active part in the Literary and Historical Society’s debates.’6 Joyce, at the end of his second year, contested the auditorship of the society for the session of 1900–1901, losing by nine votes to fifteen to Hugh Kennedy (1879–1936), who was to become the first attorney general of the Irish Free State. It was to the L&H that Joyce delivered his papers ‘Drama and Life’ on 20 January 1900 and on James Clarence Mangan on 15 February 1902.7 University College, and within it the L&H, was to provide the principal arena of Joyce’s public engagement in Ireland.
There was a hiatus in the L&H that extended from the spring of 1891 to 1897, the year before Joyce’s arrival, which the historian of the society suggested owed something to the Parnell Split: ‘It may have been thought that a student society could not operate with advantage to the College or its members in an atmosphere that was steadily filled with hate’.8 By the time the society was reconstituted, the Jesuits had tacitly abandoned their never entirely successful attempt to confine the discussion of contemporary Irish politics to ‘the university question’ (that is, whether to allow women to attend university in Ireland). This was achieved less by overt censorship than through the subtle deprecation of political controversy. Fallon, a near contemporary of Joyce, recalled that ‘the Society was repeatedly cautioned against excursions into the field of domestic politics, even after the closing of the “Parnellite Split” in 1900.’9
The L&H was also the principal point of intersection between the life of the college and the wider world of politics that lay beyond St Stephen’s Green. Public figures were invited to reply to the annual inaugural addresses of the auditor, and frequently to chair meetings. During Joyce’s four years there, the public figures to attend the society included Timothy Michael Healy (twice), John Dillon, Timothy Harrington, J. G. Swift MacNeill, William Field, Mathias McDonnell Bodkin, Richard Adams, John Francis Taylor, Eoin MacNeill, and Patrick Pearse.10 Joyce thus had the opportunity to observe members of the Irish Party with whose names and careers he was familiar from the time of the Parnell Split, and figures of the contemporary Irish language revival.
Constantine Curran (1883–1972) is the most important biographical source for Joyce’s politics in University College. His James Joyce Remembered (1968), published over a quarter century after Joyce’s death, was followed by a graceful memoir, Under the Receding Wave (1970). A barrister who never practised and who became the registrar of the Supreme Court,11 Curran was a politically and institutionally trusted and well-connected figure on the fringes of Sinn Féin and in the new Irish state.12 He was an acutely perceptive observer of his contemporaries. With his actor wife, Helen Laird, in his private life he moved in artistic and theatrical circles. An observant Catholic, and discreet to a fault—he was nicknamed ‘cautious Con’—Curran was learned, highly intelligent, and possessed of a fine prose style.13 He was the author of the first major work on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Irish stucco.14 Curran lived happily a divided life. ‘Though most of my life was spent in the Four Courts—at the Registrar’s desk, between Bench and Bar—my free hours were passed on the fringes of the arts in the company of men who lived outside the Common Law—poets, painters, musicians, theatre men and a few scholars who made up a Dublin that Pericles might have commended.’15 His relationship with Joyce, of which he only wrote on his retirement, was the fraught emblem of this duality. Without Curran’s memoirs, the political relationship in which Joyce stood to his peers would be largely a matter of surmise and inference drawn from his own writings and from the recollections of his brother Stanislaus.
FIGURE 6.1. Graduation group, University College, Dublin, 1902. Joyce is standing second from left; C. P. Curran is front row, far right; George Clancy is seated second row, first left, in mortarboard. Source: 1.12, James Joyce Collection, The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York.
The years Joyce spent at University College Dublin, from 1898 to 1902, were marked by ostensible political stability, if not stagnation, but there were underlying rifts which were to reconfigure Irish politics and have devastating consequences for the generation to which he belonged. In the Ireland of 1898–1902, the vast majority of nationalists believed Home Rule would be won once a Liberal government was returned to office, and were prepared to accept the sufficiency of Home Rule, not perhaps for all time, but certainly for a generation or more. The students of University College for the most part subscribed to this consensus. Curran wrote of the student body,
They were eloquently divided between an orthodox majority, readers of the Home Rule Freeman’s Journal, many of them sons of members of the Irish Parliamentary Party, and a small minority who read the insurgent United Irishman and preached the new doctrine of Arthur Griffith and William Rooney. A very few were members of the Celtic Literary Society, or the militant Dungannon Club, or the Confederates, but this handful of artsmen was fortified by a strong battalion of medicals from the Cecilia Street School ready to play an active part in any intra or extra commotion. The Gaelic League occupied a middle field of general respect.16
The students were swept by the contemporary vogue for the Gaelic League and the revival of the Irish language and were the first generation of University College students to be so affected. It was principally the extent of the sympathy with the aims of the Gaelic League that set the University College students in Joyce’s era in some degree apart from general nationalist opinion in Ireland, which looked on the revival of the language as a worthy but distant national aspiration towards which some progress might be made after the attainment of Home Rule.
The Gaelic League professed to political neutrality—hence Curran’s ‘middle field’—and many students in University College who were loyal adherents of the Irish Party professed ardent support for the revival of the language, though their attempts to learn Irish, however enthusiastically embarked on, were rarely sustained. Their attitude was naïve: Douglas Hyde’s much-acclaimed 1892 address ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland’ breathed contempt for the agenda of constitutional nationalism.17 Their ingenuousness found expression in their enthusiasm for the Gaelicising chauvinism of D. P. Moran’s Leader, conceived in opposition to what Curran characterised as ‘the insurgent United Irishman’. Written in Moran’s distinctively pungent English, the Leader dismissed the idea that political nationalism could reflect Ireland’s Gaelic essence. Joyce, a political nationalist whose thinking was honed in the Split, was undeceived.
There are no direct avowals of Joyce’s political convictions while he was at University College. But the reconstitution of his attitudes is nonetheless possible. It entails mapping against the course of contemporary politics his early Parnellism, what is recorded of him in University College, what he wrote while still in Dublin after his graduation from late 1902 to late 1904 and in early exile, and what he wrote in Stephen Hero set against the considerably later and highly stylised A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This yields a comprehensible account of Joyce’s Irish politics, which is coherent and disposes of any lingering idea that Joyce was devoid of political conviction, or that he set out to render his thinking undecipherably opaque. His later rendering of his fictional characters attested to an acute sense that in Ireland politics was an integral part of personal identity: the idea that he set out to maintain a godlike authorial exemption for himself was never altogether credible.
In contrast to many of his contemporaries in University College, Joyce was not a supporter of either of the factions of the Irish Parliamentary Party after Parnell, which remained divided up to 1900. He also had reservations that led him to withhold assent from the opponents of the Irish Party. This marked not a midway position but a Parnell-inflected solitude. He grasped the enormous and novel potential implications, both political and cultural, of the Irish language revival. He was instinctively more suspicious than most of his peers of Gaelicising rhetoric, and of the sources of support for the Gaelic League. However, probably not without a struggle with his own instincts, he managed to remain open-minded about the project of a Gaelic revival.
The great paradox is that in the midst of his volubly political contemporaries, Joyce, while appearing disengaged from politics, was more politically incisive in his thinking than they were. His nationalism was politically intelligent, and he intuited what the political implications of a Gaelic revival might be. While he declined to flaunt his convictions, his Parnellite and Fenian-inflected nationalism was politically more radical than theirs. He thought traditional Fenian conceptions of revolution to be superseded. He was not opposed to Home Rule, but he did not see the paradigm of Home Rule nationalism as either sacrosanct or ineluctably predestined to succeed.
Parnellism was neither Joyce’s major nor immediate preoccupation while in University College. Quite apart from his bitter intimation of the contemporary eclipse of the Parnellism of the Split, his Parnellite affiliations seemed to have no relevance to his exalted prospective vocation as ‘a literary artist’,18 to use the phrase applied to Stephen Daedalus, as he then conceived it. His Parnellism, already interiorised, had not abated. He did not vaunt the depth of his prior intellectual engagement with the Parnellism of the Split. It endured as a touchstone—he was always attentive to attitudes to the Split—and as an inhibition, as something that held him back from engagement in the indiscriminate fluidity of undergraduate political discussion. The Split informed his reticence. His recusant Parnellism was a major element in his holding back from the matrix of contemporary political debate among his peers. He seems to have been reluctant to be drawn on political subjects by declarations of opinion. There was too much explaining to do, unless he was prepared to engage in arguments from premises he was unable to accept. Joyce’s marked political reticence was a kind of economy that can be understood as expressive of a despairingly resigned rationality rather than intellectual pride, artistic hauteur, or contemptuous disaffection. He negotiated a terrible solitude with measured urbanity and a surprising readiness to be proved wrong.
‘Constructing the Enigma of a Manner’
In Stephen Hero, Stephen, in his quest for imaginative emancipation, spurns not merely the ‘stale maxims’ of the Jesuits but also his university peers, ‘the company of decrepit youth—and he swore an oath that never would they establish with him a compact of fraud’.19 Later in the novel, the inaugural address of Moynihan, as auditor of the L&H, provides the occasion for Stephen’s most sustained contemplation of his peers in the aggregate.
Moynihan is modelled on Robert Kinahan, who delivered his inaugural address ‘The Social Problem’ on 20 November 1901, in Joyce’s fourth and final year. The address comprised a cursory history of socialism in modern Europe that culminated in a deferential consideration of recent papal encyclicals on social issues informed by a concern that the pope’s utterances might be considered even faintly sympathetic to socialism in any form: ‘Private property has in him a staunch champion’.20 It was an expression of the doctrinal docility of students in University College that exasperated Joyce. The occasion was enlivened by John Francis Taylor’s speech in reply. Joyce’s aloof presence was noted in St Stephen’s, which compared Taylor’s style to that of ‘our own Joyce at his best’ but claimed it had ‘a broadness of sympathy’ that, it is implied, Joyce had yet to acquire. During Taylor’s speech, ‘Dreamy Jimmy and J.F. Byrne, standing on a window-sill, looked as if they could say things unutterable.’21
Stephen Hero reproduces the scene: ‘From his post beside Cranly [modelled on John Francis Byrne] in an angle of the hall Stephen glanced along the ranks of students’:
The faces which were now composed to seriousness all bore the same stamp of Jesuit training.… They admired Gladstone, physical science and the tragedies of Shakespeare: and they believed in the adjustment of Catholic teaching to everyday needs, in the Church diplomatic. Without displaying an English desire for an aristocracy of substance they held violent measures to be unseemly and in their relations among themselves and towards their superiors they displayed a nervous and (whenever there was question of authority) a very English liberalism. They respected spiritual and temporal authorities, the spiritual authorities of Catholicism and of patriotism, and the temporal authorities of the hierarchy and the government. The memory of Terence Bellew MacManus was not less revered by them than the memory of Cardinal Cullen.22
Paul Cullen, Cardinal Archbishop of Dublin, had famously refused to let the body of McManus rest in the Pro-Cathedral before the extravagant Fenian-sponsored obsequies of the exiled Young Irelander in 1861. The admiration of Gladstone and physical science was also part of the incongruous mix of patriotic piety: ‘They listened to all the speakers attentively and applauded whenever there was an allusion to the President [of the college, William Delany], to Ireland or to the faith.’23 This was a reworking of a passage in Joyce’s ‘Portrait of the Artist’ essay of 1904. In the earlier text, in his analysis of the thinking of ‘the younglings’, Joyce had written with scathing subtlety, ‘The exercise of authority might be sometimes (rarely) questionable, its intention, never.’24 Joyce’s assessment of his student contemporaries in the aggregate was more unforgiving than of his Jesuit preceptors.
Joyce assumed a mask in University College, of which his political reticence was part. In his social relations he cultivated a certain aloofness. This was not reflected in striking bohemian attitudes (he was for long austerely sceptical of Oscar Wilde’s social presentation of the self, though admiring of The Soul of Man under Socialism), but by a degree of reserve and a dialectical conversational style. His aphoristic provocations were intended in part as decoys. In Stephen Hero, referring to Stephen’s weekly English essay, Joyce wrote, ‘He gave himself no great trouble to sustain the boldnesses which were expressed or implied in his essays. He threw them out as sudden defence-works while he was busy constructing the enigma of a manner.’25
