The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (5 page)

Since Paris, Joyce had been searching for an epiphany in a person. He thought the world’s radiance could emerge from an erotic connection with a woman who became in his mind an amalgam of women he had seen in Paris and in Nighttown, and the fact that she didn’t exist made it easy to sentimentalize her. “Thy love,” he wrote, “had made to arise in him the central torrents of life. Thou hadst put thine arms about him and, intimately prisoned as thou hadst been, in the soft stir of thy bosom, the raptures of silence, the murmured words, thy heart had spoken to his heart.” Contempt for the trolls was no longer enough. Joyce believed he would achieve true artistry only if he could find a companion.

2.

Joyce moved out of the house in March 1904 and rented a room close to the Dublin docks. He declined the university’s offer to teach French (he suspected it was the priests’ way of controlling him) and cast about for other options. He wanted to start a newspaper called
The Goblin
with one of his friends—all they needed was £2,000. Joyce and Gogarty talked excitedly about compiling an anthology of poetry and witticisms gathered from public toilets. Joyce thought of turning himself into a joint-stock company and selling shares. He imagined that the prices would go up for his lucky investors as soon as his publications began to change Western civilization, and his lucky 1904 investors could get him at a bargain.

One Friday in June, Joyce was walking down Nassau Street, where carriages and bicycles made way for double-decker trams rounding the corner of Grafton Street—people rode up top in the pleasant weather, their heads swaying above the railing advertisements. The drivers wound brass handles to speed the trams forward beneath cables that were spread out over the streets like broken spider webs. Amid the urban tableau, Joyce saw a tall woman he had never seen before striding up the street with her long auburn hair pinned down over her ears. She had heavy-lidded eyes, a mischievous smile and she moved with confidence. Joyce approached her, and she glanced at his dirty canvas shoes. He had smooth, flushed skin, a bold chin and clear blue eyes with an earnest look about them. She thought he looked severe, yet like a little boy.

When he asked, she told him her name in her low, resonant voice. “Nora Barnacle,” she said. It was beautiful and absurd. “Nora” was right out of Ibsen, and she pronounced her surname “
Bear
nacle,” like someone from the west of Ireland. In fact, she was from Galway City, a town of less than fifteen thousand, and the Joyces originated in Galway, so he already had something to talk about. Nora mentioned that she was a chambermaid at Finn’s Hotel just up the street. She cleaned rooms, waited tables and probably helped tend bar in the meager redbrick establishment.

Joyce asked her to meet him Tuesday evening in Merrion Square, just steps away from Finn’s Hotel. He arrived on time, but she never came. The following night, he wrote Miss Barnacle a letter.

—

NORA BARNACLE CAME to Dublin to escape what little semblance of a family she had. When she was five years old, Nora’s mother sent her to live with her grandmother. The Barnacles had been barely able to keep their house together, and they had to send Nora to her grandmother when twins arrived and Nora’s father lost his bakery because of his drinking. Nora was thirteen when her grandmother died. After her grandmother, it was the convent, and after the convent, Uncle Tommy.

Nora’s uncle was a disciplinarian who warned his niece to be home on time lest she get a beating. In the evenings, he went looking for her through the streets of Galway while swinging a blackthorn stick. Nora was usually with her friend Mary O’Holleran when Uncle Tommy couldn’t find her, and the young women were more brazen together. They dared each other to use foul language, and Nora wasn’t afraid to say “bloody” or “God” or “damn” the way men did. They sneaked into their neighbors’ gardens and stole vegetables, because if they’d eat a head of cabbage while looking into the mirror they would see the face of their future husbands. They would stick nine pins into an apple, throw the tenth away, stuff the apple into their left stockings and tie it with their right garters—
not
the left. When they put the apple under their pillow, they would dream of the man they’d marry. But it only worked on Halloween.

Nora had gotten more than her share of attention from men. A young schoolteacher named Michael Feeney sang songs to her, but he succumbed to typhoid in the winter of 1897, the same winter her grandmother died. Sonny Bodkin gave Nora a bracelet when she was sixteen, but tuberculosis ended that courtship. At the convent, they called her the “man killer.” A young priest once invited her to tea at the presbytery and then pulled her onto his lap. The priest’s hand was already under her dress before she could push him away, and he told her that
she
was the one who sinned by tempting him.

Sometimes Nora and Mary would put on trousers, neckties and heavy boots. They would tuck their hair under their caps and roam around Galway’s Eyre Square disguised as men. Mary remembered hearing Uncle Tommy whistling his favorite tune as he walked toward them one night. “My love, my pearl, my own dear girl.” As they passed within the length of his blackthorn, Mary muttered in a husky voice, “Good night,” as if the three of them had just finished a pint together. Uncle Tommy paused for a perplexed moment as the two figures walked quickly away, and when they turned the corner they broke into fits of laughter over their triumph.

—

NORA CHANGED her mind after receiving Joyce’s letter. On June 16, 1904, she met him in Dublin’s Merrion Square and walked with him to Ringsend, an empty field by the docks on the eastern edge of the city where the River Liffey opens into the bay. There were no streetlamps, and they were alone. As she drew closer he could smell the balsam and rose from the scented handkerchief she pinned into her clothes, and he blushed when he felt the gentle tugging at his buttons. She pulled his shirttails up, nimbly reached her fingers inside and began. When he moaned, she looked at Joyce and smirked, “What is it, dear?” It was an important moment in literary history.

Joyce, eager to remain aloof, kept up his carousing, but every now and then he strolled into Finn’s to see Nora, and the sight of his clothes and shoes embarrassed her. Considering his appearance, his letters to her were oddly formal. He insisted on signing his name “James Joyce” or “J.A.J.” or with joking pseudonyms—anything but “Jim.” So she did the same. “N Barnacle,” sometimes, or “Norah Barnacle” (Joyce found the
h
appalling). He insisted on calling her “Miss Barnacle” when they were together, and by August he was still unsure how to relinquish the formalities. “How am I to sign myself?” he once wrote before refusing to sign at all.

But he wrote to her about her deep voice, her brown shoes, and the kisses she placed upon his neck like small birds. And as the summer went on, the days without her became longer. By the end of July, Joyce was frustrated and suspicious when he couldn’t see her for more than two consecutive evenings. He took one of her gloves to help him pass the time until their next meeting, and he slept with it unbuttoned beside him, where it was quite well behaved, he wrote, just like Nora herself.

Few people approved of what was happening between them. Miss Barnacle was, after all, just a chambermaid, and despite his family’s travails, Dublin thought James Joyce could do better. His brother Stannie thought her face was rather “common.” Joyce’s father didn’t take the match seriously, and he laughed when he heard her name.
Barn
acle? “Oh, she’ll never leave him.” Joyce’s friends went so far as to insult her in front of him. They were surprised that Joyce could be interested in a woman so uneducated—the Galway girl never got past grammar school. Cosgrave insisted that it wouldn’t last and called Miss Barnacle by her first name just to nettle Joyce, if not to remind him that he had met her first. Joyce pretended to have the same indifference for their opinions in this matter as he had in all other matters, but the act was more difficult. “Their least word,” he confessed to her in a letter, “tumbles my heart about like a bird in a storm.”

Joyce was unsure how a serious relationship would affect his life as a writer. Despite his affectations, being an artist was not a pose or a passing fancy. It was who he was. To declare yourself an artist in 1904 Dublin was not an embarrassment. An aspiring artist didn’t fear accusations of pretentiousness or irrelevance. Even if, as Joyce insisted, Ireland had failed its writers, art mattered, and like all things that matter, it required sacrifice. The question nettling Joyce was whether Nora fit into his life as an artist. He was torn between the isolation he had cultivated since his banned essay and the companionship he had craved since writing “A Portrait.”

He tried to explain this in a long, oblique letter to Nora. He had left the Catholic Church years ago, he wrote, and everything he did was a part of the battle he waged against it. But it was more than the Church. The whole order of life seemed flawed—so many nations like encampments containing families packed up like miserable parcels going nowhere. “How could I like the idea of home?” he asked her, after growing up with a dissolute father who slowly killed his wife and nearly ruined the children who managed to survive childhood. Joyce feared he was destined to relive his father’s mistakes. She wanted stability, and he was a vagabond. Yet he insisted that he wanted more than her caresses. Joyce hinted that he was ready to give something up for Nora, though his letter offered little more than hints. He wanted her to search for him through his words and find him hiding there like a child.

Joyce demanded that Nora demonstrate her love in the most exacting terms possible. She would have to reject the conventions he resented—marriage, the Church and the home. He wanted her to spurn him or guide him through “the central torrents of life.” Nora had to study his letter carefully because the pages read like a finished puzzle unsolving itself. Each revealing moment was followed by a turn that seemed deliberately vague. What, exactly, did he want beyond her caresses? When she didn’t respond, he wrote another letter imploring her to write back quickly. He had
thirteen
letters from her.

—

JOYCE WAS EVICTED at the end of August, which forced him to venture out to Oliver Gogarty’s watchtower by the sea. Gogarty was living in one of the many Martello towers that had been built along Ireland’s eastern coastline to repel a Napoleonic invasion. In 1900, the British War Office had decommissioned the towers, removed the howitzers and swivel guns, emptied the gunpowder magazines and abandoned them. Gogarty rented the granite tower on Sandycove, nine miles south of Dublin, for eight pounds a year.

For Joyce, the shoreside tower was a last resort. For Gogarty, it was a boyhood bohemia by the sand grass. Their conversations swerved from steep philosophy to sacrilegious japes. Gogarty would close his eyes and summon all of his medico-spiritual powers to make sure he got all of Jesus’ platelets and white corpuscles into the wine at consecration, and Joyce matched it with his venereal version of the prayer at the end of the Mass.

Blessed Michael, the ass

angel, propel us in the hour of contact; be our safeguard against the wickedness and snares of the Syph Fiend; May God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do Thou, O Prince of the Heavenly Host, thrust Syphilis down to Hell and with him all the wicked spirits who wander through the world for the ruin of tools. Amen.

Joyce did not remain in the tower for long. A dispute, which Gogarty said involved his playfully firing a pistol above Joyce’s head, gave Joyce the impetus to do what he had been planning for months: he walked the nine miles back to Dublin in the middle of the night to leave Ireland forever. Joyce waited for Nora in Merrion Square the following evening with the hope that she would give up everything to be with him. He didn’t ask her directly if she would go. He asked, “Is there one who understands me?”

—

WHEN NORA BARNACLE LEFT GALWAY, she did it alone in the middle of the night. She didn’t say good-bye to her mother or Mary O’Holleran. When she wanted only brief escapes from home, she would tell her mother and Uncle Tommy she was going to church in the evening with Mary. The two friends would walk to the Abbey Church near Eyre Square, and when Nora said enough prayers not to raise suspicions, she would slip away to meet Willy Mulvagh, the only Protestant on Mary Street, while her friend waited in the pew. Nora and Willy went places where Uncle Tommy wouldn’t find them, and she would return to the church hours later with details and a box of cream sweets.

But Uncle Tommy couldn’t be fooled forever. When he forbade her to see him, she saw him even more. She wasn’t in love with Willy, but she enjoyed the freedom and thrill of their time alone, and she was happy. But one night as she walked home, Nora heard the tapping stick and “My love, my pearl, my own dear girl.” She didn’t even need to turn around. Uncle Tommy followed her home.

When he entered the house after her, Uncle Tommy ordered Nora’s mother out of the room and began beating his insolent bitch of a niece with his blackthorn stick. Nora fell down screaming and clutched his knees while her mother listened through the door. The sharp blows fell on her back and ribs as she curled up on the floor and trembled like an angry fist.

The next day Nora began her secret plans—the inquiries about jobs, the furtive packing, the one-way ticket for Dublin—and by the end of the week she was gone. Nora Barnacle gave up everything she knew to go to a city she had never seen and start a new life where she knew no one. She was nineteen years old, and her life was finally her own.