December 03, 2008
James Joyce: “My love, my life, my star, my little strange-eyed Ireland” (1909)
From Dublin, James Joyce sat down to write a letter to his wife, Nora Barnacle, who was taking care of the family in Triest. He began by recalling the moment five years before when he stepped out with Nora the first time, an event that — after the success of "Ulysses" — would be celebrated thereafter as Bloomsday: ... you seem to turn me into a beast. It was you yourself, you naughty shameless girl who first led the way. It was not I who first touched you long ago down at Ringsend. If was you who slid your hand down down inside my trousers and pulled my shirt softly aside and touched my ...Obviously, Joyce had other things on his mind that month than literary matters. He had been in Dublin since October, on behalf of several businessmen in Triest, to open the city=s first moviehouse. Before he left, he had made a pact with Nora to write each other erotic letters. While Nora's had disappeared, Joyce's were preserved and eventually published in 1975.
The letters can inspire much juvenile sniggering, perhaps even arousal. But intertwined with the scatalogical references and intimate sex fantasies acts are passages of poetic intensity that express his deepest, most intimate love for her, particularly in this passage, written as he was when he is preparing to return home:
Get ready. Put some warm-brown-linoleum on the kitchen and hang a pair of red common curtains on the windows at night. Get some kind of a cheap common comfortable armchair for your lazy lover. Do this above all, darling, as I shall not quit that kitchen for a whole week after I arrive, reading, lolling, smoking, and watching you get ready the meals and talking, talking, talking, talking to you. O how supremely happy I shall be!Small wonder that, when asked about her husband, Nora replied: "I guess the man's a genius, but what a dirty mind he has, hasn't he?" She would know.
Born: Mary Lamb, author, London, 1764; Joseph Conrad, novelist, short-story writer, Berdichev, Polish Ukraine, 1857; Anna Freud, psychoanalysist, Vienna, 1895.
Died: Robert Louis Stevenson, essayist, poet, novelist, near Apia, Samoa, 1894; John Bartlett, lexicographer, compiler, Cambridge, Mass., 1905; Lewis Thomas, physician, author, New York City, 1993; Gwendolyn Brooks, poet, author, Chicago, 2000.
Quote for the Day: "For me, writing — the only possible writing — is just simply the conversion of nervous force into phrases." — Joseph Conrad, who was born today in 1857
Also from "Writers 365":
- Last act for Chekov (1904)
- Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein Meet Cute (1907)
- The Love Song of Edith Wharton (1908)
- Katharine Mansfield elopes (1909)
- James Patterson's Love Story (1996)
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