James joyce, p.44
James Joyce, page 44
5. Sheehy, May It Please the Court, 21–24; Ellmann, James Joyce, 51–53.
6. Typescript of radio interview of Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington with Dr Dixon, [1946], incomplete, Sheehy-Skeffington Papers, NLI, MS 24164.
7. Patrick Maume, ‘Francis Sheehy-Skeffington’, DIB 8:981–83; Leah Levenson, ‘Francis Sheehy-Skeffington’, ODNB 50:820–22; S. Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 152; Curran, Under the Receding Wave, 112.
8. Sheehy, May It Please the Court, 30–31.
9. Leader, 20 February 1909, quoted in J. B. Lyons, The Enigma of Tom Kettle: Irish Patriot, Essayist, Poet, British Soldier, 1880–1916 (Dublin: Glendale, 1983), 151.
10. Gogarty, It Isn’t That Time, 31.
11. Curran, Under the Receding Wave, 112.
12. Leah Levenson, With Wooden Sword: A Portrait of Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, Militant Pacifist (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1983), 94. The Leader, in its issue of 9 December 1911, referred to Sheehy-Skeffington as ‘a spook in whispers and knickerbockers’, as well as ‘a hyphened democrat’.
13. Curran, Under the Receding Wave, 112–13.
14. Curran, Under the Receding Wave, 114.
15. Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, ‘Michael Davitt’s Unfinished Campaign’, Independent Review 10 (July–September 1906): 308.
16. Sheehy, May It Please the Court, 35.
17. S. Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 152.
18. Sheehy, May It Please the Court, 30. Kennedy received fifteen votes and Joyce nine; Meenan, Centenary History, 61. In 1937 Eugene Jolas left with the concierge of Joyce’s apartment in the Rue Edmond Valentin a copy of A Page of Irish History, the history of the university published under Jesuit auspices. Joyce noted the incorrect statement on page 338 that he had in 1897 contested the auditorship against Skeffington. Joyce was there referred to ‘James A. Joyce, popularly described as “Jimmy” or “The Hatter”’, and it was stated that ‘the Hatter never wore this particular crown’. Joyce scarcely failed to register the combination of incorrectness with slighting jocularity. He wrote to Curran of his contest with Kennedy, adding his own inaccuracy: ‘He won by ca 22 to 16 all the U. C. Staff voting for him’. Joyce to C. P. Curran, 10 June 1937, Letters III 400.
19. Sheehy-Skeffington, ‘Michael Davitt’s Unfinished Campaign’, 312. In his Davitt biography, he wrote likewise of the attainment with political freedom of erecting Ireland ‘into a great modern and progressive State, free from tyrannies either material or spiritual’. Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, Michael Davitt: Revolutionary, Agitator and Labour Leader (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1908; London: McGibbon and Kee, 1967), 242. The difference lies primarily in the much greater expressive force of Joyce’s ‘two masters’ and related propositions. Joyce was dismissive of the effectiveness of the writing of Irish intellectuals; and specifically of Skeffington’s proselytising mode, at least carried beyond university.
20. Curran, Under the Receding Wave, 116.
21. Sheehy, May It Please the Court, 36; Curran, Under the Receding Wave, 115.
22. Sheehy-Skeffington, Michael Davitt, 269.
23. Sheehy-Skeffington, Michael Davitt. Davitt’s widow, Mary, was not in favour of Sheehy-Skeffington writing her husband’s biography; King, Michael Davitt, 554–55. Sheehy-Skeffington wrote to a correspondent, ‘As was to be expected, my book has not pleased any section of the Irish press. It is too “rebel” for one side, and too anticlerical for the other. I believe Mrs Davitt’s objections to the publication were inspired by the Jesuits’; Sheehy-Skeffington to John M. Robertson, 25 July 1908, typescript copy, Skeffington Papers, NLI, MS 40,471/6. Of H. M. Hyndman’s review in Justice, he wrote, ‘I see that he agrees with me, as against Keir Hardie, that Davitt was not actually a Socialist, though close to Socialism in his later days’; Sheehy-Skeffington to Theodore Rothstein, 16 September 1908, typescript copy, Skeffington Papers, NLI, MS 40,471/6. In his biography, he had written, ‘Davitt was not a Socialist’; Sheehy-Skeffington, Michael Davitt, 273.
24. Sheehy-Skeffington, Michael Davitt, 181.
25. Sheehy-Skeffington, Michael Davitt, 73, 126. He thought Parnell’s pre-eminence was ‘due to temperament and not to intellect’ (108).
26. Sheehy-Skeffington, Michael Davitt, 272.
27. Sheehy-Skeffington, Michael Davitt, 186–87. He was constrained to add that it was one of the strangest ironies of Davitt’s career ‘that he, the least clerically minded of Irish politicians, should have become the standard-bearer of an outrageously arrogant clericalism’ in the North Meath election of 1892.
28. Sheehy-Skeffington, Michael Davitt, 277.
29. Justin McCarthy, introduction to Sheehy-Skeffington, Michael Davitt, xix.
30. Sheehy-Skeffington, Michael Davitt, 279. It is striking that Skeffington had never met Davitt, though he had heard him speak, and was part of a group which included Kettle and Fred Ryan, who called to see Davitt in connection with a proposal for a national democratic committee, but Davitt was too ill to see them and died on 30 May 1906; Levenson, With Wooden Sword, 54–55; King, Michael Davitt, 553–56. While he clearly already took Davitt’s side in the Split when in University College, one wonders if his full self-conception as a ‘true Davittite’ (the term used in Sheehy-Skeffington, Michael Davitt, 44), whatever exactly he thought that to mean, post-dated Davitt’s death.
31. Curran, Under the Receding Wave, 114.
32. Sheehy-Skeffington to W. T. Stead, manuscript draft, endorsed ‘copied and sent 20/2/1 to W. T. Stead’, Sheehy-Skeffington Papers, NLI, MS 40,470/13.
33. Sheehy-Skeffington, unpublished typescript article on W. T. Stead, Sheehy-Skeffington Papers, NLI, MS 40,475/6.
34. Sheehy-Skeffington, unpublished typescript article.
35. Levenson, With Wooden Sword, 134–35.
36. Sheehy-Skeffington, ‘Michael Davitt’s Unfinished Campaign’, 301.
37. There was no necessity for the change, and one wonders if this was not one of the mordant name games to which Joyce was so drawn. It is possible that he was at once giving the figure who represented the anti–Gaelic League Skeffington a slightly more ‘Gaelicised’ name and sardonically reflecting the name change that Skeffington had embraced on his marriage.
38. F. Whyte, The Life of W. T. Stead, 2 vols. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1925), 2:122–53; James Sheehan, The Monopoly of Violence: Why Europeans Hate Going to War (London: Faber and Faber, 2008), 23–26. Tolstoy, who influenced Joyce politically, was opposed to the conference proposed by the tsar, as the Review of Reviews later reported: R.E.C. Long, ‘Count Tolstoy in Thought and Action’, Review of Reviews, 15 January 1901, 438–39.
39. SH 112–13. The idea of a resemblance between Skeffington and the tsar is rehearsed in Stephen Hero: ‘As McCann was standing sideways to the light Stephen amused himself in tracing a resemblance between him and the pacific Emperor whose photograph had been taken in profile’ (112). It disappears in A Portrait and, combined with the non-identification of Stead as the person in the second photograph, leaves the focus fixed on the photograph of the tsar.
40. P 5.716–20.
41. SH 112.
42. P 5.737–38.
43. P 5.739–44.
44. P 5.802–7.
45. P 5.838–41.
46. P 5.842–43. The rendering of the incident and its end is significantly reworked from Stephen Hero, where Stephen states he has no intention of signing the petition: ‘All right, said McCann promptly, as if he was accustomed to rebuffs, if you won’t, you won’t’ (SH 115).
47. P 5.852–53.
48. P 5.879–84.
49. Sheehy-Skeffington wrote breezily in his Davitt biography, ‘Davitt was almost as good a Russian as Mr. W. T. Stead. He had no patience with the English Tory who holds up hands in horror at tyranny in Russia, while maintaining a state of things in many respects worse in Ireland’ (Michael Davitt, 231).
50. SH 114.
51. Callanan, T. M. Healy, 679n57.
52. Ellmann, James Joyce, 62.
53. Sheehy-Skeffington, typescript article on W. T. Stead, April 1912, Sheehy-Skeffington Papers, NLI, MS 40,475/6. In one particular, Skeffington’s memory seems wrong. St Stephen’s was not in existence in 1899, presuming that the petition episode coincided with the Hague conference or its immediate prelude; ‘Chanel’ (Arthur Clery) did contribute to the Leader, but its first issue was 1 September 1900.
54. SH 112.
55. P 5.716–19.
56. P 5.721–23, 897–98.
57. P 5.903–7.
58. SH 112–13.
59. Curran, Under the Receding Wave, 116. It is possible also that Stephen’s irritation at Cranly’s signing of the petition is a transposition of Joyce’s annoyance that J. F. Byrne (the Cranly figure) had signed the later letter from students of University College condemning The Countess Cathleen.
60. U 15.4434–37. The Anglo-French entente of 1904, which was of greater significance than the settling of colonial disputes with which it was initially concerned, was exaggeratedly credited to Edward VII’s visit to Paris of May 1903. He also played some role in improving relations with Russia after the Russian defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904, culminating in a meeting with Nicholas at what is now Tallin, on the Baltic Sea. Nicholas was Edward’s nephew, as was the kaiser; Jane Ridley, Bertie: A Life of Edward VII (London: Chatto and Windus, 2012), 376–82, 398–400. In the ‘Cyclops’ episode, a reference to ‘Edward the peacemaker’ prompts the scorn of the Citizen, who observes ‘there’s a bloody sight more pox than pax about that boyo’ (U 12.1399–1401).
61. Leader, 28 January 1911.
62. Margot Norris challenges Ellmann’s assertion that ‘neither agreed with the other’s position’ (James Joyce, 888–89), which she says ‘creates the long-lived assumption that Joyce feared contamination of his work by Skeffington’s feminist text’ (Joyce’s Web, 14–15). The difference in Joyce’s approach, at least as an artist, is exemplified in his notes to Exiles, where he writes, ‘Richard must not appear as a champion of woman’s rights’ (E 153).
63. Sheehy-Skeffington’s eccentric views on sex are well summarised by Patrick Maume in his authoritative DIB entry: ‘Francis Sheehy-Skeffington’, 981.
64. Quoted in Ellmann, James Joyce, 179n109, from a letter at Cornell.
65. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 12 July 1905, 18 September 1905, Letters II 96–97, 108.
66. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 7 February 1905, Letters II 80–81; SH 113.
67. Letters II xliv.
68. Joyce was extremely sparing in his use of the term ‘hero’ and its cognates but was prepared to apply it to Henrik Ibsen, of whose ‘inward heroism’ Joyce had written to Ibsen himself: Joyce to Henrik Ibsen, March 1901, Letters I 52.
69. Curran, Under the Receding Wave, 112–14.
70. S. Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 155.
71. Curran, Under the Receding Wave, 114. What cannot be established is the extent to which Skeffington contributed to Joyce’s scrupulous disdain for and fictional exploitation of prophesy, the subject of Paul K. Saint-Amour’s excellent essay ‘ “The Imprevidibility of the Future”: On Joycean Prophesy’, in Renascent Joyce, ed. Daniel Ferrer, Sam Slote, and Andre Topia (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013), 90–105.
72. By this time Skeffington had abandoned his indulgent view of the tsar which had survived his suppression of the 1905 revolution. Patrick Maume writes, ‘He feared that an allied victory would strengthen the autocratic tsarist empire at the expense of a relatively advanced Germany, and a triumphant Britain would become aggressively imperialist and repress Ireland’ (‘Francis Sheehy-Skeffington’, 982). Executed along with his wife and children by the Bolsheviks at Ekaterinburg in July 1918, Nicholas II did not long outlive Skeffington.
73. Dorothy MacArdle, The Irish Republic, 4th ed. (Dublin: Irish Press, 1951), 82. Conor Cruise O’Brien perceptively assesses Skeffington’s position, the outcome of his ‘brooding over the parallel lives of Tom and Frank’, his uncles by marriage, in his Memoir: My Life and Themes (Dublin: Poolbeg, 1988), 9–27. He wrote of Kettle, ‘He may have been “wrong” politically, but as a human being he was all right. But there seemed, from what I heard from my mother, to be something wrong with Frank as a human being’ (Memoir, 19).
74. Maume, ‘Francis Sheehy-Skeffington’, 982–93; J. B. Lyons, Enigma of Tom Kettle, 285; MacArdle, Irish Republic, 181–82.
75. T. M. Kettle, An Irishman’s Calendar: A Quotation from the Works of T. M. Kettle for Every Day of the Year, ed. Mary Kettle (Dublin: Browne and Nolan, 1938), 115.
76. Desmond McCabe, ‘Andrew Joseph Kettle’, DIB 5:161–63. Margaret O’Callaghan emphasises the importance of ‘his exceptional and powerful father’ in understanding Kettle: O’Callaghan, ‘Forgetting to Remember: Tom Kettle in Modern Ireland’, in Remembering Tom Kettle, 1880–1916, ed. Gerald Barry (Dublin: University College Dublin Archives, 2006), 7–15.
77. W. G. Fallon, manuscript script of speech on Kettle [1930–32?], W. G. Fallon Papers, NLI, MS 22598.
78. Robert Lynd, Old and New Masters (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1919), 201.
79. Robert Lynd, Essays on Life and Literature (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1951), 52.
80. Arthur Clery, ‘Thomas Kettle’, Studies 5, no. 20 (December 1916): 503, reprinted in Arthur Clery, Dublin Essays (Dublin: Maunsel, 1919), 1.
81. Padraic Colum, ‘Tom Kettle: A Memory’, Dublin Magazine 24 (1949): 28–29.
82. Irish Review 2 (1912): 55.
83. Kettle felt taunted for his advocacy of recruitment and that he had to serve at the front. T. P. O’Connor wrote to John Redmond in late October 1914, ‘Tom Kettle came to see me today and said he thought it essential in the interests of Ireland that we should have some representation of our Party at the front, and he says he is quite willing to go himself. I suggested he should go as an interpreter. Stephen Gwynn, as you know, has applied for the same job. Of course Kitchener may stand in the way’. T. P. O’Connor to Redmond, 26 October 1914, Redmond Papers, NLI, MS 15215 (2). Kettle sought a commission in November 1914 but was not accorded one straightaway, on grounds of poor health arising from his alcoholism. Colin Reid, The Lost Ireland of Stephen Gwynn: Irish Constitutional Nationalism and Cultural Politics, 1864–1950 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 65–66; Senia Pašeta, Thomas Kettle (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2008), 82.
84. Margaret O’Callaghan has written, in her astute essay ‘The Politics of the Lost Generation and the Cult of Tom Kettle’, that ‘the almost unbelievable peculiarity of the fact that Home Rule became imminent and finally due to pass in the year that the First World War broke out meant that Kettle, like so many of his generation, operated in a terrain without maps.’ In From Parnell to Paisley, ed. Caoimhe Nic Dhaibhead and Colin Reid (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2010), 74. Sheehy-Skeffington had been outraged by Kettle’s recruiting activities on Irish platforms, and his enlistment, to the point of condemning in his diary Kettle’s ‘contemptible selling of himself’, and accepting that ‘a bullet at the front [would be] the best end for him’. Sheehy-Skeffington diary, entry for 29 June 1915, Sheehy-Skeffington Papers, NLI, MS 22277, quoted in Pašeta, Thomas Kettle, 90.
85. Donal Lowry, ‘Thomas Michael Kettle’, DIB 5:164.
86. P. Colum, ‘Tom Kettle’, 32.
87. Pašeta, Thomas Kettle, 60, 70, 82–83, 85–88. Professor James Meenan told me, when I was a University College Dublin student writing on Kettle, that it was said that Kettle had not drunk alcohol until prevailed upon to do so at dinners in the terms he kept in the King’s Inns (private communication, 1978).
88. Lowry, ‘Thomas Michael Kettle’, 164. Arthur Clery related that Kettle had acted for the defence in a few prosecutions for cattle driving, for which there had been a brief political vogue. Clery, ‘Thomas Kettle’ (1916), 510–11.
89. Freeman’s Journal, 17 December 1904; Dermot Meleady, John Redmond: The National Leader (Dublin: Merrion, 2014), 98–99. The inaugural meeting was a remarkable affair, characterised in one of the Freeman’s Journal’s headlines as a ‘splendid gathering of young men’ (though women were in attendance). After the speeches there was ‘a most delightful smoking concert’. Cathal McGarvey sang two of his comic Irish songs. John McCormack sang ‘The West’s Awake’ and ‘The Irish Emigrant’. Redmond declared, ‘I think an organization like this branch ought very largely partake of the nature of the best class of debating society’, which sounded ominously like a carrying forward of the L&H.
90. Meleady, John Redmond, 99.
91. L. Paul Dubois, Contemporary Ireland, introduction by T. M. Kettle (Dublin: Maunsel, 1911), viii.
92. Arthur Griffith, The Resurrection of Hungary: A Parallel for Ireland, 2nd ed. (Dublin: James Duffy, 1904).
93. T. M. Kettle, ‘Would the “Hungarian Policy” Work?’, New Ireland Review 22, no. 6 (February 1905): 321–28.
