FURTHER RECOLLEC T IONS OF JOYCE
543
I always felt that originally Joyce was of an open, impulsive nature,
but as we all know natures have a way of being modified by experience
as well as of being subdued to what they work in, like the dyer's hand,
and therefore I suppose that a spontaneous utterance of the natural
Joyce might easily be checked and stifled by an acquired defensiveness.
This is an attempt to explain in advance something that occurred during
one of my visits to Paris
in
the early thirties. J oyce and I were alone
in his apartment, and while I was looking at a book during a lull in
the conversation he broke the silence with: "When you get an idea,
have you ever noticed what I can make of it?" I looked up and waited
for him to go on, feeling rather pleased with myself that I should have
any ideas of such a caliber. But instead of going on he walked back and
forth across the room, looked out of the window and changed the subject.
I wish I had asked him there and then exactly what he meant, for it
has cost me a lot of cogitation since then to arrive at a conclusion as
to what the idea might be. Quite certainly it was an idea having a bearing
on
Finnegans Wake,
and an important bearing at that-something fun–
damen tal. The words, phrases, anecdotes, snatches of song, and suchlike
that he picked up every day from somebody or other were so numerous
that he would have considered them hardly worth mentioning, and in
any case he would not have used the word idea in connection with them.
I come finally to rest on two possibilities. He may have been thinking
of a talk we had in a cafe near the Amtshaus in Zurich. I told him
on that occasion how much my dreams interested me, and explained
the difficulty I had in making a written record of them. All the dream
quality went out of them as soon as I turned them into a string of
time-bound sentences. This is one guess. In any case I have always felt
that at that session some seed was sown that later was to blossom into
the dream language of
Finnegans Wake.
"That was the prick of the
spindle to me that gave me the key to dreamland." It could be. Why
not? There must be germ carriers also in the realm of ideas. Or it may
have been a poem of mine I once showed him in which I tried to
express a state of mind between sleeping and waking. I called the poem
"At the Gates of Sleep," and it ended with the words "Sleep is best."
If
in the first guess, the suggestion was for the dream material of
Finne–
gans Wake,
in the case of the second guess the suggestion would be
for the timeplace to be inhabited by his "... twin eternities of spirit
and nature expressed in the twin eternities of male and female." The
quotation is from
Stephen Hero.
Tracing a work of genius to its source
is like searching for the source of a river. Eventually we come as with
Anna Livia Plurabelle to the principle of evaporation and condensation
working through the sea and the sky. But in a rough and ready way it
