Among autumn’s events at the James Joyce Centre in Dublin, I see, is the unveiling next week of Na Mairbh, a new Irish language version of The Dead. This is a development that would greatly have cheered at least of one the characters in Joyce’s great short story: Molly Ivors.
Readers may recall that “Miss Ivors” is the spirited, outspoken young nationalist with whom Gabriel Conroy (the author’s alter ego) is paired for a square dance called “Lancers”.
Their quasi-military manoeuvres become a verbal skirmish during which she questions his commitment to Irish culture, berates his journalism for the Daily Express, and calls him a “West Briton”.
Then she refuses to stay for supper, having a political meeting to attend. “Well, you’re the comical girl,” remarks Conroy’s wife, Gretta. To which Miss Ivors replies laughingly, “Beannacht libh,” and runs downstairs, out of the story.
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The character of Ivors was inspired by one of the daughters of David Sheehy MP, a Joyce family friend. The name for Gretta, meanwhile, was borrowed from the woman half of a couple the author of Dubliners also knew well.
James and Gretta Cousins had a home in Dublin’s Sandymount, where Joyce stayed for a time during his pivotal summer of 1904 before falling ill from what he claimed was a “typhoid turnip” (the Cousinses were committed vegetarians) and fleeing.
As mentioned here previously (Diary September 7th, 2023), the Belfast-born James was a prominent figure in Irish literary life for a time, befriended by WB Yeats who shared his interest in eastern religion.
But Yeats went off him eventually, while the nonconformist couple felt increasingly at odds with life in Ireland. They moved to India in 1915, embraced Hinduism, and merged their personalities to the extent of writing a joint autobiography, the 800-page We Two Together (1950), in alternating chapters.
Which brings us back to Molly Ivors, sort of, because in one of the early chapters of that sprawling memoir, James Cousins describes a real-life equivalent of the fictional character, who came to a tragically heroic end.
He and Eveleen Nicolls had already met somewhere before, he recalls, “at one or other of the meetings within the Irish movement”.
[ Frank McNally: Ulysses updated, with apologies to James JoyceOpens in new window ]
But their paths crossed again on the Dingle Peninsula in July 1909, where Nicolls – a Gaelic League lecturer – was adding Kerry Irish to her battery of dialects.
Cousins (whose wife was campaigning in Kerry as a suffragist) had secured a room in Dunquin – the same bed previously occupied by JM Synge. Nicolls, alas, could be accommodated only on the Great Blasket Island, across the sound.
Before going there, she first scandalised locals by sitting in the men’s aisle at Sunday Mass. Then, having secured from Cousins a promise to visit her soon, she left for the island, unconsciously echoing Miss Ivors with the parting phrase “Beannacht leat”.
Cousins described her at the time: “She was twenty-five, tall, stately; an embodiment of sweetness and gentleness, but a sweetness that had no mawkishness in it, and a gentleness resting on fixity and fearlessness.”
A month later, he and his wife took a boat to the Blaskets, landing amid great commotion. Another currach had rushed to get in before them: clearly an emergency.
They soon learned it contained the body of Nicolls, who had got into difficulties while trying to save the life of a local girl. The girl – one of the Crohan family later immortalised by her father Tomás Ó Criomhthain in An t-Oileánach – survived. Her teenage brother Domhnall died alongside Nicolls in the rescue.
It’s not known (to me anyway) whether Joyce ever heard of Eveleen Nicolls, dead or alive. He had already written, although not yet published, The Dead by then. But the real-life tragedy in Kerry has other echoes of his famous story.
There, his alter ego is haunted by his wife’s memory of a former lover: “I think he died for me”. Of Nicolls’s actual demise, Cousins records visiting her parents in Dublin afterwards and hearing about a gathering of her woman friends before the holidays at which each was asked what sort of death she would prefer. “To be drowned saving another” was their daughter’s prophetic choice.
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Still with the James Joyce Centre, but back among the living, my indefatigable long-time correspondent Owen Morton tells me the venue will also play host this coming weekend to a conference on “Social Cohesion and a New Inclusive Humanism”.
New humanism, I gather, is a humanism “stripped of its sometimes-aggressive atheism”. It harks back to, among other places, the Belfast Enlightenment of the 1790s. And I’m told its bridge-building spirit was very much alive in that recent visit by Protestant women to Garvaghy Road, as reported in this newspaper.
We could do with more of it, clearly. In the meantime, the two-day symposium at the Joyce Centre opens on Friday at 4.30pm. You can register online, but I’m told they will also take cash (€35 for Friday only, €70 for the weekend) at the door.
[ For Irish women writers, James Joyce was never a shadow but a lightOpens in new window ]
