Lee’s Reviews > James Joyce > Status Update

(To Stanislaus Joyce)

'O Vague Something behind Everything! For the love of the Lord Christ change my curse-o'-God state of affairs. Give me for Christ' sake a pen and an ink-bottle and some peace of mind and then, by the crucified Jaysus, if I don't sharpen that little pen and dip it into fermented ink and write tiny little sentences about the people who betrayed me send me to hell.'

'"It is my idea of the significance of trivial things that I want to give the two or three unfortunate wretches who may eventually read me."'

'He took a long walk through the streets of Paris, and didn't return to his little room until late. A telegram was waiting, and he opened it with foreboding. 'MOTHER DYING COME HOME FATHER.'
He had no money for a trip. He managed to rouse his pupil Douce and showed him the telegram. Douce obligingly provided 375 francs and Joyce left the next morning. He spoke broken English on the pier to avoid tipping a porter.'

'The epiphany did not mean for Joyce the manifestation of godhead, the showing forth of Christ to the Magi; the epiphany was the sudden 'revelation of the whatness of a thing,' the moment in which 'the soul of the commonest object seems to us radiant.' The artist, he felt, was charged with such revelations, and must look for them not among gods but among men, in casual, unostentatious, even unpleasant moments.'

'A man of small virtue, inclined to alcoholism,' he described himself to a doctor; to Louis Gillet, the French Academician who wished to exalt him, he said, 'Don't make a hero out of me, I'm only a simple middle-class man.' He surrounded himself with mostly unknowns: waiters, tailors, fruitsellers, concierges. This assemblage was as inevitable for Joyce's temperament as marquises and marchionesses were for Proust's.'