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The Enigma of Arthur Griffith. Colum Kenny
Читать онлайн.Название The Enigma of Arthur Griffith
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781785373169
Автор произведения Colum Kenny
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
The turn of the century saw many young men attempting to learn Irish, with James Joyce among those taking lessons.
South Africa
When the Leinster was dissolved, Rooney soon became the founding stalwart of a new Celtic Literary Society. Griffith seems not to have been actively involved at meetings of this new group before going to South Africa in January 1898, although before leaving he attended its Christmas festivities with the woman whom he would one day marry.42 He had recently lost his job in Dublin, perhaps by quitting in resentment at the response to a practical joke played on him, and this presumably put him under financial pressure. Printing jobs were not easy to find at the time.43 He was not alone or first among his friends in leaving Ireland. John R. Whelan, ‘a capable and energetic secretary’ of the Celtic Literary Society and ‘a disciple of John Mitchel’ had no sooner had his considered appeal to ‘the thinking Irishman’ on literature and nationalism printed in the advanced nationalist Shan Van Vocht in 1897 than he went to South Africa before Griffith. In his case, Dublin Castle suspected that it was for political rather than economic reasons. Griffith was fond of Whelan, and Griffith’s humorous poem ‘The Thirteenth Lock’ was recited at Whelan’s farewell drinks.44 Griffith’s son Nevin later said that Whelan wrote from Africa urging his father to go out. Rumours that Whelan was killed there were false, and he later returned to Ireland before emigrating long-term to Scotland.45
When Griffith announced that he was leaving Ireland, his friends held a farewell session for him too. At it Rooney paid Griffith a glowing tribute, speaking as someone who knew ‘how much the existence of many National organisations have owed to your support, who have watched how well the gospel of Young Ireland has been put into practice by you, who have recognised the reality of your enthusiasm and patriotism by your very modesty and reserve.’46 Before Griffith went he contributed for the society’s journal under his pen name ‘J.P. Ruhart’ a ‘very amusing skit’ about the adventures of an Irish philosopher.47
Griffith may have emigrated simply in search of better-paid employment. But there is also a hint of threatened tuberculosis, a disease that was common in Dublin. It has even been suggested that he deliberately went to South Africa to ‘make friends for Ireland’.48 Perhaps he went as part of a general strategy on the part of the IRB, when it was hoped that the Boers might beat the British in an imminent war. He was certainly politically active there, along with John MacBride.
So much did Griffith’s friends admire his skills that months after he left they took the unusual step of devoting a special session of the Celtic Literary Society to his writings. These consisted ‘in a great measure of local stories, sketches, and songs, dealing with life in the Liberties and other ancient parts of our city’. It was recorded that ‘The character drawing, treatment of dialogue, and general surroundings of the story were recognised and heartily enjoyed by the audience as absolutely true to their models.’49 Members regretted that Griffith’s writings were not better known, ‘and trusted that some effort would be made to bring them into greater popularity’. In this way a seed was planted that would grow into Rooney’s decision to propose for the position of editor of the planned United Irishman his friend Arthur Griffith, who returned to Dublin from South Africa in the autumn of 1898.
Griffith then sometimes made his way to Sandycove, in south Dublin, to swim at the Forty Foot and relax on the sheltered roof of a nearby Martello tower that Oliver St John Gogarty occasionally leased from its owner (Plate 6). Gogarty, like Griffith, was a strong swimmer and the two men ventured far out into Dublin Bay.50 James Joyce was to set in this tower the opening scene of Ulysses, perhaps the most famous novel of the twentieth century. As that century dawned, Arthur Griffith was approaching his thirtieth birthday.
Sackville/O’Connell Street, 1903–8. The Dublin of Griffith and of Joyce’s Ulysses (National Library of Ireland [L_CAB_06672]).
4
An ‘Un-Irish’ Personality?
During negotiations for the Anglo-Irish Treaty, Michael Collins was filmed impatiently pacing a back balcony at the Irish delegation’s house in Hans Place. Griffith was photographed standing quietly at its front door with his wife, facing a little park on the other side of the building (Plate 15). He was not excitable, being ‘one of the calmest appraisers of men’, and ‘not lavish of his praises’.1 He reluctantly granted interviews to journalists, and could prove difficult to interview due not least to his falling silent.2 Yet to shy young people he was fatherly and kind. When the Butler sisters first approached him as teenagers at his ‘grimy’ office in Fownes Street, for example, ‘suddenly his face lit up with a smile that had something paternal in it – though he was quite a young man’.3
Patrick Carey said ‘I often had a conversation with him, but he was a very silent and retiring man, not pushing. His parents were nice and respectable people. They had no time for gossip. Griffith was a hard-working man and had nothing to give away.’ Carey, a crane operator along the Liffey, was a tenant at 83 Summerhill in the early 1900s, when the Griffiths also rented rooms there.4
Griffith being a Dubliner of artisan or lower middle-class origins and of low income, his formal education was undistinguished. He left school in his early teens as was common then, but he read widely, buying books cheaply from barrows along the quays. He facilitated, argued with and was surrounded by confident men who had completed secondary school and attended college. They included John O’Leary (Tipperary Grammar School, TCD and QCG), W.B. Yeats (Erasmus Smith High School and the Metropolitan School of Art), James Joyce (Clongowes and Belvedere, UCD), Patrick Pearse (Christian Brothers’ School, UCD, Trinity and King’s Inns) and Éamon de Valera (Blackrock College, the Royal University of Ireland and lectures at TCD and UCD).
Neither his features nor his temperament marked Griffith as exotic. He did not pose in a studio with a gun, as Constance Markievicz did with her revolver, thus bequeathing future generations an image of her as a dramatic revolutionary icon. Griffith was photographed not as he collected his rifle from a boat at Howth, but bent over a desk at work. ‘Griffith’s Sinn Féin policy was improving the morale of the people but it was plodding work, not revolution,’ wrote Maud Gonne, somewhat dismissively, of the hard grind of everyday politics.5
When Michael Lennon was gathering information about Griffith in the early 1950s, a correspondent wrote:
I think the man in any Irish revolutionary movement who is likely to be remembered longest is the one with a romantic sounding name. O’Donovan Rossa is spoken of now when James Stephens [1825–1901] is forgotten – the latter was the more prominent in the Fenian days. De Valera is another instance of this Irish tendency. The name had an irresistible fascination for the crowd.6
De Valera’s name also evolved, from George de Valero on his New York birth certificate to Edward at his baptism, to Eddie Coll when sent back to live with his mother’s people in Ireland, to Éamon (sometimes spelt by him with two letters ‘n’) de Valera (sometimes spelt by him with an accent/fada). His ‘exotic name helped him to stand out in later life’, thinks his most recent biographer.7 And perhaps his birth overseas even strengthened de Valera’s appeal at some level in the national psyche, by associating him with that salvation from abroad that Gaelic poets had long anticipated in the form of exiled Irish lords returning with Spanish or French help?
For his part Griffith was a common Dubliner, born and bred in the heart of a city long set apart from Gaelic Ireland. He had no exotic name, no Anglo-Irish sheen of a George Moore or Yeats, and no barrister’s wig like Patrick Pearse. Although a city boy, he had not the working-class profile of his socialist friend Connolly or of ‘Big Jim’ Larkin. Yet H.E. Kenny (‘Sean-ghall’) admired his dedication, writing to Alice Stopford Green in 1915 ‘He has remained voluntarily poor in a venal age’ and ‘I love him with as rich a love as my nature can yield.’8
‘Un-Irish’?