Arthur Clery

Life
1879-1932 [Arthur E. Clery; pseud. “Chanel”]; ed. UCD; prominent in L & H with Joyce and Kettle and author of highly successful paper given on 13 Nov. 1899; reviewed Chamber Music (1909); wrote as “Chanel” in D. P. Moran’s The Leader; advocated Partition of Ireland as logical conclusion of Irish Ireland politics, 1906; his articles collected as The Idea of a Nation (1907); issued The Coming of the King (1909), a novel; appt. chair of law, NUI, 1910; issued Dublin Essays (1912); defended Eoin MacNeill after the Rising in 1916; refused to take the [British] oath of allegiance on election to Dáil Eireann, 1927 (i.e., opposed Treaty); he is Maloney in Joyce’s Stephen Hero. FDA

Criticism
William Dawson, ‘Arthur Clery 1879-1932,in Studies, XXII, 85 (March 1933); Patrick Maume, ‘Nationalism and Partition: The Political Thought of Arthur Clery’, in Irish Historical Studies, XXXI, 122 (November 1998), pp.222-40; Maume, intro. to The Idea of a Nation [1907] (UCD Press 2002), 128pp.

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References
Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 2; features Clery prominently in the editorial essay ‘constructing the Canon; Versions of National Identity’, and selects ‘Ireland, Irish and Otherwise’(Dublin Essays, 1919) [977-80]; ‘Irish Genius in English Prose’ [1004-07]; Irish Irelanders such as Arthur Clery, a leading contributor to D. P. Moran’s The Leader, argued that nationalism and cosmopolitanism were not contradictory ideals, 953 [Luke Gibbon, ed.]; Arthur Clery rejected any monolithic approach that would seek to exclude alternative or dissident strands in Irish culture: ‘This strange method of criticism, a method we ourselves, unhappily, are only too ready to submit to and adopt, arises from the [...] fallacy [...] of supposing all things Irish to be uniform and conformable to one pattern [...] We must be prepared to meet with many and various Irish natures, and must not attribute every deviation from the conventional type to English ancestry, 955; 1019, Biography & Criticism [as supra].

Brian Earls, ‘Oscar Wilde and the Irish’, review of Oscar’s Shadow: Wilde, Homosexuality and Modern Ireland, by Éibhear Walshe, in Dublin Review of Books (Dec. 2014): ‘Two years before the publication of The Hidden Ireland [in which Wilde holds Daniel Corkery's admiring attention], Wilde provided the subject for a series of sympathetic reflections by Arthur Clery in the Jesuit journal Studies. Clery, a popular lecturer in University College Dublin, who also served as a judge in the Sinn Féin courts during the 1919-21 period, was, like Corkery, a major nationalist publicist and intellectual. He was a man of strong and at times unconventional intelligence; he was, for example, one of the few voices during that period to argue that the Protestant community of northeast Ulster was a separate national grouping, which could not be browbeaten or beguiled into an independent Irish state. Clery was far from endorsing Wilde - in an intriguing speculation he suggested that “an over-dose of patriotism in his Merrion Square home had something to do with the sinister frivolity” of his outlook; nonetheless he regarded him as a significant, contrarian intelligence.’ (online; accessed 08.12.2014.)

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