Work in Progress

There’s something about James Joyce. Once you get into him, he becomes addictive, grabs you, inspires in you some obsessive devotion, a kind of fanaticism dedicated to the man and his works, a worship. When F. Scott Fitzgerald first met Joyce in person at a dinner party in Paris on July 27, 1928 (organized by Shakespeare & Company bookstore owner Sylivia Beach), he addressed his idol as “sir,” kneeling before him, suddenly announcing that, as a tribute to Joyce’s genius, to “St. James,” he was going to throw himself out of the window. Joyce managed to catch Fitzgerald, holding him back from falling, from disappearing over the apartment’s fourth floor windowsill, saying afterward: “That young man must be mad—I’m afraid he’ll do himself some injury.”

And then there was Samuel Beckett, one-time Joyce’s personal assistant (and suitor of Joyce’s daughter Lucia), who was so beguiled by his mentor that he wore the same battered tennis shoes, in the same size, a good three-sizes too small for Beckett! And the stranger in a Zurich café, who seized Joyce by the hand, exclaiming, “may I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses?” Joyce responded, “No—that hand did a lot of other things, too!”

I plead guilty to my own Joycean obsessions. Off-and-on for forty-odd years I’ve been reading him, appreciating him, obtaining tremendous joy from his prose and probing insights he teaches us on the human condition. I make no claims as any expert of Irish literature, only as a self-avowed amateur, with no credentials other than an enormous admiration for the man. I’m not alone in this passionate embrace. Scattered around the globe, almost everywhere in the world, thousands of people, in numerous languages, dutifully meet and participate in assorted reading groups devoted to Joyce’s books, often reading them line by line, doing so for years on end, without fail. At the Venice branch of Los Angeles Public Library, a James Joyce reading group met every month to read Finnegans Wake, eventually finishing it in October 2023, twenty-eight years after they’d begun it.

Reading Joyce has been a no-strings attached labor of love for me, nothing instrumental, a quirky devotion, including an almost squirrel-like compulsion of collecting different editions of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. I’ve got dozens of different versions on my bookshelf: “corrected” editions and abridged editions, old editions and new “special” editions, anything and everything that might have a different cover. Each time I see a Ulysses or a Finnegans Wake in a used bookstore, in an edition or version I haven’t got, with a cover that’s novel to me, I nab it, shelve it under my ever-expanding collection. Curiously, afterward, I reread this newly acquired version, making fresh annotations in it, often discovering lines, ideas, and words I hadn’t noticed before, as if the new clear copy, perhaps with a different font, helped me see things anew.

Pride of place is a 1940s Faber & Faber red hardback Finnegans Wake, a fourth printing of the text, the nearest I have to a first edition. Everything resembles the first edition anyway, a red hardback cover, quite plain. It’s all the more charming because it is literally falling apart at the seams, its pages dropping out. I love this copy but it isn’t my most affectionate version of Finnegans Wake. Dearest to my heart, is an ordinary Penguin publication, from 1999, with its Book of Kells cover and an introduction by the late John Bishop (of Joyce’s Book of the Dark fame), which I purchased at the “Murder Ink” bookstore on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

I bought it on my fortieth birthday, in the millennium year, a little gift to myself, when I lived around the corner on West 93^rd Street. I remember six-years on reading with poignancy an article in The New York Times (December 20, 2006), reporting “Many Suspects Seen in the Death of a Mystery Bookstore,” as Murder Ink finally went out of business after thirty-four years of trading. The rent was increasing five percent, and the current eighteen thousand dollars a month was already crippling the small independent, devoted to crime and mystery fiction, yet not entirely. Jay Pearsall, the owner, lamented its closing. “When I see the books that I can’t order again, it’s hard. Whether it’s Finnegans Wake or Pat the Bunny, it seems impossible,” Pearsall said, “that we won’t order or sell those again.”

I also recall, after purchasing that copy of Finnegans Wake, meeting up later the same day with my friend, the writer Marshall Berman, himself a Joyce devotee—Stephen Dedalus’s “shout in the street” in Ulysses, after all, plays a pivotal role in Marshall’s own modernist masterpiece, All That is Solid Melts into Air. When I told Marshall I’d just bought a nice copy of Finnegans Wake, we went on to have a lengthy conversation about the relative merits of Ulysses vis-à-vis Finnegans Wake; Marshall always preferring Ulysses whereas I, despite also loving Ulysses, had a bit of penchant for Finnegans Wake.

Marshall liked the fact that Ulysses was a novel, challenging for sure, but its narrative could be read from start to finish, whereas Finnegans Wake was something else again, neither a novel nor readable in English. Above all, Ulysses brought together twin themes that preoccupied Marshall’s Marxist imagination, that animated his scholarship: it’s not only preeminently an urban book, it’s equally a book about urban everyday life. With this unity (and wholeness), Ulysses expressed the kind of democratic modernism that lit Marshall’s fire, the opposite of the oppressive, top-down modernization espoused by the likes of Robert Moses and Le Corbusier; Finnegans Wake, Joyce’s nighttime (and nightmare) book, would never speak to Marshall in the same way.

Ulysses voiced Marshall’s 1960s generation’s modernism, taught them where to look, how to find nourishment in a place where few modernists at the time ever dreamed of looking: in the everyday street. This is the life that Joyce’s Stephen points to with his thumb, “the apparently inchoate random shouts that drift in from the street.” Each time I pick up this edition of the Wake, with great nostalgia I think of the late Marshall, of Murder Ink, of New York’s Upper West Side, of my younger self, and of a past life gone forever.