Finnegans Wake as Magical Evocation

Hermes Trismegistus ('the emerald canticle of Hermes' 263.22)

'Joyce believed that his words were 'Words of silent power' (345.19)....he believed that he was entrapping some part of the essence of life within (Finnegans Wake's) pages.... that somehow the spirit of language was working through him of its own volition....Joyce was not in his own opinion simply writing a book, he was also performing a work of magic.'

J.S.Atherton, The Books at the Wake, 1959, p.15 

'I am sometimes asked, 'Did Joyce believe in theosophy, magic, and so forth?' An answer is difficult, owing to the ambiguity of the term 'believe in'....But he accepted their existence as a fact, on a footing of validity no higher and no lower than that of many of the fluctuating 'truths' of science and psychology.'

Stuart Gilbert, preface to the 1952 edition of James Joyce's Ulysses

THE UNIVERSAL MIND

 

'With regard to the language used by Joyce, particularly in Finnegans Wake, it is sometimes forgotten that in his early years in Dublin Joyce lived among the believers and adepts in magic gathered round the poet Yeats. Yeats held that the borders of our minds are always shifting, tending to become part of the universal mind, and that the borders of our memory also shift and form part of the universal memory. This universal mind and memory could be evoked by symbols. When telling me this Joyce added that in his own work he never used the recognized symbols, preferring instead to use trivial and quadrivial words and local geographical allusions. The intention of magical evocation, however, remained the same.'

Frank Budgen, 'Further Recollections of James Joyce' in James Joyce and the Making of 'Ulysses', and Other Writings (1972). This is an almost verbatim quotation of a letter dictated by Joyce to Budgen.*

'When I was writing on the ‘Aeolus' episode of Ulysses and the subject of the ‘Akasic records' mentioned in it cropped up in conversation, he seemed inclined to give some credence to the theory, held by certain occultists, that essentially thoughts, like matter, are indestructible and persist in some ‘repository’ out of space and out of time, yet accessible in certain privileged moments to the ‘subliminal self’.'  

Stuart Gilbert introduction to Joyce's Letters, 1957, p.30

The Universal Mind or Memory is also called the Memory of Nature, Great Memory, and Spiritus Mundi or Anima Mundi (by Plato and Yeats). Gilbert tells us that Joyce read about it in the writings of the theosophist A.P.Sinnett.

'Consciousness is in indirect relations with the all but infinite memory of Nature, which is preserved with imperishable perfection in the all-embracing medium known to occult science as the Akasa.'

A.P.Sinnett, The Growth of the Soul, 1896, quoted by Gilbert, James Joyce's Ulysses

'Akasa' is from the Sanskrit word for sky.  The French occultist Éliphas Lévi called this 'all embracing medium' the 'Astral Light' (see appendix below).

In his 1902 essay on Mangan, Joyce presents this all-embracing Great Memory as a source of comfort:

'In those vast courses which enfold us and in that great memory which is greater and more generous than our memory, no life, no moment of exaltation is ever lost; and all those who have written nobly have not written in vain...'

James Joyce, 'James Clarence Mangan,' 1902 

In Ulysses, the grieving Stephen thinks of his dead mother, folded away in the memory of nature along with her trinkets:

'Her secrets: old feather fans, tasselled dancecards, powdered with musk, a gaud of amber beads in her locked drawer. A birdcage hung in the sunny window of her house when she was a girl....Folded away in the memory of nature with her toys.'

'Telemachus'  

And the liberator Daniel O'Connell's spoken words to his monster meetings may have been scattered to the winds, but they too survive in the Akasa:

'Gone with the wind. Hosts at Mullaghmast and Tara of the kings. Miles of ears of porches. The tribune's words howled and scattered to the four winds. A people sheltered within his voice. Dead noise. Akasic records of all that ever anywhere wherever was'

 
'Aeolus'

Even a casual encounter with a prostitute can be recorded in the Akasa:

'Against the wall. Face glistening tallow under her fustian shawl. Frantic hearts. Akasic records. Quicker, darlint!'

'Aeolus' 

VISIONS OF THE PAST

The best thing I've read about Joyce and the Universal Mind is Craig Carver's 1978 article 'James Joyce and the Theory of Magic', in the James Joyce Quarterly,  Vol.15. No.3. He quotes a passage from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where Stephen Dedalus experiences a timeslip, a vision of Viking Dublin:

'In the distance along the course of the slowflowing Liffey slender masts flecked the sky and, more distant still, the dim fabric of the city lay prone in haze. Like a scene on some vague arras, old as man’s weariness, the image of the seventh city of christendom was visible to him across the timeless air, no older nor more weary nor less patient of subjection than in the days of the thingmote
  ....So timeless seemed the grey warm air, so fluid and impersonal his own mood, that all ages were as one to him. A moment before the ghost of the ancient kingdom of the Danes had looked forth through the vesture of the hazewrapped city.'

The timeless air, says Carver, is the Akasa. He then quotes a passage in the Wake based on the same text:

'It scenes like a landescape from Wildu Picturescu or some seem on some dimb Arras, dumb as Mum’s mutyness, this mimage of the seventyseventh kusin of kristansen is odable to os across the wineless Ere no oedor nor mere eerie nor liss potent of suggestion than in the tales of the tingmount.' 53.01

 

Here's Carver's commentary:

 

''Instead of being visible or audible in the ordinary sense, this scene is 'odable'...'Od' is a term coined by a certain Baron von Reichenbach in the 1840s to describe an all pervading and emanating force which the later theosophists characteristically picked up and elaborated on.  For Mme Blavatsky the 'od' or 'odic forse,' as Reichenbach also called it, is none other than the universal agent, ''the divine light through which the soul perceives things past, present and to come.'''

 

Carl Von Reichenbach

 
See appendix below for more on the Od.

 

In the Cork episode of A Portrait, the sight of the word 'Fœtus' cut into a desk evokes another vision, of the student who cut it:

'A vision of their life...sprang up before him out of the word cut in the desk. A broadshouldered student with a moustache was cutting in the letters with a jackknife, seriously. Other students stood or sat near him laughing at his handiwork. One jogged his elbow. The big student turned on him, frowning. He was dressed in loose grey clothes and had tan boots.'

Carver comments:

 

'This..is not a scene from personal memory, but a disturbingly real, if trivial, scene out of the universal memory. Its clear hard details are typical of such visions as A.P.Sinnett explains: 'We are in a position to remember it not in that dim shadowy way which physical memory alone achieves, but in such a way that the past scene...re-enacts before us in vivid perception of detail.''

These are uncalled visions from the Universal Memory. Joyce believed that, as an artist, he could use language to summon such visions. Carver quotes this boast of Stephen's:

'You have spoken of the past and its phantoms, Stephen said. Why think of them? If I call them into life across the waters of Lethe will not the poor ghosts troop to my call?'

'Oxen of the Sun' 

Carver also cites Joyce's 1912 lecture on Blake, in which he told his Trieste audience that he planned 'to recall (Blake's) spirit from the twilight of the universal mind, to detain it for a minute and question it.' 

Here's Carver's conclusion:

'The importance of memory and the past for Joyce's work is self-evident....It is no wonder then that Joyce was interested in the concept of the Great Memory, the all-recording Akasa, and the artist's relation to it. His whole work is in a sense an evocation of the memory of nature, imaginatively transformed and artistically embodied.'

FINNEGANS WAKE AS THE UNIVERSAL MIND DREAMING

 

'In his last work he includes all the memory of humanity, all histories, all the world, a  representation of universal life, of Allspace in a Natshall'.

Louis Gillet, 'The Extraordinary Adventure of James Joyce', 1941, Claybook for James Joyce, 1958, p.61

Another place where Joyce believed that we might experience the Universal Mind is in our dreams. In his Scribbledehobble notebook, he wrote:

'dream thoughts are wake thoughts of centuries ago: unconscious memory: great recurrence: race memorial' VI.A.571

In a wonderful lecture at the very first Joyce symposium, J.S.Atherton argued that the Universal Mind is the Dreamer of Finnegans Wake:

'As I see FW it is everyone’s dream, the dream of all the living and the dead....It is the universal mind which Joyce assumes as the identity of the dreamer; he, of course, is writing it all down but everyone else contributes. Sometimes the contributions are those of 'the...intermisunderstanding minds of the anticollaborators' (118.25), but they are made all the same. The idea may seem strange. Like many of Joyce’s ideas it is spreading. The Jesuit biologist, Teilhard de Chardin, wrote 'Taken in its entirety, the living substance spread over the earth—from the first stages of its evolution—traces the lineaments of one single and gigantic organism. To see life properly we must never lose sight of the unity of the biosphere that lies beyond the plurality and essential rivalry of individual beings.'...One final word about my theory. It may also give the Wake (I say this with some diffidence) a purpose and a message. Joyce is saying that mankind is one. We are 'humble indivisibles in this grand continuum'(472.30). It is customary, or was until a year or so ago, to speak of Joyce as entirely uninterested in politics. He was an ardent pacifist; he saw the world as a single family. Can we not also see it as one in which it is time the boys grew up and stopped fighting? If so the Wake is not a “crazy book” but a work of importance for all of us.'

J.S.Atherton,'The Identity of the Sleeper', A Wake Newslitter, Vol IV no 5, October 1967.

If Joyce saw himself as a channel for the Universal Mind rather than a conventional author many odd features of the Wake are explained. This may be why he added so many words from foreign languages which he couldn't speak; why he used as the basic material phrases extracted from hundreds of other books and newspaper articles (a way of magically absorbing these texts into his own); and why, in Ellmann's words, he 'was quite willing to accept coincidence as his collaborator'.
 

'Every dimmed letter in it is a copy and not a few of the silbils and wholly words....The last word in stolentelling!' 424.32
 

'Really it is not I who am writing this crazy book,' Joyce told a party of friends. 'It is you, and you, and you, and that man over there, and that girl at the next table.'  

Eugene Jolas, 'My Friend James Joyce' in James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism (ed Givens), 1948 

PROPHECY

 

Joyce's sense that he was a channel for something much bigger lies behind another magical idea – that his writing had the power of prophecy.

 

'I sometimes felt there was a hint of the uncanny in his facility of inner visualization, rather like that of the 'sensitive' who, under certain conditions, can evoke latent memories with a precision impossible to his normal self and occasionally displays clairvoyance. On more than one occasion Joyce told me that certain incidents in his writings ('A Painful Case' in Dubliners was one) had proved to be premonitions of incidents that subsequently took place.'

Stuart Gilbert introduction to Joyce's Letters, p.30  

'The word scorching has a peculiar significance for my superstitious mind not so much because of any quality or merit in the writing itself as for the fact that the progress of the book is in fact like the progress of some sandblast. As soon as I mention or include any person in it I hear of his or her death or departure or misfortune: and each successive episode, dealing with some province of artistic culture (rhetoric or music or dialectic), leaves behind it a burnt up field.' 

To Harriet Shaw Weaver, 2 July 1919, Letters p129

'In one of your letters, which I cannot refer to here, you mentioned some book or writings of on the subject of prophecy. It was in connection with the articles in a Viennese paper about the coincidence of 'A Painful Case'. May I ask you for the name of the writer?'

To Weaver, 9 December 1920, Letters p151  

'It is strange that on the day I sent off to you a picture of an epicene professor of history in an Irish university college seated in the hospice for the dying etc after ‘eating a bad crab in the red sea' I received a paper from Dublin containing news of the death at the age of 41 of an old schoolfellow of mine in the hospice for the dying, Harold's Cross, Dublin, professor of law in the university of Galway who, it seems, had lately returned from the West Indies where his health collapsed. More strangely still his name (which he used to say, was an Irish (Celtic) variant of my own) is in English an epicene name being made up of the feminine and masculine personal pronouns — Sheehy. It is as usual rather uncanny, I have written to his father (an ex M.P. for Meath) and did not care to think of it too much. ' 

To Weaver 23 Oct 1923 Letters, p.205
 
'Thanks for remembering my birthday. Ruggiero did so too....I have had many more since, Italian, one from Magdeburg, one by a Russian American, a remarkable one and, naturally enough perhaps, a strange symbolical affair from Helsinki — sent about 6 weeks ago — where, as foretold by the prophet, the Finn again wakes. I should not jest.'

To Frank Budgen 8 Feb 1940 Letters p 408 

'My daughter-in-law staged a marvellous banquet for my last birthday and read the closing pages on the passing-out of Anna Livia — to a seemingly much affected audience. Alas, if you ever read them you will see they were unconsciously prophetical! 
....I have received a number of foreign notices of my book.....the most curious comes from Helsinki where as was predicted, the Finn again wakes.'

To Constantine Curran, 11 February 1940, Letters, p 408 
 
'For Joyce himself, Finnegans Wake had prophetic significance. Finn MacCool, the Finnish-Norwegian-Irish hero of the tale, seemed to him to be coming alive again after the publication of the book, and in a letter from France I received from him last spring, he said: '...It is strange, however, that after publication of my book, Finland came into the foreground suddenly....the most curious comment I have received on the book is a symbolical one from Helsinki, where, as foretold by the prophet, the Finn again wakes, and volunteer Buckleys are hurrying from all sides to shoot Russian generals....'Prophetic too, were the last pages of my book...' he added in the same letter.  The last pages, that had cost him such profound anguish at the time of their writing. 'I felt so completely exhaiusted,' he told me when it was done, 'as if all the blood had run out of my brain. I sat for a long while on a street bench, unable to move....'
   'And it’s old and old it’s sad and old it’s sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father, till the near sight of the mere size of him, the moyles and moyles of it, moananoaning, makes me seasilt saltsick and I rush, my only, into your arms.'
   There was no turning back after these lines, my friend. You knew it well. Adew!'

Eugene Jolas, 'My Friend James Joyce', 1941 in Sean Givens (ed) James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism,  Vanguard Press, 1948, p17-18

SOURCES FOR OCCULT JOYCE

You can find hundreds of references to the occult in Finnegans Wake. Len Platt has compiled an annotated list of references to Madame Blavatsky. Fweet provides Joyce's borrowings from Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled, 1877; W.J. Perry's The Origin of Magic and Religion, 1923; and Arthur Waite's The Occult Sciences 1891. There are also more than a hundred quotations from the spells of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. 

Another good source is Enrico Terrinoni's book, Occult Joyce: The Hidden in Ulysses, 2007. He gives a useful summary of Joyce's occult reading:

'Among the volumes on occult subjects  he had in his personal library in Trieste, we find many texts concerning occult matters, like Jacob Boehme’s The Signature of all Things, Emanuel Swedenborg’s Heaven and Its Wonders and Hell, two books on theosophy and discipleship by Annie Besant, a tract on the occult meaning of blood by Rudolph Steiner, a study in French on Spiritism, a volume by Merlin called The Book of Charms and Ceremonies Whereby All May Have the Opportunity of Obtaining Any Object They Desire, a translation of Plutarch’s theosophical essays, a study on Yogi philosophy and oriental occultism, a work by Giordano Bruno and a study on him, and finally several works by Blake and Yeats. Joyce remained interested in the occult also in his more mature years. In the Paris library we find a copy of The Occult Review (July 1923) which features essays and articles on the “Practical Qabala,” the “Akasic Records,” and “the alleged communication with Madame Blavatsky.” The Paris library hosts also other books on similar subjects...'


The 'study in French on Spiritism'  was Allen Kardec's La Genèse, les Miracles et les Preditions selon le Spiritisme, which Atherton tells us 'was frequently underlined'. (Books at the Wake, p48). You can read an English translation of this book online here.


*

'Yeats's defence & definition of magic: a) The borders of our minds are always shifting tending to become part of the universal mind b) the borders of our memory also shift and form part of universal memory. c) This universal mind and memory can be evoked by symbols. 
  It should be pointed out that Mr J. lived amidst all this (including Yeats) and his library was fiull of theophicle (sic) works though he did not use the recognised symbols – using instead trivial and quadrivial and local geographical allusions (Trivial meaning literally – carrefour – where three roads meet.'

Letter dictated by Joyce to Budgen, quoted by Clive Hart in his introduction to James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses, p xvii

Budgen also quotes Joyce's reply to a critic: 'Yes, some of the means I use are trivial and some quadrivial'

He meant that Finnegans Wake includes all seven of the liberal arts. The trivium (three ways) comprised grammar, rehetoric, and logic. The quadrivium (four ways) was arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy  

 

APPENDIX: THE ODIC FORCE 

 

'The divine light through which, unimpeded by matter, the soul perceives things past, present, and to come, as though their rays were focused in a mirror; the death-dealing bolt projected in an instant of fierce anger or at the climax of long-festering hate; the blessing wafted from a grateful or benevolent heart; and the curse hurled at an object--offender or victim--all have to pass through that universal agent, which under one impulse is the breath of God, and under another--the venom of the devil. It was discovered (?) by Baron Reichenbach and called OD.'

 

Madame Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, I, p 145-6

'There is a composite agent, a natural and divine agent, at once corporeal and spiritual, an universal plastic mediator, a common receptacle for vibrations of movement and images of form, a fluid and a force which may be called, in a sense at least, the imagination of Nat ure. By the mediation of this force every nervous apparatus is in secret communication together ; hence come sympathy and antipathy, hence dreams, hence the phenomena of second sight and extranatural vision. This universal agent of Nature's works is the Od of the Jews and of Reichenbach, the Astral Light of the Martinists, which denomination we ptefer as the more explicit.'

 

Eliphas Levi,  The History of Magic, Rider and Son, 1922

Happy Birthday Finnegans Wake!

Finnegans Wake is 80 years-old today!  It was officially published on 4 May 1939, though Joyce had received the first copy from Faber on 30 January, in time for his birthday party on 2 February.  It was simultaneously published in London, by Faber and Faber, and New York, by the Viking Press.   

Publication also meant the revelation of a secret, which Joyce had kept for sixteen years - the title of the book.

This is the Viking Press cover.

Here's Faber and Faber's version. What they share is the reddish brown colour of the River Liffey, which Joyce had previously chosen for the Anna Livia Plurabelle booklet. He told an Italian journalist, 'The river at Dublin passes dye-houses, and so has reddish water.'

Apart from the covers, the texts are the same, and both publishers' names appear on the title page.

For publicity, Joyce agreed to a photo session for Time magazine with Gisèle Freund, in March 1939. This was the only time that Joyce was photographed in colour. 

Joyce also looks reddish brown, just like his book!

You can read Freund's account of the session on my post marking the Wake's 75th birthday. 

Time magazine put Joyce on their cover on 8 May. They have a framed copy on the wall of the Palace bar in Dublin (left).  The magazine carried a long article by Whittaker Chambers, titled 'Night Thoughts':

'All children are afraid of the night; when they grow up, they are still afraid, but more afraid of admitting it. In this frightening darkness men lie down to sleep and dream. Generations of diviners, black magicians, fortune tellers and poets have made night and dreams their province, interpreting the troubled images that float through men’s sleeping minds as omens of good & evil. Only of late have psychologists asserted that dreams tell nothing about men’s future, much about their hidden or forgotten past. In dreams, this past floats, usually uncensored and distorted, to the surface of their slumbering consciousness. This week, for the first time, a writer had attempted to make articulate this wordless world of sleep. The writer is James Joyce; the book, Finnegans Wake — final title of his long-heralded Work in Progress. In his 57 years this erudite and fanciful Irishman, from homes in exile all over Europe, has written two books that have influenced the work of his contemporaries more than any others of his time: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the best of innumerable novels picturing an artist’s struggle with his environment; Ulysses, considered baffling and obscure 15 years ago, now accepted as a modern masterpiece.

Finnegans Wake is a difficult book — too difficult for most people to read. In fact, it cannot be “read” in the ordinary sense. It is perhaps the most consciously obscure work that a man of acknowledged genius has produced. Its four sections run to 628 pages, and from its first line:

riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay

to its last:

A way a lone a last a loved a long the

there is not a sentence to guide the reader in interpreting it; there is not a single direct statement of what it is about, where its action takes place, what, in the simplest sense, it means.

As a gigantic laboratory experiment with language, Finnegans Wake is bound to exert an influence far beyond the circle of its immediate readers. Whether Joyce is eventually convicted of assaulting the King’s English with intent to kill or whether he has really added a cubit to her stature, she will never be quite the same again....

Method. Joyce’s idea in Finnegans Wake is not new. More than a hundred years ago, when Nathaniel Hawthorne was living in Salem, he jotted in his notebook an idea for a story: “To write a dream which shall resemble the real course of a dream, with all its inconsistency, its strange transformations . . . with nevertheless a leading idea running through the whole. Up to this old age of the world, no such thing has ever been written.”

But Joyce’s method is new. Dreams exist as sensation or impression, not as speech. Words are spoken in dreams, but they are usually not the words of waking life, may be capable of multiple meanings, or may even be understood in several different senses by the same dreamer at the same moment. Since dreams take place in a state of suspended consciousness, out of which language itself arises, Joyce creates, in Finnegans Wake, a dream language to communicate the dream itself.'

So the Time cover bears the text 'he wrote Hawthorne's dream book'.

The article also reveals that 'At present Joyce is not writing. His wife is trying to get him started on something, because when he is not working he is hard to live with.'

You can read the whole article on the Whittaker Chambers website. 

'Campden Grave': James Joyce in London

In London last weekend, I made a pilgrimage to another Joyce address, 28 Campden Grove. It's a quiet leafy street on the west side of Kensington Park. James and Nora Joyce lived here, along with Lucia, from May to August 1931.

'I never liked the flat much though I liked the gardens nearby. That grove is inhabited by mummies. Campden Grave, it should be called. London is not made for divided houses. The little sooty dwellings with their backs to the railway line etc etc are genuine; so is Portland Place. But houses like that were never built to be run on the continental system and as flats they are fakes.'  

To Harriet Shaw Weaver, 20 April 1932, Letters p317

Unlike most of his Paris addresses, there's a plaque on the building.

'In the early thirties Joyce discovered that for reasons connected with the legality of his testamentary disposition he needed to spend a period of two or three consecutive months in England. Being the man he was, he rented, for this brief sojourn, an unfurnished flat: a dreary little flat, for which he then decided to buy some still drearier necessary pieces of furniture.' 

T.S.Eliot, 'Miss Sylvia Beach', Mercure de France, August 1963, p.10

Joyce's purpose, left vague by Eliot, was to marry Nora Barnacle and legitimise his children and future grandchildren (Giorgio Joyce had married Helen Fleischman on 10 December 1930). Joyce, who claimed he had already married Nora in 1904, tried to keep his wedding a secret. He only applied for the license two days before the ceremony, and didn't give his occupation or birthplace.  On the same day, he wrote to Giorgio and Helen:

'My Dear Children
The lease of this flat finally came into my possession on Monday so that I am now a householder and elector and juryman etc. The marriage has been arranged for Saturday July 4 (my father's birthday and the birthday of my brother George to say nothing of American independence) at the hour of 11.15am Greenwich time. Try to look as natural as possible so that people meeting you may not perceive that you have been turned into honest citizens all of a sudden.
  To throw people off the scent the bride will wear her lifeguard uniform while the groom will be in green satin with a white veil and an orange umbrella.
  Goodbye now dear infants. Say your prayers regularly and don't eat with the knife.
 Babbo'

Letter to Giorgio and Helen Joyce, 2 July 1931 in the National Library of Ireland. 

Despite Joyce's precautions, the press found out and the story was in the Daily Mirror on the wedding day. The couple were besieged by reporters. One took this photo of them leaving Kensington Register Office after the wedding.

The Joyces with Lionel Monroe their solicitor

While they were in London, the Joyces ate out every night, usually at Slaters in Kensington High Street. They went to Covent Garden Opera, where Joyce continued to promote John Sullivan. In a letter to Weaver he ironically refers to 'that wretched warbler S. who disgraced the boards of the Kitchen Garden Opera' Letters 308. 

Nora's sister Kathleen came to stay. She later told Ellmann that she accompanied Joyce to Stonehenge, where Nora had no wish to go, and to the Tower of London, Windsor Forest, and Madame Tussaud's Waxworks where Kathleen said, 'I want to see you here.' Joyce replied 'You never will.'

Joyce would be surprised to know that he's now in the Dublin Wax Museum.

Kathleen recalled that, when they reached Stonehenge, Joyce said, 'I have been fourteen years trying to get here'.

(Statement by Mrs. Kathleen Griffin on the BBC Third Program, Part II,"The Artist in Maturity," 17 February 1950. quoted by David Hayman, A First Draft Version of Finnegans Wake, p3)


So Joyce had wanted to go to Stonehenge since 1917?!

'JOYCE IS NOT A VERY CONVENIENT GUEST AT LUNCHEON'

 

My favourite story from this period comes from the diaries of Harold Nicolson, the diplomat and Bloomsburyite. On 30 July, Nicolson went to an upper class literary luncheon at the home of Constant and Gladys Huntington. Constant, son of the Protestant Bishop of New York, was chairman of Puttnam's the publishers while Gladys, from a wealthy Philadelphia  family, was a writer. Another guest was the American heiress, Mildred Carter, who was now the Countess of Gosford. There was also the leading literary critic, Desmond MacCarthy, who was an old Etonian and had been a member of the Apostles at Cambridge. 

They were all keen to meet James Joyce!

Desmond MacCarthy and Harold Nicolson

'To luncheon with the Huntingtons to meet James Joyce. We await the arrival of this mysterious celebrity in a drawing-room heavy with the scent of Madonna lilies. There are the Huntingtons (Gladys a little nervous), Lady Gosford and Desmond MacCarthy. We make conversation apprehensively. Suddenly a sound is heard in the staircase. We stop talking and rise. Mrs Joyce enters followed by her husband. A young-looking woman with the remains of beauty and an Irish accent so marked that she might have been a Belgian. Well dressed in the clothes of a young French bourgeoise: an art-nouveau brooch. Joyce himself, aloof and blind, follows her.  My first impression is of a slightly bearded spinster: my second is of Willie King made up like Philip II: my third of some thin little bird, pecking, crooked, reserved, violent and timid. Little claw hands. so blind that he stares away from one at a tangent, like a very thin owl.
  We go down to the luncheon. Gladys Huntington in her excitement talks to Joyce in a very shrill voice on the subject of Italo Svevo. She bursts into Italian. I address myself to Mildred Gosford, speaking of Eton and whether boys under twenty should be allowed to fly. With my left ear, however, I catch the fact that Joyce is contradicting Gladys pretty sharply, and withal with bored indifference. My conversation with Lady G. peters out about the same time as the Svevo subject. Desmond then weighs in with a talk on Charles Pace and the Partridge murder. I describe the latter with great verve and acumen. 'Are you,' I say to Joyce, hoping to draw him into conversation, 'interested in murders?' 'Not,' he answers with the gesture of a governess shutting the piano, 'in the very least.'  The failure of that opening leads Desmond to start on the subject of Sir Richard and Lady Burton. The fact that Burton was once consul at Trieste sends a pallid but very fleeting light of interest across the pinched features of Joyce. It is quickly gone. 'Are you interested,' asks Desmond, 'in Burton?' 'Not,' answers Joyce, 'in the very least.' In despair I tell, not him, but Desmond, that I have not been allowed to mention Ulysses in my radio talks. This makes Joyce perk up. He actually asks, 'What talks?' I tell him. He says he will send me a book about Ulysses which I can read and quote. He asks if I have reads Les Lauriers sont coupés by a man to whom Moore dedicated The Lake and whose name, if I recollect aright, was Du Jardin, and that the latter, a broken old man, came to visit Joyce with tears in his eyes. His description of this incident is human enough, in spite of the odd-corner look behind his spectacles. He is not a rude man: he manages to hide his dislike of the English in general and of the literary English in particular. But he is a difficult man to talk to. 'Joyce,' as Desmond remarked afterwards, 'is not a very convenient guest at luncheon.''

Diaries and Letters, 1930–1939, (London and New York: Atheneum, 1966) pp. 83-4.

In fact, Joyce was lying when he said he wasn't interested in Richard Burton. His Paris library included the seventeen volume 1919 edition of Burton's Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night, and he'd been taking notes from it as recently as February 1931. 

Padraic Colum, who helped Joyce work on the Wake, later wrote:

'Because Finnegans Wake dealt with night life he wanted to know about other books that proceeded from night life. One was The Arabian Nights....Joyce wanted The Arabian Nights read by someone who would tell him some of its features, so he sent over to my apartment a sixteen (sic) volume set of Burton's translation.' 

Our Friend James Joyce, p161 

Burton is recycled in the Wake:

'And they led the most pleasurable of lives and the most delectable, till there came to them the Destroyer of delights and the Severer of societies and they became as though they had never been.' 'Terminal Essay' to the Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night

'And they leaved the most leavely of leaftimes and the most folliagenous till there came the marrer of mirth and the jangtherapper of all jocolarinas and they were as were they never ere.' 361.26

Joyce was also not telling the truth when he said he had no interest in murders. He'd closely followed the story of the Thompson and Bywaters case, also using it in Finnegans Wake. In the early 1920s, talking about that crime, with Arthur Power, he described his impressions of London and England:

'I can smell the English effluvia here – and it reminds me...yes...of the Strand, say, on a Saturday night, the huddles of people in the passage outside the pubs; the sudden fights; the traffic-weary streets; the arc-lights shining down on the muddy tramped pavements. I remember how I disliked it all and I decided that I could never have become part of English life, or even ever have worked there, for somehow I would have felt that in that atmosphere of power, politics and money, writing was not sufficiently important.'

Arthur Power, Conversations with James Joyce, p76

The 'partridge murder' was the case of Lt Hubert Chavis, poisoned after eating a patridge contaminated with strychnine in 1931. It's still unsolved.

I've posted previously Nicolson's description of his second meeting with Joyce, in Paris in 1934, when he likened him to 'a very nervous and refined animal – a gazelle in a drawing room'.