Thread by @henryfarrell

1. Today's the 100th anniversary of the publication of Ulysses. Like many Irish people, I'm related to a minor character in the book. "Professor MacHugh" in the Aeolus episode is based on my great-granduncle Hugh McNeill, an alcoholic reprobate who died in a workhouse.

2. This provides by far the most complete account of his life that I've seen jjon.org/jioyce-s-peopl…. Hugh came from an ambitious family in Glenarm in Antrim. Their father owned a baker's shop. According to family memories, one brother, Archie, left for Canada under a cloud

3. (apparently having stolen money from the business - his children tried to re-establish contact a generation later but rigid attachment to proprieties meant they got a cold shoulder). Charles joined the civil service, retired early, and lived for decades on a dwindling pension.

4. James joined the Indian Civil Service, was promoted quickly, dropped out of sight for a couple of years (I've meant for years to go to India House to see if there are any records of the story why) and became Governor General of Ireland for a period after independence

5. My great-grandfather, John (Eoin) became involved in the Irish language revival and nationalist, and played a controversial part in the Easter Rising (trying to stop it) and the Boundary Commission between the Saorstat and Northern Ireland. Hugh was the black sheep.

6. Like Eoin, he became an academic, but he didn't take well to it, occupying temporary positions, and eventually ending up destitute. In Ulysses, he is depicted hanging around a newspaper office, pontificating about how the Irish were like the Greeks, and the English like Romans

7. builders of an empire that was "vast" but "vile," governed by a "cloacal obsession," building toilets wherever they went (Joyce put words in MacHugh's mouth to score a point off H.G. Wells - m.joyceproject.com/notes/070020cl… ). The real Hugh MacNeill became a hanger-on in slow stages.

8. He started as a "tutor" in Latin at University College Dublin, briefly being styled a professor without actually holding a chair. His position seems to have been tenuous and temporary, reflecting a combination of real intelligence with testiness and unreliability.

9. He also worked as an examiner in Latin, and set up as a private tutor for a little while, and edited the journal of the Gaelic League (which had been founded by Eoin and Douglas Hyde).

10. But he was chronically short of money, looking to his brothers to bail him out. According to the memories of my grandmother, he had problems with gambling and alcohol. He wasn't able to maintain steady employment, and began hanging around in newspaper offices, as per Ulysses.

11. In 1913, he was imprisoned for debt. The Rising and War of Independence caused further tumult (Eoin lost his professorship while in prison; Hugh's son (also Hugh) was imprisoned too (he later played an important role in the Free State Army - dib.ie/biography/mcne… )

12. Hugh senior became estranged from his family and ended up falling ill and dying in a workhouse (stories - apparently untrue - circulated that he had been found dead in a telephone booth).

13. By no reasonable measure could Hugh MacNeill's life be considered a successful one. His early promise was never fulfilled. His family life was tumultuous and bitter, and he died in squalid circumstances. But he achieved a minor measure of immortality that few of us will have.

14. A tangential post script, on the "cloacal obsession." My grandmother Eilis, who passed down what family memories I have, married a man with no great fondness for the English. One evening, when she tried to get him to go out to dinner with an English couple, he tried to refuse

15. Claiming that all the other couple would do would be to "talk about their bowels." Eventually he was prevailed upon to attend, grudgingly and with many imprecations. After they had gotten there, the conversation turned at some point to a recent move the other couple had made.

16. And one of the other couple remarked that the wonderful water in the new place meant that they were "ever so much more regular" than they had been before. My grandfather, beaming with sheer delight, kept them going on the topic for a long while.

17. And after they got home, my grandmother reportedly refused to speak to him in sentences of more than one word for two days. Of such minor engagements, victories and defeats are marriages made.