A Little Circle Of Kindred Minds

Joyce in Paris

Conor Fennell

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Published by Green Lamp Editions At Smashwords

Copyright © Conor Fennell, 2011

Cover Design by Ciara Panacchia

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He could not sway the crowd, but he might appeal to a little circle of kindred minds.

A Little Cloud, Dubliners

Introduction ~The Revolution Of The Word

Legend has it that it was the taxis that saved Paris. On 6 September, 1914, as the German guns came within 30 miles of the city, its defenders – French and British troops stationed along the Marne – were badly in need of reinforcement. French reserve troops were available in Paris but there was a shortage of motor vehicles and drivers to transport them. So the city’s taxis were assembled and 600 vehicles, each carrying five soldiers, made two journeys eastwards. Two days later 6,000 troops had been ferried to the front. The ensuing Battle of the Marne resulted in stalemate and both sides dug in for the trench warfare that would last for years.

Paris was spared. What might have been destroyed in an attack must remain conjectural. But given not just the splendour of Haussmann’s boulevards, but also the historic and cultural aspects of the city, its monuments and museums, its art, its books, its archives, one can only express enormous relief.

It could so easily have been otherwise. The government had deserted the city for Bordeaux and almost a million Parisians fled to other parts of France.

For those who stayed on, the custom of people watching was temporarily abandoned as the café terraces were closed and customers had to sit inside at the zinc counters of those few that remained open. Theatres and music halls were also shut down. The City of Light became a city of darkness.

As men were mobilised, women did what they could to keep the wheels of the economy moving and to help the war effort. And not just the French: Dolly Wilde, niece of Oscar, went to Paris to join a group of women ambulance drivers on their way to the front. Eileen Gray, the Irish designer, became one of the first women in Paris to acquire a driving license; she bought her own car for use as an ambulance on condition she would be the only driver (she claimed it was the fastest ambulance in town). Gertrude Stein and her partner Alice B Toklas acquired a Ford, which they called affectionately ‘Auntie.’ Stein learned to drive and they carried supplies to French hospitals.

With the peace in November 1918, the city threw open its doors again, especially to the Americans who had helped win the war.¹ Paris was open for business. The Germans had been repelled. But now the city was to see an invasion of a very different kind.

Within a year a wave of writers, artists and musicians began to arrive and for most of the 1920s their numbers steadily increased from a trickle to a flood. Many of them were intellectual refugees fleeing from a climate of conservatism and prejudice in their own countries. For those whose ambition was to write or paint or compose, Paris offered them creative freedom and a tolerance in which they could explore and develop their art and bring it forward into the rest of the century whose early years had been so savagely interrupted by war.

Unknowingly they were participants in a revolution, what one of them – Eugene Jolas, founder of the literary magazine transition – called the Revolution of the Word.

Revolution was not new to Paris. But the quiet revolution that started in the cafés and bars of Montparnasse in the aftermath of the Great War had an impact well beyond France and its reverberations are likely to be felt well into the 21^st century.

Many of them were influenced by the presence in the city of painters such as Pablo Picasso, composers like Igor Stravinsky and writers like Stein who had begun to break away from the old, established values of their art. But now there was another attraction: the city had become more affordable as the post-war franc fell in value against sterling and the dollar.

Among the first of these to arrive – in July 1920 - was an Irishman who had no intention of putting down roots in Paris. James Joyce was on his way from Trieste to London and Dublin where he would finish writing Ulysses in ‘a quiet place.’² He stopped off in Paris to see about French translations of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners. Crucially, he was invited to do so by the American poet Ezra Pound who had been secretary to William Butler Yeats (Yeats had introduced Pound to Joyce). Joyce intended to stay no longer than a week. Instead he stayed for 20 years, during which time he completed Ulysses and wrote Finnegans Wake.

Joyce regarded himself as an exile. But in a sense he was as much an expatriate as others who made Paris their home.³ And he was far from unique among the Irish writers of the time. In 1931, Daniel Corkery wrote that there were more Irish writers overseas than at home. ‘Where today are those wild geese of the pen?’ he asked, going on to name over 30 people, among them Padraic Colum, Frank Harris, Thomas MacGreevy, Austin Clarke, James Joyce, James Stephens, George Moore and Liam O’Flaherty. ‘It would be impossible to make a list quarter as long of home-staying writers.’⁴

Expatriate or not, Joyce was surely a patriot, for he was among those who, as Malcolm Cowley put it, ‘had fled in despair from their own country, but still they wanted to redeem it.’⁵ Joyce would seek to redeem his country through his writing.

Whatever way Joyce preferred to define himself, his main concern was to finish writing Ulysses. Within three days of his arrival he met an American expatriate who was to have an enormous effect on his work. Sylvia Beach, the owner of a bookshop called Shakespeare and Company, would soon become his publisher. Thanks to Pound’s encouragement and Beach’s practical support, the outline of a Joyce circle began to form, which would come into sharper focus as others befriended the Irish writer and offered their help. Joyce particularly enjoyed the friendship of writers from Ireland who provided him with an opportunity to keep up to date with events in Dublin. But he was not slow to exploit them. He was frank about it too. He told Arthur Power: ‘I’m always friends with a person for a purpose.’⁶

The publication of Ulysses in February 1922 was a revolutionary milestone of the period. The novel, according to Malcolm Cowley, ‘came to be revered by the new writers almost as the Bible was by Primitive Methodists.’ Joyce, he wrote, was the paramount hero of the age.⁷

Joyce’s presence in Paris, together with Pound and Stein, made the city the centre of English-language Modernism. In the years immediately following Joyce’s arrival, scores of writers and others made their way there to see if they too could hone their skills and expand their art.

Robert McAlmon arrived in autumn 1921. Ernest Hemingway followed in December. Djuna Barnes and Ford Madox Ford arrived in 1922. F Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda visited the city in 1921, and stayed for longer in subsequent years. TS Eliot came and went, as did Wyndham Lewis.

Of the Irish, George Moore had a long-lasting flirtation with the city. Padraic and Mary Colum were regular visitors and James Stephens, who owned an apartment in the city, regarded Paris as his second home. Thomas MacGreevy came in 1927 and Samuel Beckett a year later. All this time many Irish artists were studying or working in Paris. Evie Hone and Mainie Jellett spent much of the 1920s there and Eileen Gray had her own gallery at Faubourg Saint-Honoré (she called one of her rugs ‘Ulysses’ in homage to Joyce who was one of her clients).

This book is an attempt to describe some of those who came to Paris and who became part of the Joyce circle. It is not exhaustive; its emphasis is on Irish writers and those of Irish extraction. The Joyce circle was constantly changing as people came and went and as they moved in and out of favour.

Joyce attracted people like a magnet and as they got closer he energised them. He also exploited them shamelessly. Such was their devotion that they let him. They took his dictation, typed his manuscripts, wrote articles in praise of his work and provided prefaces for his books. Perhaps, most important of all, they listened to him and talked to him about Dublin and Ireland, Greece and Rome, history and geography. They had conversations that triggered in Joyce’s mind words and ideas that ultimately found their way into Finnegans Wake.

They so admired Joyce that they put up with his foibles and his moods. Depending on the company he was in, Joyce could be witty or shy, loquacious or silent. He did not like being asked about anything and particularly resented journalists who questioned him about his sight. But the gregarious side of his nature emerged in the evening, either dining out at an expensive restaurant (for he lived well on the vast sums he got in patronage) or during soirées at home among family and friends when he would sing, play the piano and dance.

In looking at those who befriended Joyce and helped him, much is revealed about the man himself. And one thing becomes clear: in the Joyce circle it was always Joyce who was in control.

Chapter One - The City of Light

The literary beacon that attracted so many English-speaking writers and others to Paris in the 1920s had been shining for centuries. The city was renowned as the ultimate capital of culture and for anyone interested in the arts it was the place to be.

But there was something else that lay behind the movement of such vast numbers across the Atlantic, the Irish Sea and the English Channel and that was the state of culture in their home countries. In the United States, a new Puritanism, even bigotry, was stifling the arts. The mere mention of the name of Gertrude Stein would invite ridicule, not just because of her experimental writing but also because of her sexual proclivity. A similar culture existed in the newly independent Ireland where the Free State government was pre-occupied with tackling poverty and militant republicanism and where the Catholic Church kept its flock under strict control. To refer in conversation to James Joyce would result in sniggers about a writer of dirty books.

For Americans, travel to France had become easier after the war, thanks to a surplus of merchant ships. Many of these were converted into passenger liners by Cunard and Ellerman and carried thousands across the Atlantic for only $80. It was different for the Irish whose route to Paris brought them through England and the Channel ports. It would have been as easy to go to London.

The reason they chose Paris over London seems to be bound up in their perception of the two cities. Around the turn of the 20th century, according to the writer and scholar Declan Kiberd, many Irish writers – Tom Kettle and Joyce among them – saw the country as belonging to the European mainstream. England had become provincial; Oscar Wilde’s Salomé was banned in London and had to be staged in Paris. Besides, London was not the place to go because of the stereotype of the Irish there.

That is why the debate in Joyce’s great story The Dead is about whether the Irish person of the future will recreate themselves on Aran or on the Continent. All of a sudden England is a bore.⁸

Many Irish writers of the period reached beyond Britain for their mentors. Rather than look eastwards, Joyce looked north to Scandinavia (Henrik Ibsen) and Beckett looked south to France (Marcel Proust).

One wonders if Britain even existed. Talking in Paris to the poet Austin Clarke (another ex-Belvedere man), Joyce said that Dublin was the nearest city to the continent. ‘Places here in Paris on a Saturday night are like Capel Street and Thomas Street. There’s the same joy and excitement, as though bargaining for Sunday’s dinner was a holiday. The very faces I see seem to be the same.’⁹

Irish politicians (perhaps more mindful of history) also looked beyond Britain for their ideas and philosophy. Arthur Griffith’s advocacy of ‘economic nationalism’ was based on the German Friedrich List. And he took his views on a dual monarchy from the history of Austria and Hungary. According to one of his biographers, ‘Griffith was a Europhile long before the idea of close European co-operation gained currency, this while espousing a nationalism which has often been stigmatised as inward-looking.’¹⁰

Some writers looked to Europe as a means of escape from the ‘old enemy’ that was subordinating them. Mary Colum, looking back on that period, wrote: ‘The truth, as I now see it, is that the country’s writers were not economically independent of England and consequently not intellectually independent.’¹¹

Paris was ‘a free space beyond Anglocentric images of Ireland.’¹² It stood for independence and liberty. Besides, France was no stranger to the Irish. Thousands of Irishmen had fought in France’s wars and its navy had responded to calls for help, resulting in abortive attempts to land at Bantry and elsewhere. Over three centuries, innumerable Irishmen studied at the seminary of the Irish College in Paris. Paris was where, in 1833, Harriet Smithson, an actress from Co Clare, met and married Hector Berlioz, inspiring his Symphony Fantastique.¹³ It was where Fenians lived in exile and where Maud Gonne founded a branch of the Young Ireland Society (L’Association Irlandaise) and a newspaper (L’Irlande Libre). Paris was where John Millington Synge wrote articles for French magazines about the Irish language revival. Paris was where WB Yeats met Synge, telling him to go to the Aran Islands. Paris was where Synge met Joyce.

In the 1870s, Henry James had acclaimed Paris as the ‘great literary workshop of Europe.’ Yet until the Great War, American writers were more likely to go to London and composers to Germany. By and large it was only painters who gravitated towards France. All that changed after the war. Malcolm Cowley wrote of Paris in the 1920s: ‘There was no second centre for a dozen years after the war; almost every aspirant in every art spent more or less time in Paris.’¹⁴

Cowley was one of many young American men who had spent wartime service in Europe and found the city irresistible. Typically, they had served in the ambulance corps of the Red Cross. They included young writers such as Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Archibald MacLeish and EE Cummings – men whose senses were sharpened, as Cowley put it, by the thought of dying the next day. Some of them passed through Paris on their way home after the war, losing their virginity en route, determined to make the most of their young lives having seen death and devastation up close.

The France they were leaving was tolerant, a country where private space was not intruded upon and where sexual morality was not an issue; and they were returning to an America where religious conservatism and social narrow-mindedness were prevalent. And just as a new form of popular music called jazz was spreading from New Orleans to Chicago and New York, bringing with it a new sense of freedom and excitement, just as women were liberating themselves from the shackles of Edwardian society, just as America was emerging as a potent force of progress and modernity, Congress legislated to ban the sale of alcohol. This was, for many, the final straw. As one writer put it, a government that could pass the Eighteenth Amendment would probably do a lot of things to make life as stuffy and as bigoted as possible.¹⁵

Stein believed her country had gone back in time:

‘America is the mother of Twentieth Century civilisation, but she is now early Victorian.’¹⁶ Another writer referred to the erosion of liberty in the land of the free: ‘Many an American who feels outraged at living under a government which treats its subjects like a set of naughty children, who shall be told what to drink, to read, to wear, and to see at the theatre, prefers to go into exile.’¹⁷

It was difficult to live life to the full in conservative middle-America. If you expressed interest in the arts, you would likely be regarded as neurotic or effeminate. There was widespread hostility towards African-Americans and Jews. The United States Post Office had power to intercept mail they believed to be salacious or dangerous (copies of Ulysses had to be smuggled into the country). Sexual liberation was still a long way off, even though condoms had become generally available (they had been issued to soldiers during the war to prevent the spread of venereal disease) and couples of the same sex felt compelled to hide their relationships.

Political power in the United States was moving into the hands of big business and profit was everything; Cummings called it ‘the age of dollars and no sense.’ He was one of many who could not abide the new philosophy of greed. According to Samuel Putnam, ‘the conclusion was that life must somehow be spiritualised… and it seemed that this could be done only in Europe.¹⁸

Many of the former conscripts got jobs as newspaper reporters. With the shortage of newsprint no longer an issue, the bigger US papers opened Paris bureaux. Newspapers in Chicago and New York launched English language editions in Paris and journalists and would-be novelists were attracted to work for them. In time, some of these writers moved away from hard news to set up literary journals. Although their circulation figures were small, the influence of these ‘little magazines’ was enormous since they provided a platform for many writers, among them Joyce, Hemingway and Stein.

In Britain, life was not much better than in the US. The country had lost 700,000 soldiers in the war and there had been over two million casualties. They included many prose writers and poets who had been conscripted after the casualty figures among the regular soldiers had reached alarming proportions. Post-war government promises of a better society and a higher standard of living were not fulfilled and there was mass unemployment. Both Stein and Natalie Barney found London depressingly unsympathetic to women. Dolly Wilde regarded the city as sexually stifling (it was not that long since her Uncle Oscar’s trial). TS Eliot, in 1920, wrote that ‘Paris was a great relief after many months of London.’¹⁹ In the same year Ezra Pound, who had spent twelve years in England where he was associated with several literary magazines, eventually decided that everything of importance in modern literature was happening in Paris. ‘There is no longer an intellectual life in England,’ he wrote.

In Ireland, those who had fought in the war returned in silence. Public opinion had changed dramatically while they had been away. Proud to fight for king and country when they left, they came back to a society whose mood had shifted, in the aftermath of the Easter Rising in 1916, away from thoughts of Home Rule and towards a more militant demand for full independence from the country on whose side they had fought. Caught in this surge of nationalism, many ex-soldiers never spoke about the war, even to their own families, for the rest of their lives. (In an awful irony, some of the returned soldiers joined the new Free State army only to find themselves fighting a civil war against their own).

As happened elsewhere, economic difficulties beset the Free State that emerged painfully in 1922, exacerbating the slow but relentless haemorrhaging of its population that had started with the Famine 80 years earlier. The poor and the jobless had few on their side for the Left had little influence. The Irish were reluctant to embrace either communism or fascism to any significant degree, believing instead that the more important ‘ism’ was nationalism.²⁰

Since the new State promoted Gaelic culture above all else, the Literary Renaissance was seen as Anglo-Irish and therefore not quite Irish.²¹ The old enemy, England, was to an extent replaced by the enemy within as the new government felt obliged to make its presence felt in exercising law and order. Parallel to this – and often in collusion with it – the Catholic bishops exercised crosier-belting authority over their flock. This combination of state and religious conservatism compelled many of the country’s writers and artists to leave.

Joyce, who while in exile kept in touch with his native country, noted how it had changed with independence: whereas under British rule anyone could say what they felt, independence brought responsibility and cautiousness.²² Kiberd has described 1920s Ireland as a ‘far-from-free state’ where ‘war and civil war appeared to have drained all energy and imagination away.’²³

The new state introduced film censorship as early as 1923. When it came under increasing pressure to introduce further censorship it set up a Committee on Evil Literature in 1926 to consider if it was necessary to ban certain publications. It urged the banning of several British newspapers²⁴ and recommended the establishment of a censorship board. Contrary to popular belief, Ulysses was never banned in Ireland although it was banned in Britain from its publication until 1936.

Sex was a major preoccupation of the Free State at this time. Historian Diarmaid Ferriter notes: ‘It was frequently maintained that sexual morality was in decline and that perceived moral failings needed to be tackled by a joint alliance of state, Catholic church and voluntary lay Catholic groups in an effort to recover a historic (or mythical) Irish chasteness.’²⁵

It was not only writers and artists who found it difficult to stay at home. Erskine Childers, a future president of Ireland, could not live in a country whose governing party had executed his father. Having completed his studies at Cambridge, he moved to Paris in 1927 where he worked for a travel agency whose limousine taxis carried, among others, James Joyce.²⁶ (The writer was very generous with his tips as a result of which, according to Thomas MacGreevy, ‘like the attendants at the opera, pretty well every taxi-driver in Paris knew Joyce and took care of him’).²⁷

By comparison with Dublin, London and New York, Paris after the war was liberal rather than conservative, colourful rather than grey, innovative rather than stagnant. True, there were economic difficulties and industrial unrest in France too, and as Joyce was arriving in July 1920 its legislature outlawed abortion and banned the sale of contraceptives – but this was seen partly as a response to the need for an increase in the birth rate following the devastation of the war in which almost one and a half million Frenchmen had died and four times that number had been wounded.

By 1920 the city’s artistic centre had changed from Montmartre to Montparnasse where it was cheaper to rent a studio; the Left Bank quartier became the new focus for the city’s painters and writers, its bistros and cafés the centre of their intellectual lives. This was where most of the new expatriates settled. As the war had left the French currency at a very low exchange rate, they could afford to stay in hotels and spend much of their time on the café terraces. The American journalist Janet Flanner’s hotel room cost her $1 a day (about $10 in today’s money).

They arrived in a society that admired American popular culture and was open to ideas and trends coming across the Atlantic. Parisians organised Fourth of July parades as well as their own quatorze juillet. The French were quick to adapt outdoor advertising to their street kiosks and embraced wholeheartedly America’s latest export, jazz.

The city had changed enormously since the war. Duelling was no longer acceptable. Taxis had replaced fiacres. Flaneurs still walked the boulevards but they had to be more careful when crossing the street. Skirts rose and social barriers fell so that few cared about one’s sexual inclination. The Americans brought with them the cocktail and there were discussions in French academic circles as to whether it should be spelt coquetèle.²⁸ (The cocktail hour encroached on the cinq a sept, a more generous period set aside for the Frenchman’s liaison with his lover before going home to his wife for dinner).

By 1923, Paris had become the new cultural centre of the United States, with Montparnasse replacing Greenwich Village.²⁹ The heart of expatriate social activity in that quartier was the junction where Boulevard du Montparnasse meets Boulevard Raspail, where the cafés of the Rotonde and the Dome face each other. Each had its own clientele. The Dome attracted British, Americans, Irish and Scandinavians; the Rotonde Italians, Spanish and Russians. Poles drank at the Closerie des Lilas, Germans at the Coupole. The Irish-American writer Robert McAlmon recalled that, as early as the summer of 1921, before the throngs arrived in the following years, ‘crossing and recrossing between the Dome and the Rotonde of an evening… anybody from the writing or art world of any country was apt to appear and quite as apt to be dead drunk or mildly intoxicated.’³⁰

Joyce, however, was a family man who shunned the bistros and bars of the Left Bank (although he did fall by the wayside on occasions, much to his wife’s annoyance). Several expatriates crossed his path and became intimate friends. Hemingway was one of the early arrivals, having been encouraged by Sherwood Anderson who gave him a letter of introduction to Joyce. He became a frequent visitor to the Joyce home and was much admired by the Irish writer. Hemingway rowed with almost everyone, notably with F Scott Fitzgerald (who also got to know Joyce) and McAlmon, who undertook secretarial work for Joyce and provided him with a regular income. Joyce never fell out publicly with any of them (although he later became estranged from women like Sylvia Beach and Harriet Weaver who had helped him so much financially and in kind) and he frequently took advantage of them to promote his writing.

But it was those coming from Ireland who had a special place in Joyce’s heart. If they came from Dublin, he was eager to glean from them the latest happenings in the city he was writing about and to recall the name of a certain shop or the precise location of a landmark. He became friendly with Beckett – who made Paris his permanent home - through the Kerry poet Thomas MacGreevy to whom Joyce and his family became particularly attached. Other visitors, such as Padraic Colum, he had known from his younger days at the Royal University in Dublin. He had met James Stephens during his last and final visit to Dublin in 1912 when they were both having rows with a Dublin publisher; in Paris he asked Stephens would he finish writing Finnegans Wake if he was unable to complete it. Joyce developed a lasting friendship with the writer and artist Arthur Power who was among the first of the Irish he met in Paris; and he got to know the irascible painter Patrick Tuohy after he had done a portrait of his father. Most strangely of all, Joyce developed an obsession with the career of the Irish tenor John Sullivan and persuaded his friends to campaign publicly on the singer’s behalf.

Joyce’s exceptional linguistic ability as well as his deep interest in European literature meant that, unlike many of his American and British counterparts, he became friendly with many French writers. While he is reputed to have talked to the reclusive Proust for only seconds, he developed long-lasting friendships with Paul Valéry, Léon-Paul Fargue, Philippe Soupault and Valery Larbaud.

After Pound, the person who had the biggest influence on Joyce staying in Paris was Beach. Shakespeare and Company became more than the publisher of Ulysses. It was, in effect, the poste restante for Joyce, for the family moved home 19 times during their 20 years in the city. For many years it was the bookshop rather than the man himself that became the centre of the Joyce circle. It was the information and communications base for friends and acquaintances of Joyce, among them writers from Ireland, Britain, the United States and France itself.³¹

It was to Shakespeare and Company that Hemingway went when he wanted to meet Joyce. McAlmon used the shop as a post office and as a storehouse for unsold books left over from his publishing business. Fitzgerald was too shy to approach Joyce, so he persuaded Beach to introduce him. Padraic Colum always made the bookshop his first port of call when he came to the city. And it was at Shakespeare and Company that Beach introduced Joyce to Larbaud who would be highly influential in promoting his work. Larbaud praised Beach as one who ‘assembles the elite among the young English, Irish and Americans who are temporarily in Paris.’³² Without her there might never had been a Joyce circle.

Across the road from Shakespeare and Company – when the shop moved to rue de l’Odéon - was a French bookshop, La Maison des Amis des Livres, run by Adrienne Monnier. The shops complemented each other. Far from being business rivals, the two women became lovers and they played vital roles in literary Paris and in the life of Joyce in particular. They introduced French and English writers to one another. As one writer put it: ‘… the French and Anglo-American circles that frequented the rue de l’Odéon were sometimes concentric.’³³

This cross-fertilisation of literary language and culture in one Parisian street benefited the French as well as the Anglo-Irish-Americans. Simone de Beauvoir, then a young student at the Sorbonne, devoured books at Monnier’s shop. ‘After a monumental Ulysses appeared in French,’ she recalled, ‘a door opened for us to a new world of foreign writers.’ It was at Monnier’s that she saw those writers, among them Joyce, ‘the most remote and inaccessible of them all.’³⁴

Although living in Paris, the expatriate writer’s mind was at home; Stein wrote about America, Hemingway about Americans and the Midwest, Joyce about Dublin.

‘There are exiles – expatriates as they prefer to call themselves – in Paris who know more about the United States, about Ireland, about England, than anybody who lives in those countries,’ wrote Sisley Huddleston.³⁵ Paris, he said, will ‘take the provincialism from the majority of writers.’

Another circle revolved around the American writer Stein. She kept a literary salon at the home she shared with Alice B Toklas at 27 rue de Fleurus. She had come to Paris in 1903 and went on to live at the same address (except for wartime interludes) for 35 years. About all that Stein and Joyce had in common was that both experimented with language, albeit in different ways.

Stein often visited Shakespeare and Company to borrow books, although she and Joyce never met there. Neither acknowledged the other’s existence. Hemingway, who got on well with both, felt it unwise to mention one to the other.

Beach frequently went to the Saturday evening salons run by Stein, and she introduced many American writers to the often-difficult and overpowering hostess. Joyce never attended Stein’s salons. She, on the other hand, frequently went to the Friday salons run by a fellow American writer and lesbian Natalie Barney. Joyce, too, was known to have visited Barney’s salon at rue Jacob, though probably not more than once.³⁶ Unlike Stein, who had a long-term relationship (she called it a marriage) with Toklas, Barney was renowned for her promiscuity. She was extrovertly lesbian and feminist (her home featured a Temple a l’Amitié in praise of women) and among her lovers were Dolly Wilde and the American painter Romaine Brooks. She was a writer, intellectual and linguist and her salon was one of the liveliest in Paris, attracting an eclectic mix of writers and raconteurs, French and English-speaking. Some of the best-known French figures of the period could be seen there, among them Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, Paul Valery, André Gide, Jean Cocteau and Louis Aragon. Frequent English-speaking visitors included Stein, Djuna Barnes, Pound and Ford Madox Ford. Occasionally one might see Eliot or the American composer George Antheil or the heiresses Nancy Cunard and Peggy Guggenheim.

The literary circles of Barney, Stein, Pound and Joyce were far from being mutually exclusive. They overlapped and, like the effect of several stones cast into a pond, they opened into one another, merging and interrelating, the better to spread Eugene Jolas’s ‘Revolution of the Word.’

Chapter Two - Meeting Mr Joyce

Like many of the expatriates, Arthur Power felt he had to get away from the stifling social and political atmosphere in his own country. Having been invalided out of the British Army with exposure to gas in the trenches of Flanders, he returned to Dublin in 1916 only to be shot at by republican rebels. Unlike many of his compatriots who had returned from the war, Power was a man of independent means and could well afford to travel. He chose Paris because of his deep interest in art and the opportunity it provided him to lead a bohemian existence.

Involving himself in the city’s literary scene was not on his agenda and meeting James Joyce was the last thing on his mind. Yet he was to become a close friend and confidant of Joyce and his family and friends with whom he frequently attended Irish parlour-style singsongs.

The two men met by accident in a dance hall in Montparnasse.³⁷ It was an evening in early April 1921. Power had arranged to meet a young French woman but she failed to turn up. Wandering through the dance hall in search of a substitute, he saw a familiar face – a woman seated at a table with a group deep in conversation. He tried to avoid her, for he just wanted to enjoy himself. But eventually she called him over and introduced him to the others. Among them was a slightly built man with a small pointed beard who wore thick-lensed glasses.

Power was taken aback. He had never met Joyce and he had heard the writer was living in Switzerland. Now here he was shaking his hand in a noisy dance hall in Montparnasse.

It was the start of a friendship that would remain close for the next decade. Even after Joyce’s death in 1941, Power kept in touch with his wife, Nora.

Appropriately for a man who was passionate about French culture, he had been born midway between the two countries – in the island of Guernsey – and brought up near New Ross in the southeast of Ireland in a mansion that resembled a chateau. His grandmother, who had been reared in France, had filled the house – ‘Bellevue’ – with French tapestries and furniture.³⁸

Arthur’s was a privileged upbringing with gracious dinner parties and croquet on the lawn that swept down to the River Suir. In common with other children of the Irish rural gentry he was sent to a boarding school in England. There he got his first taste of things French. On the day he made his First Communion, his young French teacher planted a kiss on his lips to thank him for helping out in the organ loft. It was a moment he would always remember.

It was inevitable that, like his father, Power should join the army. He carried the rank of lieutenant when the Great War broke out and he was sent to the trenches of Flanders. After eight months at the front he was badly gassed and invalided out, a nervous and physical wreck.

Following hospitalisation in England, he returned home in 1916 only to experience some of the drama of the Easter Rising. Having come to Dublin for a medical check-up, he decided to stay over the Easter weekend and his car was shot at as he left the city for the races at Fairyhouse on Easter Monday. He also witnessed the battle of Mount Street Bridge between the rebels under the command of Eamon de Valera and British Army reinforcements. Power, who deplored all violence, had no sympathy for the republican cause, even after the execution of its leaders.

Like many of his former comrades, Power found himself in a different kind of ‘no man’s land’ – having no time for an increasingly nationalist Ireland and blaming his parents’ generation for the war which had traumatised him. But he differed from many others in that he had the financial independence to do something about his predicament.

He did not need persuading to leave Ireland, wanting to escape from what he later described as ‘the clogging intellectual atmosphere’ of his own country.

While in Dublin he had met the painter Paul Henry who had moved there from Achill. Henry had lived in Paris and the two men often discussed French art, thus influencing Power’s move to France.

In his search for artists in Paris, he went first to Montmartre, unaware that the rising cost of renting studios was forcing the local painters to relocate to cheaper lodgings around Montparnasse. He too moved to the Left Bank, booking into a hotel at Place de la Sorbonne.

His first encounter with an artist was with the young Russian sculptor Ossip Zadkine³⁹ with whom he got talking in a café. Shortly afterwards, the Russian set off for a period of sculpting in Savoy, arranging for Power to rent his studio.

Power then made contact with the American sculptor Jo Davidson⁴⁰ whom he had met while recuperating in London. A man of considerable charm and influence, Davidson got Power a job writing a column for the New York Herald on the artistic life of Paris. The column was called Around the Studios and it brought Power into direct contact with many of the city’s painters and sculptors. He took to the task with enthusiasm, even taking classes at the Académie Colarossi in the rue de la Grande Chaumière where many artists had their studios.⁴¹ Power took a studio there himself – next to that of Amedeo Modigliani.⁴²

Unlike many of the artists he was writing about, Power lived alone. He was now 30 years of age. He became friendly, however, with the young woman who called to his studio once a week to look after his laundry. Her name was Annette and she told him she went dancing every Saturday. Power was attracted to her and they agreed to meet at the Bal Bullier, a popular dancehall on the boulevard St-Michel near avenue de l’Observatoire.

That weekend the Bal Bullier was, as usual, teeming with young men and women who worked in the shops and cafés of Montparnasse. They were attracted as much by the cheap drink as the opportunity to dance and socialise. But there was another type of person who liked to come here. They were the more serious and mature ones who were tiring of the cafés where increasing numbers of expatriates seemed to be taking over the terraces.

Joyce was in one such group that evening. At first, Power felt uncomfortable, for he had read Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but they had left little impression on him.

Now another book of Joyce’s was about to make its appearance, and this was the cause of the evening’s celebration. The book was Ulysses and one of those at the table had agreed to publish it. Sylvia Beach was a diminutive young American and proprietor of Shakespeare and Company, a bookshop and lending library on rue Dupuytren near Odéon. Just that day she had finalised arrangements with a printer in Dijon, Maurice Darantière, for a limited edition of 1,000 copies of Ulysses. Under the agreement, Joyce would receive an exceptionally large royalty of 66 per cent of the net profit.

Joyce loved to celebrate and would do so at the drop of a hat. On this occasion, he had particularly good reason: he had devoted more than seven years to writing his novel and eventually he had found someone who would publish it. He was still working on the book and not without difficulties. The previous day, the husband of the woman who was typing the last pages of Circe read some of the manuscript and, believing it to be indecent, burned it. Joyce had to ask John Quinn – the Irish-American lawyer to whom he had sent a copy of the chapter – to return it.

Sitting next to this writer whose works he did not think much of, Power found himself being pumped for information about Dublin and the people he knew there. Power had come to Paris to forget about Ireland but it seemed his new acquaintance was not going to let him. He soon warmed to him, however. He found him sympathetic rather than friendly and enjoyed his old-fashioned politeness. But he was surprised to be asked if he was a ‘man of letters.’

Embarrassed by the question, Power admitted to at least being interested. He was ill prepared, however, for the direct questioning that followed.

‘What do you want to write?’ asked Joyce.

Recalling his own interest in literature, Power replied: ‘Something on the model of the French satirists.’

‘You’ll never do it. You are an Irishman and you must write in your own tradition. Borrowed styles are no good. You must write what is in your blood and not what is in your brain.’

Power insisted that he wanted to be international, like all the great writers.

‘They were national first,’ responded Joyce, ‘and it was the intensity of their own nationalism which made them international in the end, as in the case of Turgenev [Ivan Turgenev]. You remember his Sportsman’s Notebook? - How local it was - and yet out of that germ he became a great international writer. For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world.’

At that moment, one of the bands struck up. It was fashionable in the Bal Bullier for two small orchestras - one string and one brass - to play at opposite ends of the dance floor. Usually, neither was of a particularly high standard and their sound could verge on the cacophonous - but at least they played alternately.

Attracted to a pretty young French woman nearby, Power asked her to dance. As they waltzed out into the centre of the floor, Power felt distracted by the brief conversation he had just had. Sensing his inattention, his dancing partner wandered off when the music stopped. Power, though, was happy to rejoin Joyce’s table and to resume his conversation.

‘How do you feel about being Irish?’ he asked Joyce.

‘I regret it,’ said Joyce, ‘for the temperament it has given me.’

At that point Beach interrupted to propose a toast to the success of Ulysses.

As they were leaving, Joyce suggested, in the time-honoured Irish way, that Power join them for a last drink at the Closerie des Lilas across the road.

Power’s unexpected encounter with the author of Ulysses was the start of a long friendship. The two men would often meet, in restaurants or in Joyce’s apartment, to argue over literature and talk about Dublin.

At the time of their meeting at the Bal Bullier, Power’s perception of Joyce was limited to hearsay and to his own assumptions about the writer. He was to be proven very wrong. He had heard accounts from Trieste of Joyce being found lying in the gutter the morning after a drinking session. But the man he had met struck him as quite bourgeois – a feature that disappointed Power who felt that an artist should be more bohemian.

The assumption that there was any bohemian element in Joyce’s make-up threatened Power’s friendship with Joyce when it had barely begun.

Shortly after their first encounter, he decided to call on the Joyces at their apartment at 5 boulevard Raspail. It was a large flat, dark and forbidding, and it was costing Joyce more than he could afford. But it was furnished and included a piano, which pleased him. A large red lampshade dominated the living room. Joyce called it ‘my damn brothel.’

Power dropped in on his way to a party being thrown by some artist friends in the studio of a Russian painter. He thought he would ask Joyce if he would like to come along. He thought Joyce’s life was too settled and restricted and that he would benefit from a party where he might, as he put it, ‘have a drink and talk with the girls.’

Tactlessly, Power arrived at the Joyce apartment his pockets bulging with bottles. Unsurprisingly, he was not well received by the family. Joyce was going through a difficult time with his eyes and had been forbidden to drink. Power was perceived as the proverbial drunken Irishman luring Joyce away from home for a wild night on the town.

Georgio Joyce, now a tall youth of 16, stood over Power’s chair, legs apart, as much as to say: ‘When are you going to leave?’

Joyce having declined his invitation, Power was glad to escape from what had become a charged atmosphere. Joyce accompanied him to the door of the apartment where, in a plaintive but amused voice, he told his visitor: ‘You know I am an intelligent man, but I have to put up with this sort of thing - however, we will meet again soon.’⁴³

Shortly afterwards, the two met in the street and Joyce invited Power back to his flat. Over a meal, Power was amazed at the frequency with which Joyce talked about Dublin. While Power had left his native land to become more cosmopolitan, Joyce seemed to have left it to sharpen his Irish consciousness.

Power got on well with all the family, especially Nora who, he felt, now realised that he had no intention of leading her husband astray and that in fact he disliked drinking to excess. He also met Giorgio’s 14-year-old sister Lucia who seemed hypersensitive, possibly showing early signs of what would later be diagnosed as schizophrenia.

Power reciprocated by inviting Joyce and Nora to his studio at rue de la Grande Chaumière. He was having a party to which he had also invited Jo Davidson and his wife Yvonne. They brought along an American journalist who was staying with them.

Lincoln Steffens, a Californian, was probably the first campaigning journalist, having exposed corruption in public authorities in the States. He had come to Paris at the time of the Armistice in November 1918. He later covered post-war peace and economic conferences in Europe alongside Hemingway and the two became good friends. Following a visit to Bolshevik Russia, he had become radicalised, declaring: ‘I have been over into the future and it works.’

As soon as Steffens arrived, Power sensed he had an agenda, as if he were out to expose artistic Paris as some kind of sham. Since Davidson knew Joyce (probably through Beach who was very fond of the American artist), Power left him to introduce Joyce to the others while he went about bringing food and drink from the kitchen. Joyce made little effort to socialise, however, and seemed to Power to be either shy or simply bored by his fellow-guests. Nora, he noticed, was far chattier.

There was a knock on the door. It was Annette, his young blanchisseuse, calling to explain why she had failed to turn up at the dancehall. As she was in her working clothes, Power ushered her into the kitchen. There was a pause in the conversation outside, his guests assuming there was a relationship between their host and the young woman. An embarrassed Power returned to offer cakes to those present. When he got back to the kitchen the young woman had disappeared.

Power was talking to Joyce when Steffens came over. The journalist looked determined to establish if this was indeed the same James Joyce whom literary Paris was talking about. Power politely left the men to their conversation but observed that Joyce was refusing to answer questions. Afterwards, Power talked to the journalist, who was clearly disappointed. ‘There is nothing left in him,’ Steffens told him, quoting Joyce. ‘It has all gone into his book.’

After that Power saw Joyce and his family virtually every day, becoming Joyce’s closest friend at the time. Joyce had many acquaintances, especially those who could be useful to him and his writing. He enjoyed the company of people who could talk to him about Dublin and if they could be useful to him in other ways, such as promoting his work or funding it, so much the better.

For the moment Power satisfied the first of these. Although nine years younger than Joyce, he was an affable young man with literary interests that appealed to Joyce; and the fact that he got on well with Nora and the children was important.

Power became a regular visitor to the Joyces wherever they lived, for they never seemed to stay long in the one place.⁴⁴ In June 1921 they moved to their fifth home in the eleven months since they had arrived in Paris – an apartment at 71 rue du Cardinal Lemoine⁴⁵ borrowed from the French writer Valery Larbaud. By the end of that year, Joyce had moved again, to Hotel Lenox at rue de l’Université (where he was living when Ulysses was published in February 1922). Towards the end of that year, the family moved to a bright apartment at 26 avenue Charles Floquet near the Eiffel Tower.

By then the idea for a new book was forming in Joyce’s mind. He kept its title, Finnegans Wake, a secret, telling only Nora. To everyone else he called it his Work in Progress. Despite difficulties with his eyes, Joyce worked away on its early drafts. He spent much of his time with blinds drawn and joked that he was waiting for Ireland’s Eye to do its duty.

Joyce had good reason to fear losing his sight. He suffered from iritis and glaucoma and between 1918 and 1932 he had over a dozen operations for these and to remove cataracts. Between operations he underwent painful treatment, which was alleviated by morphine and cocaine. Sometimes leeches were applied to his eyes, which looked red much of the time. As his sight deteriorated his hearing improved and he was able to recognise friends by their voices.

Power took care not to arrive before late afternoon when he called on Joyce, to be sure that he had finished his work for the day. Then, the writer would leave his study and come into the living room, dressed in a short white working jacket rather like a dentist’s, collapsing into an armchair. Often Nora would scold her husband: ‘For God’s sake, Jim, take that coat off you!’⁴⁶

Sometimes Power would accompany Joyce in a taxi to his doctor on rue de la Paix. Dr Louis Borsch’s consulting rooms were small and drab and as often as not he would, after examination, ask Joyce to come back in a couple of days. The two would then catch a taxi to the Café Francis, Joyce’s latest haunt overlooking the Seine by the Pont de l’Alma.

Drinking his favourite tipple at the time, a Cinzano with water, Joyce would discuss literature, Dublin and what Power called the ‘disadvantages of possessing a Celtic temperament.’ Then the two would return to the flat and an excellent dinner cooked by Nora.

Joyce enjoyed a very structured life. He liked to write during the day and if he was dining out in the evening he limited himself to two or three restaurants, depending which was in favour at the time: the Trianons near Montparnasse station, the Café Francis by the Seine or Fouquets on the Champs-Elysées. He never went to any of the popular cafés of Montparnasse such as the Rotonde or the Dome (where Power occasionally drank; both were just a few paces from his apartment). Power, who wanted to live a more unconventional existence, found this frustrating. But if he took Joyce somewhere outside his routine, he noticed the writer became ill tempered. Once he wanted to go to the Deux Magots, which some American journalists, including Hemingway and Djuna Barnes, frequented. But Joyce refused to go there and they settled instead on a small café just a three-minute walk from the places where his friends met.

Power saw a different side to the man when at home, especially at one of his own parties when he was relaxed and happy. His guests were usually the same and included Beach and Adrienne Monnier, the composer George Antheil who lived above Shakespeare and Company, the Irish-American writer Robert McAlmon and the American artist Myron Nutting and his wife Helen. Around midnight he would sit down at his piano and run his fingers over the keys, breaking into an Irish ballad or two such as The Brown and the Yellow Ale, his favourite, about a man who lends his wife to a stranger.

It was clear to anyone who met them together that Joyce and Nora were very close. Power felt there was a perfect understanding between them. While there were those who were shocked to hear Nora tease her husband in public, Irish friends saw it as a measure of their closeness. Joyce enjoyed being teased - and didn’t even seem to mind being chastised - by his wife.

Yet Nora had no interest in her husband’s work. When in Power’s presence Joyce presented her with the 1000th copy of Ulysses, which he had inscribed, she weighed it in her hand and looked at Power. ‘How much will you give me for this?’ she asked. Power felt that, far from displaying ignorance, Nora was simply cutting her man down to size.⁴⁷

Sometimes Power would accompany the family on Sunday drives (in a hired car with driver). If a storm broke out, Joyce would order the driver to turn around and take them home. On one occasion, Power asked why was he so afraid of thunder while his children did not seem to mind. ‘Ah,’ replied Joyce, ‘they have no religion.’⁴⁸

Looking back on his friendship, Power found Joyce at his best during this time. He gave the impression of being calm and settled, although his confidence was inclined to fluctuate with his temperament. Despite his undoubted achievement with Ulysses, he sometimes questioned the ultimate value of his talent. But Power felt that that was one of the most attractive and human of Joyce’s qualities. If he was down one day, a few days later there would be a gleam in his eye and his confidence would have returned.

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