'Not even
an escort of battleships and the loan of a bulletproof vest could induce me to set foot in your Free-fire [sic] State.'
James Joyce refuses an invitation to meet Eamon de Valera, the new Irish President, in 1932.
Today is April Fool's Day, which gives me the excuse to share the greatest ever Joycean April Fool. It's an anonymous book review, written in 1985, from the Economist. I learned about the story at the time from an Irish friend, who sent me a report about the article from the Sunday Tribune, which you can read at the bottom. Searching online recently, I found that, in 2009, Hal O'Brien had posted the original book review on his blog. O'Brien was taken in by the article, only realising it was a hoax twenty years later.
The article appeared in The Economist, a weekly journal, on 30 March 1985:
AFTER THE WAKE: A Selection from the Papers of James Joyce in the National Library of Ireland
Edited, and with a commentary by Dermot O’Grady. The University College Press, Cork. 185 pages. I£15
It has long been a source of annoyance to Joyce scholars that the National Library of Ireland should have imposed a seal on those private papers of James Joyce that came into its possession shortly after the second world war. These papers, consisting of several thousand letters to and from the harassed and impecunious author, a great many unpaid bills and what appears to be the first draft of a long poem intended to be the successor to Finnegans Wake, were retrieved from his apartment in Paris a few weeks after Joyce’s death in January, 1941, by his honorary secretary, Mr Paul Léon. Mr Léon handed the papers to the Irish Free State’s ambassador to Vichy, with the instruction that they should be deposited in the National Library under a 50-year seal if he should fail to survive the war.
Mr Léon perished at the hands of the Gestapo and the papers were duly sent to Dublin, since when they have languished in 16 metal boxes in Kildare Street, uncatalogued and unread until Professor O’Grady was allowed access to them. The senior tutor in Celtic studies in University College, Cork, he has hitherto enjoyed a career undistinguished even by Irish academic standards and it is difficult to imagine why he should have been chosen as the recipient of this honour.
The seal on the papers had been imposed by the library on the advice of Constantine Curran,
a schoolboy acquaintance of Joyce’s, whose adherence to the Roman
Catholic faith was steadfast, and was not due to expire until 1991.
This earlier examination of the papers was allowed apparently on the
personal intercession of Dr Garrett Fitzgerald, the taoiseach (prime minister). He has opened a hornet’s nest.
Professor O’Grady is exceedingly parsimonious in his quotation from the correspondence. This is not surprising, given the incendiary quality of many letters, particularly those written to Joyce by his wife, Nora Barnacle, and by the sensitive nature of the private exchanges, previously unsuspected, which passed between him and Eamon De Valera. Joyce was formally invited to meet de Valera, shortly after the latter’s installation as president of the executive council of the Irish Free State in 1932, and answered in most unrepublican terms. 'Not even an escort of battleships and the loan of a bulletproof vest', he wrote, 'could induce me to set foot in your Free-fire [sic] State, nor would I wish to put in jeopardy the pension which has been so generously been bestowed upon me by the British at the behest of Sir Edmund Gosse. I notice, incidentally, that you persist in the impudence of depicting on your postage stamps a map of the whole island of Ireland although your write [sic] runs in only three-quarters of it.'
The letters written to Joyce by his wife are, as previously suspected, highly pornographic. Professor O’Grady does not sully his pages with more than the barest allusion to their content. Joyce was several times away from Nora Barnacle on what he alleged were business trips and she was in the habit of sending him, at his own request, what he called 'dirty letters'. Professor O’Grady makes it abundantly clear that large stretches of the Penelope episode of Ulysses (commonly known as Molly Bloom’s soliloquy) were the work not of James Joyce, but of his wife. The passages quoted show convincingly why Constantine Curran, after he had examined the papers for the library in 1951, passionately pleaded for their destruction. In his introduction, Professor O’Grady also calls for continued suppression of the papers for a further period of 50 years beyond 1991.
His argument appears to rest on his contention that to allow the publication of Joyce’s comments on his own work and on the work of other modernist masters, particularly Eliot and Pound, would deal literary scholarship a blow from which it would be a long time recovering. This is a tendentious argument, and the standard of Professor O’Grady’s own scholarship falls well below mediocrity. His text is by no means free of error (Chapelizod, for example, is not in County Wicklow), and the bibliography is grossly inadequate and there is no index. The whole publication is shoddily printed and bound. The publication date — the Monday after this issue of The Economist is published — seems entirely appropriate.
According to the Sunday Tribune, the author was 'an Irish writer', 'a Joycean scholar' and 'a man of many parts'. Parts of his piece remind me of Myles na gCopaleen's 'Cruiskeen Lawn' column in the Irish Times ('a career undistinguished even by Irish academic standards', 'Joyce was several times away from Nora Barnacle on what he alleged were business trips').
The article is close enough to the truth to be convincing. Paul Léon really did save Joyce's correspondence, which was kept by the Dublin Library under a 50 year seal. Here's Lucie Léon, his widow:
'He took all of his and Joyce's private correspondence over the years of their friendship and put it in a large envelope on which he wrote:
Private correspondence between James Joyce and Paul Léon. In the event of my death I bequeath these letters to the Dublin library. They are not to be opened before fifty years from now (1990). Only the immediate family of James Joyce and his literary executors may have access to these letters, when necessary.'
Lucie Léon, James Joyce and Paul L Léon: The Story of a Friendship, 1950 p36
Léon also risked his life to save many papers from Joyce's final address.
'Paul and a handyman we sometimes employed made two trips with a pushcart, and it was only later that I realised how distasteful entering someone else's home and rummaging through their private possessions had been to my husnband. He told me he hoped he had saved everything of importance, and I suggested that he go once more and make sure. Paul looked at me steadily and said very gently, 'Do you realise what you are saying?'
Lucie Léon, James Joyce and Paul L Léon: The Story of a Friendship, 1950 p39
Unike the correspondence, these papers, which included Joyce's working notebooks for the Wake, were not Léon's property. Giorgio Joyce later sold them to the Lockwood Memorial Library of the University of Buffalo. So the Economist author has combined two separate sets of documents here.
When the Dublin library papers were finally opened to scholars in1992, Danis Rose was there:
'At a special ceremony held at the National Library on 5 April 1992, and attended by inter alia the present author, Albert Reynolds (the Taoiseach), Stephen Joyce and Alexis Léon (Paul's son), these important papers were made available for inspection by the public for the first time. But not quite all. Some were resealed for another fifty-odd years, and others were handed over to Stephen Joyce. This occasioned much controversy. David Norris, a well-known Joycean raised the matter in the Irish Senate but failed to get any satisfaction.'
The Textual Diaries of James Joyce, 1995, p9
According to the New York Times, Stephen Joyce's call for the continued suppression of the papers caused 'Senator David Norris, to stalk angrily out of a reception at the library'.
So Professor O'Grady's call for 'continued suppression of the papers for a further period of 50 years beyond 1991' was partly successful!
'Not even an escort of battleships and the loan of a bulletproof vest', he wrote, 'could induce me to set foot in your Free-fire [sic] State'
This sounds like something Joyce could have written. He really did believe that if he visited the Irish Free State he risked being shot. In 1922, Nora, Giorgio and Lucia, visiting the Barnacle family in Galway, were on a train carrying Free State troops which was fired on by Irregulars:
'Joyce persuaded himself that the attack had an ulterior motive and, incredible as it sounds, that he was being aimed at through his family....Equally he is reported as believing some silly, quite groundless story that his books were burned at some date or another on the steps of the National University.'
Constantine Curran, James Joyce Remembered, p 81
'No doubt you will see Nora some other time when she goes to revisit her native dunghill, but it is doubtful that Giorgio and Lucia will go. The air in Galway is good but too dear at the present price.'
Joyce to his aunt, Josephine Murray, October 1922.
'nor would I wish to put in jeopardy the pension which has been so generously been bestowed upon me by the British at the behest of Sir Edmund Gosse.'
Joyce, a British citizen all his life, refused offers of an Irish passport, even during World War Two, when it would have helped him escape from occupied France.
At Yeats's request, in 1916 Edmund Gosse did help Joyce get £75 from the Royal Literary Fund, though not a pension. Gosse, who had not read Joyce's writing at the time, later regretted helping him:
'I have difficulty in describing to you in writing the character of Mr Joyce's notoriety. It is partly political, partly a perfectly cynical appeal to sheer indecency. He is not of course entirely without talent, but he is a literary charlatan of the extremest order. His principal book, Ulysses, has no parallel that I know of in French. It is an anarchical production, infamous in taste, in style, in everything.
Mr Joyce is unable to publish or sell his books in England, on account of their obscenity. He therefore publishes a 'private' edition in Paris and charges a huge price for each copy. He is a sort of Marquis de Sade, but does not write so well. He is the perfect type of the Irish fumiste, a hater of England, more than suspected of partiality for Germany....There are no English critics of weight or judgment who consider Mr Joyce an author of any importance....He is not as I say without talent, but he has prostituted it to the most vulgar uses.'
Edmund Gosse to Louis Gillet, 7 June 1924, quoted by Ellmann, James Joyce 1982, p528
A 'fumiste' is a chimney sweep, with the additional slang meaning of crackpot, joker or fraud.
Joyce knew all about this letter, and responded to it in Gorman's official biography:
'Louis Gillet...luckily knew when to spice Anglo-Saxon advice with a large pinch of salt and the senseless and unforgiveable judgement of the author of 'Peach and apple and apricot' bore no weight with the French writer.'
Herbert Gorman, James Joyce, p338.
'I notice, incidentally, that you persist in the impudence of depicting on your postage stamps a map of the whole island of Ireland although your write [sic] runs in only three-quarters of it.'
Finn Fordham tells me that Joyce made a similar comment in a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver:
'Shaun's map: for this see any postage stamp of the Irish Free State. It is a philatelic curiosity. A territorial stamp, it includes the territory of another state, Northern Ireland.'
24 March 1924, Letters p.213
Joyce was explaining Anna Livia's gift of 'a sunless map of the world including the moon and stars for Shaun the Post' which later became 'a sunless map of the month, including the sword and stamps, for Shemus O'Shaun the Post' 211.31):
Having created credibility, a good April Fool should suggest something startling. Here we have the suggestions that Nora Barnacle co-wrote 'Penelope' and that Eamon De Valera, an arch-conservative Catholic, wanted to meet James Joyce – known in Ireland as a writer of dirty books and an enemy of the Church.
De Valera appears in Finnegans Wake, where his name becomes 'the devil era' (473.07).
There's also the tantalisising mention of 'what appears to be the first draft of a long poem intended to be the successor to Finnegans Wake'.
What wouldn't we give to read that!
James Joyce refuses an invitation to meet Eamon de Valera, the new Irish President, in 1932.
 |
| Eamon De Valera |
The article appeared in The Economist, a weekly journal, on 30 March 1985:
AFTER THE WAKE: A Selection from the Papers of James Joyce in the National Library of Ireland
Edited, and with a commentary by Dermot O’Grady. The University College Press, Cork. 185 pages. I£15
It has long been a source of annoyance to Joyce scholars that the National Library of Ireland should have imposed a seal on those private papers of James Joyce that came into its possession shortly after the second world war. These papers, consisting of several thousand letters to and from the harassed and impecunious author, a great many unpaid bills and what appears to be the first draft of a long poem intended to be the successor to Finnegans Wake, were retrieved from his apartment in Paris a few weeks after Joyce’s death in January, 1941, by his honorary secretary, Mr Paul Léon. Mr Léon handed the papers to the Irish Free State’s ambassador to Vichy, with the instruction that they should be deposited in the National Library under a 50-year seal if he should fail to survive the war.
Mr Léon perished at the hands of the Gestapo and the papers were duly sent to Dublin, since when they have languished in 16 metal boxes in Kildare Street, uncatalogued and unread until Professor O’Grady was allowed access to them. The senior tutor in Celtic studies in University College, Cork, he has hitherto enjoyed a career undistinguished even by Irish academic standards and it is difficult to imagine why he should have been chosen as the recipient of this honour.
 |
| Constantine Curran with Paul Léon |
Professor O’Grady is exceedingly parsimonious in his quotation from the correspondence. This is not surprising, given the incendiary quality of many letters, particularly those written to Joyce by his wife, Nora Barnacle, and by the sensitive nature of the private exchanges, previously unsuspected, which passed between him and Eamon De Valera. Joyce was formally invited to meet de Valera, shortly after the latter’s installation as president of the executive council of the Irish Free State in 1932, and answered in most unrepublican terms. 'Not even an escort of battleships and the loan of a bulletproof vest', he wrote, 'could induce me to set foot in your Free-fire [sic] State, nor would I wish to put in jeopardy the pension which has been so generously been bestowed upon me by the British at the behest of Sir Edmund Gosse. I notice, incidentally, that you persist in the impudence of depicting on your postage stamps a map of the whole island of Ireland although your write [sic] runs in only three-quarters of it.'
The letters written to Joyce by his wife are, as previously suspected, highly pornographic. Professor O’Grady does not sully his pages with more than the barest allusion to their content. Joyce was several times away from Nora Barnacle on what he alleged were business trips and she was in the habit of sending him, at his own request, what he called 'dirty letters'. Professor O’Grady makes it abundantly clear that large stretches of the Penelope episode of Ulysses (commonly known as Molly Bloom’s soliloquy) were the work not of James Joyce, but of his wife. The passages quoted show convincingly why Constantine Curran, after he had examined the papers for the library in 1951, passionately pleaded for their destruction. In his introduction, Professor O’Grady also calls for continued suppression of the papers for a further period of 50 years beyond 1991.
His argument appears to rest on his contention that to allow the publication of Joyce’s comments on his own work and on the work of other modernist masters, particularly Eliot and Pound, would deal literary scholarship a blow from which it would be a long time recovering. This is a tendentious argument, and the standard of Professor O’Grady’s own scholarship falls well below mediocrity. His text is by no means free of error (Chapelizod, for example, is not in County Wicklow), and the bibliography is grossly inadequate and there is no index. The whole publication is shoddily printed and bound. The publication date — the Monday after this issue of The Economist is published — seems entirely appropriate.
According to the Sunday Tribune, the author was 'an Irish writer', 'a Joycean scholar' and 'a man of many parts'. Parts of his piece remind me of Myles na gCopaleen's 'Cruiskeen Lawn' column in the Irish Times ('a career undistinguished even by Irish academic standards', 'Joyce was several times away from Nora Barnacle on what he alleged were business trips').
The article is close enough to the truth to be convincing. Paul Léon really did save Joyce's correspondence, which was kept by the Dublin Library under a 50 year seal. Here's Lucie Léon, his widow:
'He took all of his and Joyce's private correspondence over the years of their friendship and put it in a large envelope on which he wrote:
Private correspondence between James Joyce and Paul Léon. In the event of my death I bequeath these letters to the Dublin library. They are not to be opened before fifty years from now (1990). Only the immediate family of James Joyce and his literary executors may have access to these letters, when necessary.'
Lucie Léon, James Joyce and Paul L Léon: The Story of a Friendship, 1950 p36
Léon also risked his life to save many papers from Joyce's final address.
'Paul and a handyman we sometimes employed made two trips with a pushcart, and it was only later that I realised how distasteful entering someone else's home and rummaging through their private possessions had been to my husnband. He told me he hoped he had saved everything of importance, and I suggested that he go once more and make sure. Paul looked at me steadily and said very gently, 'Do you realise what you are saying?'
Lucie Léon, James Joyce and Paul L Léon: The Story of a Friendship, 1950 p39
Unike the correspondence, these papers, which included Joyce's working notebooks for the Wake, were not Léon's property. Giorgio Joyce later sold them to the Lockwood Memorial Library of the University of Buffalo. So the Economist author has combined two separate sets of documents here.
When the Dublin library papers were finally opened to scholars in1992, Danis Rose was there:
'At a special ceremony held at the National Library on 5 April 1992, and attended by inter alia the present author, Albert Reynolds (the Taoiseach), Stephen Joyce and Alexis Léon (Paul's son), these important papers were made available for inspection by the public for the first time. But not quite all. Some were resealed for another fifty-odd years, and others were handed over to Stephen Joyce. This occasioned much controversy. David Norris, a well-known Joycean raised the matter in the Irish Senate but failed to get any satisfaction.'
The Textual Diaries of James Joyce, 1995, p9
According to the New York Times, Stephen Joyce's call for the continued suppression of the papers caused 'Senator David Norris, to stalk angrily out of a reception at the library'.
So Professor O'Grady's call for 'continued suppression of the papers for a further period of 50 years beyond 1991' was partly successful!
'Not even an escort of battleships and the loan of a bulletproof vest', he wrote, 'could induce me to set foot in your Free-fire [sic] State'
This sounds like something Joyce could have written. He really did believe that if he visited the Irish Free State he risked being shot. In 1922, Nora, Giorgio and Lucia, visiting the Barnacle family in Galway, were on a train carrying Free State troops which was fired on by Irregulars:
'Joyce persuaded himself that the attack had an ulterior motive and, incredible as it sounds, that he was being aimed at through his family....Equally he is reported as believing some silly, quite groundless story that his books were burned at some date or another on the steps of the National University.'
Constantine Curran, James Joyce Remembered, p 81
'No doubt you will see Nora some other time when she goes to revisit her native dunghill, but it is doubtful that Giorgio and Lucia will go. The air in Galway is good but too dear at the present price.'
Joyce to his aunt, Josephine Murray, October 1922.
'nor would I wish to put in jeopardy the pension which has been so generously been bestowed upon me by the British at the behest of Sir Edmund Gosse.'
Joyce, a British citizen all his life, refused offers of an Irish passport, even during World War Two, when it would have helped him escape from occupied France.
At Yeats's request, in 1916 Edmund Gosse did help Joyce get £75 from the Royal Literary Fund, though not a pension. Gosse, who had not read Joyce's writing at the time, later regretted helping him:
'I have difficulty in describing to you in writing the character of Mr Joyce's notoriety. It is partly political, partly a perfectly cynical appeal to sheer indecency. He is not of course entirely without talent, but he is a literary charlatan of the extremest order. His principal book, Ulysses, has no parallel that I know of in French. It is an anarchical production, infamous in taste, in style, in everything.
Mr Joyce is unable to publish or sell his books in England, on account of their obscenity. He therefore publishes a 'private' edition in Paris and charges a huge price for each copy. He is a sort of Marquis de Sade, but does not write so well. He is the perfect type of the Irish fumiste, a hater of England, more than suspected of partiality for Germany....There are no English critics of weight or judgment who consider Mr Joyce an author of any importance....He is not as I say without talent, but he has prostituted it to the most vulgar uses.'
Edmund Gosse to Louis Gillet, 7 June 1924, quoted by Ellmann, James Joyce 1982, p528
Joyce knew all about this letter, and responded to it in Gorman's official biography:
'Louis Gillet...luckily knew when to spice Anglo-Saxon advice with a large pinch of salt and the senseless and unforgiveable judgement of the author of 'Peach and apple and apricot' bore no weight with the French writer.'
Herbert Gorman, James Joyce, p338.
'I notice, incidentally, that you persist in the impudence of depicting on your postage stamps a map of the whole island of Ireland although your write [sic] runs in only three-quarters of it.'
Finn Fordham tells me that Joyce made a similar comment in a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver:
'Shaun's map: for this see any postage stamp of the Irish Free State. It is a philatelic curiosity. A territorial stamp, it includes the territory of another state, Northern Ireland.'
24 March 1924, Letters p.213
Joyce was explaining Anna Livia's gift of 'a sunless map of the world including the moon and stars for Shaun the Post' which later became 'a sunless map of the month, including the sword and stamps, for Shemus O'Shaun the Post' 211.31):
 |
| Some Free State stamps show a Sword of Light |
Having created credibility, a good April Fool should suggest something startling. Here we have the suggestions that Nora Barnacle co-wrote 'Penelope' and that Eamon De Valera, an arch-conservative Catholic, wanted to meet James Joyce – known in Ireland as a writer of dirty books and an enemy of the Church.
De Valera appears in Finnegans Wake, where his name becomes 'the devil era' (473.07).
There's also the tantalisising mention of 'what appears to be the first draft of a long poem intended to be the successor to Finnegans Wake'.
What wouldn't we give to read that!
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