"Martin Cunningham, first, poked his silkhatted head into the
creaking carriage and, entering deftly, seated himself": Hades
begins by reintroducing a character from Dubliners.
Cunningham appears again in Wandering Rocks and Cyclops,
and is mentioned in more than half the chapters of the novel.
Joyce drew several of his identifying features, including the
hat, from a man named Matthew Francis Kane whose funeral
served as a model for Paddy
Dignam's. Cunningham stands apart from most Dubliners in
Ulysses as unusually sympathetic, competent, and
purposeful. But Joyce also gave him qualities that relegate
him to second-class status, inferior to the less conventional
Bloom.
In "Grace," Martin
Cunningham is one of three men, along with
Jack Power and
C. P. M'Coy, who show up at the home
of their alcoholic friend Tom Kernan to perform an intervention,
promising to "make a new man of him" by escorting him to a
religious retreat. (M'Coy appears in
Lotus Eaters, and
Power and Kernan have speaking roles in
Hades.) Like
Matthew Kane, Cunningham works in
Dublin Castle as the chief
clerk for the Crown Solicitor. He is older than Mr. Power, who
likewise has a law enforcement job in the Castle.
The short story gives Cunningham numerous qualities that figure
in
Ulysses, many of them inspired by Matthew Kane
. "People
had great sympathy with him for it was known that he had married
an unpresentable woman who was an incurable drunkard. He had set
up house for her six times; and each time she had pawned the
furniture on him. / Everyone had respect for poor Martin
Cunningham. He was a thoroughly sensible man, influential and
intelligent. His blade of human knowledge, natural astuteness
particularised by long association with cases in the police
courts, had been tempered by brief immersions in the waters of
general philosophy. He was well informed. His friends bowed to
his opinions and considered that his face was like
Shakespeare's." This man takes the lead in impressing Kernan
with the value of the retreat at the Gardiner Street church, and
Kernan is duly impressed. But Cunningham's pronouncements about
the
Jesuits and the papacy,
confidently uttered and spectacularly ignorant, suggest that his
immersions in the waters of general philosophy must have been
very brief indeed.
In
Hades Cunningham possesses enough tact and human
sympathy (as well as knowledge of Bloom's family situation) to
try to forestall the other men's condemnations of suicide, and
Bloom thinks, "Sympathetic human man he is. Intelligent. Like
Shakespeare's face. Always a good word to say. They have no
mercy on that here or infanticide." In language evocative of
Sisyphus, he pities Cunningham for
"that awful drunkard of a wife of his." But Cunningham
participates in the anti-Semitic banter about Reuben J. Dodd,
and when Bloom tries to ingratiate himself into this closed
society by telling an unflattering story about Dodd, it is
Cunningham who "rudely" cuts him off and finishes the story
himself.
Wandering Rocks and
Cyclops present Cunningham in
the highly positive light of organizing a collection of funds to
support Paddy Dignam's destitute family. At the end of
Cyclops
he appears charitable and prudently proactive as he rescues
Bloom from the Citizen's maddened attack, and he has tolerant,
sympathetic things to say about Judaism in the midst of the
barhounds' bigoted sniping. But he also particpates willingly in
their gossip about a suspicious outsider: "
— He's a
perverted Jew, says Martin, from a place in Hungary and it
was he drew up all the plans according to the Hungarian system.
We know that in the castle." It seems possible that "perverted"
here may mean something like "converted" ("turned" from Judaism
to Christianity), but the usual connotations of the word are
overwhelmingly negative.
On the afternoon of 10 July 1904 Matthew Kane went swimming
from a boat off Kingstown Harbor, suffered a heart attack, and
drowned. He was 39 years old. Like Dignam, he had five young
children. He also had many friends, and his funeral four days
later was much better attended than Dignam's. Among the
mourners were James Joyce and his father John. In Surface
and Symbol, Robert Martin Adams observes that "Matthew
Kane had been widely popular, and was much respected by his
associates and superiors in the Castle, as well as in the
community at large" (63). Joyce apparently thought enough of
Kane to represent him in Ulysses in three different
ways. In addition to Dignam's funeral, and the character of
Martin Cunningham, he included Kane under his own name,
violating not only the neat pairing of real and fictional
people but even chronology. In a list of Bloom's deceased
acquaintances Ithaca mentions "Matthew F. Kane
(accidental drowning, Dublin Bay)," even though the
drowning would not take place for another three and half
weeks.
