James Joyce ? Wasn’t he the anti-Catholic who looked down his nose at the Christian Brothers and wrote `dirty books’? Or, indeed, who wrote “dirty books” that no one can understand? Well, not quite. Like many things said about Joyce, there’s truth and fiction there, and we shouldn’t confuse either James with his Stephen Dedalus character of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or his father John Stanislaus Joyce with Simon Dedalus. In that novel, when Stephen’s father Simon parodied all boys who attended Christian Brothers schools as “Paddy Stink and Mickey Mud”, let’s remember that Stephen and Simon are fictitious representations of James and John Stanislaus and that the author, James Joyce, was not above a little artistic licence.
We do know that the fortunes of the Joyce family fell into decline and that John Stanislaus, in 1891, had to remove James from the exclusive and expensive Jesuit-run Clongowes Wood College and that he didn’t enter Belvedere College, a Jesuit day school for boys from what would be called “upper middle class” families, until 1893. So what went on during this interval? Joyce seems to suggest in A Portrait of the Artist that he studied at home but more recent research reveals that the bold James was rubbing shoulders with the much-reviled Paddy and Mickey at my old alma mater, O’Connell Schools, North Richmond Street, run by the Christian Brothers. Readers of A Portrait of the Artist will recall that Fr Conmee, then Rec.
