The Joyce We Knew Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Eugene Sheehy

  William G. Fallon

  Padraic Colum

  Arthur Power

  Sean Lester

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements

  The contribution by W. G. Fallon was written specially for this book.

  Padraic Colum’s contribution is from Our Friend James Joyce by Mary and Padraic Colum (London: Victor Gollancz, 1959).

  Arthur Power’s contribution is from an original submitted manuscript and also partly from extracts from The Old Waterford House (Waterford: Carthage Press, 1940).

  Sean Lester’s contribution is from The Last Secretary General, Sean Lester and the League of Nations by Douglas Gageby (Dublin: Townhouse, 1999).

  A Cubist portrait by Arthur Power entitled James of the Joyces, which Power originally presented to the editor, is reproduced on the inside front and back covers by kind permission of Sotheby’s.

  Introduction

  A THEME WHICH is common to these five memoirs is Joyce’s obsession with his native city. In Judge Sheehy’s account he records Joyce’s reply when Sheehy’s sister Hannah asked him why almost everything he had written was about Dublin: ‘There was an English Queen who said that when she died the word “Calais” would be written on her heart. “Dublin” will be found on mine.’

  Visitors when they came to Paris were always asked about the streets of Dublin and how the names of shops had changed. Joyce is almost petulant when Judge Sheehy tells him that a statue had been moved in O’Connell Street, saying, ‘Why has nobody told me that before?’

  Almost forty years after Joyce left Dublin, when he met the Irish diplomat Sean Lester in Geneva, he had this to say about his native city: ‘I am attached to it daily and nightly like an umbilical cord.’

  Even the carpet in Joyce’s Paris flat was interwoven with a design tracing the course of the River Liffey, as Padraic Colum noticed when he visited in the 1920s. Arthur Power observed that he had phoenix palms growing in the room to remind him of the Phoenix Park. Sean Lester, who met Joyce in Geneva in 1940, remembers how delighted the writer was when in his daily listening to Radio Éireann he learnt he had been identified on Question Time by a Dublin labourer as the recent winner of a literary prize. After he heard this Joyce stood up and bowed to the radio. He summed up his fixation himself when he said that he never left Dublin, as he took it with him when he went away.

  Some myths are laid to rest here. Joyce was said to have been uninterested in sport. But we learn from William Fallon, who was at Belvedere with him and later in University College, that Joyce was an ‘expert swimmer’.

  He was accomplished not only at the breast stroke, but the trudge [trudgeon stroke] as well. This was due in a measure to his lean frame and lithe build, but mainly to his determination in practice … He asked me to propose him to my own swimming club, Pembroke [which was the best in the city]. If he had become a member he would have competed in swimming races, but he had left Dublin before I had the opportunity to propose him.

  We get insights into his relationship with his parents somewhat different from that which emerges in the biographies and in the Stephen Dedalus persona of A Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses. Judge Sheehy remembers Joyce’s mother coming to the musical evenings which they held in their big Georgian house in Belvedere Place.

  I remember her as a frail, sad-faced, and gentle lady whose skill at music suggested a sensitive, artistic temperament. She was very proud and fond of Joyce, and he worshipped her. I can still see him linking her towards the piano with grave Old World courtesy.

  This is a very different image from the shrinking figure of Dedalus’s mother sketched in A Portrait.

  Joyce talked a great deal about his father. He credited him with being the source of hundreds of pages in his books and scores of characters and much of the caustic wit that he endowed his characters with. Yet he never visited his father after he left Dublin for the last time in 1912. Their relationship was interwoven with difficulties. There is an account here from Padraic Colum of a meeting between father and son after a five-year gap (1904–1909), where each communicates with the other through music feelings they are unable to convey in words. Some estrangement had come between them which was resolved through the piano. They had gone up to a pub called The Yellow House in Rathfarnham, then a country village on the edge of the city.

  In the big room, empty at the time, there were two pianos. Refreshment having been ordered, the older man sat at one. He played a theme that asked, ‘Why did you go from us?’ His son, ‘Jim’, at the other piano, played something in reply (he told me what it was, but I cannot remember). It was an epiphany of a sort, a showing forth of a relationship which was nearly always covered over, and Joyce dwelt on it later with some tenderness.

  Taking it that there was that almost psychic relationship between them, it is inexplicable why, after he left Ireland in 1912, Joyce never met his father again, though the old man didn’t die until December 1931.

  Joyce was given to announcing somewhat dramatically that he could not return to Ireland to see his father, because of his foreboding that he would be undone there. But what was to stop him bringing his father to Bognor in Sussex when Joyce was on an extended visit there in 1923, or later to Torquay in Devon, a journey of about four hours from Dublin by sea ferry and hired car, which could have been undertaken at minimal cost? Indeed, when he was staying at Bognor he received news of a gift from Harriet Weaver of £12,000 (approximately €280,000 in today’s money), and it would have been a not unfilial response for the son to have invited his father to England for a holiday on the strength of this windfall. But though he would receive in the next ten years from Miss Weaver a sum amounting in today’s money to nearly half a million pounds (€556,000), there is no evidence that he used a penny of this towards making an attempt to see the parent to whom he owed so much.

  No wonder he wrote to Harriet Weaver in January 1932 saying, ‘It is not his death that crushed me so much but self-accusation.’

  Clearly there was some deep psychological impulse at work preventing Joyce from meeting with his father. It could have been that he believed it would upset the delicate mechanism which enabled him to bring up, from his subconscious, material that would form the basis of his work. It could be a sense of guilt at leaving his father behind in charge of a large family as Joyce did.

  Perhaps the emotional shock might have been too great for him if he had met his father en face, and seen reflected there marks of those dreadful years, when the family of ten children had led a gypsy-like existence shifting from house to house through the labyrinth of the Dublin middle class.

  His wife Nora too has sometimes been represented as a sort of subservient companion to her husband, attendant on her husband’s every need. She was in fact highly intelligent, spoke Italian and had a working knowledge of French and German, and, as well as being of fiercely independent character, was a passionate lover of opera and more in touch with literary matters than she has been given credit for. When after Joyce’s death she met Arthur Power in Paris, and remarked as she limped to a taxi: ‘This too too solid flesh,’ it’s hard to believe she wasn’t aware she was quoting from Hamlet.

  Dublin was a city that cherished its characters, and when he was a young man Joyce was one. Colum recalls how Joyce, with his yachting cap, grey flannels, white tennis shoes and an ash plant under his arm, was out to make an impression. He was what Dubliners liked to refer to as ‘a real artist’, not meaning that he was a painter or musician, but one who creates his personality for the public delight.

  According to Colum, it was Joyce’s friend Oliver St John Go
garty (later to figure prominently in both the Oxford Book of English Verse and the Oxford Book of Modern Verse) who helped him develop this persona.

  It was solely as a ‘character’ and that partly a Gogartian creation, that Joyce was known to Dubliners of that time … Joyce and Gogarty seemed to be engaged in some enterprise. An apostalate of irreverence! The rationalism of Catholicism and the non-rationalism of Protestantism; the nonsensicalness of Irish nationalism, the stupidity of British imperialism was satirised by them in verse and anecdote.

  Gogarty, who was tone deaf, wasn’t in a position to appreciate Joyce’s remarkable tenor voice. But Eugene Sheehy recalls here how Joyce once took precedence over John MacCormack at a concert in the Antient Concert Rooms around 1902, and Sean Lester remembers that in their meeting in Zürich in 1940 Joyce talked of having been a rival to the young MacCormack, whom he greatly admired. (Joyce wrote to MacCormack in 1920 after hearing him sing in Paris ‘Il Mio Tesoro’ from Don Giovanni: ‘No Italian tenor I know, Bonci possibly excepted, could do such a feat to say nothing of beauty of tone in which I am glad to see Roscommon can leave the peninsula a fair distance behind.’)

  Concert tenor, flaneur, punchinello – the young Joyce was fulfilling all that Dublin demanded from its ‘characters’. But, like Yeats,* he was aware of the dangers of becoming the victim of his own image and in accepting the mask created for him by the crowd. He had seen many who had played the popular role left unable to fix their identity, to separate the phantom of memory from the reality of the future, and had observed the disintegration that followed. The artist must seek moments of crisis, when he will encounter the enormity of self and resist the mask offered to him by the mob, creating his own by cultivating the antithesis of self. Thus he confronts the buried self, fixed for an instant in time, unrelated to the past and unencumbered by the future. From this he can create his own mask, which he uses as a protection against that which the mob would impose upon him. Almost a priestly role. This would not have been foreign to Joyce for there is in his character something akin to those ascetic monastic figures of ninth-century Ireland immured in their cells inscribing sacred writ in a form now recognised as high art. He would recommend the study of the Book of Kells to his friends, and we learn here from Arthur Power that Joyce carried a copy of this eighth-century illuminated manuscript around with him for inspiration.

  William Fallon gives a good description here of the dilemma of many of Joyce’s background at the time. They had an inherent sense of insecurity often a surrogate of the colonial condition which undermined the capacity for achievement of even the most brilliant of them. Joyce may have sensed what the fate of some of his brilliant contemporaries at University College would be: poor drunken Thomas Kettle, orator, and MP at twenty-six, dying disillusioned on the Western Front; George Clancy (Davin in A Portrait of the Artist) murdered by the Black and Tans when he was Lord Mayor of Limerick; Vincent Cosgrave (Lynch in A Portrait of the Artist) jumping off Westminster Bridge in 1909. Joyce had no intention of becoming another aspirant writer celebrated by brilliant failures in his native town, which regarded promise more kindly than fulfilment.

  An episode recalled here by William Fallon can give an intriguing insight into Joyce’s mindset when he wrote Finnegans Wake. Fallon, a friend of Joyce both at school and University College, had been a first-class rugby back for Bective Rangers, a leading Irish club, and had gone to Paris in the 1920s as an official of the Irish Rugby Football Union to see Ireland play France. His old school pal Joyce had by this time become a world famous literary figure. Fallon looked him up in Paris and to his surprise found that Joyce had been to see the rugby international.

  Ten years later Fallon was again in Paris and looked up Joyce before the match this time to find that he had two tickets for the match and could reel off the names of the players and the clubs like any rugby aficionado.

  Some time after Fallon told me this, he was kind enough to let me see copies of Transition, the avant-garde magazine edited by Eugene Jolas which Joyce had sent to him a year or so before their last meeting. Fallon told me he hadn’t been able to make head nor tail of Joyce’s contribution, which consisted of extracts from what would later become his last book, Finnegans Wake. I read through Joyce’s pieces in Transition a few times without discovering anything in particular which would explain why Joyce should have sent what must have seemed an incomprehensible mélange to his friend. Then after a few attempts I began to get a clue as to why they might have been sent to Fallon. I found this sentence which now appears on page 457 of Finnegans Wake: ‘By the horn of twenty of both of the two saint Collopys, blackmail him I will.’

  I remembered that there were two brothers, Bill and Dick Collopy, who had played for Ireland against France in the 1920s. I checked in the records and found that they had both been playing the day Joyce and Fallon had seen the match in Paris. Then on page 446 there was this reference which confirmed my view: ‘in that united I.R.U. stade’. I.R.U. stood for Irish Rugby Union. Stade was the Stade Columbe where the match was played. Then on page 451 came a reference to Fallon’s own rugby club, Bective Rangers: ‘And I tell you the Bective’s wouldn’t hold me.’ In Joyce’s day the Bective first fifteen contained several Old Belvederians and it turned out that Joyce used to go out to their grounds in Ballsbridge to watch the team play, which is where presumably he got the inspiration for his comparison on page 499 of the moon rolling through the clouds like a rugby ball in a scrum: ‘I’d followed through my upfielded neviewscope the rugaby moon cumuliously god-rolling himself westasleep amuckst the cloudscrums…’

  What are we to make of this? In Finnegans Wake Joyce has loaded almost every word with more than one meaning, just like Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. ‘You see it’s like a portmanteau, there are two meanings packed into one word. But I always pay it extra. Impenetrability that’s what I say.’ It seems as if Joyce is demanding from his reader that the personal experiences of a writer, no matter how remote or irretrievable, can be valid material for a work of art. Take this, for instance, from page 115 of Finnegans Wake: ‘… we grisly old Sykos who have done our unsmiling bit on ’alices, when they were yung and easily freudened …’

  This sentence has three references dependent on puns. The ‘grisly old Sykos’ are clearly tied up with the words ‘yung and easily freudened’, which are plays on the names of the two famous psychiatrists of the twentieth century. The ‘alices’ most likely connect with Alice in Wonderland and the use to which it has been suggested Lewis Carroll put his camera. How, one wonders, did Joyce expect his readers to carry such baggage around in their heads? Today, of course, it could be accessed by computer; a slight pressure of a finger on a keyboard and the information is before the reader’s eye. The question, however, will still remain, how much closer the introduction of the identity of the Collopy brothers brings us towards Aquinas’ definition of beauty which Stephen Dedalus quotes approvingly in A Portrait of the Artist: ‘Pulchra enim dicunturquae visa placent.’ (We call beautiful those things which give pleasure when seen.)

  University College, St Stephen’s Green, Dublin, which Joyce attended, had had John Henry Newman as its president in its first incarnation as the Catholic University of Ireland; Gerald Manley Hopkins had been on the staff little more than a decade before Joyce arrived. Thomas Arnold, brother of Matthew and friend of Arthur Hugh Clough, taught English there in Joyce’s time.

  Newman had employed Hungerford Pollen to design the college church and encouraged craftsmen from William Morris’s school to come over to design the interior work. Joyce was to remain all his life a passionate admirer of Newman’s ‘cloistered silver-veined prose’, and never let an opportunity go by when he could praise it. As late as 1931, he would write to Harriet Weaver that ‘nobody has written English prose that can be compared with that of a tiresome footling Anglican parson who afterwards became a prince of the only true church’.

  At the turn of the century University College had a spec
ial position. It would be one of the centres of a movement which was transfiguring Ireland. The alchemy which makes a nation was at work. Self-government was on the way for the first time in four hundred years. A new Irishman was coming into existence, neither Anglo-Irish nor Gaelic, but a blend of both races. The welding of racial elements unleashed an elation in the national being productive of exceptional energy in those who lived at that time. What John Addington Symonds has written of the Elizabethan and Florentine man can be usefully applied to Ireland in the first decade of this century:

  There is a heritage of power prepared for them at birth. The atmosphere in which they breathe is so charged with mental energy that the least stirring of their special energy brings them into contact with forces mightier than the forces of single nature.

  How Joyce would have seen himself as a product of these forces is hard to say. But whether he liked it or not he was part of a literary renaissance, the end of one of those great outbursts of the imagination which began in Florence and finished in the twentieth century on the last island of Europe.

  * E. R. Dodds, the Oxford classical scholar, has written of Yeats that ‘he behaved like the consecrated priest of a mystery – the mystery of words which alone are certain good. The mask had consumed the man, he had become that which he had chosen to appear as being; in Plotinus’ phrase “he had carved his own image”.’

  Eugene Sheehy

  1883–1957

  EUGENE SHEEHY WAS at University College with James Joyce between 1898 and 1902. He had known him at school at Belvedere, where Joyce had formed a close friendship with his brother Dick. Joyce also had an early crush on Mary Sheehy, who was the very good-looking sister of the Sheehy brothers and model for Emma Clery in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.