MY FRIEND JAMES JOYCE
83
urgies; education; anthropology; philology; and certain sciences,
particularly physics, geometry and mathematics. He was little
interested in pure politics and economics, although he followed
events faithfully.
I am conscious of difficulty in writing about him, for he was
often amused by the articles that concerned his private life. He
seemed to resent the constant macabre preoccupations with the con·
clition of his eyes. Once, when I read a particularly inept piece
about his personal habits, written in German, he said: "What are
they writing about?
Es ist eben nichts zu malen."
(There really is
nothing to paint, anyway.) During the fourteen years of our asso·
ciation-which coincided with the writing of
Work
in
Progress,
or
Finnegans Wake--!
had many opportunities to observe his kindli–
ness, his humor, his pathos. I saw his stoicism before fate. I saw
him in moments of insouciance and in moments of distress. In
spite of the frailty of his physique, there was a certain toughness
in him which saw him through the ups and downs of his destiny.
This tenacity was part of his honesty of conviction, his horror of
cheap compromise, his fanatic belief in his own intellectual
powers. His being was compact and fashioned by a will of steel.
He was a man of deep tolerance, and objected to all denigrations
of friends, or enemies, in his presence.
I met James Joyce for the first time in 1924, three years
before I launched
transition.
It
was at a rather dull banquet given
at the Restaurant Marguery in honor of Valery Larbaud, his first
French friend and translator. (By a curious turn of fate, Larbaud
was the last French writer Joyce saw anything of. While in Vichy,
during the war, he went frequently to visit the now incurably ill
author of
Barnabooth.)
Joyce was beaming in the aurole of
Ulysses,
and in a happy mood, when I was introduced to him. He
thanked me courteously for something I had written about the book
in a literary column I was then conducting for the Paris edition of
the
Chicago Tribune.
We did not meet again until early in 1927,
when I was preparing
transition
with Elliot Paul. We had ap·
roached Miss Sylvia Beach, his publisher, to ask her for a manu·
script from Joyce, but with very little hope that anything would be
orthcoming. Miss Beach consulted him, and within a few days we
ad the manuscript in our hands.
On a Sunday afternoon, in the winter of 1927, Joyce invited
lie. Adrienne Monnier, Miss Sylvia Beach, my wife, Elliot Paul
