Ulysses and Fermoy: the Joyce connection

On 2nd February 1922, on what was Joyce’s 40th birthday, the novel Ulysses was published, and Fermoy can lay claim to the famous author in one James Augustine Joyce, the writer’s grandfather, who was born out by Castlehyde.

James Augustine Joyce, the famous James Joyce’s grandfather, was reportedly born in Rose Cottage, Castlehyde outside the town. He and his wife Ellen O’Connell (who claimed kinship with Daniel O’Connell) were the parents of John Stanislaus Joyce. Unusually for the time, neither James the grandfather, nor John the father, had any siblings, thus James Joyce the writer was born the only son of an only son.

After the elder Joyce took his family to move to Anglsea Street in Cork City, John Joyce returned to Fermoy to attend school in St Colman’s College from 1859 to 1860. He was sent to the school at the age of nine, on St Patrick’s Day in 1859. He didn’t stay long, with records indicating he left the next year.

According to an expansive book on Joyce’s father by John Wyse Jackson and Peter Costello, John’s experience may have been felt in his son’s work, in the character of Simon Dedalus of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and in Ulysses.

“His time at St Colman’s was important to John Stanislaus, and he would retain it in his highly selective memory ... his contempt for the Christian Brothers, as revealed in Simon Dedalus’ famous denunciation of the teaching order, may well have had its origins in this more prestigious establishment.”

John Joyce married Mary ‘May’ Murray, and moved to Dublin, where his famous son would be born, the eldest of 10 surviving siblings. John did however inherit his father’s property in Cork, but allegedly ‘ran through’ it, dying in 1931.

MARY ST LEGER There is further reference to the Blackwater region in Joyce’s work, such as reference to the first lady mason in Ulysses - who, of course, was Mary St Leger, daughter of the First Lord Doneraile.

“There was one woman, Nosey Flynn said, hid herself in a clock to find out what they do be doing. But be damned but they smelt her out and swore her in on the spot a master mason. That was one of the saint Legers of Doneraile.” (Ulysses)

Wyse and Costello’s book goes into some detail about where, exactly, James Joyce’s grandfather was born in Fermoy.

“In the middle ages the main road crossed the River Blackwater by a bridge just the west of present-day Fermoy. Even today the old medieval road can be followed down a narrow defile between the lands of Castlehyde and Grange Farm to the riverbank where the ancient wooden bridge once was. And it is on this old road that Rose Cottage (now called Grange Cottage) stands, where the father of John Stanislaous Joyce was born in 1827.”

James Joyce attributed much of the inspiration for his work to his father.

“Hundreds of pages and scores of characters in my books came from him.”

A notorious work of literature, the novel ’Ulysses’ takes the reader on a journey through Dublin over the course of one day in June 1904. Much lauded, and notorious for being censored in the USA and the UK, 2022 is the 100th anniversary of its publication. The book was never ‘ banned’ in Ireland, as, according to the Department of Justice “it was never actually put on sale, as copies of the book seemingly didn’t make it through customs.”