Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: ‘The journey westward’
- 1 ‘Endless stories about the distillery’: Joyce and Whiskey
- 2 ‘Their friends, the French’: Joyce, Jacobitism and the Revival
- 3 ‘He would put in allusions’: The Uses and Abuses of Revivalism
- Conclusion: Protestant Power and Plates of Peas
- Select Bibliography
- Index
1 - ‘Endless stories about the distillery’: Joyce and Whiskey
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: ‘The journey westward’
- 1 ‘Endless stories about the distillery’: Joyce and Whiskey
- 2 ‘Their friends, the French’: Joyce, Jacobitism and the Revival
- 3 ‘He would put in allusions’: The Uses and Abuses of Revivalism
- Conclusion: Protestant Power and Plates of Peas
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
With fell design, England suppressed our commerce, our factories, our mines, our industries, and left us only the distillery.
— Father Michael Kelly (temperance crusader)When we knew him first he used to be rather interesting, talking of faints and worms; but I soon grew tired of him and his endless stories about the distillery.
— James Joyce, ‘The Sisters’Flann O'Brien, the much-loved Irish comic writer, lived uncomfortably in the shadow of James Joyce. An admirer of the great Dubliner's achievements and one of the first to formally celebrate Bloomsday, O'Brien was also deeply frustrated by his own inability to escape comparison with the author of Ulysses. This anxiety is brought to the surface for comic effect in O'Brien's late novel The Dalkey Archive (1964) where his central character, the civil servant Mick O'Shaughnessy, finds Joyce alive and well and working as a barman in the north County Dublin seaside resort of Skerries. Shy of public recognition and adulation, Joyce tells Mick, ‘I've had things imputed to me which – ah – I've had nothing to do with.’ He goes on to claim that he has in fact authored only one book, Dubliners, a collection that was co-written with Oliver St John Gogarty. Mick, astounded by his discovery, feels compelled to introduce Joyce to the only other genius he knows, the philosopher, inventor and distiller De Selby, in the hope that a meeting of these two great minds might lead to riches:
If in fact after a second interview with Joyce an arrangement was made for him to meet De Selby, Mick would have by that time the way made ready. Two elderly men, of giant intellectual potential, who had run wild somewhat in their minds might, in coming together, find a community of endeavour and unsuspected common loyalties. Both certainly knew what whiskey was. Mick wondered whether in the absence of his deadly container De Selby would continue to produce perfectly mature whiskey which was only seven days old? Could one look forward to the founding of the firm of De Selby, Joyce & Co., distillers, maltsters and warehousemen, to market those high-grade spirits all over the world and make a fortune?
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- Journey WestwardJoyce, Dubliners and the Literary Revival, pp. 12 - 61Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2012