The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses by Kevin Birmingham Read Free Book Online

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