JAMES JOYCE FOR DUMMIES

A paper presented by Stephen P. Thomas to The Chicago Literary Club at its Closing Meeting held on May 23, 2005

The title of this paper is directed at me; not at its audience.  First a word about the medical profession.  You’ll see in a moment how it relates to James Joyce.  Prior to joining The Chicago  Literary Club  in 2000 I had a very distorted sense of what doctors do with their spare time.  I had not known many doctors outside their offices, hospitals or clinics.  For that matter  it still seems to me that doctors and lawyers don’t mix very well or readily, socially.  Perhaps that is because,  when their paths cross as professionals,  they are often in conflict.  If  I had to suggest prior to 2000 what I believed  most physicians do with their spare time, I would have said something like: “Well I imagine they spend a fair amount of time on the golf course, or at the tennis club, also looking over their investment portfolios, and  then planning additions to their already oversized suburban mansions.”   Wrong.  What I have learned here is that the doctors,  physicians and medical professionals in this Chicago Literary Club are now, and throughout its history have been, among its most prolific and talented members.   I have learned that they are also nice people.   

          I do know a doctor, not yet a member of this Club, who was our neighbor in Hyde Park. He is now also our neighbor in Beverly where we moved after we were evicted from Hyde Park.   His name is Kevin Fagan and he is a neurologist, which means he doesn’t spend much time chopping people up or poisoning them with pills, but a lot of time looking at them and listening to them or family members trying to figure our whether they are really sick or just nuts.    On Easter Sunday, 2004 we were dinner guests of the Fagans, and although I had known Kevin for more than 10 years, I had never thought to ask about his interests.  So I said --  “Kevin, what do you like to read?” 

          And  he replied: “Mostly any of James Joyce, and then I spend some time with W. B. Yeats.  And then I come back to Joyce and start over again.  That’s pretty much it.” I later learned that Joyce did once say, only partly in jest, “The only demand I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works.”

I was astounded by Kevin’s reply. I had never heard a word before from him about  James Joyce.  So I asked:  “Isn’t his work pretty much written in code so that you have to have a key to know what you are reading?”

And he said:  “Yes, to some extent, but it’s worth digging into.  And also there is some of Joyce which is very accessible – such as Dubliners.   Those are very readable stories.”

          This led me to observe:  “At last year’s Coop book sale I bought a well-worn copy of the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction   for twenty five cents. I have read two Joyce stories from that collection, and you are correct.   I could follow the narrative fairly well.”  Kevin asked what stories these were, but  I could not answer.  This conversation planted a seed which has led to this evening’s presentation and more.  Please note the irony.  Here am I, a lawyer and wordsmith by trade, being encouraged by a doctor to take some time to look at an author I had considered to be largely inaccessible except to professional literati.   So I soon stumbled on to Dubliners at the local  Borders, a large print edition, and read all the stories, quite carefully.  Let me talk to you about them for a  bit.

Dubliners

There are fourteen short stories and one longer one. They were begun in Dublin in 1904 and finished in Trieste in 1907.  Dubliners was finally published in 1914 after languishing for years in the hands of a skittish Irish publisher who feared libel and sedition charges.  They progress through episodes of childhood, adolescence and maturity, looking at ordinary life, politics and social conditions to the final story, The Dead. This story can be viewed as an account of living people who are essentially dead and of a dead person who is very much alive.  There is not much plot to these narratives.  They emerged in part from what Joyce called epiphanies, little vignettes of every day people and events which he wrote down as he observed and experienced them.

The word pictures in these stories are intense, cinematic, even stereophonic.  Here is an excerpt from the opening lines of Araby.  Note the personification of the geography:

North Richmond Street, being  blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers’ School set the boys free.  An uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the  blind end, detached from its neighbours in a square ground.  The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces. 

In another story, An Encounter, three boys resolve to ditch school for a day and take a ferryboat out to see a place along Wharf Road called the Pigeon House.  Along the way, as they lounge on a bank by a deserted field, a man silently walks by, and then turns back in their direction.  He comments on the weather, school and books, and asks whether they have sweethearts. 

Every boy, he said, has a little sweetheart.  . . .  He began to speak to us about girls, saying what nice soft hair they had and how soft their hands were and how all girls were not so good as they seemed to be if one only knew.

The man leaves again only to return a second time.  One of the two boys leaves to chase a cat. Our narrator is left to converse with what his companion has already termed “a queer old josser.”  Now the subject turns to the proper punishment of errant boys, as he says:

. . .  when boys were that kind they ought to be whipped and well whipped. . . . A slap on the hand or a box on the ear was no good: what he wanted was to get a nice warm whipping. . . . and if a boy had a girl for a sweetheart and told lies about it then he would give him such a whipping as no boy ever got in this world.

The boys soon call to each other by their prearranged code names and escape from this encounter without harm, and without visiting the Pigeon House.   Before 1914 a few of the Dubliners stories had already been published in a magazine called the Irish Homestead, a kind of mix between the Saturday Evening Post and the Prairie Farmer to name two publications from my own youth.  The editor soon enjoined Joyce – no more of your stories.  They are depressing and do not give a true picture to our complaining readers of life in Ireland.   I guess we have to accept the much later statements of Joyce’s brother, Stanislaus, that he and James were the two boys in the Encounter story and that this was a fairly straightforward account of a homosexual encounter they had experienced.  That was one of the many grounds on which Joyce’s Irish publisher sat on the manuscript as part of the Dubliners collection. 

          In The Dead two elderly sisters are entertaining friends and family at a festive annual dinner and dance party in their home.  Actually, the home consists of several upstairs rooms the sisters have occupied for more than thirty years in a building which includes the offices of a corn merchant on the ground floor.  This story is the subject of a well-received 1987 film of the same name, the last to be directed by John Huston before his death.  Here are Joyce’s opening lines:

Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet.  Hardly had she brought one gentleman into the little pantry behind the office on the ground floor and helped him off with his overcoat than the wheezy halldoor bell clanged again and she had to scamper along the bare hallway to let in another guest.  It was well for her she had not to attend to the ladies also.  But Miss Kate and Miss Julia had thought of that and had converted the bathroom upstairs into a ladies’ dressing-room.  Miss Kate and Miss Julia were there, gossiping and laughing and fussing, walking after each other to the head of the stairs, peering down over the banisters and calling down to Lily to ask her who had come.

Pretty cinegenic, right? Cinegenic? One thing I have learned from Joyce.  If the right word doesn’t exist, or even if it does, invent your own.  Use it and move on.  Yes, cinematic might work as well, but then would you also say photomatic?  Here’s Joyce’s word for being serious and flippant at the same time – jocoseriously. Joyce and the love of words and language, sometimes just for the sound and flow of them, go hand in hand. 

          This winter I enrolled in a course in Joyce’s Ulysses at the University of Chicago.  It was a graduate level course in a master’s degree program.  I had to find out whether I had any real clue about what I had been reading for the past several months. The result – yes, … and no. Early on a debate which lasted for more than three weeks started in class over whether it was or was not correct to refer to members of the Anglican Church (sometimes called Episcopalians) as protestants.  In the end the heads of the departments of theology and of European history at the University had to be consulted and were drawn in this debate before Professor Lisa Ruddick called a halt to further discussion.  It had settled down only to flare up two or three times.  Want to hear about the Eucharist and the concept of transubstantiation?  Body and blood.  Real or representational.  Catholic or protestant or Anglican?  Joyce would have loved it.

          In The Dead it falls to Gabriel Conroy to give the dinner toast.  He has fretted over this assignment his entire time at the party.  How to strike just the right note.  Make everyone feel welcome and cheerful without being verbose.  It’s kind of like being asked to deliver the closing paper at the end of a year of The Chicago Literary Club.  Gabriel gives it his best.  There is singing and dancing, and some drinking.  In the late evening a snowfall commences.  Gabriel and his wife Gretta are to spend the night at a nearby hotel.  The singing continues as their carriage leaves the party.   It is a sort of second honeymoon adventure for them.  They soon arrive at the hotel. Something is clearly bothering Gretta.  She says she is tired.  She is morose.  Then she embraces Gabriel.  He is relieved.  Still she looks very sad.  What is it?  Finally she says “ O, I am thinking about that song, The Lass of Aughrim.”  Pressed, she tells Gabriel that years ago in Galway a young boy with whom she took walks used to sing that song to her.  Michael Furey.  He is dead.  Gabriel is now understandably also very  agitated.  He must hear details of Michael Furey’s life and death. You can read all about it in The Dead, but please start at the beginning. 

There are other levels of life and death in The Dead but here is what puts it in Joycean context. Joyce’s wife, Nora, admitted to Joyce years after they first met that she had once known a young man in Galway who was now dead.  His name was Michael Bodkin. Joyce felt betrayed.  He was furious. It took some  time before he could again think of Nora as his alone.  When Joyce visited Ireland for the last time in 1912 with his young son, he traveled to Galway, met members of Nora’s family, and insisted on seeing the gravesite of Michael Bodkin.

A Personal Note

         I was born in the low birth rate year of 1938, a year of scarcity near the end of the great depression and wedged between two huge world conflicts.  Although my life may extend a few years into the future, that is mostly beyond my control.  For the past several years I have been trying to project my life (or my understanding) in the other direction, back to the early decades of the last century – or from 1900 forward.  It makes me a kind of instant centenarian, enjoying largely psychic privileges for which ordinary senior citizens do not qualify.  I have done this mostly through the perceptions and expressions of two writers, one American and one European.  Each wrote primarily and intensely about his own life during these early 20^th century decades. 

They are Thomas Wolfe and James Joyce.  I thought Thomas Wolfe held the key after I read Look Homeward Angel [originally titled O Lost], much more intently than anything I had read before.  It takes Wolfe up to about 1920 and is such a thinly disguised and frank autobiographical work that he was regarded with contempt by his own family and was not welcome in Asheville, North Carolina for many years.  By 1938 he was dead, at age thirty-eight.  So Thomas Wolfe (not Tom Wolf) served as my key to the past until I stumbled into James Joyce with help from my friend, Kevin Fagan.

Early Years of James Joyce

Let’s start in the middle with Joyce.  In late 1912 James Augustine Joyce of Dublin, Ireland was thirty years old.   In 1912 the Titanic went down on its maiden voyage in the Atlantic and Poetry Magazine was launched in Chicago. Joyce could not know that his life was already more than half over.  He was a self-proclaimed writer and artist whose body of published work then consisted of a slim volume of poetry (which he rightly felt was of little literary merit) and a few essays, feature articles, short stories and polemics which had found their way into print, some self-published.  Joyce was living in Trieste, a seaport in northern Italy.  He had not lived in Ireland for ten years, living since 1902 in self-imposed exile in Paris, Rome and Trieste, mostly Trieste.

He had returned to Ireland three times since leaving in 1902 to attend to compelling family or business matters.  He was determined never again to return to Ireland, and he did not.  Even so, the life, politics and culture of Ireland, and especially of Dublin, were to remain the central focus of his work and thought.  He tutored students in English – otherwise he was unemployed.  He had been living in Europe with Nora Barnacle of Galway, Ireland since 1904.  They were not married.  They had two children, Giorgio, born in 1905, and Lucia, born in 1907.  Joyce was indebted to anyone he could persuade to lend money to him.  Friends, family, casual associates, total strangers. It didn’t matter.  His health, particularly his eyesight, was precarious. 

          You may say that Joyce could probably depend on his family for support.  Not really.  It’s true that his younger brother Stanislaus had come to Trieste in 1905 at James’ bidding and shared his meager income with James and Nora, sometimes living with them.  James’ mother, Mary Jane “May” Murray, had died of  cancer in 1903.  James returned from Paris at his father’s bidding to share her last days.  As she lay dying he resolutely refused her request that he pray at her bedside.  May was a devout Catholic.  Although the product of a superb Jesuit education, James was estranged from the Church.  In fact he held the Irish clergy (excepting his Jesuit teachers) in the same contempt as he did the Crown and the English masters and owners of Ireland.

At the death of May Joyce at age forty four there were ten surviving brothers and sisters, all living at home, ranging in age from  twenty one to ten. James’ father, John Stanislaus Joyce, fifty four in 1903, was an imposing, handsome, charming, talented, well-educated, cultivated, unemployed, nearly bankrupt alcoholic who could be either loving and endearing or abusive and repugnant depending on his mood, the time of day and how much he had to drink.  His singing voice, like that of his first son, James, was widely admired.  Picture a thirsty Irish tenor who at will could break out in song in a pub and never want for a drink. 

The Joyce family fortunes had spiraled downward from a peak in the 1870s when John Joyce inherited substantial sums from his father and grandfather to an essentially impoverished state by the time of May’s death.  It would get worse.  There was little to eat and no one to look after the children except themselves.  James Joyce’s solution to the situation at home in 1903 was to move out shortly following his mother’s death, staying with extended family and friends in the Dublin area, including for a time with friends at Martello Tower at Sandycove. This was an early 19^th century fortification and shoreline observation post which is now a museum.

You will hear later what John Joyce thought about these friends as depicted in Ulysses. James soon returned to Europe, this time with Nora Barnacle, a hotel maid from Galway whom he had met in Dublin.   Joyce’s father felt his son’s companion (hearing of her Galway antecedents) was of an inferior sort, and learning her name observed – “She’ll never leave him.”  She never did.  It is possible from Joyce’s writings, letters and the recollections of contemporaries to judge his general state of mind after these first ten years of voluntary exile, that  ‘life is unfair’ and Ireland has been so corrupted by the Crown and clergy that it remains an unfit place to live.   But he was resolute.  He would not give up.  He would not compromise.  He would press on.  He would find a way to get his way, to realize his vision of artistic pursuit and accomplishment.  And he did.

          Fast forward ten years from 1912 to 1922.  His collection of short stories – Dubliners – was published in 1914 after a great struggle over libel issues; his mainly autobiographical work -  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man -  was published in 1916, taking Joyce to about age twenty, as he was in 1902.  His most influential work – Ulysses – was published on his fortieth anniversary in 1922, a good year all around considering that it was the year of publication  of T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland and Sinclair Lewis’ Babbit.

Joyce had become neither wealthy nor universally admired by 1922, but enough people had taken note of his talent that they took careful note of much of what he said and did from that time forward.  Soon they were also pok