James joyce, p.57
James Joyce, page 57
In My Brother’s Keeper, Stanislaus wrote that while Joyce in Dublin favoured the embryonic Sinn Féin over the Irish Parliamentary Party (which Stanislaus supported), ‘his political leanings were towards socialism, and he had frequented meetings of socialist groups in back rooms in the manner ascribed to Mr Duffy in “A Painful Case”, one of the stories in Dubliners’. Stanislaus had accompanied him to ‘these dimly illuminated melancholy haunts’. In ‘A Painful Case’, the deeply alienated Mr Duffy is pressed by Mrs Sinico to reveal events in his life rather than theories:
He told her that for some time he had assisted at the meetings of an Irish Socialist Party where he had felt himself a unique figure amid a score of sober workmen in a garret lit by an inefficient oillamp. When the party had divided into three sections, each under its own leader and in its own garret, he had discontinued his attendances. The workmen’s discussions, he said, were too timorous; the interest they took in the question of wages was inordinate. He felt that they were hardfeatured realists and that they resented an exactitude which was the product of a leisure which was not within their reach. No social revolution, he told her, would be likely to strike Dublin for some centuries.192
Stanislaus does not date the period in which his brother attended socialist meetings in Dublin. From the broad chronological parameters of My Brother’s Keeper, and the fact that they are not referred to (curiously, not even retrospectively in the references to his brother’s socialism), the best guess is that his attendance was in the year that followed Joyce’s graduation in October 1902, which is also consistent with the turn towards European socialism in the close of the ‘Portrait’ essay. The dating has a bearing on the meetings he attended.193 Stanislaus’s account refers to a plurality of ‘groups’. The capitalised reference to ‘an Irish Socialist Party’, as well as the relative prominence of James Connolly’s party in the minuscule universe of Irish socialism, suggests that these included the Irish Socialist Republican Party (the joke in Dublin ran that it had more initials than members). Connolly played a leading role in the establishment of the party in 1896, but the party collapsed in a dispute over funds after Connolly came back from the United States in January 1903. Connolly returned to the United States in September 1903, where he remained for seven years.194
Stanislaus wrote that Mr Duffy, as well as the type of the male celibate, was ‘also intended to be a portrait of what my brother imagined I should become in middle age’.195 Stanislaus was hostile to socialism, as he was to what became Sinn Féin, and Mr Duffy’s disillusionment reflected Stanislaus’s own rather than this brother’s ideas: ‘At Trieste he still called himself a socialist.’196 Mr Duffy’s observation that no social revolution was likely to strike Dublin for some centuries was unmistakeably Joyce’s.
Joyce’s socialist sympathies were European rather than Irish. As part of the exercise on which he embarked after University College of experiencing as much of Dublin life as he could, he acquainted himself with the radical fringe, nationalist and socialist, of Dublin politics. He already knew the Fenian or Fenianesque members of his father’s circle who had some involvement in municipal politics or officialdom. Joyce was not admiring of most of his father’s friends, but it is salient that Joyce’s family background gave him an angle of approach to Dublin municipal life that was more Fenian and more lower-middle class than that of his most prominent Home Rule–supporting peers in University College.
Joyce’s alienation from the Catholic nationalist middle class and from the personae of the Celtic Twilight had a symmetry, and it was natural that he should have explored the milieu of nascent radical nationalism and socialism in Dublin. This quest was also aligned with Parnellism. Dublin was the political centre to which post-Split Parnellism was largely reduced. Nationalist Dublin remained Parnellite but with a sharp diminution in the vibrant excitement present while the leader remained alive. Fenians shifted their support away, and radical nationalists and socialists, though mostly admiring of Parnell, were ideologically hostile to parliamentarism and suspicious even of Redmond’s Parnellite party. The opening up of Dublin politics to radical nationalism and socialism nevertheless owed much more to the Split than partisans of either liked to admit, and residues of the Parnell of the Split endured, which Joyce would crystallise with imaginative brilliance and political intelligence in the fictional persona of Joe Hynes, who recites his poem ‘The Death of Parnell’ in the Dubliners story ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’, written in Trieste in September 1905.
In the years leading up to Joyce’s exile, Dublin saw a confluence of socialism and proto–Sinn Féin radical nationalism that found expression in Griffith’s support of labour municipal candidates including James Connolly, though Griffith was emphatically not a socialist. Attractive as the idea may be of Joyce treading the streets of Dublin as a politically curious flâneur, his reading of Griffith’s United Irishman and of the mainstream press is more important for the development of his thinking than was standing at the back of ‘dimly illuminated’ meetings. Joyce’s investigation of Dublin socialism apprised him of its limitations. He did not adhere to Connolly’s Irish Socialist Republican Party, which was Marxist and separatist. He remained sympathetic to socialism, but his ardent exilic interest in Italian socialism reflected a conscious turning away from Irish socialism towards the continental European left.
There were four groups in Dublin with which Joyce might conceivably have aligned himself in the two years before he left Dublin: There was, first, the faction of his University College contemporaries who supported the Irish Party, with Kettle on the centre-right and Skeffington on the left, who formed themselves into the Young Ireland Branch of the United Irish League the month after Joyce left Dublin. There was, second, the coterie of Griffith and the United Irishman, which had not yet constituted itself as Sinn Féin, and to whose cultural nationalism Joyce remained averse. Third, the Dana alignment of Magee and Ryan, and fourth, the final possibility was proletarian socialism, principally represented by Connolly’s Irish Socialist Republican Party. In the course of what is best seen as an exploratory quest over the two years after he left University College, Joyce came to the realisation he could not subscribe to any of them. The quest does not conform to the stereotype of disdainful artist in the making, determined to express himself with forbidding individuality and to hold himself aloof from assent or alliance. There is a tentativeness to Joyce in these years which is too easily lost sight of—something of it survives in Stephen’s exchange with Madden in Stephen Hero:
—But surely you have some political opinions, man!
—I am going to think them out. I am an artist, don’t you see?197
‘The Centre of Paralysis’
Politically, Joyce had not sought solitude as an end. To this period belongs Joyce’s conception of Irish paralysis, which has been much overdetermined. The close of the ‘Portrait’ essay referred to ‘the general paralysis of an insane society’, which invokes the tertiary stage of syphilis, but does so in a European or universal setting. The history of Joyce’s deployment of the image is important. In July 1904, Joyce’s story ‘The Sisters’, written at the invitation of George Russell, and the first of the stories that would become Dubliners, was accepted by the Irish Homestead. It appeared the following month, the first publication of Joyce’s fiction. He wrote to Constantine Curran, ‘I have written one. I call the series “Dubliners” to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city.’198 In ‘The Sisters’ Father James Flynn has died after his third stroke, his life ‘crossed’ by the episode of a broken chalice: his face is remembered as ‘the heavy grey face of the paralytic’.199 There is also a hint of madness when Father Flynn is found sitting in a confessional in a darkened church ‘laughing—like softly to himself’.200
The following month, Stanislaus noted somewhat sceptically in his diary the drift of his brother’s conversation on the subject of syphilis:
He talks much of the syphilitic contagion in Europe, is at present writing a series of studies in it in Dublin, tracing practically everything to it. The drift of his talk seems to be that the contagion is congenital and incurable and responsible for all manias, and being so, that it is useless to try to avoid it. He even seems to invite you to delight in the manias and to humour each to the top of its bent. In this I do not follow him except to accept his theory of contagion, which he adduces on medical authority. Even this I do slowly for I have the idea that the influence of heredity is somewhat overstated.201
Stanislaus’s reservations were well founded and came to be shared by his brother. Joyce was struggling to connect the idea of social stasis with the psychological pathology of individuals. The principal means of doing this was through a thinly punning invocation of the general paralysis of the insane, the tertiary stage of syphilis, which was rarely apposite. The paralysis-syphilis theme moreover is likely to reflect the influence of Gogarty,202 which Joyce came to repudiate.
In relation to Dubliners, Joyce’s playing with the clinical conception of paralysis was a means of proclaiming his intention to treat Dublin as a laboratory, and the stories as case studies informed by a sense of empirical rigour. It attests to the attraction for Joyce at that time of a quasi-scientific determinism, from which his interest in socialism also in part derives. While writing the stories that would make up Dubliners, Joyce quickly retreated from the idea of a pseudo-clinical diagnosis of paralysis. He instead invested the idea of paralysis with ethical and political connotations. This marked the reinstatement of a concept of political agency, however infirm, that permitted Joyce to reconcile his Parnellism and his art in ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’. The shift is reflected in what he wrote to the publisher Grant Richards some two years later: ‘My intention was to write a chapter in the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis.’203
In Stephen Hero Joyce dropped the pseudo-clinical idea of paralysis and deployed the image of paralysis in relation to the influence of the Catholic Church. Stephen ‘cursed the farce of Irish Catholicism’ whereby the Irish entrust ‘their wills and minds to others that they may ensure for themselves a life of spiritual paralysis.’204 And later, ‘The deadly chill of the atmosphere of the college paralysed Stephen’s heart.’ Stephen accused the Church of inculcating ‘hemiplegia of the will’.205 It was against this that Stephen resolved to rise up, in a passage that resembled the close of the ‘Portrait’ essay: ‘The spectacle of the world in thrall filled him with the fire of courage. He, at least, though living at the farthest remove from the centre of European culture, marooned on an island in the ocean, though inheriting a will broken by doubt and a soul the steadfastness of whose hate became as weak as water in siren arms, would live his own life according to what he recognised as the voice of the new humanity, active, unafraid and unashamed.’206
The idea of Irish stasis—the political immobilism and suspicion of the modern in an island cut off from continental Europe and locked in on itself—remained central to Joyce’s thinking. In the ‘Aeolus’ episode of Ulysses, Myles Crawford, the editor of the Freeman’s Journal, declares, presaging heroic feats of drinking, ‘We’ll paralyse Europe, as Ignatius Gallaher used to say when he was on the shaughraun’.207 If it is an expression of Irish incorrigibility, it is also a wry inversion permitted by Joyce of his and Stephen’s theme of Ireland’s insular paralysis.
‘The Holy Office’
Joyce wrote his satirical broadside ‘The Holy Office’ some two months before he left Dublin. He mischievously offered it, or an early version, to Curran for St Stephen’s.208 Joyce commissioned its printing before he left Dublin but failed to pay the printer. He had it reprinted in Trieste in mid-1905, and had Stanislaus distribute it in Dublin.209 It is a scathing retort in Joyce’s high, biting doggerel to Yeats (its true addressee, spared individual attack) and Russell and their circle. Writing it in adversity, as if repudiating the mode of Wilde’s De Profundis, he does not cry from the depths unto the Lord; on the contrary, he calmly identifies himself with Leviathan, Satan in Isaiah, albeit against Mammon. It draws on his drunken dissolute phase in the wake of the death of his mother, to imply in a defiant retorsion of the negative image that was engendered that it had given them a certain imaginative license, as well as marked out his course as implacably opposed to theirs:
I, who dishevelled ways forsook,
To hold the poet’s grammar-book,
Bringing to tavern and to brothel
The mind of witty Aristotle,
He contrived a defiant retorsion on his critics of their strictures.
But all these men of whom I speak
Make me the sewer of their clique.
That they may dream their dreamy dreams
I carry off their filthy streams210
‘The Holy Office’ was an insouciant raising of the wager on his own future as a writer. Joyce’s local mythos as an author ran ahead of what he had written. He continued to insist that the mask he donned in University College (‘the enigma of a manner’) was defensive. The fact that he was perceived as someone who had avowed an ambition to be a writer before he had written much had objective consequences and corollaries. It introduced the persona, or surrogates for the persona, of the writer and his travails into the work, as a biographical fact before it became a creative stratagem. It also put Joyce under pressures which had the potential to destroy a writer of lesser genius and resolve. Joyce was closely observed, even in early exile. Skeffington recorded in his diary in September 1905, ten months after Joyce had left Dublin, ‘[John Francis] Byrne told me of Joyce’s novel—Chapters up to 25 or 30 have recently been in Dublin with Stan. Curran and [Vincent] Cosgrave saw them. Byrne has appeared in it! Though Joyce always denied having Epiphanized him; [Michael] Lennon also; row with [William] Delany over paper. The child is a boy! Gogarty, says B[yrne], might easily go over to Trieste to horsewhip J. if he attacks G[ogarty]’s mother.’211
This was trivial, even flattering in a certain way, and in some degree intended by Joyce. Of greater concern to Joyce were the writers around Yeats. What ‘The Holy Office’ signified was that whether or not he had set out to create the challenge, he did not propose to resile from it and would make good on the promise of his status as a writer.
It was at this point, under intense pressure that was not only financial but as a writer, that Joyce re-found and brought into his writing, in however ephemeral a form, his identification with Parnell. He invoked the image of the stag at bay which he had already deployed in the ‘Portrait’ essay:
So distantly I turn to view
The shambling of that motley crew,
Those souls that hate the strength that mine has
Steeled in the school of old Aquinas.
Where they have crouched and crawled and prayed
I stand the self-doomed, unafraid,
Unfellowed, friendless and alone,
Indifferent as the herring-bone,
Firm as the mountain-ridges where
I flash my antlers on the air.212
The identification with Parnell is intense and apposite. Parnell was twice derided: at the outset of his career, and in the Split, which Parnell had insisted was a re-beginning. The Parnell of the Split is more salient; Joyce was only starting out but he, like Parnell in 1890–91, was already burdened by the expectations of a myth. Something else is breaking through. There is no record of the broadsheet having reached Yeats.213 If it did, the specific invocation of Parnell was internal to Joyce’s writing and scarcely obvious. But its import was plain. The Catholic idiom of Joyce’s lines is incisively etched. In Joyce’s repudiation of Catholicism, the stereotype of a submissive Irish Catholicism is deliberately reversed. It is the mainly Protestant figures of the Revival who ‘have crouched and crawled and prayed’. Yeats would have to contend with the destabilising intervention of a writer of traditional Catholic nationalist provenance who had repudiated Catholicism. It is an outflanking move of Parnellian audacity that sought to shift the centre of gravity of modern Irish literature. It accounts for why Joyce in Pola should have gone to the bother of having ‘The Holy Office’ reprinted and distributed by Stanislaus in Dublin. Already, Joyce’s relationship to Yeats has begun to be mediated through Parnell; and Joyce’s relationship to Parnell is soldered at a time of personal crisis and creative flux which the writing of Stephen Hero could not register.
Meeting Nora and Leaving Ireland
On 10 June 1904 Joyce accosted a striking, tall, auburn-haired woman on Nassau Street. Nora Barnacle was two years younger than Joyce. She was born on 21 or 22 March 1884 in the maternity ward of the Galway workhouse which served as the hospital of the city of Galway, the second daughter of Thomas Barnacle, a journeyman baker who was illiterate, and his wife, Anne (née Healy). Her mother’s people were hardworking and, as Joyce put it, ‘toney’;214 her uncle Michael Healy, who became H. M. inspector of customs and receiver of wrecks, at Galway and then at Dublin, was to be close to Joyce. Her father, a heavy drinker, drew apart from the family. She grew up with her grandmother in the centre of Galway, attending the Convent of Mercy National School. In 1897, at the age of thirteen, she attained the relatively elevated position of portress of the then-enclosed Convent of the Presentation Order, which she held for the remainder of her time in Galway. She had her first romance with Michael Bodkin, a handsome, dark-haired young man, a clerk with the Gas Company who had enrolled for a time as a student of University College, Galway. Stricken with tuberculosis, he died at the age of twenty on 11 February 1900. He was buried in Rahoon. Distraught, Nora confided in a Galway city curate who tried to take sexual advantage of her. She had a second romance with Will Mulvey, the son of a sergeant in the Royal Irish Constabulary. When her uncle caught her returning from an assignation with the Protestant Mulvey, he beat her. That experience led to her departure for Dublin in early 1904. She obtained employment as a waitress and chambermaid at Finn’s Hotel on Leinster Street, at the end of Nassau Street on the southern perimeter of Trinity College.215 It was close by Finn’s Hotel that she was approached by the figure she recalled many years later: ‘his expression strange and severe, an overcoat that hung down to his feet, shoes down at the heel, a big, white sombrero’.216
