James joyce, p.5
James Joyce, page 5
15. PSW 99.
1
The Shade of Parnell
JOYCE’S RELATIONSHIP TO the Irish political begins with Charles Stewart Parnell, and the Parnell Split, and it is to Parnell that one is consistently driven back in considering Joyce’s nationalism and his political relationship to Ireland. One has therefore to address how it was that Parnell, a politician who was never the leader of a state, whose career and political project ostensibly ended in conspicuous failure, whom Joyce never saw and who was dead when he was nine years old, came to be so central to Joyce’s political imagination and to his treatment of Ireland in his writing.
The advent of Parnell (1846–91) came to be hailed as something like a meteor appearing in the bleak firmament of late nineteenth-century Irish politics. A minor Irish landlord in County Wicklow, whose Avondale estate was heavily encumbered, Parnell showed seemingly little interest in politics and lived the life of a young man of his class. The earliest indication that he was considering a parliamentary candidacy was in 1873. In the event, since he held the office of high sheriff of County Wicklow, he confined himself at the general election of February 1874 to supporting the impromptu candidacy of his brother John Howard Parnell, who finished at the bottom of the poll. Charles Stewart stood and was defeated for County Dublin in a by-election immediately after the general election. He had to wait until the following year to be returned for County Meath, in April 1875, at the age of twenty-eight.
He was regarded at the outset of his career in Parliament as the unprepossessing and falteringly articulate scion of a distinguished ‘patriotic’ Anglo-Irish family—Sir John Parnell had staunchly opposed the Act of Union of 1800. After a brief parliamentary apprenticeship, he steadily dispelled the low expectations that attended his election by placidly exhibiting a fearless strength of purpose. He joined the ranks of the handful of Irish ‘obstructives’ and made of Irish parliamentary obstructionism at Westminster a strategic weapon. What was distinctive about Parnell was that he realised that nationalism could not prevail as an exclusively parliamentary phenomenon. In 1878–79, shortly before the beginning of the land agitation in response to distress in the west of Ireland, he came to a distanced but effective understanding with John Devoy, a leading member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood in the United States. Three weeks after meeting Devoy in Irishtown, County Mayo, on 20 April 1879, Parnell assumed the mantle of agrarian agitator by speaking at a meeting at Westport, County Mayo, on 8 June. The establishment of the Land League of Mayo followed on 16 August in Castlebar, and the Irish National Land League was founded in Dublin on 21 October. Parnell thus seized the possibilities of fusing obstructionism with Irish agrarianism, with the sanction of the more pragmatic Fenians (though hard-line Fenians remained dogmatically opposed to parliamentarism). He had come to assume a pivotal position and wide public prominence during the Land War in Ireland.
The 1880 general election caught Parnell and his allies somewhat off guard, but he emerged, at first precariously, as the leader of an Irish Parliamentary Party divided between those who shared his purpose and temporising ‘Whig’ or ‘nominal’ Home Rulers. In the general election, Joyce’s father, John Stanislaus Joyce, managed the campaigns of the two Liberal candidates in Dublin city, Maurice Brooks and Robert Spencer Dyer Lyons, who achieved the considerable feat of wresting the two seats from the Conservatives, in a constituency which was not contested by a Home Rule candidate. By 1882, the year Joyce was born, Parnell was already on course to achieving a remarkable ascendancy in Irish politics. He clashed with the Liberal Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone over the government’s Land Act and coercive legislation and was incarcerated in Kilmainham Jail from October 1881 to May 1882. His release just preceded the Phoenix Park murders on 6 May 1882, when the Chief Secretary Lord Frederick Cavendish and his undersecretary T. H. Burke were ferociously stabbed to death by members of a secret society called the Invincibles. The cabman in whose shelter part of the ‘Eumaeus’ episode of Ulysses takes place was reputedly James Fitzharris, ‘Skin the Goat’,1 the jarvey who drove the assassins to and from the murder scene in Phoenix Park, in sight of the Viceregal Lodge. Parnell was aghast and thought of resigning but finally resolved on seeking to contain the destabilising effects of the violence of the murders.
FIGURE 1.1. Charles Stewart Parnell (National Library of Ireland). Reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Ireland, CLON1152.
Parnell had contrived to create a disciplined Irish Parliamentary Party at Westminster that put the English party system under intense pressure. Gladstone’s government was brought down in early June 1885 by combined Irish and Tory votes. At the general election of July 1885, Parnell threw the Irish vote in England against the Liberals. He emerged with eighty-six seats, holding very narrowly the balance of power. After a protracted standoff, Gladstone introduced the Government of Ireland Bill on 8 April 1886. The Liberals split. The bill was lost in the Commons in June 1886. The general election the following month returned a Conservative government.
The introduction of what became known as the First Home Rule Bill nevertheless transformed how the prospects for Irish legislative independence were perceived. It inaugurated what was to be called in Britain the ‘union of hearts’ between Gladstonian Liberals and the Irish Parliamentary Party that Parnell led. There was a political cost. The governing precept of the Irish Party was of ‘independent opposition’ to both the Conservative and Liberal parties. The strategic fiction was that either British party could be brought to concede Home Rule to avoid the traditional debilitating dependence on the Liberals, though it was never likely that a Conservative government would enact Home Rule. Once a Liberal government had introduced a Home Rule measure, the idea that the Conservatives would contemplate doing so became still more improbable. Ireland was now the principal line of division between the British parties.
By 1886 Parnell’s hegemony in Ireland was unchallenged. He attained the status of a living legend as Ireland’s ‘uncrowned king’. That made Parnell a Unionist target, in his own right and perhaps still more because the Liberal party, in what the Conservatives confidently believed to be its Achilles’ heel, had allied itself with the Home Rule party. The Conservative government of Lord Salisbury, which succeeded Gladstone’s, set out to establish that Parnell was privy to the Phoenix Park murders, following the publication by The Times in 1887 of letters from Parnell that implicated him in the murders but had in fact been forged by Richard Pigott, a rogue Irish journalist down on his luck. The instrumentality by which the government sought to achieve this was the establishment of a Special Commission whose loaded remit was to enquire into Parnellite complicity in political violence in Ireland in general. Pigott gave evidence to the Special Commission and was exposed to searching cross-examination by Sir Charles Russell in one of the great set pieces of Victorian advocacy in which Russell held all the cards. It could only get worse, and over a weekend recess the hapless Pigott fled from London and finally shot himself in Madrid. Parnell stood at the zenith of his career in Britain and Ireland, extravagantly acclaimed by those in the Liberal party who had doubted him. Both the Pigott forgery and the inquisition feature in the accusatory matrix of Finnegans Wake. Parnell’s visit to Gladstone at home in Hawarden on 18–19 December 1889 marked the acme of the Liberal-nationalist alliance, the ‘union of hearts’.
Parnell’s public image had been of Spartan self-abnegation and solitude, of unforgiving political commitment; almost of secular sanctity as an Irish Protestant in the service of a predominantly Catholic people. That aspect of selfless austerity was to render Parnell vulnerable. In the latter part of 1881, he had begun a relationship with Katharine O’Shea, the wife of Captain William Henry O’Shea, an Irish member of Parliament of unrequited political ambition and social aspiration, and devoid of discernible political convictions. The relationship came to be an open secret in the Victorian manner in political and journalistic circles but was unknown to the wider public in Ireland or Britain. After O’Shea stood for the Liberal party in 1885 and lost, Parnell’s brutal imposition of O’Shea as the nationalist member of Parliament in the Galway by-election of February 1886 bewildered ordinary nationalists and brought Parnell’s relationship with O’Shea’s wife to the brink of public disclosure.
On 24 December 1889, Captain O’Shea instituted divorce proceedings naming Parnell as a co-respondent. The action came on for hearing a year later, on 15–17 November 1890. Parnell was absolutely resolved that there would be a divorce, which would enable him to marry Katharine. O’Shea’s evidence, highly damaging to Parnell, was unchallenged, and he obtained a conditional decree of divorce. A decree nisi could be made absolute after six months if nothing emerged to establish collusion or acquiescence on the part of the petitioner that could elicit the intervention of the Queen’s Proctor. Divorce proceedings were, at the time, heard in public. The O’Shea divorce case created an immense sensation in which politics and morality intersected. The career of the promising Liberal Sir Charles Dilke had been substantially destroyed when he was named, quite possibly falsely, as a co-respondent in divorce proceedings in 1885–86. Parnell was a different proposition to Dilke given his status as the leader of nationalist Ireland and his immense popularity in Ireland as the leader who had transformed the prospects for Irish nationalism. If anything, the political assumption was that Parnell’s leadership would survive, but then no-one quite knew how a divorce scandal might play out in Catholic nationalist Ireland.
The immediate nationalist response was a closing of ranks in support of Parnell. On 20 November leading nationalist parliamentarians endorsed Parnell’s leadership at a meeting in the Leinster Hall. Timothy Michael Healy’s endorsement was the most ringing and became a principal taunt of Parnellites after he had changed sides to become Parnell’s most ferocious and décomplexé opponent. The Irish party re-elected Parnell as sessional chairman on 25 November. The divorce exposed a fault line in the Home Rule alliance between Gladstone’s Liberal party and the Irish Party led by Parnell. Liberal nonconformist sentiment was affronted almost as much by the initial condoning by Irish nationalists of Parnell’s relationship with Katharine O’Shea as by the relationship itself. Gladstone responded to Parnell’s re-election by publishing a letter to John Morley, his principal co-adjutor on Irish affairs, asserting that Parnell’s continued leadership of the Irish Party would render his own leadership of the Liberal party ‘almost a nullity’.2
This was the situation characterised by Joyce in his 1912 article ‘L’ombra di Parnell’ (‘The Shade of Parnell’): ‘The ministers Gladstone and Morley openly refused to legislate in favour of Ireland if the felon stayed on as leader of the Nationalist Party’.3 It was of course an intervention that was difficult to reconcile philosophically with Liberal support of Home Rule, premised on the idea that the Irish people were entitled to make their own political choices, but reflected Gladstone’s assessment of what Liberal voters in Britain would tolerate. Gladstone’s intervention caused many moderate nationalists to conclude that for Parnell to remain as leader would undo what was seen as his greatest political achievement, the winning of the Liberal party to the cause of Home Rule; for Parnellites that was to confuse the means with the end.
Parnell retaliated on 29 November 1890 with an inflammatory ‘Manifesto to the Irish People’. It contained a highly tendentious account of his negotiations with Gladstone at Hawarden, an account which he asserted ‘will enable you [the Irish people] to understand the measure of the loss with which you are threatened unless you consent to throw me to the English wolves now baying for my destruction’.4 While most contemporary observers considered Parnell’s manifesto to be a catastrophically counter-productive misjudgement, what it revealed was that Parnell fully apprehended the scale of the challenge he was facing, and was pre-emptively framing the issue in anticipation of what was fast becoming its inevitable second phase on Irish terrain. He hoped to deploy his immense political stature to overwhelm on Irish ground the rapidly mounting opposition to his leadership.
The Irish Party met in Committee Room 15 of the Houses of Parliament at Westminster from 1 to 6 December 1890 to debate Parnell’s continued leadership. In the course of that debate, the Irish Catholic hierarchy, which had theretofore held back, intervened through a denunciation of Parnell by their standing committee. The meetings of the party were intense and fraught across a very long week. The debates were carried more or less verbatim by the Freeman’s Journal, whose reporters were in attendance. It was apparent from early on that Parnell was in a minority. He chaired the meetings without much pretence of impartiality but without quite abrogating democratic norms. In his interventions he demonstrated once more his commanding political ability, but the debates also disclosed the problem that was to dog him throughout the Split. That was that whatever he said could be dismissed as a cynically self-serving attempt to maintain his leadership, rather than a disinterested assertion of Irish independence in the face of an impermissible Liberal attempt to dictate who was to be the leader of the Irish Party. Parnell fiercely—and with some justification, given his strange clairvoyance and his estimate of the political capacity of his opponents—refused to recognise the distinction. That was Parnell’s difficulty, and it was one that his most adroit and uninhibited adversary, Healy, exploited to the hilt in Committee Room 15 and in Ireland. Joyce fully shared the Parnellite loathing of Healy, which was almost a correlative of loyalty to Parnell.
The most notorious episode in Committee Room 15 came on the last day as the disintegration of the party set in. When John Redmond interjected to refer to Gladstone as ‘the master of the party’, Healy scornfully enquired, ‘Who is to be the mistress of the party?’ Infuriated, Parnell repeatedly rose and subsided and was poised to strike Healy, whom he characterised as ‘that cowardly little scoundrel there who dares in an assembly of Irishmen to insult a woman’.5 Joyce never mentions the episode, perhaps reflecting the Parnellite precept of disdaining to refer to Healy, consigning him to the realms of the unspeakable.
FIGURE 1.2. Timothy Michael Healy (National Library of Ireland). Reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Ireland, NPA DOCF1.
Joyce extracted something else from the debates in Committee Room 15. On the first day, Redmond made a supportive speech which elicited an interpellation from Parnell that, slightly paraphrased, was to become part of the Parnell myth:
Redmond—In deciding a question of this kind, where we are asked to sell our leader (loud cheers) to preserve an alliance, it seems to me that we are bound to inquire what we are getting for the price that we are paying (renewed cheers).
Parnell—Don’t sell me for nothing. If you get my value you may change me tomorrow (renewed cheers).6
Redmond’s speech and Parnell’s intervention prefigured Parnell’s tactic of seeking to extract assurances from the Liberal leadership on the points in relation to the Home Rule Bill raised in the manifesto, which were not to be forthcoming. Parnell’s almost conversational interjection revealed a great deal of his character: his sardonic realpolitik, the ability sweetly to feign reasonableness, and his superb contempt for his opponents in the imputation that they were submitting to a squalid bargain with the Liberals, which they had neither the political means nor the capacity to hold them to. For Joyce, who was prone to drawing oblique parallels between Parnell and Christ, it also recalled the pieces of silver of Judas Iscariot. The phrase ‘get my price’ recurs as a drumbeat through Finnegans Wake.
The party in Committee Room 15 finally divided almost two to one against Parnell. That sundering was designated as ‘the Split’, though the term can also, depending on context, refer to the duration of the Split in Parnell’s lifetime, 1890–91, or to what might be termed the long Split of 1890–1900, the period during which the Irish Party was divided before its reunification in 1900.
Forsaken by a majority in his party, Parnell came back to Ireland to reassert his leadership of the Irish people. His speech in the Rotunda in Dublin was perhaps his last truly great speech, his power in Ireland as yet unbroken. In the course of it he declaimed to loud cheers, ‘I am too unworthy to walk with you within the sight of the promised land, which, please God, I will enter with you.’7 There had already been, in the cult of Parnell, equations of the Irish leader with Moses leading the Jewish people out of servitude, both before and after the divorce crisis, which were not lost on Joyce, and would provide the subtext of the rendering of J. F. Taylor’s speech in the ‘Aeolus’ episode of Ulysses.8
Early the following morning, before leaving Dublin for his Cork constituency, Parnell led the forcible ousting of the anti-Parnellite personnel who had taken over the offices of United Ireland. Joyce was to deploy the ‘historic fracas’ in the ‘Eumaeus’ episode of Ulysses—where Leopold Bloom, who ‘enjoyed the distinction of being close to Erin’s uncrowned king in the flesh’, restores Parnell’s hat—inserting Bloom into the narrative of the episode quoted by Richard Barry O’Brien.9
