Conversations with James Joyce (Irish Literature) - Softcover

Power, Arthur

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1628972718 ISBN 13: 9781628972719

Verlag: Dalkey Archive Press, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

A memoir of James Joyce, one of the most important novelists of the twentieth century, never before published in North America.

In the ordinary sense Joyce was not a conversationalist, writes Arthur Power, in Conversations with James Joyce. An aspiring painter and art critic, Power (of the famous whiskey family) struck up a strained, somewhat prickly friendship with the master of exile, silence, and cunning at the Bal Bullier in Paris, in the year of 1921. This volume is Power’s record of the two men’s encounters and conversations, whose subjects ranged from Irish literature to American politics, and from Assyrian monuments to the individual “odor of a country,” which, Joyce assured his wide-eyed interlocutor, was “the gauge of its civilization.” Here is a rare glimpse of the private James Joyce―to Power’s great surprise, not a brash bohemian, but a steadily working, sharp-tongued, elusive man.

Arthur Power's Conversations with James Joyce, edited by Clive Hart and originally published in 1974, is an important artifact relating Joyce's thoughts and opinions on past writers as well as his contemporaries: Synge, Ibsen, Hardy, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Gide, Proust, Eliot, Tennyson, and Shakespeare.

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Arthur Power (1891–1984) was raised in Waterford, Ireland, and served in the First World War before moving to Paris, where he socialized with the sculptor Jo Davidson, interviewed Amadeo Modigliani, and became a regular visitor to the Joyce home. After ten years in France, Power moved back home to Ireland to try to manage the family estate and was for a long time an art critic for The Irish Times. He is also the author of From the Old Waterford House (1940).

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The first time I met James Joyce was at the Bal Bullier. I had gone there one Saturday evening to meet Annette, the young blanchisseuse who used to call for my washing every week, a handsome self-willed girl who later became a model, and whose life ended in tragedy.

It was the fact, I think, that I lived in a studio that interested her in my lonely bachelordom, for while I talked with her she used to amuse herself by kicking the odd pieces of coal which lay in front of the stove across the floor, a subtle intimation that she did not think much of my domestic arrangements. She told me she used to go dancing every Saturday so I asked her to meet me at the Bal Bullier, a popular dancehall of the Montparnasse district which, like much of old Paris, has since disappeared, but then it stood at the top of the Boulevard St Michel in the Avenue de l’Observatoire opposite the Luxembourg Gardens.

The Bal itself was a large building and one entered down a flight of stairs, for the foundations were below street level. Inside it consisted of a wide dance-floor surrounded by a balcony supported on iron pillars, and underneath this balcony were placed rows of marble-topped tables and iron chairs. It had two orchestras, a brass one and a string one which played alternately at opposite ends of the floor, neither, as can be imagined, of a very high order, for it was chiefly frequented by the local shop-boys and girls, with a sprinkling of intellectuals who, tiring of the cafés, entered to find distraction and were pleased by its old-fashioned atmosphere and low prices. In its day it had been a fashionable resort, but being outmoded it had gradually declined except for one or two occasions during the winter when the big artistic balls organized by the different studios were held there. On these occasions it used to be completely transformed when the students from the studios erected small stages on the floor and gave burlesque performances during the intervals of the dance. The now deserted balcony was then crowded with supper tables, with all bohemian Paris packed on to its floor. But this night was one of its ordinary nights with only about thirty couples dancing.

As I entered I saw a party seated at one of the tables, one of whom I knew, a lady who was a friend of Jo Davidson. I took care to avoid them, for I had come there to meet Annette and not to pass my evening with intellectuals (my constant and recurring fate). I was excited at the idea of an evening with this handsome girl with whom, as a lonely man, I was already half in love, and would, if fates were kind, be fully in love before the night was out. As time went on Annette did not appear, though I searched and re-searched that vast hall for her, so that in the end I despaired that she would keep her rendezvous. Anxious for some company to help me forget my disappointment, towards the end of the evening I passed by the table where the party was seated. A lady called me over and introduced me to a slightly built, finely featured man with a small pointed beard who wore thick lensed glasses―‘Mr James Joyce,’ she said. The introduction came as a surprise for I did not know that he was in Paris. The last time I had heard about him he was living in Switzerland.

While living in Dublin I had read Dubliners, and later I had read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but being at that time chiefly interested in romantic literature I had not been greatly impressed by his books. I was nevertheless intrigued to meet one of our most important authors, and I liked the man himself, his quiet sensitive manner and his old-fashioned courtliness, and I soon found myself sitting next to him. He asked if I came from Dublin, seemed pleased when I told him that I did, and asked how long had I left it and whom I had known there. These questions did not altogether please me, for I had gone to Paris to forget Ireland as a whole, and my native Dublin in particular.

Our conversation was interrupted by a young American woman at the table, Miss Sylvia Beach, who proposed that we should all fill our glasses and drink a toast to the success of James Joyce’s new book, Ulysses. Towards midnight the party broke up, but as we stood on the boulevard outside, Joyce suggested that I should cross over with him to the Closerie des Lilas opposite for a final drink before we parted. There he told me of the difficulty he had had in finding a publisher for this new book, which had taken him eight years to write.

After that night I did not see him again for some time until I received a message through a mutual friend suggesting that I should call on him at an address in the Rue de Rennes. So a couple of evenings later as I happened to be passing his flat on my way to a studio party I called in to see if he would accompany me. I believed then that an artist should be something of a bohemian, especially in the exciting circumstances which a city like Paris offered, and it had seemed to me, in the short time that I had met Joyce, that he led a very restricted and bourgeois life. I wanted to persuade him to come to this party, which was to he held in the studio of a Russian painter called Feder, whose place was out in the Montrouge district in a garden behind a block of flats. It looked more like a booth in a fair than an artist’s studio, and had about five different entrances which in turn had been blocked up by each new tenant in an effort to keep out the draughts. One side of it had been torn badly, and the story was that a painter of animal subjects who had lived in it had had a lioness brought in. She had torn it down, it was said, in protest against ‘having to pose in her skin.’ In this studio Feder had a magnificent assembly of negro sculpture, one piece of which, a representation of the sun in yellow wood, displayed its pointed rays running down the whole length of the wall. He had also collected numerous dance-masks, exotic and macabre, and some musical instruments. A Russian Jew, he had escaped from the pogroms in Odessa to become a painter in Paris. A kindly and urbane soul with a gentle, cynical wit, he was an excellent host. I thought that in such an atmosphere Joyce would relax, have a drink, and talk with the girls, but I was badly received by the family, as I had arrived at his flat with my pockets full of bottles.

Since Joyce’s eyes were very weak at that time, he had been forbidden to drink, and they looked on me as the proverbial drunken Irishman inviting him out on a Celtic bash. Giorgio, his son, stood over my chair with his legs apart as much as to say, ‘When are you going to leave?’ It was an awkward situation, and I decided to make out as best I could. Joyce, bending to the storm with a rueful smile, refused my invitation, while I, feeling the atmosphere so charged, was glad to make my escape. As I went down the passage Joyce accompanied me to the door and, as I passed out, standing with his back against the wall he said to me in a plaintive, but amused voice:

―You know I am an intelligent man, but I have to put up with this sort of thing―however, he commented with a smile, we will meet again soon.

At the time I thought he was a much bullied man, but when I got to know him and the family better, and to understand the serious threat to his sight, I changed my point of view. Shortly afterwards I met him again in the rue du Bac and he invited me back to his gloomy, iron-shuttered flat. I immediately became great friends with his family, and particularly with Nora, who realised that I had no wish to lead her husband into drinking bouts, that in fact I disliked drinking to excess.

Joyce, a restless man, was continually changing his abode, partly through circumstances no doubt, but also on account of his nature, and shortly afterwards he moved to a pleasant, airy apartment opposite...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Dalkey Archive Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2020
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1628972718
• ISBN 13: 9781628972719
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 128
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar