Of pigs and poetry

The standard commentaries rightly identify “The pig’s paper” here as a reference to the Irish Homestead, seizing on the comic potential of a would-be literary journal with a focus on agricultural topics such as beekeeping and animal husbandry. The phrase itself, however, was not freely invented by Joyce or his circle, but was a refinement of a running tag — “the organ of pigs and poetry” — to be found in that thesaurus of invective, the Leader.

     The Leader was created by D. P. Moran in September 1900 as the voice of Catholic sectarian nationalism. It had strong support from the Catholic Church and foremost among its patrons was Father Tom Finlay. It is likely that Joyce would have encountered Moran at meetings of the Literary and Historical Society of University College, which was a recruiting ground for the Leader, whose contributors would include Hugh Kennedy, who beat Joyce to become auditor of the L. & H., L. J. Walsh, and Arthur Clery. Much of the Leader’s content was strongly polemical, making use of mocking epithets, which gathered force as they recurred from issue to issue. Protestants were ‘sourfaces’, the Guinness industry was ‘Bung’, the Celtic Twilighters were ‘opal hushers’, and the arguments of the opposition were invariably raimeis.

     The ‘pigs and poetry’ label appears to have had its origins on pages 423-4 of the issue dated 18 February 1905, under the headline ‘The Manure War’:

For the first time in our lives we anxiously awaited the appearance of our puissant contemporary, by the name of The Homestead […] our pigs and poetry contemporary, but we were disappointed.[…] We leave the matter here for the present […] and we again look out with interest for the next issue of the organ of pigs and poetry — the Homestead.

This refers to an attempt by the Irish Agricultural Wholesale Society (I.A.W.S.), a subdivision of Sir Horace Plunkett’s Irish Agricultural Organisational Society (I.A.O.S.), to reduce the price of manure by turning from an Irish supplier (who supported the Leader with advertising) to a cheaper British source. As the organ of the I.A.O.S., the Irish Homestead had defended the procedure, and this led to a series of attacks by the Leader.

     By the following week the epithet has been expanded to “our contemporary, the organ of pigs, poetry, warts and corns” (Leader, 25 February, page 3). In typical Leader fashion it is developed further and counterpointed with another running barb:

For some weeks a solemn hush — whether an “opal hush” or not we cannot say—fell upon our puissant contemporary — the organ of poetry, warts, pigs, measles, chilblains, and other things. (11 March 1905, 45)1

  But more often the Leader settles for “the organ of pigs and poetry”:

Last week that organ of pigs and poetry, edited by the mystic poet, Mr. George Russell, told its farmer readers that the Freeman has got a cosmic nightmare (8 February 1908, 399)

the organ of Pigs and Poetry associated with the clique who want to make a Party cry of co-operation, is now on a campaign against the small shops ... (2 September 1911, 59)

     There is also the occasional punning variant:

If the I.A.O.S.[…] drops its absurd posings at poetry, and sticks to the pigs and poultry […] there is no reason, that we can see, that it should not have as good a chance of living and progressing as any other of the compromised Irish organisations[…] (23 December 1916, 486)

The Leader’s campaign had wound down by the end of WW1, by which time the Irish Homestead was in serious financial trouble — in 1923 it was dissolved into the Irish Statesman.

     Writing about the appearance of a new Irish newspaper, the Irish Press, launched by De Valera in August 1931, the Leader was able to look back on earlier days:

When the Hairy Fairy [George Russell] ran the Homestead — or, as we called it, the organ of pigs and poetry — it claimed that it was not the official organ of the I.A.O.S. We are tired smiling at official organs that proclaim themselves non-official… (15 August 1931, 54)

     How did we move from “the organ of pigs and poetry” to the more laconic “pigs’ paper” we find in Ulysses? It appears that the Irish Homestead itself came up with this formula. In his work on an as-yet-unpublished study of Joyce and his lesser-known contemporaries, Niels Caul discovered the phrase in the issue for 21 October 1905, in an article, signed ‘Diarmuid’, with the heading ‘The Romance of Agriculture’. This is in essence a belated response to the Leader’s ‘Manure War’ attacks (the Homestead makes no reference to the Leader either here or at the time of the actual campaign). It begins:

The IRISH HOMESTEAD aspires to provide the farmers of this country with something more than a bulletin of the health of calves and poultry, a manual for the composition of manures and a monthly letter of admonition to lazy secretaries of Agricultural Societies. We are not satisfied with being described — as an irreverent critic once described us — as “the Pigs’ Paper”. Pigs and bees, manures and mangolds are things of much importance to the farmer, and as such will ever occupy the greater share of our attention. It is not, however, for such things that we exist but for the thinking men and women, whose life work it is to deal with these things, and to turn them to profitable account. But these people have other and higher facilities — thank Heaven — than those involved in the mere material needs of existence! (770)

However, the writer is forced to admit that the process of trying to elevate the taste of farmers with the inclusion of poetry and literary stories has not been successful:

Imagine our chagrin on being told, as we were told last Saturday by one who knew country life from life-long experience, that the HOMESTEAD comes a long way second to the Budget and Illustrated Bits in the order of preference in which the farmer buys light literature at the fair. (770-1)

     In its earliest issues the Leader did not appear hostile to the Homestead; it initially advertised and promoted it. Its attacks only began with the publication of the special Celtic Christmas issue in December 1903, crushingly reviewed by ‘Imaal’, who ridiculed its Yeatsian aspirations. The incongruous juxtaposition of these with the predominantly agricultural concerns of the Homestead provided an irresistible source of satire. While J. J. O'Molloy’s reference to the “opal hush poets” (7.783-4) can be read as a topical reference to a recent Leader campaign, Stephen’s “pigs’ paper” anticipates a coinage yet to be minted.2

Vincent Deane