Quote of the Day (James Joyce, on Winter and Death in Ireland)

“A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”—James Joyce, “The Dead,” in Dubliners (1914)

The end that James Joyce imagined for himself came in winter, but it wasn’t in Ireland, but in Zurich, Switzerland, where he died on this day 75 years ago at age 58. The immediate cause of death was peritonitis brought on by a perforated ulcer, but he might be said to have been dying by degrees for some time before this, as his days were darkened by10 eye operations, the divided reception given his latest novel, Finnegans Wake, double exile (first from Ireland, then from Nazi-occupied France), his son’s inability to find a stable life and career, and his daughter Lucia’s schizophrenia. 

I wrote that Joyce had been exiled from Ireland, but in the literary sense he never really left. He returned to his homeland obsessively in fiction, from the short stories in Dubliners that put him on the literary map to Finnegans Wake. 

There is, above all, his masterpiece, Ulysses, which tracks the progress of one man, Leopold Bloom, and two other people in his life—wife Molly and possible surrogate son, Stephen Dedalus (Joyce’s stand-in)—over the course of 24 hours in Dublin. 

In the geographic and temporal particulars of that fiction, Joyce created an entire universe accessible to all fascinated by the dazzling power of language. There is, for instance, one particular “epiphany” (Joyce's phrase) that occurs to Bloom on the “special affinities…between the moon and woman”:

“Her antiquity in preceding and surviving succeeding tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.”

A prior post I wrote on Dubliners can be found here. You might also be interested in blog posts related to the late Clockwork Orange novelist Anthony Burgess’ appreciation for Joyce, on the Web site of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, here.

Quote of the Day (Alfred Lord Tennyson, With Appropriate Thoughts on Aging and Resolution for My Birthday)

“Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,--

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses”

To all my friends, thank you for the multitude of birthday wishes, which, against all the odds, help to keep me “strong in will.”

Song Lyric of the Day (Jimmy Webb, Inspired by James Joyce)

“Out by Sandy Cove

Just a mile beyond the strand

There stands an ancient tower

On a rocky point of land.”—Jimmy Webb, “Sandy Cove,” from his Suspending Disbelief CD (1993)

Recently, reading novelist and James Joyce aficionado Peter Quinn spurred me to write this post on a famous songwriter tipping his cap to the author of Ulysses.

In a prior post, I compared Jimmy Webb, composer of “MacArthur Park” and other hits too numerous to mention, to a fellow boundless romantic, Thomas Wolfe. But I forgot that there was another, more tangible connection that Webb has alluded to more strongly in both his songs and interviews. For evidence, I refer you here to his evocation of the Martello Tower, the setting of the first chapter of Ulysses.

On this date four years into the century he set on its ear with his great experiments in literary modernism, James Joyce moved into the Martello Tower in Sandycove, eight miles south of Dublin on a coastal road. Sharing living quarters with him was Oliver St. John Gogarty, whom he immortalized in the very first phrase of his masterpiece as “stately, plump Buck Mulligan.”

In a book group nearly 20 years ago, I met an elderly lady who met Gogarty in the 1940s, when she worked in a New York publishing house that was publishing the memoir of Joyce’s former friend. She described him as a gregarious sort, and I’ll bet he was—as a doctor, politician and writer, he was the one-man Facebook of his time.

Notice that I referred to Gogarty as Joyce’s “former friend.” That relationship had one too many strains placed on it when they resided in Sandycove. (Their abode, incidentally, was one of a series of towers that the British built to defend against an invasion by Napoleon.)

Within a week, Joyce had left. Eighteen years later, he’d have his revenge against Gogarty through his acid-tinged portrait of Mulligan—loud, obnoxious, and late with the rent.

A longtime admirer of the Irish novelist, Webb began composing “Sandy Cove” in a Joyce notebook that a friend had recently bought for him. His song is about finding oneself psychologically at sea.

Joyce felt these emotions as a 22-year-old who had recently lost his mother and his Roman Catholic faith; Webb found himself adrift in his 40s, after initial wild success as a songwriter had failed to yield greater dividends as a solo artist in his own right.

Anyway who thinks that visiting the tower where Joyce slept or the pubs where he drank would be enough to help one channel his spirit doesn’t understand the creative process well. Central to both the songwriter and the novelist (such a good singer in his own right that wife Nora would later believe he had taken up the wrong career) was a sense of loss needed for a change of direction and heart, as in the following lyrics from “Sandy Cove”:

“I would pay a sultan's ransom

If only I could place
The ship back in the bottle

Or see my mother's face.”