Joyce among the Brothers

Noting James Joyce's famous remark that "You allude to me as a Catholic; you ought to allude to me as a Jesuit" (2), Kevin Sullivan writes in Joyce Among the Jesuits that Joyce "received the whole of his formal education from the Jesuits. Only once during these fourteen years [between the ages of seven and twenty] was his study with them interrupted, and during this period--from the beginning of the year 1892 to April, 1893--he seems not to have attended any school whatever" (7). It is an abundantly documented commonplace of Joyce criticism that the Society of Jesus played a major role in his life and works. On the other hand, it has long been assumed, from one reference in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, that the Christian Brothers figured little in Joyce's life and that, in fact, his admiration for his Jesuit teachers was complemented by a contempt for the Brothers who educated many of his contemporaries. An examination of references to the Brothers in Joyce's texts, however, leads to the conclusion that he respected them, whatever he may have thought of them as educators. The Brothers appear at least briefly in each of Joyce's major fictional works, and the only negative remark is that of Simon Dedalus in the second chapter of Portrait: "Christian brothers be damned! [...] Is it with Paddy Stink and Mickey Mud? No, let him stick to the jesuits in God's name since he began with them. They'll be of service to him in after years. Those are the fellows that can get you a position" (72). Dedalus draws a very clear line between the Christian Brothers and the Jesuits. Because Joyce himself suppressed the detail that he spent some months in 1893 as a student of the Christian Brothers at their school in North Richmond Street in Dublin, Sullivan logically assumed that Joyce's schooling was entirely with the Jesuits, but Richard Ellmann finally revealed the truth: [When the Joyces moved into] Fitzgibbon Street off Mountjoy Square, the last of their good addresses[,] the children were not sent to school at once, but eventually John Joyce, with the greatest reluctance, sent them to the Christian Brothers' school on North Richmond Street. James Joyce chose never to remember this interlude with the Christian Brothers in his writings, preferring to have his hero spend the period in two years of reverie, and he did not mention it to [his first biographer] Herbert Gorman. It was Joyce's one break with Jesuit education, and he shared his father's view that the Jesuits were the gentlemen of Catholic education, and the Christian Brothers ("Paddy Stink and Micky [sic] Mud;' as his father denominated them) its drones. (35) Ellmann is quoting not Joyce's father but Stephen's father in Portrait. When Simon Dedalus returns home one day to report that he has managed to place Stephen with the Jesuits at Belvedere College, Mrs. Dedalus says, "I never liked the idea of sending him to the christian brothers" (an interestingly ambiguous remark that could reflect Joyce's own brief experience with the Brothers), and Simon responds with the words already quoted. Although James Joyce and his father John may have agreed with Simon Dedalus's characterization, the names have stuck ever since as a handy description of Joyce's view of the Christian Brothers. So famous did the phrase become that Joyce seems to be parodying himself in a section of Finnegans Wake characterized as students' class notes. One parenthetical passage begins: "Sure you could wright anny pippap passage, Eye bet, as foyne as that moultylousy Erewhig, yerself, mick! Nock the muddy nickers!" The second sentence is footnoted, "Excuse theyre christianbrothers irish?" (301). Here "Mickey Mud" of Portrait becomes "muddy nickers." The phrase itself, however, was not uttered by Joyce or by his father but by a fictional father who is not a very attractive or intelligent character. Ellmann ignores the distinction, and Barry Coldrey, an Australian Christian Brother, blurs the fact/fiction distinction even further when he writes that Joyce himself "recoils from the prospect of being educated 'with Paddy Stink and Mickey Mud' at a Christian Brothers' School" (69). …