Benchmark of a father and his genius son
Almost 90 years on, James Joyce’s request to remember his father has finally been fulfilled, writes Liam Collins
W HEN his rakish father John Stanislaus Joyce died in the Whitworth Hospital in Drumcondra, Dublin in December 1931, his son James requested that he be commemorated with a bench adjacent to the grounds where people could sit and chat.
It wasn’t much to ask — and he even offered to pay for it — but the city fathers said no to the author of Ulysses.
Last Friday, 87 years later, his wish was finally fulfilled and a motley crew of Gay Byrne, the film director John Boorman and the writer John Banville joined the developer Harry Crosbie to unveil the Joyce Bench all those years later in the grounds of what was once Whitworth Hospital.
As the curmudgeons settled themselves on the bench, Gay Byrne declared, “the older I get the better I used to be” and nudged a reluctant John Banville to say a few words on the occasion in honour of the man he had described as a “bowsey and a drunkard”.
Eventually the novelist was coaxed into saying a few, a very few words, without rising from his sitting position.
“I don’t know what to say, I suppose he (James Joyce) would be happy, he didn’t particularly like his father, but he got a lot from him, he got his character from him, he got stories from him, but he didn’t get any money.”
After a round of applause, he added: “It’s the cheapest round of applause I have got in my life.”
Now regarded as the genius of the 20th Century who immortalised his native city in his books, back in the early 1930s James Joyce was regarded by the authorities as the author of a ‘‘dirty book’’ published in Paris and someone who had turned his back on his Catholic faith.
After the Joycean milliner John Shevlin read an extract from Ulysses ,a discussion developed on the fact that another bench commemorating John Joyce was eventually erected by some of his admirers and is now situated in the grounds of St Stephen’s Green.
“It wasn’t what Joyce asked for,” said Harry Crosbie emphatically.
The genesis of the bench around the corner from John Joyce’s last lodgings in Claude Road, Drumcondra and now within the grounds of the National Council for the Blind in Ireland, goes back to a Joycean sort of Christmas Day discussion between Harry Crosbie and Llewellyn Farquharson on the “disgraceful” way the city fathers had treated his wishes. They set about righting that wrong with the help of Robin Farquharson, who arranged for it to be sited in the grounds of the NCBI, whose chief executive Chris White reminded us that it was also the scene of the marriage of the Duke of Wellington to Kitty Pakenham.
Following his death, the elder Joyce was buried near Parnell, in Glasnevin Cemetery in the unmarked grave of his wife May (Murray). James Joyce later paid for a headstone to be erected.
Now his son’s wishes have been fulfilled with the bench inscribed. The wooden bench contains the simple inscription: ‘‘James Joyce wished that a bench be placed here in memory of his father John Joyce who lived nearby and died in this place. NCBI Whitworth Road.’’
‘He got a lot from him, he got stories, but he didn’t get any money’