University College Dublin’s (UCD) Literary and Historical Society (the L&H) was considered of sufficient gravitas to merit a centenary history in 1955, edited by the political economist James Meenan.
In reviewing this book almost 70 years ago, the historian Leland Lyons approached his task with some trepidation.
Commemorative books, he suggested, could drown in sentimental piety and self-congratulations, the reflections producing “a kind of euphoria in the minds of those who write about it which allows them to indulge their nostalgia without restraint, happily unaware that those who stand outside the charmed circle of initiates cannot share their pleasures, indeed often cannot even understand them”.
I recall my own experience of witnessing L&H debates while an undergraduate at UCD 35 years ago, cynical about what I saw as the preening, self-entitled, privately-schooled toffs in their tuxedos, who seemed enthralled by their witticisms and caustic put downs.
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Many went on to become senior civil servants, journalists, pillars of the business world, the judicial system or academia. As Lyons had noted in the 1950s: “To glance at the lists of officers, committee men and prize winners of the society between, say, 1880 and 1920, is in a very real sense to experience the feeling of being in the antechambers of power.” That was also true of the 1990s and beyond.
Age brings a different perspective. I see now that the L&H provided participants with a springboard and newfound freedoms of expression and confidence. And for all the pretension, there was a seriousness about debate, befitting a society of such vintage; one that in its early years did much to offer a new platform for an educated Catholic laity, and some of whose debaters pushed out boundaries.
As a student at UCD, James Joyce took the L&H seriously. He delivered a paper on “Drama and Life” to the society in 1900 which included an apologia for Henrik Ibsen, and it brought him a new profile.
Bruce Bradley, author of a book on Joyce’s younger years, suggested: “In Ibsen, he found encouragement to express in his writings the raw truth of experience with a candour which would increasingly distance him from the conventions of nineteenth-century literary propriety and the social and cultural orthodoxies by which he felt himself hedged in.”
But there was another layer to that 1900 presentation. The auditor at the time, Arthur Clery, in advance of the talk, had submitted Joyce’s paper to the president of UCD, Fr William Delaney, for approval. Delaney decided the paper was not suitable and forbade its reading.
The courageous Joyce then confronted Delaney personally and defended his paper, with the result that, according to Joyce biographer Richard Ellmann, “the president decided not to press his objections, but several orthodox students were probably coached to attack Joyce.”
Joyce’s account of this episode subsequently appeared in his novel Stephen Hero:
“The next [evening] afternoon McCann reported:
– Well, I’ve read your paper.
– Well?
– Brilliantly written – a bit strong, it seems to me. However I gave it to the President this morning to read.
– What for?
– All the papers must be submitted to him first for approval, you know.
– Do you mean to say, said Stephen scornfully, that the President must approve of my paper before I can read it to your society!
– Yes. He’s the Censor.
– What a valuable society!”
As is well known, Joyce’s work kept censors and other guardians of purity busy. The extent to which, as Edna O’Brien put it, he made “such breathless transcendations out of such torrid stuff,” perpetuated his renown but also his exile from Ireland.
But in recent decades, Joyce has been embraced by UCD. Its main library is named in his honour; there are annual Bloomsday honorary conferrings; the UCD Ulysses medal is the most distinguished tribute the university offers, and the L&H James Joyce medal is “considered among the highest honour that any student body in Ireland can bestow”.
One of the lessons of the first century of the L&H, according to Lyons, was that “the students learnt what no academic authority could have taught them – how to express themselves and even, though perhaps less successfully, how to govern themselves”.
As reported last week, the current L&H has rescinded its decision to award author John Boyne its Joyce medal because of what many regard as his offensive views on transgender issues, which are trenchantly and provocatively expressed.
The plan was to award the medal to Boyne, not for his views on gender identity, but because he is “one of Ireland’s most celebrated and courageous literary voices”, who has “consistently tackled the themes that matter – identity, morality, power, shame and the search for truth with searing honesty and compassion”.
The L&H’s stance brings to mind Joyce’s assertion about Ireland in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “the old sow that eats her farrow.”
