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friend and
homme d'affaires,
Paul Leon, a number of suggestions which
he urged me to work into the proofs. Some of these I used, others I
failed to make use of, partly no doubt on account of my dilatoriness,
but partly also because they were concerned with music or some other
subject I feared to touch because of my ignorance of it. However, used
or unused, I appreciated to the full the generosity that prompted so
much proffered assistance.
For about two years during our stay in Switzerland, I met Joyce
almost every day. Later, during his stay in Trieste and during the early
part of his stay in Paris, he kept me informed by letter of the progress
of
Ulysses.
For about five years after its publication, I lost touch with
Joyce altogether. Then, hearing through Miss Sylvia Beach that I was
in Paris, he wrote asking me to call. He was living
dans ses meublt3s
in the rue de Grenelle. From that time on I saw him whenever work or
some other occasion took me to Paris and also on several occasions
when he came to London.
I found the Joyce of Paris and
Finnegans Wake
different in many
ways from the Joyce of Zurich and
Ulysses.
The resounding success of
Ulysses
had given him an air of established authority, and the task of
composing
Finnegans Wake,
often amid weighty family cares, had taken
some of the spontaneous naturalness out of his manner. But observers
change together with things observed, and the flight of time shows
different aspects of all of us, though never what isn't there.
I t was some time in the early or middle thirties, I think (I can
never remember dates: only occasions) that on one of our strolls some–
where near the Etoile Joyce surprised me by starting to talk bitterly
about women in general. I was surprised only because I had never heard
him talk that way before, for lives there a man who has never let himself
go on the subject of womankind at some time or other? The interesting
thing is always the how and the why and the how much. On the first
of the two occasions I have in mind, he began with a bitter comment
on woman's invasiveness and in general her perpetual urge to usurp
all the functions of the male-all save that one which is biologically
pre-empted, and even on that they cast jealous threatening eyes. So far
nothing unusual. But then he stopped suddenly in his tracks as peasants
and country people habitually do when they have something especially
weighty to communicate.
"Women write books and paint pictures and compose and perform
music. You know that."
"Yes, I do," I said. "And there are others who have attained
eminence in the field of scientific research. But where does that get us?"
