The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (15 page)

Dr. Sidler decided to give Joyce atropine, though two months later, in April, Joyce developed glaucoma again, and as his illness continued through the summer and fall, he discovered another problem with atropine: it was poisonous. Atropine is derived from a plant called belladonna, or deadly nightshade, and its roots, berries and leaves contain a chemical that disrupts the parasympathetic nervous system. Eating a single leaf could be fatal, and an excessive amount of atropine—one or two too many eyedrops per day or a slightly stronger solution—could cause fainting, headaches, throat irritation, delirium and hallucinations. During the months Joyce spent avoiding surgery, the amount of atropine he took became toxic. He complained of fevers and an irritated throat. He began hallucinating.

Word of Joyce’s condition spread. John Quinn purchased some of Joyce’s manuscripts to help him financially, and knowing Joyce was unable to read, he wrote to Nora to explain the seriousness of glaucoma and the importance of obtaining Switzerland’s best doctors—advice from friends or a priest or the British consul, he said, would do no good. Quinn cabled ten pounds to help pay for the medical fee, and he consulted America’s “best eye expert” about Joyce’s case. “Poor fellow,” he wrote to Pound, “one can tell from his letters that he is a sick man and worried and harassed and depressed.”

Pound had worried about Joyce’s eyes ever since Joyce sent a picture of himself in 1916. “Thanks for the photograph,” Pound responded. “It is a bit terrifying.” He was alarmed that Joyce’s eyes were so distorted, and he offered his own alternatives to surgery. He suggested squinting through cylindrical lenses used to correct astigmatism and twisting them around to see if they helped. He should also track down an osteopath in Zurich instead of a typical M.D. He might be cured, he wrote, “by having a vertebra set right side up and thus relieving blood or nerve pressures.” Like Quinn, Pound consulted his own medical expert for advice. Quinn’s expert didn’t like Pound’s expert.

—

SOMEHOW—DESPITE WAR, pain, atropine hallucinations and his inability to earn an income—Joyce found ways to write
Ulysses
. There were small moments of health stolen in early afternoons, days of reduced pain and functioning pupils, a week or two of optimism inspired by Dr. Sidler’s confidence. Joyce scrawled phrases on slips of paper that he left like Easter eggs in unlikely spots around the apartment. He would try to find them when he was better and piece together the lives of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom from scraps. It continued like this for years. There were few, if any, bursts of inspiration that set him composing paragraphs at a time.
Ulysses
was a procession of drafts, a sedimentary novel that gained its mass one grain at a time.

Joyce kept notebooks and large sheets of paper crammed with character descriptions, lists of rhetorical devices, notes on mathematics, facts about ancient Greece and Homer’s
Odyssey
. Sometimes the notes were arranged by chapter or subject: “Names and Places,” “Gulls,” “Theosophy,” “Blind” and “Recipes.” He wrote down phrases and single words, seemingly at random—“tainted curds,” “heaventree,” “knight of the razor,” “boiled shirt,” “toro”—and collected them in notebooks, where they waited to be inserted into his manuscript like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. Big or small (one of his entries was simply “We”), Joyce seems to have known exactly where the fragments would go (Bloom must use the royal We, the embodied collective, at a certain moment in the “Circe” episode). Each time he inserted a detail into a draft, he crossed it out with a crayon until he had notebooks filled with large Xs and lists of insertions struck through with red, blue and green slashes.

As time went on, Joyce’s note taking increased. There was a torrent of notes—he made notes from his notes—all of them together, he said, would fill a small suitcase. He stopped drafting on both sides of his notebook pages so that he could use the left pages (the versos) entirely for additions. Joyce built
Ulysses
phrase by phrase.

Though he was far from Dublin, Joyce found his material everywhere. He mined the Club des Étrangers for information and manipulated conversations so that they would bear upon the subjects discussed in his novel. Everything around him, anything people talked about, had a potential place in his scheme—a Swiss pun, an idle gesture, the name of a poison, an item of physiology or folklore. Joyce was voracious. In the middle of a conversation, or at dinner, or while walking down the street, he would stop and produce a small notebook from his vest pocket and bend forward until his face approached the end of his twitching pencil while he jotted down a fortuitous word or phrase. In August, after Nora took the children to Locarno to give Joyce the space he seemed to need, he wrote alone and talked to the cat. “Mrkgnao!” said the cat. He wrote it down.

Nora wrote from Locarno about how much the marketplace reminded her of Trieste, and she told him about the thunderstorms, which would have terrified him. “I shall wait at the telephone at Eleven if you telephone well and good if not dosent matter.” Nora’s letters, though short and infrequent, were like Joyce’s. The tenderness was half concealed. “I hope you are writing Ulisses dont stay up too late at night I suppose you havent bought any close for yourself be sure and do so[.]” If it was strange to be in Zurich without his family, it became easier as he ambled through the city, swinging his ashplant cane just as he did in Dublin. Joyce walked down Bahnhofstrasse in the late summer afternoon and listened to the languages populating the sidewalks. He could smell the linden trees along the street, and behind their slender trunks were Zurich’s blue and white trams, the same colors as the trams on Nassau Street.

Pain
—without warning—struck Joyce’s head like lightning. The face of the stranger who carried him to a nearby bench was blurry, and Joyce saw halos around the streetlamps radiating outward from red to yellow to green. When he gathered his senses, the dread of knowing what the doctor would say when he returned to the Augenklinik must have washed over him. Dr. Sidler would have tapped on his eyelids and felt the retinal arteries throbbing against the wall of Joyce’s eye. He decided that an operation was unavoidable.

Joyce was conscious during his surgery. The nurse medicated him with atropine and cocaine before the blepharostats pried his eyelids open. The surgeon held Joyce’s eyeball with fixation forceps so that his eye, riveted in the surgical light, watched the blade advancing like a bayonet. The cornea resisted for a moment before the blade pierced the surface and slid into the eye’s anterior chamber. Exudate flowed over into the incision. The nurse took the fixation forceps, turned Joyce’s eye downward and handed Dr. Sidler the iris forceps. The prongs entered the chamber and pulled the top edge of Joyce’s iris out through the incision like a tissue from a box. The nurse handed the doctor the iris scissors, and after warning Joyce to hold still, he cut away a triangular piece of his iris and pushed the severed edge back inside with a spatula.

When it was over, Joyce had a nervous breakdown. Perhaps it was the trauma of the procedure—the sound of the instruments clinking in the tray, taking their turns at him. Perhaps as he lay in bed, the cocaine fading and his single eye darting around the room to follow atropine hallucinations flitting into corners like ghosts, he had too many hours to imagine the prospect of a life spent groping for scraps of paper like an old man. Perhaps it was the burden of writing an exhaustive story of a single day in Dublin, a day that he insisted on narrating minute by minute and wouldn’t end until well past midnight. After three years of work, it was still only eight in the morning—and he did not have a single completed episode. Perhaps it was the strain of warfare, of never having money, of children to feed and the mounting quotidian problems he could barely manage when he was healthy. Perhaps it was guilt. Nora rushed back from Locarno to be with him in the recovery room, but the doctors refused all visitors until his emotional collapse subsided. It took three days. She wrote letters on his behalf and nursed him while his eye bled for two weeks.

—

THE SURGERY MIGHT have provided Nora with some small measure of hope, for Joyce had been ensconcing himself in a private world with little room for her or the children. Perhaps his pain would bring him back to her and to the world outside of
Ulysses
. Since fleeing to Switzerland, Joyce had begun to treat his life as a feeding ground for his book. At one point, he asked Nora to cheat on him so that he might understand more completely Leopold Bloom’s life as a cuckold. Nora’s trip to Locarno with the children was a tactical retreat to coax out a man steadily withdrawing into his work, but neither the retreat nor his illness brought him back.

The family’s more practical problem was that Joyce fervently pursued his writing despite the fact that his career, well over ten years in the making, provided so little. Though Joyce was gaining recognition, the possibility of making a living as a writer seemed as distant now as it had ever been. By mid-1917, Joyce had earned exactly two and a half shillings in royalties on
Dubliners
—a fraction of one pound.
A Portrait
was published in the United States at the end of 1916, and Miss Weaver published a British edition by persuading the U.S. publisher, Ben Huebsch, to ship extra copies to England. Though Joyce’s first novel was buoyed by a raft of good reviews, it took several months for the British edition to sell only 750 copies. Joyce was mystified, but Pound reminded him just what sort of writers they were. “How many intelligent people do you think there are in England and America? If
you will
write for the intelligent, how THE HELL do you expect your books to sell by the 100,000???????”

Joyce expected little more than enough income to make wartime inflation manageable, and yet even elemental concerns (paying the rent, keeping his family warm, his eyes) were lost in his pressing desire to create one permanent work of art. While writing
Dubliners
and the first draft of
A Portrait
, he told Stannie that he wanted to transubstantiate “the bread of everyday life” into something immortal. As time went on, the quest for artistic permanence grew into the desire to write a novel in a language “above all languages,” to speak beyond the vocabulary that tradition handed to him. The war had given Joyce what it gave the Dadaists and the anarchists, what it gave Lenin and Freud: the sense that everything was about to change, that the crackup of Europe and the fall of empires portended something truly revolutionary, and if a novel were skillful enough, it could advance all of civilization. For what mattered about being an egoist and an artist was that the pure, self-directed individual would abandon the self, would delve back into the far reaches of culture, the broad collectives and abstractions, the imperial traditions, the conscience of a race, and transform it all.

Luckily, money arrived from various sources. Supporters in New York (including Scofield Thayer, the editor of
The
Dial
) donated a thousand dollars to help. One of John D. Rockefeller’s daughters, Edith McCormick, gave Joyce a thousand Swiss francs a month for over a year. A few days after the publication of
A Portrait
, Joyce received a letter from a London law firm while he was convalescing in a darkened room—someone else had to read it to him. The letter informed him that an anonymous “admirer” was giving him two hundred pounds, equivalent to his annual salary before the war. Neither Joyce nor Pound could guess who the donor was.

Wartime patronage made it easier for Joyce to indulge his artistic ambitions, but the grandeur of his ambition meant that there was little room in his life for anything other than
Ulysses
. He read portions of his manuscript to Nora, who remained indifferent, and when he couldn’t talk to her about
Ulysses
, he found little to say to her at all. It was no coincidence that one of Joyce’s closest friends in Zurich, an English painter named Frank Budgen, wanted to hear all about his book. Budgen remembered how he first saw Joyce in the summer of 1918. Joyce was a slender man with pants cut narrow at the legs “wading like a heron,” navigating around chairs and tables in a darkened garden with his head tilted upward and his irregular eyes peering out from behind thick lenses. Joyce and Budgen drank carafes of white wine (always white wine, which tasted, Joyce said, like electricity) at their regular table at the Pfauen. Joyce would throw his head back, and the café would echo with his outburst of a laugh.

They had conversations with sculptors and poets, intellectuals, expats, communists and Freudians. “Why all this fuss and bother about the mystery of the unconscious?” Joyce asked Budgen. “What about the mystery of the conscious?” Once, to liven up the mood, Joyce took from his pocket a tiny pair of a doll’s underwear, put the frilly garment on his fingers and walked them seductively across the table toward a poet, who became red with embarrassment.

Budgen was eager to hear about
Ulysses
. “Among other things,” Joyce told him, “my book is the epic of the human body.” Budgen looked on skeptically as Joyce continued. “In my book the body lives in and moves through space and is the home of a full human personality.”

“But the minds, the thoughts of the characters—”

“If they had no body they would have no mind,” Joyce said. “It’s all one.”

What Budgen admired most about Joyce was his zeal, his boyish excitement about small things—he could work all day on two sentences. He read portions of his manuscript to Budgen in a muted, far-off voice, as if he were reading only to himself. He seemed to be discovering something no one had ever found, like a new continent or a cure to a dreadful disease.

Once, Joyce handed Budgen a piece of graph paper torn from his notebook. “Can you read it?” Joyce asked. He couldn’t. “There are about a dozen words written in all directions, up, down and across.” Joyce pulled out his magnifying glass and asked him to try with that—even a few letters would help. The glass enlarged a thicket of writing. Was there an “e”? Or a “c”? A “c-l”? Budgen discerned a few letters appearing like deer in the woods, and that was good enough. Joyce took back his paper and magnifying glass and waded on. He was one word further into the day.