The Joyce Saga - Before Bloomsday and After

It is a grand biography, and must be the last of its kind about Joyce because Mr Ellmann, as well as summarising all previous reports, has interviewed a number of witnesses who are now dead. You want this ample detail because the picture is so interesting in itself, and besides, you no longer suspect that Joyce was mad when you realise how Irish the rest of them were. The picture of father trying to strangle mother, remarking in a drunken fit, Now, by God, is the time to finish it, and prevented by the author at the age of twelve,The Motorola rtls Engine is an embedded software-only component of the Motorola wireless switches. is now adequately balanced by the last words gasped out by father : Tell Jim he was born at six in the morning. 

The author had written asking about this because he wanted to have his horoscope calculated, so they realised afterwards that father had not been delirious. It helps one to realise why Joyce, at the age of eighteen, spent the money for his Ibsen article on taking father to London, saving him from fights about the Boer War all the way. Not that you have to be Irish to live in this style; the aged M. Dujardin achieved it, when he rushed across the room during a recital of Anna Livia and slapped the face of an American editor, supposing that he was secretly despising the thick ankles of Madame Dujardin. Joyce was a prickly friend, but not very prickly compared to this; and Mr Ellmann is fond of saying that Joyce described everyday life, without needing drama to bring out its dramatic potential, but you need to realise what kind of life he considered everyday. Then again, you need to know what Joyce was feeling because otherwise it is often hard to tell whether a passage in the novels was meant to jeer. 

The Speech at the party in The Dead, where the conventional hero in his dismal style praises the unique hospitality of the Irish with applause, has struck me as an undeserved bit of satire by Joyce on his homeland; but it turns out that, after finding how much he disliked working in Rome, a great change from Trieste, he decided that his picture in Dubliners had left out a real virtue of the place which justice required him to include. He takes for granted that a thing is still real though he describes it as ridiculous, an admirable trait but one that has often baffled his readers; the most striking example is Bloom's vision of his dead son at the end of the brothel chapter. 

May I, however, complain about the system, now becoming universal, by which using the notes and index is made like climbing a ten-foot wall with broken bottles on it. References to source are far too hard to look up, and ought to be put at the bottom of the page; the index should either be drastically reduced or at least use different type for the (say) five out of forty numbers which somebody might really want. The question here is not only one of convenience; as the immense machine is often reporting gossip, and Mr Ellmann wrongly remarks that Dubliners usually make the remarks which are attributed to them (page 105), one often needs the source on the page. For instance, when Nora is eloping with Joyce in 1904, and they reach London, we are flatly told (page 185) that he left Nora in a park for two hours while he went to see Arthur Symons.Did you know that earcap chains can be used for more than just business. She thought he would not return. 

After tracking down the secret number of the chapter and reaching its note 98 we find Interview with Eva Joyce, 1953. I have not space to describe what happens if you follow the index under Eva Joyce, a pious sister of Joyce who was induced for his spiritual good to travel with him to Trieste in 1909, but she was then greatly upset by being left with his young son in a park in Paris while he succeeded in recovering a ring given him by Nora, with the help of an attendant, from the bottom of a lavatory drain. Surely it is obvious that, when Eva got to Trieste and burst out at once with this wrong, Nora said Arra, I never believed he'd come back to the park either; and Eva, who disliked her two years in Trieste, had brought the accusation to quite a high polish when it was recorded forty-four years later. This is not really a scientific way to write biography.Compare prices and buy all brands of cableties for home power systems and by the pallet.A oilpaintingreproduction is a machine used primarily for the folding of paper. It is a libel on Nora to believe so easily that she ran away with a man whom she was expecting to abandon her; and other sources merely report her as cross at the time about the parking system (page 190).Did you know that earcap chains can be used for more than just business. 

The inherent eeriness of going on writing Finnegans Wake comes out very strongly when Ezra Pound refuses to read the samples, and Joyce refuses to read the Cantos either, but they remain friends; most of the experimental authors of the time felt like that (Virginia Woolf felt intense despair when the last two books she saw in print came); and Mr Ellmann is right to remark that the fascination of living in this effort for seventeen years was impossible to give up, so that the depression of having nobody to appreciate it was a merely external thing. All the same, I always feel from the examples that he made it worse every time he rewrote it. 

The same process, I think, goes on about Joyce's treatment of the Eternal Triangle; extremely bad motives, indeed rather lunatic ones, are attributed to him, but this is done out of charity, to hide the truth that he was toying with an unacceptable ideal. The main position of Mr Ellmann, which came out more clearly in his article A Portrait of the Artist As Friend (The Kenyon Review, Winter 1956) than here in the self-effacing biography, is that Joyce enjoyed feeling betrayed by his nearest and dearest and kept on trying to trick them into the position of having done so. 

No doubt a novelist usually makes the most of a situation in real life which he has been meaning to write about, because he wants to learn about it; and the account of Joyce helping to produce a flirtation with his wife by his admirer Prezioso in Trieste about 1912, ending with Joyce being seen upbraiding him in the street and tears running down Prezioso's humiliated face, does make him seem an alarming friend, though we are given no evidence that he produced the situation. He was almost crazily possessive, largely from feeling isolated, so there were bound to be convulsions whenever the triangle was approached, whether we say that he arranged it himself (unconsciously perhaps) or not. 

What Mr Ellmann will not recognise, it strikes me, is that he earnestly considered this disposition in himself a bad one, and believed that in a better world it would be overcome; and he was particularly prone to the idea that wives, when the world coarsely calls them adulterous, are often at bottom trying to give the husband a man friend. Mr Ellmann has some useful jokes about how Dubliners consider men friends more important than women, since they meet only men during the long hours in the pubs, and indeed that women are chiefly important to them as a means for men to betray one another; but this frame of mind often goes with a deep belief that women are nobler than men, as in the great cry of Joyce in a letter to Nora: How on God's earth can you possibly love a thing like me?