James joyce, p.37
James Joyce, page 37
4. Donal McCartney, UCD, a National Idea: The History of University College, Dublin (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1999), 17–18, 27, 47.
5. There was a perception that the Jesuits were more interested in entrenching clerical influence than fostering Irish nationalism that was given cryptic expression by John Francis Taylor, who wrote shortly after Parnell’s death, ‘Some of the least likely of our public men to take up positions of ecclesiastical championship in Irish politics were alumni of the Stephen’s Green institution’. ‘The Home Rule Problem, III: The Police’, Manchester Guardian, 27 October 1891. This was a somewhat arch reference to John Dillon.
6. U. O’Connor, Joyce We Knew, 51.
7. OCPW 23–29, 53–60.
8. James Meenan, ed., Centenary History of the Literary and Historical Society of University College Dublin, 1855–1955 (Tralee: Kerryman, [1955]), 41.
9. Meenan, Centenary History, 97.
10. Meenan, Centenary History, 70, 327, et passim; Minutes of the Literary and Historical Society, UCD Archives, IE UCDA Soc 2.
11. Curran’s appointment as registrar of the Supreme Court was noted in the Irish Times of 14 August 1906, and his retirement in its issue of 4 November 1952. He had been appointed a registrar of the Court of King’s Bench in 1921.
12. See C. P. Curran, ‘Griffith, MacNeill and Pearse’, Studies 55, no. 217 (Spring 1966): 21–28.
13. Pauric J. Dempsey and Bridget Hourican, ‘Constantine Peter Curran’, DIB 2:1102–3.
14. C. P. Curran, Dublin Decorative Plasterwork of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London: Alec Tiranti, 1967).
15. C. P. Curran, ‘The Side Walks of Dublin: Self-Portrait’, Studies 51, no. 201 (Spring 1962): 108. This article originated as a radio broadcast.
16. Curran, Under the Receding Wave, 79.
17. Douglas Hyde, ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland’, delivered before the Irish National Literary Society in Dublin, 25 November 1892, republished in The Politics of Language in Ireland, 1366–1922: A Sourcebook, ed. Tony Crowley (London: Routledge, 1999).
18. SH 122.
19. SH 38; see also SH 171, 187, 193.
20. Freeman’s Journal, 21 November 1901. Understandably misremembering that Kinahan’s address was on socialism, rather than ‘the social order’, Eugene Sheehy wrote, ‘Kinahan was a clever and witty debater who affected a rather precious way of expressing his thoughts and loved to use a high-sounding and unusual word. In his address on Socialism, he introduced us to the word “proletariat” and I and many other students had to consult our dictionaries to find out what he meant’ (in Meenan, Centenary History, 80–81). Robert Kinahan became a barrister who practised on the Leinster Circuit and died at the age of forty on 21 July 1921; Freeman’s Journal, 22 July 1921. His L&H address was enlivened by John Francis Taylor’s speech in reply, which is discussed in chapter 8, ‘The Language of the Outlaw’.
21. St Stephen’s, February 1902.
22. SH 172–73.
23. SH 173.
24. PSW 213.
25. SH 27.
26. PSW 211–18.
27. PSW 212.
28. SH 34–35.
29. PSW 99.
30. U 3.310–11.
31. The point is made in John Whittier Ferguson’s annotation of the passage in PSW 277–78. He refers also to a misquotation of Goethe comparing the Irish to ‘a pack of hounds, always dragging down some noble stag’, which Yeats, in his Autobiographies (190), recalled being cited in the newspapers in the recriminations that followed Parnell’s death. Richard Ellmann (James Joyce, 145n) refers to Joyce’s predilection for the self-image of a deer without reference to the Parnell association.
32. Curran, ‘Side Walks of Dublin’, 115.
33. C. P. Curran, ‘Joyce’s D’Annunzian Mask’, Studies 51, no. 202 (Summer 1962): 309. The essay is republished in Curran, James Joyce Remembered, 105–15.
34. Eugene Sheehy, May It Please the Court (Dublin: CJ Fallon, 1951), 8, 21. The reference is to ‘the rapidly indurating shield’ in the ‘Portrait’ essay (PSW 212), carried over into the passage in Stephen Hero already quoted.
35. Meenan, Centenary History, 69–70.
36. SH 122–23.
37. S. Joyce, entry for 2 February 1904, in Dublin Diary, 11–12.
38. U. O’Connor, Joyce We Knew, 51.
39. SH 217. The sequence of ‘think’ and ‘write’ preserves the concept of the ‘literary artist’.
40. OCPW 30.
41. Curran, James Joyce Remembered, 29.
42. Curran, obituary of James Joyce.
43. Curran, James Joyce Remembered, 21–22.
44. U. O’Connor, Joyce We Knew, 48.
45. Curran, James Joyce Remembered, 34. Curran was referring to a sentence in Stephen Hero the full sense of which derives from the preceding one already quoted earlier: ‘He gave himself no 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’ (SH 27).
46. Curran, James Joyce Remembered, 82.
47. SH 124.
48. Curran, James Joyce Remembered, 35. Curran added, ‘The cryptic answer, the reticence on deep issues, which always seemed to me his dominant characteristic, never disappeared’.
49. Curran, James Joyce Remembered, viii, 50.
50. Curran, Under the Receding Wave, 115–16.
51. Curran, James Joyce Remembered, 78. Referring to pages 15–16 of the Recollections of James Joyce, Curran was taking issue with what he paraphrased as Stanislaus Joyce’s suggestion that his brother ‘had all the little literary world of Dublin against him’.
52. S. Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 172–73. Stanislaus’s own view (My Brother’s Keeper, 163–64) of Parnell’s overthrow, which he saw in terms of quasi-misogynistic social Puritanism, abstracts the nationalist element.
53. U. O’Connor, Joyce We Knew, 50. Fallon was a selector for the Irish team on the second occasion he met Joyce in Paris, and president of the Irish Rugby Football Union from 1949 to 1950.
54. OCPW 52.
55. OCPW 51; George Moore, Parnell and His Island (London: Swan Sonnenschein, Lowrey, 1887). See the introduction by Carla King to the reissue of the novel (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2004), vii–viii.
56. William Dawson (1877–1934) was five years older than Joyce and the son of Charles Dawson (1842–1917), Lord Mayor of Dublin from 1882 to 1883 and member of Parliament for Carlow from 1880 to 1885. Felix Hackett wrote, ‘Callan, Kettle, the Dawsons, the Sheehys, belonged to families which had been in the midst of the struggles of the Parnell period and after’ (in Meenan, Centenary History, 50).
57. Daily Nation, 12 May 1899. Its editorial of 8 May 1899 achieves a plangent lyricism.
58. Joseph Holloway, Joseph Holloway’s Abbey Theatre: A Selection from his Unpublished Journal ‘Impressions of a Dublin Playgoer’, ed. Robert Hogan and Michael J. O’Neill (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967), 6. Holloway noted, ‘Thomas Davis seemed to be the particular “bee in their bonnets”, as they frequently made reference to the poet.’
59. Fathers of the Society of Jesus, Page of Irish History, 481.
60. Seamus O’Sullivan, The Rose and Bottle (Dublin: Talbot, 1946), 119–20.
61. Curran, James Joyce Remembered, 41.
62. W. B. Yeats, The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats, ed. Russell K. Alspach (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 52–56.
63. U 1.239–53. This is also recalled by the ghost of his mother (U 15.4189–90).
64. U 15.4931–50.
65. Freeman’s Journal, 10 May 1899.
66. Daily Nation, 10 May 1899.
67. Daily Nation, 10 May 1899.
68. Gorman, James Joyce, 61.
69. The importance that Joyce attached to this assertion is reflected in the fact that it appears in the list containing ‘some account of my books’ which Joyce forwarded in 1916 to Harriet Shaw Weaver for forwarding to B. W. Huebsch, where it serves to introduce his relations with Yeats (Joyce to Harriet Shaw Weaver, Letters I 98). Ellmann’s assertion (James Joyce, 67n) that the letter of protest was left on a table in the college for students to sign appears to be a pure transposition of the account of the mode of gathering signatures for MacCann’s peace petition in A Portrait.
70. Curran, Under the Receding Wave, 101–2; Meenan, Centenary History, 57. Curran noted that neither Arthur Clery nor Dawson signed. Clery wrote a letter of much milder criticism of Yeats (Daily Express, 11 May 1899).
71. St Stephen’s, December 1901.
72. Evening Telegraph, 25 March 1907. In a typescript article in his papers titled ‘Irish Playwrights and the Irish Public’, Skeffington wrote with alarming insouciance that ‘the will of the artist may need to be sometimes curbed by the direct censorship of the people’. Sheehy-Skeffington Papers, NLI MS 40,474/5.
73. Daily Express, 8 May 1899.
74. Daily Express, 12 May 1899.
75. See OCPW 50–52; Curran, James Joyce Remembered, 17–20; S. Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 151–53; Meenan, Centenary History, 61–62; and Ellmann, James Joyce, 88–89. One would have thought that the two references to Giordano Bruno would have done more to disquiet the Jesuit authorities than the single reference to D’Annunzio and Il Fuoco, and were more intentionally defiant on Joyce’s part: see Lernout, Help My Unbelief, 44, 80–81. Joyce may have first read of Bruno in a setting of Jesuit condemnation of contemporary Italian anticlericalism in an article entitled ‘Giordano Bruno and United Italy’, Lyceum 3, no. 25 (September 1889): 7–10.
76. Curran, James Joyce Remembered, 18; W. B. Yeats, ed. Samhain (Dublin: n.p., 1891), republished in W. B. Yeats, Explorations (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 73–84. Joyce’s attack was more distantly informed by the controversy initiated by William Archer’s response to an attack in George Moore’s introduction to Edward Martyn’s The Heather Field and Maeve (London: Duckworth, 1899), vii–xvii, in which Yeats as well as Moore had vigorously participated (Daily Chronicle, 20, 26, 27, and 30 January 1899; the issue of 30 January, containing Yeats’s letter, is illustrated by a cartoon by Max Beerbohm depicting Moore as an Irish peasant trailing his coat before William Archer in a kilt; Yeats’s letter is republished in The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade [London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954], 308–11). Joyce was in part concerned to salvage the honour of the much-invoked Ibsen as the Irish Literary Theatre took a regressive turn. Near the end of ‘The Day of the Rabblement’ Joyce invoked ‘the old master who is dying in Christiana’ (OCPW 52).
77. OCPW 50. The reference was evidently not lost on Fr Dinneen, who had left the Jesuit order the year before. Joyce’s tract opened with an enigmatic reference to Giordano Bruno as ‘the Nolan’. Stanislaus recalled an excursion with Fr Dinneen and a group of students in the Dublin mountains shortly after the publication of the pamphlet which included Joyce’s essay: ‘He was a little man with a pale, prematurely old face, like a pathetic leprechaun, but on this occasion to show the lightness and innocence of his heart, he kept jumping up on the low stone walls along the way and off again, and every time he landed on the grassy border, he exclaimed amid the merriment of the students: “Said the Nolan”’ (My Brother’s Keeper, 152).
78. OCPW 51. Curran notes that Joyce’s attack ‘coincided with the moment when Yeats stood closest to the Gaelic League’, and that Lionel Johnson had written of Mangan’s ‘floating will’ (James Joyce Remembered, 18–19).
79. OCPW 52.
80. St Stephen’s, June 1902.
81. S. Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 189.
82. St Stephen’s, November 1902; Freeman’s Journal, 1 November 1902 (editorial).
83. Patricia Hutchins, James Joyce’s Dublin (London: Grey Walls, 1950), 68–70. Joyce was not the only bearer of his surname.
84. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 31 August 1906, Letters II 153–55.
85. McCartney, UCD, a National Idea, 47.
86. Leader, 30 October 1909. Clery’s piece was published in the Jesuits’ 1930 history of the college: Fathers of the Society of Jesus, Page of Irish History, 583–87. A footnote was appended to Clery’s assertion that the revival movement, ‘by giving students an ideal, raised the tone of our lives, and an exceptionally high moral standard prevailed among us’: ‘Readers of Mr. James Joyce will get a different impression, but this is the actual fact. Among the students of the college about this time were—P. H. Pearse, T. M. Kettle, F. Sheehy-Skeffington. Joyce is true as far as he goes, but confining himself to one small knot of medical students he gives a wrong impression of the whole’ (586). Joyce can scarcely have missed this indexed reference in the copy Eugene Jolas gave him. Pearse was not a student of University College.
87. Chanel [Arthur Clery], ‘Down among the Dead Men’, Leader, 6 November 1909. Not everyone was persuaded of this. A contributor to the Leader, evidently a Gaelicising cleric, expressed the conviction that the values of Irish Ireland would bring about a reformation of the decadent colleges of the Royal University: ‘And once it takes possession of the University, as I hope it will, there will be created there a public spirit against the fashionable vices hitherto so lamentably common amongst the gentlemen that came from our great Catholic Colleges’. ‘Ireland or Infidelity, Which?’, Leader, 9 January 1909.
88. Robert Scholes, ‘The Broadsides of James Joyce’, in A James Joyce Miscellany, Third Series, ed. Marvin Magalaner (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962), 8–18.
89. Oliver St John Gogarty, It Isn’t That Time of Year at All (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1954), 72–74, 79. ‘Gas from a Burner’ did include a reference to ‘swag, / from Maunsel’s manager’s travelling bag’, to which Stanislaus alludes (My Brother’s Keeper, 249).
90. Meenan, Centenary History, 69.
91. Meenan, Centenary History, 136, 140.
92. Meenan, Centenary History, 242, 257. Flann O’Brien also mentions the gas-jet in At Swim-Two-Birds (London: Penguin, 1967), 48.
7
Four Friends from University College
JOYCE APPREHENDED THAT he attended University College at an extraordinary hiatus—after the deemed termination of the Parnell Split, and before Irish politics began to take a different direction away from parliamentarism. He rendered that long moment with fastidious imaginative exactitude in A Portrait. His portrayal of a generation did not depend on what happened next, but it transpired to be startlingly proleptic. Joyce’s contemporaries struggled to contain their later accounts within a frame of nostalgic reminiscence. In 1930 Arthur Clery reviewed the Jesuit-compiled A Page of Irish History: Story of University College, Dublin, 1883–1909—while affirming, ‘I still look on the age of Kettle as the great age’, he characterised the book as ‘a record of the golden glorious days of troubled lives.’1
Joyce’s generation became caught up in the crisis of Irish politics from 1912 to 1921. The four people with whom Joyce was most involved personally or intellectually in University College—Francis Skeffington, Tom Kettle, George Clancy, and John Francis Byrne—were all politically active after graduation, and three of them died violently in conflict (in the Easter Rising, the Somme, and the Irish War of Independence). This represents a freakishly high proportion by reference to Irish fatalities in the period, including those of the Great War. His relationship to these men meant that, at a personal level, Joyce in exile was not divorced from the trajectory towards Irish independence. Their importance to his intellectual development is attested by his deploying all four as characters in his fiction.
There were romantic, as well as social and political, entanglements—Skeffington and Kettle were brothers-in-law through their marriages to Hanna and Mary Sheehy, daughters of the nationalist member of Parliament David Sheehy, and Joyce had a ‘small, rich passion’ for Mary, unsuspected by her.2 The theatre of their relations was the Sheehy household in Belvedere Place, to which Joyce was first introduced while at school in Belvedere College, where he was friendly with Richard and Eugene Sheehy.
David Sheehy was the nationalist member of Parliament for Galway South (1885–1900) and South Meath (1903–18) who had been an anti-Parnellite in the Split. In the South Meath by-election of October 1903, he had defeated Charles Stewart Parnell’s brother John Howard Parnell as an independent nationalist.3 An ally of John Dillon, he loathed Timothy Michael Healy. Sheehy and his wife, Elizabeth (Bessie), lived with their six children at No. 2 Belvedere Place. The household was marked by its gregarious hospitality and its support for Home Rule. Eugene Sheehy recalled often seeing Tom Kettle and Francis Skeffington in the house ‘writing articles and leaderettes on large, loose-paged notebooks, whilst conversation raged all round or parlour games were in progress.’4 Elaborate parlour and party games, charades, and theatrical improvisations were de rigueur in Belvedere Place, as if translating the parliamentary into the domestic sphere.
