Exiles — Commentary

In brief

Richard Rowan, a writer, has come back to Dublin in the summer of 1912 after nine years in Rome with Bertha, who is not his wife in law, and their eight-year-old son. His old friend Robert Hand, a journalist, is arranging a university chair for him and trying to seduce Bertha at the same time. Bertha tells Richard everything as it happens. Richard refuses to forbid anything, goes to Robert’s cottage ahead of her to tell him he knows, and then leaves the two of them alone there. In the morning nobody will ever be able to say what happened, and that, it turns out, is what Richard wanted.

The argument

Exiles asks what love would look like with possession taken out of it, and it gives a much less comfortable answer than Richard expects. His creed is complete freedom. He will not marry Bertha, will not command her, and when she pleads with him at the end of the First Act, “Tell me not to go and I will not”, he says only “Decide yourself”.

The play’s intelligence lies in refusing to accept this as nobility. Bertha sees through it first: “I know why you have allowed me what you call complete liberty”, she says, and supposes it is so that he may have the same with Beatrice. Then, in the Second Act, Richard himself goes further. Robert calls his forgiveness noble, and he answers that “in the very core of my ignoble heart I longed to be betrayed by you and by her”. The freedom he gives is also an experiment on the people he loves, and it has a masochistic relish in it.

The ending does not resolve this. Bertha offers to tell him what happened, and he answers: “You will tell me. But I will never know. Never in this world.” What he claims in the last speech is that he has chosen this on purpose, desiring her “in restless living wounding doubt”. Is that the highest form of love, or the most elaborate form of cruelty? The play is strongest when you cannot decide, and it is Bertha, who asks only for her lover back, who gets the last line. Her exasperation is the play’s best check on its hero.

The shape of the play

Joyce described the structure as “three cat and mouse acts”, and they are cleanly built, taking place within a day: from one June afternoon to the following morning.

First Act, Merrion. A series of two-handers. Beatrice and Richard on their old correspondence; Robert and Richard on the chair; Robert’s roses and advances to Bertha; Bertha reporting them all.
Second Act, Robert’s cottage at Ranelagh. Robert expects Bertha, and Richard walks in instead. The long duologue that follows, with its talk of a duel of souls, is the core of the play. Bertha arrives, Richard goes, and rain falls outside as the act closes without an answer.
Third Act, Merrion. Morning. Robert’s leading article on the returned exile is in the paper. No one’s account settles what happened. Robert leaves for Surrey.

The structural trick is that the decisive event falls in the interval. Robert asks Bertha, “Were you mine in that sacred night of love? Or have I dreamed it?” and she tells him, “Remember your dream of me.” He then gives Richard a different account again. The audience has been shown everything except the one thing it came to see.

The people

Richard Rowan

Richard is Joyce with the jokes removed, proud, exact and cruel about his dead mother, who “died alone, not having forgiven me”. His hardness is a principle and also a wound.

Bertha

Bertha is the play’s most alive person, shrewd and unschooled and refusing to be anyone’s test case. “I gave up everything for him, religion, family, my own peace”, she says, and she knows what that has been worth. Richard says “You were my bride in exile”; she remembers sitting alone on a terrace in Rome.

Robert Hand

Robert is a journalist who loves Richard at least as much as he wants Bertha, and it is often hard to separate the two. He talks like a bad novel: her face is “A wild flower blowing in a hedge”. Yet he has the courage of his appetites, and he can rise to “Laws are for slaves”. He is also the only one with any charm.

Beatrice Justice

Beatrice is Robert’s cousin, a music teacher, and the correspondent to whom Richard sent his book in chapters from Rome. Richard tells her she could never give herself freely and wholly; she replies that it is “a terribly hard thing to do”. She is the least realised of the four, more an idea than a woman.

Archie and Brigid

Archie is eight, says “Buon giorno” to his mother, and wants to go out with the milkman. The old servant, Brigid, knew Richard as a boy talking “yards of talk” on the kitchen table. Between them they supply nearly all the air in the room, and Robert’s parting hint, as Archie’s face presses against the window, is that the freedom they all seek may belong to the child.

The Ibsen problem

The objection that has followed Exiles for a century is that it is a young disciple’s Ibsen: the returned exile, the bourgeois drawing room, the unspoken past. Joyce had written on Ibsen at eighteen, and the theatre he admired was this one. Padraic Colum, defending the play, conceded that critics had discounted it on this ground.

The charge is true of its surface and misses what is odd about it. Ibsen’s secrets come out and destroy people. Here the secret is deliberately kept unknowable, and the destruction, if any, is chosen. The real weakness lies elsewhere. Joyce’s own genius was for comedy and the texture of speech, and his characters here speak a stiff, abstract English, a language of “the spectre of fidelity” and “the spectre of friendship”, even in their moments of passion. Richard admits that it is the language of his youth. The play knows this, but knowing it does not make the lines easy to say.

How it was made

Joyce began the play soon after war broke out in 1914 and finished it in 1915, during the years when he was starting Ulysses. It looks back to “The Dead”, with its husband jealous of a past that cannot be recovered, and forward to Bloom, who also contemplates his wife’s lover with something more complicated than anger.

The private sources are close to home. Joyce and Nora Barnacle lived unmarried in Trieste as the Rowans do in Rome. In 1909 Joyce’s old friend Vincent Cosgrave told him that Nora had been seeing him too in 1904, which appears to have been a lie but drove Joyce into an agony of jealousy. Cosgrave and Oliver Gogarty both feed into Robert Hand, as does the Trieste journalist Roberto Prezioso. Joyce’s private notes for the play, first printed in the edition of 1951, are not part of the free text.

Getting it staged failed repeatedly. Yeats turned it down for the Abbey, and Ezra Pound, who had praised it as a basis for his attack on the contemporary theatre, could not get it taken on by English or American companies. Grant Richards published it on 25 May 1918, before it had ever been performed.

On the stage

The première was in Munich on 7 August 1919, in German, and it was a failure that left the bill at once. London first saw it in February 1926. For half a century the verdict was that this was Joyce’s one bad book, an embarrassment or a necessary clearing of the throat; A. Walton Litz called it a “cathartic release” on the way to Ulysses.

That changed with Harold Pinter’s production at the Mermaid Theatre in 1970. Pinter cut back the scenes with Brigid, with the estate’s permission, and critics still disagree about what else he did; Irving Wardle thought he had stripped out the Ibsen. It worked so well that some reviewers joked that Pinter must have written it. Michael Billington sees in it the seed of Pinter’s own Betrayal. James Macdonald’s staging at the National Theatre in 2006 was also well received. The lesson is that the play is more stageable than it reads, provided the director trusts the pauses and does not trust the speeches.

How to read it

Read it as a play. Most of its bad reputation comes from being read as a failed novel by the author of Ulysses. Imagine it played slowly and quietly.
Keep Bertha at the centre. The men’s philosophy is easier to bear if you watch what it costs her.
Do not try to solve the night. The evidence is designed not to add up.
The free text is sound. Project Gutenberg #55945 and Standard Ebooks both give the complete play, and Wikisource has a scan-backed text. They do not include Joyce’s notes.
For the notes, buy an edition. J. C. C. Mays’s Poems and Exiles (Penguin, 1992) and A. Nicholas Fargnoli and Michael Patrick Gillespie’s critical edition (University Press of Florida, 2016) are the ones to look for.