Rising, with difficulty – An Irishman’s Diary about Arthur Power and 1916

One of the more amusing recollections of Easter 1916 was left to us in the memoirs of Arthur Power, then a British soldier on sick leave, later a well-known art critic and friend of James Joyce in 1920s Paris.

At the time of the rebellion, he was a 24-year-old war veteran, home from the front after suffering a gas attack, and staying at the family’s Dublin residence in Fitzwilliam Place. Then the Rising happened.  And by the middle of week, his existing condition combined with the stressful surroundings to cause some sort of collapse (a “heart attack”, as he airily described it), sending him to bed.

But like most parents of idle young men, his mother was intolerant of the spectacle of her son wasting his day. “How can you lie there when all this is going on?” she asked, adding, in a variation on the “get up and do something useful” line, “You are a soldier, are you not? Then you should be out fighting – one side or the other.”

Races

In fairness to Power, he had already seen more action than most non-combatants. On Easter Monday, like many of his social class (the family were big-house Catholics from Waterford), he had belatedly roused himself from bed to drive to the races at Fairyhouse, setting out at 1pm.

En route up the city quays, he ran the gauntlet of a line of volunteers who levelled rifles as he passed. He was unalarmed at first, being used to the sight of manoeuvres (“I had met one of their officers, Young Plunkett, at a party, where we had discussed poetry together”).

And being young and reckless, he took a nosey detour, driving “rather aimlessly down O’Connell St”, where the sight of a dead or wounded man in front of the GPO suggested more than mere manoeuvres.

A little later, he was trying to get back onto the quays, at Grattan Bridge, when a crack-shot rebel fired on the car three times, hitting the back, puncturing a tyre, and smashing a windscreen.

Several less-fraught adventures and a tyre change later (he was interviewed during the latter exercise by a policeman “who seemed very distressed and said several times that this sort of thing could not be allowed”), Power finally made it to Fairyhouse, where he thought his news would be “electric”.

But a British officer there refused to take him seriously, “and seemed to think it had been a personal attack on me”.

So Power watched the races, then spent that night with friends in Lucan. And by the time he returned to Dublin, the British were no longer struggling to believe what had happened.

After his mother’s haranguing, he witnessed the slaughter at Mount Street bridge on the Wednesday – “a curious battlefield with the terraces of red brick houses on either side […] the lace curtains and aspidistras in their brass bowls in the centre of the lower windows”.

But nothing he saw persuaded him to join in, for or against the rebels. By Thursday night, with the whole city a war zone, he watched it from an upstairs window alongside a worried butler whose son was fighting for the Republic, somewhere: “As I looked out on all this destruction and confusion I hated it, not from any political motive, but because I hate war […] its cruelty, its bestiality, its absurdity.”

Power published his memoir, From the Old Waterford House Recollections of a Soldier and Artist, in 1940 (I'm not sure all the 1916 stuff made it in – I owe the foregoing to my friend Imelda, who has an original manuscript).

But he was by then better known for his years in Paris, where one of his early commissions as art critic was to interview the great Modigliani who, broken down by TB and alcoholism, died two weeks later.

Joyce

More famously, Power had also become friends with Joyce, although not at first an admirer of his works. On the contrary, his early opinion of the genius’s books was not dissimilar from his attitude to war – he “disliked them intensely”.

But he overcame this disadvantage in time, and eventually published a book on their friendship, Conversations with Joyce (1974).

Interestingly, Power saw something of revolutionary Dublin in the writer: “I realised there was much of the Fenian about him – his dark suiting, his wide hat, his light carriage, and his intense expression. A literary conspirator, [he] was determined to destroy the oppressive cultural structures under which we had been reared, and which were then crumbling”.