The Early Joyce and the Writing of Exiles

Transcription

1 The Early Joyce and the Writing of Exiles Nick De Marco ARACNE

2 Copyright MMVIII ARACNE editrice S.r.l. via Raffaele Garofalo, 133 a/b Roma (06) ISBN I diritti di traduzione, di memorizzazione elettronica, di riproduzione e di adattamento anche parziale, con qualsiasi mezzo, sono riservati per tutti i Paesi. Non sono assolutamente consentite le fotocopie senza il permesso scritto dell Editore. I edizione: luglio 2008

3 Contents Acknoledgements 7 Preface 9 Part I The Artist as Seer ( ) 17 Chapter One Young Joyce: Forging an Identity 1.1. Clongowes Wood College ( ) Belvedere College ( ) University College ( ) 26 Chapter Two Joyful Joyce : Mastering the Modern Masters 2.1. Drama and Life (1900) The Influence of Henrik Ibsen Emulating the Nolan and Pescarese The Teutonic Touch: Wagner and Hauptmann 58 Part II The Artist as Observer ( ) 67 Chapter Three Parisian Joyce: A First Taste of Exile 3.1. Paris Notebook and Reviews The Early Poems and Chamber Music The First Version of A Portrait of the Artist 79 Chapter Four Mediterranean Joyce: The Struggling Expatriate 4.1. The Pola Notebook and the Conception of Epiphany Dubliners and The Dead 88

4 6 Contents Chapter Five Journalistic Joyce: Dissecting the Detail for Il Piccolo della Sera 5.1. Irish Lecturer and Missionary Exile, Dante and Cuckoldry 103 Part III The Artist as Jealous Egomaniac ( ) 107 Chapter Six Regenerated Joyce: From Stephen Daedalus to Stephen Dedalus 6.1. Stephen Hero The First Three Chapters of A Portrait The Last Two Chapters of A Portrait The Cuckolded Exile? 122 Chapter Seven Critical Joyce: Lecturer and Essayist 7.1. Verismo ed idealismo nella letteratura inglese The Paduan Papers Parnell Revisited, Irish Idylls and a Final Salute 138 Chapter Eight Doubting Joyce: Notes to Exiles and Giacomo Joyce 8.1. The Shadow of Ibsen The Buffalo and Cornell Manuscripts Giacomo Joyce 151 Part IV The Artist as Dramatist ( ) 155 Chapter Nine Gnostic Joyce: The World of the Demiurge 9.1. A Portrait of the Creator as a Botched Artist Exiles: The Drama of Unrelated Relationships Exiles: To Stage or not to Stage? 175 Bibliography 193 Index of Proper Names 201

5 Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to the Editors of the Series Studi di Anglistica, Professors Leo Marchetti and Francesco Marroni for the opportunity of contributing to their very successful series. A special thanks to Marzia Di Noia, doctorate student and, for the occasion, invaluable research assistant.

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7 Preface Though more than enough has been said on individual works written by Joyce early in his literary career, few attempts have been made to see them as successive, evolving stages in the development and consolidation of an aesthetic theory. What I find even more surprising, is the fact that very little critical attention has been given to the shaping or forging of this forma mentis that went on to create the masterpieces that we are all familiar with. I find this both amusing and ironic considering that someone like James Joyce who considered himself, or his own mind, the only proper object of study and one of the very few writers who put such strong emphasis on the idea of conception, gestation and embryonic growth, did not stimulate sufficient critical interest with regards to psychological or biological origins this, notwithstanding Joyce s quasi-obsession with infancy, adolescence and youth. The present study does not even remotely consider the possibility of filling this gap. It merely intends to suggest the feasibility of approaching the early Joyce from his own academic point of view. This approach necessarily highlights the successive stages of his formal education because it is this same development that determines the growth not only of his aesthetic theory as such, but also, and more importantly, of his gradual awareness of the artist-creator model. In this way, it becomes possible to link together, in a continuous chain of chronological development, all of the various influences that shaped and forged his mind while still a young man. These influences, however, were not all intellectual or academic in nature. His character and mode of being was also greatly influenced by his family situation and financial position. The University and the home(s) are the two poles that form the axis around which his life rotates during his early years. It becomes necessary, therefore, to understand how, and to what extent, these two realities influenced each other. These

8 10 Preface considerations, then, determine the structure of the book. Since Joyce s biographical background is deemed as important as his intellectual growth, or more precisely, shapes and defines this intellectual growth, a chronological approach, as mentioned, becomes necessary doubly so if we take into account the extreme self-consciousness and acute sensibilities of the very young wouldbe artist. The second general problematic raised in this study concerns Joyce s motivations in writing Exiles. This play defines both a point of arrival and a new beginning in Joyce s artistic development. Having completed Dubliners and A Portrait Joyce was just beginning to revise the first episodes of Ulysses in Exiles, then, written between April 1914 and July 1915, represents an important watershed defining a kind of chronological division between the early Joyce and the mature artist. Since the contrast between these two phases is more than apparent, an explanation is attempted to show how Exiles serves as a bridge or transitional passage from one aesthetic paradigm to another. Before Exiles was written, Joyce was the self-centred, self-conscious, timid and tentatively inconclusive artist concerned with problems of aesthetics, stylistics and their formal implementations; after the writing of Exiles, Joyce is the self-centred, self-conscious, confident, wildly boisterous, extroverted artist fully capable of manipulating and adapting aesthetics and stylistic devices to his own ends. This shift in attitude, if not in narrative techniques, is explained by the fact that Joyce has succeeded in exorcising some of his private demons: his bizarre sense of jealousy and his irrational, morbid fear of being cuckolded. These same themes are amply treated in Ulysses but from a tranquil, aloof, wholly impersonal point of view. The early Joyce and the writing of Exiles, as reflected in the title of this book, aims to distinguish, then, the mature artist from the apprenticeship period, which includes the writing of A Portrait. This is not to suggest, of course, that this novel is, in any way, defective or formally flawed. On the contrary, as evidenced in my discussion of the novel in Chapter Six, I try to examine both its technical merits as well as its thematic structure. What I do suggest is that Joyce is here still concerned

9 Preface 11 with the apprentice-artist or potential creator. He is still immersed in the theoretical world of Thomistic thought and poetic composition. Everything is potential but very little becomes actual. In Exiles, the dramatic mode enables him to enact his theories as well as his phobias. The artist becomes craftsman as well. He makes things happen. He confronts issues. He experiences directly the emotional impact of certain actions and/or ideas. The influence of Ibsen is palpable but Joyce s brand of naturalism is not as raw. The characters tend to hold back, to refrain from certain words or statements that might threaten their psychic and emotional survival. In this play, Joyce achieves a sort of equilibrium between theory and practice, abstract idealism and the concrete situation, the ideal and the real. And this equilibrium gives him peace and confidence in his own ability to deal with and successfully resolve the vicissitudes present in daily experience. Jealousy and cuckoldry are drained of their power to intoxicate him; they become precious themes to employ at will in the making of Ulysses. Exiles frees Joyce to create the kind of world Stephen Dedalus could never create because frozen in his youth and immobile in his inability to bridge theory to practice. Joyce needed first to create Richard Rowan, the protagonist of Exiles a middleaged artist capable of doing; capable of acting out his theories before he could go on to develop the model of the artist that would animate Ulysses. Structurally divided into four Parts, the book analyzes the figure of the artist from different perspectives, paralleling Joyce s development of his conception of the artist figure. Starting from the premise that Joyce is Stephen Dedalus, a theory first advanced in the 1950 s by David Daiches, Edmund Wilson, William York Tindall, William Empson and reinforced by the biographical research of Richard Ellmann, the thesis is advanced that the early Joyce reaches maturity with the writing of Exiles. Thus, the period involved must necessarily begin with childhood since Joyce was a born artist. In Part I, for example, The Artist as Seer, Joyce s family life as well as his Jesuit education in the various schools, starting from Clongowes Wood College to University College, is documented in order to emphasize how the young artist interpreted

10 12 Preface and made use of his home and school experiences in his fiction. The second Chapter in particular outlines the various academic influences that formed Joyce s conception of the artist: Ibsen, Bruno, d Annunzio, Wagner and Hauptmann. Through these writers, but also from Shelley, Joyce derived the idea of the artist as seer. As his artistic development progressed this image of the artist as prophet and seer, superman and occult sage was gradually modified but never erased. In Part II, we can see how Joyce begins to make use of his academic knowledge. Now a voluntary exile in Paris, he begins to map out his artistic career writing poems, studying aesthetics and publishing book reviews for the Dublin Express. Back in Ireland, before his second and considerably longer exile, he makes his first attempt at writing a novel. It was not very successful but, in the meantime, he did succeed in writing some excellent short stories. As a short story writer, he was forced to adapt his image of the artist from seer to observer. The meticulously detailed descriptions of the Dublin landscape and its paralyzed citizens required the use of a magnifying glass rather than a telescope of the seerartist. This Part also deals with Joyce s developing aesthetics and the Pola Notebook is analyzed extensively in order to show how the concept of Epiphany undergoes a radical change and is finally abandoned, as a means of narrative expression, precisely because it lacks an observational or objective scale of reference. This conclusion is, in part, due to the fact that at this same time Joyce was involved in writing articles for the local Trieste newspaper. This journalistic experience of sticking to facts, events, places etc. accentuated a kind of objectivism or external point of reference, which was put to good use in the short stories but was detrimental to the development of the epiphany as a subjective mode of expression. Closely related to journalism is Joyce s experience in delivering lectures on Irish politics and culture. This involvement with Ireland, trying to explain its many contradictions to his Triestine audience, succeeded in altering his own views concerning its history and present condition. He no longer viewed Ireland as the saw that eats its farrow but rather as a victim of its own ignorance and insularity.

11 Preface 13 In Part III, these various influences are brought together and examined in relation to the writing of A Portrait. As evidenced by the heading The Artist as Jealous Egomaniac, the focus is on the character of Joyce both as artist and husband. Immediately after finishing writing this novel, which is the culmination of his previous theoretical, critical and aesthetic doctrines, Joyce begins to pursue a different artistic direction. This direction is no longer dominated by Thomistic or Aristotelian paradigms but by a much more physical, emotional, Ibsenesque theme, that of jealousy and cuckoldry. As we can see from the writing of Giacomo Joyce and the Notes for Exiles, Joyce is now fully engaged in a battle with his own private trolls. Before achieving the kind of detachment necessary for the creation of any artistic work, he had to come to terms with these personal obsessions. Joyce s relationship with his wife, Nora Barnacle, whom he legally married on July 4, 1931 in a London Registry Office, were never idyllic chiefly because of their permanent financial precariousness but also on account of Joyce s jealousy, drinking bouts and artistic intransigence. Yet, in the memories-fantasies of Giacomo Joyce, it is to her that he calls for help to help him resist the siren call of a mysterious girl towards whom he felt physically attracted. Nora is both his anchor and his bane. The jealous egomaniac who confronted Vincent Cosgrave in London and Roberto Prezioso in the Piazza in Trieste, always in relation to Nora s supposed infidelity, succeeds in transmuting his feelings and ideas on the subject into a very psychologically complex play. Exiles permits Joyce to explore the major question in the moral life of contemporary society. He pursues the idea of tolerance to its logical conclusion, namely, submitting to the actions of others hostile to one s own condition. Joyce chose cuckoldry to illustrate this morality of tolerance because it best responded to his own way of thinking in relating moral principles to concrete behaviour. This new ethic of tolerance beginning to be worked out in Exiles, finds its full expression in Bloom s complaisance in accepting and living with Molly s betrayals. In Part IV, the play Exiles is examined from the point of view of the creation of a new moral order. It is seen as the natural sequel to A Portrait where Stephen was intent in forging the uncreated

12 14 Preface conscience of his race. This new conscience is to be a liberated conscience the kind of conscience the returned exile, Richard Rowan, seeks to create in the minds and hearts of Beatrice Justice, Robert Hand, his wife Bertha and, of course, in his own soul. Stephen s idealism is here tempered with lived experience. Richard Rowan, and Gabriel Conroy before him, are vivid examples of how this uncreated conscience is very difficult to forge. The former wants to re-write the rule book concerning friendship, loyalty, personal freedom and moral obligations while the latter tries to overcome petty feelings of jealousy and envy with regards to Gretta and Michael Furey. Yet, both are left in a state of limbo. They do not fail in their attempts to overcome their feelings but they do not succeed either. Forging a new moral order, a new racial conscience involves force and violence the kind of imposition that places a character, willingly or unwillingly, into a definite context designed and ordered by a governing consciousness. Richard Rowan puts himself in this position of creator-artist. He forces Beatrice to accept the role he has assigned her; he manipulates Bertha like a puppet making her say and do things precisely in the manner he desires, though not always obtaining the expected results; he engages in verbal battles with Robert Hand resorting to casuistry and other subtle modes of argumentation in order to best his opponent. But, in the end, what he creates, what he succeeds in forging is not a new moral order but a half-baked, incomplete and thus confusing and chaotic middle realm in which creator and creatures find themselves without any absolute reference point. Exiles, seen in this perspective, effectively enacts the inverse process of artistic creation Joyce had just accomplished in A Portrait. Whereas in this novel the model of the artist-creator was based on the Aristotelian-Thomistic Godhead familiar to most of us as the God of Genesis, in Exiles, Joyce is experimenting with a different sort of the artist-creator model. In this play, Joyce, in forging the uncreated conscience of his race, resorts to the Demiurge figure of Gnostic-Hermetic tradition. The figure of the Demiurge, preached by the Gnostic Valentinus and terribly criticized by the orthodox Church Fathers Irenaeus, Tertullian and

13 Preface 15 Hyppolitus, is the creator of the material world or cosmic catastrophe. He is not the unfathomable God. The God of Genesis remains unknowable, paring his fingernails. According to Gnostic doctrine, only gnosis or divine knowledge can free us from the prison of matter that the Demiurge unwittingly created. It is this gnosis that the Gnostic Richard Rowan is trying to give his followers and disciples. But he does not succeed. The characters of Exiles remain Gnostic exiles from the spiritual world from which they come. Hence, the title of the play is not a misnomer because it has these Gnostic allusions: exile from a spiritual world, victims of a life not their own, strangers in a strange land. Richard Rowan, model of the creator-artist, remains trapped in a world he was trying to create in his own image and likeness. Viewed from this perspective, Joyce s dramatic aim becomes much clearer. He wants us to see the result of a botched creation by a flawed artist-creator. Unfortunately, most critics who have analyzed this play mistook the content for its form. It is the Joyce of Exiles and not the Joyce of A Portrait who contemplates and executes the complexities of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

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15 Part I The Artist as Seer ( ) You allude to me as a Catholic. Now for the sake of precision and to get the correct contour on me, you ought to allude to me as a Jesuit 1. Chapter One Young Joyce: Forging an Identity 1.1. Clongowes Wood College ( ) Focusing primarily on the intellectual and artistic development of the early Joyce, it is almost second nature for someone undertaking such study to begin with the tempting and alluring catch-phrase which opens the first Chapter of A Portrait: Once upon a time and a very good time it was because in this incipit we find the reminiscence and recreation of the origin, the intervening of time and the process of becoming all fundamental aspects for the understanding of the entire Joycean oeuvre. At the same time, the phrase contains not only the seminal notion of the narrative act as an implicit prerequisite for conveying any kind of idea or portraying concrete audio-visual observations but, more importantly, it alerts the reader to the notion that, for Joyce, all subsequent development is nothing else than the unfolding or gestation of that potential, already present in embryonic form, in the perceiving subject. For this reason, youth, as a phase in the cycle of human development, becomes an obsessive theme, pursued to its very 1 Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1959 (1982), p. 27. Reported in an interview with Frank Budgen in Henceforward referred to as Ellmann followed by page number.

16 18 Part I origins not excluding the instant of conception as we can see in the Oxen episode of Ulysses. It is the distillation of this concept that, in my opinion, best accounts for the continual difficulty Joyce encountered in recasting the discursive and malleable Stephen Hero into the symbolic and tightly structured A Portrait. Whereas the former seems largely a lax account of the present understood as the by-product of a college student s sensibility the latter is a much more stringent and controlled rendition of an experienced and mature consciousness. Thus, it is practically impossible to ignore the chronological element in trying to assess the reason and the manner in which Joyce s work progressed throughout his career. The once upon a time motif can be traced back to Bray, the sea-side resort town twenty kilometers south of Dublin, where the five-year-old Joyce found himself after having changed addresses twice already: from his birthplace at 41 Brighton Square West in the Rathgar suburb of Dublin and a three year permanence at 23 Castlewood Avenue in Rathmines, another suburb circa five kilometers south of the city centre. In early May 1887, John Stanislaus Joyce (James s father) took his family to live at 1 Martello Terrace, a beach-front house, just a few paces from the water. It was here in Bray that Mrs Dante Hearn Conway, originally from Cork, joined the family as governess to the children. Her bitterness and frustration, as depicted in Chapter I of A Portrait, is easily explained by the fact that soon after her marriage she was abandoned by her husband who ran off to South America with 30,000 pounds of the money that she had inherited from her brother. Moreover, the fact that she had to look after seven children (James, Margaret, John, Charles, George, Eileen and Mary) did not help matters. She left the Joyce s household on December 29, 1891 two months after the birth of Eva, the eighth child of Mary Jane (Murray) Joyce who was yet to give birth to Florence and Mabel. The last resident of the house was William O Connell, the Uncle Charles of A Portrait, who was John Joyce s uncle and also from Cork. It was sitting at the feet of Dante Conway that the young James began his formal education but what he

17 The Artist as Seer 19 retained from these hours of instruction was chiefly a superstitious fear of thunderstorms. According to Mrs Conway, they were a sign of God s wrath and vengeance (Ellmann, 25). Judging from A Portrait, these were the four significant others in the life of the very young Joyce: father, mother, Dante and Uncle Charles. From them he learned the meaning of family, affection, belonging and religious piety but he also learned, if somewhat theoretically, the significance of loss and betrayal. For the family was politically sensitive, if not active, in the cause of Irish independence and very partisan in the support of some of its key figures such as Charles Stewart Parnell. Nothing was wasted on the young boy who was soon to leave the home to go to a distinguished school, as a boarder, some fifty kilometers away. Both parents accompanied Joyce on his first day of school at Clongowes Wood College on September 1, This school was one of the most prestigious in the country and John Joyce did not wince in paying the annual fee of 25. Today Clongowes Wood still enjoys a fine reputation and the 2008 annual fee is a hefty 15,200. Father Peter Kenney S.J. purchased this Jesuit institution in March 1814 for 16,000 from the Browne family and it included 219 surrounding acres. When Joyce began his studies on September 14, 1888 he was the youngest pupil. The Rector at the time was Father John Conmee who later helped Joyce enroll at Belvedere College without paying tuition fees. The presence of the Jesuits had an immediate and lasting effect on the mind and heart of James Joyce. The school curriculum, loosely based on the Ratio Studiorum 2, began to mould a precocious intelligence along pre- 2 The Ratio atque Institutio Studiorum Societatis Jesu, usually quoted as Ratio Studiorum was written by the Jesuit Father Claudio Acquaviva born in Atri in It was officially published in 1599 and contained the plan of studies meant as much for the education of lay students as for Jesuits. It integrated humanistic and literary subjects such as literature, history, drama, philosophy into the study of professional or scientific as well as traditionally clerical subjects.

18 20 Part I determined Scholastic lines. Already, the concept of form began to dominate over content. Discipline and precision were the two characteristics enforced at every level, including sports and the daily routine of prayers and religious services. Ritual was fast becoming more substantial and nourishing than the actual meals. Surprisingly, Joyce, in addition to being head of his class in his studies, was also a good athlete and an avid cricket fan. Clongowes Wood College was an ideal environment also because it provided the opportunity to taste, first-hand, the pungent flavors of the past that saturated the air in the long corridors and adjoining halls. Archibald Hamilton Rowan ( ) friend of Wolfe Tone ( ), father of Irish Republicanism, was said to have walked these grounds and halls. Rowan is best remembered as one of the founders of the Dublin Society of United Irishmen. After his conviction for sedition in 1794, he hid in Clongowes Wood College before escaping to France. Two important events further defined Joyce s character while at Clongowes: his First Communion and his Confirmation on April 21, On receiving the latter sacrament, he chose Aloysius for his Christian name, patron saint of youth and religious vocation. This is an interesting choice because even at this stage of his life, barely a boy of seven, Joyce privileged youth and all its vigor in pursuing a determined goal, a definite lifestyle with all its strictures and necessary denials. Though it was not religion that determined his vocation, he nevertheless treated his artistic career with the same zeal and conviction. And as late as 1914, when he was 32 years old, Joyce was still struggling with the implications of the artist as a young man. In his adolescence and youth Joyce was fixated with his present; in his maturity and middle age he was still absorbed wholly and completely with his past when he was still a young man. It is as though his life was a continual revolution around the fixed point of youth, which could only be the years 1900 to While still at Clongowes Wood College, Joyce became imbued with Irish politics mainly through his vacations spent at home. The famous Christmas dinner quarrel in Chapter I of A

19 The Artist as Seer 21 Portrait is a good example. His father was an ardent supporter of Parnell and Joyce could not help but be influenced by his father s strong personality. The political events that burned through Joyce s consciousness at this time may be quickly summarized. On Christmas Eve 1889, Captain William Henry O Shea filed a petition for divorce from his wife Kitty on the ground of adultery with Parnell. The divorce was granted a year later. Tim Healy, Parnell s close friend and advisor, supported Parnell initially. Nevertheless, shortly after the divorce, he abandoned Parnell after the faithful meeting in the Committee Room 15 and Healy was his chief accuser. Parnell died shortly afterwards, on October 6, The death of Parnell was the occasion of Joyce s first poem Et Tu Healy that John Joyce printed and distributed to his friends. This was not just a childish outburst; the figure of Parnell looms large in the newspaper article Joyce later published in Il Piccolo della Sera of Trieste in the May 16, 1912 issue. It is also reaffirmed in his vitriolic poem Gas from a Burner also written in 1912 and in the Dubliners short story Ivy Day in the Committee Room completed in Parnell was firmly associated in the mind of the young Joyce with betrayal something that he came to fear as much as lightning and thunderstorms. The other malady inherited by Joyce while still at the College was the nagging insecurity of a precarious social and financial position that later became much more acute and ultimately forced him into exile. In fact, the promising student was forced to abandon Clongowes in 1891 on account of the family s financial difficulties. John Joyce was obliged to sell some of his Cork properties to pay his many debts and, in 1892, the family moved back to Dublin, in the suburb of Blackrock, at 23 Carysfort Avenue. From the time he was taken out of Clongowes in June 1891 to January 1893, Joyce studied at home under the supervision of his mother. Forced to move once again, the Joyces went to live at 14 Fitzgibbon Street near Mountjoy Square and, at this time, John Joyce had to send his first-born to the Christian Brothers School on Richmond Street. Fortunately, not for long. A chance encounter with Father Conmee, now Prefect of Studies at

20 22 Part I Belvedere College, was all it took for John Joyce to convince the Reverend Father to accept not only James but also his brother Stanislaus at Belvedere without paying any tuition. James entered Belvedere College on April 6, He was eleven years old and already a veteran of life s hardship having endured five different addresses and almost three years away from his family altogether. Forced from house to house and systematically being pushed away from the more affluent neighborhoods to more modest surroundings, Joyce soon understood the meaning of being an outcast, an alien unwanted because not financially capable. And the idea of being a perpetual exile began to take definite shape in his mind Belvedere College ( ) It was a short walk from Fitzgibbon Street to Belvedere College on Great Denmark Street. This Georgian mansion, converted into a college by the Jesuits in 1841, provided Joyce with the same aristocratic milieu that he previously had the privilege of experiencing at Clongowes. George Rochfort, second Earl of Belvedere, was responsible for its construction in Once again, these impressive surroundings stimulated the imagination of the young student to the extent of prompting him into an extensive research into the Belvedere family. As was the case with Clongowes Wood College, history, legend and tradition seemed to exude from the very walls. To the young Joyce the sense of permanence and stability inspired by the College must have been a very welcomed respite from the monadic existence he had lived up to this time. He was ready to settle down and concentrate on his studies and above all to put behind him the uncertainties of his domestic environment. He quickly excelled in English composition as the only surviving weekly theme of this period demonstrates. Entitled Trust not