Conversations With James Joyce

by Arthur Power

Overview

'In the Dublin of my day there was the kind of desperate freedom which comes from a lack of responsibility, for the English were in governance then, so everyone said what he liked. Now I hear since the Free State came in there is less freedom. The Church has made inroads everywhere, so that we are in fact becoming a bourgeois nation, with the Church supplying our aristocracy, and I do not see much hope for us intellectually. Once the Church is in command she will devour everything..'
-James Joyce in conversation with Arthur Power.

This is the first paperback edition of Arthur Power's unique and fascinating account of his friendship with James Joyce during the 1920s. Power, a young Irishman working as an art critic in Paris, first met Joyce in a Montparnasse dancehall, and the two men maintained a prickly friendship for several years. Power re-creates his conversations with the master, on a remarkable range of topics, literary and otherwise. We read of Joyce's thoughts on writers past and present: Synge, Ibsen, Hardy, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Gide, Proust, T.S. Eliot, Tennyson and Shakespeare. Joyce also speaks of the looming might of America ('Political influence, yes, but not cultural'); of religion ('Do you believe in a next life?' 'I don't think much of this life'); and of his own work.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781843513094
Publisher:	Lilliput Press, Limited, The
Publication date:	12/15/1999
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	128
File size:	211 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Arthur Power (1891-1984) was raised in Waterford, and served in the First World War before moving to Paris. He later returned to Ireland and was art critic for The Irish Times. He is the author of From the Old Waterford House (1940). Conversations with James Joyce, edited by the Joyce scholar Clive Hart, was originally published in 1974.

Read an Excerpt

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 organised 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 the Eiffel Tower, where I used to visit him frequently.

I always took care not to call at his flat until the late afternoon,
when he used to come into the room from his study wearing that short white working-coat of his, not unlike a dentist’s,
and collapse into the armchair with his usual long, heartfelt sigh.

As often as not Mrs Joyce would say to him,

—For God’s sake, Jim, take that coat off you!

But the only answer she got was his Gioconda smile, and he would gaze back humorously at me through his thick glasses.

Later in the evening it was his normal habit to dine at Les
Trianons, a smart restaurant opposite the Gare Montparnasse.
Once I met Marie Laurencin there when she stopped on her way out to speak to Joyce. A great admirer of her work, I was fascinated by those delicate and supersensitive young girls of hers. But to my surprise, I, who had imagined her to be like them, found her heavily built and rather masculine-looking—a woman who,
according to gossip, preferred hommes de sport for her companions,
footballers and racing cyclists.

—Monsieur Joyce, she told him, I want to do a portrait of your daughter. Tell her to come on Thursday next, at eleven o’clock.

I believe that when Lucia did turn up, Marie Laurencin was lying in a darkened room complaining of a headache from the previous night’s bombe. She put off the meeting to a later date,
and so I never saw the portrait, which is a pity, since Lucia, with her sensitive bearing and that squint of hers, would have been
Marie Laurencin’s typical subject.

After returning to his flat in the Square Robiac, Joyce would settle down in a sympathetic and social mood. Here in the evening,
with his favourite bottle of white wine, ‘St Patrice,’ at his elbow, a wine he discovered while on holiday in the south of
France, we used to discuss many things, but the main subject of our conversation was naturally our common interest in literature.
In the ordinary sense Joyce was not a conversationalist. In fact he was remarkably taciturn, ‘silence, exile and cunning’ being his three vaunted weapons, though I must say I never saw any evidence of the third quality, for he was singularly openhearted and devoid of guile, except perhaps that all silent men seem more cunning than do talkative ones. In our discussions I spoke much more than he, and I think it was my argumentativeness which strangely enough cemented the friendship between us.

Joyce had lent me the manuscript of Ulysses, which I carried in a bulky parcel tied up in brown paper, across the taxi-ridden streets back to my studio in constant fear that I should be run over and the manuscript lost. But when I sat down to read it I found myself confused by its novelty and lost in the fantasia of its complicated prose, not knowing if a thing had really happened or was just a Celtic whorl. In fact I later irritated Joyce by enquiring into the details of what actually occurred during
Bloom’s encounter with Gerty MacDowell on the beach.

—Nothing happened between them, he replied. It all took place in Bloom’s imagination.

It is said that when H.G. Wells put down the loosely bound first edition, with pages falling all over the place, he felt that he had suppressed a revolution; but I knew that one had been launched. Taking for his subject his native city, which once he had evidently hated, but which now he had re-found to cherish,
Joyce had created a new realism, in an atmosphere that was at the same time half factual and half dream.

In regard to its well-known analogy with Homer’s Odyssey,
an analogy which at the time I questioned, I remember Joyce choosing as an example the ‘Sirens’ episode, which takes place in the Ormond Bar on the quays. He compared the barmaids with Homer’s Sirens, pointing out that the barmaids, with careful hair-do, make-up, and smart blouses, looked well only to the waist, and that below the waist they wore old stained skirts, broken and comfortable shoes, and mended stockings. Again, when
I once admired the phrase ‘Thalatta! Thalatta! She is our great sweet mother,’ he looked across at me and said ‘Read what I have written above: “The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea.”’
Whereas Homer’s Odyssey describes prancing horses, handsome men and fair women, gods and goddesses, Joyce’s Ulysses,
as we know, is laid in tattered streets among blowsy women and in jostling bars, culminating in the ‘Nighttown’ episode. I
remember the brothel area faintly from my youth, a fly-blown district including a number of thatched cottages in which every trick was practised, with a number of oldish women in black shifts running about. If you got up to talk to somebody, by means of some miracle only known to them you found when you returned to your seat that your whiskey had been changed to water—while in a back room there lay a peasant Venus with a religious lamp burning over the nuptial bed. Despite these sordid memories, it meant something to me that an Irishman from Zürich had arrived in Paris with a huge masterpiece, in the modern idiom, based on my native city. Indeed, it was perhaps pride in this achievement, rather than a reaction against Joyce’s bourgeois life, that had really prompted me to try to bring him to studio parties, in order to show him off to my friends.

Editorial Reviews

While working in Paris as an art critic for the Irish press, Power became friends with Joyce during the 1920s. The Dubliners shared many a conversation over many a drink, and afterward Power wrote down as much of these exchanges as he could remember. In this volume, released in 1974, Power recounts many of those discussions on a variety of subjects with the long-deceased Joyce. Though Power acknowledges that he might not be recalling Kinch's exact words, LJ's reviewer found that the book "has the ring of authenticity" (LJ 9/1/74). This is a must read for Joyce fans as it offers unique insights into his very private character. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal