No book on James Joyce goes half as far as this one in establishing connections between passages in the classic texts and incidents in the artist’s life. Even Joyce’s uneasy struggle to exclude unflattering details from the first biography of him, by Herbert Gorman, is used to explain a passing reference in Finnegans Wake to a “biografiend.” What Joyce wanted was someone who would allow him control over every element of his reputation: a biografriend. Gorman, although he accepted the main interdictions — on family privacies — was not happy with the arrangement or the outcome. He insulted Joyce by failing to send him a copy of the published volume.
Gordon Bowker demonstrates just how comprehensively the artist also sought to control the first extended works of literary analysis on Ulysses. Joyce was a gifted “autocritic,” and even today Frank Budgen’s 1934 memoir about the making of Ulysses sparkles, because it is filled with the Dubliner’s table-talk. Stuart Gilbert, author of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1930), was somewhat more resistant to manipulation, keeping his reservations out of his study of Homeric analogies in the masterpiece, but filling a sardonic diary with sarcasms about the Joyce circle. Bowker, whose respect for the greatness of Joyce’s texts never wanes, is shrewd enough to include a liberal amount of these balancing judgments.
The strictest injunction laid on Gorman was also the last: that Joyce’s motivation in leaving Ireland never be disclosed. All subsequent biographies have accepted that Joyce made himself modern by abandoning Ireland as a cultural backwater disfigured by clerical oppression and a general censoriousness. The truth is more mundane but sadly prophetic of the fate of thousands of Irish graduates in the decades after Joyce: he simply could not find a post in the country commensurate with his qualifications, abilities and ambitions. So the flight with Nora Barnacle had to be re-branded as a dissident exercise in “silence, exile and cunning.”
Only once did Joyce deviate from this line. He told the painter Arthur Power that in the Dublin of his youth the British retained all power, with the consequence that ordinary people felt no responsibility for anything and were free to do or say what they wanted. Only with independence in 1922 emerged a nation of apple-lickers: people who, if tempted in the Garden of Eden, would have licked rather than bitten the apple.
Like all honest biographers before him, Bowker knows that turn-of-the-century Dublin was filled with intrepid artists and unfettered intellectuals. Yet somehow he feels compelled to support the common contention that the great man made himself thoroughly modern by ceasing to be knowingly Irish. Not so. To be Irish, in those days, was to be modern anyway, whether one wanted to be or not. Good educational opportunities along with chronic under-capitalization produced the formula for a major experimental culture.
Perhaps because he doesn’t rate modernist Dublin too highly, Bowker sometimes slips up on details — he sets the Cyclops episode of Ulysses in Davy Byrne’s rather than Barney Kiernan’s pub; he seems unaware that the burning of Cork city was due mainly to the Black and Tans; and his etymologies of Gaelic names can be dubious. On the credit side, he has been careful not to accept as fact details that were fictionalized by Joyce. He records, accurately, that Oliver Gogarty (the false friend who lived with Joyce for a time in the Martello Tower in Sandycove) was the son of a surgeon, whereas Richard Ellmann (taking Ulysses at its word) depicted him as a “counterjumper’s son” — that
is, the child of a sales assistant.
Ellmann was a brilliant
biographer and skilful interviewer, early enough on the scene to talk with many of Joyce’s acquaintances, some of whom told him untruths. Bowker, without fuss, fixes mistaken details. He also gives a more nuanced account of just how deeply Joyce’s years in Trieste influenced the shaping of Ulysses. Because it was a port city like Dublin on the edge of an already shaky empire and because it contained geniuses such as Italo Svevo, it filled Joyce’s head with ideas and characters.
This study will be valuable to students as a summation of our current biographical knowledge of Joyce. It captures recurring features of his art: a vaudevillian’s love of seaside settings, a delight in using children’s lore and nursery rhymes as portals of discovery, a compulsion to map his own family romance on to world history. It shows how difficult he could be even to his greatest admirers; yet it also evokes the heroism of a man who, confronted by poverty, ill health and endless uprootings, somehow found in himself the courage to write epics in celebration of ordinary people and the intricacies of their minds. It is in its way an example as well as an account of dignified audacity.
This doesn’t mean that Ellmann’s 1959 biography is passe. Not only did he write a beautiful prose, which no subsequent scholar has equaled, but he also had a fellow-artist’s understanding of the strange blend of facts, experiences, ideas and accidents which went into the creation of The Dead and Ulysses. Ellmann was one of the great literary critics of the last century and his biography, though long, implies a great deal more than it says. His account is of a flawed but decent man, who redeemed occasional misbehavior by the scale of his devotion to his family and to his work. Because its portrait contains much of the painter as well as the sitter, it will live forever as itself a work of art.
Joyce was restless, not only about biographies of him but sitting for portraits. When the painter Patrick Tuohy began to talk about the importance of capturing the Joycean soul, he muttered darkly: “Never mind my soul, Tuohy. Just make sure you get my tie right.” He would, for that reason, probably approve of Bowker’s book, which generally rests content with external detail but leaves the deeper acts of interpretation to others.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist