>Published in The New Yorker on 2nd. July, 2012<
by Louis Menand
''I will tell you what i will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use--silence, exile, and cunning.''
-James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
 |
| The detritus of reality is the material of Joyce’s fiction. “If ‘Ulysses’ isn’t fit to read,” he once said, “life isn’t fit to live.” Artist: Delphine Lebourgeois |
On
a day in May, 1922, in Paris, a medical student named Pierre Mérigot
de Treigny was asked by his teacher, Dr. Victor Morax, a well-known
ophthalmologist, to attend to a patient who had telephoned
complaining about pain from iritis, an inflammation of the eye. The
student went to the patient’s apartment, in a residential hotel on
the Rue de l’Université. Inside, he found a scene of
disarray. Clothes were hanging everywhere; toilet articles were
scattered around on chairs and the mantelpiece. A man wearing dark
glasses and wrapped in a blanket was squatting in front of a pan that
contained the remains of a chicken. A woman was sitting across from
him. There was a half-empty bottle of wine next to them on the floor.
The man was James Joyce. A few months before, on February 2nd, he had
published what some people regarded then, and many people regard now,
as the greatest work of prose fiction ever written in the English
language.
The woman was Nora Barnacle. She and Joyce were unmarried, and had two teen-age children, Giorgio and Lucia, who were living with them in the two-room apartment. The conditions in which the student discovered them were not typical - Joyce lived in luxury whenever he could afford it, and often when he couldn't - but the scene was emblematic. Joyce was a nomad. He was born in 1882, in Rathgar, a suburb of Dublin, and grew up the oldest of ten surviving children. After he started school, his family changed houses nine times in eleven years, an itinerancy not always undertaken by choice. They sometimes moved, with their shrinking stock of possessions, at night, in order to escape the attention of creditors. They did not leave a forwarding address.
James
was the favorite of his charming, cantankerous, and dissolute father,
John Stanislaus Joyce, and was adored by his brothers and sisters.
They called him Sunny Jim, because he laughed at everything. He was a
brilliant student when he chose to excel, a prodigy; and, despite the
family’s relentless downward spiral—John Joyce wasted a
considerable inheritance—he received a serious education at Jesuit
schools. By the time he got his degree, from University College,
Dublin, in 1902, the family was living in the northern suburb of
Cabra. A friend later described the house: “The banisters were
broken, the grass in the back-yard was all blackened out. There was
laundry there and a few chickens, and it was a very very miserable
home.” Joyce’s mother, Mary, died there, of liver cancer, in
1903.
Joyce left Ireland a year later, when
he was twenty-two, but he never really left the manner of life he had
known. Like his father, he was a raconteur and a barfly. He had a
good tenor voice (as did John Joyce), and he loved to sing and to
dance. When he had no money, he borrowed it; when he had it, he
picked up the tab for whatever company he was in, booked himself and
his family into fancy hotels, and bought fur coats for Nora and
Lucia. He was generous in the free-spirited way that only
the inveterately insolvent can be.
For
many years after he moved to the Continent, he scraped a living as a
language teacher in Berlitz schools, a job he disliked. He started
out in Pula, moved to Trieste, to Rome, then back to Trieste, and,
finally, to Zurich. He changed residences regularly wherever he was,
sometimes under a landlord’s gun. In 1920, he moved to Paris, where
he was supported by patrons and—though only toward the end of his
life, since “Ulysses” was banned for twelve years in the United
States and for fourteen in Britain—by royalties. During the twenty
years he lived in Paris, he had eighteen different addresses.
“A
man of small virtue, inclined to extravagance and alcoholism” is
how Joyce described himself to Carl Jung. He was frail—he avoided
contact sports like rugby as a child and barroom pugilism as a
grownup—and he was frequently laid low by nervous attacks and
illnesses. His eye troubles forced him to submit to a series of
tricky and painful operations. At times, he was virtually blind. When
he wrote, which he did usually stretched out across a bed, he wore a
white jacket, so that light was reflected onto the paper; as he got
older, he used a magnifying glass, in addition to his eyeglasses, to
read.
After
the Second World War broke out and the Germans occupied Paris, Joyce
managed to get to Switzerland. He died there, in Zurich, of a
perforated ulcer, on January 13, 1941. He was fifty-eight, and a very
old man. He had burned the candle all the way down. He had spent
eight years on “Ulysses,” and fifteen years on “Finnegans
Wake,” which was published in 1939. “My eyes are tired,” he
wrote in a letter to Giorgio, in 1935. “For over half a century,
they have gazed into nullity where they have found a lovely nothing.”
To read more, go to: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/07/02/silence-exile-punning
Louis
Menand has contributed to The
New Yorker since
1991, and has been a staff writer since 2001. His book “The
Metaphysical Club” was awarded the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for history
and the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American
Historians. He was an associate editor of The
New Republic from
1986 to 1987, an editor at The
New Yorker from
1992 to 1993, and a contributing editor of The
New York Review of Books from
1994 to 2001. He is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of
English at Harvard University. He has also taught at the Graduate
Center of the City University of New York, Queens College, Princeton,
Columbia, and the University of Virginia School of Law.
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