constant escape
winter withered, warm
Joseph Conrad, in a letter to a sorrowing aunt, wrote “how solitude loses its terrors once one fully knows it,” but for Joyce, solitude would have meant the madhouse. His fear of dogs and thunder are no secret; his fear of madness he both admitted and repudiated; but his fear of aloneness he kept to himself. His family—Nora and their two children—was a bulwark against it, and so was drink. The exile that had been first from his own country extended to an exile from all the rest of the world, and to endure it he had to have bustle around him. The visitors always gauged their behavior by his mood, his smile, or his non-smile. Nora would sit with the guests, not even offering them a drink until Joyce appeared, and his increasing blindness added to the sense of formality as he recognized his guests by their voices, then took his customary place, by the window. The first half hour was always somewhat sombre, with conversation so stilted that even Harriet Weaver was addressed formally. This was not simply grandeur; it was a man with a distance between himself and others.
Paradoxically, as writers wrestle with language to capture the human condition, they become callous, and cut off from the very human traits they so glisteningly depict. There can be no outer voice, no interruptions—only the inner drone, rhythmic, insistent, and struggling to make a living moment of both beauty and austerity. For Joyce, people were becoming more and more remote, and would eventually be spectres.
In 1922, Sylvia Beach wrote to tell him that by allowing a second edition to be published from the same plates she felt that she was in danger of being brought up before a French court for having palmed off a bogus first edition. Angry booksellers, angry publishers, and angry collectors were outraged that their first edition might not be unique. Adrienne Monnier, Miss Beach’s lover, later wrote to tell Joyce what she had for a long time been thinking—that Miss Beach, his “maid of all work,” was being exploited. She had been put upon, made to hustle. Shakespeare and Company had existed only for the benefit of James Joyce. Those who thought he was indifferent to fame and fortune were sadly mistaken, as she could assure them. True to Joyce’s dissembling nature, he did not enter the fray. He said that it was always best not to act for oneself but to cultivate ostensible aloofness and to pull strings.
“I am always friends with a person for a purpose,” he had said, and Miss Beach’s purpose was waning. He would replace her with another acolyte.
True to a long line of dauntless Englishwomen who have risked their lives and their respectability for a “cause,” Harriet Weaver found her cause in the person of James Augustine Aloysius Joyce. That she loved him was undoubted, and that the fact of it was never even broached is remarkable. Whenever she received a small pension from this or that deceased relative, she rushed to put it at his disposal. Whenever he voiced concern over worsening impecunity, she would cross the Channel to reassure him of her support. She saw him down bottle after bottle of wine, tip handsomely, and travel by taxi when she travelled by bus. But none of that did anything to disillusion her.
Various estimates have been made of how much Miss Weaver gave him, over the course of twenty-four years: one Joyce specialist, Robert Adams Day, has calculated that in the equivalent of today’s currency it was close to a million dollars. She asked for nothing in return. Her original intention was to give him the wherewithal to write, but soon her role extended to helping him with his living expenses, his wife’s living expenses, his children’s needs, their illnesses, his numerous eye operations, the hotels in Paris where he lived, and the more opulent hotels where he vacationed. As Joyce became more and more dependent on his benefactress, his need of money became more and more rapacious. His treasury, he wrote her, was being “sucked up by some giant vacuum,” which he omitted to call himself.
Miss Weaver would get something in return—the gift of seeing the wonder of Joyce’s imagination in full flight. As he began to write his next masterpiece, he sent her glossary after glossary of explanation, along with little nudges for her to delight in his word puzzles. “Wolken,” he explained, was a woollen cap of clouds; “dinn” was a mixture of “din” and the Arabic “djinn”; this from a mind whereupon the word “battlefield” would become “bluddle filth.”
One morning in March of 1923, despite upheavals, failing eyesight, and deteriorating health, Joyce took up some foolscap and commenced on his “Work in Progress.” The book’s title—“Finnegans Wake”—he jealously guarded, confiding it only to Nora, in case he died. “ ‘Ulysses’—who wrote it, I’ve forgotten,” he said.
Paradoxically, as writers wrestle with language to capture the human condition, they become callous, and cut off from the very human traits they so glisteningly depict. There can be no outer voice, no interruptions—only the inner drone, rhythmic, insistent, and struggling to make a living moment of both beauty and austerity. For Joyce, people were becoming more and more remote, and would eventually be spectres.
In 1922, Sylvia Beach wrote to tell him that by allowing a second edition to be published from the same plates she felt that she was in danger of being brought up before a French court for having palmed off a bogus first edition. Angry booksellers, angry publishers, and angry collectors were outraged that their first edition might not be unique. Adrienne Monnier, Miss Beach’s lover, later wrote to tell Joyce what she had for a long time been thinking—that Miss Beach, his “maid of all work,” was being exploited. She had been put upon, made to hustle. Shakespeare and Company had existed only for the benefit of James Joyce. Those who thought he was indifferent to fame and fortune were sadly mistaken, as she could assure them. True to Joyce’s dissembling nature, he did not enter the fray. He said that it was always best not to act for oneself but to cultivate ostensible aloofness and to pull strings.
“I am always friends with a person for a purpose,” he had said, and Miss Beach’s purpose was waning. He would replace her with another acolyte.
True to a long line of dauntless Englishwomen who have risked their lives and their respectability for a “cause,” Harriet Weaver found her cause in the person of James Augustine Aloysius Joyce. That she loved him was undoubted, and that the fact of it was never even broached is remarkable. Whenever she received a small pension from this or that deceased relative, she rushed to put it at his disposal. Whenever he voiced concern over worsening impecunity, she would cross the Channel to reassure him of her support. She saw him down bottle after bottle of wine, tip handsomely, and travel by taxi when she travelled by bus. But none of that did anything to disillusion her.
Various estimates have been made of how much Miss Weaver gave him, over the course of twenty-four years: one Joyce specialist, Robert Adams Day, has calculated that in the equivalent of today’s currency it was close to a million dollars. She asked for nothing in return. Her original intention was to give him the wherewithal to write, but soon her role extended to helping him with his living expenses, his wife’s living expenses, his children’s needs, their illnesses, his numerous eye operations, the hotels in Paris where he lived, and the more opulent hotels where he vacationed. As Joyce became more and more dependent on his benefactress, his need of money became more and more rapacious. His treasury, he wrote her, was being “sucked up by some giant vacuum,” which he omitted to call himself.
Miss Weaver would get something in return—the gift of seeing the wonder of Joyce’s imagination in full flight. As he began to write his next masterpiece, he sent her glossary after glossary of explanation, along with little nudges for her to delight in his word puzzles. “Wolken,” he explained, was a woollen cap of clouds; “dinn” was a mixture of “din” and the Arabic “djinn”; this from a mind whereupon the word “battlefield” would become “bluddle filth.”
One morning in March of 1923, despite upheavals, failing eyesight, and deteriorating health, Joyce took up some foolscap and commenced on his “Work in Progress.” The book’s title—“Finnegans Wake”—he jealously guarded, confiding it only to Nora, in case he died. “ ‘Ulysses’—who wrote it, I’ve forgotten,” he said.
