James joyce, p.51
James Joyce, page 51
63. Yeats, Autobiographies, 234–35, 235n. With the publication of Ulysses, the persona of Taylor had become a site of friendly and faintly comical contestation between Joyce and Yeats. Up to that point, Taylor’s memory had been principally maintained in Yeats’s rolling sequence of autobiographical writing, which rendered, with a remarkable combination of candour and striving for fairness, his fraught relationship with Taylor.
64. The debate is reported in the Irish Independent and the Daily Express of 21 November 1901.
65. Meenan, Centenary History, 48.
66. St Stephen’s, December 1901. The comparison of Taylor’s speaking style to Joyce’s perhaps gives a deepened significance to Joyce’s recording of the speech as reworked in Ulysses.
67. Michael Tierney, ed., Struggle with Fortune: A Miscellany for the Centenary of the Catholic University of Ireland, 1854–1954 (Dublin: Browne and Nolan, 1954), 229.
68. FW 3.9–10.
69. OCPW 61–63.
70. Callanan, ‘Joyce and the United Irishman’, 72–77. For an account of the life of Thomas William Rolleston (1857–1920), poet and writer, see W. B. Yeats, The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. John Kelly (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 1:508–9.
71. United Irishman, 15 November 1902.
72. United Irishman, 12 May 1900. The passage is cited by Griffith in instancing Taylor’s ‘magnificent scorn’ in his obituary of Taylor (United Irishman, 15 November 1902); see Callanan, ‘Joyce and the United Irishman’, 73–74.
73. Ian Ker, John Henry Newman (1988; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 420.
74. John Henry Newman, Callista: A Tale of the Third Century (London: Longmans, Green, 1904), 43, 47.
75. Newman, Callista, 84.
76. Newman, Callista, 312–13.
77. Lernout, Help My Unbelief, 117–18.
78. Stuart Gilbert, introduction to Letters I 30.
79. Extratextually, the character of professor MacHugh is considered to be based on Hugh MacNeill (1866–1935), brother of Eoin MacNeill, and of James MacNeill, the second Governor-General of the Irish Free State, after T. M. Healy. He was not a professor but until 1913 a tutor in University College. He was a familiar figure in the offices of the Freeman’s Journal and the Evening Telegraph and later in the Irish Times. Journalists working on the papers bestowed on him the title of ‘professor’. Igoe, Real People of Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’, 185–86.
80. U 7.487, U 7.820–21.
81. Adrian Hardiman, Joyce in Court: James Joyce and the Law (London: Head of Zeus, 2017), 106.
82. U 7.286–90.
83. U 7.306–7.
84. U 7.484–85. In Stephen Hero, in the debate on Joyce’s paper, Whelan, ‘the orator of the College’, declaims that Greek art stands aloof and alone for all time’, and is ‘imperial, imperious and imperative’ (SH 101).
85. U 7.551–53, 7.564–68.
86. Hardiman, Joyce in Court, 162.
87. U 7.776.
88. U 7.772. The only other occasion on which a similar blush is elicited from Stephen is in A Portrait. In the Christmas dinner scene, Mr Casey denounces the sequence of betrayals of the Irish patriotic cause by the Catholic bishops: ‘His face was glowing with anger and Stephen felt the glow rise to his own cheek as the spoken words thrilled him’ (P 1.1108–9).
89. U 7.836–37.
90. U 8.830–34.
91. U 7.845–50.
92. U 7.862–69.
93. U 7.871–72.
94. Callanan, Parnell Split, 63.
95. U 7.880–84.
96. U 7.909–11.
97. U 7.572–73; Gifford, Ulysses Annotated, 139.
98. Abby Bender, Israelites in Erin: Exodus, Revolution, and the Irish Revival (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2015), 144, 231n59. The only other recording Joyce made is of the gossip of the washerwomen by the banks of the Liffey in the twilight of flitting bats, from Finnegans Wake, Book I, Chapter 8. The two recordings are in different voices; something of the Cork of John Stanislaus Joyce endures acoustically in the whispering chatter of his son’s Finnegans Wake recording.
99. Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare and Company (London: Faber and Faber, 1956), 177–78.
100. A. Nicholas Fargnoli and Michael Patrick Gillespie, James Joyce A to Z (London: Bloomsbury, 1995), 216.
101. U 17.337–41.
102. This encompasses an allusion to the Merchant Tailors’ Guild of St John the Baptist, established in Dublin in 1704; Gifford, Ulysses Annotated, 61. The ‘meer’ is likely to be a gentle dig at Yeats’s unforgettable half-admiring, half-condemnatory characterisation of Taylor in his autobiographical writings.
103. FW 61.28–62.25.
104. OCPW 125.
105. OCPW 146.
9
Moving towards Exile
ENCOUNTERING LITERARY AND RADICAL DUBLIN, 1902–4
I think that the tensions that gave [Yeats and Joyce] their magnitude came from tensions produced from a transition from the nation to the State. The same transition was made forty years before when Norway, with Ibsen as its dominating figure, passed from the consciousness of the community of a nation into the consciousness of the community as a State. Yeats and Joyce show, as Ibsen showed, their stressful involvement in the political and social drift of their country.… I should place the period of transition in Ireland between the Parnell epoch and the establishment of a national government.
—PADRAIC COLUM, JUNE 19671
James writes quietly and without haste and seems to write not what he is thinking but what he has thought. He does not grasp at a thought when it is presented to him, but waits until it has settled in his mind’s perspective and then arranges it with easy lucidity, writing clearly, minutely and consequently.
—STANISLAUS JOYCE, OCTOBER 19042
THE TWO YEARS FROM JOYCE leaving University College to his leaving Ireland teem with events that would feature in his writing. The change in ambience and tempo from the claustral setting of the university was marked. It was not merely that he now met the leading figures of the Irish Literary Revival; he set out to enlarge his exposure to the experience of Dublin life, which included the contemporary political. If it was not from the outset, it became a poignant quest to see if Dublin could hold him. The persona of Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a misleading guide to the Joyce of 1902–4.
Joyce experimented with exile in Paris for most of December 1902, returning for Christmas, and leaving Paris again in April on receiving a telegram from his father that his mother was dying. The death of May Joyce on 4 August 1903 was followed by a plummeting deterioration in the circumstances of the Joyce household. Joyce wrote the essay ‘A Portrait of the Artist’, rejected by the editors of Dana in January 1904, and immediately commenced writing his novel Stephen Hero. He wrote a number of the poems that would make up Chamber Music, and in August ‘The Sisters’, the first of the stories that would comprise Dubliners, appeared in the Irish Homestead. In June he met Nora Barnacle. He resided in and abruptly departed from the Martello tower in Sandycove in September. He left Ireland with Nora on 8 October 1904. In these crowded months Joyce began to revise, on his own terms, his conception of the political, and of the relationship of the political to his nascent art.
Accosting the Twilight
I have met with you, bird, too late, or if not too worm and early.3
It was not difficult to meet the leading Irish writers in the Dublin of 1902, but Joyce set about doing so with a certain system, beginning naturally with George Russell in August 1902. Two months later, he accosted W. B. Yeats near the National Library, and they repaired to the smoking room of a restaurant on Sackville Street. Yeats wrote a long account of their meeting, which he had intended for a preface to his Ideas of Good and Evil published the following year, on the proofs of which he had been working in the National Library. Joyce read him ‘a beautiful though immature and eccentric harmony of little prose descriptions and meditations’. He professed himself indifferent to Yeats’s opinion of them, before battle commenced:
Then, putting down his book, he began to explain all his objections to everything I had ever done. Why had I concerned myself with politics, with folklore, with the historical setting of events, and so on? Above all, why had I written about ideas, why had I condescended to make generalizations? These things were all a sign of the cooling of the iron, of the fading out of inspiration. I had been puzzled, but now I was confident again. He is from the Royal University, I thought, and he thinks that everything has been settled by Thomas Aquinas, so we need not trouble about it. I have met so many like him. He would probably review my book in the newspapers if I sent it there. But the next moment he spoke of a friend of mine [Oscar Wilde] who after a wild life had turned Catholic on his deathbed. He said that he hoped his conversion was not sincere. He did not like to think that he had been untrue to himself at the end. No, I had not understood him yet.
A long apologia from Yeats on the artistic use of folklore was met by the retort,
‘Generalizations aren’t made by poets, they are made by men of letters. They are no use.’
Presently he got up to go, and, as he was going out, he said, ‘I am twenty. How old are you?’ I told him, but I am afraid I said I was a year younger than I am. He said with a sigh, ‘I thought as much. I have met you too late. You are too old.’
And now I am still undecided as to whether I shall send this book to the Irish papers for review. The younger generation is knocking at my door as well as theirs.4
In Russell’s perhaps more plausible if second-hand account, Joyce’s parting shot was a role reversal: ‘We have met too late. You are too old for me to have any effect on you.’5 While no doubt pleased with the irruptive éclat, Joyce later disavowed any suggestion of disrespect towards Yeats. Reviewing the proofs of Herbert Gorman’s biography, he noted, ‘The story as constantly retailed in the press is another story of Dublin public house gossip. J.J. at this time had an immense admiration for Yeats as a poet and though he did say the words or something to the effect attributed to him they were never said in the tone of contempt which is implied in the story.’6
Yeats was somewhat more affronted than his gracefully self-deprecatory account might suggest. He complained to his friend William Kirkpatrick Magee, ‘Never have I encountered so much pretension with so little to show for it.’7 In The Trembling of the Veil (1923) he recalled the response to his counter-Victorian declamations at the Rhymers’ Club, where Lionel Johnston and others met over the Cheshire Cheese off Fleet Street in London: ‘I say this because I am ashamed to admit that I had these ideas and that whenever I began to speak of them a gloomy silence fell upon the room. A young Irish poet, who wrote excellently but had the worst manners, was to say a few years later, “You do not talk like a poet, you talk like a man of letters”, and if all the Rhymers had not been polite, if most of them had not been to Oxford or Cambridge, the greater number would have said the same thing.’8
In his ‘Modern Ireland’ address in America in 1932–33, he wrote, ‘I remember the young Joyce as he [was] when I first met him in Dublin, and he will forgive me for saying, knowing how much I admire his work, that [he] seemed to me in those [days] possessed of an extreme irritation, mounting to almost ungovernable rage against all that [he] saw and heard, even against the mere bodies and faces that passed him in the street.’9
It was an extraordinary Dublin encounter in which Joyce had the advantage of surprise. Yeats was caught off guard by Joyce’s aloof offensive. He was unprepared for a meeting that was a point in a trajectory that Joyce had already begun to chart with ‘The Day of the Rabblement’ and his James Clarence Mangan paper in University College, but it was impressive that he realised his encounter with the calm but insistently assertive graduate of University College was of some significance. From Joyce’s perspective, the fact of their meeting was more important than what was said. It was a necessary event in the intersecting sequence of their careers that Joyce had already decided would be constitutive of a modern Irish literature, and which required a correlative of personal acquaintance. It achieved more than it needed to: Joyce had irruptively inscribed himself into Yeats’s narrative, as Yeats was already inscribed in his own.
It was probably at a meeting some months later that Joyce conveyed his admiration of Yeats’s stories ‘The Tables of the Law’ and ‘The Adoration of the Magi’. Elkin Mathews republished the stories in 1904 with a prefatory note from Yeats: ‘These two stories were privately printed some years ago. I do not think I should have reprinted them had I not met a young man in Ireland the other day, who liked them very much and nothing else I have written.’10
Yeats wrote Joyce, ‘You have a very delicate talent but I cannot say whether for prose or verse.’ He said, ‘I will do anything for you I can but I am afraid it will not be a great deal.’11 In fact he did much, through introductions in Dublin and London and counsel politely and fearlessly tendered.12
Yeats had Lady Gregory invite Joyce to dine at the Nassau Hotel on 4 November 1902 to meet Yeats’s father,13 who became in later years a perceptive admirer of Joyce’s works. Two weeks later Joyce wrote Lady Gregory a letter of fierce importunacy. He was going ‘alone and friendless’ to Paris: ‘And though I seem to have been driven out of my country here as a misbeliever I have found no man yet with a faith like mine.’14 She was not unsympathetic: ‘Poor boy, I am afraid he will knock his ribs against the earth, but he has grit and will succeed in the end’, she wrote, urging Yeats to meet him in London on his way through. She wrote also to John Millington Synge and sent Joyce to E. V. Longworth, the editor of the Daily Express, who agreed to send him books to review.15 She did not offer financial support, but Joyce responded appreciatively to her reply on 1 December, the day he left Dublin.16 However, he was always harshly ungrateful to her thereafter. She unfairly bore the burden of his sense of having been shut out from the Literary Revival. Joyce was desperately short of money in Paris but unflinching; he was compelled to ask his mother to draw on her meagre resources, which she readily did.17
In his letter to Lady Gregory, Joyce said he had met Synge. During Joyce’s second Paris sojourn, Synge came to Paris for a week to evacuate his room on the Rue d’Assas. He must have alerted Joyce, who on 8 March 1903 called and left a card.18 Synge sent a note to Joyce at the Hotel Corneille to meet ‘under the Odeon cloisters in front of your door’.19 They met on 9 March and saw a good deal of each other in the days that followed. Something of their encounters is captured, as if through a haze of wine, in Stephen’s memory in Ulysses, prompted by Mulligan’s suggestion that the ‘the tramper Synge’ was looking to murder him: ‘Harsh gargoyle face that warred against me over our mess of hash of lights in rue Saint André des Arts. In words of words for words, palabras. Oisin with Patrick. Faunman he met in Clamart woods, brandishing a winebottle. C’est vendredi saint! Murthering Irish. His image, wandering, he met. I mine. I met a fool i’ the forest.’20
Stanislaus, to whom Joyce had evidently talked a good deal about Synge, wrote, ‘In Paris my brother met John Synge, who was living there almost as poor as my brother himself, and had many quarrelsome discussions with him about language, style, poetry, the drama, and literature in general.… When [Synge] was at a loss for an argument, [he] was inclined to lose his temper. When that happened Synge’s angry face and wagging beard used to send my brother into kinks of laughter that made Synge still angrier.’21
Synge reported back to Lady Gregory,
He seems to be pretty badly off, and is wandering around Paris rather unbrushed and rather indolent, spending his studious moments in the National Library reading Ben Jonson. French literature I understand is beneath him! Still he interested me a good deal and as he is being gradually won over by the charm of French life his time in Paris is not wasted. He talks of coming back to Dublin in the summer to live there on journalism while he does his serious work at his leisure. I cannot think that he will ever be a poet of importance, but his intellect is extraordinarily keen and if he keeps fairly sane he ought to do excellent essay writing.22
Joyce responded with implacable dogmatism to Riders to the Sea, which Synge showed him, and which Yeats had already told him was ‘quite Greek’. Joyce reported to Stanislaus, ‘I am glad to say that ever since I read it I have been riddling it mentally till it has [not] a sound spot. It is tragic about all the men that are drowned in the islands: but thanks be to God Synge isn’t an Aristotelian. I told him part of my esthetic: he says I have a mind like Spinosa.’23 Joyce relayed his criticism to Padraic Colum that the play was too short to sustain the tragic mood: ‘You can’t have a tragedy in a play that lasts for twenty minutes.’24 Joyce told Stanislaus a good deal about his meetings with Synge. Stanislaus wrote, ‘He called Riders to the Sea a tragic poem. Synge did not agree, but he listened and countered my brother’s arguments calmly. Perhaps he was mollified by the fact that the rhythm of certain phrases had stuck in my brother’s memory—he already knew Maurya’s final speeches almost by heart—and he repeated them with such a keen sense of their beauty that it must have tempered his strictures.’25 Later in Trieste, Joyce would collaborate with his pupil and friend Nicolò Vidacovich on a translation of Synge’s play into Italian.26
