BiographyThe enduring power of James Connolly's reputation is a phenomenon in itself. Almost nine decades after his death (two members of the firing squad were instructed to aim at his head, which could be interpreted as a back-handed compliment to the power of his intellect), many of his writings are still in print, and he is virtually the only patron saint of Irish socialism over whose reputation Irish socialists do not quarrel, however much they disagree among themselves about the nature of socialism and the strategy it should adopt.
This is all the more surprising in that he was a man whose career, as Joe Lee once pointed out, was the epitome of failure. He failed as a political journalist, not just once but many times over. The various journals with which he was associated rarely achieved significant circulations and, as often as not, crumbled under the twin burden of debt and ideological disputation.
As a trade union organiser, his successes were sporadic, and modest at best.
Whenever he stood for election, his results were derisory. As a revolutionary, he was equally responsible with the other 1916 leaders for the planning and organisation of an insurrection which, as they must all have suspected, was militarily doomed from the start.
His political writings, for all the freshness and vividness of his style, are almost completely lacking in one important dimension: they contain few if any observations on the nature of socialist governance of society, on the relationship between people and parliament (if indeed there was to be a parliament at all in the parousia), and on the role of trade unionism in the brave new world of the future. The latter topic, in effect, is the only one that receives any serious treatment, and even this is sketchy enough.
The power he exerts over the imagination must therefore be located somewhere else. Perhaps it is to be found, after all these years, in the fact that for so many people on the left, despite the weakness of his strategic thinking and the now archaic flavour of some of his examples, his analysis is often enough translatable into our own era, and our contemporary equivalents of the targets he pursued with such gusto can be identified without straining the imagination.
There are three other aspects of his life which add to this, and which are satisfyingly explored in this fair-minded and absorbing work. One is the tension between nationalism and socialism, which he embodied in a particularly acute form, and which is as real today as it ever was, although the terms of the debate have changed significantly. Another is the relationship between socialism and religion, specifically Christianity, an area in which one Jesuit engaged him in a mighty battle, and another, not long after his execution, embraced him. The third is the fact that, despite all the work that has been done, not least in this massive and fascinating book - a biography with ambitions to be an encyclopedia, I felt at times - there are still some questions about him that will probably never be answered.
One of the reasons why we shall never know the answers is that Connolly himself was secretive about some aspects of his life, and at times actively misled people. In the returns for the 1901 census, he allowed his birthplace to be listed as Co Monaghan, which was untrue: later, when this piece of misinformation was repeated elsewhere, he denounced its author (although not in public).
And then there is the question of his military service in the British army, the seven years between 1882 and 1889. Nevin supports Greaves on this dating, and has exhaustively investigated and dismissed the alternatives (here and elsewhere the research is extraordinarily painstaking and detailed). Information about this period is virtually non- existent, and it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Connolly himself, embarrassed by it, went to great lengths to avoid drawing attention to it. It is even possible, on the basis of this chronology, that Connolly could have served in India for three or four years.
Nevin believes he did not, but the evidence he adduces is far from conclusive and could be read either way. Connolly's own hyper-sensitivity on this issue is a pointer to the opposite conclusion. Equally, one is left to wonder why Connolly seems never (with only one, marginal exception) to have regarded the British army itself as a field for left-wing agitation, despite the fact that there were potent anti-Establishment currents in that organisation from the 1840s onwards.
When one retreats from the amount of detail inseparable from any full account of Connolly's complex life in three countries and (at least) two continents, some strong overall images emerge.
One is the extraordinary significance of some of the friendships he made, and of the relationships between Connolly and other key players: John Matheson and John Leslie in Scotland (particularly the former, who knew when to criticise as well as when to support Connolly in his ideological battles), de Leon in the United States, the Lyng brothers in Dublin, Con Lehane (otherwise Lyhane) in Cork, and William O'Brien and Jim Larkin. Many of these emerge from this book as satisfyingly rounded, three- dimensional characters instead of the ciphers they sometimes appear.
Another is the extraordinary volatility of Connolly's own temperament. He could be described by people who knew him quite well in completely opposite terms: as lugubrious, even depressed, or as good-humoured and witty. His attitude towards Ireland was, for many years, markedly ambiguous. He left for America, like many an emigrant before him, primarily to provide a better life for his daughters; later he was to describe it as "this cursed country". In 1909 he observed that "apart from the cause, Ireland has no attractions for me". A few years later, he found in himself a "hunger to get back among the parties I disrupted", despite the fact that, as he said in a phrase which will find an echo among his followers today, "my days for guileless trust in the comradeship of Socialists are long since over!".
Donal Nevin's approach to this huge task, a mixture of the chronological and the thematic, can sometimes lead to disconcerting repetitions, and it is doubtful whether the extended treatment of some of Connolly's writings still in print is strictly necessary. On the other hand, the material is so rich that we probably need a book on Connolly in every generation to keep his memory green. Perhaps the next one will also remind us, not only of the Irish Independent's splenetic editorial on the eve of the execution of Connolly and MacDiarmada, but also of the Irish Times's cold-blooded and repeated exhortations to Asquith and Maxwell, as the protests against the executions gathered momentum, to wield "the surgeon's knife . . . until the whole malignant growth has been removed".
John Horgan is Professor of Journalism at Dublin City University and the author of biographies of Sean Lemass and Noel Browne. His latest book, Broadcasting and Public Life, was published by Four Courts Press last year
James Connolly: A Full Life By Donal Nevin Gill and Macmillan, 840pp. €29.99