James joyce, p.55
James Joyce, page 55
Stanislaus Joyce wrote much later of the review that ‘some phrases in it are interesting because they reflect my brother’s almost neutral attitude to Irish politics.’ He wrote that Joyce’s own political thought ‘ran more or less in the same direction as Gwynn’s’ and that his ‘political attitude was equally indefinable’. Conceding in a striking understatement that ‘my brother was not favourable to an English government in Ireland’, he asserted that Joyce ‘could not imagine any form of Irish government that would not be still more uncongenial to him than anything to be found in England or abroad. He did not try to solve the problem of nationality. He flouted it to save his soul.’130 This commentary reflected Stanislaus’s unmovable inability, captured in the almost tragic impercipience of the phrase ‘my brother’s almost neutral attitude to Irish politics’, to comprehend his brother’s Irish nationalism.
While Joyce was beginning to refine his indiscriminate suspicion of the ‘patriots’, he had not relinquished the position he had taken as a student. He was also in a characteristic way at once taking advantage of and satirising the role of a reviewer writing for a Unionist newspaper. The game was conducted at two levels. The first was to write a superbly poised review that read superficially as if its author shared the politics of the paper, but on a closer reading probably did not. The second was to challenge those who realised its unidentified author was probably of nationalist convictions by its sceptical dispassion. As in the Rooney review, it was the consummate familiarity with nationalist politics that rendered it improbable that the writer was a Unionist. Joyce had feared that his reference to the ‘true patriots who are beginning to speak a little vaguely about their friends the French’ might have been suppressed, writing from Paris to Stanislaus to enquire, ‘Was that in it?’131
When Longworth sent Augusta Gregory’s Poets and Dreamers: Studies and Translations from the Irish to Joyce in Paris in March 1903, he anticipated that, however temperamental Joyce was as a reviewer, ordinary gratitude would ensure that he treated at least politely a work by the woman who had recommended him to the Daily Express. He could not have been more wrong. Joyce’s review, published in the Daily Express of 26 March 1903, was of unsparing ferocity. It was a critique of the Celtic Twilight in which, Joyce argued, the vigour—the primaeval youth—of Irish myth had been lost in Lady Gregory’s reverence for aged living renderers of Irish folklore: ‘Perhaps, in the future little boys with long beards will stand aside and applaud, while old men in short trousers play handball against the side of a house. This may even happen in Ireland, if Lady Gregory has truly set forth the old age of her country. In her new book she has left legends and heroic youth far behind, and has explored in a land almost fabulous in its sorrow and senility.’132
On this occasion, Joyce’s habitual exemption of Yeats from his strictures on contemporary Irish writers seems to have been intended to drive a wedge into the Twilight: ‘In fine, her book, wherever it treats of the “folk”, sets forth in the fullness of its senility a class of mind which Mr Yeats has set forth with such delicate scepticism in his happiest book, The Celtic Twilight.’ Gregory’s book improved with the poet Raftery (Antoine Ó Raiftearí), who, ‘though he be the last of the great bardic procession, has much of the bardic tradition about him’, an observation of some significance in suggesting Joyce’s knowledge, if rudimentary, of where Raftery stood. He characterised the four one-act plays by Douglas Hyde, translations of which were included in the book, as belonging to the genre of the ‘dwarf-drama’.133 In his final paragraph Joyce asserted, in the interplay between ‘memories of beliefs’ and ‘the central belief of Ireland’, the linkage of political enfeeblement and cultural atrophy:
This book, like so many other books of our time, is in part picturesque and in part an indirect or direct utterance of the central belief of Ireland. Out of the material and spiritual battle which has gone so hardly with her Ireland has emerged with many memories of beliefs, and with one belief—a belief in the incurable ignobility of the forces that have overcome her—and Lady Gregory, whose old men and women seem to be almost their own judges when they tell their wandering stories, might add to the passage from Whitman which forms her dedication, Whitman’s ambiguous word for the vanquished—‘Battles are lost in the spirit in which they are won.’134
The line—like the rather anodyne verse that Lady Gregory had chosen as an epigraph, ‘Will you seek afar off’ (from ‘A Song for Occupations’)—came from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, from ‘Song of Myself’:
With music strong I came, with my cornets and my drums,
I play not marches for accepted victors only, I play marches for
conquer’d and slain persons.
Have you heard that it was good to gain the day?
I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit in
which they are won.
I beat and pound for the dead,
I blow through my embouchures my loudest and gayest for them,
Vivas for those who have fail’d.135
This is significant as the first recorded expression—by citation—of the idea that became increasingly important for Joyce of the ‘ousted possibilities’ of history, of the retroactive blindsiding that attended positivistic accounts of history’s victors and of movements or forces that prevailed or are deemed to have done so. Here it is an ambitious turn in his argument that could not be fully developed within the confines of the review; Joyce was decrying Gregory’s treatment of Irish myths and emphasis on the contemporary folkloric, which he saw as an editing of the Irish past that was collusive with teleological narratives of Irish nationalism. It is an assertion of the ungovernability of the Irish past, of the impossibility of assimilating Irish history and culture to retrospective socio-political ordering. It is a viscerally instinctual response. So far as is known, there is nothing to suggest that Joyce as of the spring of 1903 had much knowledge of old Irish literature; it was as if he was throwing down a challenge to the Celtic Twilight, as he conceived it, that he would have to make good.
Joyce’s argument was that revivalism, which professed to be a corrective redressing of imperialist narratives of Irish history and culture, displaced one ideological order with another. The Irish response to ‘the material and spiritual battle which had gone so hardly with [Ireland]’ was to don a defensive carapace. Irish nationalism and the Twilight imposed a categorisation of the victorious and the vanquished of their own that was as much a distortion as were Unionist accounts of Irish history. The rehearsing of that intimation in the review of Gregory’s book makes plain that Joyce’s concept of ‘ousted possibilities’ derived from his contemplation of Irish history and politics, which had as its point of departure his unsparing assessment of the Parnell Split.
The ferocity of the review overshadowed the incisiveness of his challenge to the premises of the Celtic Twilight which would inform the intricate allusiveness to Irish myth in his own work. Joyce wrote to his mother from Paris, ‘I sent in my review of Lady Gregory’s book a week ago. I do not know if Longworth put it in as I sent it: the review was very severe.’ He added, in deference to May Joyce’s anxious counsels of prudence, ‘I shall write to Lady Gregory one of these days.’136 The editor of the Daily Express, with evident hesitation, published the review as written, but over the initials ‘J.J.’ to disavow personal responsibility for a review by the writer whom Augusta Gregory had commended to him.137 The episode was to inspire Buck Mulligan’s baiting remonstrance to Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses: ‘Longworth is awfully sick, he said, after what you wrote about that old hake Lady Gregory. O you inquisitional drunken jewjesuit! She gets you a job on the paper and then you go and slate her drivel to Jaysus. Couldn’t you do the Yeats touch?’138
Stanislaus Joyce concluded that the fact that Joyce continued to be sent books for review signified that Longworth bore him no ill will.139 It is clear, however, that the Gregory review brought about a change in the relationship of editor to reviewer. There was a hiatus of almost six months before Joyce was asked to write another review. The books were sent for review with diminished frequency and were such as to deny Joyce the opportunity to display his gift for controversy. There were signs of open revolt in Joyce’s review in October 1903 of three popular novels by Alfred Edward Woodley Mason which ended with the sentence, ‘Isn’t Miranda of the Balcony a pretty name?’140 Joyce was perhaps in some degree placated with the next commission, reviewing J. Lewis McIntyre’s biography of the sixteenth-century Italian heretic Giordano Bruno, which he did with some flair.141
Joyce’s valedictory flourish to the Daily Express came in the ending to his review, published on 19 November 1903, of T. Baron Russell’s novel Borlase and Son. Derisively echoing Longworth’s insertion to his review of Stephen Gwynn’s book, Joyce wrote, ‘For the rest, the binding of the book is as ugly as one could reasonably expect.’142
Joyce’s Daily Express reviews were written with consummate poise. Curran later wrote, ‘They have complete assurance with due sense of responsibility, occasionally harsh but more usually written with courtesy or a politeness touched with irony.’143 They were certainly not ‘dully expressed’, Joyce’s play on the name of the paper in Finnegans Wake.144 In one aspect they afford a glimpse of the Joyce who was not to be: a Dublin- or London-based writer who got by on literary journalism, though the unbiddable ‘enigma of a manner’ of Joyce’s persona as a reviewer seems intended to convey that this was a career prospect he had ruled out.
The incisive prose style of the reviews had nothing in common with the sentimental style of Gabriel Conroy in ‘The Dead’, as exemplified in the speech he makes. Miss Ivors’s attack on Conroy was wide of the mark in relation to Joyce: while the paper was Unionist, Joyce’s reviews scarcely conformed to either the paper’s politics or its house style. In a double move of the type he was to make his own in addressing the political, he declined to mitigate his criticisms of the inferior literature or propaganda of the cultural revival, defying what might have been expected of him as a Catholic and putatively nationalist contributor, while subtly challenging the politics of the paper, and more overtly the authority of its editor.
In ‘The Dead’, in considering his response to Miss Ivors’s attack on his writing for the Daily Express, Gabriel Conroy ‘wanted to say that literature was above politics’ but felt it was too abrupt given their past associations and shrewdly guessed that ‘he could not risk a grandiose phrase with her’. Instead he ‘murmured lamely that he saw nothing political in writing reviews of books.’145 It is doubtful that Joyce subscribed to the first proposition in that facile formulation; his reviews disproved the second.
The Politics of Dana
References to the journal Dana: An Irish Magazine of Independent Thought in biographical and critical writing on Joyce feature chiefly as an early episode in the chronicle of the thwarted publication of his works in Ireland. The editors’ rejection in early 1904 of his ‘A Portrait of the Artist’ essay is of significance in itself, but it is Joyce’s inability to subscribe to the editorial politics of Dana that is critically important to an understanding of his political solitariness in the Ireland that he was to leave later that year.
The first issue of Dana, started and edited by William Kirkpatrick Magee and Frederick Ryan, and supported by George Moore, appeared in May 1904. In the first issue, its editors wrote that ‘the elemental freedom of the human mind’ had been absent from the Irish literary movement, and Ryan wrote, ‘We need in Ireland a spirit of intellectual freedom, and a recognition of the supremacy of humanity.… Intellectual freedom and political freedom are not opposites. Rightly understood, intellectual freedom and political freedom are one.’146 Moore wrote to his friend Edouard Dujardin, referring to Magee, ‘One of my friends has started a tiny review in Dublin, somewhat on lines of the Revue des Idées, that is it has an anticlerical bias.’147 As Magee recalled, ‘Yeats held aloof, talking cuttingly of “Fleet Street atheism”.’148
The significance of the intellectual relationship of Joyce and Magee has not been recognised. They were complementary opposites. Born on either side of the Irish sectarian divide—Magee was the son of a Presbyterian minister and superintendent of the Dublin city mission—each was uncompromisingly independent. Joyce was of nationalist conviction, while Magee declined to embrace or enter into a compact of subservience with Irish nationalism (though ‘Yeats, A. E. and Arthur Griffith got hold of me and tried to turn me into a nationalist’).149 Joyce was modernistic; Magee’s literary values were more classical. Their relations were informed by a strained reciprocal sense, never fully articulated, of their mirroring each other, that shifted across time.
Yeats characterised Magee as ‘our one philosophical critic’.150 While Magee was personally close to the literary figures of the Revival, his refusal of political compromise set him apart. Reviewing Magee’s Pebbles from a Brook for the United Irishman in 1901, Yeats criticised his aloofness from the political: ‘I believe him right in thinking that the great movement of our time is a movement to destroy modern civilization, but I cannot but believe him wrong in thinking that it will be ended by “liberated individuals” who separate themselves from the great passions, from the great popular interests, from religion, from humanitarianism.’151
Joyce’s relationship with Magee was in its way the most intellectually haunting of his Dublin relations, belying the frequent cruelty of Joyce’s comments. Joyce and Gogarty traded jokes and limericks on the subject of Magee’s Presbyterian rectitude, and of the virginity which he had inadvisedly confessed to Gogarty.152 The lines on Magee in ‘The Holy Office’, which Joyce wrote before he left Dublin in October 1904, were comparatively measured:
Or him who will not his hat unfix
Neither to malt nor crucifix
But show to all that poor-dressed be
His high Castilian courtesy.153
In 1907 Stanislaus evidently relayed to Joyce a joke about Magee having his cake and not eating it. In dire financial straits in Rome, Joyce responded, ‘I laughed at Eglinton and his cake but I fear I have eaten nearly all mine; still his must be a trifle stale by this.’154 Nevertheless, in the literary colloque in the National Library in the ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ episode of Ulysses, it is to John Eglinton (Magee’s nom de plume) that Stephen directs his argument on Shakespeare. Magee makes a later fleeting appearance ‘with carping accent’ in ‘Circe’.155
Their ideas touched closely from opposite directions. In controversy with Yeats on the idea of a national literature in 1899, Magee objected, ‘In all ages poets and thinkers have owed far less to their countries than their countries have owed to them.’156 He returned to the idea four years later, writing in the United Irishman, ‘It is meaningless to say that national literature is the conscious and deliberate expression of what are called “national ideas”. The ideas of a nation are those it receives from its poets and thinkers. The nationality of a literature represents the homage of a nation to her poets far more than the loyalty of poets to the nation.’157
Magee’s thesis is congruent with, if not a distant point of departure for, Joyce’s more egotistical formulations of the comparative importance of Stephen Dedalus and his country.158 Likewise there was much with which Joyce agreed in Magee’s essay ‘The De-Davization of Irish Literature’ in his Bards and Saints, which Joyce had in his library in Trieste. Magee had written, ‘Since Davis the true religion of the Irish Nationalist has been patriotism’.159
Magee found the pre-exilic Joyce acutely bewildering and later confessed with austere candour that he had regarded him ‘with a certain amount of condescension’.160 It was only in retrospect, in an essay published in 1935, that he wrote of the figure he had known: ‘Religion had been with him a profound adolescent experience, torturing the sensitiveness which it awakened; all its floods had gone over him. He had now recovered, and had no objection to “Fleet Street atheism”, but “independent thought” appeared to him an amusing disguise of the proselytising spirit, and one night as we walked across town he endeavoured, with a certain earnestness, to bring home to me the extreme futility of the ideals represented in Dana, by describing to me the solemn ceremonial of High Mass.’161
Both Joyce and Magee were alive to the salience of confessional background and frank in their treatment of it. When Joyce appeared in the National Library in the course of one of his last visits to Ireland, ‘marvellously smartened up and with a short trim beard’, Magee discerned the early stages of a transformation: ‘Certain it is that when he decided to scrap the scholastic habiliments of his mind, the poor disguise of a seedy snobbishness, and in lieu thereof endued himself with the elemental diabolism of Ulysses, he was transfigured.’162 Many years later, Magee, by then living in England, called on Joyce at the Paris hotel where Joyce was staying at the time.163
The reasons for which Joyce declined to identify himself with Dana, the most ambitious and sophisticated journal of liberal intellectuality to appear in his time in Dublin, bear scrutiny. They lie in his Parnellite nationalism. In the absence of an alignment with nationalism, or at the very least a clear political direction in relation to nationalism, Dana had no prospect of mounting a challenge to the politico-cultural hegemony of the Catholic Church, or of winning over even an exiguous body of nationalist opinion. Moreover, as Magee had shrewdly discerned, Joyce disliked the didacticism of Dana. Even though the ethos of the journal was essentially free-thinking, it carried for Joyce a whiff of the ‘nonconformist conscience’, his loathing of which derived from the Split.
