The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (20 page)

Dearer than the whole

world would she be to him and gild his days with happiness. Nothing else mattered. Come what might she would be wild, untrammelled, free.

But Gerty’s happiness would have to be a hard-won thing. As Joyce thought more about that moment, he began to imagine the arduous paths her thoughts would take, the difficulties she and the mysterious gentleman must surmount before their gilded days of freedom together. Gerty’s thoughts gathered like clouds. Joyce marked a letter
M
after the word
happiness,
wrote another
M
on the blank left page, and began writing. “There was the allimportant question was he a married man. But even if—what then? Perhaps it was an old flame he was in mourning for from the days beyond recall.” “Allimportant” was not enough for Gerty. Joyce drew an arrow up and inserted “and she was dying to know.”

Her curiosity leads her beyond the question of whether the man looking at her is married, for there are more poignant obstacles than matrimony. Joyce drew another arrow farther up: “or a widower who had lost his wife or some tragedy.” What kind of tragedy? Joyce drew yet another arrow up. A tragedy “like the nobleman in that novel that had to have her put into a madhouse, cruel only to be kind.” As the nobleman on the beach came into focus, Joyce added one last flourish at the top left corner of the page. The man looking at her was like the nobleman “with the foreign name from the land of song.”

With that small phrase—an insert to an insert to an insert—Gerty’s imagination captures something of who Leopold Bloom actually is. “Leopold” is foreign to Ireland, of course, and yet his family name is still more foreign, though dressed in native garb. When Leopold’s father immigrated to Ireland, he anglicized his surname to “Bloom” from “Virag,” the Hungarian word for flower. Bloom’s Jewishness is well known in Dublin, but his foreign name is half obscured. Gerty, in her fantasy, stumbles upon his secret. There are several other moments of insight lurking in their thoughts. Bloom guesses that she’s about to have her period, and she is. Gerty guesses that he is a cuckold, and he is. They are blind epiphanies.

Joyce returned to the beginning of Gerty’s new excursion where it began lower down on the left page. “But even if—what then?” Gerty would push on. What
if
he were married? He marked the letter
W
and began another insertion at the left edge of the page. “Would it make a very great difference?” He wrote another sentence he discarded, but the misstep took him in a new direction. He began a larger answer to the question in another insert at the bottom of the page.

From everything in

the least indelicate her finebred nature instinctively recoiled. She loathed that sort of person, the fallen women off the accommodation walk beside the Dodder that went with the soldiers and coarse men, degrading the sex and being taken up to the police station. No, no: not that. They would be just good friends in spite of the conventions of Society with a big ess.

Like the “Sirens” overture, Gerty’s mind becomes clearer in retrospect. Now when Joyce imagines her fantasizing about the man watching her on the beach, she conjures possible worlds (a marriage, an affair, the awful consequences) and pulls back toward virtue. Friendship is, nevertheless, a dead end for Gerty. The promise that “she would be wild, untrammelled, free” is still on the horizon of her thoughts, and Joyce would take her there.

She finds another way to get close to the man on the beach while avoiding the shame of the fallen women in the Ringsend tenements. Joyce went all the way back to the “allimportant question” and her first thought: “Perhaps it was an old flame. . . .” Gerty would understand his loss. She imagines the ghost of the woman who stands between them. “The old love was waiting, waiting with little white hands stretched out, with blue appealing eyes. Heart of mine! She would follow, her dream of love, the dictates of her heart that told her he was her all in all, the only man in all the world for her for love was the master guide.” She enjoys the way a small word like
all
can do so much.

“Nothing else mattered.” Gerty finally arrives at her destination, only now she would be “wild, untrammelled, free” whether she is with him or not. Her fantasy about the nobleman has freed her from him. Joyce opened up an excursion to a madhouse, a foreign nobleman, fallen tenement women, a police station and a dead lover’s ghost all in the period between “gild his days with happiness” and “Nothing else mattered.” To build this passage, he incorporated fifteen insertions from his “Nausicaa” note sheets. He had 879 more. Joyce didn’t revise
Ulysses
. It was revisionary through and through.

11.

For all of its obscurities, Joyce’s book is more sentimental than erudite, more elemental than cerebral. The origin of his interest in the
Odyssey
wasn’t lofty. It was a children’s book. Joyce was eleven years old when an English teacher at his Jesuit school asked his class to write an essay about their favorite hero. Joyce thought of Charles Lamb’s
The Adventures of Ulysses
. It was about the wily Greek warrior traveling home from the Trojan War, a king who was, according to Lamb’s version, “inflamed with a desire of seeing again, after a ten years’ absence, his wife and native country, Ithaca.” It was a tale of superhuman feats, magical spells, banquets and treasures, terrifying monsters, fair princesses and thwarted villains.

Ulysses heard the song of the Sirens (a song so beautiful that men abandoned their families forever) by plugging his crew’s ears with wax and having them tie him to the ship’s mast. He survived the storm that killed his crew by clinging to that same mast for nine days. When Ulysses returned to Ithaca, he disguised himself as a beggar and slaughtered his wife’s suitors to be reunited with his wife and only son at last. The teacher, after reading Joyce’s essay, frowned at the young man and said, “Ulysses is not a hero.”

But to Joyce, he was. Ulysses was the “world-troubling seaman” and the most complete human being in all of literature. He was a father to Telemachus and a son to Laertes. He was a friend, a soldier, a lover and a husband. Joyce thought of him as Europe’s first gentleman, but he was also a rebel. Ulysses was the only man in Hellas who opposed the Trojan War. He knew the official reasons were “only a pretext for Greek merchants, who were seeking new markets,” Joyce said, but when he fought, Ulysses was an ingenious warrior. He invented the first tank, he reasoned, the Trojan horse. Yet beyond all of the adventures—beyond the hard work, the detours, the challenges, the schemes and disguises, the spells and the riches given and lost—the story of Ulysses is a story about going home.

—

IN 1909, years before the First World War, Joyce returned home to Dublin with his son Giorgio. After five years abroad,
Dubliners
was unpublished,
A Portrait
was a mess, and
Ulysses
was merely an idea. Joyce could not properly call himself a writer, though he could call himself a father, and he made the rounds in Dublin displaying his four-year-old boy. One afternoon he met Vincent Cosgrave and boasted of his life in Trieste sipping coffee on the Adriatic and coming home to Nora. Cosgrave agreed that Joyce was lucky to be with Nora—he himself, he told Joyce, was fortunate enough to have met Nora in front of the National Museum steps several nights a week back in 1904. And they, too, had walked out to Ringsend.

Joyce’s mind tumbled through the implications. There
were
many nights when she couldn’t meet him, and Finn’s Hotel couldn’t have been that busy. She might have walked with Cosgrave down the same streets even as Joyce was in his room writing her letters. He wondered if she whispered the same things in Cosgrave’s ear that she whispered to him and if, perhaps, she had taken things further.

Joyce did the math before he wrote to her. They had first slept together three nights after leaving Dublin—October 11, 1904. Giorgio was born on July 27. That was nine months and sixteen days (and what’s two weeks to a jealous mind?). He remembered how small the bloodstain was on their hotel sheets, and the baby came much earlier than expected. In the upstairs room of his father’s house in Dublin, Joyce got a pen and paper. “Is Georgie my son?” he wrote to Nora. “Were you fucked by anyone before you came to me?” Joyce, who despised violence, wanted to stop a man’s beating heart with a bullet.

After nearly two weeks of silence from Trieste, Joyce visited his friend John Byrne in his row house on Eccles Street and broke down in a fit of sobbing. Byrne later wrote that he had never seen anyone so thoroughly shattered. He listened to Joyce’s story before concluding that it was all a “blasted lie.” Cosgrave and Gogarty, his ne’er-do-well Nighttown companions, were conspiring against him to destroy his happiness. They were simply jealous. Whether or not Byrne was right, he was telling Joyce what he wanted to hear. Byrne’s assurances sank into Joyce’s beaten frame over the course of the evening. He slept at Eccles Street and woke up the next morning in a new mood.

Joyce begged Nora for her forgiveness, and for perhaps the first time in his life, his tenacious superiority dissolved. The defiant individualist so eager to cast off home, fatherland and church found relief in helplessness. He thought of Nora holding him “in her hand like a pebble.” To feel belittled by her was to sense something larger than himself, something approaching awe—this is what happened when the ego splits. Like the imaginary woman in his first prose sketch who “made to arise in him the central torrents of life,” Joyce believed Nora was making him a writer, and he idolized her for it. “Guide me, my saint, my angel,” he wrote to her. “
Everything
that is noble and exalted and deep and true and moving in what I write comes, I believe, from you.” He imagined curling up in her womb like her unborn child, as if she were bringing him into the world at last.

It was Joyce’s first time away from Nora, and he wrote to her constantly. He sent her gloves and Donegal tweed for a new dress. He bought her an ivory necklace with an inscription etched into one of the pieces. “Love Is Unhappy,” it said on one side, “When Love Is Away” on the other. He sent her money to buy lingerie. He wanted to see her in a woman’s ample undergarments—nothing skimpy and tight like a schoolgirl’s things, nothing with silly lace trim or fabric thin enough to see through. He wanted her in full, roomy lingerie bedecked with “great crimson bows” and three or four layers of frills at the knees and thighs. He sent her packages of cocoa and told Stannie to make sure she drank it twice a day and ate plentifully so that when he returned to Trieste her body would be as ample and as womanly as her underclothes. Joyce enjoyed the complex secrecy of lingerie. He enjoyed the public glimpse of a private article. He imagined smelling her perfume on the cloth blended with her heavier smells beneath it. He imagined pristine white fabric bearing stains.

At first, he didn’t dare mention the mad images welling up in his mind, but when he wrote to Nora near the end of November he alluded to a certain kind of letter that he wished she would write. He wanted her to lead the way. So she did. She began by giving him instructions and telling him what she would do to him if he disobeyed her. The letter was so dirty that we will never know what her instructions were. Nora destroyed her letters years later. Only one item survives—Joyce cherished it in a white leather pouch lined with satin. It was a one-word telegram from Nora: “
Sì
.”

Most of Joyce’s letters remain, and in December 1909 they began to evolve. One of the effects of his declarations of devotion is that they allowed him to give himself over to a fierce abandon. “Inside this spiritual love I have for you,” he wrote, “there is also a wild beast-like craving for every inch of your body, for every secret and shameful part of it, for every odour and act of it.” He had previously alluded to the various acts and positions that flashed across his mind, and now he went so far as to describe them. He imagined, he wrote, “your hot lips sucking off my cock while my head is wedged in between your fat thighs, my hands clutching the round cushions of your bum and my tongue licking ravenously up your rank red cunt.”

Joyce was trying to take language as far as it could go, and in doing so he was crossing a threshold he had wanted to cross for years. When he was struggling in Paris in 1902, Yeats wrote to tell him that a poem he sent was amateurish. It was the poetry “of a young man who is practicing his instrument, taking pleasure in the mere handling of the stops.” Now Joyce was sounding the deepest notes. He was beginning to say everything, to write the unwritten thoughts that go on in the mind.

He wanted, he wrote to Nora, “to fuck between your two rosy-tipped bubbies, to come on your face and squirt it over your hot cheeks and eyes.” Each articulated desire compelled him to write more, as if his letters could give Nora a complete inventory of his thoughts. He listed all the places she should fuck him. He wanted her to ride him in a chair, on the floor, over the back of the sofa. He wanted her to pull him on top of her on the kitchen table. “Fuck me into you arseways,” he wrote. He wanted her to ride him with a red rose sticking out behind her. He wanted her to hike up her clothes and squat over him, “grunting like a young sow doing her dung, and a big fat dirty snaking thing coming slowly out of your backside.” He wanted her to take him on a darkened staircase while she whispered into his ear all the filthy words and stories she and other girls told each other.

The things he wrote would mortify him the next day, and brief silences from Trieste sparked fears that he had gravely offended her. Joyce was, for the first time in his life, afraid of the power of his words. When he was not worried that his letters would estrange Nora, he was terrified that their intensity would provoke her to throw herself at someone out of sheer lust. While Nora telegrammed Joyce, “
Sì
,” he telegrammed, “
Be careful
.” And yet the thrill of their erotic letters depended upon dismissing caution. His extravagant words deliberately risked his own rejection so that the arrival of her next letter in the mail could usher him all the more dramatically to the safe intimacy of acceptance. Nora Barnacle guided Joyce to his most noble and exalted writing by letting him be obscene.