James joyce, p.95
James Joyce, page 95
114. Freeman’s Journal, 29 November 1890, reprinted in F.S.L. Lyons, Fall of Parnell, 321.
115. Edward Clarke, The Story of My Life (London: Ohn Murray, 1918), 293; Callanan, T. M. Healy, 241.
116. I. Svevo, ‘James Joyce’, 154.
117. FW 479.14.
118. OCPW 149.
119. OCPW 149–50.
120. For the Special Commission, see O’Callaghan, British High Politics.
121. Ellmann, James Joyce, 322.
122. Nora Barnacle to Eileen Joyce, 14 August 1912, Letters II 302–3.
123. Nora Barnacle to Joyce, 11 July 1912, Letters II 296–97.
124. Joyce to Nora Barnacle, 12 July 1912, Letters II 297.
125. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, postmark 17 July 1912, Letters II 298.
126. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 4 August 1909, Letters II 230.
127. Joseph Hone, ‘A Recollection of James Joyce’, Envoy 5, no. 17 (1951): 45.
128. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, postmark 17 July 1912, Letters II 298; Ellmann, James Joyce, 324.
129. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, postmark 10 August 1912, Letters II 301.
130. Nora Barnacle to Eileen Joyce, 14 August 1912, Letters II 302.
131. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, postmark 7 August 1912, Letters II 300; Ellmann, James Joyce, 324–25.
132. Joyce to Nora Barnacle, [21 August 1912], Letters II 309.
133. OCPW 204. This contrasts starkly with Stephen’s reaction at the end of A Portrait to the old man whom John Alphonsus Mulrennan told him he had met in a mountain cabin in the west of Ireland: ‘I fear him. I fear his redrimmed horny eyes’ (P 223).
134. OCPW 205.
135. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, postmark 7 August 1912, Letters II 300; Ellmann, James Joyce, 325–27; McCourt, Years of Bloom, 175, 185.
136. Joyce, Critical Writings, 238–41. ‘Politics and Cattle Disease’ is also included in OCPW 206–8.
137. Ellmann, James Joyce, 325–27.
138. Charles Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 6 September 1912, Letters II 318.
139. The idea of Joyce’s authorship of ‘Politics and Cattle Disease’ was finally debunked by Terence Matthews in his excellent ‘Emendation to the Joycean Canon’. Matthews points out that a sub-leader in the Freeman’s Journal of 6 September 1912 does refer to Blackwood Price and to the Styrian cure, which explains the error of Charles Joyce. In the ‘Nestor’ episode of Ulysses, Mr Deasy wants Stephen to secure the publication in the press of his letter on foot-and-mouth disease. Stephen skims over Deasy’s letter: ‘May I trespass on your valuable space.… Our cattle trade. The way of all our old industries. Liverpool ring which jockeyed the Galway harbour scheme’ (U 2.324–27). Ellmann was further misled by this conflating on Joyce’s part of the issue of foot-and-mouth disease and the Galway harbour scheme to which he had referred in his ‘Fisherman of Aran’ article. Ellmann, James Joyce, 327.
140. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, postmark 7 August 1912, Letters II 298–301; Ellmann, James Joyce, 326–28; McCourt, Years of Bloom, 186–87.
141. J. G. Lidwell to Joyce, n.d., enclosed with Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, [21 August 1912], Letters II 306.
142. Hone, ‘Recollection of James Joyce’, 44; Ellmann, James Joyce, 328.
143. Stanislaus Joyce to Constantine Curran, 2 March 1955, quoted in McCourt, Years of Bloom, 189. Curran did not deal with the debacle of Dubliners in James Joyce Remembered.
144. Patrick Maume, ‘John Campbell Aberdeen’, DIB 4:147. Aberdeen had the longest term of office of any Irish viceroy.
145. Katherine Mullin, James Joyce, Sexuality and Social Purity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 21.
146. Joyce to Carlo Linati, 19 December 1919 (in Italian), Letters I 132. Herbert Gorman wrote in his 1939 biography, ‘There has never been any valid explanation for this crude sacrifice and wanton destruction on the part of the printer. It may be pointed out here that the printers were Falconer and Company who did a lot of work for various Roman Catholic societies and were in a small way official printers to the Crown’ (James Joyce, 216–17).
147. S. Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 80.
148. Quoted in Ellmann, James Joyce, 329.
149. Stanislaus Joyce to C. P. Curran, 2 March 1955, quoted in McCourt, Years of Bloom, 189. The manager of one bookshop told Joyce that a couple of weeks previously two young men had presented themselves who insisted that he take a particular French novel out of the window. When asked, they declined to state their authority for giving such an order other than to say he would otherwise have his windows broken.
150. Joyce to Nora Barnacle, [21 August 1912]; Joyce to George Roberts, 21 August 1912, Letters II 308–10.
151. Joyce to Nora Barnacle, postmark 22 August 1912; Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 23 August 1912, Letters II 310–12.
152. George Roberts to Joyce, 23 August 1912, Letters II 313–14.
153. Joyce to Nora Barnacle, postmark 23 August 1912, Letters II 311.
154. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 23 August 1912, Letters II 313. Joyce retained in his family circle a certain equanimity. When Curran interviewed May Monaghan in 1964, he noted, ‘She returned more than once to Jim’s gentleness and good humour. Even at the time he was distressed over the failure to publish Dubliners he was no more than gloomy and would sit down to piano and improvise and yet out of his moodiness evoked comic street ballads and opera’ (UCD, Curran Collection, MS 6).
155. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 23 August 1912, Letters II 312.
156. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, postmark 30 August 1912, Letters II 314. ‘My letter’ was Joyce’s letter to the press about the thwarted publication history of Dubliners which Griffith had published in Sinn Féin on 2 September 1911.
157. Charles Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 5, 6, 11 September 1912, Letters II 314–19.
158. Charles Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 6 September 1912, Letters II 317.
159. Charles Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 5 September 1912, Letters II 316.
160. Charles Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 11 September 1912, Letters II 319.
161. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, [11 September 1912], Letters II 319. Roberts told Ellmann they were guillotined rather than burnt.
162. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, postmark 11 September 1912, Letters II 320.
163. PSW 261; Gorman, James Joyce, 217; Slocum and Cahoon, Bibliography of James Joyce, 11–12. One might be tempted to see this as a reprise of Stephen writing his Parnell poem ‘on the back of one of his father’s second moiety notices’ (P 61). That is to assume that Joyce did actually write the poem on a rent demand, but Stanislaus does not refer to his having done so; S. Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 64–65. It is, on the other hand, perfectly possible that writing ‘Gas from a Burner’ on the back of the Maunsel contract inspired the description in A Portrait of Stephen using the second moiety notice.
164. Slocum and Cahoon, Bibliography of James Joyce, 12.
165. Ellmann, James Joyce, 335.
166. PSW 105.
167. Gogarty, It Isn’t That Time, 72–74. The episode is recounted with some difference of detail in S. Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 249.
168. PSW 104.
169. PSW 103.
170. PSW 103.
171. Gorman, James Joyce, 216–17; Ellmann, James Joyce, 338, 775n68.
172. Peter Hartshorn, James Joyce and Trieste (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1997), 58.
173. Silvio Benco, ‘James Joyce in Trieste’ (1930), reprinted in translation in Potts, Portraits of the Artist, 52.
174. GJ 10.
175. Ellmann, James Joyce, 345, 775–76; Crivelli, James Joyce, 136, 218–20; McCourt, Years of Bloom, 191–92.
176. Crivelli, Rose for Joyce, 179.
177. Crivelli, Rose for Joyce, 142–64; McCourt, Years of Bloom, 207.
178. Crivelli, James Joyce, 132.
179. De Tuoni, Ricordo di Joyce, 106.
180. De Tuoni, Ricordo di Joyce, 107. Francini Bruni, who visited Joyce at home in Paris, noted that Joyce would initiate discourses in Italian as he did not want his children to forget the language. In a house where many languages were spoken, the only words that were not permitted to be translated were the names of his children. ‘He used to say that the language of family affection could only be Italian’ (Ricordo di Joyce, 45). Benco observed, ‘It’s a strange thing, that luxurious Parisian apartment full of the speech of Trieste’s slums’ (‘James Joyce in Trieste’, 49).
181. FW 301.16–27.
182. De Tuoni, Ricordo di Joyce, 109, 128–29.
183. Joyce to Josephine Murray, New Year’s Eve 1904, Letters I 57.
184. Gorman, James Joyce, 143.
185. Gorman’s acknowledgements include Mary and Padraic Colum.
186. Mary Colum, Life and the Dream (New York: Doubleday, 1947), 383.
187. FW 464.27–28.
188. Adaline Glasheen, Third Census of ‘Finnegans Wake’: An Index of the Characters and Their Roles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 190.
189. FW 173.15.
190. Mazzini did not actually favour Irish independence: he ‘believed, as did Garibaldi and Cavour, that the Irish should not aim to become a separate nation state. Britain was greatly at fault in her treatment of Ireland, but he suspected reactionary motives in some Irish patriots who wanted to end the union, and when Fenians asked for his support he gave a discouraging answer. He believed unconvincingly that nations could sometimes be identified by their possession of a distinctive “mission” for the progress of humanity, and failed to find such a mission in Ireland, Denmark or Portugal’. Denis Mack Smith, Mazzini (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 156–57.
191. Rusinow, Italy’s Austrian Heritage, 87–88.
192. Joyce to Nora Barnacle, 7 September 1909, Letters II 249.
193. FW 228.22–23.
194. Brian Carraher, ‘Semicolonial Cities and Triestine Joyce: The Cultural Politics of Reading Joyce’s Homeplaces’, James Joyce Quarterly 38, nos. 3 and 4 (Spring and Summer 2001): 509.
195. McCourt, Years of Bloom, 53.
196. FW 76.31. See McCourt, Years of Bloom, 208.
197. Quoted in Stelio Crise, Epiphanies & Phadographs: Joyce e Trieste (Milan: All’insegna del pesce d’oro, 1994), 20, 22, cited in McCourt, Years of Bloom, 3. See also H. Leeming, ‘James Joyce’s Slavonic Optophones’, Slavonic and East European Review 55, no. 3 (July 1977): 289–309.
17
‘The Society of Jewses’: Gestating Bloom
An old caftaned Jewish refugee, sitting in a train compartment, shows his ticket to the inspector. The inspector, suspicious, thinking that perhaps he is hiding a child in his caftan to save the price of a ticket, asks the Jew what he has in there. The Jew produces a framed portrait of Emperor Franz Joseph.
—A TALE JOSEPH ROTH LIKED TO TELL1
THERE IS IN THE ‘Proteus’ episode of Ulysses an account of Stephen Dedalus having lunch with Kevin Egan (the semi-accidental but sentimental Fenian Joseph Casey, friend of Joyce’s father, whom Joyce had met in Paris). Postprandially, as the absinthe takes effect, Kevin Egan rolls ‘gunpowder cigarettes’ and reminisces. He talks ‘of Ireland, the Dalcassians, of hopes, conspiracies, of Ireland now’. His conversation runs on: ‘M. Drumont, famous journalist, Drumont, know what he called Queen Victoria? Old hag, with the yellow teeth. Vieille ogresse with the dents jaunes. Maud Gonne, beautiful woman, la Patrie, M. Millevoye. Felix Faure, know how he died?’2
The old Fenian in whom Stephen had hoped to find some revolutionary glamour, if not inspiration, turns out to have unreflectively absorbed the conventional wisdom of the French anti-Semitic ultra-right, remote from the affiliation to the French Revolution which Fenians professed. This is beautifully layered. It is the conversation of Kevin Egan that is rendered. It is he who explains to Stephen that Edouard Drumont is a ‘famous journalist’, which, while not untrue, hardly characterises the notorious and virulently anti-Semitic French publicist; Egan cites Drumont in his Anglophobe rather than anti-Semitic aspect. But Stephen does not know enough about French politics or the anti-Jewish convulsions of French life to know who Drumont is. Joyce in Paris in 1902–3 knew very well who Drumont was, but he is conveying that Stephen (and perhaps Joyce himself) was not particularly responsive to manifestations of anti-Jewish prejudice at the time.3 The episode poses the issue of the sources of Joyce’s personal interest in the Jews, subsequently fortified by his reading.
Ettore Schmitz professed the hope that Joyce would write of Trieste. He did not do so, other than in the slight but significant Giacomo Joyce that remained unpublished in his lifetime. But Joyce did translate aspects of his experience of Trieste into Ulysses. Having chosen exile and having passed a decade of that exile in Trieste, Joyce had the challenge of making sense of, and rendering at least obliquely, his ‘second country’.4 Trieste was multi-ethnic and liminal: on the Dalmatian coast, with a predominantly Italian culture, on the edge of the Balkans, with a vast Slavic hinterland that stretched to the Black Sea. The possible approaches were infinite, but it was through the Jews of the city that he strategised Trieste, and his own experience of early exile.
The purpose of a novel about Dublin with a Jewish central character was long nurtured by Joyce. If Jewishness was not quite a universal, there were Jews in every country in Europe. The subject of the Jews in Europe embraced polarities, whether real or supposed: East and West, Old Testament and New Testament, the ancient and the modern, the Semitic and the classical. Having declined to acknowledge crude affinities between the Irish and the Italian irredentists, Joyce was creative and resourceful in exploring more subtle affinities between the Irish and the Jews. But he was not privileging the narratives of two races or national cultures: they were co-emblematic of European history. The choice of Ireland was foreordained: Ireland was the country of Joyce’s birth and early life, the culture with which he was most intimately familiar and which had shaped his early understanding of politics, and the country in which all his fictional writing was set. The Jews were dispersed across Europe. Theirs was an ancient history and culture, more closely interwoven with European history and more centrally constitutive of the idea of Europe. In Ulysses the Jewishness of Bloom bore the principal weight of the connection of Ireland to Europe.
From the hatred unleashed on Émile Zola, Joyce knew there was an idea, assiduously promoted in right-wing reactionary polemic, of the Jews as cynical promoters of a corrosive modernism. This was part of a rich stock of anti-Semitic narratives and images which were to become important for Joyce, but were not what initially drew him to Jewish themes.
Crucially, the Irish and the Jews stood outside the paradigm of established European statehood. Their common statelessness, for radically disparate reasons, provided a strategic perspective on a European state system shaped by the Congress of Vienna which more or less perdured until the First World War. Bloom embodied two stateless tribes, one an island people, the other dispersed. Their peripherality or marginality to the schema of constituted statehood and empire is as much a matter of providing an enabling perspective as it is of the prejudice and oppression to which the two races were (unequally) subject.
There were centuries of struggle and oppression remembered in both cultures with mournful pride. Both were minorities in imperial settings (though the Jews were minorities in every European country) with contested issues about assimilation and language. There was some correlation between Irish nationalism and Zionism (Joyce was borderline sceptical on the subject of Zionism, though understanding of its inspiration). Joyce was drawn to the richness and fluidity of associations between the Irish and the Jews, a great lurch forward from his doomed attempt to establish tortuous equivalences between the Irish working class and peasantry and the Italian proletariat in his revolutionary syndicalist phase at the start of his exile.
To all of this has to be added Joyce’s sympathetic curiosity about the Jews, developing into a sense of affinity, and a prescient sense of unease at the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism elsewhere in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and in Europe and Russia generally, beyond what seemed the comparatively tranquil enclave of pre-war Trieste. His identification with the Jews was affirmed in exile, especially post-1912, by the ‘Hebraic theme of non-return’ that runs through Ulysses5 and by the idea of the Jews as People of the Book, leading to Ira Nadel’s proposition that ‘the essential Judaism of Joyce is textual’.6
Joyce knew what he could make in his novel of the progress of an Irish Jewish protagonist across a day through the semi-resistant medium of the Irish capital. He knew also that the foregrounding of a Dublin Jew would irritate most conservative Catholic Irish nationalists, those who were in sympathy with Healy’s attacks on Parnell as an Irish Protestant, as well as xenophobic cultural nationalists. That might be thought within its limits as a perfectly judged—and rare—political deployment of literary modernism. But the annoyance the novel might provoke in those whom Joyce most despised politically in Ireland was a secondary consideration. His ambitions for his work were vaster in scope. He had read a great deal of contemporary writing as well as newspaper coverage on the subject of the Jews. He was writing not merely against overt anti-Semitism; he was also pitting his art against the dogmatic characterisation and objectification of Jews in contemporary ‘informed’ discourse, most typically in portentous meditations on the ‘Jewish question’, mainly in relation to Austro-Hungary and eastern Europe, in avowedly non-partisan or even philosemitic writing as well as in anti-Semitic texts. In this Joyce’s placid Bloom of Dublin was conceived as a radically revisionist figure on a European scale.
