Deasy's letter mentions a "Mr Henry Blackwood Price" in
connection with foot-and-mouth
disease. Soon after Stephen reads this detail in the
letter, Deasy explains its significance to him: "My cousin,
Blackwood Price, writes to me it is regularly treated and
cured in Austria by cattledoctors there. They offer to come
over here." Joyce got Deasy's interest in the health of cattle
not from Francis Irwin, but
from an Irishman whom he met in Italy, and apparently liked—a
man named Henry Blackwood Price. Moreover, when Deasy, acting
on behalf of his cousin of that name, writes a letter about
the disease to Irish newspapers he is playing a role that
Joyce, acting on behalf of his friend of that name, himself
performed. The novel also includes an MP named "William Field"
whom the real Blackwood Price, with Joyce's help, contacted
for assistance in the matter.
In 1912, when he was in Trieste, Joyce met Henry Nicholas
Blackwood Price. Blackwood Price was proud of his Ulster
ancestry (hence Deasy's boast about being "descended from Sir John Blackwood who
voted for the union"), and he was concerned about the spread
of foot-and-mouth disease, which at that time was wasting
cattle herds in the Austro-Hungarian empire. He asked Joyce to
find the address of an Irish M.P., William Field, who feared
that the disease might spread to Ireland, because he wanted to
tell Field of a cure that Austrian scientists had developed.
Joyce got the address, Blackwood Price sent a letter to Field,
and Field saw that the letter was published in the Evening Telegraph on 19
August 1912 (CW 238).
In Ulysses the action develops slightly
differently. Blackwood Price is now the cousin of Mr. Deasy,
and interests him in the problem. Deasy asks Stephen for help
getting his letter in the papers, and turns to William Field
for another kind of assistance. "I wrote last night to
Mr Field, M.P. There is a meeting of the cattletraders'
association today at the City Arms hotel. I asked him to lay
my letter before the meeting." In Cyclops
Joe Hynes mentions that he has just seen a local politician,
Joseph Patrick Nannetti, in the company of Field: "I
saw him up at that meeting now with William Field, M. P.,
the cattle traders." Apparently some position on
foot-and-mouth was decided at the meeting, because Hynes adds
that "Field and Nannetti are going over tonight to
London to ask about it on the floor of the house of commons."
Despite his weak grasp
of the science involved, then, Deasy's proposal appears to be
making some progress toward political enactment.
Joyce's assistance to Blackwood Price did not end with
finding an address for Mr. Field. A letter from his brother
Charles to his brother Stanislaus dated 6 September 1912
indicates that Joyce wrote his own editorial letter
for the Freeman's Journal, which appeared unsigned
in the paper on 10 September 1912. That short article,
included in Joyce's Critical Writings under the
title "Politics and Cattle Disease," argues for active and
transparent monitoring of Irish herds to fight against a
destructive English embargo on Irish cattle.
It is interesting, to say the least, that Joyce modeled the
pompous and prejudiced old man who makes life difficult for
his proud young persona partly on a man whom he liked, and
partly on himself. At the end of Nestor, as Stephen
trudges off with Deasy's letter in his pocket (he will place
the letter in the Evening Telegraph, the same
newspaper that published Blackwood Price's letter, and sister
publication of the Freeman's Journal in which Joyce
published his), he thinks, "Still I will help him in
his fight. Mulligan will dub me a new name: the
bullockbefriending bard." The same could be said of
Joyce. It might also be supposed that, by including a tiny
sliver of himself in Deasy, he sympathized with the old man's
wish to give paternal advice to the wayward young poet.
