Voyage of human soul through Mullingar

Thomas Lyons

It’s an awful way to start your day to find out you’re at peril of being doomed to eternal damnation. Particularly when things had started so well. A pleasant summer morning, a guided tour led by local historian and James Joyce enthusiast Ruth Illingworth, and a feeling that all was well in the world.

Mullingar was marking its unique connection with one of the world’s greatest literary figures on Bloomsday, June 16.

Ruth outlined how Joyce spent short periods in the town during the summers of 1900 and 1901, but emphasised that Mullingar left a lasting impression on the icon of Irish literature.

She explained that the celebrated author, whose masterpiece Ulysses is commemorated annually on Bloomsday, never forgot his experiences in the town, and the town has never forgotten him: “The hotel here is proud of its Joycean connections,” the tour guide explained in the lobby of the historic Greville Arms Hotel, the starting point for the tour.

The compact group gathered around the lecturer, writer, and broadcaster as she painted a verbal picture of the Mullingar at the turn of the 20th century that James Joyce visited as his father sifted through the electoral roll.

John Joyce was employed by Westmeath County Council to sort out and update the list of citizens entitled to vote in Mullingar. His son, then just 18, worked with his father in the courthouse. The two stints in the midlands town was Joyce’s longest period of residence in Ireland outside of Dublin.

Ruth led the group outside to view the facade of the establishment providing short-term lodgings since 1750: “This is the hotel as it would have been in Joyce’s time, it’s expanded greatly into neighbouring buildings since then. When Joyce was here, the population of the town was four and a half thousand.

“The population had dropped at that time and that was a bit of a problem because it meant that all the pubs in the town had to close at 10pm. There was a rule that if the population was below a certain figure, you had to close the pubs early,” the guide says as she points to a picture in Leo Daly’s publication James Joyce and the Mullingar Connection. “So this is the Greville Arms, this is the main street and this photograph here shows Mullingar where we’re standing as it would have looked around 1900.”

Beside the august hostelry was the former home of this particular publication.

The potential of making a living from letters was already manifesting itself for the young Joyce as he had received seven guineas from a magazine article, so the local paper represented income potential.

“What also fascinated him about the Westminster Examiner was the fact it was the same age as him. Joyce was born in February 1882, the first edition of Examiner appeared in September,” the historian informed the group.

A large part of the public record of Joyce’s feelings toward Mullingar comes from Stephen Hero, his earliest novel. Though only published towards the end of his life, it was refined and published as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

“He didn’t like the manuscript,” Ruth holds up exhibit B. “Unfortunately, when he rewrote it, he left out all the Mullingar material, but about half the manuscript of Stephen Hero survives.

“This edition was published in 1940 just before Joyce died. A new edition came out in 1972. Curiously enough, it ends right in the middle of the Mullingar chapter, in the middle of a sentence actually. Stephen Hero, young Stephen Dedalus, calls into the Westminster Examiner office to meet with a Mr Garvey, who is a journalist.”

The degrees of separation between the potentially damned soul on the walking tour and possibly the greatest modernist novel were contracting on each step of the tour: “Garvey was actually a man called Michael Tobin who did work for the Examiner before moving to Dublin to work for a major national paper of the day, The Freeman’s Journal,” said Ruth.

“The Freeman’s Journal’s office is one of the locations visited by Leopold Bloom during his odyssey around Dublin on Bloomsday. It’s not flattering to the Examiner because Stephen and a friend of his, Nash, walk down towards the Examiner office, in the window a white fox terrier’s head could be seen over a dirty brown blind and his intelligent eyes were the only signs of life in the office.”

As was the style of the time, the journalist took them drinking, said Ruth: “Mr Garvey presently sent word that they were to come into the Greville Arms where they have a drink and chat up the barmaid. The barmaid is described as ‘a genteel young person of a very tempting figure’. While she was polishing glasses, she indulged in flirty, gossipy conversation with young men.

“She seemed to have the life of the town at her fingertips. She reproved Mr Garvey once or twice for levity and asked Stephen wasn’t it a shame for a married man. Stephen said it was and began to count the buttons on her blouse.

“The barmaid said Stephen was a nice sensible young man not a gad-about fellow and smiled very sweetly over her brisk napkin. After a while the young men left the bar, first touching the fingertips of the barmaid and raising their hats.”

The guide then took our meandering group to Phil Shaw’s Photographers, (now Fagan Office Supplies), on Pearse (then Earl) Street. We were told that Joyce came to write Ulysses, more than a decade later, and he had Milly Bloom, the 15-year-old daughter of Leopold and Mollie Bloom, working in Shaw’s learning “the photo business”.

The historic walk emphasised the number of beautiful buildings around the town. The enjoyable stroll took the group over the River Brosna, which has transformed from being “an open sewer” when Joyce visited, to the attractive, tranquil watercourse it is today.

The county town had a sizeable number of doctors and dispensaries at the time, and the solid dependable grandeur of the banks a century and a quarter ago continues to hold an imposing presence on the streetscape.

The significance of Bishopsgate Street and its architectural evolution were laid out with a description of how the great writer would have seen them as an 18-year-old.

Down Mary Street on to Dominick Street the group continued.

That was when my own personal church censure was revealed. It started innocently enough. We were told that in 1858, Colonel Fulke Southwell Greville, who would later become the 1st Baron Greville, purchased the entire town of Mullingar from the Earl of Granard. The estate cost £120,000 (equivalent to roughly €13 million today) and included the local inn, which he renamed the Greville Arms Hotel.

The discussion turned to Irish nationalist and newspaper publisher John Hayden, a passionate supporter of Charles Stewart Parnell during the 1890 Irish Parliamentary Party split. His allegiance caused massive local friction with the Catholic Bishop of Meath, who fiercely opposed Parnell following the Kitty O’Shea divorce scandal.

“The Examiner office was actually excommunicated by Bishop Nulty,” our guide proclaimed. “He declared that any Catholic who read the Westminster Examiner or wrote for the paper was not worthy to receive the sacraments of the church.

“When Bishop Nulty died in 1898, the Westminster Examiner simply reported his death: the bishop had died and then they gave a resume of his career. There was no black border as there normally would have been to mark the death of a significant figure like the bishop.

“While many of the town’s leading Protestant families, including the landlord Lord Greville, attended the funeral and an English regiment, the Oxford Light Infantry, played the music of the funeral quartet as it went down the town, there was no sign of John Hayden. He didn’t attend the funeral.

“He outlived the bishop by half a century but technically the Westminster Examiner is still excommunicated. When Joyce was here, the office of the Westminster Examiner was referred to as ‘the mortal sin office’.”

To set out on an odyssey around your adopted town, to have its historic marvels revealed, is a wonderful way to spend part of a working day; however, when it concludes with the revelation that the fires of eternal damnation may await you without the appropriate repentance, well that’s another matter.

Ruth Illingworth’s tour of Mullingar took place on Bloomsday, June 16. A petition to have the Examiner removed from excommunication will be forthcoming...