The World of James Joyce: His Life & Work documentary (1986)

[Music] on the 8th of October in the year 1904 a young man came to the north wall of the city of Dublin to take the boat from Liverpool he was James Joyce aged 22 he was on his way to Switzerland to become a teacher of English James Joyce saw himself as a voluntary exile expelled from Dublin City because he refused to respect the authority of its Guardians the priests of the Roman Catholic Church the functionaries of the Imperial British state and extremists of the Irish national revival he was joyful as the boat moved out into the bay rather than compromise his honesty he would go to the continent and there in silence secrecy and cunning forge a new conscience for the Irish race I am NOT despondent I shall try myself against the powers of the world and though I seemed to have been driven out of my country here as a miss believer I have found no man yet with a faith like mine James Joyce was not traveling alone waiting for him on the boat was a young woman from Galway who had consented to share the lot of the young man she had known for less than four months there were difficult years ahead for him but eventually like thousands of others all over the world they would look back on this night as the beginning of a journey during which James Joyce with Nora beside him would change the course of modern literature and preserved imperishable the city which was slipping into the distance behind them [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moo cow coming down along the road and this moo cow that was coming down along the road met a nice uns little boy named baby chuckle James Agustin Joyce remembered everything he could recall stories had heard from his earliest years in the house where he was born 41 Brighton Square West in the comfortable Dublin suburb of Hrothgar his father told him that story his father looked at him through a glass he had a hairy face his father John Joyce worked in the rake collector's office he had inherited a good deal of property he lavished affection on his eldest son James his mother had a nicer smell than his father she played on the piano May Joyce was well mannered and self-sacrificing the house and Hrothgar was warm and handy but laughter and a great deal of singing James remembered everything when you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold his mother but on the oil sheet that had the queer smell five years after James was born the Joyce family moved to the fashionable seaside town of Bray from number one Martello Terrace John Joyce could indulge his love of boating James never forgot the laughter the songs the stories that fill the house by the sea nor Eileen danced the little Protestant girl who lived nearby at number four Eileen had long thin cool white hands because she was a girl they were like ivory only soft tower of ivory house of gold by thinking of things you could understand them soon James had brothers and sisters lots of them and then the family was on the move again they would move again and again away from Eileen and her ivory handles while the family had money James was sent to Tonga's wood college a Jesuit school some 20 miles from Dublin John Joyce was gratified to see his son among the elite of Irish Catholic society nothing but the best was good enough for his Jim and the Jesuits were the best [Music] Clongowes was the eatin of Catholic Ireland Joyce was unusually young only six and a half years of age when he entered Clongowes he was known as half-past six to his own family he had always been sonny jim because of his age and his cheerfulness he became a great favorite with the school and he was very happy there his Jesuit teachers were their severity and kindness fascinated him they taught him as he would say long afterwards how to order and to judge but there were awkward moments for young Joyce one of his fellow students nasty Roche asked unpleasant questions what is your father a gentleman is he a magistrate nasty Roche was a stink rody Kickham was not like that rody Kickham was a decent fellow he would be captain of the third line Joyce was good at his studies but did not aspire to be a model school boy he was punished three times for minor infractions within a few months of entering drongos he forgot his books he wore muddy boots and worst of all used vulgar language the Tongass punishment book records Joyce's first encounter with censorship Joyce disliked rugby as too rough but he enjoyed other sports such as swimming but most of all he liked the sunny afternoons on the cricket field in the soft gray silence he could hear the bump of the balls and from here and from there through the quiet air the sound of the cricket bats pig pack punk puck but Clongowes was an expensive school and his father was not a magistrate after three years his father could no longer afford the fees and had to withdraw James a debt of 25 pounds still stands on the college books [Music] [Applause] Joyce returned to a household that was riven by politics the fall of Charles Stewart Parnell was the principal political event of James Joyce's childhood Parnell had been the idol of the Irish people the man who would win Home Rule for Ireland but he fell from his position as leader when a divorce suit revealed that he had been living with kitty O'Shea the wife of a political colleague Joyce's father was four powernail but mrs. Dante Conway the children's governess was against him she followed the lead of the Catholic clergy and demanded that the Irish people reject the Protestant adulterer Joyce described a family row that took place here at number one Martello tennis the Christmas dinner echoed the bitterness of a divided country right right they were always right God and morality and religion come first very well then if he comes to that know God for Ireland blasphemer devil we won we crushed him to death my danger within a year of the crisis my nel was dead a year later John Joyce lost his job in the rapes office John Joyce believed that the two events were related that he was a victim of the same people who had dragged as he rolled down time and time again young James heard his father tell the story of before how repeatedly throughout their history the mean-minded Catholic clergy and the ignorant Irish people had betrayed their great men at the age of nine he wrote a poem on the betrayal of Parnell his father liked it so much he had it privately printed remember it why shouldn't I remember it didn't I pay for the printing of it and didn't I sing the copy to the poor no copy survives not even in the Vatican Library Joyce at this time was very much his father's son now and afterwards he was quite willing to overlook his faults I was very fond of him always being a sinner myself and even liked his false hundreds of pages and scores of characters in my books came from him towards evil uncle Jack and we heard a lot about what hey I thought it was a bit of a bamboo stiff - you later cause he was came from a very county in County people in Cork and he very much let that be known I think he was slightly I don't know how it was slightly felt himself tried to superior to the whole out of us John Joyce had inherited a substantial fortune and soon acquired the ability to squander it as his wife bought a long line of children into the world he mortgaged their fortune out of existence when he lost his job at the age of 42 he had to manage with ten children on a pension of 130 pounds a year pursued by landlords and creditors he took his growing family with a few possessions from house to house [Music] James Joyce ought clearly what was happening and observed it with detachment as well as mortification he was beginning to develop that I for sordid actuality which would distinguish him as an artist the dark muddy lanes behind the houses where we ran the gauntlet of the rough tribes from the cottages to the back doors of the dark dripping gardens where odours arose from the ash pit most of his children came to dislike John Joyce as an improvident drunken father but between him and James the bond of love remained intact as his sister Eileen remembered from boyhood gave him everything absolutely everything deprived the rest of the family to give it to Jim he saw in him a genius and he gave from the refined splendor of his school at tangulls James came down to the turmoil of working-class Dublin for a year and a half he either did not attend school at all or attended a Christian brother school which he chose not to remember Christian Brothers be damned this is with Paddy stink and Micky mode no let him stick to the Jesuits in God's name since he began with them they'll be of service to him in after years those are the fellows that can get you a position even as the unemployed father of a hungry family John Joyce had enough connections left to arrange for his sons to attend the Jesuit day school Belvedere College free of charge at Belvedere James continued to shine as he had done at tangulls he specialized in modern languages English French and Italian and regularly won prizes he was made a house captain and a prefect of the sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary his growing confidence and independence emerged when he used his part in a school play to impersonate the rector of Bavaria much to the delight of his audience the Jesuits were watching him carefully in a college like this there is one boy or perhaps two or three boys whom God calls to the religious life such a boy is marked off from his companions by his piety but a good example he shows to others and you have been such a boy in this College but the Jesuits were too late two years earlier at the age of fourteen Joyce had been walking home along the canal one night when he met a prostitute and he had his first full sexual experience Willy dear he closed his eyes surrendering himself to her body and mind conscious of nothing in the world but the dark pressure of her softly parting lips and between them he felt an unknown and timid pressure darker than the swoon of sin softer than sound or odor his first reaction was one of self disgust and he sought refuge in religious comfort in a burst of guilt he went to confession and promised to live in purity and obedience to the church but his Reformation was not to last sexual sin had given him a taste of freedom a desire to break out of the repressive life around him he had to choose between the Catholic Church and the directions of his own mind and body he chose rebellion he would be different he would be free he would be himself at university college Joyce was still under the Jesuits but now made no effort to conceal his break with the Catholic Church he gained a reputation as a free thinker brilliant but reckless he was one of the better speakers at the literary and historical debating society which he and his brother Stanislaus attended every Saturday night but it was in the national library and the office of the librarian T W Lister that Joyce began to make his name known in Dublin intellectual life astounding people with the extent of his reading and the arrogant lucidity of his arguments a fellow student and close friend was Constantine Kern he recalled those days he talked at lady lab innocence he talked a little about books but not in the way that students do it of much more about aesthetics about the principles of aesthetics his his his talk about books was always very usual that if lasting illusions of course because he assumed that you had laid all that he had laid and perhaps one concealed one's ignorance for the time being and then they looked at the book in the National Library Elsa shortly after the fall of Parnell island discovered a new excitement cultural nationalism the Gaelic League wanted a new island based on traditional Gaelic culture and involving the restoration of the Gaelic language Joyce knew himself to be an Irish writer but was dubious of they are Z he took a few lessons from porrik Pearce then disassociated himself when the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flow matter to hold it back from flight you talked to me of nationality language religion I shall try to fly by those nets he observed with some contempt the effort of Yeats and lady Gregory and others to start up a new Irish School of Drama based upon Irish legend and folklore and concentrating especially on peasant life Joyce was convinced that what Ireland needed was to become aware of intellectual currents in other countries life we must accept as we see it before our eyes man and woman as we meet them in the real world not as we understand them in the world of fairy for Joyce the dammit of the wheel world was the Norwegian Heinrich Ibsen whose plays explored life as it was and not as others would wish it to be Joyce championed Ibsen and other modern European dramatists on the National Theatre insisted on Irish peasant plays Joyce issued a pamphlet in which he accused Yeats of deferring to the tastes of the most belated race in Europe the world of the abbey play was not the world of Joyce knew it in 1902 Joyce graduated he proposed to become neither lawyer nor teacher not Clark he thought for a time of becoming a doctor as well as a writer he decided to take a medical course in Paris supporting himself by reviewing books in English there was plenty of literary atmosphere in Paris but food heat and money were scarce [Music] despite his poverty Joyce reported by postcard to his friends that he was attending theatres cafes and visiting brothels [Applause] on Good Friday 1903 a telegram came from Dublin mother dying come home father his first exile was suddenly at an end he came home for his mother's death as maid Joyce died of cancer she prayed aloud that James and Stanislaus would return to the Catholic Church in this as in so much she was disappointed my mind rejects the whole present social order and Christianity 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 at her face as she lay in her coffin a face gray and wasted with cancer I understood that I was looking on the face of a victim and I cursed the system which made her a victim [Music] joy spoke of Dublin as the seventh city of Christendom it was the second city of the British Isles and the focal centre of Irish culture Commerce and administration it retained with all its metropolitan air and its population of 300,000 something of the atmosphere of a small town people tended to know each other and to know about each other no serious writer as Joyce filtered had ever yet presented Dublin to the world he believed that he was in a position to do this for the first time as his brother Stanislaus observed he always held that he was lucky to have been born in a city that is old and historic enough to be considered a representative European capital and small enough to be viewed as a whole and he believed that circumstances in her talent and character had made him its interpreter [Music] Joyce's first efforts at a modern Irish prose fiction appeared in the Irish homestead the stories he was led to call Dublin earth set in the drab parts of the city which Joyce knew so intimately the stories portrayed people who were victims brutalized and repressed three stories were published but readers of the Irish homestead complained and Joyce was requested to submit no more he regarded this is yet another effort to silence him and his reaction was to circulate the Holy Office a verse Lampoon which contrasted his own artistic honesty but the intellectual cowardice of his contemporaries all these men of whom I speak make me the sewer of their clique but they may dream they're dreamy dreams I carry off the healthy streams depressed at the disintegration of his home and the apparent hopelessness of his own prospects Joyce found some relief in the company of Oliver Sinjin Goethe a medical student with a reputation for high jinks and low birth together they drank heavily and sampled the delights of the Kipps the red-light district of Dublin Stanislaus ever sober and serious was disgusted to see his brother fall among medical students but he never lost faith in him Jim is a genius of character he has extraordinary moral courage few people will love him lighting in spite of his genius one person would love him and she would love him in spite of his genius she was Nora Barnacle [Music] one June day in 1904 Joyce noticed an attractive girl sauntering along nassau ski he spoke to her noting his blue eyes and his cap she thought he was a foreign sailor and allowed a conversation to develop Nora Barnacle was lonely having run away from her home in Galway to escape a brutal uncle Joyce and Nora made a date she did not keep it what could the strange were spoken young man's see in a simple uneducated country girl like her it was a question many others would ask but not Joyce he turned up waited and waited and then went home and wrote I may be blind I looked for a long time at ahead of reddish-brown hair and decided it was not yours I went home quite dejected another date was made and this one was kept together they went walking through Dublin [Music] they fell in love and joy always look back on that day June the 16th 1904 as the most important day of his life and being the most important day of his life he made it the most important day in the calendar of modern literature Joyce had the events of his masterpiece Ulysses take place in Dublin on June the 16th 1904 and ever since it has become a feast day bloomsday after Leopold Bloom the hero are overseas and as such is observed with joseon celebration and pilgrimage [Music] with Norah Joyce discovered the love that had been missing from his life it made a great contrast to his family situation which since his mother's death had further deteriorated Gogarty saw how difficult a choice children started to survive with only their wayward father to look after them once I was in Joyce's told it cabro Road st. Peter's Road Capra and his minister of religion the Bannister's were broken and the backyard was all the grass was all blackened out for the boat was laundry there were few chickens and was a very very miserable home he spent most of his time in the national library I think he went home rather reluctantly Doherty invited Joyce to join him in his extraordinary lodgings in the Martello tower at Sandy Cove it would become one of the strangest settings and picture it is here we find Stephen Dedalus and Buck Mulligan portraits of Joyce and Dorothy in the opening chapter of Ulysses Joyce and go buddy soon quarreled and Joyce left the tower abruptly it was time to get out not only out of the tower but out of Ireland he had tried to live and work there but had found no place for his rebellious talent only in Nora had he found the love and trust and craved once she agreed to go with him he decided to accept a teaching position in Switzerland he would go into exile and there he would write books which would contain the moral history of the people who had driven him away amen so be it I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race the journey into exile was no honeymoon for the young Joyce had to borrow money in London and Paris to continue the journey to Zurich when they arrived in Zurich there was no vacancy they should try Trieste on the Adriatic coast no jobs there either then further south to poet where Joyce found employment for a while they were soon on the move again this time they were lucky the Berlitz school entry s now needed a teacher of English Trieste where Joyce and Nora would spend the next ten years was at that time one of the most important ports in southern Europe Joyce warmed to it immediately I think having got there he found the atmosphere congenial there were several thing that must appeal to him for a start it was a cosmopolitan city it was a city of many languages majority perhaps Italians certainly a very large constant contingents of Germans from Austria of slobs from the part of Slovenia which was then in the Austrian Empire of Hungarians of Jews of Greeks etc in other words it was a very prosperous Seaport and has the cosmopolitan atmosphere of a very large seaport at the time also from a cultural point of view and there was an opera theatre which the still is and it's a very good one there were theatres were players and so on which gave a certain cultural atmosphere that he must have appreciated at the Berlitz school Joyce's teaching methods were unusual but successful one of his pupils remembers the these lessons were very funny because we spoke a little it character very little of English language and discussed very much politics Joyce taught Christine pupils English by lecturing them on Irish history the subject predictable he spoke very much of faith amen of whom I don't remember first and I think honor yes and she said also his books that will work warrant in his family about this famine because one part of the family was for him and the other part was against him but I think he would have the great hope that Ireland would be one day a free country there were more immediate problems to be solved Joyce was incapable of living within his means he was happy to borrow today and promised to pay tomorrow in a way it suited him that Nora had few domestic skills it was an excuse to take her out nightly to cafes it was very hard but it was a little his fault because he didn't know the value of money you know because he was gaining at the Battle School and thousand private lessons but he went again creates about Trieste and in the bars and took wine with the workers because he wanted to know the real character of the Philistines and then also in his house there was not a great order Nora was lost in the strange new world baffled by the languages which Joyce mastered so easily depressed by pregnancy poverty and the hot weather she spent medically days in bed landlady's used her pregnancy as justification for ridding themselves of these unreliable foreigners when Nora went into labor Joyce thought it was indigestion and while surprised at the arrival of his son George Joyce had not travelled across Europe to become a teacher of English he was in Trieste to write but it was not easy to write in a tiny flat with a wife complaining a baby crying debt collectors beating at the door Oleg's something behind everything for the love of the Lord Christ changed my curse of God's state of affairs give me for Christ's sake a pen and an ink bottle and some peace of mind and then by the Crucified gazes if I don't sharpen that pen and dip it into fermented ink and rise tiny little sentences about the people that betrayed me send me to hell Joyce was recreating in Trieste the domestic anarchy he had escaped from in Dublin yet he never lost sight of his artistic mission and with that genius for survival which characterized all his carelessness he saw the solution he would get his brother Stanislas solid sober Stanislaus to fill a vacancy which had occurred at the Berlitz school Stanislaus summoned across the continent by his brother was scandalized by the squalor and repression he immediately took upon himself the role of his brother's keeper my brother's keeper well he saw himself as having being his brother's keeper in the period between 1900 and 4 when they arrived in Trieste to the first world war and he saw correctly that that was the formative period in my uncle's artistic area which is after all the years when portrait of the artist was written and the beginning of Ulysses and certainly Dubliners um and he felt that he had to act as a guardian in order to protect his great talents from his own personality in his own perhaps self-destruction Joyce continued to write driven by his own compulsion encouraged bullied and sometimes even beaten by Stanislaus yes he had no doubts about his genius and he had no doubts about his personality could be drawn to Matt for instance was quite obvious to him the fact that in many ways he behaved irresponsibly was also quite obvious to him I think in a way that didn't matter so long as he could write good books and so long as he kept on writing good books then my father was willing to to support him was willing to take home you know the aggro that went with it and generally stick by him longer Stanny was very careful about money and he always had it all this done he always had it and yeah I always remember my uncle standing with gloves and the whole getup you know uncle Uncle Jim was careless about money and he didn't care a hang whether he had it or now and he even spenders us quickly as in your habit Joyce was struggling to have a stories published a London publisher agreed to publish Dubliners then got cold feet Joyce conducted a long and fruitless correspondence in a heroic defense of his text the publisher was unmoved and returned the manuscript this was the last straw Joyce decided that it was time to move he snatched at an opportunity to become a bank clerk in Rome leaving Stanislaus in Trieste Joyce with Nora and Giorgio went there in July 1906 eager to see what the Eternal City and he might make of each other in Rome Joyce was employed by this Bank he had to write 200 letters a day and look respectable before long Joyce wished himself out of the Eternal City 25th of September 1906 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 sevens photograph sellers I was so moved that I almost fell asleep and had to rise briskly I looked at the stone bench ruefully but it was too hard than the grass near the Colosseum was too far so I went home sadly Rome reminds me of a man who lives by exhibiting to travelers his grandmother's corpse unable to make progress with his own novel Joyce was casting a critical eye over the work of his contemporaries he was disgusted of what he saw their failure to come to grips with contemporary life Henry James ought to get a running kick in the arse for writing his tea slop about Italy the novelists he read were like the tourists in Rome paying more attention to the empty forms of the past than to the life of the living City the more he read of others the more he believed that he was right to persevere with his own stories of life in Dublin Dublin was never far from his mind September 25th 1906 sometimes thinking of Ireland it seems to me that I have been unnecessarily harsh I have reproduced in Dubliners at least none of the attractions of the city but I've never felt at my ease in any city since I left it except in Paris November 1906 I wish someone was here to talk to me about Dublin I forget half the things I wanted to do in this mood Joyce began a new story which opens in the house beside the Liffey where his aunt used to hold lavish parties at Christmastime the central character Gabriel Conroy is somewhat like Joyce himself Gabriel prefers an international culture and isn't trying to be snobbish towards Irish parochialism his wife is from the West like Nora Barnacle and he is rather embarrassed by her country origins back in the Gresham hotel Gabriel wants to make love but Greta's mind is miles away she is remembering Michael Furey a young country boy who loved her violently and who died when she left him and went to Dublin the story of metal fury leads Gabriel to realize how thin his own emotional life is when contrasted with the rich passion his wife had known in Galway yes the newspapers were right snow was general all over Ireland it was falling on every part of the dark central plain on the treeless Hills falling softly upon the bog of Allen and further westwards softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves it was falling too upon every part of a lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried it lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones on the spears of the little gate on the barren thorns his soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling like the descent of their last end upon all the living and the dead the dead is Joyce's first masterpiece and reflects both his maturity as a writer and his new generosity of feeling for his wife and for Ireland as Gabriel Conroy looks whispered through the snow across Ireland Joyce looks westward across Europe to Ireland he was no longer the angry young man who had left Dublin in 1904 he was now the father of two children the second of whom Lucia had been born in the poker warden Trieste Joyce decided to rewrite his autobiographical novel accordingly he took the incomplete version of Steven hero and distill the sixty-three chapters into a sequence of five movements each dealing with an important stage in the evolution of the artist each chapter is written in a style to suit the material from the baby talk of the opening to the intellectual dispute ations of the final chapter Stephen as he prepares to leave his own country sees his vision of beauty on Dali monks stand she is neither also like the Virgin Mary nor all body like the prostitute a girl stood before him in midstream alone and still gazing out to sea she seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird partly to gather material for his writing and partly to gratify his nostalgia Joyce made three trips back to Dublin from his self-imposed exile in Trieste his first visit in 1909 was followed by an attempt to set up the first cinema in Ireland the Volta theatre it was a splendid idea but it failed he had hopes that the Dublin firm of Mont salon company would publish Dubliners but eventually they were afraid to touch what they considered dangerous material he believed that the Dublin publisher Monsterland Col George Robert Cecil was it was bringing out his doublers and he wanted to go back to Trieste with his new book on tourism and instead of that Roberts informed him that he had burned all the proofs and wasn't going to bring out the book I just managed to get a copy or perhaps the proofs and I remember so well standing in Westmoreland Street and Joyce helpless and hopeless not knowing where to go up what to turn to he was he had been thrown out of Dublin as it were and that I think was the reason why he never went back to Dublin Joyce had had enough of Dublin and would never return his farewell was a broadside supposed to be spoken by the printer who had burned or so Joyce preferred to believe the sheets of Dubliners scheisse and onions do you think I'll print the name of the wellington monument Sidney parade and Sandymount tram downs as cake shop and Williams Jam I'm damned if I do I'm damned to blazes after his return to Trieste Joyce was to be rescued by an unexpected source his rescue was Ezra Pound an American poet and admirer of WB Yeats one day a letter arrived from pound offering help Joyce sent him Dubliners and the first section of a portrait of the artist Pound knew he was on to something and set about launching Joyce he arranged for a portrait of the artist to appear in serial form in the London magazine the egg whist Joyce was especially delighted and the first section appeared on February the 2nd 1914 his 32nd birthday four months later grant Richards published Dubliners and there was no legal reaction Joyce had broken through [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] on a wave of creative energy joyce wrote his only play exiles it deals with betrayal a theme he would return to in his later work [Music] but 1914 was memorable for other reasons Austria declared war on Serbia and soon all Europe was embroiled in death and destruction Stanislas and I've spoken critical Austria was in turn for the duration of the war he was interned simply because he was a British subject at the time he had been opening critical of the Austrian government that seemed to be his habit so while my uncle and his family were about to move to Zurich he was interned in a place called katana which is in need of a strife south north east of Vienna and he stayed there from 1915 till the end of the war 1919 in fact when he was he was liberated James had too much on his mind to risk involvement in a mere world war he needed peace and wish to write and in June 1915 he and his family moved to Zurich in neutral Switzerland even there however the old problem followed him how to find the money to live on he could give English lessons but that would use up the time and energy he needed to devote to his new book his luck held things began to go his way [Music] thanks to pound and Yeates he received two grants from the British government and waiting in the wings was a woman who would do more than anybody else to enable him to write Harriet Shaw Weaver now he could get down to the novel which have been gathering in his brain it was to be the most ambitious work he had ever attempted it would deal with a single dublin day June the 16th 1904 this will be a radically new kind of known a modern epoch which would contain the complexity of urban life in the 20th century and would bear the ancient title of Ulysses [Music] Preeti Jane my pre teacher so sure meet me [Music] James Joyce's Ulysses is a modern epic based not on the glorious deeds of warriors but on the ordinary doings of the people of Dublin as they go about their business one summer's day Thursday the 16th of June 1904 it begins at 8 o clock in the morning in a Martello tower where Stephen Dedalus is eating breakfast with buck Mulligan and proceeds to describe with the extraordinary detail the actions and interactions of hundreds of doublings throughout the day but if the setting is locally the themes are universal here is the world in which we live thoughts that occupy us the substance of ordinary life the hero of the book is a friendly man who feeds the cat brings his wife breakfast in bed tries to make a living and contemplates the sights and sounds of Dublin only in one external detail is he unusual Leopold Bloom is a Jew though not a practicing law mr. broom is neither a philosopher not a fool a saint or a villain he is an ordinary man son father husband would-be lover a friend mr. bloom is an extraordinary creation because through bloom Joyce explores the amazing richness of human life never before in the future had the complex individuality of man been revealed with such conviction to realize his conception of Eunice's Joyce needed to be assured of time to work and money to live on [Music] unknown to him Harriet Weaver had come to this conclusion herself and she began to send him money anonymously a relative of mine had left me some money and that I really didn't need it and made it over to mr. Joyce to be a help to him and even though financier and he greatly exaggerated the amount he didn't understand at all Harriet Weaver always seemed to be ladylike and proper she was however intellectually one of the most daring women of our day a feminist a political radical and a champion of the avant-garde in literature she had been involved with the publication of a portrait of the artist in the egg West well I think she saw in him Robin Stephen I think initially because she had met him the the personification of all the ideals that she she she stood for liberation from institutional religion liberation from sexual conventions and so on and these were all embodied in the portrait of course and I think it was a portrait that won her over know when Joyce was trying to find out who was giving him the money and he wrote to her solicitors they rent on her behalf but I'm drawing her words to say that what she remembered was I think the scorching truth of his work [Music] with his new affluence joy soon became well-known in the restaurants and cafes of Zurich where he liked to drink Swiss white wine and meet people of all nationalities it was here he met Frank budgin an English painter with whom he discussed the enormous difficulties to be overcome in writing you said I write with such difficulty so slowly chance furnishes me what I need I am like a man who stumbles along my foot strikes something I bend over and it is exactly what I want Joyce was putting everything into Ulysses utterly obsessed by the task at times Nora had to put her foot down I go to bed and then that man sits in the next room and continues laughing about his own rising and then I knock at the door and I say now Jim stop writing or stop laughing he enjoyed the sheer difficulty of writing such a book of reconstructing Dublin exactly as it had been in June 1900 and for in far-off Zurich Joyce still held the city in his mind Ulysses teams of the life and language of the people he had known and with the shops and streets of the city that was vivid in his memory he insisted on absolute accuracy consulting maps and directories sending pestering letters to friends and Dublin for detailed information using a stopwatch to keep the movements of his characters within the bounds of strict possibility but Joyce like Homer was about to suffer for his work on Ulysses physical strain of writing was damaging his eyes his daughter Lucia saw him in tears and he could not read his own words and his sister Eileen remembered him trying to protect his threatened sight wrote at night mostly mostly is nice and he lay always across the bed on his stomach very rude with a huge blue pencil a huge blue pencil like a carpenter's pencil and a fine coat on them to reflect on the paper you see to give an inflection because his sight was so bad he always wrote with a fight problem it'll give that kind of a white light the pain became so excruciating a joyous agreed to undergo an operation which though relatively successful reduced the vision of one eye he had about a dozen operations over the next 20 years in an attempt to save as much of his vision as he could more harrowing than physical pain was the fear that he will be unable to complete Ulysses the early chapters which appeared in an American magazine the little review had been received with the rapture as the book progressed Joyce's methods became necessarily more outrageous in terms of conventional narrative some disciples began to have doubts but Joyce carried on well aware that what he was doing needed to be done and hopeful that one day it would all seem justified when war ended Joyce felt that he should leave Zurich and return to Trieste when he did so in 1919 Trieste proved to be a much duller city under the Italians than it had been under the austro-hungarian Empire his brother Stanislaus had his own circle of friends and was not so eager to be confided in even if Joyce had wanted to do that it was clear that he could not remain for long in this city Trieste was a backward step not a soul to talk to about Blum lent two chapters to one or two people what they know as much about it as the parliamentary side of my arse my brother knows something but he thinks at a joke Oh shite and onions when as this bloody state of affairs going to end at ezra pound's invitation joyce decided to spend a few days in paris he stayed for 20 years [Music] between the two wars Paris was the home of the avant-garde well I think you know Paris in the this time the twenties was the capital of Arts in the world that was something everybody came to Paris because it was really the center of the world the spirit and arts and culture and I suppose it was the best town where George could found is Liberty Paris between the wars was an extremely cheap place to live well and that explains why so many foreigners and artists in particular where there were painters or writers sculptors or what have you could manage to live fairly well on even as little as $50 a month very quickly Joyce became the most famous the most daring the most mysterious writer of them all accepted more Jewish certainly Joyce was a man who was very conscious and sure about his genius I am convinced he knew it perfectly but he didn't boast about it mommy insolvent a pal Joyce had an extraordinary ability to gather disciples people who could help him fulfill his mission soon after his arrival in Paris he met a young American woman Sylvia Beach who had recently opened a bookstore with the unlikely name of Shakespeare and company she had heard of him and was eager to help with the aid of her friend Adrienne money err who shoppers across the street from hers on the Rue de lo Dion she did everything in her power to facilitate the publishing of Ulysses and then Joyce who had begun by being a member of my library and he'd taken out riders to the sea that was the first book he borrowed he began to frequent the bookshop like all these other people who had adopted it as their headquarters and Hemingway and all the young writers used to practically live in my bookshop I could hardly get any work done Ulysses was placed in the hands of Valerie LeBeau the most eminent critic of international literature in France he was enraptured declared that it was a comic masterpiece and promised to do everything possible to bring it to the public but there were others who sought to protect the public from this terrible book with its crude language and explicit descriptions of bodily functions the United States Post Office seized unburn numbers of the little review which included episodes of Ulysses well I used to tell me about what was going on in New York and he was following this case where the Ulysses was being suppressed and finally he came one day to show me this little review and he said you see this is now being completely suppressed and my book as he pronounced it will never come out so he sat there with his head in his hands and I said to him would you like me to publish Ulysses and he said I would he was very seem very much relieved in fact why I don't know because it wouldn't inspire confidence in anyone who had such a book that he'd taken seven years to write to give it to the into the hands of someone so with inexperienced and young and just a kind of a little bookshop not a publishing house at all in retrospect the production of the book seems almost miraculous but it was largely due to the efforts of three women Sylvia beech Adrian one-year and Harriet Weaver as Joyce laboured a way to finish the book these three guardian angels drummed up as much excitement and money as possible subscriptions were called for Yeats Churchill and many other people sent theirs in but one dublin writer declined i have read several fragments of ulysses it is a revolting record of a disgusting phase of civilization but it is the truthful one faithfully George Bernard Shaw Joyce looked forward to the publication of his book but was intensely superstitious some omens were fearful he wanted the book to be published on his 40th birthday February the 2nd 1922 there was tremendous pressure on Sylvia beech to coax the printer into managing this and at last she did so on the morning of February the second to advance copies were collected one was given to Joyce and the other exhibited in Sylvia Beach's shop window in the midst of all the praise and celebration Joyce seemed strangely subdued as if he was sorry to lose the task but which he had been so exhausted when he later presented a copy to Norah she offered to sell it Joyce eyed her with displeasure she was loyal and loving but she had never known and never would know of what his literary greatness insisted his setting of the book on the day of their first date was a gesture she could appreciate nonetheless [Music] because of Joyce's revolutionary style and technique readers of Ulysses were coming to know mr. Leopold Bloom as intimately as they knew themselves always see a fellow's weak point in his wife still but as destiny in it falling in love have their own secrets between them shatzer would go to the dogs if some woman didn't take them in hand and then little chips of girls tied to his shilling in coppers with little hobbies as God made them he matched them didn't look that when she was going down the Strand who can give that satisfaction those girls those girls those lovely seaside girls fine eyes she had clear it's the fight of the eye brings are out not so much the pupil did she know what I cause like a cat sitting beyond the dogs jump never see them sit on a bench marked with pink [Music] different island cars your head it simply was polarize complexions pink and why's the diamond earrings and dainty feet golden every night is a kind of reassuring not going to hurt you sunlight still red rays are longest red orange yellow green blue indigo violet where those nights lives they're all the time looks like a phantom ship no wait trees are they an optical illusion mirages land of the Setting Sun this home-rule Sun setting in the southeast nine native land good night we know more or less what mr. bloom looked like because Joyce drew this caricature of him readers often wonder if bloom was based on a living person some feel that Joyce's model was this man hitori Schmitz who wrote under the name of italo svevo he was a tree a Stein Jewish novelist whose family befriended the Joyce's Schmitz financed at least one of Joyce's trips to Ireland and received a strange postcard from that country when Joyce was visiting Nora's home in Galway mr. bloom analysis is not my father which it is a part of my father at a part of all the Jewish person's of the rest but when he spoke with my father in Ted Alicia's in his mind he asked very often mr. Schmidt what would you is do answer to decide this and she asked him so often that my father was really afraid of asking and he said to stannous all guys well he asked me too much about Jewish I will then ask him what food you are answer as an Irishman EULA says was printed in the Greek colours white letters on a blue cover Joyce edit I made to match the occasion a small influential group understood his literary achievement TS Eliot I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present day has found WB Yeats he has certainly surpassed an intensity any novelist of our time Ernest Hemingway was overwhelmed Joyce has a most goddamn wonderful book Joyce was glad to have their praise but was more interested in the views of his own family none of them said what he hoped his father was slightly surprised but not shocked he is a nice sort of blyad Joyce's aunt Josephine Murray his regular correspondent was deeply shocked well otherwise miss fame he comes to London to his publishers M and he never neglected to bring up the hospital where my two sisters were nurses and take them out to dinner and just before this he had apparently sent mother the book of Ulysses signed to aunt Josephine from Jim 20 1922 so he said then he turned to Alice and of course he was full of their joy and everything else his success and he said what did aunt Josephine think of my book and Alice said she never read it well there was a blank silence I think she was she never read it why did you read it no she wouldn't give letters readers why not because she didn't think it was fit to be read well then my book was not fit to be read life isn't fit to lived many readers felt uneasy at Joyce's to pick of Molly bloom blooms wife and her lover blazes Boylan in the long monologue of Molly at the end she recalls her erotic history Joyce made it difficult for readers to be squeamish or for writers after him to be prudish buxom ample exuberant and imperfect Molly is typical of the world of Ulysses and she has given the last welcoming word yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would i yes to say yes my Mountain flower at first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts or perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes Joyce became a legend in his own time he refused all interviews his silence was taken by Sun to be a subtle device to attract more attention but he didn't want to answer questions about his work he didn't forget those who helped him most Harriet Weaver was given copy number one of Ulysses it was Joyce's way of acknowledging her literary and financial backing up to 1924 and from 1917 she gave him just over 21,000 pounds and I've had a sound um to find out how much that would mean now and it's just about a quarter million quarter million pounds the amazement generated by the writing and Ulysses made Joyce the focus of international attention and adulation scott Fitzgerald drew this cartoon as a comic tribute to the new master on rag'd James Stephens Frank O'Connor Paul valéry TS Eliot Ezra Pound for Maddox Ford and many others arrived to pay their respects a devoted family man Joyce was now an object of public curiosity and they used to the see Jim at this restaurant he was never allowed any piece at the restaurant that he went to opposite the Roma upon us because they used to come there and bring a book for him to sign and people used to come and sit it crowd the tables just to look at him while he was having his dinner which was very disturbing for the floor joists family the whole family when Miss Weaver was coming he he became more extravagant than usual when she was there he wouldn't take she would take buses but he he would always take taxis and he would always go to Phu kids among his favorite restaurants was Phuket's on the seans Alizee but he used to die in fairly regularly in the late 1920s and 1930s drinking white wine and eating little always tipping lavishly the head Porter Asiago grande was a bellboy at Phuket's in the 1920s today he remembers the Irish writer we said unit oh yes the man with the glasses he wore very thick glasses he could see very little he could hardly see it all oh he was very nice very nice man they treated him like royalty first of all he did like royalty I don't know how royal did dibs but he would take out a hundred franc note which at that time really had some meaning and handed around as being perfectly normal the Joyce family was nomadic moving from Trieste to Zurich back to Trieste and on to Paris it was difficult for the children to cope with the changes from their native Italian to German and lates the French joys seldom stayed for long in the same city let alone at the same flat his biographer Richard Elmen has calculated that Joyce had more than 200 addresses throughout his life his children Giorgio and Lucia was spun around like the willard satellites unable to see themselves except in relation to their strange renowned father a serious problem arose when Lucia in her early 20s began to show signs of mental disturbance Joyce was most reluctant to believe that anything was wrong with her he thought her illness was related to his own extremism of creation whatever spark or gift I possess has been transmitted to Lucia and has kindled a fire in her and as you know she suffered from schizophrenia and there was nothing else that you could say that she never went to bed never never slept at all and she was always sleeping outside and and it's on the seat in the garden and police would come along and knock on our door and say which year is out again and we'll have to take her in and the weather didn't upset her at all but and because she was funny as well you know I mean she was full life and always singing always in all the different languages that she knew Joyce did everything he could for her short of abandoning his own work he encouraged her as a dancer later he encouraged her efforts to illustrate books he took her from specialist to specialist spending most of his income on her I think that the story of Lucci award really the most awful for him because a light very much and she like naturally very much his father and that will I think it was broken Lucia's illness was a cross he would have to bear for the remainder of his life he had some friends and many admirers but as he said to a particularly close friend Beckett I don't love anyone except my family there was only his family and his work even when it seemed that his work would be at the expense of his family he carried on though he was almost blind physically weak and under appalling psychological strain he was now launched on a book which would be so outrageously adventurous that would make Ulysses seem simple it was a book on which you would spend 17 years working at a universal comedy he had first heard as a boy in [Music] [Music] Britain an Irish mighty odd he had the authority to rise in the world in carried our heart achievement the Psalter meticulous way with [Music] every month rightful Adar that's to your father shake Ulises have been the book of one Dublin day Finnegan's Wake was a book of the night set in the village of chattel lizard on the banks of the River Liffey it is a dream book which brings the reader into the subconscious of the sleeping narrator the characters of the dream of fluid and unfixed we encounter Republican Humphrey chimp Tennille Wicca he is related to Finn McCool an ancient Irish epic hero whose body is supposed to lie from hope but his head is to the Phoenix Park where his feet are he is married to an Olivia florabelle who is in some sense the River Liffey and all rivers all wives all mothers their sons are Shem and Shawn artists and priests all conflicting brothers and principals their daughter is Isabel who seems to be every man's desire the story of this family becomes that of the world as well as the chapel isn't here with us to communicate what he wanted Joyce made another great stylistic innovation he invaded the unconscious of his race where language is formed partly by spitting familiar words but also by borrowing words from other languages Joyce evolved a language which though based on English with a strong Irish accent was a mixture of the many languages he knew this is Joyce's own reading of one passage but she was the queer old Scotia any hope on Olivia think at all I'm sure he was the queer our bonds to their dirty dumpling who's the father of Engels and uh forgive me Catherine gammer were all the gangsters patent his seven dams can wave him and every damn hunter seven crutches and every crud chatted seven years and each you had a different crime sons for me and support for you and the doctor is billed for George on the first reaction of readers was predictable complete Battlement some suspected a hoax others wondered if the writing of Ulysses had softened Joyce's brain Stanislaus was in no doubt as to what was happening it seemed to me that the indispensable controls which had held so firmly before the war failed to act in the French capital where he was surrounded by a two admiring group and where the deference to originality tends to run to a cult of the eccentric Finnegan's Wake was never discussed with my father and when my father saw the first edition of it was quite appalled he felt that there was a certain attitude of content on the part of the artist towards the public he wasn't trying to communicate he was deliberately using a very difficult language even miss Weaver who had applauded Joyce's experiments in Ulysses was appalled by his latest efforts she rarely couldn't take it and gradually this of course became apparent to mr. Joyce to over the over the years in the 20s and it was it was a terrible thing for them this because I think from his point of view the fact that she admired his work need the money that she gave him a symbol of her approval of his work and when she could no longer improve approval for sure he was doing then the money took on a completely different color Joyce was badly shaken by these criticisms drained by his concerns Lucia and increasingly isolated by poor sight he came close to breakdown there were some who remain steadfast in their support of Joyce and who tried to prepare the public for his new book among them was Samuel Beckett a fellow Dublin ah who was later to become famous himself as a literary innovator Beckett was a strange young man but Joyce admired his enigmatic mind and valued his assistance with Beckett Joyce engaged in quiet conversations which were interrupted by long silences he tended to be less guarded with Beckett than he was with other artists and intellectuals the key figure in Joyce's support group was poorly on a Russian Jew who had come to live in Paris he was an intellectual emigres who had written on law and literature I have been working with Joyce the name probably means nothing to you but it is that of the great the greatest writer of our time and yet he is writing in a way that nobody understands or can understand every afternoon at 2 o clock Joyce left his apartment at number 2 square Roby act walked along the Rue de Grenelle in the direction of Rue Casimir parry air here was poorly on department Joyce's literary headquarters throughout the 1930s yes this is the living room today dining room so long what-have-you but in those days and I'm talking now about the 30s when I was only about 12 or 13 it was a room and this is the table in which there were a lot of work was done mr. Joyce I remember I used to sit there my father there feed him super there Eugen Jolla's there I believe mr. Beckett when he came was there and there were others too Ulysses was already out of course but they were working on the translation into French of an Olivia pleura bell the fragment of Finnegan's Wake that is mostly about Dublin here are some galley proofs I noticed my father's handwriting mr. Joyce would direct the corrections and these are in my father's hand here we have a painting that my parents like very much below a photograph of mr. Joyce taken for a cover of a news magazine in the 30s there a photograph of mr. Joyce and my father Leon put himself at Joyce's service he asked for no payment other than the honor of assisting as I look back I think they were perhaps complimentary personalities on the physical side I must tell you the anecdote of Philip supa running into them I think it was on their way why y'all you know between Concord and Madeline and my father walked rather stooped you know he worked long hours on his writing table writing and he was a bit stupid mr Joyce couldn't see very well that's to say the least and so they would walk you know arm in arm slowly around Paris and when Philippe super saw them he said ah la verga le paralytic the lame leading the blind one could say and so just as they were complimentary in the physical sense in their D ambulation around Paris so they were in there well perhaps one could call it a literary relationship my father very often read to mr. Joyce not only works of other writers that mr. Joyce liked to hear and discussed with him afterwards such as some of the Russian writers of the 19th century but also there was the whole question of galley proofs and reading the text that the manuscripts the type scripts that came from the publishers these were particularly difficult for the last work which was not written in Queen's English Finnegan's Wake and therefore there were many many Corrections and that meant spelling out as it was written since mr. Joyce couldn't very well read because of his eyes like mr. Blume Joyce was essentially a family man despite his customary carelessness about money and his earlier objections to formalise matrimony he married Nora during a visit to London in 1931 to ensure that she and the children could inherit his estate though they lived among people who scorned conventional morality Joyce and Nora remained faithful in an old-fashioned way [Music] well she told me that she didn't know whether it was a genius or not and every time then she she would say well why don't we just put him behind bars and feed him peanuts but she said quite seriously I do know that he's unique and that I think was a great compliment from her you know James Joseph Paris was very different from a struggling writer whose late-night roistering had shocked the solid citizens of Trieste and Zurich although the language of Ulysses had terrified the moral guardians of two continents the author of Ulysses would not tolerate any obscenity and conversation and was notoriously prudish in the company of women for the loyal troops of the other guard Joyce was in many ways a disappointing leader he disliked literary discussions he preferred the cinema the radio the newspaper and old-fashioned opera and the courageous champion of freedom of expression was a profoundly superstitious person he wills I remember one year we were going away for a a fairly long time it was in summer and we went to say goodbye to them and as we were going away and Turing Yahoo what do you we hope the window of their flat opened and Joyce bending over the history shouting don't go away tomorrow it is Friday 13 Joyce was off-putting until one got to know him he seemed in draw fastidious and preoccupied with his work [Music] only when the situation was convivial indeed relaxed modes are areas Wars melodies and the songs of a musical were always sung when the Joyce family entertained people would then discover how friendly and entertaining [Music] they always gave parties at that time for their friendship for later we're in Perry I remember a few of those writer but I forgotten must say Wilma come on Lord care for my Oxford of course the Nyugen Zola's and the Leo and it was a very cheerful party always at the end Joyce always sang I have been told that in the most recent biography of Beckett that he says that when Joyce and Mariah Doris started squalling after dinner I left something to that effect anyway he speaks of our caterwauling or something like that anyway we thought we were singing we did think it was caterwauling and we sang we knew that we realize if we knew a whole lot of the same songs you see and Joyce had this lovely tenor voice and of course my my voice is bits of soprano and and so we had a lot of fun seeing George you're saying and very Jojo had a beautiful voice you know remarkable bass voice [Music] Oh [Music] where are we saying shall I sing it for you just the song met while when the lights are on softly come and go though the heart to be weary Saturday still to come [Music] [Music] and I hear Joyce's tenor voice you see singing it above me Joyce cultivated the idea of himself as an exile though he refused several invitations to return to Ireland he could and often did claim that in a sense he had never left it he lived in his writings and the world of his writings was always Ireland I came from Dublin he was always interested in anybody came to Dublin and if you asked him would he see anybody he always same questions do they come from Dublin and if they did he would see them but otherwise they didn't come from Dublin he wasn't interested and for instance the last time I saw him in his partially furnished flat and there really been there's a rogue on the floor and I was looking at the rogen he's coming look the other open can you make out the pattern his head no I don't know that's the Liffey from its source to its mouth given to me by an American and then it had more than any of my countrymen have ever done for me well he no doubt considered for a long time that he was in exile from Ireland a voluntary exile as he put it he rather liked the idea that while Dante was a forced exile he himself was a voluntary exile but then as we know he kept coming back he kept circling back to looking through the window of the place that he had left in the end he could not leave Ireland alone he was Irish he was anti Irish in an Irish way I think he definitely does belong to his own country in the same way he maintained a strange relationship with the Catholic Church he never confessed north took communion he was often derogatory yet he was anxious that his books should not commit propaganda even against the institutions of which he disapproved Joyce's rejection of a church was compatible however with considerable interest in it and in its ceremonies because there's one thing you two have to realize about Joyce that is to say he turned against the church he left the church then but he vilified it but he remained a profoundly Christian man and he as as I know Alexis knows too that I'm not inventing I think that Paul went very often with him supposedly you might say on a sort of an expedition to see how they were doing it now in December 1931 news came from Dublin that his father had died at the age of 82 Joyce was so overwhelmed with grief and guilt but he even thought of abandoning his work for years he had longed to visit his father and had led him to believe that he would go to Dublin but some instinct had held him back now it was too late Pappy was dead hundreds of pages and scores of characters and my books came from him I got from him portraits a waistcoat a good tenor voice and an extravagant licensures disposition Joyce's pain was eased when George Yeo presented him with a grandson he expressed his sense of the ebb and flow of human life in his finest poem Jay Bowie of the dark past a boy is born with joy and grief my heart is torn come in his cradle the living lies made love that messy and closed his eyes young life is breeded on the lasts a world that was not comes to pass a child is sleeping an old man gone Oh father forsaken forgive your son a baby boy was called Steven James Joyce he was pleased to be able to have a photograph taken of his father himself his son and his grandson and this photograph was taken in the villa we lived in on the fish affair in Paris I would say around 1936 but to him it meant that he had for generations gathered together [Music] Joyce was fast becoming an old and Harold man all around him was disintegration George's marriage was breaking up but coolest of all was the accelerating destruction of Lucia's sanity eventually even Joyce accepted that his beloved daughter would have to be put in a sanatorium and he he never lost contact and he he went to Sierra for every Sunday afternoon and I remember his coming back one night two fou kids and telling us about the situation and he said and I'm supposed to be writing a funny book with the help of his friends the awesome task of checking the proofs of his new book was completed and at Joyce's 50th birthday party the centerpiece was an advance copy of Finnegan's Wake [Music] the year was 1939 and once again the world had other things to think about he was he knew the world was coming had no doubts whatever dimension but all the French were saying a paddock a sham Attica but not him the First World War had exploded just when he had wanted people to read a portrait of the artist during that war he had worked on Ulysses a book would celebrate a generosity of spirit and mocked the men of violence it seemed that Finnegan's Wake the work of 17 years would be lost and yet another explosion of human greed and cruelty [Music] Abel's furious I said why he said that just a stupid thing that were just for the beginning of my book is going out and now with that war people will need not read him that was the only one fact in the world that was wrong for now Joyce was more alone than ever on the verge of giving up and passing out like an Olivia at the end of Finnegan's Wake I done my best when I was left thinking always as I go all those a hundred cares a tide of troubles and is there one who understands me one in a thousand of years of the nights all my life I have been lived among them but now they are becoming loathe to me you are only a pumpkin I thought you were great in all things in guilt and in glory your butter puny home but I'm losing them that's here and all I lose lonely in my loneliness for all their faults I am passing out or bitter ending I will sit the way before the rap he'll never see no no nor miss me Joyce admitted to feeling exhausted but in fact he was dying the truth was captured by the camera of Giselle Freund when she took photographs of George for a Time magazine cover in May 1939 and when I photographed ever he did say work he cited tests you see like some somebody who who doesn't feel well and she told me by the way this is my last polka and now already for me is to die and he was and I think 58 57 and I said mr. joy to the youngest man of the French Academy is in the 60s so right so to think about this and on and I think he was very very very exhausted but I might just think it might have been also a little white wine he liked so much you know as I have fun picture which I never shoot him because it's two tweets this is a face in front where you seem a fuss because she looked so uh twist sad said so sad and so exhausted that I never dare to shoulder and she seen every other picture but since I'd ever dare to show him and this was a very good psychological picture I think this was the best picture the tougher as German forces occupied France Joyce who had always seen himself as something of a Wandering Jew was on the move again we it was the last time I saw him and it was in that little village called Sanjay O'Leary very near Vichy where he had fled from Paris with with Mirage orison late in the night played during the night I said to him I remember that very well what are you doing at present mr. Joyce and he said to me well adding comments to Finnegan's Wake which meant naturally that he was doing nothing at all then I went on after a while and I said to him will you are you are you you're working and nothing new and he said no then there was silence again and chuckle sigh and well I think that if ever I write something else it will be it will be very very very very simple and it's old and old it's sad and old it's sad and weary I go back to you my cold father am i cold mad father my cold mad fury father yes carry me along daddy like you done through the Toy Fair gulls far calls coming far and hear us then Finn again take the softly mmmm more me away alone alas a loved along the river ran past Eve and Adams from swerve of Shore to bend of Bay brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to his castle and environs he was tired and drinking heavily the fate of Lucia haunted him Paul Leon was arrested by the Germans and later killed as a jewel Joyce refused to fly to America preferring to seek once again the safety of Switzerland in Zurich he spent his time quietly walking with his grandson Stephen well the city of Zurich of course all through his life and the family's life was always a refuge in a haven in the First World War no no Norma my father and aunt Lucia fled to Zurich from Trieste and they spent the whole war here and during the Second World War we again fled to Zurich but the second time there was only no no Norma my father and myself because aunt Lucia was in hospital and we couldn't get her out of France so in a sense I think Zurich was a haven a refuge the family has always been exiled and this was a place where they came to when there was trouble but I do remember very distinctly that he was tired and we hope that when he came here and in a sense our major troubles were over he would tell us what was wrong in January 1941 he had an attack of stomach cramps when morphine didn't alleviate the pain he was taken to hospital where it was discovered that he had a perforated ulcer James Joyce died on January the 13th and was buried two days later as a snow fell on fun terms Cemetery [Music] when asked to comment for this program on the centenary of Joyce's birth Samuel Beckett had this to say I expressed yet again my debt to this great man and enduring wonder before his achievement professor Richard Elmen is the biographer and acknowledged authority on Joyce but he himself hoped I think that he was doing something as important as had been done by other great writers of the past I don't think he compared himself to Homer completely or to Dante completely but I think he thought that he was dealing with certain aspects of experience in as radical away as those writers had done Joyce's reputation seems to be increasing if anything I suspect he is a permanent fixture that in the future we will think of him as a principal pillar of English literature Norah Joyce died in 1951 and is buried in Zurich their son Giorgio died in 1976 [Music] Lucia Joyce is 75 years of age since 1936 she has lived in an English hospital which has an outstanding reputation for caring for patients with her affliction schizophrenia her condition has improved somewhat in recent years she still speaks four languages and sings all the songs she sang with her parents whom she remembers with great affection today James Joyce is still the focus of worldwide literary attention he anticipated this and even encouraged the ingenuity with which he wrote his books was the same with which he forced the world to read them if you're asking me what he would think of all this I think I can give you a very clear and unequivocal answer on this day of the 2nd of February in 1982 when the world will celebrate his centennial wherever he is he will be smiling the man who died in Zurich on the 13th of January 1941 had travelled a great distance from a boy and Hrothgar yet Joyce held firm throughout his books would be Irish he would lay bare Dublin life he would imply what a new Island might be like with Dublin as he had to spread the effect of repression with a portrait he had represented the growth of the artist as a victory over that repression Ulysses he elaborated this victory in portraying a Dublin day and in Finnegan's Wake he offered intimations of humanity attuned to nature and exalted in song all in terms of a Dublin night for all this we can only thank him as we go about our business in an imperfect world which he seems to have understood better than it understood him [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Manufacturing Intellect

Views: 335,262

Rating: 4.8536711 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: 4IwrHkNUk24

Length: 115min 48sec (6948 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 04 2017