Bibliographical details: Hilary Pyle, James Stephens: His Work and an Account of His Life (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1965), xi, 196pp.; and Do. (Barnes & Noble  1965) [ded. To Hug”], xi, 196pp. [Pref., pp.ix-xi; Bibl., pp.183ff.; Index193ff.] rep. by Routledge (2026), 214pp. [publ. digitally by Taylor Francis, 2026].

CONTENTS - Part One: Dublin — 1880–1925. [Chaps] I: Youth [3]; II: Early Writings [15]; III: The Influence of Blake []31; IV: The Influence of Blake and of Theosophy [36]; V: Nationalism and the Irish Language [77]; VI: Irish Epic [91]. Part Two. : London - 1925-1950. London  [111]; VII: Final Philosophy [122]; IX:|Lectures in America and Return to London [135]; X: Later Poetry [149]; XI: Broadcasting [158]; XII Conclusion [174-81]. See extracts under Commentary - as infra or as attached.]

Meeting “Cynthia” contributed to the stable background necessary for his work, and certainly she was a source of inspiration to the writer. The story goes that Stephens took lodgings in the house of a couple named Kavanagh. This was probably in 17 Great Brunswick Street from which he addressed the poems written in 1908. Cythia’s husband, Mr. Kavanagh, has been described by different people as a shopkeeper, a sceneshifter and the doorkeeper of the Tivoli Theatre, a Dublin music-hall. He and Mrs. Kavanagh decided to part and he went off leaving his wife expecting a baby. [Ftn., Irish, now Mrs. Norman Wise, b. c.1908.]  Stephens feared that he would compromise Mrs. Kavanagh if he remained in the house and he made arrangements to depart; but Mrs. Kavanagh insisted that she was without means and that she would prefer him to stay so that she would at least have his rent. James stayed and met all the expenses and gradually he made it known to his friends that he had a wife and family.

Millicent Josephine, to give Mrs. Kavanagh her real name, was a charming little persons with red-gold hair, hazel eyes, and a pink and white complexion. James renamed her after the moon, to him a symbol of religious significance, and she later adopted the name as her own. She had a strong personality. She could be overpowering. But Stephens was largely dependent upon her: she was infinitely kind and loyal and in his days of penury and ill-health she was a tower of strength. Stephens’s deep affection for her is clear in the delightful portrait of Mary Makebelieve in The Charwoman’’s Daughter, where all the delightful traits are transcended and all the irritating characteristics are swept aside. For years they lived in a single room, with the children concealed behind a screen in the evening when people called, and her Cynthia made a comfortable home for James, arranging their few possessions tastefully. When they were poor she made clothes for both of them with remarkable succession.

Then in 1908 fame burst upon James Stephens and he realized that his contribution was recognized by those who had launched the literary movement. [...] (pp.25.)

‘In Hail and Farewell, [George] Moore related how George Russell, A.E., looked for a rival to Yeat’s discovery, Synge, and swore that he would find him in Arthur Griffith’s paper [Sinn Féin]; and there follows the description of A.E. [25] to journey to Mecredy’s office, when he had found his poet, his request to be introduced to Mr. Stephens, and his surprise when the big brown eyes looked up from the typewriter and the clerk answered, “I am he.”’ (pp.25-26.)

‘Sean O’Casey and Lennox Robinson have both commented unkindly on the atmosphere [at Russell’s “open house evenings in Rathgar], but O’Casey approved of [28] Stephens’s allegiance to his friend on the occasions when Russell was in danger of looking ridiculous. Stephens was not daunted by A.E.’s pomposity. One evening, to A.E.’s astonishment, he asked hte asembled company what had happend to “Mutt and Jeff” that day. [...] A.E. was appalled and said that all such trash should be boiled in oil. A few weeks later, however, Stephens met him walking up Grafton Street bearing under his arm a bundle of papers containing back numbers of “Mutt and Jeff”, whcih he had sent after himfor his perusal to Donegal. Stephens and Russell enjoyed detective stories and thrillers together, beginning their studies with M. P. Shiel. They amassed shelves full of them, and exchanged them from time to time, delighting in the florid terms and incredibility.

It was not long before A.E. appeared in Sinn Féin under the title of the Old Philosopher. One of Stephens’s favourite sayings was that a man never made more than six intimate friends during a lifetime. A.E. and Griffith were his first two intimate friends, yet he did not hesitiate to make a gently humorous study of the former’s pontifications in his articles. The Old Philosopher discoursing on Washing, on Politeness, on Smoking, on Eating, and on Going to Bed, on Policemen, on Education, and on a host of other subjects, one which A.E. must have lectured each Sunday evening, though here reinforced by Stephens’s sympathetic imagination. The expression and wite are typically Stephens’s, he made the subjects as much is as A.E.’s; and it is interesting to see that he did not merely record what he had noticed from watching, “as a cat watches a mouse”, but that he moulded the material to his own purpose, achieving a finer result. He had already attempted character studies of “Mrs. Maurice M’Quillan”, “Old Mrs. Hannigan”, and other people surely of his acquaintance, which were reprinted in Here Are Ladies, but these lacked the brilliance of the Old Philosopher’s Discourses, from when the Philosopher in The Crock of Gold was to originate. They appeared about twice a month from January 1909 onwards; some were reprinted in Sinn Féin and Here Are Ladies and some in The Crock of Gold.’ (pp.28-29.)

In May 1909 Insurrections was issued by Maunsell & Company, who were responsible for most of the literary publications in Dublin at the time. [...] Even when we overlook the natural weakness of a first volume it is diffult to realize now what an impression it must have made on Stephen’s contemporaries. [Here compares his poetic diction to Synge’s call for a verse [that] must be “brutal” before it can be “human” again - but discounts his influence on Stephens.] Stephens was refreshing for he injected poetic idiom with a stream of vigorous down-to-weath language. With his enthusiasm for nation irish tradition he combined intuition and sympathy, and he prepared Dublin for the coming of James Larkin’s labour movement. Here was a glimpse of the sordidity and the humanity of the Dublin slums. The direct attack of his stark realism and Blakean philosophy contrasted with the twlligh idealism of O’sullivan and the remoteness of Colum’s country scholar.

Insurrections is a collection of songs about muddy back streets [31] and the irksome life lived under such conditions. There the sorrow of the individual must be kept private and a brave face must be shown to the world or no bread will be earned. Even t he wind seems perpetually to moan. But there are moments of vision, even if people will condemn the visionary as insane, and Stephens shows that if life and fate are inexorable one can can at least fel for other people. Courage, truth and kindness are aids on the way to hope; and man with the help of God and nature may attain to heaven’s way of life.

[...]

Criticism was divided. Some critics regarded Stephens as a roguish elf who could not be judged by the standards of normal human beings, and this is the view which is current at the present day. Some were more severe and called hima naughty child. even A.E., who had encouraged him from the beginning, said to Arnold Bax:

I think that Stephens is a little too free with Gawd (God). His attitude is rather like that of an Africn heathen towards his joss. When things are not going too well with out friend he bangs God about, and pitches him into the corner amongst the rubbish. And then an hour later, feeling some compunction at the forlorn appearance of the old fellow, he sets God up agin and seeks to propitiate him with libation and sacrifice. [Ftn. Bax, Farewell, My Youth, 1943, pp.96-97.]

Stephen Gwynn complained, when reading Insurrections, that Stephens reflected too many depressing experiences and not enough of what thrilled him. [...; 32] Despite their disapprobation Gwynn and others were sure that Stephens held a permanent position in Anglo-Irish literature; and it became obvious that the poet was no merely contented to shock the public into a new attitude of mind; he set out, through a number of years, to cultivate a new diction for himself which, in common with the later Irish poets, preserved all the poetry life had to offer, while affecting a more realistic medium than the poets of the Celtic Twilight had used. (pp.31-33.)

Like Blake, he [Stephens] condemned states of sin, but not individual sinners; and he attacked human law consistently in the person of policemen. The big policeman in The Charwoman’s Daughter is show to be blown up with self-love. “The Merry Policeman” has a job in hell to keep him hot, while the Philosopher in The Crock of Gold denies any use for policemen in the world; “If policemen were necessary to a civilization crows would most certainly have evolved them.”

But living in this world, the Philosopher is subject to their power. Quite wrongly, he is accused of his brother Philosopher’s murder and put in prison: “When the morning came the Philosopher was taken to a car to the big city in order that he might be put on trial and hanged. It was the custom.”

Many people find security in the conventional judicial system. [40] Blake saw law, not as an external force of constraint which mankind itself desires. (pp.40-41.)

In The Charwoman’s Daughter Stephens stated that evil was necessary to prevent our falling into lethargy. Even a policeman has chaos in his soul and may work his way to salvation; for when we have fought our battle we will reach God. [...; 42.]

The first issue of The Irish Review appeared in March 1911. [...] The serial “Mary, Mary”, known at the time as “Mary Makebelieve”, or, since Stephens was becoming interested in the Irish language, “Mary Macbelieve”, was most popular and held the paper together. [Ftn. It was said that when he offered it to the paper Professor Houston had to go through the manuscript and correct the spelling and formation of the story.] When it was published in book form in 1912 the title was changed to The Charwoman’s Daughter, and it is the only one of Stephen’s books which might be called a novel. The Charwoman’s Daughter is a story of life in the tenements of Dublin. Mrs. Makebelieve is a charwoman who would like her daughter to be equipped for a life of leisure, married to a handsome man of fortune. Mary is now sixteen, [46] and has not yet had to go to twork, and she pends the dys, while her mother is out, wandering the streets of Dublin, feeding her imagination on all she sees about her. These pictures delighted Stephens’s contemporaries who saw George Moore in the tiredest man in the world, who gazes at everyone as if seeing those who are dead but whom he does not regret; Yeats in the thin black man wo buzzes like a bee; A.E. in the picture of a big man with a brown beard; and Synge in the unkempt man with a pale face and drooping moustache. One day May meets the big policeman and she realizes that she is a a child no more. A delightful vignette of a young girl and her growing experience of life, the nove in fact describes some of the seamier side of living and an attempt at abduction; but the whole air of the book is innocent and like a fairytale. [Quotes:]

“In most of the trouble of life she divined men and women not knowing and not doing their duty, which was to love one another and to be neighbourly and obliging to their fellows. A partner, home and children - through the loyal co-operation of these she saw happiness, and, dimly, a design of so vast an architecture aas scarcely to be discussed.” [CW]

A publisher in Boston, Edward O’Brien, offered Stephens £100 for the story and this financial success encouraged him to continue with The Crock of Gold and form it into a novel.

After its initial impact, the need for a pubication of such idealism seemed to die out and it became harder and harder to find the money to print The Irish Review (they charged only six-pence a copy) and to find contributors. A change too came over the founders of the paper. [...] (pp.46-47.)

[...]

In The Charwoman’s Daughter, he had not yet shaken off orthodoxy, for he saw the origin of the Fall in the careless words of a gay young man who says “Let Truth go to Hell.” (p.55.)

While he swiftly established an oral reputation for himself in London [1925 onwards], Stephens found that he wrote less and less, and he tended to rework old material; what writing he did was now concerned solely with mystic subjects. In June 1925, shortly after he left Dublin, he published A Poetry Recital, the poems he used on his American tour, which included pieces from Songs From the Clay, and The Adventures of Seumas Beg; and here appeared the first poems in his new style. The old rambling conversational tone was abandoned as he concentrated himself in communion with the All-Being and advocated loneliness; and this inspired dedication lent itself to a tense method of expression, which did not permit him to glance about on each side, in his former leisurely manner, which robbed his vocabulary of its fluency.

The following year, in 1926, he published his Collected Poems, drawing from all his volumes, includoing A Poetry Recital and Little Things, which had come out in America in 1924.

He had always revised his poems, sometimes changing only an odd word, and at other times rewriting whole sentences. This had happened especially with certain Seumas Beg poems, when they appeared in The Adventures of Seumas Beg, five or more years after they were first composed, but in Collected Poems there was a general revision of verse forms and punctuation. This was because of the recitals of his work which he was giving more and more frequently. His verse had always been oral, but now it became consciously so, and he wished to express this quality in writing. In A Poetry Recital he had given instructions [119] for the method of reading some of the poems., Now with his owld poems he broke up long lines into two or more short ones, he added exclamation marks in abundance, dashes in place of inverted commas, and triplicate dots to give more force to sentences and signal words. The shorter lines also emphasize words by isolating them and giving them more length of sound, and these features were characteristic of any verse written after this date. Importance was now to be place on the single word. (pp.119-20.)

It is easy to expatiate on Stephens’s qualities as a writer, on his attractive personality, the individualism and the whimsy; the love of exaggeration and fantastic stories; the tendency to treat serious matters with apparent levity; the ability talk for hours on any subject. But when juding him in the general context of English Literature one cannot deny that his output was small for a writer of eminence – half a dozen “novels”, two books of short stories and a volume of his collected poems. It is rather unfortunate that he matured early as a writer, for, having adopted an ideal philosophy at the beginning of his career, his work had little chance to develop. There is no history of an internal struggle and resultant triumph.

Nevertheless, he has proved himself worthy of a permanent place in English literature. In a word grown pessimistic after the downfall of established customs he offered ultimate values where human ones were fast becoming standard. He exalted the spirit of literature rather than the letter, preaching that the author has a spiritual duty as well as an artistic one. […; p. 174]

His limitation is that as a writer he stood alone; he founded no school of writing and the threads of tradition which he pickedvup were absorbed into a style that was his and inimitable. […] His characters are independently concerned with spiritual ideas. Mrs. Makebelieve sees even her working like in terms of an ultimate reality and as a set of relationship of employee and employer.   [...] It is this present world translated into spiritual terms, and physical and intellectual problems are set aside beside the supernatural [179] Those who live in the human conventional world are represented through Stephens’s work by the Policeman, who has no curiosity or wonder, but is solely interested in the Law and how to prevent the breach of it. […]

The habit of not taking himself too seriously meant that most absurd statements might be ventured, for it was likely that they would be contradicted straight away; and since human criteria [176] were ignored in the notions of an indefinable Eternity, there was no standard by which the importance of an idea of the significance of an event might be precisely measured. […] He differed from the other Irish writers of his generation, however, in that, in his frank disregard of social position, he similarly wished to make friends with heavenly bodies, and so archangel sups with tinkers. […; 177]