Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know

by Colm Toibin

  The following year, he wrote: “Were he [her father] a young man and growing up, how happy he would be!—for Dublin is in the grip of the young poets—how happy and free!” In January 1916, he wrote about Ireland again: “I have always said that I am for Home Rule in order to rescue Irish Protestants from greed and vulgarity, but though you are Isaac Butt’s daughter, there is no use talking to you about Home Rule—alas! I think Irish Protestants are the meanest people on earth and have always thought so.”

  In the immediate aftermath of the 1916 Rebellion, on the very day of Patrick Pearse’s execution for his part in the uprising, he wrote to her: “It was a folly but a heroic folly.” And two months later: “These events in Ireland because of the executions are now the most important and the most blessed in Irish history. You don’t know how often I wished for your father. What he needed all his life was a great crisis, which while leaving everyone else bewildered would have found in him the statesman.” In January 1917, he wrote to her an astute comment about the American response to the rebellion: “The execution of the fifteen by Sir J. Maxwell seems to Americans something so out of date, and to be out of date is a crime in America. Ireland stands very high with every one. Her repute grows daily.”

  And the following day he wrote again with more news about Ireland: “A wonderful Irish novel has just appeared, called ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ by Joyce.”

  In 1916 and 1917, it is obvious that his letters were not receiving a sufficient response from her. But his tone remained fond, if often hectoring. “I wish you and I had a talk. I am always in vision seeing you and me sitting together under a shading tree in your park while I tell you some of what I hear in America and I hear your mocking and humorous laughter.” And in an undated letter from the same period: “I can’t understand why all your life you have put up with so many tiresome people.” And also: “I wish I had married [you] years ago. Had I done so you would now be more cheerful, or I would have become as low-spirited as you are. I think I could have rescued you from some of your depressing friends.”

  In stray comments, he disparaged Rosa’s sister Lizzie and blamed her on one occasion for Rosa’s failure to write. When Lizzie became ill, we catch a glimpse of Yeats at his most impossible when he suggested to Rosa that she send her sister away: “Among strangers she would be perfectly well. Invalids of her kind should be kept among strangers.” This reminded him of his daughter and his wife:

  She [Lollie] gets [along] perfectly well among strangers, as long as they remain strangers. If she knew them too well, she hates them. Lollie’s mother was the same . . . I used to wonder what was the matter with her and why she hated so many people and said such vitriolic things . . . At first when Susan insulted me and my friends I used to mind a great deal, but afterwards I did not mind at all. She was perfectly convinced that she herself was always right and everybody else was wrong.

  A month later, he made clear how much he wanted Rosa’s praise, as though he himself were the subject of his son’s poem “Her Praise,” which would appear in the volume The Wild Swans at Coole in 1919, which began: “She is foremost of those that I would hear praised”: “I don’t think you have studied my character. I like to be praised, and I would rather be praised by you than by anyone else in this world. Yet you never praise me.”

  But no matter what he wanted from Rosa Butt, the memories of his marriage continued to haunt him:

  I became engaged on two or three days’ acquaintance, and it was not from first love or love at all (this really entre nous—I have never confessed it to anyone) but just destiny. The Pollexfen family revolted me and at the same time greatly attracted me, and have never lost that attraction . . . I used to enjoy hearing my poor wife talk of other people. She was always wrong, but her mistakes were more interesting than other people’s right judgement.

  And on Christmas Eve 1918, he wrote: “My poor dear wife had no luck.”

  Despite his constant talk about it, he still had not finished the self-portrait. On Christmas Eve 1918 he wrote:

  My programme at present is to finish the portrait of myself for Quinn, then write a lot more memoirs, and finish an article for the North American Review, and then come home—to my sweetheart and my family . . . My portrait looks well. One day since my illness (the day before yesterday) I almost finished the hands and put a life and authority in it such as I have never reached any time before.

  It surely did not escape Rosa Butt’s attention that he had now been working on the self-portrait for seven years and that the idea of his coming home to his sweetheart had to be tempered not only with the knowledge that such previous promises had come to nothing, but also with the fact that they were both almost eighty years old.

  As pressure from his children and from Quinn mounted on him to return to Dublin, he wrote on March 9, 1919, a week before his eightieth birthday: “Had I stayed in Dublin I should have died years ago . . . Coming here saved my life. I have been afraid to go back.” When John Quinn offered to pay for a nurse to accompany him, he wrote: “I told him I would as soon travel with an orang-utang.” In March the following year, after a visit from his son and his daughter-in-law, he wrote: “I told Willie and George that if I went home I would have to bid farewell to painting and be just an old man in his second childhood.”

  In November, he wrote: “The people at home are making great effort to bring me home.” And the following March, two days after his eighty-second birthday: “Willie finds that he cannot keep me here.” Then in November: “I propose sailing Dec 3rd but may stay longer . . . Some unknown rich person through a friend has offered to finance me if I wish it, and I may accept the generosity. The portrait is my magnum opus, and I can’t desert it.”

  As he came to the end of his life, the old painter still imagined what could have been: “Had we married I would have had a great struggle with you and never rested till I had won your confidence.” And the following month: “I shudder when I look back over my life. It would not have been so bad had you been with me.” When he heard that Rosa’s sister Amy had died, he wrote: “A thin wall divides all of us from the abyss of despair. Not to break through this slender partition is the whole struggle of my life for if I get but one glimpse into that abyss my whole efficiency and power of work is gone for the day.” The following month, he wrote again about how much he imagined being with Rosa: “You are lonely and sad and I suppose old. I wish I was near you. We should see each other every day. When we found ourselves alone we should exchange kisses . . . I remember perfectly what it tastes [sic] to kiss you.”

  As his son’s fame continued to grow, and his own work seemed to have come to nothing, John B. Yeats was given further reason to shudder when, in 1921, the last year of his life, W. B. Yeats wrote a short section of autobiography called “Four Years,” serialized in the Dial and later published in book form by Cuala Press, overseen by Lollie. The four years in question were years of poverty in London, when Yeats the poet was still living in his father’s house. Roy Foster in his biography of the poet wrote:

  And in the portrait of JBY was etched all his negligence, improvidence, and superb carelessness—as well as the alarm he aroused in his children. The unhappiness which pervades the book could be read as an indictment of the world created (or unmade) by the author’s father, even if the implicit message was that insecurity acted as the nursery of genius.

  In the book, W. B. Yeats described returning from Oxford during that period to his “enraged family.” The implication was that they were enraged by his father’s indolence and inadequacies.

  His father wrote to him:

  Why “enraged family”? I remember when you came back from Oxford how glad I was to see you and hear your account of your visit . . . As to Lily and Lollie, they were too busy to be “enraged” about anything, Lily working all day at the Morrises and Lollie dashing about giving lectures on picture painting and earning close on three hundred pounds a year . . . while both gave all their earnings to the house. An
d besides all this work, of course, they did the housekeeping and had to contrive things and see to things for their invalid mother . . . They paid the penalty of having a father who did not earn enough . . . I am sure that “enraged family” was a slip of the pen.

  To Lollie, he wrote: “We must submit and pay the penalty for knowing a poet . . . I am quite sure Willie has no malice against us, but just wants to tell histories . . . I don’t really now complain of his contempt, but it should not be revived in his book for the benefit of his glory.”

  The next day, with all this on his mind, he composed his most eloquent attack on his son’s work and sent it to him:

  When is your poetry at its best? I challenge all the critics if it is not when its wild spirit of your imagination is wedded to concrete fact. Had you stayed with me and not left me for Lady Gregory, and her friends and associations, you would have loved and adored concrete life for which I know you have a real affection. What would have resulted? Realistic and poetical plays—poetry in closest and most intimate union with the positive realities and complexities of life. And that is the world that waits, so far in vain, for its poet.

  He went on:

  Am I talking wildly? Am I senile? I don’t think so, for I would have said the same any time these 20 or 30 years. The best thing in life is the game of life, and some day a poet will find this out. I hope you will be that poet. It is easier to write poetry that is far away from life, but it is infinitely more exciting to write the poetry of life—and it is what the whole world is crying out for as pants the hart for the water brook. I bet it is what your wife wants—ask her. She will know what I mean and drive it home. I have great confidence in her. Does she have the courage to say it? Had you stayed with me, we would have collaborated and York Powell would have helped. We should have loved the opportunity of a poet among us to handle the concrete which is now left in the hands of the humorists and the preachers.

  As William M. Murphy wrote in his biography: “Willie received the resentments as a Pollexfen. When he returned the Cuala proofs to Lollie, he suggested that she change the word ‘enraged’ to ‘troubled,’ but added, ‘Do not make it if it upsets the type too much.’ It was all very well to mollify the old man if no inconvenience were involved, but not otherwise. He refused to pursue the matter further with his father.”

  John B. Yeats died in his sleep on February 3, 1922. W. B. Yeats wrote to Lily:

  If he had come home he would have lived longer but he might have grown infirm, grown to feel himself a useless old man. He has died as the Antarctic explorers died, in the midst of his work & the middle of his thought, convinced that he was about to paint as never before . . . Several times lately (the last, two or 3 months ago) he wrote of dreaming of our mother . . . I think in spite of his misfortunes that his life has been happy, especially of recent years; for more than any man I have ever known he could live in the happiness of the passing moment.

  THE TWO TENORS: JAMES JOYCE AND HIS FATHER

  In his book Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Richard Ellmann quotes Ivan Karamazov: “Who doesn’t desire his father’s death?” Ellmann wrote:

  From the Urals to Donegal the theme recurs, in Turgenev, in Samuel Butler, in Gosse. It is especially prominent in Ireland. George Moore, in his Confessions of a Young Man, blatantly proclaims his sense of liberation and relief when his father died. Synge makes an attempted parricide the theme of his The Playboy of the Western World; James Joyce describes in Ulysses how Stephen Dedalus, disowning his own parent, searches for another father . . . Yeats, after handling the subject in an unpublished play written in 1884, returns to it in 1892 in a poem “The Death of Cuchulain,” turns the same story into a play in 1903, makes two translations of Oedipus Rex, the first in 1912, the second in 1927, and writes another play involving parricide, Purgatory, shortly before his death.

  In his work, James Joyce sought to re-create his father, reimagine him, fully invoke him, live in his world, while at the same time making sure that, from the age of twenty-two, with the exception of a few short visits to Dublin, he did not see him much. Since his father’s presence loomed so large in his Dublin, he would go into exile not only to escape the city of his birth but so that both Dublin and the man who had begotten him could move into shadow.

  Just as Oscar Wilde began to become himself in the very year after his father’s death, and John B. Yeats managed, figuratively, to kill his son by going into exile, so too James Joyce managed to kill his father by leaving him to his fate in Dublin, seeking, in his father’s absence, not only to forge the uncreated conscience of his race but to find shape for the experience of his father, to resurrect him, to offer life to what had become shadow.

  In this world of sons then, fathers become ghosts and shadows and fictions. They live in memories and letters, becoming more complex, fulfilling their sons’ needs as artists, standing out of the way. As Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses says: “A father . . . is a necessary evil.” And later in the same speech: “Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?”

  But Joyce’s relationship to his father was more complex than either Wilde’s or Yeats’s. In My Brother’s Keeper, Stanislaus Joyce muses on his brother’s relationship to his parents: “Every man who has known the torment of thought attaches himself spiritually to one or the other of his parents . . . in the case of an author the elective affinity strongly influences his artistic production.” In the case of his brother, he wrote, the attachment was to his father.

  Stanislaus Joyce makes a distinction between literature and life:

  In Ulysses Simon Dedalus, for whom my father served as model, is a battered wreck in whom even the wish to live carefree has become a vague memory, but if the facets of his character that are presented make the figure an effective and amusing literary creation, that is possibly only because the tolerance of literature greatly exceeds that of actual life.

  John Stanislaus Joyce was born in Cork in 1849. Like his father and his grandfather, he was an only son. The family were well-to-do merchants and property owners, prominent in local politics. As a youth, in order to build up his health, John Stanislaus’s father found him work on the pilot boats that operated in Cork Harbor. As his son Stanislaus later wrote, he was allowed to

  go out on the pilot boats that went to meet the transatlantic liners, for which in those days Queenstown was a port of call . . . Besides the robust health which he acquired from the briny Atlantic breezes he learned from the Queenstown pilots the varied and fluent vocabulary of abuse that in later years was the delight of his bar room cronies.

  When he was eighteen, a year after his father’s death, John Stanislaus went to Queen’s College in Cork to study medicine. While he did not finish his degree, he enjoyed himself enormously as a student, having a fine tenor voice and becoming involved in amateur theater. Having left college, he began working as an accountant in Cork before moving to Dublin with his mother at the age of twenty-four to work as secretary in a distillery in which he had bought shares situated in Chapelizod on the banks of the Liffey.

  John Stanislaus was a popular fellow and much admired for his singing. Stanislaus reported that on his last evening in Cork at a gala dinner in his honor a leading English tenor “said he would willingly have given two hundred pounds there and then to be able to sing that aria as my father had sung it.” In Dublin he sang at concerts and attended many recitals, where he heard the great singers of the age.

  When, a few years after his arrival in Dublin, the distillery at Chapelizod went into liquidation, thus causing Joyce to lose his job and most of the £500—over £50,000 in today’s money—that he had invested in the company, he began to work as an accountant again. He walked the city looking for business, doing the accounts of small firms or becoming involved in liquidations.

  Soon he became secretary of the United Liberal Club, which welcomed both Liberals and Home Rulers in a time when Isaac Butt’s leadership of the Irish Parliamentary Par
ty was giving way to that of Charles Stewart Parnell. The club in Dawson Street was a place to meet and smoke and drink and discuss politics.

  Joyce played an active part in the elections to the Westminster Parliament in 1880. In the Dublin constituency where he worked, the two Conservative candidates—including Sir Arthur Guinness—were defeated and a Liberal and a Home Ruler elected. For his tireless efforts on the campaign, John Stanislaus was given a bonus as part of the celebrations.

  As this campaign was going on, Joyce got to know May Murray, who was then nineteen. She had been trained to sing and play the piano by her aunts, who were well-known in musical circles in Dublin. May’s father disapproved of Joyce, as Joyce’s mother disapproved of May. The two were living close to each other in Clanbrassil Street, near where James Joyce would later have Leopold Bloom in Ulysses spend his childhood. When it became clear that John Stanislaus and May were determined to marry, John Stanislaus’s mother decided to return to Cork for good. The wedding took place in her absence in May 1880, the same month that Parnell became the official leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party.

  The Joyces’ first home in Dublin was Ontario Terrace, near the Grand Canal, the same address where the fictional Leopold Bloom and his wife, Molly, would live. Their first child, born seven months after their marriage, died when he was eight days old. The following year, when the United Liberal Club closed, John Stanislaus, using his political friends to assist him, found work as a rate collector—a collector of local taxes—in Dublin. This was a kind of sinecure that had an average salary of £400 a year, about four times the average industrial wage, and included a pension. Soon after he began this job, Joyce’s mother died, leaving him six tenanted properties in Cork, which brought in £500 a year. Thus by the time James Joyce was born, in February 1882, his parents were very well off and could expect a life of some comfort.