Frank Budgen
FURTHER RECOLLECTIONS
OF JAMES JOYCE
Joyce was born on February 2, Candlemas, of the year 1882,
and I on March 1, St. David's Day of the same year, so that he was
my senior by twenty-six days. My book,
James Joyce and the Making of
Ulysses,
appeared in 1934 when Joyce was still with us and, as some
may remember, that book contained, among other matters, some per–
sonal recollections of the author of
Ulysses
designed to give the reader
an idea of the man as well as of his work. Here I set forth a few more
such recollections with the same end in view. They follow no plan,
unless there is a concealed plan in the seemingly haphazard operations
of memory. Should any of them appear trivial I entrench myself in
advance behind Joyce's own doctrine, which was that a place where
three or four roads meet is a good place to look and listen for talk
and happenings that signify much.
As I knew him Joyce liked to talk about his work when he could
find an understanding listener, and particularly he liked to talk about
that upon which he was actively engaged, and I surmise that this talk
served a dual purpose. It kept his mind fixed upon the matter in hand,
and it provoked responsive comment which might, and often did, prove
useful to him.
Understandably the talk in Ziirich turned generally on
Ulysses,
and I can remember few references in that period to his play,
Exiles.
But later in Paris, in the autumn of 1933, he referred to
Exiles
in con–
nection with my book on
Ulysses.
The reference is important because
of the light it throws on the Joycean conception of sexual love (at any
rate on the male side) as an irreconcilable conflict between a passion
for absolute possession and a categorical imperative of absolute free–
dom. It occurred during a short stay I made in Paris on my way to
Switzerland. I had sent the proofs of my book on in advance, and Joyce
and Stuart Gilbert had begun to read them. For my short stay I was
the guest of the Joyces.
There is a passage in my book in which I try to explain the mo–
tives for Bloom's conduct as, seemingly, a
maTi complaisant.
R eaders
of
Ulysses
all remember that in the Sirens episode Bloom watches Blazes
