James joyce, p.36
James Joyce, page 36
Joyce in University College was preoccupied primarily with the development of his thinking on art, and the cultivation of a literary sensibility. There was a radical disjuncture between his Parnellism and the exaltedly high conception of the artist he held at that time. He did not believe that his experience of the Split, his Parnellite sympathies and insights, had any relevance to his aspirations as an artist. He was nevertheless alert to the literary referencing of Parnell, making in ‘The Day of the Rabblement’ a dismissive reference to ‘Mr. Moore and his island’, an allusion to George Moore’s Parnell and His Island.55
The influence of the Split lingered still in University College, but Joyce’s position was anomalous. He was not considered to be political; some of his contemporaries—notably, Thomas Michael Kettle and William Dawson56—were the sons of prominent political figures. Yet none had experienced the Split with the intellectual intensity that Joyce had. His recusant Parnellism was part of the distance he kept from his peers.
The Rabblement against The Countess Cathleen
A defining moment of Joyce’s dissent from his contemporaries came early in his college career, near the end of his first year, in the controversy surrounding the inaugural production of Yeats’s play The Countess Cathleen on 8 May 1899.
In the play, which Yeats had revised since its first publication in 1892 and continued to revise, a starved peasantry are driven by famine to sell their souls to demon merchants; the Countess offers her soul in return for the salvation of her people. The production was preceded by salvos of condemnation from Frank Hugh O’Donnell, an early parliamentary obstructionist who was marginalised by the rise of Parnell—whom he hated—and who came to profess in the era of the Dreyfus Affair virulently reactionary and anti-Semitic views in the guise of a Hiberno-continental ultra-Catholicism. O’Donnell’s opposition was taken up by William Martin Murphy’s Healyite Daily Nation in its contest with the liberal nationalist Freeman’s Journal. The Daily Nation’s proclamation that ‘the fundamental idea of the play is inherently false, vicious, and repugnant to all correct recognition of the doctrines of Religion and of Faith’ re-inscribed the idiom of the Parnell Split.57
On the occasion of the premiere of The Countess Cathleen, the Antient Concert Rooms in Great Brunswick Street were invested by a party of protesting students from University College, whom the diarist and theatre critic Joseph Holloway characterised as an ‘organised claque of about twenty brainless, beardless, idiotic-looking youths’.58 They were drawn principally from the Central Branch of the Gaelic League but included—in exactly the kind of anomalous conjuncture that attracted Joyce’s sharpest scrutiny—the ardently anti–Gaelic League Francis Skeffington.59 Joyce was in the audience, applauding resolutely.60 He heard sung ‘Who Will Go Drive with Fergus Now’ and ‘Impetuous Heart, Be Still, Be Still’, which remained in his personal repertoire all his life. He set the latter to music of his own. Three years later he sang these songs on the piano to his fourteen-year-old brother George, who lay dying of typhoid fever in an adjoining room.61 In Yeats’s play, Oona says, ‘I’ll sing how Fergus drove his brazen cars’:
Who will go drive with Fergus now,
And pierce the deep wood’s woven shade,
And dance upon the level shore?
Young man, lift up your russet brow,
And lift your tender eyelids, maid,
And brood on hopes and fears no more.
She ends,
And no more turn aside and brood
Upon Love’s bitter mystery;
For Fergus rules the brazen cars,
And rules the shadows of the wood,
And the white breast of the dim sea
And all the dishevelled wandering stars.62
In a deliberately overt way, unusual for Joyce, ‘Who Goes with Fergus’ was to be threaded through Ulysses. It provides the first quoted lines of verse in Ulysses, intoned by Buck Mulligan in the Martello Tower, plunging Stephen into the desolate recall of his mother and of singing to her the ‘Fergus’ song when she was dying;63 hours later the drunken Stephen of night-town in the ‘Circe’ episode murmurs fragments of the lines.64
Two days after the premiere of The Countess Cathleen, a pompous remonstrance of striking vacuity issued forth from some of Joyce’s most prominent University College contemporaries, who felt it their ‘duty, in the name and for the honour of Dublin Catholic students of the Royal University to protest against an art, even a dispassionate art, which offers as a type of our people a loathsome brood of apostate’. The letter, published in the Freeman’s Journal, was a sorry affair:
The subject is not Irish. It has been shown that the plot is founded on a German legend. The characters are ludicrous travesties of the Irish Catholic Celt. The purpose of Mr. Yeats’s drama is apparently to show the sublimity of self-sacrifice.… He represents the Irish peasant as a crooning barbarian, crazed with morbid superstition, who, having added the Catholic faith to his store of superstition, sells that faith for gold or bread in the proving of famine.… Why, if this is a true portrait of Irish Catholic character, every effort of England to stamp our religion and incidentally our nationality is not merely to be justified, but to be applauded.65
In the Healyite Daily Nation this letter appeared beneath one from Cardinal Michael Logue, the Archbishop of Armagh, also condemning Yeats’s play.66 The Daily Nation unctuously lauded the action of the Catholic students: ‘We venture to prophesy that there will be no period in the bright and prosperous future which we trust lies before each and every one of them, in which they will not be entitled to recall with pride the part they have now taken in denouncing what can only be regarded as an unparalleled insult to the honour of our race’.67
The signatories included Tom Kettle, Francis Skeffington, Hugh Kennedy, William Fallon, and others to whom Joyce was personally close: John Francis Byrne, George Clancy, and Richard Sheehy. Joyce, in his first year in University College, refused to sign. It was in its small way a defining moment of dissent from his contemporaries, and identification with Yeats, of whom Joyce was otherwise ostentatiously critical in University College. The significance of the schism for Joyce is attested to by the fact that Herbert Gorman refers to it in his 1941 biography. Gorman exaggerates, writing that ‘all the students were gently coerced into signing it. That is, all except one. Joyce, contemptuously, refused to add his signature to the rest’.68 This reflected Joyce’s assertion, ‘I was the only student who refused his signature.’69
Constantine Curran, who in his memoir goes to inordinate lengths to mitigate the letter, and Thomas F. Bacon, in his contribution to the history of the L&H, indignantly disputed that Joyce had stood alone.70 But if others also declined to sign the letter, it was Joyce’s refusal that was noticed at the time. Two and a half years later, it was recalled against him by the college magazine St Stephen’s on the publication of his essay ‘The Day of the Rabblement’: ‘So it happened that when this rabblement protested against Countess Cathleen, our fellow-students approved and supported the protest. Mr. Joyce alone, to our knowledge, stood aloof. If Mr. Joyce thinks that the artist must stand aloof from the multitude, and means that he must also sever himself from the moral and religious teachings which have, under Divine guidance, moulded its spiritual character, we join issue with him, and we prophesy but ill-success for any school which offers an Irish public art based upon such a principle.’71
The schism over The Countess Cathleen was neither insignificant nor transient. In 1907 during the controversy that surrounded John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, Skeffington blamed the contention over The Countess Cathleen on ‘the wanton provocation of the public by Mr Yeats’.72
It was not simply that the issue set Joyce in defiance against his peers. It enlisted him in a famous nationalist artistic controversy from which he was, to his intense frustration, to be excluded in the case of the Playboy riots, which erupted in the course of his sojourn in Rome. Moreover, it brought him, almost in spite of himself, into alliance with Yeats. He would still publish ‘The Day of the Rabblement’, a broadside against Yeats, but their alignment on The Countess Cathleen was important to how he came later to conceptualise his relation to Yeats and to the Celtic Twilight. While they had yet to meet, the premiere of the play marks the inception of a relationship that was from the outset characterised by a marred and jagged reciprocity that verged on the weird. Speaking in advance of the play’s production at the National Literary Society, Yeats invoked Ibsen, at the time Joyce’s principal inspiration: ‘The only European country, he thought, which had a drama at once intellectual and popular was Norway. The national literary movement in that country between 1840 and 1860 in almost everything resembled the national literary movement going on in this country today.’73
Yeats had already elided the more provocative aspects of the play as originally published. T. P. Gill’s Daily Express celebrated the fact that ‘for the first time in at least a hundred years of Irish History the people of Dublin are agitated by a question which has nothing to do with politics or sectarian theology. We have found something new to take sides upon—something intellectual and literary.’ This was the note Yeats chose to sound. At the grand dinner in the Shelbourne Hotel that Gill gave four days after the play opened, Yeats ‘rejoiced to see the country fierce at last upon a purely intellectual issue.’74
Joyce was still a student, at the start of his final year, when in October 1901 he assailed in ‘The Day of the Rabblement’ what he saw as a craven change of direction on the part of Yeats and the Irish Literary Theatre. Joyce intended his piece as an article for St Stephen’s, but it was vetoed by the Jesuit authorities, reportedly on account of a reference to Gabriele D’Annunzio, who was on the Vatican’s Index of Prohibited Books. Joyce had ‘The Day of the Rabblement’ published as an essay in a pamphlet in conjunction with Skeffington’s article championing the equal status of women in the university, which had met a similar fate.75 Joyce was writing in response to the assessment Yeats had published in Samhain at the start of the same month of the first two years of the Irish Literary Theatre, and its programme for the third. The theatre would produce Yeats and Moore’s Diarmuid and Grania and Douglas Hyde’s Casadh an tSúgáin (The Twisting of the Rope).76 Joyce asserted that in surrendering to the popular will, ‘the Irish Literary Theatre must now be considered the property of the rabblement of the most belated race in Europe’. Yeats had cloyingly written in Samhain of Fr Patrick Dinneen’s Creideamh agus Gorta (Faith and Famine) that ‘the reverence and simplicity of the verse makes one think of a medieval miracle play’. Joyce coldly retorted that ‘a nation which has never advanced so far as the miracle play affords no literary model to the artist and he must look abroad.’77 He extolled Yeats’s The Wind among the Reeds and ‘The Adoration of the Magi’ as showing ‘what Mr. Yeats can do when he breaks with the half-gods. But an esthete has a floating will, and Mr. Yeats’s treacherous instinct of adaptability must be blamed for his recent association with a platform from which even self-respect should have urged him to refrain’.78 Joyce’s pamphlet exhibited the first flash of his distinctive artistic temper, defined in relation to his critique of Yeats and foreshadowing his treatment of Mangan in his paper to the L&H the following February. The ‘true servitude’ of the artist is ‘that he inherits a will broken by doubt and a soul that yields up all its hate to a caress.’79
‘Gas from a Burner’
Joyce sat his final exams in September 1902. While St Stephens had numbered Joyce among those who might carry off the Irish studentship in 1903,80 Joyce’s degree was undistinguished. The conferring was on 31 October 1902. In deference to the anxiously receding aspirations of his father, Joyce submitted to a photograph in cap and gown.81 The conferring took place in the Aula Maxima of University College. The interminable proceedings included the singing of ‘God Save the King’ to the accompaniment of the organ. This elicited muted resistance by the student body, some of whom, according to St Stephen’s, intoned ‘A Nation Once Again’, ‘Dolly Grey’, and the ‘Marseillaise’, though not so volubly as to attract press comment. The Freeman’s Journal merely noted that the conferring was ‘even less imposing than usual’.82 The subdued dissent foreshadowed the flamboyant protest at the conferring of 1905, in which some of the students seized the organ to prevent the singing of ‘God Save the King’. Patricia Hutchins’s assertion that Joyce led a revolt at the conferring is a canard.83 Unlike many of his contemporaries, Joyce was resolutely unsentimental about University College as an institution. Debate about the Irish university question rumbled on during Joyce’s early exile. He wrote an exasperated and brilliantly funny letter to Stanislaus from Rome in 1906 responding to newspapers sent by his aunt Josephine Murray, observing of some of his contemporaries that ‘they are all in the public eye and favour’. He caustically noted, ‘What do these gentlemen in Ireland want a new University for? The one they have is quite good enough for them—both in “saince and in art”’.84
The Irish Universities Act was enacted in 1908. It provided for the dissolution of the Royal University, of which University College had been a constituent part, and the establishment of University College Dublin. As it happened, Joyce was in Ireland on his second return trip for the transition and the opening of University College Dublin on 2 November 1909.85 It was the only significant institutional change to have occurred since Joyce had left Dublin five years earlier. In the Leader, Joyce’s contemporary Arthur Clery wrote an article titled ‘The Passing of University College’: ‘A hearse-like furniture van stands at the door to excite the curiosity of the chance passer-by’. Clery wrote of the era which began with the return of William Delany S.J. to the presidency of the college in 1897, the year before Joyce’s arrival:
If University College of old had any special defect, it was really that it was too true a University.… If outsiders had known the brilliant and varied college life that existed behind the shabby exterior of the Stephen’s Green buildings, they might be more of my way of thinking. Some of the men of that time are already on the road to distinction, in science, in philosophy, in public life, in various paths of effort. Others may never fulfil their early promise. It is all but a memory now. But the college life, which had these men in the first promise of youth as its chief figures was indescribably brilliant and interesting.86
The following week Clery wrote a further piece, asserting that the students of the college had refused to follow the path of more assured advancement that Trinity College offered, culminating in the declaration that ‘we, University College men, fought the battle of the Church’.87
It was after his third return visit to Ireland and the destruction by the printer of virtually the entire print run of Dubliners that Joyce on 14 November 1912, on the journey back to Trieste, wrote his magnificently splenetic ‘Gas from a Burner’ on the back of his contract with Maunsel & Company. Its subject relates to Joyce’s artistic travails and seems to have nothing to do with University College. However, its title and concept suggest an acrid secondary allusion to University College, and specifically to the L&H.
The form of the poetic broadside is an apologia by what is to be taken as a printer rather than a publisher to an unidentified audience. Formally it is an attack on John Falconer, the printer who burned almost the entirety of the print run of Dubliners, rather than the pusillanimous publisher George Roberts, who had retained him. It is an obsequious apologia that recounts in the first person how the printer had spurned printing the text once he had discerned the ‘foul intent’ of the author. The title encompasses a pun on the ignition of a fart, obliquely developed towards the poem’s end. The title of the first draft is entitled ‘Falconer Addresses the Vigilance Committee’.88 The setting is ostensibly formal (‘Ladies and Gents, you are here assembled …’).
Oliver St John Gogarty suggested that the title referred to the gas jet in the office of the manager of Maunsel’s responsible for the burning of the print run, from which Joyce had removed a suitcase containing ladies’ underwear (which the manager sold as a side line).89 There is a more obvious source. The debates of the L&H were conducted in the Old Physics Theatre, as the handsome Georgian space was designated, badly illumined by the light from two gas jets. Joyce’s contemporary Thomas F. Bacon recalled, ‘The illumination at night was furnished by two gas-jets with mantle burners, which were so unsatisfactory that during Arthur Clery’s auditorship the secretary was directed to “procure and have at each debate a pair of white wax candles for the convenience of the gentleman occupying the chair”.’90 Indeed the Centenary History of the Literary and Historical Society suggests that the two gas jets were features of the institutional memory of the society,91 and remained so into the era of Flann O’Brien.92 The Catholic nationalist audience of the L&H and the Vigilance Committee had insensibly merged, enlarging the scope of Joyce’s verse philippic beyond its identifiable (and predominantly Anglo-Irish) targets. Joyce had with his habitual economy found an occasion to deploy an image of oratorical flatulence he had evidently played with in the protractedness of the imperfectly lit debates of the L&H.
1. C. P. Curran, obituary of James Joyce, Irish Times, 14 January 1941, republished in Envoy 5, no. 17 (1951): 74.
2. S. Joyce, entry for 23 July 1904, in Dublin Diary, 44.
3. The older No. 85, built by Richard Castle, also Palladian, passed to the university in 1865. The Aula Maxima was constructed as a memorial to Cardinal Paul Cullen in 1878. With the completion of the first stage of the building of Earlsfort Terrace, the two houses fell into serious disrepair, and the great ceiling of the saloon in No. 85 was on the verge of collapse, until a decision was made to restore the buildings and adapt them for the purposes of the Students’ Union. C. P. Curran, Nos 85 and 86 St. Stephen’s Green (Dublin: President and Governing Body of University College, Dublin, n.d.), 3–10.
