Byrne was born in February 1880, two years before Joyce. He
knew Joyce first at Belvedere College and then at University
College, Dublin. At UCD, Ellmann writes, he was "handsome,
athletic, and clever; he excelled at chess and handball, and
disregarded his studies even more cavalierly than Joyce.... it
was his manner that attracted: he moved about with the air of
a man who knows all the secrets but disinclines to exercise
the power he thereby possesses.... His power over Joyce came
from his habit of refraining from comment: Joyce's admissions
about his feelings towards family, friends, and church, about
his overweening ambitions, struck like waves against Byrne's
cryptic taciturnity. Byrne listened to Joyce's confidences
without offering any of his own, and, as Joyce noted, without
conferring absolution. Joyce needed no friend as he did
Byrne.... The friendship was of such importance to Joyce that
when it dwindled, as it did later, he felt less at home in
Ireland" (64).
In December 1903, near the end of his abortive exile in
Paris, Joyce had a photograph of himself taken and made into
postcards. He sent one to Byrne, on the back of which he wrote
a moody poem about the winds and waters heard by the soul.
Another went to Vincent Cosgrave, with joking doggerel about
the prostitutes of Paris. When Joyce returned to Dublin on
December 23, Ellmann writes, "he discovered he had lost a
friend. The photo-postcard which he had sent to Byrne, with
the poem written in the space for a message, had pleased Byrne
very much. He showed it to Cosgrave and said proudly that no
man in Dublin knew more about Joyce than he did. Cosgrave,
making the retort irresistible [an allusion to As You Like
It 5.4.72, it would appear], slyly took a similar
photograph from his pocket and showed it to Byrne saying,
'Perhaps that's something you didn't know'" (116). Byrne was
deeply hurt to be put on an equal footing with Cosgrave, whom
he distrusted, and offended by the scabrous heterosexual
content. He gave his card to Cosgrave: "You can have this one
too."
The offense taken by Byrne, and the disdain with which Joyce
responded, suggest a relationship that exceeded the usual
bounds of male friendship. Ellmann remarks that "Joyce had no
relationships with women that were not coarse or distant. In
his writing more is at stake in the friendship of Stephen and
Cranly (Byrne) than in the relationship of Stephen and Emma
Clery. Friendship becomes, in fact, a focal point, for if
friendship exists, it impugns the quality of exile and of
lonely heroism" (116). Joyce searched for reasons to regard
Byrne's newfound coolness as some kind of deep betrayal. In A
Portrait, Ellmann infers, he "goes further to evolve the
fiction that Cranly's motivation is homosexual" (117).
Ellmann is referring to part 5 of A Portrait, where
Stephen breaks off his friendship with Cranly. The actual
rupture between Joyce and Byrne was repaired less than a year
later, but the novel makes the rift seem more consequential.
Stephen rejects Cranly because Cranly likes women and will
never devote himself wholly to his friend:
Yes. His face was handsome: and his body was strong
and hard. He had spoken of a mother’s love. He felt then the
sufferings of women, the weaknesses of their bodies and souls:
and would shield them with a strong and resolute arm and bow
his mind to them.
Away then: it is time to go. A voice
spoke softly to Stephen’s lonely heart, bidding him go and
telling him that his friendship was coming to an end. Yes; he
would go. He could not strive against another. He knew his
part.
— Probably I shall go away, he said.
But as Ellmann recognizes, there is more to it than
heterosexual feeling on Cranly's part and artistic egomania on
Stephen's. A little after this, readers learn that “Cranly
seized his arm and steered him round so as to head back
towards Leeson Park,” pressing the arm “with an elder’s
affection.” Stephen is “thrilled by his touch,” but affirms
his determination to pursue his solitary vision, even if it
means being utterly alone. This strikes “some deep chord” in
Cranly, who wonders whether Stephen would choose loneliness
over having someone “who would be more than a friend, more
even than the noblest and truest friend a man ever had.”
Stephen asks him, “Of whom are you speaking?” and Cranly does
not answer.
It is hard not to hear homoerotic attraction in Cranly's wish
to "be more than a friend," and "thrilled by his touch"
suggests a strong physical response of some kind on Stephen's
part. There is no indication in Joyce's fiction that Stephen
has pronounced homosexual desires, but if the man holding his
arm wants such a relationship and Stephen does not, that would
explain his habit of recoiling from male touches at various
points in Ulysses, and his suspicion that Mulligan
has sexual designs on him. In Proteus he thinks of
Mulligan as a "Staunch friend, a brother soul: Wilde’s love that dare not speak its
name. His arm: Cranly’s arm. He now will leave
me. And the blame? As I am. As I am. All or not at all." (The
boldfaced sentence appears only in Gabler's edition of the
novel.) In Scylla and Charybdis Stephen thinks, more
bitterly, of being groomed to become a "Catamite." At
the end of that chapter Mulligan jokingly suggests that Bloom
has sexual designs on him, and Stephen's comment when he wakes
up to see Bloom bending over him at the end of Circe––"Vampire"––suggests
that he may have taken the message to heart.
Ellmann has reason, then, to argue that Stephen intuits
homosexual desire in his friend Cranly and recoils from it.
But is he right to argue that this is only a "fiction"? Most
known facts about Byrne would suggest so. He eventually
married and had children (at least one daughter and one son),
and after the repair of his relationship with Joyce he
remained a good friend for life. Joyce visited him when he
returned to Dublin in 1909, and Byrne visited him in Paris in
1927. Far from being torn by jealousy, Byrne encouraged him to
elope with Nora in 1904, encouraged him to marry her in 1931,
and in a crucial episode during that 1909 visit to Dublin
convinced him to trust in her sexual fidelity. Vincent
Cosgrave had told Joyce that after he started seeing Nora in
1904, she "had gone for walks in the darkness along the river
bank with another escort—himself" (Ellmann, 279). Although he
should have believed better of his partner, Joyce was
devastated. He discussed the matter with Byrne, who "wrote
later that he had never 'seen a human being more shattered'"
(281). He pronounced Cosgrave's report "a blasted lie," and
Joyce was persuaded.
This helpful conversation is associated with 7 Eccles Street, where
Byrne lived with two female
cousins from 1908 to 1910. Joyce paid a visit to the
house to thank his friend for helping him through the Cosgrave
crisis. The two men had supper and then walked about Dublin
until 3 AM. When they returned, Byrne discovered that he had
forgotten his house key. "Undismayed," Ellmann writes, "he
agilely let himself down to the front area and entered the
house by the unlocked side door; then he went round to the
front and admitted his companion" (290). The events are
reproduced almost exactly in Ithaca, suggesting that
Joyce associated the kindly and harmless Bloom with his
longtime friend. Even if Byrne did have unwelcomed homosexual
designs on Joyce in their university years––a big if––it would
appear that both men moved on. And of course it is possible
for men to feel strong love for one another without sexual
desire. Our culture's current binary choices, vicious
homophobia and gay pride, do not sufficiently allow for that
often-attested dimension of male experience.
Nevertheless, Stephen's homophobia in Ulysses (an
unvicious form which illustrates the literal sense of that
word––fear of gay men) must have come from somewhere,
and he associates that source with "Cranly's arm." Ellmann may
be correct to judge this a "fiction," but at least one piece
of reported evidence implies that Byrne had strong
homosexual desires and was willing to act on them in ways that
violated social norms. If this report is to be credited,
Joyce's fiction may be recording an accurate intuition.
