James Joyce

I've mentioned my love of biographies/autobiographies. They flesh out the subject, bring much of their writings into another focus. I remember knowing only of Shelley from his "Ode to the Western Wind" and imagined a wrinkled old poet stuck up in some musty garret somewhere, bereft of life as I knew it. But in the end, there he was, the Boy George of his own times, gallivanting around the continent, eloping with his love. Joyce I think, his writings, always gain from biographical details.

He was always on the cadge, always short of money. Yet sometimes he displayed a giving heart. Once he was strolling down a Dublin street with a friend when they were accosted by a man asking for a handout. "Can you spare a penny sirs?"

Joyce asked him what he wanted it for and the man said:- "To be honest sir, I'm thirsting for a drink" (obviously alcoholic). Joyce gave him his own last penny.

After the man sped away Joyce said to his friend:- "If he had said he wanted a cup of tea I would have hit him."

But anyway, the more we know of another's life, often the more we can enjoy their words. It is certainly so with Joyce.

Getting back to "Finnegans Wake", there is a review of that book that I wrote for Amazon which is maybe worth sharing. I had downloaded the Penguin edition to my Kindle.

Review:-

[i]Well, first, this particular edition. Begins on the very first page by telling us that Joyce was the oldest often (sic) children. Is this a typo, or are Penguin getting into the spirit of the book? Anyway, whatever, this is certainly the best book I have never read. I have managed the first page or two, but the reality is that I enjoy books ABOUT Finnegans Wake rather than actually attempting to wend my way through it. One book about it informed me that each sentence, even each single word, could be seen as a microcosm of the entire text, so in that context why actually read it all. "riverrun" is enough. Then again, the word play is very enjoyable and the ABC of the book, and a Lexicon, offer endless interest and much humour. Apparently Joyce was heard by his long suffering wife Nora Barnacle late into many a night as he laughed aloud at his own jokes, setting his traps for the future literary critics to decipher, writing yet another un-understandable book that Nora wished was more "understandable" and thus more of a cash cow. But as I grow older I see more clearly that understanding life is a terrible trap - as thoughts, words and beliefs congeal and enclose the mind in circles of self-justification as the inevitable end approaches. But what end? The end of Finnegans Wake (not that I have ever reached it) takes us back to the beginning. As Joyce said about Ulysses as he faced the obscenity trials, "if Ulysses is unfit to read, then life is unfit to live". So life is to be lived rather than "understood". And Molly Bloom, in Ulysses, ends her monologue with a beautiful "Yes". Learning about Finnegans Wake, from various books, does help me to live, hopefully with compassion and not a little gratitude. Not least for the life and writings of James Joyce himself who gave us this last wonderful book using eyes that just might have reduced many others to night and despair. So buy a copy, if not to read it, then to have it on your bookshelf to impress the neighbours.

Absintheminded? Absent, mind drifting? Forgetful? Drunk? Or just a joke, all things, or nothing. Dig deep or skim the surface.[/i]

I remember that I did make it to page 16 of the book. What did I make of it? Gradually, from those few pages, and from all previous reading of his words and the words of others about Joyce's words, I learn and see that he never mocks the mundane, never jeers at any expression of humanity. Joyce tends to observe without judgement, reports it, conjures with it in an essentially egalitarian way, seeking moments that have been called "epiphanies", when the mundane is transported to another plane entirely - for those who see.

"God is a shout in the street" as he writes in Ulysses.