James joyce, p.9
James Joyce, page 9
He was—as evidenced by the range of figures to whom Joyce parcelled out features of his character and voice—a protean figure, of multiple aspects. He was at once idiosyncratic and original, touched by history in ways he did not necessarily understand, and an emblematic Irish figure, which endowed his persona with the plasticity on which Joyce was able to draw in so many of his works, not least Finnegans Wake.
John Stanislaus Joyce’s relationship to Parnellism has an importance because of the issue of its influence on his son’s Parnellism. There are two defining themes in the conventional rendering of his biographical profile. The first is that he was an ardent Parnellite at least from 1880. The second and related proposition is that his own decline more or less coincided with that of Parnell, or that he at least nursed a subjective connection between his professional failure and Parnell’s fall. Richard Ellmann wrote in his biography of James Joyce, ‘For John Joyce the fall of Parnell, closely synchronised with a fall in his own fortunes, was the dividing line between the stale present and the good old days.’36 This proposition has a superficial attractiveness—the living conditions of John Stanislaus and his household did indeed begin to plummet shortly after Parnell’s death—but it ignores the fact that the unravelling of the fortunes of Joyce predated the fall of Parnell, and assumes that his idea of ‘the good old days’ related to the period of Parnell’s hegemony. The times whose passing John Stanislaus Joyce mourned were those that coincided with Parnell’s emergence as a leader, most notably the Dublin city election of 1880.
There is no evidence of political passion, never mind activism, on the part of John Stanislaus Joyce in Parnell’s cause before the Split of 1890–91. While he is conventionally rendered as an ardent Parnellite and even a Parnellite apparatchik, the more plausible view in the absence of any evidence to the contrary is that he held somewhat aloof from Parnellism in the 1880s. In purely generational terms, he was ostensibly a reasonably good candidate for Parnellite allegiance, having been born in 1849, three years after Parnell. Yet he did not fit easily into the Ireland of Parnell, more because his conception of himself was rooted in an older Ireland than by reason of his ambiguous sociological status in the new dispensation as a rentier whose income derived principally from urban property in Cork. The mischaracterisation of John Stanislaus Joyce as a Parnellite whose own rise and fall were connected to those of Parnell superimposes a thesis that does not square with Joyce’s fictional rendering of his father in its socio-political aspect. That portrayal comprises both the mild and recessive Simon Dedalus of Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the more blistering Simon Daedalus of Stephen Hero, as well as the John Stanislaus Joyce whose voice is heard through other characters in his son’s writings. In the former direct portrayal, his father is fictionally rendered as someone who was in some degree remote from the Ireland in which he lived. Joyce did not render his father simply as idiosyncratic, mild, or wildly extrovert in his various direct and indirect manifestations, but as someone who was tangential to if not out of joint with his political time. John Stanislaus Joyce was an exuberantly assertive figure, well captured in Stephen Hero, but whose potentially destabilising fictional impact Joyce had to rein in in his comparatively pallid renderings of Simon Dedalus in A Portrait and Ulysses, which he was to redress in various ways in Finnegans Wake.
One searches Joyce’s fiction in vain for an affirmation of his brother Stanislaus’s later (and fairly sarcastic) suggestion that their father was an earnest partisan of Parnell through the 1880s. In a famous passage in A Portrait, Joyce, with beautifully modulated objectivity and affection, in an early foray in his use of the catalogue, serialises his father’s multiple lives. Stephen is being interrogated by Cranly: ‘But was your father what is called well-to-do? I mean when you were growing up?’ Stephen begins ‘to enumerate glibly his father’s attributes’: ‘A medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a storyteller, somebody’s secretary, something in a distillery, a taxgatherer, a bankrupt and at present a praiser of his own past.’37
The characterisation of his father as ‘a shouting politician’ in a sequence of aborted careers is plainly a reference to the Dublin city election of 1880, possibly coloured by his support of Parnell in the Split. The catalogue scarcely sustains the idea of his father as tirelessly politically active or ambitious. In a similar vein to the catalogue, Joyce told Eugene Sheehy that he had put down his father’s occupation as ‘entering for competitions’ when applying for University College.38
Padraic Colum wrote a remarkably sharply recalled account of his first real encounter with James Joyce as they left the National Library. It was the post–University College Joyce, whom Colum had been introduced to at Lady Gregory’s and had crossed several times thereafter. Colum candidly acknowledges that Joyce knew that Colum was fascinated by him, and played up to that. His characterisation of his father was significant: ‘On that occasion he showed himself as the scion of an outstanding family. His father, who had come to Dublin from Cork, had had a sinecure; he had lost it and got through his capital in practises of good fellowship. Joyce permitted himself to be a little homilectic: “What I kept, I lost; what I gave, I have. If my father was able to say that he need not regret what he has come to”’.39
John Stanislaus Joyce’s eccentricity encompassed the idea that he was ex-centric to the Ireland in which Parnell was becoming hegemonic, and some part of his own humour played on the fact. His imaginative affinities were with a more politically formless anterior Ireland which he imperfectly understood. His roots in that Ireland, pre-Parnellite if not quite post-Gaelic, were shallow and only glimpsed by him through the receding memories or fables of three anterior generations. He was stranded between the vague contours of the still not yet post-Gaelic Ireland of the late eighteenth century and the more sharply edged modern Ireland of Parnell.
Joyce neither forgot nor discounted his father’s embrace of Parnell in the Split, which had opened his mind as a child to the cause of Parnell, but he apprehended that it was a turn that was steeped in irony, and he came in time to love his father more on account of it. Joyce understood that Parnell represented a modern nationalism, from which his father stood apart. What he took from John Stanislaus, as well as an opening to Parnellism in the Split, was an intimation of the cruelty of displacement in the cycles of history. The phrase Joyce wrote on the first page of Finnegans Wake, ‘a kidscad buttended a bland old isaac’,40 referring to Parnell’s eclipsing of his predecessor Isaac Butt, had a distant origin in his contemplation of the broken life of his father.
Relationships to two contemporary institutions cast some light on John Stanislaus Joyce’s thinking. The first is the Catholic Church. He was openly contemptuous of the Catholic clergy. It was something he saw as the proper attitude of an independent gentleman. It was also pointedly male: deference to the priesthood was the province of female piety, and unmanly. This is traceable to his grandfather James Joyce and his father, and was to descend to his son, the second James Joyce. John Stanislaus was little disposed to recalibrate his attitude to the Catholic clergy to reflect the consolidation of the social power and influence of the Catholic Church in Ireland that had taken place since his grandfather’s youth. The second institution is Fenianism. John Stanislaus’s affective relation to Fenianism in his early life is nebulous, turning essentially on a few scraps of information provided by his son Stanislaus, by Herbert Gorman, Joyce’s first biographer, and by what might be inferred from the course of his later life and friendships. James Joyce never suggested that his father had any involvement with Fenianism, though his own openness to older Fenian ideas is consistent with at least passive Fenian affinities on his father’s part. Gorman wrote that John Stanislaus as a medical student made an impetuous dash to join the French army after the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War; his mother caught up with him in London and brought him back to Cork.41 Stanislaus provides a little more detail, and adds an account of his father having an involvement in a Fenian group in Cork:
After an abortive attempt to volunteer with three college friends for the French army in ’70 (he was twenty-one then), including a flight to London with his mother in stern chase and a crest-fallen return, he got mixed up with a Fenian group in Rebel Cork so that his harassed mother decided to leave Cork for good. She was influenced in her decision by the fact that in view of the approaching O’Connell Centenary, her cousin, Peter Paul M’Swiney, a cousin of the Liberator’s, had been elected Lord Mayor of Dublin. She hoped the Lord Mayor would make her son his secretary.42
The chronology is garbled in the manner of family memories. The Germans defeated the French at Sedan in 1870; Peter Paul McSwiney was Lord Mayor of Dublin in 1864–65 and 1875–76, and in his second term presided over the O’Connell centenary. John Stanislaus Joyce’s Fenian involvement, such as it may have been, post-dated the feeble rising of 1867. What Stanislaus’s rendering of his father’s narrative of his life suggests is less Fenian ardour than a marked resentment of his female line, in the person of his mother, in constraining his self-expression. One imagines that John Stanislaus Joyce would have made a great deal more of his putative relationship to Daniel O’Connell if it derived from the male line. Something of this reserve was transmitted to his son. O’Connell is a somewhat marginal figure in James Joyce’s rendering of Irish history in a way that is not wholly accounted for by his embrace of Parnell as the pre-eminent nationalist Irish leader of the nineteenth century. That McSwiney, who in 1875 had a leading role in the commemoration of the centenary of the birth of O’Connell, was the creature of the ultra-montane and implacably anti-Fenian Cardinal Cullen, Archbishop of Dublin, who more than any other prelate embodied the consolidation of Catholic power in nineteenth-century Ireland, was not calculated to endear Joyce to his female ancestral line, nor, however unfair it might be, to O’Connell. There is a certain rivalry in myth between Parnell and O’Connell, but the fact that Joyce never celebrated a familial connection to the Liberator suggests an adoption of his father’s prejudices.
Stanislaus Joyce wrote of his father that ‘a position was found for him as secretary of the National Liberal Club.’43 The position was as secretary of the United Liberal Club, which had its offices at 53 Dawson Street. Gorman states that he was appointed through the influence of McSwiney, his mother’s relative. By 1877 the antecedent Liberal Registration Association was, as the Freeman’s Journal wrote after the election, ‘practically defunct. There was neither means nor organization to work the Registries’. The Conservatives in Dublin city and county had in the Constitutional Club ‘a vigorous, active and opulent association’. The initiative for the establishment of the United Liberal Club came from pro–Home Rule professionals and businessmen. The Freeman’s Journal stated,
A few men in face of great discouragements initiated the United Liberal Club. The bulk of the Whig Liberals of Dublin refused them any support or assistance because they were Home Rulers. Many of the Home Rulers who claimed a monopoly of patriotism denounced them as Whigs because they were willing to co-operate with the whole Liberal Party for the registration purposes. The men who alone would benefit pecuniarily by the change of Government—lawyers and the whole class of place honour seekers—held aloof from them. The bulk of men who owed their fortunes to Liberal Administration would not touch them or contribute a shilling towards the objects of the Club. The Club worked on, and did the work in spite of the discouraging sneers and opposition of those who should have helped.44
The United Liberal Club was established at a point in time when the contest between Parnell’s supporters and those loyal to Isaac Butt was already advanced. It is likely that most of its members were Home Rule moderates, though by no means all were necessarily opposed to Parnell. Its purpose of seeking to secure the defeat of Conservative candidates in Dublin was shaped by the exigencies of Dublin electoral politics, where on the prevailing franchise there was little prospect of a Parnellite candidate being returned.
It was in his capacity as secretary of the United Liberal Club that John Stanislaus Joyce had his most substantial political involvement, in the Liberal triumph in winning both seats in the city of Dublin at the 1880 election. At the general election of 1874, Sir Arthur Edward Guinness had been returned at the head of the poll, followed by Maurice Brooks, a Liberal and nominal Home Ruler. Had the Conservatives run only Guinness, there would not have been a contest. However, in a colossal misjudgement a second Conservative candidate, James Stirling, was also nominated.45 This was regarded by Liberals and Home Rulers as throwing down the gauntlet in an attempt to restore the ‘Dublin Six’, the return of Unionists for all the Dublin constituencies, comprising Dublin city and county, and Trinity College. The then–moderate Liberal Freeman’s Journal declared that ‘Sir Arthur Guinness has forfeited every claim to personal consideration by becoming a party to this most insolent attempt of his faction to force a second Conservative upon the people of Dublin and to thus re-establish the hated ascendancy of the Dublin Six.’46 The paper continued to denounce the Stirling candidacy as ‘an audacious attempt … to renew the old ascendancy of the “Dublin Six”, and to add, moreover, a new shackle to the yoke and degradation of that ascendancy’.47
At a meeting at the Liberal Club on 27 March 1880, the Liberals in their turn adopted a second candidate, Robert Dyer Lyons, a Liberal Catholic professional, along with the incumbent Brooks. His candidacy was hailed by the Evening Telegraph: ‘The war-cry of “Guinness and Stirling” has been answered by the Liberals of Dublin. They shout in reply, “Up for Lyons and Brooks!”’ The paper was obliged to add that his election address was ‘all that a Liberal and a Catholic could wish, though it falls short of what a thorough Home Ruler would desire’.48 The Freeman’s Journal professed its confidence in their return: ‘The foe has more money and better organization, but on our side is right and justice and that mighty force of enthusiasm. The foe may have more paid agents fighting under their plutocratic banner, but on our side volunteers will show how infinitely more valuable their unbought aid is.’49 Endeavouring to close over the gap between Liberals and nationalists in Dublin, the paper thundered against the imperialist Tory prime minister, Lord Beaconsfield, the former Benjamin Disraeli.
The contest for the parliamentary representation of the Irish capital was charged with symbolism, not only because of the issue of the Dublin Six. The Irishman noted, ‘Since O’Connell fought Dublin there has not been such interest in the contest for the city.’50 O’Connell had won in 1837 but lost in 1841. Whatever its intelligence on the register of voters in Dublin city, the hubristic running of two candidates reflected a Conservative strategy at the 1880 election of inflicting maximum damage on the Irish Liberal party and exploiting the divisions in the Home Rule party between the partisans of the activist policies espoused by Parnell and moderate or nominal Home Rulers. Thus, the Unionist Daily Express, immediately before the poll, warned against an electoral outcome that would result in the formation of a Liberal government by a William Gladstone beholden to Parnell:
To secure this support it is plain that Mr. Parnell will become the arbiter of all questions of both home and foreign politics, and that whatever he asks must be given to him. What the nature of those demands is we all know well. The property of a great class of the community is to be confiscated, and the Union is to be repealed. Anything that brings these nearer will be accepted, and in return for any such concessions a temporary support may be secured. But Mr. Parnell will make no final compromise, no binding settlement. He is one of those politicians who stride straight onwards to their goal. He has shown the House already what mischief he could do with half a dozen at his back. With thirty at his back, and with parties equally divided, he will render the transaction of all public business impossible unless the Liberal party submit to his dictation.51
The shadow of Parnell’s gathering ascendancy thus fell across the Dublin city election, in which there was no Parnellite candidate. The venerable Nation, which was pro-Parnell, complained bitterly of the restricted Irish borough franchise that denied Ireland the benefit of the Reform Act of 1867 that applied in England and Scotland, and of the Irish system of voter registration that favoured ‘the Tory plutocracy’. It conceded that ‘the popular candidates for Dublin are not politicians with whom we are particularly in love’. Brooks, though he had honoured his pledges at the preceding election, ‘is not by any means an ideal advocate of the national demand for self-government. Dr. Lyons is even less to our taste, for he is not even a “moderate” Home Ruler but only a Liberal’. The reality, however, was that, given the restricted electorate, ‘we must … put up with less advanced candidates of the popular type than we would desire to see come into the field’. The Home Rule League had endorsed the Liberal candidates.52
Whatever the tepidity of one of the Liberal candidates about Home Rule, and the lack of commitment of the other, popular nationalist support of their candidacy in resistance to the Conservatives was visceral and unstinted. The general election of 1880 was transitional, the last election before the establishment of a clear nationalist predominance, outside the north-east of the island, at the general election of 1885. It was fiercely contested. The Dublin Tory Evening Mail exuberantly prophesied that ‘the present general election will show this result in Ireland, that those parts of the country where wealth, commerce and education most abound will return Conservatives, while the strongholds of Parnellites and other varieties of “United Liberalism” will be found among the population that are quite ready to believe in the miracles of Knock.’53 The reported apparition of the Virgin Mary in the Mayo village had taken place six months previously, on 21 August 1879.
