Today is the birthday of James Joyce. He was born on February 2, 1882, in Rathgar.<\/p>\n
Words can’t even express how much this man’s writing means to me – and I came to it relatively late. I read Araby<\/i> and The Dead<\/i> 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<\/i> and Finnegans Wake<\/i> 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!!<\/p>\n
In honor of his birthday, I will post some of my favorite quotes ABOUT James Joyce – said by his fans and fellow writers.<\/p>\n
ABOUT JOYCE<\/b><\/p>\n
— T. S. Eliot said, after reading Ulysses<\/i>: “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)<\/p>\n
— 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.”<\/p>\n
— James Joyce worked on Finnegans Wake <\/i>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!<\/p>\n
However: Nora always thought that Finnegans Wake <\/i>– which pretty much the entire world thought was incomprehensible – was his best book. She understood it. She understood the language.<\/p>\n
Years after his death, she was still pestererd by reporters about James Joyce. And nobody ever asked about Finnegans Wake <\/i>– which confused her. It was always Ulysses, Ulysses, Ulysses<\/i>.<\/p>\n
She commented once, “What’s all this talk about Ulysses<\/i>? Finnegans Wake <\/i>is the important book.”<\/p>\n
For some reason, that gives me a chill. I think she might actually be onto something.<\/p>\n
— George Bernard Shaw said, upon reading Ulysses<\/i> (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.”<\/p>\n
— Ernest Hemingway wrote in a letter to Sherwood Anderson – after reading Ulysses<\/i>: “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…”<\/p>\n
— 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<\/i>, was published in 1908. That was long before Ulysses<\/i>. 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<\/p>\n
— TS Eliot said a lot about Ulysses<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n
— Carl Jung read Ulysses<\/i> 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.”<\/p>\n
— Joseph Campbell said, upon reading Finnegans Wake<\/i>: “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.”<\/p>\n
— Here is what Samuel Beckett had to say about the language in Finnegans Wake<\/i>: “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 <\/i>something. It is that something itself<\/i>.”<\/p>\n
— Ezra Pound, one of Joyce’s greatest champions, had this to say about Ulysses<\/i>: “In a single chapter he discharges all the cliches of the English language like an uninterrupted river.”<\/p>\n
— Poet Hart Crane had this to say after reading Ulysses<\/i>: “I feel like shouting EUREKA! Easily the epic of the age.”<\/p>\n
— Sylvia Beach, book store owner and publisher of Ulysses<\/i> (I wrote about her here<\/a>) 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.”<\/p>\n — Oliver Gogarty, friend of Joyce, and immortalized in Ulysses<\/i>, 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.”)<\/p>\n — William Faulkner said: “You should approach Joyce’s Ulysses <\/i>as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.”<\/p>\n — 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<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n — 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.”<\/p>\n Happy birthday, murderer of the 19th century!!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … Continue reading