5#
PARTISAN REVIEW
is true that the original inspiration for all Joyce's work is always to be
sought in the imaginings of his boyhood and adolescence in Dublin. The
idea, of course, may have been in some word or other
I
let fall and
forgot as soon as uttered, for, as he wrote to me during the composition
of the Circe episode of
Ulysses:
"A word is enough to set me off."
However, if both my guesses are wrong then Joyce's moment of in–
hibition must take the blame for my vain cogitations.
I
talked with J oyce for the last time in the spring of 1939 when,
having a little money in hand, and sensing that the outbreak of war was
near,
I
went to Paris to see the city all artists love before enemy bombs
should mar her noble skyline.
It
turned out otherwise, but that is the
way some of us foresaw it at the time. Joyce was living in a flat in
Passy. When
I
called on him, a copy of
Finnegans Wake
fresh from
the printers lay on the table.
In
the course of the afternoon he asked
me to read aloud to him Anna Livia's monologue as she passes out
by day to lose her individual identity in the ocean whence she came. No
doubt he knew every word of it by heart, and no doubt
I
blundered
in the reading of it, but he let me go on to the end without interrup–
tion.
It
was perhaps the first time he had heard the words spoken by
any voice other than his own. The last
I
saw of Joyce was his wave
from a taxi late that afternoon.
I
was to write an article on
Finnegans Wake
when
I
got back to
London, but
I
found it heavy going with war a practical certainty loom–
ing close ahead. Later in 1939 Joyce and his family began that series
of moves that were to end in Zurich in 1941. His self-exile in Europe
may be said to have begun in "noble Turricum abounding in all manner
of merchandise," and there it ended. He wrote me, though not fre–
quently, during 1939 from Etretat, from Berne, and finally (as far as
my record goes) from Gerard-Ie-Puy in the Allier- about literary reac–
tions to
Finnegans Wake,
about his family anxieties (both his daughter
and his daughter-in-law were ill), but never a word about the war, not
even the most guarded reference. His entry into Switzerland was re–
ferred to in the press. Then came news of his sudden illness. A para–
graph in the
Evening Standard
announcing his death was shown to me
in the dugout where
I
was standing by to report air-raid damage.
When
I
met Mrs. Joyce in Zurich after the war, she told me that during
the day preceding the sudden onset of his fatal seizure Joyce had been
to an exhibition of French nineteenth century painting. Somehow there
seems to me to be an affinity there,
I
mean between French nineteenth
century painters and Joyce, in the sense that all the work of his im–
agination and intellect was rooted, as was theirs, in a natural sensibility.
