Sir,—I read Daniel Mulhall’s piece (HI 32.3, May/June 2024) with interest. No context is given for the Citizen’s jibe about King Edward VII—‘There’s a bloody sight more Pox than Pax in that boyo’.
Joyce set the novel in 1904, the year of the Entente Cordiale between England and France. In the first paragraphs of his 1,000-page war memoir, David Lloyd George recalls his innocence at the time when, as a young MP, he called on the ex-prime minister, Lord Roseberry, who asked him what he thought of it. He replied that he was glad that the scratching and snarling with France was over, only to be told that it meant war with Germany. Roger Casement, an Irishman in the British diplomatic service, came to condemn the conspiracy as a crime against Europe and was hanged for it and his name blackened by British agencies.
A selection of the political diaries of C.P. Scott, published in 1961 (30 years after his death), makes clear that the conspiracy to make war on Germany was so advanced by 1911 that a joint French and British schedule for the landing and deployment of a British Expeditionary Force was in place. That schedule was implemented without a hitch in 1914.
Joyce’s friends, described in his works under pseudonyms, include Miss Ivors in ‘The Dead’, in real life Kathleen Sheehy, mother of Conor Cruise O’Brien and sister-in-law of Francis Sheehy Skeffington and of Tom Kettle, who feature under pseudonyms in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as does George Clancy. Skeffington, Kettle and Clancy were to die of bullet wounds. Kettle, who became a Nationalist MP, died in battle, leading a platoon of Dublin Fusiliers in France in September 1916. He was predeceased by Skeffington, Ireland’s most prominent pacifist and feminist, on Easter Tuesday 1916, after being taken prisoner while attempting to stop looting. His captor was British Captain Bowen-Colthurst of Blarney Castle, who called out the guard of Portobello Barracks and used them as an impromptu firing squad to murder him, and had his body buried without ceremony in its grounds. Colthurst and his soldiers murdered others during that rampage and Colthurst was promoted during it. George Clancy was elected mayor of Limerick and was murdered in his home in front of his wife in March 1921 by a British officer who had murdered his immediate predecessor, Michael O’Callaghan, that same night.
There is no reason to believe that James Joyce was unmoved by the deaths of any of his friends or that he held any brief for British statesmanship. He was quite happy in Trieste under the Hapsburg Empire.—Yours etc.,
DONAL KENNEDY