Status Updates From James Joyce and Italo Svevo...

“To mark his sadness at his father’s passing, Joyce invented a new weekday calendar – Moansday, Tearsday, Wailsday, Thumpsday, Frightday, Shatterday.”

“Meanwhile Joyce was spending long hours, when his sight allowed, on his Work in Progress. It was to be seventeen years before he unveiled it as Finnegans Wake. The apostrophe was omitted because it meant both the death of Finnegan, and the resurgence of all Finnegans.”

“From Galway he sent Svevo a postcard of an elderly fisherman sitting on a rock. On the back he wrote ‘A portrait of the artist as an old man.’ He signed it ‘Stephen Dedalus’.”

“Joyce now put Bloom and Ulysses to the back of his mind, although, with Joyce, the back of his mind was never very far from the front.”

“In early September, frustrated at still not being able to write properly, he dictated the last few pages of ‘The Dead’ to Stanislaus. There is something very touching in the image of the two brothers sitting together, a thousand miles from Dublin, finishing the last story in Dubliners, an ending considered by many to be one of the finest in modern literature.”

“The most he had ever promised was that one day – through his books – they would be rich and famous. And Joyce did write prodigiously, whatever the adverse conditions. In their numerous apartments, Joyce nearly always had to write in the bedroom, sitting on the bed and using an open suitcase as a desk-top.”

“When a production of La Bohème came to the opera house, Joyce bought and read the score, then went eight times in the two weeks it was running. He saw Mahler conduct a Wagner concert, Eleonora Duse act in Ibsen’s Rosmersholm and the Triestine premières of plays by Strindberg and Pirandello.” [James Joyce in Trieste]