'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'.