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Dublin literary gossip of 1898-1904

Except for the bits on Joyce, Gogarty, and a few others, most of this is based on RF Foster's righteous WB Yeats: A Life [Amazon] [1st chapter] [NYT review] [negative review]

Occasional links to original documents of the period are marked: []

WBY c1895

The unifying theme:

WB Yeats leads a motley band of Irish theatrical 'pirates' as they forge an alternative to imported English drama, hoping to reach a larger, non-literary Irish audience.

Jump to:
# 1898 - # 1899 - # 1900 - # 1901 - # 1902 - # 1903 - # 1904

More detail and references: Dedalus-years : Yeats : JAJ-timeline : Irish lit

At the start of 1898, 15yo James A Joyce (JAJ) was just coming down from a year of intense Catholic religious fervor, and turning just as passionately against the Church.

He was probably working on a (lost) notebook of poems, titled Moods, and feeling very fin de siècle: "The spectacle of the world... filled him with such sudden despair as could be assuaged only by melancholy versifying":

I have consorted with vulgarity
And am indelibly marked with its fell kiss,
Meanly I lived upon casual charity
Eagerly drinking of the dregs of bliss.

NOTED POET LATE BLOOMER, DOPE FIEND

32yo William Butler Yeats spent most of the winter of 1897-98 in London (where he'd taken an apartment in 1896, in order finally to lose his virginity, at age 30!) hosting a regular Monday night salon for his literary friends, taking hashish pills and pursuing magickal researches with the Order of the Golden Dawn (OGD).

(then-32yo Olivia Shakespear (Mrs) had finally made a man of Yeats in 1896)

30yo George W. Russell (AE) had quit his drygoods job the year before at WBY's instigation, and was now travelling around Ireland by train and bike, organising agricultural co-ops instead-- an enormous leap for a mystical painter to undertake, but one he mastered admirably. (He also took advantage of his contacts with 'peasants' to collect folklore and superstitions for the literary movement.)

The co-op movement had been founded a few years earlier by 44yo Protestant Horace Plunkett to help Irish peasants better their lot, mainly by starting creameries where their milk could be turned into more-profitable butter. Plunkett was a Yeats-fan who also owned the Daily Express newspaper and was a member of parliament; and it was Yeats who had urged him to take a chance on AE.

Plunkett

Scholarly 26yo John Millington Synge (pronounced just like 'sing') visited WBY in London on his way back from Dublin to Paris in late January-- his first trip to the Aran Islands that became his trademark wouldn't take place until later that spring.

Synge

AMAZON SPARKS RIOT, ONE DEAD

32yo Maud Gonne had just returned from a fundraising tour of the USA (£1000 raised-- less than they'd hoped) and divided her time between Paris (where her relationship with Lucien Millevoye was disintegrating around their 4yo daughter Iseult) and Ireland, where she was rabble-rousing in preparation for the centennial celebrations of the 1798 rebellion. (The year before, she'd helped start a Dublin riot that had led to the death of a woman bystander.)

MaudG

Mostly to impress MaudG, WBY was taking a leading role in organising these celebrations. And he was simultaneously laying the groundwork for the Irish Literary Theatre (ILT), conceived with AE, 45yo Lady Augusta Gregory and 38yo Edward Martyn the previous summer.

LadyG

Each of these projects (centennial, ILT, and OGD) required diplomatic juggling by WBY with various opposing factions: Martyn was Catholic, Yeats and AE were anti-Catholic (with Protestant roots). MaudG believed England was controlled by Freemasons and Jews. She could hardly be trusted around agents of the British, for fear she'd attack them, while LadyG was a somehat hesitant nationalist, belonging to the Protestant landlord class. (LadyG told WBY "I have longed to turn Catholic, that I might be nearer to the people, but you have taught me that paganism brings me nearer still.")

Martyn

LITERARY KITTENS BARE CLAWS

LadyG-- who surely had secret designs on WBY though she was 13 years his senior-- would say jealously of her first meeting with MaudG "instead of beauty I saw a death's head".

In late May JAJ demonstrated his own rebellion by parodying the rector (principal) in the Belvedere play. And then in June he skipped his religion final.

In June, too, MaudG was thrown from her carriage in Dublin when a horse fell, breaking her arm... so WBY sat by her bed and read to her from 46yo George Moore's new novel "Evelyn Innes" ...which included a flattering portrayal of Yeats himself (as Ulick Deane). The same month AE married a sentimental English Theosophist named Violet North. (He had resigned from the Theosophical Society a few months earlier, disgreeing with its new leader.)

In July, 20yo Oliver 'Baywatch' Gogarty got a medal for another of his many successful rescues of drowning Dubliners. He had flunked two straight years at University College, preferring to race bikes, so his mother had him transfered to Trinity just before Joyce entered UC.

In August, JAJ went to see a play called "Sweet Briar" and (in the afterglow) hired his first prostitute.

The 15th of August was the climax of the 1798-centennial celebrations, with 100,000 people viewing a parade, followed by speeches including one by Yeats (Gonne was also on the platform but had not been invited to speak). JAJ and his father Jack were in the audience.

DON JUAN OF BEDFORD PARK

Yeats returned to London where he took mescaline-- supplied by 38yo Havelock Ellis-- on 16 Sept, trying to achieve astral communication with Maud in Paris. Ellis had published a paean to the drug in January. []

Ellis

It was around this time that Yeats wrote:

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

In September Joyce started at the University, and was befriended by 18yo JF Byrne, who was spending most of his time playing chess with John Howard Parnell in the DBC (Dublin Bakery Company). Joyce was able to start using the National Library (where Lyster was librarian) instead of the more-limited municipal libraries.

(AND 24 YEARS LATER...)

From September to December a high-level literary debate was staged in the Daily Express between Yeats, AE, and 29yo 'John Eglinton' (William K Magee), about the proper role of theater in Ireland, intended to lead up to the announcement of the ILT in January. Joyce surely saw Yeats' comment about Homer's 'Odyssey':

"I think that we will learn again how to describe at great length an old man wandering among enchanted islands, his return home at last, his slow gathering vengeance, a flitting shape of a goddess, and a flight of arrows..."

(A related essay Yeats published in 1898 was "The Celtic Element in Literature".) []

Arthur Griffith

In October, 26yo Arthur Griffith returned to Dublin from two years in South Africa fighting for the Boers, and by the following March had begun publishing the United Irishman, with MaudG (on whom he probably had a hopeless crush-- he was short and had a foot deformity) paying his salary of 25 shillings per week while he continued to live with his mother. (Stannie says JAJ favored the UI over all other Dublin papers.)

On 19Nov 1898, 22yo Aleister Crowley, having dropped out of Cambridge University, was initiated into the OGD. (He and Yeats loathed each other, but Yeats had been one of the first members ten years earlier so WBY ultimately prevailed.) A Crowley-poem from this time:

The end of everything. The veil of night
Is not so deep I cannot comprehend.
I see before me yawn-- a ghastly sight--
The End.

Love long ago deserted me to wend
His way with younger men. Life spreads a blight
Over me now. I have not now one friend.

There is no hope for me; no gleam of light
To my black path will any comfort lend--
Yet will I meet with smiling face, upright
The End.

In late November WBY returned to Dublin and apparently stayed at the same hotel as Maud (the Crown-- usually he was more discreet) while they spent their days researching Irish mythology in the National Library (not in the Reading Room with JAJ, though-- by now they had privacy-privileges). They were creating a magickal "Order of Celtic Mysteries" which Yeats hoped would eventually rival Christianity, that included a tarot whose suits were Cauldron, Stone, Sword and Spear.

Joyce would occasionally have seen them in passing. Yeats had made no secret that Maud was his muse-- someone described the spectacle they presented on the street:

"It is Maud Gonne and the Poet. She has a radiance as of sunlight. Yeats, that leopard of the moon, holds back in a leash a huge lion-colored Great Dane-- Maud Gonne's dog, Dagda."

NINE YEARS TO FIRST BASE

But on 08 Dec, after acknowledging their 'spiritual marriage' (and kissing him for the first time!) Maud traumatized WBY by finally telling him about her eight-year relationship with Millevoye, and of their two children (an infant son had died in 1891). On 18 Dec WBY would nonetheless propose to her, again, but she refused again: "I have a horror and terror of physical love."

Maud then returned to Paris, and WBY slunk off to Sligo, taking the hashish pills he relied on, to finish his new book of poems, The Wind Among the Reeds.

At Xmas, 38yo Gaelic-League founder Douglas Hyde visited Coole and performed a puppetshow in Gaelic for the local children.

And somewhere around here JAJ discovered Ibsen...

The big story of 1899 (otherwise a quiet year) was the debut of the ILT with WBY's Maud-inspired play 'Countess Cathleen' and Martyn's 'Heather Field' at the Antient Concert Rooms on 08 May.

Yeats spent the winter bouncing between Dublin, London, and Paris, promoting the ILT to anyone who'd listen. Strangely enough, the play itself was rehearsed in London using professional actors financed by Martyn, and it imported some of the avant-garde (non-Irish) dramatic styles Yeats had been exploring with the Bedford Park theater community (an artsy London suburb dominated by utopian William Morris).

(Morris had died in 1896)

Yeats, influenced by Wagner, hoped to 'invoke spiritual realities' (ie, to promote his magickal beliefs) via formalised chanting, against a background of 'simple scenery, altered by light'.

The play had long been in print, and so could be attacked in advance in Dublin as blasphemous, especially an early scene where a peasant attacks an image of the Virgin Mary. Martyn (the Catholic in the group) had grave misgivings, and Yeats ultimately deleted that scene from the staged version.

POLITICAL PUPS BARE FANGS

The Irish nationalists (aka the rabblement) had naturally expected the ILT would glorify the Irish peasantry, and felt betrayed by the choice of this play. A month before the opening, the (brand-new, Maud-funded) United Irishman denounced WBY as "a meandering decadent with a diseased mind". (Ten years earlier the Catholic Freeman's Journal had called his first book of poems "a jumble of confused ideas in a maze of verbiage".)

Simultaneously, the Irish language was on trial before the Board of Intermediate Education with Mahaffy of Trinity leading the opposition, claiming there was no literature worth preserving, easily routed by Hyde's forces for the defense.

"WILLIE'S NOT HERE"

Synge was in Paris again, visited by WBY in February (sounding like Cheech & Chong, WBY had to beg Synge for a name and address he'd forgotten... of the place he was expected to speak that night!).

AE, too, used the co-op newsletter (the Irish Homestead) to promote the ILT, and he also designed the promotional posters, which depicted 'occult angels'. The United Irishman caricatured the Plunkett-Yeats alliance as a "union of Butter and Poesy". (Joyce would use the mysterious expression 'Venomous Butter' for his enemies, in January 1904.)

Joyce in early 1899 was attending debates at the university's parochial Literary & Historical Society (L&H) every Saturday night, where he quickly made a splash with his impassioned advocacy of Ibsen. (Yeats's ILT-publicity often cited Ibsen as an inspiration, and Martyn was a serious Ibsen-enthusiast, but it wasn't until Synge wrote 'Riders' in 1902 that any credible influence could be detected in the plays.)

In March Joyce saw Sudermann's Magda with his parents and told them afterward, "The subject of the play is genius breaking out in the home and against the home... It's going to happen in your own house."

A few weeks before the ILT play, the Daily Express debate was published in book form, and Yeats's new book of poems [] appeared. (His renown as a poet had reached a level where he could demand £5 for a single poem, or £2 per thousand words for his journalism, so he was able in 1899 to give up the book-reviewing he'd been relying on to make ends meet.)

All of this was orchestrated by WBY to precede the ILT-debut, to ensure in it a maximum of explosive force, and the consensus seems to be it succeeded admirably, despite the catcalls and the weakness of the play (and the bare spartan benches that were all the shabby Antient Concert Rooms offered).

So it only served Yeats's purposes when 23 of Joyce's fellow students (including Skeffington, Byrne, Tom Kettle and Richard Sheehy) protested it in the Catholic Freeman's Journal for offering "as a type of our people a loathesome brood of apostates".

The programs read:

MaudG attended but dissociated herself from it (she'd refused the lead role) and spent her efforts rousing her own political rabble instead.

These lines, probably chanted by Florence Farr in the role of Aleel, became Joyce's favorites of Yeats:

Who will go drive with Fergus now,
And pierce the deep wood's woven shade,
And dance upon the level shore?
Young man, lift up your russet brow,
And lift your tender eyelids, maid,
And brood on hopes and fear no more.

And no more turn aside and brood
Upon love's bitter mystery;
For Fergus rules the brazen cars,
And rules the shadows of the wood,
And the white breast of the dim sea
And all dishevelled wandering stars.

This would have been chanted rather than sung, but Joyce set it to music later, and sang it for his dying brother. (When Mulligan sings it in Ulysses, he's presumably usurping Stephen's tune.)

Joyce's tendency was to delve deeply into any artist who caught his fancy, and by this point Yeats should have achieved that distinction. (At some point he even acquired an autographed copy of WBY's obscure, pseudonymous novellas, 'John Sherman' and 'Dhoya'.) Joyce would even try his own hand at writing a verse play, called "Dream Stuff":

In the soft nightfall
Hear thy lover call,
Hearken the guitar!
Lady, lady fair
Snatch a cloak in haste,
Let thy lover taste
The sweetness of thy hair...

At the end of "Cathleen"s run, the Daily Express hosted a grand dinner at the Shelbourne Hotel to celebrate the triumph, with WBY, George Moore, Martyn, Eglinton, JF Taylor, Douglas Hyde and many others. Yeats faced much criticism on details, but it was clear that his cause had been advanced, and he must have felt gratified as he headed west for another summer at LadyG's Coole estate... where he worked mainly on his next play, a fin-de-siècle pirate-allegory called "The Shadowy Waters". Martyn and Moore were neighbors with WBY and LadyG again this summer.

Douglas Hyde published his 20-year magnum opus "A Literary History of Ireland" in the summer of 1899, sending a copy to his old flame MaudG.

One of the criticisms of the ILT that did have an effect on WBY was Padraic Pearse's attack on their reliance on the English language-- it was the ILT's eventual compromise that provoked JAJ's 1901 broadside, 'Day of the Rabblement'.

Joyce devoted 1899 to Ibsen, and a bit of Maeterlinck. He continued to visit the every-other-Sunday parties at Sheehys, and got involved as an actor in one of Maggy Sheehy's productions. (Probably he was picturing himself as a playwright/actor, with a Maud-muse of his own...?)

His whetstones in 1899 were Byrne and Clancy and Stannie. But Byrne (as usual) spent part of the summer on a Wicklow farm: he was researching a problem he'd encountered there when Joyce saw him reading "Diseases of the Ox".

HAPPY BIRTHDAY (YOU'RE BROKE)

Gogarty turned 21 in August, expecting to inherit his father's fortune... only to be told by his mother she'd spent it all on the children's educations. She had a standard of living to maintain as well, and Gogarty was ruled by her purse-strings until he started his surgical practice in 1906. In 1899 he still cared mainly about bicycle racing, but he did start writing for the United Irishman at this time, including explicitly anti-Semitic articles.

Oliver St John Gogarty c1899

Yeats finally returned to London in November, after a few more political adventures with Maud in Belfast and Dublin. Maud was organising Irish (and French) sympathies for the Boers in their new war against the British in South Africa.

LOOSE LIPS DON'T SINK SHIPS

She rather noisily advocated the bombing of British troop-ships, and so was considered dangerously indiscreet by the otherwise sympathetic Irish Republican Brotherhood. (Ten years before, she'd supposedly encouraged evicted peasants to kill their landlords.)

And in the fall Joyce undertook his 'Drama and Life' essay, which he spent several months carefully overwriting. Since he offered it to the Fortnightly Review, it may be he was reading that journal around this time, including a piece called "The Divine Adventure" [] by William Sharp under his transgendered pseudonym 'Fiona Macleod' (which Yeats and AE had finally seen thru after being fooled for several years). S/he published it in book form [] in 1900.

William Sharp

'Fiona Macleod' (note resemblance)

The magicians and mystics of Dublin were disappointed that the New Year 1900 didn't usher in any noticeable New Age (and reset their alarms for 1901).

Joyce finished his essay on Ibsen on 10 Jan and wrote to Courtney of the 'Fortnightly Review' to ask if he'd be interested in publishing it. Courtney instead requested a review of Ibsen's new play, 'When We Dead Awaken'. (Qualified reviewers for Ibsen were evidently scarce!)

The reaction of the L&H to JAJ's paper on 20 Jan was mixed-- he was nominated for various honors in the following weeks but consistently came in second in their voting. But it surely disappointed him that the L&H was not instantly swayed by his argument-- an entirely predictable disappointment that would be echoed quite exactly, 40 years later with Finnegans Wake. 'Drama and Life' is his earliest surviving attempt at creating that definitively-Joycean 'enigma of manner' via obscure allusions-- intimidating his critics into silence, at worst.

Ruskin died that same day (20 Jan) and supposedly Joyce wrote a tribute in his best Ruskonian voice called 'A Crown of Olive'-- but he must first have rattled off the 12-page Ibsen review almost without thought, for it was accepted by 03 Feb. This coup can also be seen as a parable of Joyce's future-- the less time he spent on a work, the more saleable it often was!

72yo Henrik Ibsen saw the review and sent a message via his translator, William Archer: "I have spelt out a review by Mr James Joyce... which is very benevolent, and for which I should greatly like to thank the author..."

[If you're wondering why the detail in this photo is so much subtler than the others... it's because it's a painting!]

A FUN COUPLE

Queen Victoria was visiting Dublin for most of April, and to protest her presence WBY and MaudG went around rolling up the red carpets they saw put out for her visit!

ART FOR GOLD FOR ART'S SAKE

Jack Joyce, still proud of his promising prodigy progeny, allowed Joyce to spend Courtney's twelve guineas (about $1260 today) as he liked, but what Joyce settled on was a trip to London in May to see Eleanora Duse, with his father as chaperone. (There may have been a second unchaperoned trip as well.)

Joyce had discovered Duse and D'Annunzio, who echoed more successfully that playwright-and-actress-muse model that surely attracted Joyce, but which Yeats and Gonne only partly fulfilled. D'A had even had a book banned by the Vatican-- a fictionalised autobiography of his relationship with Duse, Il Fuoco (The Fire) that Joyce briefly considered the best novel ever written.

Duse

HE'S HER FAN

Joyce kept a picture of Duse on his desk, wrote her an adulatory poem, and once when she disparaged Ibsen in an interview, JAJ bragged to Stannie that he could have changed her view within a half-hour's conversation. (William Sharp published an essay [] on D'A in the Fortnightly later in 1900, under his own name.)

Archer

While in London Joyce had optimistically pursued his new connections, calling on Courtney (disappointing) and 46yo William Archer, who at least bought him lunch.

MASKED BEAST TERRIFIES SUBURBANITES

Crowley

Yeats meanwhile had come into open warfare with Crowley in London-- there was a surreal confrontation on 19 April 1900 that may have helped inspire Chesterton's surreal 'Man Who Was Thursday', where Crowley, dressed in a kilt and a black Egyptian mask and carrying a dagger, tried to force his way into the Golden Dawn headquarters until they called the police on him. Yeats' comment: "We did not think a mystical society was intended to be a reformatory." Crowley on WBY: "a lank dishevelled demonologist". (WBY later claimed Crowley hired a gang to kill him, for a fee of eight shillings and sixpence each.)

Yeats' new play wasn't ready in time, so the February ILT season featured George Moore's "Bending of the Bough". Yeats failed to promote it and attendance was miniscule. And Moore had stolen the plot from Edward Martyn, which further alienated the ILT's primary moneybags. (Martyn's 'Maeve' was also produced, and Yeats wrote about it in the ILT's magazine.) []

Joyce made his own stage debut in March at the XL Cafe in another Maggy Sheehy production. And he may have been pursuing Mary Clery (as SH claims) when he attended a Gaelic League meeting with Byrne in May. In June he managed an extremely good score on his math final, which I've never seen explained...

THE WHORES WILL BE BUSY

In June Gogarty finally made his first literary splash with the anonymous acrostic 'Ode of Welcome' in 'Irish Society':

The Gallant Irish yeoman
Home from the war has come
Each victory gained o'er foeman
Why should our bards be dumb.

How shall we sing their praises
Our glory in their deeds
Renowned their worth amazes
Empire their prowess needs.

So to Old Ireland's hearts and homes
We welcome now our own brave boys
In cot and Hall; neath lordly domes
Love's heroes share once more our joys.

Love is the Lord of all just now
Be he the husband, lover, son,
Each dauntless soul recalls the vow
By which not fame, but love was won.

United now in fond embrace
Salute with joy each well-loved face
Yeoman: in women's hearts you hold the place.

The issue is said to have sold out within minutes, and to have been talked about for months, so the Moore-Yeats circle surely knew of it and eventually traced the author... but Gogarty was still much more interested in bikes than in poems. He'd now completed two years as the token Catholic at (Protestant) Trinity College, after flunking two years at (Catholic) University College.

Maud Gonne in 1900 was mad gone on the Boers, and began campaigning with her future husband Major John MacBride at this time. He was a candidate for parliament from Mayo, apparently positioning himself as explicitly anti-Semitic. Gonne founded the Daughters of Erin in 1900 as well-- among the classes they offered was an acting class that would supply actresses to the theater movement. And on the first of July she led 30,000 children in an explicitly anti-British parade.

The Boer War drove many of the Dublin literati to declare explicitly against the British and for the Boers. For Yeats in particular this sort of publicity destroyed many possibilities for playing to all the various factions for his own ends.

As his literary allegiances shifted, so did his mystical ones, with the Crowley-battles bringing Annie Horniman into a leading role in the London Golden Dawn, which would eventually lead her to a major role in the theater movement as well (taking over as moneybags after Martyn broke away).

Annie Horniman in 1910 (at 50yo!?)

Yeats again summered with Lady Gregory, and made a decision to focus on plays instead of poetry-- which he held to for more than a decade. His 1900 project was 'Diarmuid and Grania', written with George Moore. Moore was to supply the structure and WBY the style-- and this worked well enough that in October they offered it to Mrs Patrick Campbell (a hottie-- she'd also starred in the 'Magda' mentioned above).

Mrs Campbell

She liked it, but it wasn't done, and her flattering attention just made them more competitive, so it would be a full year before it reached the stage... without Mrs Campbell.

Yeats also helped Douglas Hyde get started on his first Gaelic play, "The Twisting of the Rope" written at Coole in a few days in late August.

HOLY PAUL!

Joyce spent the summer in Mullingar reading D'Annunzio and Hauptmann, and writing an Ibsen-like play of his own: "A Brilliant Career" dedicated famously "To My own Soul". A single fragment of song survives:

We will leave the village behind,
Merrily, you and I,
Tramp it smart and sing to the wind,
With the Romany Rye.

Joyce unwisely fired this off to Archer, before he'd cooled enough to notice its serious lapses of dramatic economy, and in the wake of Archer's tepid encouragement Joyce laid low for the next year, creating almost nothing that survives.

(It's important to notice he sent it to Archer rather than Yeats or any of the ILT crowd. WBY would surely have valued the underlying talent as he did with Padraic Colum a few years later, and encouraged him to keep trying, and no doubt to be more Irish and less Norwegian!)

In Nov 1900, William Sharp published an essay called "The Gael and his Heritage". []

In London, WBY and Maud Gonne cozily saw in 1901 together, WBY reading to her from his play 'The Shadowy Waters'. [] John MacBride had invited her to join him for a US fund-raising tour in Feb (where he'd propose marriage for the first time).

Florence Farr

The Golden Dawn was in upheaval following the crisis with Crowley. The nominal leader was Florence Farr, a glamorous actress who'd been brought into the group by Yeats. But Yeats had begun allying himself with Annie Horniman, a very wealthy heiress who'd joined before either of them. Horniman was authoritarian, Farr the opposite... and the group in general favored Farr, leading WBY and Horniman in February to resign from their leadership roles.

MEET "THE DEMON"

WBY was continuing to work on his 'Order of the Celtic Mysteries', apparently picturing it as a credible longterm challenger to Christianity; and he hoped to begin initiations in the fall. (These societies were all about hierarchies of initiation inspired by Freemasonry. The Golden Dawn was pseudo-Egyptian instead of pseudo-Celtic. Yeats's code-name within the Golden Dawn was "Demon Est Deus Inversus"-- the devil is god inverted-- so Horniman called him 'the Demon' for short!)

Yeats stayed in London until May, his Monday night salons now invaded by George Moore, who was about to move back to Dublin in the spring, blaming the British war-atrocities for his decision. (Moore had lived in London since 1880, and Paris for seven years before that. He was 49 to Yeats' 36.)

A REVELATION OF AMATEUR BLUSHING

For Joyce, 1901 opened with his small-scale debut at the Antient Concert Rooms, as an actor again in Maggie Sheehy's play on 08 Jan. The Freeman's Journal praised him for 'a revelation of amateur acting' (but it was a family friend doing the review). Only the Sheehys retained any memory of it-- so Joyce certainly didn't exploit his UC notoriety to boost attendance, and may even have kept embarrassed-ly quiet about his involvement.

Most likely in the spring of 1901 Joyce went thru a major series of changes that left almost no dateable traces. Probably the sequence began with his dabbling in the literature of St Francis and the early Franciscans, which somehow led to his 'leaving the Church' in a stronger sense than in 1898, and then coincidentally his discovery of Yeats's occult fiction, "The Tables of the Law" and "The Adoration of the Magi".

HE ANTICIPATES ANGELS

These stories triggered a year of occult researches, mainly Theosophy, that offered enough conceptual novelty to keep Joyce occupied for a considerable time, though he later claimed those efforts were a total waste. He admits in Stephen Hero that he was naive enough at first to believe Yeats's hallucinations were fact-based: Stephen had "no pains to believe in the reality of their existence" (SH178). But they were so over-the-top apocalyptic that this implies Joyce expected literally to meet 'Immortals' around any random Dublin corner, summoned by Yeats and his fellow adepts.

Stannie claims Joyce read all of 'Adoration' to a Capuchin monk that summer, but this memory could have been influenced by SH's claim that Stephen was tempted to recite it from memory (but resisted).

$#%@!

Sometime in 1901 Gogarty was finally banned from bicycle-racing in Dublin, for swearing during a race. (It wouldn't have taken more than a 'bloody Jaysus' in those days.) His substitute ground for his competitive instincts became poetry-- he immediately won the Vice Chancellor's Prize at Trinity for a poem on the set topic 'In Memoriam: Robert Louis Stevenson'. And thus he came to the delighted attention of the Trinity esthetes, led by the classicist Mahaffy-- who'd taught Wilde as well.

His quick wit made him an instant celebrity, soon welcomed too by Moore's Dublin circle. Moore: "Gogarty is the Arch Mocker, the youngest of my friends, the author of the jokes that enable us to live in Dublin, of the limericks of the Golden Age, full in the face with a smile in his eyes, and always a witticism on his lips overflowing with quotations."

AE on OG: "I had long hoped to meet the author of the witty verses and scandalous sayings that circulated the city... He was then an undergraduate at Trinity, and when he came into the room, Moore had the rare experience of being brilliantly out-talked... How we exulted in that dazzling conversation, which spared neither the maker of the Universe or His creatures..."

William Archer, to Richard Best, at Moore's, of OG: "Who is that astonishing young man?"

John Eglinton, also a member of Moore's circle, published his first book of essays in 1901: "Pebbles from a Brook". Joyce would have known him from the 1898 drama-debate, and supposedly memorised some bits of these essays. (From what I've seen, Eglinton only rarely achieved memorable prose.)

In July, Jack Joyce dragged James back out to Mullingar, where he translated two Hauptmann plays from the German, taking Yeats at his published word that the ILT hoped to import avant-garde European authors like Ibsen/ Maeterlinck/ Hauptmann. (Joyce finally offered WBY these translations in Sept 1904, desperate to raise money for his flight, but WBY turned up his nose rather brutally.)

Two surviving Mullingar epiphanies are surely among the earliest he wrote. They're formatted as play-fragments, so they may well have begun life as literary exercises for the apprentice playwright.

But when he got back to Dublin, in the United Irishman for 31 Aug, Joyce would have read a new article by WBY, written in anticipation of the October ILT season, called "Ireland and the Arts", where WBY called for Irish artists to limit themselves to Irish themes. (He did add, though, that artists must follow their own muse, for there can be no "excellent beauty without strangeness"!)

Also in July-August WBY was at Coole again with AE, Synge, Douglas Hyde, and even a visit from Violet Martin, lesbian co-author if the "Irish RM" comedies. Yeats ceremoniously carved her initials into Lady Gregory's initials-tree.

There's an improbable sketch of Yeats, AE, and Synge together in a rowboat at Coole, fishing (!) ...but there's also an earlier anecdote of Hyde taking the maladroit Yeats fishing, and WBY forever losing face with Hyde by impaling the ear of a clergyman with his fishhook...

Douglas Hyde

Yeats had had a dream in the spring, that LadyG was now busily elaborating into the play "Cathleen ni Houlihan". (He acknowledged she was better than him at peasants' dialog.) WBY had also conceived a new collaboration with Moore on "Where There Is Nothing", a 'religious Don Quixote' based on a friend of AE's named Little who suffered from a religious mania. (Moore and WBY were also still putting the finishing touches on 'Diarmuid and Grania', scheduled to debut in October.)

In September Joyce sent Archer a batch of poems, only one of which survives:

Commonplace (CMii)

The twilight turns from amethyst
    To deep and deeper blue,
The lamp fills with a pale green glow
    The trees of the avenue.

The old piano plays an air
    Sedate and slow and gay;
She bends upon the yellow keys,
    Her head inclines this way.

Shy thoughts and grave wide eyes and hands
    That wander as they list--
The twilight turns to darker blue
    With lights of amethyst.

ANOTHER REJECTION SLIP

Archer was again tepidly dismissive: "I do not find that as yet you have very much to say."

George Moore

George Moore that autumn began telling the Dublin press he'd converted back to Catholicism, apparently purely as a prank. (Joyce took the reports seriously, in 'Rabblement'.)

Yeats in September published in the Monthly Review an essay called simply 'Magic' that publicly defended his occult beliefs.

In October the Joyces moved back into the city (from a near-north suburb, Fairview) to Glengariff Parade (near Bloom's Eccles address) which Stannie remembers as the site for the first epiphanies, and where Joyce first worked out piano accompaniments for his favorite poems.

It was here he wrote his attack on Yeats, "The Day of the Rabblement" [] censored by the UC magazine for mentioning D'Annunzio's forbidden novel.

His style had matured enormously since the Ibsen articles, and having been written quickly this piece is mostly free from enigmatic obscurities (except that infamous opening "said the Nolan"). Joyce expresses disappointment that Yeats has the potential to create true art but is instead trying to appease the Nationalists... though he apparently had no idea yet what 'Diarmuid and Grania' had turned out like.

the Nolan (Giordano Bruno)

Working with Skeffington, Joyce self-published his broadside before the play's premiere on 21 Oct. Supposedly the 85 copies cost £2/5/0 to print, and some were sold in bookstores for 2p. Most were hand-delivered to the homes of the Dublin literati. (Only Moore's reaction survives: 'preposterously clever'. But supposedly Griffith also reviewed the pamphlet in the UI.)

A FIASCO!

While Joyce had assumed that the rabblement, at least, would appreciate Yeats's concessions, in fact the play was an unrelieved fiasco on all fronts. An English company had again been imported, the costumes were 'dreadful', a live goat-kid was brought on in one scene, and the audience hooted derisively at the mismatch between Moore's modern style and Yeats's mythic one. Violet Martin's summation: "If this is the lofty purity of the Irish drama I am indeed mystified."

On 24 October, Yeats's lifelong nemesis JF Taylor gave his address on the Irish language, quoted in Ulysses ch7 (the only passage in Ulysses that Joyce chose to record on audio). Yeats was moved in spite of himself and praised the speech in print.

Also in October, AE introduced 29yo Richard Best to Moore and Griffith, Griffith agreeing to publish Best's translation of Jubainville (serially in the UI).

THE TONE-DEAF HARPIST

WBY returned to London with a sense that his theatrical plans needed rethinking. Florence Farr offered a modest possibility, in the form of an antique harp called a 'psaltery' [wav] that she'd gotten from Arnold Dolmetsch, which Yeats seized on for accompanying his poems on stage. (Yeats was utterly tone-deaf, so this was probably a very bad idea!)

Farr again (run away!)

He also began exploring the idea of having the Fay brothers in Dublin produce the next plays with Irish actors ('Cathleen ni Houlihan' in April, as it happened).

UNSPEAKABLE DEPRAVITY

In December there was yet another Golden Dawn crisis, when two new members, an American couple named Jackson, were convicted of deflowering a 16yo virgin named Daisy Adams in a Black Mass... the scandal inspiring the Order to change its name to 'Morgen Rothe'. Mrs Jackson at some point claimed to be the illegitimate daughter of Pope Pius IX and Lola Montes. (But did the Irish press know WBY was a member?)

And late in the year Joyce must have begun composing his 'Mangan' essay for the L&H...

After the ILT flop in Oct 1901, Moore and Martyn drifted away from the ILT, and the ambitious Fay brothers took their place. The company's name was changed to the "Irish National Dramatic Society" (INDS).

The Fays had been mounting amateur productions for several years, and were on better terms than the ILT with Maud Gonne and her newly-trained Daughters-of-Erin actresses. In January Gonne agreed to star in "Cathleen ni Houlihan" if Yeats would let the Fays produce it. (He was already taking authorial credit for this play, though it was mostly LadyG's work.)

Padraic Colum

(separated at birth!?)

Another newcomer to the Fays' company was 20yo Padraic Colum (just two months older than JAJ). Colum had started publishing poems in the United Irishman, including this special favorite of Yeats:

A Poor Scholar of the Forties

My eyelids red and heavy are
With bending o'er the smouldering peat
I know my Aeneid now by heart
My Virgil read in cold and heat
In loneliness and hunger smart
   And I know Homer too, I we'en
   As Munster poets know Ossian.

And I must walk this road that winds
'Twixt bog and bog, while east there lies
A city with its men of books,
With treasures open to the wise
Heart-words from equals, comrade-looks;
   Down here they have but tale and song
   They talk repeal the whole night long.

"You teach Greek verbs and Latin nouns"
The dreamer of young Ireland said.
"You do not hear the muffled call
The sword being forged, the far-off tread
Of hosts to meet as Gael and Gall--
   What good to us your wisdom store?
   Your Latin verse, your Grecian lore?"

And what to me is Gael or Gall?
Less than the Latin or the Greek
I teach by the dim rush light
In smoky cabins night and week.
But what avail my teaching slight?
   Years hence in rustic speech, a phrase
   As in wild earth a Grecian vase!

While JAJ was slouching thru UC, Colum had been clerking at the Kildare street railway office. His anti-UK play "The Saxon Shillin'" won a contest which brought him to the attention of the Fays (who produced it-- or tried-- in 1903). Colum ended up playing bit parts for the INDS, and he joined AE's Hermetic Society as well.

Joyce on 01 Feb delivered his "James Clarence Mangan" [] to the L&H, attacked afterwards as described in Stephen Hero, especially by Walsh ('Hughes'). "Rabblement" had annoyed the Nationalist faction, who took this opportunity for revenge. But another ally at the Freeman's Journal loyally reported it was "the best paper ever read before the Society". (I don't imagine Yeats or Moore paid any attention to the FJ.)

JAJ

Joyce's 14yo brother Georgie fell ill in March, and JF Byrne has salvaged this untitled poem that Joyce wrote that month:

I

O, it is cold and still-- alas!--
The soft white bosom of my love,
Wherein no mood of guile or fear
But only gentleness did move.
She heard as standing on the shore,
A bell above the water's toll,
She heard the call of, "come away"
Which is the calling of the soul.

II

They covered her with linen white
And set white candles at her head
And loosened out her glorious hair
And laid her on a snow-white bed.
I saw her passing like a cloud,
Discreet and silent and apart.
O, little joy and great sorrow
Is all the music of the heart

III

The fiddle has a mournful sound
That's playing in the street below,
I would I lay with her I love--
And who is there to say me no?
We lie upon the bed of love
And lie together in the ground:
To live, to love and to forget
Is all the wisdom lovers have.

Ad in United Irishman, 29Mar 1902:

Inghinidhe na h-Eireann.
----------
WEDNESDAY, THURSDAY,
AND FRIDAY NEXT
(APRIL 2nd, 3rd and 4th),
AT EIGHT O'CLOCK
At the Hall of St. Teresa's Total
Abstinence Association,
CLARENDON STREET, DUBLIN
"DEIRDRE"
A Play in Three Acts, by "A. E."
...AND...
"KATHLEEN
NI HOULIHAN"
A Play in One Act, by W. B. YEATS,
Will be presented for the first time,
AND PRODUCED BY
MR. W. G. FAY'S IRISH NATIONAL
DRAMATIC CO.
The Cast includes:- Miss Maud Gonne, Miss
Mary T. Quinn, Maire Nic Shuibhlaigh, Mr. J.
Dudley Digges, Mr. P. J. Kelly, Mr. C. Caulfield,
Mr. Frederick Ryan, Mr. Henry Sproull, Mr. P.
Collumb, Mr Brian Callender, Mr. F. J. Fay,
Mr. W. G. Fay.
------
MUSIC BY STRING BAND OF THE WORKMEN'S
CLUB, YORK STREET.
------
Admission - 6d., 1s., 2s. and 3s.
Tickets can be had at Messrs. CRAMER, WOOD & Co's,
Westmoreland Street, and at the office of THE UNITED
IRISHMAN, 17 Fownes' Street, Dublin.

A HIT!

Yeats stayed in London until just before the play debuted on 02 April (but LadyG had absented herself to Italy for the month). Maud Gonne had turned their play into a platform for her own trademark rabblement-rousing, which she knew better than anyone how to pull off-- so the play was an enormous, unexpected success. (Joyce, though, called it 'claptrap'.)

AE's "Deirdre" was less successful, despite the author's cameo as a druid who chants this curse:

Let the Faed Fia [a curse] fall, Mananaun MacLir,
Take back the day,
Amid days unremembered,
Over the warring mind,
Let thy Faed Fia fall, Mananaun MacLir,
Let thy waters rise, Mananaun MacLir,
Let the earth fail,
Beneath their feet,
Let thy waves flow over them,
Mananaun, Lord of the Ocean!

A woman in the audience complained that as AE chanted she saw "three black waves of darkness rolling down over the stage and audience and it made her ill". AE's comment to WBY: "I feel filled with the pride of wickedness, almost a demon. Isn't it a delightful audience we get in Dublin."

(Richard Best and James Cousins had also participated in rehearsals but I don't know if they were in the real performances.)

Afterwards Yeats returned to London and his psaltery-experiments, but he took every possible advantage of the goodwill the play had generated among the Nationalists.

SHE LEARNS HIS PRICE

In late April LadyG returned from Italy for the publication of her folktale collection "Cuchulain of Muirthemne" [] with the infamous preface [] by WBY: "I think this book is the best that has come out of Ireland in my time". (LadyG had paid him a shameless £10 for this puff!) The same preface included Yeats's recent thinking on lyrical, epical, and dramatic art which would inspire some of JAJ's own theorising. (WBY had first explored them ten years earlier. He placed lyricism as the pinnacle of the series, where Joyce placed it at the origin.) WBY also revised his classic "Celtic Twilight" [] in 1902, and published an essay in the Fortnightly about superstitions. []

George Moore hosted a private performance in May of Douglas Hyde's new play (in Gaelic) "The Tinker and the Fairy".

Synge was in Paris until summer, trying unsuccessfully to peddle his first "Aran Islands" book. [] (Summering in Wicklow he would begin 'Riders to the Sea' and 'Shadow of the Glen'.)

At Trinity, Gogarty won his second consecutive Vice Chancellor's Prize for a poem on the set topic 'The Death of Byron'. Gogarty claims that in order to know Yeats better he had his mother invite the poet to a literary party around this general time.

Yeats summered again at Coole, but instead of collaborating with Moore on "Where There is Nothing" each of them began his own version, with Yeats rushing his into print in October to gain priority, annoying Moore and ending the possibility of future collaborations.

Quinn in 1923

32yo John Quinn first visited from the USA in August, and began a generous patronage of the entire Yeats family. (He had a brief fling with LadyG at some point as well.) WBY's father and sisters were at this time preparing to move back from London to start their "Dun Emer Industries" (printing and embroidery) specializing in deluxe editions of WBY's works. (WBY's mother had died quietly in January after a decade of poor health and severe depression.)

In May Georgie Joyce suddenly died, inspiring various Joycean epiphanies. In June JAJ finished his University classes (which he was hardly bothering with anyway).

It was probably in August 1902 that JAJ saw the birdgirl 'Lucy' wading at the North Bull, and experienced a major spiritual liberation. For years he'd been following the adventures of Yeats and AE from a distance, without daring to approach them, but suddenly on 15 August he felt such an urgent need to meet AE that he travelled out to Rathgar and paced up and down in front of the house for hours until AE returned.

AE had been married for four years and had two small sons. He was living two blocks from JAJ's birthplace, and MaudG owned a house next door, but she'd left for Paris the day before.

Their encounter has been much mythologised, but AE immediately wrote "I wouldn't be his Messiah for a thousand million pounds. He would always be criticising the bad taste of his deity."

AE wrote to Yeats at Coole of this "young fellow named Joyce... writes amazingly well in prose... engaged in writing a comedy which he expects will occupy him five years or thereabouts as he writes slowly... certainly more promising than Magee [Eglinton?]". AE claims he told Yeats "The first spectre of the new generation has appeared... I have suffered from him and I would like you to suffer." and later: "Of all the wild youths I have ever met he is the wildest."

AE even thought of writing a play about JAJ, specifically his 'search for a Messiah' (as AE understood it): "The play might end by his discovery of himself."

In London on 04 Oct, 35yo decadent Lionel Johnson fell off a barstool and died, having drunk himself to death.

In October JAJ passed his final exams and registered implausibly for med school. Sometime that month he finally met Yeats-- legend holds that JAJ insulted WBY, but Stannie has a more credible explanation: JAJ revered WBY's talent, and was trying to say that WBY should compromise less, ie be more arrogant. WBY wrote up his version in 1903:

"I went out into the street and there a young man came up to me... I asked him to come with me to the smoking room of a restaurant in O'Connell Street, and read me a beautiful though immature and eccentric harmony of little prose descriptions and meditations. He had thrown over metrical form, he said, that he might get a form so fluent that it would respond to the motions of the spirit... he began to explain all his objections to everything I had ever done. Why had I concerned myself with politics, with folklore, with the historical setting of events, and so on? Above all why had I written about ideas, why had I condescended to make generalizations?... 'Generalizations aren't made by poets; they are made by men of letters. They are no use.'"

(Yeats claimed much later that it was during 1903 he finally admitted he'd been compromising his artist's soul by writing propaganda... so Joyce's comments may actually have had a beneficial effect!)

Mysteriously, on 22 Oct JAJ paid his only known visit to Marsh's Library to read Joachim Abbas-- possibly WBY had tipped him off about its availability there?

On 24 Oct, in the emotional wake of the Georgie-tragedy, Jack Joyce commuted more of his pension to buy a small house in Cabra where they'd live for the next three years.

Between 28 Oct and 02 Nov, the INDS repeated 'Cathleen' (with Gonne) and 'Deirdre', plus various new plays. After these, on 04 Nov, WBY invited JAJ to dine at the Nassau Hotel with WBY, WBY's father, and LadyG. (JB Yeats Sr may have been something of a booby-prize among dinner guests-- Lady G thought him 'the most trying visitor possible in a house'.)

Over the next two weeks (while Yeats was wrangling with the INDS about which way to go next) Joyce gave up on the Dublin med school idea, and conceived the implausible idea of Paris med school, seeking help from his new semi-allies: AE, LadyG, and Yeats. LadyG supplied £5 and arranged for book reviewing for the Express, AE took reluctant charge of JAJ's manuscripts, and on 01 Dec JAJ left Dublin for Paris.

Yeats (just back in London) met him for a half-day's stopover, giving him a tour and introducing him to Arthur Symons. WBY wrote LadyG that JAJ was "unexpectedly amiable... did not knock at the gate with his old Ibsenite fury." Symons found him "a curious mixture of sinister genius and uncertain talent".

(it was Symons who had introduced WBY to hashish c1896)

In Paris Joyce called on MaudG but was turned away by her concierge because 8yo daughter Iseult was sick. Maud wrote him a warm apology but he inexplicably never took up her invitation to return.

For the next three weeks Joyce starved, froze, whored, and rattled off many reviews, poems, epiphanies, and letters home, begging for funds.

All day I hear the noise of waters
    Making moan,
Sad as the sea-bird is, when going
    Forth alone
He hears the winds cry to the waters'
    Monotone.

The grey winds, the cold winds are blowing
    Where I go;
I hear the noise of many waters
    Far below,
All day, all night I hear them flowing
    To and fro.

JAJ in Paris

I NEED A HUG

After two weeks he'd gotten so homesick his mother insisted Jack take a mortgage on their new house to finance JAJ's Xmas return, so on 22 Dec he stopped back briefly with Yeats in London, who wrote LadyG: "I have had Joyce all morning... He has now given up the idea of medicine and will take up literature. He said some rather absurd things and I rather scolded him but we got on very well."

Back in Dublin Joyce played the worldy-wise traveller for the Sheehys, and apparently finally met Gogarty (and Eglinton) at the National Library during this break.

But Byrne had been offended by an obscene postcard JAJ had sent Cosgrave (possibly insulting Byrne), and their relationship would become cooler...

Having mortgaged their new house to the tune of £50, the Joyce family enjoyed an extravagant holiday season, and when Joyce finally headed back for Paris on 17 January he finagled £7 from the remnants for his trip (the ferries and trains alone came to £3, one-way).

It seems he beguiled them all with the glamor and promise of his adventure, so that they fully expected him to begin sending back regular checks from Paris.

Maud Gonne in January was back in Dublin herself, wrangling with the Fays about Colum's play, "The Saxon Shillin'" which was scheduled for the spring. The Fays were trying to soften its sharpest anti-UK points, which Gonne and Griffith wouldn't hear of. After many battles it was decided to reorganise the INDS as the INTS (substituting 'Theatre' for 'Dramatic') with AE unanimously elected president and the Fays somewhat demoted.

But AE refused this honor and managed to get WBY (absent in London) elected instead. Gonne, Russell, Hyde, William Fay, and Fred Ryan were the other officers, and a 'Reading Committee' included LadyG, Colum, and Griffith as well.

Yeats immediately used his office to squelch Colum's play entirely, along with one by Cousins, substituting a play by LadyG and his own "Hour-Glass" (these did moderately well in March).

In London, Yeats heard Synge read 'Riders' [] for the first time on 20 Jan, and foresaw great things for the play. Joyce was lingering all that week in London but barely saw Yeats and wouldn't meet Synge until March. He was quickly running thru his cash, as evidenced by two remarkable new epiphanies:

The human crowd swarms in the enclosure, moving through the slush. A fat woman passes, her dress lifted boldly, her face nozzling in an orange. A pale young man with a Cockney accent does tricks in his shirtsleeves and drinks out of a bottle. A little old man has mice on an umbrella; a policeman in heavy boots charges down and seizes the umbrella: the little old man disappears. Bookies are bawling out names and prices; one of them screams with the voice of a child-- "Bonny Boy!" "Bonny Boy!" ...Human creatures are swarming in the enclosure, moving backwards and forwards through the thick ooze. Some ask if the race is going on; they are answered "Yes" and "No." A band begins to play... A beautiful brown horse, with a yellow rider upon him, flashes far away in the sunlight.

A LOVE THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME

And:

London: in a house at Kennington

Eva Leslie-- Yes, Maudie Leslie's my sister an' Fred Leslie's my brother-- yev 'eard of Fred Leslie? ...(musing)... O, 'e's a whoite-arsed bugger... 'E's awoy at present...

(later)I told you someun went with me ten toimes one noight... That's Fred-- my own brother Fred... (musing)... 'E is 'andsome... O I do love Fred...

Joyce made many ineffectual literary contacts in London. His great coup, he believed, was a promised appointment as Paris correspondent for a new 6p weekly called 'Men and Women'. If this had worked out, the promised pay would have solved all his financial problems, but as it worked out, by his 21st birthday (02 Feb 1903) he was once again down and out in Paris.

On that same date, still in London, Synge read 'Riders' again to Yeats, MaudG and GK Chesterton (!?). Maud must have returned to Paris immediately after, because on 07 Feb (probably) she sent WBY a telegram admitting that she was about to marry MacBride... after converting to Catholicism!

MacBride had first proposed during their US tour two years before, and she finally accepted, considering that he (unlike WBY) was a man whose will was stronger than her own.

Yeats was horrified, and considered it a betrayal of-- almost a deathblow to-- their planned 'Celtic Mysteries' religion.

The marriage took place in Paris on 21 Feb. Joyce was alternately starving and partying, reading Aristotle and Jonson, starting his esthetics notebook, still writing reviews and poems and epiphanies and begging letters home. His mother had to start pawning even their Xmas trophies to wire him cash.

THE NEWLYWED GAME

Maud and MacBride honeymooned near Gibraltar. She later claimed they had agreed to assassinate King Edward VII while he visited there in April (surely a suicide mission for him, probably for her as well) but that MacBride got drunk instead. She immediately left him and went to Yeats in London.

26 Feb 1903 saw the unprecedented 'big wind' in Dublin, knocking down trees and houses. And in Feb, Annie Horniman finally left the OGD.

Synge spent a week in Paris with Joyce in March. Synge reported back to LadyG: "He seems to be pretty badly off... unbrushed and rather indolent... French literature I understand is beneath him! ...being gradually won over by the charm of French life... coming back to Dublin in the summer to live there on journalism while he does his serious work at his leisure."

Joyce and Gogarty had hit it off well enough over Xmas to exchange addresses and stay in touch. (Joyce even managed to borrow the first of many pounds off him.) Gogarty wrote JAJ that even Eglinton admitted "There is something sublime in Joyce's standing alone."

One letter parodied LadyG's Kiltartan dialect: "Dear Joyce, It is myself that write to answer the letter you kindly sent me and I waiting for it in Ireland. For a long time I have been wanting to speak to you and tell you what I was thinking about you. Yourself it is that must have had the strange thoughts about me not writing to you, and you so long gone from the old place where you were born and reared. There are fine poets in your country who have been making songs in the tounge in which the sons of Usna were betrayed..."

On 17 Mar JAJ sent his dismissive review of LadyG's new book to the Express. Before she'd seen it she wrote Synge: "Poor Joyce! The funny thing is that Longworth of the Express, whom I had asked for work for Joyce has sent him my Poets & Dreamers to review, as a kindness to us both! I wonder what the review will be like!" (JAJ at least promised to send her an explanation/apology for the review's tone.) Yeats had also reviewed it in 1902. []

NOTHER DYING

On 20 Mar JAJ predicted "My book of songs will be published in the spring of 1907. My first comedy about five years later. My 'Esthetic' about five years later again." But he continued to demand support from home, and as the 'Men and Women' offer had never panned out, he had no real prospect of self-support... so the 10 April telegram summoning him home simply hastened the inevitable.

Joyce spent his first week back trying to reconcile with Byrne, but only partially succeeding. (Byrne considered that the Cranly-dialog in PoA5 accurately reflected this debate, in part.)

On 24 Apr, Jack Joyce took yet another mortgage to see them thru May's illness.

At some point Gogarty won his third consecutive Vice Chancellor's Prize at Trinity for a poem on the set topic 'Cervantes: Tercentenary of Don Quixote'. This was OG's last year at Trinity, but someone hatched the idea of sending him to Oxford for two terms (Jan-Jun 1904) so he could qualify for the prestigious Newdigate poetry prize.

In June, 25yo Francis Skeffington married 26yo Hanna Sheehy. Most likely this epiphany referred to Hanna, implying she (not Mary) was the unsuspected Sheehy JAJ-flame:

She is engaged. She dances with them in the round-- a white dress lightly lifted as she dances, a white spray in her hair; eyes a little averted, a faint glow on her cheek. Her hand is in mine for a moment, softest of merchandise.
-- You very seldom come here now.--
-- Yes I am becoming something of a recluse.
-- I saw your brother the other day... He is very like you.--
-- Really?--
She dances with them in the round-- evenly, discreetly, giving herself to none. The white spray is ruffled as she dances, and when she is in shadow the glow is deeper on her cheek.

Hanna much later

(In later years Hanna would become Maud Gonne's best friend.)

On 08 June, an amateur Dublin company presented Ibsen's "Doll's House", probably for the first time. And in New York, John Quinn arranged for three WBY plays to be successfully produced in June.

In England, Yeats and Farr were doing a psaltery tour, and probably had a brief sexual fling. Yeats was also trying to start a 'theatre of beauty' with his London friends to attempt the esthetic experiments the Dublin rabblement had scorned; and he imported the Dublin (INTS) group for a successful series of London performances in May.

HIS WEIRD SISTERS

Also in May a collection of WBY's essays was published as "Ideas of Good and Evil", criticised for its elitism by Eglinton in the UI. And in August (in that Year of the Big Wind), Dun Emer's first book appeared, a new collection of WBY poems called "In the Seven Woods". [] In December they followed up with a collection of AE's poems called "The Nuts of Knowledge" in an edition of 200.

Dun Emer embroidery room

By June WBY was back with LadyG at Coole, while a new rift was brewing in the INTS between WBY, LadyG and the Fays (on one side), and Gonne, Russell, Hyde, Colum, and Cousins on the other. WBY rejected Cousins' play again in favor of Synge's new "In the Shadow of the Glen" [] (compared by some to Ibsen) which was so lacking in nationalist values that Gonne and Hyde resigned in August. (Griffith founded the forerunner of Sinn Fein the same month.)

Sometime in 1903 Richard Best helped found the School of Irish Learning in Dublin. (He had also helped organise the first Feis Ceoils a few years earlier.) And sometime in 1903 James Cousins married Margaret Gillespie.

May Joyce died in August. Padraic Colum sent a sympathy note, but Gogarty apparently actually did make a comment like the one cited in Ulysses: "It's only Joyce, whose mother is beastly dead."

But Joyce forgave this, and Gogarty was his primary whetstone for most of 1903. They hung out together in Gogarty's lovely garden near Glasnevin, competing in poetry, debating, and now drinking and whoring too. A Joyce-poem from this period:

In the dark pinewood
    There, O there,
Beside you, dearest,
    I would I were!

For the night is still there,
    Still and grave,
Repose in the shadows
    Should we have.

In the dark pinewood
    There, O there,
Beside you, dearest,
    I would I were!

The kindly elves the pine-wood
    To revel go,
And peace, sweet peace there
    Should we know.

Gogarty, who knew everyone, tried to create a comic persona for reserved JAJ, nicknaming him 'Bardolph' and 'Cadet Rouselle'.

BEES NOT KEPT

From Sept to Nov Joyce wrote a new series of book reviews for the Express, applied for a library job (rejected), refused Skeffington's offer of tutoring-work, offered his poems to Symons, spent a day as sub-editor of the "Irish Bee-keeper", and proposed starting a daily arts-paper called 'The Goblin'.

LUCKY PIGEON

This last project was (JAJ hoped) to be financed by Colum's new patron, Thomas Kelly. Kelly had guaranteed Colum a stipend equal to his clerking wages, so he could devote himself exclusively to writing.

AE had apparently intended to include Joyce's poems in his new anthology, but this seems to have fallen thru in early November, for unknown reasons.

The INTS produced "Shadow of the Glen" and a new Yeats play in October, and Colum's "Broken Soil" in December. Gogarty attacked the latter in a UI review, arguing that Irish peasants need to be taught "hate for holiness-- hate for all that tends to enslave, emasculate" He further dismissed the "folk-smoke" of Synge and the whole 'peasant aspect' of the INTS as a celebration of lowest common denominator.

DON JUAN OF SAN JUAN HILL

In October Annie Horniman formally offered to finance a theater building for Yeats&co, which gave birth to the Abbey in 1904 (though there would be strings attached). Yeats then left in November for a very successful four-month lecture tour of the US, arranged by John Quinn. On 28 Dec he even dined at the White House with Teddy Roosevelt!

1904

[1904 on hold]

Briefly, in 1904: Yeats returned in triumph from the USA, Gogarty went off to raise hell at Oxford, Joyce started Stephen Hero and registered for the 'Feis' singing contest, Gogarty over Easter break helped JAJ move out of his house, JAJ taught briefly at Dalkey and lost the Feis, Joyce met Nora just before OG returned, JAJ got kicked out of his room for debt and went on an historic bender, Nora began to fall in love, Joyce convinced OG to rent the Tower for a year and let JAJ finish SH there, AE commissioned the Dubliners stories but rejected Stephen Hero, JAJ wrote 'Holy Office' [] expressing general contempt for everyone who'd lent him money, OG was appalled by this and withdrew the Tower offer, then reversed himself briefly, and finally Nora agreed to run away to Europe...

Nora in 1918

JAJ

John McCormack

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Ulysses:
chapters: summary : anchors : 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12a 12b 13 14a 14b 15a 15b 15c 15d 16a 16b 17a 17b 18a 18b
notes: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
reference: Bloom : clocktime : prices : schemata : Tower : riddles : errors : Homeric parallels : [B-L Odyssey] : Eolus tropes : parable : Oxen : Circe : 1904 : Thom's : Gold Cup : Seaside Girls : M'appari : acatalectic : search
riddles: overview : Rudy : condom : Gerty : Hades : Strand : murder : Eccles
maps: Ulysses : WRocks : Strand : VR tour : aerial tour : Dublin : Leinster : Ireland : Europe
editing: etexts : lapses : Gabler : capitals : commas : compounds : deletes : punct : typists
drafts: prequel : Proteus : Cyclops : Circe
closereadings: notes : Oxen : Circe

Finnegans Wake:
txt: [I.1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 II.1 2 3 4 III.1 2 3 4 IV] : [HTML]
shorter: main : I.1-4 : 5-8 : II.1-2 : 3-4 : III.1-2 : 3 : 4 : IV
reference: thunder : Quinet : waves : [MP3 ALP] : FrALP : ItalALP : ch4 digest : Finn's Hotel : JAJquotes : search
drafts: NewGame : ROC : Kev : B&P : T&I : HCE : Mmlj : Cad : Rev : Pacata
closereadings: notes : ROC : T&S : Kev : B&P : T&I : HCE : Mmlj : Cad
theory: AI : archetypes : WakeOS : notes : origin : Scribble

Portrait:
ref: main : ch1 : ch1 notes : ch2 : 3 : 4 : 5a : 5b : Pinamonti : [notes] : [Cave] : [Gabler]

SHero: outline : quotes : PoA04

Dubliners:
etexts: Sis : Sis04 : Sis05 : Enc : Araby : Evel : After : 2Gall : Board : LitCl : Cntr : Clay : Pain : Ivy : Moth : Grace : Dead
guides: main : [Cave] : [Peng]

Other:
Exiles: Ex1 : 2 : 3

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