James Joyce- A Christian Brothers Boy?
James Joyce must be one of the most researched writers in history. There have been countless books and articles on his childhood, his family and his later life. In addition, Joyce himself drew on his own life experience in creating his great works. Yet there are some interesting gaps in the narrative. One of these is the time that he spent in O’Connell Schools.
To begin with however, a statistic. In 1930, there were just over 502,000 children enrolled in primary schools in the Irish Free State. There were 27,000 attending secondary schools. Of the roughly 60,000 children in the relevant age cohort in 1930, only 1,570 sat the leaving certificate examination. Joyce went to school and university thirty years before these statistics were compiled. He was in a very small minority of children of his generation to attend secondary school and university. Indeed in 1950 of the three million people in the country, the number of fulltime students at the universities was only 7,900.
What do we know?
We know that James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born on 2 February 1882 to John Stanislaus Joyce and Mary Jane "May" Murray in the Dublin suburb of Rathgar. In 1887, when Joyce was five, his father was appointed rate collector (i.e., a collector of local property taxes) by Dublin Corporation. This was a much sought after position at the time.
Joyce had begun his education at Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit boarding school near Clane, County Kildare, in 1888 when he was six years old, six months before the minimum age. His experience in Clongowes is fictionalised in the first chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In “A Portrait,” in the pandy bat scene, he approaches the Rector of Clongowes, Father Conmee to complain at being punished unfairly, by father Daly/Dolan. Conmee accepts this complaint in good humour, and Joyce becomes a “hero” with the other boys.
We know that he left Clongowes in June 1891. About this time, his father began a rapid descent in his fortunes. But some sources at least say that Joyce left Clongowes due to ill health rather than an inability to pay the fees. His latest biographer, Gordon Bowker, tells us that it could have been for either reason but that the family did indeed leave the last term’s fees unpaid. In any event Joyce never returned to Clongowes. Between June 1891 and January 1893 when Joyce was almost eleven years old he studied at home. He then spent a term, with his brother Stanislaus at the Christian Brothers O'Connell School on North Richmond Street, Dublin. This is quite a lengthy period in the life of a young boy. It would appear that Joyce arrived in O’Connell Schools shortly after Oliver St. John Gogarty, the model for Buck Mulligan in Ulysses, had left the school to attend Mungret College in Limerick.
It is interesting that in “A Portrait of the Artist”, Joyce describes a rather idyllic sojourn from school which comes to an end, when his father meets Father Conmee. And indeed, Joyce’s admission to Belvedere came after a chance meeting between John Joyce and Fr John Conmee. By now, Conmee was Dean of Studies at Belvedere. When John Joyce told Conmee that Joyce was now at the Christian Brothers’ School, Conmee offered to have Joyce and his brothers educated free of charge at Belvedere. Bowker speculates that Joyce had impressed Conmee with his intelligence and bravery, and that he “probably also saw the bright and dedicated James as a potential candidate for the Priesthood”.
This scene is described in “A Portrait” as follows.
“But his long spell of leisure and liberty was drawing to its end. One evening his father came home full of news which kept his tongue busy all through dinner. Stephen had been awaiting his father's return for there had been mutton hash that day and he knew that his father would make him dip his bread in the gravy. But he did not relish the hash for the mention of Clongowes had coated his palate with a scum of disgust.
—I walked bang into him, said Mr Dedalus for the fourth time, just at the corner of the square.
—Then I suppose, said Mrs Dedalus, he will be able to arrange it. I mean about Belvedere.
—Of course he will, said Mr Dedalus. Don't I tell you he's provincial of the order now? (In fact he was the prefect of studies in Belvedere)
—I never liked the idea of sending him to the christian brothers myself, said Mrs Dedalus.
—Christian brothers be damned! said Mr Dedalus. Is it with Paddy Stink and Micky Mud? No, let him stick to the Jesuits in God's name since he began with them. They'll be of service to him in after years. Those are the fellows that can get you a position.
—And they're a very rich order, aren't they, Simon?
—Rather. They live well, I tell you. You saw their table at Clongowes. Fed up, by God, like gamecocks.”
In a portrait, Joyce does not mention his sojourn in O’Connell Schools, nor is much known of his sojourn there. Bowker tells us that he assured his first biographer, Herbert Gorman, that he had never been to the school. Indeed in later life when referred to as a catholic, Joyce could say by way of correction “You allude to me as a Catholic. Now for the sake of precision, and to get the correct contour on me, you ought to allude to me as a Jesuit.”
The one article I have been able to find on his schooling by the Christian Brothers is an article in Christianity and Literature, by John Mahon, entitled “Joyce amongst the Christian Brothers”. This article points out that the general perception that Joyce had a negative view of the Christian Brothers is not in fact correct and, as we will see later, he had a nuanced and at times favourable view. Mahon also tells us that the relevant school records for the time of Joyce’s attendance at the School have been lost and that Joyce’s mother and paternal grandmother Ellen O’Connell were related to Daniel O’Connell who laid cornerstone of North Richmond St school in 1828.
In My Brother's Keeper: Joyce’s Brother Stanislaus writes"From Fitzgibbon Street, after a few months at a Christian Brothers school, we were sent free of fees at the invitation of the Jesuit Father Conmee to the Jesuit school, Belvedere College, in Denmark Street at the other side of Mountjoy Square. My vague memory of the Christian Brothers school in that my class was so large that I felt lost in it, and sitting in a back bench I heard little and understood less.”
The Chance encounter with Conmee saw Joyce moved once more. In the space of two years then, he had left a school for the established upper class, been educated at home, moved to a school for what Bowker calls the “disadvantaged” but in reality was a school for the lower middle class and then moved to a school for the middle class or as Bowker calls them the “aspiring” middle class.
Brendan Bracken a fellow fugitive?
In the Christian brothers at the time, at secondary level, the pupils were mostly the children of tradesmen, small shop owners and lower civil servants. For while Christian Brother’s secondary schools were cheaper, they were by no means free. O’Connell Schools numbers among its past pupils a President of Ireland, Sean T. O’Kelly, who was of Joyce’s age and would have been in the school when Joyce was there. In the two decades after Joyce spent his short time there, Sean Lemass and John A. Costello, both later Taoisigh of Ireland, Emmet Dalton, one of Michael Collins’ right hand men and Brendan Bracken, who was later to be Winston Churchill’s Minister for Informationduring the second world war, all attended the school.
Bracken, like Joyce, seems to have been a natural outsider. A bright and unruly child, he was sent to the O'Connell School in 1910, after his widowed mother moved the family from Tipperary. He was moved from the School to Mungret College in Limerick, after he had apparently almost drowned a fellow schoolboy by throwing him in a canal. This too failed to tame him and he was sent to Australia in 1915. Like Joyce, Bracken left the nationalist influences of his childhood (his father was an IRB man and a founder of the Gaelic Athletic Association) behind him, reinvented himself as an Australian orphan and became a newspaper editor, Tory MP, Government Minister and ultimately the first, and last, Viscount Bracken.
Bracken, in whose ministry, George Orwell served, and who apparently was the model for both Big Brother and Rex Mottram in Brideshead Revisited, assumed the identity of an Anglo Irish gentleman. At times his old identity surfaced as on the occasion when he was introduced in the Ritz, to his former school mate Major General Emmet Dalton. When Bracken affected not to know Dalton, the latter responded “If you don’t remember me Brendan, I bloody remember you and those corduroy trousers which you wore day in day out until you stank to high heaven. The smell is not out of my nostrils yet.”
Cultures apart
The culture of a Christian Brothers school and a Jesuits School would of course have been very different. The Jesuits were, famously, extremely well educated, having to study for 14 years before ordination. The Brothers were not ordained and were often recruited into the order in their early to mid teens. If the Jesuits can be seen as the staff officers of the Catholic Church, the Christian Brothers could perhaps be seen as the Non Commissioned Officers. Where the Jesuits were intellectually on a very high plane, and socially of the refined classes, the Christian Brothers were perhaps a more robust version both in terms of their thinking and their social standing of the “Church Militant”. Corporal Punishment, at least in my childhood, and I speak as a Christian Brothers’ boy, was definitely more common in the Christian Brothers schools, although Stanislaus Joyce does refer to the liberal use of pandy bats in Belvedere. The Brothers would also have been more committed to helping the disadvantaged and were generally perceived to have a more nationalist leaning and a stronger commitment to the Irish language than the Jesuits.
Joyce himself saw Conmee as a central figure in his life and one wonders if, in fact, he saw him as his saviour not only in the case of the Pandy Bat in Clongowes but his saviour from the robust ministrations of the Christian Brothers. In Ulysses, he refers to himself as “A child Conmee saved from pandies.” This, of course, could refer to the scene in “A Portrait” or the fact that he delivered Joyce from the Christian Brothers, even though the Christian brothers would not have used pandy bats but by tradition used a “leather” strap with which the miscreant was struck on the hands.
Conmee appears in various roles in Ulysses. The following extracts give perhaps both society’s and Joyce’s view of the difference between the Jesuit and Christian Brothers environments.
“O, lest he forget. That letter to father provincial.
Father Conmee stopped three little schoolboys at the corner of Mountjoy square. Yes: they were from Belvedere. The little house. Aha. And were they good boys at school? O. That was very good now. And what was his name? Jack Sohan. And his name? Ger. Gallaher. And the other little man? His name was Brunny Lynam. O, that was a very nice name to have.
Father Conmee gave a letter from his breast to Master Brunny Lynam and pointed to the red pillarbox at the corner of Fitzgibbon street.
--But mind you don't post yourself into the box, little man, he said.
The boys sixeyed Father Conmee and laughed:
--O, sir.
--Well, let me see if you can post a letter, Father Conmee said.
Master Brunny Lynam ran across the road and put Father Conmee's letter to father provincial into the mouth of the bright red letterbox. Father Conmee smiled and nodded and smiled and walked along Mountjoy square east.”
Later in that passage we hear.
“A band of satchelled schoolboys crossed from Richmond street. All raised untidy caps. Father Conmee greeted them more than once benignly. Christian brother boys. “
For a period, Joyce lived very near O’Connell Schools and in the Opening lines of Araby, in Dubliners, Joyce refers to O’Connell Schools, but not by name.
“North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers' School set the boys free. An uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbours in a square ground. The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces. “
Again the reference to “setting the boys free” perhaps gives us an understanding of how Joyce perceived his experience in the school.
A Tinge of Regret?
Finally, in chapter 4 of “A Portrait” when Joyce is casting off his religious faith, and deciding against a religious vocation there is the following scene.
“He turned seaward from the road at Dollymount and as he passed on to the thin wooden bridge he felt the planks shaking with the tramp of heavily shod feet. A squad of christian brothers was on its way back from the Bull and had begun to pass, two by two, across the bridge. Soon the whole bridge was trembling and resounding. The uncouth faces passed him two by two, stained yellow or red or livid by the sea, and, as he strove to look at them with ease and indifference, a faint stain of personal shame and commiseration rose to his own face. Angry with himself he tried to hide his face from their eyes by gazing down sideways into the shallow swirling water under the bridge but he still saw a reflection therein of their top-heavy silk hats and humble tape-like collars and loosely-hanging clerical clothes.
- Brother Hickey
Brother Quaid
Brother McArdle
Brother Keogh. -
Their piety would be like their names, like their faces, like their clothes, and it was idle for him to tell himself that their humble and contrite hearts, it might be, paid a far richer tribute of devotion than his had ever been, a gift tenfold more acceptable than his elaborate adoration. “
Did Joyce feel that if he had stayed in O’Connell schools, he would have acquired a more “uncouth” but genuine faith?
What if?
One wonders how Joyce would have turned out, if his father had not met Father Conmee. At the time the family’s fortunes were in deep decline. The free education in Belvedere and the prizes that Joyce won there must have been critical to his future education.
Would he have, for instance been more nationalist in his thinking, like O’Kelly? Would he have gone to University? Would he perhaps have become brother or priest? Would he perhaps have emulated Brendan Bracken and reinvented himself entirely, to the point of denying his Irishness completely at times?