Stephen Bloom

LETTERS OF JAMES JOYCE (437 pp.)--Edited by Stuart Gilbert--Viking ($7.50)

James Joyce, the great artificer of words who both revitalized and nearly destroyed the English novel with Ulysses, and left even some of his admirers behind in the labyrinth of Finnegans Wake, will not be remembered for his letters. In them he sounds as relaxed, colloquial, and sometimes as pedestrian as a chatty uncle in Chicago. But they make fascinating reading--something like seeing the Bearded Lady without her whiskers or the Fire Eater spooning ice cream.

This collection contains a few selected letters to Joyce as well as hundreds from him. The first, written in 1901 when Joyce was 19, is a reverent birthday greeting to Henrik Ibsen and glows with optimism about the dawning age of "enlightenment." The last, written in 1940, three weeks before Joyce's death, is a note of thanks to the mayor of Zurich for giving Joyce and his family asylum from the Nazi war machine. It reflects the "painful times" on which the age of enlightenment has fallen.

"Who the Hell Is Joyce?" Such ironies were commonplace in Joyce's life. Few men have had to struggle harder--against illness, insensitivity, poverty, misunderstanding and bustling ignorance. Job-Joyce's trials are traced in the letters. His short-story collection, Dubliners, was "rejected by 40 publishers." Ulysses, banned in Britain and kept out of the U.S. as "obscene," was pirated by publishers. Finnegans Wake was denounced as a book written "by a lunatic for lunatics." H. G. Wells arrogantly wrote Joyce: "You have in your composition a mighty genius for expression which has escaped discipline . . . So I ask: Who the hell is this Joyce who demands so many waking hours of the few thousands I have still to live for a proper appreciation of his quirks and fancies?"

Faced by such lack of comprehension, Joyce complained: "Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised. The English reading public explains the reason why."

Trees Behind the Church. The letters show Joyce as a man drunk on language. He had the gift of tongues (just for fun, he dashed off translations of a poem by James Stephens in German, Latin, Norwegian, Italian and French). His view of himself was generally rueful, whether he was commenting on his physical "cowardice" or remarking on his "steely cheerfulness in what does not afflict me personally." He read hugely, but at times with so little discrimination that his head felt full of "pebbles and rubbish and broken matches and lots of glass picked up 'most everywhere.' " When he was losing his eyesight he devoted hours to reading Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, but lost patience after two pages of a book about D. H. Lawrence's sex-ridden Lady Chatterley's Loner. The critique was, he thought, a piece of propaganda "in favour of something which, outside of D.H.L.'s own country at any rate, makes all the propaganda for itself."

Joyce was a great hater. Like Dante, he put his enemies in his books (often under their right names) and hit them hard. He seemed to take a dim view of psychoanalysis, referred to Jung as "the Swiss Tweedledum who is not to be confused with the Viennese Tweedledee, Dr. Freud." And he disposed of Marcel Proust with the remark that he could not see "any special talent" in him.

Ireland was in his veins. He lived most of his life on the Continent, in Trieste, Paris, Zurich, but his writing never left Dublin. His maturity was spent putting the first 22 years of his life on paper and infusing them with the thousands of years that had gone before. His letters to relatives in Ireland asked endlessly for bits of information (are there trees--and of what kind--behind the Star of the Sea Church in Sandymount?), and no universal acclaim could root out the canker of rejection by his native land.

On the surface, Joyce was an apostate Roman Catholic, an expatriate Irishman, a bohemian believer in free love (he was finally married in 1931 in a London registry office to Nora Barnacle after they had lived together for 27 years and had two children). But at heart he was a devout man, a patriot, a model husband and father. H. G. Wells spotted these contradictions, told Joyce: "You really believe in chastity, purity and the personal God and that is why you are always breaking out into cries" of assorted obscenity and profanity (which Wells listed in four-letter fullness).

Waking Finn. His collected Letters only spottily reflect the man. Much of his humor is here, the punnier the better. He called himself "a Joyce crying in the wilderness," and when, among a batch of criticisms about Finnegans Wake he found one to be from a Helsinki publication, he shouted triumphantly: ''The Finn again wakes."

Too many of the Letters are concerned with business, legal squabbles, appeals for money, and desperate attempts to find a decent place to live. He was avid for praise, stoically unmoved by criticism, and would starve rather than change a line he had written. Even to his closest friends, Joyce seldom laid bare his soul. But with his family he was not often the literary man. Writing to his son Giorgio, he discusses singing; to his daughter Lucia, who had suffered a mental breakdown, he is cautionary and gentle. Since he was scarcely absent a day from his wife, there are no letters reflecting their closeness and love.

In many of these letters Joyce is revealed as a real Leopold Bloom, a small householder with much the same business worries, family concerns and deep absorption in his own health and digestive tract. Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, the Hellene and the Jew, the artist and the Philistine, the son and the father--by the time of James Joyce's death these two dissimilars seem to have found a comforting oneness in the man who created them.

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