James joyce, p.90
James Joyce, page 90
A strange land, a strange house, strange eyes and the shadow of a strange, strange girl standing silently by the fire, or gazing out of the window across the misty College park. What a mysterious beauty clothes every place where she has lived!49
Aside from his cinema business, Joyce had had to deal with the continuing subsidence of the fortunes of his family in Dublin. He had resolved to take back with him his sister Eileen to join Eva, who was already in Trieste. He wrote from Fontenoy Street to Stanislaus, who suspected with reason that Joyce’s altruism would be charged to his account, on 23 December, ‘This is such a dreadful house that it is a God’s act to rescue Eileen from it. Let us try to manage it.’50 On 2 January 1910, Joyce left Dublin with Eileen, travelling back through Paris and Milan to Trieste, which they reached on 6 January.
Trieste 1910–12
Joyce’s relations with Stanislaus, already strained by the eviction crisis in his absence, continued to deteriorate with Joyce’s continuing demands on his brother, and reached a culmination in July when Stanislaus briefly broke off relations.51 Joyce resumed giving private lessons a month after his return, and in the autumn was appointed to teach an evening English course in the Scuola Commerciale di Perfezionamento.52
There was a modest but steady improvement in the living conditions of the family. In August 1910 they moved to an apartment at 32 Via della Barriera Vecchia. The household now comprised James, Nora, Giorgio, Lucia, and Joyce’s sisters Eva and Eileen. The young Maria Kirn from St Peter’s Station, a small village outside Trieste, answered an advertisement for a maid. Her monthly income from Joyce was supplemented by tips from the students of Joyce whom she would lead up the three flights of stairs to the apartment. She was there when Joyce tried to burn an earlier manuscript version of A Portrait. She noticed that Joyce would not permit his sisters to take Giorgio and Lucia to mass with them on Sunday. He remained nonetheless a culinary Irish traditionalist: his favourite food was lean bacon, cabbage, and potatoes. Some of Kirn’s memories had faded by the time the Joyce scholar Thomas Staley spoke to her about Joyce: ‘She remembers Nora’s pleasant Irish smile, and a slender head, silhouetted against the bright light in the kitchen, bent over a book or paper.’53
On 12 January 1911 Joyce despatched a letter to Stanislaus stating that he was about to leave Trieste. The occasion for this particular démarche is not clear, but it seems to relate to pupils of theirs. Joyce accused Stanislaus of in some way betraying him to ‘your friend Miss O’Brien (of London)’, whom he characterised as ‘the aforesaid Cockney virgin and comfortress of the afflicted’, and to an unnamed person referred to as ‘the preoccupied Christographer of the Via dell Olmo’. Whatever was involved, it seemed that Stanislaus was in the wrong and that Joyce was determined to press a temporary advantage that he rarely enjoyed: ‘I intend to do what Parnell was advised to do on a similar occasion: clear out, the conflict being beneath my dignity, and leave you and the cattolicissime to make what you can of the city discovered by my courage (and Nora’s) seven years ago, whither you and they came in obedience to my summons, from your ignorant and famine-stricken and treacherous country. My irregularities can easily be made the excuse of your conduct.’54
FIGURE 16.1. Giorgio and Lucia Joyce, with kitten, in Trieste, about 1910. Source: 2.1, James Joyce Collection, The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York.
Joyce’s remonstrance suggests how infuriating (if in the end suasive) he must have been as a controversialist in financial and domestic affairs from the perspective of Stanislaus. The bracketing of the sternly atheistic Stanislaus with the ‘ultra-Catholic’ Eileen and Eva, and with the country of his birth that Stanislaus had repudiated with a remorselessness of which Joyce was incapable, was magnificent in its preposterousness. Joyce’s high rhetorical identification with the Parnell of the Split, who had disregarded the advice to ‘clear out’, is strikingly characteristic. The only Joyce to leave Trieste was Eva, who returned to Dublin six months later.55 Joyce’s situation did not, however, improve, and by the winter of 1910–11 he intensified his efforts to find a more stable teaching post in Italy by applying to sit the examination for a teaching diploma held in Padua.56
The publication of Dubliners had become once more bogged down, this time as a result of objections first raised by George Roberts in December 1909 to a passage in ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’ in which Edward VII is discussed in relation to Victoria. Mr Henchy says, ‘Here’s this chap come to the throne after his bloody old bitch of a mother keeping him out of it till the man was grey. He’s just a jolly decent fellow if you ask me.… He’s fond of his glass of grog and he’s a bit of a rake, perhaps.’ Joyce agreed to some alterations. On 10 June 1910, Roberts objected that Joyce’s deletion of the terms ‘bloody’ and ‘bitch’ in reference to Victoria was not ‘effective’ and asked him to rewrite or delete the passage, which Joyce declined to do.57
Joyce wrote to Maunsel on 10 July 1911 threatening, in the absence of a response, to ‘communicate the whole matter of the dispute in a circular letter to the Irish press’ and to sue Maunsel.58 To put himself in a better position to carry out the first threat, Joyce had the idea of writing to George V, which he did on 1 August, enclosing a printed proof of the story with the disputed passage marked and begging the king ‘to inform me whether in his view the passage (certain allusions made by a person of the story in the idiom of his social class) should be withheld from publication as offensive to the memory of his father’. The king’s private secretary responded on 11 August that ‘it was inconsistent with rule for His Majesty to express his opinion in such cases’.59
Armed with the royal non-response, Joyce on 17 August 1911 despatched a letter to the press, setting out the history of his dealings over the previous six years in relation to his two contracts for Dubliners, with Grant Richards, ‘publisher of London’, and with Maunsel. He carefully crafted his letter as one ‘which throws some light on the present conditions of authorship in England and Ireland’; in his only nationalist flourish, he wrote of Maunsel that their ‘attitude as an Irish publishing firm may be judged by Irish public opinion’. The passage to which Maunsel objected was set forth. The letter concluded, ‘I, as a writer, protest against the systems (legal, social and ceremonious) which have brought me to this pass.’60 Only two papers published Joyce’s letter: Arthur Griffith’s Sinn Féin published it in full,61 while the Belfast liberal Unionist Northern Whig primly omitted the passage in dispute.62
In November 1911 Joyce applied for a position in the Istituto Tecnico in Como but was told there was none available, and that in any case he would need a teaching diploma to be eligible to be considered.63 That led him to write to the Ministry of Education in Rome asking to sit the examination for the teaching diploma in Padua. He duly made his way there for the examination set for 24–26 April 1912. He wrote an essay in Italian titled ‘The Universal Literary Influence of the Renaissance’. It was of consummate brilliance but poorly marked. The next day he sent a postcard to Stanislaus saying he had to write his essay in English on Charles Dickens, ‘and saw my English examiner, an old, ugly, spinster from the tight little island—a most dreadful fRump (reformed spelling)’.64 The lady was the exotically named Margherita de Renoche, who, as well as supervising the essays of the first two days, administered the section of the examination on the final day, dictation from Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s grandiosely convoluted novel of 1834, The Last Days of Pompeii.65 She was also a member of the examination commission.66 His essay ‘The Centenary of Charles Dickens’ got full marks but Joyce characteristically took a grudge which migrated to his ruminations on national character to Frank Budgen in Zurich. Budgen renders their conversation: ‘[Joyce] liked Italy and the Italians, but he could never forgive the Italian university (it was Padua I think) that failed him in an examination in English. The examining professor was an old woman looking like Sairey Gamp, black bag and all complete, and no knowledge of English at all.’67 In fact the judging committee deemed him to have passed the examination but on 1 August 1912, the rector of Padua wrote to Joyce to convey that the Ministry of Education had advised that its higher council, meeting on 14 June 1912, had not recognised the equivalence of Joyce’s 1902 Dublin degree with that of an Italian university.68 This intelligence could not have come at a worse time for Joyce, who was then in Galway as the crisis over the publication of Dubliners in Ireland entered its final stages. He concluded he was jinxed, writing in exasperation to Stanislaus, ‘Of Padua I understand nothing. The sooner you convince yourself that I am pursued by scalogna the better.’69
Joyce continued to give lectures in the Università Popolare and to contribute articles to Il Piccolo della Sera. In February 1912 he delivered two lectures on ‘verismo e idealismo nella letteratura inglese (Daniele Defoe e William Blake)’. The first, on 9 February, was on Defoe, followed a few weeks later by a better-attended lecture on Blake.70 Only the text of the Defoe lecture survives in full, with a substantial fragment of that on Blake.
The Defoe lecture is an arresting example of Joyce’s rare capacity to assess a writer both in terms of the history of literature and by intelligent reference to the writer’s national politics. Defoe is both ‘the great precursor of the Realist movement’ and ‘the first English writer to write without copying or adapting foreign works, to create without literary models, to instil a truly national spirit into the creations of his pen … the father of the English novel’. Of Defoe he writes with admiration, transposing his restrained sarcasm to Defoe’s countrymen. He dismisses the caricature of John Bull:
The true symbol of the British conquest is Robinson Crusoe who, shipwrecked on a lonely island, with a knife and a pipe in his pocket, becomes an architect, carpenter, knifegrinder, astronomer, baker, shipwright, potter, saddler, farmer, tailor, umbrella-maker and cleric. He is the true prototype of the British colonist just as Friday (the faithful savage who arrives one ill-starred day) is the symbol of the subject race. All the Anglo-Saxon soul is in Crusoe: virile independence, unthinking cruelty, persistence, slow yet effective intelligence, sexual apathy, practical and well-balanced religiosity, calculating dourness. Whoever re-reads this simple and moving book in the light of subsequent history cannot but be taken by its prophetic spell.71
What Joyce writes implies that there was an innate impulse to conquest, rather than an instinct acquired with empire. Joyce was not averse to the idea of national types, treated with historical intelligence. If Joyce had come to the realisation quite independently of his own nationalism that England was aberrant within Europe, he was not prepared to dispense with English empiricist realism. The conclusion he drew was open-ended: ‘Saint John the Evangelist saw on the island of Patmos the apocalyptic collapse of the universe and the raising up of the walls of the eternal city splendid with beryl and emerald, onyx and jasper, sapphire and rubies. Crusoe saw but one marvel in all the fertile creation that surrounded him, a naked footprint in the virgin sand: and who knows if the latter does not matter more than the former?’72
Of Defoe’s Duncan Campbell, which he characterised as ‘a spiritualistic study, as we would put it, of an interesting case of clairvoyance in Scotland’, Joyce wrote, ‘Seated at the bedside of a boy visionary, gazing at his raised eyelids, examining the position of his head, noting his fresh complexion, Defoe is the realist in the presence of the unknown; it is the experience of the man who struggles and conquers in the presence of a dream which he fears may fool him; he is, finally, the Anglo-Saxon in the presence of the Celt.’73
In his draft, beyond the point of conclusion of the lecture, Joyce wrote, ‘The narrative that pivots upon this simple marvel is a whole, harmonious, and consistent national epic.’74 Joyce was beginning to turn to a national epic of his own, what he had originally conceived in 1906 as ‘a new story for Dubliners’, that of Mr Hunter, which became Ulysses.75
‘The Shade of Parnell’
‘The Shade of Parnell’ (‘L’ombra di Parnell’) was published in Il Piccolo della Sera on 16 May 1912. The immediate occasion was the introduction of the Third Home Rule Bill on 11 April 1912. A great deal had occurred in the year and a half that had elapsed since the second election of 1910, when Joyce had written ‘The Home Rule Comet’ for the Triestine paper.
The fact that the Irish Party again held the balance of power at Westminster had drawn attention to Parnell’s masterly fashioning of the circumstances in which Gladstone had introduced the First Home Rule Bill in 1886. At the unveiling of the Parnell monument in Dublin on 1 October 1911, John Redmond had declared, ‘We have got back at long last, to the point to which Parnell had led us, before he and our cause were submerged in that catastrophe of twenty years ago.’76 Equally Redmond’s critics would use the Parnell precedent to criticise his every move. At the very least, the memory of Parnell was brought out from the shadow of the divorce court and the recriminations that ensued in the Split. This had a particular salience for Joyce. He did not require the legitimation of some degree of rehabilitation of Parnell to write his article, but he observed an artistic principle in writing of Parnell of tracking the contemporary course of the Parnell myth that owed much to his aloof critique of the futile—and un-Parnellian—bombastic mode of the Parnellite remembering of the dead leader. In its Irish political setting, Joyce’s dread of anachronism in writing of Parnell was complicated: it meant not moving too far ahead in writing of the past. He craved something exogenous, something objective, that arose independently of his volitional early identification with Parnell. He needed the traction of some contemporary synchrony in the public remembering of Parnell and in the course of contemporary Irish politics to unveil his thinking. He was now free to use the occasion of the introduction of the Home Rule bill to publish a masterly, politically astringent characterisation of Parnell.
In the prelude to the introduction of the Home Rule bill, Arthur Griffith, in what was a discernible shift, had begun to write more fully and freely of Parnell in Sinn Féin. The Parnell issue posed difficulties for Griffith from the right and the left. T. M. Kettle wrote to Sinn Féin in November 1907, ‘Sinn Féin says that it is a violation of national principle to enter the Westminster Parliament. Now, was Parnell likely to join in a violation of national principle? But he entered the Westminster Parliament, and what was good enough for him is good enough for me. Will you kindly point out the flaw in the argument? Parnell is to you a problem, so far unsolved; to us he is the great precedent. If you would print the Parliamentary oath with his name on it, you would help your readers to appreciate your arguments better.’77
Griffith’s support of Parnell in the Split had made him the object of suspicion of doctrinaire republicans and cultural nationalists, but he could now politically justify lauding Parnell as a means of assailing Redmond. Identifying with Parnell was also a means by which Griffith could reassure potential sympathisers that he was not predisposed for ideological reasons to thwart the achievement of Home Rule. Sinn Féin was beleaguered. Griffith had to allow for the possibility that Home Rule would be achieved,78 and to seek to win over nationalists who were not hardened opponents of the Irish Party. His constrained political position meant that he had to advance arguments that were somewhat opportunistic, sometimes crudely so. In this instance the constraints worked positively to provide political cover to rehearse his old admiration for Parnell. It was strangely complementary to Joyce’s purpose of tracking the actual course of the Parnell myth.
Two of Griffith’s articles in Sinn Féin which express views that were for Joyce gratifyingly axiomatic have a bearing on his piece. The first was written just before the election of January 1910 and was accompanied by a cartoon in which Herbert Henry Asquith stood with his foot on the neck of a recumbent representative of the Irish Party, with a spectral Parnell standing with clenched fists by his side. It was entitled in part ‘The Shade of Parnell’, which may well have given Joyce his title.79
FIGURE 16.2. ‘The Shade of Parnell’, Sinn Féin, 15 January 1910. With thanks to Irish Newspaper Archives.
The point of departure of Griffith’s article was a statement by the obstructionist Joseph Biggar that the Irish parliamentarians were sent to Westminster not to promote legislation but to block it. He wildly charged that the Liberals had connived in the Conservatives’ attempt to destroy Parnell at the Special Commission. He celebrated in Carlylean terms Parnell’s vindication:
Where the strength of England had failed, the cowardice of Ireland played out the game, and delivered her from the man she hated and feared. Parnell went, and Ireland no longer blocked the way. Nineteen years have passed since the greatest political leader Ireland has possessed since Shane O’Neill died, deserted, but like the man he was, unconquered to the last. It is just twenty years since his proud voice was heard in appeal to his infatuated countrymen—believers in English promises, credulous dupes of English diplomacy—‘Before you throw me to the English wolves get my price’.
The price of Mr. Parnell’s blood has not been paid.80
For Joyce this was almost eerily vindicatory. Ten years after the formal closing over of the Parnell Split, an Irish political figure of substance was trenchantly enunciating the view that Joyce had always held but had feared was without contemporary salience. Griffith returned to the subject following the unveiling of the Parnell monument:
On Sunday last Mr. John Redmond unveiled the Parnell statue, and in the course of his eloquent address inquired where were the libellers of Parnell’s greatness that day. Some were beside him on the platform, amongst them Mr. William Abraham, who moved Parnell’s deposition in Committee Room 15. A dozen public men stood on that platform cheering Parnell’s name, who during the last years of Parnell’s life held him up to the deluded people of Ireland as another Dermott MacMurrough and pledged their faith that if Ireland got rid of Parnell, Ireland would be immediately given Home Rule by those English Liberals who planned his destruction and used the Irish Parliamentary Party as its tool.… Twenty years after Parnell is laid in Glasnevin, the men who failed him appear in the white sheet in the centre of Dublin city. Let us leave it at that.81
