by Colm Toibin
“Strangled with rage,” he will call out the word “Shite!” as “his features grow drawn and grey and old.”
In the next episode, Bloom remarks to Stephen that he has met his father earlier in the day, adding that he has gathered in the course of the conversation that he has moved house and asking where he is living. “I believe he is in Dublin somewhere, Stephen answered unconcernedly. Why?”
Bloom goes on: “A gifted man . . . in more respects than one and a born raconteur if ever there was one. He takes great pride, quite legitimately, out of you.” He suggests that Stephen might return to live with his father:
There was no response forthcoming to the suggestion, however, such as it was, Stephen’s mind’s eye being too busily engaged in repicturing his family hearth the last time he saw it, with his sister Dilly sitting by the ingle, her hair hanging down, waiting for some weak Trinidad shell cocoa that was in the sootcoated kettle to be done so that she and he could drink it with the oatmeal water for milk after the Friday herrings they had eaten at two a penny, with an egg apiece for Maggy, Boody and Katey, the cat meanwhile under the mangle devouring a mess of eggshells and charred fish heads and bones on a square of brown paper in accordance with the third precept of the church to fast and abstain on the days commanded, it being quarter tense or, if not, ember days or something like that.
It is the unconcern in his son’s first reply as much as this stark image of poverty that further consigns Simon Dedalus to the shadows. But, once more, the shadows waver when Simon Dedalus’s voice comes into Bloom’s mind as he and Stephen walk to Eccles Street, where Bloom lives. Bloom remembers Simon singing the aria from Martha earlier in the day, or the day before as it now is. It was, he lets Stephen know, “sung to perfection, a study of the number, in fact, which made all the others take a back seat.” Thus his father’s guilt will be tempered for a second by the memory of his father’s glory.
In the final episode in the book, known as Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, when Molly mentions living in Ontario Terrace, where John Stanislaus Joyce and his wife first lived after they were married, it is as though she and her husband have all along, throughout the book, been pursuing Stephen, whose mother has died, whose father has been cast aside, to become shadow versions of what his parents might have been, Bloom having taken on some of John Stanislaus’s preferences, such as his relishing “the inner organs of beasts and fowls,” and some of his characteristics, such as his interest in reading magazines like Tid-bits, as Stephen, in turn, becomes a shadow version of the Blooms’ son, Rudy, who died as a baby, just as Stephen’s older brother John Augustine, the first boy in the family, born in Ontario Terrace, had died as a baby.
In the soliloquy, Simon Dedalus moves from shadow to substance once more as he is remembered by Molly, remembered singing a duet with her:
Simon Dedalus too he was always turning up half screwed singing the second verse first the old love is the new was one of his so sweetly sang the maiden on the hawthorn bough he was always on for flirtyfying too when I sang Maritana with him at Freddy Mayers private opera he had a delicious glorious voice Phoebe dearest goodbye sweetheart he always sang it not like Bartell dArcy sweet tart goodbye of course he had the gift of the voice so there was no art in it all over you like a warm showerbath O Maritana wildwood flower we sang splendidly though it was a bit too high for my register even transposed and he was married at the time to May Goulding but then hed say or do something to knock the good out of it hes a widower now I wonder what sort is his son he says hes an author and going to be a university professor of Italian . . .
*
John Stanislaus Joyce was living in lodgings with the Medcalf family in Claude Road in Drumcondra, where the best English is spoken, when Ulysses came out in 1922. As James Joyce became increasingly famous, he continued to treasure the family portraits his father had given him and wished to add to them by having a portrait of his father made by the Irish painter Patrick J. Tuohy, which he hung in his apartment in Paris. (Before it left Dublin, the painting was mistitled a portrait of Simon Joyce, thus merging the two fathers, one from the books, one from life.) Even Stanislaus appreciated the likeness, calling it a “wonderful study of the old Milesian . . . The likeness is striking.” When, in turn, John Stanislaus Joyce was shown Brâncusi’s abstract image of his son James, which came in the form of a set of straight lines and spirals, he remarked: “Jim has changed quite a bit since I have last seen him.” The old dry wit traveled with him everywhere he went.
In his book Being Geniuses Together, written with Kay Boyle, the American writer Robert McAlmon remembered a visit to Dublin in 1925:
In Paris, Joyce had introduced me to Patrick Tuohy, a portrait painter [who] had done portraits of Joyce and Joyce’s father, and he was now conducting an art class in Dublin. While I was there he took me to see Mr. Joyce, Sr., and an amazing old man he was. He sat up in bed and looked Tuohy and me over with fiery eyes, and complained of his weakness. The fact was that he didn’t like to exert himself too much, but he rang the bell, and his landlady brought barley water, and the three of us sat ourselves down to a bottle of Dublin whisky which we had brought. He assured me that he was fond of his son James but the boy was mad entirely; but he couldn’t help admiring the lad for the way he’d written of Dublin as it was, and many a chuckle it gave him. I have never seen a more intense face than that of old man Joyce.
The old man was staying in a typical boarding-house of the type I had known in New York in other years. The landlady was a none too cleanly good-natured and rather shiftless Irishwoman, who complained about the trouble and work the old man caused her. But she appeared to like his presence in the house, and boasting of her own self-sacrificing nature. Before I left, Mr. Joyce had become for me the street-corner politician and aged man about town as revealed in Ulysses.
Just as it is strange to imagine John B. Yeats in his boardinghouse in New York receiving the books his son was publishing as though they were being sent to the dead—The Green Helmet, Responsibilities, The Wild Swans at Coole, Michael Robartes and the Dancer—so, too, the thought is strange of John Stanislaus Joyce in his boardinghouse in Dublin getting his copy of Ulysses in 1922, and in 1929, around the time of his eightieth birthday, being sent the deluxe edition of Tales Told of Shem and Shaun. It evokes the image from Finnegans Wake of a “dweller in the downandoutermost where voice only of the dead may come, because ye left from me, because ye laughed on me, because, O me lonly son, ye are forgetting me!”
But John Stanislaus Joyce’s son forgot nothing. And nothing was resolved by his staying away from Dublin. His father remained raw and present. Because Joyce found the space between what he knew about John Stanislaus and what he felt about him so haunting and captivating, he forged a style that was capable of evoking its shivering ambiguities, combining the need to be generous with the need to be true to what it had been like in all its variety and fullness, and indeed its pain and misery.
That style, in all its achievement, did not settle anything, however, or stop Joyce from accusing himself, as though he were the one who had caused all the damage. Shortly after his father died, James Joyce’s only grandson was born. The child was given the name Stephen. On the day of his birth Joyce wrote his poem “Ecce Puer”:
Of the dark past
A child is born;
With joy and grief
My heart is torn.
Calm in his cradle
The living lies.
May love and mercy
Unclose his eyes!
Young life is breathed
On the glass;
The world that was not
Comes to pass.
A child is sleeping:
An old man gone.
O, father forsaken,
Forgive your son!
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to Professor Ron Schuchard and Professor Geraldine Higgins at Emory for the invitation to give the lectures and to them and their colleagues for all their kindness a
nd hospitality.
The lectures were also published in the London Review of Books, and I am grateful to Daniel Soar for his skillful editorial work.
Also, I wish to acknowledge Patrick Bower for his careful and painstaking work on the contemporary reports of the Wilde/Travers case.
I wish as well to thank Catriona Crowe, Ed Mulhall, Seona MacReamoinn, my agent Peter Straus, Mary Mount at Penguin UK, Nan Graham at Scribner in the US and, as usual, Angela Rohan.
More from the Author
House of Names
Nora Webster
The Blackwater Lightship
The Testament of Mary
The Heather Blazing
The South
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© BRIGITTE LACOMBE
COLM TÓIBÍN is the author of nine novels, including The Blackwater Lightship; The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award; The Testament of Mary; Nora Webster; and House of Names; as well as two story collections. Three times shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Tóibín lives in Dublin and New York, where he is Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of Humanities at Columbia University.
MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT
SimonandSchuster.com
Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Colm-Tóibín
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ALSO BY COLM TÓIBÍN
FICTION
The South
The Heather Blazing
The Story of the Night
The Blackwater Lightship
The Master
Mothers and Sons
Brooklyn
The Empty Family
The Testament of Mary
Nora Webster
House of Names
NONFICTION
Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border
Homage to Barcelona
The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe
Love in a Dark Time:
Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodóvar
Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush
All a Novelist Needs: Essays on Henry James
New Ways to Kill Your Mother
On Elizabeth Bishop
PLAYS
Beauty in a Broken Place
The Testament of Mary
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
The author used the following editions in his research for Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know
Beckett, Samuel. Murphy (London, 2011).
Boland, Eavan. A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet (New York, 2012).
Craig, Maurice. Dublin, 1660–1860 (London, 1952).
Cronin, Anthony. Collected Poems (Dublin, 2004).
Dickson, David. Dublin: The Making of a Capital City (Cambridge, MA, 2014).
Dudley, Anthony. Oscar in the Wilds (London, 2003).
Ellmann, Richard. Four Dubliners (London, 1988).
———. James Joyce (Oxford, 1983).
———. Oscar Wilde (London, 1988).
———. Yeats: The Man and the Masks (London, 2013).
Figgis, Darrell. A Chronicle of Jails (Dublin, 2010).
Foster, R. F. Modern Ireland (London, 1988).
———. W. B. Yeats, A Life I: The Apprentice Mage (Oxford, 1997).
———. W. B. Yeats, A Life II: The Arch-Poet (Oxford, 2003).
Hanberry, Gerard. More Lives Than One (Cork, 2011).
Holland, Merlin (ed.). Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters (London, 2009).
Jackson, John Wyse, and Peter Costello. John Stanislaus Joyce (New York, 1998).
Joyce, James. Dubliners (London, 1993).
———. Finnegans Wake (London, 1999).
———. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (London, 2003).
———. Selected Letters, ed. Richard Ellmann (London, 2003).
———. Stephen Hero (London, 1963).
———. Ulysses (London, 1986).
Joyce, Stanislaus. The Complete Dublin Diary of Stanislaus Joyce (Ithaca, 1971).
———. My Brother’s Keeper (London, 2003).
Kinsella, Thomas. Collected Poems (Winston-Salem, 2006).
McAlmon, Robert, and Kay Boyle. Being Geniuses Together, 1920–1930 (New York, 1984).
Melville, Joy. Mother of Oscar (London, 1994).
Murphy, William. Political Imprisonment and the Irish, 1912–1921 (Oxford, 2016).
Murphy, William M. Family Secrets (Syracuse, 1995).
———. Prodigal Father (Syracuse, 2001).
Murray, Douglas. Bosie (London, 2000).
O’Brien, Conor Cruise. Maria Cross (London, 1963).
Ó hEithir, Breandán, and Ruairi Ó hEithir, eds. An Aran Reader (Dublin, 1991).
O’Sullivan, Emer. The Fall of the House of Wilde (London, 2016).
Robinson, Tim. Stones of Aran (Dublin, 1985).
White, Terence de Vere. The Parents of Oscar Wilde (London, 1967).
———. The Road of Excess (Dublin, 1945).
Wilde, Oscar. The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis (London, 2000).
———. De Profundis and Other Prison Writing, ed. Colm Tóibín (London, 2013).
Wilde, William. The Beauties of the Boyne and the Blackwater (Dublin, 1849).
———. Lough Corrib, Its Shores and Islands (Dublin, 1867).
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———. The Narrative of a Voyage to Madeira, Tenerife, and Along the Shores of the Mediterranean (Dublin, 1840).
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Wyndham, Horace. Speranza (London, 1951).
Yeats, John Butler. Letters of John Butler Yeats (London, 1999).
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———. The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats ed. John Kelly (Oxford, 1986).
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INDEX
A note about the index: The pages referenced in this index refer to the page numbers in the print edition. Clicking on a page number will take you to the ebook location that corresponds to the beginning of that page in the print edition. For a comprehensive list of locations of any word or phrase, use your reading system’s search function.
Abbey Theatre, Dublin, 23, 35, 126, 128
Academy Cinema, Dublin, 6
“Acre of Grass, An” (Yeats), 166–67
“Aedh Tells of the Perfect Beauty” (Yeats), 108
Amarcord (film), 6
Ambassadors, The (James), 148–49
“Another September” (Kinsella), 10
“Apparitions, The” (Yeats), 165–66
Aran Islands, 54–55, 71–73, 96
“Are You Content” (Yeats), 166
Arnold, Matthew, 137–38
Autobiographies (Yeats), 20, 120
“Baile and Aillinn” (Yeats), 19
“Ballad of Reading Gaol, The” (Wilde), 33–34
Bank of Ireland, Dublin, 2, 6–7
Barnacle, Nora, 3–4, 208, 209
Beamish, Noelle, 6
Beauties of the Boyne and the Blackwater, The (William Wilde), 54–56, 95
“Beautiful Lofty Things” (Yeats), 23
Beckett, Samuel, 2, 4–5, 6, 27
“Becoming an Irish Poet” (Boland), 24
Blythe, Ernest, 35
Boland, Eavan, 24–25
Bo
wen, Elizabeth, 6
Boyle, Kay, 234
Brâncusi, Constantin, 234
Browning, Robert, 120
Burton, Frederick, 72
Butt, Isaac, 50, 51–53, 57–58, 59, 88, 100, 117, 142, 172, 187
John B. Yeats and, 116, 118
Mary Travers and, 82–85, 91
Butt, Lizzie, 150, 174
Butt, Rosa, 142–43, 150–64, 167–77
Carson, Edward, 88
Cathleen ni Houlihan (Yeats), 19
Chesterton, G. K., 121–22
Clare Street, Dublin, 4–5, 27
College of Art, Dublin, 29
Colum, Mary, 114
Complete Dublin Diary of Stanislaus Joyce, The (Joyce), 193, 195–97, 201–2, 204, 216
Conmee, Father, 193
Conway, Mrs., 189
Costello, Peter, 15, 19, 197, 221
Craig, Maurice, 11, 15
Cronin, Anthony, 7, 8, 14
Cruise O’Brien, Conor, 206–7
Cuchulain (Irish mythological hero), 1–2
Curran, Constantine, 209
“Dead, The” (Joyce), 205–11, 217, 220
“Death of Cuchulain, The” (Yeats), 183
De Profundis (Wilde), 23, 38–47, 87, 93, 103–4
