Читать книгу The Enigma of Arthur Griffith - Colum Kenny - Страница 13

6

His ‘Best Friend’ Rooney Dies

Arthur Griffith loved his close friend William Rooney (Liam Ó Maolruanaidh). Rooney’s dark hair, good looks and romantic vision thrilled his contemporaries (Plate 5). When Rooney died in his late twenties, Griffith was so devastated that he was admitted to hospital.1 The following year, Yeats dedicated his signal play Kathleen Ni Houlihan to Rooney’s memory.2 Joyce criticised Rooney’s poetry but did not forget the man.

Griffith and Rooney both attended the Christian Brothers’ school in Strand Street, and together trawled bookstalls for works by Irish poets and activists.3 As they grew older, they broke into journalism by writing for the Evening Herald a series on the graves of notable Irish patriots, hoping to resurrect the spirit of Irish independence. They later launched and edited the new United Irishman, which ultimately impelled the foundation of Sinn Féin. Griffith thought Rooney a Thomas Davis for the twentieth century: ‘Davis spoke to the soul of the sleeping nation – drunk with the waters of forgetfulness. He sought to unite the whole people. He fought against sectarianism and all the other causes which divided them,’ according to Michael Collins.4

William Rooney: Thine Own Sweet Tongue

Griffith, when he recovered from the trauma of Rooney’s death, published his late friend’s poems and ballads.5 He gave pride of place to ‘Ceann Dubh Dílis’ (‘O Dear Dark Head’). Written in English, it was addressed to Mother Ireland. Hanna Sheehy Skeffington thought it ‘embodies in poetic form the story of her [Ireland’s] life-long dream for freedom’.6 By placing first this poem by Rooney in the collection that he published in 1902, Griffith makes Rooney a promise:

O Dear Dark Head, bowed low in death’s black sorrow,

Let not thy heart be tramelled in despair;

Lift, lift thine eyes unto the radiant morrow,

And wait the light that surely shall break there.

What, though the grave hath closed about thy dearest,

All are not gone that love thee, nor all fled;

And though thine own sweet tongue thou seldom hearest,

Yet shall it ring again, O Dear Dark Head.

Both Griffith and Rooney were ‘northsiders’, with Griffith born in 1871 on Dominick Street and Rooney in 1873 on Mabbot Street. The latter led into the notorious red-light district mentioned in Ulysses by Joyce: ‘The Mabbot street entrance of nighttown, before which stretches an uncobbled tramsiding set with skeleton tracks, red and green will-o’-the-wisps and danger signals. Rows of grimy houses with gaping doors. Rare lamps with faint rainbow fans.’

Griffith and Rooney left school before the age of fourteen to find work. Griffith became a printer’s apprentice and Rooney a solicitor’s junior clerk.7 Where Griffith’s father was a printer, Rooney’s was a coachbuilder. In 1902 a former schoolfriend recalled that Rooney ‘took a hard position as clerk which hardly brought him a comfortable competence. He, the most energetic, the best informed, and the ablest of them all, elected to occupy a humble position in order to work for Ireland.’8

We know very little about Rooney’s family and personal life. None of his papers appear to survive.9 About 1888, he and Griffith attended the Irish Fireside Club. Here they learnt some Irish language, and discussed works by Thomas Davis and John Mitchel. Their friendship subsequently grew in the Leinster Literary Club/Society, of which Griffith became president and into which Rooney followed him. In February 1893 Rooney founded the Celtic Literary Society, of which Griffith was president at the time of the former’s death. This was a significant cultural forum that by its very name asserted that literature was not the preserve of the English or Anglo-Irish alone. The two friends also supported Douglas Hyde’s Gaelic League, founded later in 1893. Rooney played an active role in that league to the end. The intensity of his personality is evident from an incident said to have occurred when he arrived one night at the rooms of the Celtic Literary Society to find some men playing cards: ‘He neither remonstrated nor argued, but, with his eyes blazing and his face stern, threw the cards into the fire, kicked over the table, and pointed to the door.’10

They were apart for nearly two years when Griffith in 1897 went to South Africa. During that period Rooney published his poem ‘An Exile’s Shamrock’, likely if not actually calculated to make Griffith yearn for home by referring to ‘voices of friends beloved of boyhood years’ and ‘the strong true friendship time nor space can kill’.11 Maud Gonne said of Griffith that ‘home-sickness brought him back to Ireland’ in the autumn of 1898.12 But he had also been offered a job editing the United Irishman newspaper, albeit on a very small income. It is said that Rooney had turned down an offer to be its editor, proposing Griffith instead because, as he is said to have put it: ‘Dan is not doing well in South Africa.’13 Griffith on his return to Ireland was enthusiastically elected an honorary member of the Celtic Literary Society.14 Also admitted to the society was George Clancy, who took lessons in Irish from William Rooney and who himself taught Irish to James Joyce for a period.15

Working by now as a clerk with a railway company, Rooney also immersed himself in the writing and production of the United Irishman as fully as his other commitments allowed. The ‘All Ireland’ section on the front page was his in particular.16 In 1900, he and Griffith founded Cumann na nGaedheal, an organisation intended to unite advanced nationalist and cultural groups, and a forerunner of Sinn Féin.

Boys of The Heather

Rooney like Griffith frequented the National Library of Ireland, ‘a haunt loved by us’, as H.E. Kenny, Griffith’s friend and the future librarian of Dáil Éireann, called it.17 It was, wrote Maud Gonne, ‘a very pleasant place indeed for reading and writing’, which Yeats also used then.18 When her close relationship with the French politician Lucien Millevoye ended in November 1898,19 Gonne returned to Dublin quite frequently. She left their daughter Iseult in Paris.20

In 1898 Rooney was heavily involved with Gonne and Yeats and others in organising celebrations to mark the centenary of the United Irishmen rebellion. He wrote a rousing ballad, ‘The Men of the West’, to commemorate the men who, in 1798, had supported a force of French soldiers that landed in Co. Mayo and routed the English at a victory known as ‘the races of Castlebar’:

Forget not the boys of the heather

Who rallied their bravest and best

When Ireland was broken in Wexford

And looked for revenge to the West.21

Rooney’s ballad was popular, soon acquiring something of the cachet of a traditional folk song. James Joyce is thought to allude to him and to it in Ulysses – ‘that minstrel boy of the wild wet west’, and ‘We are a long time waiting for that day, citizen, says Ned. Since the poor old woman told us that the French were on the sea and landed at Killala.’22

Moral Pollution

Rooney promoted the Irish language and Gaelic culture at a time when employees worked six days a week. He frequently finished work on a Saturday, took a train to address a meeting on Sunday, came back to Dublin again by the night mail, and was at his job again on Monday morning.23 The Liverpool Mercury praised him, because ‘Working ten hours a day as a railway clerk, he taught classes of men, women and children every evening, produced literature of a lasting kind, and refused a single penny of recompense.’24 Given the currency of British jingoism then, and the very British syllabi in many Irish schools where Irish history might go untaught, it is not surprising that he tried to persuade young people to read works by Irish authors, both Catholic and Protestant. In explaining his position as early as 1889 in a paper read to the Irish Fireside Club, he had indicated that the Irish writers whom he had in mind included Elizabeth Hamilton, Maria Edgeworth and Lady Wilde.25

Griffith and Rooney also helped Maud Gonne and a group of women who founded in 1900 Inghinidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Ireland), with not only Griffith and Rooney joining them on the initial organising committee but also, as Gonne recalled, ‘the sisters of both and Willie Rooney’s fianceé, Maire Kil[l]een’.26 Rooney confessed ‘I am not an advocate of the “political woman” or the “woman’s rights” specimen, but I think that the best interests of the nation could be benefited if the women of Ireland were educated, as their brothers should be, to the needs and capabilities of the country.’27 He also wrote for the Shan Van Vocht paper edited by Alice Milligan and Anna Johnston.28

Rooney’s poems are of his time, the era of Rudyard Kipling and others whose particular form of earnestness and chauvinism seem very dated now. In the United Irishman Kipling was characterised as ‘the Poet of the Empire’ and repeatedly mocked.29 Rooney was the poet of the nation. He could be bluntly priggish, castigating (for example) ‘all the drivil and dirt of cockneydom’ that was imported from England and that Irish people bought when their own country did not support even one native comic paper. He condemned the Dublin evening papers for retailing ‘the doings of American widows or English aristocrats’ and lamented ‘the immoral and unnatural ideas which underlie’ modern society plays.30 Rooney was, said a contemporary:

The first public voice raised insistently against the moral pollution of the London music-hall ditties … Indeed, everything which weakened the moral fibre of our people found him its sworn foe … the sheer beauty and simplicity of his character was known to all who had the good fortune to enjoy his friendship … Almost always he was gay in company, but when a scoffer at female goodness, a juggler of words of dubious double meaning … obtruded himself, a solemn and stern rebuke awaited him from the high-minded William Rooney.31

In a preface to the collection of Rooney’s poems, it was said that ‘His aim was to write such verse and prose as would appeal to the average Irish man or woman, and all his work, whether in prose or verse was written with the one object – that of strengthening and perpetuating the feeling of Irish nationhood in its highest form, in the minds and hearts of the people.’32 In reviewing that collection of poetry, James Joyce thought that Rooney ‘might have written well if he had not suffered from one of those big words which make us so unhappy’, although Joyce left the word ‘patriotism’ unsaid.33 Joyce later echoed himself in Ulysses; ‘I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy.’

In 1909, in his brief introduction to a separate volume of some of Rooney’s prose from the United Irishman, Seumas MacManus noted ‘These are not the laboriously polished essays of one whose mission was the making of literature, but the outspoken words of a deeply-in-earnest man.’34

Typhoid

Rooney fell ill on 2 March 1901 and died two months later at home in North Strand, in his twenty-eighth year and ‘to the inexpressible grief of his parents and friends’.35 To the last his busy brain planned cultural initiatives: ‘If I were well,’ he said on his deathbed, ‘we should surprise everyone … we would teach every singer a song that was never heard in Dublin before. I know where to get airs and words.’36 The United Irishman reported ‘as we sat by his bedside, with a wistful smile he told us, quoting from a poem of Denis Florence McCarthy’s, that he was weary waiting for the May. And the May brought him death, as he knew it would, although we had hoped and prayed it might bring him health.’37 A death certificate records the cause of his death on 6 May 1901 as typhoid, a hazard then of the Dublin tenements.38

Griffith never doubted Rooney’s value to the national movement, and his immediate response to Rooney’s death was immensely emotional. He confessed ‘I came to build my hopes for Ireland on him, and to regard him as the destined regenerator of his people.’ He recalled that Rooney had ‘stayed with the peasant in his sheiling [a small, rough structure] and learned from him the old folk-stories and folk-songs which are now becoming known to us’.39 He added ‘As a man and as an Irishman, his life was beautiful.’40

If Griffith was in love with Rooney, nothing indicates that his love was other than platonic. Griffith was to describe him as the ‘best friend’ he ever had.41 In the next issue of the United Irishman, its editor admitted ‘we have scarcely looked at our correspondents’ letters for the last few days. In the presence of the calamity that has befallen the national cause, we have neither time nor heart to deal with other subjects.’ Rooney was ‘dead in the spring of life – a martyr to his passionate love of our unhappy country’, and ‘It seemed impossible to us that he could die.’42

When Griffith mourned Rooney’s passing he was, as William Murphy notes, ‘unstinting (well past the point of hyperbole) in his praise’.43 The pages of the United Irishman were decked out with black mourning borders or rules, as they had been when James Stephens ‘the greatest Irishman of the century’ died one month earlier.44 On 21 May 1901, W.B. Yeats wrote to Lady Gregory that the death ‘has plunged everybody onto gloom. Griffith has had to go to hospital for a week, so much did it affect him’.45 Maud Gonne wrote:

In Boston, I got a cable from Griffith, telling of Willie Rooney’s death. It was a great blow … He was Griffith’s greatest friend and helper in the paper. His loss was irreparable; I wondered if Griffith would be able to carry on without him … In Philadelphia I got a short, broken-hearted letter from Griffith. Rooney … had a cold and should have stayed in bed, but he had meetings in the West for the weekend and insisted on going. He came back very ill and never recovered. He was engaged to be married to Marie Killeen, one of the executive of Inghinidhe na hÉireann, a dark girl who, in our tableaux vivants, looked very beautiful as the Dark Rosaleen. He had done a lot to help our women’s organisation.46

In St Louis she received another letter, Griffith ‘begging me not to stay too long in America as I was badly needed in Dublin’.47 On 26 October 1901, in the United Irishman, Griffith wrote of Rooney that ‘[we] feel every hour of our lives his loss’. Michael Collins, just ten years old when Rooney died, later acknowledged his role in the national movement. As the Irish Free State came into existence in 1922, Collins wrote glowingly of him.48

‘Those Big Words’

Griffith’s United Irishman gave publicity to James Joyce’s early essay ‘The Day of the Rabblement’, which warned that ‘the artist, though he may employ the crowd, is very careful to isolate himself … it is strange to see the artist making terms with the rabble.’49 But Joyce quite liked the rabble, and his review of Rooney’s poems and ballads for the Dublin Daily Express of 11 December 1902 was not some kind of dramatic break with Ireland or with its people. It was the first of twenty book reviews that he wrote for that Dublin paper.50 He penned it on his way to Paris, at the age of twenty. He had dropped out of medical school in Dublin and thought that he might instead study medicine in France while also developing a literary career. He had spoken with Lady Gregory who recommended him to the editor as a reviewer, although the Dublin Daily Express scarcely reflected his own perspective on society. It had a unionist and conservative reputation, with Karl Marx condemning it in 1858 as ‘the Government organ, which day by day treats its readers to false rumours’.51 Joyce himself, in his short story ‘The Dead’, later had a character discover that Gabriel Conroy writes for the Daily Express. She asks him ‘Now, aren’t you ashamed of yourself?’

A look of perplexity appeared on Gabriel’s face. It was true that he wrote a literary column every Wednesday in The Daily Express, for which he was paid fifteen shillings. But that did not make him a West Briton surely … He wanted to say that literature was above politics. But they were friends of many years’ standing and their careers had been parallel, first at the university and then as teachers: he could not risk a grandiose phrase with her. He continued blinking his eyes and trying to smile and murmured lamely that he saw nothing political in writing reviews of books.52

Strikingly, in the launch issues and in some subsequent issues of the United Irishman in 1899, Griffith had complimented the Daily Express, thanking it for its courtesy in informing its readers about Griffith and Rooney’s new paper and describing the Express under its then editor as ‘the best written and generally best informed, daily paper in Ireland’. However, in late December 1899, the United Irishman claimed that, ‘The Daily Express, under its new management, has reverted to its old pre-Maunsell policy of lying.’53

Joyce’s review in the Daily Express was unlikely to go unnoticed because, as he stated in its opening sentence: ‘These are the verses of a writer lately dead, whom many consider the [Thomas] Davis of the latest national movement … They are illustrative of the national temper.’ He wrote that the volume had ‘issued from headquarters’, by which he meant the offices of the United Irishman, which had also very recently published a play by W.B. Yeats.54 It may be relevant that Joyce had recently been trying his own hand at poetry but the critic and translator William Archer, to whom he sent verses during 1901, told him that his early efforts were too moody, ‘more temperament than anything else’.55 Joyce now asserted in his review of Rooney that (from an exclusively literary perspective perhaps), ‘a man who writes a book cannot be excused by his good intentions, or by his moral character’. He judged that Rooney had ‘no care then to create anything according to the art of literature’:

Instead we find in these pages a weary succession of verses … [that] have no spiritual or living energy, because they come from one in whom the spirit is in a manner dead … a weary and foolish spirit, speaking of redemption and revenge, blaspheming against tyrants, and going forth, full of tears and curses, upon its infernal labours. Religion and all that is allied thereto can manifestly persuade men to great evil, and by writing these verses, even though they should, as the writers of the prefaces think, enkindle the young men of Ireland to hope and activity, Mr Rooney has been persuaded to great evil.

Joyce excluded from his harsh criticism ‘one piece in the book which seems to have come out of a conscious personal life’. It is a translation of ‘Impidhe: A Request’ by Douglas Hyde, which Griffith published in pride of place on the front page of the United Irishman in the week that Rooney died and from which Joyce quoted some verses as translated by Rooney.56 But the fact that he chided Rooney for spoiling his art by speaking ‘those big words which make us so unhappy’ irked Griffith. The latter responded smartly by quoting Joyce’s phrase without comment in an advertisement for Rooney’s book but adding, within that quotation, the single word ‘Patriotism’ in brackets.57

Joyce was harsh not only on Rooney’s poetry but also on Poets and Dreamers by Lady Gregory. Gregory had been instrumental in getting Joyce commissions from the Daily Express and also in persuading Yeats to entertain him for some hours in London on his way to Paris. The editor placed Joyce’s initials at the end of the reviews to indicate clearly who had written them, and also urged Joyce in future to write more favourably. Joyce made use of this incident in both Dubliners and Ulysses, in the former when Gabriel Conroy’s initials betray him to Miss Ivors as a reviewer of the poet Robert Browning.58 In Ulysses, Buck Mulligan (Gogarty) exclaims to Stephen ‘O you inquisitorial drunken jewjesuit! She gets you a job on the paper and then you go and slate her drivel to Jaysus. Couldn’t you do the Yeats touch?’

While Joyce did not renounce his review of Rooney he gave the latter a certain artistic afterlife in his own work and retained his copy of Rooney’s poetry until his own death.59 Joyce had studied Irish under George Clancy, himself a student of Rooney, and Joyce approved of the Sinn Féin independence movement, albeit with reservations.60 He seemingly references Rooney in both ‘The Dead’, the best-known short story of Joyce’s Dubliners, and Ulysses. The short story, published in 1914, happens to share its title with an article in Griffith’s Sinn Féin on 3 April 1909 that recalled Rooney mourning the passing of John Millington Synge, who had died aged just thirty-eight after what the paper described as ‘a long period of ill health’, and whom the editor thought ‘would have become one of the first of modern dramatists’.

The Potent Dead

Alice Milligan, founder and president of the Irish Women’s Association and editor of Shan Van Vocht, wrote a long poem in Rooney’s honour, ‘By the Grave-Side’, which challenged those who thought that the dead are simply gone. It includes these notable lines:

‘Sweet were his songs, his dreams were wild and vain.

He is dead and silent now and shall dream no more.’

They know not Ireland by whom such words are said;

They know not Ireland’s heart, they cannot know

More potent than the living are our dead.61

In Joyce’s short story ‘The Dead’, one can see the potency of past lives, and aspects of that story are related to the milieu of Griffith and Rooney. One of Joyce’s sources for it appears to have been Richard Irvine Best’s rendering of an old Irish myth in the pages of the United Irishman.62 ‘The Dead’ also happens to echo aspects of William Rooney’s work. For in 1898, the Weekly Freeman newspaper awarded Rooney a prize for the best poem written on an incident in the 1798 rebellion. The title of Rooney’s winning entry ‘The Priest of Adrigoole’, refers to one Fr Conroy who was instrumental in helping the French force that landed in Co. Mayo in 1798 but that was heavily defeated.63 Gabriel Conroy in ‘The Dead’ has a brother who is a priest. Moreover, the climax of ‘The Dead’ posits an Ireland sleeping under snow while Gabriel and his wife in the Gresham Hotel uneasily conjure up the ghost of her long-deceased sweetheart from the west of Ireland, Michael Furey. The story’s last paragraph begins ‘A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again.’ Compare this stanza of Rooney’s ‘Priest of Adrigoole’:

There’s someone at the window. Tap! tap! tap, anew;

Sharp thro’ the silent midnight it speeds the cottage through;

‘Some poor soul speeding onward, some sudden call to go

Unshriven on the pathway we all of us must know.’

Thus muses he, that sagart [Irish for ‘priest’], as from his couch he flies

And opens full the window where wonder-widened eyes

Look into his, and accents with haste all husky spake –

‘The French are in Killala – and all the land’s awake!’64

Here too, as in Rooney’s poem ‘Men of the West’, the poet is haunted by the power of the past glorious failure. Joycean scholars such as Kevin Whelan have seen the defeated rebellion of 1798 as ‘a hidden reverberative source’ for ‘The Dead’.65 Dialogue with the dead itself is reverberative of an ancient Irish creative tradition.66

Joyce did not forget Rooney, for in Ulysses he again used the motif of persistent tapping, the tapping being that of a blind man’s cane as he sings a ballad about 1798. At one point Joyce drops into this passage the surname Rooney, albeit with the first name Micky (a diminutive of the ‘Michael’ he had given Furey in Dubliners): ‘Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Bloom went by Barry’s. Wish I could. Wait. That wonderworker if I had … But for example the chap that wallops the big drum. His vocation: Micky Rooney’s band.’ Advanced nationalists such as William Rooney were mockingly dubbed ‘the Green Hungarian Band’, because Griffith’s proposal for a dual monarchy for Ireland and Britain was based loosely on the Austro-Hungarian constitution.67 Also, in ‘The Dead’, Michael Furey ‘was going to study singing only for his health.’68 As noted already, both Rooney and Griffith were collectors of Irish ballads. We have seen that Rooney was reported publicly to have spoken wistfully in his last days of how he ‘would teach every singer a song that was never heard in Dublin before’, knowing where ‘to get airs and words’.

At the next meeting of the Celtic Literary Society after Rooney’s death, with Griffith presiding, they sang and recited songs or poems by his late friend ‘and the proceedings were brought to a close by the singing of “The Memory of the Dead” – which on the occasion had a singular and sad appropriateness for those present’. The rousing ballad, written by the poet and economist John Kells Ingram (and not by William Elliott Hudson as once thought), was first published anonymously in Thomas Davis’ The Nation on 1 April 1843 and was often sung at patriotic events. It is better known today as ‘Who Fears to Speak of [17]98’.69 The currency of the ballad is reflected in a report in Griffith’s United Irishman, on 3 February 1900, when the editor recalled a summer evening two years earlier in Pretoria. Griffith and others had ‘gathered to greet a comrade who had journeyed down from Bechuanaland to drink a toast to the memory of the dead’. They stretched out beside the Apies River

and there under the shadow of the black hills he sang us ‘The Memory of the Dead’, and we made the kopjes [small hills] re-echo back the chorus. We chorused in many brogues, for we were Leinstermen and Ulstermen, Connaughtmen and Munstermen, and some of us had never seen Ireland at all … It was midnight ere we quitted his side … He talked to us long and earnestly of Ireland and her future and his hopes for it … I see him now as he stood up to sing the parting song – ‘The Memory of the Dead.’ I hear his voice in memory again as he sang … but only in memory. Never again shall my eyes behold him or my ears hearken to his voice. For he died for Ireland like the men whose memory he revered. Tied to a post in Mafeking he was riddled by the bullets of Baden-Powell’s assassins for being ‘an Irish Fenian’. His name was James Quinlan. Let his countrymen be but as true through good and ill to Ireland as he was, and the dream he dreamed will yet be realised.70

If Joyce read this evocative report in one of the cuttings from or copies of Griffith’s paper sent to him abroad, it may have made a lasting impression on him. At this very time he was certainly impressed by Henrik Ibsen’s latest play When We Dead Awaken, and intrigued by its lines ‘We see the irretrievable only when [breaks off silent] … When we dead awaken.’ He wrote a review of the play that he sent to Ibsen who found it ‘very benevolent’. 71

Quinlan, stationmaster at Mafeking, himself rose from the grave. More precisely, reports of his demise turned out to be premature. In 1901, his friends welcomed him home to Ireland, their celebrations ending with the singing of ‘The Memory of the Dead’.72 On one occasion Griffith was outraged to learn that the London Catholic Universe had published a version of ‘The Memory of the Dead’ that compared soldiers of the British Army in South Africa to the men of 1798: ‘The fellow who wrote this deserves the horsewhip,’ his paper fulminated.73 When praising a new edition of the poetry of John Kells Ingram, Rooney himself had written ‘It may safely be asserted that “The Memory of the Dead” has cheered the heart and cheered the soul of every single man and woman of the Irish National millions at home and abroad.’74 It was reported that at a Wolfe Tone Memorial Concert the great proportion of an audience rose and left a hall in protest when the event turned out to be ‘low music hall entertainments’. They sang ‘The Memory of the Dead’ as they did so.75 Griffith publicly lamented the ‘oversight’ involved when an Oireachtas festival opened without a mention of his late friend Rooney, remarking ‘The dead are soon forgotten by some people.’76 In 1910 Yeats appears to have regarded the song as emblematic.77

In Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, Gabriel Conroy, a language teacher like Joyce himself, asks his wife about her dead admirer Michael Furey: ‘Who was he?’ She replies ‘He was [working] in the gasworks.’ Gabriel presses her ‘And what did he die of so young, Gretta? Consumption was it?’ She retorts ‘He died for me.’78 Maud Gonne thought ‘Rooney had literally killed himself from over-work’79 by pursuing his revivalist campaign and writing for the United Irishman while also holding down a job in a railway. A less romantic view, akin to Gabriel Conroy’s in respect to Michael Furey, is reflected on William Rooney’s death certificate. Typhoid and tuberculosis (‘consumption’) killed many then, albeit aided by bad diet or exhaustion.

Joycean scholars believe that the character of Michael Furey is based primarily on Michael Bodkin who once courted Joyce’s wife Nora. Confined by TB to his sickbed in Galway, Bodkin stole out when he learnt that she had resolved to move to Dublin, and sang to her under an apple tree. He died soon afterwards. Nora was first attracted to Joyce, she said, because he resembled Bodkin.80 But there are parallels too with Rooney’s desperate dedication to Ireland and to the memory of ’98, as well as with Rooney’s early tragic death.