A Sermon by Father Conmee

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• A Sermon by Father Conmee
• Jonathan Morse (bio)

John S. Conmee, S.J. (1847–1910) figures under his nonfictional name and vocation in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses and was nonfictionally characterized by Joyce as “a bland and courtly humanist.”¹ On 24 February 1900, it was that Father Conmee who could have been spotted slipping in black through the colorful columns on page 4 of the Freeman’s Journal. There, just above the notice of Father Conmee’s impending “Appeal for the Poor,” an exhibition space was advertising some of Jack Yeats’s views of Ireland, and in the column immediately adjacent, the fruiterer J. Thornton of 63 Grafton Street solicited business. On 16 June 1904, Blazes Boylan was to drop by among the “ripe shamefaced peaches,” look approvingly down the counter-girl’s dress, and order something nice for Molly.² As the advertiser who took out a large display might have put it on 24 February 1900, variety like that is the Worcestershire sauce of life.

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In the midst of the same Dublin-bustling life on 4 October 1897, the Journal reported on another charity sermon by Father Conmee, and that item is of specific Joycean interest for two reasons: it was delivered on behalf of Dublin’s National Maternity Hospital, the setting for “Oxen of the Sun,” and it was published in full. Because it is formatted on the page as a single paragraph, I suppose it may have been set in type by a compositor working mechanically from Father Conmee’s manuscript and making no edits beyond replacing direct quotations in the present tense (“It is my duty to speak to you today”) with a paraphrase in the past tense (“He said it was his duty to speak to them that day”). If that is the case, reversing the editorial changes as we read will deliver into our hands a direct transcript of a voice speaking one of the languages of Joyce’s Dublin—specifically, the language uttered by one of Joyce’s characters just before it was translated into Joyce by Joyce. In that language, it reads like the following inclusions.

Jonathan Morse

JONATHAN MORSE writes about photography and language at jonathanmorse.blog.

NOTES

1. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), p. 29.

2. James Joyce, “Ulysses”: The Corrected Text, ed. Hans Walter Gabler et al. (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 10.305–06.

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