James Stephens

Artist Info

James StephensDublin, Ireland, 1880 - 1950, London

Stephens, James (1880–1950), poet and novelist, deliberately shrouded his origins in mystery, claiming to have been born in Dublin on the same day and in the same year as James Joyce (2 Feb 1882). In fact he is probably identifiable with the James Stephens born at the Rotunda Hospital, Dublin, on 9 February 1880, the son of Francis Stephens (c.1840–1882/3) of 5 Thomas's Court, Dublin, a vanman and a messenger for a stationer's office, and his wife, Charlotte Collins (b. c.1847). His father died when he was two, and on his mother's remarriage when he was six he was committed to an orphanage, the Meath Protestant Industrial School for Boys, at Blackrock, near Dublin, for begging in the streets. The school was a charitable organization aiming to give destitute children a secure grounding in the protestant faith and an education to fit them for a skilled trade or office work, and in 1896 Stephens began work as a typist-clerk in a Dublin solicitor's office.

In 1905 Stephens published his first short story in Arthur Griffiths's nationalist paper the United Irishman, which was later that year renamed Sinn Féin, becoming the official organ of the new Sinn Féin party. He began to publish regularly there—essays on ethics and poetry, idealistic verses, and Sinn Féin propaganda. Many years later he was to write a tribute to his early patron: Arthur Griffiths: Journalist and Statesman (1922). About this time he took lodgings with a young couple, Harry Kavanagh and his wife, Millicent Josephine, née Gardiner (b. c.1885), and when Kavanagh deserted his pregnant wife in 1907, Stephens became Millicent's lover, named her Cynthia, and passed her off as his wife and her unborn child as his own. The couple were not able to marry until 1919, by which time Stephens had a stepdaughter and, with Cynthia, a son.

The publication of Where the Demons Grin in 1908 introduced Stephens to literary circles, and he became caught up in the Irish literary revival, meeting Maud Gonne, George Russell (AE), and Horace Plunkett. With Cynthia he went to Gaelic League meetings, where they were taught Irish nationalist history and Gaelic, and danced at ceilidhs. Where the Demons Grin was a collection of poems written in a realist, Browningesque style, but in 1909 the appearance of Insurrections, filled with bold, angry pictures of Dublin slums, demonstrated that Stephens had been heavily influenced by his new friends and cultural interests. The collection, dedicated to AE and showing his particular influence, had a pronounced visionary flavour and marked the beginning of a lifelong obsession with William Blake, whom Stephens described as ‘a very good poet to steal from, and let it be conceded that theft is the first duty of man’ (Pyle, 52).

In 1911 Stephens was one of the founders of the Irish Review, a product of the cultural nationalist movement providing a forum for the Irish arts. Its first issues were partly kept afloat by a popular serial ‘Mary, Mary’, a realist idyll set on the Dublin streets, written by Stephens and later published in 1912 as The Charwoman's Daughter. It was his first novel and contained recognizable but affectionate spoof portraits of William Butler Yeats, Russell, Synge, and George Moore. It was a success in both the United States and Britain and was translated into French. In October 1912 the appearance of The Crock of Gold, his most popular book, ‘brought him into the first rank of prose writers’, in the words of Oliver St John Gogarty (DNB). This early success enabled him to give up his work as an attorney's clerk and emigrate to Paris. It remains the novel for which he is best known.

Away from Dublin, Stephens was unhappy. Although he received the Polignac prize in 1913, his collections of poems The Hill of Vision (1912) and Five New Poems (1913) were indifferently received, and he confessed to friends that they, and Songs from the Clay (1915), were heavily imitative of Blake. His second novel, The Demi-Gods (1914), with its heavy reliance on theosophical ideas, sold badly. While in Paris he campaigned vigorously for an Irish free state, and the desire to see Ireland a nation once more can be seen in the verse both of Songs from the Clay and The Adventures of Seamas Beg (also 1915). He found it impossible to support his family on the proceeds of writing, and late in 1915 he returned to Dublin to take up the position of registrar at the National Gallery of Ireland. During this period his interest in social and political advance can be seen in his contributions to the Sheehy-Skeffingtons' socialist, feminist, nationalist, and pacifist paper the Irish Citizen, and to the Irish Worker. His brilliantly journalistic eyewitness account of the 1916 Easter rising, in which many of his friends and colleagues were killed, appeared as The Insurrection in Dublin at the end of 1916, followed by Green Branches, a moving poetic elegy.

In 1918 Reincarnations, Stephens's lyrical translations of the poems of the Gaelic poets Antony Raftery, Egan O'Rahilly, and David O'Bruadhair, caught the mood of a nation eager for independence. With Deirdre (1923), a novel which is an Irish variant of the Tristan and Isolda legend, he continued to bring Irish culture to an English-speaking audience. He left Ireland in 1925 and moved to London, where he gave a series of lecture tours, popularizing his uniquely cantative style of poetry in distinctive, musical readings. In his biography of Arthur Griffiths in 1922 he wrote: ‘The hero, the man of goodwill, belongs to no nation. He is the international man and the world's currency’, a statement which he seems to have applied to himself in his gradual secession from Ireland. In 1924 he was awarded the Irish Tailltean gold medal for services to literature, and in 1926 he published his Collected Poems, remarking that ‘it is about as easy to organise a sodality of Fleas as a book of verse’. Many poems were rewritten for the collection, which was revised and reissued after his death.

Although he lived in England for a further twenty years, Stephens produced little new or memorable work there. His time was devoted to lecture tours, both in England and in the United States, which he visited nine times between 1925 and 1935. In 1927 his friendship with James Joyce blossomed, as an initial mutual dislike fostered by a chance meeting in 1912 shifted to mutual affection. Joyce, initially attracted by their supposed shared birthday, made continuing efforts to cultivate Stephens's friendship, which culminated in what Richard Ellmann has called ‘the strangest idea in literary history’ (Ellmann, 604): disheartened by the progress of Finnegans Wake, Joyce asked Stephens to complete the book if he were unable or indisposed to do so. Joyce persisted in this request for several years.

On 24 December 1937 Stephens's son, James Naoise, was killed after accidentally stepping on a railway line, and the shock brought an almost total end to Stephens's writing career; he was so greatly distressed that he never again mentioned his son. In 1940 he wrote to The Times declaring himself an Englishman in protest at Irish neutrality during the Second World War, and he worked for a short time at the Ministry of Information in Malet Street, London. From 1941 until his death in 1950 he recorded more than seventy talks for the BBC, reading his verse, discussing poetry and poets, or reminiscing about old friends, and in 1942 he was put on the British civil pensions list. He received only £100 to £200 from the civil list, and when he was awarded an honorary DLitt of University College, Dublin, in 1947, he was unable to afford the travel costs to collect it without help from friends. On St Stephen's day, 26 December 1950, the lover of coincidences died at his home, 28 Queens Walk, Kingsbury, London; he was buried in Kingsbury old graveyard. A memorial service was held at St Martin-in-the-Fields a month later.

Katherine Mullin

Sources

H. Pyle, James Stephens: his work and an account of his life (1965) · The Times (29 Dec 1950) · R. J. Finneran, ‘James Joyce and James Stephens: the record of a friendship’, James Joyce Quarterly, 11/3 (1974), 179–92 · P. A. McFate, ‘James Stephens’, British poets, 1880–1914, ed. D. E. Stanford, DLitB, 19 (1983) · R. Ellmann, James Joyce (1959), 604 · DNB · CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1951)