The Battle of James Joyce's Bones 2

Ireland has already made amends to Joyce with statues and plaques

James Joyce, who never visited Dublin after 1912, was often asked why he didn't return.

He said that he feared being physically attacked if he went back, like Charles Stewart Parnell who had had quicklime flung in his eye.

'He told me that he had heard of some man who had gone into a Dublin bookshop, and asked if they had a copy of Ulysses. He was told that they had not. 'Well', the man remarked threateningly, 'the writer of that had better not come back to Dublin.'
'A fanatic!' I protested.
'Yes, but it is such a person who does it.'  

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

In 1936, Ole Vinding asked him if he ever missed Ireland:

'I am not sure I would care to go back. Ulysses is coming out this month in England; let us see how the Irish take it. Furthermore I am afraid to go back to Ireland. You see when one is almost blind and can't see whom one is talking to, then one becomes suspicious.'

'James Joyce in Copenhagen', Portraits of the Artists in Exile

In 1937, Joyce told Constantine Curran why he did not intend to join Nora on a planned visit to Ireland:

'I am trying to finish my W.I.P. (Work in Progress) and I am not taking any chances with my fellow countrymen if I can help it until it is done....But, every day, in every way, I am walking along the streets of Dublin and along the strand.'   

James Joyce Remembered 

It was the Dublin of his imagination rather than the physical place Joyce loved. When Philippe Soupault asked him why he didn't return there, he replied 'It would prevent me from writing about Dublin.'  

Joyce read about Ireland every day in the newspapers, and he did not like De Valera ('the devil era' FW 473.08) or his narrow sectarian Catholic state.  He told Harriet Shaw Weaver that the Irish priests who were now in charge were 'barbarians with crucifixes' and said, 'Any semblance they had of liberty when under England seems to have gone – and goodness knows that was not much.'   

On 30 October, Dr John Doherty had a letter in the Irish Times pointing out that Joyce chose to remain a British citizen all his life:

'Joyce positively rejected Irish nationality on several occasions. Living in Paris in 1930 he wrote to his son Giorgio: 'Some days ago I had to renew my passport. The clerk told me he had orders to send people like me to the Irish legation. But I insisted and got a British one.'
    A decade later the Joyce family were again offered Irish passports which would have enabled them to leave Nazi occupied France more easily if needed. The offer was declined and Joyce clung doggedly to his British passport, despite the increased risk.'
 
The only one of Joyce's 18 Paris residences to have a plaque, at 71 Cardinal Rue Lemoine, calls him 'a British writer of Irish origin'.

Ironically, because of Brexit, many of my fellow Britons are now trying to get Irish passports!

Two of Joyce's Dublin friends believed that he would eventually have gone back, but only if Ireland had recognised his status as a great writer:

'Up to nearly the end of his life Joyce was waiting patiently, I think, for a signal from the Irish government, inviting him back to place bay leaves in his hair. However the Irish political people are peculiarly indifferent to what their great writers have done for the country. The invitation never came Joyce's way.' 

Mary Colum, Our Friend James Joyce p.168

'He felt his pride involved. I see him postponing his return until some public recognition of the position he had won after much hardship was offered.'  

C.P.Curran James Joyce Remembered p.101 

Dublin has now given Joyce this public recognition, filling the streets with statues and plaques, and staging a massive festival on Bloomsday. It doesn't need his bones too.

NORA'S VIEW

 

The councillors' proposal also involved 'repatriating' Nora to Dublin, though she only lived there for a few months in 1904, while working as a maid in Finn's Hotel. She did not like Dublin or Ireland:

 

'When I questioned (Joyce) about Ireland, Mrs Joyce protested against his eulogy. 'A wretched country, dirty and dreary, where they eat cabbages, potatoes and bacon all year round, where the women spend their days in church and the men in pubs.' Joyce smiled.' 

Jaques Mercanton, 'The Hours of James Joyce', in Portraits of the Artist in Exile

 

Nora's favourite city was Paris, where she could eat in luxurious restaurants like Fouquet's and bump into film stars.  

 

The Joyces regularly ate at Fouquets with the celebrities

After her husband's death, Nora took on a new role as 'the widow Joyce', protecting his reputation.

'As she came to play the part of the widow Joyce, Nora began at last to believe in her husband's genius.... Ignazio Silone's wife asked for her opinion of Andre Gide and got it. 'Sure when you've been married to the greatest writer in the world you don't remember all the little fellows.''

Brenda Maddox, Nora, 473. 

 

According to Harriet Shaw Weaver's biographers, in 1947 Nora was 'extremely upset' when she read in a newpaper cutting sent her from Galway that the late Paul Leon had given papers rescued from Joyce's last Paris address to the National Library of Ireland.

 

'She considered that the wishes of the family should have been consulted and that as 'Ireland had never appreciated' her husband the library would not have been her first choice.'  

Jane Lidderdale and Mary Nicholson, Dear Miss Weaver,  412

Imagine her bitterness in 1948, when she read about the state funeral given to Yeats!  She felt that 'the greatest writer in the world' deserved the same honour from his homeland. When her request was ignored, Ireland was finally dead to her.

'Nora Joyce was now bitterly opposed to the idea of her husband's manuscripts going to Ireland. When Harriet mentioned her work on sorting the Finnegans Wake material for its eventual transfer to the National Library, she 'found her without a good word to say for the Irish' and 'strongly averse' to the bequest.' 

Jane Lidderdale and Mary Nicholson, Dear Miss Weaver,  413

So the Finnegans Wake manuscripts ended up in the British Library in London.

'Immersed in Continental life he felt safe and happy.... After he died, Mrs Joyce maintained the same attitude.
   Meeting her in Paris once I suggested, since she complained of loneliness, that she should go over to Ireland.  'What! she cried, her voice hysterical. 'They burnt my husband's books.' 

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

HOLY RELICS

 

The whole bone battle reminded my Chicago friend Marc Goldin of medieval relic thefts described in this wonderful book by Patrick Geary. Joyce and Yeats are the modern equivalents of the saints whose bones drew vast numbers of pilgrims to European cathedrals – it's especially fitting that the bones in Sligo were not really Yeats's, since many medieval relics were also fake.

 

Stealing saints' bodies was big business, and it was justified on the grounds that if they disapproved of their 'translation', they could have used their powers to prevent it. Therefore Saint Mark must have approved of being taken from Alexandria to Venice.

As a modern secular saint, Joyce would supposedly bring the same money-making status to Dublin as St Mark did for Venice.

'Some cemeteries around the world have become major tourist centres due to the graves of famous people....Glasnevin Cemetery, in Dublin, is making great strides to become such a centre. However, it lacks what is termed in the business as a gold-plated grave which would immediately be recognised worldwide.'

Anthony Jordan, The Sunday Independent 18 June 2017
 
'I don’t want to calculate something like this in shilling and pence but I don’t think it would do any harm. I think it would do some good.' 

Councillor Dermot Lacey, The Journal, 14 October 2019

'There is a calculating, even mercantile, aspect to contemporary Ireland’s relationship to its great writers, whom we are often more keen to 'celebrate', and if possible monetise, than read.'

'The Irish Times view on James Joyce's remains: Leave him be' 26 October 2019 

JOYCE'S DUBLIN IS DISAPPEARING

In late October, the debate turned into a bigger discussion about the gentrification of Dublin, and the hypocrisy of councillors monetising Joyce's bones while failing to protect the very fabric of the city he celebrated.  

In the last year, Sweny the Chemist, the wonderful Joycean shrine run by volunteers, has seen its commercial rates doubled. Sweny's is a place where, every day, Joyce's words live again through group readings, and people from all over the world visit to take part.

It would be far better to save Sweny's than have a grave as a tourist attraction!

 

Una Mulally in The Guardian on 2 October

On 23 October, the Dublin novelist Mark O'Connell had a passionate and angry article in the Guardian, describing what would happen if the repatriation proposal went ahead:

'What would happen is that it would become one more way for Dublin to present itself as a literary mecca, while in reality transitioning into a cultural wasteland where creative spaces are closing down to make way for more hotels, where artists can’t afford to live due to a brutal and unregulated rental market....What would happen is that Joyce’s bones would bring more tourists to a city that, were he alive today, he would still have to leave because he couldn’t afford to live in it. And what would furthermore happen, I may as well warn you now, is that I would personally dig up those bones in the dead of night, haul them into eternity along Sandymount strand, and heave them into the snot-green, scrotum-tightening sea.'
 

Bookninja.com shares O'Connell's article on 23 October

 
On the same day, the Irish Times had an article by another Dubliner, John McCourt, about the ongoing threat to Joyce's Dublin:

'It is hard not to see the request to repatriate his bones as an ill-conceived plan driven by political opportunism or the hope of gain in the field of cultural tourism. It happens in a larger context in which significant pieces of Joyce’s Dublin remain under threat. The house of Leopold and Molly Bloom on 7 Eccles Street was torn town in the late 60s, the Ormond hotel, site of the Sirens episode in Ulysses recently suffered a similar fate, while national and civic officialdom has refused to buy or secure the house in which his great short story “The Dead” took place.'

Astonishingly, just a week after McCourt's article was published, it was announced that there were plans to turn the House of the Dead into a 56 room hostel! 

McCourt responded in the Irish Times.

On Sunday, I was startled to find this picture in the Observer. That's me on the right with my back to the camera!

On 4 November, Dublin Council passed a motion to save the house. But power to do this rests with the Minister of Culture, Josepha Madigan.

Following the Council motion, almost 100 prominent Irish and international writers, artists and academics signed a letter calling on the minister to protect the House of the Dead:

'As we approach the centenary of Ulysses in 2022, we believe that saving this unique piece of our national heritage is within the power of the Government and the national institutions and that it should be an urgent priority. We appeal to you and to the government to act before it is too late.'

Signatories included Colm Tóibín,  John Banville, Sally Rooney, Anne Enright, Kevin Barry,  Eavan Boland, Dermot Bolger, Patrick McCabe, Salman Rushdie, Richard Ford, Edna O’Brien, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Carlo Gébler, Michael Ondaatje, Paul Muldoon and Tobias Wolff.

Here's Brendan Kilty, former owner, showing us the most important dining room in world literature.

On 8 November, Colm Toibin, one of the letter's authors, told RTE's Morning Ireland why this house is so important: 

'You go in now, and it is the same house, especially on the ground floor and first floor, as in the story. The corn factor mentioned in the opening - you can see where that was. The hallway and then the rooms upstairs where the dance happened, where the meal happened, where the coats were put.

So anyone going into the building is seeing how life inspired this story, how a real place where James Joyce’s grand-aunts lived, a party that his parents went to, a house he was in during his life, was used in this way.

Anyone coming to Dublin can see this is not just where the story was set, but it hasn’t been reconstructed on the inside, it’s intact....The Dead is a winter story, so it happens inside. The story is filled with the way the rooms are configured. It’s a very unusual thing to be still in existence in that way. 56 rooms for a youth hostel will simply ruin that interior. What other city would do that? It’s not being done deliberately, it’s happening sort of by accident.

If the world is still there in 1,000 years time, The Dead will be known still, and that house will be an essential element in the fabric of Dublin. It’s a wake-up call to the nation to say we have a piece of treasure, please don’t let’s regret this in 50 years time when people ask, how did you let this happen?'

On the same day, the Irish Times carried this appalling headline.