Picked-Up Pieces (25 page)

JOYCE AND PROUST

W
HAT IS
“
GIACOMO JOYCE
”?

It is (a) a tiny prose work of some twenty-six hundred words, whose first sentence is interrogative—“Who?”—and whose substance is so evanescent with tentativity and mysteriousness that the reviewer, like the heroine, finds it handy to don “quizzing glasses.” Variously described as a “short story” and “the notebook” and “a love poem which is never recited” and “this most delicate of novels,”
Giacomo Joyce
was probably copied out, in his best schoolbook hand, by James Joyce (1882–1941) in 1914 in Trieste.

(b) It is also an elegantly produced, boxed, ten-dollar object of veneration published by Viking Press on January 1, 1968—a saint’s bone whose marrow is (a) and whose surrounding calcium consists of nine pages of introduction by the foremost of American Joyce scholars, Mr. Richard Ellmann; four and a fraction pages of notes amplifying and exemplifying correspondences and echoes already noted in the introduction; and, most delightfully and luxuriantly, a photographic facsimile of the manuscript pages, two of them full size (13¼ inches by 10¼ inches) and folded quarto, the six others reduced by half but still legible.

D
OES THE SUMPTUOUS FORMAT OF
(B)
ENTIRELY SUIT THE MODEST TEXT OF
(A)?

It is a pleasure to handle, in an age when the crafts languish, so fine a piece of book production. Mr. Ellmann, as master of scholarly ceremonies,
writes gracefully, employing his matchless intimacy with the Joycean universe to demonstrate how phrases from this slender text were dispersed, with surprising transmutations, through
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Exiles, Pomes Penyeach
, and
Ulysses
. The decision to print, however, this text line for line as it appears in the manuscript, with all the spaces, not only compels a rather stingy size of type but somehow weakens the voice of the prose; the sections of this notebook quoted in Ellmann’s massive biography of Joyce (Oxford, 1959) and set in orthodox justified lines, read more vividly, with more of the narrative energy whose lack is the most puzzling aesthetic quality of
Giacomo Joyce
. Departing from normal typographic procedures seems chichi, since the facsimile manuscript is also bound into the volume.

The facsimile is doubly welcome, as a specimen of Joyce’s fluent, lucid hand and as light upon the central riddle—of what the work wishes to
do;
we seem to draw a little closer to Joyce’s intention in examining the graphic texture of these paragraphs and phrases spaced and scattered upon large sheets of art paper. There is no crossing-out or emendation, though there is some trouble with “websoft” on page 7. This indicates a fair copy from preëxistent notes, yet on some pages the tone of ink (page 10), or the size of the writing (page 15), or the speed of the penmanship (page 13) changes between paragraphs. Mr. Ellman’s suggestion is that, “perhaps with Mallarmé in mind,” Joyce was indicating “pauses of varying duration measured by spaces of varying length.” If that is so, this pictographic intention is indifferently carried out; the amount of waste space—the lower third of the sheets is frequently blank, and some of the space gaps, as on pages 5 and page 8, are huge—seems inartistic and its distribution rather random. More likely that this enterprise, whether of copying or composition, was executed at several sittings, with a mixture of purposes, among them crystallization and formal ordering for the author’s own benefit, as a way of pinning these images to a surface from which they could be later plucked and employed in published works. I doubt that
Giacomo Joyce
was ever intended for print. It is too personal, too unformed and febrile; it would scarcely be published now were its author not a classic. Publication in a very private sense, however, may have been intended: these pages, one’s impression grows, were copied out to be shown or given to someone, like the parchment sheets upon which Joyce five years earlier copied out the poems of
Chamber Music
as a gift for his wife.

S
HOWN OR GIVEN TO WHOM
?

One possibility is Italo Svevo, Joyce’s fellow-author and fellow-Triestine of the time, who contributed so much information and temperament to the character of Leopold Bloom, and who had written and shown to Joyce a novel called
Senilità
(the English title, at Joyce’s suggestion, became
As a Man Grows Older
), concerning a middle-aged man’s love for a young woman, and who had asked Joyce, in a letter dated June 26, 1914, “When will you write an Italian work about our town? Why not?” Joyce had recently shown Svevo a typescript of the first three chapters of
Portrait of the Artist
, and
Giacomo Joyce
could be his response to Svevo’s challenge. The story’s complex tone, literary and personal and polyglot and arch, and its distinct Triestine locality are congenial with this thesis; any clear-cut echo of
Senilità
would be virtually clinching. But Mr. Ellmann offers none, and Svevo’s elegiac and wry psychologizing belongs to a different literary era from Joyce’s compacted personal imagery. The friendship between Svevo and Joyce was a curious one. The letter of June 26th, read in full, is stilted even beyond the stiltedness of Svevo’s English; his inquiry in context seems more polite than spirited. Svevo was in his fifties, a prosperous and amiable businessman who had diffidently abandoned writing after two early, neglected novels; Joyce was in his early thirties, an impoverished and unamiable Berlitz instructor, full of faith in his own genius and, as his brother Stanislaus put it, “that inflexibility firmly rooted in failure.” Joyce’s fierce enthusiasm for Svevo’s novels—tinged, perhaps, by the generosity authors feel toward non-competitors and by Svevo’s usefulness to him as a hoard of Jewish lore—seems to have rather baffled the older man. They came together as student and teacher, since Svevo wanted to improve his English. His letters retain a student’s shyness and tact.

A more piquant possibility is that the intended readership of one was the work’s subject herself.
Giacomo Joyce
tells us that she had been shown some of
A Portrait
, including the third chapter, wherein Stephen’s erotic sins are described, for “She says that, had
The Portrait of the Artist
been frank only for frankness’ sake, she would have asked why I had given it to her to read.” On the next page the author broods, “Those quiet cold fingers have touched the pages, foul and fair, on which my shame shall glow for ever.” It can be objected that within
Giacomo Joyce
its heroine is
sometimes mocked and sometimes hymned in physical terms she could only have found embarrassing. But Joyce was peculiarly fond of this mode of wooing—courtship by shamelessness. He detailed to Nora Barnacle his sexual life before he met her. In the long letter of August 29, 1904, he refers to another letter, in which he dwelt on the details of their first liaison: “You have misunderstood, I think, some passages in a letter I wrote you and I have noticed a certain shyness in your manner as if the recollection of that night troubled you.” And, amid that extraordinary torrent of letters he directed toward her from Dublin in 1909, while she remained in Trieste, he beseeches her, “Now, my darling Nora, I want you to read over and over all I have written to you. Some of it is ugly, obscene, and bestial, some of it is pure and holy and spiritual: all of it is myself.” He dotes on the “something obscene and lecherous in the very look” of certain words, and hopes that “you too will write me letters even madder and dirtier than mine to you.” It was always one of his marital sorrows that she would not read his books. Voyeurism and exhibitionism both were exercised by his performance of writing. In 1918, Joyce, seeing Martha Fleischmann on a Zurich street, sent her four ardent and presumptuous letters in French and German. In the first, he tells this unknown lady she is “
un joli
animal,” likens himself to Dante espying Beatrice, and concludes by saying, in French, “I believe you are good at ——.” The word, evidently obscene, was torn from the corner by the recipient. He also sent her a copy of
Chamber Music
, and Ellmann’s biography describes how Joyce “from his vantage point on the street had watched her take it from the letter box and sit down with it in her front room.” Among Stephen Dedalus’ sins are “the foul long letters he had written in the joy of guilty confession and carried secretly for days and days only to throw them under cover of night among the grass in the corner of a field or beneath some hingeless door or in some niche in the hedges where a girl might come upon them as she walked by and read them secretly.” When, in
Exiles
, Robert Hand rebukes Joyce’s alter ego Richard Rowan for waking his wife from sleep and confessing the night’s infidelity, Rowan answers, “She must know me as I am.” But one suspects that in Joyce’s case candor was an act not merely of integrity but of concupiscence. It would not have been out of character for him to display this delineation of passion to its young but intelligent and nubile object.

One is forced into these conjectures by the definite omissions of Ellmann’s introduction. He tells us at the outset of the manuscript that “The present owner … wishes to remain anonymous.” He goes on to discuss the “title” of these pages, which are “loosely held within the nondescript gray-paper covers of a school notebook.… On the upper left-hand corner of the front cover, the name ‘Giacomo Joyce’ is inscribed in another hand.” Well,
whose
hand? Can no comparison be made of the handwritings of Joyce’s intimates at this time? Is it a matter of indifference who was permitted to bestow this ironical title? It looks to me, assuming that the label on the Viking volume is an accurate reproduction, as if the word “Joyce” were written in the center, with a spidery “Giacomo” added above it, perhaps in the “cobweb handwriting” of the little book’s heroine. Ellmann declines to speculate. And he withholds two points of information given in his biography of Joyce. “Giacomo” was Casanova’s first name and “a familiar epithet in Italy for a great lover” and the lady, the young student with whom Joyce fell in love and who inspired this work, also had a name. She was Amalia Popper, the daughter of a Jewish businessman called not quite Leopold Bloom but Leopoldo Popper.

H
OW MUCH—ER—ACTUAL CONTACT DID
J
OYCE MAKE WITH
S
IGNORINA
P
OPPER
?

A good question. Ellmann assumes that the affair is “of eyes rather than of bodies” and that the sexual episodes of the manuscript represent “morose delectation—diet of writers.” This is not hard to believe of overheated passages like

But there are quieter passages with an air of reality:

Joyce observes that “her body has no smell: an odourless flower” and describes a seduction with a soft clarity of detail that belongs either to reality or to an imagination of genius:

True, Joyce was an imaginative genius. True, his adventures with women, Nora Barnacle excepted, appear to have tended toward either plain whoring or timid, voyeuristic adoration. But his attentions to Martha Fleischmann, of which only the correspondence remains, caused her lover and
Vormund
, Rudolph Hiltpold, to write Joyce (all this is confided in a note to Frank Budgen) “a threatening violent letter” leading to a “long interview” in Hiltpold’s apartment with “violent gestures” on Hiltpold’s part and “that timidity which yet is courage” on Joyce’s, ending in a return of Martha’s letters and a “
Waffenstillstand
.” The photographs of these years
^*
show a somewhat rakish dandy; in 1915, the Joyce strumming a guitar is positively handsome. Richard Rowan of
Exiles
says he has betrayed his wife “grossly and many times.” The one moment of psychological tension in
Giacomo Joyce
occurs when the heroine’s father tells Joyce in Italian that “My daughter has the greatest admiration for her English teacher.” This assertion, whose manner purportedly combines “suspicion, naturalness, helplessness of age, confidence, frankness, urbanity, sincerity, warning,” is inwardly greeted by Joyce with the exclamation “Ignatius Loyola, make haste to help me!” The girl’s susceptibility is as moot as the strength of his advances. Concerning the percentage of wealthy middle-class Jewish girls seduced by their instructors in prewar Austria-Hungary, there was no Kinsey to gather statistics. The elliptical, fraught allusiveness of
Giacomo Joyce
and the powerful resonance with which the experience reverberates through Joyce’s work
(Signorina Popper not only is credited with being Beatrice Justice of
Exiles
and the Irish girl of the last chapter of the
Portrait
but is supposed to have contributed the something Mediterranean in the character of Molly Bloom) do seem insufficiently explained by a one-sided infatuation. The relationship, at any rate, made an impression upon Signorina Popper. Nineteen years later, in 1933, now Signora Risola of Florence, she wrote Joyce asking for permission to translate
Dubliners
into Italian. Permission was granted, and a book entitled
Araby
did appear in Italian, but the standard Italian translation was done by other hands. She died not much longer than a year ago, and perhaps her death (again we must resort to speculation) released
Giacomo Joyce
to posterity.