by The Irish Times says the country’s turn in the chair of the Union may be about to hit a snag, and I have been rereading the exile who got there seventy years before the state did
Thursday, the Till, a Quiet Afternoon
A man came in today looking for Joyce “in the original.” I asked which original he meant. He said, “The Irish.” I explained, as gently as I could, that Joyce wrote in English. He seemed disappointed. He bought a guidebook to Dublin.
It stayed with me, though, because of where Joyce actually did write. Not in Dublin. Hardly a page of it.
The Addresses
He left Ireland in 1904, at twenty-two, with a young woman from Galway who had been working as a chambermaid. They were not married. They had almost no money. He had the promise of a job teaching English at a language school in Switzerland, which turned out not to exist when he got there.
So they went on to Trieste. It was then the great port of the Austrian empire, a city of Italians, Slovenes, Germans, Greeks and Jews. He taught English to clerks and naval officers. He learned the local dialect. His children grew up speaking Italian at home.
When the war came he moved to Zurich, which was full of refugees, spies and artists. He wrote most of Ulysses there, going blind, in rented rooms.
After the war, Paris. The book was published there in 1922 by an American woman who ran a bookshop, because no publisher in Britain or Ireland would touch it.
At the end of Ulysses he wrote three place names and two dates. Trieste, Zurich, Paris. 1914 to 1921. Not Dublin.
And yet every page of it is Dublin. One day, in one city, street by street, so exactly that he said if the place were destroyed it could be rebuilt from his book.
Why He Went
He told us why. In the novel he wrote about his own youth, the young man explains what he will do. He will not serve the things he no longer believes in, his home, his fatherland or his church. He will try to express himself freely, using for his defence the only arms he allows himself: silence, exile and cunning.
The Ireland he left was small, poor and watchful. The Church sat on one shoulder and the Empire on the other. A writer who told the truth about the place could not get printed in it. Dubliners was held up for nine years because a printer was afraid of a rude word and a remark about the King.
So he went to the Continent. Not to escape Ireland. To be able to see it.
And he became, without ever ceasing to be a Dubliner, the most European writer of his age. His great book is built on a Greek poem. He read in eight or nine languages. His friends were Italians and Frenchmen. He thought of Ireland as a European country that had been cut off from Europe by its neighbour, and he reattached it by himself.
The Column
My mother read me a headline on Sunday that made me laugh, and I looked up the piece. It is the Irish Times politics column from Tuesday of last week, under the title Ireland’s EU presidency may be about to hit a snag.
I had forgotten. Ireland has the chair this half-year. The presidency of the Council goes round the member states in turn, six months each, and this is Dublin’s. For half a year, Irish ministers run the meetings of the twenty-seven.
I do not know what the snag is. The part I could see was mostly about the North. But I thought about the bare fact of it for a long while.
The country that a young man had to leave in 1904, because it was too narrow to write in, is this autumn presiding over Europe.
How That Happened
It was not quick.
For the first fifty years after independence, the Irish state was very nearly as closed as the one Joyce fled. Poor. Devout. It banned books by the hundred, including, for a time, a good many by Irish writers who are now on its banknotes and its tea towels. It lost half its young people to the boat.
My mother left Sligo in 1973 at nineteen. That was the same year Ireland joined what was then the Common Market. She says nobody she knew thought it would make any difference. It was to do with cattle prices.
It made all the difference. Money for roads. Markets other than Britain. And something less easy to measure: for the first time, Ireland was in a room where it was one of many small countries and not the smaller half of a quarrel with a big one.
My mother’s generation went to London to scrub floors. Her nieces went to Brussels and Frankfurt as lawyers.
What Joyce Would Make of It
I have no business guessing. But I shall, because that is what a quiet afternoon is for.
I think he would be astonished, and pleased, and unsentimental about it.
Pleased, because it is what he believed. That Ireland’s natural company was the Continent. That a small nation is freer among many than alone beside one.
Unsentimental, because he distrusted every kind of official enthusiasm. He disliked nationalists nearly as much as he disliked the Empire. He would have looked at a summit in Dublin Castle, with flags and a family photograph, and he would have noticed who was not in the picture and what was being left unsaid.
And he would have listened to how they talked. That was his whole method. He thought you could tell everything about a society from its language. The first story he wrote of Dublin turns on three words a boy does not understand. I wonder what he would have done with a communique.
A Caution
I should not make it too pretty. My mother would correct me.
The same Europe that gave Ireland its place also, in the crash of fifteen years ago, sent in men in suits to tell it what it could spend. People emigrated again. She has not forgotten.
And being a small country at a big table is not the same as being powerful. You get the chair for six months. Then it goes to the next. What you can do with it depends on whether the large members want it done.
Whatever this snag is, I expect it has to do with that.
Still. It is a chair. Joyce could not get his book printed.
Silence, Exile, Cunning
What I love about that phrase is that it is a list of weapons for the weak.
A strong country does not need cunning. It has an army. A small one has to think. It has to be quiet when shouting would be satisfying. It has to go abroad and learn other people’s languages. It has to be clever in rooms.
That is not a bad description of how a small state gets on in Europe. Ireland has been rather good at it. Better, some would say, than its large neighbour, which had the army and the confidence and walked out.
I say that as someone who is half English and sells books in London. I am not gloating. I only notice that the exile’s arms turned out to be useful.
Friday
The man who wanted Joyce in Irish came back. He had started the guidebook and wanted to know which book was “the easy one.” I sold him Dubliners. Seven pounds, a reading copy, with someone’s name in the front in violet ink. Not the first edition. That is still locked up.
I told him to start with the last story and to read it on a cold night.
The London Prat, I see, is curious about the neighbours. Its English satirical news on exiles has an Englishman abroad who cannot understand why nobody will speak English more slowly, and its UK satirical news about summits in Dublin features a British observer in the corridor. My Boston lecturer says Bohiney Magazine has discovered that half of America is Irish and the other half is about to be.
Trieste, Zurich, Paris. I have always wanted to go to Trieste. There is a statue of him on a bridge there, walking, with his hands in his pockets.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
