Cranly's arm

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Byrne was born in February 1880, two years before Joyce. He knew Joyce first at Belvedere College and then at University College, Dublin. At UCD, Ellmann writes, he was "handsome, athletic, and clever; he excelled at chess and handball, and disregarded his studies even more cavalierly than Joyce.... it was his manner that attracted: he moved about with the air of a man who knows all the secrets but disinclines to exercise the power he thereby possesses.... His power over Joyce came from his habit of refraining from comment: Joyce's admissions about his feelings towards family, friends, and church, about his overweening ambitions, struck like waves against Byrne's cryptic taciturnity. Byrne listened to Joyce's confidences without offering any of his own, and, as Joyce noted, without conferring absolution. Joyce needed no friend as he did Byrne.... The friendship was of such importance to Joyce that when it dwindled, as it did later, he felt less at home in Ireland" (64).

In December 1903, near the end of his abortive exile in Paris, Joyce had a photograph of himself taken and made into postcards. He sent one to Byrne, on the back of which he wrote a moody poem about the winds and waters heard by the soul. Another went to Vincent Cosgrave, with joking doggerel about the prostitutes of Paris. When Joyce returned to Dublin on December 23, Ellmann writes, "he discovered he had lost a friend. The photo-postcard which he had sent to Byrne, with the poem written in the space for a message, had pleased Byrne very much. He showed it to Cosgrave and said proudly that no man in Dublin knew more about Joyce than he did. Cosgrave, making the retort irresistible [an allusion to As You Like It 5.4.72, it would appear], slyly took a similar photograph from his pocket and showed it to Byrne saying, 'Perhaps that's something you didn't know'" (116). Byrne was deeply hurt to be put on an equal footing with Cosgrave, whom he distrusted, and offended by the scabrous heterosexual content. He gave his card to Cosgrave: "You can have this one too."

The offense taken by Byrne, and the disdain with which Joyce responded, suggest a relationship that exceeded the usual bounds of male friendship. Ellmann remarks that "Joyce had no relationships with women that were not coarse or distant. In his writing more is at stake in the friendship of Stephen and Cranly (Byrne) than in the relationship of Stephen and Emma Clery. Friendship becomes, in fact, a focal point, for if friendship exists, it impugns the quality of exile and of lonely heroism" (116). Joyce searched for reasons to regard Byrne's newfound coolness as some kind of deep betrayal. In A Portrait, Ellmann infers, he "goes further to evolve the fiction that Cranly's motivation is homosexual" (117). 

Ellmann is referring to part 5 of A Portrait, where Stephen breaks off his friendship with Cranly. The actual rupture between Joyce and Byrne was repaired less than a year later, but the novel makes the rift seem more consequential. Stephen rejects Cranly because Cranly likes women and will never devote himself wholly to his friend:

Yes. His face was handsome: and his body was strong and hard. He had spoken of a mother’s love. He felt then the sufferings of women, the weaknesses of their bodies and souls: and would shield them with a strong and resolute arm and bow his mind to them.    
     Away then: it is time to go. A voice spoke softly to Stephen’s lonely heart, bidding him go and telling him that his friendship was coming to an end. Yes; he would go. He could not strive against another. He knew his part.
    — Probably I shall go away, he said.

But as Ellmann recognizes, there is more to it than heterosexual feeling on Cranly's part and artistic egomania on Stephen's. A little after this, readers learn that “Cranly seized his arm and steered him round so as to head back towards Leeson Park,” pressing the arm “with an elder’s affection.” Stephen is “thrilled by his touch,” but affirms his determination to pursue his solitary vision, even if it means being utterly alone. This strikes “some deep chord” in Cranly, who wonders whether Stephen would choose loneliness over having someone “who would be more than a friend, more even than the noblest and truest friend a man ever had.” Stephen asks him, “Of whom are you speaking?” and Cranly does not answer.

It is hard not to hear homoerotic attraction in Cranly's wish to "be more than a friend," and "thrilled by his touch" suggests a strong physical response of some kind on Stephen's part. There is no indication in Joyce's fiction that Stephen has pronounced homosexual desires, but if the man holding his arm wants such a relationship and Stephen does not, that would explain his habit of recoiling from male touches at various points in Ulysses, and his suspicion that Mulligan has sexual designs on him. In Proteus he thinks of Mulligan as a "Staunch friend, a brother soul: Wilde’s love that dare not speak its name. His arm: Cranly’s arm. He now will leave me. And the blame? As I am. As I am. All or not at all." (The boldfaced sentence appears only in Gabler's edition of the novel.) In Scylla and Charybdis Stephen thinks, more bitterly, of being groomed to become a "Catamite." At the end of that chapter Mulligan jokingly suggests that Bloom has sexual designs on him, and Stephen's comment when he wakes up to see Bloom bending over him at the end of Circe––"Vampire"––suggests that he may have taken the message to heart.

Ellmann has reason, then, to argue that Stephen intuits homosexual desire in his friend Cranly and recoils from it. But is he right to argue that this is only a "fiction"? Most known facts about Byrne would suggest so. He eventually married and had children (at least one daughter and one son), and after the repair of his relationship with Joyce he remained a good friend for life. Joyce visited him when he returned to Dublin in 1909, and Byrne visited him in Paris in 1927. Far from being torn by jealousy, Byrne encouraged him to elope with Nora in 1904, encouraged him to marry her in 1931, and in a crucial episode during that 1909 visit to Dublin convinced him to trust in her sexual fidelity. Vincent Cosgrave had told Joyce that after he started seeing Nora in 1904, she "had gone for walks in the darkness along the river bank with another escort—himself" (Ellmann, 279). Although he should have believed better of his partner, Joyce was devastated. He discussed the matter with Byrne, who "wrote later that he had never 'seen a human being more shattered'" (281). He pronounced Cosgrave's report "a blasted lie," and Joyce was persuaded.

This helpful conversation is associated with 7 Eccles Street, where Byrne lived with two female cousins from 1908 to 1910. Joyce paid a visit to the house to thank his friend for helping him through the Cosgrave crisis. The two men had supper and then walked about Dublin until 3 AM. When they returned, Byrne discovered that he had forgotten his house key. "Undismayed," Ellmann writes, "he agilely let himself down to the front area and entered the house by the unlocked side door; then he went round to the front and admitted his companion" (290). The events are reproduced almost exactly in Ithaca, suggesting that Joyce associated the kindly and harmless Bloom with his longtime friend. Even if Byrne did have unwelcomed homosexual designs on Joyce in their university years––a big if––it would appear that both men moved on. And of course it is possible for men to feel strong love for one another without sexual desire. Our culture's current binary choices, vicious homophobia and gay pride, do not sufficiently allow for that often-attested dimension of male experience.

Nevertheless, Stephen's homophobia in Ulysses (an unvicious form which illustrates the literal sense of that word––fear of gay men) must have come from somewhere, and he associates that source with "Cranly's arm." Ellmann may be correct to judge this a "fiction," but at least one piece of reported evidence implies that Byrne had strong homosexual desires and was willing to act on them in ways that violated social norms. If this report is to be credited, Joyce's fiction may be recording an accurate intuition.