James joyce, p.74
James Joyce, page 74
109. Kelleher, ‘Irish History and Mythology’, 423.
110. Muldoon, To Ireland, I, 52.
111. D 180–81.
112. Kelleher, ‘Irish History and Mythology’, 418, 424–27.
113. Kelleher’s article disrupts and transcends Ellmann’s bland if dutifully informative chapter ‘The Backgrounds of “The Dead”’ (James Joyce, 243–53). Ellmann’s second edition of his biography (1982) did not pretend to be a comprehensive revision of the first (1959).
114. Subsequently published as Whitley Stokes, ed. and trans., Togail bruidne Dá Derga / The Destruction of Dá Derga’s Hostel (Paris: Émile Bouillon, 1902).
115. If Stokes’s translation is Joyce’s principal source, the issue remains of when Joyce read it. One presumes that he first read it in Dublin, the most likely proposition. He was at least aware of and struck by the story, and presumably had access to the Revue Celtique in Trieste, where he wrote ‘The Dead’ in August–September 1907.
116. In ‘L’Irlanda: Isola dei santi e dei savi’, his 1907 Trieste lecture, he principally credited German scholars with the advances that had been achieved (OCPW 109). Stokes was himself greatly influenced by the work of Johann Kaspar Zeuss and collaborated with Kuno Meyer, Ernst Windisch, and Adalbert Bezzenberger; Georgina Clinton and Sinead Sturgeon, ‘Whitley Stokes’, DIB 9:105–7.
117. Muldoon, To Ireland, I, 53–54.
118. Muldoon, To Ireland, I, 109–11. This is a kind of post scriptum, wittily encompassed in Muldoon’s entry in his abecedary for Laurence Sterne.
119. Muldoon, To Ireland, I, 44, 59. Ellmann, in his treatment of the story, cites Joyce’s statement in a letter to Stanislaus of 25 September 1906 that there were some elements of Dublin he had not rendered in the stories written up to that point, specifically ‘its ingenuous insularity and its hospitality’. Ellmann, James Joyce, 245. That reference to ‘hospitality’ does not negate Muldoon’s proposition.
120. D 177.
121. Kelleher, ‘Irish History and Mythology’, 418.
122. D 152.
123. Don Gifford, Joyce Annotated: Notes for ‘Dubliners’ and ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 110.
124. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 1 March 1907, Letters II 217.
125. D 194.
13
Reading Ireland from Exile
JOYCE’S LETTERS TO Stanislaus from Trieste and Rome in 1905–7 convey the experience of exile. They contain, as well as statements on Joyce’s attitude to Sinn Féin, extensive observations on his University College contemporaries, and on Oliver St John Gogarty. As a biographical source they are unique in containing a semi-continuous contemporary record of Joyce’s response to Irish events and politics.
It is superficially tempting to see in Joyce’s comments on Ireland an exilic turn, a revisionist softening towards ‘the old country’ from afar. It is unwise to impute to Joyce, the supreme ironist of exile, conventional expatriate sentimentality. Moreover, hypotheses of radical change in Joyce’s political thinking about Ireland are to be treated guardedly, not least on account of the depth of the consideration he had given to Irish politics even before he arrived at University College. Joyce was exasperated by his exile and the hardship that attended it, but what is striking is the adamantine purpose with which he set out to master the constraints of exile as it bore on his thinking and writing. In the period of his first exile, 1904–12, he managed to maintain a remarkable continuity of engagement with the subjects and themes which had exercised him when he was in Ireland, and to finish out at least the phase of Irish controversy that existed when he left. Joyce’s hermeneutic scrupulosity prevailed over any sentimental sense of separation from Ireland: he would only write of that which he had experienced or thoroughly understood. He was consistently vexed at being cut off from what was happening in Ireland, and his most irate exilic protests were at breakdowns in the meagre flow of intelligence from Ireland on which his apprehension of Irish affairs was dependent. He strove to remain astringently objective. He rendered his exile as virtual as it could be.
Joyce’s contemplation of Irish politics led him to a qualified identification with the early Sinn Féin of Arthur Griffith. He conveyed this privately in his correspondence with his brother, who was hostile to Sinn Féin, and it found clear if oblique public expression in what he wrote and said on Irish affairs in Trieste. The importance of Joyce’s support of Sinn Féin, however guarded, can scarcely be overstated: like his Parnellism, it was an aspect of his fashioning of a political self, and it provided him with a bridgehead into the politics of Ireland after the introduction of the Third Home Rule Bill. Joyce’s sympathy with the early Sinn Féin arose from his contemplation of contemporary Irish politics. He did not see Sinn Féin as a projection of Parnellism. His Parnellism and his identification with Sinn Féin were discrete, though he and Griffith were both Parnellites of the Split, and his essay ‘The Shade of Parnell’ (‘L’ombra di Parnell’) owed something to the prompting of what Griffith had written on Parnell in his journal Sinn Féin.
Sinn Féin, the advanced national political movement founded by Griffith in 1905, was in Joyce’s early exile a tiny movement which achieved a disproportionate but still limited public profile through Griffith’s trenchant journalism. For many of Griffith’s readers, the role of Sinn Féin, the weekly paper, and of Sinn Féin, the exiguous political entity, was to stiffen the resolve of the Irish Parliamentary Party rather than to displace the party. Nationalist politics remained, in the absence of a serious challenge to the Irish Party, highly fluid until late in the Home Rule crisis from 1912. Joyce’s favouring of Sinn Féin was tentative and contingent, and did not reflect an ideological opposition to parliamentarism, as distinct from a sceptical indifference to the activities of the Irish Party at Westminster. If his acerbic comments in his correspondence on Sheehy-Skeffington and Kettle may have been fortified by Kettle’s election to Parliament, it was because Joyce saw it as representing an avenue of Catholic nationalist social advancement rather than by reason of anti-parliamentary conviction.
Joyce’s first reference in the correspondence to Griffith is in a letter to Stanislaus of 15 March 1905. He had read in Le Figaro of the judicial separation of Maud Gonne and John MacBride, and added the comment, referring to Griffith’s close friendship with both and to his paper, United Irishman, ‘Poor little U. I.: indignant little chap’.1 Joyce was not an admirer of Gonne, ‘the Irish Joan of Arc’, and disliked the extravagant Francophile republicanism for which the United Irishman unflaggingly lauded her. The characterisation of Griffith at that stage suggested an attitude of mingled sympathy and political scepticism.
While Joyce continued to read copies of the United Irishman and of Griffith’s next paper, Sinn Féin, which launched 4 May 1906,2 a long silence supervened in the correspondence. The Liberal landslide at the general election of January 1906 passed without comment from Joyce. It had brought to an end over a decade of Conservative-Unionist governance in Ireland and was psychologically transformative in raising popular expectations, but it wrought little in the way of immediate change in Ireland: the Liberals had an overall majority and were not reliant on the support of the Irish Party. Joyce’s silence on Irish politics was broken by Kettle’s election to Parliament in a by-election in East Tyrone on 25 July 1906, which Joyce learnt of after the fact. From Rome he sent to Stanislaus a copy of Sinn Féin for 4 August 1906, which contained a parody by Arthur Griffith (writing as ‘Shanganash’) of Sheehy-Skeffington’s series of articles entitled ‘Dialogues of the Day’ and serialised in the Nationist. Griffith situated his little drama in the office of Sir Antony MacDonnell, the influential Under-Secretary for Ireland, who had served in India, and whose office Griffith depicted as populated with flunkeys from Trinity College as well as his officials:
‘I see’, said the Private Secretary, ‘that Kettle has won East Tyrone’.
‘To the truly Irish and National tune of “We’re off to Bom-bom-bay”’, remarked the Future Provost.
‘What is the difference between an Irishman going off to Bom-bom-bay to work out the salvation of his country and going off to Lon-don-don?’ asked the Present Provost.
‘He might make trouble for us in Bombay’, said Sir Antony reflectively.3
It was thus that Joyce received the news of Kettle’s election. He had overlooked Stanislaus having marked the news of this in a copy of the Irish Independent sent from Trieste. Always superbly recriminatory in relation to delays in receiving intelligence from Ireland, Joyce protested to Stanislaus, ‘I suppose it is by the merest chance that I learn this. Who knows what else has taken place in Dublin?’ In the same letter, he referred to the news of Gogarty’s marriage, of which Nora had found a newspaper announcement: ‘I fancy when he emerged from the church door his agile eye went right and left a little anxiously in search of a certain lean myopic face in the crowd but he will rapidly grow out of that remaining sensibility.’4
‘A bundle of any old papers’: Sinn Féin, the Nationist, and the Irish Catholic
Joyce’s seven-month sojourn in Rome with Nora and Giorgio from 31 July 1906 to 7 March 1907 proved extremely difficult. He liked neither Rome nor his employment with the Nast-Kolb and Schumacher bank. Exhausted by a visit in September to the desolate and tourist-thronged expanse of the Forum, he superbly pronounced, ‘Rome reminds me of a man who lives by exhibiting to travellers his grandmother’s corpse.’5 Early in his Rome sojourn, he declared himself to Stanislaus ‘damnably sick of Italy, Italian and Italians, outrageously, illogically sick.’6 Early in 1907 he wrote, ‘My hatred of Italy and Italians is on the increase.’7
Joyce’s Roman crisis was not attributable to conventional nostalgia, but to a concern that he needed, for artistic reasons, to be in Dublin: he was still adding stories to Dubliners. Joyce’s anxiety of absence from Dublin when in Rome derived from an acute intimation of flux in the city that was his subject matter, if not quite of the ‘sparkling excitement over art and politics in the air above the Liffey’ of which his first biographer wrote.8 That intimation antedated the Playboy riots.
For Irish news in Rome, he was reliant on what his aunt, Josephine Murray, could send from Dublin. At his request she sent him copies of Griffith’s paper Sinn Féin; Sheehy-Skeffington’s short-lived weekly, the Nationist; and the Irish Catholic. Stanislaus occasionally forwarded Irish newspapers from Trieste, including the Irish Independent, and Joyce got some Irish news from English papers in Rome, chiefly the Daily Mail. But the difficulty of getting news from Ireland was a constant refrain throughout his time in Rome. On 25 September 1906, he complained to Stanislaus that their aunt ‘has left off sending me Skeffington’s paper or writing at all’,9 and three weeks later, lamenting that ‘my imagination is starved at present’, he protested, ‘Does Aunt Josephine write to you? She never writes to me and sends me Sinn Féin at long intervals. Is there nobody in Ireland who will think it worth his or her while to make a bundle of any old papers that are lying about his or her house and send them to me?’10
The political weeklies were valuable to Joyce for their political intelligence and as found objects. This was not the common exilic demand for ‘news from home’. Joyce craved text, newsprint, the thing itself. In November his request to his aunt for material extended to a collage of the cultural detritus of contemporary Dublin—he reported to Stanislaus that he had written to his aunt to send him some Irish books ‘and to send me a Xmas present made up of tram-tickets, advts, handbills, posters, papers, programmes & c. I would like to have a map of Dublin on my wall. I suppose I am becoming something of a maniac’.11 In February 1907, he reported happily to Stanislaus, ‘Baby, Poppie, Pappie and Charlie sent me picture postcards on my birthday!! The postcards are all coloured green, dark sea, sage, emerald, cabbage etc.’12 But days later, he was back complaining: ‘Of course just the very week I wanted it most Aunt J did not send Sinn Féin.’13
The politics of his contemporaries and the emergence of Sinn Féin as a political force dominated Joyce’s correspondence with Stanislaus throughout his time in Rome. On these, he sought constantly to wrong-foot his brother. Evidently prompted by Joyce’s reaction to Kettle’s election, Stanislaus despatched some further news of the newly elected member of Parliament, to which Joyce ferociously retorted, ‘How the devil did you think the news about Kettle would interest me? But I would like to see a copy of Dialogues of the Day’.14 (In his correspondence Joyce frequently misnames the Nationist, of which Sheehy-Skeffington was assistant editor, as Dialogues of the Day—in fact the title of a series of articles, written by Sheehy-Skeffington, which appeared in the Nationist.) The wounded Stanislaus, in his lost response, evidently attacked Joyce’s failure to forge alliances with any of his male contemporaries. Joyce’s assuaging reply began with an adroit deflection:
You seem to be annoyed about Kettle. The reason I was not interested is because I take no interest in parliamentarianism as I suppose you know. However, I have asked Aunt J. to send me a copy of The Nationist—if it still exists. As for a possible friendship with Kettle it seems to me my influence on male friends is provocative. They find it hard to understand me, and difficult to get on with me even when they seem well-equipped for these tasks. On the other hand two ill-equipped women, to wit, Aunt Josephine and Nora, seem to be able to get at my point of view, and if they do not get on with me as well as they might they certainly manage to preserve a certain loyalty.… Of course I am not speaking of you.15
Joyce, in the same letter, defended Arthur Griffith’s United Irishman (which had ceased publication on 14 April 1906): ‘I don’t quite agree with you about the U. I. In my opinion, it is the only newspaper with any pretensions in Ireland. I believe that its policy would benefit Ireland very much. Of course so far as any intellectual interest is concerned it is hopelessly deaf. But even that deafness is preferable to the alertness of Dialogues of the Day.’16
This is a striking election. Having held aloof not just from Sheehy-Skeffington’s various political projects but from other intellectual coteries in Dublin, to the point of looking as if he might be incapable of aligning himself with any movement in Ireland, Joyce was not inhibited in expressing support for the ‘policy’ advocated by Griffith’s papers. It marks a clear departure from his cultivated political aloofness in Dublin. But it is not a sudden turn towards radical nationalism engendered by the experience and perspective of exile. With Griffith’s ‘policy’, nationalism found an institutional, albeit journalistic, expression with which Joyce could identify. The ease and readiness of Joyce’s expression of sympathy for the views Griffith enunciated in the now-defunct United Irishman retrospectively illumine the extent to which his repudiation of William Kirkpatrick Magee, Frederick Ryan, and Dana before he left Ireland had derived from his convictions as an Irish nationalist and his sensible and realistic reservations about the viability of an intellectual journal or grouping that did not have a clear conception of political nationalism.
The United Irishman had been in existence since 1899, and Joyce read it attentively without it eliciting from him any statement of sympathy with Griffith’s radical nationalism. What had changed was that Griffith was now hammering his views into a more programmatic form, and that Sinn Féin, though not formally constituted as an organisation until September 1907, was emerging as a movement in Irish politics. Sinn Féin’s prospects of ending the hegemony of the Irish Party seemed exceedingly remote, but its emergence did mark a change in Irish politics and represented in some limited degree an answer to Joyce’s denunciations of the passivity and ineffectuality of nationalist politics.
Deeply frustrated in Rome by the continuing impasse over the publication of Dubliners, he observed the progress of his contemporaries in Dublin. He conveyed his exasperation to Stanislaus in a report at the end of his first month in the city, with impressive humour:
Aunt J. sent me papers: no letter. The Irish Catholic and Dialogues of the Day. Unluckily I lost the latter in the street. I shall send you the next copy: it was very ‘brilliant’. Three pages of puff by F.S.S. at the end: full of thick typed catch phrases such as ‘this novelty of Irish journalism’ ‘order at once’ ‘absolutely unique’. An advt appears for some booklet by (very big letters) Thomas Kettle, M.P. A column of the Irish Catholic is devoted to a series of letters between Dr Delany and J. M. O’Sullivan M.A.: philosophical student at Bonn. They are all in the public eye and favour: even Dr O. S. Jesus Gogarty. And here am I (whom their writings and lives nauseate to the point of vomiting) writing away letters for ten hours a day like the blue devil on the offchance of pleasing three bad-tempered bankers and inducing them to let me retain my position while (as a luxury) I am allowed to haggle for two years with the same publisher, trying to induce him to publish a book for which he has an intense admiration. Orco Dio!17
Joyce’s description of Sheehy-Skeffington’s paper was comically exact: a disproportionate amount of space was taken up with advertisements for, or notices of, or correspondence about itself. The eighth issue, that of 25 August 1906, evidently the first Joyce had seen, did not disappoint. As if to exemplify the circularity of Dublin social controversy, the rambling ‘Dialogue’ (‘A Holiday Miscellany’) extended to the university question, with J. M. O’Sullivan’s views on the ‘Bonn scheme’ respectfully invoked. Most satisfying from Joyce’s point of view was a letter from William J. Maloney, who criticised the fact that the female gender was represented by a solitary lady, with the ironic appellation of the ‘Mere Woman’. As if frantic to fill his columns, Sheehy-Skeffington responded, ‘I should be glad to publish comments, approving or otherwise, on Mr. Maloney’s letter. Are women’s interests adequately represented in “Dialogues of the Day”? Or should the “Mere Woman” be reinforced or superseded by a number of other types? These are questions again upon which I should like to receive, in particular, the opinion of the women who read the “Dialogues”’.18
