Joyce modeled "Mr Deasy" on Francis Irwin, the owner and
headmaster of the Clifton
School in Dalkey, where he worked for several weeks or
months in March-June 1904. Altering some details and keeping
others, he created a vivid portrait of a blustery old man
whose authoritative advice is undermined by frequent errors of
fact.
Deasy is richly characterized by a host of little physical
details that make him appear antiquated and decrepit: his "gaitered
feet, the "angry white moustache"
that is also called a "rare moustache" as he
blows the wispy threads away from his mouth, "the
honey of his ill-dyed head," the "coughball
of laughter [that] leaped from his throat
dragging after it a rattling chain of phlegm."
Preparing to utter wisdom, "He raised his forefinger
and beat the air oldly before his voice spoke."
These unattractive physical attributes cohere with his habit
of not listening to what other people are saying, and his
curmudgeonly insistence on giving unwanted advice.
According to Ellmann, Irwin was "an Ulster Scot, very
pro-British" (153), and this conservative Protestant heritage
is strongly pronounced in Deasy. Gifford adds that the
fictional name "may owe something to the Deasy Act (1860), an
act ostensibly intended for land reform in Ireland but in
practice a ruthless regulation of land tenancy in favor of
landlords (i.e., in favor of the pro-English, anti-Catholic
Establishment)" (33). Deasy regards the Catholic, nationalist,
freethinking, and wildly prodigal Stephen as an antagonist: "I
like to break a lance with you, old as I am."
Stephen might well say of him what he says in Circe
about the British soldiers: "I seem to annoy them. Green rag
to a bull." In addition to his Protestant respect for money,
which Stephen might learn
something from, he represents many values that cannot
benefit his employee: Unionism,
anti-Semitism, and misogyny.
Ellmann observes that Francis Irwin was an alcoholic with a
very red nose, and that his malady forced him to close down
the school not long after Joyce's departure. Joyce left out
this detail, and gave Garrett Deasy (we learn his first name
in Aeolus) an
estranged wife which the bachelor Irwin did not have. He
also incorporated characteristics of Henry Blackwood Price, a
man he knew in Trieste: "preoccupation with a distinguished
Ulster ancestry," and "interest in the hoof-and-mouth disease"
(153).
