Today is the birthday of James Joyce. He was born on February 2, 1882, in Rathgar.
Words can’t even express how much this man’s writing means to me – and I came to it relatively late. I read Araby and The Dead in high school – but despite the fact of my father – I didn’t read the rest of his work until I was in my 20s. Actually – I didn’t read Ulysses and Finnegans Wake until a couple of years ago. It is hard to describe or comprehend true genius. It just IS. Like the ocean, or the stars. The rest of us mere mortals just have to deal with it. Yes, he casts a long shadow, and yes, he sort of has taken over the landscape of literature – EVERYONE must contend with his ghost – but that’s the breaks. Let us just revel in his genius. I chose one of my favorite Joycean quotes as the tagline to this blog … and you know what? Even though I look at the quote every day … it STILL inspires me. It STILL opens up this quiet contemplative space within me, where I can feel that I am now ready to WORK. Thanks, Jimmy!!
In honor of his birthday, I will post some of my favorite quotes ABOUT James Joyce – said by his fans and fellow writers.
ABOUT JOYCE
— T. S. Eliot said, after reading Ulysses: “He single-handedly killed the 19th century.” (This way pissed Gertrude Stein off, because she was already convinced that SHE had killed the 19th century. hahahahaha)
— Nora Joyce (Joyce’s wife) – after Joyce’s death – was asked about which new writers she read. Here is what she said: “Sure, if you’ve been married to the greatest writer in the world, you don’t remember all the little fellows.”
— James Joyce worked on Finnegans Wake for 17 years or something like that. Nora, looking at the gibberish pages, the ciphers, the codes, said, “Why don’t you write books people can read?” Ha!
However: Nora always thought that Finnegans Wake – which pretty much the entire world thought was incomprehensible – was his best book. She understood it. She understood the language.
Years after his death, she was still pestererd by reporters about James Joyce. And nobody ever asked about Finnegans Wake – which confused her. It was always Ulysses, Ulysses, Ulysses.
She commented once, “What’s all this talk about Ulysses? Finnegans Wake is the important book.”
For some reason, that gives me a chill. I think she might actually be onto something.
— George Bernard Shaw said, upon reading Ulysses (a book which disturbed him greatly): “If a man holds up a mirror to your nature and shows you that it needs washing — not whitewashing — it is no use breaking the mirror. Go for soap and water.”
— Ernest Hemingway wrote in a letter to Sherwood Anderson – after reading Ulysses: “Joyce has a most goddamn wonderful book. It’ll probably reach you in time. Meantime the report is that he and all his family are starving but you can find the whole celtic crew of them every night in Michaud’s where Binney and I can only afford to go about once a week…The damned Irish, they have to moan about something or other…”
— Gertrude Stein was very pissy and irritable about Joyce’s phenomenal success. Here is what she said about him: “Joyce is good. He is a good writer. People like him because he is incomprehensible and anybody can understand him. But who came first, Gertrude Stein or James Joyce? Do not forget that my first great book, Three Lives, was published in 1908. That was long before Ulysses. But Joyce has done something. His influence, however, is local. Like Synge, another Irish writer, he has had his day.” Joyce was told Stein’s comment, and his response was: “I hate intellectual women.” hahahahaha
— TS Eliot said a lot about Ulysses but one of his comments that I really like is: “I wish, for my own sake, that I had not read it.” Writers everywhere had the same response.
— Carl Jung read Ulysses and was so moved and disturbed by it that he wrote Joyce a letter about it. He also wrote extensively on his own about the book. One of his comments about the book: “It’s a miserable ritual, a magical procedure. . . a homunculus of the consciousness of the new world — our world passed away and a new world has arisen.”
— Joseph Campbell said, upon reading Finnegans Wake: “If our society should go to smash tomorrow (which, as Joyce implies, it may) one could find all the pieces, together with the forces that broke them, in Finnegans Wake.”
— Here is what Samuel Beckett had to say about the language in Finnegans Wake: “You cannot complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something. It is that something itself.”
— Ezra Pound, one of Joyce’s greatest champions, had this to say about Ulysses: “In a single chapter he discharges all the cliches of the English language like an uninterrupted river.”
— Poet Hart Crane had this to say after reading Ulysses: “I feel like shouting EUREKA! Easily the epic of the age.”
— Sylvia Beach, book store owner and publisher of Ulysses (I wrote about her here) had this to say about Joyce (I love this quote): “As for Joyce, he treated people invariably as his equals, whether they were writers, children, waiters, princesses, or charladies. What anybody had to say interested him; he told me that he had never met a bore.”
— Oliver Gogarty, friend of Joyce, and immortalized in Ulysses, said: “Looking back, there was something uncanny in his certainty, which he had more than any other writer I have ever known, that he would one day be famous. It was more than mere wishful thinking. It governed all his attitudes to his compatriots and accounts for what many referred to as his arrogance. He was never really arrogant, but seemed to have a curious sense of his own powers and wouldn’t tolerate anyone who didn’t really appreciate his work.” (That comment about Joyce’s supposed arrogance reminds me of one of my favorite quotes – this one from Bette Davis: “I was thought to be “stuck up”. I wasn’t. I was just sure of myself. This is and always has been an unforgivable quality to the unsure.”)
— William Faulkner said: “You should approach Joyce’s Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.”
— More from TS Eliot: “I hold Ulysses to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.” Ulysses ROCKED the literary world – and the literary world has yet to recover. It called into question other writer’s talents – other writer’s accomplishments – it seemed to sweep everything else away. Of course it did not – but that’s how it SEEMED. TS Eliot was especially blown away by it. Joyce was a lightning rod. He was the kind of writer that made other writers want to be better – and yet also despair of ever being as good as he was. Time and time again – with GREAT writers – like Hemingway and Eliot and Faulkner – we see that sentiment in regards to Joyce.
— And lastly, a quote from Joyce himself. I love this quote. And if you read and re-read his work, if you delve into his work – as complex as it may seem – you will discover that he spoke the truth when he said: “With me, the thought is always simple.”
Happy birthday, murderer of the 19th century!!
Sheila – I just don’t know what happens to me when I read about him, read his name, etc. What is it? Just like the “it’s not about something, it is something”. Yes, exactly. Now I think I have to go and read Ulysses and let me tell you I am scared shitless!
I get a weird goosebumpy feeling when I hear his name, too, Jean – and I will BE there for you as you tackle Ulysses – it is tough, but it is SO worth it!!!
Wow. I am not going to tackle Ulysses yet, however it gives me heart to know I have a friend or two who will help me when I do.
And by the way, where the hell was Gertrude Stein’s publicist. How could anyone let her write such a self-pitying, self-aggrandizing, simpering comment.
David – hahahaha I know! She had been experimenting with language for years – and her work is very important – but, in my opinion, it stayed as an experiment. And so pretty much only literary types read her stuff. Joyce experimented with language and created an epic masterpiece. She was PISSED that he “got the credit”. But … but … Gertie … he brought it to the next level … he built on what you had been doing … he transcended it … DEAL WITH IT.
I also think Joyce’s response to her comment is flat out hysterical. You would think he would want a bookish intellectual woman – but that was so not the case. He married Nora – a wild earthy girl from Galway.
Oh, you are just so pretentious with your James Joyce and bragging that you’ve read Ulysses. I don’t like it and therefore anyone who does is obviously a pompous jerk. And aren’t there more important things in the world going on right now? I mean, there are places where people are dying and you are writing about James Joyce? On your own blog of all places.
Get some perspective, woman. Perspective.
I’m having a flashback.
Abu Gharib? Abu Gharib??
Yeah! Why aren’t you writing about that instead? Clearly this blog represents 100% of your thoughts and actions and because you have not composed endless essays about torture, violence, and crimes against children, you obviously don’t care about these things EVER.
BTW, Ulysses is still in my “Best Intentions” pile…to try and bring things back to the subject at hand. I really must read it soon.
I do not exist outside what I write on this blog. Literally every thought that goes through my head is on this blog. I don’t even know who our President is – since I never write about him I am obviously unaware of his very existence. I have no life except for my blog posts.
WHAT???? hahahahahahaha
But back to the topic at hand … it’s kind of like I had to gear up to read the damn book – get ready for a full-immersion experience – and I finally got into it when I stopped trying to control it or “understand” it – I just let Joyce lead me around. That, for me, was the best way to read it. Stop assuming it’s a “normal” book that works the way other books do.
Also, it helped to have my father on speed dial.
“Uhm … what the hell is going on with the chapter with the Citizen, Dad??”
“Oh. That’s the Cyclops chapter.”
“Got it. Thanks!!”
I was definitely counting on a combination of the search function of your blog and your posts on the subject to act as a kind of Cliff Notes as I work my way through.
and Sheila’s father on speed dial wouldn’t hurt…
it’s on my list of books to read too…still working up to it…
Happy birthday, O Great One!
One of my own favorite quotations about Joyce comes from J. Mitchell Morse, an obscure Joyce scholar who became one of my culture heroes on the force of a little book called The Irrelevant English Teacher.
“He [Joyce] knew that we would all be feeding on him.”
Concerning Jung’s response to Ulysses, Joyce was pretty irritated by his essay. “Jung appears to have read Ulysses without a single laugh. The only thing to be done in such a case is to change one’s drink.”
Bryan – “feeding on him” – awesome!!
about that Jung letter – I love that Jung wrote something about the Molly monologue and how, to him, it was the best understanding of a woman’s mind he had ever read. Joyce read the letter outloud to a group of friends – Nora listened and scoffed to a friend sitting next to her, “Jim knows nothin’ at all about women.”
hahaha She just burst his bubble right there!
I really need to read Nora’s biography, because a lot of the early Joyce scholarship on which I cut my teeth (back in my stripling days when I was a budding Joycean) tended to regard Nora basically as a simple-minded fishwife whom the great Joyce stayed with for no other reason than that she was willing to put up with his taste for weird sex (cf. the letters to Nora, if you’re willing to indulge in what Samuel Beckett, who protested the publication of the letters, called “all that snooping”). Some of her remarks, though, make me suspect that a lot more was going on with her than those early scholars might have suspected.
A bunch of narrow-minded sex-starved scholars who had never known a real woman were in charge of this characterization of Nora. I mean – what Joyce said about her himself – the beginnings of their time together – his obsession with her – hell, every female character he ever wrote – they were all Nora – she was his muse, he stole openly from her language – he was fascinated by her – his early love letters to her. And yes, they had a strong sexual connection. These narrow-minded dust-covered scholars found this HIGHLY unusual. She must have been an illiterate fish-wife. Oh my God, she liked sex!!! How WEIRD she is! To admit she liked sex? To be open about it??? SHE LIKED SEX WITH HER HUSBAND????? She must have been such a WEIRDO.
grrrr.
Don’t even get me started.
Uhm – I think I HAVE started, actually.
HAHAHA! Yes, but tell us what you really think about this, Sheila!
Concerning Beckett’s objection to “all this snooping” into Joyce’s personal life, it’s interesting to me that he would take that stance when Joyce himself in the library episode of Ulysses gives us through Stephen’s mouth a very strong argument that the personal life of a great writer is very much relevant to the writer’s work. Against the views of such characters as the oracular AE who asserts that art represents to us the formless Platonic essences, Stephen argues through his interpretation of Shakespeare that art is the artist’s way of healing himself of his psychic difficulties. Far from being a mirror of the Platonic ideal realm, art is above all about sex, our difficulties with it, and the problems it causes us, as well as our conflicts with our fathers, our mothers, and our children. So the snooping is crucial to understanding the artist’s work.
Or as Morse said, “He knew that we would all be feeding on him.”
I think these dusty stuffy-headed scholars think that Joyce SHOULD have liked intellectual women – because that’s what would make sense to THEM.
But no … Joyce had to go and fall in love with a rowdy runaway from Galway who professed that she never read any of his books. (But it is obvious from her comments that that was just a pose. She never wanted Joyce to get too big a head. She constantly took him down to size. Joyce loved it.)
His books are not stuffy or intellectual either. They are highly earthy (uhm – let’s remember our first meeting with Leopold Bloom and what he is doing when we first meet him) – Joyce came from Ireland, let’s remember. As he called it “priest-ridden”. He had to leave Ireland, with Nora, in order to live the kind of “free and open life” he wanted to live. A lot of that had to do with sex. Again, you only need to look to his letters – he wanted sex to seem “natural” – Or – it DID seem “natural” to him, but his country shamed him for it.
Etc. Etc.
Again, I think it says more about the scholars and their stuffy priggish response to womanhood than anything else.
I do not believe, however, that Nora was the genius behind the man … she was just a wife. A woman who loved James, and stayed with him for 40 years or whatever. He used her as inspiration – but his genius was his own.
Sorry – don’t mean to get down on all those scholarly gentlemen. A lot of their scholarship is invaluable to understanding Joyce – and I have many of their books myself – but I dislike the judgmental stance towards Nora. It seems close-minded and unimaginative.
I totally agree with you on this, although in fairness to the “Nora was an idiot” brigade, I would point out that one of the gentlemen responsible for that meme was the formidable Anthony Burgess, hardly a castrated scholar, although one could say plenty about his general attitude toward women.
I once had a feminist literary critic friend who complained about the fact that all her students absolutely loved Burgess, and she felt compelled to keep on introducing more students to this unhealthy influence because it was the most effective way she had of getting them interested in literature at all. Hahaha.
I tried to read Joyce once, but it gave me a headache.
Which, reading y’all’s comments, I’m starting think is the point. :)
It strikes me that Joyce and Nora were complimentary – and identical units rarely are. A vioin requires a bow, not another violin, to make music. Critics who fail to understand that simply reveal why they are critics and not artists.
When it was Yeats’ birthday we were all posting our favorite passages from his work, so I thought I’d offer a few of my favorite Joycean touchstones.
“The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”
“I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile, and cunning.”
“Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.”
“A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals to discovery.”
“Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart. Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown grave-clothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes. Across the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother by the well-fed voice beside him. The ring of bay and skyline held a dull green mass of liquid.”
“Woodshadows floated silently by through the morning peace from the stairhead seaward where he gazed. Inshore and farther out the mirror of water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying feet. White breast of the dim sea. The twining stresses, two by two. A hand plucking the harpstrings merging their twining chords. Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide.”
“O, touch me soon, now. What is that word known to all men? I am quiet here alone. Sad too. Touch, touch me.”
“Airs romped around him, nipping and eager airs. They are coming, waves. The whitemaned seahorses, champing, brightwindbridled, the steeds of Mananaan.”
“With me all or not at all. Non serviam!”
“O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire…”
“Vah! Suvarn Sur! Scatter brand to the reneweller of the sky, thou who agnitest! Dah! Arcthuris comeing!”
Those are some of my favorites as well, bryan – I love the line about “silence, exile, and cunning” – and I also love the line about “errors being volitional” … truly words to live by.
Then, of course, “yes i said yes i will yes”. :)
I just love it all.
I think it’s funny that these scholars would assume Nora was some idiot – just because she wrote him dirty letters, and sent him her panties in the mail to sniff, and spoke openly about menstruating, etc. – when … Good Lord, Leopold Bloom takes a dump in the first chapter of Ulysses, he then masturbates on the strand, and the last 60 page monologue includes a moment when Molly gets up to change her menstrual pads.
Joyce was a master at language. He also was an earthy guy, unafraid of bodily functions – unafraid of them in general, and also unafraid to use them as moments in literature.
I don’t know – I think the “Nora was an idiot” contingent have some issues – and they can’t have read the same commentary I did. They came to it with a bias against open “natural” women – the very kind of bias that Joyce fled Ireland to escape.
SO THERE.
hahahahahaha
Back to Joyce himself – I love the section in the first part of Portrait where he describes the memory of Parnell’s death. It’s so poetic – because he gets into the language and mindset of a child – but he remembers the upheavals in the adult world around him
Indeed. It’s really fascinating in general how the language in the novel evolves in complexity in parallel to the evolving complexity of Stephen’s mind.
A bit of a non-comment, Sheila.. apologies.. I’m in some kind of twilight right now.. but I’ll be back real soon.
In the meantime..
[belated] Happy Birthday, Jimmy!