James joyce, p.79
James Joyce, page 79
—HERMANN BAHR, ON A VISIT TO TRIESTE IN 19092
‘THE STAY IN ROME had seemed purposeless, but during it Joyce became aware of the change in his attitude towards Ireland so towards the world. He embodied his new perceptions in “The Dead”’, wrote Richard Ellmann.3 There is a change in Joyce in 1906–7, but it is not to be seen as entailing a belated yearning for Ireland. That is to underestimate both the ferocious emotional discipline Joyce maintained in exile and his intellectual constancy. What exile did entail was a shift in perspective. Ireland and the choices facing Ireland did not look quite the same from outside. What occurs is a major shift within what Joyce conceived as his exilic project that led him to semi-invert the relationship of Ireland to continental Europe he had perceived as he headed into exile. It was where his experiment in exile took him. His initial, somewhat callow belief that exile would yield universal political truths that could remedy Irish backwardness yielded to the realisation that Ireland after all had something to offer Europe. Ireland’s relation to Europe was more reciprocal and dynamic than he had originally conceived it to be.
Something else takes place. Joyce’s early Parnellite nationalism was abstractly conceived, with the high-minded political disinterestedness of the Irish Catholic elite of which he was precariously a member. Exile was in its material aspect a humiliation, and he and his household had experienced its privations.4 He was prepared, objectively and without self-pity, to acknowledge a correlation between his own circumstances and Ireland’s colonial status, even if he remained extremely wary of the sense of victimhood. With that, something more humane enters his nationalism and his relation to Ireland which had a profound influence on his development as an artist. Margot Norris has magisterially chronicled the process by which Joyce over time came to revise his early aestheticism and to make the material, religious, and political constraints that he encountered part of his art.5 That shift derives from the adversity of his final two years in Dublin as well as his early exile, but principally bears the impress of exile.
Stanislaus was ill prepared for the apparition of Joyce, Nora, and Giorgio, grubby and ‘almost as thin and poverty stricken as Italian immigrants’, arriving back in Trieste from Rome on 7 March 1907. Joyce, clad ‘in a manky shapeless capecoat’, was pallid, gaunt, and unshaven.6 He had no money. When Stanislaus asked what he would do, he said he would give lessons. When Stanislaus pointed out it was the end of the season, Joyce laughed and replied, ‘Well, then, I have you’.7 In the hard five years to follow, Joyce’s impositions on Stanislaus were to strain their relations to breaking point. Stanislaus was acutely conscious that their pupils thought him and his brother, on account of their culture and educational attainments, to be reasonably well off.8 The perpetuation in Trieste of the anomalous socio-economic state of the Joyces in Dublin, coupled with the persisting non-publication of Joyce’s fiction, created the oppressive sense of stasis that hung like a curse over Joyce’s household and his relations with his brother.
The publication by Elkin Mathews of Joyce’s collection of poems Chamber Music in London in May 1907 served only to deepen Joyce’s frustration at his failure to secure the publication of Dubliners. Stanislaus had walked up and down outside the Trieste post office to dissuade Joyce from his professed intention to countermand publication. Joyce asserted of his poems ‘all that kind of thing is false’. The publication was out of phase, and it was Dubliners that informed Stanislaus’s reservations: ‘It seemed to me that the strength of his mind and his moral courage had not gone into [the poems].’9 Arthur Symons reviewed Chamber Music favourably in the London Nation,10 as did Kettle in the Freeman’s Journal11 and Arthur Clery two years later in the Leader (22 June 1909). Joyce later told his first biographer, Herbert Gorman, that Kettle’s review was the first and last mention of him in any Dublin newspaper.12 This was incorrect, but a less wild exaggeration than it might appear. Joyce’s concern was characteristically with the mainstream popular Irish media, and he was referring specifically to Irish newspapers. No Dublin newspaper reviewed Dubliners. The next extended Irish newspaper mention of Joyce or his work was the mildly horrified anonymous review of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that appeared in the Freeman’s Journal in 1917.13
Around mid-May, Joyce’s health collapsed. He was laid up for an extended period into the autumn, with a combination of inflammation of his eyes and rheumatic fever.14 It was an ill omen for a young man of twenty-five. Stanislaus took over his teaching and read to him in the evening: Joyce favoured Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories.15 On 26 July Nora gave birth in the Ospedale Civico di Trieste to a daughter. Before the onset of his ocular problems, Joyce had resolved on the name Lucia, patron saint of eyesight.16
Joyce’s debility coincided with a recuperation of the imaginative powers and of the acuity of memory of Dublin that he had feared in Rome were waning. By the end of September he had finished ‘The Dead’, completing the transformation of the cycle of his Dubliners stories which he had begun with ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’ without knowing quite how far it would take him. Joyce, his own most unsparing critic, knew the story was a tour de force. He told Stanislaus that he ‘had put more work in one story than any of the Irish put into two or three plays’. Stanislaus too considered the story ‘magnificent … worthy of any of the Russians I have read’.17 Psychologically the effect was to deepen Joyce’s frustration at his persisting inability to find a publisher for Dubliners, doubtless aggravated by the awareness that the publishers he had canvassed since 1905 had seen Dubliners without its climactic story.
‘Professor Zois’: Joyce’s Triestine Pupils
The major change in Joyce’s standing as a teacher of English came when he left the Berlitz school in September 1907 and began relying on giving private lessons. While Nora and Stanislaus were apprehensive about the move, it was a success.18 ‘Professor Zois’19—he appeared in the General Guide to Trieste of 1909 as ‘Joyce Giac. Prof. d’ingl’20—took with him some of his former pupils and added numerous others from the Triestine upper-middle class. It meant that Joyce went ‘from house to house’,21 at least until he took an apartment on the Via della Barriera Vecchia in August 1910. It probably conduced to a greater degree of self-discipline on Joyce’s part and liberated him from rigid adherence to the Berlitz method; his preferred method of teaching English was highly improvisational.
One of his pupils, Mario Nordio, a young journalist, recalled, ‘He continually skipped from one topic to the other, embellishing his words with anecdotes told in his favourite form, that of the fable.’22 With Paolo Cuzzi, who would become a distinguished lawyer in Trieste, he liked to discuss Thomism; when Cuzzi was reading Sigmund Freud, whose works were all the rage in Trieste, and discussed slips of the tongue, Joyce listened politely but said that Freud had been anticipated by Giambattista Vico.23 Boris Furlan, from a Triestine Slovenian family, who was to be a distinguished jurist who came to play a prominent role in Yugoslavian politics in resistance to Josip Broz Tito, was enthused by Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche; Joyce told him that Thomas Aquinas, whose reasoning was ‘like a sharp sword’, was the greatest philosopher.24 Not all of Joyce’s teaching was at this elevated level of discourse. Adriano Sturli, a highly distinguished and innovative Triestine surgeon, took lessons from Joyce. Sixteen pages of Sturli’s notes from the lessons survive; three pages were removed by Sturli and apparently relate to the vocabulary of the brothel in advance of a trip he was making to attend a medical conference in London. What survives includes what seems to be an exercise in the pronunciation of the word ‘whore’.25
Among Joyce’s students was Ettore Schmitz, who had written two neglected novels under the pen name Italo Svevo. He had married in 1896 Livia Veneziani, whose father had set up a factory manufacturing underwater paint in Chiarbola Superiore, a suburb of Trieste, beside which stood the Villa Veneziani. The product had military application, and the business was international, with a branch office in Charlton outside London. Schmitz had commercial as well as literary reasons for improving his English.26 His wife recalled, ‘Ettore wanted not only to learn the language but to find an expert guide to modern English. He turned to Joyce, who at that time was a fashionable teacher to Trieste’s rich bourgeoisie, and that was how they met. The lessons had nothing to do with grammar; the pair of them talked of literature, and touched on a hundred other subjects. Even I took part in them. The expressions Joyce used were extremely amusing, and he spoke like us in Trieste dialect’27—a remark that might suggest that as much Italian as English was spoken. Schmitz’s appraisal of Joyce’s physical aspect, recalled in 1927 after he had re-met Joyce in Paris, reflects their closeness: ‘In appearance Joyce has not changed much from what he was when he arrived in Trieste. He is over forty. Lean, lithe, tall, he might almost seem a sportsman if he had not the negligent gait of a person who does not care what he does with his limbs.… He is very short-sighted and wears strong glasses that make his eyes look enlarged. The eyes are blue and very notable even without the glasses, and they gaze with a look of ceaseless curiosity matched with supreme coldness.’28
In autumn 1907 Joyce brought his just-completed story ‘The Dead’ to Schmitz and read it: Livia went down to the garden to present a bouquet to Joyce.29 A curious reciprocity underpinned their relations. Schmitz was prompted to give Joyce copies of his two overlooked novels. Returning them, Joyce told Schmitz, ‘Do you know that you are a neglected writer. There are passages in Senilità that even Anatole France could not have improved?’30 Livia wrote, ‘These words were a balm to Ettore’s heart. He gazed wide-eyed at Joyce, delighted and amazed. That day he could not leave Joyce, he accompanied him all the way back to his home in Piazza Vico, telling him of his literary disappointments. It was the first time he had opened his heart to anyone and showed his profound bitterness.’31
It was in Trieste that Joyce’s interest in Christian liturgy found overt expression. What seems to have been his first attendance at the Greek Orthodox mass in the Chiesa della Santissima Trinità e San Nicolo in the spring of 1905 was a moment of high significance. It gave the Catholicism in which he had grown up, and which he had repudiated, a comparative referent. Intrigued by the ritual, he wrote to Stanislaus describing how the Greek Orthodox mass differed from the Catholic. Joyce’s refusal to miss anything, coupled with his poor eyesight, drove him towards the front of the congregation: ‘The Greek priest has been taking a great eyeful out of me: two haruspices’. It made him think of his story ‘The Sisters’,32 and led him to revise it.33 It was likewise in Trieste that Joyce’s lifelong practice of attending Easter ceremonies, by which he was fascinated, began. Alessandro Francini Bruni, who lived with the Joyces for six months after they left Pola for Trieste, recalled, ‘On the morning of Palm Sunday, then during the four days that follow the Wednesday of Holy Week, and especially during all the hours of those great symbolic rituals at the early morning service, Joyce is at church’.34 Joyce’s sister Eileen Schaurek, who moved to Trieste in 1910, recalled, ‘He used to go to the Greek Orthodox Church because he said he liked the ceremonies better there. But in Holy Week he always went to the Catholic Church. He said that Catholics were the only people who knew how to keep Holy Week.’35 He reported to Stanislaus that the English teacher in the Berlitz school said to him that Joyce would ‘die a Catholic because I am always moping in and out of the Greek Churches and am a believer at heart: whereas in my opinion I am incapable of belief of any kind.’36 Stanislaus recorded his brother as observing that every man was religious and had in his heart some faith in a deity.37
FIGURE 14.1. Ettore Schmitz (Italo Svevo) (Wikimedia).
Joyce was not in the process of becoming a borghese. If the pattern of out-of-control drinking, that spanned roughly the summer of 1905 through his Roman sojourn and return to Trieste, seemed to abate after the birth of Lucia in July 1907, his drinking continued to be on a significant scale.38 His nocturnal descents into the cità vecia, the ‘old city’ in the triestino dialect, where he drank in cheap dives, were frequent.39 He would often dine in the open air in front of what Stanislaus characterised as ‘a workman’s Trattoria’, where Stanislaus was rigid with anxiety that he would be observed by some of his grander students.40 His young student Mario Nordio recalled that ‘during the hours of his nightly escapes, it was easy to find him in some of the wine shops in the old part of town, where he carefully emptied glasses of a generous Dalmatian wine and sang in chorus with the wharf porters’.41 The wine was Opollo, the wine of the island of Lissa on the Dalmatian coast (now Vis in southern Croatia),42 characterised by Dario de Tuoni as ‘a treacherous white wine which, without going to your head, cuts the legs from under you’.43
The brothels of Trieste were concentrated in the cità vecia. While there is no direct evidence, it seems unlikely that Joyce, having availed himself of the services of prostitutes in Dublin, did not patronise these institutions of a maritime port city. The brothels are the feature of Trieste most starkly carried over into Finnegans Wake. The old ghetto of Trieste was within the cità vecia, whence ‘jerumsalemdo’, close to the fruit markets: ‘Not to wandly be woking around jerumsalemdo at small hours about the murketplots, smelling okey boney, this little figgy and arraky belloky this little pink into porker’.44 Stanislaus, in his Triestine diary, makes a point of the fact that he would not patronise brothels, invoking ‘my prejudice against availing myself of whores, because they are the scapegoat class of humanity’.45 In the Wake, the Rainbow Girls worship their sun god, Shaun, hailed as ‘dear sweet Stainusless’, the antithesis of his brother, the Joyce surrogate Shem. Their incantation includes the lines, ‘You are pure. You are pure. You are in your puerity. You have not brought stinking members into the house of Amanti. Elleb Inam, Titep Notep, we name them to the Hall of Honour.’46 As John McCourt points out in breaking Joyce’s pseudo-Egyptianising code, ‘Elleb Inam’ is ‘belli mani’ backwards, and ‘Tipet Notep’ is ‘petit peton’, French for ‘little feet’, and more significantly (beyond high fetishism) Triestine for ‘ample breasts’,47 either the attributes or real or invented noms de guerre of women professionally providing sexual services.
If Joyce became respected in Trieste, his remuneration remained frugal, and there was an issue of class. Lina Galli, who helped Livia Schmitz (Svevo’s widow) in writing her memoir of her husband, bluntly observed, ‘In the eyes of the Triestine merchant class, Joyce was a member of the lower class. He lived in a modest flat, and his wife had to work. He was not considered worthy of being invited to parties’.48 Joyce wrote of the dead Schmitz to Stanislaus in 1932, ‘My relations with S were quite formal. I never crossed the soglia [threshold] except as a paid teacher and his wife became longsighted when she met Nora in the street’.49 It is easy to make too much of this. There were issues of cultural as well as social difference: the Joyce household was short of money and conspicuously failed to meet the Triestine bourgeois norms of cleanliness, hygiene, and economy, deviations that were held more against Nora than Joyce.50 Joyce was not too preoccupied with the social conventions of the Triestine haute bourgeoisie, perhaps in part because he himself enjoyed a certain bohemian licence.
Issues of class did impinge on Joyce’s erotic, or at least amorous, interests in his female pupils. They are reflected in the set of fragments published posthumously as Giacomo Joyce, about his distant infatuation with a ‘young person of quality’, ‘a lady of letters’, Jewish, whom he at one point observes throughout a performance from the loggione, the gods, whose ‘sodden walls ooze a steamy damp’.51 Ellmann identifies the figure of the woman as Amalia Popper, daughter of Leopoldo Popper, a Jewish businessman.52 The Triestine scholar Stelio Crise identified a second candidate, Anna Maria (Annie) Schleimer. According to Crise, Joyce had kissed Annie and suggested she marry him, a project which foundered on the objections of her father, Andrea, a prosperous merchant, who was aghast at the involvement of his daughter with a language teacher.53 A further possible model, more nebulously, is the young Emma Cuzzi, daughter of the Triestine lawyer Giuseppe Cuzzi whom he taught along with two of her friends, all of Jewish or Catholic-Jewish origin.54 Renzo Crivelli concludes, ‘It is not about “one” woman, but the fusion of two (or three if we include Emma Cuzzi)’, representing the projection of several women, including Nora, ‘united by the common anomalous relationship between a seducer who ends up being seduced (Joyce himself) and a pupil who gives lessons rather than receive them (lessons in desire naturally)’.55
The Politics of Trieste
In spring 1907 Joyce was invited by a student, Attilio Tamaro, secretary of the irredentist Università Popolare, to lecture at the university, and by a former student, Roberto Prezioso, political editor of the irredentist newspaper Il Piccolo, to contribute articles on Irish politics and literature to its evening paper. These invitations from prominent irredentists attest to Joyce’s standing as an expatriate Irish writer in Trieste and came on the basis that he was an Irish nationalist, and that his Irish nationalism struck a chord with Triestine irredentism. It is therefore necessary to assess the impact of the politics of Trieste on the political thinking of Joyce, as well as Triestine perceptions of Joyce’s Irish politics.
In the decade that preceded the entry of Italy into the Great War, Trieste—the ‘docile Trieste’ of which Joyce wrote in Giacomo Joyce—enjoyed a certain tranquillity, but one riven by sharply escalating tension between its dominant population of those who were culturally Italian, and identified politically with Italy, and its Slav (Slovene) minority. Much of the First World War in Italy would be fought in close proximity to Trieste, with the city a principal strategic target of the Italian army. In the peace settlement, the region of which Trieste was part, known to Italians as Venezia Giulia, along with Venezia Triestina—the Alto Adige (South Tyrol) in the north-west—were the ‘New Provinces’ wrested by Italy from the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Italian nationalists of the New Provinces were to play a significant role in the triumph of Italian fascism.56 The fulfilment of the aspiration of the Italian population of Trieste to union with Italy exacted a very high price, and left the city economically diminished and its triestinità—the attributes of distinctiveness and politico-cultural hybridity that had defined it—severely compromised. ‘Docile Trieste’ had become a cockpit of the bellicose nationalism of the First World War and one that, through the ascent to power of Benito Mussolini, was to feed directly into the second.
