James Joyce in Bognor Regis

Finnegans Wake ends with the postscript 'Paris 1922-39'. It would be more accurate, but less romantic, if it said 'Bognor Regis-Paris'. Joyce wrote some of the first sketches for the book in Bognor Regis, where he was on holiday, from 29 June to 3 August 1923. 

The Joyces stayed in the Alexandra Guest House on Clarence Road, which I photographed in 2002. Three cheers for Arun District Council for putting up the plaque!

On 5 July, Joyce wrote a letter from Alexandra House to his patroness, Harriet Shaw Weaver:

'Anyhow, here I am and I like it very much and that is all for the present. The weather is very fine and the country here restful. I shall remain in this place (though it is rather queer the way they serve the meals for when you once let the fork out of your hand you have to wrestle with the girl for your plate and they put out all the electric lights at 11 in the bedrooms)...' Letters Vol I p.203

Richard Ellmann's biography has some lovely details of the Joyces' stay in Bognor, based on a 1953 interview with Nora's youngest sister, Kathleen, who came from Galway to stay with them. When Kathleen bought some shoes, which split the next day, Nora took them back saying, 'My husband is a writer and if you don't change them I'll have it published in the paper.' Ellmann writes that this was 'the only recorded occasion on which Nora spoke of her husband's occupation with any approval.' 

'Her more habitual reaction was brought on by Joyce's purchase, at her insistence, of a pair of white trousers.  They proved to be translucent and she had to tell him, 'For goodness sake, take those off.' Later she confided to her sister, 'He's a weakling, Kathleen. I always have to be after his tail. I wish I was married to a man like my father.  Being married to a writer is a very hard life.''

I wonder if there's a memory of these transparent white trousers in Finnegans Wake:

'not forgetting the time you laughed at Elder Charterhouse’s duckwhite pants and the way you said the whole township can see his hairy legs' 137.20

Ellmann claims that Joyce was inspired by the squawking of seagulls on Bognor beach to write his famous seagull song, which gave us the word 'quark': 'Three Quarks for Muster Mark!' in his Tristan and Isolde sketch. The Digital Archive dates this to July 1923.

Patricia Hutchins visited Alexandra House in the 1950s, when it was still a guest house. Here's her description, from James Joyce's World, 1957

The book also has a photo of Joyce sitting on a Bognor bench, with an unknown companion.  A Galway relative of Nora gave the photo to Hutchins, who suggests, 'It was taken perhaps by Lucia experimenting with a box camera, or one of those ambulant photographers of the seaside.'

These could be Joyce's white transparent trousers, which might explain why he's crossed his legs. He wears an eyepatch because he was still recovering from two operations on his left eye - an April iridectomy and a May sphincterectomy.

Joyce wrote two other sketches in Bognor, St Kevin and St Patrick and the Druid. Like the other early sketches, these are comical treatment of Irish legends. St Patrick represented a new departure, for it was partly written in pidgin English. Did Joyce find a pidgin dictionary in his Bognor guesthouse?*  

The holiday also gave Joyce the name of his book's central figure, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Peter Timmerman (writing in A Wake Newslitter June 1979) tracked this down to the 1923 Bognor Guidebook's description of neighbouring Sidlesham Church: 'An examination of the surrounding tombstones should not be omitted if any interest is felt in deciphering curious names, striking examples being Earwicker, Glue, Gravy, Boniface, Anker, and Northeast.'

The Alexandra is now a private home

Joyce uses these names on page 30 of the Wake, where he looks into the origins of HCE's unusual surname:

'Now...concerning the genesis of Harold or Humphrey Chimpden’s occupational agnomen ... and discarding once for all those theories from older sources which would link him back with such pivotal ancestors as the Glues, the Gravys, the Northeasts, the Ankers and the Earwickers of Sidlesham...'

I visited Sidlesham in 2014, and photographed the Earwicker graves.

Bognor is also the setting of the scene on pages 51-52, when the Cad with a Pipe, who accosts HCE in the park, gives his own version of the event many years later 'in a quiet English garden' (52.09).  The Cad is a Dubliner who has moved to Sussex, settling in 'the southeast bluffs of the stranger stepshore'. 51.29

In a list of the topics covered in Book One which Joyce drew up later, he listed this scene as 'Sunday evg Bognor (cad)'.

*This question was answered in 2021 by Ian MacArthur and Viviana-Mirela Braslasu, who discovered that Joyce took all his pidgin from Otto Jesperson's book Language: its nature development and origin, which has a whole chapter on Pidgin. So Joyce was doing some unusual reading in Bognor!