Reflections on James Joyce: Stuart Gilbert's Paris Journal

by Stuart Gilbert, Thomas F. Staley (Editor), Randolph Lewis (Editor)

Stuart Gilbert's friendship with James Joyce began in Paris in 1927 after Gilbert read several pages from a forthcoming French translation of Ulysses in the window of Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company book shop and went in to tell Beach that the translation was poorly done. She reported the encounter to Joyce, who subsequently sought out Gilbert. Their meeting began a literary collaboration and friendship that lasted until Joyce's death in 1941. This journal is a chronicle of that remarkable and productive friendship. Stuart Gilbert records many amusing anecdotes and provocative opinions regarding Joyce's social life, his relationship with his wife, Nora, and his compositional techniques for Finnegans Wake. Also included in the book are some of Joyce's previously unpublished letters to Gilbert (also reproduced in photographs), numerous unpublished photographs, and a typically dyspeptic 1941 essay on Joyce, Paul Léon, and Herbert Gorman by Gilbert. The volume is fully annotated and contains an introduction by noted Joyce scholar Thomas F. Staley. These materials from the Stuart Gilbert Archive of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin offer new perspectives on literary Paris of the 1920s and 1930s. They will be important for everyone interested in the modernist period.

Genres: Biography

117 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1993

Reviews

[E. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This for me is quite eye-opening. And let's not judge Gilbert too much - when people write journals not intended for publication, much is said that would never be found in one of those more well-edited, almost scripted, and certainly self-censoring interviews. For those who really want to know the (deeply complex) relationship between Gilbert and Joyce, or the inner dynamics Joyce's circle, or even Joyce the man, this is an enlightening read. It, at least, challenged my preexisting images of the Gilbert-Joyce collaboration and showed a much more profound undercurrent beneath the Joyce circle in Paris.

[Greg · Rating 2 out of 5]

If anything, this journal is more impenetrable than Ulysses itself. It's a collection of short journal entries by Gilbert, who worked with Joyce, and hung out with Joyce and his wife for a time. If you don't know all the people they hung out with, or want to read tacky insults of them, you'll be fairly lost, as I generally was when reading it. He also abbreviates a lot, and the endnotes are often as obtuse as the entries.

It's a bit of a hoot, however, because Gilbert, despite acknowledging that he's just a parasite on Joyce's genius and fame, is forever lamenting the lack of culture found in 99.9% of the people of the world. It's one thing for an obtuse academic to rail about the lack of high culture amongst the hoi polloi, but it's something else again to have him tell you that Mozart "Didn't know much" about music. No joke, he says that. I mean, you have to have a pretty high opinion of yourself to dismiss Mozart as someone who really didn't bring much to the table. His opinion of women isn't much better.