TONY GRAY'S book on the legendary editor of The Irish Times, Robert Smyllie, Mr Smyllie, Sir, published in 1991, includes an account of a Professor MacNeill, who more or less lived in the Irish Timesnewsroom in the 1930s, though he never did any work for the paper. A taciturn figure, "with a big, dangling red beard", he survived on cups of tea and buns from Bewleys bought for him by reporters. He was rumoured to be related to Eoin MacNeill, founder of the Irish Volunteers, and also to James MacNeill, the Free State's last governor general, writes TERENCE KILLEEN.
He was also rumoured to have been a professor in Maynooth, but to have abandoned this career for obscure reasons, while retaining the title "professor", rather as men who once studied for the priesthood were still commonly known as "Father". He was allegedly found dead in a telephone kiosk in College Green, where he spent many nights, the others being passed in the Irish Timesnewsroom, where he was a genially tolerated figure, for many years. (Peter Murtagh, in the preface to The Irish Times Book of the Year 2007, has also given an account of this interesting eccentric.) One would love to know if it was realised at the time that Professor MacNeill had another life – as a character in Ulysses.
Did he know? Did he care? In any case, he is the “Professor McHugh” who holds forth in the newspaper episode, Episode 7, with great eloquence, on imperialism, the Greeks, and the destiny of the Irish. The rumour that he was the brother of Eoin MacNeill was indeed true, though the idea that he was a professor of classics was more that a little exaggerated.
There is a certain piquancy in the thought that many real professors would now give a great deal for a chance to talk with this fake professor.
Hugh MacNeill was born, like his brothers, in Glenarm, Co Antrim, in 1866. In 1911 he was living in Sandford Parade, Ranelagh, married with four children. He had tutored in classics, not in Maynooth, but in what is now UCD, then the Royal University, in the early 1900s, though not to the point of becoming a professor. He didn’t last long in this position, apparently due to drinking and general dissipation. In the world of Ulysses he still cuts a rather dashing figure, being well able to mix it with Stephen Dedalus (Joyce) and the other work-shy occupants of the newspaper office. His later, and probably more accurate, incarnation in the pages of Tony Gray’s memoir is a very diminished and rather sad one – but it is also quite appropriate to the world of Ulysses, a world in which the mighty are often fallen. (I am grateful to Vivien Igoe and Kieran Fagan for assistance in tracing the story of MacNeill).
Peter Murtagh's point in outlining the case of Professor MacNeill in the preface to the 2007 Irish Times Book of the Yearis to highlight the absence of such "characters" in the modern newspaper world, and the difficulty of imagining a possible place for them. This is quite true, but journalism does retain some of the traits that make the world of the offices of the Freeman's Journal and Evening Telegraph in North Princes Street, as depicted in Ulysses, recognisable to a current or recent practitioner of the craft.
The picture given by Joyce in this episode of the newspaper operation is quite comprehensive: it begins in the caseroom, where the newspaper is produced – and this part actually is obsolete.
This is one of the very few places in the book where we see work actually being done: the bustle and industry of the production process are vividly conveyed. It is particularly concentrated in the figure of the foreman (also called the caseroom overseer) Nannetti. Nannetti (also a real figure and later to become lord mayor of Dublin) is probably the busiest person in the book, an accurate reflection of the reality of newspaper production in those days. To anyone who has worked in this environment, the scene in which Bloom succeeds in momentarily grabbing Nannetti’s attention, only to lose it irretrievably about a minute later, will seem all too familiar. There is considerable, largely accurate detail of the work of the caseroom. Linotype machines had recently been introduced and the noise of these engines – and of the printing presses themselves – is evoked in the episode: “The machines clanked in threefour time. Thump, thump, thump”. Following his sojourn in the caseroom, Bloom moves on to what might be called the editorial area, which is where Professor McHugh holds forth – and here no work is done whatsoever. The contrast could hardly be greater between the bustle and activity of the caseroom and the purely rhetorical energies that animate this upper echelon.
Some of the features of this scenario that may seem bizarre to an average reader are much less so to someone with experience of the newspaper world, especially to a veteran. (This is true of many other features of Joyce's Dublin.) Myles Crawford, the editor of the Evening Telegraph, for instance, may well seem eccentric to the verge of demented in the eyes of an average reader. But the tradition of eccentric editors is an old and honourable one: I remember hearing from older colleagues about figures such as Vincent Gill of the Longford Leaderand Joe Walsh of the Munster Express– not to mention Smyllie himself. Besides, one should bear in mind JJ O'Molloy's wise words about the editor's strange behaviour: "It is not always as it seems." Again, the sports journalist, Lenehan, with his multiple appalling puns, his breezy insouciance and his cadger's cuteness, may seem an improbable persona, but in fact he is recognisable even to someone who, like the present writer, worked in journalism as recently as the 1980s.
Finally, while the topics discussed in the editor’s sanctum may seem remote indeed from any conceivable form of journalism, they do actually have a twisted relationship to issues that might be of relevance to a newspaper’s concerns, even if treated with a broader brush than would be tolerated in a “great daily organ” of the present time.
So while Joyce's portrayal of the world of newspapers and the people who inhabit it may seem remote from today's high-tech operations, it is by no means unfamiliar. And this little excursus into that world can serve as a reminder of one of the reasons why we celebrate Ulysses today: it constantly invites us outwards, out from the book itself to its context, a context which has its own fascination and where Joycean researches can overlap with the experiences and knowledge of historians, sociologists, lawyers, doctors, wine merchants, veterinary surgeons, and many others. The term "life-enhancing", as a description of Ulysses, has to be handled with great care, but if to involve one much more fully in one's society and one's culture can be called "life-enhancing", then Ulysses triumphantly passes the test.