for the Dublin Daily Express of 11 December 1902 was not some kind of dramatic break with Ireland or with its people. It was the first of twenty book reviews that he wrote for that Dublin paper.50 He penned it on his way to Paris, at the age of twenty. He had dropped out of medical school in Dublin and thought that he might instead study medicine in France while also developing a literary career. He had spoken with Lady Gregory who recommended him to the editor as a reviewer, although the Dublin Daily Express scarcely reflected his own perspective on society. It had a unionist and conservative reputation, with Karl Marx condemning it in 1858 as ‘the Government organ, which day by day treats its readers to false rumours’.51 Joyce himself, in his short story ‘The Dead’, later had a character discover that Gabriel Conroy writes for the Daily Express. She asks him ‘Now, aren’t you ashamed of yourself?’
A look of perplexity appeared on Gabriel’s face. It was true that he wrote a literary column every Wednesday in The Daily Express, for which he was paid fifteen shillings. But that did not make him a West Briton surely … He wanted to say that literature was above politics. But they were friends of many years’ standing and their careers had been parallel, first at the university and then as teachers: he could not risk a grandiose phrase with her. He continued blinking his eyes and trying to smile and murmured lamely that he saw nothing political in writing reviews of books.52
Strikingly, in the launch issues and in some subsequent issues of the United Irishman in 1899, Griffith had complimented the Daily Express, thanking it for its courtesy in informing its readers about Griffith and Rooney’s new paper and describing the Express under its then editor as ‘the best written and generally best informed, daily paper in Ireland’. However, in late December 1899, the United Irishman claimed that, ‘The Daily Express, under its new management, has reverted to its old pre-Maunsell policy of lying.’53
Joyce’s review in the Daily Express was unlikely to go unnoticed because, as he stated in its opening sentence: ‘These are the verses of a writer lately dead, whom many consider the [Thomas] Davis of the latest national movement … They are illustrative of the national temper.’ He wrote that the volume had ‘issued from headquarters’, by which he meant the offices of the United Irishman, which had also very recently published a play by W.B. Yeats.54 It may be relevant that Joyce had recently been trying his own hand at poetry but the critic and translator William Archer, to whom he sent verses during 1901, told him that his early efforts were too moody, ‘more temperament than anything else’.55 Joyce now asserted in his review of Rooney that (from an exclusively literary perspective perhaps), ‘a man who writes a book cannot be excused by his good intentions, or by his moral character’. He judged that Rooney had ‘no care then to create anything according to the art of literature’:
Instead we find in these pages a weary succession of verses … [that] have no spiritual or living energy, because they come from one in whom the spirit is in a manner dead … a weary and foolish spirit, speaking of redemption and revenge, blaspheming against tyrants, and going forth, full of tears and curses, upon its infernal labours. Religion and all that is allied thereto can manifestly persuade men to great evil, and by writing these verses, even though they should, as the writers of the prefaces think, enkindle the young men of Ireland to hope and activity, Mr Rooney has been persuaded to great evil.
Joyce excluded from his harsh criticism ‘one piece in the book which seems to have come out of a conscious personal life’. It is a translation of ‘Impidhe: A Request’ by Douglas Hyde, which Griffith published in pride of place on the front page of the United Irishman in the week that Rooney died and from which Joyce quoted some verses as translated by Rooney.56 But the fact that he chided Rooney for spoiling his art by speaking ‘those big words which make us so unhappy’ irked Griffith. The latter responded smartly by quoting Joyce’s phrase without comment in an advertisement for Rooney’s book but adding, within that quotation, the single word ‘Patriotism’ in brackets.57
Joyce was harsh not only on Rooney’s poetry but also on Poets and Dreamers by Lady Gregory. Gregory had been instrumental in getting Joyce commissions from the Daily Express and also in persuading Yeats to entertain him for some hours in London on his way to Paris. The editor placed Joyce’s initials at the end of the reviews to indicate clearly who had written them, and also urged Joyce in future to write more favourably. Joyce made use of this incident in both Dubliners and Ulysses, in the former when Gabriel Conroy’s initials betray him to Miss Ivors as a reviewer of the poet Robert Browning.58 In Ulysses, Buck Mulligan (Gogarty) exclaims to Stephen ‘O you inquisitorial drunken jewjesuit! She gets you a job on the paper and then you go and slate her drivel to Jaysus. Couldn’t you do the Yeats touch?’
While Joyce did not renounce his review of Rooney he gave the latter a certain artistic afterlife in his own work and retained his copy of Rooney’s poetry until his own death.59 Joyce had studied Irish under George Clancy, himself a student of Rooney, and Joyce approved of the Sinn Féin independence movement, albeit with reservations.60 He seemingly references Rooney in both ‘The Dead’, the best-known short story of Joyce’s Dubliners, and Ulysses. The short story, published in 1914, happens to share its title with an article in Griffith’s Sinn Féin on 3 April 1909 that recalled Rooney mourning the passing of John Millington Synge, who had died aged just thirty-eight after what the paper described as ‘a long period of ill health’, and whom the editor thought ‘would have become one of the first of modern dramatists’.
The Potent Dead
Alice Milligan, founder and president of the Irish Women’s Association and editor of Shan Van Vocht, wrote a long poem in Rooney’s honour, ‘By the Grave-Side’, which challenged those who thought that the dead are simply gone. It includes these notable lines:
‘Sweet were his songs, his dreams were wild and vain.
He is dead and silent now and shall dream no more.’
They know not Ireland by whom such words are said;
They know not Ireland’s heart, they cannot know
More potent than the living are our dead.61
In Joyce’s short story ‘The Dead’, one can see the potency of past lives, and aspects of that story are related to the milieu of Griffith and Rooney. One of Joyce’s sources for it appears to have been Richard Irvine Best’s rendering of an old Irish myth in the pages of the United Irishman.62 ‘The Dead’ also happens to echo aspects of William Rooney’s work. For in 1898, the Weekly Freeman newspaper awarded Rooney a prize for the best poem written on an incident in the 1798 rebellion. The title of Rooney’s winning entry ‘The Priest of Adrigoole’, refers to one Fr Conroy who was instrumental in helping the French force that landed in Co. Mayo in 1798 but that was heavily defeated.63 Gabriel Conroy in ‘The Dead’ has a brother who is a priest. Moreover, the climax of ‘The Dead’ posits an Ireland sleeping under snow while Gabriel and his wife in the Gresham Hotel uneasily conjure up the ghost of her long-deceased sweetheart from the west of Ireland, Michael Furey. The story’s last paragraph begins ‘A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again.’ Compare this stanza of Rooney’s ‘Priest of Adrigoole’:
There’s someone at the window. Tap! tap! tap, anew;
Sharp thro’ the silent midnight it speeds the cottage through;
‘Some poor soul speeding onward, some sudden call to go
Unshriven on the pathway we all of us must know.’
Thus muses he, that sagart [Irish for ‘priest’], as from his couch he flies
And opens full the window where wonder-widened eyes
Look into his, and accents with haste all husky spake –
‘The
