JOYCE COMES TO PARIS DURING THE GLORY YEARS
He was nearly always a drifter, moving from city to city. But people remembered the tall, myopic man wherever he went. Always the intellectual, James Augustine Aloysius Joyce is best known for The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. It was in Paris that Ulysses was completed and published.
Joyce had been to Paris before. After his early contact with the Irish Literary Renaissance, he lost interest in becoming a priest. He was the son of a fiery Irish Catholic and these influences can be seen in his works. In 1902, at 20 years of age, he went to Paris to attend medical school, but that was short lived. Joyce then taught for a while, finally settling in Zurich. Here he wrote Dubliners and began a lifelong relationship with Nora Barnacle, who would one day become his wife. After A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man appeared, Ezra Pound took note of Joyce’s work, and Pound was well known in literary circles. Through him, Joyce met Harriet Shaw Weaver, who became Joyce’s editor and patron.
In 1922 he had a meeting with Marcel Proust; Joyce was impressed that Proust could write a single sentence that would fill a whole magazine. It was through the efforts of Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare and Company that Joyce was able to get Ulysses published.Beach worked tirelessly for Joyce, and Pound collected subscription money to pay for the book’s first printing.
The story takes place in Dublin on one particular day, June 16, 1904. It traces the wanderings through the city of a Jewish advertising salesman named Leopold Blum, whom Joyce sees as on an odyssey. The book enters into the minds of both Bloom and his wife, Molly. It deals with the subconscious and is written in the Proustian style that is mostly “stream of consciousness.” By getting inside the characters’ brains, Joyce came up with some seriously sexual ideas that certain critics called pornography. The long last chapter of the book is mainly just one sentence. When the book was published, it was banned in many places, including England and the United States, where it was considered “obscene”. It was not until the thirties that the ban was lifted. In the USA. Joyce said, “If Ulysses is not fit to read, then life isn’t fit to live.”
But of interest to many of his biographers are the years he spent in Paris. Journalists wrote about his daily swim in the Seine, his penchant for surrounding himself with mirrors while he worked, and the black gloves he wore while he slept. Yet he was also deeply interested in music and often attended major concerts.
While he lived in an apartment at 71, rue Cardinal Lemoyne, he was across from Ernest Hemingway. It had been a rent-free gift by the writer Valery Larbaud, offered to Joyce while Larbaud was in Italy. Joyce
lived like a mogul at times, always finding someone else to pay his way. He stayed at the Hôtel Lutetia and could be seen eating elaborate meals fairly often at the Gypsy Bar near the Pantheon, Brasserie Lipp, Les Deux Magots, Le Closerie des Lilas and Le Dôme.
He was invited to the salons of the rich and famous and was a welcome icon to all except Gertrude Stein, who said he was “an incomprehensible whom anyone could understand.”He was a Paris celebrity but was much bothered by failing eyesight. He suffered from a serious eye disease and had as many as eleven operations. People doted on him, cared for him and tried to make him comfortable. When the proceeds began coming in for the book, it was Sylvia Beach who was denied any of the profits. She had been shunned by the man who was now a “star”.
He had as a secretary the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, author of Waiting For Godot. He and Nora had a son, Georgio, and a daughter, Lucia, who fell in love with Beckett. They were seen in restaurants and theatres for a time, but then he shunned her. She was an unstable young woman and “sex starved” (in her own words) and was deeply hurt by the incident.
His final undertaking was Finnegan’s Wake, which was even more difficult to understand than his other works. He died on January 13th 1941, having fled France to Switzerland by train via Aix-Les-Bains.
It is interesting to walk in the shadow of James Joyce in Paris. Since 1999 there is a tiny square named after him; it is a little well tended garden very close to the Biblioteque Nationale, equipped with children’s swings. The sign says, simply, James Joyce, “writer”. Joyce is buried with Nora and his son, Giorgio, in Zurich, Switzerland.
He lived at the following places:
Victoria Palace Hotel, 6, rue Blaise Desgolf in the 6th. (Here he started Finnigan’s Wake)Hotel Lenox , 9, rue de l’UniversitéHotel Lutetia, 45, boulevard Raspail in the 6th
Residences:
5, boulevard Raspail 71, rue Cardinal-Lemoine 5, rue de l’Assomption on Ile St-Louis 8, ave Charjes Floquet
ARNIE GREENBERG
Double Deception is work of fiction recently published in serialization on the web. It is a story through the memories of Dr Robert Bartlett Haas, a close friend of Gertrude’s,about the portrait of Gertrude Stein that had been done by Picasso before WWI. This portrait is now on view in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The story unfolds when Gertrude decides that she would like a copy of the painting done so she can keep a similar image in her summer home…
JOYCE COMES TO PARIS DURING THE GLORY YEARS
He was nearly always a drifter, moving from city to city. But people remembered the tall, myopic man wherever he went. Always the intellectual, James Augustine Aloysius Joyce is best known for The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. It was in Paris that Ulysses was completed and published.
Joyce had been to Paris before. After his early contact with the Irish Literary Renaissance, he lost interest in becoming a priest. He was the son of a fiery Irish Catholic and these influences can be seen in his works. In 1902, at 20 years of age, he went to Paris to attend medical school, but that was short lived. Joyce then taught for a while, finally settling in Zurich. Here he wrote Dubliners and began a lifelong relationship with Nora Barnacle, who would one day become his wife. After A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man appeared, Ezra Pound took note of Joyce’s work, and Pound was well known in literary circles. Through him, Joyce met Harriet Shaw Weaver, who became Joyce’s editor and patron.
In 1922 he had a meeting with Marcel Proust; Joyce was impressed that Proust could write a single sentence that would fill a whole magazine. It was through the efforts of Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare and Company that Joyce was able to get Ulysses published.
Beach worked tirelessly for Joyce, and Pound collected subscription money to pay for the book’s first printing.
The story takes place in Dublin on one particular day, June 16, 1904. It traces the wanderings through the city of a Jewish advertising salesman named Leopold Blum, whom Joyce sees as on an odyssey. The book enters into the minds of both Bloom and his wife, Molly. It deals with the subconscious and is written in the Proustian style that is mostly “stream of consciousness.” By getting inside the characters’ brains, Joyce came up with some seriously sexual ideas that certain critics called pornography. The long last chapter of the book is mainly just one sentence. When the book was published, it was banned in many places, including England and the United States, where it was considered “obscene”. It was not until the thirties that the ban was lifted. In the USA. Joyce said, “If Ulysses is not fit to read, then life isn’t fit to live.”
But of interest to many of his biographers are the years he spent in Paris. Journalists wrote about his daily swim in the Seine, his penchant for surrounding himself with mirrors while he worked, and the black gloves he wore while he slept. Yet he was also deeply interested in music and often attended major concerts.
While he lived in an apartment at 71, rue Cardinal Lemoyne, he was across from Ernest Hemingway. It had been a rent-free gift by the writer Valery Larbaud, offered to
Joyce while Larbaud was in Italy. Joyce 
lived like a mogul at times, always finding someone else to pay his way. He stayed at the Hôtel Lutetia and could be seen eating elaborate meals fairly often at the Gypsy Bar near the Pantheon, Brasserie Lipp, Les Deux Magots, Le Closerie des Lilas and Le Dôme.
He was invited to the salons of the rich and famous and was a welcome icon to all except Gertrude Stein, who said he was “an incomprehensible whom anyone could understand.”
He was a Paris celebrity but was much bothered by failing eyesight. He suffered from a serious eye disease and had as many as eleven operations. People doted on him, cared for him and tried to make him comfortable. When the proceeds began coming in for the book, it was Sylvia Beach who was denied any of the profits. She had been shunned by the man who was now a “star”.
He had as a secretary the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, author of Waiting For Godot. He and Nora had a son, Georgio, and a daughter, Lucia, who fell in love with Beckett. They were seen in restaurants and theatres for a time, but then he shunned her. She was an unstable young woman and “sex starved” (in her own words) and was deeply hurt by the incident.
His final undertaking was Finnegan’s Wake, which was even more difficult to understand than his other works. He died on January 13th 1941, having fled France to Switzerland by train via Aix-Les-Bains.
It is interesting to walk in the shadow of James Joyce in Paris. Since 1999 there is a tiny square named after him; it is a little well tended garden very close to the Biblioteque Nationale, equipped with children’s swings. The sign says, simply, James Joyce, “writer”. Joyce is buried with Nora and his son, Giorgio, in Zurich, Switzerland.
He lived at the following places:
Victoria Palace Hotel, 6, rue Blaise Desgolf in the 6th. (Here he started Finnigan’s Wake)
Hotel Lenox , 9, rue de l’Université
Hotel Lutetia, 45, boulevard Raspail in the 6th
Residences:
5, boulevard Raspail
71, rue Cardinal-Lemoine
5, rue de l’Assomption on Ile St-Louis
8, ave Charjes Floquet
ARNIE GREENBERG
Double Deception is work of fiction recently published in serialization on the web. It is a story through the memories of Dr Robert Bartlett Haas, a close friend of Gertrude’s,about the portrait of Gertrude Stein that had been done by Picasso before WWI. This portrait is now on view in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The story unfolds when Gertrude decides that she would like a copy of the painting done so she can keep a similar image in her summer home in Bilignin, near Belley not far from Aix Les Bains. She engages the copyist Morevna Vorobiev to do the job and when it is delivered even Picasso cannot tell the paintings apart since he sees them in a gas lit room.
After Gertrude dies, the painting is sent to New York where it is deemed a copy. Has the wrong painting been delivered? Through the work of two master art detectives it is determined that Miss Vorobiev, the lover of Diego Rivera, has copied the painting twice and has kept the original. The remainder of the story deals with the uncovering of the original, the solution of the mystery and the final hanging of the right painting at the Met.
It is, as Gertrude might have said, “a mystery with an ending”.
