Dear readers of my blog,
this is not yet what I announced to start publishing this year. At the same, the sequence of seven poems on James Joyce, published to coincide with the 80th anniversary of his death tomorrow, is taken from the collection that I hope to present here in the next few months.
Reading Joyce's works since the autumn of 1983, which was earlier than I started to study Oscar Wilde who was not on the syllabus of Dundee University at the time, I have been writing on his life and work since 1984. One of my student essays at Dundee University was on his first novel "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man". At the time, I did not know that this title is in a way derived from the first chapter of "The Picture of Dorian Gray", which, in another way, is also a novel portraying an artist.
Turning from criticism to biography, I published a biography of James Joyce in 2004, which was re-issued in 2009 when I had so much left over, which simply did not fit into the framework of a non-fiction book, that I took advantage of travelling to Luxembourg to write the following pieces. "Written to the moment", they both refer to the moment of writing them and to moments in Joyce's life.
Since all social and cultural activities have been ruled out, a celebration planned at Nuremberg last weekend had to be cancelled, too. Projected by the indefatigable Maria Eger, everybody who would have liked to attend now needs to do what is still possible: read Joyce, think of Joyce, cook the food he wrote about, listen to the music he referred to and wait for the moment when social gatherings in his name are again a possibility.
Normally, posting a blog post, sorry for that untimely repetition does not mean I need to return to the text three or four times in an hour but in Joyce's and Wilde's case this is necessary because both of them could be called famous or infamous for their tendency to revise what they had written. So I need to do so, too, when writing about either of them.
With this fifth version - you see I added a paragraph at least every second revision I made - I hope to have reached the end for the time being but you should never say never for others may spot corrections.
James Joyce’s Life Revisited
I
Minestrone at Zürich
Unused to clean pavements
either in Dublin or in Trieste
Joyce was wont to crack the odd joke
when after the journey across Austria
his family of four finally set foot
on clean Bahnhofstrasse later also publishing a poem.
Not a Cape of Good Hope
for the discoverer of good old Europe
in autumn 1904 the Pension Hoffnung
eleven years on became the point
of departure for one of the
least momentous of such phases as the portrait –
he had had an unnamed protagonist
say in a forgotten essay – of an artist
was to consist of. Rather than ladling
out the soup prepared by herself
which like many of these chores wasn’t her
cup of tea his mate preferred patronising
the same restaurants where he one day
would spot his favourite white wine:
Fendant de Sion. Such a generous even
Profligate patron as JJ wouldn’t mind
having a sponsor let alone a patron
himself and he happened to acquire one in Zürich.
While some recall the arrival of the
first anonymous cheque to have coincided
with one of JJ’s fits of blindness
there are others who have him happily
act the spendthrift he freely admitted
to have been from his father’s side.
With Dublin a city he left for good
in 1912 after only three visits since 1904
and Trieste a haven he couldn’t care for less
after the war while Rome proved intolerable
after seven months and Paris the
place where he finally found fame
it was Zürich which he turned to first
in October 1904 and last
36 yeas later when the second war
made him & his family leave the city of light
for the darkness of the Zone libre
where his peaceful mission of Finnegans Wake
remained unknown even at the
Hôtel de la Paix. Writing letters
at a pace he had never written
prose or poetry before he eventually succeeded
in obtaining travel permits for his loved ones
except for daughter Lucia lingering in occupied France.
The day he breathed his last
in hospital where he’d hardly wanted to be
he’d stopped writing letters some days before
trying to help his brother Stanislaus
stuck in the clutches
of another régime in another war
for the only reason that he couldn’t
but clutch the little comfort
he’d always craved
and remained unwilling to yield
for the sake of freely carrying around
his portable fatherland:
the English language that brother James
would always take with him first
then the family portraits
never the pot to stir porridge in
or Irish stew before it was yet again
time to say good-bye.
Düsseldorf – Remagen, 5 July 2009
II
Travelling around
Surely not descended from tinkers
JJ early learned though the lesson of travelling light
when as the eldest of many surviving siblings
he witnessed the dwindling of family possessions
the household moved with from home to home
in the North of Dublin so that once himself
a family man he insisted on keeping
a flat in Trieste although his brother
would’ve to pay the rent in their absence.
Travel light but keep your pied à terre in either
Trieste Zürich or Paris furnished or unfurnished
that he might return and pick up papers
ready to be recycled for his current chapter
or ask someone like Italo Svevo
aka Hector Aron Schmitz to take it
to Paris thus sparing the post office
the responsibility of losing such a precious
parcel of papers only JJ could use
for any other purpose than lighting a fire –
which view of course he didn’t share.
Trier, Hille’s Hostel, 6 July 2009
III
English as a foreign language
Teaching his mother tongue which his father taught him
by telling him tales or singing him more or less silly songs
proved to be his main source of income
once he had got off the boat in the port of Pula.
At first it was Austrian naval officers
supposed to start talking English
aping their master from Dublin a Bachelor of Arts
used to one on one tuition himself
having acquired a more than working knowledge
of Dantesque Italian in his tutorials at University
College which he would later choose to commemorate
by placing his teacher of Italian
in chapter ten of Ulysses. Meanwhile he had a full day
but complained about the meagre remuneration
given there was a flat to pay for & their habit
of dining out not to forget cigarettes to smoke
a whole set of teeth to be done &
a broadside against the Dublin literati
to be printed with the odd drink not the
smallest expense so if he wanted to learn German
too he would’ve to teach the colleague
another lesson of English – though in his epistles
dispatched regularly to all four corners
of the Dublin universe he never says whether he did do so.
In Rome however where his evening classes
at the École de langues were to provide
him & his with the extra funds for food
his day job at the bank failed to produce
JJ one day refused to stand neither
the enormous number of eight adult students
nor the impudent request a man
he called a Roman peasant uttered
to have the English grammar explained in Italian.
So matters came to a head the Dubliner
gave up banking teaching & dining in Rome
for yet more private lessons in Trieste
where all through summer autumn & winter of 1906/1907
brother Stannie had had to fend off creditors
and where he now would’ve to ingratiate
himself again for the sake of a family of three soon four
to find a flat & students willing to pay
perhaps in advance for the simple reason
that brother James felt fed up with having noone
to walk the streets at night while
enjoying an exchange of ideas. Unlike Baudelaire
who had been declared incapable of business at age 22
but couldn’t avoid indebting himself which meant
he was stuck in either Paris or Bruxelles
JJ also trained by Jesuits only ever
proved to be scrupulous about words
especially spoken ones he sought to keep absolutely beyond
reproof so while he taught people from all walks of life
it took some time until he met the only
Italian writer among his students who’d
published two novels long since forgotten
and who later wrote perceptively both
about Dubliners A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man &
about a performance of Exiles in London.
Socially though the two families
were hardly on a par since the Irishman
remained forever chained & manacled to the part
of underpaid teacher of English as a foreign
language sometime badly paid bookkeeper
in Livia Schmitz’ father’s shipyard Veneziani
as well all of which no generous advance
payments for one year of private tuition
in 1909 nor any other proofs of literary friendship
could make up for since a Joyce
like a Dickens couldn’t but continue
to feel outclassed so that once arrived in Paris
he tried not to teach English any longer
waiting – not in vain – for both money and fame to arrive.
Lobby of the city of Luxembourg Youth Hostel, 7 July 2009
IV
Drama
Epiphanies wasn’t what he called such moments
in his life when his own & his loved ones’
safety seemed at stake nor did he adopt
a phrase like “moments of being”
for instants of sudden recognition on his characters’ part.
While never neglecting to mix dramatic narrative
& poetic modes of rendering perceptions
the only play he ever composed entitled Exiles
had no dramatic action on stage at all
unless you term public & secular confessions dramatic.
Making explicit what had hitherto been part of
epistolary novels like Clarissa Harlowe
& Les Liaisons dangereuses being somewhat his forte
he was in no need of staging fist fights or police raids
in his fiction for a brothel imagined promised much more fun.
This he did in his longest dramatic text
chapter 15 of Ulysses aka “Circe”
by those who don’t accept Joyce’s indignation expressed
in letters when he realised that once he had leaked
chapter titles to certain individuals the same
trusted people would not fail to spread the word
world-wide so that “Telemachus” through “Scylla and
Charybdis” to “Ithaca” & “Penelope” have become
household words rather remain privy to
the happy few the minority of one sought to please.
Anything but dramatic are 136 removals
in his life for such was his attitude towards
possessions that rather than furnishing a flat
which he did but three or four times
he preferred to move in and out of rooms
fully provided with all but books
papers & ancestral portraits
all of which were left behind when the Joyces
like many Parisians fled for the Zone libre
in May/June 1940. If anything this was
pure drama given that a writer – a subject as much as
Alan Bennett’s sovereign – was a reader first
and will always continue reading unless his work
library or both is missing with Joyce
having published Finnegans Wake in May 1939
he even lacked the project which earlier
had kept his sense of being a writer
alive despite all the worries both his
children were wont to caused him
thus he lacked a purpose & a profession
filling his pockets with stones every morning
like Molloy in the later eponymous novel –
before walking the streets of St. Gérand-le-Puy
where he used them one by one to stone the dogs
flocking around him just as he had envisaged
an anonymous protagonist to be beset by the pack
of what were dogs figuratively speaking
hunting the stag that could only flash the antlers
in what was the 22-year-old Joyce’s moving image
of the social strife any outsider would face in Ireland.
Whether he had just put into words his hallucinations
or whether he had anticipated the witch hunts
regularly staged by the media today it was
just nine months & a day after
dating this essay duly rejected by the editors of Dana
as unprintable since they didn’t understand it
that JJ went abroad boarding the ship
unaccompanied it seemed but he had pulled the strings
so it became known only after their departure –
a petty intrigue played at the expense of
his enraged father – that he was followed
by Nora Barnacle whose name meaning goose
made for a nice pun since JJ could thus
hope to be one of the many lucky geese
who in former times had left Ireland never to return.
Trier, in the kitchen of Hille’s Hostel, 6 July 2009
V
Publishers
Invisible facilitators of printed matter
these VIP for writers are sometimes
also photographed like Sylvia Beach
in the doorway to her Anglo-American
lending-library in the Rue de l’Odéon Paris
where true lovers of JJ
remember her standing face to face
with her first & only author but
these days photographs are wont to be
tinkered with recklessly with Joyce’s
white tennis shoes & his stick more
focused than heretofore and
the people walking past on the opposite
pavement appearing suddenly to be more than
street furniture so that at long last
after looking at it repeatedly it dawned
on me that Sylvia Beach couldn’t be
made to disappear without harming the picture
though in real life Joyce abandoned her
when he thought her in the way of a more
profitable contract with a publisher in New York
who would make Ulysses a financial success as well.
Lobby of the city of Luxembourg Youth Hostel, 7 July, 12 noon
VI
Correspondences
At age 15 I discovered retaining
the complete text of a drama
by Gerhart Hauptmann we had studied at school
wasn’t something I needed to work hard for
so until recently it never occurred to me that
Joyce when unable to find an English translation
of the current Hauptmann play
Vor Sonnenaufgang worked hard
to make his own English version or was extremely doué –
after having learned German for that purpose.
He may have accomplished the same surprising
feat regard to Henrik Ibsen
whose native tongue he is also said to
have mastered well enough to translate
his own letter into Norwegian and to
have read the last play When We Dead Awaken
in the original. A poly-linguist Joyce
corresponded fluently in at least four languages –
it’s no surprise then finding him
reading Hauptmann in German
or Wilde in Italian whose drama Salomé
he also wrote an essay on
published in Italian to coincide
with the première of the opera in Trieste.
Corresponding in a professional capacity
as he did for some months in a Roman bank
however didn’t please him
his counterparts or correspondents being all but genuine
he lacked a purpose in life
which could only be writing
and if he had to teach English
he also accepted this under certain conditions
for a limited period while remaining a socialist
concerning one point only: he refused to do
many of the chores he couldn’t see a profit in
so that he only exceptionally earned
his living as a hack. An Irish gentleman
he considered himself to be so when famous at last
Joyce took up polite correspondence with
Writers whom he had met or admired earlier
and who like George Moore W. B. Yeats
& Gerhart Hauptmann belonged to a generation
he at least in polite conversation
or more often in as polite correspondences looked up to.
The story of how he used his brother Stannie
& Ezra Pound himself an acquaintance of Hauptmann’s
in Rapallo to have his copy of Vor Sonnenaufgang
Before Sunrise signed by the Nobel Laureate of 1912
needn’t be retold but it’s interesting
to note that Joyce refused to publish youthful
tour de force but sought to clinch the relationship
he thought to have established by asking
for an autograph while Hauptmann also
in private said in his diaries that he had
lost his way in Joyce’s Ulysses just as
George Moore wrote about that book’s French version
Joyce had given him in 1929.
Just as colours and sounds happily correspond
in Baudelaire’s poem “Correspondances”
and as Rimbaud makes vowel sounds correspondents
people interests & works in a later age
fail to find each other being merely juxtaposed
so that Joyce had he been able to perceive that
wouldn’t have choked with anger on learning
that his wreath for Moore’s funeral
went unmentioned by the press
and that unlike Hauptmann & his spouse
the Joyces were unnamed too on Yeats’s death.
He kept up many strands of correspondence
all his life managing not to lose too many friends
though he didn’t correspond well
to people’s expectations standing out
& thus being passed over
while all he tried to do in later life
was to toe the line of politeness
when in terms of his literary work
he had reached a point of no return.
Trier, in the yard of Hille’s Hostel, 5 July 2009
VII
Stations of the Cross
Listening to but not watching
the ceremony televised live worldwide to commemorate
the “Sphinx of Pop” as put by Durs Grünbein
I couldn’t but think of JJ’s life
in terms of seven stations of the cross
which is a given in Catholic liturgy not only
a fig of the literary imagination
in Nuremberg it was Adam Kraft who halved
the customary fourteen stations
with Joyce becoming a pictorial Jesus Christ bearing his cross
accompanied by a host of Dublin hecklers
in a photo collage prepared to render
the late mediæval Catholic atmosphere
within an early 20th century society
redolent of a Corpus Christi procession –
bodies in bloom-like – as you can still witness it
and participate in traditional parishes all over Europe
where however JJ’s formula of refusing
to be a “literary Jesus Christ” who would
die for his passion rather than give up writing
would necessarily be condemned as blasphemer
with the result that his post-Catholic claim
to be a literary martyr misunderstood by all
but the closest and staunchest friends
would ring wrong in their ears
making his struggle a literary image of his day & age
not the scrupulous chart
of what he perceived & felt when still in Ireland
but the gratuitous action of an amoral man fouling the nest.
Cafeteria of the city of Luxembourg Youth Hostel, 7 July 2009
So, dear readers, when you have worked through all this, which I had to do in order to place all the references to place and time of writing, to italicise titles as well as uncommon words from languages other than English, you know what is the lot of someone like James Joyce who in late 1939 during the "funny war", the "drôle de guerre", was said to have placed commas in his last novel Finnegans Wake. Today, we have got the lockdown or shutdown with Ireland recently much affected because of decisions taken at the wrong time. People there deserve both our sympathy and our support. Perhaps reading this on the internet can be supportive, too. Do spread the word,
all best wishes,
Jörg W. Rademacher
