JAMES JOYCE
Who is James Joyce? is a question that was answered by John Quinn,
who told us that the new writer was from Dublin and at present
residing in Switzerland; that he is not in good health--his eyes
trouble him--and that he was once a student in theology, but soon
gave up the idea of becoming a priest. He is evidently a member of
the new group of young Irish writers who see their country and
countrymen in anything but a flattering light. Ireland, surely the
most beautiful and most melancholy island on the globe, is not the
Isle of Saints for those iconoclasts. George Moore is a poet who
happens to write English, though he often thinks in French; Bernard
Shaw, notwithstanding his native wit, is of London and the
Londoners; while Yeats and Synge are essentially Celtic, and both
poets. Yes, and there is the delightful James Stephen, who mingles
angels' pin-feathers with rainbow gold; a magic decoction of which
we never weary. But James Joyce, potentially a poet, and a realist
of the De Maupassant breed, envisages Dublin and the Dubliners with
a cruel scrutinising gaze. He is as truthful as Tchekov, and as
grey--that Tchekov compared with whose the "realism" of De
Maupassant is romantic bric-a-brac, gilded with a fine style. Joyce
is as implacably naturalistic as the Russian in his vision of the
sombre, mean, petty, dusty commonplaces of middle-class life, and he
sometimes suggests the Frenchman in his clear, concise, technical
methods. The man is indubitably a fresh talent.
Emerson, after his experiences in Europe, became an armchair
traveller. He positively despised the idea of voyaging across the
water to see what is just as good at home. He calls Europe a
tapeworm in the brain of his countrymen. "The stuff of all countries
is just the same." So Ralph Waldo sat in his chair and enjoyed
thinking about Europe, thus evading the worries of going there too
often. It has its merit, this Emersonian way, particularly for souls
easily disillusioned. To anticipate too much of a foreign city may
result in disappointment. We have all had this experience. Paris
resembles Chicago, or Vienna is a second Philadelphia at times; it
depends on the colour of your mood. Few countries have been so
persistently misrepresented as Ireland. It is lauded to the eleventh
heaven of the Burmese or it is a place full of fighting devils in a
hell of crazy politics. Of course, it is neither, nor is it the land
of Lover and Lever; Handy Andy and Harry Lorrequer are there, but
you never encounter them in Dublin. John Synge got nearer to the
heart of the peasantry, and Yeats and Lady Gregory brought back
from the hidden spaces fairies and heroes.
Is Father Ralph by Gerald O'Donovan a veracious picture of Irish
priesthood and college life? Is the fiction of Mr. Joyce
representative of the middle class and of the Jesuits? A cloud of
contradictory witnesses passes across the sky. What is the Celtic
character? Dion Boucicault's The Shaughraun? Or isn't the
pessimistic dreamer with the soul of a "wild goose," depicted in
George Moore's story, the real man? Celtic magic, cried Matthew
Arnold. He should have said, Irish magic, for while the Irishman is
a Celt, he is unlike his brethren across the Channel. Perhaps he is
nearer to the Sarmatian than the continental Celt. Ireland and
Poland! The Irish and the Polish! Dissatisfied no matter under which
king! Not Playboys of the Western World, but martyrs to their
unhappy temperaments.
The Dublin of Mr. Joyce shows another variation of this always
interesting theme. It is a rather depressing picture, his, of the
daily doings of his contemporaries. His novel is called A Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man, a title quite original and expressive
of what follows; also a title that seems to have emerged from the
catalogue of an art-collector. It is a veritable portrait of the
artist as a boy, a youth and a young man. From school to college,
from the brothel to the confessional, from his mother's
apron-strings to coarse revelry, the hero is put to the torture by
art and relates the story of his blotched yet striving soul. We do
not recall a book like this since the autobiography En Route of
J.-K. Huysmans. This Parisian of Dutch extraction is in the company
of James Joyce. Neither writer stops at the half-way house of
reticence. It's the House of Flesh in its most sordid aspects, and
the human soul is occasionally illuminated by gleams from the grace
of God. With both men the love of Rabelaisian speech is marked.
This, if you please, is a Celtic trait. Not even the Elizabethans so
joyed in "green" words, as the French say, as do some Irish. Of
richest hue are his curses, and the Prince of Obliquity himself must
chuckle when he overhears one Irishman consign another to
everlasting damnation by the turn of his tongue.
Stephen, the hero of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, tells
his student friend about his father. These were his attributes: "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 story-teller, somebody's secretary, something in a
distillery, a tax-gatherer, a bankrupt, at present a praiser of his
own past." He could talk the devil out of the liver-wing of a
turkey--as they say up Cork way. The portrait is well-nigh perfect.
The wild goose over again, and ever on the wing. Stephen became
violently pious after a retreat at the Jesuits. From the extreme of
riotous living he was transformed into a militant Catholic. The
reverend fathers had hopes of him. He was an excellent Latinist, but
his mind was too speculative; later it proved his spiritual undoing.
To analyse the sensibility of a soul mounting on flaming pinions to
God is easier than to describe the modulations of a moral
recidivist. Stephen fell away from his faith, though he did not
again sink into the slough of Dublin low life. Cranly, the student,
saw through the hole in his sceptical millstone. "It is a curious
thing, do you know," Cranly said dispassionately, "how your mind is
supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve." A
profound remark. Once a Roman Catholic always a Roman Catholic,
particularly if you are born in Ireland.
Mr. Joyce holds the scales evenly. He neither abuses nor praises. He
is evidently out of key with religious life; yet he speaks of the
Jesuits with affection and admiration. The sermons preached by them
during the retreat are models. They are printed in full--strange
material for a novel. And he can show us the black hatred caused by
the clash of political and religious opinions. There is a scene of
this sort in the house of Stephen's parents that simply blazes with
verity. At a Christmas dinner the argument between Dante (a certain
Mrs. Riordan) and Mr. Casey spoils the affair. Stephen's father
carves the turkey and tries to stop the mouths of the angry man and
woman with food. The mother implores. Stephen stolidly gobbles,
watching the row, which culminates with Mr. Casey losing his
temper--he has had several tumblers of mountain dew and is a little
"how come you so?" He bursts forth: "No God in Ireland! We have had
too much God in Ireland! Away with God!" "Blasphemer! Devil!"
screamed Dante, starting to her feet and almost spitting in his
face. "Devil out of hell! We won! We crushed him to death! Fiend!"
The door slammed behind her. Mr. Casey suddenly bowed his head on
his hands with a sob of pain. "Poor Parnell!" he cried loudly. "My
dead King." Naturally the dinner was not a success. Stephen noted
that there were tears in his father's eyes at the mention of
Parnell, but that he seemed debonair enough when the old woman
unpacked her heart of vile words like a drab.
There is no denying that the novel is as a whole hardly cheerful.
Its grip on life, its intensity, its evident truth, and unflinching
acceptance of facts will make A Portrait disagreeable to the average
reader. There is relief in the Trinity College episodes; humour of a
saturnine kind in the artistic armoury of Mr. Joyce. There is no
ironist like an Irishman. The book is undoubtedly written from a
full heart, but the author must have sighed with relief when he
wrote the last line. No one may tell the truth with impunity, and
the portrait of Stephen in its objective frigidity--as an artistic
performance--and its passionate personal note, is bound to give
offence in every quarter. It is too Irish to be liked by the Irish;
not an infrequent paradox. The volume of tales entitled Dubliners
reveals a wider range, a practised technical hand, and a gift for
etching character that may be compared with De Maupassant's. A big
comparison, but read such masterpieces in pity and irony as The
Dead, A Painful Case, The Boarding-House or Two Gallants, and be
convinced that we do not exaggerate.
Dublin, we have said elsewhere, is a huge whispering gallery.
Scandal of the most insignificant order never lacks multiple echoes.
From Merrion Square, from the Shelbourne, to Dalkey or Drumcondra;
from the Monument to Chapelizod, the repercussion of spoken gossip
is unfailing. The book Dubliners is filled with Dublinesque
anecdotes. It is charged with the sights and scents and gestures of
the town. The slackers who pester servant-girls for their shillings
to spend on whisky; the young man in the boarding-house who succumbs
to the "planted" charms of the landlady's daughter to fall into the
matrimonial trap--only De Maupassant could better the telling of
this too commonplace story; the middle-aged man, parsimonious as to
his emotions and the tragic ending of a love-affair that had hardly
begun; and the wonderfully etched plate called The Dead with its
hundred fine touches of comedy and satire--these but prove the claim
of James Joyce's admirers that he is a writer signally gifted. A
malevolent fairy seemingly made him a misanthrope. With Spinoza he
could say--oh, terrifying irony!--that "mankind is not necessary" in
the eternal scheme. We hope that with the years he may become
mellower, but that he will never lose the appreciation of "life's
more bitter flavours." Insipid novelists are legion. He is
Huysmans's little brother in his flair for disintegrating character.
But yet an Irishman, who sees the shining vision in the sky, a
vision that too often vanishes before he can pin its beauty on
canvas. But yet an Irishman in his sense of the murderous humour of
such a story as Ivy Day in the Committee-Room, which would bring to
a Tammany heeler what Henry James called "the emotion of
recognition." Ah! the wild goose. The flying dream.