Sir, – In his interesting discussion of James Joyce's engagement with St Francis and the Franciscan tradition ("James Joyce on his church", February 3rd), Dr Jason McElligott omits mention of two noteworthy references in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In chapter four, Stephen (undoubtedly reflecting the experience of Joyce himself) goes to Church Street to make his confession, his anguished response to the sermons on hell which have so terrified him during the Belvedere retreat described in the previous chapter. A little later Stephen is interviewed by the "director" (the term is foreign to normal Jesuit usage – Fr William Henry, clearly the model here, was both rector and prefect of studies at the time and known as such) about a possible Jesuit vocation.
There is, it has to be said, a striking contrast between the reaction of the tired, but gentle, old Capuchin confessor to the boy's catalogue of sins (he is surely one of the most appealing priests in all of Joyce's work) and the (stereotypically) subtle calculation of the Jesuit "director" in the Belvedere parlour who, among other efforts to interest his interviewee in joining his own order, disparages the Capuchin habit ("Just imagine when I was in Belgium I used to see them out cycling in all kinds of weather with this thing up about their knees! It is really ridiculous. Les jupes, they call them in Belgium").
Dr McElligott quotes Stephen's instinctive sense in Stephen Hero that, whatever his attraction, "S.Francis' love-chains would not hold him long". "Love-chains" is hardly the mot juste for Joyce's complex relationship with the Jesuits. But whatever the word is (and that's a rather longer story!), they didn't hold him – at least in the sense hoped for by the "director" – for long either. – Yours, etc,
BRUCE BRADLEY, SJ
Clongowes Wood College,
Clane,
Co Kildare.