tradition.66
Joyce did not forget Rooney, for in Ulysses he again used the motif of persistent tapping, the tapping being that of a blind man’s cane as he sings a ballad about 1798. At one point Joyce drops into this passage the surname Rooney, albeit with the first name Micky (a diminutive of the ‘Michael’ he had given Furey in Dubliners): ‘Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Bloom went by Barry’s. Wish I could. Wait. That wonderworker if I had … But for example the chap that wallops the big drum. His vocation: Micky Rooney’s band.’ Advanced nationalists such as William Rooney were mockingly dubbed ‘the Green Hungarian Band’, because Griffith’s proposal for a dual monarchy for Ireland and Britain was based loosely on the Austro-Hungarian constitution.67 Also, in ‘The Dead’, Michael Furey ‘was going to study singing only for his health.’68 As noted already, both Rooney and Griffith were collectors of Irish ballads. We have seen that Rooney was reported publicly to have spoken wistfully in his last days of how he ‘would teach every singer a song that was never heard in Dublin before’, knowing where ‘to get airs and words’.
At the next meeting of the Celtic Literary Society after Rooney’s death, with Griffith presiding, they sang and recited songs or poems by his late friend ‘and the proceedings were brought to a close by the singing of “The Memory of the Dead” – which on the occasion had a singular and sad appropriateness for those present’. The rousing ballad, written by the poet and economist John Kells Ingram (and not by William Elliott Hudson as once thought), was first published anonymously in Thomas Davis’ The Nation on 1 April 1843 and was often sung at patriotic events. It is better known today as ‘Who Fears to Speak of [17]98’.69 The currency of the ballad is reflected in a report in Griffith’s United Irishman, on 3 February 1900, when the editor recalled a summer evening two years earlier in Pretoria. Griffith and others had ‘gathered to greet a comrade who had journeyed down from Bechuanaland to drink a toast to the memory of the dead’. They stretched out beside the Apies River
and there under the shadow of the black hills he sang us ‘The Memory of the Dead’, and we made the kopjes [small hills] re-echo back the chorus. We chorused in many brogues, for we were Leinstermen and Ulstermen, Connaughtmen and Munstermen, and some of us had never seen Ireland at all … It was midnight ere we quitted his side … He talked to us long and earnestly of Ireland and her future and his hopes for it … I see him now as he stood up to sing the parting song – ‘The Memory of the Dead.’ I hear his voice in memory again as he sang … but only in memory. Never again shall my eyes behold him or my ears hearken to his voice. For he died for Ireland like the men whose memory he revered. Tied to a post in Mafeking he was riddled by the bullets of Baden-Powell’s assassins for being ‘an Irish Fenian’. His name was James Quinlan. Let his countrymen be but as true through good and ill to Ireland as he was, and the dream he dreamed will yet be realised.70
If Joyce read this evocative report in one of the cuttings from or copies of Griffith’s paper sent to him abroad, it may have made a lasting impression on him. At this very time he was certainly impressed by Henrik Ibsen’s latest play When We Dead Awaken, and intrigued by its lines ‘We see the irretrievable only when [breaks off silent] … When we dead awaken.’ He wrote a review of the play that he sent to Ibsen who found it ‘very benevolent’. 71
Quinlan, stationmaster at Mafeking, himself rose from the grave. More precisely, reports of his demise turned out to be premature. In 1901, his friends welcomed him home to Ireland, their celebrations ending with the singing of ‘The Memory of the Dead’.72 On one occasion Griffith was outraged to learn that the London Catholic Universe had published a version of ‘The Memory of the Dead’ that compared soldiers of the British Army in South Africa to the men of 1798: ‘The fellow who wrote this deserves the horsewhip,’ his paper fulminated.73 When praising a new edition of the poetry of John Kells Ingram, Rooney himself had written ‘It may safely be asserted that “The Memory of the Dead” has cheered the heart and cheered the soul of every single man and woman of the Irish National millions at home and abroad.’74 It was reported that at a Wolfe Tone Memorial Concert the great proportion of an audience rose and left a hall in protest when the event turned out to be ‘low music hall entertainments’. They sang ‘The Memory of the Dead’ as they did so.75 Griffith publicly lamented the ‘oversight’ involved when an Oireachtas festival opened without a mention of his late friend Rooney, remarking ‘The dead are soon forgotten by some people.’76 In 1910 Yeats appears to have regarded the song as emblematic.77
In Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, Gabriel Conroy, a language teacher like Joyce himself, asks his wife about her dead admirer Michael Furey: ‘Who was he?’ She replies ‘He was [working] in the gasworks.’ Gabriel presses her ‘And what did he die of so young, Gretta? Consumption was it?’ She retorts ‘He died for me.’78 Maud Gonne thought ‘Rooney had literally killed himself from over-work’79 by pursuing his revivalist campaign and writing for the United Irishman while also holding down a job in a railway. A less romantic view, akin to Gabriel Conroy’s in respect to Michael Furey, is reflected on William Rooney’s death certificate. Typhoid and tuberculosis (‘consumption’) killed many then, albeit aided by bad diet or exhaustion.
Joycean scholars believe that the character of Michael Furey is based primarily on Michael Bodkin who once courted Joyce’s wife Nora. Confined by TB to his sickbed in Galway, Bodkin stole out when he learnt that she had resolved to move to Dublin, and sang to her under an apple tree. He died soon afterwards. Nora was first attracted to Joyce, she said, because he resembled Bodkin.80 But there are parallels too with Rooney’s desperate dedication to Ireland and to the memory of ’98, as well as with Rooney’s early tragic death.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
