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rants; to [cancel] their agreements if he wanted their assistance in
some trivial, easily postponed task; to run errands for him, pull
strings for him, undertake delicate and distasteful missions which
exposed them to snubs, rebuffs, and ridicules at his bidding.72
Gilbert was an Oxford-educated Englishman who had formerly
been a judge in colonial Burma. He may have fancied himself an
arbiter in matters of fair and honourable conduct (an irony Joyce
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would have relished). The Irishman with the cruel, playful, tiger cat
mind probably took a little pleasure in turning Gilbert into Boots.
There was none the less a kernel of truth in Gilbert s general obser-
vation. Joyce increasingly became Joyce and Company, of which he
none the less remained executive director and sole inspiration.
This was particularly the case with the Wake. Joyce s relation-
ship with the Jolases is one example. Eugene and Maria Jolas were
Americans, though Eugene s parents were from Lorraine. They had
founded an avant-garde review called transition. They became key
figures in the new entourage. Joyce decided to publish extracts and
drafts of the Wake serially with them, beginning in 1927. In the long
term, this was to have major consequences for its reception, in
which an understanding of it as a formidably hermetic, definitively
abstract, modernist tour de force has always predominated. Another
figure who became practically indispensable was Paul Léon,
a wealthy Russian émigré who was devoted to Joyce and effectively
came to serve as his (unpaid) personal assistant and secretary.
Together with the Swiss architectural historian Sigfried Giedion
and his wife, art critic Carola Giedion-Welcker, the Jolases and
Léon formed the core of the Joyce circle in the 1930s. By contrast,
Sylvia Beach and even, in the long run, Harriet Shaw Weaver
became less important. Pound was no longer in Paris, and had
faded from the scene.
Joyce might seem to have exchanged Left Bank bohemianism
for a less louche and abandoned, more professional set of compan-
ions. But in another way, as always, he continued to live in two
worlds. For all his reluctance even to set foot in the Free State, his
less glamorous ties to Ireland not only remained many, varied and
deep, but also became more outward ones. Joyce might publicly
claim to be unwanted and unnoticed by his own people. In fact, to
a much greater extent than in Trieste or Zurich, Ireland came look-
ing for him. Old friends from the days before exile, some of whom
had been fictionalized in A Portrait, like J. F. Byrne, Padraic and
146
Mary Colum, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington and Constantine Curran,
all made their way to Paris at different times. So did members of
Joyce s and Nora s families, like Stanislaus and Michael Healy.
Dubliner Patrick Tuohy painted his portrait (and his father s).
Younger Irish writers and poets like Thomas McGreevy, Brian
Coffey and Arthur Power came to see him or were drawn into his
orbit. Most significantly of all, the young Beckett attached himself
to Joyce. As a writer, Beckett both learned profoundly from and
reacted astringently against Joyce s example. Like a number of
other members of Joyce s circle, he worked both as an amanuensis
and a researcher for Work in Progress, reading books at Joyce s
behest and reporting back to him.
To a greater extent than at any time since he had left, in conver-
sation at least, Joyce was once more saturated in Ireland, particu-
larly Dublin, in their literature, history and geography. He and his
Irish friends talked endlessly about particular Irish people and
places. He steeped Work in Progress in both. He listened to Radio
Éireann, or Radio Athlone, as he preferred to call it, hearing Irish
voices through static and foreign interferences, as does the reader
of the Wake. (Ironically enough, the station s call-sign was  2rn ,
suggesting that listeners  come back to Erin ). Joyce remained an
astute self-promoter during the 1930s. But he saw self-promotion
as his way of promoting his country. If the growth of Joyce tourism
in Ireland is anything to go by, he was right to do so. Increasingly,
he promoted Ireland in Europe in other, usually small and typically
idiosyncratic ways. In this respect, he did his duty by the Free
State, though on his terms, not its.
He became particularly interested in promoting the Irish tenor
John Sullivan. Like Joyce s father, Sullivan was a Cork man. Like
Joyce himself, he had long been living in continental Europe. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]