James joyce, p.73
James Joyce, page 73
13. D 116.
14. Frank O’Connor, ‘Work in Progress’, in Twentieth Century Interpretations of Dubliners, ed. Peter K Garrett (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968), 22.
15. D 112.
16. D 112–13.
17. D 113.
18. D 112–13.
19. D 106.
20. S. Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 206.
21. An exchange between Mr O’Connor and Mr Henchy, leading up to Mr Henchy’s description of Fr Keon as ‘travelling on his own account’, makes this clear:
—What is he exactly?
—Ask me an easier one, said Mr Hinchy.
—Fanning and himself seem to me very thick. They’re often in Kavanagh’s together. Is he a priest at all?
—’Mmmyes, I believe so … I think he’s what you call a black sheep. (D 107)
The issue is posed almost by way of a riddle. Fr Keon is defrocked but remains a priest and still uses the title ‘Fr Keon’ on the principle of sacerdos in aeternum. A priest cannot cease to be such.
22. See chapter 5, ‘ “Christ and Caesar”: The Origins of Joyce’s Thesis of the “Two Masters”’.
23. D 114.
24. D 116.
25. D 105.
26. D 106.
27. In relation to the difficulties of the labour or trade union candidates actually elected maintaining a distinctive political identity, see Mary E. Daly, Dublin: The Deposed Capital (Cork: Cork University Press, 1985), 216–18.
28. Manganiello, Joyce’s Politics, 126.
29. D 112.
30. United Irishman, 10 January 1903. James Fairhall uses the congruence between some of the social issues raised by Connolly and those the story touches on to underpin his claim that ‘beyond doubt, Connolly’s solid historical reality underlies the vague, absent figure of the Labour candidate in ‘Ivy Day’. Fairhall, James Joyce and the Question of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 103–4. He does so without reference to the fact that the United Irishman, which Joyce read assiduously, raised most of the same issues. In Joyce’s play with surnames, Colgan and Connolly are temptingly close, but not quite close enough to admit a confident equation.
31. D 115.
32. S. Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 65.
33. D 115.
34. OCPW 196.
35. D 115.
36. Frank O’Connor, The Backward Look (London: Macmillan, 1967), 198.
37. Frank O’Connor, The Lonely Voice (London, Macmillan, 1963), 120. He had made the point about the popping corks earlier, in The Mirror in the Roadway (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1957), 298.
38. F. O’Connor, Lonely Voice, 121.
39. Seamus Deane, ‘Dead Ends: Joyce’s Finest Moments’, in Attridge and Howes, Semicolonial Joyce, 29. Remarkably, these epithets are applied by Deane in castigating Henchy as the story’s ‘most prolific name-caller’.
40. Margot Norris, in her annotation of the story in the Norton critical edition (D 104), loses a little of the force of Henchy’s splenetic characterisation of the operation of ‘the hand-me-down shop’ in Mary’s Lane by Tierney’s father. In the rendering of ‘moya!’ as ‘an Irish expression of ironic sympathy’, Henchy’s ‘moya!’ is surely ‘mar dhea’, a heavily sarcastic Gaelic taunt of phoniness that has endured in Irish conversation in English. It means, in feeble translation, ‘as if’. The import of the passage is that patrons of the shop, on the pretext of seeking to purchase a second-hand garment, could on Sunday mornings obtain drink from the ‘tricky little black bottle’ that ‘Tricky Dicky’s little old father’ kept up in a corner of the shop. Joyce’s enjoyment of the idiom of Mr Henchy prefigures his relishing of the discourse of the Citizen in the ‘Cyclops’ episode of Ulysses, who is at once a more comedic and much darker figure than Mr Henchy, and whose characterisation is divorced from the persona of John Stanislaus Joyce even if a certain commonality of idiom survives.
41. D 105; Margot Norris, Suspicious Readings of Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’ (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 183.
42. D 104.
43. D 107.
44. D 108.
45. D 109.
46. D 149.
47. See chapter 3, ‘Four Friends of the Father’.
48. S. Joyce, entry for 31 August 1904, in Dublin Diary, 78.
49. The municipal franchise in Dublin was limited. It was enlarged by the Local Government Act of 1898 from some eight thousand to just short of thirty-eight thousand: M. Daly, Dublin, 216. Daly’s account conveys the extent to which Dublin municipal politics in the 1890s was a world unto itself, in which national trends were filtered by the narrow franchise, commercial interests, and what might be termed corporate particularity. David Dickson puts the franchise as of January 1899 somewhat higher, at forty-nine thousand. ‘Parnellites vanquished anti-Parnellites in 1899, and then after 1900 the re-united Irish party completely dominated representation in City Hall for the next two decades, with the retail trade, especially publicans, still pre-eminent’. David Dickson, Dublin: The Making of a Capital City (Dublin: Profile Books, 2014), 414–15.
50. D 111.
51. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, [?2 or 3 May 1905], Letters II 89.
52. For more context, see Callanan, ‘Joyce and the United Irishman’. Griffith and the United Irishman were prominent opponents of the visit of Edward VII in 1903, and Griffith’s organisation, the National Council, a precursor of Sinn Féin, originated in the protest against the visit. It would, however, be erroneous to see the foregrounding of the anticipated royal visit in ‘Ivy Day’ as a gesturing forward to, or a coded avowal of, the sympathy with Griffith’s Sinn Féin that Joyce later professed. The story is specific to the time in which it is set, and at which it was written. The relation of municipal politics in 1902 to Parnell’s death is itself delicate in its complexity. Joyce moreover abhorred teleological anachronism, which he considered a besetting intellectual vice of nationalism. The story is a brilliant rendering of the time of its setting, and its prescience is objective.
53. Padraic Colum, introduction to Dubliners, by James Joyce (New York: Modern Library, 1926), x. Colum’s introduction is referred to approvingly by Stanislaus Joyce in both S. Joyce, Recollections of James Joyce, 6; and S. Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 206.
54. Emily Monroe Dickinson, A Patriot’s Mistake: Being Personal Recollections of the Parnell Family by a Daughter of the House (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis, 1905); Irish Times, 4 December 1905.
55. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 15 March 1905 and 11 February 1907, Letters II 85, 212.
56. Kelleher, ‘Irish History and Mythology’, 455–56. Kelleher develops a suggestion of Stanislaus Joyce in his Recollections of James Joyce. Paul Muldoon’s brilliant To Ireland, I draws, in turn, on Kelleher to terrifying effect.
57. Letters II 212n8, annotation to Joyce’s letter to Stanislaus of 6 February 1907. It is worthy of note that in a passage of a letter of Joyce’s of September 1905, shortly after he had written ‘Ivy Day’, Anatole France, Ernest Renan, and Christ (‘the Galilean’) mingle: Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 24 September 1905, Letters II 110. In the letter that Ellmann annotates, Joyce expresses his admiration for France’s story ‘Crainquebille’, which concerns a miscarriage of justice visited on a vegetable seller who plied his trade by cart in Montmartre, at one level an allegory on the Dreyfus Affair in which Alfred Dreyfus is not once mentioned, but it is clear from the letter that the story could not have been the inspiration for either ‘Ivy Day’ or ‘The Dead’.
58. Anatole France, ‘Le Procurateur de Judée,’ in L’Étui de nacre, ed. C. Lévy (Paris, 1892).
59. ‘L’ombra di Parnell’, in OCPW, 194.
60. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 6 February 1907, Letters II 209.
61. In conversation with the author.
62. R. B. O’Brien, Charles Stewart Parnell, 2:257–88.
63. U 16.1495–528.
64. R. Barry O’Brien, Charles Stewart Parnell, 2:296: ‘His [Parnell’s] hat was off now, his hair dishevelled, the dust of the conflict begrimed his well-brushed coat.’
65. Stanislaus Joyce to Joyce, 10 October 1905, Letters II 115
66. S. Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 206.
67. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 1 September 1905, Letters II 105.
68. U 6.856.
69. In the intricate sequence of Joyce’s work, the Parnell-saturated opening chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man appeared before ‘Ivy Day’ in the serial publication in the Egoist from early 1914, though not in book form until 1917.
70. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, [ca. 24 September 1905], Letters II 111. Joyce repeated the quadripartite scheme in a letter to Grant Richards: 5 May 1906, Letters II 134.
71. See chapter 1, ‘The Shade of Parnell’, 39.
72. FW 594.7–9.
73. D 117.
74. D 127.
75. D 122.
76. D 126–27.
77. Callanan, Parnell Split, 11, 22–23.
78. Joyce was, as ever, attentive to surnames. There is a heartily Gladstonian Father Healy, a brother-in-law of Mr Daniels, in Stephen Hero (SH 156–58), and a Father Healy is mentioned in ‘The Dead’ (D 177), but neither has attributes that would identify him specifically with T. M. Healy, which does not eliminate the possibility of a private joke.
There was a celebrated Fr Healy, James Healy (1824–1894) whom Joyce had met as a boy. Fr Healy’s celebrity as a wit and raconteur was such that he had been introduced at Coolatin in County Wicklow to Gladstone on the latter’s first visit to Ireland in 1877. He was a member of the Howth circle of the high Unionist Lord Justice Gerald Fitzgibbon. He was parish priest of Little Bray from 1868 to 1893, and finally of Ballybrack, Killiney, and Cabinteely; Andrew O’Brien and Linde Lunney, ‘James Healy’, DIB 4:559–60. Joyce wrote to Lucia when she was on her ill-fated visit to Bray in 1935 that if she was going to the library, she should look for his life (the Memories of Father Healy published in 1898 anonymously but in fact by W. J. Fitzpatrick). Joyce had known him and believed that he had baptised someone in the family. He had been parish priest of Little Bray and ‘used to visit very frequently the Viceregal Court and was a very witty man’. Joyce to Lucia Joyce, 27 April 1935, letter and card (in Italian), with typescript translation, NLI, MS 5754.
79. In the Cornell alphabetical notebook, Joyce wrote of his mother, ‘She was taken sometimes to a performance of Christy Minstrels in the Leinster Hall’. In Scholes and Kain, Workshop of Daedalus, 103.
80. Joyce to Giorgio and Helen Joyce, 26 February 1935, Letters III 348.
81. D 43.
82. D 45.
83. Joyce to Grant Richards, 3 May 1906, Letters II 132–33.
84. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 11 February 1907, Letters II 212.
85. Manganiello, Joyce’s Politics, 46–57; Humphreys, ‘Ferrero Etc’. See also Robert Spoo, ‘ “Una Piccola Nuvoletta”: Ferrero’s Young Europe and Joyce’s Mature Dubliners Stories’, James Joyce Quarterly 24, no. 4 (Summer 1987): 401–10; and chapter 11, ‘ “Professing to Be a Socialist”’.
86. Ferrero, Il militarismo, 129–30, quoted in Giorgio Melchiori, ‘The Genesis of Ulysses’, in Joyce in Rome: The Genesis of Ulysses, ed. Giorgio Melchiori (Rome: Bulzoni, 1984), 42; John McCourt, The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste, 1904–1920 (Dublin: Lilliput, 2000), 68–69.
87. ‘W. H. Grattan Flood’, Irish Book Lover 17 (March–April 1929): 26; obituary, Irish Times, 7 August 1928; Patrick M. Geoghegan, ‘William Henry Grattan Flood’, DIB 3:1030–31.
88. W. H. Grattan Flood, The Story of the Harp (London: Scott, 1905), viii–x. The harp features prominently in Flood’s important History of Irish Music, 3rd ed. (Dublin: Browne and Nolan, 1913).
89. Richard P. Davis, Arthur Griffith and Non-violent Sinn Féin (Dublin: Anvil Books, 1974), 16, 122; P. Colum, Arthur Griffith, 17.
90. United Irishman, 11 November 1905.
91. United Irishman, 11 November 1905.
92. United Irishman, 18 November 1905.
93. Emmett O’Byrne, ‘Rory (Ruaidhrí Óg) O’More (Ó’Mórdha)’, DIB 7:717–19.
94. United Irishman, 18 November 1905. As if to exemplify the phenomenon of Joycean coincidence, Tom Moore’s harp was exhibited (along with the death mask of Robert Emmet) at the Irish Industrial Exposition in Madison Square Garden in New York for three weeks from 18 September 1905; Gaelic American, 16 September 1905. This does not seem to have been noted in the Irish papers.
95. Frances Clarke and Patrick Maume, ‘Emily Lawless’, DIB 5:351–53.
96. Yeats to the editor of the Daily Express (Dublin), 27 February 1895, in Collected Letters, 1:440–42.
97. Lawless, With Essex in Ireland, 162.
98. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 25 September 1906, Letters II 166.
99. Christine Casey, The Buildings of Ireland: Dublin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 498.
100. Donald T. Torchiana, Backgrounds for Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’ (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1986), 91–98.
101. D 45.
102. Curran, James Joyce Remembered, 39–40.
103. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 11 February 1907, Letters II 212. The first reference to ‘The Dead’ that has survived was five days earlier, the second letter written after Joyce had read of the Playboy affair, when he listed ‘The Dead’ among five titles of stories he could write ‘if circumstances were favourable’. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 6 February 1907, Letters II 209.
104. Stanislaus Joyce, Triestine diary, entry for 7 September 1907, quoted in McCourt, Years of Bloom, 127.
105. Kelleher, ‘Irish History and Mythology’. Kelleher does not say so, but it seems possible, if not likely, that his paper on the ‘The Dead’ (read to the Conference of Irish Studies at the University of Illinois on 25 April 1964, subsequently published as his 1965 article) arose from his reading of Finnegans Wake, in which as he writes Joyce makes ‘large use of the saga’ (‘Irish History and Mythology’, 419). That a reading of Finnegans Wake could have prompted a major re-reading of ‘The Dead’ is a reflection of the encircling integrity of Joyce’s oeuvre. That Joyce could have anticipated this in invoking Dá Derga’s hostel in the Wake invests Kelleher’s paper with yet another level of the presence of the dead: he might have thought the identification of the subtext was a long time coming.
106. Muldoon, To Ireland, I. While Muldoon does not betray its promise, the title is a brilliant conceit: it is a meditation on ‘The Dead’ primarily by reference to Dá Derga’s hostel, taking ‘The Dead’ as a pivotal text, drawing on antecedent Irish literature or literatures, and providing a primary point of departure for Irish literature after its belated publication in Dubliners in 1914. Muldoon, it might be thought defensively to minimise the extent that he adopts and carries further Kelleher’s thesis, refers to Kelleher’s essay as ‘magnificently provocative’ (To Ireland, I, 51). He does much to build on Kelleher’s argument and to put it beyond dispute. When Muldoon makes a point that is possibly subjective or debatable, he scrupulously flags that he is doing so. Frank Shovlin, writing post-Muldoon, characterises Kelleher’s Dá Derga’s hostel thesis as ‘brilliant, and still controversial’. Shovlin, Journey Westward: Joyce, Dubliners and the Literary Revival (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014), 53.
107. Tymoczko, The Irish Ulysses. O’Hehir’s Gaelic Lexicon for Finnegans Wake (1967), published two years after Kelleher’s article, seemed to promise a dawn that did not quite break, at least at that time. Perhaps due to a lag in the publication of the submitted text, O’Hehir does not refer to, and his short bibliography does not include, Kelleher’s article.
108. Kelleher notes parenthetically a small but intriguing detail. Joyce was far too imaginatively cunning to equate the Morkan house on Usher’s Island with Dá Derga’s hostel. On the journey that he is forced to take to find refuge in Dá Derga’s hostel, Conaire crosses the Liffey by the hurdle ford from which the Irish name of Dublin derives, which was very close to the Morkan house, which stood at the dead centre of the old city; Kelleher, ‘Irish History and Mythology’, 420. It might be added, for what it is worth, that the house was situated in the tightly circumscribed locale in which Joyce’s close friend in University College, John Francis Byrne, born on East Essex Street, which was once submerged in and intermittently flooded by the river, grew up. Byrne, in his memoir, narrated a ghost story concerning a house on Cork Hill almost opposite the City Hall, which, since he devoted a chapter to it, he can scarcely have failed to recount to Joyce; Byrne, Silent Years, ix, 27–28, 67–73.
