James joyce, p.78
James Joyce, page 78
The controversy from which Joyce was shut out rattled on in Dublin. Sheehy-Skeffington had already, in a letter to the Irish Times, while professing himself ‘for over three years an enthusiastic admirer of Mr. Synge’s work’, pronounced that, given ‘Mr. Synge’s bad taste’, ‘the hostile demonstration, manifestly spontaneous and sincere, was thoroughly justified and distinctly healthy’. He stated sanctimoniously that he himself had participated neither in the groaning nor in the counter-cheering that broke out towards the close of the third act in response to what he delicately termed ‘one particularly objectionable phrase’.74 In March, Sheehy-Skeffington, at a large public meeting under the auspices of the Literary and Historical Society in the Oak Room of the Mansion House, gave a paper entitled ‘Stray Thoughts about the Modern Dramatic Movement in Ireland’. He asserted that Synge ‘has lately given rein to what Mr. Yeats has justly called his singularly harsh imagination, and has lost himself and wasted his talents in repellent studies of the morbid’. If a dramatist ‘wishes his plays to be stage-plays, and if he further wishes to see them staged in his own lifetime, amid applause, he is practically compelled to choose between the applause of the masses of his own countrymen and the applause of a clique’. Kettle, in putting the vote of thanks, vented his Catholic nationalist animus against Yeats: ‘He had always thought that Mr. Yeats despised his fellow-man a little too openly to be a good dramatist.’75 Both thus replicated their response to The Countess Cathleen.
In his fulminations against Yeats and Synge, Joyce abrogated the exemplary artistic intellectual patience he had observed in exile. They were also a departure from his consistent artistic resistance to the demands of Catholic nationalist opinion. Joyce’s refusal to call to mind his dissociation from the denunciation of The Countess Cathleen in University College affords the most striking measure of his psychological disorientation. His reaction attested to the depth of his exasperation at his absence from the fray and—which touched off his resentment—at what he felt to be his exclusion when he was in Dublin from the circle dominated by Yeats, which he habitually directed with remorseless unfairness and lack of gallantry at the person of Augusta Gregory. Above all, the Playboy controversy sharpened his exacerbation at the thwarting of the publication of Dubliners.
Joyce’s reaction was especially ill judged in its timing in relation to Yeats. This was a critical moment in the redirection of their politico-artistic relation towards convergence. Joyce had reoriented his own relationship towards his Irish subject matter, and Yeats’s position had for the first time begun to move sensibly closer to his own.76 The perverseness of Joyce’s immediate response to the Playboy ‘riots’ is most apparent in what Yeats said at the end of his third intervention in the debate at the Abbey, reported in the Daily Express but omitted in the Freeman’s Journal, every word of which echoed Joyce’s own deeply held sentiments: ‘He refused to give up the work of a man of genius because the mob cried out against it. Some novelists represented the Irish peasant as a cherub with wings and no body. Mr. Synge represented him with a body, but without wings, and he was sure that even “the man who killed his father” was a more acceptable figure in a woman’s eyes than the timid, cowering creature who was afraid to stay in the house with his lover for fear of “what Father O’Reilly would say” (great groaning and hissing)’.77
What Joyce, in the bitterness of his Roman captivity, and with very limited intelligence about the controversy in Dublin and no knowledge of the play itself beyond what was thrown up in that controversy, did not apprehend was the significance of The Playboy in the modernistic recasting of the Celtic Twilight. The perfect alignment of the critics of Synge’s plays with what he had identified as the political and cultural opposition to his own artistic project should have led him to hold back. That it did not is a measure of the temporary disorientation wrought by his understandably deep sense of frustration at not being in Dublin at a critical moment, as if to affirm the artistic anxieties he had expressed to Stanislaus over the previous months about his absence.
The Playboy controversy marked Joyce’s exilic nadir, and the only point in his life at which adversity overbore, albeit briefly and in private correspondence, his poise. He quickly reasserted his self-control and reassessed the significance of The Playboy for the Irish literary movement. The controversy over the play became for him the obverse of the non-publication of Dubliners. He wrote to Stanislaus in mid-February, ‘Synge is a storm centre: but I have done nothing.’78 He wrote to Nora from Dublin in September 1909, during the crisis in their relations brought about by the allegations of Vincent Cosgrave, ‘When is this cursed thing going to end? When am I going to start?’79 When, in August 1912, the hope of Maunsel actually publishing Dubliners flickered for the last time, Joyce wrote to Nora in Galway urging her to come to Dublin: ‘The Abbey Theatre will be open and they will give plays of Yeats and Synge. You have a right to be there because you are my bride: and I am one of the writers of this generation who are perhaps creating at last a conscience in the soul of this wretched race. Addio!’80
Joyce brought his unhappy sojourn in Rome to an end, returning to Trieste via Florence on 7 March 1907.
1. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 15 March 1905, Letters II 185.
2. The United Irishman ceased publication in the wake of a libel action with its issue of 14 April 1906. Two weeks later, its successor Sinn Féin appeared: it ran from 4 May 1906 to 28 November 1914.
3. ‘A “Dialogue of the Day” [with acknowledgements to Mr Sheehy-Skeffington]’, Sinn Féin, 4 August 1906.
4. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, [ca. 12 August 1906], Letters II 147.
5. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 25 September 1906, Letters II 165. The church to which Joyce retreated is evidently San Clemente.
6. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 7 December 1906, Letters II 201.
7. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, postmark 10 January 1907, Letters II 205.
8. Gorman, James Joyce, 184.
9. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 25 September 1906, Letters II 165.
10. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 18 October 1906, Letters II 182.
11. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 6 November 1906, Letters II 186.
12. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 6 February 1907, Letters II 210.
13. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 11 February 1907, Letters II 211.
14. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, postmark 19 August 1906, Letters II 151.
15. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 6 September 1906, Letters II 157.
16. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 6 September 1906, Letters II 157–58.
17. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 31 August 1906, Letters II 153–54.
18. Nationist, 25 August 1906.
19. Patrick Maume, ‘John Marcus O’Sullivan’, DIB 7:971–73.
20. J. M. O’Sullivan ‘Bonn University and Trinity College: A Parallel’, New Ireland Review 23 (March 1905): 1–9.
21. Irish Catholic, 25 August 1906.
22. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 31 August 1906, Letters II 155.
23. Sinn Féin, 8 September 1906.
24. Sinn Féin, 8 September 1906.
25. Sinn Féin, 8 September 1906.
26. Sinn Féin, 15 September 1906.
27. Ellmann, James Joyce, 199, 303, 772n19; Gorman, James Joyce, 200.
28. Leader, 24 April 1910.
29. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 25 September 1906, Letters II 167.
30. Davis, Arthur Griffith, 29.
31. Davis, Arthur Griffith, 12; Calton Younger, Arthur Griffith (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1981), 10–15.
32. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 13 November 1906, Letters II 190. It is unlikely that the austere Dillon, though fiercely opposed to ‘conciliation’, made such a remark.
33. Terence de Vere White, ‘Oliver Joseph St. John Gogarty’, in Dictionary of National Biography, 1951–60 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 415.
34. O. G. [Oliver St John Gogarty], ‘Ugly England’, pt. 1, Sinn Féin, 15 September 1906.
35. Sinn Féin, 15 September 1906. The sexual morality of the British army was a favourite theme of Sinn Féin in its anti-recruitment campaign. Its issue of 4 August 1906, for example, which Joyce read, contained alongside Griffith’s parody of ‘Dialogues of the Day’ an article entitled ‘Anti-enlistment’ by ‘Sinn Féin’. It stated, ‘The medical reports and revelations tell a terrible tale of the morality of soldiering’, and complained of prostitution in India.
36. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 25 September 1906, Letters II 164–65. Joyce had written to Stanislaus from the torpor of the Roman summer two weeks previously, ‘Lately I found myself wishing myself at a seaside place in England or Ireland: rashers and eggs in the morning, the English variety of sunshine, a beefsteak with boiled potatoes and onions, a pier at night or a beach and cigarettes.’ Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 6 September 1906, Letters II 157.
37. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 4 October 1906, Letters II 170–71.
38. Sinn Féin, 24 November 1906.
39. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, postmark 3 December 1906, Letters II 200. In the same letter Joyce wrote, ‘O.G., I understand, writes in Sinn Féin under the name of “Mettus Curtius”, the gent who leaped into the chasm in the forum, I think’ (198).
40. Sinn Féin, 1 December 1906.
41. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 13 November 1906, Letters II 191; Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, [?1 February 1907], Letters II 209. Bulfin was an emigrant who returned from Argentina to whom Griffith was close, and whose Rambles in Eirinn, first published in book form in 1907, had been serialised in Sinn Féin. C. J. Woods, ‘William Bulfin’, DIB, 1:977–78.
42. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 9 October 1906, Letters II 173–74.
43. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 6 November 1906, Letters II 186–87.
44. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 6 November 1906, Letters II 187.
45. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 6 November 1906, Letters II 187.
46. Belfast Newsletter, 1 November 1906.
47. Sinn Féin, 10 November 1906.
48. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 13 November 1906, Letters II 189.
49. In the ‘Wandering Rocks’ episode of Ulysses, Fr Conmee thinks, ‘Yes, it was very probable that Father Bernard Vaughan would come again to preach. O, yes: a very great success. A wonderful man really’ (U 10.24–25).
50. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 13 November 1906, Letters II 191–92. That Joyce could commence his response to Sinn Féin’s issue of 10 November on 13 November attests to the efficiency of the European postal system, even though it is likely Sinn Féin went on sale in Dublin a day earlier than the published date.
51. Stanislaus Joyce’s ‘Triestine Book of Days 1907–09’ remains unpublished, but extracts are cited in McCourt, Years of Bloom; and in Laura Pelaschiar, ‘Stanislaus Joyce’s “Book of Days”: The Triestine Diary’, James Joyce Quarterly 36, no. 2 (Winter 1999): 61–71.
52. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 7 August 1906, Letters II 146. For an indication that the Daily Mail was the English paper that Joyce principally read in Rome, see Letters II 146, 159, 189, 190, 198, 208. He also, of course, read the Italian press, in part in search of advertisements for private English lessons. Carlo Bigazzi, ‘Joyce and the Italian Press’, in Melchiori, Joyce in Rome, 52–62.
53. Koss, The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in England, 358, 368–69.
54. Sydney Brooks (1872–1937) was a British author and critic. Brooks’s series was later published in book form as The New Ireland (Dublin: Maunsel, 1907).
55. ‘The New Ireland, No. 1’, Daily Mail, 12 December 1906.
56. ‘The New Ireland, No. 2’, Daily Mail, 13 December 1906.
57. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 1 September 1905, Letters II 105.
58. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 25 September 1906, Letters II 166–67. I have been unsuccessful in locating the quotation of what was written on Ibsen’s death in the Irish Independent or the Daily Mail.
59. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 7 December 1906, Letters II 202.
60. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, postmark 10 January 1907, Letters II 205.
61. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 13 November 1906, Letters II 192–94.
62. Freeman’s Journal, 28 January 1907.
63. Walter Starkie, Scholars and Gypsies: An Autobiography (London: John Murray, 1963), 37–39.
64. Hilary Berrow, ‘Eight Nights in the Abbey’, in J. M. Synge: Centenary Papers 1971, ed. Maurice Harmon (Dublin: Dolmen, 1972), 75–83.
65. Daily Mail, 31 January 1907.
66. Daily Mail, 31 January 1907.
67. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, [?1 February 1907], Letters II 208.
68. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, [?1 February 1907], Letters II 207–9. He had written earlier in the letter, ‘I suspect Synge’s naggin is on the increase’.
69. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 11 February 1907, Letters II 211. Sinn Féin declared, ‘Mr. Synge’s play as a play is one of the worst constructed we have ever witnessed. As a presentation on the public stage it is a vile and inhuman story told in the foulest language we have ever listened to from a public platform.’ It continued in the same vein, and complained that the directors of the Abbey Theatre ‘have now got hopelessly away from life’ (2 February 1907). Griffith attended the third performance, which was also the first which Yeats saw.
70. One wonders whether Daniel Sheehan might not be the doctor referred to in a passage of ‘J. M. Synge and the Ireland of His Time’ in which Yeats discussed his response to the third night of The Playboy, the first he attended: ‘As I stood there watching, knowing well that I saw the dissolution of a school of patriotism that had held sway over my youth, Synge came and stood beside me, and said, “A young doctor has just told me that he can hardly keep himself from jumping on to a seat, and pointing out in that howling mob those whom he is treating for venereal disease”.’ W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (New York: Macmillan, 1961), 312.
71. Freeman’s Journal, 5 February 1907. A typescript by Sheehy-Skeffington, entitled ‘Irish Playwrights and the Irish Public’, contains the statements quoted. It includes the Jacobin proposition that ‘the will of the artist may need to be sometimes curbed by the direct censorship of the people’ (Sheehy-Skeffington Papers, NLI, MS 40, 474/5).
72. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 11 February 1907, Letters II 211. Joyce’s use of the word ‘bloody’, though sparing, was a recurrent difficulty in having Dubliners published.
73. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 11 February 1907, Letters II 211–12.
74. ‘F. S. S.’ to the editor, Irish Times, 29 January 1907.
75. Evening Telegraph, 25 March 1907.
76. Yeats’s role is excellently discussed in Foster, W. B. Yeats, 1:359–67.
77. Daily Express, 5 February 1907. The report in the Daily Express, which Joyce did not see, went to greater lengths to describe the ambience of the debate. It identified two mutually antagonistic younger groups, aesthetes and nationalists: ‘[A] portion of the audience looked grimly in earnest, the group of long-haired young men, between whom and other little knots of serious youths who affect broad-leafed hats, there appeared to be no love lost.’ The proceedings had commenced late, but the early arrivals, who were predominantly hostile to the play, ‘amused themselves with whistling, and a song of many verses, having pungent reference to “The man who killed his Da”, was sung and applauded with great gusto’.
78. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 16 February 1907, Letters II 215.
79. Joyce to Nora Barnacle, 2 September 1909, Letters II 243.
80. Joyce to Nora Barnacle, postmark 22 August 1912, Letters II 311.
14
The Triestine Joyce
It is a great title of honour for my city that in Ulysses some of the streets of Dublin stretch on and on into the windings of our old Trieste. Recently Joyce wrote to me: ‘If Anna Livia (the Liffey) were not swallowed up by the Ocean, she would certainly debouch into the Canal Grande of Trieste’.
—ITALO SVEVO, 19271
Trieste is strange. The most wonderful landscape.… But it is not a town. One has a sense of being nowhere at all. I had the feeling of being suspended in unreality. Here, the state has caused the city to withhold its character. Naturally this cannot work because it is an Italian town. But it is not allowed to be so. Hence the vexation that one feels everywhere. It is a town that pursues an unwilling existence. What she is, she is not allowed to be.
