Is Religion Child Abuse? - Christopher Hitchens

First part of Chapter Sixteen from the book ''GOD IS NOT GREAT''

How Religion Poisons Everything
Published by Atlantic Books, London in 2007

Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 - 15 December 2011) was an Anglo-American author, columnist, orator, religious and literary critic, social critic, and journalist. Hitchens was the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of over 30 books, including five collections of essays, on politics, literature and religion.

When we consider whether religion has ''done more harm than good'' - not that this would say anything at all about its truth or authenticity - we are faced with an imponderably large question. How can we ever know how many children had their psychological and physical lives irreparably maimed by the compulsory inculcation of faith? This is almost as hard to determine as the number of spiritual and religious dreams and visions that came ''true'', which in order to possess even a minimal claim to value would have to be measured against all the unrecorded and unremembered ones that did not. But we can be sure that religion has always hoped to practice upon the unformed and undefended minds of the young, and has gone to great lengths to make sure of this privilege by making alliances with secular powers in the material world.

    One of the great instances of moral terrorism in our literature is the sermon preached by Father Arnall in James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This disgusting old priest is reading Stephen Dedalus and his other young ''charges'' for a retreat in honor of Saint Francis Yavier (the man who brought the Inquisition to Asia and whose bones are still revered by those who choose to revere bones). He decided to impress them with a long and gloating account of eternal punishment, of the sort which the church used to mandate when it still had the confidence to do so. It is possible to quote the entire rant, but two particularly element - concerning the nature of torture and the nature of time - are of interest. It is easy to see that the priest's words are precisely to frighten children. In the first place, the images are themselves childlike. In the torture section, the very devil himself makes a mountain shrivel like wax. Every frightening malady is summoned, and the childlike worry that this pain might go on forever is deftly played upon. When it comes to the picture of a unit of time, we see a child on the beach playing with grains of sand, and then the infantile magnification of units (''Daddy, what if there were a million million million squillion kittens: would they fill up the whole world?''), and then, adding further multiplicities, the evocation of nature's leaves, and the easily conjured fur and feathers and scales of the family pet. For centuries, grown men have been paid to frighten children in this way (and to torture and beat and violate them as well, as they also did in Joyce's memory and the memory of countless others).
    The other man-made stupidities and cruelties of the religious are easy to detect as well. The idea of torture is as old as the nastiness of mankind, which is the only species with the imagination to guess what it might feel like when imposed upon another. We cannot blame religion for this impulse, but we can condemn it for institutionalizing and refining the practice. The museums of medieval Europe, from Holland to Tuscany, are crammed with instruments and devices upon which holy men labored devoutly, in order to see how long they could keep someone alive while being roasted. It is not needful to go into further details, but there were also religious books of instruction in this art, and guides for the detection of heresy by pain. Those who were not lucky enough to be allowed to take part in the auto-da-fé (or ''act of faith'', as a torture session was known) were permitted free rein to fantasize as many lurid nightmares as they could, and to inflict them verbally in order to keep the ignorant in a state of permanent fear. In an era where there was little enough by way of public entertainment, a good public burning or disembowelment or breaking on the wheel was often as much recreation as the saintly dared to allow. 

Tertullian, full name
Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus,
 c. 155 – c. 240 AD,
 was a prolific early Christian author from
Carthage in the Roman province of Africa

Nothing proves the man-made character of religion as obviously as the sick mind that designed hell, unless it is the sorely limited mind that has failed to describe heaven-except as a place of either worldly comfort, eternal tedium, or (as Tertullian thought) continual relish in the torture of others.
    Pre-Christian hells were highly unpleasant too, and called upon the same sadistic ingenuity for their invention. However, some of the early ones we know of - most notably the Hindu - were limited in time. A sinner, for example, might be sentenced to a given number of years in hell, where every day counted as 6,400 human years. If he slew a priest, the sentence thus adjusted would be 149,504,000,000 years. It was left to Christians to find a hell from which there was no possible appeal. (And the idea is easily plagiarized: I once heard Louis Farrakhan, leader of the heretical black-only ''Nation of Islam'', as he drew a hideous roar from a mob in Madison Square Garden. Hurling spittle at the Jews, he yelled: ''And don't you forget - when it's God who puts you in the ovens, it's FOREVER!).
    The obsession with children, and with rigid control over their upbringing, has been part of every system of absolute authority. It may have been a Jesuit who was first actually quoted as saying: ''Give me the child until he is ten, and I will give you the man'', but the idea is very much older than the school of Ignatius Loyola. Indoctrination of the young often has the reverse effect, as we also know from the fate of many secular ideologies, but it seems that the religious will run this risk in order to imprint the average boy or girl with enough propaganda. What else can they hope to do? If religious instruction were not allowed until the child had attained the age of reason, we would be living in a quite different world. Faithful parents are divided over this, since they naturally hope to share the wonders and delights of Christmas and other fiestas with their offspring (and can also make good use of a god, as well as of lesser figures like Santa Claus, to help tame the unruly) but mark what happens if the child should stray to another faith, let alone another cult, even in early adolescence. The parents will tend to proclaim that this is taking advantage of the innocent. All monotheisms have, or used to have, a very strong prohibition against apostasy for just this reason. In her Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, Mary McCarthy remembers her shock at learning from a Jesuit preacher that her Protestant grandfather - her guardian and friend - was doomed to eternal punishment because he had been baptized in the wrong way. A precociously intelligent child, she would not let the matter drop until she had made the Mother Superior consult some higher authorities and discover a loophole in the writings of Bishop Athanasius, who held that heretics were only damned if they rejected the true church with full awareness of what they were doing. Her grandfather, then, might be sufficiently unaware of the true church to evade hell. But what an agony to which to subject an eleven-year-old girl! And only think of the number of less curious children who simply accepted this evil teaching without questioning it. Those who lie to the young in this way are wicked in the extreme......................

JAMES JOYCE’S BOOK REVIEW IN THE DAILY EXPRESS on 19 November 1903

Borlase and Son by T. Baron Russell 

'Borlase and Son' has the merit, first of all, of actuality'. As the preface is dated for May last, one may credit the author with prophetic power, or at least with that special affinity for the actual, the engrossing topic, which is a very necessary quality in the melodramatist. The scene of the story is the suburban district about Peckham Rye, where the Armenians have just fought out a quarrel, and, moreover, the epitasis (as Ben Jonson would call it) of the story dates from fall of stocks incident upon a revolution among the Latin peoples of America.

But the author has an interest beyond that derivable from such allusions. He has been called the Zola of Camberwell, and, inappropriate as the pepithet is, it is to Zola we must turn for what is, perhaps, the supreme achievement in that class of fiction of which 'Borlase and Son' is a type. In 'Au Bonheur des Dames' Zola has set forth the intimate glories and shames of the great warehouse – has, in fact, written an epic for drapers; and in 'Borlase and Son', a much smaller canvas, our author has drawn very faithfully the picture of the smaller 'emporium', with its sordid avarice, its underpaid labour, its intrigue, its 'customs of trade'.

The suburban mind is not invariably beautiful, and its working is here delineated with unsentimental vigour. Perhaps the unctuousness of old Borlase is somewhat overstated, and the landladies may be reminiscent of Dickens. In spite of its 'double circle' plot, 'Borlase and Son' has much original merit, and the story, a little slender starveling of a story, is told very-neatly and often very humorously. For the rest, the binding of the book is as ugly as one could reasonably expect.  

James Joyce

For more information about this review go to The James Joyce Centre - http://jamesjoyce.ie/tag/t-baron-russell/

J.P. Donleavy, Acclaimed Author of ‘The Ginger Man,’ Dies at 91

By ANITA GATES  13th September, 2017 - The New York Times -

The novelist and playwright J. P. Donleavy at 

Levington Park, the County Westmeath, Ireland, estate 

where he had lived since the 1970s. 

photo: Kenneth O Halloran  

J. P. Donleavy, the expatriate American author whose 1955 novel “The Ginger Man” shook up the literary world with its combination of sexual frankness and outrageous humor, died on Monday at a hospital near his home in Mullingar, County Westmeath, Ireland. He was 91.

His sister, Mary Rita Donleavy, said the cause was a stroke.

Mr. Donleavy had considerable trouble finding a publisher for “The Ginger Man,” his bawdily adventurous story of 1940s university life in Dublin, which he described to The New York Times in 2000 as “celebratory, boisterous and resolutely careless mayhem.”

The playwright Brendan Behan, a friend, suggested that Mr. Donleavy send the manuscript to Olympia Press in Paris. This worked out well, in that Olympia accepted the book, and not well, in that it was published as part of the Traveler’s Companion series, which was known for erotica.

“That was basically the end of my career,” Mr. Donleavy told The Times. “I was ‘a dirty book writer’ out of Paris.” In fact, he went on to write many other successful novels.

“The Ginger Man” — whose bohemian American-in-Ireland antihero, Sebastian Dangerfield, has been described as impulsive, destructive, wayward, cruel, a monster, a clown and a psychopath — was both banned and burned in Ireland. When it was published in the United States in 1958, Chapter 10 was omitted, along with numerous sentences here and there.

The novel eventually won critical acclaim and public acceptance, so much so that it is now considered a contemporary classic, selling more than 45 million copies worldwide. Mr. Donleavy was compared to James Joyce and hailed as a forerunner of both the black humor movement and the London playwrights known as the Angry Young Men.

“What really makes ‘The Ginger Man’ a vital work,” Norman Podhoretz, the longtime editor of Commentary, wrote, “is the fact that it both reflects and comments dramatically on the absurdities of an age clinging to values in which it simply cannot believe and unable to summon up the courage to find out what its moral convictions really are.”

For the whole article go to: The New York Times

My Little Town

James Joyce and Italo Svevo: The Story of a friendship

By Stanly Price

Somerville Press 276 pp £14

A review by Jan Morris in today's Literary Review

This fascinating work of scholarship concerns the association between two great 20th-century writers and the city that brought them together. The writers were the Italian Italo Svevo (1861–1928) and the Irishman James Joyce (1882–1941). The city was Trieste (45˚38’N 13˚46’E).

All three – the two men and the city – were almost equally complex in status, origin, style, condition and intention. To my dilettante mind the governing presence of the triad, binding it together in a kind of posthumous trinity, was the city, standing as it did upon an ethnic and historical fault line, and notorious for its genius loci, a gale-force wind called the bora.

The three of them are properly matched, and for me perhaps the most telling passage in the book (which is essentially a work of advanced cultural reportage) describes the two writers walking together in the city when the bora blew in one day. An eyewitness reported that they clung like mountain climbers to the safety ropes fixed in the downtown streets, but never stopped talking as the genius howled around them.

They met in Trieste in 1907: Joyce was scraping a living teaching English to Italian residents and Svevo came to him for lessons. Nothing in the tale, though, is as simple as that. Svevo, who was born Ettore Schmitz, was twenty years older that his teacher. He was a prominent local businessman whose family had enriched itself by making a unique kind of underwater paint, and he was not yet a writer at all. His only vice, it seems, was chain-smoking. Joyce, on the other hand, was already writing books of startling originality, was nearly always in debt and was a notorious drunkard. Yet the two, it seems, recognised the genius in each other, however latent, and were to remain friends and colleagues for life.

To read more go to: The Little Review

James Joyce - Scientist of Letters

...he was absolutely without an equal.

The New Republic's obituary for James Joyce, 1882-1941

by The New Republic

January 20, 1941

Detail of a photo by Gisèlle Freund

James Joyce died in Switzerland, the last truly neutral country in western Europe. Since his escape from France, he had been living with his family in Zurich—in the same house, we are told, that they occupied in the World War. He was there twenty-six years ago when Romain Rolland, also a refugee in Switzerland, published Above the Battle. But Joyce was not so much above as completely outside the battle. He was working as much as 16 hours a day on the writing of Ulysses, a task that seemed more important to him than the fate of the warring countries. After leaving Ireland in 1904, he never permitted himself to make a statement on any political issue. He was the leading representative in our time, and perhaps in all times, of the theory of literature as a pure art almost

Literature as a pure art approaches the nature of pure science. And Joyce was also the great research scientist of letters, handling words with the same freedom and originality that Einstein handles mathematical symbols. The sounds, patterns, roots, and connotations of words interested him much more than their definite meanings. One might say that he invented a non-Euclidean geometry of language; and that he worked over it with doggedness and devotion, as if in a laboratory far removed from the noises of the street. This does not mean that he neglected to present human beings in his novels. Stephen Dedalus and his father, Leopold and Molly Bloom, even H. C. Earwicker of Finnegans Wake, are figures that will not be forgotten. But they are figures that are analyzed exhaustively in repose rather than being presented in action. And the side of them that held Joyce’s interest was their subconscious—that is, the side that medical scientists like to deal with. Moreover, even the strongest of his characters seem dwarfed by the great apparatus of learning that he brings to bear on them. They are almost like atoms being smashed by a 250-ton cyclotron.

These are some of the reasons why Joyce was not a writer of the same magnitude as Tolstoy or Stendhal or Dickens or any of the great men whose subject was human actions in their social background. In his own field, however, he was absolutely without an equal. There are very few serious novels of the last twenty years that do not show traces of his influence, even if only at third hand. The writers of the world owe him an enormous debt for making discoveries that have opened new horizons even to those who completely disagree with Joyce’s idea of literature. They will miss him all the more because, in the hard years that lie ahead of us, it is doubtful whether any great scientist of letters will have the opportunity to carry on his work. Perhaps there will not even be neutral countries to which they can escape.

https://newrepublic.com/article/127591/scientist-lett

A visit to John Cowper Powys - by Clifford Tolchard

John Cowper Powys (1872-1963)

Clifford Tolchard (1908-1980) was Hilary Reynolds' maternal uncle, who emigrated to Australia in November 1962.

It was on a Saturday in the late autumn that I paid my first visit to John Cowper Powys at his home in Corwen, where he then lived. It was six-fifteen in the morning when I left Birmingham and still dark.

Most of the passengers on that early train were anglers going out into the country for a day's fishing. They carried bundles of rods and large square wicker-work baskets which served the double purpose of 'holdalls' and seats. After brief greetings they snuggled down in the corners of compartment and endeavoured to resume their interrupted slumbers. I was to excited to sleep and as it got lighter I amused myself by trying to pronounce and memorise the names of Welsh stations as we passed through them.

I had an hour to wait at Ruabon for the branch line train that would take me to Corwen. It was bitterly cold; far colder in the higher altitudes of Wales than it had been in Birmingham. Several other travellers waiting for connections walked up and down the platform stamping their feet or stood in corners in vain efforts to keep out of the icy wind.

I went and sat in the waiting room. There was of course no fire there but the cold was less rigorous than on the open platform. A porter was cleaning the windows there and we talked together as I ate two of my sandwiches. Later he accepted a mouthful of burgundy from my plastic cup: ''Just to try it, man,'' he said.

After a while I joined the other travellers in trying to keep warm by violent walking along the platform. The movement also helped to allay some of the nervousness I felt at meeting for the first time this author who, to me stood out above his contemporaries like a Triton among minnows.

Corwen Station in 1961

A friend of mine, a librarian, had suggested that perhaps it was not quite wise to risk visiting a writer for whom I had so great an admiration. Writers are so often a disappointment when you meet them, she said. They don't talk or act a bit like their books. But I was not worried about that. My main concern was that in my nervousness I should not say too many foolish things.
There were still two hours to go before the time of my appointment when I got out of the train at Corwen. My visit had been arranged for ''anytime after twelve o'clock,'' by which time Mr Powys would have returned from his customary morning walk. This walk is something of a ritual and nothing is allowed to interfere with it's accomplishment; it takes exactly two hours and is undertaken regardless of the state of the weather.

As I strolled around the little town I had the impression of being in a foreign country--I suppose a Welsh Nationalist would say that I was. All about me I could hear the Welsh language being spoken. Somehow I had not been prepared for that; my journey here had been entirely by land therefore it seemed natural to expect the people to be speaking in my own tongue. But there it was, and I felt foolishly surprised. I went into one shop to buy cigarettes and into another to purchase a handkerchief, an article I had forgotten to bring with me. The shopkeepers and their customers were gossiping in Welsh and when I appeared and proffered my requests in English they became silent, momentarily nonplussed and adverted to English with an effort, like a driver performing a difficult gear change on a car. I felt like an interloper, an alien. And I suspected that they meant me to feel like that.

John Cowper Powys with Clifford
Tolchard at Corwen in 1952

At ten minutes past twelve I turned into Cae Coed, the cul-de-sac where Mr Powys lived. No.7, like the others in the road is quite a small house, ''Jerry built, but very comfortably Jerry built'', is how he refered to it, and as I came level with it I was able to see from where I stood in the road clear into the front room. I could see Mr Powys, his hands clasped behind his head half lying on the couch he habitually uses in preference to a chair. Of course I had known for years what he looked like; nobody could mistake that 'cat head' and cropped skull; the head and features of 'Dud No-man', 'Jobber Skald', and 'John Crow', and Mr Powys knew me from photographs I had sent him. I saw him jump up and hurry from the room to open the door to me. Within seconds the door was flung open and I was enveloped in an almost overwhelming embrace and kissed on the cheek. And in those first brief moments I was made aware of his terrific vitality and nervous energy. It was I realized later the intensity of that super abundant energy that had provided the power and stamina necessary to produce that veritable masterpiece, 'A Glastonbury Romance'. And with more than eighty years behind him Mr Powys's exuberance remains unabated.
''My dear, Tolchard!'' he exclaimed, beaming and rubbing his hands as though welcoming and old friend. ''My dear, Tolchard, how good of you to come all this way''. And with his arms still round my shoulders he almost dragged me into the hall.
''But how smart you look,'' he said. I was wearing a new jacket and I remember being surprised that of all people should have noticed it or have bothered to comment on it. It is well known that Mr Powys has no regard for sartorial niceties.

There was a friend, a neighbour in the room into which he ushered me.  I was introduced and accommodated in an armchair. Mr Powys threw himself on his couch, jumped up, flung himself down again, his limbs never still, his features animated while all the time words poured from him in an exuberance torrent; he talks as he writes with a volubility, a flow that will not, cannot be checked.

Cowper Powys on his couch

I took from my bag and gave him a book that I had brought as a gift. It was a new Welsh dictionary that had just been published. It was a happy choice as at that time Mr Powys was going deeper into his study of the Welsh language. He seized the parcel from my hands and fumbled excitedly with the wrappings like an eager boy opening an birthday present. And when he saw what the book was he leapt off his couch and grasped both my hands: ''Oh, my dear, Tolchard, you are an angel! You really are,'' he exclaimed. And I thought how good it was in this sophisticated age to be capable of such enthusiasms at eighty years of age and to be able to vent them so unselfconsciously. But that is how Mr Powys is; completely unselfconscious and retaining as an octogenarian that gusto for life which has characterised each member of his family with the exception of his brother, Theodore Francis.
And then he decided that I too must have a book; a present from him. ''We will go upstairs directly and find something for you,'' he said. ''I have a book on Black Magic you might like. I hate it. I want to get it out of the house. I don't like having it here.'' And he laughed as though at his own squeamishness.

For years Mr Powys has been a non-smoker and his diet is the dullest thing imaginable; milk, cups of strong very sweet tea and bread. He did not mind he said how stale the bread was, even the most obdurate crust did not daunt him, and by movements of his mouth he demonstrated how he chumbled them up after dipping them in his tea. So while he lay on his couch drinking milk his friend and I ate sandwiches and drank sherry.
From time to time he checked his flow of talk to refill his glass with milk from a bottle that stood on the small table beside his couch so that while we sat there he completely finished a pint bottle.
Unfortunately without the aid of a tape machine--and how he would have hated that modern invention--it would impossible to record all the things Mr Powys said and animadverted upon; his restless mind ranged over so many topics and fancies, embroidering and enlarging upon them and included miniature lecture on the origins of the Welsh race. I recall him saying: ''They are not Celtic, you know, they are Iberian.'' He was quite dogmatic about it.

Phyllis Playter and John Cowper Powys

Then, during a pause in the talk, while he was perhaps changing from one subject to another, he remarked the tie I was wearing. Like my jacket it was a new one, probably a present. ''What a pretty tie that is you have, Tolchard,'' he said. He appealed to his friend, ''Is'nt that an attractive tie he has on?''
Without further ado I took it off and offered it to him; it seemed the natural thing to do. He accepted it happily without any of those hypercritical attempts at refusal that are the rule among ordinary people. And then, as with the book it was necessary that I have one of his to replace mine. ''I'll go and get one'', he said, and hurried out of the room. It was like swapping stamps or bird's eggs at school.
A few moments later Mr Powys returned carrying a cloth covered hoop trough which were draped about two dozen ties. I was amazed at their number and variety. He had, I wondered come by them all in the same way? I had always imagined him as a man who would have only one tie at a time and make that one last for at least twelve months. This galaxy of neckwear was an eye-opener.
I was instructed to choose one. ''And if it is one you can't have I'll tell you,'' he said. I picked one at random. ''No you can't have that one,'' Mr Powys said, ''choose another.'' I wondered what the story was behind his attachment to that particular tie. I dipped again and came up with a screaming tartan; no Scotsman would have owned it. My hand must have been drawn to it by the violence of it's colours. Apparently Mr Powys had no special regard for this one and I was allowed to keep it, at least until I got home and my wife saw it.

Cliffort Tolchard  in front of his house in Australia
[photo from Hilary Reynolds' private collection]

We had finished our sherry and sandwiches and Mr Powys's milk bottle was empty. Also the time was approaching when I should have to leave. He suggested that we should go and choose a book for myself from his shelves upstairs.
It was so cold outside the warm room in which we had been sitting that Mr Powys stopped for a moment in the hall to put on an overcoat before mounting to the unheated upper rooms where most of his books were kept. I had time while he was adjusting his coat to look round the hall and I noticed his unique collection of walking sticks standing in one corner. Sticks, like many other inanimate objects have always played an important part in his life, and in his writing, too. More than one of his chief characters, John Crow in 'A Glastonbury Romance', Dud No-Man in 'Maiden Castle' and Wolf Solent had each carried one of these great misshapen cudgels with gnarled handles made smooth bu use. And had there not at one time been a favourite stick of his own, a 'magic stick' called 'sacred'?

The Powys Family (late 1890s)
Marian, Albert, Charles Francis (father), John Cowper,
Theodore,Philippa (Katie), Littleton, Mary Cowper (mother), 

Margaret, Gertrude,Llewelyn, William, Lucy.

It was not a large room into which Mr Powys took me and it was full of personal treasures. It was a room that did not appear to be used a great deal. Besides his books and some pictures there were many photographs of his family; the whole egregious Powys clan, solus and in groups. And in the middle of a wall of photographs hung the white death mask of his brother, Llewellyn.
Swiftly, vividly, with his writer's touch he sketched brief histories of each of these relatives as we stood in front of their likenesses. And his engaging chuckle kept breaking in contagiously as he recounted some Rabelasion (sic.) anecdote of the past.
Regarding the photograph of his brother, Theodore Francis, with his tight mouth and grim visage I said that I thought that I should have been rather afraid of meeting him; he looked so forbidding and unapproachable. ''O, you would'', Mr Powys said. ''you would. He frightened Thomas Hardy. Hardy quite jumped when Theo' came into the room''. And he gave a little jump and a grunt himself to show how Hardy had been affected by the sudden appearance of his brother. ''But Mrs Hardy got on with him splendidly'', Mr Powys said. ''She quite liked him''. We chose a book, or rather four books--he insisted on my having them all--although I wondered how I was going to carry them all the way back to Birmingham. We took them downstairs for Mr Powys to inscribe them.

Cowper Powys at  Corwen

And then it was time for me to go.
With difficulty we packed the books into my small case. Around my neck I now wore the eye-filling tartan tie. Mr Powys accompanied me to the door and there embraced me and repeated his kiss on my cheek exhorting me to come again whenever I felt so inclined.
At the bottom of the road I stopped to look back before turning the corner. And there standing in the doorway of his modest house, John Cowper Powys, the author of 'Jobber Skald', 'Owen Glendower' and those two masterpieces: 'Wolf Solent' and 'A Glastonbury Romance', was smiling and waving me goodbye.

Clifford Tolchard.

165 Mansel Road. Birmingham. 10 

Day of the Dead

Malcolm Lowry's mysterious demise

By D.T. Max 

The New Yorker - life and letters - December 17, 2007

Malcolm Lowry died in his cottage in the village of Ripe, in Sussex, late at night on June 26, 1957, or early the next morning. He was forty-seven years old. His wife, Margerie, found his body upstairs, on the floor of their bedroom. An autopsy revealed that Lowry, an alcoholic, had been drunk, and the doctor who examined the body found that he had swallowed a large number of barbiturates and had inhaled some half-digested food from his stomach. An inquest was held, at which a police officer, the Lowrys' landlady, and Margerie testified. The coroner ruled the fatality a ''misadventure'' - that is, an accident. Lowry had choked to death on his own vomit.

Lowry is known for his 1947 novel, ''Under the Volcano'', which chronicles the final hours of Geoffrey Firmin, an alcoholic Englishman living in Mexico, in the shadow of the Ixacihuatl and Popocatepetl volcanoes. On November 1st, the Day of the Dead, Firmin, the former British consul, finds that his estranged wife, Yvonne, has come back to town, Paralyzed by his alcoholism, he drifts from cantina to cantina, considering ways to reclaim her; but he never acts. By nightfall, Firmin is dead in a ditch, shot by Mexican paramilitaries. ''Volcano'' fuses modernist and romantic sensibilities: the story is told from shifting points of view, and Firmin's daylong odyssey is borrowed from ''Ulysses''; at the same time, Lowry's prose is fervent, laid down in unstable, looping sentences. Shortly before his death, the consul sees on a house an inscription that reads “No se puede vivir sin amar”—“One cannot live without love.” Lowry, in a 1946 letter to Margerie’s family, wrote, “ ‘Volcano’ ’s theme: ‘only against death does man cry out in vain.’ ” Dawn Powell wrote soon after the book’s publication, “In ‘Under the Volcano’ you love the author for the pain of his overwhelming understanding.”

Lowry began writing “Volcano” in his late twenties. The writing took four drafts and almost a decade. In his early attempts, he was more interested in seeing how many images and symbols he could embed in the text than in creating lifelike characters. It was only in 1939, when Lowry met Margerie, who was herself an aspiring writer, that the novel began assuming a coherent shape. Margerie suggested characters and plot turns, added sentences, and cut back Lowry’s wordiness. She was a good editor, and the only person who could manage her husband’s reckless temperament.

''Volcano'' was published to broad acclaim. The critic Mark Schorer, reviewing the book in the New York Herald Tribune,wrote that few novels “convey so feelingly the agony of alienation, the infernal suffering of disintegration.” Lowry was hailed as a successor to Joyce, who had died six years earlier. “Volcano” was a popular success, too—for a time, Lowry bragged, the book outsold “Forever Amber”.

He soon fell apart. “Success”, he wrote to Margerie’s mother, “may be the worst possible thing that could happen to any serious author”. According to Lowry’s biographers—there have been six—his drinking, always prodigious, became incapacitating. He had persecution fantasies. At times, his delirium tremens was so severe that he could not hold a pencil. Lowry worked on many books in these years—he had in mind a multipart novel called “The Voyage That Never Ends”, which would parallel the Divine Comedy, with “Volcano” in the position of the Inferno—but the manuscript that he cared most about was “October Ferry to Gabriola”, a novel about the happiest phase of his marriage, in the nineteen-forties, when he and Margerie lived in a squatter’s shack on an inlet north of Vancouver. Lowry could not make the novel come together; Margerie edited and suggested, Malcolm rewrote and rewrote, and the book slid sideways. They began fighting, in part because of their failure to tell the story of their happiness. They countered their frustrations with heavy doses of alcohol, prescription sedatives, tranquillizers, and stimulants—sodium amytal, phenobarbital, Benzedrine, Allonal, Nembutal, Soneryl. (Lowry joked that he and his wife should be known as “Alcoholics Synonymous”.) But they could not inure themselves to the pain of their creative failure. Twice, during a trip to Europe, Lowry tried to strangle Margerie. Though she was a fraction of his size, she attacked him, too. Shortly before Lowry died, he told a psychiatrist whom he was seeing that either Margerie was going to kill him or he was going to kill her.

To read more go to: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/17/day-of-the-dead

Djuna Barnes - Portrait of the Man Who is, at Present, One of the More Significant Figures in Literature

Published in Vanity Fair - April 1922

Djuna Barnes

There are men in Dublin who will tell you that out of Ireland a great voice has gone; and there are a few women, lost to youth, who will add: ''One night he was singing and the next he wasn't, and there's been no silence the like of it! For the singing voice of James Joyce, author of The Portrait of the Artist as a young Man and of Ulysses is said to have been second to none.

The thought that Joyce was once a singer may not come as a revelation to the casual reader of his books; one must perhaps have spent one of those strangely aloof evenings with him, or have read passages of his Ulysses, as it appeared in The Little Review to have realized the singing quality of his words. For tradition has it that a singer must have a touch of bravado, a joyous putting forth of first the right leg and then the left, and a sigh or two this side of the cloister, and Joyce has none of these.

James Joyce

I had read Dubliners over my coffee during the war, I had been on one or two theatrical committees just long enough to suggest the production of Exiles, his only play. The Portrait had been consumed, turning from one elbow to the other, but it was not until I came upon his last work that I sensed the singer. Lines like: ''So stood they both awhile in wan hope sorrowing one with other'' or ''Thither the extremely large wains bring poison of the fields, spherical potatoes and iridescent kale and onions, pearls of the earth, and red, green,yellow, russet, sweet, big bitter ripe pomillated apples and strawberries fit for princes and raspberries from their canes'', or still better the singing humour in that delicious execution scene in which the ''learned prelate knelt in a most Christian spirit in a pool of rainwater''.

Yes, then I realized Joyce must indeed have begun life as a singer, and a very tender singer, and - because no voice can hold out over the brutalities of life without breaking - he turned to quill and paper, for so he could arrange, the necessary silence, the abundant inadequacies of life, as a laying out of jewels - jewels with a will to decay.

To read more, go to:  Vanity Fair

George Orwell about James Joyce's Ulysses

In 1933, George Orwell had managed to borrow a copy of Joyce's Ulysses which was only published in Paris, and  was being watched out for eagerly by those custodians of public morality. His Majesty's Inspectors of Customs and Excise. And in December he wrote Brenda Salkeld a huge letter, almost two thousand words, answering her 'What do you think Joyce is after?'. It could have been printed almost as it stood, a highly perceptive and interesting piece of critical writing. The book moved him deeply.

[to answer your question] one has got to decide what a novel normally sets out to do. I should say that it sets out first... to display or create a character, secondly to make a kind of pattern or design which any good story contains, and, thirdly, if the novelist is up to it, to produce good writing which can exist almost as it were in vacuo and independent of subject... I think Ulysses follows this scheme fairly closely, but the queer and original thing about it is that instead of taking as his material the conventional and highly simplified version of life presented in most novels, Joyce attempts to present life more or less as it is lived. Of course he is not trying merely to represent life. When Ulysses first came out one heard it said on every side that it was an attempt to describe a day in somebody’s life, leaving nothing out, etc. etc. It is not that. If one thinks, a complete description of a day, or even of an hour, would be simply an enormous omnium gatherum, quite formless and probably not at all interesting, and in any case would not convey the impression of life at all. Art implies selection and there is as much selection in Ulysses as in Pride and Prejudice. Only Joyce is attempting to select and represent events and thoughts as they occur in life and not as they occur in fiction.

Orwell shared Joyce’s scorn for those who write novels through reading other novels. He appreciated the formal structure of Ulysses more than most (many could not see it at all) and yet ‘quite apart from the different styles used to represent different manners of thought, the observation is in places marvellous.’ Some of the passages ‘have haunted me ever since reading them. If you read them aloud you will see that most of them are essentially verse.’

This Ulysses letter, while mainly it shows an enthusiast trying to define and convey his growing absorption in the mechanics and craft of fiction, yet also shows a potentiality for real critical ability — as came later in the great essays on Swift, Dickens and Henry Miller. But Ulysses proved nearly fatal to his own development as a novelist. Self-consciously and mechanically he wrote A Clergyman’s Daughter with ‘different styles used to represent different manners of thought’; and there are still elements of this, though less gross, in Keep the Aspidistra Flying. A year later he confided to Brenda:

I managed to get my copy of Ulysses through safely this time. I rather wish I had never read it. It gives me an inferiority complex. When I read a book like that and then come back to my own work, I feel like a eunuch who has taken a course in voice production ... but if you listen closely you can hear the good old squeak just the same as ever.

The novel he was working on at that time which ‘instead of going forward goes backward with the most alarming speed’ was A Clergyman’s Daughter. Joyce stimulated Orwell as a critic but could have been disastrous to him as a writer, if his documentary plain style had not already emerged in Down and Out and was there to fall back upon, even to extend and still further purify.

(Source: Bernard Crick - George Orwell - A Life - Little, Brown and Company, Boston - 1980)

Silence, Exile, Punning

James Joyce's chance encounters

>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.

My very first James Joyce book

As a bookseller, I was working, between 1969 and 1975, in a bookshop in Dordrecht. For a couple of years, on the shelves of books translated from English, we had had a beautiful hardcover copy of James Joyce's Ulysses, in Dutch translation, with a extra volume of notes by the translator. It was a second edition from 1970. A regular customer, who was an English teacher and with whom I had often had discussions about literature, told me that he was reading that book of Joyce's again, in English, but now with the Dutch translation beside it.
It was, according to him, the best book ever published in the 20th century until now. Making me very curious about it, I decided to purchase that copy of the book myself. Because the price was too high for my pocket at the time, I left it where it was, intending to buy it the next month. Shortly after the talk with the customer, the owner of the bookshop popped in, as he was wont to do, complaining as always about the unsaleable titles in the shop and he gave as an example that eye-catching book of Joyce's. I told him, that he didn't need to worry about that particular book, as I intended to buy it myself in the coming month.

A few weeks later, the owner asked me if I had already taken the book home with me. I answered, that I was waiting for my salary at the end of the week. ''But where is the book then'', he asked. ''Just on the shelf'', I answered. I went to take it off the shelf, but saw only an empty space. ''It must have been stolen'', I said, with a fright. ''Are you sure of that'', he asked. ''What else could have happened, since I haven't sold it'', I replied in a disgruntled manner. He looked at me suspiciously and said: ''Then you will have to order it again, won't you''.

Two days later, I got information from the wholesaler, that the book was sold out and that there was no chance of a reprint. I felt terribly let down and decided to look for a second hand copy, which I found, only a week later, in a large antiquarian bookshop in Rotterdam. Who knows; maybe it was the very same copy from the bookshop where I was working.

Hans van den Bos