when they show you who they are,
believe them the first time
Thursday 27 July 2006 | I like a cookie
excerpts [taken long, long ago, at a university far, far away], from Richard Elllman’s biography of James Joyce:
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“Dante Conway [Joyce’s aunt] reminded James that if he played with Eileen he would certainly go to hell, and he duly informed Eileen of his destination but did not cease to merit it. Hell and its superintendent had already become useful histrionic counters for him. He loved to arrange little plays, and his brother Stanislaus’s earliest memory was of playing Adam to the Eve of his sister Margaret, while James crawled about them in the congenial role of serpent.”
Mary Sheehy: “I think you are very wicked.”
Joyce: “No, but I do my best.”
“That night after leaving the tower he went to her, told her his plans [to emigrate to Paris], and asked, ‘Is there one who understands me?’ Correctly interpreting this egotistical appeal as a proposal, Nora replied, ‘Yes.’ “
“Perhaps all grand gestures end with someone else packing the trunk.”
“Their relationship was becoming as complex as a young novelist could have wished.”
“When asked about André Gide, she [Nora] remarked, ‘Sure, when you’ve been married to the greatest writer in the world, you don’t remember all the little fellows.”
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Then, one of my very favorite pictures of the old artificer himself, taken by CF Curran. When later asked what he had been thinking, Joyce replied, “I wondered would he lend me five shillings.”
and finally, wrenchingly, this, which I can barely stand to read, from an old school friend of Nora’s:
“When I’m alone in the evening the tears come into my eyes as I often think of the nights when Nora and I used to dress up in men’s clothes. We would ramble round the square and our hair stuck up under our caps. We were never caught at this we met her uncle Tommy one night and Nora says to me here’s my uncle and I says to Nora come on, don’t shirk it. I said good night to him as I could imitate a man’s voice he never knew and I’m still here but my Nora is gone.”
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