Just as Joyce modeled Mulligan on his friend Gogarty, he modeled
"Haines" on Gogarty’s other guest in the tower, a well-off
young Hiberno-English scholar named Richard Samuel Chenevix
Trench who was born in 1881, one year before Joyce. Gogarty
met Trench during a term at
Oxford in early 1904, a fact which accounts for
Mulligan's referring to "the oxy chap downstairs" in Telemachus
and for Stephen's thinking in Scylla and Charybdis that
Mulligan has acquired the "Manner of Oxenford." In 1909,
following an unhappy love affair, Trench killed himself with a
handgun—perhaps the same one that terrorized Joyce in the
middle of the night.
Haine is French for “hate.” Haines’ Englishness provides one
possible basis for hearing his name as an indictment, but late
in Telemachus Stephen sees that as Haines looks at
him his gaze is "not all unkind," and in Nestor
he thinks again that Haines' eyes were "unhating."
So if we are to hear Haines' name as an indication that he is
a hater, it appears to have more to do with the revelation, a
few moments after Stephen's realization that Haines does not
hate him, that the Englishman is antisemitic.
In Scylla and Charybdis, Joyce will show that
Mulligan too is antisemitic,
though perhaps he has only flippantly picked up the
affectation from Haines.
The friendship of Gogarty and Trench represented a kind of
cross-Irish Sea chiasmus. Though settled in England, Trench’s
family was Anglo-Irish, and Gogarty’s Catholic family moved in
Dublin’s Anglo-Irish elite. Gogarty met Trench through the
Oxford Gaelic Society, where both of them were learning Irish.
After Gogarty returned to complete his degree at Trinity
College Dublin, Trench reciprocated by visiting Ireland in
September 1904. Into this insular harmony, Joyce interjected
the continental dissonance of naming him Haines. In Circe,
Mulligan celebrates a Black
Mass assisted by "The Reverend Mr Hugh
C Haines Love M. A." Haines here
has become conflated with the Reverend Hugh C. Love, an
entirely different (but similarly Protestant, upper-crusty,
well-meaning, and insensitive) personage in the novel. The
juxtaposition of their two names produces the meaning Hate
Love.
Trench was an enthusiast proponent of the Gaelic League cause
of reviving Irish language and native Irish culture. Although
English friends called him Samuel, he asked to be called
Dermot (Diarmuid) in Ireland, and in 1905 he legally added
Dermot to his string of names. Under this name he wrote a
short work called What is the Use of Reviving Irish?, published
in 1907 by a Dublin printer. A copy of the pamphlet, seen in
the image accompanying this note, is held in the Joyce Museum
housed in the Martello tower at Sandycove. Trench’s third
cousin once removed, an Irishman named C. E. F. (Chalmers)
Trench, wrote an article titled “Dermot Chenevix Trench and
Haines of Ulysses,” published in JJQ 13
(1975): 39-48, which makes clear how deeply passionate was
Trench’s commitment to the cause of resuscitating the Irish
language.
Another Trench, Richard Chenevix (1807-86), whose relation to
Richard Samuel Chenevix I do not know, was a poet and
philologist who became the Archbishop of Dublin in 1864. His
four published works on linguistic topics—On the Study of
Words (1851), On the Lessons in Proverbs (1853),
English Past and Present (1855), and A
Select Glossary (1860)—were evidently important to Joyce
when he was writing Oxen of the Sun. In "Richard
Chenevix Trench and Joyce's Historical Study of Words," Joyce
Studies Annual 9 (1998), Gregory Downing argues that the
elder Trench gave Joyce his notion that language develops
organically. Sarah Davison cites Downing's work in "Joyce's
Incorporation of Literary Sources in Oxen of the Sun,"
Genetic Joyce Studies 9 (2009), asserting "with
confidence" that The Study of Words influenced the
composition of Oxen.
