Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know

by Colm Toibin

  After his father’s death, James Joyce wrote of him to T. S. Eliot:

  He had an intense love for me and it adds anew to my grief and remorse that I did not go to Dublin to see him for so many years. I kept him constantly under the illusion that I would come and was always in correspondence with him but an instinct I believed in held me back from going, much as I longed to.

  To his benefactor Harriet Weaver, Joyce wrote:

  I was very fond of him always, being a sinner myself, and even liked his faults. Hundreds of pages and scores of characters in my books came from him . . . I got from him his portraits, a waistcoat, a good tenor voice, and an extravagant licentious disposition (out of which, however, the greater part of any talent I may have springs) but, apart from these, something else I cannot define.

  He told his friend Louis Gillet in Paris: “The humour of Ulysses is his; its people are his friends. The book is his spittin’ image.”

  Since we have so much evidence about John Stanislaus Joyce as a father, it is fascinating to watch as his son set about making art from the threadbare and often miserable business of what he knew, what he had experienced, and who his father was. In his work, James Joyce allowed a complex imagination to shine its pale, unsettled light on what had already passed into shade so that he could coax it back into substance, courtesy of style.

  As he began the process, however, it is important to note that he was tentative. He dealt with his father’s legacy in ways that wavered and moved against each other.

  In his original plan for Dubliners, the last story was to be “Grace,” written in October 1905. The story begins with a real event that happened to Joyce’s father when he fell down the stairs of John Nolan’s public house in Harry Street off Grafton Street on his way to the lavatory. He was rescued by a friend of his, Tom Devin, who was an official in Dublin Corporation. As he imagined the story, Joyce changed the background of Mr. Kernan, the man who falls, from that of his father to a neighbor of the Joyces’ called Dick Thornton, a tea taster and an opera lover. The story of the religious retreat that occurs in “Grace” was provided to Joyce by Stanislaus, who had followed his father and some of his friends to such a retreat in Gardiner Street Church.

  In his diary for September 29, 1904, Stanislaus wrote:

  The last time Pappie went to Confession and Communion was highly amusing. I bawled laughing at the time. It was about two years ago. Mr. Kane and Mr. Boyd and Mr. Chance [Kane becoming Martin Cunningham in Dubliners and Ulysses; Boyd also mentioned by name in Ulysses, and Chance in Finnegans Wake] were to attend a retreat in Gardiner Street, and Pappie, who would never do anything so vulgar himself, was persuaded by Mr. Kane to attend it too. He did so and came home very drunk for two nights after each sermon.

  When his father went to confession, he came home and announced that the priest had told him that he “wasn’t such a bad fellow after all.”

  The tone of the story “Grace” is unsparing, unmerciful. The drinker’s clothes “were smeared with the filth and ooze of the floor on which he had lain, face downwards. His eyes were closed and he breathed with a grunting noise.”

  The use of a style that is forensic continues as, having taken the drunk man home, “two nights after, his friends came to see him” as he was in bed and they began to discuss religion. When they mention the name of a priest who will lead the retreat, Father Purdon, the Dublin reader will get the joke, as Purdon Street was one of the best-known streets in Dublin’s red-light district—it will be named in the Nighttown section of Ulysses—but the men themselves are not aware of how funny this is. Nor are they alert to their own foolishness as they muse on the various popes and their mottos from Lux upon Lux to Crux upon Crux. And at the retreat itself as they peer at a speck of red light suspended before the high altar and are preached to by Father Purdon, they are comic figures, worthy of our mockery. The jokes in the story happen because of their ignorance, their insularity, the clichés they use. They have no wit, no energy.

  Had Dubliners ended there, Joyce would have taken a suitable revenge on his father and mocked his father’s friends, and allowed the reader in on the joke. The figures in “Grace,” even the priest in his sermon, speak in tired, dead voices. “The Dead” would have been a worthy title for a story in which the idea of grace is presented ironically.

  Two years later, when Joyce wrote “The Dead,” which eventually became the last story in Dubliners, it was as though he sought to resurrect those whom he had buried with mockery and distancing in “Grace.” Instead of studying the main character as though for his own amusement, he entered his spirit, allowed him to have a complex sensibility and a rich response to experience.

  The story was also based on an event in his father’s life, but this time instead of recounting it, Joyce began to dream it, reimagine it, and offer it a sort of grace that the previous story had significantly lacked.

  *

  This idea of fully imagining events that had occurred in the lives of the previous generation is analyzed in the opening of an essay on Seán Ó Faoláin by Conor Cruise O’Brien in his book Maria Cross. In Joyce’s last years in Dublin, both he and Stanislaus spent time in the house of the Sheehy family, whose father was an MP for the Irish Parliamentary Party, and they got to know some of the daughters in that house, one of whom, Kathleen, was the mother of Conor Cruise O’Brien. The figure of Miss Ivors in “The Dead” was partly based on her.

  In much of Conor Cruise O’Brien’s own writing about Ireland, there is a sense of a twilight time after the fall of Parnell and before the 1916 Rebellion when his mother’s family, the Sheehys, held power in Dublin, a time that Cruise O’Brien seemed to inhabit with considerable ease and a sort of longing, a time that is also when Joyce imagined his Dublin.

  Cruise O’Brien wrote:

  There is for all of us a twilight zone of time, stretching back for a generation or two before we were born, which never quite belongs to the rest of history. Our elders have talked their memories into our memories until we come to possess some sense of a continuity exceeding and traversing our own individual being . . . Children of small and vocal communities are likely to possess it to a high degree and, if they are imaginative, have the power of incorporating into their own lives a significant span of time before their individual births.

  This twilight zone of time entered the spirit of “The Dead” in fascinating ways, as Joyce set his story not only in an imagined past but also in an imagined future. In the time between writing “Grace” and writing “The Dead,” scrupulous meanness in Joyce gave way to a hesitant, hushed generosity. In abandoning his siblings’ version of his father, he managed to release a great deal of psychic energy, which allowed him then to experiment with form and style, to move subsequently from the hesitant and the hushed into a fictional system that was brave and comic and untempered by caution.

  He had not attended those parties in Usher’s Island, the parties described in “The Dead.” In My Brother’s Keeper, Stanislaus wrote: “My father and mother had many friends in Bray and in town, and at about Christmas time and New Year they often went up to dances in Dublin and stayed overnight at a hotel, as the Conroys do in ‘The Dead.’ ” He also noted that his father had a “glib tongue” as a public speaker. “As for his ‘gift of the gab,’ excepting the literary allusions which Gabriel Conroy considers above the head of his listeners, the speech in ‘The Dead’ is a fair sample, somewhat polished and emended, of his after-dinner oratory.”

  In his biography of Joyce, Richard Ellmann wrote:

  The other festival occasions of [James Joyce’s] childhood were associated with his hospitable great-aunts, Mrs. Callanan and Mrs. Lyons, and Mrs. Callanan’s daughter Mary Ellen at their house at 15 Usher’s Island, which was also known as the “Misses Flynn school.” There every year the Joyces who were old enough would go, and John Joyce carved the goose and made the speech.

  The quarrel between Gabriel and his mother about his marriage in “The Dead” has elements of the
quarrel between John Stanislaus and his mother when he married May Murray.

  However, the figure of Gabriel has elements in common with James Joyce himself as well as his father. Gabriel writes book reviews for the Daily Express, as Joyce did. His wife is from the west of Ireland, as Nora Barnacle was. Gabriel is a teacher, as James Joyce was. He has cosmopolitan tendencies rather than nationalist sympathies, as Joyce did.

  Ellmann also suggested, using Stanislaus Joyce as a source, that there could be another model for Gabriel, a friend of Joyce’s called Constantine Curran, and he offers some possible evidence for this, including Curran’s uneasy personality and the fact that Gabriel’s brother in the story is called Constantine.

  But it is more likely that Joyce found details wherever he needed them. He was not working from precise models. He began by imagining that house on Usher’s Island, and the twilight time for him when his parents, as a glamorous young couple that he saw depart from the house in Bray, went there, a couple united in their love of song, gifted with good singing voices. He gave his father a rich dignity in the story. It is Freddy Malins who was drunk, not Gabriel. He imagined his parents’ night in all its glowing detail; he saw who else was there; he saw how the evening moved and how it ended.

  He saw this so clearly that he entered its spirit until he began to walk himself in those rooms in the footsteps of his father. He saw his own partner Nora Barnacle there in the place of his mother, or in the guise of his mother. He saw himself in the guise of his father. He merged his own spirit with that of his father, as he would do later with the river at the end of Finnegans Wake: “it’s sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father”; as he invokes his father in the very last lines of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.”

  He moved both himself and his father out of time in “The Dead.” To do this, he needed to make a third character, who is the writer of the story, who, as Joyce with the white page in front of him attempts this grand act of emotional recuperation, wavers in his style, begins in a tone of pure colloquialism, like someone casually telling a story, and ends in a tone of high artifice that is close to the language of pre-Raphaelite poetry or Victorian prayer. It begins with the isolated figure of Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, who quickly disappears, and ends with “all the living and the dead.”

  In between, the point of view and the texture of noticed things in the story shift and change. And Gabriel’s very uneasiness, his watchfulness, his in-betweenness, operate as a writer does who is attempting to do something new. Nothing is lost on him, least of all his own sense of inadequacy, his own sense of need. Just as Gabriel is unsure that his speech is suitable for the occasion, the story itself is unsure, unwilling to settle into a single tone.

  Gabriel is tentative, as much a ghost as Michael Furey is. He is caught between two identities, his Irish one and his efforts to escape insularity, as Joyce is caught now between two visions of his father, the one he knows and remembers, and the other that he wishes to bring into being in order to rescue his imagination from a sense of narrow grievance that is capable only of debasing and maiming that same imagination.

  The opening sentence of the second-to-last paragraph of “The Dead” reads: “Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes.” In the mixing of his own sensuality with his imagination of his father’s sensuality, in allowing his own ghost to mingle with that of John Stanislaus Joyce, he banished his scrupulous meanness and performed an act of generosity. He rescued himself for the work that he would now make.

  But it was still tentative. There is a wonderfully tender passage in Joyce’s Stephen Hero, the early version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, when Stephen the son, who is attending university, asks his mother if she would like him to read out to her an essay he has written on Ibsen. When she assents: “Stephen read out the essay to her slowly and emphatically and when he had finished reading she said it was very beautifully written but that as there were some things in it which she couldn’t follow, would he mind reading it to her again and explaining some of it.”

  When he has finished, she expresses an interest in reading Ibsen’s best play. “But do you really want to read Ibsen?” Stephen says. His mother replies: “I do, really.” A few moments later, she says: “Before I married your father I used to read a great deal. I used to take an interest in all kinds of new plays.”

  In Stephen Hero, Mrs. Daedalus begins to read Ibsen:

  A day or two afterwards Stephen gave his mother a few of the plays to read. She read them with great interest and found Nora Helmer a charming character. Dr. Stockmann she admired but her admiration was naturally checked by her son’s light-heartedly blasphemous description of that stout burgher as “Jesus in a frock-coat.” But the play which she preferred to all others was The Wild Duck. Of it she spoke readily and on her own initiative: it had moved her deeply.

  When Stephen tries to patronize her, by hoping she is not going to compare Hedvig Ekdal to Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop, she responds: “Of course I like Dickens too but I can see a great difference between Little Nell and that poor little creature . . .” She goes on to say that Ibsen’s plays “have impressed me very much” and that she thinks they are “magnificent plays indeed.” When her son asks if she thinks them immoral, she replies: “I think that Ibsen . . . has an extraordinary knowledge of human nature . . . And I think that human nature is a very extraordinary thing sometimes.”

  In Stephen Hero, Stephen is also confronted directly by his mother about his loss of faith. She is fervent and fully present in the scene, a person with firm beliefs and with a conscience as insistent as that of her son. What we get from her in Stephen Hero is a hurt stubbornness, which matches her son’s.

  While Stephen’s mother in Stephen Hero is thus presented as intelligent, open-minded and sensitive, as well as a devout and serious Catholic who pays attention to her priest, Stephen’s father is depicted as hard-hearted and callous as he responds coldly to the return home of his daughter, Isabel, who will die in the novel:

  Stephen’s father did not like the prospect of another inhabitant in his house, particularly a daughter for whom he had little affection. He was annoyed that his daughter would not avail herself of the opportunity afforded her in the convent, but his sense of public duty was real if spasmodic and he would by no means permit his wife to bring the girl home without his aid . . . Stephen’s father was quite capable of talking himself into believing what he knew to be untrue. He knew that his own ruin had been his own handiwork but he had talked himself into believing that it was the handiwork of others. He had his son’s distaste for responsibility without his son’s courage.

  He was in danger, we are told, “of becoming a monomaniac. The hearth at night was the sacred witness of these revenges, pondered, muttered, growled and execrated.”

  Later, the book describes Mr. Daedalus’s attitude towards paying rent:

  Mr. Daedalus had not an acute sense of the rights of private property: he paid rent very rarely. To demand money for eatables seemed to him just but to expect people to pay for shelter the exorbitant sums which are demanded annually by house-owners in Dublin seemed to him unjust. He had now been a year in his house in Clontarf and for that year he had paid a quarter’s rent.

  Later in the book also, Stephen is abused by his father for not studying hard enough (“the sooner you clear out the better”) and for turning down an offer of paid work that the Jesuits had made him. His father calls him an “unnatural bloody ruffian” and expresses his shame at seeing him drinking a pint of stout with the hearse drivers after his sister’s funeral. (“By Christ I was ashamed of you that morning.”)

  What is fascinating here is how the tones in which the parents are described change from Stephen Hero to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In the later book, the figure of the mother will have no interest other than domestic peace, household activities and religion.
She is no longer the sensitive woman who could respond to reading Ibsen or who can argue with her son about his loss of faith. Her agency has been relinquished, she has been consigned to cliché, to the background of the book, so that other dynamics, most notably those connected with her son’s startling growth of conscience and ambition, can be fully exploited.

  These energies will allow the figure of the mother to be resurrected with haunting urgency in the pages of Ulysses. But it is as though a full confrontation with her has been willfully postponed.

  Just as the scenes with the mother are rendered more ordinary in A Portrait, so, too, the father’s impecuniousness is not analyzed glibly or easily there. The son’s relationship with his father is presented in real time as something oddly mysterious and painful, evoking a tone that is melancholy, puzzled, almost poetic. There is none of the certainty of a sentence like: “Mr. Daedalus had not an acute sense of the rights of private property: he paid rent very rarely,” a sentence that is very pleased with itself and sure of what it wishes to achieve.

  In A Portrait, on the other hand, in the scene where they have moved house, the tone is that from a book about the making of a poet rather than the unmasking of a father:

  Stephen sat on a footstool beside his father listening to a long and incoherent monologue. He understood little or nothing of it at first but he became slowly aware that his father had enemies and that some fight was going to take place. He felt too that he was being enlisted for the fight, that some duty was being laid upon his shoulders. The sudden flight from the comfort and revery of Blackrock, the passage through the gloomy foggy city, the thought of the bare cheerless house in which they were now to live made his heart heavy . . .

  When his father’s speech is quoted, it comes like this: “There’s a crack of the whip left in me yet, Stephen, old chap, said Mr. Dedalus, poking at the dull fire with fierce energy. We’re not dead yet, sonny. No, by the Lord Jesus (God forgive me) nor half dead.”