Joyce/Conversations

Quotes

Part II

- It is intoxication in one form or another, I said, to be always drunk, as Rimbaud puts it, drunk with life - is not that what an artist should be ?

- That is the emotional aspect, said Joyce, but there is also the intellectual outlook which dissects life, and that is now what interests me most, to get down to the residuum of truth about life, instead of puffing it up with romanticism, which is a fundamentally false attitude. In Ulysses I have tried to forge literature out of my own experience, and not out of a con­ceived idea, or a temporary emotion.

- p. 36

-Every one hurts and the last one kills. That is good, Joyce remarked, I must remember that.

- p. 37

Part III

He hated anything to do with bohemians, and always showed contempt for their way of life. Once, when I asked where he liked to go for his holidays, he answered abruptly: "To some place where honest people earn an honest living." He seemed to have a passion for an ordered life, and I thought it a reaction from his former life in Dublin, from the poverty and bohemianism of his youth...

- p. 38

One day, meeting his friends in the street, he told each of them that they must meet him again on the following Saturday at midday at the bottom of Grafton Street with a pound note in their pockets-a matter, he intimated to them, of the utmost urgency. On the following Saturday a number of them turned up.

--Have you all got your pound notes? he asked, and when they produced the promised money he said, now let us all go and dine at Jammet's.

(Jammet's being at that time Dublin's best known and most expensive restaurant, a few yards from their meeting place.) Such and other stories are told of Joyce's bohemian youth, but in Paris he lived the most ordinary life imaginable, remaining shut up in his flat during most of the day.

- p. 39

Everywhere he went he acted in the same detached manner. If, for instance, anyone he knew came up to greet him in a restaurant, or at a theatre, or in any public place, he would quickly disengage himself and resume his isolation.

While one talked to him one could not but feel, at times, that he was using the conversation as a sort of counterpoint to his own thoughts, which ran in an altogether different vein as he mentally composed 'Work in Progress'.

- p. 40

Yet in spite of the stiff barrier which he put against the out­side world, he sometimes did unpredictable things. Once as I was entering his flat, I met a strange and very bohemian couple on the landing outside, just about to leave him, a shock­ headed young man and a girl of the very type he professed to dislike. I asked him who they were since strangers with him were such an unusual occurrence. But he seemed uncertain of their names.

-What did they want? I asked him, piqued by my curiosity.

-They wanted to translate Ulysses.

-And you gave them permission?

-Yes.

-But you don't know anything about them. You don't know who they are, or what they are, I protested. Why did you give them your permission ?

-Quite a number of people come to me and ask for my per­ mission to translate Ulysses, he remarked, and I always give it to them.

-Always ! I repeated, dumbfounded.

-Yes, he replied with a smile, because I know that none of them will ever do it.

And it was this remark more than any other which revealed to me his contempt for people whom he did not regard as serious artists able to undertake the sustained labour of an artistic work, "people who sleep all day and amuse themselves all night", as Hemingway put it.

- p. 41-42

Part IV

Meredith is one of those authors I cannot read. I remember I came across a copy of The Egoist in the trenches and mad for something to read I was delighted with my find, but after a while, being continually reminded that 'he had a leg', I became so irritated with it that I got some string and tying a stone on it I threw it over to the Germans.

- p. 44