James Stephens
by
A.
Norman Jeffares
Introduction taken from
The Poetry of James Stephens
I
Who was James Stephens? Many aspects
of his early life are obscure, and he did little to clarify them. He was
born in Dublin on 9 February 1880 (though he always said in later life
that he was born on the same day as James Joyce, 2 February 1882), his
father Francis Stephens, a vanman, dying two years later. When he was
six James was committed to the Meath Protestant Industrial School for
Boys; he did not return to his mother when he left the school in 1896 to
work for a solicitor. He lived with the Collins family; the two
brothers, Tom and Dick, had become his friends at school. Stephens held
several posts in various Dublin offices, becoming a proficient shorthand
typist.
He was determined that he would be a writer, and so, as well as
reading voraciously, he wrote stories on scraps of paper, his
amusements otherwise including cycling and gymnastics – the latter
undertaken in a hope of increasing his stature. Though he only grew
to a height of four feet ten inches he was physically strong and
very agile, being a member of the Dawson Street Gymnastic Club,
which won the Irish shield for gymnastics in 1901.
What he did for some time after he left the Collins household is
uncertain: he may have worked in Belfast, he may have had a spell as
a vagrant, but he returned to being a clerk and typist, ‘a
scrivener’ in Dublin in 1906. He was employed by a firm of
solicitors, Messrs. T.T.Mecredy & Sons, whose office was in 91
Merrion Square. The Mecredy family liked him very much (something
not brought out in biographical accounts, but confirmed to me by
members of the family), and he became friendly with Hilary Mecredy,
an art student, who enjoyed talking to him about art and literature.
Stephens’ first published work, ‘The Greatest Miracle’, a short
story, had appeared in The United Irishman on
16 September 1905. This paper, set up by William Rooney and Arthur
Griffith, was edited by Griffith from its inception in March 1899
until April 1906, when it was suppressed for its revolutionary
content; it was succeeded by
Sinn Féin from May 1906 to November 1914. Griffith and
Rooney had established the Celtic Literary Society in 1893 and
Cumann na nGadhael in 1900, and Stephens was deeply impressed by
Griffith’s brand of nationalism and by his enthusiasm for the study
and use of Irish. They became close friends and Griffith published
him in Sinn Féin from 1907 to 1912, his verses, essays
and pieces supporting the Sinn Féin party were founded on Stephens’
admiration for the way Griffith was fusing a political process with
the cultural movement.
In 1907 George Russell (AE) ‘discovered’ Stephens; having read some
of his work, he called on him in the Mecredy office and soon became
his mentor, encouraging his study of Theosophy, the Bhagavadgita,
the
Upanishads and the Vedanta Sutras. It was a
lasting friendship, like that formed with Stephen MacKenna, the
translator of Plotinus who had fought for the Greeks against the
Turks in 1897, and had covered the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05
before returning to Dublin in 1907 where he taught Stephens Irish.
Thomas Bodkin, too, was a close friend in these early days of
Stephens’ writing: he offered legal help as well as literary advice
and Stephens respected his critical judgement; later they read
French poetry and translated it together. (By 1918, however, their
friendship had cooled somewhat; both had hot tempers.)
In becoming a published writer Stephens was emerging into a new
world. He was asked to join friends who met in the Bailey
Restaurant, a chophouse in Duke Street, Griffith sometimes arriving
there, and Oliver St John Gogarty usually adding notably to the
lively and generally witty talk of the gathering. Gogarty
appreciated Stephens, recalling how he used to meet him ‘of an
evening when his work was over. Then he would recite some of the
lyrics “on which I have been sitting all day long in the office,
keeping them warm like a hen on a nest of eggs”’. Stephens heard for
the first time in the Bailey, he said later, poetry ‘spoken of with
the assured carelessness with which a carpenter talks of his planks
and of the chairs and tables and oddments he will make of them’. In
his ‘Memories of Dublin’ published in The Sunday Times, 18
April 1937, Stephens describes this period of his life well:
The Dublin I was born
to was poor and Protestant and athletic. While very young I extended
my range and entered a Dublin that was poor and Catholic and Gaelic
– a very wonderworld. Then as a young writer I further extended to a
Dublin that was poor and artistic and political. Then I made a
Dublin for myself, my Dublin.
The
Dublin he made for himself was the happier for its having a secure
domestic base. Stephens had been lodging with the Kavanaghs, a
couple who split up. The wife, Millicent Josephine (1882-1966), was
expecting a child. This was Iris, born on 14 June 1907. Stephens
stayed on, supporting the household, announcing his liaison with
Millicent to his friends by telling them that he had a wife (whom he
called Cynthia) and family, to which Stephens’ son James Naoise was
added on 26 October 1909. It says a great deal for Stephens as a
parent that Iris did not know he was not her father until she
married Norman Wise in 1937, the marriage certificate identifying
her as ‘Iris Clare Brannick Kavanagh (otherwise Stephens)’. He was
utterly devastated when his son was killed in a railway accident on
Christmas Eve that same year, which the family believed to have been
suicide. Cynthia had a powerful personality and needed it: she coped
very well with their initially small income and Stephens’ occasional
outbursts of bad temper. These may have been caused by insecurity,
for obviously he was dissatisfied with his lack of stature – so
often is he described as a leprechaun, and was drawn as such in
The Celebrity Zoo (1925) by ‘Mac’ (Isa MacNie),
when he had already moved to ‘furrin parts’ as the accompanying poem
indicated – but at times he compensated for this in an Irish way by
laughing at himself.
Stephens’ own brand of humour was not always appreciated in his own
day. But then his first volume of verse, Insurrections,
published by the Dublin firm of Maunsel & Co. in May 1909, came as
somewhat of a shock to many of his contemporaries. These poems
reflected Stephens’ anger at the conditions of the Dublin poor, the
restrictive lives enforced on them by poverty. This was tough poetry
for the time, realistic in the way it put the sordid streets into
sharp focus in such poems as ‘The Street Behind Yours’, or ‘A
Street’, where strange men and women prowl ‘shity eyed / And
shocking’. Here the gutters are noisome, conveying ‘a turbid evil
stream’. This cityscape is mean, drab, grimy, grey, where ‘it is
sore / And sad and sorry to be living’. Its inhabitants match their
surroundings. A drunken clown sings obscenely; old men are bent with
age, are glum, for ‘the poor, when they’re old, have little of
peace!’
Yet exuberance breaks through. There are moments of vision. The
volume reflects not only Stephens’ own strong imagination and his
enjoyment in using a wide range of words, but shows how he made use
of his reading of the English poets. From the sad resignation
implied in the first poem, ‘What’s the Use’:
What’s the use
Of my abuse?
he moves in the last ‘Slán
Leath’, to the challenge of the future:
...But he has found
The path to newer romance, and, with you,
May go seek wonders. We are bound
Out to the storm of things, and all is new.
A
poet greatly impressed by Blake’s ideas, as in the imagery of
Nature, in the contradictions and tensions between men and women in
‘The Dancer’ and ‘The Red-Haired Man’s Wife’, and, at times, by
Browning’s technique, he was a teller of tales, ‘a gleeman’, as
Gogarty put it, ‘The most lyrical spirit of his time’. His natural
gift for story telling shaped such poems as ‘Teig Garabh and the
Liar’, ‘Where the Demons Grin’, and ‘Seumas Beg’.
He
was also an idealist. That innate idealism found its first
impressive outlet in The Charwoman’s Daughter
(1912), a story set in the Dublin tenements, its Cinderella-like
heroine, Mary Makebelieve, founded upon Cynthia. Stimulated by its
success, its financial success, Stephens then completed his best
known, deservedly famous book The Crock of Gold (1912), which
is an idiosyncratic, unique blend of the soul and the body. Stephens
remarked that ‘in it there is only one character – man – Pan is his
sensual nature, Caitilin his emotional nature, the Philosopher his
intellect at play, Angus Og his intellect spiritualised, the
policeman
his conventions and logics, the leprechauns his elemental side, the
children his innocence, and the idea is not too rigidly carried out,
but that is how I conceived the story.’ In the story the gods, pagan
and classical, return to Ireland – an idea which AE and Yeats had
both developed earlier – Stephens echoes Goldsmith’s The Vicar of
Wakefield, and, as Augustine Martin has commented in his
stimulating and perceptive James Stephens. A Critical Study
(1977), its satire arises in the counter-point of the rural idyll of
endless freedom against the city with its prisons, laws and
repressions. While stressing how in Stephens God never stopped being
Nature and Lover both, Martin firmly, and persuasively argued for
the comic nature of the novel with its culminating commands to leave
‘the loan and the desk’, the ‘shop where the carcasses are hung’,
the ‘place where raiment is sold and sewn in darkness’. The dance
‘has begun lightly, the wind is sounding over the hill’.
1912
was a turning point in Stephens’ life. Up to then in addition to his
literary work he had acted in a few amateur productions and written
The Marriage of Julia Elizabeth for the Theatre of Ireland
(it was staged in 1911 and later in 1913 at the Hardwicke Street
Theatre, and was later retitled as The Wooing of Julia Elizabeth);
as well as writing regularly for Sinn Féin he had
contributed essays to The Irish Citizen, The Irish Worker
and, under the pseudonym James Esse, to The Irish Homestead,
and he sat on the committee of a monthly, The Irish Review,
which appeared from 1911 to 1914. But none of this activity added
much if anything at all to his income; he was paid a pound a week as
a clerk (hence the indignant poem ‘Fifty Pounds a Year and a
Pension’) and he and his family could only afford to live in a
single room flat in Mount Street. But in 1912 Stephens left the
Mecredy office, ‘discharging himself’ as he put it in a dramatised
anecdote. He had decided to live as a full-time writer, and, perhaps
symbolically, he paid a visit, his first, to Paris, and put himself
in the hands of the famous literary agent James B. Pinker.
What
prompted this change in his life? It may well have been triggered by
an American publisher, Edward O’Brien of Small, Maynard, of
Boston, who read the story about ‘Mary Makebelieve’ in The Irish
Review
and offered Stephens £100 for it, its title becoming The
Charwoman’s Daughter when Macmillan published it in 1912. The
family moved from the single room in Mount Street to more
spacious accommodation in Killeen Road in Rathmines. A second volume
of poetry, The Hill of Vision, was published in 1912, as well
as
The Crock of Gold, which was to be awarded the Edmund
Polignac Prize of £100 the following year, and continued to sell
well over many years after its publication. In London The
Nation commissioned a series of short stories from Stephens. He
moved the family to Paris in May 1913; by June they had rented a
three-room flat at 11 Rue Compaigne-Première and were to stay in
Paris two years.
Paris was not conducive to writing poetry, but Here are Ladies
(1913), rewritten stories, shows how Stephens had been influenced by
French writing. He began The Demi-Gods (1914) as a play but
then turned it into a novel. Though his French was improving – he
was reading a lot of Anatole France – he was not meeting many French
people, and returned to Dublin in early August.
The Demi-Gods appears at once to be a picaresque novel in
which the tinkers Patsy MacCann and his daughter Mary are joined by
three angels, Finaun, Caeltia and Art, whom the tinkers disguise in
stolen clothes; all of them then wander about the roads of Ireland.
In the second Book they meet Eileen Ni Cooley, a tinker woman, who
forms a relationship with Patsy only to leave them when Patsy taunts
her about her promiscuity. Finaun recounts the story of Creation. In
the third Book Billy the Music, a tramp, relates how he has been
converted by a supernatural visitation from Cuchulain and Brien
O’Brien. Patsy then adds his version of how these two had stolen the
MaCanns’ clothes. Caeltia joins in, narrating how the two had been
expelled from Eternity. The fourth Book provides some rather
slapstick encounters and tells how Eileen Ni Cooley, who has been
seeking protection from O’Brien, and Patsy are reconciled. Art, the
third angel, remains on earth as Mary’s lover while the other angels
return to Heaven. O’Brien, kicked on the head by an ass, again
enters his karma. The angels, thanks to their disguises, have
appeared to be like men.
The Demi-Gods, however, is not merely picaresque in its
wandering yet complex, interwoven narrative – its characters
certainly are rogues – but it is also comic – its lovers are finally
paired off in the manner of romantic comedies – and decidedly
anarchic in its scope, its angels highly unorthodox. The story
provided Stephens with a framework for his panoptic, quasi-Miltonic
blending of Christian, Blakean, and Theosophical ideas about the
universe and its creation. It is a fine experimental novel, filled
with complexity, with layers of meaning matching the intricate
patterns of its storytelling, its cosmic comedy, its overview of
life that embraces both the spiritual and the physical and takes
into its boundaries not only human but animal and vegetable life.
The Demi-Gods did not match the success of The Crock of Gold.
Stephens became depressed after the family went back to Paris in
November 1914, now finding he couldn’t write there. But while
thinking of Irish subjects he discovered the pleasure of reading
Balzac (as Yeats did later, claiming to have read all of him in his
last stay at Coole in 1931); perhaps an Irish Comedie
Humaine was a possibility. He wrote to Bodkin that in addition
to The Adventures of Seumas Beg he was issuing The Rocky
Road to Dublin, and asked him if he could ‘recollect any small
street facts & refresh my memories with your recollects I’ll be your
servant’. In some despair at the way his writing career seemed to be
becoming stagnant he applied for the position of Registrar of the
National Gallery of Ireland and was installed in this post on 1
August 1915, the appointment confirmed officially in 1918.
The
return to Dublin began a period of great happiness for the family as
they settled into a spacious flat, the top floor of 42 Fitzwilliam
Place. And now Stephens began writing again. The Insurrection in
Dublin (1916) is a personal but objective account of the Easter
Rising which brings home in elegantly simple prose the initial
general ignorance about what was happening; in this Stephens was
anticipating Yeats’s poem ‘The Stare’s Nest by My Window’ which was
to encapsulate the effect of the Civil War upon individuals with its
‘Yet no clear fact to be discerned’.
In
1918 Resurrections was published: it contains his most
effective poems, written out of his still deepening interest in
Irish literature. Irish Fairy Tales (1920), illustrated
by Arthur Rackham, suggested in 1913 by his American friend
W.T.H.Howe, reflected Stephens’ feeling that in the Gaelic epic
Táin
Bo Cuailgne he had found treasure trove from a
story-teller’s point of view. He planned five volumes in which he
would handle the tale, ‘each volume a complete story in itself, but
will yet form an introduction to the volume which succeeds it’.
Stephens enjoyed the possibility of enclosing tale within tale, and
he obviously revelled in the grotesque element in his subject
matter, realising its comic potential which struck a chord with his
innate sense of extravagant but more whimsical humour. He intended,
however, to modernise what he found, and the result was to include
his own strong interest in mysticism, reincarnation and the
After-Life. In the original Gaelic tale he found matter relating to
metamorphosis (the shape-changing), and the Otherworld, which
blended with his reading in Theosophy and allowed him to depict
different planes of reality.
Out
of the Táin Bo Cuailgne Stephens quarried the
epic tale of Deirdre, making it into a novel which ranges between
the comic and the tragic. The tragedy had been previously treated by
Sir Samuel Ferguson, Yeats, AE and Synge, but Stephens, echoing his
earlier works The Crock of Gold, The Charwoman’s Daughter
and The Demi-Gods not a little, while offering Deirdre
(1923) as a portrayal of the youthful heroine’s relationship with an
older man, actually differed from the earlier treatments of the tale
by making the novel’s central figure the king, Conachur. Its theme
is his thwarted pride, frustration and consequent rage. In this
novel Stephens studies sexual jealousy, a subject that lies at the
root of much of his writing: a Blakean opposition between male and
female. Conachur, sexually driven and arrogant, has failed with two
women. Maeve, resenting his imperious demands, has left him.
Deirdre, about to become his second wife, chooses instead to run
away with Naoise, a younger, less politically powerful man. Conachur
has been sexually demanding, insensitive and greedy; his sexual
obsession leads to his ultimate collapse; he has lacked any true
spiritual quality.
In the Land of Youth (1924), which contains ‘The Feast of
Samhain’ and ‘The Feast of Lughnasa’ (now known mainly through Brian
Friel’s drama Dancing at Lughnasa) deals with a
period before that of Deirdre. Though Stephens had intended
to write five volumes dealing with the Gaelic epic, he didn’t carry
out his plan. We can only surmise why, just as we can only guess at
his reasons for resigning his post at the National Gallery in late
1924 and moving to England in 1925.
Deirdre had won the Tailtean Prize for Literature in 1924, but
that distinction did not ensure its commercial success, nor that of
the earlier Irish Fairy Tales (though it fared better in
America where it went through numerous reprints). The interest in
Irish literature rooted in the past heroic tradition which had
sustained the Celtic Revival had diminished. And so, perhaps, had
Stephens’ own interest in it. Like some other Irish writers he did
not find the prospect of life in the new Irish state encouraging; he
wrote of a new Irish world of ‘jobbers’. This disillusion may have
coincided with a renewed hope of earning the family’s living by his
writing, something to be supplemented by the fees to be got from
lecture tours – he made his first two in America in 1925. If this
was his hope, he was ignoring the earlier experience of living in
Paris cut off from his native sources. However, he decided he would
leave Ireland, and so the family settled in Eversleigh, ‘a little
houseen with an hundred-foot garden’ in the London suburb of
Kingsbury, near Wembley Stadium.
In
making this move Stephens left the small closely-connected social
and cultural world of Dublin for a London of which he knew little;
he left the libraries and the second-hand bookshops; and he left
behind not only the world of scholarship and translation but the
friends with whom he could discuss his treatment of The
Tain, with whom he could talk and enjoy the critical
conversation that circulated so stimulatingly in Dublin. In London
there was no AE, no Padraic Colum, no Osborn Bergin, no Richard
Best, no Oliver Gogarty. Stephen MacKenna, however, had moved to
Bournemouth, and there were visits to him; later he was more
accessible when he moved to Harrow in 1929, though, because of
MacKenna’s increasing ill health, the friends saw less of each other
in the years before his death in 1934. Gogarty’s poem ‘To James
Stephens’ shows how one of his friends regarded his moving to
London:
Where are you, Spirit, who could
pass into our hearts and all
Hearts of little children, hearts of
trees and hills, and elves?
Where is the pen that could, sweetly
deep and whimsical,
Make old poets sing again far better
than themselves?
You passed through all our past
worst time, and proved yourself no caitiff.
American then listened to a voice
too dear for wealth;
Then you went to London, where I
fear you have ‘gone native’;
Too long in a metropolis will tax a
poet’s health:
It’s not as if you had no wit, and
cared for recognition;
A mind that lit the Liffey could
emblazon all the Thames,
But we’re not ourselves without you,
and we long for coalition;
Oh, half of Erin’s energy! What can
have happened, James?
Stephens was not short
of intellectual company in London, however different this was from
the milieu in which he had moved in Dublin. His English circle
extended to some degree through his knowing Lady Ottoline Morrell
and Lady Glenavy, and also through Samuel Solomonovitch Koteliansky,
‘Kot’, the translator and critic who had come to London from the
Ukraine, now a penurious pensioner who had been a reader at the
Cresset Press. Kot and Stephens greatly enjoyed each other’s
company: they met regularly in Kot’s flat on Thursday afternoons,
Stephens firmly collected by his wife in their car at half past five
(Kot and she did not get on very well, though Iris enjoyed his
company, and remembered him with affection) and they often met in
the West End, in the Monico Café in Piccadilly, for example.
Ridgeways was another meeting place on Wednesdays where Stephens got
to know, among others, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, W.J.Turner, Ralph
Hodgson, Mark Gertler and Middleton Murry. Other friends included
Sir Julian and Lady Huxley, Ruth Pitter and Dilys Powell. In 1927 he
met Joyce in Paris and began to appreciate his work, with which he
had found fault earlier. Did it produce sufficient shared experience
to create tolerance? At any rate Stephens could write about Joyce to
Kot, telling him that although Joyce didn’t bother ‘one smallest
part of a demi damn about the world and its waggings’ he was nice,
‘which, perhaps is no great virtue but is assuredly nowhat whatever
of a vice.’ They argued and quarrelled ‘and made up on a Riesling
wine’ about Ibsen, whom Joyce, like Kot, applauded, Stephens
considering him ‘the only example of the literary sadist that
western literature has known’. So friendly did they become that
Joyce thought that if he could not finish Finnegans Wake
himself Stephens should complete it.
As well as, or more
accurately, instead of writing Stephens was busy with his lecture
tours in America. The two tours he made in 1925 were followed by
often exhausting annual visits to America to lecture from 1929 to
1935. But he had discovered a new outlet for what was perhaps his
best talent: talking on the radio. He made his first broadcast for
the BBC in 1928: by 1937 he was giving a series of talks on a
regular basis. He was, par excellence, a teller of tales and he
learned how to hold an invisible audience as well as he had always
captivated so many visible ones; he did this by adapting his
narrative technique and blending it with his conversational skills
to suit a new medium of expression. During the second World War, the
Stephenses moved in 1940 to a virtually empty retreat in the
Gloucestershire countryside, Woodside Cottage which was built on to
a disused chapel near Sapperton, itself not far from Cirencester.
From there Stephens made many difficult wartime train journeys to
London to deliver his broadcast talks.
In 1942 life was made
easier when Stephens was awarded a Civil List pension; three years
later they were back in Eversleigh again. By now Stephens was tired.
He had suffered a great deal of debilitating ill health: operations
for stomach ulcers, bouts of double pneumonia and fits of depression
had left him weak in body as well as spirit. The gregarious man now
wandered aimlessly around London. This wandering was of a different
kind from his earlier wanderings in Dublin, so well captured by
Brendan Kennelly in ‘A Short Story’:
I think how Stephens
Suffered, remote,
Trudged Dublin streets,
Brooding on the singers and the
wise,
Wolves of hunger prowling in his
heart,
Sorrow in his eyes.
Now he seems to resemble the King he created in his last volume,
Kings and Tanists:
I do wish to seem
–
More than other be –
The dreamer in his dream,
Anonymity:
Let who, or what, or why,
Be answered as may be,
I give no reply,
All stupidity:
I wish away all mind, only wish to
be
Invisible as wind,
Lonely as a tree:
Lonely, and unknown,
– As all that is must be –
He did, however,
manage to go to Dublin in October 1947 to receive an honorary degree
from Trinity College, the Public Orator praising his varied genius,
the Latin oration later well translated by Gogarty. It was Gogarty
who told us how Stephens measured success: ‘How many men have loved
you? Women, yes; but I am not talking about sexual love. How many
men have loved you?’ He had many men friends who loved him and he
himself loved them – Griffith, AE, Bodkin, MacKenna, Koteliansky and
Joyce were among them – but then his own love also extended, as
Hilary Pyle has rightly remarked, ‘to women, children, animals and
Ireland in what seem to be equal amounts.’ To his human success can
be added his love of the ultimately ineffable: Eternity, Space,
Force. As he put it in his poetry, he was linking in his mind
Buddhist, Christian and Platonic as the Divine in its different
aspects. For him
the Good, the Beautiful, the True
Is Love.
He did not die fearful on St Stephen’s Day, 1950.
Light floods the mind!
And now the mind is pure,
Is naught-intent,
Is empty:
It is withdrawn into its solitude,
–
As the moon withdraws.
When storm and rain have blacked the
world away,
And only the great gold sun rides on
the main –
The Shining Ones are vanished
In greater splendour,
Withdrawn, not lost, in gold,
In light not gone away:
Stars and the moon
Are lost in the light of life,
As the pure mind, withdrawn,
Is lost in the light of God.
II
As a child I knew and enjoyed some of the work of James Stephens: my
knowledge consisted of a few poems in anthologies and The Crock
of Gold, a copy of which my parents possessed. Gradually I got
to know more of his writings, particularly liking The Charwoman’s
Daughter, as well as some of the stories and essays. Then there
came the pleasure of hearing him on the radio, great talker that he
was. Something of the flavour of his conversational speech was
captured later in the prose of the posthumous collection of his
broadcast talks, James, Seumas and Jacques, edited by
Patricia McFate (1964).
When writing A History of Anglo-Irish Literature
(1982) I naturally reread my way through the Collected
Poems (but in the 1926 edition). While referring to fourteen of
his poems the exigencies of space did not, to my regret, permit me
to quote from more than four of them. Now I have been enjoying
reading him again in this fine edition that Shirley Stevens Mulligan
has prepared with thoroughness, skill and discrimination. She has
arranged all Stephens’ poetry chronologically volume by volume as
the poet himself originally ordered it, remarking that the poems in
his Collected Poems (1954) are arranged thematically
under ‘charming but elusive titles’ which mostly tell us nothing
about the contents or period of their composition. Here she has most
usefully provided the initial published sources for poems. She gives
her readers credit for being thoughtful enough to find Stephens’
poems readily comprehensible, and so refrains from giving us any
glossary. In an age of academic editors striving to be all-inclusive
and often succeeding in being over-informative her restraint is
admirable. (The late Professor Sir James Sutherland, general editing
a series of texts, said wearily to one editor wanting directions
about the scope of the annotation envisaged by the general editor,
‘Oh, you know the kind of thing: notes by morons for morons.’)
Shirley Mulligan has indeed done Stephens well in her self-effacing,
scholarly editing.
What emerges from this new, most welcome volume is the
variety of Stephens’ poetry. It begins with the youthful
rebelliousness of Insurrections (1909). Here the
Browningesque monologues are for the time unusually outspoken. ‘The
Dancer’ defies her audience; she will not dance, hop and prance and
posture, she will not lay
My womanhood before
them! Let them drain
Their porter-pots and
snuffle – I’ll not stay!
The wife declares her independence as an individual from her husband
in ‘The Red-Haired Man’s Wife’:
Must I bow when you
speak!
Be silent and hear;
Inclining my cheek
And incredulous ear
To your voice, and command, and
behest; hold you lightest wish dear!
Her conclusion is a triumphant proclamation of her individuality;
she will preserve her privacy:
I am separate still!
I am I and not you!
And my mind and my will,
As in secret they grew
Still are secret;
unreached, and untouched, and not subject to you.
Stephens himself remarked that he did not get ‘The Tale
of Mad Brigid’, ‘Hate’, ‘Chill of the Eve’ and ‘What Tomas Said in a
Pub’ from Browning; they and ‘The Street Behind Yours’, and ‘A
Street’ have the flavour of closely observed decay about them, while
‘To the Four Courts, Please’ carried the compassion that Stephens
felt for the poor and weak, for animals in distress. ‘Slán leath’ is
a precursor of many sensitive love poems.
The Hill of Vision (1912) exhibits a lighter
touch; as Hilary Pyle has pointed out, the influence of Blake is
very strong, particularly in such poems as ‘The Fairy Boy’ and
‘Mount Derision’. There is, however, the Browning touch apparent in
the ruthless ending of ‘Nora Criona’ and in some despair in ‘Bessie
Bobtail’ and ‘Nothing at all’ which conveys the desolating,
destructive effect of poverty. The love poems deal, often, with
Blakean sexual oppositions as in ‘The Brute’ or ‘Light-O’-Love’ but
humour sets the tone of ‘The Sootherer’ with its final abuse from
the would-be lover:
Now cry, go on, mew like a little
cat,
And rub your eyes and stamp and tear
your wig;
I see your ankles! Listen, they are
fat,
And so’s your head. You’re angled
like a twig.
Your back’s all baggy, and your
clothes don’t fit,
And your feet are big!
Then comes the rejected lover’s remedy, couched in the vernacular:
She’s gone! Bedad, she
legged it like a hare!
You’d think I had the
itch, or had a face
Like a blue monkey
He will race back to make it up with one of the other girls he had
described to the girl who would not stay with him, thinking him ‘not
good enough to touch her’. The same kind of humour illuminates ‘Og
Goes Courting’ and where there is sadness, as in ‘A Woman is a
Branchy Tree’, it is not wholly depressing. The most significant
poem in this volume is ‘Mac Dhoul’, a lighthearted but fundamentally
serious escaping from orthodoxies of religion through the persona,
here, of a mocking scoundrel. He gets to Heaven, sees
. . . them
at their capers;
That serious,
solemn-footed, weighty crowd
Of angels – or, say,
resurrected drapers!
God, finding him on his throne, flings him back to earth, ‘twisting
heels and head’. Arrived, he says he’ll sing the ballad ‘The Peeler
and the Goat’, God the policeman, Stephens the goat. The whole
process is one of shedding what Augustine Martin called ‘the
strictures of an oppressive social morality sanctioned by a
primitive and inexplicable deity’. The same note persists in ‘The
Merry Policeman’, ‘The Fair Boy’ and ‘What the Devil Said’.
Songs from the Clay (1913) reveals Stephens still
very much under the influence of other poets, Blake obviously (and
notably in ‘In Waste Places’), but echoes of Spenser and Milton also
appear, while the Romantics confirmed his interest in the innocence
of childhood, in the Poet as a Solitary Thinker, in Nature and in
those who lived in rural surroundings. Less useful to Stephens was
the imagery of the pastoral modes of the Georgians, the sentimental
effect of the poetry, something he realised himself when revising
these poems. The deleterious effect of Stephens being brought into
anthologies of Georgian Poetry has been emphasised by Augustine
Martin in James Stephens. A Critical Study. Stephens himself
thought the best poems in this volume included ‘The Rivals’, ‘Washed
in Silver’, ‘The Voice of God’ and ‘Blue Stars and Gold’, all of
which are imbued with his sense of wonder at the beauty of nature,
his delighted joy at being alive and part of it all. ‘The Wild Man’,
too, conveys his enthusiastic empathy. Stephens’ sympathy streams
out in ‘The Snare’ which stresses man’s cruelty; he writes well here
about rabbits and bees, as he does about the colours he finds in
contemplating the sun, the moon, the stars, the hills. In this
volume ‘The Centaurs’, one that he valued himself, perhaps because
of its exciting vitality (In it, he said, he tried to reproduce the
beating of horses’ hooves) and ‘The Goat Paths’ remain longest in
the memory, the latter stressing the wisdom of the goats, a
reflection of his own search for ideas to oppose to the tragic
transience of human life. Something of this searching appears in
‘Etched in Frost’ with its almost Shakespearean picture of winter
where continuity is briefly captured and celebrated in the grin of
the farmer ‘for his crops are in’ while
. . . his buxom wife
Makes merry within.
When young I liked
reading about places I knew – indeed I still do, and sometimes
wonder if this is a universal experience, an Aristotelian
recognition perhaps. L.A.G. Strong’s novel The Garden
(1931), for instance, and, to a lesser degree, his Sea
Wall (1933) were probably overvalued by a schoolboy for their
exciting evocations of that well-known littoral, the coastal path of
the Dublin and South Eastern Railway. Similarly appealing were some
of Stephens’ The Adventures of Seamus Beg. The Rocky Road to
Dublin (1915) with their evocations, say, of ‘The Fifteen Acres’
in Phoenix Park, ‘of ‘The Canal Bank’, of ‘Katty Gollagher’ a hill
near Dublin, and of ‘The Dodder Bank’ as well as their vignettes of
cityscapes in ‘Grafton Street’, ‘York Street’, ‘College Green’,
‘Mount Street’, ‘Cork Hill’ or ‘Donnybrook’.
When Stephens wrote to
ask Bodkin
for ‘any small street facts’, somewhat like Joyce asking his aunt
for details of Dublin, he told him that his memory failed him ‘a
little far from my native land’. He remembered that ‘one walks in
Grafton Street at four o’clock & have harvested that fact’. He
remembered, too, that ‘flower-pots & patriotic verse fell from the
windows of York Street, that one sees the moon well from Rathmines
Bridge & the coloured clouds from O’Connell Bridge, that at Dunphies
Corner you can get funerally tipsy & that King Billy rides in
College Green & Larkin rides in Beresford Place.’
Many of this volume’s
poems echo children’s fears, for instance ‘In the Orchard’, ‘Day and
Night’, ‘The Devil’s Bag’, ‘The Secret’ and ‘Midnight’. There are
poems that depict adults as seen by children, terrifying creatures
often as in ‘Behind the Hill’, ‘The Turn of the Road’ where an old
woman may have been a witch from foreign lands, ‘What the Snake Saw’
and ‘The Apple Tree’. A child’s musing on death emerges in ‘When I
was Young’ while ‘The Wood of Flowers’, ‘April Showers’ and ‘The
Appointment’ are cheerful and lively. These poems may well reflect
Stephens’ own experiences of marriage and fatherhood. Cynthia had,
obviously, a strong effect on his portrayals of male and female
relationships and the cheerfulness of ‘The Cherry Tree’ in this
volume probably reflects the domestic happiness she brought into his
hitherto lonely life.
With the poems of his
next collection Reincarnations (1918) Stephens reached a new
and even more original achievement, though paradoxically, it was
founded on the writings of others. He had begun to learn Irish in
the Ely Place branch of the Gaelic League, then discovered the Irish
Texts Society’s editions of Ó Bruadair and Ó Rathaille (and many
more that he purchased for his library) and Douglas Hyde’s Poems
Ascribed to Raftery (1907), learning much about Irish poetry
from the scholar Dr Osborn Bergin, as well as from his friend
Stephen MacKenna.
Stephens was not so
much a translator as an adapter and an interpreter. With Ó Bruadair
and O’Rahilly he came into contact with the Gaelic bardic tradition:
learned, witty, complex in its verse patterns and its imagery. These
two poets lamented the loss of the poets’ powerful position in
Gaelic society. The effect on Ó Bruadair of the Flight of the Irish
Earls after the Battle of Kinsale in 1603 was paralleled by the even
greater effect of the Treaty of Limerick in 1691 upon O’Rahilly. The
bards were now reduced to the role of itinerant poets and
storytellers, whose auditors were no longer aristocrats but country
folk. Stephens managed to blend the sophisticated techniques, the
bardic utterance of Ó Bruadair and O’Rahilly with vigorous
colloquial expressions. He was skilled in selecting and compressing
the savage sense of loss expressed by the poets who had a deep and
lasting sense of deprivation and despair.
In his own earlier
poems Stephens had given a strong voice to his intense dislike of
the poverty he saw around him. His monologues rejected the roles
society imposed upon its weaker individuals and he was extremely
angry at the limitations imposed upon him by ‘Fifty Pounds a Year
and a Pension’. Thus he could sympathise with the Gaelic poets’ loss
of the status once conferred on them by their being bards; thus he
was able to handle most convincingly what he called Ó Bruadair’s
‘unending rebellious bawl which would be the most desolating
utterance ever made by man if it was not also the most gleeful’ in
‘An Apology’, ‘The Weavers’, ‘A Glass of Beer’, ‘Blue Blood’,
‘Odell’, ‘The Geraldine’s Cloak’, ‘Skim Milk’, O Bruadair’, and ‘The
Gang’. Egan O’Rahilly is the source of four less apparently angry
but no less effective poems. ‘Eileen, Diarmuid and Teig’, ‘The Wave
of Cliona’, ‘Inis Fail’, and ‘Egan O’Rahilly’ share a sadness, their
lamentation plangent, their sense of loss wistful and moving.
Of these poems the
powerful ‘A Glass of Beer’ is probably the best known, frequently
anthologised; in it Stephens captures the forcefulness of Ó
Bruadair’s attack on ‘the lanky hank of a she’ who refused him drink
on credit, while ‘Skim Milk’ conveys the pathos inherent in the
decline in the standing of one of the last poets to be trained in
the rigorous traditions of the bardic schools. He does this by
blending the formal with the urgent personal utterance:
… Once I had books,
each book beyond compare,
And now no book at all
is left to me;
Now I am spied and
peeped on everywhere
And this old head,
stuffed with Latinity,
Rich with poet’s store
of grave and gay,
Will not get me skim
milk for half a day…
In ‘Ó Bruadair’ Stephens renders the original with masterly skill,
again employing the contrast between the lofty bardic tone and the
colloquial to emphasise the depth of the Gaelic poet’s bitter
despair.
In ‘Egan O’Rahilly’ again he captures most evocatively
the situation of an older generation. He echoes the Gaelic poet’s
skill in giving poignant voice to his loss, making new for us the
direct dignity of O’Rahilly, his sure strength in handling imagery,
rhyme and rhythm:
Here in a distant place
I hold my tongue;
I am O’Rahilly!
When I was young,
Who now am young no
more,
I did not eat things
picked up from the shore:
The periwinkle and the
tough dog-fish
At even-tide have got
into my dish.
The great, where are
they now! The great had said –
This is not seemly!
Bring him instead
That which serves his
and serves our dignity –
And that was done.
I am O’Rahilly!
Here in a distant place
he holds his tongue,
Who once said all his
say, when he was young!
Of the Irish poets to
whom he gave fresh expression in English Stephens was probably most
in tune with Raftery, responding to his apparent simplicity and his
appreciation of natural beauty. The poems he adapted are ‘Mary
Hynes’, ‘The Coolin’, ‘Peggy Mitchell’, the two ‘Nancy Walsh’ poems,
‘Anthony O’Daly’, ‘Mary Ruane’, ‘William O’Kelly’ and ‘The County
Mayo’ (Raftery’s ‘Cill Aodain’) the nearest of these poems to
Raftery’s original.
Stephens reworked
Raftery’s poems, selecting from them what seemed their essence. Thus
he takes the fourth stanza of ‘The Coolin’ in Douglas Hyde’s
translation and makes its content, the lover’s invitation, into a
highly concentrated twenty-line poem, cutting out the original
adjectives’ colouring and strengthening his effect with tough
monosyllables and striking repetition of them. He was trying, he
said, ‘to represent the state which is almost entirely a condition
of dream, wherein the passion of love has almost overreached itself,
and is sinking into a motionless langour’. He applies the same
technique in ‘Mary Hynes’, a poem about the peasant beauty
celebrated by Raftery and, later, by Yeats in ‘The Tower’ where she
is ‘A peasant girl commended by a song’ about whom old people in
Ballylee had spoken to Yeats ‘as the old men upon the wall of Troy
spoke of Helen’. (The link between blind Homer, blind Raftery and
Yeats with his own very poor sight is clearly established in this
Tower poem.)
Stephens wrote, in
August 1917, to John Quinn the American lawyer and great patron of
Irish writers and artists (he bought some of Stephens’ manuscripts,
including that of The Crock of Gold) telling him that he had
‘nailed one line from the Irish of Raftery’ and round it he had
‘blown a bubble of English verse’, the lines being written as
follows in the letter:
She is the sky of the sun
She is the dart
Of love
She is the love of my heart,
She is a rune,
She is above
The women of the race of Eve
As the sun is above the moon.
In this volume the
love poems gain from the repetition in the use of connectives, from
the spare expression of an extravagant exuberance in their
compliments, their unaffected celebration of beauty. Stephens
employs a variety of rhyme and rhythm in them. The short lines have
an easy assurance about them. ‘The Coolin’, for instance, moves from
the invitation of its first stanza:
Come with me, under my coat
And we will drink our fill
Of the milk of the white goat
Or wine if it be thy will
through the passage of time
And we will talk until
Talk is a trouble, too,
Out on the side of the
hill;
And nothing is left to
do,
But an eye to look into
an eye;
And a hand into a hand
to slip;
And a sigh to answer a
sigh;
And a lip to find out a
lip!
into the black night and the chill mountain air the poem moves, to
change its invitation subtly:
Stay with me, under my
coat!
And we will drink our
fill
Of the milk of the white
goat,
Out on the side of the
hill!
The effect of these quatrains is equalled in the shorter line poems,
such as ‘Mary Hynes’. ‘Nancy Walsh (I)’, for instance, possesses the
same confidence, the same simplicity:
It is not on her gown
She fears to tread
But on her hair
That tumbles down
And strays
About her ways.
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