James joyce, p.39
James Joyce, page 39
Stephen does not expressly refuse to sign, probably because Joyce did not want to dignify the petition by the assertion of an adamant resistance it scarcely warranted. MacCann accusatorially asks Stephen if he is ‘a reactionary’: ‘Do you think you impress me, Stephen asked, when you flourish your wooden sword?’45 ‘Wooden sword’ suggests a toy, signifying the ineffectuality of the tsar’s rescript, and ‘flourish’ implies a hollow theatricality on MacCann/Skeffington’s part. It also gives rise to a kind of duel in which MacCann ‘stood his ground’. MacCann’s response is ‘Metaphors! Come to facts.’ Stephen will not be drawn, though that physically involves a retreat:46
Stephen, moving away the bystanders, jerked his shoulder angrily in the direction of the Czar’s image, saying:
—Keep your icon. If we must have a Jesus, let us have a legitimate Jesus.47
As he is led away by Cranly, Stephen catches sight of ‘MacCann’s flushed blunt featured face’:
—My signature is of no account, he said politely. You are right to go your way. Leave me to go mine.
—Dedalus, said MacCann crisply, I believe you’re a good man but you have yet to learn the dignity of altruism and the responsibility of the human individual.48
The reasons for Stephen’s refusal are not explained, but it is the juxtaposition of the two photographs that accounts for his anger. Through the two photographs the episode is rendered as a displaced template of the Parnell Split. It is a variation—and enhancement—of Joyce’s ‘two masters’ thesis. Nicholas II was both the emperor of Russia and a dominant figure in the Russian Orthodox Church (whence ‘icon’). Stead was the journalistic exponent of the nonconformist conscience.49 The alliance of Nicholas II and Stead—in Stephen Hero, ‘both of the photographs were signed by the happy couple’50—is incongruous. They are MacCann’s false gods. The reference to ‘a legitimate Jesus’ is in the first instance a sharp objection to the confusion of the realms of politics and moralism. Stephen is also bitterly reflecting that the dead Parnell, to whom Nicholas II had a distinct photographic resemblance, was ‘a legitimate Jesus’. The figure of Parnell, which emblematised the difference between Joyce and Skeffington, hangs over the encounter. It is a doubling of the conceit of ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’ of Parnell’s absence in which Parnell’s name is not mentioned. Stephen would never have signed MacCann’s petition, but to sign it with those two photographs arrayed on either side would be an act of apostacy. He sees something that would not occur to any of his contemporaries milling around the entrance hall. But Stephen is himself surprised and disconcerted by his own non-volitional recoil, as if recalled to a fealty that he thought had little bearing on his life in the university—and connects back to the Christmas dinner scene earlier in the novel.
There is no other surviving passage of Stephen Hero where the relationship of what survives of the unfinished novel and A Portrait is quite so intricate. The idea of Parnell’s absent photographic image and the fact of Stephen’s anger and disconcertedness do not feature in Stephen Hero: there is no trace of Parnell in the rendering of the episode in the earlier, unfinished novel.
The handsomeness of Parnell is evident from photos and was widely attested to in his lifetime.51 His striking good looks were finely captured in the mid-1880s (before a series of illnesses took their toll on his appearance) in a sequence of photographic portraits by the Dublin firm of William Lawrence. In Parnell’s lifetime his visual image was rendered principally by crudely hagiographical cartoon images carried in United Ireland and the Freeman’s Journal. It was after Parnell’s death that the Lawrence photographic portraits became accessible to a larger public. The association between photography and the memory of the dead, identified most poignantly by Roland Barthes, gives way to a more specific shock of the posthumous in the history of the dissemination in Ireland of the photographic image of Parnell. It is thus emblematic that in Barry O’Brien’s biography of Parnell, the Lawrence portrait should face the title page. Dwelling on the contemporary traces of Parnell’s memory, Joyce had worked out that, in Irish political iconography, the photographic portrait of Parnell was supercharged with the political desolateness of his demise.
Did something like the encounter described in both Stephen Hero and A Portrait actually take place between Joyce and Skeffington, as Richard Ellmann more or less assumes it did?52 Unlike the student protest at The Countess Cathleen, the petition did not attract public attention outside University College, although Skeffington did organise a petition and wrote with reference to the Hague conference, ‘I remember trying, not very successfully, to induce my fellow students in University College to sign it, and being satirised therefor in one of Chanel’s first contributions to the college magazine, St. Stephens. Mr. T. M. Kettle, I recall, was one of those who refused to sign it, because the Tsar’s disarmament proposals would mean the stereotyping of England’s naval supremacy.’53
Skeffington’s assertion that his endeavours to elicit signatures was not very successful is at odds with the account in Stephen Hero, in which ‘nearly all the young men in the College were signing their names to it’,54 and with the ‘crowded’ entrance hall in which MacCann leads his peers ‘one after another to the table’ of A Portrait.55 Moreover, in A Portrait Joyce cleverly renders the idea that, far from MacCann’s petition being defiantly radical, it enjoyed at least passive assent from the Jesuits. Throughout the episode, the dean of studies is engaged in conversation with a student in the inner hall beyond the entrance hall without the slightest hint that he disapproves of the petition.56 In the middle of the inner hall the prefect of the college sodality, biting on ‘a tiny bone pencil’ is working on enlisting the maximum number of signatories.57 The idea of Catholic approbation of the tsar who resembles ‘a besotted Christ’, and whose photograph sits alongside that of Stead, affirms the co-relation of the episode to the Parnell Split.
In Skeffington’s account, Joyce was not alone in refusing to sign; writing in 1912 for an intended English readership, it was understandable that Skeffington chose to identify Kettle, who had been a member of Parliament until 1910 and was a public figure, as the recusant and saw no reason to mention the objections of an obscure contemporary in exile in Trieste. The fact that an account of the incident appears in the more autobiographical Stephen Hero, and the scorn to which Joyce was moved by ‘the Tsar’s air of besotted Christ’,58 does favour the likelihood that Joyce was angered, declined to sign, and had an altercation with Skeffington over it. It is possible that the episodes, as recounted in Stephen Hero and in A Portrait, bear some of the weight transposed from Joyce’s refusal to sign the Countess Cathleen letter, which does not feature in either work, and which Curran reasoned ‘would put his Portrait out of drawing’.59
Something of Stephen’s scorn for the tsar’s rescript and the fleeting enthusiasm it attracted lingers in Ulysses, in the ‘Circe’ episode as Bloom seeks to extract Stephen from his altercation with two British soldiers in night-town. Stephen says, ‘Struggle for life is the law of existence, but human philirenists, notably the tsar and the king of England have invented arbitration. (he taps his brow). But in here it is I must kill the priest and the king.’60
This of course heightens the hostility of the soldiers. Edward VII is thus linked with Nicholas II. Stephen’s citation of William Blake captures the viscerality of Joyce’s scorn for Skeffington’s embrace of the idea of international arbitration championed by the tsar of Russia. It is a retrospective measuring of the thinness of Skeffington’s programmatic aspirations against Joyce’s deeper revolt, even if reduced to an exchange with two soldiers in Dublin’s red-light district.
While Joyce enjoyed Skeffington’s casuistry and approved in a general way of his remorselessly contestatory political stances, their convictions diverged, even when ostensibly similar. To take the politics of gender, Skeffington was an ardent advocate of women’s rights and an ally of the suffragettes, derided by D. P. Moran as ‘England’s screeching sisterhood in Ireland’.61 Had Joyce disagreed with Skeffington’s support for the removal of legal disabilities on women, it seems unlikely that he would have agreed to the joint private publication in 1901 of his ‘Day of the Rabblement’ along with Skeffington’s A Forgotten Aspect of the University Question, which advocated the equal status of women as students of University College. While the pamphlet carried the caveat that ‘each writer is responsible only for what appears under his own name’, there is nothing to suggest that Joyce dissented from Skeffington’s conclusions on the status of women, whatever issues he may have had with the process by which Skeffington came to them.62 But Joyce came to be increasingly suspicious that what he understood as Skeffington’s reduction of the position of women to a purely political or legal issue was the expression of a philosophical aversion to the corporeal. He was opposed to, and in his early exile ever more irritated by, Skeffington’s sexual asceticism.63
Before leaving Ireland, Joyce sought a loan from Skeffington. Skeffington, whose previous advances to Joyce had not been repaid, and who considered the elopement unfair to Nora, declined. In a letter to Joyce of 6 October 1904 he declared, ‘You have my best wishes for your welfare and for that of your companion, which is probably much more doubtful than your own.’64 Joyce found it difficult to forgive Skeffington for a gross breach of the protocols of friendship in treating his request for a loan as if it were for a donation to a political cause he was unable to support. The reference to ‘your companion’ rankled and came to stand for all the predictions in Dublin that Joyce’s relationship with Nora would end badly for her.65 Joyce was not of a forgiving disposition, and their friendship in University College was swiftly relegated to history. Joyce wrote to Stanislaus in February 1905 referring to ‘working in’ ‘Hairy Jaysus’, the soubriquet for Skeffington that featured in Stephen Hero: ‘Do you not think the search for heroics damn vulgar—and yet how are we to describe Ibsen? … I am sure however that the whole structure of heroism is, and always was, a damned lie and that there cannot be any substitute for the individual passions as the motive power of everything—art and philosophy included. For this reason Hairy Jaysus seems to be the bloodiest imposter of all I have met.’66
Joyce’s term ‘heroics’ is of some importance. It is paraphrased by Richard Ellmann as ‘selflessness and social purpose’.67 It was the public espousal or embrace of an ethic of asceticism and altruism. The idea of ‘heroics’ bears the impress of Joyce’s observation of Skeffington.68
No principle of economy governed Skeffington’s opinions. Curran’s intellectual characterisation of Skeffington was of superb incisiveness:
In the teeth of Joseph de Maistre, Skeffington was at any time ready to die not merely for truth but for any truth. He translated every belief he had into action and lived at its indecorous extreme, forcing it to your attention by its evident incongruity with circumstances. If his view of justice was at odds with actual conditions so much the worse for things as they were. He narrowed his fighting front in the course of time to two issues: suffrage and labour, but without much change in his propagandist tactics. In student days, his principles, exercised over too wide a ground, quickly lost their novelty. His positions in debate were all automatically assumed; his lively offensives were relished but taken for granted and his logic, like most logic, shut out more wisdom than it unlocked. His favourite assaults were upon Gaelic Leagues, bishops and conservatives. The controversies he so stirred up were rarely without a grain of reason. That they lacked a sense of proportion and were, as often as not, trivial did not trouble him. Impervious to ridicule, never known to be angry, they were part of his system of provocative tactics which he believed opened the way to cool reason. Tactics were his invariable defence to what to the rest of us was plainly absurd. ‘Tactics’ was a word often on his lips and the sound of it as he pronounced it, staccato and challenging, still brings his personality before me.69
While Joyce shared many of Skeffington’s conclusions, he was suspicious of dogmatic radical premises, for reasons that had much to do with the restraint and scrupulosity of Joyce’s own intellectual method. He remained determined to work things out patiently for himself, to consider issues on their merits within a coherent schema, and abhorred even in private conversation the expression of premature conviction. Stanislaus Joyce wrote, ‘Habitually when Jim was talking in earnest, he spoke slowly, not hesitatingly, but choosing his words with care, unless it was a matter he had thought out, in which case he spoke almost as he wrote.’70
Skeffington is the college contemporary from whom Joyce learned most, chiefly by negation. His attentive observation of Skeffington honed the dialectical edge of his critique of ideological nationalism, to which Skeffington was as opposed as was Joyce but without Joyce’s depth of understanding. It was also an early point of embarkation for what was to be Joyce’s ever more sophisticated detection of points of collusion in ostensibly opposed political doctrines. If a relationship with a single person influenced Joyce’s idea of the coincidentia oppositorum—the coincidence of opposites which could become the circularity of extremes—it was surely that with Skeffington.
Joyce apprehended what Skeffington could not: the unwisdom of premature convictions. This was especially marked in the case of Skeffington because of the inherent rapid obsolescence of his progressivism in the highly contemporary form he espoused. Curran lamented, ‘I never knew him in those days to modify any opinion. It was both his and our loss that for all their modernity his ideas and attitudes were stereotyped.’71 Skeffington’s views affirmed Joyce’s instinct of reserve. Unlike Skeffington, Joyce had a sceptical restraint, a slow filtration of the political, that contributed to ensuring that his writing in relation to the political in Ireland was free from dogmatic premises that could harden into anachronism.
Joyce’s dissentience was more coherent and more politically far-sighted than Skeffington’s doctrinaire radicalism, in part because it retained an anchorage in the Parnellite nationalism in the Split. Bereft of a sure sense of the relation in which the radicalism he espoused stood to nationalism, Skeffington was not capable of the exigent realism that marked Joyce’s appraisal of Irish politics. While it is true that in University College, Joyce was cultivating an aesthetic mask and maintained a posture of aloofness towards the contemporary political, the politico-philosophical gulf that separated him from Skeffington, in spite of their agreement on a number of significant contemporary issues, showed how circumscribed Joyce’s options for alignment in Irish politics were. There is no mention of Skeffington in Finnegans Wake, or at least none that has been identified. That may reflect Joyce’s sense of the finitude, and inconsequence, of Skeffington’s time-bound assertiveness.
Skeffington moved increasingly to the left. He resigned in May 1912 from the United Irish League, the organisation of the Irish Party, in protest at the refusal of the party to insist on the inclusion of votes for women in the Home Rule bill. He opposed the war and John Redmond’s advocacy of Irish enlistment.72 Skeffington’s opposition to the war drew him into increasing contact with those who were to be the leaders of the 1916 rising, and James Connolly in particular. He strove to remain constant to his pacifist principles, advocating somewhat nebulously a cohort of civic resistance over military insurgency.73 It was as if he had at last found a means of negotiating an exit from the generational impasse in which his objection to the Gaelic League had placed him. He passed the first two days of the Easter Rising discouraging looting and seeking to organise a civic police force. Taken as a hostage on Portobello Bridge by a party under the command of Captain John Bowen Colthurst, he was taken to Portobello Barracks, where he was shot with two other civilians the following morning, 26 April 1916.74
Kettle gracefully seized the paradox of the death of his non-combatant brother-in-law and friend with whom latterly he had differed so much: ‘This brave and honourable man died to the rattle of musketry; his name will be recalled to the ruffle of drums.’75
Thomas Michael Kettle
In marrying Mary Sheehy in 1909, Thomas Michael Kettle (1880–1916) became Skeffington’s brother-in-law. He was the son of Andrew Kettle, a North County Dublin farmer of independent mind and formidable character and an early and clear-sighted agrarian reformer of high initiative, who advised Isaac Butt and Parnell.76 While bluntly telling Parnell he disapproved of his relationship with Katharine O’Shea—he was probably unique among Parnellites in venturing a view on the subject to Parnell—he remained steadfast, and contested Carlow as the Parnellite candidate in the third and last by-election of the Split in Parnell’s lifetime.
Tom Kettle entered University College in 1897, a year before Joyce, and was auditor of the revived L&H in succession to Skeffington for 1898–99. Kettle was the pre-eminent contemporary of Joyce in University College. William G. Fallon characterised him as the ‘idol’ of a generation he dominated.77 Robert Lynd, though not a college contemporary, accurately described Kettle as ‘having lived in a blaze of adoration as a student’78 and elsewhere characterised him as ‘the most brilliant Irishman of his generation’.79 Arthur Clery, not quite as magnanimously as the statement might suggest, described the recently dead Kettle as ‘probably the most brilliant mind of his generation, the generation that succeeded Parnell and Yeats.’80 Padraic Colum, meeting Kettle when the latter, three years his senior, was twenty-six, referred to him as ‘the best known man I met in those early years.’81 Skeffington wrote in 1912, ‘He is the public Orator of Ireland—our nearest analogue to Lord Rosebery in the ability to frame in faultlessly-cut phrases the thoughts and emotions of the man in the street.’82
