2 days ago
Joyce on Trial - Frank McNally on a landmark libel case of 1954
When Gerry Adams took his successful libel action against the BBC in a Dublin court recently, reader Ronan Dodd reminds me, he was following a path that had been trod as far back as the 1950s, in a landmark case involving James Joyce.
Joyce was dead by then, but his writings lived on. And when BBC radio's Third Programme marked the 50th anniversary of Bloomsday with a dramatisation of Paddy Dignam's funeral, it was sued by one Reuben J Dodd Jnr, from whom Ronan is laterally descended.
Reuben J Jnr had been a classmate of Joyce in Belvedere College. Unfortunately, the two did not get on, continuing a feud that originated with their fathers, Reuben J Dodd Snr and John Joyce respectively.
The older Joyce borrowed money from the older Dodd in the 1890s and seems to have been quite resentful that Dodd expected it to be paid back. The younger Joyce inherited the grudge. And when writing Ulysses, one of the great literary masterpieces of 20th century, he managed to include this personal vendetta, using the protagonists' real names.
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Hence he has the Dignam funeral cortege pass Dodd Snr on what is now O'Connell Street, teeing up some casual anti-semitism from the mourners (even though Dodd was a Christian).
'Of the tribe of Reuben,' says Martin Cunningham, nodding towards the footpath. His gaze is followed there by Simon Dedalus, Joyce's fictionalised father, who speaks in the direction of the 'stumping' figure: 'The devil break the hasp of your back!' A conversation on money-lending ensues.
The Joyces, senior and junior, were regularly in debt. In the earlier Nestor episode of Ulysses, where the author's alter ego Stephen collects his wages as a teacher from the bigoted northern schoolmaster Mr Deasy, the theme of insolvency also features.
Deasy argues that the proudest boast of any Englishman is 'I paid my way', and challenges his young teacher: 'Can you feel that?
I owe nothing
. Can you?'
Whereupon Stephen does a quick mental reckoning:
Mulligan, nine pounds, three pairs of socks, one pair brogues, ties. Curran, ten guineas. McCann, one guinea. Fred Ryan, two shillings. Temple, two lunches. Russell, one guinea. Cousins, ten shillings, Bob Reynolds, half a guinea, Kohler, three guineas, five weeks' board…
For the moment, no, Stephen answered.
But the immediate source of the eventual libel case was not the debt. It was a story recalled by Leopold Bloom, who is also in the funeral carriage, and who himself will later be the subject of anti-semitism (although technically not Jewish either).
It was based on real events too, although they hadn't happened yet then. In most ways meticulously faithful to the Dublin of 1904, Joyce in this case backdated an incident from 1911 for the purposes of his family feud.
What is beyond dispute about the events in question is that on 26th August 1911, Reuben J Dodd jumped into the River Liffey. In Ulysses, this is presented as a suicide attempt. In the 1954 case (for which the plaintiff's lawyer was a young Ulick O'Connor) Dodd argued that, on the contrary, he was just trying to save his hat, which had been blown into the river.
His father, with whom he had been in conversation or argument beforehand, was nearby on the quays. But it fell to a heroic docker, Moses Goldin (an ironic name in the circumstances, since it suggests
he
was Jewish, although I can't find that confirmed anywhere), to drag Dood Jnr to safety.
Goldin was a serial saver of lives, apparently. According to the Daily Worker, which wrote an editorial about the incident, he had rescued 'some twenty' people from similar situations.
Suffering from heart problems by the time he fetched Dodd Jnr out of the water, he lived in a slum with his wife and four children, and ended up in hospital from exposure after his latest heroics.
But the main point of the Daily Worker's write-up, gleefully amplified by Joyce via Bloom – wad Dodd Snr's alleged meanness. When prompted to reward the docker, he settled on a sum of two shillings and sixpence. 'Mr Dodd thinks his son is worth half-a -crown,' sneered the DW editorial.
In Ulysses, this is downgraded to a 'florin' (two shillings). 'One and eightpence too much,' quips Simon Dedalus, provoking laughter in the carriage until they all remember they're at a funeral and decorum is resumed.
The 1954/5 libel suit did not trouble a judge, eventually. As Joycean scholar Pat Callan writes in a paper on the subject: 'The BBC settled as it did not wish to have an Irish court determine if a potential libel was committed at the point of reception or the point of transmission.'
Dodd Jnr thereby became the only character in Ulysses to win a case for defamation arising from the novel. Joyce had died 13 years earlier. But while alive, he knew that in Ulysses he had given certain hostages to fortune. That may be one of the reasons why, after leaving Dublin in 1912, he never again came home.
