James Joyce and James Connolly had little in common except their names and are rarely spoken of in the same sentence.
One was a militant republican who died for Ireland, the other a moderate nationalist who devoted himself to forging in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race (no less).
But as young men, they both wrote short stories set in Dublin in the years just before or after 1900. The very different lives they described – Joyce’s among the middle class, Connolly’s among the poor – collided for a time on a corner of the city’s south quays.
Joyce’s most famous short story, The Dead, commemorates an annual Christmas dinner at the home of Kate and Julia Morkan, music-teaching sisters, at 15 Usher’s Island.
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One of Connolly’s most famous short stories, titled The Mendicity and its Guests, concerns the clients of the Mendicity Institution – a charity located a few doors down the river front on Usher’s Quay.
Both stories were partly autobiographical. The Morkans were based on Joyce’s grandaunts, while Connolly’s story seems to have been inspired by his own experiences of destitution in Dublin.
Along with his entry on a British census form, the story encouraged early biographers to think he had been born in Monaghan, where his father came from, rather than Edinburgh.
His protagonist in The Mendicity and its Guests remembers growing up in a cabin “where the road from Keady strikes over the hills into the town of Ballybay”.
Some literary detectives took the Ballybay reference as a description of Connolly’s birthplace. But a later biographer, C Desmond Greaves, dismissed it, arguing that the trajectory from Monaghan to the Mendicity was chosen only “to illustrate the disintegration of the peasantry and the degradations which accompany absorption into the proletariat”.
In any case, the story’s themes also feature in another of Connolly’s short fictions, A Free Breakfast Table, from 1895.
That and several other stories of his were long forgotten until being unearthed by Conor McCabe in his anthology: The Lost & Early Writings of James Connolly, 1889-1898.
The rediscovered tales had been originally published under the pseudonym Brehon. McCabe’s discovery of their true authorship hinged on the recurrence of certain phrases Connolly was known for using, including a colourful Dublin expression we’ll return to later.
The protagonist of A Free Breakfast Table also remembers a childhood in Ireland’s “Black north”, where potatoes and buttermilk were plentiful. Now he’s homeless in Dublin, where for two months he too has depended on the Mendicity.
This brings us back to the Joyce parallel (which McCabe also discusses on his website conor-mccabe.com). As in The Dead, A Free Breakfast Table revolves around the description of a sumptuous meal, albeit in very different circumstances from the one hosted by the Morkans.
Here, the hungry hero is wandering the streets of Dublin, marvelling at the grandeur of the architecture all around him and hoping to find work somewhere before the day is out but, in the meantime, possessed of “an overpowering desire for food”.
Then he has a lucky break. While waiting to cross the street at College Green, he sees a shiny coin on the ground: “a coin to all appearances the equivalent of a workman’s weekly wage” (i.e. a crown).
In triumph, he seizes it, “turns upon his heel along Dame Street, up Cork Hill, past the castle, along Thomas Street, and dives headlong into a third-rate eating house he had known in his palmy days”.
There he orders breakfast, including “half a pound of cooked rashers”, addressing the waiter with all the confidence of the newly rich and even disparaging the thinness of the bread which, as he says, “I could read Tim Healy’s speeches through”.
At the risk of stretching comparisons between Joyce’s great story and Connolly’s – which is a mere sketch really – they both turn on a moment of poignant revelation. Joyce’s descends into tragedy. Connolly’s, perhaps surprisingly for a socialist, ends in comedy. Sketchy as it is, I won’t give the rest of his plot away.
As the author could hardly have foreseen in 1895, the Mendicity Institute would within a generation be one of the rebel garrisons in the 1916 Rising.
Severely damaged then, it recovered and is still providing dinners to the poor today, as Dublin’s second oldest charity (after only the Sick and Indigent Roomkeepers’ Society).
But getting back to that colourful expression mentioned earlier, it referred to a certain estuary north of Dublin and was used to describe someone who gazed in wonder at anything. Such a person was said to have “a mouth open like a Malahide cod”.
Master of Dublinese that he was, Joyce never seems to have used the phrase in print. Connolly did, however, repeatedly and – as McCabe realised – with a small, unique embellishment, saying “codfish” instead of “cod”.
Only the pseudonymous Brehon had also written it that way. Thus, as his newly enriched diner orders breakfast, he tells the doubting waiter to get on with it, “and don’t stand there staring with your mouth open like a Malahide codfish waiting for the tide to come in”.
