When Joyce Met St. John Greer Ervine

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• When Joyce Met St. John Greer Ervine
• Emily Bell (bio)

The meeting between James Joyce and St. John Greer Ervine has gone unnoticed. Ervine wrote of his chance encounter with this author of so-called "[r]ough [s]tuff" in 1947 in a short column for the Belfast Telegraph.¹ The scene of his recollection is a dental surgery waiting room at 62 Harley Street, London, and the probable date is 31 August 1922. A woeful and terror-stricken Joyce seeks comfort among the Marylebone dental patients as he contemplates with dread his approaching blindness. Reckoning with this fate, he had come to London to meet a recommended dentist—a Mr. Henry—who might be able to intercept the suggested link between his rotting teeth and fading sight. In the waiting room was another Irish writer. Before Ervine could offer empty words of consolation—for "what comfort can one offer a man who is threatened with darkness for the rest of his life?"—Joyce was called to the chair (4). Despite his promise to return to the clinic, he went back to Paris—supposedly the following day—to meet with his oculist, Dr. Borsch. Nevertheless, the meeting made an impression on Ervine. Joyce exposed his terror at losing his senses and revealed a candor in speaking about his situation. Ervine describes for us Joyce's natural dandyism, his "air of gentleness," and [End Page 130] the stark and unexpected contrast the author presented compared with the "frowsty garrulous drunkards" which, for Ervine, typified the atmosphere of Ulysses (4); this last observation is provided on Ervine's authority as a subscriber to the first edition of Ulysses, though he had read only "about fifty pages" (4). Joyce eventually lost his sight, Ervine tells us, and "took the loss much better than anyone expected"; by Ervine's reasoning, an author who so habitually turned inward for his writing could hardly have been too disconcerted by having to "occupy his thoughts with James Joyce" (4).

Ervine was born in Belfast in 1883. Like Joyce, he began to see some literary recognition in the 1910s, writing plays as well as journalistic pieces. His success was facilitated by a move to London at the turn of the twentieth century, where he met and became the mentee of George Bernard Shaw. Despite living in London, his plays were first produced at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, and for a few years he was a regular name on the playbill after a string of successes in the 1910s. Between 1915 and 1916, he was briefly the director of the Abbey Theatre, significantly during the Easter Rising. Like other Abbey managers of the 1910s, his tenure was short lived: though he restored the theater to comparative financial stability within a few months, his personality was difficult and led to a mutiny of the company. Still, his is a regular name in the correspondence and papers of many of the Irish literati of this period, especially those connected with the Abbey. Today, his remembrance chiefly derives from his political about-face as a nationalist turned staunch Ulster unionist—even this account of his meeting with Joyce is not spared political bombast.

Ervine's links to Joyce are, more often than not, mediated by the page. Joyce had at least two of Ervine's books in his lifetime library: Ervine's 1917 novel, Changing Winds, survives in Joyce's Trieste library, and a copy of Mixed Marriage is recorded on the shelf list Joyce compiled upon leaving Trieste in 1920.² Joyce also recommended "St. John Irvine's Life of Parnell [sic]" to Harriet Shaw Weaver for "some of the facts" in directing her reading of revised versions of the "Four Watches of Shaun" (later Book III of Finnegans Wake), but he did not indicate that he had met the work's author four years earlier.³ Ervine remained all too aware of Joyce, however, deriding his stream-of-consciousness technique as "seven hundred pages" filled with some "obscene and more … totally unintelligible" thoughts in a column for The Guardian in 1923.⁴ Later, in December 1928, Ervine published three versions of a column in different American newspapers. In each...