James Joyce: Notes (3) - People in Joyce [II]: Contemps. et al.

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John Quinn sold his collection of Joyce’s manuscripts when terminally ill with cancer. In its place he purchased a set of letters by George Meredith, much to Joyce’s indignation. Quinn’s collection of Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Seurat, et al., sold by his heirs for ludicrously low prices.

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Sylvia Beach: The Joyce papers in her possession, being gifts from Joyce, were auctioned at La Hune were largely acquired by Buffalo University for the Lockwood Mem. Library with funds supplied by Constance and Walter F. Stafford, who received from Beach a copy of Ulysses in her possession (1st Edn., No.80). See Sam Slote, Catalogue Notes, Buffalo Univ. Library “Bloomsday” Centennial Exhibit, 2004 [online; 31.12.2008].

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John Jeremiah Slocum [1] - See Brenda Maddox, Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom (London: Hamish Hamilton; Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. 1988, 2000): ‘Not only was John Slocum collecting letters for American libraries but other literary sleuths were on the trail, and Miss Weaver herself was trying to assemble what she could for a published volume of Joyce’s letters, to be edited by Stuart Gilbert. […] Miss Weaver apparently did not know that Slocum was in touch with Stanislaus in Trieste and had in fact been buying Joyce manuscripts from him. It never occurred to Slocum that Joyce’s papers in Trieste might be Nora’s proerty and the proceeds due to her, or that their sale should be reported to Miss Weaver, Joyce’s literary executor.’ (p.269.) Note also acknowledgements to the John and Eileen Slocum Collection (Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University). Further, Maddox gives Slocum’s account of meeting Nora: ‘To John Slocum, on a European swing to collect Joyce papers and memorabilia and to prepare a definitive bibliography of all of Joyce’s published writing, Nora said, “It is just as well my husband didn’t have a literary wife. There had to be somebody to do the cooking and wash the dishes.” She would, at times, idealise her marriage and say that she and Joyce had been blissfully happy. Giorgio, overhearing her remark, said, “I wonder what may father would have said to that.” More usually, she kept to her familiar deflating tone: “The all tell me my husband was one of the immortals. I’d much rather be receiving some royalties from his books than be the widow of an immortal.”’ (p.359.) Maddox writes that Slocum begun collecting the year before the La Hune auction of 1949 in which he was outwitted by Buffalo University (p.386.)

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John J. Slocum [2] - Obituary (New York Times, 1 Sept. 1997): died at Newport Hosp. Rhode Island, aged 83, on 12 Aug. 1997. Slocum graduated from Harvard and Columbia University school of Journalism. He served as press aide to Fiorello La Guardia (NY Mayor) before army service in 1941. He enlisted as a private and was promoted to captain, acting as press attache to the Joint Force that tested the atom bomb in the Marshall Islands. He subsequently acted for the government in Germany and Egypt, and represented the Inspection Corps in Asia and S. America. He was seconded to the State Dept. and helped to coordinate the various museums of the Smithsonian Institution. Later still he acted as Presidential Cultural Property Advisory Committee and was a foremost figure in the American Numismatic Society. In 1974 he was an organizer and founding president of the Friends of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington. His sale of his Joyce books including manuscripts of Chamber Music and Exiles, formed the Yale collection of Joyce papers, including the bulk of Stephen Hero.

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John J. Slocum [3]: See history notice of James Joyce Society [NY]: The James Joyce Society was founded in February 1947 at the Gotham Book Mart in New York City. Its first member was T. S. Eliot. The Joyce bibliographer, John Slocum, was the society’s first president and Frances Steloff, founder and owner of the Gotham, served as the its first treasurer. [Online.]

May Joyce (1) Joyce’s mother is portrayed in Ulysses as Mary Dedalus (née Goulding) and the date of her death set some months earlier than its actual occurrence which fell on 13 August 1904. See “Eumaeus” chapter [re Bloom]: ‘What inchoate corollary statement was consequently suppressed by the host? / A statement explanatory of his absence on the occasion of the interment of Mrs Mary Dedalus, born Goulding, 26 June 1903, vigil of the anniversary of the decease of Rudolph Bloom (born Virag).’ (Ulysses, Bodley Head Edn., 1960, p.815.)

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May Joyce (2): Joyce’s mother was cultivated enough to called Oliver St. John Gogarty ‘Sir Peter Teazle’ after the medical character in a play of Sheridan on account of his dapper appearance. (See Ellmann, James Joyce, 1965 Edn., p.141.)

May Joyce (3) wrote to his son: ‘My dear Jim if you are disappointed in my letter and if as usual I fail to understand what you wish to explain, believe me it is not from any want of a longing desire to do so and speak the words you want but as you so often said I am stupid and cannot grasp the great thoughts which are yours mush as I desire to do so. Do not wear your soul out with tears but be brave and look hopefully to the future.’ (Letters, Vol. II, p.2; quoted in Richard Ellmann, ed., Selected Letters, 1975, Intro., pp.xvii-iii, with the comment: ‘her reply to many such please is a naked statement of [xvii] maternal love … To his harshness, and the feence of harshness by reference to his art … May Joyce responded with a faultless simplicity’, pp.xvii-iii.)

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May Joyce (4) - as her final illness advanced, her increasingly alcoholic husband shouted ‘If you can’t get well […] die and be damned to you!’ - only to be screamed at by Stanislaus, ‘You swine!’ before being led off to another room by James. See Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, London: Faber & Faber 1958, p.230 - and note that Ellmann erroneously places this quotation on p.229 (James Joyce, 1965 Edn, p.141). Ellmann follows it with a quotation from an interview with Eva Joyce conducted by Niall Sheridan in 1949 during which she told that Mr Joyce completed the episode by making an escape out a second floor window. (Ellmann, op. cit., p.141.)

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Josephine Murray [Aunt Josephine] was the recipient of letters from Joyce asking for details of Dublin, e.g., ‘please send me a bundle of other novelettes and any penny hymnbook you can find’ (5 Jan. 1920; Letters, I, p.135); or, ‘[would it be] possible for an ordinary person to climb over the area railings of No. 7 Eccles street’ (2 Nov. 1921; Letters, I, p.175; both the foregoing quoted in Stephen Heath, ‘Ambiviolences: Notes for reading Joyce’, in Attridge & Ferrer, eds., Post-structuralist Joyce, Cambridge UP 1984, p.64, n.36.) Note: Heath remarks that these requests and their corresponding outcomes in the text ‘do not identify Ulysses as a prime example of realist writing.’ (Idem.)

Nora Joyce - 1: b. 21 March 1884 d.10 April 1951; dg. of Thomas Barnacle, a baker, and Annie Barnacle, both of Galway; left Galway early 1904 following family row; worked as chambermaid at Finn’s Hotel, 1 & 2 Leinster St.; encountered by Joyce in the street in June and agreed to meet some days later on 14 June; failed to show and rearranged for 16 June when they first walked out together - the date being commemorated in the setting of Ulysses. (See Selected Letters, ed. Richard Ellmann, 1975, p.21, n.7.)

Nora Joyce - 2: ‘Pretty little story, eh?’ Joyce recounts details of her Galway childhood including her relations with Michael Bodkin, a protestant young man called Mulvey, a young priest, and an uncle who beats her with a stick (letter of 3 Dec. 1904; Selected Letters, 1975, p.45).

Nora Joyce - 3: Take me!: Joyce wrote to her, ‘O take me into your soul of souls and then I will become indeed the poet of my race.’ (7 Sept. 1909; Selected Letters, p.169). Also: ‘Take me into the dark sanctuary of your womb. Shelter me, dear, from harm!’ (24 Dec. 1909; SL, p.195). Cf. ‘Take me, save me, soothe me, O spare me!’ ( Paris, 1924; Pomes Penyeach [1927], London: Faber 1966, p.14; Poems and Shorter Writings, 1991, p.63.)

Nora Joyce - 4: Joyce wrote to Nora on 19 Nov. 1909: ‘I have loved in her the image of the beauty of the world, the mystery and beauty of life itself, the beauty and doom of the race of whom I am a child, the images of spiritual purity and pity which I believed in as a boy. / Her soul! Her name! Her eyes. They seem to me like strange beautiful blue wild-flowers growing in some tangled, rain-drenched hedge. and I have felt her soul tremble beside mine, and have spoken her name softly to the night, and have wept to see the beauty of the world passing like a dream behind her eyes.’ (Selected Letters, ed. Rihcard Ellmann, 1975, p.179.)

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Nora Joyce - 5: prevented Miss Weaver from donating the MS of Finnegans Wake to the National Library of Ireland since the Irish government had refused to repatriate his body (See Stan Gebler Davies, James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist, 1975.)

Nora Joyce - 6: Did she or didn’t she?: Morris Beja appears to accept that Vincent Cosgrave seduced Nora and that Cosgrave made the claim in talking to Joyce in 1909 out of annoyance at appearing as Lynch in Stephen Hero. (See review by Ian Pindar, review of In James Joyce: A Literary Life, Macmillan 1992, in Times Literary Supplement, 18 Dec. 1992.)

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Lucia Joyce wrote to her father, ‘If I should ever go away, it would be to a country which belongs in a way to you, isn’t it, father?’ (Quoted in Kevin Kiely, review of works on Joyce, in Books Ireland, Oct. 1998, p.262.)

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Mr Alfred Hunter (1): Ellmann calls him ‘a dark complexioned Dublin Jew … who was rumoured to be a cuckold, and relates that Joyce asked Stanislaus (Letter of 3 Dec. 1906) and, later, Aunt Josephine [Murray] to send all the details they could remember about him [JJ, 238, 385]. Joyce had met Hunter twice. Ellmann also gives an account in a footnote of one Morris Harris who was the object of a divorce petition by his wife Kathleen Hynes Harris, he being a sacerdotal aged 85 and she a younger woman who accused him of having an affair with his housekeeper (aetat. 80), indecency in the dining room, relations with little girls, and putting excrement on her nightgown (JJ,238-39, n.).

Mr Hunter (2): Ellmann considers that in making Bloom an advertising canvasser Joyce had someone other than Hunter in mind, viz., the original of C. P. M’Coy in “Grace”, being Charles Chance, whose wife sang soprano in concerts under the name of Madame Marie Tallon. M’Coy is identified as a clerk on the Midland Railway, an ad. canvasser for The Irish Times and the Freeman’s Journal, a town traveller for a coal firm, a private enquiry agent [detective], a clerk in the sub-sherriff’s office, and secretary to the City Coroner. (JJ385-86.) Ellmann further cites a Bloom who worked as a dentist in Clare St. in 1903-1904 and converted to Catholicism to marry; also his son Joseph, a dentist, renowned as a wit, and finally another Bloom who was tried for the murder of a photographer’s model in Wexford in what was planned as a double suicide, inscribing the word Love (written Loive) in his own blood on the wall. (JJ386.) In Ulysses he deliberately givesn M’Coy a wife who is in competition with Marion [Molly] Bloom. Another model for Molly was Mrs. Nicolas Santos, wife of a fruitshop owner of that name in Trieste and later in Zurich [sic]; it was an open secret in the Joyce family that Senora Santos was a model for Molly. ‘But the seductiveness of Molly came, of course, from Signorina Popper.’ (JJ, 387.)

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Mr Hunter (3): Peter Costello corrects Ellmann in asserting that Joyce and his father believed Hunter to be Jewish on account of his complexion, though in fact he was a Presbyterian from Belfast whose father had a shoe shop in Dublin, and who became a nominal Catholic on marrying a Catholic wife, she turning out to be an alcoholic who sold all the furniture for drink on numerous occasions. In 1904 he resided at 28 Ballybough Rd. and latterly 23 Gt. Charles St., where he died, 12 Sept. 1926 [aetat. 60], ‘in a tumbling Dublin tenement, quite ignorant in his poverty of the character he had inspired.’ (The Years of Growth, London: Kyle Cathie 1992, p.19.) Costello relates that it was Hunter who picked Joyce up when he got involved in a fracas in the Kips on a night between 16th and 19th September 1904 and took him home either to his house on Ballybough Rd. or to his uncle William’s in North Strand where he was staying (ibid., pp.230-31.) Costello further identifies one Joseph Bloom, the brother of the dentist in Clark St. [sic for Clare St.] and son of Mark Bloom; Joseph was living at 38 Lombard St. between 1891 and 1906 - one of the former addresses that that Joyce gave to Leopold gives Bloom. (p.68.) Costello adds that Joyce enquired of A. J. [Con] Leventhal if the musical Blooms of Lombard street were still there and learnt that they were not (idem).

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Mr Hunter (4): Ellmann does not cite Hunter as the rescuer of Joyce in Nighttown when he was assaulted by two soldiers while Cosgrave stood by in September 1904. Peter Costello does however (The Years of Growth, pp.230-31). Ellmann, on the other hand, mentions the occasion when Joyce was mugged in Rome on a drunken spree immediately before departure from Rome to Trieste. According to Ellmann, this event provided the clue Joyce needed for the similar episode in Ulysses when Bloom rescues Stephen. Ellmann writes: ‘In the resulting hubbub he would have been arrested, as when he first arrived in Trieste in 1904, if some people in the crowd had not recognised him and taken him home, a good deed which he reproduced at the end of the Circe episode in Ulysses’ (JJ, 1965, p.251). On the evidence it would seem likely that Costello’s insistence that Hunter was in Nighttown is mistaken.

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Henry Blackwood Price, an Ulsterman whom Joyce met in Trieste, was the model for Mr. Deasy in Ulysses. Price pestered Joyce by letter constantly encouraging him to write to the papers about a cure for foot and mouth, known to him, which was then plaguing Ireland, leading to the destruction of 2000 cattle. Joyce remarked that Price should be looking for a cure for his wife’s foot and mouth disease, but ‘nevertheless surprised himself by writing a sub-editorial on the disease for The Freeman’s Journal.’ (See Maud Ellmann, ‘Ulysses: Changing into an Animal’, in Field Day Review, 2, 2006, p.p.81, citing Ellmann, James Joyce, p.326; Letters, Vol. 2, 300, and Joyce, ‘Politics and Cattle Disease’, 1913; in The Critical Writings, 1959, pp.238-41.)

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James Fitzharris (“Skin-the-Goat”): b, 4 Oct. 1843, Ballybeg, Co. Wexford; dismissed from his employment on the Sinnott estate for wrecking a fox hunt led by Lord Courtown; moved to Dublin; labourer and cab-driver; lived on Denzille St. opp. James Carey; nicknamed for killing a goat with a claspknife when he saw it eating straw from a horse’s collar (var. skinned it and sold skin to pay debts); sworn in to Irish National Invincibles by Carey, Dec. 1881; involved in attempts on life of W. E. Forster; drove Carey and two others to Phoenix Park, 6 May 1882; afterwards carried three away from scene of the assassination of Cavendish and Burke; arrested at Lime St. home in Feb. 1883, on informer’s information; found not guilty of murder; abused Carey and Kavanagh, both turned Queen’s witnesses (“approvers”) in court; retried and found guilt of accesory to murder, 15 May 1883; servitude for life; Maud Gonne laid wreathe on his wife’s grave in Glasnevin when the latter died in 1898; released Aug 1899; travelled to America but deported; attempted to launch stage career in Liverpool, but returned to Dublin; well-known Dublin character; d/ 7 Sept. 1910, S. Dublin Union Infirmary; bur. with wife; plaque commemorates him and the Invincibles. (See RIA Dictionary of Irish Biography, 2009; entry by James Quinn and Liam O’Leary, rep. in The Irish Times, 6 Feb. 2010.) For a note on Forster, see under Charles Gavan Duffy, supra.

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John Cage: Cage’s Roaratorio, based on Finnegans Wake, was produced in Paris (1980), and afterwards in Lille, Frankfurt and Toronto, with Seosamh Ó hÉanaí, seán-nos singer, in the vocal part - Cage having ascertained that Ó hÉanaí was the greatest living traditional Irish singer. (See Siobhan Ní Fhoghlu, ‘Sean-nós: A Living Tradition’, in Books Ireland, Dec. 2007, p.282.)

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John Henry Alleyn, the Cork wine merchant who became a major share-holder in the Chapelizod Distillery which John Stanislaus Joyce engaged in, retired to Cork after the debacle in 1878 and later to Menton [Mentona], where he died and is buried. (See Peter Costello, James Joyce: The Years of Growth, 1992, p.46.)

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Herbert Hughes, ed., The Joyce Book [1933], songs by Joyce set to music by 13 composers; these incl. Arnold Bax, Eugene Goosens, Arthur Bliss, Edgardo Carducii, Gustav Holst, Herbert Howells, John Ireland, Philip Jarnach, Albert Roussel and Darius Milhaud; the songs were performed in London on St Patrick’s Eve, [16] March 1932. Joyce liked the settings by Carducci and Hughes best. (See Hans Gèbler Davies, James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist, 1975, p.292.)

John Eglinton, in dialogue with Yeats in the Daily Express (1899), anticipates an argument later used by Stephen Dedalus about art confronting rather than escaping reality. Eglinton wrote: The poet "who looks too much away from himself and his age does not feel the facts of life enough, but seeks in art an escape from them." (Eglinton, W B. Yeats, AE & William Larminie, Literary Ideals in Ireland (Dublin: Daily Express; London: Unwin 1899; quoted in Stephen Watt, Joyce, O’Casey, and the Irish Popular Theater (Syracuse 1991). Note that this text is quoted substantially by Louis MacNeice in his Poetry of W. B. Yeats. [13 and ftn.] while the dialogue is also cited in Cairns & Richards, Writing Ireland, 1988, pp. 66, 120.)

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George Clancy, Lord Mayor of Limerick (and Mat Davin in A Portrait), was assassinated by policemen [Black and Tans?] in Limerick during curfew hours on 5 May 1921, along with with his predecessor, Michael O’Callaghan, and another prominent nationalist, Joseph O’Donoghue. Clancy is the subject of a document enscribed ‘Discharge, temporary, from jail for ill health … from Cork Mall Jail’, produced on 21 Nov 1917, and held in the Limerick City Museum where it is displayed in the online catalogue [link].

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Judge Michael Lennon: Though friendly with Joyce for some years, Lennon published an attack on him in in Catholic World [CXXXII], March 1931, accusing Joyce of working for the British ‘department propaganda’ in Italy during the war and accepting ‘sufficient cash in hand to be able to loll about for several months’ in Paris afterwards while ‘the British government was carrying on a war [..] against the nationalist forces in Ireland which culminiated in the Easter Week rebellion’ (Catholic World, CXXXII, March 1931, pp.643, 648 [cited as pp.641-52 in Ellmann, James Joyce, 1959, 1965 Edn., p.655.]). The article served as an incentive for Joyce’s co-option of Herbert Gorman to write James Joyce, 1939 - though often Gorman strayed from Joyce’s own intentions; see John Whittier-Ferguson, ‘Embattled Indifference: Politics on the Galleys of Herbert Gorman’s James Joyce’, in Vincent J. Cheng, et. al., eds., Joycean Cultures/Culturing Joyces, Delaware UP 1998, pp.134-48 [extract, infra.]

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Cyril Connolly: Joyce said to Connolly (ed. of Horizon): ‘I am afraid I am more interested, Mr. Connolly, in Dublin street names than in the riddle of the Universe.’ (in Connolly, Previous Convictions, 1963, p.271; quoted in Donald Torchiana, Backgrounds for Joyce’s Dubliners, 1986 - epigraph.) Cf. Joyce’s verses: ‘Let us floing to the winds all moping and madness, / Play us a jig in the spirit of gladness / On the creaky old squeaky strings of the fiddle. // The why of the world is an answerless riddle / Puzzlesome, tiresome, hard to unriddle. / To the seventeen devils with sapient sadness: / Tra la, tra la.’ (From Shine and Dark, quoted in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 1965 Edn., p.86 [quoting pages in the Cornell Univ. Library James Joyce Collection.]

Monk Gibbon: Mademoiselle, a character in Gibbon’s Mount Ida (1948), says: ‘You know, Ulysses would have been a failure in England. No Englishman ever prided himself on being adroit. Get that into your head. They have only one virtue - straightness. Cultivate it, or you will do nothing with them.’

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Hans Walter Gèbler, editor of the “Corrected Edition” of Ulysses (1984) was rapped on the knuckles by Dubliners on the grounds that details known to them had been overcorrected, e.g., Harry Thrift, a competitor in the TCD cycle race, was ‘corrected to ‘Schrift’ on a (Germanic) philological supposition, whereas Thrift was an rugby international, a long-serving official at College Sports, and Vice-Provost of TCD.

Caitlin Murphy, A is for Everything (Project Cube, Aug. 2002), is an 80-minute exploration of the minds of Lucia, schizophrenic daughter of James Joyce, and Suzanne, long-time partner and eventual wife of Samuel Beckett, who talk through their experiences of life in the shadows of genius. (See The Irish Times, Wed, 31 July 2002).

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Vladimir Dixon: Dixon, the author of a letter written in the form of a humorous pastiche of Wakese sent to Joyce care of Sylvia Beach was included in Our Exagmination Round His Factification for an Incamination of Work in Progress (Paris: Shakespeare & Co. 1929). Beach assumed that Dixon was none other than Joyce himself (a supposition shared by Stuart Gilbert and Richard Ellmann) but in fact he was a real person - born in Russia in 1900, grad. in mechanical engineering (BSc., MIT), 1921; settled in Paris, 1923; published poetry and essaysd. Dec. 1929. (See Sam Slote, Catalogue Notes, Buffalo Univ. Library “Bloomsday” Centennial Exhibit, 2004 [online; 31.12.2008].

Vladimir Nabokov: Nabokov’s marginalia to Joyce’s Ulysses are preserved in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library [NYPL]. See Nicholas Allen, ‘A Turn-up for the Book in New York’ [“A Scholar’s Summer”], Irish Times (8 Aug. 2009), Weekend, p.11.

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J. F. K.: During his address to the Dáil in 1963, President Kennedy purported to quote Joyce’s Ulysses writing of the Atlantic as “a bowl of bitter tears”. (Seamus Kelly, report on President Kennedy’s speech, in The Irish Times, 29 June 1963; rep. in IT [archive pages], Weekend Review, 30 May 2009). Robert Nicholas writes: ‘Joyce, however, made no reference to the Atlantic in Ulysses, nor did he use this phrase. The piece of sea in question is Dublin Bay, and the phrase used is “a bowl of bitter waters”. Kennedy, or his speech-writer, probably guessed that none of his audience knew Ulysses well enough to catch him out when he transformed Joyce from a proud and wilful exile to yet another sentimental Irishman grieving over the Diaspora. (See from Robert Nicholson [Bayview Rise, Killiney, Co Dublin], in Irish Times, Letters, 6 June 2009.)

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Adaline Glasheen, b. Evansville, Indiana; ed. University of Indiana, transferring to the University of Mississippi (grad. BA); taught English to football players there while reading widely MA at George Washington University; taught at Wheaton College (Mass.); m. Francis Glasheen; dg. b. 1946; began the “Joyce game” at that time; Census to Finnegans Wake [1st Edn.] (Northwestern UP 1946); moved to Farmington, Conn., In 1947 was and visited by Thornton Wilder; taught several summer courses at Buffalo University; conducted extensive correspondence with Joyce scholars; led seminars on Joyce at the Sorbonne and contrib. to panels at IJJ Conferences; settled in nursing home in 1986; d. 1993. (Extract from notice supplied on internet by Francis Glasheen in connection with her papers in Warren Hunting Smith Library, at Hobert and William Smith Colleges (Geneva, NY) [online; 08.03.2009] Note that the Third Census of Finnegans Wake is available at Adaline Glasheen Third Census - Wisconsin Univ. Library Joyce Collection online.

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Terry Eagleton, ‘Joyce and Modernism’, being Lecture 3 in “Joyce Perspectives 2001”, sponsored by James Joyce Centre, 35 N. Gt. George’s St. in association with The Irish Times (8 p.m., Wed. 4th Feb. 2001), Series to 14 March.

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Joseph O’Connor, ed., Yeats is Dead! (Cape 2001), a collaborative novel by Roddy Doyle, Conor McPherson, Gene Kerrigan, Gina Moxley, Marian Keyes, Anthony Cronin, Owen O’Neill, Donal Kelly, Gerard Stembridge and Frank McCourt. The basics of the plot concern a pharmeuticals rep. called Tommy Reynolds, murder[ed] in a mobile home after a visit by heavies in the shape of off-duty gardaí Nestor and Roberts, apparently working for a crime-world figure Mrs Bloom; novel littered with Joyce allusions and characters of Joycean pedigree incl. Eveline, Molly Ievers, O’Madden Burke, Dignam and even Kinch. Issued with profits to Amnesty on its 4th Anniversary. (Noticed by C. L. Dallat, in Times Literary Supplement [Irish issue], 29 June 2001, p.22.)

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Franco Moretti (‘Serious Century’) writes about the role of contingency in the novel, referencing Goethe’s ‘unheard of event’ [i.e., contingency] and Giuseppe Sertoli’s notion of the ‘unforeseen expansion of the everyday which takes everybody by surprise’ (‘I due Robinson’, [intro. to] La avventure di Robinson Crusoe, Turin 1998, p.vix, before going on to write of Lucien de Rubempré: in Balzac’s second book of Lost Illusions (1839): ‘Lucien de Rubempre is (finally!) writing his first article, which will constitute an epoch-making “revolution in journalism.” It is the chance he has been waiting for since his arrival in Paris. But within this euphoric turning point, a second episode is unconspicuously embedded: the newspaper is short of copy, it immediately needs a few pieces, never mind on what, as long as they fill the blank space: and a friend of Lucien's, obligingly, sits down and writes. It is almost the Platonic idea of the filler: words filling up space, period. And yet, this second article wounds a group of characters who, after many twists and turns, seal Lucien's ruin. / Balzac ... As in the butterfly-effect of chaos theory, no matter how small the initial event is, the great city within which it takes place is so rich in variables that it magnifies its effects out of all expectation. Between the beginning and the end of every action there is always something else that comes in between, some “third person” who is pursuing his own private aims, and deviates the course of the plot in an unforeseeable direction. And so, even the most harmless moments of everyday life become chapters in a novel (but this, in Balzac, is not always good ... )