univ

UNIVERSITY INFLUENCES
In his second year at University Joyce distinguished himself by presenting a paper on "Drama and Life" at the school's Literary and Historical Society, over the objections of school authorities. In it he enthusiastically defended modern drama, as exemplified by Ibsen, against its attackers; art has a responsibility to represent life as it is actually lived, rather than as convention dictates, he argued, and indeed has its own laws and logic as an expression of the artist that is nearly beyond judgement. More impressively, Joyce expanded upon his defense of Ibsen in an article that was published in the influential British Fortnightly Review. Ibsen himself responded with an appreciative note that his translator William Archer forwarded to Joyce, and Joyce set himself to learning Dano-Norwegian so as to read the Scandinavian Master in the original.

From youth, Joyce had shown a talent for languages. The Jesuits had immediately set him reading Latin, and at University College he studied Italian, German, and French. Yeats's enthusiasm for the native culture failed to win Joyce; he argued that "a nation which never advanced so far as a miracle play affords no literary model to the artist, and he must look abroad." Gradually he was becoming convinced that he would have to escape Ireland. Europe he saw as a freer, more cosmopolitan world, and his languages would enable him to survive there. As it turned out, Joyce spent nearly the whole of his mature life in Europe, and his children were raised speaking Italian and French as easily as English.

Joyce of course was not the only artist or rebel at University College. His friend Francis Skeffington was a committed feminist and pacifist who argued that women should be admitted to Ireland's universities. Joyce and Skeffington--who appears rather unflatteringly as McCann in Portrait--published at their own expense a pamphlet containing an essay of Joyce's attacking philistines entitled "The Day of the Rabblement" along with a feminist essay by his friend. Skeffington later married a friend of Joyce's and changed his name to Sheehy-Skeffington in her honor. He was murdered by a British officer during the 1916 insurrection after trying to stop British troops from looting. This outrage caused consternation both among the British officer's family, which included the future Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen, and Skeffington's British relatives, who changed their name in shame at his "treason."

Other friends included John Francis Byrne, who appears as "Cranly" and who later published a book protesting Joyce's version of their relationship, and Vincent Cosgrave ("Lynch"), who caused Joyce pain several years later by falsely claiming to have slept with Joyce's lover Nora. Cosgrave was to commit suicide, while Thomas Kettle, a talented scholar and writer, died in the Battle of the Somme, and George Clancy, who became mayor of Limerick, was shot by disguised Protestant irregulars in 1921. Joyce was often thought paranoid in later life because he refused to return to Ireland, but surprisingly few of his friends at U.C.D. died a natural death.

Another acquaintance of this period who was to figure importantly in Joyce's writing was Oliver St. John Gogarty, son of a wealthy Anglo-irish family who was attending Trinity and, like many of Joyce's school friends, preparing for a career in medicine. Gogarty was a prolifically talented young man who became a protege of Yeats, appearing in several of his poetry anthologies, and in later life was a successful physician, Irish senator, and a well-known public figure in Dublin. An athlete, scholar, writer, and general carouser, Gogarty "adopted" Joyce for a period, lending him clothing and money, and for a week in 1904 shared quarters in a Martello tower south of Dublin with him. This period is immortalized in Joyce's Ulysses, where Gogarty appears as Stephen's companion, rival, and--for reasons that remain somewhat obscure--his betrayer, Buck Mulligan. Like several of Joyce's school friends, Gogarty was aware that Joyce was making notes on him, preparing to use him in a literary work. In Ulysses Stephen muses, "He fears the lancet of my art." Indeed in later life Gogarty found himself protesting that he was not Buck Mulligan, but a real human being. Like Byrne, he published his own very different version of his relationship with Joyce. Like Joyce's brother Stanislaus, Gogarty appeared in an early version of Portrait (part of which has been published as Stephen Hero), but was cut from the final draft in order to give more prominence to Stephen.

For all their differences, Stephen and Joyce in this period shared what Joyce termed an "enigma of a manner," a rather formal and aloof persona with which to confront rival students, and a sometimes showy and pedantic way of speaking. Coupled with a certain reputation for debauchery--Stephen "confesses" some of his experiences with prostitutes to Davin--this helped establish his considerable reputation as a young man to be reckoned with. Eugene Sheehy observed that "Joyce, the schoolboy, was as icy, aloof, and imperturbable as. . . Joyce the man." Another friend described him delivering a paper before a debating society: "Joyce, thin and pale, stood erect, scarcely moving, cold and undisturbed by interruptions (and he had many), and seemed in passionless tones to wither the opposition by his air of indifferent disdain." He might have been Yeats facing down the rioters at the Abbey Theatre, ("You have disgraced yourselves again!") or Parnell campaigning in his last years. Following the debate on his paper and Joyce's demolition of each of his critics, a student slapped his back and exclaimed, "Joyce, that was magnificent, but you're raving mad!"

It should be noted that U.C.D. students of the time were a more rigorously selected group than those at the average American university today; also, typically they would have had considerable training in Latin, perhaps Greek, and the classics since childhood. Competitiveness was instilled by nationwide examinations and cash prizes. Their primary and secondary education stressed memorization of passages and the preparation of essays modeled on those of the great rhetoricians, so that when Stephen attacks Lynch with his "dagger definitions," for instance, he is merely practicing the art for which he has been trained. The young Joyce's intellectual style was striking mainly because he chose to cite obscure Ancients and embattled Moderns rather than the accepted Greats, and Continental rather than English writers. Also, of course, he wrote very well. Still, Joyce's portrait gives Stephen more rigor and sophistication than he himself probably possessed at the time. Although Stephen considers himself a student of Aquinas and Aristotle--and garners considerable intellectual status from this--it appears from his notebooks that Joyce himself studied Aristotle intensely only after leaving the university.

Although Stephen has fixed his romantic yearnings since childhood upon the insubstantial "E. C.", or "Emma," Joyce seems to have had no such abiding passion. His brother Stanislaus has suggested he may have been infatuated for a time with a girl named Mary Sheehy for a time, and certainly she, along with her bright and talented sisters, served in part as a model for E. C. In Stephen Hero she appears more vigorously as Emma Clery, with whom Stephen is cautiously involved, and in that manuscript argues with him over the right of women to the same education men receive. Stephen imperiously disagrees, and later suggests that the two of them spend a single night of wild passion, then part, never to see one another again. Not surprisingly, this generous offer fails to tempt her. A friend of Stephen's observes that he could marry her, but Stephen considers that price too high; and like Joyce, he feels that the institution of marriage is an unwarranted intrusion of State and Church into private relationships. Like Church, Family, and Nation, marriage is another "net" thrown up to catch the artist's fledgling soul.