James joyce, p.92
James Joyce, page 92
In his lecture on Joyce in Milan in 1927, Ettore Schmitz referred to Joyce’s article as ‘magnificent in its indignation and irony’. He quoted the conclusion and said, ‘Here you see Joyce walking through the world with his one comrade in faith, Parnell. Parnell is dead. Our poet, here, it seems, is Zarathustra carrying the great man’s corpse on his back.’116
It is important to recall the temporal political setting of Joyce’s conclusion. He was persuaded, as were the majority of his nationalist fellow countrymen, that the Home Rule bill would be enacted. He had held out implacably against what he saw as a course of forgetting from the moment of Parnell’s death, but tacitly acknowledged that the enactment of Home Rule would for practical purposes relegate the controversy of the Split to the past. There was something to be said before that happened and Joyce said it, even if in an evening newspaper published in faraway Trieste. If Home Rule was imminent, it was the last occasion for the flame of Parnell to flare before he was subsumed into history. This is the highly specific setting for the ferocity of Joyce’s conclusion. It was no small thing for Joyce to countenance, even tentatively, drawing a line under the Split.
Joyce’s views were closer to the Parnellite response to the Second Home Rule Bill of 1893 than to the nationalist response to the Third Home Rule Bill of 1912. His views were certainly not representative, but neither were they divorced from the rhythm of Irish nationalist politics. The outcome widely anticipated in nationalist Ireland in 1912 did not come about. The Home Rule bill would be enacted, after a fashion, in 1914, but would never come into effect. The Parnell myth did not achieve the relative quietus that Home Rule might have brought. ‘Do not flingamejig to the twolves’.117
Joyce had written an article on Oscar Wilde for Il Piccolo della Sera on 24 March 1909, three years previously. He drew no direct comparison with Parnell. He still maintained the view that Wilde had exposed himself to fate by assuming the role (in a distinguished line of Irish dramatists) of ‘court jester to the English’. This owed something to a Parnellite nationalist calibration of Victorian scandal, as well as to Joyce’s reservations about Wilde. He did address the process of unfolding scandal whereby ‘the fantastic myth of the apostle of beauty’ that had formed around Wilde was thrown into reverse.118 What is striking is not just Joyce’s alertness to scandal but his Parnell-inflected sensitivity to Wilde’s personal myth. It was not simply that the plummeting depths of their falls were to be measured by the fact that both Parnell and Wilde were contemporary celebrities. Both had strong myths which became part of their fall, and their fall became part of their posthumous myths. Of Wilde he wrote, ‘His fall was greeted by a howl of puritanical joy’. When he came out of prison, ‘he was driven, like a hare hunted by dogs, from hotel to hotel’. Innocent or guilty, ‘he was undoubtedly a scapegoat. His greatest crime was to have caused in England a scandal.’119 There had been three attempts to criminalise Parnell’s political actions—the Dublin state prosecution of 1881–82, his imprisonment in Kilmainham 1882–83, and the Special Commission of 1888–90 (which almost exclusively held Joyce’s attention)—but Parnell fell in the political backwash of a sexual scandal.120 Wilde fell as a result of sexual conduct deemed criminal of which he was convicted. The sympathy Joyce evinced for Wilde itself presaged a certain softening. His schema of the victimhood of scandal was to become less rigid. Held apart in Joyce’s article, Parnell’s and Wilde’s falls would intersect and intermittently coalesce in the fantasia of Finnegans Wake.
Joyce’s Third Return Visit to Ireland, July–September 1912
Nora had been away from Ireland for eight years when Joyce decided that she should go with Lucia to Galway. He may have calculated that a visit would have the incidental benefit of sapping the force and diminishing the frequency of the rhetorical threats of returning to her family to which she resorted when they rowed. Nora was also charged to intercede with George Roberts of Maunsel & Company in relation to the stalled publication of Dubliners.121
Nora and Lucia arrived in Dublin on 8 July 1912. At Westland Row, as she reported later to Eileen Joyce, ‘all the family of Joyces were there to meet me’. They went round to Finn’s Hotel, where Nora was to stay for two nights: ‘Your father every time he would look at Lucia wept copiously all about Jim with your Father’.122 If Joyce had conceived of her visit to Roberts as that of a Madonna with or without child, Roberts was confronted the day after her arrival by a deputation comprising Nora, John Stanislaus Joyce, and Charles Joyce, who together, as Nora reported, ‘just pinned that charming gentleman’. Roberts said to call again, but ‘kept out of our way’ when she and Charles called twice the next day. Nora went on to Galway, from where she reported to Joyce.123
This letter crossed with an indignant remonstrance from Joyce, who complained of having received from her only a collectively signed postcard: ‘Not one word of the places in Dublin where I met you and which have so many memories for us both!’ He was going to leave Trieste for Dublin that evening.124 Joyce then set out from Trieste with Giorgio. In London he saw Yeats and commented petulantly, ‘For a wonder he was polite’,125 and Joseph Hone of Maunsel & Co, whom he had earlier deemed ‘an Oxford insipid’126 but now hoped to play off against Roberts. He declared to Hone that he had ‘crossed Europe’ to see him.127 In Dublin, where Joyce arrived on 15 July, he saw Roberts: ‘He says the Giant’s Causeway is putty compared to me’. Roberts now offered him the option of publication by Maunsel with the offending paragraphs of ‘Ivy Day’ and ‘An Encounter’ deleted and replaced by asterisks, with a preface by Joyce, or that Joyce would himself take over the publication, bringing the book bound and printed over to London to be issued by Simpkin Marshall on commission.128 Roberts wrote shortly afterwards varying the latter proposal, suggesting that ‘the best way out of the deadlock would be for you to offer the printed sheets to Grant Richards’.129
Of Joyce’s arrival in Galway, Nora later reported proudly to Eileen in Trieste,
I suppose it was a great surprise to you when you received my postcard saying I was leaving for Ireland. What must it have been like when you heard Jim was coming. well what have you to say to Jim now after all our little squabbles he could not live without me for a month can you imagine my joy when I received a telegram a week after Jim and georgie on their way it seems to me that he can do wonders. he sent me a wire from the boat and it out on the deep sea at midnight, but to make a long story short he arrived in Galway on a Tuesday night with Georgie all the people here were talking about him for running after me.130
In Galway Joyce cycled out to Oughterard and visited the graveyard which is the fictional burial place of Michael Furey in ‘The Dead’, though Nora’s old love, Michael Bodkin, was buried in Rahoon.131 He went with Nora to the Galway races.132 He pondered the history of Galway, through a perusal of James Hardiman’s History of the Town and County of Galway (1820), considering the interface of the new and old Galways, and the street names which ‘recall the connections of the city with Latin Europe’. He interested himself in what was an old political chestnut, the prospects for Galway as a transatlantic port. They travelled by steamboat to Aranmor, ‘the holy island that sleeps like a large shark under the grey waters of the Atlantic Ocean which the islanders call the old sea.’ The fruits of his travels, historical research, and ethnographic reveries were two articles that appeared in Il Piccolo della Sera: ‘The City of the Tribes: Italian Memories of an Irish Port’ (published 11 August 1912) and ‘The Mirage of the Fisherman of Aran: England’s Safety Valve in Case of War’ (published 5 September 1912), which dwelt once more on Irish saints. On Inishmore he and Nora had the encounter that gives the title to the latter piece, in which he affirms his counter-revivalist perception of the antecedent Gaelic culture as vanished:
We halt, uncertain, in one of the steep laneways. An islander, who speaks an English all of his own, bids us good day, adding that it had been a horrible summer, thanks be to God. The phrase which at first seems to be one of the usual Irish blunders comes, rather, from the inmost heart of human resignation. The man who said it bears a princely name, O’Flaherty, the name which the young Oscar Wilde proudly had printed on the cover of his first book. But time and the wind have razed to the ground the civilization to which he belongs—the sacred oaken groves of the island, the principality of his forefathers, his language and perhaps the name of that Aran hermit [Columba] who used to be called the dove of the church. Around the shrubs growing with difficulty on the hillocks of the island, his imagination has woven legends and fables that reveal the hereditary taint of his psyche. Under his apparent simplicity there is something sceptical, humorous, spectral. He looks away when he has spoken and lets the enthusiastic scholar note down in his pocket-book, the amazing fact that it was under yonder whitethorn bush that Joseph of Arimathea cut his walking stick.133
As the steamboat plies back to Galway, Joyce, perhaps remembering the climate of Trieste that turned men to butter, described a moment of serenity on this fraught final visit to Ireland: ‘The rain is falling on the islands and on the sea. It is raining as it can rain only in Ireland.’ A girl was noisily flirting with a deckhand, ‘holding him on her knees’.134
Joyce was also involved in a comical journalistic errand which would find its way into Ulysses. Joyce in Trieste was friendly with, and intrigued as much as he was bored by, Henry N. Blackwood Price, an Ulster Protestant and assistant manager of the Eastern Telegraph Company. An outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Ireland in July led to an embargo on the export of Irish cattle to Britain. Blackwood Price was much exercised over a treatment for foot-and-mouth disease which had been applied in the Austrian province of Styria. He wanted Joyce to publicise this in Ireland and wrote repeatedly on the subject to him. Joyce wrote to William Field, the nationalist member of Parliament for the St Patrick’s Division of Dublin and the president of the Irish Cattle Trader’s Society. Field, as it happened, was the Irish parliamentarian who remained most closely involved in the commemorations of Parnell. Joyce forwarded to Field a letter from Blackwood Price which opened with a reference to ‘my friend, Professor Joyce’. Field had the letter published in the Evening Telegraph of 19 August 1912.135 Ellsworth Mason and Ellmann included in The Critical Writings of James Joyce (1959) a lengthy sub-leader in the Freeman’s Journal of 10 September 1912 headed ‘Politics and Cattle Disease’.136 The false attribution of its authorship to Joyce, repeated in Ellmann’s biography,137 arose from Charles Joyce’s incorrect report to Stanislaus in a letter of 6 September 1912 that ‘Jim wrote a sub-editorial today for the Freeman about the Styrian cure for the foot-and-mouth disease.’138 Joyce’s authorship of what was a weary defence of the Irish Party on the subject of foot-and-mouth disease was textually never even faintly plausible and it is odd that it remained unchallenged for so long.139
In Trieste there was a further rent crisis, as the landlord demanded possession of the Joyces’ apartment where Eileen was staying. Stanislaus had ultimately to rent an apartment at 4 Via Donato Bramante—where Joyce and Nora were to live on their return until they left Trieste—and had to move across their possessions. Joyce’s response from Galway was grandiosely insouciant.140 The crisis which actively engaged Joyce’s attention was that of his negotiations with Roberts over the publication of Dubliners, which now entered their final phase. Roberts wrote to Joyce in Galway. He now gallingly claimed to have come to the realisation that the drift of the book was anti-Irish, and therefore not in keeping with his aims as an Irish publisher. Joyce arrived back in Dublin from Galway alone on the evening of 16 August. There followed an extraordinary three weeks of negotiations with Roberts, whose grounds of objections were constantly shifting and demands increasing.
Joyce had retained a solicitor, George Lidwell, who had some connection with his father. Lidwell, in his initial advice to Joyce, was concerned that ‘An Encounter’ could attract prosecution:
It would be well to remember that although these paragraphs in your book might possibly escape notice that there is at present in existence in this city a Vigilance Committee whose object is to seek out and suppress all writings of immoral tendencies and I am of opinion that if the attention of the Authorities be drawn to these paragraphs it is likely they would yield to the pressure of this body and prosecute. Whether a conviction could be obtained is another matter altogether. But I would advise you to take no risks and under the circumstances either delete or entirely alter the paragraphs in question.141
One wonders if this was not a play by a weary solicitor who felt the best he could do for his client was to urge him to compromise. Hone recalled somewhat vaguely that Maunsel published tracts on behalf of Lady Aberdeen, the wife of the Lord Lieutenant, in her campaign against tuberculosis, and thought this may have been a consideration, though Roberts denied to Ellmann, possibly truthfully for once, that this was an influence.142 The account Stanislaus sent to Constantine Curran almost half a century later is suggestive in its portrayal of the ‘two masters’ in operation, the objective collusion of the British government in Ireland and the Catholic Church or its lay zealots, as it bore on the publication of Dubliners:
Roberts told Jim that he had no end of trouble with a certain Vigilance Committee and though he was as shifty as they make ’em that fits in with the rest of the story. He mentioned people who were supposed to be on the Committee. I vaguely remember Lady Aberdeen, some priests and priests’s creatures … who all got in on the good cause. Why should Roberts himself have broken his contract to publish a book that promised to be at least as successful as the others he had published unless he too had yielded to pressure? Falconer, besides his official work for the Crown, did a lot of printing for Catholic Societies.143
It was Joyce’s solicitor who, in the correspondence that survives, had raised the spectre of the Vigilance Committee. It is a curious circumstance that the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland from 1905 to 1915, Lord Aberdeen, presided with his wife, Lady Aberdeen, over the National Vigilance Association, the largest group promoting social purity in Britain, which had a branch in Dublin, the Dublin White Cross Vigilance Association. The Irish Vigilance Association, composed predominantly of Catholics, was established in 1911, to which Aberdeen lent his patronage,144 but it lacked influence until the establishment of the Irish state, when it was aligned with the Legion of Mary. Katherine Mullin has written, ‘The Irish Catholic purity movement was, then, oddly belated.… Only when a Catholic Free State was established did a Catholic purity movement thrive in Ireland; conversely, before 1922, purity work was in the main carried out by a Protestant evangelical satellite of a British organisation.’145 From the perspective of the Joyce brothers, it was hard not to make something of the cross-contamination of Protestant and Catholic moralism and institutional crystallisation of the ‘two masters’. Joyce expressed himself with lofty tentativeness on the subject, subsuming it into his own myth, in an account of his publication history (‘the story of my books is very strange’) he sent to Carlo Linati in 1919. He wrote of the ‘burning’ in Dublin of ‘the whole first edition of 1000 copies’ of Dubliners: ‘Some say it was the doing of priests, some of enemies, others of the then Viceroy or his consort, Countess Aberdeen. Altogether it is a mystery.’146
Whatever the matrix of specific influences to which he was subject, Roberts saw trouble in a book that potentially affronted Irish middle-class susceptibilities, as well as a more unpredictably volatile maverick fringe. The attitude of Kettle was in this respect emblematic. Stanislaus Joyce recalled in his principal memoir of his brother, ‘Tom Kettle … declared against the book. He kept saying, “Oh, I’ll slate that book when it comes out, I’ll slate it!” That was a fair fight that my brother accepted, and that Kettle, by the by, would have lost had the First World War not claimed him as one of its wasted victims. My brother pointed out that was an actual experience, but Kettle waved the reply aside. “I know”, he said, “we have all met him.”’147
Joyce did not refer in his correspondence to Kettle’s comments. There is no reason, however, to doubt Stanislaus’s account, which is consistent with an entry in Joseph Holloway’s diary recording that Kettle considered ‘An Encounter’ to be ‘beyond anything in its outspokenness he had ever read’.148 In his much later account to Curran, Stanislaus also stated that when Joyce was thinking of publishing Dubliners in Trieste, he went around the principal booksellers of Dublin to ask if they would retail the book. Their response was friendly, but ‘they all hesitated when they heard the facts’.149
On 21 August, Roberts demanded third-party indemnities to publish the book which Joyce could not provide. He then said he would act on his legal advice and not publish the book. Joyce agreed to omit ‘An Encounter’ from the book subject to four conditions, of which the last was ‘that the book be published by you not later than 6th October 1912.’150 The final date of publication Joyce had nominated was that of the anniversary of Parnell’s death. This was a characteristic Parnellite flourish on Joyce’s part that in its political irony mitigated the concession he was making. Pointedly asserting the political correlation between the content of Dubliners and the history of its thwarted publication, it reflected the prominent part that objections to ‘Ivy Day’ had played in the first phase of the resistance he had encountered to the publication of Dubliners. The hommage to Parnell was, in the highly charged circumstances in which it was rendered, a striking expression of the depth of Joyce’s personal and political identification with the dead Irish leader.
