James Joyce:
Notes (6) - Joyces People [1/1]
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Joyces People |
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[ For information on Alfred Byrne, Lord Mayor of Dublin and character
in The Cat and the Devil/The Cat of Beaugency, see attached.
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Irish Figures
College
friends: The chief of Joyces friends and associates at
University College who modelled for characters in his autobiographical
fiction were Vincent Cosgrave (Lynch in A Portrait);
John Francis (Jeff) Byrne [1879-1960], later a journalist
in America (Cranly in A Portrait and Ulysses);
George Clancy [d.1921], a naïve exponent of Irish-Ireland purismo
who was later assassinated by the Black and Tans while Mayor of
Limerick (Davin in A Portrait); Francis Skeffington
[d.1916], pacificist-feminist-vegetarian and sporter of knickerbockers,
who was likewise murdered while in custody by British soliders after
he quixotically attempted to prevent looting in the 1916 Rising
(McCann in A Portrait); and finally Constantine Curran [1983-1972],
later Registrar of Supreme Court and author on Georgian Dublin architecture
who produced the most complete memoir of their college days excepting
Stanislaus Joyces. Joyce narrowly lost elections for the posts
of Treasure and Auditor to Louis J. Walsh and Hugh Kennedy - both
of whom had distinguished careers after - in March 1899 and May
1900. John Rudolf Elwood [d.1931?] was a medical student who eventually
qualified as an apothecary (Temple in A Portrait). |
[Extract from Bruce Stewart, James Joyce, in the New Dictionary of National Biography (UK), with add. remarks from taken notes in Richard Ellmann, Selected Letters of James Joyce (Faber 1975), p.21.]
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See also ... |
Joyces remarks on the reported reaction
of Daniel Sheehan, also known to him at UCD, to Synges Playboy
of the Western World - under Sheehan, infra.
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Identity of E.C.
[ Emma Clery]: |
Stephens bien aimée in
A Portrait of the Artist has been identified with Mary Sheehy
by Richard Ellmann and others. It is probable that the character
is composite since some episodes concerning her in A Portrait
- notably the circumstances surrounding the Vilanelle
- are clearly associated with Mary Sheehy in Stanislauss account
of Joyces relations with that family in My Brothers
Keeper (1958, p.157.) |
Stanislaus pronounces Mary Sheehy the object
of Joyces attachment and notes that [s]he wants Hero
- meaning a man of heroic mould rather than the protagonist of
Joyces draft novel (already under way). She also perceives
that those who do not work are wrong for the
purposes of her and her kind. (See The Complete Dublin
Diary [1962], Dublin: Anna Livia 1994, p.23.)
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Peter Costello has suggested that the real
Emma was a contemporary student called M[ary] E[lizabeth] Cleary,
later Mrs. Meehan. When asked by her son, Prof. James Meehan of
UCD, she said she had known James Joyce [...] but had found
him to be a common, vulgar person and further admitted that
he had been keen on her. (See Peter Costello, James
Joyce: The Years of Growth 1882-1915, London: Kyle Cathie; NY:
Roberts Rinehart 1992, p.189.) |
See also remarks in Conor Cruise OBrien,
Ancestral Voices: Religion and Nationalism in Ireland
(Poolbeg 1994), who lists the sisters of the Sheehy family and
their spouses: Mary Sheehy m. Tom Kettle; Hanna Sheehy m. Francis
Skeffington; Kathleen Sheehy m. Francis Cruise OBrien; also
Cathleen OBrien m. Eimar ODuffy. OBrien argues
that his mother - Kathleen - is a much better fit for Miss Ivors
in The Dead than Hanna Sheehy, the identification
tentatively supplied by Terence Brown. He adds: It seems
possible that Joyce may have been conflating a memory of a conversation
with Kathleen about the Irish language with a memory of a conversation
with Hanna, about politics. Certainly Hanna would have been much
more likely to call a person a West Briton, before people.
[48]
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May Joyce (1) Joyces
mother is portrayed in Ulysses as Mary Dedalus (née Goulding)
and the date of her death set on [24] June 1903 - a little earlier than its actual occurrence
which fell on 13 August 1903. See Ithaca chapter:
What inchoate corollary statement was consequently suppressed by
the host [Bloom]? / A statement explanatory of his absence on the occasion of
the interment of Mrs Mary Dedalus, born Goulding, 26 June 1903, vigil
of the anniversary of the decease of Rudolph Bloom (born Virag).
(Ulysses, Bodley Head Edn., 1960, p.815.)
May Joyce (1) Joyces mother met his father
in the choir of Rathmines Church. (Information supplied by Anne-Marie DArcy
on Facebook - 174.07.2016.)
May Joyce (2) wrote to his son: My dear
Jim if you are disappointed in my letter and if as usual I fail to understand
what you wish to explain, believe me it is not from any want of a longing
desire to do so and speak the words you want but as you so often said
I am stupid and cannot grasp the great thoughts which are yours much
as I desire to do so. Do not wear your soul out with tears but be brave
and look hopefully to the future. (Letters, Vol. II, p.2;
quoted in Richard Ellmann, ed., Selected Letters, 1975, Intro.,
pp.xvii-iii, with the comment: Her reply to many such pleas is
a naked statement of [xvii] maternal love ... To his harshness, and
the defence of harshness by reference to his art ... May Joyce responded
with a faultless simplicity, pp.xvii-iii.)
Richard Ellmann [Introduction, Selected Letters 1975] begins by describing the moral note of Joyces extraordinary letter written to his mother written from Paris soon after his twenty-first birthday [2 Feb. 1903] as equivocal (p.xvi) and adds after quoting it in full: [.. ] This letter does not inspire an instant sympathy [...] Its young writer is not self-sacrificing, not virtuous, not sensible, although he waves his hand distantly at these attributes. At first we see only self-pity and heartlessness in this assertion of his own needs as paramount. He takes unfair advantage of the fact that his mothers love is large enough to accept even the abuse of it. Yet there are twinges of conscience, sudden moments of concern for her, and there is evidence that he depends upon her for more than money, as if he could not live outside the environment of family affection, badly as he acts within in. [...] Throughout the letter the emphasis is on his lenten fasts for his art. In other correspondence with her too, Joyce asks his mother to approve his artistic plans while he is fully aware that they are beyond her grasps, just as later he makes the same demands of his less educated wife. He writes that he will publish a book of songs in 1907, a comedy in 1913, and an aesthetic system five years after that. This must interest you! he insists, fearful that she may regard him as a starveling rather than as a starved hero. Her reply to many such pleas is a naked statement of [xvii] maternal love [Quotes as above: My dear Jim ... If you are disappointed in my letter]. To his harshness, and the defence of harshness by reference to his art ... May Joyce responded with a faultless simplicity. (Sel. Letters, Faber 1975, pp.xvii-iii.)
Richard Ellmann [James Joyce, rev. edn. 1983, p.136]: His father became increasingly difficult to handle as his drinking caught up with the pace of May Joyces decay. One hopeless night he reeled home and in his wife's room blurted out I'm finished. I can't do any more. If you can't get well, die. Die and be damned to you! Stanislaus screamed at him, You swine! and went for him murderously, but stopped when he say his mother struggling frantically to get out of bed and intercept him. James led his father out and langed to lock him in another room. [n.24] Shortly after, tragedy yielded to absurdity. John Joyce was seen disappearing around the corner, having connived to escape out a second-floor window. [n.25]
May Joyce died on August 13, 1903, at the early age of forty-four. [n.26] In her last hours she lay in a coma, and the family knelt about her bed, praying and lamenting. Her brother John Murray, observing that neither Stanislaus nor James was kneeling, peremptorily ordered them to do so. Neither obeyed. [Interview with Mrs Monagham [sic], 1953; MBK.] Mrs Joyce's body was taken to Glasnevin to be buried, and Joyce Joyce wept inconsolably for his wife and himself. I'll soon be stretched beside her, he said. Let Him take me whenever he likes. [Ulysses; confirmed by daughters to Ellmann] His feelings were genuine enough, and when Stanislaus, goaded to fury by what he regarded as his father's hypocritical whinings, denounced him for all his misdeeds, John Joyce listened quietly and merely said, You don't understand, boy. James and Margaret got up at midnight to see their mother's ghost, and Margaret thought she saw her in the brown habit in which she was buried. [MBK] The whole family was dismayed and sad, but especially Mabel, the youngest, not yet ten years old. James sat beside her on the stairs, his arm around her saying, You must not cry like that because there is no reason to cry. Mother is in heaven. She is far happier now than she has ever been on earth, but if she sees you crying it will spoil her happiness. You must remember that when you feel like crying. You can pray for her if you wish, Mother would like that. But don't cry any more. [Told to Rev. Godfrey Ainsworth in an interview with Mabel and communicated to Ellmann by letter in 1980 - i.e., added in rev. edn.]
A few days later he found a packet of love letters from his father to his mother, and read them in the garden. Well? asked Stanislaus. Nothing, James replied. He had changed from son to literary critic. Stanisalus, incapable of such rapid transformations, burnt them unread. [Stanislaus, Diary; quoted in Intro. to MBK] Joyce was not demonstrative, but he remembered his vigils with Margaret and wrote in Ulysses: Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown graveclothes ...; he spoke also of Her secrets: old feather fans, tasseled [sic] dancecards, powdered with musk, a gaud of amber beads in her locked drawer, and he summed up his feelings in the poems Tilly which he did not publish until 1927. [MBK - My Brothers Keeper. Above cites dual pag. for older and newer eds.]
May Joyce (3) - as her final illness advanced, her increasingly alcoholic husband shouted If you cant get well [...] die and be damned to you! - only to be screamed at by Stanislaus, You swine! before being led off to another room by James. (See Stanislaus Joyce, My Brothers Keeper, London: Faber & Faber 1958, p.230 - and note that Ellmann erroneously places this quotation on p.229 (James Joyce, 1965 Edn, p.141). Ellmann follows it with a quotation from an interview with Eva Joyce conducted by Niall Sheridan in 1949 during which she told that Mr Joyce completed the episode by making an escape out a second floor window. (Ellmann, op. cit., p.141.)
May Joyce (4) - acc. Stanislaus Joyce: My mother had become for my brother the type of the woman who fears and, with weak insistence and disapproval, tries to hinder the adventures of the spirit. Above all, she bejcame for him the Irishwoman, the accomplice of the Irish Catholic Church, which he called the scullery-maid of Christendom, the accomplice, that is to say, olf a hybrid form of religion produced by the most unenlightened features of Catholicism [...] the accomplice, in fine, of the vigilant and ruthless enemy of free thought and the joy of living.’ (My Brother’s Keeper, London: Faber & Faber 1959, p.234.) [In the ellipsis, Stanislaus suggets that the Catholic Church in Ireland was trying to match the Puritanism of the English so as not to appear immoral.]
May Joyce (5) - remarks by Marvin Magalaner: As a child Joyce had the standard, normal Catholic upbringing of an Irish youngster of the 1880s. His good-tempered, pious mother personifies the strengths and weaknesses of Irish Catholicism during that period: her skill in music brought remarkable beauty to the middle-class suburban hearth; her deep religious sense, not so much a conviction as an intuition, gave her the emotional strength to compensate for physical weakness; her routine adherence to the demanding ritual calendar supplied a center of meaningful activity about which family life and religious hope might revolve. If she worried out loud, it was not about creditors or bedbugs-matters of immediate concern to Stephen Dedalus - but about the irreverence or profanity of her brood, the external signs of troubled spirits. From such maternal singleness of mind, one might have expected priests and nuns to come. One of Joyces sisters did enter a religious order. And the stress on respectability through religious conformity brought Joyce very close to a Jesuit novitiate. (‘The Problem of Biography’, in Magalaner & Richard M. Kain, James Joyce: The Man, The Works, The Reputation [1956] (London: John Calder 1957), pp.15-43; pp.38-39.)
May Joyce (6): Joyces mother was cultivated
enough to called Oliver St. John Gogarty Sir Peter Teazle
after the medical character in a play of Sheridan on account of his
dapper appearance. (See Ellmann, James Joyce, 1965 Edn., p.141.)
Ellmann on Joyce & motherhood (7): Joyce seems to have thought with equal affection of the roles of mother and child. He said once to Stanislaus about the bond between the two, There are only two forms of love in the world, the love of a mother for a child and the love of a man for lies. In later life, as Maria Jolas remarked, Joyce talked about fatherhood as if it were motherhood. he seemed to have longed to establish in himself all aspects of the bond of mother and child. He was attracted, particularly, by the image of himself as a weak child cherished by a strong woman, which seems closely connected wit the images of himself as victim, whether as a deer pursued by hunters, as a passive man surrounded by burly extroverts, as a Parnell or a Jesus among traitors. His favourite characters are those who in one way or another retreat before masculinity, yet are loved regardless by motherly women. (James Joyce, 1965 Edn. p.303; see longer quotations from the biography - in RICORSO > Criticism > Major Writers - infra.)
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Josephine Murray [Aunt Josephine]
was the recipient of letters from Joyce asking for details of Dublin,
e.g., please send me a bundle of other novelettes and any penny
hymnbook you can find (5 Jan. 1920; Letters, I, p.135); or,
[would it be] possible for an ordinary person to climb over the
area railings of No. 7 Eccles street (2 Nov. 1921; Letters,
I, p.175; both the foregoing quoted in Stephen Heath, Ambiviolences:
Notes for reading Joyce, in Attridge & Ferrer, eds., Post-structuralist
Joyce, Cambridge UP 1984, p.64, n.36.) Note: Heath remarks that these
requests and their corresponding outcomes in the text do not identify
Ulysses as a prime example of realist writing. (Idem.)
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Nora Joyce - 1: b.
21 March 1884 d.10 April 1951; dg. of Thomas Barnacle, a baker, and Annie
Barnacle, both of Galway; left Galway early 1904 following family row;
worked as chambermaid at Finns Hotel, 1 & 2 Leinster St.; encountered
by Joyce in the street in June and agreed to meet some days later on 14
June; failed to show and rearranged for 16 June when they first walked
out together - the date being commemorated in the setting of Ulysses.
(See Selected Letters, ed. Richard Ellmann, 1975, p.21, n.7.)
Nora Joyce - 2: Pretty little story, eh?
- Joyce recounts details of her Galway childhood including her relations
with Michael Bodkin, a protestant young man called Mulvey, a young priest,
and an uncle who beats her with a stick. (Letter of 3 Dec. 1904; Selected
Letters, 1975, p.45).
Nora Joyce - 3: Take me!: Joyce wrote to her,
O take me into your soul of souls and then I will become indeed
the poet of my race. (7 Sept. 1909; Selected Letters, p.169).
Also: Take me into the dark sanctuary of your womb. Shelter me,
dear, from harm! (24 Dec. 1909; SL, p.195). Cf. Take
me, save me, soothe me, O spare me! ( Paris, 1924; Pomes Penyeach
[1927], London: Faber 1966, p.14; Poems and Shorter Writings,
1991, p.63.)
Nora Joyce - 4: Joyce wrote to Nora on 19 Nov.
1909: I have loved in her the image of the beauty of the world,
the mystery and beauty of life itself, the beauty and doom of the race
of whom I am a child, the images of spiritual purity and pity which
I believed in as a boy. / Her soul! Her name! Her eyes. They seem to
me like strange beautiful blue wild-flowers growing in some tangled,
rain-drenched hedge. and I have felt her soul tremble beside mine, and
have spoken her name softly to the night, and have wept to see the beauty
of the world passing like a dream behind her eyes. (Selected
Letters, ed. Richard Ellmann, 1975, p.179.)
Nora Joyce - 5: Nora prevented Miss Weaver from
donating the MS of Finnegans Wake to the National Library of
Ireland since the Irish government had refused to repatriate his body.
(See Stan Gebler Davies, James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist,
1975.)
Nora Joyce - 6: Did she or didnt she?:
Morris Beja appears to accept that Vincent Cosgrave seduced Nora and
that Cosgrave made the claim in talking to Joyce in 1909 out of annoyance
at appearing as Lynch in Stephen Hero. (See Ian Pindar, review of Beja, James Joyce: A Literary Life, Macmillan 1992, in
Times Literary Supplement, 18 Dec. 1992 [Note: Pindar went on to write A Life of James Joyce, with an intro. by Terry Eagleton, London: Haus Publ. 2004.]
Nora Joyce (namesake) was the mother of Adolph Menjou, an American actor known for his moustache and his appearances in numerous films including Chaplins A Woman of Paris (1927) and Kubriks Paths of Glory (1958). Nora [née Joyce] (1869–1953) was born in Galway. She married Albert Menjou (1858–1917) and had two sons with him, Adolph (1890-1963) and Henry Arthur (1891–1956), Adolph was raised Catholic, attended the Culver Military Academy, and graduated from Cornell University with a degree in engineering. Attracted to the vaudeville stage, he made his movie debut in 1916 in The Blue Envelope Mystery. He served as a captain in the United States Army Ambulance Service during World War I and later participated enthusiastically in the House Committee on Un-American Activities, 1947 and some years following. (See Wikpedia - online; accessed 24.11.2021.)
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Lucia Joyce (1): Lucia wrote to her
father, If I should ever go away, it would be to a country which
belongs in a way to you, isnt it, father? (Quoted in Kevin
Kiely, review of works on Joyce, in Books Ireland, Oct. 1998, p.262.)
[Note: No concerted attempt is made here to list the growing number of studies
of Lucia - including biographies and novels.]
Lucia Joyce (2): See Caitlín Murphy, A
is for Everything (Project Cube, Aug. 2002), is an 80-minute exploration
of the minds of Lucia, schizophrenic daughter of James Joyce, and Suzanne,
long-time partner and eventual wife of Samuel Beckett, who talk through
their experiences of life in the shadows of genius. (The Irish Times,
Wed, 31 July 2002.)
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Stephen Joyce: Stephen James
Joyce, son of Giorgio Joyce with Helen Kastor Fleischmann, and the grandson
of James Joyce, was born on 15 Feb. 1932 and was the recipent of the letter
upon which The Cat and the Devil (1964) is based. He attended school
in Andover, Hants. - Harcourt Prep School? - and graduated from Harvard
and worked with UNESCO, chiefly in Africa, until 1991. He assumed control
of the James Joyce Estate in the early 1990s, since which time he has
been a thorn in the side of students and writers on Joyce in his determination
to protect the secrecy of the family and particularly the sexual relationship
of his grandparents and the management of Lucias insanity. Stephen
Joyces resistance to the use of texts controlled by the Joyce estate
which he governs gave rise to a series of attacks in journalism and scholarship
exemplified by an article by D. T. Max under the title The Injustice
Collector: Is James Joyces grandson suppressing scholarship?,
in The New Yorker (19 June 2006) - in which the following is alleged:
at a Bloomsday symposium in Venice, Stephen announced that he had
destroyed all the letters that his aunt Lucia had written to him and his
wife. He added that he had done the same with postcards and a telegram
sent to Lucia by Samuel Beckett, with whom she had pursued a relationship
in the late nineteen-twenties. / I have not destroyed any papers
or letters in my grandfathers hand, yet, Stephen wrote at
the time. But in the early nineties he persuaded the National Library
of Ireland to give him some Joyce family correspondence that was scheduled
to be unsealed. Scholars worry that these documents, too, have been destroyed.
Stephen inherited half of the estate at the death of
Lucia in 1982; at the death of Giorgio in 1993, half of the remainder
devolved on him, the other half going to Hans Jahnke and his sister
Evelyn, being the children of Giorgios second wife Asta. Following
the case brought against Danis Rose arising from edition of Ulysses
issued by Lilliput, Jahnke parted with his share to Stephen to cover
legal costs incurred. Other matters described include Stephen Joyces
measures to preclude publication of Joycean text by Michael Groden (viz., a database
on internet), Carol Loeb Shloss (in her life of Lucia), Danis Rose,
and others. The article ante-dates the resolution of the Shloss case.
D. T Max writes [in The New Yorker, 19 June 2006): |
Stephen Joyce was born in February, 1932, during
a chaotic month for his grandfather. Ulysses, published
in France in 1922, had finally found an American publisher who
would challenge its purported obscenity in court. Fragments of Finnegans Wake were appearing in print, and friends
and patrons - even the usually docile Harriet Weaver - were expressing
grave doubts about the books merits. And Giorgio had just
taken Lucia to a psychiatric clinic, following an outburst on
Joyces birthday.
The birth of Stephen came soon after the death
of Joyces father, whom Joyce had romanticized as the source
of his talent. Joyce commemorated these events in the poem Ecce
Puer, which begins, Of the dark past / A boy is born;
/ With joy and grief / My heart is torn. Stephen - German
Jewish on his mothers side, Irish on his fathers -
was a beautiful baby. His mother, Helen, in an unpublished memoir
that is housed in the archives of the University of Tulsa, describes
him as a handsome lively, wavy haired blonde, with bright
blue eyes not as dark as his fathers and rosy cheeks and a bright
smile (my smile, I think). Joyce put the boy on his lap
and told him stories. In 1936, he wrote Stephen a childrens
story, The Cat and the Devil. Helen, in her memoir,
captures their growing rapport: As Stevie grew older I loved
to watch him crawling onto his grandfathers knee and asking
him grave little questions. His serious childish face was charming
to see as he listened to the slow and painstaking answers that
[his grandfather] gave him in his slow careful Dublin drawl. [Joyce]
was infinitely patient with him and was always willing to stop
and talk to him or to answer as he grew older his incessant whys.
The answers needless to say were always wonderful ones.
The marriage of Stephens parents rapidly
dissolved. Giorgio, deciding that he and Helen were incompatible,
largely abandoned the family, and when Stephen was six, Helen,
suffering from depression, checked herself into a Swiss clinic.
Stephen spent more and more time with his grandparents. He and
Joyce took regular walks along the Zürichsee. Joyce bought
him a box of toy soldiers. Helen recalls in her memoir, I
do not think that Stephen will ever forget his famous grandfather
and their relationship was a deep and lovely one. Even now,
when Stephen has to make important decisions about the estate,
he sometimes goes to Joyces grave to consult with him.
After the Second World War, Helens family
sent Stephen to Andover, where, in 1948, he wrote an essay about
his grandfather, titled The Man Whom I Loved and Respected
Most in This World. Yet being related to a genius was also
a burden. When Stephen was at Andover, this magazine wrote about
him in The Talk of the Town [New Yorker column]. After Stephen recalled of Joyce,
He used to drop in before breakfast to talk to me about
Greek mythology, he was asked if he remembered who Daedalus
was. He responded, Wasnt he a Greek in a big battle
with somebody? Some members of Joyces retinue found
Stephen a disappointment. In 1955, Maria Jolas, a friend of the
Joyces, wrote a letter to Harriet Weaver, saying that Stephen
had been invited to leave Harvard because he wouldnt
study. Jolas added, I find his idle, intellectually
mediocre existence deplorable, and suggested that Stephen
had an unjustified arrogance.
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See copy of full article in Library >
Criticism > Reviews - via index
or as attached.
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Further: Max discusses Richard Ellmanns
circumvention of Joyces and the estates desire to keep the
so-called black letters of 1909 to Nora private (published
unexpurgated in the Selected Letters, 1979) and gives an account
of Joyces close relationship with Stephen Joyce as a child: The
birth of Stephen came soon after the death of Joyces father, whom
Joyce had romanticized as the source of his talent. Joyce commemorated
these events in the poem Ecce Puer, which begins, Of
the dark past / A boy is born; / With joy and grief / My heart is torn.
Stephen - German Jewish on his mothers side, Irish on his fathers
- was a beautiful baby. His mother, Helen, in an unpublished memoir
that is housed in the archives of the University of Tulsa, describes
him as "a handsome lively, wavy haired blonde, with bright blue eyes
not as dark as his fathers and rosy cheeks and a bright smile (my smile,
I think). Joyce put the boy on his lap and told him stories. In
1936, he wrote Stephen a childrens story, The Cat and the Devil.
Helen, in her memoir, captures their growing rapport: As Stevie
grew older I loved to watch him crawling onto his grandfathers
knee and asking him grave little questions. His serious childish face
was charming to see as he listened to the slow and painstaking answers
that [his grandfather] gave him in his slow careful Dublin drawl. [Joyce]
was infinitely patient with him and was always willing to stop and talk
to him or to answer as he grew older his incessant whys.
The answers needless to say were always wonderful ones.
Further [after the breakdown of his parents
marriage]: He [Stephen] and Joyce took regular walks along the
Zürichsee. Joyce bought him a box of toy soldiers. Helen recalls
in her memoir, "I do not think that Stephen will ever forget his famous
grandfather and their relationship was a deep and lovely one." Even
now, when Stephen has to make important decisions about the estate,
he sometimes goes to Joyces grave to consult with him.
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Eileen Joyce [Schaurek] - Anne Enright gives an account of the suicide of her husband Frantisek and Joyce's reaction to it - including his inability to tell her it had happened when he passed through his home in Paris on her way back from Dublin to Trieste - with details about her subsequent life in Dublin when she worked as a translation clerk in the Irish Sweepstake and had a house in Bray and a flat in Dublin - at the former of which she hosted Lucia and suffered damage to the floor when the latter lit a fire on it. Eileens daughter Bozena is he source of much of this information:
Eileens husband, Frantisek Schaurek, killed himself in November 1926, while Eileen was in Dublin visiting her sick father. Bozena, who was nine at the time, recalled a night of great storm, during which Schaurek looked out the window at the waves while the phone kept ringing. Before he left for work on Monday, he told her of a dream in which a black horse bit him. The next time she saw her father, he was dead. Her uncle Stanislaus told the children he had been in a car accident, but she spotted a newspaper article that gave the cause as suicide.
Bozena remembered a childhood lived in some style, with servants and an apartment filled with fine furnishings. On the day of her fathers funeral, she wrote, all the antique shops of Trieste closed in order to honour their ardent client. She also said that her father had been ruined by the stock market crash - a theory not supported by the dates. Other sources say Schaurek was a bank cashier who had been caught embezzling. His was a terrible death that scattered the facts even as it made them, and some of those facts, as remembered by his daughter, were quite grand.
James had been best man at Eileens wedding and was fond of his sister, who was, of all his siblings, the most like him in being extravagant, superstitious and able to sing. Stanislaus wrote to James in Paris to tell him the terrible news. Eileen was on her way from Dublin to Trieste, and stopped to visit James along the way but, when she arrived, he could not bring himself to tell her what had happened. He left that task to Stanislaus - Eileens least favourite brother - who met her on the station platform in Trieste, taking off his black armband and the black band on his hat so as not to alarm her as she got off the train. By this time, her husband had been buried a week.
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—Enright, Priests in the Family, Diary in London Review of Books, 18 Nov. 2021 - as attached.) |
Mr Alfred Hunter (1): Ellmann
calls him a dark complexioned Dublin Jew ... who was rumoured to
be a cuckold, and relates that Joyce asked Stanislaus (Letter of
3 Dec. 1906) and, later, Aunt Josephine [Murray] to send all the details
they could remember about him [James Joyce, 1965 Edn., pp.238,
385]. Joyce had met Hunter twice. Ellmann also gives an account in a footnote
of one Morris Harris who was the object of a divorce petition by his wife
Kathleen Hynes Harris, he being a sacerdotal [Jew] aged 85 and she a younger
woman who accused him of having an affair with his housekeeper (aetat.
80), indecency in the dining room, relations with little girls, and putting
excrement on her nightgown. (Ibid., pp.238-39, n.).
See Terence Killeen, Myth and Monuments:
The Case of Alfred H. Hunter, in Dublin James Joyce
Journal, No. 1 (2008), 47-53; p.1 - available at MUSE online;
accessed 29.05.1014.
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Richard Ellmann relates that Hunter was a
dark-complexioned Dublin Jew [...] who was rumoured to be a cuckold
in the first edition of James Joyce 1959) while, in the second edition
(1984), he wrote that Hunter was rumoured to be Jewish and
to have an unfaithful wife and speaks with less assurance
of of Hunter as putatively Jewish Dubliner.
In his Afterword to the first paperback edition
of Ulysses (1968), Ellmann gives an account of a fracas in
June 1904 after which Joyce was dusted off and taken home
by a man named Alfred Hunter - an event more circumspectly
described in the second edition his his biography: If Dublin
report can be trusted [...] Joyce was said to have been dusted off
and taken home by a man named Alfred H. Hunter, attended by
a footnote naming the source: W.P. DArcy, a friend of
Joyces father, heard the story from John Joyce; letter to
me from DArcy. Other confirmation is lacking. Ellmann
was assailed for these confusions by Hugh Kenner in a review of
the revised edition of James Joyce as The Impertinence
of Being Definitive. (TLS, 1982); rep. in Mazes:
Essays, Georgia UP 1989, pp.101-12).
Returning to the subject in A Colder Eye Kenner
took Ellmann to task for the inconsistency of his accounts of Hunter
- and later in Mazes: Essays (1986) where he gives an account
of his own encounter with W. P. DArcy whom he met in Dublin
in November 1956. According to Kenner, DArcy told him that
the original of Blazes Boylan was a man named Creech and showed
him a photograph of that man without any further proof of his identity.
In a letter of 2 January 1957 to Adaline Glasheen, however, Kenner
gives Bleech as the name of the original of Boylan, rendering his
own testimony suspect. |
[ top ]
Mr Hunter (2): Ellmann considers that in making
Bloom an advertising canvasser Joyce had someone other than Hunter in
mind, viz., the original of C. P. MCoy in Grace, being
Charles Chance, whose wife sang soprano in concerts under the name of
Madame Marie Tallon. MCoy is identified as a clerk on the Midland
Railway, an ad. canvasser for The Irish Times and the Freemans
Journal, a town traveller for a coal firm, a private enquiry agent
[detective], a clerk in the sub-sherriffs office, and secretary
to the City Coroner. (James Joyce, [1965] pp.385-86.) Ellmann
further cites a Bloom who worked as a dentist in Clare St. in 1903-04
and converted to Catholicism to marry; also his son Joseph, a dentist,
renowned as a wit, and finally another Bloom who was tried for the murder
of a photographers model in Wexford in what was planned as a double
suicide, inscribing the word Love (written Loive) in his own
blood on the wall. (JJ, 386.) In Ulysses he deliberately gives
MCoy a wife who is in competition with Marion [Molly] Bloom. Another
model for Molly was Mrs. Nicolas Santos, wife of a fruitshop owner of
that name in Trieste and later in Zurich [sic]; it was an open secret
in the Joyce family that Senora Santos was a model for Molly. But
the seductiveness of Molly came, of course, from Signorina [Amelia]
Popper. (JJ, [1959,] 387.)
Note: Blooms height (5 9)
and weight (11 stone 4lb.) are those of J. F. Byrne as shown on the
scale which he and Joyce used to measure themselves during the evening
walk on 8 Sept. 1909 when Joyce went round to Byrnes home at
7 Eccles St. to thank him again for his support when Cosgrave tricked
him into believing that he, Cosgrave, had had an affair with Nora.
On returning home at 3 a.m. after the walk, Byrne found that he didnt
have his door-key and let himself into the house by lowering himself
to the area and entering through the side-door (i.e., the kitchen
door beneath the steps] (See Richard Ellmann, James Joyce,
1984 Edn., p.290.)
Note further that the episode in A Portrait
of the Artist in which Stephen talks with Fr Darlington, the Dean
of Studies (now chiefly identified with the word tundish),
actually happened to J. F. Byrne who related it to Joyce and was displeased
to find his innocuous account of the priest lighting a fire had been
converted into a reflection on Stephens strained relations with
Church. (See Ellmann, op. cit., p.298, citing The Silent Years.)
Mr Hunter (3): Peter Costello corrects Ellmann
in asserting that Joyce and his father believed Hunter to be Jewish
on account of his complexion, though in fact he was a Presbyterian from
Belfast whose father had a shoe shop in Dublin, and who became a nominal
Catholic on marrying a Catholic wife, she turning out to be an alcoholic
who sold all the furniture for drink on numerous occasions. In 1904
he resided at 28 Ballybough Rd. and latterly 23 Gt. Charles St., where
he died, 12 Sept. 1926 [aetat. 60], in a tumbling Dublin tenement,
quite ignorant in his poverty of the character he had inspired.
(The Years of Growth, London: Kyle Cathie 1992, p.19.) Costello
relates that it was Hunter who picked Joyce up when he got involved
in a fracas in the Kips on a night between 16th and 19th September 1904
and took him home either to his house on Ballybough Rd. or to his uncle
Williams in North Strand where he was staying (ibid., pp.230-31.)
Costello further identifies one Joseph Bloom, the brother of the dentist
in Clark St. [sic for Clare St.] and son of Mark Bloom; Joseph was living
at 38 Lombard St. between 1891 and 1906 - one of the former addresses
that Joyce gave to Leopold gives Bloom. (p.68.) Costello adds that Joyce
enquired of A. J. [Con] Leventhal if the musical Blooms of Lombard street
were still there and learnt that they were not (idem).
Mr Hunter (4): Ellmann
does not cite Hunter as the rescuer of Joyce in Nighttown when he was
assaulted by two soldiers while Cosgrave stood by in September 1904.
Peter Costello does however (The Years of Growth, pp.230-31).
Ellmann, on the other hand, mentions the occasion when Joyce was mugged
in Rome on a drunken spree immediately before departure from Rome to
Trieste. According to Ellmann, this event provided the clue Joyce needed
for the similar episode in Ulysses when Bloom rescues Stephen.
Ellmann writes: In the resulting hubbub he would have been arrested,
as when he first arrived in Trieste in 1904, if some people in the crowd
had not recognised him and taken him home, a good deed which he reproduced
at the end of the Circe episode in Ulysses. (JJ, 1965,
p.251). On the evidence it would seem likely that Costellos insistence
that Hunter was in Night-town is mistaken. [Viz., proximity of Nighttown
(Monto) to Ballybough Rd., in N. Dublin.
Alfred Hunter (5): the
belief that Joyce based Bloom (in Ulysses) on one Alfred Hunter,
a commercial traveller who rescued him [Joyce] after a fracas
in Nighttown and brought him home to recuperate in the small hours
which is promulgated in Ellmanns life (James Joyce, 1957)
derived from information supplied to the biographer by William DArcy
of Dublin in the 1950s. This information - the reliability of which
Ellmann tended to doubt - has been subjected to close interrogation
by Terence Killeen in Marion Hunter Revisited (Dublin
James Joyce Journal, 3, 2011; and see Killeens review of Gordon
Bowker, Joyce: A Biography, in The Irish Times, 28 May
2011, Weekend, p.12).
Note: Joyce did write to Stanislaus specifically
seeking information about Alfred Hunter in a letter of 3 Dec. 1906.
Hunter has been identified by Peter Costello in James Joyce: The
Years of Growth 1882-1915 (1992) as a Presbyterian and a commercial
traveller from Belfast who turned Catholic to marry a Dublin woman
who later cuckolded him. Hunter, who had an address at 28 Ballybough
Rd. in 1904, apparently died in poor circumstances at 23 Gt. Charles
St. on 12 Sept. 1926 [aetat. 60].
Further reading: A. Nicholas Fargnoli &
Michael Patrick Gillespie, James Joyce A to Z: An Enclyclopaedic
Guide to his Life and Work (London: Bloomsbury 1995); Terence
Killeen, The Case of Alfred H. Hunter, in Dublin James
Joyce Journal, I (Dublin 2008), pp.47-53.
Alfred Hunter (6) - see
Marilyn Reizbaum, James Joyces Judaic Other (Stanford UP
2009): Ellmann, among others, documented Jewish prototypes of
Bloom as Alfred H. Hunter of Dublin, Italo Sveno (Ettore Schmitz) and
Teodore Mayer [ed. of Piccolo della Sera] of Trieste, and Ottocaro
Weiss of Zurich. Of these, Hunter was in fact not a Jew, although Joyce
might have thought him Jewish because of his physical type (as he similarly
assumed of Martha Fleischmann), and perhaps, as Michael Seidel has said
of Joyces use of certain sources, because for Hunter to be Jewish
corroborated the wishmarks of his imagination (Epic
Geography, 19.) [...] There are two significant traits that Hunter
contributed to Blooms character: first, it was thought that Hunter
was a cuckhold, and second, on June 22 1904, according to Ellmann, Hunter
rescued Joyce from a fracas involving a girlfriend of another man, took
him to his house, and tended to his [23] wounds. latter incident would
have provided for the scene at the beginning of Eumaeus where Bloom
does the same for Stephen.) The other Dublin source for Blooms
surname, at least, was the family of Blooms who were dentists and with
whom Joyce was familiar. (pp.22-23.) [See further under Commentary,
supra.]
[ top ]
Fr. John Conmee - Conmee,
Rev John SJ (1487-1910), rector of Clongowes, 1885-91; Prefect of Studies
at Belvedere, 1891-92; prefect of Studies at UCD, 1893-95; superior of
St. Francis Xavier Church, 1897-1905; provincial, 1905-09; rector of Milltown,
1909-10. Joyce described Conmee to Herbert Gorman as a very decent
sort of chap. (See Fargnoli & Gillespie, James Joyce A to
Z: An Enclyclopaedic Guide to his Life and Work, Bloomsbury 1995,
p.43.
Note: His chance meeting with John Stanislaus
Joyce resulted in James and Stanislaus [Jnr.] entering Belvedere as
free students. Fr. Conmee also arranged that the Joyce boys would have
breakfast before class in the college. The first allusion to him in
Ulysses is in Lotus Eaters where Bloom thinks, Conmee:
Martin Cunningham knows him: distinguished looking. Sorry I didnt
work him about getting Molly into the choir" (U5.331. His first appearance
is in the Wandering Rocks episode where his pious thoughts
about Providence set at Charleville Mall are conveyed by means of a
stylised interior monologue and and later on, he reflects on the Churchs
foreign missions when he sees a black man on a tram. Fr. Conmee has
read in the days newspapers about the tragic steamboat accident
in New York which he views from a theological perspective as an occasion
for a perfect act of contrition. He also sees Lenehan emerging
from the shrubbery with a young woman and seems free of any suspicions.
He is the object of Martin Cunninghams attempts to get Patrick
Dignam, the son of the deceased (and uninsured) character whose funeral
is taking place on Bloomsday, into the Institute for Destitute Children
in Fairview. In the Oxen of the Sun episode, the medical
student Francis reminds Stephen Dedalus of years before when they
had been at school together in Conmees time (U., 14.1110-11.).
In the Circe episode, he pops out of the piano to berate
Stephen Dedalus. [These notes assembled from various websites;
24.05.2014.]
Further: Joyce wrote the Wandering
Rocks with a map of Dublin before him on which were traced in
red ink the paths of the Earl of Dudley and Father Conmee. He calculated
to a minute the time necessary for his characters to cover a given distance
of the city (Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses,
1934, &c.).
[ top ]
Charles Ghezzi:
The Italian priest who taught Joyce Italian at the Royal University
was Fr. Charles Ghezzi, SJ. Joyce bestowed the name of Dr. Artifoni on
him Stephen Hero [Cape Edn., pp.174-75] - a name that properly
belonged to Almidano Artifoni, the owner of the Berlitz School for whom
Joyce worked in Pola and Trieste. The Italian Jesuit is also to be met
with under the name of Artifoni in Ulysses - notably in Wandering
Rocks [U293] but also, with a single line, in Circe
[U635]. In A Portrait of the Artist, Ghezzi appears under his own
name in a shorter passage than the draft-novel - being now confined to
an entry in Stephens diary at the close [AP253].
Fr. Ghezzi in Stephen Hero: [Stephen]
chose Italian as his optional subject, partly from a desire to read
Dante seriously, and partly to escape the cruch of french and German
lectures. No-one else in the college studied Italian and every second
morning he came to the college at ten oclock and went up to
Father Artifonis bedroom. Father Artifoni was an intelligent
little moro, who came from Bergamo, a town in Lombardy. [...]
The Italian lessons often extended beyond the hour and much less grammar
and literature was discussed than philosophy. The teacher probably
knew the doubtful reputation of his pupil but for this very reason
he adopted a language of ingenious piety, not that he was himself
Jesuit enough to lack ingenuousness but that he was Italian enough
to enjoy a game of belief and unbelief. He [174] reproved his pupil
once for an admiring allusion to the author of The Triumphant Beast.
—You know, he said, the writer, Bruno, was a terrible heretic.
—Yes, said Stephen, and he was terribly burned.
But the teacher was a poor inquisitor. [...] He was unlike many of
the citizens of the third Italy in his want of affection for the English
and he was inclined to be lenient towards the audacities of his pupil,
which, he supposed, must have been the outcome of too fervid Irishism.
He was unable to associate audacity of thought with any temper but
that of an irredentist. (Stephen Hero, Jonathan Cape
Edn., p.174-75.)
[Note: A moro (adj.) denotes a dark-haired
man, with overtones of Moorish appearance. See Oxford Paravia
Italian Dictionary.]
Fr. Ghezzi in A Portrait - diary entry
for 24 March: Other wrangle with little roundhead rogueseye
Ghezzi. This time about Bruno the Nolan. Began in Italian and ended
in pidgin English. He said Bruno was a terrible heretic. I said he
was terribly burned. He agreed to this with some sorrow. Then gave
me a recipe for what he calls risotto alla bergamasca [...].
(Corr. Edn., Jonathan Cape 1968, p.253.)
[See Don Gifford, Ulysses Annotated [2nd Edn.],
California UP 1989, p.266; and see further under Notes > Giordano
Bruno, supra.]
[ top ]
John Henry Alleyn, the Cork
wine merchant who became a major share-holder in the Chapelizod Distillery
which John Stanislaus Joyce engaged in, retired to Cork after the debacle
in 1878 and later to Menton [Mentona], where he died and is buried. (See
Peter Costello, James Joyce: The Years of Growth, 1992, p.46.)
Henry Blackwood Price,
an Ulsterman whom Joyce met in Trieste, was the model for Mr. Deasy
in Ulysses. Price pestered Joyce by letter constantly encouraging
him to write to the papers about a cure for foot and mouth, known to
him, which was then plaguing Ireland, leading to the destruction of
2000 cattle. Joyce remarked that Price should be looking for a cure
for his wifes foot and mouth disease, but nevertheless surprised
himself by writing a sub-editorial on the disease for The Freemans
Journal. (See Maud Ellmann, Ulysses: Changing into an
Animal, in Field Day Review, 2, 2006, p.p.81, citing Ellmann,
James Joyce, p.326; Letters, Vol. 2, 300, and Joyce, Politics
and Cattle Disease, 1913; in The Critical Writings, 1959,
pp.238-41.)
[ top ]
James Fitzharris (Skin-the-Goat):
b, 4 Oct. 1843, Ballybeg [var. Clonee], Co. Wexford; dismissed from his
employment on the Sinnott estate for wrecking a fox hunt led by Lord Courtown;
moved to Dublin; labourer and cab-driver; lived on Denzille St. opp. James
Carey; nicknamed for killing a goat with a claspknife when he saw it eating
straw from a horses collar (var. skinned it and sold skin to pay
debts); sworn in to Irish National Invincibles by Carey, Dec. 1881; involved
in attempts on life of W. E. Forster [Irish Sec. of State]; drove Carey
and two others to Phoenix Park, 6 May 1882; afterwards carried three away
from scene of the assassination of Cavendish and Burke; arrested at Lime
St. home in Feb. 1883, on informers information; found not guilty
of murder; abused Carey and Kavanagh, both turned Queens witnesses
(approvers) in court; retried and found guilt of accesory
to murder, 15 May 1883; servitude for life; Maud Gonne laid wreathe on
his wifes grave in Glasnevin when the latter died in 1898; released
Aug 1899; travelled to America, but deported; attempted to launch stage
career in Liverpool, but returned to Dublin; well-known Dublin character;
d. 7 Sept. 1910, S. Dublin Union Infirmary; bur. with his wife; a plaque
commemorates him and the Invincibles. (See RIA Dictionary of Irish
Biography, 2009; entry by James Quinn and Liam OLeary, rep.
in The Irish Times, 6 Feb. 2010.) For a note on Forster, see under
Charles Gavan Duffy, supra.
See also Vivien Igoe, Blazes Boylan, Skin-the-Goat
and Frederick Sweny: the real people of Ulysses, in The
Irish Times (16 June 2016): James FitzHarris, known as Skin-the-Goat,
was born on October 4th, 1833 at Co Wexford. From a family of evicted
farmers, he was forced to seek employment in Dublin. He became a well-known
Dublin jarvey or cab driver, and was described as coarsely cheerful
and robust. He got the nickname from a goat he found plucking at the
straw that filled a horses collar. He killed the goat, skinned
it and used its hide to cover his knees while driving. Another story
is that he sold the hide of his pet animal to pay for his drinking debts.
/ It was FitzHarris who drove the Invincibles to the Phoenix Park on
May 6th, 1882 when Lord Frederick Cavendish, the chief secretary for
Ireland, and Thomas Henry Burke, the under-secretary, were assassinated.
It is not known whether FitzHarris was a member of the Invincibles but
he was among a number of men arrested and put on trial. Five were sentenced
and executed at Kilmainham Gaol. / FitzHarris was offered £10,000
by the British government, and transport to any foreign place of his
choice, to inform on the men. He declined and - although not guilty
of murder - was sentenced to penal servitude for his part in the affair.
He later declared: I came from Sliabh Buidhe where a crow never
flew over the head of an informer. He died in 1910 in the South
Dublin Union Workhouse on Jamess Street. A memorial plaque was
unveiled by the National Graves Association on his grave in Glasnevin
Cemetery on July 14th, 1968.) [Available online;
accessed 16.06.2016; also review of Igoes The Real People of
Joyces Ulysses: A Biographical Guide by Terence Killeen, in
The Irish Times (11 June 2016) - online.]
[ top ]
George Clancy, Lord Mayor
of Limerick (and Mat Davin in A Portrait), was assassinated by
policemen [Black and Tans?] in Limerick during curfew hours on 5 May 1921,
along with with his predecessor, Michael OCallaghan, and another
prominent nationalist, Joseph ODonoghue. Clancy is the subject of
a document enscribed Discharge, temporary, from jail for ill health
... from Cork Mall Jail, produced on 21 Nov 1917, and held in the
Limerick City Museum where it is displayed in the online catalogue [link].
[ top ]
Michael Lennon: Though friendly
with Joyce for some years, Judge Michael Lennon published an attack on
him in Catholic World [CXXXII], March 1931, accusing Joyce of working
for the British department propaganda in Italy during the
war and accepting sufficient cash in hand to be able to loll about
for several months in Paris afterwards while the British government
was carrying on a war [..] against the nationalist forces in Ireland which
culminiated in the Easter Week rebellion (Catholic World,
CXXXII, March 1931, pp.643, 648 [cited as pp.641-52 in Ellmann, James
Joyce, 1959, 1965 Edn., p.655.]). The article served as an incentive
for Joyces co-option of Herbert Gorman to write James Joyce,
1939 - though often Gorman strayed from Joyces own intentions. (John
Whittier-Ferguson, Embattled Indifference: Politics on the Galleys
of Herbert Gormans James Joyce, in Vincent J. Cheng,
et. al., eds., Joycean Cultures/Culturing Joyces, Delaware UP 1998,
pp.134-48. [See extract, infra.]
Note - a letter from Joyce to Michael Lennon
is held in the Harley K. Croessmann Collection of Emory University Library
(Irish Literary Collection). See catalogue details as follows: In
1930 and 1931, Joyce wrote two letters to Michael Lennon, who had agreed
to support Joyces campaign on behalf of John Sullivan. The letters
indicate that Joyce was ingenuously grateful for Lennons help;
and yet, interestingly enough, the second letter is dated in the same
month as Lennons biographical manuscript about Joyce (also contained
in the collection) that appeared in Catholic World in 1931.
The article, which is filled with inaccuracies, came to Joyces
attention years later and deeply offended him.
Further: Two manuscripts by Michael J.
Lennon, including the one mentioned above, are collected here. The first,
written and published in 1931, contains a highly imaginative account
of Joyces life and works considered by Joyce to be libelous. A
few years later when Joyce was reviewing the manuscripts for the Gorman
biography, he asked the author to remove an entire section which erroneously,
Joyce maintained, depicted his relationship with his father. Joyce felt
that the passage sounded as if it had been inspired by Lennons
fabricated essay. Joyce had only become aware of the existence of Lennons
article several years after it was published, and he considered it a
disservice that his friends had not brought it to his attention earlier.
In fact, Joyce blamed his lack of success on the other side of the Atlantic
largely on this very matter - the fact that the article had been published
without challenge in America. Gorman had, it turns out, surreptitiously
enlisted the help of Lennon when he was researching the biography; but,
well aware of Joyces disposition, Gorman left Lennons name
off his list of acknowledgments when the book was published. The other
Lennon manuscript in the collection was written in the mid 50s
and identifies the historical counterpart of John F. Taylor who delivers
an oratory in Ulysses. (See Irish Literary Collection Portal,
Emory University > Croessmann catalogue - online.)
Note: Joyce wrote to Curran in August 1937 indicating
that he would not take the chance of returning to Ireland and that the
map of his countrymen was legibly marked Hic sunt Lennones -
a reference to Michael Lennon and a pun on hic sunt leones (lions),
the tag of the medieval map-makers.
[ top ]
Alfred Bergan: Bergan is
called a practical joker by Gifford (Annotations to Ulysses, 1984);
he was a solicitors clerk for David Charles, Clare St., Dublin;
and later assistant to the sub-sheriff of Dublin John Clancy, in 1904,
with a home on Clonliffe Rd.; see Joyces letter of 14 Oct. 1921
in Letters, Vol. 1, 1957, p.174. Richard Ellmann (James Joyce,
OUP 1957) calls him a frequent visitor to John S. Joyces at 1 Martello
Tower, Bray, and later asst. to the sub-sheriff of Dublin. In 1934 Joyce
wrote to him: We used to have merry evenings in our house, used
we not? (Ellmann, op. cit., p.23.) Clancy was a neighbour of the
Joyces on N. Richmond St. and appears thinly disguised in Ulysses as
Long John Fanning and under his own name in Finnegans Wake. Bergan,
his assistant, delighted the Joyces by telling them how on one of those
occasions when a criminal had to be hanged, Clancy betook himself to London
and left the arrangements to Bergan who advertised for a hangman and received
the information that Joyce used to adorn the Cyclops chapter
of Ulysses, changing the name of the information from Billington
to Rumboldt to pay off a score in Zurich. (Ellmann, op. cit., pp.43-44.)
Leopold Blooms remarks on seagulls in Ulysses were originally
addressed by Joyce to Bergan during a walk from Fairview to Dollymount
and back. (See Niall Sheridans interview with Bergan; Ellmann, op.
cit., p.45.) On one occasion, JAJ stopped Bergan in the street and asked
him to sing McSorleys Twins, which he committed immediately
to heart and sang that night at the Sheehys. (ibid., p.52.) Bergan
recalls JSJ nodding tragically at the portraits being carried out to Mrs
McGuinnesss, the pawnbroker, with the remark: there goes the
whole seed, breed and generation of the Joyce family. JSJ managed
to scrape together enough to redeem them. (Ibid., p.71.) Bergan is the
author of the story of JSJ and the Dollymount tram which he tells in an
interview with Niall Sheridan [q.v.]
(Ellmann, op. cit., p.109-10.n.) After the death of Joyces father,
he asked Bergan to take charge of setting up a monument for him, resulting
in his gravestone being erected with an inscription by Joyce that includes
the name of his mother in keeping with Bergans information that
JSJ expressed the wish for her name to be added in the curious roundabout
delicate and allusive way he had in spite of all his loud elaborate curses,
acc. to Joyce in a letter to Harriet Weaver of 22 July 1932 (Ellmann,
op. cit., p.657.) Joyce wrote a lengthy letter to Bergan (25 May 1935)
on hearing of the death of Tom Devin - a frequent visitor at Martello
Tce., and a singer and piano-player there; Devin, who Joyce variously
spells thus and Devan, is Mr. Power in Dubliners and Ulysses,
as his letter makes clear. (Ellmann, op. cit., pp.717-18.)
See also the letter to Alf Bergan of 25 May
1937 (MS NY Public Library) in which Joyce dwells on the pleasant
nights we used to have singing in his father’s house and
recalls the laughter induced in Tom Devin by certain sallies of
my father. [SL384]: The Lord knows whether you will be able
to pick the Kersse-McCann story out of my crazy tale. It was a great
story of my fathers [sic] and Im sure if they get a copy of transition
in the shades his comment will be Well, he cant tell that
story as i used to and thats one sure five!. See also
note: Thomas Devin (d.1936) was the model for Mr. Power in Dubliners
and Ulysses.
[ top ]
Hugh Kennedy: who defeated
Joyce for Chair of the L&H, was successfully elected in the Dublin
South bye-election of 1923 - defeating Michael OMullane, who was
supported by Countess Markievicz - as show in a letter sent to the Mountjoy
Sinn Fein Club and signed her appealing for volunteers to help with OMullanes
campaign for Sinn Fein. (See Whytes Irish Art - website [asp];
accessed 07.03.2017.)
[ top ]
Vladimir Dixon:
Dixon, the author of a letter written in the form of a humorous pastiche
of Wakese sent to Joyce care of Sylvia Beach was included in
Our Exagmination Round His Factification for an Incamination of Work
in Progress (Paris: Shakespeare & Co. 1929). Beach assumed that
Dixon was none other than Joyce himself (a supposition shared by Stuart
Gilbert and Richard Ellmann) but in fact he was a real person - born
in Russia in 1900, grad. in mechanical engineering (BSc., MIT), 1921;
settled in Paris, 1923; published poetry and essays; d. Dec. 1929 -
without ever having met Joyce. (See Sam Slote, Catalogue Notes, Buffalo
Univ. Library Bloomsday Centennial Exhibit, 2004 [Available
online - Index
> Case
XI; accessed 31.12.2008 & 13.04.2017]
Vladimir Nabokov: Nabokovs marginalia to
Joyces Ulysses are preserved in the Berg Collection of the
New York Public Library [NYPL]. (See Nicholas Allen, A Turn-up for
the Book in New York [A Scholars Summer], Irish
Times (8 Aug. 2009), Weekend, p.11.)
[ top ]
John Eglinton, in dialogue
with Yeats in the Daily Express (1899), anticipates an argument
later used by Stephen Dedalus about art confronting rather than escaping
reality. Eglinton wrote: The poet who looks too much away from himself
and his age does not feel the facts of life enough, but seeks in art an
escape from them. (Eglinton, W B. Yeats, AE & William Larminie,
Literary Ideals in Ireland (Dublin: Daily Express; London:
Unwin 1899; quoted in Stephen Watt, Joyce, OCasey, and the Irish
Popular Theater (Syracuse 1991). Note that this text is quoted substantially
by Louis MacNeice in his Poetry of W. B. Yeats. [13 and ftn.] while
the dialogue is also cited in Cairns & Richards, Writing Ireland,
1988, pp. 66, 120.)
Monk Gibbon: Mademoiselle,
a character in Gibbons Mount Ida (1948), says: You
know, Ulysses would have been a failure in England. No Englishman
ever prided himself on being adroit. Get that into your head. They have
only one virtue - straightness. Cultivate it, or you will do nothing
with them.
Chenevix-Trench: Samuel
Chenevix Trench adopted the first-name Dermot (aka Diarmuid Trench)
and played the tramp in Hydes Casadh an tSugain. He is Haines
in the Telemachus episode of Ulysses - and later (unrelatedly) committed suicide. The family name
was besmirched in posthumous revelations about the Eton headmast Anthony
Chenevix-Trench, formerly headmaster of Shrewsbury public school, who
was a flagellomaniac. According to Nick Frazer, He would offer his culprit
an alternative: four strokes with the cane, which hurt; or six with the
strap, with trousers down, which didnt. Sensible boys always
chose the strap, despite the humiliation, and Trench, quite unable to
control his glee, led the way to an upstairs room, which he locked, before
hauling down the miscreants trousers, lying him face down on a couch
and lashing out with a belt. After Eton he ruled at Fettes. (See
John Carey, review of Nick Frazer, The Importance of Being Eton, in The Sunday
Times, 4 June 2006; reported at Anngirfan blogspot - online;
accessed 14.03.2017.)
[ top ]
Albert Altman (1851-1903;
aka Altman the Saltman): A case for Albert Liebes Lascar Altman
to be considered as part-model for the fictional Leopold Bloom in Ulysses
has been made by Vincent Altman OConnor, the grand-son
of Emmanuel Altman (1889-1963) who was Alberts nephew. Altman was
a Jewish salt merchant and member of Dublin Corporation in 1903; he gained
many enemies by revealing non-payment of rates; Altman lived at 11 Ushers
Island; his brother Mendal (1866-1915) shared a house with Joe Hynes who
appears in Ivy Day in the Committee Rooms and also in Ulysses;
Alberts daughter Mimi was a singer with whom Joyce was
once smitten, according to Altman family tradition; she sang at Sandymount
Church where Joyce was invited to become tenor; Mendals daughters,
were Cissy and Edy - names employed by Joyce for the Caffrey and Boardman
sisters in Nausicaa; Altman was an advanced Irish
nationalist and a temperance enthusiast - an interest shared with Paddy
Dignam, the drunkard in Ulysses; Altmans father Moritz died
after ingesting poison - as Blooms father does in the novel; when
Albert died in 1903 he was living in Ballsbridge and hence his funeral
route would have been almost the same as Dignams, departing from
Sandymount; he is buried in Glasnevin some metres from Matthew Kane, the
model for Dignam; with him are buried his wife Susan, their daughter Mimi,
and a son Bertie who died in infancy - a family unit to be compared with
Bloom, Molly, Milly and Rudi. Vincent Altman OConnor notes that
the Irish writer John D. Sheridan, a conservative Catholic, urged Emmanuel
Altman to read Ulysses and take legal advice following a successful
suit of the BBC by Reuben J. Dodd after the novel was broadcast by the
station in the 1960s; Emmanuel had no interest in so doing so, nor in
Joyces smutty book.
Notes: Altman died of diabetes shortly before
the question of at least eleven Borough members failure
to pay their rates raised by him has reached its conclusion. No foul
play was suspected. He was buried in Glasnevin and was dead before
Bloomsday and hence, as Altman OConnor points out, the funeral
party which buries Dignam must have passed his grave. Altman the Saltman
was cited in the trial of the Invincibles following the Phoenix Park
Murders since it emerged that his yard had been the intended scene
of the assassination of William Edward Forster - Lord Cavendishs
predecessor as Chief Secretary for Ireland. Albert Altman was succeeded
in the Ushers Quay ward by his brother Mendal in 1907. Altman
was occasionally known as the Jewish Fenian - a name coined by Barrow
Belisha, the Liverpool MP [best known for sponsoring Belish beacons
or traffic lights in Parliament; vide. FW267: Belisha beacon,
beckon bright! Usherette, unmesh us!.] (Derived from the above:
BS - 24.08.2017.)
The following add. links have been supplied by Vincent
Altman OConnor: Frank McNally, An Irishmans Diary,
in The Irish Times - online
(18 May 2017); Vincent Altman OConnor at the James Joyce Centre
(Lect. of 8 May 2017) - online;
abridged version of same in History Ireland (May-June 2017)
- online;
Vincent Altman OConnor on the RTÉ History Show (Aug.
2017) -online;
Vincent Altman OConnor, with Neil R. Davison [Oregon US] & Yvonne Altman OConnor [curator at the Irish-Jewish Museum], Altman the Saltman and Joyces Dublin: New Research on Irish-Jewish Influences in Ulysses, in Dublin James Joyce Journal online;
Neil R. Davison, a lecture at The Irish-Jewish Museum -
online; Shane MacThomais, in Comeheretome: Dublin Life and Culture - online;
Colum Kenny in the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies - online;
Neil R. Davison, Ivy Day: Dublin Municipal Politics and Joyce in Journal of Modern Literature, 42: 4 [ Joyce, Beckett, Coetzee] ([Indiana UP] Summer 2019), pp.20-38.
O’Connor also notes that Joe Duffy cites “Altman the Saltman” in Children of the Rising: The untold story of the young lives lost during Easter 1916 (Hachtte 2015).
Joseph O’Connor, ed., Yeats is Dead! (Cape 2001), a collaborative novel by Roddy Doyle, Conor McPherson, Gene Kerrigan, Gina Moxley, Marian Keyes, Anthony Cronin, Owen ONeill, Donal Kelly, Gerard Stembridge and Frank McCourt. The basics of the plot concern a pharmeuticals rep. called Tommy Reynolds, murder[ed] in a mobile home after a visit by heavies in the shape of off-duty gardaí Nestor and Roberts, apparently working for a crime-world figure Mrs Bloom; novel littered with Joyce allusions and characters of Joycean pedigree incl. Eveline, Molly Ievers [Ivors], O’Madden Burke, Dignam and even Kinch. Issued with profits to Amnesty on its 4th Anniversary. (Noticed by C. L. Dallat, in Times Literary Supplement [Irish issue], 29 June 2001, p.22.)
[ top ]
International Figures
Ezra Pound
The letter
that changed literary history ... |
Dear Sir,
Mr. Yeats has been speaking to me of your writing. This
is the first time I have written to any one outside of my
own circle of acquaintance (save in the case of French authors).
[I] dont in the least know that I can be of any use
to you—or use to me.
Ezra Pound
|
The letter is copied thus on the Dailybeast website
at the 100th anniversary of its arrival - 15 Dec. 2013
- online;
accessed 15.05.2104.
|
|
Ezra Pound (2) - the EP-JJ Correspondence: 198
letters passed between Pound and Joyce of which 103 from Joyce of which
26 have been published by 1995) and 95 from Pound to Joyce of which 75
have been published - chiefly in Forrest Read, letters of EP to JJ. (See
Robert Spoo, Unpublished Letters of Ezra Pound to James, Nora, and
Stanislaus Joyce, in James Joyce Quarterly, 32, 3/4 (Spring-Summer
1995), pp.533-581; available at JSTOR - online.
[ top ]
John Quinn:
Quinn sold his collection of Joyces manuscripts when terminally
ill with cancer. In its place he purchased a set of letters by George
Meredith, much to Joyces indignation. Quinns collection
of Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Seurat, et al., sold
by his heirs for ludicrously low prices. (See further under John Quinn
> Richard Ellmann - supra.)
[ top ]
Sylvia Beach
(1): b. Nancy Woodbridge Beach (14 March, 1887-5 Oct. 1962) [nb. Oct.
6 in Letters, ed. Keri Walsh], the daughter of Sylvester Beach,
a prominent Presbyterian minister from Princeton, NJ, and Eleanor Thomazine
[née] Orbison - after whose mother she was called Nancy (being
an Indian missionary with her husband); lived in young the family lived
in Baltimore (Maryland) and in Bridgeton (NJ); moved to France with her
family to France when her father was app. minister to the American Church
in Paris, and director of the American student centre, 1901; remained
there for three years (1902-05), returning to America when her father
became minister of the First Presbyterian Church of Princeton, 1906; lived
two years in Spain; worked for Balkan Commission of the Red Cross during
WWI; returned to Paris to study French literature, 1916; at Bibl. Nationale
she met Adrienne Monnier, prop. of La Maison des Amis des Livres (a lending
bookshop - otherwise librairie/société de lecture
- fnd. 1915) - who counted Gide, Paul Valéry and Jules Romains
among her friends - and became her lover, remaining close friends till
the latters death by suicide in 1955 [suffering acturely from tinnitus
symptoms taken to be Ménièseres Disease - causing
Beach to write, Im glad its over]; initially planned
to open branch of Monniers firm in New York but constrained by finances
and established Shakespeare and Company at 8 rue Dupuytren, 19 Nov. 1919;
met Joyce at a party given by André Spire on 11 July 1920 - which
Monnier also attended. moved to 12 rue de lOdéon where she
occupied premises opposite Monnier - who had also been at the Spires
party - at 7 rue de lOdéon, May 1921 [recte; var. by autumn
1921: Ellmann]; visited by Joyce at both premises; offered, and then formally
agreed to publish Ulysses on 25 March 1921, and ultimately did so on 2
Feb. 1923; Shakespeare and Company supported during the Depression by
wealthy friends including Bryher [nom de plume of Annie Winifred
Ellerman; marriage of convenience to Robert McAlmon]; at Gides advice,
she created the Friends of Shakespeare and Company with an annual subscription
of 200 francs a year for literary readings, 1936; interned for six months
after Occupation of Paris [recte as alien] - purportedly on refusing to
sell Finnegans Wake to a German officer; hideher stock in an unoccupied
apartment above 12 rue de lOdeon, 1941; Shakespeare and Company
was liberated after the war by Ernest Hemingway, 1944 [var.
1946]; did not reopen the shop; lived on modestly in Paris; received honorary
degree from Univ. of Buffalo, 1959; d. Île de France, 1[6 Oct.]
962; gave an interview to RTE in that year [with Niall Sheridan for Hilton
Edwards, Self-Portraits ser.; broadcast 2 or 3 Oct. 1962); [cremated
in Paris;] remains buried in Princeton Cemetery; George Whitman received
her permission to use the name of her shop, which he did in 1964 - setting
up his establishment at rue de la Bûcherie on the Left Bank (V arr.).
Holly Beach: a sister - was with her in the
Balkans and visited in Paris; recipient of announcement about the
forthcoming publication of Ulysses (23 April 1921: Its
going to be in October) an letters anticipating her arrival
in Paris in November (with regrets that it would be so late); thought
to be in the photograph with Beach and John Rodkers [or Cyprian?]
in Shakespeare and Company, probably at the rue Dupuytren premises
- ergo circa Nov.-December 1921. Holly married Frederick Dennis, a
Connecticut businessman, who donated his papers to the Princeton Library
incl. photos of the Beach children when young. His son Fred, Sylvias
nephew, inherited the rights to her papers and is thanked accordingly
in Jeri Walshs edition of the Letters.
Cyprian Beach: Note that Cyrian is called
a sister in Walsh, ed., Letters (2010), Introduction,
p.xvii - while the following entry is given in the Chronology: All
three sisters, Syvlia, Holly and Cyprian are living in Europe.
(p.xxx.) Cyprian - whose given name was Eleanor and is often so referred
to in the actual Letters hoped to be an actress. She died in
1951 (idem., p.9; p.xxxiii.)
[ top ]
Turismo Letterario > Paris
> Shakespeare and Company |
[...] Ma che fine ha fatto questo luogo magico
e ricco di storia letteraria del Novecento? Arrivò la guerra
e la Francia fu invasa dai nazisti. Sylvia, contrariamente a molti
dei suoi compatrioti, decise di rimanere a Parigi. Dopo una strenue
resistenza fu costretta a chiudere la libreria (il 14 giugno
1940) e nascondere tutti i libri per il timore che le venissero
requisiti e distrutti. Dopo il 1945 niente era più come
prima: la città e la coscienza del mondo erano stati sconvolti
dagli orrori della guerra. Shakespeare and Company non riaprì
più. Nel 1951 lamericano George Whitman aprì
in 37 rue de la Bûcherie, vicino Place Saint-Michel e a
pochi passi dalla Senna, Le Mistral, una libreria
di libri in lingua inglese.
|
[Note: The website illustrates the interior
of Shakespeare and Company with the familiar photograph of Joyce
and Beach standing beside her desk with a third figure in the background
usually taken to be John Rodker but here identified as Cyprian Beach
(d.1951), the brother of the bookshop owner [libraia]. Cropped
from the picture is the female figure browsing at the bookshelves
to the right who is identified elsewhere as Holly Beach, an identification
which makes that of Cyprian - known of course to be her brother
- a great deal more likely. The date is not given and the picture
is reversed, thus placing Holly Beach on the left in comparison
with the usual printings. |
|
Sylvia Beach e James
Joyce. Sullo sfondo Cyprian Beach, fratello della libraia |
|
See Turismo Litterario - online;
accessed 17 April 2017 [paras altered: BS.] |
Memo to self: Find the book which
avers that John Rodker was photographed with Beach and Joyce
- be it major biography or study of the epoch.
|
[ top ]
Ulysses: In 1922 she published
Ulysses using the Dijon de luxe [hand-setting] printer Darantière
in 1,000 copies under the imprint of Shakespeare and Company [rather
than his own]. Her reprints of Ulysses ran through seven printings
in the first edition and four more in the second, ending with the 11th
printing in 1930. Shakespeare and Company continued to trade until the
German Occupation of Paris in 1940 and was liberated by
Hemingway - according to himself - in 1946. Joyce and Beach had a rocky
after-life since he forced her to relinquish her world rights to Ulysses
in December 1930, while in 1935 she sold the MS of Stephen Hero,
which he had given her ingratitude (calling it the original MS of A
Portrait)- to NY State University (Buffalo) causing trouble for
the writer. It remains uncertain whether he ever intended it to be read
at all but he seems to have responded boldly to news of its capitivity
in his final revision of the Shem chapter of Finnegans
Wake which revisit some of the episodes and ideas compassed in that
ambitous - if ultimately futile - exercise in egoistical authorship.
[BS]
Stephen Hero: The Joyce papers
in her possession, being gifts from Joyce, were auctioned at La Hune
and largely acquired by SUNY (Buffalo) for the Lockwood Mem. Library
with funds supplied by Constance and Walter F. Stafford, who received
from Beach a copy of Ulysses in her possession (1st Edn., No.80).
See Sam Slote, Catalogue Notes, SUNY Library (Buffalo) Bloomsday
Centennial Exhibit, 2004 [online;
31.12.2008]. The Staffords returned to the fray to assist with the purchase
of the residuence [relict] of Beachs collection preserved in her
apartment over Shakespeare and Company in 1964. (See Howard C. Rice
- in Shakespeare and Company [appendix], as attached.)
Shakespeare & Co. In 1951 the American
George Whitman opened an English-language bookshop called Le Mistral
at 37 Rue de la Bûcherie (nr. Pont St. Michel) which became a
haunt of young American writers - and, in 1964, two years after the
Beachs death, he changed its name to Shakespeare & Co., in
her honour as the doyen of literary American expatriates and apparently
with her permission. The business has been carried on by a daughter
called Sylvia Beach Whitman who organises a literary festival there
besides maintaining a steady trade in English-language books. Opinions
about its authenticity in relation to the literary scene
of the 1920s and 30s must inevitably vary but it certainly merits its
place on the tourist map for young people today.
See further .. |
Gallery of photographs with Joyce at
Shakespeare and Company
- as attached. |
PeSkeleton bibliography in Shakespeare
and Company > Appendix
- as attached. |
|
Sylvia Beach (3): In 1924, Sylvia Beach arranged
a recording of Joyce reading from Ulysses - a declamatory
passage from Aeolus at his insistence - in 1924. The technician
from His Masters Voice in Paris who assisted her was called Coppola.
Later she organised another made by Ogden Nash and the BBC in London.
Joyce and Beach had a rocky after-life since he forced her to relinquish
her world rights to Ulysses (which she famously published) in Dec.
1930, and in 1935 she sold the MS of Stephen Hero, which he had
given her, to the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo causing
trouble for the writer. It remains uncertain whether he ever intended
it to be read but he seems to have responded boldly to news of its captivity
in his final revision of the Shem the Penman episode of Finnegans
Wake. Arguably, too, the addition of panepiphanal to a
late revision of Balkelly episode [613] - answering to epiphany
in Stephen Hero - derives from this cause.
RTE Interview: Beach was interviewed by RTEs
Self-Portrait series in 1962 - in the course of which she says:
[...His buke as he pronounced it would
never come out and so he sat there with his head in hands and I said
to him: Would you like me to publish Ulysses? And
he said, I would. He seemed very much relieved. [See
details at Broadsheet.ie - online;
accessed 19.06.2014. See Youtube video - online
- or see copy under Shakespeare and Company - infra.]
Sylvia
Beach (4) - Steve King, Joyce, Fitzgerald, Jumping, at
Today in Literature (2014): On this day [27 June 1928], Sylvia
Beach hosted a dinner party in order that F. Scott Fitzgerald, who worshipped
James Joyce, but was afraid to approach him, might do so. In her
Shakespeare and Company memoir Beach delicately avoids describing
what happened, although she perhaps suggests an explanation: Poor
Scott was earning so much from his books that he and Zelda had to drink
a great deal of champagne in Montmartre in an effort to get rid of it.
According to Herbert Gorman, another guest and Joyces first biographer,
Fitzgerald sank down on one knee before Joyce, kissed his hand, and declared:
How does it feel to be a great genius, Sir? I am so excited at seeing
you, Sir, that I could weep. As the evening progressed, Fitzgerald
enlarged upon Nora Joyces beauty, and, finally, darted through
an open window to the stone balcony outside, jumped on to the eighteen-inch-wide
parapet and threatened to fling himself to the cobbled thoroughfare below
unless Nora declared that she loved him. [...] Several years later,
Joyces daughter, Lucia would have the same psychiatrist as Zelda,
stay for a time in the same Lake Geneva clinic, and also be diagnosed
as schizophrenic. (Available online - online;
accessed 29.06.2014.)
Bibl. Noel Riley Fitch, Sylvia Beach and
the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the 1920s and
1930s (NY: Norton; London: Penguin 1985). Note that Fitch characterises
Sylvia Beach as heir to nine ecclesiastical generations
(p.14; available online;
accessed 13..04.2017.)
[ top ]
Sylvia Beach (5) - publishing Ulysses:
When Ben Huebsch formally declined to publish Ulysses and John
Quinn similarly failed to persuade Boni and Liveright to do so, Joyce
went round to Shakespeare and Company to bemoan his disappoint. Beach
then said: Would you let Shakespeare & Co. have the honour of
bringing out your Ulysses? - with the aid of Adrienne Monnier
in spite of her total lack of capital, experience, and all the other
requisites of a publisher. An agreement was signed on or around
10 April 1921 to produce an edition of 1,000 (100 copies on Holland paper,
to be signed by author and to be sold at 350 frs.; 150 copies on vergé
darche to be sold at 250 frs., and 750 copies on linen to be
sold at 150 frs. each all to be printed by Maurice Darantière of
Dijon (proposed by Monnier) - with 66% royalties to author. On hearing
of the plan, Harriet Shaw Weaver lent immediate support, collating the
names of all those interested in the novel, and advancing £200 to
Joyce on royalties for an English edition which she would publish from
the French sheets under the Egoist Press imprint after the limited French
edition had sold out. (See Richard Ellmann, James Joyce [rev. edn.]
Oxford 1982, pp.504-05.)
See also Ellmanns account of the first
row with Beach, arising from Joyces request for that a third
printing of Ulysses after the second printing quickly sold
out and her rejection of the idea having been warned that the nigh-identical
appearance of the second printing of Jan. 1923 might be taken as an
attempt to issue a bogus first edition. (Ellmann, op.
cit., 1982, pp.541-42.)
Joyce wrote of the dispute to Miss Weaver: Possibly
the fault is partly mine. I, my eye, my needs and my troublesome book
are always there. There is no feast or celebration or meeting of shareholders
but at the fatal hour I appear at the door in dubious habiliments,
with impedimenta of baggage, a mute expectant family, a patch over
one eye howling dismally for aid. (Letter of 17 Nov. 1922; Letters,
Vol. 1, p.194; Ellmann, James Joyce [rev. edn.] 1982, p.542.
Loss
& Gain: Ulysses was the paying investment
of his lifetime after years of penury, Sylvia said, while hardly
acknowledging the fact that the publishing costs almost wiped
out her Shakespeare and Company. The peak of his prosperity
came in 1932 with the news of his sale of the book to Random
House in New York for a forty-five-thousand-dollar advance,
which, she confessed, he failed to announce to her and of which,
as was later known, he never even offered her a penny. I
understood from the first that, working with or for Mr. Joyce,
the pleasure was mine - an infinite pleasure: the profits were
for him. (Janet Flanner, Paris was Yesterday
1925-39; quoted in Macy Halford, Books and Their Makers:
James Joyce and Sylvia Beach, New Yorker [Blog],
5 March 2010 - online.) |
|
—Janet Flanner, Paris was Yesterday
1925-39; (NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1988), p.[xi]. |
[ top ]
The dispersal
of Sylvia Beachs books (Princeton Univ. Library 2011) |
When Sylvia Beach died in 1962, relict in her
apartment were books, business papers, correspondence, photographs,
paintings, and literary memorabilia. By agreement with her sister,
Holly Beach Dennis, Princeton purchased these effects in early 1964.
Associate librarian for special collections, Howard C. Rice arrived
in Paris in late March and spent three weeks in the rooms over her
famous bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, 12, rue de lOléon
[sic for lOdéon].
Even though Sylvia Beach had given away 5,000 books
to the American Library in Paris in 1951 (New York Herald Tribune,
April 25, 1951) and even though she had sold her Joyce Collection
(as she called it) to the University of Buffalo in 1959, the apartment
held, counting just the books, according to her sisters lawyer,
Richard Ader, 8,000 to 10,000 volumes. Untold numbers of papers
and other objects filled closets, shelves, and walls. Howard Rice
described as a struggle his efforts to sort, collocate,
organize, pack, and arrange shipping or further disposition of the
apartments contents. When Rice returned to Princeton in April,
he had completed dividing the contents as follows:
-
31 shipping cases sent to the library filled with more
than 2000 books, hundreds of photographs, thousands of pages
of personal and business papers, as well as some paintings
and artifacts. For customs purposes Rice said these should
be described as two paintings plus books and papers
for an educational institution. He also described
it as the Sylvia Beach Collection proper
— that is, her papers, inscribed copies of books,
first editions of American, French and English authors,
inscribed photographs, drawings, etc., … Today
these are arranged in two groups: the Sylvia Beach Papers
(C0108) and the book collection given the location designator
Beach.
-
Another group of books - on the order of 3,000 to 4,000
- constituting the basic library of English literature
which once formed the core of the Shakespeare and
Company lending library was presented to the
University of Paris, for use in the library of its English
Department, the Institut dEtudes Anglaises et Nord-Américaines.
Rice wrote that these books were [...] far more than
a mere circulating library for current reading. French teachers,
students, and English scholars, as well as translators and
writers, were in the habit of finding [at Shakespeare and
Company], alongside the avant-garde writers of the twentieth
century, not only Shakespeare, but also, in his company,
the Elizabethan poets, the eighteenth-century novelists,
the Romantics and the Victorians. Such books, which Miss
Beach brought into France, with persistence and discrimination,
from across the Channel or the Atlantic, may now continue
their ambassadorial and fertilizing role among new generations
at the Instituts library, located in the Rue de lÉcole
de Médecine, in the heart of Paris, where
Sylvia Beach lived for more than four decades. (Princeton
University Library Chronicle, 26:1, p.12) Current successor
to the library of the Institut is the Bibliothèque
du Monde Anglophone - online.
-
An unnumbered group of books was consigned by Howard Rice
to antiquarian bookseller André Jammes. One document
in the librarians records (AC123, box 51) shows these
amounting to a 1500 Francs credit (or about $300).
-
Maurice Saillet, a friend of Sylvia Beach since the 1930s,
acquired her apartment after her death, and, according to
Howard Rices notes, was the key person during
HCRs sojourn. Saillets collection of Sylvia
Beach and Shakespeare and Company is now in the Carlton
Lake Collection at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research
Center at the University of Texas. It evidently includes
some of Beachs books.
Coda I: In the late 1950s, Sylvia Beach prepared
a 53 page list headed The Library of Shakespeare and Company
/ Sylvia Beach / Paris – VI together with a one page
list of Memorabilia from the Shakespeare and Company Bookshop,
12, Rue de lOdéon – Paris -VI Plans for
making this list are mentioned in Sylvia Beachs letter to
Jackson Mathews, dated 2 July 1959. (Letters of Sylvia Beach,
ed. K. Walsh [2010], p. 284). A copy of the list is in the Noël
Riley Fitch Papers (C0841, box 3, folder 10). Coda II: Photographs
from Howard Rices memoranda in C0108, box 276.
|
|
See online;
accessed 14.04.2017. |
|
Adrienne Monnier Archives -
at IMEC - lAbbaye dArdenne |
La Maison des Amis des Livres, société
de lecture, fut fondée en 1915, rue de lOdéon
à Paris, par Adrienne Monnier (1892-1955). Son objectif tendait
plutôt à représenter jusque dans ses manifestations
les plus audacieuses, la Littérature moderne, en réunissant
pour une Société de lettrés tous les
avantages dune bibliothèque et dune librairie.
Adrienne Monnier organisa de nombreuses séances de lecture
et sa librairie devint très vite le lieu de rencontre de
toute lavant-garde littéraire. Première éditrice,
en 1929, de la traduction française dUlysse de James
Joyce, elle publia – de 1916 à 1940 – vingt-six
ouvrages, anima deux revues littéraires, Le Navire dargent
et La Gazette des Amis des livres, et en diffusa de nombreuses autres.
Ces archives ont été déposées par Maurice
Imbert, qui les avait lui-même reçues de Maurice Saillet,
dernier collaborateur dAdrienne Monnier. Depuis le premier
versement, certaines pièces ont été extraites
du fonds par le déposant, qui a également procédé
à plusieurs accroissements du fonds. Fonds déposé
par Maurice Saillet en 1997. |
See IMEC [lInstitut Mémoires
de lédition contemporaine] > Adrienne Monnier -
online. |
Syvlia Beach [6] - pay-back: Katherine Hughes,
review of Letters of Sylvia Beach, ed. Keri Walsh, in The Guardian
(31 July 2010): [...] That Beach often felt a whole lot wilder
underneath her chipper surface is suggested not just by her constant tension
headaches but also by a remarkable unsent letter that she wrote to James
Joyce in 1927 which is included in an appendix. It is the kind of letter
we have all written, and then stuffed in a drawer for second thoughts.
Addressing it to Dear Mr Joyce, Beach explains tautly that
as my affection and admiration for you are unlimited, so is the
work you pile on my shoulders, before proceeding to that lament
which we would all love to scream to the world: I am poor and tired
too. Shortly after not receiving this letter, Joyce shifted the
focus of his emotional and financial needs on to another well-bred woman,
this time the British Harriet Weaver, whom he proceeded to suck dry in
much the same way.
Sylvia Beach [7] - Ernest Hemingway wrote: No
one that I ever knew, was nicer to me. There was no reason for her to
trust me. She did not know me and the address I had given her 74 rue du
Cardinal Lemoine, could not have been a poorer one. But she was delightful
and charming and welcoming and behind her, as high as the wall and stretching
out into he back room which gave unto the inner court of the building,
were shelves and shelves of the wealth of the library.(A Moveable
Feast, pp.35-36; posted by Moïcani Odéon on James Joyce Facebook pages,
19 July 2018.)
[See also RICORSO Library > Gallery > James
Joyce > People > Sylvia Beach > Shakespeare and Company -as attached.]
[ top ]
Stuart Gilbert:
b. 25 Oct. 1883, Chipping Ongar, Essex; son of Arthur Stronge Gilbert
(Army officer, ret.) and his wife Melvina Kundiher Singh; grad. Cheltenham
School and Hertford College, Oxford; joined Indian Civil Service, 1907;
served inFirst World War; afterwards appointed to a judge on the Court
of Assizes in Burma; ret. 1924; moved to Paris, 1925, with French-born
wife Marie Agnès Mathilde Douin [Moune); translated
works of Saint-Exupéry, Malraux, Camus, Sartre, Simenon, Cocteau,
and other contemporary French authors into English; met Sylvia Beach [in
1924] and notified her of errors in French trans. of Ulysses; advised
Joyce on the translation; remained on clise terms with Joyce up to his
death in 1941; issued James Joyces Ulysses: A Study (1930),
and later edited the first volume of Joyces Letters for Faber
& Viking (1957); settled in Wales for the duration of WWII. Returned
to Paris after the war, and died in his apartment at 7 rue Jean du Bellay
on January 5, 1969.
Stuart Gilbert: Bibliography
|
Exhibitions |
- Portraits by Gilbert Stuart: June 29 to August 1, 1936 at
the galleries of M. Knoedler & Company, Newport, Rhode Island
(Newport, R.I.: M. Knoedler & Co., 1936);
- Gilbert Stuart: Memorial exhibition, October 24-December 9,
1928 (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts 1928);
|
Translations |
The epic-makers, by Paul Morand (London: Lovat Dickson
[1935]);
The Wisdom of the Sands, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
[from the French Citadelle] (London: Hollis & Carter
1952);
The Plague, by Albert Camus (London: Hamish Hamilton,
1948). |
Biography |
- Lawrence Park [1873-1924], Stuart Gilbert: An Illustrated
Descriptive Account of his Works, 4 vols. (NY: W. E. Rudge
1926) [fronts.; ills., ports., facs., index; 34 cm.]; concluded
by William Sawitzky, Mrs. E. Hadley Galbreath, John Hill Morgan
and Theodore Bolton. [vide. Vol. 1, p.4]; Vol. 1: Gilbert
Stuart, the artist. Technical note on the painting of Gilbert
Stuart. Descriptive list of the portraits by Gilbert Stuart.;
Vol. 2: Descriptive list of the portraits by Gilbert Stuart;
Vol. 3-4: Portraits.
|
See COPAC [Discovery Library Hub > Gilbert
- online;
accessed 18.08.2019. |
Harry Ransom Research Library holdings
incl. correspondence, diaries, notebooks, clippings, photographs,
and other material created between 1900 and 1985 (bulk 1928-1975)
documenting Gilberts literary career, particularly his
work with James Joyce and as a literary translator. Due to
the dislocation brought about by World War II little of the
collection apart from one diary and Joyces correspondence
to Gilbert date from before 1941. There is virtually no material
in the collection on Gilberts personal history and non-literary
activities, apart from a curriculum vitae and a few official
documents. The material had little apparent original order
when it arrived at the Ransom Center; the arrangement employed
here is largely an imposed one. The papers have been organized
into three series: Series I. Stuart Gilbert, 1900-1969 (bulk
1940-1969) (15 boxes), Series II. Moune Gilbert, 1919-1985
(bulk 1941-1975) (1 box), and Series III. James Joyce, 1921-1973
(bulk 1928-1973) (2 boxes). Papers of Moune Gilbert are also
included. Catalogue continues: The third and final series
illuminates James Joyces relationship with one of his
most trusted associates during the years Finnegans Wake was
being written and its author achieving international fame.
The series embraces four subseries: Subseries A. Correspondence,
1921-1973, Subseries B. Works, 1929-1935, Subseries C. Biography
and Criticism, 1928-1982, and Subseries D. Photographs and
Artwork, 1928-1982.The correspondence subseries includes about
seventy postcards and letters Joyce sent Gilbert between 1928
and 1940. These missives were generally brief, dealing with
questions Gilbert asked of Joyce, Joyces comments on
his own writing, and otherwise simply keeping in touch. Joyces
letter of 11 June 1938 includes a short poem, "Dapple Grey."
Correspondence from Nora, George, and Lucia Joyce is also
present.The major item in the Works subseries is the opening
chapter of Finnegans Wake in typescript, though
the poem "Ecce Puer" and other pieces of short verse by Joyce
are also included. The Biography and Criticism subseries is
formed of numerous clippings on Joyce and his work that the
Gilberts began collecting in the late 1920s and maintained
the remainder of their lives. The final subseries, Photographs
and Artwork, embraces a significant number of photos of the
Joyces, together with a number of pieces of Lucia Joyces
calligraphic art from the early 1930s.
|
|
[Extract follows:] The first series reflects several
aspects of Stuart Gilberts life and professional
activities. The materials have been divided into eight
subseries: Subseries A. Correspondence, 1940-1969, Subseries
B. Diaries, 1929-1967, Subseries C. Notebooks, 1928-1952,
Subseries D. Works, 1900-1957, Subseries E. Translations,
1946-1960, Subseries F. Biographical materials, 1907-1969,
Subseries G. Photographs and illustrations, 1925-1960,
and Subseries H. Programs, 1920-1972. The Correspondence
sub-series represents material essentially professional
in character. The letters to Gilbert - and a significant
number of his surviving carbons--give considerable insight
into his relationships with writers and publishers. Significant
correspondents include Sylvia Beach, Peter Du Sautoy,
T.S. Eliot, Richard Ellmann, Desmond Harmsworth, Ben Huebsch,
Patricia Hutchins, André Malraux, Roger Martin
du Gard, and Harriet Weaver. Gilberts correspondence
with James Joyce is found in the Joyce Series.Diaries
kept by Gilbert between 1929 and 1934 and from 1941 to
1967 are present, as are notebooks and drafts of articles
and longer works. The notebooks are about equally divided
between those containing fairly systematic material on
Joyce and his novels, particularly Finnegans Wake, and
commonplace books of the sort many writers maintain to
store turns of phrase and to work out concepts.The diary
for the years 1929-34 (published by the Ransom Center
in 1993 as Reflections on James Joyce: Stuart Gilberts
Paris Journal) outlines Gilberts evolving relationship
with Joyce in those years. The diary for 1941-45 was written
during Gilberts wartime exile, and in his reaction
to the war and rural Wales represents his least guarded
writing present in the papers. The diaries for the years
1948-67 are essentially brief notations of appointments
kept and friends seen.Stuart Gilberts Works subseries
includes numerous essays and articles iIn the last decade
of his long life Stuart Gilbert translated numerous texts
for the art book publisher Albert Skira of Geneva. Gilbert
died in his apartment at 7 rue Jean du Bellay on January
5, 1969.n manuscript, typescript, or galleys, as well
as a film script of Anna Livia Plurabelle. His James
Joyces Ulysses is present in manuscript form,
along with partial galleys, and related materials.Drafts
of Gilberts translation projects are present only
in fragments, apart from that of Valérys Analects, which
is essentially complete in manuscript and typescript.
A small group of biographical materials, together with
some photos and four boxes of musical and theatrical programs
of 1920s and 30s Paris concludes the series.Series
II comprises materials relating to Moune Gilberts
life as the spouse and sometime collaborator of Stuart
Gilbert and as a homemaker. Her papers are arranged in
three subseries: Subseries A. Correspondence, 1939-1985,
Subseries B. Notebooks, 1920-1981, and Subseries C. Home
Economics Materials, 1953-1968. Mounes correspondents
were generally social acquaintances, and included James
and Christiane Emmons, Milton and Laura Runyon, Narcissa
S. King, and Anie Parent. The notebooks contain poems
and excerpts from French authors, together with abstracts
of various books. An undated interview (in typescript
and with notations in Mounes hand) describes her
husbands relationship with James Joyce. The home
economics materials are largely clippings and other materials
indicative of maintaining a home in Paris in the postwar
period.
|
Harry Ransom Centre / University
of Texas - online;
accessed 18.08.2019. |
[ top ]
John Rodker (1894-1955)-
He was the son of a Jewish corset-maker who fled form Poland during
the pogroms of the 1880s and set up in Manchester, later moving to London.
John Rodker was associated with the Whitechapel Boys [group] and was
painted by co-member David Bomberg. He published modernist poetry (Adolphe,
1920) and contributed to The Dial (May 1914), including an essay
on Bomberg. who designed a semi-abstract cover for his first collection
in 1914 - based on studies of Rodkers girlfriend Sonia Cohen performing
as a member of Margaret Morriss famous dance troupe. During the
First World War he took the stance of a conscientious objector and sheltered
with the poet R. C. Trevelyan until captured and imprisoned in Home
Office Work Centre (formerly Dartmoor Prison). He recounted the experience
in a later account called Memoirs of Other Fronts (anon. 1932).
In the 1920s he was associated with Syvlia Beachs Shakespeare
and Company in Paris and was photographed there with Joyce in 1921.
He co-published the 2nd edition of Ulysses with Harriet Weavers
the Egoist Press (London) and founded his own company as the short-lived
Ovid Press (1919) which published T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and Ezra
Pound. (See Ben Uri Gallery - online;
accessed 22.07.2017.)
 |
 |
John Rodker at Shakespeare & Co.
and port. by David Bomberg |
[ For details of the first picture
- see under Sylvia Beach, infra.
] |
|
In the 1920s he [Rodker] spent time in Paris on the
second edition of James Joyces Ulysses and
assisted with French translations of the novel. He set up the Casanova
Society, for limited editions - i.e., erotic works and published occult
subjects under the imprint J. Rodker. He was among the
13 contributors to Our Exagmination Round His Factification for
Incamination of Work in Progress (Faber 1929) and worked and published
in French translation. In 1932 he became bankrupt. Rodker had three
wives, Mary Butts, Barbara McKenzie-Smith, and Marianne Rais
- the last a Paris bookseller and daughter of his translator Ludmila
Savitzky. He also had a dg. with the dancer Sonia Cohen. His dg. Joan
by Cohen has a son, Ernest Rodker, with the actor Gerard Heinz. Ernest
became a conscientious objector in World War II. (See Wikipedia
> John Rodker - online.)
[ top ]
John Jeremiah
Slocum [1] - See Brenda Maddox, Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom
(London: Hamish Hamilton; Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. 1988, 2000): Not
only was John Slocum collecting letters for American libraries but other
literary sleuths were on the trail, and Miss Weaver herself was trying
to assemble what she could for a published volume of Joyces letters,
to be edited by Stuart Gilbert. [...] Miss Weaver apparently did not know
that Slocum was in touch with Stanislaus in Trieste and had in fact been
buying Joyce manuscripts from him. It never occurred to Slocum that Joyces
papers in Trieste might be Noras property and the proceeds due to
her, or that their sale should be reported to Miss Weaver, Joyces
literary executor. (p.269.) Note also acknowledgements to the John
and Eileen Slocum Collection (Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale
University).
John J. Slocum [2] - cont.: Maddox gives Slocums
account of meeting Nora: To John Slocum, on a European swing to
collect Joyce papers and memorabilia and to prepare a definitive bibliography
of all of Joyces published writing, Nora said, It is just
as well my husband didnt have a literary wife. There had to be
somebody to do the cooking and wash the dishes. She would, at
times, idealise her marriage and say that she and Joyce had been blissfully
happy. Giorgio, overhearing her remark, said, I wonder what may
father would have said to that. More usually, she kept to her
familiar deflating tone: They all tell me my husband was one of
the immortals. Id much rather be receiving some royalties from
his books than be the widow of an immortal. (p.359.) Maddox
writes that Slocum begun collecting the year before the La Hune auction
of 1949 in which he was outwitted by State University of New York (SUNY)
at Buffalo (p.386.)
John J. Slocum [3] - Obituary (New York
Times, 1 Sept. 1997): died at Newport Hosp. Rhode Island, aged 83,
on 12 Aug. 1997. Slocum graduated from Harvard and Columbia University
school of Journalism. He served as press aide to Fiorello La Guardia
(NY Mayor) before army service in 1941. He enlisted as a private and
was promoted to captain, acting as press attache to the Joint Force
that tested the atom bomb in the Marshall Islands. He subsequently acted
for the government in Germany and Egypt, and represented the Inspection
Corps in Asia and S. America. He was seconded to the State Dept. and
helped to coordinate the various museums of the Smithsonian Institution.
Later still he acted as Presidential Cultural Property Advisory Committee
and was a foremost figure in the American Numismatic Society. In 1974
he was an organizer and founding president of the Friends of the Folger
Shakespeare Library in Washington. His sale of his Joyce books including
manuscripts of Chamber Music and Exiles, formed the Yale
collection of Joyce papers, including the bulk of Stephen Hero.
John J. Slocum [4]: See history notice of James
Joyce Society [NY]: The James Joyce Society was founded in February
1947 at the Gotham Book Mart in New York City. Its first member was
T. S. Eliot. The Joyce bibliographer, John Slocum, was the societys
first president and Frances Steloff, founder and owner of the Gotham,
served as the its first treasurer. [Online.]
[ top ]
Herbert Gorman:
A letter to Arthur Clery in the Harley K. Croessmann Collection at Emory
Univ. Library offers thanks for his generous notice of Chamber Music
in a Dublin newspaper - in spite of which Joyce led Gorman to believe
that Thomas Kettle wrote the only Dublin review of the poems. (See Irish
Literary Collection Portal, Emory University > Croessmann catalogue
- online.)
[ See Emory Irish Literary Collection holdings of Herbert
Gorman Papers 1902-39 - online.
]
Scope and Content: [...] Sometimes
criticized by his biographer for being elusive, Joyce would on occasion
enclose letters he had recently received from others in an effort to
keep Gorman up to date on his affairs. [...] Joyce frequently turned
his biographer to other sources, sometimes simply suggesting that Gorman
travel to Dublin for clues and answers to his research difficulties.
Such a method of exploring Joyces background was in most cases
a luxury Gorman could not afford. Consequently, he was forced to correspond
for a good deal of the information he gathered about Joyces Dublin.
Many of Joyces close friends living in Dublin were anxious to
give assistance to Gorman, supplying their recollections, clarifying
information about Dublin, even excerpting from records in Ireland that
contained traces of Joyces past. Gorman also prepared individualized
questionnaires to make his research efforts as economical as possible.
Alf Bergan [see note] responded to
one that sought facts about Dublin before Joyces time. Joyce was
himself the recipient of some questionnaires which he dutifully completed
with his secretary Paul Léons help; however his answers
were sometimes evasive. Gormans correspondents incl. Harriet [Shaw]
Weaver, T.S. Eliot, Paul Léon, Stuart Gilbert, Arthur Symons,
Oliver St. John Gogarty, Stanislaus Joyce, Eugene Jolas, Bennet Cerf,
B. W. Huebsch, C.K. Ogden, Paul Ruggiero, James S. Starkey [Seumas OSullivan],
Gerald Griffin, Michael J. Lennon, Cyril Corrigan, and Padraic Colum.
[Note:
Alfred Bergan is the source of a memoir of John Stanislaus Joyce,
man about town, in an interview made by Niall Sheridan - as attached.]
[ top ]
Harriet Shaw
Weaver: Miss Weaver - who was to remain Joyces patron and supporter,
and the recipient of many of his letters explaining his progress on Ulysses
and Work in Progress (and rebutting accusations a dissolute
lifestyle), instructed her solicitors Slack, Monro, Saw & Co. to write
the letter which established him as an author of independent means: Dear
Sir, / We are instructed to write to you on behalf of an admirer of your
writing, who desires to be anonymous, to say that we are to forward you
a cheque for £50 on the 1st May, August, November and February nexst,
making a total of £200, which we hope you will accept without any
enquiry as to the source of the gift. (Letters, II, 389.)
John Cage: Cages
Roaratorio, based on Finnegans Wake, was produced in Paris
(1980), and afterwards in Lille, Frankfurt and Toronto, with Seosamh Ó
hÉanaí, seán-nos singer, in the vocal part - Cage
having ascertained that Ó hÉanaí was the greatest
living traditional Irish singer. (See Siobhan Ní Fhoghlu, Sean-nós:
A Living Tradition, in Books Ireland, Dec. 2007, p.282.)
Herbert Hughes,
ed., The Joyce Book [1933], songs by Joyce set to music by 13 composers;
these incl. Arnold Bax, Eugene Goosens, Arthur Bliss, Edgardo Carducii,
Gustav Holst, Herbert Howells, John Ireland, Philip Jarnach, Albert Roussel
and Darius Milhaud; the songs were performed in London on St Patricks
Eve, [16] March 1932. Joyce liked the settings by Carducci and Hughes
best. (See Hans Gèbler Davies, James Joyce: A Portrait of the
Artist, 1975, p.292.)
[ top ]
Harry Levin,
Levin, James Joyce: A Critical Introduction [1941] (London:
Faber & Faber 1944; rev. 1968):
The first edition was printed by New Directions
in its Makers of Modern Literature series in 1941. The British,
edition published by Faber in London in 1944, bears a preface signed
and dated Eliot House, Cambridge, Mass., 3rd Oct. 1942,
in which the author states that the first edition was published
in America last year. This edition - which conforms
with the authorized economic standards - was presumably
delayed by the war. A revised edition appeared in 1960, containing
an extra chapter [Revisiting Joyce] and a new Preface.
This was reprinted unaltered in 1968. The section on Joyces
epiphanies, falling in a chapter entitled The City [viz.,
Chap. 2], remains unchanged in all editions. In view of the detailed
account of Joyces treatment of epiphany in that work and the
date of the 1941 edition, which falls three years earlier than the
publication of Stephen Hero (ed. Theodore Spencer, 1944),
it seems certain that Levin saw the manuscript, which Spencer states
to be in Joyces handwriting (ibid., Intro., Jonathan Cape
1956 [1960; 1969], p.13.) The verbal form of his acknowledgement
remains, however, a little obscure: I am especially grateful
to Theodore Spencer for sharing not only his interest in Joyce,
but his opportunity to consult the unpublishd manuscript of the
Portrait of the Artist, now in the Harvard College Library.
It is a satisfaction to know that this discarded version is at last
to appear in print. (Levin, op. cit., 1944 Edn., Preface,
pp.6-7; 1960 Edn., pp.10-11.) Levin also thanks James Laughlin,
IV, for permission to plagiarise his own [H.L.s] article On
First Looking into Finnegans Wake in New Directions
in Prose and Poetry (1939). [BS] |
|
Levin also edited The Essential James Joyce, with an
introduction and notes (London: Jonathan Cape 1946; rep. in
1948, 1950, 1961; Penguin 1963, 1974; Grafton 1977; Triad Paladin
1991). Contents: Dubliners, A Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man, Exiles, Collected
Poems, and selections from Ulysses and Finnegans
Wake.
|
Cyril Connolly:
Joyce said to Connolly (ed. of Horizon): I am afraid I
am more interested, Mr. Connolly, in Dublin street names than in the
riddle of the Universe. (in Connolly, Previous Convictions,
1963, p.271; quoted in Donald Torchiana, Backgrounds for Joyces
Dubliners, 1986 - epigraph.) Cf. Joyces verses: Let
us floing to the winds all moping and madness, / Play us a jig in the
spirit of gladness / On the creaky old squeaky strings of the fiddle.
// The why of the world is an answerless riddle / Puzzlesome, tiresome,
hard to unriddle. / To the seventeen devils with sapient sadness: /
Tra la, tra la. (From Shine and Dark, quoted in Richard Ellmann,
James Joyce, 1965 Edn., p.86 [quoting pages in the Cornell Univ. Library
James Joyce Collection.]
[ top ]
Gisèle Freund
(1908-2000): photographer, and portraitist of many French writers,
she photographed Joyce with his friends and contemporaries in the Paris
during the 1930s. At that time, her studio was located at 18, rue de lOdeon
- at a small distance from Sylvia Beachs bookshop. Freund was born
into a wealthy German textile family and turned to photography early -
recording an anti-Fascist march which included Walter Benjamin, a friend,
and Bertolt Brecht among the marchers (1 May 1932). As a Jew, she was
forced to escape to France in 1933, and was introduced to the literary
world by André Malraux - resulting in her portraits of Joyce in
1934. When Sylvia Beach visited America in 1936 she moved into her Paris
flat and became intimate with Adrienne Monnier - continuing in friendship
with both of them long after. La photographie en France au dix-neuvieme
siècle, her doctoral dissertation awarded by the Sorbonne in
1936, was published by Monnier under her Maison des Amis des Livres imprint.
In the same year she did a colour photo-essay on Depression-striken Northern
England which was printed by Time Magazine. Her portraits of Joyce
stem from three days in 1938 when, at Adrienne Monniers suggestion,
she applied to Joyce and was permitted her to observe him with his family
and associates both at home and out and about in Paris. One of these was
used on the cover of Time Magazine (8 May 1939). Other writers
whom she captured at that time include Malraux, Cocteau, Gide, Colette,
Valéry, Zweig, Joyce, Woolf and later Beckett. Malraux and others
secured her escape to Argentina in 1940, and there she photographed Jorge
Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda. In 1950 her photographs of Eva Peron won
her the enmity of the dictatorship, intent on advertising its austerity,
and in 1953 she moved to Mexico where she associated with Diego Riveira,
Juan Luis Oroczo, and others. Her career with Magnum began in 1947 but
ended in 1954 when Robert Capa forced her resignation - by which time
she had been declared persona non grata in the USA on account of
her purportedly Communist sympathies. She returned to France in and settled
permanently in Paris in 1953. Her photographic style was distinguished
by her use of a 36-frame Leica for candid shots, and later by experimentation
with Kodachrome and Agfacolour 35mm film stock. She made the official
photograph of President François Mitterand on his election, and
was herself elected President of the French Association of Photographers
in 1981. Her studio was located at 12 rue Lalande and she is buried at
nearby Montparnasse.
[See Freunds photographs of Joyce with Sylvia
Beach - attached.]
The majority of her pictures of Joyce were included
in James Joyce in Paris: His Final Years (NY: Harcourt Brace
& World 1965; London: Cassell 1966), accompanied by text by V. B.
Carleton - who had worked on a previous project with her - and with
a preface by Simon de Beauvoir. The archive consisting of 161 photographs
on which the book was based was purchased by the University of Victoria
in the early 1970s together with correspondence, manuscripts, paste-ups
and proofs relating to the book. Many of the photos of Joyce show him
proofing galleys in his home, or else depict him with his family or
in public places. Other pictures are of contemporary French, English
and American writers and editors. The best-known pictures are those
which capture Syvlia Beachs Shakespeare and Company bookshop in
that period.
Bibl.: Gisèle Freund & V.
B. Carleton, James Joyce in Paris: His Final Years (NY:
Harcourt Brace & World 1965; London: Cassell 1966), ix, 117pp.
[photos by Freund, text by Carleton.] |
(See University of Victorian > Special Collections
> James Joyce Featured Collection - online;
also Wikipedia > Gisèle Freund [online]
- both accessed 29.06.2014.) [Note that her name is sometimes erroneously
given as Freud.)
Showtime: An exhibition of her Paris work in
1933-40 was held by the Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves St. Laurent
in Oct. 2011-Jan. 2012 [online]
and later by the A kademie der Künste [Academy of Arts], Berlin
- in which her portraits of Walter Benjamin were seen publicly for the
first time - during May-July 2014 [online].
Berenice Abbott
(orig. Bernice; 1898-1991), born in Springfield, Ohio; moved to Greenwich
Village where she shared an apartment iwth Djuna Barnes - who advised
her to go to Paris and to change her name to the French spelling - Kenneth
Burke and Malcolm Cowley; travelled to Europe, 1921; worked as darkroom
assistant to Man Ray in Montparnasse; held a solo exhibition, 1926; started
her own studio at rue du Bac; studied in Berlin; returned to Paris, 1927,
with a new studio on rue Servandon; made portraits of Jean Cocteau and
James Joyce; promoted work of Eugène Atget and purchased much of
his stock of negatives (Atget: photograph de Paris, 1930); returned to
New York, 1929; influenced by Lewis Mumford (The City); issued
Changing New York (1935); shared a Greenwich Village loft with
Elizabeth McCausland, her partner up to McCauslands death in 1965.
Her photograph of Joyce was taken in 1928. (See Wikipedia - Berenice Abbott
- online.]
J. F. K.:
During his address to the Dáil in 1963, President Kennedy purported
to quote Joyces Ulysses writing of the Atlantic as a
bowl of bitter tears. (Seamus Kelly, report on President Kennedys
speech, in The Irish Times, 29 June 1963; rep. in IT [archive
pages], Weekend Review, 30 May 2009). Robert Nicholas writes: Joyce,
however, made no reference to the Atlantic in Ulysses, nor did
he use this phrase. The piece of sea in question is Dublin Bay, and
the phrase used is a bowl of bitter waters. Kennedy, or
his speech-writer, probably guessed that none of his audience knew Ulysses
well enough to catch him out when he transformed Joyce from a proud
and wilful exile to yet another sentimental Irishman grieving over the
Diaspora. (See from Robert Nicholson [Bayview Rise, Killiney, Co Dublin],
in Irish Times, Letters, 6 June 2009.)
[ top ]
Adaline Glasheen,
b. Evansville, Indiana; ed. University of Indiana, transferring to the
University of Mississippi (grad. BA); taught English to football players
there while reading widely MA at George Washington University; taught
at Wheaton College (Mass.); m. Francis Glasheen; dg. b. 1946; began the
Joyce game at that time; Census to Finnegans Wake [1st
Edn.] (Northwestern UP 1946); moved to Farmington, Conn., In 1947 was
and visited by Thornton Wilder; taught several summer courses at State
University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo; conducted extensive correspondence
with Joyce scholars; led seminars on Joyce at the Sorbonne and contrib.
to panels at IJJ Conferences; settled in nursing home in 1986; d. 1993.
(Extract from notice supplied on internet by Francis Glasheen in connection
with her papers in Warren Hunting Smith Library, at Hobert and William
Smith Colleges (Geneva, NY) [online;
08.03.2009] Note that the Third Census of Finnegans Wake is available
at Adaline Glasheen Third Census - Wisconsin Univ. Library Joyce Collection
online.
Terry Eagleton,
Joyce and Modernism, being Lecture 3 in Joyce Perspectives
2001, sponsored by James Joyce Centre, 35 N. Gt. Georges
St. in association with The Irish Times (8 p.m., Wed. 4th Feb.
2001), Series to 14 March.
Franco Moretti
(Serious Century) writes about the role of contingency in
the novel, referencing Goethes unheard of event [i.e.,
contingency] and Giuseppe Sertolis notion of the unforeseen
expansion of the everyday which takes everybody by surprise (I
due Robinson [i.e., The Two Robinsons], [intro. to] La avventure
di Robinson Crusoe, Turin 1998, p.vix, before going on to write of
Lucien de Rubempré in Balzacs second book of Lost Illusions
(1839): Lucien de Rubempré is (finally!) writing his first
article, which will constitute an epoch-making revolution in journalism.
It is the chance he has been waiting for since his arrival in Paris. But
within this euphoric turning point, a second episode is unconspicuously
embedded: the newspaper is short of copy, it immediately needs a few pieces,
never mind on what, as long as they fill the blank space: and a friend
of Luciens, obligingly, sits down and writes. It is almost the Platonic
idea of the filler: words filling up space, period. And yet, this second
article wounds a group of characters who, after many twists and turns,
seal Luciens ruin. / [...] As in the butterfly-effect of chaos theory,
no matter how small the initial event is, the great city within which
it takes place is so rich in variables that it magnifies its effects out
of all expectation. Between the beginning and the end of every action
there is always something else that comes in between, some third
person who is pursuing his own private aims, and deviates the course
of the plot in an unforeseeable direction. And so, even the most harmless
moments of everyday life become chapters in a novel (but this, in Balzac,
is not always good ...). Note: Morettis essay is printed
in his edited collection, The Novel, 2 vols, Princeton UP 2006),
Vol. 1 [q.pp.].
James Baldwin
(in 1955): James Joyce was right about history being a nightmare,
wrote the African American essayist [sic] James Baldwin, but it
is maybe the nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped
in history and history is trapped in them. [...] Just thee months
after the murder, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in Montgomery,
Alabama, sparking the bus boycott that would kick-start the civil rights
era, she said Emmett Till was on her mind. (See Garry Younge,
[article] on reopening of the Emmett Till murder case [Mississippi,
1955], in Guardian Weekly, 17 June 2005.)
John Berryman -
Dream Song 288 |
|
In neighbourhoods evil of noise, he deployed, Henry,
stance unheroic. Say yes without offending.
In our career here
good will we too with ill. Wrinkle a grin.
The place is not so bad, considering
the alternative with real fear.
Being dead, I mean. Well it is a long rest
to himself said Mr Bloom. But is it that now?
As one Hungarian
Jew to another, I have seen grins that test
our patience, pal. Things are getting out
of hand, gaffered another one.
|
Blundering, faltering, uphill all the way
& icy. O say yes without offending.
His heart, a mud-puddle, sang. Serve, Serve it sang
and it sang that all day.
New tasks will craze you in your happy ending.
Let go without a pang. |
Quoted in Katherine Ebury, Serve, Serve,
It Sang, And It Sang That All Day: James Joyce and John
Berryman, in Hypermedia Joyce Studies [HJS] (March
2015); citing The Dream Songs (NY: Farrar, Straus
& Giroux 2007) [p.11] - online.
|
Hans Walter Gèbler,
[ed.,] Ulysses: The Corrected Edition (1984) was rapped
on the knuckles by Dubliners on the grounds that details known to them
had been over-corrected in places, e.g., Harry Thrift, a competitor in
the TCD cycle race, was corrected to Schrift on an inapposite
philological supposition whereas the person correctly indicated by the
name was an rugby international, a long-serving official at College Sports,
and Vice-Provost of the College. Likewis the cattle-dealers talk
of five pound recalled by Bloom was corrected to five
pounds on a similar assumption but overlooking the fact that pound
is a common plural form for the monetary denomination in Hiberno-English.
Note that it is also given in Nevill Coghills
Modern English version of Chaucers Canterbury Tales: Her
kerchiefs were of finely woven ground; / I dared have sworn they weighed
a good give pound. (Wife of Bath, in General Prologue.) See also
the original: I dorste swere they weyeden ten pound (Norton
Anthology of Poetry, 2005, p.30 [l.456]) [BS 28.09.2108].
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