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

At a very early stage I came to the conclusion that to stay in Ireland would be to rot, and I never had any intention of rotting, or at least if I had to, I intended to rot in my own way, and I think most people will agree that I have done that.

- p. 47

Part V

Joyce seemed very interested in the religious aspects of Tutankhamen's tomb, which we discussed shortly after its discovery on 26 November 1922.

- p. 48

Indeed, I remember one evening meeting an Irish painter who had turned into a bitter anti­ Catholic, and sitting in Joyce's room he had scoffed at what he had called this Italian conspiracy in which one of their number was appointed to represent God on earth. He had ridiculed the idea of man's creating God and enclosing Him in a tabernacle under lock and key to give Him only to those who were of the same sect as themselves. He had also attacked Confession as taking away God's power of forgiveness, and many other Roman Catholic practices, the details of which I have forgotten. Joyce was said to be anti-Catholic and I waited for him to express his opinion, but he retained his character­istic silence, his thin lips tightly compressed, uttering no word of approval or disapproval in the argument that raged between us.

- p. 49

The only comment I ever heard him make on these matters was his once telling me that when the new pope was being elected the conclave of cardinals were fed with less food each day so that in the end they were forced to overcome their personal jealousies and elect a pope, which, whether true or not, seemed to amuse him greatly.

- p. 49

one day, the subject having arisen between us as we were walking past the Odéon Theatre, I pushed him into a corner of the street, and I asked him the straight question,

-Do you believe in a next life ?

Embarrassed by my sudden seriousness he quickly dis­engaged himself and with a shrug of his slim shoulders he answered,

-I don't think much of this life,

and closed the conversation, so that I realized that I would never get a direct answer on this subject from him.

Indeed, one of his marked characteristics was his avoidance of giving a direct opinion about anyone or about anything, and I attributed some of his reticence to his early life in the provincial atmosphere of Dublin, where everything one said was echoed back and forth with considerable distortion among one's associates, until in the end it could assume the fantastic proportions of a Celtic myth, so that one was inclined to dis­ believe all one heard.

- p. 49

All he would say about Paris, when any one asked his opinion about it, was that "it is a very convenient city", though what he meant by this phrase I was never able to discover.

- p. 50

Part VI

-Pushkin! and he looked at me with a puzzled expression on his face. I cannot understand how you can be entertained by such simple fare-tales which might have amused one's boyhood, of soldiers, and camps, villains, gallant heroes, and horses galloping over the wide open spaces, and tucked away in a suitable corner a beautiful maiden of about seventeen years of age to be rescued at a suitable moment. I know that the Russians admire Pushkin, but, as I understand it, it is chiefly for his poetry which since I do not know Russian I cannot read. But I remember once reading a translation of Pushkin's prose, The Captain's Daughter - a bustling affair that might interest the Upper Fourth. As I say there was not a pin's worth of intellect in it, and I do not under­ stand how you prefer him to the other Russians such as Tolstoy, who did much the same thing but on a grander scale; or Chekhov.

- p. 52

-Yes, I always thought that he (Pushkin) lived like a boy, wrote like a boy, and died like a boy, Joyce remarked.

- p. 52

-Here we are, he said, back into a discussion as to what is "poetry" as distinct from "literature", to what is life, and what is a lie trumped up by the imagination: the difference between the perpetual adolescent and homo sapiens.

- p. 53

-...though you criticize Ulysses, yet the one thing you must admit that I have done is to liberate literature from its age-old shackles. You are evidently a die­ hard traditionalist, but you should realize that a new way of thinking and writing has been started, and those who don't fall in with it are going to be left behind. Previously, writers were interested in externals and, like Pushkin and Tolstoy even, they thought only on one plane; but the modern theme is the subterranean forces, those hidden tides which govern everything and run humanity counter to the apparent flood: those poisonous subtleties which envelop the soul, the ascend­ing fumes of sex.

- p. 54

the writer of that period I admire most is Chekhov. For he brought something new into literature, a sense of drama in opposition to the classical idea which was for a play to have a definite beginning, a definite middle, a definite end, and for the author to work up tc a climax in the second act and resolve it in the last. But in a Chekhov play there is no beginning, no middle, and no end, nor does he work up to a climax; his plays are a continuous action in which life flows on to the stage and flows off again, and in which nothing is resolved, for with all his characters we feel that they have lived before they came on to the stage and will go on living just as dramatically after they have left it. His drama is not so much a drama of individuals as it is the drama of life and that is his essence, in contrast, say, to Shakespeare whose drama is of conflicting passions and ambitions.

- p. 57

But since we are talking about Russian literature, what do you think of Dostoevski? Does he appeal to you?

-Of course, replied Joyce, for he is the man more than any other who has created modern prose, and intensified it to its present-day pitch. It was his explosive power which shattered the Victorian novel with its simpering maidens and ordered commonplaces; books which were without imagination or violence. I know that some people think that he was fantastic, mad even, but the motives he employed in his work, violence and desire, are the very breath of literature. Much as we know has been made of his sentence to execution, which was commuted as he was waiting for his turn to be shot, and of his subsequent four years' imprisonment in Siberia. But those events did not form his temperament though they may have intensified it, for he was always enamored of violence, which makes him so modern.

- p. 58-59

-Yes, replied Joyce, but how could a man like George Moore, the Parisian, admire a writer like Dostoevski-Moore whose literary heroes were Balzac and Turgeniev, traditionalists like Moore himself with all the inherited weariness of the tradi­tionalists. But there are people, and many people, who think that The Brothers Karamazov is one of the greatest novels ever written. Certainly it made a deep impression on me.

- p. 59

-Do you remember when Alyosha goes to see his father after Dmitri has attacked him; his father's head is still wrapped up in a red silk scarf, and he gets up every now and then to examine his wounds in the mirror while he declares he will go on living as he has always lived, passionately, evilly; his pride, his boasting; his desire for the young Grouschengka, the strumpet and virgin in one.

-I remember, I said, being asked by a friend, a writer, his eyes burning with enthusiasm, what I thought of Grouschengka. But I did not know what to answer him, and it was then that I realized that Grouschengka and in fact all of Dostoevski's characters were unreal, so while I am reading him, I am asking myself all the time would any reasonable beings act and speak as they do; exaggerations larger than life; or to speak plain useful language, they are mad, all of them.

-Madness you may call it, said Joyce, but therein may be the secret of his genius. Hamlet was mad, hence the great drama; some of the characters in the Greek plays were mad; Gogol was mad; Van Gogh was mad; but I prefer the word exaltation, exaltation which can merge into madness, perhaps. In fact all great men have had that vein in them; it was the source of their greatness; the reasonable man achieves nothing.

- p. 59-60

Part VII

As a picture I can see it all clearly, exclaimed Joyce, Ilford-the dark streets with dim lights showing behind the yellow window-blinds, and from the distance a soft wind coming up with the raw smell of fish and chips on it, the Thompsons walking arm in arm under the trees when this young man suddenly dashes out and stabs him, her crying and wailing, and her search, or pretended search, for help. I can smell the English effluvia here - and it reminds me... yes... of the Strand, say, on a Saturday night, the huddles of people in the passage outside the pubs; the sudden fights; the traffic-weary streets; the arc-lights shining down on the muddy tramped pavements. I remember how I disliked it all and I decided that I could never have become part of English life, or even have worked there, for somehow I would have felt that in that atmosphere of power, politics, and money, writing was not sufficiently important.

- p. 64

while in Paris here you have the only real freedom in Europe, where no one gives a damn what his neighbour thinks or does, provided he does not make himself obnoxious. But in England everybody is busy about everybody else, which, except for an Englishman, is intolerable.

- p. 65

In ·the Dublin of my day there was the kind of desperate freedom which comes from a lack of responsibility, for the English were in governance then, so everyone said what he liked. Now I hear since the Free State came in there is less freedom. The Church has made inroads everywhere, so that we are in fact becoming a bourgeois nation, with the Church supplying our aristocracy... and I do not see much hope for us intellectually. Once the Church is in command she will devour everything... what she will leave will be a few old rags not worth the having : and we may degenerate to the position of a second Spain.

Part VIII

As I escorted him to the top of the perilous stairs, trebly perilous for him on account of his bad sight, I wondered-as was natural, even as the American journalist must have done-' is this the man who has written the book which has shocked the whole world-the man who in Ulysses has described Bob Doran weeping in the pub about Paddy Dignam's death : " The finest man, says he, snivelling, the finest purest character "...' ?

- p. 69

Truly, appearances are deceptive, for who would think that this slight and delicately built man with his smooth clerkly face, small pointed beard, with those strong spectacles glassing his weak eyes, was the most revolutionary character in this age of artistic revolutions? Indeed I realized that there was much of the Fenian about him-his dark suiting, his wide hat, his light carriage, and his intense expression-a literary conspirator, who was determined to destroy the oppressive and respectable cultural structures under which we had been reared, and which were then crumbling.

- p. 69

Mrs Joyce did not seem to be quite so conscious of his difficult position. Indeed the only time she ever mentioned the subject to me was one day when Imet her in the rue du Bae. She had been to see a priest about something-maybe it was to go to confession-and she told me the priest had said to her:

-Mrs Joyce, cannot you stop your husband from writing those terrible books?

But she replied:

-What can I do?

Indeed it was the only answer she could give, for what rebel worth his salt is going to be persuaded out of his course either by his wife or by a priest?

- p. 70

Joyce's sensitivity was such that during the composition of ' Oxen of the Sun ', which takes place in the lying-in hospital, he was put off his food because his imagination was filled with half-born foetuses, swabs, and the smell of disinfectants.

- p. 71

Part IX

-The history of Antony and Cleopatra, I remarked, is one of the greatest love stories in which passion dominates wealth and power; and finally there is their brave contempt for death.

-Yes, agreed Joyce, it is Christianity which has made us afraid of death, for men, nowadays, live in two halves in which their desire to live is tempered by their fear of death so that we no longer know which way to turn, and as a result both our public and private lives are smothered in hypocrisy. The pagans faced death as bravely as they faced life ; ' one life one death ' was their philosophy. But I don't know why you have chosen Antony as your hero. Surely there were many better Romans than he.

- p. 72

-\Vhat I have wanted to say was that the classical style still seems to me to be the best form of writing. -Perhaps, but to my mind it is a form of writing which contains little or no mystery, commented Joyce, and since we are surrounded by mystery it has always seemed to me inadequate. It can deal with facts very well, but when it has to deal with motives, the secret currents of life which govern everything, it has not the orchestra, for life is a complicated problem. It is no doubt flattering and pleasant to have it presented in an uncomplicated fashion, as the classicists pretend to do, but it is an intellectual approach which no longer satisfies the modern mind, which is interested above all in subtleties, equivocations and the subterranean complexities which dominate the average man and compose his life.

I would say that the difference between classical literature and modern literature is the difference between the obj ective and the subjective : classical literature represents the daylight of human personality while modern literature is concerned with the twilight, the passive rather than the active mind. We feel that the classicists explored the physical world to its limit, and we are now anxious to explore the hidden world, those undercurrents which flow beneath the apparently firm surface. But as our education was based on the classical, most of us have a fixed idea of what literature should be, and not only literature but also of what life should be.

And so we moderns are accused of distortion; but our literature is no more distorted than classical literature is. All art in a sense is distorted in that it must exaggerate certain aspects to obtain its effect and in time people will accept this so-called modern distortion, and regard it as ·the truth. Our object is to create a new fusion between the exterior world and our contemporary selves, and also to enlarge our vocabulary of the subconscious as Proust has done. We believe that it is in the abnormal that we approach closer to reality. When we are living a normal life we are living a conventional one, following a pattern which has been laid out by other people in another generation, an objective pattern imposed on us by the church and state. But a writer must maintain a continual struggle against the objective : that is his function. The eternal qualities are the imagination and the sexual instinct, and the formal life tries to suppress both. Out of this present conflict arise the phenomena of modern life.

- p. 74

Part X

-Yes, said Joyce, I met him (Proust) once at a literary dinner and when we were introduced all he said to me was: 'Do you like truffles ?' 'Yes', I replied, 'I am very fond of truffles.' And that was the only conversation which took place between the two most famous writers of their time, remarked Joyce - who seemed to be highly amused at the incident.

- p. 79

-It is a cult I cannot understand, I argued. As Bacon remarked : ' old gold is old family '. It all seems to me to be on such a material basis; while with genius on the other hand one feels it is a gift of the gods.

-I would not altogether agree with you there, he said. There must be some quality in "blood" for it to maintain its position generation after generation : some strength and some wisdom. Also how often do we find that some nobleman was the patron of an artist, or a musician, even when the rest of the world did not take notice of him. Indeed some people think that the decline of the patron has caused a decline in art.

- p. 81

You must admit that patrons have played an important part in the arts. Indeed in many cases they would not have been created but for their help.

- p. 81

{{Quote| But the thought came to my mind as I examined it, this shrunken image, how lucky was the man, a man like Joyce, who had a patron and so had been spared this Calvary for if with increasing years Joyce had decided to abandon everything for his writing it might have happened to him. Though Modigliani had some artistic success, the appreciation had not been sufficiently general to save him financially.

- p. 85