James Joyce in Vanity Fair (1922)

Joyce by Mina Loy. Also by Djuna Barnes here. 

Djuna Barnes wrote about her meeting with James Joyce at the Deux Megots for Vanity Fair magazine, published in April 1922:

"There are men in Dublin who will tell you that out of Ireland a great voice has gone; and there are a few women, lost to youth, who will add: “One night he was singing and the next he wasn’t, and there’s been no silence the like of it!
 For the singing voice of James Joyce, author of The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and of Ulysses is said to have been second to none.

Day Six of the Easter Rising - By James Stephens

James Stephens and James Joyce in Paris, circa 1934.

James Stephens was in Dublin during the Easter 1916 Rising. He documented his take on events in 'The Insurrection in Dublin'. I have republished his account of Easter Monday, Easter Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. You can read his account of Saturday April 29 1916, Day 6 of the fighting here, where James Stephens wrote:

"This morning also there has been no bread, no milk, no meat, no newspapers, but the sun is shining. It is astonishing that, thus early in the Spring, the weather should be so beautiful. 

Day Five of the Easter Rising - By James Stephens

James Stephens, James Joyce and John Sullivan talking on Rue Raspail, Paris.

James Stephens, fellow Dubliner, writer and and friend of James Joyce, spent all of Easter 1916 in the Irish capital, the theatre of the republican Rising. He documented his experience of life in the city among the lead and the cordite his book 'The Insurrection in Dublin'. I have republished his account of Easter Monday, Easter Tuesday, the Wednesday and the Thursday. You can read his account of the Friday, Day Five of the Rising, April 28 1916 below. He wrote:

"This morning there are no newspapers, no bread, no milk, no news. The sun is shining, and the streets are lively but discreet. All people continue to talk to one another without distinction of class, but nobody knows what any person thinks.

James Joyce on Home Rule

James Joyce by Ronald Searle

In an earlier post I looked at a 25 year old Joyce who wrote about 'The Last Fenian' John O'Leary. In the same year, 1907, he wrote, ‘Home Rule Comes of Age’. "From a hasty study of the history of Home Rule," Joyce made two deductions, one:

"The first is this: the most powerful weapons that England can use against Ireland are no longer those of Conservatism, but those of Liberalism and Vaticanism. Conservatism, though it may be tyrannical, is a frankly and openly inimical doctrine. Its position is logical; it does not want a rival island to arise near Great Britain, or Irish factories to create competition for those in England, or tobacco and wine again to be exported from Ireland, or the great ports along the Irish coast to become enemy naval bases under a native government or a foreign protectorate. Its position is logical, as is that of the Irish separatists which contradicts it point by point. It takes little intelligence to understand that Gladstone has done Ireland greater damage than Disraeli did, and that the most fervid enemy of the Irish Catholics is the head of English Vaticanism, the Duke of Norfolk."

James Joyce on Fenianism (1907)

Doodles by Samuel Beckett, including a scribble of James Joyce

In 1907, aged 25, James Joyce wrote 'The Last Fenian'  and remarked upon the enduring struggle between violent and constitutional nationalism: 

"Anyone who studies the history of the Irish revolution during the nineteenth century finds himself faced with a double struggle — the struggle of the Irish nation against the English government, and the struggle, perhaps no less bitter, between the moderate patriots and the so-called party of physical force. This party under different names: ‘White Boys’, ‘Men of ‘98’, ‘United Irishmen’, ‘Invincibles’, ‘Fenians’, has always refused to be connected with either the English political parties or the Nationalist parliamentarians. They maintain (and in this assertion history fully supports them) that any concessions that have been granted to Ireland, England has granted unwillingly, and, as it is usually put, at the point of a bayonet."

The eloquence of Oscar Wilde

A cartoon of Oscar Wilde at the end of his visit to America in 1882, The Judge magazine.

[UPDATE - Martin Amis on the perfect paragraph rhetoric of Hitchens here and below]

Christopher Hitchens was a man of inimitable intellect and staggering, effortless eloquence. I've often pondered how he possessed such mastery and control of the language and rhetorical flair. I feel that James Joyce, speaking to Vanity Fair in Paris in 1922, gives a hint:

"All the great talkers have spoken in the language of Sterne, Swift, or the Restoration. Even Oscar Wilde. He studied the restoration through a microscope in the morning and repeated it through a telescope in the evening."

Will Self - Art is theft, Ctd

Kingsley Amis by Anglo-Polish impressionist painter Feliks Topolski

Will Self (@wself) said during a panel conversation on Dubliners by James Joyce:

"Being pray to the anxiety of influence - and if any writer tells you that she or he doesn’t suffer from the anxiety of influence then they’re a stone-cold liar."

He explained how W.H. Auden notoriously used to write "GETS" in the margins of books for "Good Enough To Steal":

"W.H. Auden notoriously used to write in the marginalia "GETS", in the margins of books for "Good Enough To Steal". So I most re-read James Joyce’s Dubliners to steal stuff."

Will Self also explained that he likes to think he's a good enough writer to thieve. He said in the Guardian:

"[Writing] is theft", Ctd 'All art is derivative'

I've referred before to Christopher Hitchen's 2004 essay in Vanity Fair on James Joyce, 'Joyce in Bloom.' In the essay Hitchens notes the parallels, parodies and plagiarisms evident in Joyce's work.

The conclusion is that all art and writing is theft in one way or another. In his book, 'Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere' Christopher Hitchens even wrote a chapter entitled, 'In Defence of Plagiarism.'

It's an inconspicuous, unspoken but patently obvious habit of the writer and the artist. One that can be hard to describe in plain English.

However Maria Popova of Brain Pickings has encapsulating it nicely. She said:

'All art is derivative.'

James Joyce on the Torture of Writing

I’ve written a couple of times before (here and here) that I often find writing intensely difficult. It’s a situation where I’m frozen by doubt, worry and self-criticism. Crippled by the inability to structure syntax correctly, get the phrases and sentences flowing or have the paragraphs follow on from one another in a linear narrative.

Unfortunately there’s no quick fix. Like anything it’s a matter of practice and of course reading often and widely.

Also, taking a long view I’m still in my writing infancy. And that’S the most pragmatic way to look at it; writing and becoming a writer is a journey. There will be challenges, highs and lows – but I’m up for the challenge.

I recently stumbled across a quote by the iconic Irish writer and novelist James Joyce.

Writing in the English language is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives.

And so it appears even he, surely one of the most storied and studied writers in the history of man, also struggled writing in the English language. What a huge comfort this has been!