In Scylla and Charybdis Stephen thinks cryptically of
"Cranly's eleven true Wicklowmen to free their sireland....
And one more to hail him: ave, rabbi: the Tinahely
twelve. In the shadow of the glen he cooees for them. My
soul's youth I gave him, night by night." These reveries
recall his lost friendship
with Cranly. Stephen's thoughts about his friend are
focused by allusions to a play by John
Millington Synge, the Irish dramatist who surfaces four
more times in this chapter about Shakespeare, and also by an
incident in the gospels that undercuts Cranly's patriotism.
Joyce did give his "soul's youth" to John Francis
Byrne, in a long string of shocking confidences which Byrne
received impassively in the manner of a father confessor.
Byrne's own conversational offerings were more conventional:
Ellmann notes that when Stanislaus Joyce scorned his ideas as
commonplace, "the best defense James could think of was that
they were 'daringly commonplace'; in a world of foppishness,
Byrne had the courage to be plain" (64). One such assertion,
detailed in the biography, was a remark that he "made to
George Clancy; they agreed that twelve men with resolution
could save Ireland, and Byrne said that he thought he could
find twelve such men in Wicklow" (367). The first image
included with this note shows Clancy and Byrne with Joyce
during their time at University College, Dublin.
Although Byrne was born in Dublin, his father Mathew had been
a farmer in County Wicklow until a fire devastated his
properties and he took up shopkeeping in the city. Byrne fils
loved to walk in the Wicklow
hills; he went there regularly for spiritual sustenance.
Given this personal attachment, and the extensive history of
rebellions against English rule in the county, Byrne's idea of
finding deliverance for Ireland in a band of "Wicklowmen"
seems daringly commonplace. Someone (Cranly or Stephen?) calls
them "the Tinahely twelve" after a small market town in
County Wicklow on the eastern slopes of the mountains. In
addition to its satisfying alliteration this moniker probably
owes something to the fact that Tinahely was destroyed in the
1798 Rebellion. It sits on a walking route that Byrne no doubt
traveled often. Today it is on the Wicklow Way, a maintained
trail that starts in the southern Dublin suburb of Rathfarnham
and winds south for many miles along mountain tracks, forest
trails, quiet country roads, and unpaved grassy lanes.
Stephen imagines his friend making contact with his fellow
travelers there, calling out to them with bird calls like the
rebels who once sheltered in the Wicklow hills: "In the
shadow of the glen he cooees for them." This fancy
reflects Joyce's awareness of the seriousness of Byrne's
dedication to Irish independence (in January 1917, after the
Easter Rising, he published a long article titled "The Irish
grievance: the case for the anti-English party" in Century
Magazine). It also evokes Byrne's treks through the
Wicklow hills by echoing Synge's In the Shadow of the Glen
(1903), a one-act play set in a remote farmhouse in County
Wicklow. In the play a vagrant seeks shelter in a cottage
where a woman is tending the body of her dead husband. The
husband is only playing dead, and when he sees a man woo his
widow he throws her out of the house. She heads off with the
hobo, who assures her that she will be better off in the
freedom of the countryside.
ยง One
more literary text surfaces in Stephen's thoughts. Cranly's
number twelve ("eleven true Wicklowmen" plus Cranly
himself, presumably) appears to suggest that his band of
patriots is motivated by a devotion like that of Christ's
apostles. Stephen deflates this highminded idealism by
sardonically adding his own twelfth to the group: "And
one more to hail him: ave, rabbi." In the
Vulgate texts of Matthew 26:49 and Mark 14:45 Judas hails
Jesus in this way when he comes to betray him. Having told the
Roman soldiers to seize the man he kisses, he then plants a
kiss on Jesus' cheek. Irish history is all too faithful to
biblical precedent: every rebellion has an informer lurking in
its midst.
