Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know

by Colm Toibin

  This scene, and a later scene in the book when the family moves house once more, are rendered in slow time. In the earlier book, we get sentences like: “Stephen’s father was quite capable of talking himself into believing what he knew to be untrue.” Compared to this piece of firm judgment, the description of the father in the later book withholds easy conclusions. Character is created not by statements but by suggestions, not by verdicts but by stray images that form a dense, open-ended pattern.

  Joyce rescues his father from the sort of certainty that Stanislaus uses in his diary and his memoir and from the tone that he himself adopts in Stephen Hero by moving his father from the private realm, where he clearly is a bully and a monster, into the public sphere. He allows him to be the man he is with his friends rather than with his family. He sees what can be done by dramatizing the friction between Simon Dedalus and a world he enjoys somewhat but does not fully control.

  Towards the end of A Portrait, Stephen is asked by his friend Cranly the precise question about his father that Gretta is asked by Gabriel in “The Dead” about Michael Furey. “What was he?” In “The Dead,” Gretta’s answer will come with a soft innocence: “He was in the gasworks.” In A Portrait, Stephen’s reply is filled with comic energy, as though his father is a character in a novel, and his attributes are something almost to be proud of, and all the better for being true: “A medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a storyteller, somebody’s secretary, something in a distillery, a taxgatherer, a bankrupt and at present a praiser of his own past.”

  But even though the figure of the father in A Portrait comes to us with greater sympathy and tolerance and shade than in Stephen Hero, he is not to be presented as a model citizen or a father to be proud of. The two other scenes in which his conflicted self and ways of confronting the world are dramatized have different kinds of force.

  The first is the Christmas Day scene that happens early in the book in which both Mrs. Riordan on one side of the argument about Parnell and the Fenian Mr. Casey on the other are more extreme and intemperate than Simon Dedalus, although Simon Dedalus makes his own position very clear, and, courtesy of sharp wit and persistence, brings the reader with him so that it seems to the reader, as to his son, that he has won the day and routed Mrs. Riordan and all other enemies of freedom.

  The texture of his dialogue here is crisp and rational. When Simon says of the church: “They have only themselves to blame . . . If they took a fool’s advice they would confine their attention to religion,” it is added that he said this “suavely.” This is not a word that Stanislaus Joyce would use to modify his description of his father’s sayings. Later in the argument, the modifying word for another of Stephen’s father’s interjections is “coolly.”

  Simon manages to serve the dinner in the middle of all the acrimony, winking at his son so as to make him his ally. It is only after much care and holding back and provocation that he finally “threw his knife and fork noisily on his plate.” It is at this point only that the modifier “coarsely” is used about his speech. After that, however, he can return to being good-humored quite easily, as indeed he can continue the argument without invective or abuse. There is no question of his being the worse for drink. He maintains a sort of dignity throughout the scene.

  In the end, it is Mr. Casey who shouts, “No God for Ireland!,” not Mr. Dedalus. In fact, Mr. Dedalus, as a figure of reason, tries to restrain him from further intemperate speech and he and Uncle Charles pull him back into the chair again, “talking to him from both sides reasonably.” And rather than hearing his father shout further, Stephen, “raising his terror-stricken face, saw that his father’s eyes were full of tears.” He is crying for the one thing that his son also will feel reverence for throughout his life—the memory of Charles Stewart Parnell.

  The other scene with his father in A Portrait moves completely out of the domestic sphere as Stephen accompanies a more wayward figure of a father to Cork, so that his father can revisit old places, rekindle memories, drink a great deal and also sell his properties by auction.

  From the beginning of the journey, Stephen is uncomfortable with his father. “He listened without sympathy to his father’s evocation of Cork and of scenes of his youth, a tale broken by sighs or draughts from his pocketflask whenever the image of some dead friend appeared in it or whenever the evoker remembered suddenly the purpose of his actual visit. Stephen heard but could feel no pity.”

  Because his father’s sojourn in Cork is presented as shameful and maudlin, he emerges as pathetic rather than strong, sad rather than bullying, tedious rather than frightening. As he moves with him, Stephen does not come to loathe his father, nor even despise him. That would be too easy and fixed; it would not serve his purpose. Instead, he listens and watches and lets his mind wander. Stray words come to him powerfully, but also confusingly, and fragments of poetry. And also guilt about how he himself feels or who he has become fills his mind, as the conversation around him in all its futility goes on.

  There is too much else happening in his delicate consciousness, and the range of his anxieties is too great, for him to be able to make the easy judgments about his father that were made in Stephen Hero. The gaze is always inwards. But nonetheless his father is not honored or exalted in this scene as he drinks with his friend. His very weakness allows Stephen to feel that his own “mind seemed older than theirs: it shone coldly on their strifes and happiness and regrets like a moon upon a younger earth.” It is not merely that he is growing up in these scenes, but rather he is becoming wiser than his father ever was, he is more filled with watchfulness and nerves and depth of feeling than his father ever will be.

  *

  Having learned to observe his father in a story such as “Grace” and in Stephen Hero, and having merged his spirit with that of his father in “The Dead,” in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce now sought to outsoar his father, to see him as if through sweetened air from high above. He has become Icarus, the son of Daedalus, but an Icarus who will fly to avoid what will seek to ensnare him, who will declare: “When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.”

  As he flies, however, he will be followed by his father, the figure evoked in the very last sentence of his portrait of himself as a young man.

  Simon Dedalus appears or is mentioned in seven of the eighteen episodes of Ulysses. In some of the earlier versions we have of him, whether as John Stanislaus Joyce in My Brother’s Keeper or in the biography of him by Wyse Jackson and Costello, once he is at home, he is fully ostracized, but when we meet him first in the Hades episode of Ulysses he is fully socialized. He is in a carriage with other men on his way to Paddy Dignam’s funeral.

  As they travel to the funeral, they catch sight of Stephen Dedalus, “your son and heir,” as Leopold Bloom points out. As Simon Dedalus rants for a while about the company his son is keeping and what he intends to do about it, this is a moment when it is open to Joyce to establish that Simon is seen as a crank by his companions. Thus Bloom muses: “Noisy selfwilled man.”

  But then, making clear that he does not see Simon in the same way as Stanislaus Joyce sees his father, Bloom follows: “Full of his son. He is right.” Twice, as he speaks, Simon Dedalus is given a good sharp line of dialogue, thus establishing him as a man who is witty or has a way with words. The first is when he says of Buck Mulligan: “I’ll tickle his catastrophe.” The second is when he announces that the weather is “as uncertain as a child’s bottom.”

  In order to anchor the figure of Simon Dedalus in the life of his own father, Joyce then quickly allows a moment in which Reuben J. Dodd, someone from his father’s actual life, a man to whom John Stanislaus owed money and whom he disliked intensely, appears on the street. Simon Dedalus says: “The devil break the hasp of your b
ack!”

  The modifier here for the verb “said” is “mildly,” and it is significant. Simon Dedalus does not shout at the man or bark the abuse; he does not embarrass his companions in the carriage by roaring at the man. However, he makes his views known to them as they discuss Dodd, saying that “I wish to Christ” that Dodd would drown and calling him “that confirmed bloody hobbledehoy.”

  Thus by the time he has arrived at Glasnevin Cemetery, Simon has already had two outbursts, however controlled, one against his son and the other against the man who lent him money. For the rest of the journey and in the graveyard itself, nonetheless, he is dignified and treated with respect by those whom he meets. When the question arises if Dignam, who had died suddenly, was a heavy drinker, Simon Dedalus says: “Many a good man’s fault,” and it is noted that he said this with “a sigh.” Soon, he thinks of his dead wife—May Joyce had died in 1903, a year before the time the novel is set:

  — Her grave is over there, Jack, Mr. Dedalus said. I’ll soon be stretched beside her. Let Him take me whenever He likes.

  Breaking down, he began to weep to himself quietly, stumbling a little in his walk. Mr. Power took his arm.

  — She’s better where she is, he said kindly.

  — I suppose so, Mr. Dedalus said with a weak gasp. I suppose she is in heaven if there is a heaven.

  The next time we see Simon Dedalus he is in the offices of the Freeman’s Journal, and once more he is in company where he feels comfortable, comfortable enough to exclaim, “Agonising Christ, wouldn’t it give you a heartburn on your arse?” when he is read a piece of overblown writing on the subject of Ireland. Soon he is quoting Byron. And not long after that he is “giving vent to a hopeless groan” and crying “shite and onions!” before putting on his hat and announcing: “I must get a drink after that.”

  Soon, however, the real world, or the world of Simon Dedalus’s unfortunate family, makes itself felt, as two of his daughters talk in the kitchen of his house, one of them remarking, “Crickey, is there nothing for us to eat?” as the other sister asks where their sibling Dilly is. “Gone to meet father,” she is told. The other sister replies: “Our father who art not in heaven.”

  Later, close to an auctioneer’s house, the afflicted Dilly meets her afflicted father and asks him for money. “Where would I get money?” he asks. “There is no-one in Dublin would lend me fourpence.” Dilly does not believe him. Eventually, he hands her a shilling and when she asks for more, he offers her a tirade of abuse: “You’re like the rest of them, are you? An insolent pack of little bitches since your poor mother died. But wait awhile. You’ll all get a short shrift and a long day from me. Low blackguardism! I’m going to get rid of you. Wouldn’t care if I was stretched out stiff. He’s dead. The man upstairs is dead.”

  Eventually, he gives her two more pennies and says that he will be home soon. Thus he has been placed in the position of a man whose children do not have enough money for food as he himself moves easily in the city. A man more at home with his companions and acquaintances than with his family.

  When he appears next, in the company of a man called Cowley, it is significant that Cowley is in even worse financial straits than he is, and is being pursued by Dedalus’s nemesis Reuben J. Dodd, to whom he owes money. When another man appears, Simon can make fun of him for his poor dress.

  These encounters soften the previous one, or offer a context for it, establishing that to owe money and fear the bailiff and be poor are not attributes that belong to Dedalus alone, as they are treated almost lightly. The scene with Cowley further socializes, normalizes Simon Dedalus.

  Up to this, however, he has been merely part of the day, another figure who wanders in the book, but in the next episode, Sirens, which takes place in the bar and restaurant of the Ormond Hotel on Ormond Quay, a building now sadly derelict, he moves towards the center. The bar of this hotel was a place where Joyce, during his final visit to Dublin in 1912, had regularly met his father, who was working in some capacity for his friend the solicitor George Lidwell, who had offices nearby, and whose business address John Stanislaus was using as his address. Lidwell also advised James Joyce on the problems he was having with the putative publishers of Dubliners.

  On August 21, 1912, Joyce wrote to Stanislaus in Trieste reporting on the jokes and stories he had heard while in the company of Lidwell and his father in the bar of the Ormond Hotel. “Pappie told them this story,” he wrote:

  A bishop visited a P. P. [parish priest] and stayed too late to go home. The P. P. asked him to stay and said that there were only two beds in the house, his own and that of his housekeeper. The bishop said he would sleep in the P. P.’s bed for one night. They went to bed. In the morning the P. P. half awoke and hit the bishop a slap on the backside saying:—Get up Mary Ann, I’ll be late for mass—And, by God, the very next day His Grace was made an archbishop.

  In Ulysses, at four o’clock in the afternoon, Simon Dedalus, in the Ormond Hotel, having flirted with the waitress, orders a half glass of whiskey and some fresh water and lights up his pipe. Soon, his friend Lenehan puts his head around the door, and eventually greets him with: “Greetings from the famous son of a famous father.” And when asked who this is, he replies: “Stephen, the youthful bard.”

  Mr. Dedalus, famous father, laid by his dry filled pipe.

  — I see, he said, I didn’t recognize him for the moment. I hear he is keeping very select company. Have you seen him lately?

  He had.

  — I quaffed the nectarbowl with him this very day, said Lenehan. In Mooney’s en ville and in Mooney’s sur mer. He had received the rhino for the labour of his muse.

  He smiled at bronze’s teabathed lips, at listening lips and eyes.

  — The élite of Erin hung upon his lips. The ponderous pundit. Hugh MacHugh, Dublin’s most brilliant scribe and editor and that minstrel boy of the wild wet west who is known by the euphonious appellation of the O’Madden Burke.

  After an interval Mr. Dedalus raised his grog and

  — That must have been highly diverting, said he. I see.

  He see. He drank. With faraway mourning mountain eye. Set down his glass.

  He looked towards the saloon door.

  The “rhino” referred to here is money. So it is clear that Stephen has money. And he is spending it with Hugh MacHugh, whom Simon Dedalus has seen earlier in the offices of the Freeman’s Journal. O’Madden Burke is also a journalist. Hugh MacHugh would have been recognizable to readers as Hugh McNeill; O’Madden Burke is based on William O’Leary Curtis, a well-known journalist, whom James Joyce and his brother knew.

  Since Simon Dedalus’s tone is usually filled with wit and texture, his two responses here, “That must have been highly diverting” and “I see,” witness him at his most subdued. He is neither the disliked father nor the easy companion; rather, he is the spurned father whose son does not seek his company, but who spends his time amusing more interesting people. Simon’s “faraway mourning mountain eye” is mourning the loss of Stephen, who has discarded him.

  It would be easy then to have him ruminate on this loss for the rest of the chapter, order more drinks and feel sorry for himself before going home to annoy his daughters. But Joyce wishes to create in Simon a complex figure of moods, an unsettled rather than a solid presence in the book. As well as possessing a talent for not having money, Simon has, as Joyce’s father did, a great tenor voice. In the rest of the chapter, as Bloom ruminates on many matters in the bar of the Ormond Hotel, and George Lidwell, whose real name is used, joins the company, Simon Dedalus and his companions move towards the piano, Simon manages to make a lewd joke about Molly Bloom and then he sings “M’appari” from Flotow’s Martha: “Through the hush of air a voice sang to them, low, not rain, not leaves in murmur, like no voice of strings or reeds or whatdoyoucallthem dulcimers, touching their still ears with words, still hearts of their each his remembered lives. Good, good to hear: sorrow from them each seemed to from both depart when fi
rst they heard.”

  As Bloom listens, the novel tells us, “the voice rose, sighing, changed: loud, full, shining, proud.” This is Simon Dedalus at his most exalted. Bloom notes the “glorious tone he has still. Cork air softer also their brogue.” Once more, Joyce, in this portrait of his father as an artist, has moved him to becoming Simon Hero among his friends.

  But Joyce will never let anything happen for long. As Bloom watches Simon, he muses: “Silly man! Could have made oceans of money.” And then in one pithy phrase, he returns the soaring singer to earth: “Wore out his wife: now sings.”

  When Simon finishes, he is greeted not only with applause but also with memories of other times when he sang, as Richie Goulding, Simon’s brother-in-law,

  remembered one night long ago. Never forget that night. Si sang ’Twas rank and fame: in Ned Lambert’s ’twas. Good God he never heard in all his life a note like that he never did then false one we had better part so clear so God he never heard since love lives not a clinking voice ask Lambert he can tell you too.

  Simon Dedalus, after his moment of apotheosis in the book, in the company of Ben Dollard, also remembers Italians singing in Cork: “He heard them as a boy in Ringabella, Crosshaven, Ringabella, singing their barcaroles. Queenstown harbour full of Italian ships. Walking, you know, Ben, in the moonlight with those earthquake hats. Blending their voices. God, such music, Ben. Heard as a boy. Cross Ringabella haven mooncarole.”

  Simon Dedalus praises Ben Dollard after he sings “The Croppy Boy.” Then the last time he will speak in Ulysses, as a mortal, will be when he muses, “The wife has a fine voice,” when he hears that Bloom has been among the company. The rest of the novel will belong to Bloom and to Stephen.

  The father will have been sent on his way as his son moves through the city in search of a surrogate for him.

  Simon will, however, appear again in the Circe episode, in the phantasmagoria that takes place in the brothel. He will be wearing “strong ponderous buzzard wings” and will ask Stephen, “Think of your mother’s people!” before, in a moment of extraordinary beauty, Stephen’s mother, “emaciated, rises stark through the floor in leper grey with a wreath of faded orange blossoms and a torn bridal veil, her face worn and noseless, green with grave mould. Her hair is scant and lank. She fixes her bluecircled hollow eyesockets on Stephen and opens her toothless mouth uttering a silent word.” Having said some words in Latin, wearing “the subtle smile of death’s madness,” she will say: “I was once the beautiful May Goulding. I am dead.” She will ask Stephen to repent, and suggest that he get his sister Dilly “to make you that boiled rice every night after your brainwork.” When she says: “Beware! God’s hand!” a “green crab with malignant red eyes sticks deep its grinning claws in Stephen’s heart.”