The Battle of James Joyce's Bones 1

Over the past three weeks, we've seen an 'international battle of the bones' fought in the media over James Joyce. So much has been said about the case that it will take me two posts to cover the story so far. I can't remember him ever making so many appearances in headlines. Here are just a few from the Irish Times and the Guardian.

For the background, we have to go back to 1948, when Ireland gave W.B.Yeats, who had died in France, a state funeral.  His coffin was brought back to Galway on an Irish naval ship where it was greeted by a guard of honour. With Eamon de Valera and the bishops in attendance, he was buried in Sligo Churchyard. At the funeral, Louis MacNiece said the coffin was more likely to hold 'a Frenchman with a club foot' than Yeats – it turns out he was right.

In Zurich, Nora Joyce read all about Yeats' state funeral.

'Why not the same for Joyce? Nora, backed by Giorgio, felt that the Irish Government should do no less for its greatest writer of prose than for its greatest poet. Joyce's body, in any case, needed a more permanent resting place than the grave accorded him upon his unexpected death in Zurich. Swiss policy, unwelcoming to immigrants dead or alive, encouraged the repatriation of foreign visitors.'  

Brenda Maddox, Nora, p 477

'While his grave remained in Zurich, she felt she must remain there, though the climate was bad for her. But she was prepared to leave if her proposal were accepted....the proposal had come to nothing....Nora Joyce had been bitterly disppointed.' 

Jane Lidderdale and Mary Nicolson, Dear Miss Weaver, p412

Nora's worry about a more permanent resting place no longer applies. In 1966, both Joyces, originally buried separately, were reunited in the cemetery in an ehrengrab (honour grave), awarded to people for extraordinary services or achievements in their lifetimes. The city takes perpetual responsibility for the care of Joyce's grave. 
 

THE BATTLE BEGINS 

In 2017, the Dublin biographer Anthony Jordan called for the repatriation of Joyce to right 'the great wrong' done to Nora. This October, his plan was taken up by two Dublin city councillors, Dermot Lacey and Paddy McCartan, who suggested bringing back James and Nora for the centenary of Ulysses in 2022.  On 14 October, Lacey told The Journal : 'The benefit of this is that you’re honouring someone’s last wishes. I’m not going to be cynical about bones but I think it’s something Joycean lovers would appreciate.' 

In the same article, Senator David Norris said, 'I am on two minds about this. I tried to get it off the ground about 40 or 50 years ago but it didn’t get anywhere and it is only bones after all. And when we dug up Yeats’ they got the wrong person. I think they probably could get Joyce but I think he’s probably happy where he is....Nothing disinfects a reputation so thoroughly as the tinkle of cash and of course it’s about that. So I would say I wouldn’t oppose it but I wouldn’t be doing anything to encourage it.' 

JOYCE BELONGS IN ZURICH

Ezra Pound visits Joyce's grave shortly before his death, photo by Horst Tappe

As the headlines at the top show, the responses from Joyceans to the proposal were overwhelmingly negative. The first came from Professor Sam Slote of Trinity, in a letter on 16 October to the Irish Times. 

'Joyce never expressed any wish to be buried in Ireland.....Zurich has done very well for Joyce with a beautiful statue at his grave and it is an entirely fitting city for him to be buried: besides being the city where he died, it is where he wrote large chunks of Ulysses.

Furthermore, there is a line in Finnegans Wake that seems to anticipate Joyce’s burial in Fluntern cemetery: ‘As the lion in our teargarten rememberers the nenuphars of his Nile’: Fluntern is right next to the Zurich zoo; the German word for zoo is Tiergarten. Joyce himself remarked that in the cemetery you can hear lions roaring in the nearby zoo. So, ’teargarten’ is a lovely little compound word that combines zoo with cemetery (a tear garden) and one can indeed hear lions in the teargarten from by Joyce’s grave.'

I love that Wake reading! Here's another prophetic quotation from the book:

— One might hear in their beyond that lionroar in the air again, the zoohoohoom of Felin make Call. 488.13

Ellmann ends his Joyce biography with this quotation from Nora, who would take visitors to see the grave:

'He was awfully fond of the lions - I like to think of him lying there and hearing them roar.'

On 17 October, Fritz Senn from the Zurich James Joyce Foundation was interviewed in the Guardian.

'All I know is that there seems to be no evidence that Joyce wanted to return to Ireland or even be buried there, He never took Irish citizenship when he could have done it. Most Joyce experts would agree....The Zurich grave contains four bodies, of Joyce, Nora and Giorgio, the son. But there is also Asta Osterwalder Joyce, Giorgio’s second wife, who would have no relation to Ireland at all. There would also be some local resistance on this side....the city is quite proud of the grave. A natural reaction. And then Joyce’s last refuge was Zurich.'  

There was also a letter on 22 October from Lady Antonia Fraser to the Guardian with a picture of her husband Harold Pinter, standing by the grave. She wrote, 'I understand completely why the city of Zurich does not want such a perfect place of pilgrimage disturbed.'

It's fitting that Joyce should be buried in Zurich, right in the middle of Europe. Although his subject was always Dublin, he saw himself as a European writer. His degree was in modern languages and, when his contemporaries were learning Irish, he was teaching himself Danish so that he could read Ibsen in the original.

'Joyce hated all manner of provincialism. It was the main reason for his continual residence on the mainland of Europe....'Ah,' exclaimed Joyce contemptuously to me once when we were discussing the Irish literary movement, 'the bloody nonsense that has been written about Ireland! – parish froth! I intend to lift it into the international sphere and get away from the parish pump, and from my dearly beloved brethren'.... To be plunged back into the comparatively primitive society...of Dublin would have horrified him....Immersed in Continental life he felt safe and happy, as an international genius, where the physical life pleased him at every turn.' 

Arthur Power, 'James Joyce - The Internationalist', Envoy, 1951 

Joyce in Zurich photographed by Carola Giedion-Welcker

 
Joyce loved Zurich, which he told Carola Giedion-Welcker 'always brought him luck.'  'What a city!', he would exclaim, 'A lake a mountain and two rivers are its treasures'. He often visited the city in the 1930s to see Alfred Vogt, the eye surgeon who saved him from total blindness. There are dozens of references to Zurich in Finnegans Wake.

The drawings on p308 were made by a real Zurich schoolgirl, Lucia von Curiel

'The connection between me and your hospitable city extends over a period of nearly forty years and in these painful times I feel highly honoured that I should owe my presence here in large part to the personal guarantee of Zurich's first citizen.' 

One of Joyce's last letters, written to the Mayor of Zurich on 20 December 1940

WHO OWNS JOYCE?

 

On 19 October, Patrick Callan had a witty letter in the Irish Times, under the heading 'Who Owns Joyce?'

'Dublin City Council’s recent motion in favour of 'repatriating' the remains of James Joyce and other individuals interred in Zurich treats these distant bodies as if they were somehow the property of an ideal Ireland, with the Government asked to take 'all appropriate steps' to bring them to Dublin....The motion is only the latest in a long series of Irish requests to move the Joyce remains. The persistent clamour has been such that in 1977, one of the Irish Times’s most distinguished satirists caustically noted the implications of the rolling calls for a Joyce reburial.

Donal Foley, in his Man Bites Dog column, declared that the 'Joyce funeral' would be an ideal way to introduce visitors to a newly established Irish 'Festival of Funerals'. Other repatriations might include Thomas Moore, John F Kennedy, Niall of the Nine Hostages, and Che Guevara. A spokesman for Bord Fáilte (Great Funerals Festival Department) said that when they ran out of 'Great Irish Bodies', they would dig up figures such as Brian Boru, and transfer them to their 'rightful place in the republican plot at Glasnevin'.'

Che Guevara did appear on an Irish stamp

We have one answer to the question 'Who owns Joyce?' from the man himself, in this dialogue between Bloom and Stephen in Ulysses:

Joyce doesn't belong to Ireland!

Foley's column reminded me of Joyce's magnificent list of the 'Irish heroes and heroines of antiquity' decorating the Citizen's kilt in 'Cyclops' (see comments section below). Ireland could also repatriate The Man that Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo, The Last of the Mohicans, Thomas Cook and Sons and the Buddha.

When I mentioned this on Facebook, Finn Fordham, author of the excellent Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake, came up with a lovely suggestion:

'Since you mention Buddha, the solution surely, one I think I read about in one of Myles's Irish Times columns, is to divide the body up, Osiris-like, if you like, and distribute it around the seven cities that have a claim on him. A committay will have to be formed, but in anticipation I suggest the following: Dublin gets the heart, Cork the throat, Trieste the liver, London the right arm, Rome the left, Paris the brain and Zurich the eyes. Other bits unaccounted for - well how about the city parks mentioned in Haveth Childers Everywhere?'

Bognor Regis and Sidlesham Churchyard, where the Earwickers are buried, would also have a claim.

To finish for now, here's a song by a modern pilgrim, Andy White, who went on a journey from Dublin to Zurich, looking for James Joyce's grave.