James joyce, p.76
James Joyce, page 76
The latitude he afforded Griffith attested to a readiness on Joyce’s part to take a relatively pragmatic view of Irish politics. The exaggerated political deference to the Catholic Church was deep-rooted and pervasive in Ireland, as was the linkage of nationalism and moralism. Sinn Féin, like any other party, was never going to be immune from this—though Griffith was certainly not pro-clerical and was viewed with suspicion by most ecclesiastics—and it had the potential to become fervently moralistic, if in a nationalist rather than Catholic mode. Joyce’s readiness to discount this risk, which might at first seem surprising, can be explained by his Parnellite-Fenian convictions. For Fenians and Parnellites of the Split, the model of modern Irish history to which they adhered was one in which the political aggrandisement of the Catholic Church occurred in periods of political immobility and was held in check by the emergence of assertive secular nationalist movements, and would be constrained by independence. Whether a fervent moralism deriving from cultural nationalism and the revival of the Irish language would be similarly constrained was more uncertain, but Joyce was enough of a radical nationalist to be prepared to take the chance that it would. This is consistent with Joyce’s view of the attainment of Irish independence as a necessary event in the modernisation of Ireland, something more than a concession to the historical grievances and sentimental aspirations of Irish nationalists.
There is a further aspect to Joyce’s readiness to suspend his misgivings and to give Griffith the benefit of the doubt. His fear that his Parnellite nationalism was politically archaic, fortified by his dread of the anachronistic, had been in some degree a silent inhibition for Joyce in University College when it came to engaging with contemporary national politics. Appreciative that there was an Irish movement in gestation which articulated a nationalism that was not dissimilar to his own, he was not disposed to hold back from a qualified expression of sympathy, or to hedge that sympathy with conditions he knew to be unrealistic.
There is a striking dearth of references in Joyce’s correspondence to the activities of the Irish Party, the speeches of its members in the House of Commons and Ireland that filled the columns of the Freeman’s Journal (a paper he rarely saw in exile but with whose political style he had been very familiar). That sparsity would be carried over into Ulysses. His dis-esteem for the Irish Party is reflected in his comment on an incident in the 1906 Galway by-election in which the Irish Party nominee, Stephen Gwynn, was challenged by Captain John Shawe-Taylor, a nephew of Lady Gregory who was an advocate of conciliation between landlords and tenants and of administrative devolution. Joyce wrote Stanislaus, ‘I see that John Dillon at the Galway election alluded to Capt. Shawe Taylor as a bastard and a blackguard. Note the discrimination.’32
‘Venereal Excess’: Gogarty’s Articles in Sinn Féin
Of the articles published in Sinn Féin, most distasteful to Joyce were the three written by Oliver St John Gogarty, published in late 1906. From a chance acquaintance, Gogarty had become friendly with Griffith,33 and spoke at the first annual convention in November 1905 of the National Council, a precursor of Sinn Féin.
Gogarty’s first ‘Ugly England’ piece appeared in Sinn Féin 15 September 1906. This was a daintily written diatribe on the decline of England after Oliver Cromwell. His thoughts were prompted by the incursion of day-trippers on a brake into the English pastoral setting in which Gogarty was staying on his honeymoon: ‘These are the English middle-class, the common men than whom the world cannot show more ugly or more animal human beings.… For them the choicest spots of Europe must become sties and lazar houses. For them the sea must receive their shapeless skeleton pier with its bands, promenades, and side-shows; the nigger minstrel must shout and grin, and the slattern comedienne must dance and smile.’34
Gogarty insisted on treating the English middle class and ‘the common man’ as one and proposed substituting the term ‘Sludge’ for John Bull. His piece was replete with the snobbish fatuities of the Dublin Catholic professional classes. What Joyce fastened on was the latter part of the article—that by which Gogarty intended to ingratiate himself politically with the readers of Sinn Féin. Gogarty complained that it was in deference to Sludge that ‘the best of our peasantry have become renegades, and, by selling their strength and manhood as a woman might her beauty enter the ranks of the R.I.C.’ This transpired to be a prelude for a theme by which Gogarty was much exercised and which enabled him to deploy his professional expertise to align himself with Griffith’s type of nationalism: the high incidence of venereal disease in the British army.
[Sludge] cries out again at the godlessness of the foreign Governments regarding their treatment of how those women who associate with their soldiers, and he points to his own virtuous forbearance, when all the time, for anyone who cares to buy it, he has published a book—too sordid and too lost to see his own hypocrisy—wherein are statistics to prove, if any proof were needed, that his own army is rottener and more immoral than any or all of the armies in Europe put together. And also as he remains with his eyes devoutly lifted he cannot perceive that at his very feet in India are slave-compounds, where women are incarcerated with more than the horrors of a harem to be debauched at the good pleasure of the Army, a body of men who, as their own statistics show, are already more than half leprous from venereal excess. So concentrated are Sludge’s thoughts on prayer that he never has time to realise the fact, however he may denounce it in others, that his Army at home is in a condition so immoral as not to leave even room for such hesitation as that which preceded the destruction of Sodom.35
Joyce, whose loathing of nationalist moralising postures extended to a sensibly realistic view of military behaviour, sent on from Rome to Stanislaus in Trieste this edition of what he persisted in designating ‘U. I.’ ‘with an article by Gogarty of which I hope you will appreciate the full flavour. The part about the chummies is particularly rich. I am delighted to see it is only an instalment.… Isn’t it strange that O.G. should be anathematising ugly England just when I wanted to be in an English watering place.… Mrs G mustn’t have been very entertaining while in England since O.G. found time to write those two columns.’36 A week later, Joyce wrote to Stanislaus referring to Sinn Féin of 22 September:
I regret he has not continued his Ugly England yet. I would fain hear more about the slattern comediennes—renegade artist that I am. Starkey [Seamus O’Sullivan] writes two little immortal things in Sinn Féin about a fiddler and (damme if I can think of the other), a Piper I think … I wish some unkind person would publish a book about the venereal condition of the Irish; since they pride themselves so much on their immunity. It must be rather worse than England, I think. I know very little on the subject but it seems to me to be a disease like any other disease, caused by anti-hygienic conditions. I don’t see where the judgement of God comes into it nor do I see what the word ‘excess’ means in this connection. Perhaps Gogarty has some meaning of his own for this word. I would prefer the unscientific expression ‘venereal ill-luck’. Am I the only honest person that has come out of Ireland in our time? How dusty their phrases are!37
Gogarty’s second article appeared in the issue of Sinn Féin of 24 November 1906. His pseudo-patrician disdain for modern England now found expression in virulent anti-Semitism, a meditation on ‘the Jew mastery of England … England becoming Jewry’.38 Writing to Stanislaus, Joyce tartly conveyed his contempt, adding a sarcastic comment to the effect that Gogarty’s bad French was presumably acquired in Oxford: ‘I send you S.F. with a column of O.G.’s stupid drivel. I see he has advanced from “le petty mere” as far as “le bête noir”. This he learned I suppose from the stolidly one-languaged Sludge.’39
Gogarty’s third piece appeared in the issue of Sinn Féin of 1 December 1906. Dire, inane, and vicious, it introduced the Anglo-Irish ‘Snudge’ (‘the Irish for Sludge’). This characterisation was again steeped in anti-Semitism: ‘Strange it is that if his descent is Norman his manner is a Jew’s. See the Jew breaking out in Snudge!’ Gogarty brought his series to an end with the statement, ‘I can smell a Jew though, and in Ireland there’s something rotten.’40 It is unclear whether Joyce saw this, but if he did, it did not elicit further comment from him to Stanislaus.
William Bulfin (‘Che Buono’) was another contributor to Sinn Féin who expressed anti-Semitic sentiments and whose Irish Irelandism had an overtly racist edge. Joyce did not advert to the anti-Semitism but commented to Stanislaus, ‘By the way, one of the little illusions which gladden the heart of the staff of Sinn Féin is that the English don’t know how to pronounce their own language. When an English tourist meets Che Buono, the latter sneers at him because he says ‘Haw, I cawn’t heawh wot youah saying …’. Joyce later derided in similar vein a letter in Sinn Féin by Bulfin ‘ridiculing a Union Jack regatta in Galway. Two columns are consumed by his account of the talk of the classes’.41
On 9 October 1906 Joyce had made his abstractly conceived comparison of Arturo Labriola, who inveighed at the socialist congress against the intellectuals and the parliamentary socialists, to Arthur Griffith.42 In a lengthy missive to Stanislaus in November 1906, Joyce noted a report of a protest of David Sheehy and Francis Sheehy-Skeffington at the playing of ‘God Save the King’ at the conferring of degrees at University College. He struggled to reconcile his support for Sinn Féin to the socialism that he was still at this stage professing:
You ask me what I would substitute for parliamentary agitation in Ireland. I think the Sinn Féin policy would be more effective. Of course I see that its success would be to substitute Irish for English capital but no-one, I suppose, denies that capitalism is a stage of progress. The Irish proletariat has yet to be created. A feudal peasantry exists scraping the soil but this would with a national revival or with a definite preponderance of England surely disappear. I quite agree with you that Griffith is afraid of the priests—and he has every reason to be so. But, possibly, they are also a little afraid of him too. After all, he is holding out some secular liberty to the people and the Church doesn’t approve of that. I quite see, of course, that the church is still, as it was in the time of Adrian IV, the enemy of Ireland: but I think her time is almost up. For either Sinn Féin or Imperialism will conquer the present Ireland.43
Joyce’s sense of a defining generational crisis in Ireland owes something to his immersion in Italian socialism. It is striking that he was sufficiently dispassionate, and sceptical of the notion that Irish nationalism would inevitably prevail, to be prepared twice in this passage to allow for the possibility of what he called in the first statement ‘a definite preponderance of England’. For most nationalists, weaned on the idea that the eventual prevailing of Irish nationhood was ordained by providence, this was anathema. Joyce followed this with one of his most oft-quoted political self-characterisations: ‘If the Irish programme did not insist on the Irish language I suppose I would call myself a nationalist. As it is, I am content to recognise myself an exile: and, prophetically, a repudiated one.’44
It is Joyce’s clearest statement of his objection to Sinn Féin’s promotion of the language revival as something that forbade his unqualified personal identification with what was to become Sinn Féin, but did not preclude sympathy with its broader policy. Joyce’s use of the term ‘nationalist’ is predicated on his equation of contemporary nationalism with Sinn Féin, and on having defined the policies enunciated by Sinn Féin as ‘the Irish programme’. His ostensible refusal to avow himself a nationalist is subtly but inextricably bound up with his exiled state. The strategic deployment of the political uses of exile is graceful, and opens up a mode of trenchantly aphoristic self-characterisation that would feature in all that he was to write, reaching a brilliant culmination that is quasi-parodic in the creation of Shem the Penman in Finnegans Wake. There is a terrible consistency in the fact that he first gave expression to his most extended commentary on Irish politics in his correspondence while he was in exile, from Rome in November 1906.
In the final part of this extended letter, Joyce underscored the fact that the political content of Sinn Féin of which he approved was that provided by Griffith as editor or contributor. His condemned Gogarty by reference to two notorious Irish informers, Leonard MacNally and Thomas Reynolds:
You complain of Griffith’s using Gogarty & Co. How do you expect him to fill his paper: he can’t write it all himself. The part he does write, at least, has some intelligence and directness about it. As for O. G I am waiting for the S.F. policy to make some headway in the hope that he will join it for no doubt whatever exists in my mind but that, if he gets the chance, and the moment comes, he will play the part of MacNally and Reynolds. I do not say this out of spleen. It is my final view of his character, and if I begin to write my novel again it is in this way that I shall treat them. If it is not far-fetched to say that my action, and that of men like Ibsen &c, is a virtual strike I would call such people as Gogarty and Yeats and Colum the blacklegs of literature. Because they have tried to substitute us, to serve the old idols at a lower rate when we refused to do so for a higher.45
The bracketing of Yeats and Colum with Gogarty was unjustifiable and marked by a raw anger uncharacteristic of Joyce, which owed something to his unhappiness during his Roman sojourn, which the outbreak of the Playboy controversy in Dublin some three months later was to exacerbate greatly.
Joyce remained deeply irritated by the sanctimoniousness of Sinn Féin’s anti-recruitment campaign, which culminated in an ebullition of lucid fury directed at Gogarty’s conception of ‘venereal excess’ in a letter to Stanislaus from Rome of 13 November 1906. What provoked Joyce was a competition of national moralities which recalled the dialectic of the Parnell Split. On 31 October 1906 Lieutenant Colonel E. Macartney Filgate, commanding the Fourth Battalion of the Royal Irish Rifles, the County Antrim and Belfast Territorial Battalion, inspected the recruits of the battalion at the Victoria Barracks in Belfast. He addressed the recruits on the subject of moral character. This was a carefully rehearsed retort to an attack on him in Sinn Féin. He asked the men who were teetotallers to hold up their hands, and a majority were reported to have done so. He then launched into an attack on Sinn Féin: ‘There is published in Dublin a newspaper which loses no opportunity of pouring contempt upon those who wear the King’s uniform. It is a newspaper which openly boasts of its sympathy and alliance with what is known as the anti-recruiting movement—a movement which was responsible for the posting in this city recently of many placards, some of them, to put it in the plainest language, of a peculiarly filthy character.’ The Belfast Newsletter reported these utterances in full and endorsed them in an editorial which pronounced it scandalous that the law should tolerate the continued publication of Sinn Féin.46 Sinn Féin responded on 10 November 1906. Griffith, almost certainly prompted by Gogarty, his principal adviser on sexually transmitted disease, cited the Report of Venereal Disease in the British Army, an official publication, and asserted that statistically, ‘if Russia be excluded, the immorality of the British Army is almost as great as that of the other combined Great Powers of Europe’:
The appendix to the Official Report shows by diagrams that the immorality of the British Army has been on the increase since 1900. It presents a picture of the British Army in India, which shows that army to be simply riddled through and through with disease. Finally it may be said that the Report shows about one-fourth of the British Army to be annually incapacitated through immorality, and it holds out no hope of raising the army’s moral standard.
In the publication ‘War with Disease’, written by Dr. MacCabe, a British Army doctor, and commended to officers by General Rimington, and published within the last few months, Dr. MacCabe proposes that the British Army should be preserved by having the soldiers disinfected every night. He proposes dealing with the appalling state of affairs that exist by erecting a disinfecting room in every barracks in which the soldier is to be disinfected nightly, under the direction of a sergeant. Such is the state to which the British Army is reduced.
It is in such an army, the only mercenary and the most diseased army in civilisation, Lieutenant-Colonel Macartney-Filgate assures the young men of Ulster their ‘moral’ welfare is looked after.47
In a remarkable letter to Stanislaus of 13 November 1906 from Rome, Joyce’s first passing comments were mordantly oblique: ‘The editor of S.F. alludes to the British army as the only mercenary army in Europe. I suppose he prefers the conscription system because it is French. Irish intellectuals are very tiresome.’48
Joyce returns to the moral argument of the Sinn Féin article later, suggesting the letter may have been written in more than one sitting. His magnificently scornful repudiation of the rhetoric of sexual purity embraces not only Griffith but Sheehy-Skeffington and Fr Bernard Vaughan,49 an English Jesuit whose sermons were fashionable in Dublin.
By the way, they are still at the ‘venereal excess’ cry in Sinn Féin. Why does nobody compile statistics of ‘venereal excess’ from Dublin hospitals. What is ‘venereal excess’? Perhaps Mr Skeffington-Sheehy could write something on the subject, being as [John Francis] Byrne puts it ‘a pure man’. ‘Infant Jesus, meek and mild, Pity me a little child. Make me humble as thou art, And with Thy love inflame my heart’. Anyway my opinion is that if I put down a bucket into my own soul’s well, sexual department, I draw up Griffith’s and Ibsen’s and Skeffington’s and Bernard Vaughan’s and St Aloysius’ and Shelley’s and Renan’s water along with my own. And I am going to do that in my novel (inter alia) and plank the bucket down before the shades and substances above mentioned to see how they like it, and if they don’t like it I can’t help them. I am nauseated by their lying drivel about pure men and pure women and love for ever: blatant lying in the face of the truth. I don’t know much about the ‘saince’ of the subject but I presume there are very few mortals in Europe who are not in danger of waking some morning and finding themselves syphilitic. The Irish consider England a sink: but, if cleanliness be important in this matter, what is Ireland?50
