Cousins
Cousins
In Brief
The "Cousins" listed among Stephen's creditors in Nestor
to the tune of "ten shillings" is James Cousins, a Dublin
poet, critic, and Theosophist. He was nearly nine years older
than Joyce, and at the time represented in the novel he was
married and living in Sandymount. Joyce was friends with the
couple. He attended evening gatherings at their house and very
briefly lived with them in the summer of 1904.
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Born in Belfast in 1873, James Henry Cousins published a
volume of poems in 1894 before moving to Dublin, where he
associated with writers of the Irish Literary Revival and
became friends with George
Russell. In 1903 he married Margaret Elizabeth
Gillespie, a women's rights activist born in 1878 who shared
his strong commitments to Theosophy, socialism, and
vegetarianism. Living at 22 Dromard Terrace, just off the
seaside Strand Road in Sandymount,
the Cousins continued working in the Dublin area until 1913,
when they moved to Liverpool. In 1915 they permanently
relocated to India, where James wrote a number of books and
worked as the literary editor for New India, a journal
founded by Theosophist Annie Besant. Margaret continued her
energetic suffragist work until the late 1930s, and she
preserved Rabindranath Tagore's song Jana Gana Mana, which
in 1950 became the Indian national anthem.
Joyce seems to have gotten along well with both Cousins, and
they treated him well. Ellmann records that in March or April
1904, when he needed a piano to practice for a singing competition, Margaret
offered to let him use hers in the mornings (151). James lent
him small sums, though Ellmann notes that he turned down his
request for a very substantial £5 in 1904 (178). Both Cousins
spouses secured small places in Joyce's fictions. In addition
to the financial debt to James recorded in Nestor,
Joyce honored Margaret, whose friends knew her as Gretta, by
assigning her nickname to Gabriel Conroy's wife in The
Dead. (He appears to have based Gretta Conroy's
character, however, mostly on the Galwegian Nora Barnacle.)
Ellmann records two separate instances in which James and
Gretta gave the writer a place to stay. On 15 June 1904, when
the McKernans asked him to
vacate his room at their house until he could pay the rent, he
went to his friends in Sandymount and "asked them to take him
in"; they "hospitably turned over the spare room in their tiny
house" (155). In late August or early September when Joyce was
again staying with the McKernans they "went off on holiday and
closed their house," and "At James Counsins's earnest entreaty
he stayed two nights" at the Sandymount house (171).
Apparently both of these emergency stops were brief. Joyce
"disliked their do-good household" (171) and specifically
objected to the vegetarian diet, "complaining of stomach
trouble induced by a 'typhoid turnip'" (162).
In 1950, near the end of two accomplished and consequential
lives, the Cousins published a jointly written
co-autobiography, We Two Together.
