Returning to Paris after an unsuccessful and troublesome visit to Galway in April 1922, Nora and her two children, Georgio (17 ) and Lucia (15 ) became aware that fame had come to the Joyces. Three months after its publication, Ulysses was recognised as a work of genius.
The London Observer literary reviewer, writing March 5 1922, trumpeted that No book has ever been more eagerly and curiously awaited by the strange little inner circle of book-lovers and littérateurs than James Joyce’s Ulysses. ‘It is folly to be afraid of uttering big words because big words are abused and have become almost empty of meaning in many mouths; and with all my courage I will repeat what a few folk in somewhat precious cénacles have been saying – that Mr James Joyce is a man of genius. I believe the assertion to be strictly justified…’
Appetites had been seriously whetted in the immediate years leading up to its publication as parts of the book were serialised in an American magazine The Little Review. In 1921 the American post office refused to distribute the magazine, claiming that the book contained obscene material, that could ‘cause impure and lustful thoughts’. Its joint owners Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap were prosecuted. John Quinn a lawyer and great friend and supporter of the arts, defended them at the trial, ultimately losing. In a statement later, Jane Heap said that ‘Joyce was not teaching early Egyptian perversions nor inventing new ones. Girls lean back everywhere, showing lace and silk stockings; wear low-cut sleeveless blouses, breathless bathing suits; men think thoughts about these things everywhere - but seldom as delicately and as imaginatively as Mr Bloom (the central character in Ulysses ), and no one is corrupted’.*
Much to Nora’s annoyance people clambered on chairs to get a look at the family eating together. They sent notes in restaurants asking him to join them, they rang their doorbell. Journalists crowded in at parties. Expecting a rake, a roisterer, a teller of ribald stories, they were disappointed to find a thin, scholarly Irishman who peered at them from behind thick glasses….
Sylvia Beach
How Ulysses was eventually published is a legend in the bookselling world. In July 1920 an American bookseller, Sylvia Beach met James Joyce at a dinner party hosted by the French poet André Spire. The next day, Joyce called to her bookshop, Shakespeare and Co, on the Left Bank. It was famous for its lending library, and literary readings, given by such luminaries as André Gide, Ezra Pound, F Scott Fitzgerald, and TS Eliot.
Joyce complained that having spent 16 years thinking about his book Ulysses, and seven years writing it, he was having problems getting it published. Sylvia, charmed by this gifted wordsmith, said she would publish it. She had no experience in publishing, nor any money; but cleverly put out a prospectus announcing the publication of the already ‘notorious masterpiece’, and sold subscriptions to those who wanted to order copies.
Many admirers of avant-garde literature (among them TE Lawrence, Winston Churchill, and Havelock Ellis ), accepted the offer and sent in their money: 150 francs per copy, or 300 for a de luxe edition.
George Bernard Shaw, true to his fashion, was not among them. ‘In Ireland’, he wrote to Sylvia, declining her invitation, ‘they try to make a cat cleanly by rubbing its nose in its own filth. Mr Joyce has tried the same treatment on the human subject.’ He hoped Joyce would succeed if only because the book was an accurate representation of the ‘slack-jawed blackguardism’ of the Dublin of his youth.**
Always aware of the significance of matching dates with events in his own life time, Joyce arranged for the first book off the presses to be on February 2 1922, his 40th birthday.
The events of Ulysses all take place in Dublin, on an ordinary day, June 16, 1904. The fictional Leopold Bloom, sets about his appointments and encounters which mirror, on a more mundane and intimate scale, the adventures of Ulysses/Odysseus in Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey. There is humour and humanity there, aplenty.
June 16 1904 marked the first date that Joyce and Nora walked out together. Pin-pointing that date as the centre of his great work, was an elegant tribute to Nora.
‘Erratic behaviour’
Fame had also coincided with a much improved financial position for the Joyces. Harriet Shaw Weaver, a Quaker with a mission to help Joyce, gave him significant financial support to complete Ulysses, and beyond. In the following year she inherited £12,000 and passed it all on to Joyce, one of her many generous gifts.***
Nora had the means to secure a permanent apartment which was something she had always hoped for but that was put on the long finger as the family spent freely and continued their peripatetic life style. They lived in hotels. There were long family dinners in the best restaurants, with Joyce drinking heavily and Nora’s fury at it.****
Friends worried that all that money given with no strings attached was a mistake. Sylvia Beach, observing them all, felt that Joyce had no idea how bizarre his home life was, or of the torments of those sharing that life in claustrophobic hotel rooms or small, pokey apartments. She believed that he could not see how his children reacted against his obsession with his work (he was now beginning on his final novel, Finnegans Wake - A work in progress ), and his successive eye illnesses which made him ill with pain. In the months after Nora and the children returned from Ireland Sylvia blamed his family, and their chaotic lifestyle, for Joyce’s erratic behaviour.
She wrote to Miss Shaw Weaver expressing the fear that now, with all this money, Joyce had no incentive to write another book; and she worried about their son Georgio whom she felt should be made learn a profession or get a job. ‘He is seventeen and owing to the abnormal existence that his family has had, he has had no training of any kind to enable him to earn a living some day. Georgio is a fine big fellow and he has nothing to do all day but loaf…’
‘Feared for their lives’
Nora’s holiday in Ireland had been a bit of a nightmare. The build up to the publication of Ulysses had been wearying in the extreme, with Joyce fussing about proofs and type-errors to such an extent that Nora, walked out with her two children and said she was going back to Ireland. Joyce, completely emotionally dependent of Nora, implored her not to go. Showing her the latest dramatic headlines from Irish newspapers, he warned that the country was on the verge of civil war, and she and the children could be shot.
She arrived in Dublin and was met by her uncle Michael Healy, who had remained in contact with the Joyces through the years. They remembered fondly their holiday in Galway in July 1912, when Healy put them up in his Dominick Street premises, and left hampers of food for them to enjoy. It was the honeymoon Joyce had always promised her. They were a typical family on holiday in Galway, going to the races, a visit to Aran, walking out to the beach in Salthill, Joyce cycling out to Oughterard, and happily collecting material for his commissioned articles in the Piccolo newspaper in Trieste, to pay their way. Everyone adored their children who spoke Italian better than English.
This time it was totally different. Healy now senior civil servant in customs and excise, was stationed in Dublin. He met them off the boat, entertained them to lunch, with Joyce’s father, and sent them on their way.
Nora took rooms with Mrs Casey at Nun’s Island and went immediately to see her mother at Bowling Green. Nora’s father, Tom Barnacle, had recently died, and Nora and the children received a warm welcome from her mother and her two sisters Delia and Kathleen. Her two teenage children, however, were not impressed with their grandmother’s little terraced home and its smell of cabbage. They refused to enter the house, and sat on the wall outside for all the neighbours to see.
Despite this Nora thoroughly enjoyed the gossip with her family, eating in restaurants with the children, bringing them to visit the Presentation Convent where she had worked for a time in the gate-lodge. Yet it was impossible to escape the war. Two men burst into Mrs Casey’s house to mount an ambush on the street below, terrifying the children. Georgio called them the Zulus. Nora feared for their lives, and following a pathetic plea from Joyce, who wrote that he had a fainting fit in the bookshop, saying that ‘it is impossible to describe to you the despair I have been in since you left…’ she decided to return to Paris.
Her ordeal was not over. As the train left Galway station and neared Renmore Barracks there was an exchange of fire between soldiers on the train and gunmen at the barracks. Nora and her children threw themselves onto the floor and hid the best they could. Back in Dublin they told their adventures to Uncle Michael, but he just laughed it off.
The episode marked the end of Nora’s break for freedom. She was 38 years old, and had learned that she had no existence except that as Mrs James Joyce. She would never return to Ireland. From humble beginnings she was returning to Paris as a celebrity, to accompany Joyce who had become a literary sensation, who was lionised by the art world. It would demand all her wiles to keep her family together.
Next Week: Georgio’s romance prompts Nora and James to consider getting married.
NOTES: *The Little Review was founded in 1914 by Margaret Anderson and her partner Jane Heap and with the help of Ezra Pound (an expatriate American poet and critic ), and others, created a magazine that featured a wide variety of modernist writing, on feminism and art criticism, literature and theatre, under its challenging motto: ‘Making No Compromise with Public Taste’. It ceased publishing in 1929, when it could no longer find financial support.
Initially Ulysses was banned in both America and Britain; until 1936 when both countries published the full text.
** Sadly Sylvia Beach would later be financially stranded when Joyce signed with another publisher, leaving her in serious debt after she had financed the original publication. During the German occupation of Paris in June 1940, she was imprisoned for reasons that are unclear, and released six months later. In poor health, Sylvia never reopened the shop. Instead, when requested by a German officer to sell him some books, she refused to sell to him. Closing the door she brought her stock of at least 5,000 books, thousands of letters and manuscripts, pictures, tables and chairs, even electric fittings, up four flights of stairs for safe keeping, and where she lived with her partner, the original owner of the shop, Adrienne Monnier. They were lovers for 36 years. Sylvia helped the Resistance for a time, but Paris during the war was a dispiriting place. Ernest Hemingway, whose first book Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923 ) she had promoted, arrived one day in August 1944. The French and American armies had just liberated Paris. In his macho manner, Hemingway ‘liberated’ the shop. But, following the death of Adrienne, it remained closed. There was no recapturing its former glory days.
However, she was honoured by universities and scholars for her support for so many writers in particular to James Joyce. On June 16 1962 she was invited to Dublin to dedicate the Martello Tower at Sandycove - the setting for the opening passage in Ulysses - as a centre for Joyce studies. She died in October of that year.
Another American, George Whitman, opened a bookshop on Rue de la Bucherie, close to Notre-Dame de Paris, and named it Shakespeare and Company in honour of Sylvia. It is well worth a visit today. The shop’s motto is: ‘Be not Inhospitable to Strangers Lest They be Angels in Disguise.’
***An intelligent and compassionate woman, who lived frugally, who would later act as Joyce’s publisher in Britain. Miss Shaw Weaver typed and checked his manuscripts, fussed and worried about his failing eyesight, and was very generous to the Joyce family with her money. It is estimated that she gave Joyce at least half a million pounds in today’s value.
She also saw that Lucia, who would later suffer from schizophrenia, was kindly cared for in England; a care which was continued by her goddaughter, Miss Jane Lidderdale, who regularly visited Lucia at St Andrews Hospital, Northampton, and looked after her interests to the end.
****The Joyces lived in Paris for 19 years, 20 years in France, from July 1920 - December 1940. They never bought a home of their own, living instead in 10 residences on the Left Bank, and eight residences on the Right Bank of Paris. They lived in 10 apartments and eight hotels.
Sources this week include Nora - A biography of Nora Joyce by Brenda Maddox, published by Hamish Hamilton Ltd., 1988. Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation, by Noel Riley Fitch, published by WW Norton and Co., 1984.
