James joyce, p.54
James Joyce, page 54
Joyce’s review commenced with alacrity: ‘These are the verses of a writer lately dead, whom many considered the Davis of the latest national movement. They are issued from headquarters.’ In referring to Davis, whom Griffith had defensively invoked, he was enlarging the scope of his attack. While the thrust of that attack was on the subordination of the political to the literary from the era of Young Ireland onwards, it also suggested that Joyce at that time remained sceptical of the politics of the United Irishman, from whose offices the book emanated. Asserting with ruthless inexactitude that the authors of the two introductions (Griffith’s and a biographical sketch by Patrick Bradley) did not hesitate to claim for Rooney’s verses ‘the highest honours’, he retorted that the claim could not be allowed ‘unless it is supported by certain evidences of literary sincerity. For a man who writes a book cannot be excused by his good intentions, or by his moral character; he enters a region where there is question of the written word.’ This was especially so ‘now that the region of literature is so fiercely assailed by the enthusiast and the doctrinaire.’ Rooney’s verses attained little, ‘because the writing is so careless, and is yet so studiously mean’. He did, however, unstintingly praise one of Rooney’s translations.105
Joyce’s review was a searing exposition of what happened ‘when patriotism has laid hold of the writer’. Rooney’s verses
bear witness to some desperate and weary energy. But they have no spiritual and living energy, because they come from one in whom the spirit is in a manner dead, or at least in its own hell, a weary and foolish spirit, speaking of redemption and revenge, blaspheming against tyrants, and going forth, full of tears and curses, upon its infernal labours. Religion and all that is allied thereto can manifestly persuade men to great evil, and by writing these verses, even though they should, as the writers of the prefaces think, enkindle the young men of Ireland to hope and activity, Mr Rooney has been persuaded to great evil. And yet he might have written well if he had not suffered from one of those big words which make us so unhappy.106
Joyce’s argument, in one aspect a stern application of Wildean aesthetics to nationalistic rhetoric, suffered from the abbreviations required in a short review. It says something about his changing relationship to the political after University College. The ‘blaspheming against tyrants’ echoes the proposition in his Mangan paper of the start of that year that ‘the poet who hurls anger against tyrants would establish upon the future an intimate and far more cruel tyranny’,107 but the content of the review carried him beyond the realm of his ostensible political virginality in University College.
The review exhibited a close familiarity with nationalist politics and the patriotic canon. ‘The theme is consistently national, so uncompromising, indeed, that the reader must lift an eyebrow and assure himself when he meets on page 114 the name of D’Arcy McGee.’ Thomas D’Arcy McGee had been a Young Irelander who became a prominent Canadian politician; his assassination in Ottawa in 1868 was believed to have been perpetrated by Fenians. Re-reading the review after Joyce’s death, Stanislaus was prompted to recall, ‘My brother had a stronger stomach for patriotic poetry than I. He could read through the collected poems of those insignificant poets with high-sounding names, Denis Florence MacCarthy, with cold patient scorn, when a very few pages of them left me helpless and speechless with devastating boredom.’108
That would have surprised Joyce’s contemporaries in University College. If Joyce’s breadth of reference would not have been unusual for a well-read nationalist of the older generation, his statement that ‘even Mr T. D. Sullivan and Mr Rolleston have done something in the making of this book’ was of a different order and revealed a striking connoisseurship of contemporary nationalist politico-cultural controversy. The invocation of Sullivan, an anti-Parnellite politician and writer of popular songs and ballads, was faintly disparaging, but the reference to Rolleston was a barb thrust deep. Thomas William Hazen Rolleston was an Irish intellectual and poet who initially had nationalist sympathies: at one time he, Yeats, and John Francis Taylor vied as disciples of John O’Leary.109 He was employed from 1900 by Horace Plunkett’s Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction. His drift towards imperialism accelerated during the South African War, culminating in the publication of his 1901 pamphlet Ireland, the Empire and the War. Griffith came to revile Rolleston as an apostate, and repeatedly assailed him in the United Irishman. The paper also carried a fierce attack on Rolleston by John Francis Taylor entitled ‘Mr Rolleston’s Recantation’, which Griffith cited at length on the death of Taylor the following year, in an obituary that appeared less than a month before Joyce’s review.110 The mention of Rolleston was on Joyce’s part a calculated provocation.
The publication in a Unionist newspaper of a devastating review of Rooney’s poems by a reviewer who displayed an extraordinarily expert and intimate knowledge of contemporary nationalist controversy can only have excited Griffith’s most suspicious loathing. He mastered his wrath in not responding editorially. The United Irishman of 20 December 1902 carried a publicity notice for the book that comprised an abridgement of Joyce’s review. There was an interpolation of one word, in the last sentence cited from Joyce’s review, thus: ‘And yet he might have written well if he had not suffered from one of those big words [Patriotism] which makes us so unhappy.’ The insertion, with a capitalised P, of the word Joyce was referring back to earlier in the review, but had chosen not to repeat, was an effective riposte. (In the ‘Nestor’ episode of Ulysses, Stephen tells Mr Deasy, ‘I fear those words which make us so unhappy’).111
The invocation of Rolleston was addressed to Griffith. In bringing its author to Griffith’s attention, the review is continuous with the suite of introductions to literary figures in Dublin on which Joyce embarked from the autumn of 1902. A friendly relationship with Griffith could have been of considerable benefit to Joyce, as it had been to Padraic Colum; but, in the same breath that he drew himself to Griffith’s attention, he proclaimed an absolute refusal to be beholden to him. All the Joyce of 1902–4 is present in this: a furious sense of independence, an embrace of what there was to experience, intellectual lucidity, erudition, and preternaturally exact observation; and a cavalier playfulness. There was a heartbreaking fortitude which to most of his contemporaries seemed indistinguishable from improvident pride.
Joyce’s review of Rooney’s poems was something more than a virtuoso exercise in provocation. He seized the opportunity to articulate his critique of the conjuncture of hard-line cultural nationalism and revivalism of the Irish language. There was something flawed about Rooney as a political persona—the capacity in which Griffith principally esteemed him—that Joyce intuited. He was probably not aware that Rooney had been seen within the Gaelic League as a divisive figure. Eoin MacNeill blamed a speech of Rooney’s for alienating the Irish Parliamentary Party, which he had been seeking to cultivate, from the Gaelic League. There was moreover a distinct chill of politesse in the scholarly MacNeill’s characterisation of Rooney as ‘well remembered for his poems and writings on national subjects’.112 Joyce was not alone in his refusal to subscribe to Griffith’s dream of his dead friend.
Writing long afterwards, Colum, who knew Griffith very well and was his first biographer, as well as a friend of Joyce’s, in assessing Griffith’s misjudgements of Yeats and Synge, wrote that Griffith was ‘inimical to what he knew of young James Joyce’s work’. Of the Rooney review, he wrote, ‘The young man who had belittled his poems in a Unionist journal was, to Arthur Griffith, a man of sinister mind and intention.’113 Yet Griffith was not implacably affronted. His Sinn Féin was the only paper to publish in full Joyce’s open letter in 1911 relating to the objections to ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’, and the following year Joyce solicited Griffith’s advice and help in his continuing difficulties with his Dublin publishers.114 Griffith received him ‘very kindly’.115 Though they must have often passed each other in the National Library from 1898 to 1904, their encounter on 30 August 1912, presumably at the offices of Sinn Féin, was their first and only meeting, two weeks before Joyce left Ireland for the last time.
Joyce’s reading of the United Irishman persisted unabated after the publication of his Rooney review in the Daily Express. On 7 March and 4 April 1903, under the title ‘An Irish Rural Library’, the paper published two lists of Irish books (reworking an earlier list that Rooney had compiled), with the stated purpose of informing the selection of books by rural Irish libraries. The first list comprised works in English, the second in Irish. The lengthy catalogue of Irish books that appears in Joyce’s Paris–Pola Commonplace Book is drawn directly from and cleaves closely to the 1903 United Irishman lists.116 Joyce meticulously transcribed virtually the entirety of the first list of works in English, his only innovation being to constitute a separate category of ‘Speeches’, which included Jennie Wyse Power’s collation of quotations from the speeches of Parnell, Words of the Dead Chief. From the second list of books in Irish, Joyce took only twenty works, principally in the category of ‘Older Literature’, excluding contemporary writing in Irish. This attests to his interest in older works in the Irish language, principally the Irish myths, lives of the saints, and poetry, along with Geoffrey Keating’s History of Ireland, the Annals of the Four Masters, and The Ancient Laws of Ireland.117
If the original source for the works listed in the Paris–Pola Commonplace Book is clear, Joyce’s purpose in making such a list is less certain. While distantly presaging Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, the exercise is hard to match to the preoccupations of the Stephen Dedalus of A Portrait and is at odds with Joyce’s public profile in University College. I have suggested elsewhere that the lists are ‘best conceived as a scoping exercise on Joyce’s part, a sizing up and textual mapping of the subject of Ireland’.118 There is an almost eerie purposefulness in the need he felt to apprehend the corpus of Irish writing and writing on Ireland as a whole. Something in the lists presages the selectively encyclopaedic ambitions of Joyce in the rendering of Ireland that were to find expression in Finnegans Wake.
What may bring greater clarity to his purpose in transcribing the lists is the intersection of their publication with his encounters in Paris with Synge, on 9 March 1903 and over the week or so that followed. Joyce would have received the edition of the United Irishman of 7 March 1903. Though a month would expire before the publication of the second list on 4 April 1903, it is possible that Joyce’s interest in the United Irishman lists owed something to the competitive stimulus of meeting Synge which, in destabilising his conception of the Irish Revival, forced him to reconsider his own strategy as an Irish writer, if only in inflecting and giving a degree of urgency to approaches he may have already had in consideration.
The selection from the second list suggests that Joyce, however sceptical about the revival of the Irish language, and hostile to the völkisch orientation of the Celtic Twilight, was alive to the significance of the older literature in the Irish language, of Irish myths and annals. That he was interested in the modernistic deployment of Irish myths was to become clear from his story ‘The Dead’, which he wrote in Trieste in the autumn of 1907. The story has a teeming spectral sub-level that derives from Gaelic literature, principally ‘The Destruction of Dá Derga’s Hostel’, that was identified by John V. Kelleher in 1965 and hauntingly—even terrifyingly—developed by Paul Muldoon’s 1998 Clarendon lectures.119 That raises the issue of whether Joyce drew on what the United Irishman published on the Irish myths. The sources of Joyce’s knowledge of the Irish myths remain to be established. The magnificent ambitiousness of Griffith’s weekly paper was epitomised in the publication of a series titled ‘Old Irish Bardic Tales’, written by Richard Irvine Best, from 11 October 1902 to 25 April 1903, an envelope of time that also encompassed the publication of the rural library lists used by Joyce. Best’s rendering of ‘The Destruction of Dá Derga’s Hostel’ was published in the United Irishman of 27 January and 7 February 1903: the story does not feature in P. W. Joyce’s Old Celtic Romances, though it does appear in Lady Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne.
Joyce’s reading of the United Irishman from its inception did not equate to support for Griffith’s politics. There was an interval of over five years from the inception of the paper before Joyce expressed a qualified endorsement of Griffith, though that has to have owed a great deal to his reading of the paper. He was slow to detach Griffith from the ranks of the ‘patriots’ of whom his suspicions found expression in Stephen Hero. In that unfinished novel, Griffith is placed in the circle frequented by Madden (the character based on George Clancy) that was centred on Cathal McGarvey’s tobacco shop, An Stad, on North Frederick Street. Identified as ‘the editor of the weekly journal of the irreconcilable party’, Griffith reports to the circle ‘any signs of Philocelticism which he had observed in the Paris newspapers’: ‘The cry of a solitary Frenchman (“A bas l’Angleterre”) at a Celtic re-union in Paris would be made by these enthusiasts the subject of a leading article in which would be shown the imminence of aid for Ireland from the French Government. A glowing example was to be found for Ireland in the case of Hungary, an example, as these patriots imagined, of a long-suffering minority, entitled by every right of race and justice to a separate freedom, finally emancipating itself.’120
Joyce was dismissive of the Hungarian parallel that informed Griffith’s Resurrection of Hungary. Joyce’s somewhat exaggerated emphasis on Griffith’s invocation of isolated manifestations of French support was due in part to his identification of Griffith with Maud Gonne, of whom Griffith was a friend and chivalric defender. Joyce had yet to separate Griffith as a political persona from Griffith the editor and journalist, and to appreciate that Griffith was a political nationalist rather than someone who saw politics as a means of reviving the Irish language (a subject on which Griffith’s views were quite moderate).
Reviewer for the Daily Express
Well, I’m ashamed of you, said Miss Ivors frankly. To say you’d write for a rag like that. I didn’t think you were a West Briton.
—JOYCE, ‘THE DEAD’121
It was through the intercession of Lady Gregory that Joyce was commissioned to write reviews for the Daily Express by its editor E. V. Longworth. The paper was described at the time as ‘the organ of the landed gentry, the clergy, the professional and commercial classes’, whose principles were ‘distinctly Protestant and constitutional’.122 Joyce wrote a series of reviews for the paper from December 1902 to November 1903, starting with his incendiary review of William Rooney’s poems. Two more of his reviews stand out as politically significant: those of Stephen Gwynn’s Today and Tomorrow in Ireland: Essays on Irish Subjects and of Augusta Gregory’s Poets and Dreamers: Studies and Translations from the Irish.123
Joyce wrote his review of Gwynn’s Today and Tomorrow in Ireland shortly after he returned to Paris in January 1903, and it was published in the Daily Express of 29 January 1903. Stephen Gwynn (1864–1950) had been a writer and journalist in London from 1896. He was to return to Ireland in 1904, and in 1906 was elected as a nationalist for Galway City, which he represented until 1918. Unusually for a member of the Irish Party, he had a close association with the Literary Revival.124 In the preface to his book, he identified his political position: ‘I call myself a nationalist. But my nationalism has nothing irreconcilable about it. If Ireland had the status of Canada, I should be as good an Imperialist as Sir Wilfrid Laurier.’125 This enabled Joyce to situate Gwynn politically as ‘a convert to the prevailing national movement’ and to observe that he ‘professes himself a Nationalist, though his nationalism, as he says, has nothing irreconcilable about it. Give Ireland the status of Canada, and he becomes an Imperialist at once. It is hard to say into what political party Mr Gwynn should go, for he is too consistently Gaelic for the Parliamentarians, and too mild for the true patriots, who are beginning to speak a little vaguely about their friends the French. Mr. Gwynn, however, is at least a member of that party which seeks to establish an Irish literature and Irish industries.’126
The reference to ‘that party’ which favoured a revivalism that did not encompass the revival of the Irish language was deliberate and quietly startling. There was no such party in the conventional political sense of that term that answered to the definition. Writing for a Unionist paper, Joyce was refusing to submit to the choice between the post-Parnell Irish Party and the ‘patriots’. In deploying the term ‘party’ in its non-institutional sense, he was disarranging the rigid party allegiances of Irish politics.
Joyce was highly unusual as a nationalist commentator who was unsparing and sardonically minute in identifying the contradictions and divergencies within nationalism; it was an exercise that Unionist commentators largely disdained to undertake. The readiness to engage in a dispassionate critique of schools of nationalist thought marked out Joyce’s review of Gwynn, as previously of Rooney’s poems.
Joyce wrote that the essays in literary criticism were the least interesting of Gwynn’s essays, and he took the opportunity to draw an unfavourable comparison between the modern Irish writers (Yeats excepted) and Mangan, ‘that creature of lightning’. He praised ‘those essays which are illustrative of the industrial work which has been set in movement at different points of Ireland. His account of the establishing of the fishing industry in the West of Ireland is extremely interesting, and so are his accounts of dairies, old-fashioned and new-fashioned, and of carpet making’. The work was ‘full of anecdotes’: ‘Mr Gwynn has evidently a sense of the humorous, and it is pleasing to find this in a revivalist.’ He ended the review by rendering one of those anecdotes, less satisfactorily than had Gwynn.127 Joyce had skilfully dissembled a degree of impatient boredom on reading Gwynn’s book. Writing to Stanislaus, he referred to ‘my review of Everyman’s book (damn Everyman anyhow!)’.128 The studied poise of the review was disturbed by the intervention of the editor in inserting, to Joyce’s intense irritation, a ponderous sentence to end the review on a more positive note: ‘The volume, admirably bound and printed, is a credit to the Dublin firm to whose enterprise its publication is due.’129
