I hate thee, Djaun Bool

Denis Donoghue

• James Clarence Mangan: Selected Writings edited by Sean Ryder
  University College Dublin, 514 pp, £21.00, February 2004, ISBN 1 900621 92 4
• The Collected Works of James Clarence Mangan: Prose 1832-39 edited by Jacques Chuto, Peter Van der Kamp, Augustine Martin and Ellen Shannon-Mangan
  Irish Academic, 416 pp, £45.00, October 2002, ISBN 0 7165 2577 1
• The Collected Works of James Clarence Mangan: Prose 1840-82 edited by Jacques Chuto, Peter Van der Kamp, Augustine Martin and Ellen Shannon-Mangan
  Irish Academic, 496 pp, £45.00, October 2002, ISBN 0 7165 2735 9
• James Clarence Mangan: Poems edited by David Wheatley
  Gallery Press, 160 pp, £8.95, April 2005, ISBN 1 85235 345 7
• Selected Poems of James Clarence Mangan edited by Jacques Chuto, Rudolf Holzapfel, Peter Van der Kamp and Ellen Shannon-Mangan
  Irish Academic, 320 pp, £16.00, May 2003, ISBN 0 7165 2782 0

On 15 February 1902, James Joyce, aged 20, read a paper on James Clarence Mangan to the Literary and Historical Society of what is now University College, Dublin. It was a brash performance. Joyce spoke as if he were introducing an unknown poet, and chose to ignore the facts that there were several collections of Mangan’s poems at large and that his life and work had been extensively written about. ‘Mangan has been a stranger in his country,’ Joyce claimed, ‘a rare and unsympathetic figure in the streets, where he is seen going forward alone like one who does penance for some ancient sin.’ Joyce was evidently more interested in Mangan’s temperament than in his poems and essays: Mangan’s ‘purely defensive reserve’, he said, ‘is not without dangers for him, and in the end it is only his excesses that save him from indifference’. Joyce recalled the passage, then already famous, in which Walter Pater completed his ‘imaginary portrait’ of Watteau: ‘He has been a sick man all his life. He was always a seeker after something in the world that is there in no satisfying measure, or not at all.’ Swaying to Pater’s cadences, Joyce said of Mangan that he was