[ top ]

Richard Kain, Dublin in the Age of William Butler Yeats and James Joyce (Oklahoma UP 1962; Newton Abbot: David Charles 1972), p.87ff., espec. pp.92-94: ‘Arthur Clery and Constantine Curran have agreed with Lynd that Kettle was probably the most brilliant man of his generation. His wit was saturnine. An embittered Hamlet, he once defined life as “a cheap table d’hote in a rather dirty restaurant, with Time changing the plates before you have had enough of anything.” Although he was a successful member of parliament at Westminster, he had few illusions about politics. His essay on the limitations of political action is a salutary admonition to zealots of every party. “Politics can never be the architect of the New Jerusalem,” he warned, “it is not cut out to be much more than a speculative, suburban builder.” Even at best, “it will give us a world just good enough to live in.” His condemnation of suicide is ironically reversed as a commendation of death, which “has all the attractions of suicide without any of its horrors.” His sheaf of essays was appropriately entitled The Day’s Burden (1910). But he too was capable of humor. He could do a golfing ode to the strains of “The Lost Chord.” He could parody Kipling with gusto. He could present the case of Ireland clearly and vigorously. Everything he did-journalism, teaching, politics, writing-he did well. Yet throughout his short career of thirty-six years to everything he seemed to have applied the question which provided the name for a Dublin conversation group, of which Clery and Kettle were members: “Cui bono?” “What’s the good?” Or, in American, “So what?” [sic]. An advocate of Home Rule, he feared that whatever program the Liberals supported would be accepted as final. “Life is growth,” he said to a large audience on the eve of his election, “growth is change…. It may have bivouacs but no barracks.” A professor of economics at the university, he defined his subject as “not a [92] science, but a series of controversies with a fixed terminology.” Even his patriotism was touched with irony; he modified the epigram about history in applying it to his country: “Irish history is the lie disagreed upon.” More bitter is his distinction between the major parties: “When in office, the Liberals forget their principles and the Tories remember their friends.” No wonder that Clery said: “You must go to Swift himself, if you would find one to surpass Kettle in that peculiarly Irish quality, sardonic enthusiasm.” / World War I divided the sympathies of the two friends. Kettle, in Belgium buying arms for the Irish Volunteers, had been appalled by the German invasion. He cherished the hope that by supporting England during the war Ireland would be rewarded with Home Rule. […; 93] Sheehy-Skeffington’s death threw Kettle into dispair. He rushed into active service. Within three months he was killed. […; 94.[ top ]

Léon Ó Bróin, Protestant Nationalists &c (1985), writes: Hobson and others were ‘able promoters of the policy of abstention against criticisms of Kettle and other parliamentarians’ [35]; ‘… the testimony of Tom Kettle [for MacNeill], who appeared in the uniform of an officer of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, was turned against him by a hectoring prosecutor and manifestly antagonistic to the court president. Poor Kettle, who had just asked to be sent to France, his usefulness as a recruiter being exhausted, was soon to die … on the Somme. The Sinn Féin nightmare, as he called the Rising, had spoiled his dream of a free united Ireland in a free Europe. Bitterly he recognised that Home Rule was done for, and the Irish Party finished.’ [117.]

Margaret Ward, ‘“The Suffrage Above All Else!”: An Account of the Irish Suffrage Movement”, in Irish Women’s Studies: A Reader, ed. Ailbhe Smyth (Dublin: Attic Press 1993) - gives details of his chairing the anti-Cat and Mouse Act meeting at the Mansion House in 1913, with his remark that it was ‘a dangerous weapon of political oppression in the hands of any Government’ (p.33), and notes that he later followed his party leader John Redmond in voting against women’s suffrage.

Conor Cruise O’Brien on his family’s view of Kettle: ‘He may have been wrong politically, but as a human being he was alright’. (Memoir, 1999; quoted in Richard Kearney, review, in Times Literary Supplement, 15 Jan. 1999, p.6.) Note that Cruise O’Brien [not Conor], contrib. a short elegy to Kettle to ‘The Nation’; rep. in Irish Book Lover VIII Dec-Jan. 1916-17, end-page.

[ top ]

Quotations
Shaking sod: ‘A civilisation shaken by Norse invasion before it had quite recovered; a people plunged in an unimaginable chaos of races, religions, ideas, appetites, and provincialisms; brayed in the mortar without emerging as a consolidated whole; tenacious of the national idea, but unable to bring it to triumph; riven and pillaged by invasion without being conquered - how could such a people find leisure to grow up, or such a civilisation realise its full potentialities of development and discipline?’ (Preface to L. Paul-Dubois, Contemporary Ireland, 1908, p.vii; quoted in The Irish Novelists 1800-1850, Columbia UP 1959, xii, 362pp.)

“Cancel ye the past?”: ‘Cancel ye the past? soothly when it befalls / That ye amend the present and are just … / Bond, from the toil of hate we may not cease / Free, we are free to be your friend … / We keep the past the past for pride: / No deepest peace shall strike our poets dumb; / No rawest squad of all Death’s volunteers, / No rudest man who died / To tear your flag down in the bitter years / But shall have praise and three times thrice again, / When at that table men shall sit with men.’ (Answer to Dr William Watson’s verses calling on Irishmen to ‘cancel the past’; quoted in M. J. MacManus, Adventures of an Irish Bookman, 1952, p.145.) See also also his riposte to Kipling: ‘… for a coin / Hands to the gabbling rout, / A bucketful of Boyne / To put the sunrise out.’ (idem.)

[ top ]

The Ways of War, by Professor T. M. Kettle, Lieut. 9th Dublin Fusiliers, with a memoir by his wife Mary S. Kettle (Dublin: Talbot Press; London: Constable & Co. 1917); ded. To My Dear Wife and Comrade: ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem; CONTENTS, Prefatory Note [signed L, probably Louis McQuilland, possibly Lynd, either of whom who may have ghosted the Memoir], vii-viii; Memoir [1]; Why Ireland Fought [57], with sects., I, Prelude, II, The Bullying of Serbia, III: The Crime Against Belgium. Under the Heel of the Hun [102], with sects., I: A World Adrift; II: Europe Against the Barbarians, some things at stake; III: Termonde; IV: Malines; V: In Ostend; Treating Belgium Decently [135]; Belgium in Peace [140]; G.H.Q [155]; Sur Erinnerung, a Letter to an Austrian Fellow-student [160] Silhouettes from the Front [165], with sects. I: The Way to the Trenches; II: The Long Endurance; III: Rhapsody on Rats [174]; The New France [178; The Soldier-Priests of Frnace [188]; The Gospel of the Devil [206], with sects., I: Bismarck; II: Nietsche; III: Treitsche and the Professors; Trade or Honour [229]. [See Mary Kettle, “Memoir”, infra.]

War on Great Britain: ‘It is alleged that we are burning to levy war on Great Britain and would welcome any foreign invasion to that end […] We have not spent seven hundred years in recovering Ireland for ourselves in order to make a present of it to the Germans, or the Russians, or the Man in the Moon, or any other foreign power whatever. The present plan of governing Ireland in opposition to the will of the people does indeed make that country a weak spot in the defences of these islands, for such misgovernment produces discontent, and discontent is the best ally of the invader. Alter that by Home Rule and your cause instantly becomes ours.” (Source uncited; in Maurice Headlam, Irish Reminiscences, 1947, p.123; with further comment to the effect that ‘Tom Kettle died gallantly in France, and did not live to see how a Home Rule Government, with powers far exceeding anything in Mr Asquith’s Home Rule Act, made “your cause ours”’; ‘They used to be an army of occupation: now they are an army of no occupation’ [referring to the cost of the judiciary] (Home Rule Finance, 1911; Headlam, ibid., p.132.)

Chamber Music (review of Joyce’s poems): ‘Those who remember University College life of five years back will have many memories of Mr. Joyce. Wilful, fastidious, a lover of elfin paradoxes, he was for the men of his time the very embodiment of the literary spirit … The inspiration of the book is almost entirely literary. There is no trace of the folklore, folk dialect, or even the national feeling that have coloured the work of practically every writer in contemporary Ireland. Neither is there any sense of that modern point of view which consumes all life in the language of problems.’ (Quoted in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 1959; 1965 Edn., p.271; also in Stan Gèbler Davies, James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist, Poynter 1975, p.141.)

Epitaph [graven on his monument at St. Stephen’s Green:] ‘So here, while the mad guns curse overhead, / And tired men sigh with mud for couch and floor, / Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead, / Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor, / But for a dream born in a herdsman’s shed, / And for the secret scripture of the poor.’

[ top ]

References
Robert Hogan, ed., Dictionary of Irish Literature (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1979), identifies his policy with ‘a free united Ireland in a free Europe’; cites Home Rule Finance, An Experiment in Justice (1911); ‘The Economics of nationalism’, in The Day’s Burden (1918, rep. 1968); Introduction to Louis-Paul Dubois, Contemporary Ireland [1908]; poetry in Poems and Parodies (1912); a protestor against Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen (1902), argued in an essay in United Irishman that Yeats had reversed the true image of the Irish Catholic’s faith and ‘historical definiteness’ in order to make her white soul shine forth; sustained friendship with James Joyce; with him, criticised emphasis of literary theatre on folklore; also, trans. Kneller’s Christianity and the Leaders of Modern Science.

Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 2; selects ‘The Economics of Nationalism’, in 1912; with editorial rems, 951 [in an astringent polemic against the economic orthodoxies of the day, Tom Kettle, the newly appointed professor of national economics at the NUI in Dublin addressed himself to ‘the gibe’ that a chair of national economics made no more sense than a chair of ‘National Trigonometry [arguing] that economics are ‘soaked and steeped’ in ‘the history and temperament’ of a specific country]; 952 [Kettle and Ryan careful to distinguish internationalism from shallow cosmpolitanism, acc. Gibbons, ed.]; 1019- 1020 [with Fred Ryan, member of dissident Young Ireland branch of United Irish League]. BIOG, 1018 [ ‘national internationalist’; distanced himself from Griffith’s protectionism; engaged in purchasing arms in Belgium for the Irish Volunteers when war broke out; ‘My only counsel to Ireland is that in order to become more deeply Irish, she must become European;’ gave evidence for Eoin MacNeill at his court martial; & WORKS [as supra].

Libraries & Booksellers: Linen Hall Library (Belfast) holds The Open Secret of Ireland (1912). Hyland Books (Cat. 219; 1995) lists Louis Paul-Dubois, L’Irlande Contemporaine & La Question Irelandaise (12st edn. 1907), viii+516pp.

[ top ]

Notes
James Joyce held copies of Home Rule finance: An Experiment in Justice (Dublin: Maunsel 1917), Irish Orators and Oratory (Dublin: Talbot [1908]), and The Ways of War, with a memoir by Mary S. Kettle (London: Constable 1917), all stamped “J.J.”, in his Library in Trieste. (See Richard Ellmann, The Consciousness of James Joyce, Faber, p.115 [Appendix].)

[ top ]

Black Kettle: Thomas Kettle was consulted about the possibility of legal action against Dubliners when Joyce visited Dublin to negotiate with George Roberts in 1912, Kettle agreed that the mention of personal names and premisses was indeed libellous and expressed his dislike for the stories, “An Encounter” in particular: ‘I’ll slate that book’. (See Stan Gèbler Davies, James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist, London: Davis Poynter 1975, p.185.) In the fuller account given by Richard Ellmann Kettle calls Dubliners ‘the most outspoken book he had ever read’ while admitting of the pervert in “An Encounter” that ‘we have all met him’ (James Joyce, 1965 Edn., p.340). And note also that Joyce held Kettle responsible for the fate of Dubliners in 1912, as he wrote to T. S. Eliot: ‘Dubliners was banned there in 1912 on the advice of a person who was assuring me at the time of his great friendship.’ (Ellmann, James Joyce, 1959, 1965 Edn., p.656; ftn. identifies the ‘person’ as Kettle.)

Austin Clarke, gives an account account of the heckling of Kettle in uniform at the Davis Centenary Meeting, 20 Nov. 1914 (See ‘A Centenary Celebration’, Robin Skelton & David R. Clark, eds., Irish Renaissance [A Gathering of Essays, Memoirs, and Letters from the Massachusetts Review], Dolmen Press 1965, pp.90-93; also under Clarke.)

‘The Day’s Burden’: see lines from Robert Buchanan quoted in Mary Kettle’s “Memoir” and thus prefixed to Ways of War (1917) contain the phrase: ‘burdened man’, considered as a poss. inspiration for the title of The Day’s Burden. But vide also Yeats’s lines, ‘While the day its burden on to evening bore, / With head bowed on his knees Cuchulain stayed. / Then Conchubar sent that sweet-throated maid,/And she, to win him, his grey hair caressed; / In vain her arms, in vain her soft white breast.’ (“Cuchulain’s Fight with the Sea”.)

Ginchy: the Battle of Ginchy (9 Sept. 1916) - where Kettle died - involved the capture of the German-held village by the 16th (Irish) Division, including contingents of the Royal Munster Fusiliers and the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. In that action, the 47th Brigade (8th Battalion) failed to reach its objective because the enemy defences had been unscathed by a British bombardment which fell short into no-man’’s land. 8 officers and 220 men were lost in the Munsters and 6 officers and 61 men in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers (9th Battalion).

Secession: Kettle, with Colum and others, seceeded from the Irish Literary Theatre following The Playboy, forming the Theatre of Ireland which - as Maire Walker puts it - lasted six years and went out of existence ‘only becuase its members were absorbed in the wider and … more important works of the Irish Volunteer Movement.’ See Green and Stephens, J. M. Synge (1959), p. 197.

Andrew Kettle: Note that his father Andrew Kettle’s role in the Land League and the setting up of the Lady’s Land League is recounted in Katharine Tynan’s Twenty Five Years (1913), Chap. VII.

John Dillon ended his angry speech in Westminster, 18 Oct. 1916, with a quotation from Kettle, ‘This mate and mother of valiant ‘rebels’ dead/Must come with all her history on her head.’ (Hansard, House of Commons Debates, 5th ser. Vol. 86, cols. 675-86; see notes for a speech in the House of Commons, 18 Oct 1916, only half-delivered, in Dillon papers. [406]

AE [George Russell] published an elegy to Thomas MacDonagh & Thomas Kettle in The Irish Times (Dec. 1917): “The the Memory of Some I Knew who are Dead and who Loved Ireland”: ‘I listened to high from you, / Thomas MacDonagh, and it seemed, / The words were idle, but they grew / To nobleness by death redeemed’. Further: ‘Equal the sacrifice may weigh / Dear Kettle of the generous heart.’ (See Edwards & Pyle, Easter Rising, p.220; cited in Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 1995, cp.240.)

Memorial bust by Francis W. Doyle-Jones (d.1938) in St. Stephen’s Green bears his verses, ‘Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor, / But for a dream born in a herdsman’s shed, / And for the secret scripture of the poor.’ [Quoted Mary Kettle, ‘Memoir’, The Ways of War, p.8; also in MacManus, ‘Tom Kettle’, Adventure of an Irish Bookman, 1952, p.146; also in Harry Boylan, Dictionary of Irish Biography (1988), and included in the Poetry on the DART poetry series (CIE, Dublin).

Desmond Ryan cites Kettle as saying, ‘Pearse and the others will go down in history as heroes, and I will be just a bloody English officer.’ (The Singing Flame.)

Traumatised: Francis Sheehy Skeffington’s son [Owen] was traumatised by the sight of Kettle when he came visiting his sister-in-law, the former Hanna Sheehy, wearing an army uniform after the 1916 Rising in which their father had been unlawfully executed by Capt. Bowen-Colthurst. [Q. source.]

[ top ]