James joyce, p.38
James Joyce, page 38
Joyce was a popular guest on the Sheehys’ ‘Sundays’. He participated in charades and theatricals, and sang, often songs he had picked up from his father. Sometimes May Joyce came with her son and accompanied him on the piano.5 Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington in old age recalled ‘Jim Joyce’ coming with other University College students to ‘our Sundays’ in Belvedere Place: ‘Joyce was then gay and boyish, flinging himself into topical charades. He loved to “dress up” and produce plays and parodies and to sing old folk ballads in his sweet tenor.’6
Francis Skeffington
Francis (Frank) Skeffington (1878–1916) was born on 23 December 1878 at Bailieborough, County Cavan, and grew up in Downpatrick, County Down. An initiating oddity of his career is that he was educated at home by his father, J. B. Skeffington, an inspector of schools with the board of national education. He ‘was I imagine, a crank by inheritance’, Curran wrote. Stanislaus Joyce recalled, ‘He had been educated by his father on some system—so, at least, Jim told me—and was endowed with an enthusiasm that responded mechanically to all the more obvious appeals to justice, reason and humanity.’7
He entered University College in 1896, one year before Kettle, two years before Joyce. He did much to bring about the revival of the Literary and Historical Society (L&H), of which he was auditor in his second year. He graduated in 1900 and took an MA in 1902. Skeffington, bearded—he never used a razor—and in tweed plus-fours and oversize boots, was a conspicuous figure in the city.8 D. P. Moran’s Leader in 1909 derided his ‘aggressive whiskers, his high-pitched querulous voice, and his invariable, we had almost said his immortal knickerbockers’.9 The impression was indelible. Over a half century later Oliver St John Gogarty could still recall encountering ‘Joyce’s friend Sheehy-Skeffington, an opinionated, bearded little theorist in knickerbockers.’10 The speed of his talk and motion added to the effect. As Curran noted, ‘His behaviour seemed to be regulated in accordance with long-settled opinions privately arrived at. All his movements were rapid and decisive. He thought, talked and walked.… His briskness appeared to be dictated by either a hygienic or a missionary purpose.’11 As well as a Home Ruler and fin-de-siècle radical, he was a vegetarian, anti-vivisectionist, teetotaller, non-smoker, pacifist, and feminist. In 1900 he became engaged to Hanna Sheehy. They married on 27 June 1903 and merged their surnames. Sheehy-Skeffington thereby became for the Leader the ‘hyphened’ or ‘hyphenated’ democrat,12 among multiple other epithets. (In this chapter, concerned principally with the college years, I follow Joyce and Curran’s practice of referring to him as Skeffington, but in all citations after his marriage he is Sheehy-Skeffington.)
He was eccentric in a manner that might suggest Shaw as a model (he ‘wore Jaeger and homespuns like Bernard Shaw’),13 but in fact the ascendant influence was William T. Stead. Skeffington was a vociferous rebel against authority and received opinion. He was anticlerical and, almost alone in University College, an open opponent of the Gaelic League. Curran wrote that his ‘favourite assaults were on Gaelic Leaguers, bishops and conservatives’.14 Like Joyce he was suspicious of clerical involvement in the Gaelic League, which he wrote in 1906 was for the most part ‘in the hands of the Catholic clergy, who hope to profit by the return to medievalism and the reaction against modern cosmopolitan democracy which the revival of the Irish language represents.’15
FIGURE 7.1. Francis Sheehy-Skeffington and his future wife, Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington. Reproduced with the kind permission of the National Museum of Ireland.
Joyce and Skeffington were, as Curran recalled, ‘always good friends’. Skeffington, as Eugene Sheehy fairly pointed out, was ‘one of the first persons to recognize and appreciate the genius of Joyce’.16 Stanislaus attributed to his brother the comment that Skeffington was ‘the most intelligent man in Stephen’s College after myself’.17 It was Skeffington who proposed Joyce for auditor of the L&H, while Kettle proposed Hugh Kennedy, who was victorious.18
They held some views in common, though typically more in their conclusions than in their premises. They were both opposed to the political influence of the Church in Ireland. In a 1906 article titled ‘Michael Davitt’s Unfinished Campaign’, Skeffington identified himself as ‘one who revolts against the twin tyrannies of the country—that of British Government and of the Catholic Episcopacy.’19 His ‘twin tyrannies’ equated precisely to Joyce’s ‘two masters’, though without quite linking the tyrannies, and found published expression first. On the final analysis, theirs was a tactical accord rather than a meeting of minds.
Joyce’s refusal of accommodation did not mean he did not have the capacity to think politically. This capacity the briskly dogmatic Skeffington lacked. Politically, the shadow that fell between Joyce and Skeffington was that of the Parnell Split. Skeffington’s two heroes were Michael Davitt and W. T. Stead, both of whom had played prominent roles in bringing about Parnell’s fall. While many of Joyce’s intellectual jousts with Skeffington related to the disparate contemporary causes that Skeffington championed, a cleavage ran between them going back to the Split. Skeffington was, as Curran wrote with exactitude, ‘retrospectively anti-Parnellite’ in the sense of favouring the side taken by Parnell’s opponents when the Irish Party split in December 1890.20 In Irish affairs he ‘chiefly reverenced’ Davitt, ‘his single admiration’,21 whom he considered ‘the greatest Irishman of the nineteenth century’.22
In 1908, as Sheehy-Skeffington (following his marriage) he published an unauthorised biography of Davitt, who had died in 1906, entitled Michael Davitt: Revolutionary, Agitator and Labour Leader.23 It is not known if Joyce ever read this vapid work, published four years after he left Ireland, but it exemplified the incoherence of Skeffington’s political thinking. Skeffington extolled Davitt over Parnell, whom he characterised as ‘Conservative and opportunist’,24 using the latter term perhaps as it was applied to leading politicians of the Third Republic; he wrote of Parnell’s ‘cold, cautious, conservative mind’, of his ‘cold, conservative intellect’.25 Skeffington showed little understanding of Fenianism, and was over-trusting in the historically ‘close connection’ between Irish nationalism and ‘the democratic movement’ in Britain, making the revealing statement that Davitt, ‘with his simultaneous attack upon the English and upon the feudal power, was the type of this happy alliance between Nationalism and Democracy, an alliance the severance of which means the destruction for the whole National movement—for Democracy would not suffer by the breach.’26
What was most jarring was Skeffington’s combining of opposition to the Parnell of the Split with an outspoken denunciation of the political role of the Church on more or less abstract Enlightenment lines without being rooted in any particular set of Irish nationalist values. Of the Split he wrote, ‘All the machinery of ecclesiastical power was unscrupulously brought into play in the campaign against Parnell.’27 He proclaimed that ‘the Irish Nationalism of which Davitt is the type is necessarily anti-clerical.’28 The relentless advertisement of his anticlericalism produced the extraordinary result that Justin McCarthy, who had led the anti-Parnellites in the immediate aftermath of the Split, felt bound at the end of the introduction he provided to Skeffington’s book to state, ‘I cannot identify myself with some of the opinions expressed very strongly in the book by its brilliant author’, specifically that ‘the views which Mr. F. Sheehy-Skeffington sets forth very emphatically as to the position taken up by most of the Irish Catholic and Prelates and Clergy against the great National movements are altogether at variance with my own.’29 The studiously vague note on which his book ended suggested Skeffington was unsure of his own political course: ‘What is wanted is to proceed along Davitt’s lines; not to stand still where he stood. For the moment, the programme of Davitt may adequately represent our highest aspirations.’30
It is hard to resist the thought that W. T. Stead was a much more formative, and certainly an earlier, influence on Skeffington than Davitt. Curran recalled that ‘Skeffington at college was a devout reader of The Review of Reviews. He adopted to his own purpose some of W. T. Stead’s exhibitionist tactics but without that editor’s pomposity.’31 The influence of Stead ran deeper than Curran knew. It was attested to in an effusively candid letter which Skeffington sent to Stead in February 1901:
Why do you continue to use the words ‘Empire’ and ‘Imperialism’ with approbation & sympathy?
I write with some feeling, for I was myself, to some degree, misled by your use of the terms—which indeed is my only excuse for writing at all. I will explain how, you will perhaps better understand why, agreeing with you thoroughly as to principles, I yet attach so much importance to names. I am twenty-two of age, and, during the past ten years, I have obtained much of my political education from you. From the Review of Reviews I have learned, amongst other things, to be enthusiastic for the cause of Woman and the cause of Peace. From its columns, too, I learned to appreciate the greatness of the responsibilities which lie upon the people of these kingdoms. But you were fond of summing up your doctrines of the duties of a ‘ruling race’ in the world ‘Empire’; thus I was led to believe in the word ‘Empire’. I followed the word in other columns where it was used with a widely different meaning; and through it began insensibly to imbibe some of the poison of the ‘Imperialistic’ spirit. I began to lose sight of the difference in the thing; I held to ‘Imperialism’ as an expression of talismanic value. My views grew gradually more and more warped; I half-approved the behaviour of [Major-General] Kitchener at [the Battle of] Omdurman; I wholly approved of the American conduct in the Philippines. I grew daily more imbued with that arrogant, one-sided view which looks forward to the subordination of all and sundry to the English speaking races, without consideration for the rights of other stocks. The Boer war has been for me an awakening. It revealed to me, as I believe to many others, for the first time, what ‘Imperialism’ really means, what is the spirit which gives birth to it, what is the frame of mind it engenders, and what are its material consequences. So now, penetrated with a hatred not only of Imperialism the thing, but of the word ordinarily used to express it, the word which brought me for a space within its grasp, I venture to point out to you the dangers which arise from your using the word as if in itself it were innocuous. Of course, I admit that I was led away through my own fault; that, in clinging to the word, and in neglecting the modification of sense in which you used it, I was guilty of culpable carelessness, and have myself to blame.32
This rather tragic remonstrance, by which he sought to bring himself to Stead’s attention, discloses much about Skeffington. It articulates a weird nominalism, in which Skeffington protests Stead’s having given a false set of progressive coordinates which he had faithfully observed but explains that this was down to the use on Stead’s part of a language of imperialism that departed from ordinary usage. What it reveals is that Skeffington was devoid of any instinctive sense of politics or of nationalism and sought to derive his political convictions from first principles with pedantic scrupulosity. It explains why Joyce found Skeffington diverting and was unable to take him entirely seriously.
On Stead’s death, Skeffington, in an unpublished article written for the British Weekly, wrote, ‘I was just eleven years old when the Review of Reviews was started. I read it with avidity from the first number, and for years it was my bible.’ The crudity of Stead’s writing style only brought ‘into clearer relief the soundness of his heart, the transcendent moral value of his courage and sincerity’. It was Stead who had ‘first directed my attention to the importance of the woman question’, in a character sketch of Gladstone: ‘It struck me very forcibly that Stead, who also made a hero of Gladstone, should so soundly reprove him for his antifeminism. From the reading of that article, I date my interest in feminism.’ Stead’s opposition to the Boer War ‘roused my enthusiasm for him to the highest pitch’. He was involved as one of the correspondents of Stead’s ill-fated Daily Paper. It was after its collapse that Skeffington met Stead in London in 1902 for the first time. He found Stead ‘keenly interested in all things Irish’, with Michael Davitt ‘one of his greatest friends’. They met again in Stead’s new offices in Kingsway ‘just before he published his famous interview with the spirit of Mr. Gladstone’.33 A dialogue of unfathomable absurdity ensued:
He was full of spiritualism at the time. ‘Gladstone and Bright often come round’, he said. ‘They’re tremendously interested in the struggle that is going on at Westminster!’ This was at the time of the fight over the Lloyd George budget. Stead spoke of the spirits in a most matter of fact way, and it was impossible to doubt his perfect faith in the reality of the communications he received. The most curious thing he told me about them was that the spirit of Manning, from whom he often received messages, wanted him to become a Catholic. ‘You know’, said Stead, in answer to my look of astonishment, ‘they keep their own religions on the other side’. I said I could not understand this; that the spirits, if genuine, should surely be able to say definitely which religion was the true one, and that a difference of religion between them was impossible. ‘No, there is a continuity’, said he; but he did not pursue the subject.34
The last time Skeffington saw ‘this fascinating and noble-hearted man’ was when Stead came over to Dublin to study the Irish situation and Skeffington had a couple of long talks with him, arguing over Joseph Devlin.35 Stead perished on the Titanic in the early hours of 15 April 1912.
In an almost perfect exemplification of the problem Joyce experienced in identifying himself politically with any individual or movement in contemporary Ireland, Sheehy-Skeffington, in the same article in which he identified his ‘twin tyrannies’, allied himself with ‘the active liberal elements by Davitt himself, with which the cold, aristocratic conservative mind of Parnell had little sympathy.’36 This was not a purely historical issue. Skeffington continued to believe ardently in a transnational alliance between Irish nationalism, the post-Gladstonian Liberal party, and movements on the emergent left of British politics to advance progressive causes, of which Home Rule for Ireland was but one. This served to affirm Joyce’s conviction that contemporary nationalism had forfeited its coherence in the original error of the Split. For Joyce, Skeffington’s stance was delusional, a faddish Irish adaptation of the nonconformist conscience and of Stead’s opinionated journalism. A gulf separated Skeffington’s views from his own, notwithstanding what they seemed to hold in common. In his bitter experience of the Irish political, Joyce learnt to become an exegete of ostensible like-mindedness.
The reach of the Split in Joyce’s thinking beyond its immediate political setting is attested to in the treatment, in both Stephen Hero and A Portrait, of the episode in which Stephen declines to sign MacCann’s petition in favour of world peace. The Skeffington figure in Stephen Hero is ‘McCann’, and ‘MacCann’ in A Portrait.37 In August 1898 the Russian Tsar Nicholas II issued a rescript directed to the ‘maintenance of the general peace, and possible reduction in the excessive armaments which weigh upon all nations’, and proposing an international conference. The tsar’s proposal was taken up with gusto by Stead, who inaugurated an International Peace Crusade at a public meeting in London in December 1898. The crusade was promoted by a million copies of a broadsheet and the foundation by Stead of a weekly journal, War against War. The first international peace conference, by which the episode is to be dated, opened in the Hague on 18 May 1899 and published its final act on 20 July.38
The basic features of the encounter with Skeffington over the petition are unchanged in both works: on a table, a petition for peace is laid out, between photographs of the tsar and Stead, but there is one radical departure in A Portrait. In Stephen Hero Stephen and Cranly conceive a triptych: the tsar resembles Jesus (‘a wirrasthrue Jaysus’, as Stephen suggests) and Cranly adds, looking in McCann’s direction, ‘wirrasthrue Jaysus, and hairy Jaysus’.39 The triptychal concept survives in A Portrait, with an important variation: MacCann is displaced by the spectral evocation of Parnell’s photographic image.
In A Portrait the episode opens with the table near the door of the entrance hall in the college, around which a throng of students were gathered, among whom MacCann ‘went briskly to and fro’. On the table were ‘two photographs in frames and between them a long roll of paper bearing an irregular tail of signatures.’40 One of the photographs is of Nicholas II. The second, identified by implication in A Portrait, was in Stephen Hero expressly identified as a photograph of ‘the Editor of the Review of Reviews’ (Stead).41 In A Portrait, Cranly (the character based on J. F. Byrne) tells Stephen it is a petition for universal peace and confesses a little sheepishly that he has signed it.
Stephen pointed to the Czar’s photograph and said:
—He has the face of a besotted Christ.42
There is ‘scorn and anger’ in Stephen’s voice in A Portrait, though he denies being annoyed.43 The summation of the oratory by which MacCann seeks to persuade Stephen to sign his petition is certainly intended as Joyce’s characterisation of Skeffington’s beliefs. It is of lethal political exactitude. Joyce, before he left Dublin and in early exile, was interested in socialism and read widely in anarchist writers and Italian revolutionary syndicalists, and it is significant that he quite correctly did not recognise the Skeffington he had known in college as a socialist. Skeffington was a confused left-utilitarian, with a Stead-like susceptibility to that which was supposedly novel: ‘MacCann began to speak with fluent energy of the Czar’s rescript, of Stead, of general disarmament, arbitration in cases of international disputes, of the signs of the times, of the new humanity and the new gospel of life which would make it the business of the community to secure as cheaply as possible the greatest possible happiness of the greatest possible number.’44
