April Fool's Day

'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.

Eamon De Valera

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.

Constantine Curran with Paul Léon

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):

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!

Last Memories of Joyce

Here's another quotation from Nino Frank, describing the last bleak period in Joyce's life:

Joyce in 1938 by Gisele Freund

'Harnessed to an inhuman task, this man had been leading an hallucinatory and raw-nerved life for a long time. By a supreme effort during the years 1938 and 1939 he had finally completed Finnegans Wake. This was an event of the utmost importance for himself, but not for the so-called civilised world, which at that time was otherwise occupied....On the day when he held the first copies in his hands, the continent was crossing the threshold of night; from then on, all was lost in the inane noise of the first cannonades.
   The last stage of Joyce's life was therefore to be a time when the arrow shot from his bow disappeared into a derisive void. When the self relaxes after such a long effort, it no longer offers any resistance to the forces of destruction. The avidness with which James Joyce sought some attention for his work was without any doubt the cry of a life in danger. I was informed that, his daughter still mentally unbalanaced, his daughter-in-law in turn had to be hospitalized. It was as if around the old hero – I have mentioned Oedipus as well as Don Quixote: doesn't Finnegans Wake seem to be man's answer to the sphinx? – some obscure vengeance of the gods was falling.'

Nino Frank, 'The Shadow That Had Lost Its Man' in Portraits of the Artist in Exile ed Potts.

Here's a similar memory of that time, from Georges Belmont, in a 1982 account translated by Anthony Burgess:

'In my final view of him – the most precious of all – at the end of February 1940, I left him at about two in the morning. I was taking the dawn train. Back in Paris I remember telling some friends that I’d never see him again – it was all over. And I wasn’t thinking merely of the inevitable separation of war – I was thinking of Goethe after Faust Part II, Wagner after Parsifal, of the death – the most natural of deaths – which seizes the great creators after they’ve said all they have to say.
In that little hotel at Saint-Gérand-le-Puy, when I asked him if he was working at something, he replied with a smile and a sigh – “I’m adding commas to Finnegans Wake.” Then, after one of his long silences, he laughed and said: “If I write anything new, it will be something very very simple.” It was the best way, the quietest and most resigned way, of telling me that he’d write no more.'

Joyce with Paul Léon

I was reminded me of John Naughton's 1991 interview with Alexis Léon, the son of Paul Léon, Joyce's unpaid assistant while he was writing the Wake.

'My main memory of Mr Joyce is of a very quiet man. He used to come and sit, with long periods of silence, in his favourite armchair in our living room, and he and my father would talk together or would be working on some papers and so on. Like my father, he was a man of great courtesy and as I grew a little bit older I thought of them as quiet beacons of civilisation in a world that was very much in upheaval – havens of grace perhaps, under pressure....

  Why was he so devoted to Mr Joyce? Well, first of all, he admired him. And I think he felt he should help because after all Mr Joyce was labouring under many disadvantages and doing something which had never been attempted before....He was breaking the bounds of language and bringing into literature a whole stream of coinsciousness....

  The last memory I have comes from St Gérand-le-Puy during the exodus from Paris. I remember my father and Mr Joyce sitting or taking walks, very often without talking, just like that.

  Once, while I was dashing around on a bicycle, I found them sitting on a tree trunk looking at something. Joyce pointed to an earwig that was coming out of a log and he said 'Ah, here's HCE, here comes HCE' – H.C. Earwicker, one of the characters of Finnegans Wake. They were both watching it and they truly thought it was a sign.

  That is my last memory of Joyce. He then went back to Zurich and my father and I left for Paris. The war did its work and both men died. But I have never forgotten those three or four years, when I came close to someone who left his mark on this century.'   

'Arm in Arm With A Literary Legend', The Observer, 13 January 1991 

I've found another interview with Alexis Léon in the Irish Times, where he says:

'(Joyce) was courteous but very silent. He was good with children. His eyesight may have been impaired, but he had an ear open to the world....In writing Finnegans Wake, Joyce was breaking the bonds of language. He would check ways of saying things with my father, who could speak seven languages.'

 

In 1941, Paul Léon risked his life to save Joyce's papers, left behind in his flat in occupied Paris:

'Paul and a handy man we sometimes employed made two trips with a pushcart, and it was only later I realized how distasteful entering someone else's home and rummaging through private possessions had been to my husband. 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 very steadily and said very gently, 'Do you realize what you are saying?''   

Lucie Noel (Léon), quoted by Danis Rose, The Textual Diaries of James Joyce, p 4

It's thanks to those two trips with a pushcart that we can read Joyce's notebooks and manuscripts in the National Library of Ireland and the University of Buffalo.

Léon was arrested by the Gestapo in October 1941, and murdered in Auschwitz the following April.