James joyce, p.94
James Joyce, page 94
Joyce was unsentimental about Trieste. The lines from his letter to Nora of 7 September 1909, two days before he left Dublin at the end of his first trip, during which Vincent Cosgrave had asserted that he had had a romantic involvement with Nora, are much quoted: ‘La nostra bella Trieste! I have often said that angrily but tonight I feel it true. I long to see the lights twinkling along the riva as the train passes Miramar. After all, Nora, it is in the city which has sheltered us. I came back to it jaded and moneyless after my folly in Rome and now again after this absence.’192
Aside from the frantically cloying prose, if his relationship to Trieste was based on a sense of gratitude, it was not in the case of Joyce the most secure foundation. Joyce’s composite pun in referring in Finnegans Wake to Trieste as ‘tarry easty, his città immediata’193 is ingeniously calibrated. The rendering of Trieste as exotically a land of the East is less geographical than to do with the ethnic diversity of the population of the city and its hinterland. ‘Tarry’, as if to reinforce both the idea of colonial indolence and occidental conceptions of Eastern indolence, renders the frustration of Joyce’s ambitions while he was in Trieste, while the idea of leavening (‘easty’ invoking yeast as well as the East)194 conveys Joyce’s sense that his writing was self-generated rather than engendered by any conventional sense of place.
What Joyce took from Trieste was not its italianità but its triestinità, its distinctive diversity and political geography, conveyed not as political grand theory but principally through the dialect of triestino, a flamboyant rendering into language of the ethnic and cultural heterogeneity of the city that for Joyce had the merit that it was the common invention of its inhabitants rather than an imposition of ideology or state. Language was successful in achieving what formal politics had failed to do. Onto a basic template of Italian was grafted a vocabulary drawn from Italian dialects, Slovenian, Croatian, Hungarian, German, Greek, Turkish, and Armenian, a list that is not exhaustive. Its variations were boundless. The infinite suppleness of the language matched Joyce’s conception of cultural impurity and plasticity. Rosa Maria Bosinelli has established that Joyce’s triestino was better than his unimpeachable Italian.195 Triestino, and the non-Italian languages that contribute to its richly impure demotic, runs through Ulysses, and more particularly Finnegans Wake, where it is present both as vocabulary—to take one example noted by John McCourt, the Slovene word for God, bog, appears in Finnegans Wake as ‘by the wrath of Bog’—and as an active source of polyglottal word compounding and creation (‘Shem skrivenitch’).196
Though what he wrote pertained to Ireland, it was in pushing out into the Mediterranean from the built-up port of Trieste that Joyce embarked on his own odyssey, his sustained meditation on European ethnicities, nation-states, national cultures, and nationalisms. Stanislaus was quite wrong in venturing, ‘The cosmopolitan atmosphere of the Trieste of the early twentieth century did not inspire him at all.… No, Trieste did not give Jim anything.’197 As a political construct, Trieste came, against Joyce’s own expectations, to sustain the weight of his high rhetoric of exile.
1. Italo Svevo, ‘James Joyce’, trans. Stanislaus Joyce, rev. John Gatt-Rutter, in L. Veneziani Svevo, Memoir of Italo Svevo, 150. The third person in the conversation when Joyce made this observation, at a performance of Exiles in London, was Padraic Colum, who seems to have adopted Svevo’s account of what Joyce said. U. O’Connor, Joyce We Knew, 72–73.
2. Stanislaus Joyce, Triestine diary, 5 February 1908, quoted in McCourt, Years of Bloom, 127–28; Ellmann, James Joyce, 264.
3. Joyce to Nora Barnacle, postmark 22 August 1912, Letters II 310.
4. Ellmann, James Joyce, 269.
5. McCourt, Years of Bloom, 121; Ellmann, James Joyce, 260.
6. Ellmann, James Joyce, 267.
7. Ellmann, James Joyce, 267; McCourt, Years of Bloom, 133–35, 195; S. Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 214. A less successful exercise in collaborative translation related to Joyce’s own work: ‘Vidacovich also tried his hand with me on a version of my story “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” for the Nuova Antologia but the attempt was a dismal failure’. Joyce to W. B. Yeats, 14 September 1916, Letters II 95.
8. McCourt, Years of Bloom, 133.
9. Ellmann, James Joyce, 274. Ross took particular pride in the dissemination of The Soul of Man under Socialism, which Arthur Humphreys had kept in print from 1895 when he published a private edition; Oscar Wilde, The Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis (London: Hart-Davis, 1962), 364; Robert Ross, introduction to The Soul of Man under Socialism, by Oscar Wilde (London: Arthur L. Humphreys, 1912), vi. At the dinner in the Ritz in London on 1 December 1908 to mark the winding up of the Wilde estate, Ross declared that ‘Chinese and Russian translations of The Soul of Man under Socialism are sold in the bazaars of Ninji Novgorod’. Margery Ross, Robert Ross, Friend of Friends: Letters to Robert Ross, Art Critic and Writer, Together with Extracts from His Published Articles (London: Jonathan Cape, 1952), 56, 104–5.
10. Ellmann, James Joyce, 268–69.
11. Ellmann, James Joyce, 269.
12. Ellmann, James Joyce, 269.
13. Stanislaus Joyce, Triestine diary, 12 October 1908, quoted in McCourt, Years of Bloom, 131–32.
14. Erik Schneider, ‘Joyce in Concert: The Meistersinger Performance in Trieste’, James Joyce Quarterly 38, nos. 3 and 4 (Spring and Summer 2001): 495–97. ‘Die Meistersinger was his favourite opera, and he borrowed its quintet for the “Sirens” episode of Ulysses’. Ira B. Nadel, Joyce and the Jews: Culture and Texts (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 52.
15. Joyce to Margaret Joyce, 8 December 1908, Letters II 225–26.
16. Joyce to Nora Barnacle, 29 July 1909, SL 156.
17. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 4 August 1909, SL 156.
18. Joyce to Nora Barnacle, postmark 29 July 1909, SL 156.
19. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 4 August 1909, Letters II 231.
20. Joyce to Nora Barnacle, 6, 7 August 1909, Letters II 231–23.
21. Joyce to Nora Barnacle, 19 August 1909, Letters II 235–36.
22. Maddox, Nora, 130.
23. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 10 August 1909, Letters II 234.
24. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 16 August 1909, Letters II 235; Ellmann, James Joyce, 282.
25. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 21 August 1909, Letters II 238.
26. Joyce to Nora Barnacle, 19 August 1909, Letters II 235.
27. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 21, 25 August 1909, Letters II 238, 240. Joyce had evidently concluded that in Dublin the Unionist press was more likely to be receptive to external contributors.
28. OCPW 152–54. When Joyce returned to Trieste in September 1909, he sent Richard Irvine Best the Wilde article as he had promised, ‘and throw in another (very poor) on GBS’, hoping Best could succeed in puzzling out their Italian. Joyce to Richard Irvine Best, NLI, MS 11, 001.
29. Patrick Maume, ‘Piaras Béaslaí’, DIB, 1:386–89.
30. Ellmann, James Joyce, 289. Ellmann’s account is based on what Béaslaí told him. The actual editor of the Freeman’s Journal at the time was Morris Cosgrave.
31. U 7.41–42.
32. U 7.178–81.
33. Ellmann, James Joyce, 288–29.
34. Evening Telegraph, 8 September 1909; Letters II 242n1.
35. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 21 August, 10 November 1909, Letters II 238, 261.
36. Ellmann, James Joyce, 285.
37. Ellmann, James Joyce, 266–67.
38. Joyce to Nora Barnacle, 5 September 1909, Letters II 247–48; Ellmann, James Joyce, 287.
39. Joyce to Nora Barnacle, 5 September 1909, Letters II 247; Norburn, James Joyce Chronology, 44.
40. Byrne, Silent Years, 154, 156–59.
41. Holloway, Joseph Holloway’s Abbey Theatre, 130–31.
42. McCourt, Years of Bloom, 144.
43. Evening Telegraph, 21 December 1909.
44. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 20 December 1909, Letters II 277; Ellmann, James Joyce, 302–3.
45. McCourt, Years of Bloom, 147.
46. Ellmann, James Joyce, 303.
47. McCourt, Years of Bloom, 176.
48. Joyce to Nora Barnacle, 27 October 1909, Letters II 255.
49. Joyce to Nora Barnacle, 19 November 1909, Letters II 266.
50. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 23 December 1909, Letters II 280.
51. Ellmann, James Joyce, 311; McCourt, Years of Bloom, 151.
52. McCourt, Years of Bloom, 172.
53. Thomas F. Staley, ‘James Joyce in Trieste’, Georgia Review 16, no. 4 (Winter 1962): 446–49.
54. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 12 January 1911, Letters II 288–89; Ellmann, James Joyce, 313; McCourt, Years of Bloom, 176–77.
55. McCourt, Years of Bloom, 177.
56. McCourt, Years of Bloom, 178.
57. Ellmann, James Joyce, 310–11; Letters II 291. Ellmann points out that the passage was a slightly fortified version of that which had been submitted to Grant Richards.
58. Joyce to Maunsel & Company, 10 July 1911, Letters II 289.
59. Ellmann, James Joyce, 314–15; Letters II 291–93.
60. Joyce’s letter appears both in his published correspondence (Letters II 291–93) and as ‘A Curious History’ in OCPW 160–62. Grant Richards, to whom Joyce sent a copy, replied amicably (Letters II 291n2) and did ultimately publish Dubliners in 1914.
61. Sinn Féin, 2 September 1911. This does not mean that Griffith had forgiven Joyce for his review of the poems of William Rooney in 1903. Griffith was not the forgiving type.
62. Northern Whig, 26 August 1911.
63. McCourt, Years of Bloom, 178.
64. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, postmark 25 April 1912, Letters II 294–95.
65. The inflated cult of Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873), a writer, and alternately Whig and Conservative politician, who fleetingly held cabinet office and declined the crown of Greece on the abdication of King Otto in 1862, was already more or less exploded in England. His survival in Italy is presumably down to the fact that his 1843 Harold, the Last of the Saxons inspired Verdi’s opera Arnaldo of 1857, which itself seems to have gone the way of all Bulwer-Lytton. His Rienzi of 1835 also inspired the Wagner opera of 1842.
66. Louis Berrone, ed., James Joyce in Padua (New York: Random House, 1977), xxi.
67. Frank Budgen, ‘James Joyce’ (1941), reprinted in Making of ‘Ulysses’, 345. The shift in the story serves as a reminder that we only have Joyce’s word for the Englishness of Margherita de Renoche, though his postcard to Stanislaus is clear and presumably based on her accent. In enmity Joyce took imaginative licence. He mentions Sara Gamp in his essay as one of the characters of Dickens who inhabit ‘the borderland of the … human fantastic’, along with, among others, Micawber and Peggoty (OCPW 185).
68. Berrone, James Joyce in Padua, xxii.
69. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 10 August 1912, Letters II 301.
70. McCourt, Years of Bloom, 178–79; Ellmann, James Joyce, 318–19.
71. OCPW 174.
72. OCPW 174–75.
73. OCPW 171.
74. OCPW 332.
75. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 30 September 1906, Letters II 168. A year later Stanislaus noted in his diary that ‘Jim is going to expand his story “Ulysses” into a short book and make a Dublin Peer Gynt of it.’ Stanislaus Joyce, Triestine diary, 10 November 1907, quoted in Ellmann, James Joyce, 265.
76. Callanan, T. M. Healy, 461.
77. Sinn Féin, 9 November 1907.
78. Making a virtue of necessity, Griffith had Sinn Féin take the position that it would impose upon itself a cessation of political activity so as to enable Redmond to make good his pledge that, if not hampered by opposition in Ireland, he would secure the enactment of a satisfactory measure of Home Rule: see Griffith’s speech at the Central Branch of Sinn Féin, Sinn Féin, 14 October 1911. Redmond would thus not be able to blame others if the measure was unsatisfactory: ‘He has the freest field an Irish Parliamentary leader has ever been given. If he fails, his policy fails with him’ (Sinn Féin, 7 October 1911).
79. OCPW 336.
80. Sinn Féin, 15 January 1910.
81. ‘Parnell’, Sinn Féin, 7 October 1911.
82. ‘Parnell’, Sinn Féin, 7 October 1911.
83. Parnell’, Sinn Féin, 7 October 1911.
84. ‘Parnell’, Sinn Féin, 7 October 1911.
85. O’Donnell, Irish Parliamentary Party, 1:289. Healy had said in the interview he gave the Pall Mall Gazette at the outset of the Split, ‘We created Parnell, and Parnell created us—the Irish party’. Callanan, T. M. Healy, 268–69.
86. FW 87.12.
87. R. Barry O’Brien, The Life of Charles Stewart Parnell (London: Nelson Library, 1910); Gillespie, James Joyce’s Trieste Library, 178.
88. These are discussed well in F.S.L. Lyons, Charles Stewart Parnell (London: Collins, 1977), 612.
89. OCPW 191.
90. OCPW 191.
91. See, for example, Sinn Féin, 1 January 1910.
92. Sinn Féin, 20 April 1912.
93. OCPW 191, 193.
94. Freeman’s Journal, 24 April 1912; Meleady, John Redmond, 215. This event was only fleetingly alluded to in Sinn Féin 27 April, so Joyce evidently had some other newspaper source. The nephew of Gladstone to whom Joyce referred as a speaker at the convention was in fact his grandson W.C.G. Gladstone, who spoke briefly immediately after John Redmond.
95. OCPW 193.
96. OCPW 193.
97. OCPW 193.
98. OCPW 194.
99. Griffith, for reasons of his own, imputed to Parnell a presentiment that was more crudely political: ‘He never achieved victory, but the Parliamentarianism he hoped to win with slew him in the end, and the day it slew Parnell Parliamentarianism avowed its own worthlessness. Parnell was too great a man not to have foreseen the possibility of his end. He knew he could not hope to keep an Irish Party in the British Parliament uncorrupted for more than a few years, but he hoped that within that period he could succeed, and the failure of his hopes was not his fault’ (Sinn Féin, 5 February 1910).
100. O’Brien asked Gladstone what it was that first drew his attention to Parnell. ‘Mr. Gladstone (with much energy): “Parnell was the most remarkable man I ever met. I do not say ablest man; I say the most remarkable and the most interesting. He was an intellectual phenomenon.”’ R. B. O’Brien, Charles Stewart Parnell, 2:357. The interview took place on 28 January 1897. Gladstone died the following year at the age of eighty-eight.
101. OCPW 194.
102. OCPW 194.
103. OCPW 194–95.
104. For wider discussion of this, see Margaret O’Callaghan, British High Politics.
105. OCPW 195.
106. OCPW 196.
107. C. C. O’Brien, Parnell and His Party, 326.
108. OCPW 196.
109. R. B. O’Brien, Charles Stewart Parnell (1898), 2:298, cited in OCPW 339n29.
110. Sinn Féin, 7 October 1911.
111. OCPW 196.
112. Joyce, Critical Writings, 228n1.
113. OCPW 196.
