James joyce, p.64
James Joyce, page 64
44. Mamigonian and Turner, ‘Annotations for Stephen Hero’, 487. It is published after the principal text in the Spencer edition of the novel.
45. SH 247.
46. SH 241.
47. Leo Daly has pointed to the fact that Patrick Fulham had been elected for Meath South, which adjoined Westmeath, at the general election of 1892. The anti-Parnellites had won both Meath constituencies—Michael Davitt was the victor in North Meath—by fairly close margins. Following a bitterly contested and controversial election petition, both were unseated on grounds of clerical influence. The ensuing politico-legal controversy attracted considerable attention in Ireland and Britain and lingered into February 1893, when different anti-Parnellite candidates won both seats by similar margins, and beyond. It is perfectly possible that Joyce appropriated the surname of Patrick Fulham for the Mr Fulham of Stephen Hero; see Leo Daly, James Joyce and the Mullingar Connection (Dublin: Dolmen, 1975), 25; Mamigonian and Turner, ‘Annotations for Stephen Hero’, 489–90. Joyce’s own godfather, Philip McCann, was a ship chandler who died on 12 January 1898; Ellmann, James Joyce, 748.
48. SH 246–47.
49. SH 247–48.
50. SH 249.
51. SH 250.
52. SH 249–50.
53. SH 244.
54. SH 146.
55. SH 56, 204.
56. SH 146–47.
57. This has a correlative in Wilde’s idea of the burden of altruism in The Soul of Man under Socialism, which had a considerable influence on Joyce’s thinking on socialism and the state, though it was never cited by Joyce and therefore is not readily identifiable with certainty in his writing.
58. An unexpectedly strong connection between his complex theory of art and contemporary Irish politics is disclosed at the start of chapter 19 of the novel. Stephen is working on the paper he is to give on ‘art and life’. The paper was ‘very consciously intended to define his own position for himself’. He was also ‘persuaded that no-one served the generation into which he had been born so well as he who offered it, whether in his art or in his life, the gift of certitude’. Stephen dismisses the dogmas of the patriots. ‘He refused therefore to set out for any task if he had first to prejudice his success by oaths to his patria, and this refusal resulted in a theory of art which was at once severe and liberal’ (SH 76–78, my italics), which is then outlined.
59. SH 80.
60. SH 159.
61. SH 204.
62. SH 56.
63. SH 76.
64. SH 216. These sentiments are repeated at SH 231. In the ‘Trieste Notebook’, Joyce writes of his father, ‘He quarrelled with my friends’ (in Scholes and Kain, Workshop of Daedalus, 104).
65. Joyce to Grant Richards, 13 March 1906, Letters II 131–32.
66. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 10 January 1907, Letters II 206.
67. Margot Norris advances an ingenious argument to challenge the conventional conception of the relationship between Stephen Hero and A Portrait. She challenges the idea that the theoretical shift from the first to the second is ‘a retrogressive manoeuvre on Joyce’s part: a shift of attention away from art’s social function to the self-display of individual genius’ and asserts that ‘Joyce had, I believe, a subtler and more critical end in view. By foregrounding theory itself in Portrait, Joyce has his text make a deliberate gesture of self-enclosure’ (Joyce’s Web, 57). One of the problems with this is the more refined treatment of political nationalism in A Portrait.
68. SH 8.
69. Stephen tells Cranly, ‘I believe this will be an important season for me. I intend to come to some decision as to my course of action’ (SH 219).
70. Joyce to Grant Richards, 13 March 1906, Letters II 131–32.
71. SH 64–65. It is an imbalance in the novel that Stephen’s utterances are consistently milder than the thoughts that are imputed to him. Stephen is not without a sense of the politic. This gives rise to an intermittently distracting sense that the author is more strident than his creation. It is a dissonance that is rectified in A Portrait.
72. See Callanan, ‘Parnellism of James Joyce’; and chapter 12, ‘Writing Dubliners in Exile’.
73. It could be argued with some force that the actual biographical correlative of Stephen’s refusal of assent to nationalism was Joyce’s refusal to align himself with any group or movement in Ireland, before his qualified exilic identification with the early Sinn Féin of Arthur Griffith, which shortly preceded the beginning of his recasting of Stephen Hero as A Portrait.
11
‘Professing to be a Socialist’
The other night, about ten days ago, we went into the wineshop over the way where I told you we dined once.… I was reading the Avanti! and between whiles casting about for a remark to make. Pace (the propr.) and his two nephews one of whom is a complete bowsy, a Roman Lenehan, were eating at a table hard by.… Finally, I said something about the congress. Pace nodded his head (his mouth being full). The bowsy watched me until he saw my head bend again on the paper: then he leaned over his plate and asked huskily ‘Zio, è socialista il Signor Giacomo?’ Pace, having eaten what was in his mouth, glanced at me and uncurled his lower lip and answered ‘È un po’ di tutto’.
—JOYCE TO STANISLAUS JOYCE FROM ROME, OCTOBER 19061
AT SOME POINT AFTER he graduated from University College, Joyce came to identify himself as a socialist. In a note to the first entry in his ‘Dublin Diary’ in late 1903, Stanislaus wrote, ‘He is not an artist he says. He is interesting himself in politics—in which he says [he has] original ideas’:2 ‘politics’ pertains to socialism.
In August 1904, Stanislaus logged in the diaries Joyce’s first description of himself as a socialist, linked to Joyce’s conception of the modern, but coexistent with a Nietzschean nihilism. Having noted that ‘it will be obvious that whatever method there is in Jim’s life is highly unscientific, yet in theory he approves only of the scientific method’, he observed with a sigh, ‘Jim boasts—for he often boasts now—of being modern. He calls himself a socialist but attaches himself to no school of socialism. He marks the uprooting of feudal principles. Besides this, and that subtle egotism which he calls the modern mind, he proclaims all kinds of anti-Christian ideals—selfishness, licentiousness, pitilessness.’3
That sigh ‘for he often boasts now’ is to do with Joyce’s drinking, a subject of contemporary reproach by Stanislaus. In a gloss on this in his Recollections (1941), Stanislaus makes the improbable assertion that in Joyce’s relations with the other writers of the Celtic Twilight, ‘there arose a latent hostility toward him’, at first because ‘he separated himself from any purely national movement, calling himself a “socialist”’.4 This admittedly much later recollection remains of some significance in that it suggests Joyce’s avowals of socialism were not limited to Stanislaus, even if no one else paid much attention to them. Perhaps they were deemed an incident of his bohemianism.
Herbert Gorman’s treatment in his 1939 biography of Joyce’s early left-wing political reading reflects a combination of what he had read of Joyce’s correspondence, what Joyce had told him, and his own opinions. Gorman downplays Joyce’s Italian socialism, suggesting that the disputes at the congress of the Italian Socialist Party in Rome in October 1906 (whose proceedings Joyce followed in Avanti!) had ‘caused to flicker up anew, but fitfully, that speculative curiosity that had moved him since the days he had first read the anarchist and socialist writers’, on whom the accent is thus thrown. That statement is accompanied by a footnote: ‘Among the many whose works he had read may be mentioned Most, Malatesta, Stirner, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Élisée Reclus, Spencer and Benjamin Tucker, whose Instead of a Book proclaimed the liberty of the non-invasive individual. He never read anything by Karl Marx except the first sentence of Das Kapital and he found it so absurd that he immediately returned the book to the lender.’5 What is striking about this inventory is that all the authors were anarchists, with the exception of Herbert Spencer, whose philosophy was individualist. The heavy tilt towards anarchism was accentuated by the comment about Das Kapital which Joyce had strategically directed at his biographer. It is clear that Joyce did read widely among the leading anarchist authors of his day, and that this reading significantly informed the libertarian component of his thought, in particular his mistrust of public intervention in the sphere of sexual morality, and his perennially hostile attitude to officialdom and a certain residual resistance to the presumptions of statal authority. While his anarchist reading appreciably coloured Joyce’s thinking, the fact that it is difficult to identify specific instances of indebtedness to anarchism and anarchist writers in his work ensured it has attracted less consideration than his engagement with socialism.
Joyce’s socialism had first found written expression in his ‘Portrait of the Artist’ essay written in January 1904, in which he referred to socialism, without naming it, as ‘the generous idea’. Stephen Hero shows the influence of his reading in socialism and anarchism, especially the American, Benjamin Tucker, and the German, Max Stirner.6 Tucker was an adept and lucid popular exponent of pacific anarchist principles:
Aggression is simply another name for government. Aggression, invasion, government are interconvertible terms.… He who attempts to control another is a governor, an aggressor, an invader; and the nature of such invasion is not changed, whether it is made by one man upon another man, after the manner of the ordinary criminal, or by one man upon all other men, after the manner of an absolute monarch, or by all other men upon one man, after the manner of a modern democracy.… This then is the Anarchistic definition of government: the subjection of the non-invasive individual to an external will.7
The once neglected but now resurgent Élisée Reclus (1830–1905), a geographer of French Protestant provenance, was perhaps the most persuasive advocate of anarchism.
In Stephen Hero, Stephen Daedalus struggles to find an idiom: ‘Though a taste for elegance and detail unfitted him for the part of demagogue, he might have been supposed not unjustly an ally of the collectivist politicians.’8 Suggestions of socialist sympathy in Stephen Hero are intertwined with an insistence on the necessary egotism of the artist: Joyce was certainly not proposing to renounce ‘that ineradicable egotism which he was afterwards to call redeemer’.9
In the interplay of the public and the private, Joyce remained determinedly heterodox. Stanislaus noted in his diary in April 1904 in the context of his brother’s borrowings, ‘Jim says he should be supported at the expense of the State because he is capable of enjoying life.’10
Joyce’s first extant written self-characterisation as a socialist occurs in October 1904, shortly after his arrival in Trieste. After finding that there was no job for him, Joyce met Almidano Artifoni, the proprietor of the Berlitz schools in Trieste and Pola, who offered him a post in Pola. Joyce reported to Stanislaus, ‘By good luck he is a socialist like myself’.11 The next month he told Stanislaus he was reading Italian translations of the German socialist Ferdinand Lassalle. He added a perceptive comment that reveals the extent to which he was seeking to master an intellectual understanding of modern politics as much as to subscribe to the principles of socialism: ‘It is difficult to get to the bottom of a science like political science through pamphlets of too vivid actuality’.12 In March 1905 he complained of reading two books of Anatole France, ‘perhaps his worst’, and added sarcastically, ‘He is an intellectual socialist, I understand.’ At the same time, he was striving to reconcile his conception of art and politics, declaring at the end of the letter, ‘I believe that [Henrik] Ibsen and [Gerhart] Hauptmann separate from the herd of writers because of their political aptitude—eh?’13 Joyce’s admiration for Ibsen had always had a significant political element, but in University College it had seemed cloaked in a theory of artistic transcendence. What was new was his readiness to characterise the affinity with Ibsen in expressly political terms.
Stanislaus remained highly sceptical of his brother’s professed socialism. Joyce wrote in response to his criticisms in May 1905, ‘It is a mistake for you to imagine that my political opinions are those of a universal lover: but they are those of a socialistic artist.’14 The fact that Joyce goes on to discuss the attitude of others to his ‘professing to be a socialist’ serves to underscore the significance of the addition of the -ic in his self-description. Even in his private correspondence his self-characterisation as a socialist remained tentative. A tension between the terms ‘socialist’ and ‘artist’ was observed. He declined to embrace the identity of a ‘socialist artist’ tout court. For Joyce it was possible to be a socialist and an artist. Precisely because the categories belonged to different spheres, that did not render him syllogistically a socialist artist.
In the same letter, Joyce referred to his own financial circumstances and appeared to reiterate at least obliquely one of the more urgent precepts of his complex of socialist beliefs, that the artist should be subvented by the state: ‘Some people would answer that while professing to be a socialist I am trying to make money: but this is not quite true at least as they mean it. If I made a fortune it is by no means certain that I would keep it. What I wish to do is to secure a competence on which I can rely, and why I expect to have this is because I cannot believe that any State requires my energy for the work I am at present engaged in.’15 Given Joyce’s extreme guardedness in political self-categorisation, his identification as a ‘socialistic artist’ remains highly significant. It is made on the cusp between the socialism to which he gave expression in the ‘Portrait’ essay and in Stephen Hero, and his plunge into the theory of Italian revolutionary syndicalism. Because of the ostensible dogmatic ardour of Joyce’s embrace of the tenets of Italian syndicalism, there has been a tendency on the left to privilege his fleeting espousal of the principles of revolutionary syndicalism over other strains of socialist sympathy, and to treat Joyce’s socialism and his adherence to syndicalism as synonymous. The equation is fallacious. His political identification as a socialist which was expressed in terms of sympathy with continental social democracy—and owed more to Oscar Wilde than he was ever prepared to concede—preceded the phase of his subscription to the principles of Italian syndicalism. It likewise had the potential to endure beyond the abrupt abandonment of his autodidactic tutorial in Italian syndicalist socialism. Joyce’s socialism is not reducible to his sympathy with syndicalist left-wing socialism in his early Triestine and Roman exile.
Joyce’s sympathetic interest in anarchism ran in parallel to that in revolutionary syndicalism, though the rigour with which he tried to express the principles of revolutionary syndicalism suggests that it was unrelated to his anarchism. Thus, he was delighted to learn of Leo Tolstoy’s extended letter to The Times on 29 August 1905 denouncing the tsar and all governments, and was contemptuous of the pusillanimous response of the English press: ‘The English liberals are shocked: they would call him vulgar but that they know he is a prince.’16
Stanislaus’s scepticism endured. In the Recollections of James Joyce, written just after his brother’s death, he situated Joyce’s socialism in the life his brother was leading when Stanislaus arrived in Trieste in late October 1905: ‘Often I had to seek him out in the bars around the dock area, where I would find him arguing socialism with the dock hands for whom he was buying drinks. They addressed him as “Sir”, and he called them “Sir” in turn. This was evidently a socialism of polite rather than familiar terms. I would sit at the table with them, and after a little while, with one excuse or another, I would get him to leave the bar. Then I would drag him home with as much force as was necessary.’17
Italian Revolutionary Syndicalism
The course of pre–First World War socialism in Italy was inflected by the ascendancy of the Piedmontese Giovanni Giolitti, five times prime minister. Giolitti was an enlightened liberal of high adroitness who was particularly expert in the tactical accommodation of socialism.
In the era of Giolitti’s dominance, a more pragmatic school of socialism emerged, reflected in the editorial direction of the party paper Avanti!, of which the moderate Leonida Bissolati was editor from 1896. At the Rome party congress in 1900, Filippo Turati—whose reformism was influenced by the revisionism of the German social democrat Edouard Bernstein—procured the adoption of a minimum and maximum programme to avoid a split, with the minimum as the precursor of the maximum. The central figure in the resistance of the syndicalist ultras at the Rome congress was the Neapolitan professor Arturo Labriola, to whose views Joyce was drawn. Labriola was then in alliance with Enrico Ferri, professor of penal law at Rome and a distinguished disciple of Cesare Lombroso. Labriola made up for the lateness of his embrace of socialism by the extremism of the sentiments he was prepared to avow. The revolutionary syndicalists aspired to win control of the party but ultimately failed and seceded in 1908.18
Joyce’s earnest self-education in and sympathy with the tenets of revolutionary syndicalism coincided with the zenith of its political influence. The reformists again prevailed at the 1902 congress at Imola, but their control of the party was slipping. In 1903 Ferri displaced Bissolati from the editorship of Avanti! and held the position till 1908. At the 1904 Bologna congress, Ferri became in effect the leader of the party. Joyce wanted to attain an immersive understanding of Italian socialism; there is nothing to suggest that he specifically chose revolutionary syndicalism, which he came to through his reading of Avanti!, from a considered understanding of the variant strands of Italian socialism. He was touched by its intellectual excitement, without being in a position fully to appreciate what made it distinctive in the history of the Italian left. Norberto Bobbio wrote of the fleeting ascendancy of revolutionary syndicalism,
