James joyce, p.35
James Joyce, page 35
The ‘enigma of a manner’ phrase first occurs in his February 1904 essay, ‘The Portrait of the Artist’.26 Joyce was writing of the artist’s adolescent crisis of religious sensibility. Up to the point where ‘he’ (the impersonal artist) entered the university, ‘he was still soothed by devotional exercises’: ‘About this period the enigma of a manner was put up at all comers to protect the crisis. He was quick enough now to see that he must disentangle his affairs in secrecy and reserve had ever been a light penance.’ His reserve was ‘not without a satisfactory flavour of the heroic.’27 He was untroubled by the unremitting Jesuit strictures against intellectual pride.
He carried over, with slight modification, a passage from the ‘Portrait’ essay into Stephen Hero:
It was part of that ineradicable egoism which he was afterwards to call redeemer that he conceived converging to him the deeds and thoughts of microcosm. Is the mind of youth medieval that it is so divining of intrigue? Field-sports (or their equivalent in the world of mentality) are perhaps the most effective cure and Anglo-Saxon educators favour rather a system of hardy brutality. But for this fantastic idealist, eluding the grunting booted apparition with a bound, the mimic warfare was no less ludicrous than unequal in a ground chosen to his disadvantage. Behind the rapidly indurating shield the sensitive answered: Let the pack of enmities come tumbling and sniffing to my highlands after their game. There was his ground and he flung them disdain from flashing antlers.28
The awkward transition from the rugby field to that of the hunt is redeemed by the image of the stag. Joyce deployed the same self-image in his poem ‘The Holy Office’ some months after its first use in the ‘Portrait’ essay: ‘Firm as the mountain ridges where / I flash my antlers on the air’.29 When a dog approaches the apprehensive Stephen in the ‘Proteus’ episode of Ulysses, Stephen thinks, ‘Dog of my enemy. I just simply stood pale, silent, bayed about.’30 The image of the chased deer had for Joyce a strong association with Parnell, whom Joyce describes in ‘L’ombra di Parnell’ traversing the country to plead his cause ‘like a hunted deer’.31 Joyce’s cultivation of reserve owed something to Parnell.
Curran wrote in the first article in which he referred to Joyce, ‘He liked, too, to wear a mask but essentially he was never other than a reserved strong-willed artist, austerely, even savagely self-centred, but not selfish.’32 A little later, writing of ‘Joyce’s D’Annunzian mask’, he dated the ‘change over from normal companionship to an increasingly defiant, arrogant isolation’ from 1899, lasting four or five years.33
The severity of Joyce’s mask in University College, his first large socio-political arena, is not to be exaggerated. It was not altogether newly acquired. Eugene Sheehy emphasised in his memoirs the continuity between the Joyce he knew in Belvedere and the later Joyce of University College: ‘Joyce, the schoolboy, was as aloof, icy and imperturbable as later in this book I present Joyce, the man. He took the same pleasure, too, in baiting his masters and the Rector that he afterwards revelled in at the expense of his University Professors.’ Of the Joyce coming to the Sheehy household as a friend of his brother Richard and of himself, Eugene Sheehy wrote,
As I remember him then, he was a tall stripling, with flashing teeth—white as a hound’s—pale blue eyes that sometimes had an icy look, and a mobile sensitive mouth. He was fond of throwing back his head as he walked, and his mood alternated between cold, slightly haughty, aloofness and sudden boisterous merriment.
Sometimes his abrupt manner was a cloak for shyness. He refers in an early manuscript to ‘the induration of the shield’, meaning that each of us has to forge in self-protection a shield to interpose between oneself and the hostile world.34
Another contemporary, Thomas F. Bacon, recalled of Joyce as a debater, ‘Joyce, thin and pale, stood erect, scarcely moving, cold and undisturbed by interruptions (and he had many), and seemed in passionless tones to wither the opposition by his air of indifferent disdain.’35
To believe that Joyce arrived in University College possessed of the hauteur of an artist in the making is a misconception that underestimates Joyce’s preternatural tentativeness, his waiting on things to take their shape. In Stephen Hero Joyce wrote, referring to the spring of Stephen’s first academic year in University College, ‘Stephen had begun to regard himself as a literary artist: he professed scorn for the rabblement and contempt for authority.’36 This is as densely charged a sentence as any in Joyce’s writing as it bears on his own biography. The semi-ironic phrase ‘literary artist’ as distinct from writer is striking. It negotiates the gap between Joyce’s ambition and what he had written to that point but is characteristic in its self-confidence. The ‘had begun to’ introduces a further degree of tentativeness. The sentence serves as a reminder that even though Joyce would reconstitute the projected novel under the title A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, we know little of the stages by which he came to conceive of himself as a writer. It seems reasonable to assert that by the time he had resolved to recast his ‘Portrait of the Artist’ essay as a novel to be entitled Stephen Hero—a resolution which Stanislaus dates to 2 February 1904, Joyce’s twenty-second birthday37—he had accepted that he would be a writer, and showing what he had written to friends was a quasi-public embrace of this decision which post-dates his years in University College. Joyce’s seemingly dauntless self-confidence notwithstanding, one must observe a degree of scepticism towards the semi-predestinarianism of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in which there is scarcely a moment where we see Stephen as other than an artist in the making, and the title forbids us from seeing him otherwise. That deliberately elides Joyce’s uncertainty, an uncertainty that was less about his ambition to be a writer than about whether and how that could be reconciled with a professional life or at least a livelihood of some sort in Dublin. A rare glimpse of that more uncertain Joyce, bereft of the solace that their confident ambitions gave his peers, is afforded by William G. Fallon. He wrote of Joyce’s graduation, ‘His attendance at lectures had been irregular, probably because, unlike a majority of the student body who had programmed their futures, Joyce had no plans, although he toyed for a while with the College’s Cecelia St. Medical School.’ Later, ‘still perplexed by his own indecision and hesitancy’,38 Joyce confided in Professor William Magennis. The vocational incertitude observed by Fallon was the principal target of the sarcasm of Stephen’s father in Stephen Hero: ‘Can’t you go for something definite, some good appointment in a government office and then, by Christ, you can think as much as you like. Study for some first-class appointment, there are plenty of them, and you can write at your leisure. Unless, perhaps, you would prefer to be a loafer eating orange-peels and sleeping in the Park.’39
The primary model for Joyce’s emergent self-conception as ‘a literary artist’ was the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen. The publication in the prestigious London Fortnightly Review on 1 April 1900 of Joyce’s review of Ibsen’s play When We Dead Awaken,40 towards the close of his second year, enhanced Joyce’s standing among his peers, and the perception that he was a writer in the making. It was the following year that Curran and Joyce became friends. He recalled Joyce talking of Ibsen: ‘Ibsen, the truth-compeller, the heroic intransigent, was by this time above controversy. At no time did I hear Joyce discuss him as a social reformer—such propaganda was to him inadmissible—and he was first to direct me away from such journalistic criticism to the poetry and symbolism of Peer Gynt, Brand, and The Master Builder.’41 Curran’s account of the young Joyce, which remained remarkably consistent, portrayed him as primarily influenced by the writers whom he discussed openly: ‘His literary idols at that time—never, I think, to be overthrown—were Dante and Ibsen, and I cannot help thinking that he saw himself in relation to the Ireland of his day as the disdainful Florentine or as Ibsen among the Norse nationalists’.42
Curran wrote, ‘Joyce lived a withdrawn life.… He schooled himself to silence.… He easily assumed a mask—that common end-of-the-century stage property—and it was rarely dropped’. Of Joyce’s relations to his peers, Curran recalled, ‘He was self-centred and centripetal. They were gregarious.’ They engaged in interminable discussions ‘but Joyce stood aside from such debate; his conclusions were already arrived at, in petto. They recognised his distinction, accepted his aloofness from discussion, and retained his friendship or goodwill.’43 Fallon’s memory of a Joyce who was half-disengaged was not dissimilar to Curran’s: ‘I believe that Joyce was a little too distant to be a close friend. When he was with us he sometimes appeared to be peering into the future. But he always entered into the spirit of things.’44 Of Joyce’s distance, Curran wrote perceptively,
A good deal has been written about Joyce’s youthful arrogance. Some things that he admired and most things that he rejected were admired or rejected by him in the teeth of his fellows. He was curt or, if you wish, arrogant, in the defiant proclamation or defence of these opinions. He was not so in behaviour or social conduct. He was aloof, wary, dogmatic in statement, and mistrustful. He was scornful of the opposition he anticipated, and he was peremptory in his reply. To that extent, and to that extent only, he was arrogant. Stephen Dedalus confesses to throwing up defence works in the busy construction of the enigma of a manner. That enigmatic manner was very evident in Joyce in these student years.45
Curran sounded a more critical note in writing of the Joyce he met in Dublin in 1912: ‘The reserve which was second nature to him had become more marked. His self-possession had grown even greater, but there was nothing at all of the artificial aloofness of the early D’Annunzian sovrouomo.’46
In Stephen Hero, Joyce wrote with reference to Cranly (modelled on J. F. Byrne), ‘It was in favour of this young man that Stephen decided to break his commandment of reticence’.47 Curran recalled, ‘At no time, then or in later years, do I remember him in company taking part in any general discussion. For anything approaching serious talk he preferred the company of one to many, and even then you had to meet him on his own ground. You were reduced to the docile recipient of his earlier meditation, sententiously delivered. Many found his trick of recondite allusion affected. He certainly used it to evade reply. He did not debate. Question was turned aside by dark or gnomic answer.’48
Although in the preface to his Joyce memoir, Curran wrote that he had ‘touched only lightly on the politics of my day’, he was nonetheless the only contemporary to make any attempt to situate Joyce politically. It is clear that Joyce, whatever his general reserve, did not eschew the discussion of contemporary issues. Curran was shocked by the rawness of Stephen Hero, what it disclosed of Joyce’s personal circumstances, and by its rendering of University College. Reflecting that Joyce’s loan of the ‘bulky wad of manuscript’ in June 1904, followed by further instalments before Joyce left Dublin, ‘was almost as much by way of an apologia pro vita sua as an experiment in criticism’, he added, ‘He knew perfectly well that I was wholly removed from his standpoint on religious matters, and that we differed equally on other issues which were vehemently agitated in the Dublin of our day.’49
Joyce’s Veiled Parnellism in University College
Curran’s most penetrating and sustained observations in relation to Joyce’s politics in University College come not in James Joyce Remembered but in his memoir Under the Receding Wave, which was published two years later in 1970. In describing the political beliefs of Francis Skeffington (who became, on his marriage, Sheehy-Skeffington), he drew a significant contrast with Joyce:
[Skeffington] took the side of labour and democracy in college discussions and was feminist in everything. In our other domestic quarrels he was secularist in the Irish sense of the term and retrospectively anti-Parnellite. How opposed he was in this to his friend, James Joyce, who admiring Parnell for his proud self-containment also held him the victim of disloyalty. Skeffington judged Parnell cold, conservative, and, before and after Committee Room 15, disingenuous. He wrote him down as political opportunist and the merely eponymous hero of the movement. These anti-Parnellite views may seem at variance with Skeffington’s anticlericalism but only to those who see the Parnell controversy simply as a clerical and anti-clerical faction fight.…
Skeffington and Joyce were always good friends, however much the publicist deplored the artist’s seclusion. [In A Portrait] Joyce made play with Skeffington-McCann college propaganda but it is worth noting that even though Joyce was a completely unpolitical Parnellite he makes no reference to Skeffington’s anti-Parnellism nor to Skeffington’s adherence to the students’ protest on the occasion of the first performance of Yeats’ The Countess Cathleen. For Joyce to introduce either detail into his writing would put his Portrait out of drawing.50
Curran captures something of the intensity of Joyce’s identification with Parnell’s ‘proud self-containment’, a trait Joyce cultivated, and a Parnell-inflected sensitivity to betrayal. He was astute in his treatment of the relations of, and differences between, Joyce and Skeffington by reference to the Parnell Split. He was drawn to do so in the attempt to define what held Joyce and Skeffington apart, notwithstanding the anticlericalism they had in common. Curran’s portrayal of Joyce as ‘a completely unpolitical Parnellite’ stands as the most important characterisation by a contemporary of Joyce’s politics in University College. It encompasses the idea that Joyce was not actively political or aligned with the Irish Party or any of the movements that opposed or stood apart from the Irish Party, and perhaps also that he did not set out to convert others to his views. He also meant that Joyce’s Parnellism was severed from contemporary politics and, without quite saying so, that Joyce was more a Parnellite than he was a nationalist. Reflecting conceptions of nationalism of the time, he could not conceive of Joyce as a nationalist other than in a residual sense. In James Joyce Remembered he touched obliquely on what Joyce and Skeffington shared in their views: ‘John Eglinton and Fred Ryan, in their conduct of Dana, were declared anti-clericals, but John Eglinton was an imperialist and Fred Ryan a socialist and nationalist of the same temper as Frank Skeffington, and in his outlook not very far removed from Joyce himself.’51 What Curran could not apprehend was that it was Joyce’s nationalism that separated him from Ryan, whose nationalism was derivative of his socialism and anticolonialism. By discounting his nationalism, Curran did not get Joyce’s politics quite right.
The only other contemporary to comment on Joyce’s Parnellism in University College was his brother Stanislaus, in My Brother’s Keeper. Stanislaus had little imaginative comprehension of Irish nationalism and could be grudgingly obtuse where his brother’s Parnellism was concerned. He did not attend University College, but was close to his brother, knew his brother’s friends, and accompanied Joyce to debates in the L&H. He wrote of his brother’s standing aloof from the politics of the 1890s, ‘When he attended the University and listened to its groups of talkative students, Parnell’s story had become a memory of the dead and, though rancours still remained, time had begun to mellow the harshness of opinions that had been so violently agitated.’52 Stanislaus was correct in implying there was something of a lull in Joyce’s expression of Parnellite allegiance in University College.
To most of his contemporaries, Joyce appeared apolitical or vestigially political. Fallon, an active supporter of the Irish Party, and later a barrister, was a friend and perceptive observer of Joyce in Belvedere and University College and resumed his relations with Joyce in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s through the improbable medium of rugby football. Fallon wrote of Joyce, ‘the complete Dubliner’, having attended University College rather than Trinity, ‘where he would have been a misfit’. Fallon captured something significant about Joyce’s attendance at University College: ‘At University College, at least, he would realise how native traditions and culture, held in common, were the bonds that linked his Dublin with the provinces. That revelation was Joyce’s simple conception of Irish nationalism, but in the awakening political enthusiasm of those years he was wholly disinterested!’53 What was distinctive about University College was its site as a confluence of Dublin and rural Ireland, the significance of which for Joyce is emblematised in his relationship with George Clancy (discussed in chapter 7).
Both political and artistic considerations underlay Joyce’s reticence in University College on the subject of Parnell. He had lived the defeat of the Split twice over: as a child on the occasion of Parnell’s death, and in observing what he saw as the forsaking of Parnell’s memory in the years of his adolescence that followed. Joyce had brooded on Parnell, interiorised aspects of Parnell’s persona, and adopted a dissentient stance which owed much to the stark precepts he drew from the Split. But by the time he got to University College, Parnellism as a political movement seemed played out. Moreover, he perceived that amid the ebbing sound and fury of the late Split, Parnell’s memory had lost contemporary political traction and was slipping prematurely into oblivion; this was to inform his later responsiveness to stirrings of the Parnell myth. Whatever his personal fealty to Parnell, he was certainly not disposed to proselytise in an obsolete cause. Perhaps he also wanted to guard his anger: in his October 1901 pamphlet essay ‘The Day of the Rabblement’, he wrote that the conformist artist ‘inherits … a soul that yields up all its hate.’54 The final source of inhibition is perhaps counter-intuitive: Joyce was actually more nationalist than most of his contemporaries. He despised competitions in nationalist ardour, and he had his mask to keep up.
