James joyce, p.89
James Joyce, page 89
150. Both collections include an unsigned sub-editorial in the Freeman’s Journal of 10 September 1912, ‘Politics and Cattle Disease’. The idea of Joyce’s authorship of this was always extremely unlikely, and has been comprehensively demolished by Terence Matthews in his ‘An Emendation to the Joycean Canon: The Last Hurrah for “Politics and Cattle Disease”’, James Joyce Quarterly 44, no. 3 (Spring 2007): 441–53.
151. For a start, see Katherine Ebury and James Alexander Fraser, eds., Joyce’s Non-fiction Writings: ‘Outside His Jurisfiction’ (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
152. Potts, Portraits of the Artist, 43.
153. OCPW 144.
154. This was first identified by Kevin Barry in his edition of OCPW.
16
Exile Affirmed
‘But don’t you remember’, said Joyce to me, ‘how the prodigal son was received by his brother in his father’s house. It is dangerous to leave one’s country, but still more dangerous to go back to it, for then your fellow-countrymen, if they can, will drive a knife into your heart’.
—ITALO SVEVO1
JOYCE HAD WRITTEN THREE CHAPTERS OF A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by early April 1908, when he put it aside,2 having earlier protested to Stanislaus, ‘Why would I bother my head writing when nobody will publish what I write?’ Over the next five years he would work on the book only sporadically. If his suspension of fiction writing was in some degree a form of protest, it reflected what he experienced as the futility, or impossibility, of writing when what he had written was unpublished. In late August 1912, as his hopes for the publication of Dubliners by Maunsel and Company flickered still, he wrote to Nora, ‘I hope I shall have good news tomorrow. If only my book is published then I will plunge into my novel and finish it.’3
In 1908, having suspended his novel, he cast around for non-writing projects or went through the motions of doing so. Among those he conceived was to become a commission agent for Irish tweeds.4 He was sufficiently taken with the idea of an interim role as a journalist on Irish affairs that he proposed to Il Corriere della Sera in Milan to travel to cover the Dublin exposition, and to La Stampa in Turin and Il Mattino in Naples to cover Irish affairs, all to no avail.5 He also turned his hand to translation projects. As if in atonement for his response to the Playboy riots, he had commented to Stanislaus in May 1907 that Synge’s art ‘is more original than my own’.6 In March 1908 he re-read Riders to the Sea and enlisted his friend and pupil Nicolò Vidacovich (another sophisticated Triestine irridentist) to collaborate on its translation into Italian. The following year, after Synge’s death, he unsuccessfully sought the consent of Synge’s estate for a production of the play in their translation by the actor-manager Alfredo Sainati.7 On 24 March 1909 Il Piccolo della Sera published Joyce’s essay ‘Oscar Wilde: Il poeta di “Salome”’, written to coincide with the production in Trieste of the Richard Strauss opera based on Wilde’s play. However critical Joyce had been of Wilde, he wrote to Fratelli Treves Editori in Milan proposing an Italian translation of The Picture of Dorian Gray. The negative reply invoked ‘the difficulties in introducing this name and of recommending his works in catalogues and newspapers which had family readerships’.8 Joyce also sought the permission of Robert Ross to translate The Soul of Man under Socialism, the work of Wilde that had most influenced him. While Joyce received permission, he did not proceed with the translation.9
Joyce’s relations with Nora remained difficult. Their finances were parlous, dependent on episodic bailouts by Stanislaus. Joyce was sufficiently alarmed by an attack of iritis in May 1908 to adhere for some months to a renunciation of alcohol. Nora had a miscarriage at about three months on 4 August 1908.10 In the autumn, Joyce enrolled for singing lessons with Romeo Bartoli in the Conservatorio Musicale di Trieste. His casting about for other destinies was too much for Stanislaus, who protested that his brother had ‘too many futures’.11 On 5 October 1908, the eve of the anniversary of Parnell’s death, Joyce, elongated on a sofa, declared that he had ‘retired from public life’.12 This of course was precisely what Parnell had not done, and what Joyce so greatly admired him for. Stanislaus wrote sarcastically of ‘the budding tenorino’ and characterised Joyce’s serial careers with unprecedented trenchancy: Joyce had failed ‘as a poet in Paris, as a journalist in Dublin, as a lover and novelist in Trieste, as a bank clerk in Rome, and again in Trieste as a Sinnféiner, teacher and University Professor’.13 In fact Joyce was to achieve the modest but not trivial feat of singing in the ‘extremely difficult quintet’ from Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg at the Sala della Società Filarmonico-Drammatica, directed by Bartoli.14
In December 1908 Joyce had written to his sister Margaret (Poppie) proposing to send Giorgio in the charge of Stanislaus on a visit to Dublin the following year.15 At the last moment he substituted himself for Stanislaus, thereby depriving his brother of what transpired to be his last scheduled revisiting of his native city. Aside from the need to address the publication of Dubliners, in the impasse that he seemed to have reached in Trieste, Joyce appeared amenable, at least in principle, to the idea of resuming a life and career in Ireland.
Joyce’s First Return Trip to Ireland, 1909
Joyce reached Dublin with Giorgio on 29 July 1909 and went to his family’s then home at 44 Fontenoy Street. ‘All are delighted with Georgie’, he reported to Nora, ‘specially Pappie’.16
In the manner of the Dublin of those years, Joyce ran into almost everyone he knew. William Kirkpatrick Magee, who, like George Russell, was friendly, thought Joyce was ‘looking very ecclesiastical’17. With Oliver St John Gogarty, whose ‘fat back’18 he had espied on reaching the pier at Kingstown, Joyce was unyielding: ‘You and I of 6 years ago are both dead. But I must write as I have felt.’19 He opened negotiations with George Roberts of the publishers Maunsel & Company, a young firm founded in 1905 but already the leading publishers for writers of the Revival.
Joyce was hardly in Dublin a week when, on the afternoon of 6 August, Vincent Cosgrave asserted that Nora had gone out with him on alternate nights when she was not with Joyce. Distraught, Joyce despatched two accusatory letters to Nora20 and was planning to return to Trieste when John Francis Byrne convinced him, as he wrote to her on 19 August, that it was all ‘a blasted lie’ by Cosgrave.21 When Nora broke her silence to reply, she did so with restraint and ‘great shrewdness’,22 attesting to how well matched they were in strength and suppleness of character. This crisis had the incidental effect of setting Joyce’s correspondence with Nora at a high level of drama and imprecatory tendresse, and to intensify its eroticism.
Thomas Michael Kettle was ‘extremely friendly’ and urged Joyce to apply for the lectureship in Italian at the reconstituted University College Dublin under the Universities Act of 1908.23 There was no professorship, only a lectureship for evening classes in commercial Italian. Joyce decided to apply for an examinership which did not require residence in Dublin,24 but then concluded he would be ill advised to take it.25 On 19 August he signed the contract with Maunsel for the publication the following March of Dubliners,26 on which George Roberts almost immediately had second thoughts.
The possibility of a parallel career as a journalist mediating between Ireland and Italy was of greater interest to Joyce than that as a university examiner in Italian. Enrico Caruso was singing in Dublin, but the Irish Times, Daily Express, and Daily Mail did not take up Joyce’s proposal to interview the singer. Joyce had cards printed with his name and ‘Il Piccolo della Sera, Trieste’, and prevailed on the manager of the Midland Railway to give him a press pass for Galway.27 On 25 August, the last night of Horse Show week, he attended, in the capacity as a journalist-critic of Il Piccolo della Sera, the premiere of George Bernard Shaw’s The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet at the Abbey Theatre. Joyce’s piece, written in Dublin on 31 August, was carried in Trieste on 5 September. It opened with a characterisation of the Horse Show that was a recension of his view of Dublin as a centre of paralysis, mellowed by humour: ‘For a few days the tired and cynical city dresses itself up like a newly wed bride and its senile sleep is broken by an unaccustomed uproar.’ Of the controversy that attended the production of the play (the authority of the Lord Chamberlain who had banned the play in England did not extend to Ireland), Joyce, no doubt recalling the production of Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, wrote that ‘Dubliners, who couldn’t care less for art, but have an immoderate love of arguments, were rubbing their hands in glee.’ The play he dismissed as ‘a sermon’ and the playwright as ‘a born preacher’.28
Joyce’s pose as a Triestine journalist gained a certain amount of traction. At the Shaw premiere, he met Piaras Béaslaí, who worked on the Evening Telegraph. Béaslaí was much later a Dáil Éireann deputy, and a close associate and later the biographer of Michael Collins.29 Through Béaslaí, Joyce paid several visits to the offices of the Evening Telegraph—sister evening paper of the Freeman’s Journal in Prince’s Street—then edited by Patrick J. Mead, who introduced him to the staff. Mead inspired the figure of Myles Crawford in Ulysses.30 Of the institutional sites of Dublin, it was these offices, rather than University College, the National Library, and the Abbey, that were for Joyce most congenial. The offices of the most important newspapers in Ireland were also a lieu de memoire of Parnellism. Joyce’s visits were to inform the ‘Aeolus’ episode of Ulysses and represent the principal projection backwards in time of episodes of Joyce’s life that post-dated 1904. Joyce was enthralled by the offices that the Evening Telegraph shared with the Freeman’s Journal. In relation to Joyce’s presence in the offices, one incident in ‘Aeolus’ is particularly striking. It comprises two seemingly minor references that are elevated to cunning comic effect by Joyce’s headings, which replicate the idiom of contemporary Irish newspapers. The first reference is, ‘His grace phoned down twice this morning, Red Murray said gravely’. This appears in the section headed ‘THE CROZIER AND THE PEN’.31 The second is a statement of the print foreman: ‘Wait. Where’s the archbishop’s letter? It’s to be repeated in the Telegraph.’ The heading under which this appears is ‘NOTED CHURCHMAN AN OCCASIONAL CONTRIBUTOR’.32 The two references relate to a letter the Archbishop of Dublin, William Walsh, had sent for publication. Ellmann’s treatment of this is based on what he was told by Béaslaí.33 In Béaslaí’s narrative, the publisher of the Freeman’s Journal, Thomas Sexton, a leading nationalist politician out of Parliament since 1896, was at odds with the Archbishop of Dublin, with the effect that the paper tended to enlarge the coverage it afforded to the Archbishop of Armagh, Michael Logue (even though Logue was a conservative right-wing prelate who was a protector of Timothy Michael Healy, while the Freeman’s Journal was closely aligned to John Dillon, Healy’s most implacable adversary in nationalist politics). Béaslaí’s explication to Ellmann overlooks what is more salient for Joyce’s sardonic headlines: that the pedantic and officious Archbishop of Dublin was indefatigable in his interventions on what were often marginal points of public controversy, and that the publication of his letters were wearisomely routine for the staff of the newspapers. The personae invoked by Béaslaí are relevant. Sexton, Walsh, and Logue were all prominent in their opposition to Parnell. The offices were steeped in the institutional memory of the Split.
The Evening Telegraph published an evidently Joyce-inspired brief account of his Shaw article, characterising Joyce as a ‘fellow-citizen of Mr. Shaw’s and one of the few Irishmen on the Italian Press’.34 While Joyce was to be bitterly critical of his neglect by the Irish press, his criticism was not directed at journalists, whose profession had been most receptive to him, and whose bustling urbanity is commemorated in Ulysses.
The breakup of the Joyce family in Ireland continued. On 20 August Joyce was present for the leave-taking of his sister Margaret, on whom the burden of running the impoverished household had devolved since her mother’s death, to become a Sister of Mercy. She left for Kilkenny ‘and will not be seen again until she goes to New Zealand’, though in fact Joyce was to be present in Fontenoy Street on 11 November when she passed through on her way out of the country; she would never return, dying in New Zealand in 1964.35 Doing what he could, Joyce had decided to extricate one of his sisters from Fontenoy Street. Margaret had determined that, rather than Mabel, it would be the more religiously observant Eva, who had a better prospect of winning her brother from impiety.36
Joyce went by train with Giorgio to Galway, where they stayed with Nora’s uncle Michael Healy, a port official of reasonable means with whom Joyce got on well.37 Back in Dublin, he spent four hours on 5 September talking to Kettle, attending a reception at the Gresham Hotel to mark Kettle’s forthcoming wedding to Mary Sheehy, which took place on 8 September and which he did not attend. He referred to Kettle as ‘the best friend I have in Ireland, I think’.38 The evening of the day he met Kettle, he wrote to Nora, ‘O take me into your soul of souls and I will then become indeed the poet of my race.’39
On one of these last evenings, Joyce had supper with J. F. Byrne and two female cousins of Byrne who resided from 1908 to 1910 at 7 Eccles Street, to which Joyce had already repaired in distress on the evening that followed Cosgrave’s false statement about his relations with Nora. After supper, Joyce asked Byrne to go for a walk with him. Joyce had wanted to renew his acquaintance with familiar scenes of Dublin; as Byrne recalled, ‘we walked Dublin that night and early morning’, returning to Eccles Street at three in the morning. Byrne had forgotten his key but let himself down into the basement, where there was an unlocked side door through which Byrne got into the house.40 In Ulysses, 7 Eccles Street became Bloom’s home, and his return home with Stephen Dedalus in the ‘Ithaca’ episode was inspired by Joyce’s night with Byrne.
On the eve of his departure, Joyce met Joseph Holloway, the obsessive diarist of the Abbey Theatre. Holloway that afternoon discussed Joyce with a kindred spirit, D. J. O’Donoghue, who had also run into Joyce. In an exemplary Dublin valediction, Holloway concluded, ‘He was a precocious youth and learned to sneer young.’41 On 9 September Joyce left Dublin for Trieste with Giorgio and Eva.
Joyce’s Second Return Visit, 1909–10
Joyce’s second return visit was really a continuation of his first and, at two and a half months, was his most extended trip. After spending just over a month in Trieste, Joyce arrived back in Dublin on his own on 21 October 1909. His principal business was the opening of Dublin’s first cinema, financed by four Triestine businessmen. Two of them followed Joyce a month later and also went with him to Belfast and Cork, where it was proposed to open other cinemas.42 Joyce worked, as the Evening Telegraph approvingly noted, ‘apparently indefatigably’ on the project,43 identifying and securing a premises for the cinema at 45 Mary Street, supervising the work, and even designing the posters. The Volta Cinema opened on 20 December: Joyce reported to Stanislaus that just before the opening an electrician, ‘a Sinn Féiner’ whom O’Leary Curtis had recommended, had left them in the lurch ‘and I had to scour Dublin’ for a replacement.44 The cinema, however, failed to meet the expectations of the partners and was sold the following June.45 Joyce, pursuing the scheme conceived in 1908 to become an agent for Irish tweeds, also arranged to represent the Dublin Woollen Company in Trieste.46 He actually sold tweeds on its behalf in Trieste in 1910 and 1911.47
Absence in strained circumstances—Nora was threatened with eviction in Trieste—took its toll on Joyce’s equanimity. He wrote in late October after a visit to the theatre with his father and sister—‘a wretched play, a disgusting audience’—that ‘I felt (as I always feel) a stranger in my own country’. Nora was evidently by this stage practised in the demanding art of managing Joyce’s fulminations against his countrymen. She felt scepticism towards respectable Catholic nationalism in her own right, but her sympathetic acquiescence in his views on his countrymen was evidently highly important to him. This is one of few instances when the surviving correspondence registers a little of what was a sustained duet on the subject of Ireland. It was as if he were amorously proclaiming his relationship to her to be the inverse of his relation to Ireland:
Yet if you had been beside you [sic] I could have spoken into your ears the hatred and scorn I felt burning in my heart. Perhaps you would have rebuked me but you would also have understood me. I felt proud to think that my son—mine and yours, that handsome dear little boy you gave me, Nora—will always be a foreigner in Ireland, a man speaking another language and bred in a different tradition.
I loathe Ireland and the Irish. They themselves stare at me in the street though I was born among them. Perhaps they read my hatred in their eye. I see nothing on every side of me but the image of the adulterous priest and his servants and of sly deceitful women. It is not good for me to come here or be here.48
Joyce put up his two Triestine visitors in Finn’s Hotel. On 19 November he wrote to Nora an emotional rhapsody to her in the third person. He had that evening dined with the Triestines at Finn’s Hotel, where ‘a pale-faced girl waited at table, perhaps her successor’:
The place is very Irish. I have lived so long abroad and in so many countries that I can feel at once the voice of Ireland in anything. The disorder of the table was Irish, the wonder on the faces also, the curious-looking eyes of the woman herself and her waitress. A strange land this is to me though I was born in it and bear one of its old names.
I have been in the room where she passed so often, with a strange dream of love in her young heart. My God, my eyes are full of tears! …
