The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses by Kevin Birmingham

Author:Kevin Birmingham
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781594203367
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
Published: 2014-06-11T23:00:00+00:00

20.

THE KING’S CHIMNEY

Joyce’s life had become a shambles after Ulysses. In April 1922, Nora took the children to see her family in Galway. She didn’t say when she would return, and they left Paris just as Ireland was descending into civil war. A 1921 treaty between the Irish and British Parliaments established Ireland as a Free State within the United Kingdom (the Irish Parliament would swear allegiance to the Crown). The treaty split the Irish Republican Army into factions, those who supported the Free State agreement and those who demanded full Irish sovereignty, and Nora and the children were caught in the middle of escalating violence. Free State troops commandeered their hotel room and mounted machine guns in the windows, forcing Nora, Giorgio and Lucia to dash through Galway and board the next train for Dublin.

Joyce felt helpless and abandoned in Paris. Nora seemed to be thinking of staying in Ireland, and he wrote desperate letters hoping to win her back. Was she leaving him? Did she need money? “O my dearest,” he wrote, “if you would only turn to me even now and read that terrible book which has now broken the heart in my breast and take me to yourself alone to do with me what you will!” Nora felt that a part of Jim was moored to 1904 while she and their children pressed onward. Going to Ireland was her way of pulling him out of the terrible book that had colonized his life. Nora was reminding him that she was more than the voice of Molly Bloom.

Joyce did not fare well alone. He slept and ate poorly. He fainted in Shakespeare and Company. He had multiple tooth abscesses, and his iritis became worse than ever. Less than a week after Nora and the children returned (she would never leave him), Joyce developed glaucoma in his left eye. When the pain became unbearable, Joyce’s oculist sent his assistant to Joyce’s room in a small Left Bank residential hotel. The young man opened the door to find the famous Irish writer wrapped in a blanket and squatting on the floor in front of a stewpan containing the picked-over remains of a chicken. Nora was squatting across from him, and the entire place was in disarray. There were two rooms filled with mismatched furniture and half-empty bottles of wine. Clothes and toiletries were strewn over the tables, the mantelpiece and their chairs. Well-used trunks were gaping open, still half unpacked from the family’s recent return. Joyce turned from the chicken carcass to the visitor.

The doctor’s assistant told Joyce he needed surgery, and Joyce told the doctor never to send him again. A few days later, the doctor examined Joyce’s left eye and confirmed that he needed an immediate iridectomy. The longer he waited, the worse his vision would be. The prospect was terrifying. Joyce’s left eye was his “good” one—the one that hadn’t been operated on, the one he needed to read and write. Even a successful iridectomy would impair his vision, and a failed operation could render his left eye blind.

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