James Joyce: Quotations (5) - Extracts from the Letters

To Henrik Ibsen (March 1901) [Joyce’s English draft]: ‘What shall I say more? I have sounded your name defiantly through the college where it was either unknown or known faintly and darkly. I have claimed for you your rightful place in the history of the drama. I have shown what, as it seemed to me, was your highest excellence - your lofty impersonal power. Your minor claims - your satire, your technique and orchestral harmony - these, too, I advanced. Do not think me a hero-worshipper - I am not so. And when I spoke of you in debating societies and so forth, I enforced attention by no futile ranting. / But we always keep the dearest things to ourselves. I did not tell them what bound me closest to you. I did not say how what I could discern dimly of your life was my pride to see, how your battles inspired me - not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead, how your wilful resolution to wrest the secret from life me heart and how in your absolute indifference to public canons of art, friends and shibboleths you walked in the light of your inward heroism. And this is what I write to you of now. Your work on earth draws to a close and you are near the silence. It is growing dark for you. Many write of such things, but they do not know. You have only opened the way - though you have gone as far as you could upon it - to the end of “John Gabriel Borkman” and its spiritual truth - for your last play stands, I take it, apart. But I am sure that higher and holier enlightenment lies—onward.’ (Selected Letters, ed. Richard Ellmann, London: Faber & Faber 1975, p.7.)

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To Lady Gregory (6 Dec. 1902): ‘All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light. And though I seem to have been driven out of my country here as a misbeliever I have found no man yet with a faith like mine.’ (Selected Letters, ed. Richard Ellmann, London: Faber & Faber 1975, p.8.)

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To Nora [29 Aug. 1904, 60 Shelbourne Road]: ‘[...] I may have pained you tonight by what I said but surely it is well that you should know my mind on most things? My mind rejects the whole present social order and Christianity - home, the recognised virtues, classes of life, and religious doctrines. How could I like the idea of home? My home was simply a middle-class affair ruined by spendthrift habits which I have inherited. My mother was slowly killed, I think, by my father’s ill-treatment, by years of trouble, and by my cynical frankness of conduct. When I looked on her face as she lay in her coffin - a face grey and wasted with cancer - I understood that I was looking on the face of a victim and I cursed the system which had made her a victim. We were seventeen in family. My brothers and sisters are nothing to me. One brother alone is capable of understanding me. [i.e, Stanislaus; but see letter to Mrs. Joyce: ‘Georgie understood me, I am beginning to think,’ 20 March 1903; SL, p.20.] / Six years ago I left the Catholic Church, hating it most fervently. I found it impossible for me to remain in it on account of the impulses of my nature. I made secret war upon it when I was a student and declined to accept the positions it offered me. By doing this I made myself a [25] beggar but I retained my pride. Now I make open war upon it by what I write and say and do. I cannot enter the social order except as a vagabond. I started to study medicine three times, law once, music once. A week ago I was arranging to go away as a travelling actor. I could put no energy into the plan because you kept pulling me by the elbow. The actual difficulties of my life are incredible but I despise them. [...; cont.]

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To Nora (29 Aug. 1904) - cont.: ‘You have misunderstood, I think, some passages in a letter I wrote you and I have noticed a certain shyness in your manner as if the recollection of that night troubled you. I however consider it a kind of sacrament and the recollection of it fills me with amazed joy. You will perhaps not understand at once why it is that I honour you so much on account of it as you do not know much of my mind. But at the same time it was a sacrament which left in me a final sense of sorrow and degradation - sorrow because I saw in you an extraordinary, melancholy tenderness which had chosen that sacrament as a compromise, and degradation because I understood that in your eyes I was inferior to a convention of our present society. / I spoke to you satirically tonight but I was speaking of the world not of you. I am an enemy of the ignobleness and slavishness of people but not of you. Can you not see the simplicity which is at the back of all my disguises? We all wear masks. Certain people who know that we are much together often insult me about you. I listen to them calmly, disdaining to answer them but their least word tumbles my heart about like a bird in a storm. / It is not pleasant for me that I have to go to bed now remembering the last look of your eyes - a look of tired indifference - remembering the torture in your voice the other night. No human being has ever stood so close to my soul as you stand, it seems, and yet you can treat my words with painful rudeness (“I know what is talking now” you said). When I was younger I had a friend to whom I gave myself freely—in a way more than I give to you and in a way less. He was Irish, that is to say, he was false to me. / I have not said a quarter of what I want to say but it is great labour writing with this cursed pen. I don’t know what you will think of this letter. Please write to me, won’t you? Believe me, my dear Nora, I honour you very much but I want more than your caresses. You have left me again in an anguish of doubt.” [signed] JAJ. (Selected Letters, ed. Richard Ellmann, London: Faber & Faber 1975, pp.25-27.) [MS letter in Cornell U. Library.]

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To Nora [26 Sept. 1904]: ‘My dearest Nora - I must tell you how desolate I have felt since last night. I was thinking, with my usual way of regarding things, that I had a cold but I am sure it is more than a physical ailment. How little words are necessary between us! We seem to know each other though we say nothing almost for hours. I often wonder do you realise thoroughly what you are about to do. I think so little of myself when I am with you that I often doubt if you do realise it. The mere recollection of you overpowers me with some kind of dull slumber. The energy which is required for carrying on conversations seems to have left me lately and I find myself constantly slipping into silence. In a way it seems to me a pity that we do not say more to each other and yet I know how futile it is for me to remonstrate either with you or with myself for I know that when I meet you next our lips will become mute. You see how I begin to babble in these letters. And yet why should I be ashamed of words ? Why should I not call you what in my heart I continually call you? What is it that prevents me unless it be that no word is tender enough to be your name! Jim. Write if you can find time.’ (Selected Letters, ed. Richard Ellmann, London: Faber & Faber 1975, p.31.)

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To Nora [19 Sept. 1904; addressed 103 North Strand Road, Fairview]: ‘Carissima It was only when I had left you some time that the connection between my question “Are your people wealthy?” and your uneasiness afterwards struck me. My object, jowerver, was to find out whether with me your would be deprived of comforts which you have been accustomed to at home. After thinking a good while I fould a solution to your other question - this, that you were undecided whether I should be living in or out of the college. I slept very, very badly last night, waking four times. You ask me why I don’t love you, but surely you must believe I am very fond of you and if to desire to possess a person wholly, to admire and honour that person deeply, and to seek to secure that person’s happiness in every way is to “love” then perhaps my affection for you is a kind of love. I will tell you this that your soul seems to me to be the most beautiful and simple soul in the world and it may be because I am so conscious of this when I look at you that my love or affection for you loses much of its violence. / I intended to tell you that if you receive the least hint of any act on the part of your people you must leae the Hotel at once and send a telebrace to me at this address) to say where I can see you. Your people cannot of ocurse prevent you from going if you wish but they can make things unpleasant for you. I have to meet my father today and shall probably stay in his house until I leave Ireland so if you write write there. The address is 7 S. Peter's Terrace, Cabra, Dublin. Adieu then, dear Nora, till tomorrow evening. Jim.’ (Letters, Vol. II, NY: Viking Press 1966, p.55)

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To Stanislaus (31 Oct. 1904): ‘[...] Please send on at once a long and documented letter containing all the news as it is nearly a month since I left Ireland and have had none yet.’ (Selected Letters, 1975, p.41.)

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To Stanislaus (19 Nov. 1904): ‘I have not written much of the novel - only the end of the 11th [sic] chapter in Zurich. I have written about half of “Xmas Eve” and about five long pages of “Esthetic Philosophy” [Pola Notebook, Critical Writings, 1959, pp.146-48]. [...] I am afraid I cannot finish my novel for a long time. I am discontente with a great deal of it, and yet how is Stephen’s nature to be expressed otherwise. Eh? I am getting rather stout and mannish.’ (Selected Letters, 1975, p.44.)

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To Aunt Josephine [Mrs. William Murray] (31 Dec. 1904): ‘[...] I am trying to move on to Italy as soon as possible as I hate this Catholic country with its hundred races and thousand languages, governed by a parliament which can transact no business and sists for a week at the most and by the most physically corrupt royal house in Europe. Pola is a back-of-God speed palce - a naval Sibera - 37 man o’war in the harbour, swarming with faded uniforms. [...] I spit upon the image of the tenth Pius. Faithfully yours Jas A. Joyce.’ (Selected Letters, 1975, p.49.)

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To Stanislaus Joyce (7 Feb. 1905): ‘Cosgrave, whom you must recognise as a torpid animal once for all, was, so far as I can remember, guilty of no duplicity towards me. Do you think I am saying what is true? You are hard with Nora because she has an untrained [52] mind. She is learning French at present - very slowly. Her disposition, as I see it, is much nobler than my own, her lover also is greater than mine for her. I admire her and I love her and I trusts her - I cannot tell how much. I trust her. So enough. [...] (Selected Letetrs, 1975, pp.52-53.) [...] I am sure however that the whole structure of heroism is, and always was, a damned lie and that there cannot be any substitute for the individual passion as the motive power of everything- art and philosophy included.’ (Ibid., p.54.) Further: ‘I have come to accept my present situation as voluntary exile - is it not so? This seems to me important both because I am like to generate out of it a sufficiently personal future to satisfy Curran’s heart and also because it supplies me with the note on which I propose to bring my novel to a close.’ (idem.) Note: the phrases ‘general survey and indictment of the island’ and ‘frigidities’ [in Dubliners] occur in letters of July 1905 (Ibid., pp.67, 69.)

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To Stanislaus Joyce (7 Feb. 1905): ‘The stuggles against conventions in which I am at present involved was not entered into by me so much as a protest against these conventions as with the intention of living in conformity with my moral nature. There are some people in Ireland who would call my moral nature oblique, people who think that the whole duty of man consists in paying one’s debts; but in this case Irish opinion is certainly only the caricature of the opinion of any European tribunal. [...] my present lamentable circumstances seem to constitute a certain reproach against me.’ (Selected Letters, 1975, p.70.)

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To Stanislaus Joyce (28 Feb. 1905): ‘It seems to me that what astonishes most people in the length of the novel is the extraordinary energy in the tweriter and his extraordinary patience. It would be easy for me to do short novels if I chose but what I want to wear away in this novel cannot be worn away except by constant dropping. Gogarty used to pipe “63” in treble when I told him the number of the chapters. I am not quite satisfied with the title Stephen Hero and am thinking of restoring the original title of the article “A Portrait of the artist” or perhaps “A Chapter in the Life of a Young Man”. If I had a phonography or a clever stenographis I could certainly write any of the novels I have read lately in seven or eight hours.’ (Selected Letters, 1975, p.56.)

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To Stanislaus Joyce (7 Feb. 1905): ‘[...] My life is far less even than formerly. I reach prostrating depths of impersonality (multiply 9 [to the power of] 4 by 17 - the no of weeks) but on the other hand I rech levels of great satisfaction. I am sure however that the whole structure of heroism is, and always was, a damned liee and that there cannot be any substitute for the individual passion as the motive power of everythign - art and philosophy included.’ (p.54.) Note that the The idea of ‘individual passion' is traceable in the Italian line to Gabriel D’Annunzio and recurs in the ‘absolute idealism’ of Benedetto Croce [q. source], while Oscar Wilde makes Gilbert say: ‘The longer one studies life and literature the more strongly one feels that behind everything that is wonderful stands the individual, and that it is not the moment that makes the man, but the man who creates the age.’ (“The Critic As Artist” [1890], in The Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Isobel Murray, OUP 1989, p.254.)

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To Stanislaus Joyce (19 Aug. 1906): ‘[...] How the devil did you think the news about Kettle would interest me? But I would like to see a copy of Dialogues of the Day. I have written three paragraphs to add to “A Painful Case”, but I don’t know if I can rewrite it. I would like also to rewrite “After the Race” but if G.R. sent me the proofs I would pass the book as it is. The case of perfection is very unprofitable. / Send me on the news. Today I discovered a photograph of Billy Walsh [Archb. of Dublin, &c.] in a prominent street. Would you like to see some copies of L’Asino - the Italian anti-clerical newspaper. I absorbed the attention of the tree clerks in my ofice a few days ago by a socialistic outburst. One of them is a German and he was ridiculing Lombrosianism and antimilitarism. He said when chidlren cried “they should be caned”, favoured corporal punishment in schools, conscription, religion, &c. I think he was surprised not to find an ally in an Inglese. Item: English and Americans abroad talk at the top of their voices.’ (Selected Letters, 1975, p.97.) Note that Joyce later explains in a letter of 6 Sept. 1906: ‘You seem to be annoyed about Kettle. The reason I was not interested is because I take no interest in parliamentarianism as I suppose, you know. However, I have asked Aunt J[osphine] to send me a copy of the Nationalist - if it still exists. As for a possible friendship with Kettle, it seems to me my influence on male friends is provocative. They find it hard to understand me, and difficult to get on with me even when they seem well-equipped for these tasks. On the other hand, two ill-equipt women, to wit, Aunt Josephine and Nora, seem to be able to get at my point of view, and if they do not get on with me as well as they might they certainly manage to preserve a certain loyality which is [101] very commendable and pleasing. Of course I am not speaking of you. On all subjects - except socialism (for which you care nothing) and painting (of which I know nothing) - we have the same or like opinions.’ (Selected Letters, 1975, p.101.)

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Letter from Rome (to Stanislaus Joyce, 25 Sept. 1906; Via Frattina 52, II, Rome): ‘Dear Stannie, At present Monday morning I am anxiously waiting for a remittance from you. My assets are two centesimi as yesterday I had to get shaved and to pay a laundry bill and to buy medicine for Georgie who has a bad cold on his chest. I wrote yesterday again to G.R. a pressing letter asking him to reply by return of post. I sent you yesterday the U.I. with an article by Gogarty of which I hope you will appreciate the full flavour.’ The part about the chummies is particularly rich. I am delighted to see that this is only an instalment. Aunt J has left off sending me Skeffington’s paper or writing at all. I must be a very insensible person. Yesterday I went to see the Forum. I sat down on a stone bench overlooking the ruins. It was hot and sunny. Carriages full of tourists, postcard sellers, medal sellers, photograph sellers. I was so moved that I almost fell asleep and had to rise brusquely. I looked at the stone bench ruefully but it was too hard and the grass near the Colosseum was too far. So I went home sadly. Rome reminds me of a man who lives by exhibiting to travellers his grandmother’s corpse. Isn’t it strange that O.G. should be anathemising ugly England just [108] when I wanted to be in an English watering-place. As for the eating houses which must be erected for Sludge: O.G. should travel a little in beautiful Italy and artistic France. Mrs G. mustn’t have been very entertaining while in England since O.G. found time to write those two columns. I notice by the way that Cohn isn’t earning his money lately. At any rate he hasn’t contributed any peatballs to the U[nited] I[rishman] for a long time. On the way home from the Forum being very tired I went into a Dominican church where I found a comfortable straw chair. I watched two nuns at confession. Confession over confessor and penitents left the church in the direction of the cloister. But the nuns came back very shortly and knelt down beside me. Then vespers began. Then there was the rosary. Then there was a sermon. The gentleman who delivered this addressed most of his remarks to me—God knows why. I suppose I looked pious. I didn’t wait for benediction. While listening to the service a most keen regret seized me that I could not gain for myself from historical study an accurate appreciation of an order like the Dominicans. I think my policy of substracting oneself and one’s progeny from the church is too slow. I don’t believe the church has suffered vitally from the number of her apostates. An order like this couldn’t support their immense church with rent &c on the obolos of the religious but parsimonious Italian. And the same, I expect, in France. They must have vast landed estates under various names, and invested moneys. This i is one reason why they oppose the quite unheretical theory of socialism because they know that one of its items is expropriation.’ [Cont.]

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Letter from Rome (25 Sept. 1906) - cont.: ‘I received today in the nick of time your remittance of 17 Lire. The only-fear I have now is that they won’t pay me on the 9.9th. With this money I can get along till Thursday evg. Kindly let me know how much I am to send you back on the 1st and in what manner. I will wait to see if I am to be continued here and if so I will go to the B.S.2 about you. Do you think I should waste 2 lire on buying a book of Gissing’s - or ought I buy a volume of Bret Harte. I have often confessed to you surprise that there should be anything exceptional in my writing and it is only at moments when I leave down somebody else’s book that it seems to me not so unlikely after all. Sometimes thinking of Ireland it seems to me that I have been unnecessarily harsh. I have reproduced (in [109] Dubliners at least) none of the attraction of the city for I have never felt at my ease in any city since I left it except in Paris. I have not reproduced its ingenuous insularity and its hospitality. The latter ’virtue’ so far as I can see does not exist elsewhere in Europe. I have not been just to its beauty: for it is more beautiful naturally in my opinion than what I have seen of England, Switzerland, France, Austria or Italy. And yet I know how useless these reflections are. For were I to rewrite the book as G[rant] R[ichards] suggests ’in another sense’ (where the hell does he get the meaningless phrases he uses) I am sure I should find again what you call the Holy Ghost sitting in the ink-bottle and the perverse devil of my literary conscience sitting on the hump of my pen. And after all Two Gallants - with the Sunday crowds and the harp in Kildare street and Lenehan is an Irish landscape. The fuss made about Gorky, I think, is due to the fact that he was the first of his class to enter the domain of European literature. I, not having Gorky’s claim, have a more modest end. Ibsen himself seems to have disclaimed some of the rumorosity attaching to A Doll’s House. He said testily to one Italian interviewer, if you can believe the I[rish] I[ndependent]. “But you people can’t understand it properly. You should have been in Norway when the Paris fashion journals first began to be on sale in Christiania”. This is really my reason for constantly plaguing reluctant relatives at home to send me papers or cuttings from them. I wish there was an Irish Club here. I am sure there are ten times as many Irish and American-Irish here than Scandinavians. By the way, how did stupid old Aibsen [sic] make out the bit here? Teaching is impossible: he must have been in some German office.’ [Cont.]

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Letter from Rome (25 Sept. 1906) - cont.: ‘In my opinion Griffith’s speech at the meeting of the National Council justifies the existence of his paper. He, probably, has to lease out his columns to scribblers like Gogarty and Cohn, and virgin martyrs like his sub-editor. But, so far as my knowledge of Irish affairs goes, he was the first person in Ireland to revive the separatist idea on modern lines nine years ago. He wants the creation of an Irish consular service abroad, and of an Irish bank at home. What I don’t understand is that while apparently he does the talking and the thinking two or three fatheads like Martyn and Sweetman don’t begin either of the schemes. [110] He said in one of his articles that it cost a Danish merchant less to send butter to Christiania and then by sea to London than it costs an Irish merchant to send his from Mullingar to Dublin. A great deal of his programme perhaps is absurd but at least it tries to inaugurate some commercial life for Ireland and to tell you the truth once or twice in Trieste I felt myself humiliated when I heard the little Galatti girl sneering at my impoverished country. You may remember that on my arrival in Trieste I actually “took some steps” to secure an agency for Foxford tweeds there. What I object to most of all in his paper is that it is educating the people of Ireland on (the the old pap of racial hatred whereas anyone can see that if the Irish question exists, it exists for the Irish proletariat chiefly. I have expressed myself badly, I fear, but perhaps you will be able to get at what I mean. A Belfast linen company does a great deal of business in Rome through this bank. On the whole I don’t think it fair to compare him with a stupid mountebank like Knickerbockers.) / Georgie’s cold seems to be better. He can walk across the room by himself now and he has two new teeth. Certainly Rome must be very healthy. It is now noon and I am quite hungry. Last night, for example, for dinner I had soup, spaghetti al sugo, half a beefsteak, bread and cheese, grapes and a half litre of wine. The wine here is like water, poor stuff, in my opinion! The fruit is very dear. The stupid foreigners that come here in swarms put up the price of everything. Twenty years ago, I hear, it was much cheaper. JIM.’ (Selected Letters, 1975, pp.108-111.)

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Letter to John Quinn (24 November 1920): ‘I began Ulysses in 1914 and shall finish it, I suppose, in 1921. […] The complete notes fill a small valise, but in the course of continual changings very often it was not possible to sort them for the final time before the publication of certain instalments. The insertions (chiefly verbal or phrases, rarely passages) must be put in for the book publication. Before leaving Trieste I did this sorting for all episodes up to and including Circe. The episodes which have the heaviest burden of addenda are Lotus-eaters, Lestrygonians, Nausikaa and Cyclops. (Letters, Vol. III, pp.30–31; quoted in Luca Crispi, ‘A First Foray into the National Library of Ireland’s Joyce Manuscripts: Bloomsday 2011’, in Genetic Joyce, Spring 2011.)