James Joyce from James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (by Frank Budgen)

Using primary resources, I believe, is the only way to do justice to history, art, stories, and people, especially in the field of creative art itself.

1. James Joyce, a Dubliner

“I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.”

From what we know about James Joyce, he himself claims to be more of a Dubliner than an Irishman; he supports Irish to be independent of England (“if they want to be independent”. In other words, it’s not his political stand.). “His form of patriotism is that of a citizen of a free town in the middle ages.” It is very intriguing to contemplate how he identifies himself.

2. A People-watcher

“In the course of many talks with Joyce in Zurich, I found that for him human character was best displayed… in the commonest acts of life.”“Joyce in Zurich was a curious collector of facts about the human body, especially on that borderland where mind and body meet, where thought is generated and shaped by a state of the body.”

This is basically how Ulysses came about and what Ulysses is about: an ordinary day in an ordinary man’s life.

3. A Tenor

“Joyce is himself a tenor singer and a lover of music, and was well aware how far and in what way the musician’s manner would serve his turn.”“The beauty of The Sirens episode lies in this: that Joyce has mimicked all the musician’s mannerisms and rhythmical devices with so much fantastical humor, at the same time carrying his own narrative a most important step forward.”“The whole of the time he was writing The Sirens, Joyce literally lived in music.”

How Joyce approaches his material and writes.

4. Joyce’s eyes

“flickered laughter behind their powerful lenses.”

Joyce is immensely funny.

“Early in 1919 Joyce had reason to fear an eye attack and, to stave it off, left Zurich, plagued with Fohn wind, and went to Locarno.”“In spite of his bad sight and his professed lack of expert knowledge of painting, Joyce’s flat is full of pictures… But Joyce’s eyesight made his manner of looking at pictures strange and peculiar. I have seen him take pictures, when their size allowed him to do so, and look at them close up near a window like a myope reading small print.”

For sure, Joyce started to have eye problem before he went to Zurich (possibly started from 1907), though we have few evidence which indicates how bad his eyes suffered. It’s also hard to say which one of his eyes was worse when he was in Zurich, but it seems that both had relatively serious problems.

(See Travesties I – 30: JOYCE: I am a martyr to glaucoma and inflation.)

James Joyce wearing an eyepatch (after he left Zurich)

5. James Joyce is Picky about Wine

“The Pfauen restaurant-café was Joyce’s favorite”“I never saw Joyce drink red wine unless white was unobtainable, and then he did it with a bad grace.”“Joyce said: White wine is like electricity. Red wine looks and tastes like a liquefied beefsteak.”

Pfauen restaurant

6. Words for Joyce

“They have a will and life of their own and are not to be put like lead soldiers, but to be energized and persuaded like soldiers of flesh and blood. The commerce of life new mints them every day and gives them new values in the exchanges, and Joyce is ever listening for living speech from any human lips.”“Joyce spoke Italian like a native. It was, and still is, the house language of his family. In German he was fluent, but I have heard him say of both German and Italian that they were not ‘persuasive’ languages; and of French ‘a poor instrument… but how wonderfully they use it!’”“Of all instruments the human voice was Joyce’s preference, and of all voices the tenor voice.”

Seeing words as mysterious means of expression as well as an instrument of communication made Joyce sometimes a severe critic of his contemporaries.

7. Joyce doesn’t like to sit

“The difficulty about painting Joyce was to get him to sit at all… Joyce, when not standing or moving, prefers to lie down but will accept as a workable compromise a sprawl in an easy chair.”

8. Joyce on Politics

“On one subject he was more uncommunicative than any man I know: the subject of politics… Generally, if a political discussion arose he would remain silent waiting a turn of the tide.”

9. Rarely Irritated

“One saw little in Joyce of the normal impatiences of the average male. A retarted meal, a bus or a post missed, or any of the smaller annoyances of life, called forth no show of irritability. When faced with the hostility or illwill of another human being his comment

would purposely be toned down to the subnormal ‘tedious’ and ‘tiresome,’ and his strongest term of abuse applied to such persons was the word ‘lout.’…“… he felt that giving way to irritability or anger might hinder his specialist’s preoccupation with the detail of daily life as material for literature.”

It is also said that James Joyce is famous for his vulgar language since he was little. He was actually punished by his Christian School multiple times for the cause of vulgar language, and his love letters are still seen as filthy and despicable till this time. In addition, being rarely irritated seems to be contradictory with what he later did with Henry Carr on court. As a result, I’d like to say, instead of always being nice, kind and good-mannered, Joyce knows clearly where he wants to ‘waste’ time on and he is not afraid of offend anyone.

10. The English Players

“Joyce arrived in Zurich with practically no resources at all. 3 well-wishers in England, George Moore, Mr. WB Yeats and Sir Edmund Gosse, secured for him a gift of 100 pounds. The gift was unconditional, but it came to Joyce’s ears that at least one of the intermediaries thought he ought to do something for the Allied cause. This, in Joyce’s case, could mean only one thing – write for it.“But Joyce’s preoccupation with Ulysses, his own distaste for politics and also his parole to the Austrian Government, forbade any such incursion into the field of war journalism.”

With the assistance of Mr. and Mrs. Sykes, he founded the English Players, which would give plays in English in Swiss towns. And soon they selected The Importance of Being Earnest as a valuable piece of British cultural propaganda (in order to obtain official support), and had it produced in Kaufmannische Verein. A temporary employee of the British Consulate played the part of Algernon.

Hereby, we should note that, in real-life, Henry Carr was just a temporary employee in a governmental office, whose importance could easily be ignored. Additionally, British Consulate didn’t give the English Players full support which they needed. These pieces of information could, in my opinion, serve as an implication to: one, why Henry Carr accepted the role; two, why Henry Carr insisted on getting his money back; three, why he tried every way to emphasize his own status subconsciously when he became old (in the script).

11. Who is James Joyce?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOVFwljgw6Q&list=PLoejz2-IUGIRrX3YdEs5WHzad0W5FHDia&index=7https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnhfwIxSdno&list=PLoejz2-IUGIRrX3YdEs5WHzad0W5FHDia&index=8&t=249s

The first is a short video review of James Joyce and his works; the second is a documentary to understand who James Joyce really is as a human being rather than just the writer of certain books.