DRAGON: Padraic Colum / With James Joyce in Ireland

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Padraic Colum / With James Joyce in Ireland

June 11, 1922
With James Joyce in Ireland

By PADRAIC COLUM

ow that I look on the title pages of "Ulysses," James Joyce’s colossal parody, I feel some surprise that the author should render such homage to Homer. James Joyce, as I remember him, was nothing if not unchanging, and in his early manhood he professed to look on the Greek epics with a certain alienation: they were before Europe, they were outside the tradition of European culture. The "Divine Comedy" was Europe’s epic.

I remember his telling me this as we walked the streets of Dublin when we were both in our twenties. Any other man might change his opinion when he passes 39, but one is astounded to find James Joyce doing it. Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas had shown him everything then, and who was there who could show him any more? What he wrote was perfect of its kind. "A.E." said to him when Joyce showed him his first poem: "I don’t know whether you are a fountain or a cistern." And again he said to him: "I’m afraid you have not enough chaos in you to make a world."

Joyce, when I knew him first, was a student in the Old Royal University (since organized as the National University). He was very noticeable among the crowd of students that frequented the National Library or sauntered along the streets between Nelson’s Pillar and Stephens's Green. He was tall and slender then, with a Dantesque face and steely blue eyes. His costume as I see him in my mind’s eye now included a peaked cap and tennis shoes more or less white. He used to swing along the street carrying an ashplant in his hand for a cane. (That ash-plant is celebrated in "Ulysses"; Stephen Daedalus carries it with him all through the day and frequently addresses it.) Although he had a beautiful voice for singing and repeating poetry, he spoke harshly in conversation, using many of the unprintable words that he has got printed in "Ulysses." Stories were told about his arrogance. Did not this youth say to Yeats, "We have met too late: you are too old to be influenced by me." And did he not laugh in derision when Arthur Symons spoke to him of Balzac? (Balzac at this hour of the day!) We, the fry swimming about in the National Library, looked with some reverence on the youth who already had an article published in the Fortnightly Review. He had taught himself whatever Scandinavian language Ibsen wrote in--he used to repeat Ibsen’s lyrics in the original--and when "We Dead Awaken" was published in English his essay on it came out in The Fortnightly--William Archer had it published as a sort of preface to his translation.

Ibsen was then the god of his idolatry. I remember that he talked of the master the first night I met him. We met coming out of the National Library and we walked together toward his home in the north side of the city. For most of the way he listened, rather ironically, to what I had to say for myself. The Irish revival had no allegiance from him-- he distrusted all enthusiasm, he told me. And the prospect of creating a national theatre in Dublin was discounted by him. Already he had written a student pamphlet in which the whole project was belittled by him. That pamphlet would now be valuable. I remember having it--"The Day of the Rabblemen," by James Joyce, and "A Plea for Women’s Suffrage," by Francis Skeffington. Neither of these two students had enough money to bring out in print what was most important to them to say, and so they joined their divergent theses--and what divergent names these two seem now--James Joyce and Francis Sheehy-Skeffington!

In his pamphlet he called upon the projectors of the National Theatre to avail themselves of the franchise Dublin had and to produce the masterpieces of European drama-- "Ghosts" and "The Dominion of Darkness"--plays that the foolish censorship exercised by the Chamberlain of the King’s household would not permit of being produced in London or in any English city. When I met him he had already acted in an amateur production of "Hedda Gabler," taking the part of Lovborg. I did not see the production, but I imagine he did excellently in it.

"A Doll’s House" had just been given by another amateur company, but Joyce in conversation dismissed this play. It was interesting, he said, just as a letter written by Ibsen would be interesting, but it had no relation to such great drama as "Hedda Gabler" or "The Wild Duck." I contrasted Joyce’s tone with George Moore’s, whom I had heard speak of the same production a night or two before--"Sophocles, Raphael, Shelley!" George Moore had cried, running his hands through his blond hair. "What have they done compared with ‘A Doll’s House’?"

We came to be on friendly terms, and we used to walk about together--sometimes with Tom Kettle--whom I thought of as a philosopher-saint in those days, or with Joyce’s more constant companion, his fellow-student, the brilliant Oliver Gogarty. He gave me his poems to read--they were in a beautiful manuscript. He used to speak very arrogantly of these poems of his ("I have written the most perfect lyric since Shakespeare"), but I remember his saying something that made me know how precious these beautifully wrought lyrics were to him--he talked about walking the streets of Paris, poor and tormented, and about the peace that the repetition of his poems brought him.

These poems--they are in "Chamber Music"--seem far away from the enormities of "Ulysses." And yet under the measureless grossness and slag of that book one must find the lyric. What comes vividly to my mind when I think of James Joyce is some melody-- some strain of song. Perhaps it is that country ballad that Gabriel Conroy’s wife heard in that story in "Dubliners" that is called "The Dead."

O the rain falls on my heavy locks, And the dew wets my skin, My babe lies cold.

Or perhaps it is a lyric of Ben Jonson’s that I hear repeated in Joyce’s beautifully modulated voice.

Still to be neat, still to be drest As you were going to a feast; Still to be powdered, still perfumed * * *

Or perhaps it is one of Joyce’s own lyrics that, to me, justifies the comparison that he was wont to make with the Elizabethans.

What counsel hath the hood moon Put in your heart, my shyly sweet? Of love in ancient plenilune, Glory and stars beneath his feet? A sage who is but kith and kin To the comedian Capauchin.

Believe me rather who am wise In disregard of the divine-- A glory lightens in your eyes, Trembles to starlight * * * Mine O mine: No more be wraith in moon or mist For thee, sweet sentimentalist.

These lyrics come to me, not only because I have heard him sing and heard him repeat verse beautifully, but because I know how much his mind dwells upon melody, and because I know that his ideal in literature is that which is simple and free--the liberation of a rhythm. His esthetic is laid down in that conversation which the hero of "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," the Stephen Daedalus of "Ulysses," has with the student Lynch. What Stephen says there is word for word what Joyce used to say to many of us who were with him in the early twenties.

Aristotle has not defined pity and terror. I have. I say * * * Lynch halted and said bluntly:

Stop! I won’t listen. I was out last night on a yellow drunk with Horan and Goggins.

Stephen went on:

Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human suffering and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling that arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human suffering and unites it with the secret cause.

Repeat--said Lynch.

Stephen repeated the definitions slowly.

Stephen then interprets for his student-friend a definition of Aquinas: "I translate it so: Three things are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony and radiance." He goes on:

When you have apprehended that basket as one thing and have then analyzed it according to its form and apprehended it as a thing you make the only synthesis which is logically and esthetically permissible. You see that it is that thing which it is and no other thing. The radiance of which he speaks is the scholastic quidditas, the whatness of a thing. The supreme quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist, Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley’s, called the enchantment of the heart.

An enchantment of the heart! The phrase was once dear to the writer of the most disenchanting of books, "Ulysses." Out of his squalor, his lack of companionship, his closed future, the hero of "Portrait of the Artist" created a proud soul. Liberation came to him through his poetry. No one in our time has described more squalid and vicious things than has Joyce in "Ulysses" and also in "Portrait of the Artist." But in that earlier book the pure ecstasy of poetic creation has been rendered as in no other book that I know of.

An enchantment of the heart! The night had been enchanted. In a dream or vision he had known the ecstasy of seraphic life. Was it an instant of enchantment only or long hours and years and ages?

The instant of inspiration seemed now to be reflected from all sides at once from a multitude of cloudy circumstances of what had happened or what might have happened. The instant flashed forth like a point of light and now from cloud on cloud of vague circumstance confused form was veiling its afterglow. Oh! In the virgin womb of the imagination the word was made flesh. Gabriel the seraph had come to the virgin’s chamber. An afterglow deepened within his spirit, whence the white flame had passed, deepening to a rose and ardent light. That rose and ardent light was her strange willful heart, strange that no man had known or would know, willful from before the beginning of the world: and lured by that ardent roselike glow the choirs of the seraphim were falling from heaven.

Are you not weary of ardent ways, Lure of the fallen seraphim? Tell no more of enchanted days.

The verses passed from his mind to his lips, and, murmuring them over, he felt the rhythmic movement of a villanelle pass through them. the roselike glow sent forth its rays of rhyme: ways, days, blaze, praise, raise. Its rays burned up the world, consumed the hearts of men and angels: the rays from the rose that was her willful heart.

After I had made his acquaintance he went to Paris for a while and then returned to Dublin. It was then that he wrote the stories that are in "Dubliners" and began the writing of "Portrait of the Artist." (Dublin 1904--Trieste 1914.) After he had begun that book he went abroad to take a place as a teacher of English in a Berlitz school. A few years later I met him when he was back in Dublin. He had his son, a little boy, with him, of whom he was very proud. He was more mellowed than I had ever known him before. It was then that he told me the title of the book he was writing--the book that was being referred to in Dublin as "Joyce’s Meredithian novel." It was "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"--a book that is by no mean Meredithian.

He was glad he had left Dublin--he was glad to be away from a place where "the reformed conscience" had left its fetter and away from the fog of Anglo-Saxon civilization. His little boy went to all the operas in the Italian city they lived in, and he would not be brought up to speak English.

He was in Dublin then on business. The Cinematograph had come in and an Italian company had theatres in many European cities. Joyce was over to open one in Dublin. That was in the foredawn of the movies. His "Volta" Theatre was opened, but I never heard that it was successful.

As I think of this incident now I am reminded that Joyce had schemes of making a business that would bring him wealth. In the days when I first knew him he projected a great daily newspaper. He elaborated a scheme and told us the sort of articles he would have written on politics, on literature, on artistic topics. It would be along the lines of a Continental newspaper, and it would cost ten thousand, or twenty thousand, or a hundred thousand pounds to produce. I have forgotten the amount, but Joyce was very exact about the figures. He took the trouble to have its title registered--"The Goblin" it was to be called. It seems incredible, but this penniless and jobless young man actually tried to raise the capital--an amount that in Dublin would be almost fabulous.

And while I am looking back on this business scheme of his I am reminded of an incident that might find a place in "Dubliners" or in "Ulysses"--an incident that seems a parody on the plans that now and again occurred to him. He came to me one day and asked me for that rare coin with student Publiners--a golden half sovereign. By a miracle I had one. A financial scheme was involved in its use.

Joyce had been given a pawnticket by a medical student. Now, to any one else a pawnticket would be a minus quantity, but to Joyce it was something realizable. The ticket was for books, and 6 shillings was the amount they were in for. They were medical books, for a certainty, and valuable. And we would take them to our friend George Webb on the Quays and sell them and make 50, or even 100, per cent.

It was an attractive proposition. We handed in 7 and 6, and the redeemed parcel came across Terence Kelly’s counter to us. Hastily we undid the wrappings! And behold! The books were Walter Scott’s, an unsellable edition of the Waverley Novels, with one volume missing!

There was a wan hope in going to Webb’s. That most knowing of all booksellers received Joyce cordially, for he had his eye on the Italian books that Joyce was then selling. We opened the parcel and exhibited the wretched, papier-mache-bound set! Very loftily, indeed, did Joyce talk to the incredulous Webb--"Webb, I have brought you some particularly good books." He would not believe that Joyce was serious. "You have some Italian books with you, haven’t you, Mr. Joyce?" he kept on saying. When he gathered that Joyce was serious and that he had released the books on the prospect of selling them, he had them wrapped up for us. "There is only one thing to do, boys," he said. "Take them back to Terence Kelly. Pawn them again, and he may let you have 6 shillings on them." So we did.