Stanislaus Joyce

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Criticism
The most comprehensive account of Stanislaus is to be found in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (OUP 1959 & Edns.); see also Stan Gebler Davies, James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist (London: David Poynter 1975), which largely takes Stanislaus’s view of his brother’s behaviour and the character of his works.

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Commentary
Marvin Magalaner & Richard M. Kain, James Joyce: The Man, The Works, The Reputation [1956] (London; John Calder 1957), ‘If we may believe Stanislaus Jyce, the poet AE (George Russell) told him that his brother [James] was a worthless cad and that starvation on the continent woudl do him good. In fact, says Stanislaus, when Joyce reported from Europe that he had found a job as teacher in the Berlitz schools, Stanislaus woke the poet after midnight to taunt him.’ (Stanislaus Joyce, The Listener, XLI, May 1949, p.896; Magalaner & Kain, op. cit., p.21.)

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Richard Murphy reviewing Dublin Diary [prob. in Irish Times during 1962]: ‘Ireland is always Connaught to my imagination,’ Yeats remarks in “Explorations”. How far removed in 1904, Yeats and Synge were from the native mind of Dublin, where they toiled and argued, can be pictured by a glance at The Dublin Diary of Stanislaus Joyce, younger brother of the famous “Jim.” “I loathe my father. I loathe him because he is himself, and I loathe him because he is Irish - Irish, that word that epitomises all that is loath-some to me.” This self-consciously Joyce destructive journal, written by a boy of 20 who already felt doomed to be his brother’s whetstone, is as cutting as a butcher’s knife, and in its scathing resentments gloweringly funny.’ (q.p.)

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Quotations
Diary for 1907 - 10 Nov. 1907: ‘Jim told me that he is going to expand his story “Ulysses” into a short book and make a Dublin “Peer Gynt” of it. I think that some suggestions of mine put him in the way of making it important. As it happens in one day, I suggested that he should make a comedy of it, but he won’t. It should be good. Jim says that he writes well because when he writes his mind is as nearly normal as possible, that what he says is worth listening to because he has an uncommon amount of good sense at times. I think I have written this before. He repeats it very often and appears pleased with this explanation of himself.’ (Quoted in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 1965, pp.274-75) [Cont.]

Diary for 1907 - entry for 21 February 1908 in which Joyce condemns Bourget’s attempt at psychology: ‘“Psychologist! What can a man know but what passes inside his own head?” Stanislaus replied, “Then the psychological novel is an absurdity, you think? and the only novel is the egomaniac’s? D’Annunzio’s?” Joyce replied, “I said as much in my pamphlet [“The Day of the Rabblement”]’ (Thus given in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 1965. pp.274-75; see also entry for 8 Sept. 1907, under James Joyce, supra.)

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‘James Joyce: A Memoir’: ‘Uncompromising in all that concerned his artistic integrity, Joyce was, for the rest, of a sociable and amiable disposition. Around his [110] tall, agile figure there hovered a certain air of youthful grace and, despite the squalors of his home, a sense of happiness, as of one who feels within himself a joyous courage, a resolute confidence in life and in his own powers … Joyce’s laugh was characteristic ... of that pure hilarity which does not contort the mouth.’ (In Hudson Review, 11, 4, p.496; quoted in Hugh Kenner, Dublin’s Joyce, London: Chatto & Windus 1955, p.111.)

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Joyce and Pragmatism: ‘My brother’s interest in pragmatism was slight, hardly more than a certain curiosity regarding a school of philosophy [...] which, he held, avoided philosophical difficulty by sidestepping nimbly. The asserted relativity of truth and the practical test of knowledge by its usefulness to an end ran counter not only to his Aristotelian principles of logic, but still more to his character [...] In Trieste he once told me that he preferred the Italian to the British Encyclopedia because it contained so much useless knowledge that interested him. [...]. (The Early Joyce: The Book Reviews, 1902-1903, Colorado Springs, The Mamalujo Press 1955), p.43; quoted in Critical Writings of James Joyce, ed. Ellsworth Mason & Richard Ellmann, Viking Press, 1966, p.135.)

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The Complete Dublin Diary of Stanislaus Joyce, ed. George E. Healey [1962] (Cornell UP 1971 Edn.): ‘Food is good and warmth is good. This is a good house to learn to appreciate both in. We do weeks on one chance insufficient meal, and a collation in the days I have been stripped of my garments, even of my heavy boots, willingly stripped to pawn them and feed on them.’ (p.77; quoted in David Norris, ‘A Turnip for the Books’, in James Joyce: An Joyce International Perspective, ed. Suheil Bushrui & Benstock, Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1982, p.131. Norris notes that the entry occurs within a few days of 16th June 1904.)

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The Complete Dublin Diary of Stanislaus Joyce, ed. George E. Healey [1962] (Cornell UP 1971 Edn.) - 2 Feb. 1904: ‘Jim is beginning his novel, as he usually begins things, half in anger, to show that in writing about himself he has a subject of more interest than their aimless discussion. I suggested the title “A Portrait of the Artist”, and this evening, sitting in the kitchen, Jim told me his idea for the novel. It is to be almost autobiographical, and naturally as it comes from Jim, satirical. He is putting in a large number of his acquaintances into it, and those Jesuits whom he has known. I don’t think they will like themselves in it. He has not decided on a title, and again I made most of the suggestions. Finally a title of mine was accepted: Stephen Hero, from Jim’s own name in the book, “Stephen Dedalus”. The title, like the book, is satirical.’ (The Dublin Diary; quoted in Hélène Cixous, The Exile of James Joyce, London: Calder 1972, p.224, citing Ellmann, James Joyce [1959], p.152; see The Dublin Diary, ed. George H. Healey, Dublin: Anna Livia Press 1992, p.12.) [Note: Richard Ellmann quotes the entire entry in James Joyce (1959, 1965, p.152-53) - apparently from the manuscript original since no bibliographical reference is supplied; see copy, in RICORSO Library, “Criticism > Major Authors > James Joyce > Richard Ellmann (3)”, infra - and search ‘birthday’.]

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The Complete Dublin Diary of Stanislaus Joyce, ed. George E. Healey [1962] (Cornell UP 1971) - 29 March 1904: ‘Jim has turned the paper [A Portrait of the Artist - rejeced by W. K. Magee (“John Eglinton”) and Frederick Ryan, editors of Dana] into a novel the title of which - Stephen Hero - I also suggested. He has written eleven chapters. The chapters are exceptionally well-written in a style which seems to me altogether original. It is a lying autobiography and a raking satire. He is putting nearly all his acquantances in it, and the Catholic Church comes in for a bad quarter of an hour.’ (Healey, 1962, p.25; rep. in Robert H. Deming, ed., James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1970, Vol. 1, p.112.) Note: The above passage, though reprinted in Deming [op. cit., 1970], is not included in the corresponding letter in the Anna Livia Press Dublin imprint of Healey’s edition, which nevertheless includes full bibliographical acknowledgements of its Cornell UP predecessor on the title-page verso. Instead, a lacuna corresponding to the place where the passage appears in the other is marked editorially, ‘a leaf is lacking in the manuscript’. (Op. cit., 1992, p.24.) The above text of the Cornell Edition (1971) is taken from the Google Books version online by searching for ‘Joyce lying autobiography raking satire’ [accessed 20 Nov. 2008]. See also under St. John Gogarty, supra.

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My Brother’s Keeper (London: Faber & Faber 1958): ‘My brother’s major work came at the close of an epoch of Irish, perhaps one may say, of European history, to give a comprehensive picture of it in the daily life of a large city. He always held that he was lucky to have been born in a city that is old and historic enough to be considered a representative European capital, and small enough to be viewed as a whole; and he believed that circumstances of birth talent and character had made him its interpreter. To that duty of interpretation he devoted himself with a singleness of purpose that made even the upheaval of world wars seem to him meaningless disturbances.’ (p.42; quoted in Norris, op. cit., 1982, p.130.) Also: Acc. Stanislaus, Joyce berated Yeats and the Literary Theatre in his Day of the Rabblement for staging ‘such political and dramatic claptrap’. (See Ann Saddlemyer, ‘James Joyce and the Irish Dramatic Movement’, in James Joyce: An Joyce International Perspective, ed. Suheil Bushrui & Bernard Benstock, Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1982, p.208., n.22.)

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My Brother’s Keeper (1958) - on John Stanislaus Joyce: ‘Because of his bad record (says Stanislaus Joyce)’, it was at first doubtful whether my father would be granted any pension, but on the personal intercession of my mother, the people at the top, whoever they were, assigned to him a pension equal to about one third of his salary, and amounting to eleven pounds a month. At about the same time his house property in Cork, or what was left of it, was sold, apparently to make good defalcations, but it was so heavily mortgaged that little or nothing came to him from the sale. We left Blackrock abruptly and moved up to Dublin. My father was still in his early forties, a man who had received a university education and had never known a day’s illness. But though he had a large family of young children, he was quite unburdened by any sense of responsibility towards them. His pension, which could have taken in part the place of the property he had lost and been a substantial addition to an earned income, became his and our only means of subsistence.’ (Quoted in Hélène Cixous, The Exile of James Joyce , trans. by Sally Purcell [prev. as l’Exil de James Joyce, 1972] (London: Calder 1976), p.3; My Brother’s Keeper, NY: 1958; without page ref.)

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My Brother’s Keeper (NY: Viking Press 1958) - on May Joyce: ‘But my mother was not a weak character, except in regard to her husband, and not without resource or energy in the government of her household when the occasion called for it. I have a clear recollection of her dealing capably with a dangerous fire in the nursery chimney. Telephones were a rarity in houses then and the fire brigade was not easy to call. I remember her sitting in the hearth, quickly but calmly ramming up the chimney brooks, swathed in wet clothes, which the servants kept handing her from a tub of water on the floor beside her.’ (p.57; quoted in Catherine J. Hemphill, UG Diss., UUC 2003.)

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My Brother’s Keeper (NY: Viking Press 1958) [recounts an occasion when John Stanislaus Joyce cried out, ‘Now, by God, is the time to finish it’, and attacked his wife]: ‘My brother was less affected by these scenes than I was, though they certainly influenced his attitude towards marriage and family life. Half-hushed-up stories reached us of somewhat similar happenings in the families of friends of ours, whose material position, at least, was assused and normally comfortable; poverty cannot, therefore, have been the root of the evil. The main struggle of the various Mrs. This-bodies and Mrs. That-bodies, with whom we were acquainted, was to conceal carefully what went on at home.’ ( p.74; quoted in Hemphill, op. cit., supra.)

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My Brother’s Keeper (London: Faber & Faber 1958): ‘Glengariff Parade was in a depressing neighbourhood. One end of it led out on to a main road and we were near the corner. [...] One morning, shortly after we had moved into Glengariff Parade, I was standing at the open and still unattained window of the only front room watching the butcher’s boy walking in the middle of the road with his head in his empty basket; he was raising the dust with his feet, and intoning loudly:

Walkin’ along the road
Kicking up all the dust
And there's ne’er a wan in Glengariff Parade,
Dar give him a lick in the pus.

“A rival poet”, I said unsmiling to Jim, who had come to the window. But Jim was amused. He called him “the poet of the rugged glen”, which he said was the meaning of the name Glengariff. (He had been studying Irish for a year or so.) Jim was not limitary in his sympathies as I was; they extended in Ireland from Mangan and Yeats to the unlettered poets of the rugged [134] glens, where a few years later Synge was to stake out his claim. If he sometimes seemed to be limitary in his sympathies it was because he had no doubt as to their order of importance.’ (pp.133-34.)

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My Brother’s Keeper (London: Faber & Faber 1958): ‘Another experimental form which his literary urge took while we were living at this address [Royal Terrace] consisted in the noting of what he called ‘epiphanies’ - manifestations or revelations. Jim always had a contempt for secrecy, and these notes were in the beginning ironical slips and little errors and gestures - mere straws in the wind - by which people betrayed the very things they were most careful to conceal. “Epiphanies” were always brief sketches hardly ever more than some dozen lines in length, but always very accurately observed and noted, the matter being slight.’ (p.134.)

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My Brother’s Keeper (London: Faber & Faber 1958): [having disposed of the idea that the epiphanies served him as a diary, an ‘impudent invention’ promulgated by John Eglinton, or that they invited comparison with the lines of Burns, ‘[...] A chiel’s amang ye takin’ notes, / An’ faith he’ll prent it’]: ‘My brother’s purpose was different and his angle of vision new. The revelation and importance of the subconscious had caught his interest. The epiphanies became more frequently subjective and included dreams which he considered in some way revelatory. / Some of the “epiphanies” he introduced here and there into A Portrait of the Artist where the occasion offered and some into the imaginary diary at the end. The others he considered not to be of sufficient interest to be retained; but I did not share his opinon, and have kept several of them. As forhis dreams, he was at no pains at first to interpret them subtly. The following note regarding a dream was one of the first of the collection, perhaps made before we left Royal Terrace: “A white mist is falling in slow flakes. [...]”’. (p.135.)

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My Brother’s Keeper (London: Faber & Faber 1958): ‘In his paper he repudiated the idea that art should have a moral purpose or a national purpose, as well as the vague theories of art for art’s sake of the aesthetic school. He maintained that art had no purpose; that all fixed purposes falsify it, but that it had a cause, namely, necessity, the imperative inward necessity for the imagination to recreate from life its own ordered synthesis. He spoke of the importance of the artist in the community, and insisted on his right to develop his personality freely in accordance with his own artistic conscience, and without being drawn into movements or making himself a mouthpiece for others. He inherits difficulties enough to struggle within his own soul. / Turning to drama, he asserted that it was the highest art form, because it was not static but presented life in action [...] He derided the superhuman proportions of the heroes of romantic drama and the clamorous and violent deeds of which they are the centre, all “sound and fury, signifying nothing”, and declared that more intense drama of wider human significance could be enacted in the anteroom of a Norwegian villa. He defended the realism of modern drama [... &c.]’ (p.138.)

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My Brother’s Keeper (1958; London 1958): On Joyce’s reaction to the death of George [br.] in 1902: ‘Mother was certainly wrong in thinking Jim callous. He did not display his feelings as the others did, but he felt Georgie’s death no less. When he thought everybody was asleep, he went softly upstairs to see ’the poor little fellow’ where he lay alone with the blue of his eyes still visible under the lids that had been closed too late. And not long afterwards, at a mention of Irish rebellion, he exclaimed bitterly: “Ireland is an old sow that devours her farrow.” / It was a reflection on Irish history, but I saw in the expression his smouldering anger at Georgie’s untimely death, and thought to myself, “ There goes what I was trying to say.” / He thought that by the boy in the following dream-epiphany Georgie was intended. / “That is no dancing. Go down before the people, young boy, and dance for them. ... He runs out darkly-clad, lithe and serious to dance before the multitude. There is no music for him. He begins to dance far below in the amphitheatre with a slow and supple movement of the limbs, passing from movement to movement in all the grace of youth and distance, until he seems to be a whirling body, a spider wheeling amid space, a star. I desire to shout to him words of praise, to shout arrogantly over the heads of the multitude “See! See!” ... His dancing is not the dancing of harlots, the dance of the daughter of Herodias. It goes up from the midst of the people, sudden and young and male, and falls again to earth in tremulous sobbing to die upon its triumph.” [144]. He called his son, born in Trieste, Giorgio.’ (pp.144-45.)

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My Brother’s Keeper (NY: Viking Press 1958): ‘In A Portrait of the Artist, Dedalus speaks of a certain disadvantage at which Irish writers find themselves in using the English language. The very slight differences in the shades of meaning which English words may have for Englishmen can give pause, I fancy, only to Irishmen like Yeats or my brother, whose sensibility to words applies extreme tests. To me it seems that the real disadvantage of Irishmen is of quite a different nature. In Ireland, a country which has seen revolutions in every generation, there is properly speaking no national tradition. Nothing is stable in the country; nothing is stable in the minds of the people. When the Irish artist begins to write, he has to create his moral world from chaos by himself, for himself. Yet, though this is an enormous disadvantage for a host of writers of good average talent, it proves to be an enormous advantage for men of original genius, such as Shaw, Yeats or my brother.’ (p.187.) [Cont.]

My Brother’s Keeper (NY: Faber 1958) - cont. [new para.]: ‘My brother had the further advantage of being unhappy in an unhappy country. Unhappiness was like a vice which forced him either to look experience in the eye or to take refuge in dreams. An English writer - Wells or Galsworthy or Huxley or Aldington - deals with social, religious, or intellectual problems, one has the impression that even though the problems are real and the writer is striving to be sincere, the life that produced him is in general stable and balanced. It has been lived for centuries against a Constable background. And if he poses as an extremist, it is merely a picturesque attitude like Count Tolstoy’s donning of his Russian smock-frock, over trousers cut by the most expensive tailor in Petersburg, to play at being a peasant saint. The characters whom these writers create to voice conflicts of opinion are people of ease and culture [...]. Their brilliant chatter gives the impression of purely academic after-dinner discussions. In Ireland, on the other hand, the dinner itself is often lacking, and in consequence the discussions assume a different tone. The bread and butter test is not irrelevant. For my brother life was not an interesting subject for discussion; it was a passion.’ (pp.185-86; quoted in Sean Golden, ‘Post-Traditional English Literature: A Polemic’, in The Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies [Vol. 3, No. 2 1979], 1982, pp.427-34, p.436.)

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Letter to James Joyce (7 Aug. 1924) - on Finnegans Wake: ‘The first instalment faintly suggests the Book of the Four Masters and a kind of Biddy in Blunderland and a satire on the supposed matriarchal system. It has characteristics of a beginning of something, it is nebulous, chaotic but contains certain elements. That is absolutely all I can make of it. But! It is unspeakably wearisome. Gorman’s book on you practically procclaims your work as the last word in modern literature. It may be the last in another sense, the witless wandering of literature before its final extinction. [...] I for one would not read more than a paragraph of it, if I did not know you. / What I say does not matter. I have no doubt you have your plan, probably a big one again as in Ulysses. [...; 387] In any case I refuses to allow myself to be whirled round in the mad dance by a literary dervish.’ (Letters, Vol. III, 1966, pp.1102-06; rep. in Robert Deming, ed., James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1970, Vol. 2, pp.387-88.) [For further remarks on specific works, see under Joyce, Commentary, supra.]

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Notes
My whetstone: Stanislaus is the model for Stephen’s brother Maurice in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), while in Ulysses (1922) he is only obliquely referred to as ‘my whetstone’ - viz.: Where is your brother? Apothecaries’ hall. My ‘whetstone’. Him, then Cranly, Mulligan: now these. Speech, speech. But act. Act speech. They mock to try you. Act. Be acted on.’ (Ulysses, Bodley Head Edn. 1965, p.271.) Note however that the epithet ‘whetstone’ is again cited in the “Circe” episode, this time referring to Lynch - or Lynch’s hallucinatory cap: ‘He stops, points at Lynch’s cap, smiles, laughs [...] THE CAP: (With saturnine spleen.) Bah! It is because it is. Woman’s reason. Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet. Death is the highest form of life. Bah! STEPHEN: You remember fairly accurately all my errors, boasts, mistakes. How long shall I continue to close my eyes to disloyalty? Whetstone! THE CAP: Bah!’

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Dubliners - to my bro: Joyce offered to dedicate Dubliners to Stanislaus (letter of 7 Feb. 1905) because the stories seemd ‘to your taste’ but actually did not when the collection was published in 1914. In July 1905, Joyce conceived the plan of renting a cottage outside Dublin in the suburbs, furnishing it and pay half a year’s rent in advance, to share with Stanislaus. This too came to nothing. (Ibid., p.68.)

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Brother’s keeper: Stanislaus is portrayed in caricature as the priestly Jaun in Finnegans Wake, where that character is called a ‘brotherkeeper’ (FW433) and the ‘altar’s ego’ of Shem (FW463). Note that while these epithets are quoted in W. Y. Tindall, A Reader’s Guide to James Joyce (NY 1959; London 1960), the identity with Stanislaus is not expressly urged (p.290).

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“Bile Beans” was the name James Joyce gave to his brother’s “Dublin Diary”, which he [James] occasionally picked up and marked in the margin; it is also the source of an account of Stanislaus’s meeting with a handsome woman of 40 in the Rotunda concert hall who subsequently stopped him in the street to inquire about his studies. (See My Brother’s Keeper, pp.164-65, and The Dublin Diary of Stanislaus Joyce, ed. George Harris Healy, Ithaca: 1962, q.p.) Note that George Joyce (obiit 1902) called Stanislaus Brother John on account of ‘some imagined staidness in my character’, as Stanislaus puts it. (My Brother’s Keeper, 1958, p.144.)

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Party piece: Stanislaus’s party piece in childhood was “Houlihan’s Cake”, while James Joyce’s was “Finnegan’s Wake” (Ellmann, James Joyce, 1966 Edn., p.26; cited in Hemphill, op. cit., supra.)

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