James joyce, p.105
James Joyce, page 105
1. McCourt, Years of Bloom, 241–43; Ellmann, James Joyce, 383.
2. Thompson, White War, 37.
3. De Tuoni, Ricordo di Joyce, 119–21.
4. Thompson, White War, 4.
5. Smith, Modern Italy, 255–67. In an attempt to keep Italy in the Triple Alliance, Austria offered to cede Trieste. Smith, Modern Italy, 264.
6. Quoted in Thompson, White War, 36. Joyce’s seeming indifference to Croce may have resulted quite arbitrarily from Croce being characterised as a liberal, which triggered Joyce’s loathing of William Gladstone and hostility to English liberalism in general.
7. De Tuoni, Ricordo di Joyce, 119. Joyce’s view may not have been constant over time as circumstances changed. According to Gatt-Rutter (Italo Svevo, 276), Joyce bet a case of wine against it with the bookseller Eugenio Borsati, and scrupulously repaid the wager when they were both back in Trieste in 1919. The source is unidentified.
8. Thompson, White War, 121–22.
9. Ellmann, James Joyce, 380.
10. Ellmann, James Joyce, 380; McCourt, Years of Bloom, 249.
11. Ellmann, James Joyce, 383.
12. Ellmann, James Joyce, 385.
13. Gatt-Rutter, Italo Svevo, 277–78.
14. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 16 June 1915, SL 209.
15. Joyce to A. Llewelyn Roberts, secretary of the Royal Literary Fund, 30 July 1915, Letters II 356.
16. Gorman, James Joyce, 234; Ellmann, James Joyce, 385–86. See also Budgen, Making of ‘Ulysses’, 202.
17. Gorman, James Joyce, 229n1; Ellmann, James Joyce, 386. Joyce’s abiding gratitude to Sordina and to Ralli, and to Ralph Busser, attests to just how fraught the departure from Trieste actually was, even if masked by Joyce’s sangfroid. Ellmann, James Joyce, 385–86.
18. Ellmann, James Joyce, 386.
19. Ellmann, James Joyce, 386.
20. Gorman, James Joyce, 231.
21. Budgen, Making of ‘Ulysses’, 32.
22. Georges Borach recalled of the evening gatherings in the Pfauen restaurant drinking Fendant wine, where Joyce would often read from the manuscript of Ulysses, that ‘war news, art, and music’ were discussed. Georges Borach, ‘Conversations with James Joyce’, in Potts, Portraits of the Artist, 67, 69.
23. FW 70.8.
24. Thompson, White War, 5.
25. Thompson, White War, 66–68, 108–9.
26. Thompson, White War, 5.
27. Thompson, White War, 296–327.
28. Thompson, White War, 324, 351–52.
29. Thompson, White War, 342–47, 355–61.
30. Thompson, White War, 362.
31. Gatt-Rutter, Italo Svevo, 290 (see plate 15).
32. Thompson, White War, 366.
33. Budgen, Making of ‘Ulysses’, 176–77; Gorman, James Joyce, 238.
34. Borach, ‘Conversations with James Joyce’, 70 (1 August 1917), in Potts, Portraits of the Artist, 70.
35. Budgen, Making of ‘Ulysses’, 15–18; Ellmann, James Joyce, 426–27.
36. PSW 118; Ellmann, James Joyce, 416.
37. Ellmann, James Joyce, 397.
38. Ezra Pound to Joyce, 15 December 1913, Letters II 326.
39. Joyce to Harriet Shaw Weaver, 11 November 1914, Letters I 75.
40. Joyce to Harriet Shaw Weaver, 30 June 1915, Letters I 82.
41. Ellmann, James Joyce, 390.
42. Ezra Pound, ‘Dubliners and Mr. James Joyce’, Egoist, 15 July 1914, 267, reprinted in Pound/Joyce, ed. Forrest Read (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), 28–29.
43. Ezra Pound, ‘The Non-existence of Ireland’, New Age, 25 February 1915, 451–55. The reprinting of the article in Read, Pound/Joyce (32–33), is truncated and omits some of what is here quoted.
44. Ellmann, James Joyce, 390–92.
45. Yeats to Edmund Gosse, 28 August 1915, in Letters of W. B. Yeats, 596.
46. Budgen, Making of ‘Ulysses’, 173–75.
47. Gorman, James Joyce, 240; Ellmann, James Joyce, 409. One is reminded more of Joyce and Arthur Griffith coinciding in the National Library in Dublin than of brilliant Stoppardesque fantasias, of casual proximities in the public or commercial spaces of European cities.
48. Gorman, James Joyce, 233; Budgen, Making of ‘Ulysses’, 171–73. Ellmann repeats the anecdote that a friend compared the pale greenish colour of the wine to urine, and Joyce agreed but insisted that it was ‘di un’archiduchessa’ (Ellmann, James Joyce, 455), presumably because of the delicacy of the flavour.
49. Ellmann, James Joyce, 394.
50. Ellmann, James Joyce, 393, 411–12.
51. Ellmann, James Joyce, 397–98. Joyce told Budgen that the only poem of the war that interested him was by Felix Beran, which Joyce translated as ‘Lament for the Yeoman’. Budgen, Making of ‘Ulysses’, 12–13; Ellmann, James Joyce, 431–32.
52. Budgen, Making of ‘Ulysses’, xiv–xv, 29.
53. CW 246–48; PSW 120–22; Ellmann, James Joyce, 424–25. Nothing is known of the contextual setting of ‘Dooleysprudence’, which exists in a typed copy in the Slocum collection of the Yale University Library (CW 246n1).
54. The final stanza appears only in PSW 122.
55. Catherine Merridale, Lenin on the Train (London: Allen Lane, 2017), 81.
56. Budgen, Making of ‘Ulysses’, 9–13, 353, 191–92.
57. Gorman, James Joyce, 234; Ellmann, James Joyce, 399.
58. Ellmann, James Joyce, 399. In ‘Circe’ in Ulysses, Stephen says, ‘Let my country die for me’ (U 15.4474).
59. Ellmann, James Joyce, 423.
60. Joyce to Frank Budgen, 3 January 1920, SL 245. If, as Budgen believed it to be, his involvement with the Players was conceived as a vaguely friendly gesture towards the English, which is doubtful, that can only have accentuated its souring. Budgen, Making of ‘Ulysses’, 35, 200, 346.
61. Ellmann, James Joyce, 423–28, 440–52, 455–57.
62. Ellmann, James Joyce, 440–41.
63. McCourt, Years of Bloom, 248–49.
64. Ellmann, James Joyce, 413, 481.
65. Jane Lidderdale and Mary Nicholson, Dear Miss Weaver (London: Faber and Faber, 1970), 23, 108–31.
66. Ellmann, James Joyce, 442, 461.
67. Rusinow, Italy’s Austrian Heritage, 92.
68. Asked in 1936 what he thought about D’Annunzio, he responded, ‘Magnificent’; Ole Vinding, ‘James Joyce in Copenhagen’, in Potts, Portraits of the Artist, 149. He told David Fleischman in 1938, ‘I believe the three great writers of the nineteenth century who had the greatest natural talents were D’Annunzio, Kipling, and Tolstoy—it’s strange that all three had semi-fanatic ideas about religion or about patriotism’. Ellmann, James Joyce, 661.
69. Gatt-Rutter, Italo Svevo, 294–97.
70. Stanislaus Joyce to Joyce, 25 May 1919, Letters II 442–43.
71. Ellmann, James Joyce, 470–71, 482.
72. Joyce to Frank Budgen, 3 January 1920, Letters I 134.
73. Ellmann, James Joyce, 473–76.
74. Silvio Benco, ‘Joyce in Trieste’, in Potts, Portraits of the Artist, 57–58.
75. Joyce to Ezra Pound, 5 June 1920, SL 252–55; Ellmann, James Joyce, 477–78.
76. Joyce to Josephine Murray, 17 June 1920, Letters II 471–72.
77. P 5.2574–80.
78. Valéry Larbaud, ‘James Joyce’, Nouvelle Revue Française 103 (April 1922): 385–409.
79. Larbaud, ‘James Joyce’, 388.
80. Larbaud, ‘James Joyce’, 388–89.
81. Larbaud, ‘James Joyce’, 389.
82. Ellmann, James Joyce, 533.
83. O’Laoi, Nora Barnacle Joyce, 98–112; Ellmann, James Joyce, 533–35.
84. Joyce to Harriet Shaw Weaver, 7 April 1935, Letters I 362.
85. FW 375.16–17.
86. Most famously, in 1937 Joyce declined to fill out a questionnaire on his views on the Spanish Civil War, objecting that ‘politics are getting into everything’. Ellmann, James Joyce, 704.
87. OCPW 108–26. Patrick Healy has made this point to me.
88. See Verene, James Joyce.
89. OCPW 62.
90. Ira B. Nadel, ‘The Incomplete Joyce’, Joyce Studies Annual 2 (1991): 98.
91. Ellmann, James Joyce, 3.
Coda
IT IS JUST BEFORE DAYBREAK, in the fourth and final part of Finnegans Wake. The coming of the dawn is attended by heightened expectations, of peace, of reconciliation and rebirth, and of a new Irish state. History and legend are astir.
The words proclaiming the dawn are given to Pu Nuseht (‘the Sunup’ backwards), as if an emanation of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, but another voice has broken through or the speaker has acquired a new character. In its directness of utterance, in the first person, it is as if it stands outside the dream that is the Wake: ‘But hunt me the journeyon, iteritinerant, the kal his course, amid the semitary of Somnionia. Even unto Heliotropolis, the castellated, the enchanting.’1
Just before Anna Livia commences her final journey to the sea, James Joyce is making his last great tribute to Charles Stewart Parnell. Joyce, when he wrote of him, liked to emulate the spare clarity of Parnell’s speech. In ‘but hunt me the journeyon’, he is rendering with searing conciseness Parnell’s terrible last year, in which the once unassailable Irish leader plied a doomed course between England (Brighton, where he lived with Katharine O’Shea, and Westminster) and Ireland, where he rallied his forces in Dublin, fought three by-elections which he lost, and campaigned at the weekend in far-flung parts of the country, hunted at every step. His principal persecutor was Timothy Michael Healy, who became the first Governor-General of the Irish Free State: whence ‘Heliotropolis’, which means also ‘city of the sun’. ‘Journey’ is also ‘jour né’ (day born), but Parnell’s journeying serves to bleaken for a moment the onset of the dawn. The words that so succinctly convey Parnell’s embattled solitude are a culmination: by the Wake’s end, the idea of the hunt, of remorseless pursuit, is charged with the dreamed memory of the campaign that Parnell endured against him. Joyce had prefigured ‘hunt me the journeyon’ in epitomising Parnell in his 1912 essay ‘The Shade of Parnell’ as ‘strong to the verge of weakness’. As his health failed and his appearance deteriorated, Parnell persevered because it was not in his nature not to do so.
The invocation of Parnell is of necessity brief—the new Ireland approaches. It is heralded by and it rebukes ‘The Leader, the leader!’ on the preceding page.2 Yet it suffuses with a semi-faintness that is carefully calibrated to the passage of which it is part. The dawn breaks over the ancient standing stones ostensibly set in New Ireland in Melanesia: ‘The spearspid of dawnfire totouches ain the tablestoane ath the centre of the great circle of the macroliths of Helusbelus in the boshiman brush on this our peneplain by Fangaluva Bight whence the horned cairns erge, stanserstanded, to floran frohn, idols of isthmians. Overwhere. Gaunt grey ghostly gossips growing grubber in the glow. Past now pulls.’3
It appears that in Brittany there are some menhirs that in Breton are known as ‘the Gossips’, but these gossips sound more like seagulls. They are seagulls. The Wake is full of them, but these gulls have a particular lineage. In 1913 William Butler Yeats, infuriated by the controversy over the construction of a municipal gallery in Dublin, wrote ‘To a Shade’. In it he imagines Parnell’s ghost returning to Dublin, and advises against it. Its first stanza runs,
If you have revisited the town, thin Shade,
Whether to look upon your monument
(I wonder if the builder has been paid)
Or happier-thoughted when the day is spent
To drink of that salt breath out of the sea
When grey gulls flit about instead of men,
And the gaunt houses put on majesty:
Let these content you and be gone again;
For they are at their old tricks yet.4
While Joyce’s gaunt, grey ghostly gossips explicitly invoke Yeats, the tenor of what he wrote differs from that of Yeats’s poem, the last verse of which opens,
Go, unquiet wanderer,
And gather the Glasnevin coverlet
About your head till the dust stops your ear … 5
Irish independence had supervened; Joyce also, in the great wheeling movement of the passage in Finnegans Wake, steers clear of Parnell’s grave in Glasnevin, an artistic election but one that owes a little to Glasnevin’s association with a morbidly exorbitant commemorative cult of Parnell which he disdained.
Joyce’s valediction marks Parnell’s passing into history and myth in the transition to an independent Irish state, but it is a passing touched by the diurnal pain and travail that Parnell endured in the final phase of his life. It is the preciseness of that recall that enables Joyce to transcend the tragic mode.
Joyce published Finnegans Wake in 1939. He died in 1941. This book is about what prompted Joyce to write with harrowing exactitude at the end of his last work of an event that had occurred a half century earlier, when he was not yet ten years old.
1. FW 594.7–9.
2. FW 593.13.
3. FW 594.20–25.
4. W. B. Yeats, ‘To a Shade’, in The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach, 292–93.
5. Yeats, ‘To a Shade’.
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SECONDARY SOURCES
Newspapers (including dailies, weeklies, and monthlies)
Irish Newspapers
Daily Express
Daily Nation
Dana
Dublin Evening Mail
Evening Herald
Evening Telegraph
Freeman’s Journal
Insuppressible
Irish Catholic
Irish Daily Independent
Irish Independent
Irishman
Irish Times
Leader
Limerick Leader
Lyceum
Nation
National Press
National Student
Nationist
Northern Whig
Sinn Féin
St Stephen’s Review
Suppressed United Ireland
United Ireland
United Irishman
Non-Irish Newspapers (Great Britain, United States and Continental Europe)
Avanti! (Rome)
Catholic Bulletin
Catholic World
Daily Chronicle
Daily News
Fortnightly Review
Gaelic American
Il Piccolo della Sera (Trieste)
Jewish Chronicle
L’Asino (Rome)
Le Figaro (Paris)
L’Indipendente (Trieste)
Manchester Guardian
Methodist Times
National Press
New Age
North American Review
Pall Mall Gazette
Review of Reviews
Star
The Times (London)
Archives
Constantine Curran Collection, University College Dublin Special Collections
Davitt Papers, Trinity College Dublin
Gladstone Papers, British Library
James Joyce Papers, National Library of Ireland
Literary and Historical Society Records, Special Collections, University College Dublin
Redmond Papers, National Library of Ireland
Richard Ellmann Collection, University of Tulsa McFarlin Library, Tulsa, OK
Royal Irish Constabulary, Crime Branch Special Reports, National Archives of Ireland
Sheehy-Skeffington Papers, National Library of Ireland
W. G. Fallon Papers, National Library of Ireland
Secondary Sources
Allen, Nicholas. ‘Frederick Michael Ryan’. DIB 8:690–91.
________. ‘William Kirkpatrick Magee’. DIB 6:244–45.
Alspach, Russell K., ed. The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats. New York: Macmillan, 1957.
Aubert, J., and M. Jolas, eds. Joyce and Paris, 1902 … 1920–1940 … 1975: Papers from the Fifth International James Joyce Symposium, Paris, 16–20 June 1975. Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1979.
Backus, Margot Gayle. Scandal Work: James Joyce, the New Journalism, and the Home Rule Newspaper Wars. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013.
Balfour, Arthur James. A Defence of Philosophic Doubt. London: Macmillan, 1879.
Barr, Colin. ‘Paul Cullen’. DIB 2:1073–74.
Beach, Sylvia. Shakespeare and Company. London: Faber and Faber, 1956.
Benco, Silvio. ‘James Joyce in Trieste’. In Portraits of the Artist in Exile: Recollections of James Joyce by Europeans, edited by Willard Potts, 49–58. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979.
