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[ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ] contemptuous of the claim of an imperial power to be acting on behalf of small nations, and poured scorn on it in a postcard to his actor friend Claud Sykes, satirizing Lloyd George in the process.57 As the war progressed, however, like the Irish Labour movement and even the Irish Parliamentary Party, he moved steadily closer to Sinn Féin s point of view. This was particularly the case from early in 1918, when the Military Service Bill and the spectre of possible conscription united the parties against the imposition of British recruitment practices in Ireland. There were various factors prodding Joyce in the direction he took. Of his old Dublin friends, one, Tom Kettle, an intellectual Catholic and nationalist who had married into the Sheehy family, was killed on the Somme. Joyce clearly cared about this, if the dignified and compassionate letter he wrote to Kettle s mother is anything to go by. In the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, a splinter group of the IRB that was led by Patrick Pearse, and the Citizen Army, a band of armed socialists led by James Connolly, took over key buildings in Dublin, particularly the General Post Office. They proclaimed themselves the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic. This, too, had an important influence. In the Rising, Irish nationalism and Irish socialism came together. Joyce had no time for the mystical Catholicism and cult of blood-sacrifice that Pearse had espoused. But he had been sympathetic to Connolly, and was 110 Aftermath of the Easter Rising, 1916. dismayed by the brutality with which the British authorities swiftly put down the insurrection, with soldiers indiscriminately killing householders. To make matters worse, when another old friend, Francis Sheehy Skeffington a feminist and well-known pacifist who had also married a Sheehy tried to prevent some of the looting that was going on, he was arrested, then murdered on the orders of a British officer (who later went on to become a bank manager back in England). The murder appalled the Irish public. But there was one particular respect in which, in Zurich, to adapt a phrase of Ellmann s, Joyce found himself pitted against the British Empire itself.58 Claud Sykes wanted to set up a theatre company, the English Players, to perform plays in English. It would make a contribution to the war effort. Joyce agreed to join him, partly because he hoped the Players would stage Exiles. In 1916, Prime Minister Asquith had also awarded him a Civil List grant, which did something to mollify him. It also meant he had a debt to pay, and working with the English Players would be a way of 111 settling it, especially since the Players could put on a lot of Anglo- Irish drama (which they did; Joyce rightly thought that the best modern plays in English were written by Irishmen). At all events, implausibly enough, he took on the job of business manager. By agreement, the amateur actors were paid less than the pro- fessionals. One of the amateurs, a British ex-soldier named Carr who worked at the Consulate, took umbrage. What happened then is instructive, and the fact that it happened at exactly the time when opposition to the war was hardening in Ireland is no coinci- dence. Carr had fought and been wounded and taken prisoner in France. For his part, Joyce made no secret of his own lack of loyalty to the British cause. Like Longworth before him, Carr threatened to throw Joyce downstairs. Joyce was clearly a green rag to a bull (u 15.4497). It would be naïve to think that, in 1918, an ex-British soldier aggravated by an Irishman he took to be a coward did not resort to racist as well as personal insult. At all events, when, in Dublin s brothel quarter as evoked in Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus is menaced by a British soldier who is a fictional version of Carr and bears his name, Joyce was careful to capture the authentic accents of nocturnal belligerence on English streets: I ll wring the bastard fucker s bleeding blasted fucking windpipe! (u 15.4720 21). Joyce immediately sued Carr, partly for money Carr owed him for tickets not sold, partly for threatened assault and libel. The acting British Consul, A. Percy Bennett, quickly took Carr s side. Joyce could be fiercely litigious. He could also be quick-witted about legal matters. When Bennett, having put pressure on Sykes to enlist, tried to do the same to Joyce, Joyce complained to Sir Horace Rumbold, the British Minister in Berne, that a British Consul [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ] |