In Chapter XIX of ‘Stephen Hero’, the novel James Joyce abandoned in 1905, there is a conversation between Stephen Dedalus, who is at university, and his mother in which she asks: ‘What does Ibsen write, Stephen?’ When Stephen tells her that Ibsen is a playwright, she says that she would like to read his best play. Stephen asks: ‘To see whether I am reading dangerous authors or not, is that why?’

‘No, Stephen, answered his mother with a brave prevarication. I think you’re old enough now to know what is right and what is wrong without my dictating to you what you are to read.’

Mrs. Dedalus then reads the plays; she is impressed. ‘I quite agree with you,’ she says, ‘that Ibsen is a wonderful writer.’ She adds: ‘I think that Ibsen…has an extraordinary knowledge of human nature…And I think that human nature is a very extraordinary thing sometimes.’

This passage does not appear in ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, which is a later version of ‘Stephen Hero’. Nor is there a moment in ‘Ulysses’ when Mrs. Dedalus is allowed speak with such seriousness.

The scene between Stephen and his mother is one of the moments in Joyce’s writing when he ceases to be playful, or becomes almost earnest, or when he allows his characters a kind of unmediated tender feeling. It happens in ‘Ulysses’ when Leopold Bloom thinks of his dead son Rudy. And, also, in ‘Ulysses’ when Bloom remembers being on the Hill of Howth with Molly as young lovers. And it occurs in the ‘Wandering Rocks’ episode of ‘Ulysses’ when we see the young Patrick Aloysius Dignam, whose father had been buried in Glasnevin earlier in the day, walking in the city centre alone, having been sent on an errand by his mother.

Joyce has the boy concentrate on the most ordinary, banal things – such as the fact that he will not be going to school the next day – so that he can avoid thinking about the death of his father. This offers greater pathos to the moments in which the death comes into his mind, and then as the rhythms change, a sort of grief enters his spirit as he walks:

‘Master Dignam walked along Nassau street, shifted the porksteaks to his other hand. His collar sprang up again and he tugged it down. The blooming stud was too small for the buttonhole of the shirt, blooming end to it. He met schoolboys with satchels. I’m not going tomorrow either, stay away till Monday. He met other schoolboys. Do they notice I’m in mourning? Uncle Barney said he’d get it into the paper tonight. Then they’ll all see it in the paper and read my name printed and pa’s name. His face got all grey instead of being red like it was and there was a fly walking over it up to his eye. The scrunch that was when they were screwing the screws into the coffin: and the bumps when they were bringing it downstairs. Pa was inside it and ma crying in the parlour and uncle Barney telling the men how to get it round the bend. A big coffin it was, and high and heavylooking. How was that? The last night pa was boosed he was standing on the landing there bawling out for his boots to go out to Tunney’s for to boose more and he looked butty and short in his shirt. Never see him again. Death, that is. Pa is dead. My father is dead. He told me to be a good son to ma. I couldn’t hear the other things he said but I saw his tongue and his teeth trying to say it better. Poor pa. That was Mr Dignam, my father. I hope he is in purgatory now because he went to confession to father Conroy on Saturday night.’

The writing here is so exact, moving from precise thought to even more precise image and memory. It should not be possible to wrest so much hard-won emotion from a sentence like ‘Never see him again.’ But because of the context and the tone of the other sentences around it, and because of the way in which this stark realization is withheld and then baldly stated, like a gasp, or even more like a thud, then these four words have an unusual power, the same kind of power that the words of sharp melancholy or even mild despair that we hear as Bloom's memories of Howth come to an end. He sits alone in Davy Byrne’s pub knowing that Molly will soon be having sex with another man. Once more the four words are simple and stark: ‘Me. And me now.’

As ‘The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ goes on, Stephen Dedalus’s veneer of self-concern can break down, solidify, emerge again. It is never stable. He can seem priggish and then become amused by the world. This easing of his response is at its most powerful when he is with his friend Davin, whom he jestingly calls ‘the peasant student.’ Davin, in turn, calls him ‘Stevie’.

Joyce writes: ‘The homely version of his christian name on the lips of his friend had touched Stephen pleasantly when first heard for he was as formal in speech with others as they were with him.’

There is something endearing about Davin. This means that when he and Stephen have an argument about nationalism, it is much less strident than the one between Gabriel and Miss Ivors in ‘The Dead.’

For readers of ‘Ulysses’, it is interesting to read that Davin ‘had sat at the feet of Michael Cusack, the Gael’, who will appear in ‘Ulysses’ as The Citizen.

Davin, in the novel, is ‘the young peasant [who] worshipped the sorrowful legend of Ireland. The gossip of his fellow-students which strove to render the flat life of the college significant at any cost loved to think of him as a young fenian. His nurse had taught him Irish and shaped his rude imagination by the broken lights of Irish myth.’

Stephen sees a copybook in Davin’s room that seems to suggest he is engaged in a kind of military training.

‘I’m an Irish nationalist, first and foremost,’ Davin says. He tells Stephen: ‘You’re a born sneerer, Stevie.’

He then asks Stephen if he is ‘Irish at all.’ And when Stephen insists that he is, Davin replies: ‘Then be one of us…Why don’t you learn Irish? Why did you drop out of the league class after the first lesson?’

When Stephen says ‘When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets’, Davin replies: ‘Too deep for me, Stevie, …But a man’s country comes first. Ireland first, Stevie. You can be a poet or a mystic after.’

Davin emerges as a rare endearing figure in the novel. And the conversation between the two students takes on an added significance when we know that the Irish class that Stephen dropped out of was taught by Patrick Pearse.

As Joyce was writing ‘Ulysses’, two of his friends who had appeared in ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ as McCann and Davin were murdered by British forces, Francis Sheehy-Skeffington (the model for McCann) in 1916 and George Clancy (the model for Davin) in 1921.

If ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ has a sequel called ‘Ulysses’, is it possible that it also has another sequel: Irish history between 1916 to 1921.

It is, however, difficult to know what to do, as we read ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, with the knowledge we have about Pearse, Sheehy-Skeffington and Clancy. I can’t find anything in literary criticism or literary theory that guides us on this matter. We can’t erase our own knowledge, even if we must be alert that the author, who was not engaged in prophecy in any obvious or deliberate way, did not imagine what would happen to his characters when his book had ended, its last words written. Joyce wrote his books as self-enclosed non-porous entities. Thus, ‘A Portrait of the Artist’ should be able to resist events that occurred outside its pages. Or they come to us as footnote, something inessential, but oddly intriguing.

Since there is a great deal of information available on Francis Sheehy Skeffington and Patrick Pearse, I wandered the streets bemoaning how little information there is on George Clancy, the model for Davin.

But there is more than I imagined.

Since I had reached middle-age before the appearance of the Dictionary of Irish Biography and the opening of the archive about the revolutionary period in the Bureau of Military History, I am often surprised by the quality of both and how easy it is to consult them.

The historian William Murphy has a comprehensive entry on George Clancy in the Dictionary of Irish Biography.

In 1908, Murphy writes, Clancy ‘moved to Limerick city to teach Irish and became a leading figure in nationalist circles there, joining Fianna Éireann and (1913) the Irish Volunteers, in which he was soon one of the local driving forces. He was arrested after the 1916 rising but released within days; soon afterwards he was jailed in Cork, but released after a brief hunger strike. He was an influential member of the committee to elect de Valera in Clare (1917), a leader of the anti-conscription campaign (1918, and a collector of the Dáil Éireann loan.’

In January 1921, Clancy became Mayor of Limerick. In March 1921, as he stood at his own front door, he was shot dead by the Black and Tans.

In his witness statement to the Bureau of Military History, given in 1953, Harry C. Phibbs - who was then working in advertising in Chicago, having left Ireland in 1907 - remembered gatherings in McGarvey’s tobacco shop opposite Findlater’s Church on Parnell Square. ‘By way of passing, it should be mentioned that many of the meeting places in the Dublin of that day were tobacco shops. McGarvey's place was truly a stopping place for anyone interested in the Irish Revival Movement to drop in, meet some other people, know what was going on.’

Among those who visited the shop, according to Phibbs, were Oliver St. John Gogarty and James Joyce. ‘McGarvey himself’, Phibbs wrote, ‘was something of a poet and frequently recited poetry at Irish meetings. One of the people who would occasionally wander in was "old man Cusack", a bearded old stalwart who called himself "Citizen Cusack". He always carried a green muffler around his neck and wielded a heavy blackthorn stick. It was said that he was the founder of the Gaelic Athletic Association. George Clancy was a frequent visitor.’

Phibbs added that Clancy was a member of the Confederate Club: ‘This club met in the same rooms as did the Celtic Literary Society. While it was supposedly an athletic and social club, it evidently had national objectives. The leading spirit in this club was George Clancy, who was then a student at the University. Afterwards, he became Mayor of Limerick and was shot by the Black and Tans. George was the captain of the hurling team of this club and sometimes organized the members on overnight hikes into the Dublin and Wicklow Mountains. The idea was to practice marching, study map reading, learn how to live out in the hills.’

Alphonsus O’Halloran, another witness, remembered George Clancy when he had returned to Limerick. He was: ‘Very popular with all with whom he came into contact, he would have made an ideal leader in such a movement as ours but for one weakness in his character, the fact that he was very highly strung.’

‘Highly strung’ is a phrase you don’t hear that much anymore. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that it flourished most in the first decade of the twentieth century, having first seen the light of day in 1825. It means: ‘very sensitive, tense or nervous.’

In what way was Clancy ‘highly strung’? O’Halloran remembered a moment on Whit Sunday in 1915 after a parade of the Irish Volunteers when he went to where volunteers stored their arms. ‘I was surprised to see Clancy sitting on a form in the yard, his head between his hands, and bowed down almost to his knees, his whole attitude betokening great dejection. I assumed that he was ill, went over, sat beside him and, putting my arms around his shoulders, said: "What's the matter, Seoirse?". He raised his head, looked at me in a very troubled way and replied: "Is it worth it? Is it worth it?". What he intended to convey was that, in view of the malignant hostility displayed against us that day by the populace generally, could anything be done for the country!’

‘I never would take Clancy seriously when he was in such a mood… I am laying emphasis on this incident, because I know from previous experience that, had I met Seoirse next day, that mood would have vanished and he would have made a laugh of all the events of that Whit Sunday.’

It is easy to wonder if it was this ability to be troubled and change moods that endeared Clancy to James Joyce.

In the Bureau of Military History there is also a long and detailed statement from George Clancy’s widow Molly about his life, and then also about how he was murdered. Rather than a statement created specifically for the Bureau, Mrs. Clancy’s statement was produced long before the Bureau was set up. It seems composed, almost literary, set out in the shape of a story.

Clancy’s boyhood is like something from a saga: ‘To the knowledge acquired in the schools, he added a knowledge of the Irish language, laboriously learned from the old people in the neighbourhood and an intimate acquaintance with the history, traditions and legends of Ireland, more particularly of his native place. The old Fenians in the district were particular friends of the lad, and, though reticent with others, they freely unbosomed themselves to Seoirse, eager for stories of 67 and the I.R.B.’

Clancy studied at the Royal University in Dublin between 1899 and 1904. His wife lists his friends from that time, including Arthur Griffith, Patrick Pearse, Tom Kettle, Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, Sean T. O’Kelly and Michael Cusack.

It is interesting that she does not include the name of James Joyce.

In Dublin, his wife writes, Clancy’s ‘reading was encyclopaedic in character and he had an extensive acquaintance with literature of all sorts, with special emphasis on French. His friends were often struck-with his wonderful control over his companions - some of them rough and excitable - his influence over the weak, and the fascination he exercised over his younger comrades.’

But, he, could be excitable: ‘Once he met a group of Trinity College students on O'Connell Bridge, Dublin, shouting and waving a Union Jack in celebration of a Boer defeat. He rushed the crowd, tore the flag from the standard bearer; pitched it into the river and escaped, bruised but victorious.’

On youtube there is a lecture about Clancy by the Joyce scholar Terence Killeen - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mQzLqpsNxg - in which he notes a letter Joyce wrote to his son Giorgio and his wife Helen in February 1935 in which Joyce confirmed that Clancy was the only one of Joyce’s contemporaries to call him by his first name. In a notebook Joyce kept around 1910, he referred to Clancy: ‘Chance did not bring us face to face on either of my visits to Ireland. I wonder where he is at the present time. I don’t know is he alive still.’

In the history of the Irish War of Independence, as it came to be called, Clancy plays an important part. His subsequent fame was enhanced by a powerful widow, who was herself a cousin of Terence Killeen’s father. Killeen remembers Molly Clancy in Limerick as ‘a formidable woman.’ As a Fianna Fáil supporter, she sat on the platform when De Valera came to town, ‘her wound prominently displayed,’ - the wound on her hand or arm she got on the night her husband was murdered. ‘She was quite a character,’ Killeen says.

In ‘The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ there is a story that Davin tells Stephen Dedalus about walking home through the night after a hurling match, just before he came to university: ‘Well, I started to walk and on I went and it was coming on night when I got into the Ballyhoura hills, that’s better than ten miles from Kilmallock and there’s a long lonely road after that. You wouldn’t see the sign of a christian house along the road or hear a sound. It was pitch dark almost. Once or twice I stopped by the way under a bush to redden my pipe and only for the dew was thick I’d have stretched out there and slept. At last, after a bend of the road, I spied a little cottage with a light in the window. I went up and knocked at the door. A voice asked who was there and I answered I was over at the match in Buttevant and was walking back and that I’d be thankful for a glass of water. After a while a young woman opened the door and brought me out a big mug of milk. She was half undressed as if she was going to bed when I knocked and she had her hair hanging and I thought by her figure and by something in the look of her eyes that she must be carrying a child. She kept me in talk a long while at the door and I thought it strange because her breast and her shoulders were bare. She asked me was I tired and would I like to stop the night there. She said she was all alone in the house and that her husband had gone that morning to Queenstown with his sister to see her off. And all the time she was talking, Stevie, she had her eyes fixed on my face and she stood so close to me I could hear her breathing. When I handed her back the mug at last she took my hand to draw me in over the threshold and said: ‘Come in and stay the night here. You’ve no call to be frightened. There’s no one in it but ourselves....’ I didn’t go in, Stevie. I thanked her and went on my way again, all in a fever. At the first bend of the road I looked back and she was standing at the door.’

Terence Killeen has interesting things to say about this passage: ‘Joyce’s rendition of Davin’s, or Clancy’s, terminology, phraseology and syntax is quite astonishing, testament again to Joyce’s extraordinary ear for voice, intonation and vocabulary…As a result, the scene is conveyed with far greater vividness than it would be in any indirect retelling.’

Killeen continues: ‘This story is almost too significant, too pregnant with meaning. It screams out allegory, though allegory of what is…far from clear.’ He cites two critics, one who reads the scene as ‘a failed aisling’, the woman representing Ireland and Davin failing to recognize that, the other who ‘suggests that the woman is Joyce’s response to the nationalist idealisation of Mother Ireland as a chaste, asexual figure of worship.’

I wonder about these readings. Maybe every scene in fiction, no matter what, is a kind of allegory or has allegorical tendencies. But if we put too much emphasis on the allegorical, we miss the sheer physical, solid, exact force of scenes such as this. We miss its singleness, the idea that it only happened once. Searching for allegory and hidden significance allows us to mismanage our reading experience by insisting that an image cannot merely be resonant, but it must tell us something more, something about Ireland or, even worse, about the human condition.

Killeen writes: ‘Incidentally, and for what it is worth, I am inclined to believe that this was a genuine encounter that happened to Clancy.’

Now we are talking.

The scene, in this version of things, belongs to memory. It is something that Clancy said that stayed in Joyce’s mind not because it could symbolize anything or stand for some other larger set of questions.

Instead, it has an aura that is both unearthly and fixed in reality. It happened and it also seemed like a dream. But more importantly, it happened to someone other than Stephen. Recounting it is part of a process for Stephen of trying to imagine Davin, let his spirit loose in the book. And also work on his voice, how he sounded when he spoke, and what that could do on the page.

If Davin went inside with the woman, it would merely be another story one man might tell another. The idea that Davin walked on, looking behind to see the woman at the door, is not about Ireland.

In comparison to that single moment when he glances back, Ireland seems small indeed. But Joyce did not need to put a thought into that: he concentrated instead on the words themselves, the image.

Colm Tóibín (March 2024)