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English Pages 317 [283] Year 2021
James Joyce in Zurich A Guide Andreas Fischer
James Joyce in Zurich
Andreas Fischer
James Joyce in Zurich A Guide
Andreas Fischer English Department University of Zurich Zurich, Switzerland
ISBN 978-3-030-51282-8 ISBN 978-3-030-51283-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © James Joyce at Platzspitz, photograph by Carola Giedion-Welcker, February 1938 (courtesy Zurich James Joyce Foundation) This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
To Fritz Senn, “Seekersenn” (FW 586.28)
Contents
Part I 1 1.01 Introduction and Acknowledgements 3 1.02 Joyce in Zurich 9 1.03 Zurich in Joyce 33 1.04 Zurich after Joyce 57 Part II 63 2.01 Walter Ackermann 65 2.02 Bahnhofstrasse 67 2.03 Bellevue 69 2.04 Felix Beran 71 2.05 Karl Bleibtreu 75
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2.06 Georges Borach 79 2.07 Edmund Brauchbar 83 2.08 Frank Budgen 85 2.09 Carlton Elite (Hotel) 91 2.10 Henry Carr 95 2.11 Dada 99 2.12 Death Mask103 2.13 English Players107 2.14 Bernhard Fehr113 2.15 Siegmund Feilbogen117 2.16 Martha Fleischmann121 2.17 Fluntern Cemetery127 2.18 Max Geilinger133 2.19 Carola Giedion-Welcker135 2.20 Wilhelm Gimmi139 2.21 Rudolf Goldschmidt143 2.22 Hoffnung (Inn)147 2.23 James Joyce Pub149
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2.24 Philipp Jarnach151 2.25 Carl Gustav Jung155 2.26 Kaufleuten (Theatre)161 2.27 Gottfried Keller163 2.28 Eduard Korrodi and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung167 2.29 Kronenhalle (Restaurant)169 2.30 Lenin (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov)171 2.31 Otto Luening173 2.32 Edith Rockefeller McCormick177 2.33 Jacques Mercanton181 2.34 Museumsgesellschaft185 2.35 Odeon (Café)187 2.36 Pfauen (Theatre and Café-Restaurant)189 2.37 Platzspitz193 2.38 Rascher-Verlag and the First German Translation of Exiles197 2.39 Rhein-Verlag201 2.40 Paul Ruggiero203
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2.41 Baroness Antonietta de Saint-Léger207 2.42 Victor Sax211 2.43 Othmar Schoeck213 2.44 Sechseläuten and Sechseläutenplatz217 2.45 Fritz Senn221 2.46 Stadttheater225 2.47 Heinrich Straumann227 2.48 August Suter and Paul Suter229 2.49 Claud Sykes233 2.50 Tonhalle237 2.51 Travesties by Tom Stoppard241 2.52 Hannes Vogel245 2.53 Alfred Vogt249 2.54 Hannah von Mettal253 2.55 Ottocaro Weiss255 2.56 Weisses Kreuz (Restaurant) and Club des Étrangers261 2.57 Zentralbibliothek263
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2.58 Zurich James Joyce Foundation265 2.59 Zurich Notebooks269 2.60 Stefan Zweig271 Part III 277 3.01 Joyce in Switzerland: A Chronology279 3.02 Joyce’s Zurich: A Map281 Bibliography283 Index295
List of Figures
2.03 Bellevue Fig. 1 Bellevue with, from left to right, Hotel Bellevue, Café Odeon, Rämistrasse and Kronenhalle, postcard, 1934 (courtesy Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich)
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2.08 Frank Budgen Fig. 1 James Joyce, oil painting by Frank Budgen, Zurich James Joyce Foundation (courtesy Jane Rowell, Executor Estate of Joan Alida Catherine Budgen)
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2.17 Fluntern Cemetery Fig. 1 Ezra Pound at Joyce’s grave in Fluntern Cemetery, photograph by Horst Tappe (© KEYSTONE-SDA/Horst Tappe)
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2.19 Carola Giedion-Welcker Fig. 1 James and Nora Joyce, Carola Giedion-Welcker and, seated front right, Hans Curjel in Lucerne, photograph by Sigfried Giedion, October 1934 (courtesy Zurich James Joyce Foundation)
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2.20 Wilhelm Gimmi Fig. 1 James Joyce, oil painting by Wilhelm Gimmi, Kunstsammlung Kanton Zürich (courtesy Kunstsammlung Kanton Zürich)
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List of Figures
2.36 Pfauen (Theatre and Café-Restaurant) Fig. 1 The Pfauen complex with the gateway leading to the theatre (middle) and the Pfauen Café-Restaurant (on the right), photograph by Wilhelm Gallas, c. 1925 (courtesy Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich)
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2.37 Platzspitz Fig. 1 James Joyce at Platzspitz, photograph by Carola Giedion-Welcker, February 1938 (courtesy Zurich James Joyce Foundation)
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2.44 Sechseläuten and Sechseläutenplatz Fig. 1 Sechseläutenplatz during the burning of the Böögg, postcard, 1935 (courtesy Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich)
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2.48 August Suter and Paul Suter Fig. 1 Terrace at Uraniastrasse 7 with sculptures by August Suter, one of them (the fourth from the left) modelled on Frank Budgen, photograph, 1945 (courtesy Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich)231 2.50 Tonhalle Fig. 1 Tonhalle during an orchestra rehearsal with the conductor Friedrich Hegar, photograph by Camille Ruf, 1906 (courtesy Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich)
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3.02 Joyce’s Zurich: A Map Fig. 1 Joyce’s Zurich: A map (Designed by Studio Roth&Maerchy)
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List of Tables
1.03 Zurich in Joyce Table 1 The composition of Ulysses and its serial publication in the Little Review39 2.13 English Players Table 1 The English Players in Zurich: A list of productions
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3.01 Joyce in Switzerland: A Chronology Table 1 Joyce in Switzerland: A chronology
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PART I
1.01 Introduction and Acknowledgements
“1914–1921 Trieste–Zurich–Paris”. The famously laconic note at the end of Ulysses identifies the novel as a tale of three cities: It was begun in Trieste, its bulk was written in Zurich and it was finished in Paris. Trieste, Zurich and Paris were also Joyce’s homes for most of his life after he left Dublin in 1904: He lived in Trieste from 1905 through 1915, in Zurich from 1915 through 1919 and in Paris from 1920 through early 1940. Joyce’s life in these three cities is covered in all biographies, but there are works that focus on just one. For Trieste there is John McCourt’s comprehensive The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste 1904–1920 (2000) and for Paris Jean-Michel Rabaté’s more succinct “Joyce the Parisian” (1990). The present book concentrates on Joyce in Zurich, covering the years 1915–1919, 1930–1939 (when Joyce was a frequent visitor to the city) and 1940–1941. It is conceived as a guide, consisting of three overview chapters followed by a series of 60 alphabetically ordered articles on people, places, events and so on connected to Joyce in Zurich.1 The three overview chapters focus on Joyce as the central character: the time he spent in Zurich (1.02), the way Zurich is reflected in his works (1.03) and his legacy in the city (1.04). In the articles that make up the bulk of the Guide (2.01–2.60) the perspective is reversed as they throw light on Joyce through people he was in contact with, places he frequented and events he experienced. In a bold analogy one might say that the articles are to Joyce what Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (in Stoppard’s 1966 play) are to Hamlet: In each of the articles the focus is on a person, a place or an event © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_1
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that played a major or minor role during Joyce’s time in Zurich, but collectively they all contribute to a rounded picture of the man and his world. The book’s main focus, therefore, is biographical in the widest sense of the word, but in a small way it is also a contribution to a study of how Joyce was received in the German-speaking world and how he was translated into German.2 The overview chapters and the articles have been written as self- contained texts (which has necessitated a small amount of duplication), but they are connected through cross-references (in the notes) and an index. The Guide can thus be used in different ways: While some readers may choose to consult it for a single piece of information, others will take a “stroll” through it following a string of references and some may even go through it from the beginning to the end. Further guidance is provided by a chronology of Joyce’s visits to Switzerland (3.01), a map of Joyce’s Zurich (3.02) and a bibliography. The Guide has been written to serve Joyceans at all levels, from the interested general reader and the first-year student to the specialist who is looking for information on a specific topic. It subscribes to what Fritz Senn has called “the no-nonsense school of scholarship”3: It is facts- oriented, eschews myths and embellishments and goes back, if ever possible, to the earliest available sources. To this end quotations are used liberally, especially when in addition to being informative they add colour and reveal aspects of their authors’ personalities. Joyce’s time in Zurich was documented early in Frank Budgen’s lively and sympathetic James Joyce and the Making of ‘Ulysses’ (1934), followed by Herbert Gorman’s James Joyce: A Definitive Life (1939/1941), which also covers Joyce’s Zurich years.4 Gorman’s book, like Budgen’s, was written with Joyce’s explicit support and approval, but of course it was anything but “definitive”. In the early 1950 Richard Ellmann began work on a truly comprehensive biography, interviewing many of Joyce’s friends and acquaintances who were still alive. In Zurich he had the help of a local researcher, Alfred Dutli, a teacher at the local grammar school for girls, who collected material for him between 1953 and 1956. Since Ellmann, whose biography was published in 1959,5 Joyce studies in Zurich have been the preserve mostly of Fritz Senn: In a career spanning more than 60 years he has looked at Joyce from all angles, including the local, Zurich
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one. Inspired by him, two students at the University of Zurich, Thomas Faerber and Markus Luchsinger, wrote their master thesis on Joyce in Zurich, a first type of summary which was published in 1982 as a brochure entitled Joyce und Zürich. The two then collaborated on a less academic, more elaborate and richly illustrated volume, also in German, entitled Joyce in Zürich (1988). Published in the same year, Brenda Maddox’s biography of Nora also shed new light on the Joyces’ time in Zurich as has Carol Loeb Shloss’s Lucia (2003). Research on all aspects of Joyce and his oeuvre has continued since then, but to date there has been no book- length study in English devoted to Joyce in Zurich—a gap this Guide aims to fill. I am indebted to the books just mentioned and to the many further studies referenced in the text and documented in the Bibliography. I have also made full use of the four volumes of Joyce’s Letters.6 My research has been greatly facilitated by seven Zurich institutions. In alphabetical order they are the photo archive of the Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich, the library of the English Department of the University of Zurich, the photo archive of the Kantonale Denkmalpflege, the archive of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the Stadtarchiv der Stadt Zürich, the Zentralbibliothek and, last but not least, the Zurich James Joyce Foundation. My thanks also go to a number of people who were kind enough to answer specific questions or help me solve difficult problems. Their contributions are mentioned in the notes, but as a token of gratitude there follows a list of their names, again in alphabetical order: Charmian Brinson (Emerita, Imperial College London), William S. Brockman (Paterno Family Librarian for Literature, Pennsylvania State University), Ronan Crowley (Centre for Manuscript Genetics, Universiteit Antwerpen), Richard Dove (Emeritus, University of Greenwich), Ruth Frehner (Zurich James Joyce Foundation), Balder P. Gloor (Emeritus, Universität Zürich), Jochen Hesse (Zentralbibliothek Zürich), Lorenzo Kaeser (Universitätsspital Zürich), Christian Koller (Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv, Zürich and Universität Zürich), Urs Leu (Zentralbibliothek Zürich), Mario Lüscher (Schweizerisches Institut für Kunstwissenschaft, Zürich), Martin Mühlheim (Universität Zürich), Thomas Müller (Kantonale Denkmalpflege, Ressort Dokumentation), Eleonora Nodari (Studio Roth&Maerchy, Zürich), Christian Nötzli (Kantonale Denkmalpflege, Ressort Dokumentation), Richard North (Library of Congress, Washington D. C.), Mirjam Schreiber (Museumsgesellschaft Zürich), Caroline Senn (Stadtarchiv der Stadt Zürich), Tobias Straumann
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(Universität Zürich), Andreas Weigel (Vienna), Renate Wiemken-Stamm (Basel), Ursula Zeller (Zurich James Joyce Foundation). Andreas Weigel was particularly generous in sharing his partly unpublished research on Joyce’s connections with Austria. I am deeply grateful, furthermore, to six people who read the complete penultimate version of this book and whose corrections and suggestions have made it more complete, more correct and, I hope, more readable. They are my wife Linda, our daughter Emma, Fritz Senn, the director of the Zurich James Joyce Foundation, and, last but not least, the three anonymous reviewers who recommended the book for publication. As a matter of course I take responsibility for all remaining errors and omissions. Finally, my thanks go to Shaun Vigil and then Linda Aboujieb and Rebecca Hinsley at Palgrave Macmillan for their support and guidance.
Notes 1. Joyce occasionally also spent time in other parts of Switzerland, for example in Locarno in 1917 and 1919 and in the Lake Geneva region (Montreux, Lausanne, Geneva) in the late 1930s. For this reason James Joyce in Switzerland would be a more correct title of this book, but I have decided to stick with Zurich in view of its importance for Joyce. 2. For studies of the reception of Joyce in Germany and in Europe in general, see Füger, ed., Kritisches Erbe, Lernout and Van Mierlo, eds., The Reception of Joyce in Europe and Weninger, The German Joyce. 3. Senn in O’Neill, ed., Murmoirs, 291. Justifying Dubliners in his famous letter to Grant Richards dated 5 May 1906 (LII, 134) Joyce himself expressed this idea more poetically: “I have written it [the book, i.e. Dubliners] for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness and with the conviction that he is a very bold man who dares to alter in the presentment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen and heard”. 4. Gorman’s biography was first published in North America (James Joyce, New York and Toronto: Farrar & Rinehart, 1939) and then in the United Kingdom (James Joyce: A Definitive Life, London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1941). I quote from the latter, which is shorter by a few pages since it does not contain Joyce’s “Gas from a Burner” (pages 217 to 219 in the 1939 edition).
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5. A new, revised edition was published in 1982. Other biographies published since then, such as those by Edna O’Brien (1999) or Gordon Bowker (2011), have added new facets, but the status of Ellmann’s book remains unchallenged. 6. Letters of James Joyce, edited by Stuart Gilbert and Richard Ellmann, 3 vols. (London: Faber & Faber, 1957–1966) and Selected Letters of James Joyce, edited by Richard Ellmann (London: Faber & Faber, 1975). Following an established convention I have abbreviated them as LI, LII, LIII and SL throughout.
1.02 Joyce in Zurich
1904, 1915–1919 Joyce’s first contact with Zurich was brief and disappointing, but it would be the basis of a lifelong connection with the city. Wanting to leave Ireland, he had been looking for posts abroad and came to Zurich because he had learnt through an agency about a vacancy in the Berlitz school there. Having travelled via London and Paris, Joyce, accompanied by Nora Barnacle, arrived in Zurich on 11 October 1904, and took up residence in the Gasthaus Hoffnung at Reitergasse 16 near the train station.1 Joyce’s hopes were dashed immediately: The director of the Berlitz school informed him that there was no open position in Zurich. He knew of a post in Trieste, however, and Joyce and Nora thus left Zurich on 19 October.2 As it turned out, there was no vacancy in Trieste either and Joyce was referred to Pola further south, where, finally, he found work. He returned to Trieste in March 1905 and lived there for the next ten years. Apart from a period he spent working in Rome (July 1906 to February 1907) and three extended visits to Dublin (July to September 1909, October 1909 to January 1910, July to September 1912) he never left Trieste for any length of time, and it might well have become his and his family’s home for the rest of his life. Joyce settled in Trieste in all respects: He earned a living as a teacher of English and occasionally as a journalist. He took part in the cultural—and to a certain extent also political—life of the city. He had a large circle of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_2
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friends and acquaintances. He and Nora had children there: Giorgio was born on 27 July 1905, Lucia on 26 July 1907.3 He was familiar with Italian from his university studies in Dublin,4 in Trieste he learnt to speak the language fluently, and Italian became, and remained, even after Trieste, “the house language of his family”.5 Joyce also surrounded himself with members of his Dublin family: Encouraged by him, his brother Stanislaus joined him in Trieste in October 1905, his sisters Eva and Eileen in September 1909 and January 1910, respectively.6 And he found time to write: While in Trieste, he “published Chamber Music, finished Dubliners, revised Stephen Hero into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, [wrote] Exiles, and [began] Ulysses”.7 In short: Joyce and his family might never have left Trieste had it not been for World War I. As a holder of a British passport living in Austria, Joyce had not encountered any major administrative problems, but this was to change radically in 1914/15, for two reasons: From August 1914 onwards, the Austro- Hungarian Empire, as part of the Central Powers, and the United Kingdom of Britain and Ireland, as part of the Triple Entente (together with the Russian Empire and the French Third Republic) were at war. Moreover, when Italy entered the war on the side of the Entente in May 1915, Trieste became a city on the frontlines. Some of Joyce’s friends and colleagues were conscripted, others left the city, “the military authorities ordered a partial evacuation”,8 and Joyce himself faced internment as an enemy alien. It was clear that he had to act. Having received passports and a permission to depart,9 the Joyces left Trieste for Zurich, leaving behind their furniture and Joyce’s library, not to mention the rest of Joyce’s family.10 They arrived in Zurich on 30 June and spent their first few days there, again, at the Gasthaus Hoffnung. Joyce evidently envisaged his stay in Zurich as temporary: To his agent, James Pinker, he wrote: “I shall probably remain in Switzerland till it is possible for me to return to Trieste”.11 World War I dragged on, however, and Zurich thus became the Joyce family’s new home until October 1919, that is for about four years and four months. The four immediate problems facing Joyce and his family on their arrival were accommodation, contacts, language and income. Having arrived with few belongings and no furniture whatsoever, the Joyces lived in furnished apartments throughout their stay in Zurich. They moved house frequently, which was nothing new for them, for both Nora and James were used to a nomadic kind of existence.12 Before Nora left Galway, her parents had moved seven times,13 James’s parents had fourteen different addresses between 1882 and 1904,14 and the Joyces, during
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their time in Trieste, had eight.15 In Zurich they first made their home in the Seefeld district, an area by the lake just south of the old town that had been developed in the nineteenth century: From July to October 1915 they lived in Reinhardstrasse 7, from October 1915 to March 1916 in Kreuzstrasse 19, from March 1916 to January 1917 in Seefeldstrasse 54 and from January to October 1917 in Seefeldstrasse 73. The Seefeld is a fairly central part of town: It is connected with the rest of the city of Zurich through Bellevue, and many of the cafés and restaurants that Joyce frequented at the time, the Weisses Kreuz, the Odeon or the Terrace, could be reached in only a few minutes. In Zurich, Nora and James suffered from health problems of various kinds, and for this reason doctors recommended a stay in the canton of Ticino, south of the Alps. In the summer of 1917 Nora thus took the children to Locarno on Lago Maggiore, and James also moved there in October, after an attack of lumbago followed by eye problems.16 The family stayed in two guesthouses there, first in Pension Villa Rossa and then in Pension Daheim. When the Joyces returned to Zurich in early 1918 they rented lodgings in the Oberstrass district above the old town. From January to October 1918 they lived in Universitätstrasse 3817 and then from October 1918 until their departure in October 1919 in Universitätstrasse 29. On his way down into the city from Oberstrass, Joyce would first pass by Zurich’s two universities, the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School18 and the University of Zurich. From there he could either walk directly down to the old part of town (the Niederdorf) or, following Rämistrasse, to the Pfauen Café on Heimplatz and to Bellevue. On his arrival in 1915 Joyce did not know anybody in Zurich, and his first local contacts, not surprisingly, were expatriates like him, “at first Italians and Austrians, then Greeks”,19 in other words the kinds of people he knew from his time Trieste. Oscar Schwarz, one of Joyce’s Trieste pupils, referred him to Ottocaro Weiss, a young Triestine who had come to Zurich in 1914 to study political economy. Through Weiss Joyce met other students and, perhaps more importantly, the grain merchant Rudolf Goldschmidt, who, in turn, “introduced him to the circle of his friends. These men were well-to-do and they agreed readily to take lessons in English from Joyce, in some instances not because they wanted to learn the language but because they wanted to help him discreetly”.20 Some of these pupils became friends, notably the silk merchant Edmund Brauchbar and two younger men, Georges Borach and Victor Sax. Joyce also gave lessons to Olga and Vera Bliznakoff, daughters of the Bulgarian consul in
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Trieste, who had arrived in Zurich in August 1915, soon after the Joyce family.21 Goldschmidt and many of his friends were Jewish, and, as a matter of fact, “[t]he name of Joyce’s Jewish friends was legion […]. They were of all classes and from all countries, and included rich merchants and manufacturers of Zürich and poor Galician immigrants”.22 As mentioned above Joyce also had Greek friends, partly because he had known Greeks in Trieste, but also for a more specific reason: “Joyce associated a good deal with such Greeks as were available in wartime Zurich, for he thought they all had a streak of Ulysses in them”.23 They included the “illiterate” Nikola Santos, Pavlos Phokas, “[a] clerk in a Zürich commercial house”,24 and Antonio Chalas, who “had written a book proving that the centre of gravity of the earth passed through Athens”.25 For Joyce the most important “Greek”, however, was the bank clerk Paul Ruggiero, actually a Swiss who knew Greek because he had spent several years in Greece. Phokas and Ruggiero were members of the Club des Étrangers, a group of friends who would meet once a week at the Weisses Kreuz, a restaurant not far from Bellevue. Other members of the Club, according to Ellmann, were “a Pole named Czernovic who kept a cigarette shop, a wine merchant Paul Wiederkehr, and a German, Marquis, who sang in a choir”.26 A further Austrian connection opened up in late 1915, when Joyce did translations for a journal, Internationale Rundschau / International Review, which was edited by the Austrians Siegmund Feilbogen and Felix Beran. Feilbogen and Beran, who already knew each other, became friends with Joyce and both also took an interest in Joyce the writer. Newspaper articles written by them are part of the early reception history of Joyce in the German-speaking world. Joyce kept his distance from English people and especially from British officialdom represented by the Consulate General in Zurich, but two meetings, in 1917 and 1918 respectively, were to change this. They would also lead to a substantial widening of Joyce’s circle of friends. In 1917 a dubious character named Jules Martin tried to get Joyce and the English actor Claud Sykes to collaborate in a highly speculative film venture.27 The project came to nothing, but through it Joyce and Sykes became friends. In November and December 1917, when Joyce was staying in Locarno, Sykes typed the first three chapters of Ulysses for him, and in 1918 the two men set up an English language theatre company called the English Players, Sykes acting as producer and Joyce as business manager. The company’s first production, Wilde’s The Importance of Being
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Earnest, premiered on 29 April 1918. Joyce clashed with one of the actors in that production, a man called Henry Carr, the quarrel resulting in a series of lawsuits that only ended in May 1919. Partly as a result of his quarrel with Carr, Joyce withdrew from the English Players at the end of 1918, but he took an interest in the company until and beyond his departure from Zurich in October 1919. In the early summer of 1918 Joyce was introduced to Frank Budgen, an English painter who had come to Switzerland in 1914, and the two men subsequently became close friends. After the war Joyce moved back to Trieste and then to Paris and Budgen returned to England, but they remained in contact, and in the early 1930s Budgen was to write a memoir- cum-introduction to Ulysses (James Joyce and the making of ‘Ulysses’, 1934), which is still one of the best books on the novel and its author. The personable Budgen introduced Joyce to his circle of Swiss friends which included the brothers August and Paul Suter and Fritz Fleiner (1867–1937), a professor of law at the University of Zurich whom the Suters had met in Heidelberg.28 Through August Suter, Joyce also became acquainted with some of Suter’s artist friends, notably Daniel Hummel (1895–1982), Rudolf Maeglin (1892–1971) and Max Uehlinger (1894–1981).29 Joyce must have come across Swiss people from his first days in Zurich onwards, but it is remarkable that lasting friendships with Swiss nationals only developed in 1918/19, that is during Joyce’s last year in Zurich. Joyce does not seem to have taken an interest in the Dada movement that began in Zurich in 1916 and he was not part of the group of mostly German-speaking writers who had sought refuge in Zurich during the war and who met in the Café Odeon.30 There were occasional encounters, however, which appear to have been prompted mostly by Joyce’s interest in drama. According to Gorman and Ellmann, the Alsatian writer René Schickele (1883–1940) asked Joyce to translate his play Hans im Schnakenloch (“Hans in the Gnat-hole”, 1915), but nothing came of it.31 Also according to Gorman and Ellmann, Joyce took an interest in the dramatist Frank Wedekind (1864–1918), who produced some of his plays in Zurich in 1917: “Joyce met him and was interested enough to go and see the performances”.32 Joyce’s own (and only) play Exiles was published in May 1918, and in the summer of that year he sent a copy to the Austrian Stefan Zweig, himself an exile. Zweig, who did not know Joyce at the time, replied in September, the two writers met and Zweig then helped Joyce to find a theatre that would perform the German translation (1919). The two men did not become close friends, however, and Zweig’s brief
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portraits of Joyce in his diary and in his memoirs entitled The World of Yesterday are those of a sympathetic, but critical observer. Through Claud Sykes, Joyce met the German writer Karl Bleibtreu, who piqued Joyce’s interest because of a theory on Shakespeare which Joyce subsequently incorporated in the discussion of Hamlet in “Scylla and Charybdis”. Given Joyce’s interest in music and opera in particular, it is perhaps surprising that only few of his Zurich friends belonged to the musical world, and that he met them by coincidence. The most important of them was the composer and music teacher Philipp Jarnach, who had come to Zurich in 1914 and was the private secretary of the composer Ferruccio Busoni. The two men met in March 1916 when the Joyces moved into one half of a furnished apartment in Seefeldstrasse 54 and thus became— literally—next-door neighbours of Jarnach, who lived in the other half. The beginning of their acquaintance was rocky since Jarnach did not appreciate his new neighbour singing every morning, “with an incredibly strong, but rough and unbeautiful tenor voice”, “accompanying himself on a very bad piano”.33 Joyce and Jarnach became good friends nevertheless. When Jarnach moved out, his half of the apartment was taken by Charlotte Sauermann, a soprano at the Stadttheater, who, contrary to Jarnach, liked Joyce’s voice.34 Through the English Players, lastly, he met Tristan Rawson, like Sauermann a singer at the Stadttheater and Otto Luening, a student at the Conservatory who also played in the Stadttheater and Tonhalle orchestras.35 It is difficult to say how good Joyce’s German was when he arrived in Zurich. German had not been one of his subjects at University College, but when he became interested in the dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann, he “paid him the compliment of studying German, a language which until then he had disliked and avoided”.36 German, of course, was one the languages of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and soon after his arrival in Pola, Joyce “began to exchange lessons” with a fellow teacher of German, “surmising that a knowledge of German might prove useful to him some day”.37 Many of Joyce’s acquaintances in Trieste were bi- or even multilingual, but he would have spoken Italian almost exclusively.38 By 1915 he must have known a fair amount of German, however, and Philipp Jarnach’s harsh judgement that “he didn’t know a word of German” is certainly an exaggeration.39 According to Budgen, by 1918 Joyce was “fluent” in German,40 but his German never became as good as his Italian, as is shown by the very few letters he wrote in German.41 Straumann reports that when he had dinner with Joyce in January 1940, “[w]e conversed in the
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German language, which he seemed to speak with absolute facility, and he was seldom at a loss for a word”.42 Moving from Trieste to German-speaking Zurich was even harder for Joyce’s family: “Nora was not happy at the prospect of having to learn another language; Giorgio and Lucia, knowing no German, were put back two years in their school”.43 The house language of the Joyce family remained Italian even during the Zurich years.44 The children eventually learned the local Swiss German and also Standard German, the school language, but there is no denying that the frequent changes of address (which sometimes meant that they had to change schools) were not beneficial for their development.45 The fourth of Joyce’s problems, and by no means the least, was money. His main source of income during his Trieste years had been his teaching, and after his arrival in Zurich, too, he attempted to make a living as an English tutor. At the beginning of their stay in Zurich the Joyces received help from Nora’s maternal uncle Michael Healy, the only well-to-do member of the whole family. He contributed £15 to tide them over after their arrival and in October he sent another £9 to pay for their move from Reinhardstrasse 7 to Kreuzstrasse 19. Joyce’s translation work for Feilbogen’s International Review in late 1915 yielded some much-needed money as well. He also received royalties for the first time in his life, even though they amounted to very little at first: On 13 June 1917 he wrote to Miss Weaver: “My book of stories had a good press […] yet my royalties after three years came to 2/6”.46 The publication of Dubliners (1914) and A Portrait (1914/15) brought Joyce recognition, and his financial situation began to change as a result. Thanks to the efforts of Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats he was given a grant of £75 from the Royal Literary Fund,47 to be paid out in three instalments of £25—two in 1915 and a third in 1916. Also in 1916, and again on Ezra Pound’s urging, Harriet Shaw Weaver sent him £50 as an advance for serializing A Portrait in the Egoist. The Society of Authors48 granted the sum of £26, an anonymous donor sent £20, and he was awarded the substantial grant of £100 from the British Civil List.49 Not counting his earnings from teaching and from royalties Joyce’s income in 1916 thus came to over £220. Things got better in 1917 and better still in the years following. In 1917 Miss Weaver anonymously donated £200 to be paid in four instalments of £50—in May, August and November 1917 and in February 1918. Joyce’s agent, James Pinker sent him a cheque for £22 10s, the
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American lawyer John Quinn paid £25 for the manuscript of Exiles and £20 for the corrected proofs of A Portrait, royalties for A Portrait came to £15 4s, and an advance on future royalties from the American publisher B. W. Huebsch amounted to £54. The total in 1917 thus was over £270. In 1918, in addition to the last £50 from Miss Weaver’s anonymous donation, Joyce received another £25 from her as an advance for Ulysses. Most importantly, he learnt that Edith McCormick, a very wealthy American living in Zurich, had given him a stipend of 1000 Swiss francs per month, from March onwards, which came to 10,000 Swiss francs for the whole year. In 1919, Joyce’s last year in Zurich, Mrs McCormick’s monthly payments continued until September, amounting to 9000 francs. In that year Joyce also received $1000 as a gift from Scofield Thayer, an American philanthropist and another, anonymous donor. And finally Miss Weaver, wanting to make her support more permanent, gave him a £5000 War Loan, which yielded £250 per year in interest. To get an idea of what these sums mean, they first have to be converted into Swiss francs, and the annual totals then have to be compared to the income of other people at the time.50 The results are as follows: Joyce, who was virtually penniless when he arrived in Zurich in 1915, had an income of about 5500 Swiss francs in 1916, which increased to about 6200 in 1917, to just under 11,600 in 1918 and to 20,100 in 1919.51 In 1916 a bricklayer in Zurich had an average income of about 2000 Swiss francs, in 1919 of about 4500.52 In 1916, therefore, Joyce earned about two and a half times as much as a bricklayer, in 1919 more than four times as much. A second comparison: Albert Einstein, who worked at the Swiss Patent Office in Berne from 1902 to 1909,53 earned 4500 Swiss francs in 1909; adjusted for inflation, this would have corresponded to about 9000 Swiss francs in 1918, less than Joyce’s 11,600 in that year. Summarising the years 1915 to 1919, Ellmann states that “after reaching Zurich in poverty, Joyce by the end of his stay had capital as well as income. In these four years he subtly changed social position”.54 Joyce’s situation improved not only financially and socially, but in other respects as well, especially from 1917 onwards. His new-found financial security allowed him to devote most of his time to the writing of Ulysses: He finished the first three chapters in late 1917 while in Locarno, and from then onwards work proceeded smoothly. Joyce’s relatively comfortable personal situation stands in contrast to that of the general population of Zurich.55 As a neutral country Switzerland
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was not directly involved in the war, but it was completely surrounded by warring nations (France and Italy on the side of the Entente, Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire on the side of the Central Powers) and its population felt the effects, especially in 1917 and 1918. The country’s army was called up at the beginning and remained mobilised during the entire war, the number of soldiers on active duty varying depending on the political situation. This put a heavy burden on the country’s economy, exacerbated by the fact that exports and—even more so—imports slowed down considerably, both belligerent alliances trying to exert control over the Swiss economy. Certain types of food as well as fuel became scarce as the war progressed, and Switzerland introduced rationing: rice and sugar were rationed from March 1917 onwards, followed by pasta (July 1917), grain (October 1917), butter and oil (March 1918) and, finally, cheese and milk (July 1918).56 Generally low wages and a sharply rising inflation (more than 20% in 1917/18) caused growing unrest in the population. A wave of labour strikes in 1918 made the authorities fear that the first anniversary of the October revolution in Russia would bring more unrest.57 Parts of the army were called up to safeguard law and order in Switzerland’s major towns and cities including Zurich, and, in reaction to this drastic measure, a committee that had been set up by the Socialist Party and the labour unions earlier in the year (the so-called Oltener Aktionskomitee or OAK) proclaimed a national general strike (Landesstreik) on 10 November.58 This dramatic standoff ended only when the OAK, faced with an ultimatum by the Federal Council, decided on 13 November to end the strike.59 There was also a health crisis: Between 1918 and 1920 the whole world was in the grip of an influenza epidemic commonly known as the Spanish flu pandemic, one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history.60 In Switzerland in 1918, about two million people (half the population) were affected and nearly 25,000 died.61 The young Otto Luening, who actually came down with the flu himself, reports in his memoirs that, in late 1918, [t]heaters and concert halls, including the Tonhalle, and many restaurants closed because of the epidemic. The Tonhalle was transformed into a hospital, but the orchestra kept on rehearsing in the opera house. All schools were closed and many of them were made into hospitals.62
The English Players kept going, but were affected as well. When they rehearsed a production of Hindle Wakes during the epidemic, “[o]ne of
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the actors, Bernard Glenning, died of influenza shortly before the opening [on 3 December 1918]”.63 1918, in short, was an “annus horribilis” in Europe, in Switzerland and in Zurich, and it is interesting to see how little the events of that year seem to have affected Joyce,64 who was preoccupied with the writing of Ulysses, but also with the English Players and his quarrel with Henry Carr, attempts to have Exiles staged, his infatuation with Martha Fleischmann and, not to forget, many pleasant evenings spent in the company of friends at the Pfauen. As far as I can see, food shortages are only mentioned in passing in the published letters, and there is no comment on the national strike at all. On 20 August 1917, for example, Joyce wrote to Ezra Pound: It will be, I fear, very difficult to keep these rooms heated during the bad Zurich winter and it becomes more and more difficult to get different articles of food.65
Many years later, in a letter to Budgen dated 3 September 1933, Lucia noted wryly: The Zimmerleuten one [the Zunfthaus zur Zimmerleuten, a restaurant] is now quiet [sic] chic with the french chef named Michel who can serve you Kangaroo-schwanzsuppe which is a change from the Zurich cuisine at wartime.66
The Spanish flu also does not seem to have worried Joyce unduly. Gorman writes: During the summer [of 1918] the English Players took The Importance of Being Earnest on tour through Western Switzerland […]. The towns visited were Lausanne, Geneva, Montreux and Interlaken. The great influenza epidemic broke out shortly before the beginning of the tour and because of this the audiences (excepting the one at Geneva) were very sparse. […] Joyce travelled only as far as Lausanne. Being the father of two children he considered it more prudent to return to Zurich which was comparatively free of the epidemic.67
On 21 November 1918, however, Joyce wrote to Karl Bleibtreu:
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I am glad to hear that Mrs Bleibtreu and yourself are well and that you are busily engaged at your new work. You need not be afraid of ‘gripe’ [sic] here as the mortality is almost normal.68
Bleibtreu’s reply from Bremen, dated 27 November 1918, is less sanguine: My wife encloses a letter to Mrs. Joyce. You talk lightly of the Grippe, but we have other news.69
World War I ended with the signing of the armistice in Compiègne on 11 November 1918, followed by the Treaty of Versailles on 28 June 1919. Europe slowly began to recover and most of the émigrés who had lived out the war in Switzerland returned to their homelands. For the Joyces, home was still Trieste. When they left Zurich on 16 October 1919 they expected their move back to be final and never to return to Switzerland to live. Both expectations would prove wrong. It is true that the years in Zurich were interim years, but they were by no means lost. Switzerland had become “more than a refuge; it was a symbol of artistic detachment, au-dessus de la mêlée, and it was fitting that Joyce should not only write the bulk of his greatest book there, but also return there in the end to die”.70
1928, 1930–1939, 1940–1941 Joyce and his family returned to Trieste in October 1919, but the city had been annexed by Italy after the war and had lost its former importance. Encouraged by Ezra Pound they moved to Paris less than a year later, in July 1920, where they would live until December 1939. Ulysses, written largely in Zurich and completed in Trieste and Paris, was published in book form by Sylvia Beach in 1922, and Joyce devoted the following 17 years to the writing of Finnegans Wake. During his first ten years in Paris, Joyce visited Zurich only once, in 1928, but he kept in contact with some friends from his time in Switzerland and he occasionally met Swiss people. Chief among them was the artist August Suter, who had studied in Paris before the war and returned there in 1921.71 According to his own testimony, Suter “saw much of Joyce, spending many evenings with him”.72 On one of these occasions Joyce also made the acquaintance of the Swiss painter Wilhelm Gimmi, who would later portray him from memory.73 In the spring of 1928 Joyce met
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the Zurich art historian Carola Giedion-Welcker, an early admirer, at Sylvia Beach’s bookshop Shakespeare and Company and much later, in 1935, he was visited by Jacques Mercanton, a young Swiss scholar. Both Giedion-Welcker and Mercanton would become good friends. The Joyces passed through Zurich in the summer of 1928 on their way to Salzburg, where they stayed from 23 July to 29 August.74 This visit to Zurich is scantily documented and, perhaps as a result, has received little attention.75 The Joyces, with Nora, were accompanied by the Gilberts, and it is Stuart Gilbert who mentions their stay in Zurich in his “Souvenirs de voyage”: Our trip to Austria [in 1928] took place at the height of summer. Zurich, where we stopped on our way, was in the grip of a heat wave, but Joyce did not appear to be affected by the high temperatures; in fact (apart from one exception to be mentioned later)76 he seemed to be quite indifferent to the weather. He passed his time in Zurich renewing his acquaintance with many old friends (he had been a refugee in Zurich during the war 1914–1918) who belonged to all classes of society; their obvious pleasure at seeing him again, I realised, was due less to their being aware that a famous writer remembered them than a feeling of genuine affection for him.77
The Joyces spent only a few days in Zurich: They had left Paris around 14 July and arrived in Innsbruck, their next stop en route to Salzburg, on 17 July. Joyce was not only a most welcome visitor in Zurich, but, as he wrote to Miss Weaver on 20 September, that is, after his return to Paris, he even “received three offers to give a series of lectures in Switzerland”.78 Unfortunately we do not know whom Joyce met in Zurich79 nor who invited him to lecture in Switzerland. The invitation may actually have been made in the previous year, prompted perhaps by the publication of the German translation of Ulysses, for on 17 December 1927 Sylvia Beach had written to Carola Giedion-Welcker: “Please thank the people in Zurich who want Mr Joyce to lecture there, and tell them that he never speaks in public or lectures or anything of the sort. As you know, he is very sensitive and retiring, and his eyes are troubling him again. The oculist fears that another operation will be necessary”.80 During his Paris years Joyce continued to have serious eye problems and it was these that led him back to Zurich in the 1930s. “[I]n February 1930, as a result of an article about Joyce in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung”, two Zurich acquaintances, Georges Borach and Martha Fleischmann
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wrote to him and suggested that a brilliant ophthalmological surgeon in Zurich, Professor Alfred Vogt, might be able to help him. Their praise was echoed by Carola Giedion-Welcker and her husband Sigfried Giedion, and Joyce then “made arrangements through Borach to consult Vogt in April 1930”.81 In 1930 Joyce travelled to Zurich three times: in April for a first consultation with Vogt, in May and June for the actual operation82 and again in November for a check-up.83 The operation was successful and Vogt became Joyce’s eye-surgeon of choice for the rest of his life. As a result Joyce took another ten trips to Zurich between 1932 until 1939, travelling there almost every year for mostly brief periods.84 Consultations with Vogt were the main reason. Another reason was Lucia, whose mental derangement had become evident, at the latest, in early 193285 and whose condition worsened steadily afterwards. In his search for doctors and clinics that might be able to help her, Joyce also looked at places in Switzerland, and Lucia was in fact hospitalised in Nyon in 1933/34 and in Küsnacht near Zurich in 1934/35. James and Nora generally did a great deal of travelling in the 1930s and they often combined trips to Zurich with visits to other places. When in Zurich, Joyce and Nora usually stayed at one of three hotels: the St Gotthard near the main railway station, the Habis, also near the station and, mostly, the Carlton Elite off Bahnhofstrasse. Some of the people Joyce had known during World War I were not in Zurich any longer: Frank Budgen and Claud Sykes had returned to England, in 1921 August Suter had moved back to Paris and the Goldschmidts to Italy, and Siegmund Feilbogen had died in 1928. Others were still there, however, for example Felix Beran,86 Georges Borach,87 Edmund Brauchbar, Paul Ruggiero and Paul Suter. Joyce also made new friends, chief among them Carola Giedion-Welcker and her husband Sigfried Giedion. Giedion- Welcker, whom he had met in Paris in 1928, was an art historian by training; she and her husband, also an art historian and architecture critic, were influential people in the Zurich of the late 1920s and 1930s. They championed modern art and welcomed many avant-garde artists (Hans Arp, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Kurt Schwitters, Max Ernst) in their home in the Doldertal above the city. Other people Joyce met in the 1930s were Bernhard Fehr, professor of English literature at the University of Zurich, and the composer Othmar Schoeck. Vogt expected Joyce to return to Zurich for a consultation in 1931, but during that year the Joyces were otherwise engaged. Giorgio had married
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the American Helen Fleischman, née Kastor on 10 December 1930, and their son Stephen, Joyce’s only grandchild, was born on 15 February 1932. More importantly, James and Nora, who had lived together since 1904, finally got married themselves, in London, on 4 July 1931.88 In the summer of 193289 Eugene and Maria Jolas, editors of transition and friends since 1926, spent a holiday in Feldkirch, a small Austrian town on the Swiss border. At Joyce’s suggestion they took along Lucia together with a nurse,90 while Joyce and Nora went to Zurich for a consultation with Vogt, who “was annoyed with Joyce for having stayed away for two years instead of reporting at frequent intervals”.91 After five weeks they joined the Jolases and Lucia in Feldkirch, where they stayed from 10 August to 6 September. They then went back to Zurich briefly, Vogt deciding that a second eye operation was too risky after all. The Joyces left Zurich around 19 September for Nice and returned to Paris in October. In 1933 Joyce was in Zurich for consultations with Vogt from 22 May to 10 June.92 A second journey, in July, took the family first to Évian-les- Bains on the southern shore of Lake Geneva, then on to Geneva and Zurich.93 Lucia’s condition had worsened, and Joyce had her examined by Dr Hans Maier in Zurich, who “advised that she be placed in Les Rives de Prangins at Nyon, a sanatorium under the direction of Dr. Oscar Forel”.94 Joyce and Nora moved to a hotel in nearby Geneva, but they withdrew Lucia in early August and returned to Paris at the end of the month. In February 1934, however, they sent Lucia back to Nyon. In 1934 Joyce made two visits, a short one in April95 and a much longer one beginning in August.96 Friends of the Joyces, the French industrialist René Bailly and his Irish wife Kathleen invited them “to motor with them to Zurich by way of Monte Carlo and Neuchâtel[.]”97 They left Paris in late March and stayed in Zurich for about ten days in April. After his consultation with Vogt, Joyce went back to Paris by train around 20 April. The second trip would be a much longer one: After a journey through Belgium in July and August James and Nora travelled to Montreux and then “with grim forebodings went to see Dr. Forel at Les Rives de Prangins. As they feared, he had bad news for them: Lucia was worse, and the several treatments attempted had all failed”.98 The Joyces travelled to Zurich in September, moving Lucia first “to a private clinic next to the public mental asylum of Burghölzli”99 and then to Dr Theodor Brunner’s sanatorium in Küsnacht. It was during her stay in Küsnacht that Lucia was examined and treated by Carl Gustav Jung. Joyce, who was critical of psychoanalysis in general and of Jung in particular, put his trust in him
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nevertheless, but the great man was no more successful than other psychiatrists before him. Joyce took Lucia back and “installed her on January 14, 1935, in his Zurich hotel’s annex, the Villa Élite, with a nurse- companion. Lucia asked her indulgent father to send for Eileen Schaurek to take care of her, and Joyce did so. With Eileen at hand and on good terms with Lucia, Joyce led his entourage back to Paris at the end of January”.100 During this long visit there was time for other activities. On 14 October 1934 James and Nora visited Neuhausen, on 28 October they motored to Lucerne with the Giedions,101 and on 14 January 1935 Joyce attended a performance at the Tonhalle of Othmar Schoeck’s Lebendig Begraben conducted by the composer himself.102 Joyce did not travel to Zurich in 1936, but more visits followed in 1937, 1938 and 1939. In April 1937103 Joyce came to Zurich for a consultation with Vogt, but also to try and help his brother Stanislaus to find a job in Switzerland (unsuccessfully, as it turned out).104 A trip to Basel, Rheinfelden and then Zurich in late August/early September105 was marred, at least partly, by the unsatisfactory service he received at the Carlton Elite Hotel in Zurich. In February 1938106 Joyce had to travel to Zurich again because of a retinal congestion that had suddenly developed in his left eye,107 but “Vogt reassured him that while he would see badly, he would continue to see”.108 On the way he nevertheless found time to visit his young admirer and friend Jacques Mercanton in Lausanne for a couple of days. It was during this visit that Carola Giedion-Welcker took a series of now iconic photographs of Joyce at Platzspitz, the platform at the confluence of the rivers Limmat and Sihl, most showing him facing the camera, one with his back turned.109 The Joyces made two further trips to Switzerland before the outbreak of World War II, both primarily to the Lake Geneva region. In late August and early September 1938110 they spent about three weeks in Lausanne, accompanied by Paul Léon. Joyce “sought out his young admirer, Jacques Mercanton, whom he wanted to encourage to continue his work on Finnegans Wake”, and they also visited Giorgio’s wife Helen, who “had suffered a mental breakdown shortly before, and was obliged to go to a private sanitorium in Montreux”.111 The year 1939 was a year of endings both personally and historically: Finnegans Wake was finally published on 2 February, Joyce’s 57th birthday, and he would become an exile again when World War II broke out with Germany’s invasion of Poland on 1 September. There was a final pre- war visit to Switzerland112:
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In August [the Joyces] went on to Montreux, where Helen, after several nervous collapses, was again convalescing. George, much upset by his wife’s illness, remained in Paris. From Montreux Joyce and Nora proceeded to Lausanne, spending a few days there in the second week of August, chiefly to enable Joyce to talk with Mercanton about his forthcoming article on Finnegans Wake. They went on then to Bern and Zurich, but when, during the later part of August 1939, the threat of war became again unmistakable, they returned to Paris.113
With the outbreak of World War II in September 1939 the Joyces became fugitives of war a second time in their lives.114 Maria Jolas moved her École Bilingue away from Paris to the village of Saint-Gérand-le-Puy near Vichy and the Joyces followed, to be with their grandson Stephen who attended the school. In St-Gérand Joyce not only felt completely isolated, but his situation became even more precarious when the Germans, in April 1940, attacked France via an offensive through Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg and Paris fell on 14 June. The Jolases, who were Americans, urged him to go the United States, but encouraged by the Giedions, Joyce opted for Switzerland, which had been his haven between 1915 and 1919. The situation was much more difficult than in 1915, however. Since September 1939 foreign nationals needed a visa to enter Switzerland, and for a number of reasons this proved arduous. A first application in September 1940 was rejected, but Joyce re-applied in October, helped by a great many friends and supporters in Switzerland, among them Jacques Mercanton in Lausanne as well as, in Zurich, the Giedions, Alfred Vogt, Othmar Schoeck, Heinrich Straumann, Emil Klöti, mayor of the city and Ernst Howald, rector of the university.115 The authorities also demanded financial guarantees, “at first for the unreasonable amount of 50,000 Swiss francs, reduced on Paul Ruggiero’s persuasion to 20,000”.116 Joyce did not have this kind of money, and the sum was raised with the help of friends: The Giedions contributed 15,700 Swiss francs and Edmund Brauchbar in far-away New York donated the remaining 1000 Dollars (4300 Swiss francs).117 On 29 November 1940, finally, permission was given for the Joyce family to enter Switzerland.118 They left Saint-Gérand-le-Puy on 14 December, arrived in Lausanne on 15 December and, after two nights spent there, reached Zurich on 17 December. They were received by the Giedions and by Paul Ruggiero and went to stay in Pension Delphin at Mühlebachstrasse 69 in the Seefeld, the area where they had lived between 1915 and 1917.
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They were looked after by their Zurich friends119 and repeatedly dined at Joyce’s favourite restaurant, the Kronenhalle. However, as it turned out, Joyce had less than a month to live. On Thursday 9 January, after dinner at the Kronenhalle, he was overcome by stomach cramps and was taken to a nearby hospital, the Rotkreuzspital,120 on Friday. He was diagnosed with a perforated ulcer, operated on Saturday and died in the early morning of Monday 13 January 1941. Two days later, on 15 January, Joyce was buried at Fluntern Cemetery. His death had come quite suddenly and the war, of course, made it impossible for friends from abroad to travel to Zurich. The funeral in the snow- covered cemetery was nevertheless attended by a good many people.121 Joyce was honoured by Lord Derwent, British Minister to Bern, by the poet Max Geilinger as a representative of the Swiss Society of Authors, and by Professor Heinrich Straumann. The tenor Max Meili sang Addio terra, addio cielo from Monteverdi’s opera L’Orfeo.
Notes 1. LII, 66f. 2. Ellmann, Joyce, 183f. 3. Ellmann, Joyce, 204 and 262. 4. Ellmann, Joyce, 59f. 5. Budgen, Joyce, 182; Budgen writes that “Joyce spoke Italian like a native”. 6. Ellmann, Joyce, 211, 291 and 308. 7. Ellmann, Joyce, 389. 8. Ellmann, Joyce, 385. 9. The passports were issued by the United States consul in Trieste who acted for the British consul; the permission to depart was given by the Austrian authorities. For details, see Ellmann, Joyce, 385f. and McCourt, The Years of Bloom, 246f. 10. Eva had returned to Dublin in July 1911 (Norburn, Chronology, 50). Stanislaus had been arrested in January 1915 and in August was interned for the duration of the war. Eileen, who had married the Czech citizen Frantisek Schaurek, spent the war years in Prague. 11. Postcard to James B. Pinker dated 30 June 1915 (LII, 349). 12. This continued even after their time in Zurich. According to Maddox (Nora, 227) it was not until March 1925 that “Nora succeeded in persuading Joyce to do something they had not done since Trieste—to take an empty flat and furnish it themselves”. 13. Maddox, Nora, 11.
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14. Norburn, Chronology, 3–18. 15. Norburn, Chronology, 23–66. 16. See the article on Bahnhofstrasse for details. 17. This house is now marked with a plaque, see “Zurich after Joyce”. 18. Now called the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. 19. Ellmann, Joyce, 393. 20. Ellmann, Joyce, 396. 21. On Joyce and the Bliznakoffs see Ellmann, Joyce, 396f. When collecting material for his biography in the early 1950s Ellmann personally interviewed Weiss, Goldschmidt, Sax and Vela Bliznakoff Pulitzer (see Ellmann, Joyce, 780, notes 16 to 19). 22. Budgen, Joyce, 175. In the late 1930s Joyce helped some of his Jewish friends and acquaintances to escape from Nazi Germany and Austria (Ellmann, Joyce, 709 and Mercanton, “Hours”, 218, note 18). 23. Budgen, Joyce, 358f. On Joyce and the Greeks in Zurich, see Budgen, Joyce, 173–175 and 358f. 24. Pavlos (or Paul) Phokas (1885–?) lived in Zurich between September 1916 and March 1919. From 1918 onwards he was an employee at the Greek consulate and in 1919 he moved to Bucharest. This information comes from the files of the Zurich registry office (Einwohner- und Fremdenkontrolle der Stadt Zürich) via the city archive (Stadtarchiv). See also the article on the Zurich Notebooks. 25. Budgen, Joyce, 174. Gorman (Definitive Biography, 237) mentions the same three names. 26. Ellmann, Joyce, 408. Neither Budgen nor Gorman mention the Club des Étrangers. 27. On Martin, whose real name was Juda de Vries, see Budgen, Joyce, 29 and Ellmann, Joyce, 410–412, 419, 426 and 579f. 28. Fleiner had taught at the universities of Zürich, Basel, Tübingen and Heidelberg before coming back to Zurich in 1915. 29. See Budgen, Joyce, 173 and 182, Ellmann, Joyce, 438 and 561, also LI, 130-132, LII, 457 and 458, LIII, 38, 42 and 46. Joyce misspells Maeglin as Magli (LIII, 42) and Uehlinger as Ublinger (LIII, 38). For details of the three artists see SIKART Lexikon zur Kunst in der Schweiz, http:// www.sikart.ch. 30. See Billeter, “Alles nur nicht feldgrau”, Huonker, Literaturszene Zürich, 27–36 and Riess and Scheidegger, Café Odeon. 31. Gorman, Definitive Biography, 238 and Ellmann, Joyce, 412. 32. Gorman, Definitive Biography, 238 and Ellmann, Joyce, 412. The quotation is from Gorman. 33. See the article on Jarnach for the source of these quotations. 34. Ellmann, Joyce, 422.
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35. See also Hodgart and Bauerle, Joyce’s Grand Operoar, 55f. 36. Ellmann, Joyce, 76. In the summer of 1901 Joyce translated two of Hauptmann’s plays, Vor Sonnenaufgang (‘Before Sunrise’) and Michael Kramer (Ellmann, Joyce, 87f.). 37. Ellmann, Joyce, 188. 38. Joyce’s friend Ettore Schmitz alias Italo Svevo (1861–1921), the son of a German father and an Italian mother, wrote all his works in Italian. 39. See the article on Jarnach for details. Jarnach and Joyce used French when talking to each other. 40. Budgen, Joyce, 182. 41. Judging by the published letters, Joyce appears to have used German in his correspondence only when absolutely necessary. A postcard written to the interned Stanislaus on 16 June 1915 (SL, 209) is in German, probably to ensure that it would pass censorship. Martha Fleischmann did not speak English; of the four surviving romantic letters addressed to her (LII, 426–436) two are in French, one is in German and French and one, the last one, is in German. See also a letter to Daniel Hummel (14 February 1921, LIII, 38), one to Georg Goyert (11 October 1938, LIII, 432f.) and the formal thank-you letter sent to the mayor of Zurich on 20 December 1940 (SL, 407f., also in Giedion-Welcker, ed., In Memoriam, 51f.). 42. Straumann, “Last Meeting”, 113. Straumann and Joyce presumably spoke German since Ernst Howald, the former vice-chancellor of the university, was also present at the dinner. 43. Ellmann, Joyce, 390. See also Maddox, Nora, 136f. and 174f. 44. Budgen, Joyce, 182. 45. Not much is known about the Zurich years of Joyce’s children. Some information is found in Maddox (Nora, 136f.), in Shloss (Lucia, 63–73) and, for Giorgio, in the memoir of Walter Ackermann. 46. LII, 397. According to Norburn (Chronology, 199), this sum—two shillings and sixpence, that is half a crown or an eighth of a pound—would have been equivalent to about £4 in 2002. 47. The Royal Literary Fund is a benevolent fund for professional published authors established in 1790. 48. The Society of Authors, originally called Society of Authors, Playwrights and Composers, is a United Kingdom trade union for professional writers, illustrators and literary translators founded in 1884. 49. According to the Civil List Act of 1837, Civil List grants and pensions were given “to such Persons only as have just Claims on the Royal Beneficence, or who by their personal Services to the Crown, by the Performance of Duties to the Public, or by their useful Discoveries in Science and Attainments in Literature and the Arts, have merited the gra-
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cious Consideration of their Sovereign and the Gratitude of their Country”. See “Civil List, 1837”, https://www.legislation.gov.uk, last accessed on 13 December 2018. In 2011 the Civil List was replaced by the Sovereign Grant Act. 50. Not being a specialist, I had to turn to an economic historian for this purpose, and I would like to thank Tobias Straumann, adjunct professor of modern history at the University of Zurich, for his invaluable help (private communications in August 2018 and in January/February 2019). 51. Having such a substantial income made Joyce uncommonly generous. When the English Players were in financial difficulties in 1919, he gave them $200 of Thayer’s money “to alleviate their immediate difficulties” (Ellmann, Joyce, 458; see also Gorman, Definitive Biography, 258f.). According to Ellmann he went even further in July, offering “to finance them”. Ellmann’s source is a letter to Budgen dated 11 July 1919 (also in SL, 239f.): “I have offered to finance the E.P. After prolonged deliberations they very kindly and most considerately consented to accept 10,000 francs of my dirty money in consideration of my former good behavior and unstained character”. I doubt whether this offer was meant seriously, however, since the tone of the letter is so obviously sarcastic. 52. This massive increase was due, mostly, to wartime inflation. 53. Einstein’s academic career began afterwards: In 1908 he was appointed lecturer at the University of Berne, in 1909 associate professor at the University of Zurich. 54. Ellmann in SL, 213. 55. I am grateful to Christian Koller, adjunct professor at the University of Zurich and director of the Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv, for reading through and commenting on the following section. 56. Maeder, “Zürich in Ersten Weltkrieg”, 20. See also Maddox (Nora, 142): “Nora had her hands full just feeding her family. For five months there were no potatoes. There were shortages of bread, meat, and, infuriating in the land of Alpine herds and pastures, a scarcity even of butter and milk. The refugees blamed the Swiss for selling the products to the belligerents to make nitroglycerine; the Swiss blamed the refugees for eating all the bread”. 57. It was well known that Lenin, the leader of the October revolution, had lived in Switzerland from August 1914 until April 1917. 58. The decision was taken on 10 November, but the proclamation is dated 11 November. 59. The strike effectively ended on 14 November. 60. See, for example, Barry, The Great Influenza or Spinney, Pale Rider. 61. Maeder in Hebeisen et al., Kriegs- und Krisenzeit, 24. 62. Luening, Odyssey, 188.
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63. Luening, Odyssey, 189. 64. In their sketches of wartime Zurich Budgen (Joyce, 23–38) and Gorman (Definitive Biography, 229f.) emphasise the pleasant aspects, the lively atmosphere and the multiculturalism of the city, but Budgen, evenhanded as ever, also devotes a number of pages to how the war affected Switzerland. 65. SL, 226. 66. SL, 366. 67. Gorman, Definitive Biography, 256. 68. Skinner, “Two Joyce Letters”, 376. 69. Skinner, “Two Joyce Letters”, 379. 70. Ellmann, Joyce, 386. 71. Joyce must also have been in contact with two of Suter’s artist friends, Daniel Hummel and Rudolf Maeglin. On 31 May 1921 he wrote to Budgen (LIII, 42): “Giorgio leaves with Hummel and Magli [sic] for Zurich on Friday for a month”. 72. Suter, “Some Reminiscences”, 63. 73. Suter, “Some Reminiscences”, 64. 74. Norburn, Chronology, 134f. The Joyces accompanied Lucia who attended a summer school at Schloss Klessheim near Salzburg held by Elizabeth Duncan, Isadora Duncan’s sister; see Shloss (Lucia, 153–162) and Weigel (“Porträt des Künstlers als Österreich-Tourist”, 134–146) for details. It was during this stay in Salzburg that Joyce met Stefan Zweig again. 75. See, for example, the accounts of the trip to Salzburg in Ellmann (Joyce, 603) or Bowker (Joyce, 373–375). 76. Note AF: This “exception” was a thunderstorm the travellers encountered on their train journey from Zurich to Innsbruck, across the Arlberg. 77. Gilbert, “Souvenirs de voyage”, 42; my translation. Gilbert wrote: “Notre voyage en Autriche […] s’effectua en plein été. Zurich, où nous nous arrêtâmes en chemin, était en proie à une vague de chaleur, mais Joyce semblait insensible aux températures élevées; en fait (à une exception près que je vous conterai tout à l’heure), il semblait insensible aux temps qu’il faisait. Il passa la journée à Zurich, renouant connaissance avec maints vieux amis (il s’était réfugié à Zurich pendant la guerre 1914–1918), appartenant à toutes les classes de la société; le plaisir manifeste que ceuxci éprouvaient à le revoir était dû, je m’en rendais compte, moins à la satisfaction de constater qu’un écrivain célèbre se souvenait d’eux, qu’à un réel sentiment d’affection pour lui”. 78. Letter (dictated) dated 20 September 1928 to Harriet Shaw Weaver (LI, 266). 79. It is unlikely that Carola Giedion-Welcker was among them. He had met her for the first time in Paris earlier that year, and according to her
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“Meetings with Joyce” (258) she saw him for the second time “in the Zurich Red Cross Hospital, where on May 15, 1930, he had undergone an eye operation[.]” 80. This letter (unpublished) is part of the Giedion Bequest in the Zurich James Joyce Foundation. The invitation may have come from the Lesezirkel Hottingen, a very active literary society founded in 1882 (for details see Ulrich, Der Lesezirkel Hottingen). Ruth Frehner (personal communication 21 April 2020) has pointed out to me that in the James Joyce Collection of the University of Buffalo there is a letter to Joyce from Hans Bodmer (1863–1948), the president of the Lesezirkel. It is dated 5 September 1928, which fits well with the date of Joyce’s letter to Miss Weaver (20 September 1928) but not with that of Sylvia Beach’s letter to Carola Giedion-Welcker (17 December 1927). 81. Ellmann, Joyce, 622. 82. The operation took place in the Rotkreuzspital on 15 May (Giedion- Welcker, “Meetings with Joyce”, 258) and Joyce was laid up in Vogt’s clinic until 5 June. He then moved to the Hotel St Gotthard and returned to Paris on 17 June. 83. Ellmann, Joyce, 622–624 and 627f.; Norburn, Chronology, 142f. and 144f. 84. I have counted the summer of 1932 during which James and Nora shuttled between Zurich and Feldkirch in Austria as one visit. 85. Ellmann, Joyce, 645; Maddox, Nora, 278f. 86. Beran died in 1937. 87. Borach was killed in an automobile accident in March 1934. 88. For the events of that year and the reasons for James and Nora’s marriage see, especially, Maddox, Nora, 255–280 (Chap. 15, “Legitimate Interests”). 89. Ellmann, Joyce, 657–660; Norburn, Chronology, 156f.; Maddox, Nora, 286–289. According to Ellmann and Norburn, James first accompanied Nora to Feldkirch and then went on to Zurich. However, Lucia was taken to Feldkirch by the Jolases, while her parents travelled directly to Zurich. See Maddox, Nora, 286f. and Weigel, “Porträt des Künstlers als Österreich-Tourist”, 146–151. 90. According to Maddox (Nora, 286), Lucia was led to believe “that the nurse was a young woman eager for a holiday in Austria and paying for her trip out of her own savings. Patient and nurse would not live in the Feldkirch hotel where the Jolases were staying but in a chalet nearby, with their own cook”. 91. Ellmann, Joyce, 657. 92. Ellmann, Joyce, 663f.; Norburn, Chronology, 161f. According to Ellmann (Joyce, 663) “[t]he Giedions came to Paris for a visit, and helped persuade Joyce to return to Zurich with them; they left together on May 22, 1933,
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with the hapless Lucia in tow”. Norburn mentions neither the Giedions nor Lucia. 93. Ellmann, Joyce, 664f.; Norburn, Chronology, 162. 94. Ellmann, Joyce, 665. See also Shloss, Lucia, 259–265. 95. Ellmann, Joyce, 669; Norburn, Chronology, 165. 96. Ellmann, Joyce, 675–681; Norburn, Chronology, 167–170. 97. Ellmann, Joyce, 669. On the Baillys see Maddox, Nora, 294f. and 297. 98. Ellmann, Joyce, 675. See also Shloss, Lucia, 265–274. 99. Norburn, Chronology, 168. 100. Ellmann, Joyce, 681. See also Shloss, Lucia, 274–299. 101. For the dates of these two trips see Faerber and Luchsinger, Joyce in Zürich, 163. The trip to Lucerne is documented by pictures taken by Sigfried Giedion (Bruderer-Oswald, Das Neue Sehen, 82 and 84; Faerber and Luchsinger, Joyce in Zürich, 105). In Lucerne, the Giedions and the Joyces were accompanied by Hans Curjel (1896–1974), a Swiss impresario and director who had emigrated to Zurich from Berlin in 1933. 102. See the article on Schoeck for details. Ellmann (Joyce, 669)—erroneously—dates the concert and Joyce’s meeting with Schoeck to April 1934. 103. Ellmann, Joyce, 697; Norburn, Chronology, 177. 104. Ellmann (Joyce, 697, LIII, 385, note 2 and LIII, 393, note 1) dates the meeting of James and Stanislaus to late August or September 1936, but as shown by a letter to Giorgio dated 11 April 1937 (LIII, 395f.) it definitely took place during Joyce’s visit to Zurich in April 1937. For further details, see Norburn, Chronology, 177 and Maddox, Nora, 321. 105. Ellmann, Joyce, 705; Norburn, Chronology, 178f. 106. Ellmann, Joyce, 707; Norburn, Chronology, 181. 107. In a letter to Ezra Pound dated 9 February 1938 (LIII, 415) Joyce punned that his left eye was “(the only one really left) […] in consequence of months of day and (literally) allnight work in finishing W i P [Work in Progress]”. 108. Ellmann, Joyce, 707. 109. See the article on Platzspitz for details. 110. Ellmann, Joyce, 710; Norburn, Chronology, 183. 111. Ellmann, Joyce, 710. Ellmann also states that on this trip the Joyces “went on to Zurich for a short stay”. Norburn does not confirm the stay in Zurich. 112. Ellmann, Joyce, 726; Norburn, Chronology, 188. Norburn, again, does not mention Zurich. 113. Ellmann, Joyce, 726. 114. The following is a very brief summary. The story of how Joyce applied for and, eventually, received permission to return to Switzerland is told in
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detail by Ellmann (Joyce, 728–739) and, with facsimiles of a series of documents, by Faerber and Luchsinger (Joyce in Zürich, 131–144). 115. For a full list, see Ellmann, Joyce, 736f. 116. Ellmann, Joyce, 737. 117. For details, see Ellmann, Joyce, 736f. and Faerber and Luchsinger, Joyce in Zürich, 134f. and 141. 118. Visas were granted for James and Nora, Giorgio with Stephen as well as Lucia. Lucia, however, had not lived with her family for several years: From 1936 onwards she was institutionalised in the maison de santé of Dr Delmas in Ivry-sur-Seine (which was moved to Pornichet, south of La Baule, on the Atlantic coast during the war). In March 1951, shortly before Nora’s death, Miss Weaver had her transferred to St Andrew’s Hospital in Northampton, England, where she died on 12 December 1982. See Shloss, Lucia, 399–415. 119. Mostly by the Giedions and by Paul Ruggiero; there were also meetings with Othmar Schoeck and Heinrich Straumann. 120. The full name of the institution, which was founded in 1882, was Schwesternschule und Krankenhaus vom Roten Kreuz Zürich-Fluntern (‘nursing school and hospital of the Red Cross’). The hospital, at Pestalozzistrasse 11, closed in 1997 and the building was torn down subsequently. 121. See the photograph reproduced in Ellmann, Joyce, liv and in Faerber and Luchsinger, Joyce in Zürich, 147.
1.03 Zurich in Joyce
Joyce’s fictional world, from Dubliners to Finnegans Wake, is that of Dublin. Together with Nora Barnacle he left his native city in 1904, never to return permanently, and he spent the rest of his life in self-imposed exile in mostly Trieste, Zurich and Paris. Dublin and Ireland, however, stayed with him, providing the geographical locus, the subject matter and the atmosphere of the bulk of his work. The cities of his exile also affected him and his work, and the laconic note at the end of Ulysses “1914–1921 Trieste–Zurich–Paris”, has a twofold implication: The novel was written in these three cities, but in minor and major ways they are also in it. “How much Zurich” and “which Zurich” is there in Ulysses and in other works written from 1915 onwards? These are the questions I will be looking at in this chapter, moving in roughly chronological order from Exiles to poems written in Zurich, to Ulysses and finally to Finnegans Wake. The Joyce family’s move from Trieste to Zurich in June 1915 was forced upon them by the vicissitudes of war: James Joyce had to leave Trieste in order to avoid internment by the Austrians, and he decided to take his family to Zurich. Their exile from exile was to last a little more than four years. The Joyces left behind a city in which they had lived for a good ten years and a city in which their children had been born, they left behind family and friends, and they left behind most of their belongings, including Joyce’s library. For James Joyce the writer, however, the enforced move from Trieste to Zurich more or less coincided with a distinct change for the better in © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_3
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his career. During most of his Triestine years his attempts to have his work published had come to nothing. This was to change in Joyce’s annus mirabilis 1914,1 however, when—after years of delays—two of his works saw the light of day. Dubliners, the collection of short stories he had written between 1904 and 1907, was finally published by Grant Richards on 15 June 1914. Around the same time, between February 1914 and September 1915, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man appeared in serial form in the modernist London magazine The Egoist. Publication in book form followed in New York in December 1915. Joyce’s time in Zurich would prove to be fertile: His only play, Exiles, was written in Trieste, but the publication (1918), the translation into German (1919) and the first performance (in August 1919, in Munich) happened during his Zurich years. In Zurich he wrote a small number of poems that would appear, together with poems written before and after, in the collection Pomes Penyeach (1927). Most importantly, while in Zurich, he completed 12 of the altogether 18 episodes of Ulysses (1922). His second magnum opus, Finnegans Wake, was written after Joyce’s time in Zurich, but the city features in it in a number of ways.
Exiles Joyce did not write his play Exiles in Zurich. Having begun to work on it in 1913, he had it “in nearly final form by April of 1915” and “he brought the completed manuscript with him to Zurich” in the summer of that year.2 Its publication turned out to be comparatively easy: The English and American publishers of Dubliners and Portrait showed interest, Grant Richards signed a contract on 31 August 1917 and the play was published on 25 May 1918, by Richards in England and by Huebsch in the United States.3 However, the ultimate destination of a play is not the printed page but the stage, and here Exiles met with considerable difficulties. Joyce hoped that the English Players, the local troupe he was involved with in Zurich, would produce it and it was duly “listed as one of the plays in the company’s repertoire”.4 Nothing came of a Zurich production, however, and Joyce tried a number of other possible venues, all in vain: The manager of an American theatre, the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and the Stage Society in London all turned it down for a variety of reasons.5 There remained the option of a production in a non-English-speaking country, which made a translation necessary. This would be a first, since up to that time none of Joyce’s works had been translated into any foreign
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language. The translation was made by Hannah von Mettal, a Czech- Austrian woman who had moved to Zurich in 1916.6 Further help came from Stefan Zweig, the Austrian writer who at the time lived in nearby Rüschlikon. Without having met Zweig, Joyce sent him a copy of the newly published Exiles, and Zweig replied on 12 September 1918, writing that the play was a “great artistic revelation” for him and that he had “a very strong impression” of it. He felt that everything possible ought to be done to get it onto the German stage and he was certain that after the war a translated version would find its way to a first-class theatre.7 Things happened quickly afterwards, and it is possible that they came about because of Zweig: In April 1919, von Mettal’s translation, entitled Verbannte, was published by Rascher-Verlag in Zurich, the firm that had published one of Zweig’s works in 1918.8 “Probably through Stefan Zweig’s influence, Exiles was presented on the stage in Munich on August 7 [1919]”, just two months before the Joyces left Zurich to return to Trieste. Because of visa problems Joyce was unable to attend the performance himself and learnt through a telegram and newspaper reports that the production had not been successful, or, in Joyce’s own words, “a flop!”9 The printed version of the play met the same fate: According to a 1926 sales statement by Rascher, only nine copies were sold.10 It was not until 1925 and 1926 that the play was performed in English, in New York and London respectively. “No other significant production of Exiles occurred in English in Joyce’s lifetime”,11 and its stage history since then can be called chequered at best.12
Poems13 Joyce’s first volume of poems, Chamber Music, was published in 1907, his second and last, Pomes Penyeach, in 1927. While the former contains 36 lyrical poems written in Dublin, essentially in one voice, the latter is a collection of only 13 very different poems, written over an extended period of time in Dublin (one, 1904), Trieste (eight, 1912–1915), Zurich (three, 1916, 1917 and 1918) and Paris (one, 1924). It was first published, against Ezra Pound’s advice, as a small, slim volume by Shakespeare and Company in Paris, but the response to it was disappointing. In 1932 Joyce had it re-published by Desmond Harmsworth, as a facsimile manuscript with decorative initials (lettrines) designed by Lucia.14 According to Max Wildi, the 13 poems of Pomes Penyeach are, “as a whole and individually, more interesting and contain more lyrical beauty
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than any of the juvenile verses of Chamber Music, Poem XXXVI excepted. […] The mature poems all bear the stamp of genuine experience. Like Arthur Symons in his day, Joyce dates his poems and indicates scene and place of origin, as if they were entries in a diary”.15 The first of the three Zurich poems, “Alone” (1916), is most like the poems of Chamber Music. According to Georges Borach, a Zurich businessman who took English lessons with Joyce and who remembers “night strolls by the Lake of Zurich”, “Joyce composed the poem during a walk along the lake”.16 The speaker sees moonlight (“the moon’s greygolden meshes”) and “shorelights” reflected in the dark lake and he hears “sly reeds” whispering the name of a beloved, evoking “delight” as well as “a swoon of shame”. While the visual and auditory details bear the “stamp of genuine experience”, it is not clear what love affair they evoke—a love affair, moreover, which involves “delight” as well as “shame”.17 The poem as a whole is a moving evocation of “aloneness”, placing it in a long tradition of poems devoted to this motif.18 The second Zurich poem, “A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight” (1917), is also based on a documented personal experience, but in all other aspects it is entirely different in nature. The players of the title are the English Players, a Zurich theatre company Joyce was involved with. Commenting on Joyce’s work for the English Players, Budgen writes: “[His] functions were numerous and important. He aided in the business arrangements, sang ‘off’ or prompted as required, and had a general advisory voice in the proceedings. He did everything, in short, but act. He sang ‘off’ in a performance of Browning’s In a Balcony, and this was the occasion that inspired the poem beginning, ‘They mouth love’s language,’ published in Pomes Penyeach”.19 According to Ellmann, the performance in question took place on 11 December 1918, and “Joyce sang Giovanni Stefani’s song, ‘Amante Tradito,’ behind the scenes just after the curtain rose on Browning’s play, and his friend Ruggiero accompanied him on a guitar which Joyce lent and afterwards gave him”.20 The language and the overheated atmosphere of the poem are unlike anything else in Joyce’s poetry, and as a whole it reads more like a work by Browning than by Joyce. However, like the other two Zurich poems it may be seen an expression of unfulfilled passion. In his edition of the poems and Exiles, Mays states: The subject of Browning’s closet drama (published in 1855 [in Men and Women, a collection of fifty-one poems in two volumes]) is the different love
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of men and women, how it is compromised by circumstance and yet how heroically it finds expression. The characters eventually overcome their inhibitions and state beliefs that are also Browning’s: […] Browning’s hero Norbert, with the help of the heroine, Constance, states his love; Joyce, alone, meditates that he has not. His lines are an alienated reflection on high passion that translates itself into action for others but not for him, in a style that echoes Browning’s vehement, elliptical manner.21
The title of Joyce’s third Zurich poem, “Bahnhofstrasse” (1918), evokes one of Zurich’s most central and most perennially elegant streets. It is not an ode to its “metropolitan smartness”,22 however, but like “Alone” refers to a deeply personal experience.23 On Saturday 18 August 1917, when walking along Bahnhofstrasse, Joyce suffered a “violent Hexenschuss” (lumbago), followed the next day by an attack of glaucoma.24 Joyce, then 35 years old and temporarily alone,25 must have been painfully reminded of the frailty and the transitoriness of life, two central topics in the poem which he was to write about a year later. Frailty, manifested by the attack of glaucoma, is alluded to in a number of ways, from “eyes that mock me” and “violet signals” to “[t]he trysting and the twining star” and “star of evil! star of pain!”, the references to “stars” being punning allusions to the German terms for cataracts (grauer Star) and glaucoma (grüner Star).26 Frailty, in turn, evokes the transitoriness of life: The speaker realises that “[h]ighhearted youth comes not again”, while he does not yet know “old heart’s wisdom”. Joyce’s three Zurich poems, in sum, are all based on intense personal experiences made in the city, which are then turned into general expressions of aloneness and even suffering. The implied protagonist of the Zurich poems, unlike Leopold Bloom in Ulysses, is not a social being.
Ulysses Joyce’s Zurich years, first and foremost, were the years in which he wrote a major part of Ulysses. He had started the novel in Trieste, having brought it “as far as the first pages of the third episode by June [1915]”,27 the month of the Joyce family’s departure for Zurich. Settling in a new environment took its toll; Joyce had financial difficulties,28 and nearly two years would pass before he could really devote himself to the novel again. He completed the first three episodes in late 1917 while staying in
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Locarno, then posted them to his Zurich friend Claud Sykes, “who had agreed to type them if Joyce could find him a typewriter”.29 In January 1918 they “had been brought to the point where they could be published. He entered into correspondence with Miss Weaver and Pound about the possibility of printing the book first in serial form, as he had done with the Portrait”.30 It was largely thanks to Ezra Pound that Ulysses could be published in the Little Review, an American modernist monthly edited by Margaret C. Anderson and Jane Heap.31 From early 1918 onwards, the writing and the publication of Ulysses proceeded at a pace: The first three episodes of the novel, completed in late 1917, were published in March, April and May 1918; Joyce now wrote steadily and publication in the Little Review, episode by episode, followed within months. The writing continued more or less smoothly, even when the Joyce family moved back to Trieste in October 1919 and later went on to live in Paris, arriving there in early July 1920. It was during this time, however, that the publication in the Little Review came to a halt. “Nausicaa”, published between April and August 1920, aroused the interest of John Sumner, head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice in the summer of 1920, and in February 1921 Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap were found guilty of violating the New York state law against obscenity.32 The serial publication of Ulysses thus ended prematurely because of the very episode which, as we shall see, was inspired by events in Switzerland and which Joyce had begun to write in Zurich just as he was about to move back to Trieste. The following is an overview of the composition of Ulysses combined with one of its serial publication in the Little Review. It is based on Luca Crispi’s list of extant manuscripts, typescripts (and proofs) of the 18 episodes of the novel (Table 1).33 The novel is set in Dublin, in 1904, and Joyce took great pains to reconstruct that particular place and time. However, his long sojourns in Pola (1904/05), then Trieste (1905–1915) and Zurich (1915–1919) have left traces in the novel as well. The Triestine ones have been researched and written about by John McCourt in The Years of Bloom. McCourt shows that there is actually a great deal of Trieste in Ulysses.34 The Zurich traces, by contrast, are fewer in number and possibly less substantial. They will be discussed in the paragraphs to follow. To begin with, it is worth noting that Zurich has at least two features that must have reminded Joyce of home. Zurich, like Dublin, is bisected by a river that is joined in the city itself by a smaller tributary (the Limmat by the Sihl, the Liffey by the Dodder). Joyce’s fascination with these rivers
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Table 1 The composition of Ulysses and its serial publication in the Little Review Episode
Documented manuscripts (M) and typescripts (T)
Date of publication in the Little Review
1 Telemachus 2 Nestor
M: September–October 1917 (Zurich) M: October–Early December 1917 (Zurich) T: December 1917 (Zurich) M: Mid-Late October–December 1917 (Locarno & Zurich) T: January 1918 (Zurich) M: February 1918 (Zurich) T: February–May 1918 (Zurich) M: February–May 1918 (Zurich) M: March–May 1918 (Zurich) T: Early-Mid May 1918 (Zurich) M: January–May 1918 (Zurich) T: Mid-May 1918 (Zurich) M: January–July 1918 (Zurich) T: Summer 1918 (Zurich) M: Summer–Autumn 1918 (Zurich) T: Late 1918–Early 1919 (Zurich) M: January–February 1919 (Zurich) T: February 1919 (Zurich) M: Late 1917–June 1919 T: June 1919 (Zurich) M: Mid-June–October 1919 (Zurich) T: October–November 1919 (Zurich) M: November 1919–February 1920 (Trieste) T: February–March 1920 (Trieste) M: February–May 1920 T: June 1920 (Trieste) M: Late Spring 1920–January 1921 (Trieste & Paris) T: January–Mid-October 1921 (Paris) M: January–Mid-Late February 1921 (Trieste & Paris) T: February–Early December 1921 (Paris)
March 1918 April 1918
3 Proteus
4 Calypso 5 Lotus-Eaters 6 Hades 7 Aeolus 8 Lestrygonians 9 Scylla and Charybdis 10 Wandering Rocks 11 Sirens 12 Cyclops 13 Nausicaa
14 Oxen of the Sun 15 Circe
16 Eumaeus
May 1918
June 1918 July 1918 September 1918 October 1918 January–March 1919 April–May 1919 June–July 1919 August–September 1919 November 1919–March 1920 April–August 1920
September–December 1920
(continued)
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Table 1 (continued) Episode
Documented manuscripts (M) and typescripts (T)
17 Ithaca
M: Spring–Summer–Late October 1921 (Paris) T: October–Early December 1921 (Paris) M: Spring–Summer–Mid-September 1921 (Paris) T: 16 August–Mid-October 1921 (Paris)
18 Penelope
Date of publication in the Little Review
and with rivers in general is well known, but it is much more evident in Finnegans Wake than in Ulysses. And like Dublin, Zurich was a lively, bustling city—enlivened during Joyce’s years there by the many foreigners that sought refuge there from World War I. Among Joyce’s known friends and aquaintances in Zurich there were probably more foreigners than native Swiss. In order to re-construct the Dublin of 1904, Joyce mainly relied on his memory, but supplemented it by consulting books and in a variety of other ways. He had had to leave his personal library in Trieste, but most books that he needed were available in Zurich’s well-stocked public libraries, notably the Museumsgesellschaft and, from 1917 onwards, the Zentralbibliothek.35 It is well known that he used the 1904 edition of Thom’s Official Directory, an address directory of Dublin homes and businesses, which in Joyce’s time “appeared annually, providing a street-by- street guide of Dublin households and commercial establishments”.36 He also made additional inquiries: As early as 1906, while working on Dubliners, he wrote to his brother Stanislaus: “I also asked [Aunt Josephine] to try to lay hands on any old editions of Kickham, Griffin, Carleton, H. J. Smyth &c, Banim and to send me a Xmas present made up of tram-tickets, advts, handbills, posters, papers, programmes &c. I would like to have a map of Dublin on my wall. I am becoming something of a maniac”.37 Seen from one point of view, Joyce’s Dublin is an orderly, organised entity, but like any big city it also resembles a labyrinth, a maze of streets and lanes, in which an infinite number of events occur, concurrently and consecutively, at any given moment, and in which it is easy to get lost. Bloom’s one-day “odyssey” through Dublin in Episodes 4
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through 15 of the novel mirrors the wanderings of Ulysses through the Mediterranean. This is especially evident in Episode 10 (“Wandering Rocks”) devoted to the parallel actions of a series of characters between 3 and 4 p.m. According to the Linati schema, the “organ” of this episode is “blood” (presumably the blood coursing through the “veins” of Dublin), the “science, art” is “mechanics” and the “technic” is “labyrinth”.38 Joyce’s interest in and his hands-on experience with labyrinths is supported by a Zurich anecdote told by Budgen: Joyce wrote the Wandering Rocks with a map of Dublin before him on which were traced in red ink the paths of the Earl of Dudley and Father Conmee. He calculated to a minute the time necessary for his characters to cover a given distance of the city. For this is peculiarly the episode of Dublin. Not Bloom, not Stephen is here the principal personage, but Dublin itself. Its houses, streets, spaces, tramways and waterways are shown us, and the people appear as sons and daughters and guests of the city. All towns are labyrinths in which for the townsfolk there are charted fairways; but we are strangers in the town and can find our way only by the exercise of attention and caution. While working on Wandering Rocks Joyce bought at Franz Karl [sic] Weber’s on the Bahnhofstrasse a game called ‘Labyrinth,’ which he played every evening for a time with his daughter Lucia. As a result of winning or losing at the game he was enabled to catalogue six main errors of judgment into which one might fall in choosing a right, a left or centre way out of the maze.39
During their research on Joyce in Zurich, Thomas Faerber and Markus Luchsinger found an advertisement for this very “Labyrinthspiel” in a catalogue of 1914, and a copy of the original game is kept by the Zurich James Joyce Foundation. Franz Carl Weber, the toy shop mentioned by Budgen, still exists.40 In Episode 12, Bloom spends time in Barney Kiernan’s pub listening to the rants and ravings of the Citizen, the “Cyclops” that has given the episode its name. One remark of the Citizen triggers a long, ahistorical digression consisting of the report of the public execution of the Irish patriot Robert Emmet (in 1803), which is watched by a “picturesque foreign delegation known as the Friends of the Emerald Isle”.41 The delegates, identified by their farcical names as representatives of a particular country include “Herr Hurhausdirektorpresident Hans Chuechli-Steuerli” (U 12.566f.), clearly from Zurich.42 Chuechli-Steuerli’s name not only conjures up two items that Joyce must have associated with Switzerland,
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namely cakes (‘Chueche’ = Standard German ‘Kuchen’) and taxes (Standard German ‘Steuern’), but is also marked as Swiss by its phonology (initial Ch-) and morphology (the diminutive suffix -li). Chuechli- Steuerli’s title “Hurhaus-direktor-president”, moreover, makes fun of the tendency, in German, to form long, multi-element compounds, and casts him in a dubious light by turning a respectable “Kurhausdirektor” (“director of a hotel or sanatorium”) into a “Hurhausdirektor” (“director of a whorehouse”).43 By comparison with the names of some of the other delegates, however, Joyce only pokes gentle fun at the Swiss: The title of the German delegate at the end of the list, for example, is “Nationalgymnasium-museum-sanatorium-and-suspensoriums-ordinary-privatdocent-general-history-special-professor-doctor”.44 As an Irishman marooned in Switzerland during wartime, Joyce inevitably came into contact with the British diplomatic service. Its major representatives at the time were Sir Horace Rumbold, British Minister in Berne, and A. Percy Bennett, the British Consul in Zurich. Joyce’s friend Frank Budgen also had indirect ties to the British Consulate General in Zürich through his wartime work for the Ministry of Information. In the course of the English Players’ inaugural production of Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest in April 1918 Joyce came into conflict with Henry Carr, an employee at the Consulate who had the leading role of Algernon Moncrieff. The conflict escalated and resulted in Joyce suing Carr, and Carr, represented by the Zurich attorney Dr Georg Wettstein, countersuing Joyce. The conflict ended in a legal draw, but Joyce, whose attitude to England, the English and to English officialdom was mixed at best, took literary revenge by making Carr, Bennett, Rumbold, Wettstein and a few other minor characters in Ulysses, thereby allotting “punishments as scrupulously and inexorably as Dante”.45 In “Circe” Henry Carr becomes “Private Carr”, a vulgar, pugnacious British soldier (“redcoat”), who together with “Private Compton” spends time in Dublin’s red-light district and who knocks down Stephen Dedalus at the end of the episode.46 Percy Bennett has two roles: In “Wandering Rocks” and “Cyclops” he is “Battling Bennett”, a boxer pitted in a match against a certain Myler Keogh,47 while in “Circe” he is Sergeant Major Bennett, also known as “old Bennett”, Carr and Compton’s superior.48 In “Cyclops” and “Circe” we find “H. Rumbold, Master Barber” and executioner,49 while Wettstein makes an appearance in “Cyclops” as “Ole Pfotts Wettstein”, Bennett’s second in the boxing match.50
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Joyce’s negative experiences in connection with the production of The Importance of Being Earnest found their way into Ulysses after the event. His irritation over Carr, Bennett and others evidently lingered on and, as shown above, he expressed it by giving them brief roles in a number of episodes. Joyce, of course, was by no means the first writer to use real, past events to colour his writing. Where he may have gone an unusual step further was to physically create or recreate experiences for the sole purpose of providing literary material. In Myselves when Young Budgen writes: Sometimes I thought that Joyce’s memory did fail him—not so much in recollection of an event as in the subjective joys or agonies associated with it. This could necessitate the reconstruction of the event in order to relive the moment again in all its immediacy. […] Leaving the Pfauen one night I walked in company with Nora Joyce. She became tearful and through her tears she told me that Jim wanted her to ‘go with other men so that he would have something to write about’. Joyce, pretending to be more drunk that he was, was shuffling up in the rear, hoping, presumably, to catch some helpful words. At that time he was, I think, composing the Sirens episode, that truly amazing piece of writing, but that would matter little seeing that in Ulysses the story of the cuckolding of Bloom, foreseen, accomplished, and judged in retrospect, goes on from early morning till late at night. That Nora would or could have cooperated in any such way is out of the question. She was a respectable married woman with all that that implies and any such enterprise lay outside her will and means.51
Budgen then goes on to say that, to his mind, Joyce had “similar literary intentions” when entering into an affair with Martha Fleischmann in Zurich. The story of this affair, to which an earlier one with a woman called Getrude Kaempffer must be added, runs as follows. According to Ellmann,52 Joyce met Getrude Kaempffer, a young, tall and attractive German woman in the autumn of 1917, when the Joyces stayed in Locarno. He made it clear that he wanted to get to know her better, but “she was inexperienced and not eager for the sexual overtures which he soon made. She was interested in his mind, he indifferent to hers. When she would not accede, he asked her to correspond with him, using (like Bloom) the poste restante in Zurich”. A year later they coincidentally met again in Zurich, whereupon Joyce renewed his overtures. Once again she refused, and “[a]ll that he had left was a recollection of having been aroused by a woman named Gertrude. It was enough to
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bolster him in naming Gerty the pallid young woman that Bloom excites himself over in the Nausicaa episode”. The “affair” with Gertrude Kaempffer not having flowered, Joyce tried again later, with more success. In October 1918, from the back of the Joyces’ (then new) apartment in Universitätstrasse 29, he observed and was fascinated by a young woman in a bathroom, pulling a chain. Seeing her in the street later on, he made overtures similar to his approaching Gertrude Kaempffer. Martha Fleischmann was reserved like Getrude Kaempffer, but she evidently rejected Joyce less forcefully. In the months following their first encounter he wrote elaborate letters to her in French and German, and on 2 February 1919 (his birthday) he arranged a theatrically staged meeting with her in Budgen’s studio. The affair ended when Rudolf Hiltpold, the man Martha Fleischmann was living with, sent Joyce a letter and in a subsequent meeting told Joyce to keep away from Martha.53 Gertrude from Locarno and Martha from Zurich, conflated, live on in two women that trigger Bloom’s romantic and erotic imagination in Dublin: Martha Clifford and Gerty MacDowell. Martha Clifford is the woman Bloom—calling himself Henry Flower, Esq.—exchanges romantic letters with (U 5.54–66, 8.323–333, 11.859–910). And Gerty MacDowell (U 13.79) is “Nausicaa” in the eponymous episode, the young girl on Sandymount Strand who has romantic fantasies about the stranger she sees sitting nearby and who, in turn, is incited to masturbate at the sight of her “undies” (U 13.171). Apart from the general atmosphere of an older man in clandestine contact with or fantasizing about a young female, there are detailed points of resemblance: To begin with there is the similarity of names (Gertrude—Gerty and Martha Fleischmann—Martha Clifford).54 Furthermore, Bloom and Martha Clifford exchange letters via poste restante, the very method Joyce suggested to Gertrude Kaempffer. Finally, when writing to Martha Clifford, Bloom uses “Greek ees”,55 that is epsilons, just like Joyce in one of his letters to Martha Fleischmann. Leopold Bloom, too, has been “derived” from people Joyce knew,56 and at least one of them may have been a Zurich friend, the silk merchant Edmund Brauchbar. This is suggested by Carola Giedion-Welcker who writes that Brauchbar’s “outstanding characteristics—vitality, sense of reality, spontaneous human warmth and wit were woven into the traits of the central figure in Ulysses, Leopold Bloom”.57
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The phantasmagoric atmosphere of “Circe”, finally, owes something to Joyce’s meeting with Baroness Antoinetta de Saint-Leger on her island in Lago Maggiore, off Brissago, in May 1919.
Finnegans Wake Finnegans Wake, Joyce’s last work, was written after his time in Zurich.58 Called Work in Progress, it was first published in instalments in literary magazines, above all in the Parisian journals Transatlantic Review and transition, from 1924 onwards. In its final form it was published by Faber and Faber in 1939. Like Ulysses it is a Dublin book, but much more than Ulysses it also contains the whole world: In writing it Joyce created a new, global vernacular containing elements of a great many languages, and he filled it with allusions to a multitude of people, places and events—Zurich ones included. Zurich might have featured in Finnegans Wake even if Joyce had not spent time there, but the fact that he did resulted in a great number and wide variety of Zurich references. This subchapter is devoted to the ways in which Zurich features in the Wake. The passages in question will be presented in groups, contextualised and explained where necessary, but no attempt will be made to interpret the Wake in any way.59 It should also be remembered that the many languages of the Wake are mostly twisted or “broken”60—so much so that it is difficult at times to identify and interpret a word or phrase with certainty. The name Zurich itself appears three times, once in the verb “zurichschicken” = zurückschicken ‘to send back’, and twice, in faux-historical garb, as “Tugurios-in-Newrobe” = Zurich in Europe (vs. “Tukurias-in- Ashies” = Turkey in Asia?) and as “Turricum”. “Tugurios” is a conflation of Tigurini with Turicum: The Tigurini were a Celtic tribe living in Western Switzerland in Caesar’s time and Turicum was the Roman name of Zurich,61 but from the sixteenth century onwards geographers and cartographers began to call the region around Zurich pagus Tigurinus because of the similiarity between the two names. “Turricum” spelled with -rr- evokes not only Turicum, but also Latin turris ‘tower’, (church) towers being a prominent feature of the city.62 The “Turricum”-passage alludes to a journey on the Paris-Zurich (“Paname-Turricum”) express to Trieste (“tarry easty”), a journey which is complicated by the fact that it is “alley and detour” ‘aller et retour’, that is a return journey through alleys and with detours.
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and wider he might the same zurichschicken. (FW 70.7–8) Your temple, sus in cribro! Semperexcommunicambiambisumers. Tugurios- in-Newrobe or Tukurias-in-Ashies. (FW 155.4–5) quit to hail a hurry laracor and catch the Paname-Turricum and regain that absendee tarry easty, his città immediata, by an alley and detour with farecard awailable getrennty years. (FW 228.21–24)
Finnegans Wake is, inter alia, a book of rivers containing hundreds of river names, the names of the two Zurich rivers Limmat and Sihl among them.63 Further Zurich elements are the Platzspitz where the two rivers merge, two buildings (“sillypost” = Sihlpost, the central post office by the river Sihl,64 and “tonehall” = Tonhalle, the concert hall), “Bellevenue” = Bellevue, an open space in central Zurich with a view of the mountains,65 and “Neederthorpe” = Niederdorf, a part of the old town on the right side of the Limmat. In the last of these passages a feast high up (on an “acorpolous” = acropolis) leads to or ends with, a fast (or a breakdown?) lower down, the literal meaning of Niederdorf being ‘lower village’. Yssel that the limmat? (FW 198.13) legging a jig or so on the sihl. (FW 200.23–24) an litlee plads af liefest pose. (FW 265.14) You don’t say, the sillypost? (FW 200.21–22) I shall have a word to say in a few yards about the acoustic and orchidectural management of the tonehall. (FW 165.8–9) Bellevenue (FW 625.6) I made praharfeast upon acorpolous and fastbroke down in Neederthorpe. (FW 541.24–25)
In Zurich Joyce experienced the Föhn, a warm wind blowing from the Alps, and he must have had encounters with the local police (Polizei): in the wake of their good old Foehn again. (FW 394.15–16) Sonne feine, somme feehn avaunt! (FW 593.8–9)66 Boumce! It is polisignstunter. (FW 370.30)67 pollysigh patrolman Seekersenn. (FW 586.28)
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The word Polizeistunde may be taken as a reminder that Joyce loved drinking in company and that his favourite wine was a Swiss white from the Valais called Fendant. We know from Budgen that Joyce preferred white over red wine, because—in Joyce’s own words—“[w]hite wine is like electricity. Red wine looks and tastes like a liquefied beefsteak”. Budgen also recounts the following story about the drinking rituals of Joyce and his friends at the Pfauen restaurant: A Fendant de Sion in carafe was the speciality of the house. […] The colour of Fendant is a pale greenish amber, and its taste suggests an earth rich in copper ore. ‘Er schmeckt nach Erz,’ said Paul Suter. (‘It tastes like ore.’) And Joyce, staring thoughtfully and with malice behindthought, at the yellow-tinted contents of the carafe, said slowly: ‘Erzherzogin.’ (‘Archduchess.’) And Erzherzogin it was and remained. Under this guise, or by her Italian title more affected by the Triestine Dubliner, this imaginary arciduchessa has had many a brimming cup raised and lowered in her Minnedienst.68
Ellmann relates a different version of this anecdote: Several evenings were spent in tasting various crus, until one night drinking with Ottocaro Weiss, who had returned from the army in January 1919, he sampled a white Swiss wine called Fendant de Sion. This seemed to be the object of his quest, and after drinking it with satisfaction, he lifted the half- emptied glass, held it against the window like a test tube, and asked Weiss, ‘What does this remind you of?’ Weiss looked at Joyce and at the pale golden liquid and replied, ‘Orina.’ ‘Si,’ said Joyce laughing, ‘ma di un’ arciduchessa’ (‘Yes, but an archduchess’s’). From now on the wine was known as the Archduchess, and is so celebrated in Finnegans Wake.69
The ‘celebration’ in Finnegans Wake happens in an extended passage on “foodstuffs” (FW 170.26) and drinking, where Fendant figures as “archdiochesse” = Archduchess, “douches” = duchess and “Fanny Urinia”: the winevat, of the most serene magyansty az archdiochesse, if she is a duck, she’s a douches, and when she has a feherbour snot her fault, now is it? artstouchups, funny you’re grinning at, fancy you’re in her yet, Fanny Urinia. (FW 171.25–28)
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One of Zurich’s most traditional events, called Sechseläuten (in Zurich dialect Sächsilüüte), plays a central role in the Wake. Held usually on the third Monday in April every year, it celebrates the end of winter and the beginning of spring. Sechseläuten is organised and “performed” by the traditional guilds of the city of Zurich: In a procession they march through the streets of Zurich ending on the Sechseläutenplatz by the lake, where, exactly at six o’clock, the Böögg, the effigy of a snowman filled with petards, is burned on a pyre. Three elements of this tradition recur throughout the Wake, the sound of the bells (“Pingpong … Pang” and variants), the word Sechseläuten itself (“Sexaloitez” and variants), and finally the effigy (called “Begge”, “Bugge” and variants, listed at the end): Pinck poncks that bail for seeks alicence. (FW 32.2–3) Peingpeong! For saxonlootie! (FW 58.24) Pingpong! There’s the Belle for Sexaloitez! And Concepta de Send-us-pray! Pang! (FW 213.18–19) (ringrang, the chimes of sex appealing as conchitas with sentas stray, rung!) (FW 268.2–3) when Kilbarrack bell pings saksalaisance that Concessas with Sinbads may (pong!) (FW 327.24–25) Bing bong! Saxolooter, for congesters are salders’ prey. (FW 379.7–8) Well, I beg to traverse same above statement by saxy luters in their back haul of Coalcutter. (FW 492.14–15) Ding dong! Where’s your pal in silks alustre? Think of a maiden, Presentacion. Double her, Annuptiacion. (FW 528.18–20) Oho, oho, Mester Begge, you’re about to be bagged in the bog again. Bugge. (FW 58.16–17) I’m seeing rayingbogeys rings round me. […] I’d love to take you for a bugaboo ride and play funfer all. (FW 304.8–12)
The Wake also contains two longer passages in (Swiss) German, both of them fragments of popular rhymes:
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This, of course, also explains why we were taught to play in the childhood: Der Haensli ist ein Butterbrot, mein Butterbrot! Und Koebi iss dein Schtinkenkot! Ja! Ja! Ja! (FW 163.4–7) mean fawthery eastend appullcelery, old laddy he high hole: (FW 586.27–28)
The first one is a mocking children’s verse that can be translated as ‘John eats a slice of bread and butter,70 my slice of bread and butter! And James, you (must) eat your smelly excrement! Yes! Yes! Yes!’.71 The second is the ‘anglicised’ version of one line of the ‘Appenzellerlied’ “Min Vatter ischt en Appezeller”, meaning ‘My father hails from Appenzell’, followed by a yodel. Fritz Senn has discussed these two passages in more detail than is possible here and has equated the brothers Haensli/John and Koebi/James with Shem and Shaun (elsewhere also called Burrus ‘butter’ and Caseous ‘cheese’),72 the fawthery/father with H. C. Earwicker.73 Joyce was also fascinated by the—practically untranslatable—Swiss German word cheib.74 As a noun it is a mildly derogatory term for a man or boy (blöde Cheib ‘stupid fellow’), as a verb it means ‘to run, to behave wildly’ (de Bärg abecheibe ‘to rush down a mountain’, umecheibe ‘to race around’) and as an adjective it serves as a universal intensifier (cheibe schön ‘really beautiful’, cheibe chalt ‘terribly cold’). In the Wake Joyce uses cheib repeatedly, using different spellings75 and twice combining it with a variant of the expletive Donnerwetter (“Dondderwedder”, “Thunderweather”): Well, you know, when the old cheb went futt and did what you know. (‘when the old fellow went away’, FW 196.6–7) Dondderwedder Kyboshicksal. (FW 283, left margin) Thunderweather, khyber schinker escapa sansa pagar! (FW 464.10–11)
Joyce also combines cheib with other elements of ‘Swissness’ in a hilarious passage on the finale of Rossini’s Guillaume Tell, in “From a Banned Writer to a Banned Singer” (1932), a homage to the Irish-French tenor John Sullivan whom he admired greatly: And there they are, yodelling yokels, none the worse for their ducking and gewittermassen as free as you fancy to quit their homeseek heimat and leave
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the ritzprinz of their chyberschwitzerhoofs all over the worlds, cisalpic and transatlantine.76
The Swiss, Joyce intimates, are free to quit their homeland and to leave the prints of their hooves (“prinz of their hoofs”) all over the world, especially as managers of hotels, one of the most famous of them being César Ritz (1850–1918), the founder of Ritz hotels all over the world. Very many hotels in Switzerland are called Schweizerhof (“schwitzerhoofs”). By way of conclusion one should also mention the names of some of Joyce’s Zurich acquaintances that have found their way into the Wake, notably Carl Gustav Jung (together with Sigmund Freud), Siegmund Feilbogen, Edmund Brauchbar (“Abrahamsk and Brookbear” standing for the firm ‘Abraham und Brauchbar’), and finally Carola Giedion- Welcker and her husband Sigfried Giedion: and so wider but we grisly old Sykos77 who have done our unsmiling bit on ’alices, when they were yung and easily freudened. (FW 115.21–23) while m’m’ry’s leaves are falling deeply on my Jungfraud’s Messongebook. (FW 460.19–21) Not forgetting the oils of greas under that turkey in julep and Father Freeshots Feilbogen in his rockery garden with the costard? (FW 464.28–30) Abrahamsk and Brookbear! (FW 481.24) Dutiful wealker for his hydes of march. […] The man was giddy on letties on the dewry of the duary (FW 603.15–17)
Notes 1. Ellmann, Joyce, 353. 2. Ellmann, Joyce, 355, 383 and 401. For further details see the note in Mays’s edition of the play, 340–342. 3. Ellmann, Joyce, 415 and 440. Shortly before the contract was signed, on 20 August 1917, Joyce had written to Pound (SL, 227): “My agent has considerable difficulty with Mr Richards about the publication of my play”. 4. Ellmann, Joyce, 423. 5. See Ellmann, Joyce, 401–406 and 443, MacNicholas, “Stage History”, 10, and Frehner, “Joyce through the Reading-Glass”, 320 for details. 6. Based on a remark in Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, Ellmann (Joyce, 444) and MacNicholas (“Stage History”, 10) say that Zweig “may have been
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instrumental” in securing her as a translator. However, it is clear that von Mettal was at work on the translation before Joyce even contacted Zweig. See the article on von Mettal for details. 7. “[Y]our piece (which I read in two following nights) was for me a great artistic revelation. […] I have a very strong impression of your work and all what I can do for it on the German stage shall be done: I am sure, that after the war a translation could be placed immediately on a first theatre”. Letter, in English, written from Rüschlikon near Zurich on 12 September 1918, printed in Ellmann, Joyce, 444 and in LII, 420f. 8. It is a minor work, a 16-page booklet entitled Das Herz Europas: Ein Besuch im Genfer Roten Kreuz (Zürich: Rascher, 1918). Zweig’s principal publisher before and after his stay in Zürich was Insel-Verlag in Leipzig. Verbannte would remain the only work of Joyce’s published by Rascher. 9. Ellmann, Joyce, 462. 10. See the article on Rascher-Verlag for details. 11. MacNicholas, “Stage History”, 13. 12. See MacNicholas, “Stage History”. 13. On the poems in general see Mays, ed., passim with “further reading” (xlviiif.), Conner, ed., The Poetry of James Joyce and Wildi, “The lyrical poems of James Joyce”. 14. Ellmann, Joyce, 591, 593f. and 658f. 15. Wildi, “The lyrical poems”, 180. Wildi here echoes Gorman (Definitive Biography, 341): “[The poems in Pomes Penyeach] reveal a marked difference from the delicate and precious contents of Chamber Music in that nearly all of them suggest that they have been inspired by a reality, a person, a loved one or a sight seen, a boat or light reflected in water at night”. 16. Borach, “Conversations”, 72 and note 13. 17. Not everyone, I think, would agree with Holdridge (“Bleeding from the ‘Torn Bough’”, 202), who argues that the poem “has a sickly quality […]. Flowers of evil (‘sly reeds whisper’) become the delight of a ‘swoon of shame,’ reminding one of the scene from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in which Stephen first visits the prostitutes”. 18. For examples, see https://www.poemhunter.com/poems/alone/ page-1/435760/, last accessed on 5 July 2017. 19. Budgen, Joyce, 201. The episode is confirmed by Luening, Odyssey, 190. 20. Ellmann, Joyce, 447. Ellmann’s source for this detail was an interview with Paul Ruggiero, conducted in 1953. The guitar in question is now on display in the James Joyce Tower & Museum at Sandycove near Dublin. As far as I can see, nobody has pointed out an obvious chronological discrepancy: If the poem is, indeed, based on the one performance of In a
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Balcony by the English Players, on 11 December 1918, it cannot have been written in 1917. 21. Mays, ed., 295. John McCourt (The Years of Bloom, 160) sees a connection to Futurism: “[The poem] uncharacteristically contains much of the violence and harsh abruptness more commonly associated with the Futurists, and Corinna del Greco Lobner has compared it to the Futurist ‘Paolo Buzzi’s preference for shocking metaphors and grotesque effects’”. 22. Budgen, Joyce, 27. See the article on Bahnhofstrasse for details. 23. The poem is discussed by Wildi (“Lyrical Poems”, 184) and by Faerber and Luchsinger (Joyce in Zürich, 31–34), among others. 24. Described in a letter to Ezra Pound dated 20 August 1917 (SL, 226; see also a postcard by Nora to Pound postmarked 28 August 1917, in LII, 405). On Joyce’s eye problems in general see Lyons, Joyce & Medicine, 185–210 (Chapter 16, “The Miltonic Affliction”). Birmingham (The Most Dangerous Book, 9) gives the following summary of Joyce’s eye troubles: “From as early as 1907 and into the 1930s, Joyce suffered from an illness that caused bouts of iritis (a swelling of his iris), which in turn brought about episodes of acute glaucoma and other complications that withered his eyesight almost to the point of blindness. He collapsed on city streets and rolled on the floor in pain during years of recurrent ‘eye attacks,’ and the agony of his illness was as traumatizing as the eye surgeries he underwent to save his vision—all of them performed without general anesthetic”. See also 96–99 and 100–102 and Ellmann, Joyce, 417. Maddox (Nora, 146) wrongly dates the attack to “[e]arly in 1917”. 25. According to Norburn (Chronology, 76 and 78) Nora and the children were staying in Locarno at the time, but Nora came back immediately to be with him. According to Gorman (Definitive Biography, 256), however, Joyce was strolling down Bahnhofstrasse “with Nora”. Joyce was operated on by Dr Ernst Sidler on 23 August. On 12 October the Joyces returned to Locarno, where, in the following months, Joyce would complete the first three episodes of Ulysses. 26. See Gysling, “A Doctor’s Look at a Neglected Poem”, for details. 27. Ellmann, Joyce, 383, based on Gorman, Definitive Biography, 230, and confirmed by an unpublished letter to Ezra Pound dated 30 June 1915, where Joyce calls it “a continuation of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man after three years’ interval blended with many of the persons of Dubliners”. 28. See “Joyce in Zurich” for details. 29. Ellmann, Joyce, 419f. 30. Ellmann, Joyce, 421. 31. The Little Review was a small Chicago monthly edited, from March 1914 onwards, by Margaret C. Anderson. She was joined, later, by Jane Heap;
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the two women moved to New York in 1917. In May 1917 Ezra Pound became The Little Review’s foreign editor. 32. See Birmingham, The Most Dangerous Book, for details. 33. Crispi, Joyce’s Creative Process, 296–309 (Appendix 2: “A Census of the Extant Ulysses Manuscripts by Episodes”) and 292 (“Ulysses in the Little Review”). See also Ellmann, Joyce, 441f. 34. See, for example, his chapters on “Visions of the East” or on Jews in Trieste (McCourt, The Years of Bloom, 41–48 and 217–238). 35. See the articles on the Museumsgesellschaft and the Zentralbibliothek for details. 36. Fargnoli and Gillespie, Critical Companion, 360. 37. Letter dated 6 November 1906 (LII, 186). 38. Ellmann, Ulysses on the Liffey, 187ff. 39. Budgen, Joyce, 124f. 40. See Faerber and Luchsinger, Joyce in Zürich, 79–86. In December 1916 Franz Carl Weber moved from Bahnhofstrasse to the corner of Bahnhofplatz and Löwenstrasse. 41. U 12.554. The report, according to Gifford and Seidman (“Ulysses” Annotated, 333) “[p]arodies a newspapers’s feature-story coverage of a large-scale public and social event”. 42. See Senn, “Joyce, das Sechseläuten und der Föhn”, 37. 43. Joyce knew the Kurhaus Zürichberg high above the city, opened in 1900 by the Zurich Women’s Association for Temperance and Public Good (Frauenverein für Mässigkeit und Volkswohl). Under the name Sorell Hotel Zürichberg it is still in operation. See Faerber and Luchsinger, Joyce in Zürich, 93f. and https://zfv.ch/de/unternehmen/ueber-uns/ geschichte, last accessed on 5 May 2017. 44. U 12.567f. In the original the title is unhyphenated; I have added hyphens to clarify its structure. 45. Ellmann, Joyce, 458. 46. For Carr and Compton see U 15.48–50, 60, 607, 612–632, 3995–4003 and 4391–4819. According to Ellmann (Joyce, 459), Compton was the man “who, [Joyce] believed, had bungled the affairs of the English Players”. 47. See U 10.1133–1134 and 12.939–987. According to Gifford and Seidman, (“Ulysses” Annotated, 283), “[t]he match has some basis in fact, since an M. L. Keogh did box one Garry of the 6th Dragoons as the second event in a tournament in late April 1904. Percy Bennett […] is a grudge substitute for the more Irish Garry”. In the match reported in Ulysses Keogh knocks out Bennett. 48. See U 15.624–627 and 4792–4797.
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49. For Rumbold see U 12.415–431 and 15.1175–1184, 4536–4558. When Rumbold offers his services as executioner to the High Sheriff of Dublin (U 12.415–431) he mentions three people in whose executions he has been involved. According to Ellmann (Joyce, 458) two of them, “Joe Gann” and “Toad Smith”, were “the two consular employees who would not testify in Joyce’s behalf”. 50. For Wettstein see U 12.984. He probably owes his first name Ole to the fact that the real Georg Wettstein was Norwegian Vice-Consul in Zurich (Ellmann, Joyce, 440). His middle name Pfotts is a mystery. 51. Budgen, Myselves, 187f. 52. The information on Gertrude Kaempffer and the quotations are from Ellmann, Joyce, 418f. Ellmann’s sources are letters to him by Gertrude Kaempffer dated 6 January and 2 March 1963. Budgen does not mention Kaempffer. See also Maddox, Nora, 151f. 53. See the article on Martha Fleischmann for details. 54. Gerty is also the name of the heroine of Maria Cummins’s sentimental novel The Lamplighter (U 13.633), the style of which is being parodied in the first section of the episode (Gifford and Seidman, “Ulysses” Annotated, 384). And Martha is the title of an opera by Friedrich von Flotow alluded to many times in Ulysses. 55. U 11.860: “Remember write Greek ees”. 56. According to Ellmann (Joyce, 374f.) the “prototype” of Bloom “was almost certainly [his Triestine friend] Ettore Schmitz”, but “[s]everal Dubliners helped Joyce complete his hero”. 57. Giedion-Welcker, “Meetings with Joyce”, 263. 58. However, there is evidence that he worked on it also during his visits to Zurich in the 1930s. On 15 April 1930, for example, while he was staying at the hotel St Gotthard, he sent Paul Léon a letter with “changes” to the text (personal communication Fritz Senn; the unpublished letter is part of the Jahnke Bequest at the Zurich James Joyce Foundation). 59. The passages in question have been collected and commented upon, by Fritz Senn (in many articles) as well as by Thomas Faerber and Markus Luchsinger (in both Joyce und Zürich and Joyce in Zürich). The list presented here is representative, but due to the “slippery” nature of the material it cannot be called complete. To give just one example: The lion is the heraldic animal of Zurich, but also of many other cities. It is questionable, therefore, whether a passage like “My building space in lyonine city is always to let to leonlike Men” (FW 155.6–7) contains a reference to Zurich.
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60. See “wheil he was, swishing beesnest with blessure, and swobbing broguen eeriesh [broken Irish, Irish Brogue] myth brockendootsch [broken ‘Deutsch’] (FW 70.3–4). 61. See “Tiguriner” and “Zürich (Gemeinde)” in Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch, last accessed on 5 March 2020. 62. In his introduction to Budgen’s Joyce (xv) Clive Hart quotes a letter by Paul Léon referring to “the motto of the city of Zurich” as “Nobile turricum [sic, recte Turegum] multarum copia rerum”. This motto is found on a coloured etching (c 1675) by the Zurich artist Conrad Meyer (1618–1689). 63. The first passage below, of course, also contains the river name Yssel (or Ijssel). Other Swiss rivers featured in FW, for example, are Emme (198.18), Maggia (199.15), Linth (208.5) and Rhein (406.20). Joyce was very conscious of his Zurich river references as shown in a letter to Carola Giedion- Welcker dated 28 March 1938 (LIII, 418): “It’s a pity you didn’t quote the sentences about Sihl and Limmat in your article on me? They are in Anna Livia Plurabelle”. 64. The Sihlpost was opened in 1930; Joyce probably used it during his visits to Zurich in the 1930s. 65. Several places dear to Joyce are found within a stone’s throw from Bellevue: the Sechseläutenplatz as well as the restaurants Kronenhalle, Odeon and Terrasse. 66. The word “feehn” was originally “foehn”, as shown by earlier versions of the text; see Groden, ed., The James Joyce Archive, vol. 63, 3 and 19 (personal communication Fritz Senn). 67. Polizeistunde was (and in many places still is) the time when restaurants and bars have to close. 68. Budgen, Joyce, 172. The German pun on Erz “ore” and Erz(-herzogin) “arch(-duchess)” ultimately from Greek archi-, is lost in the English translation of the words. 69. Ellmann, Joyce, 455. The coexistence of these two accounts was first pointed out by Faerber and Luchsinger (Joyce und Zürich, 34). Faerber and Luchsinger also note that Ellmann does not give the source of his version. 70. The text actually reads “Der Haensli ist …”, meaning “John is …”. However, I think that it should be corrected to “Der Haensli isst …”, that is “John eats …”. 71. Schtinkenkot is also a pun on Schinkenbrot “ham sandwich”. 72. FW 161.12. 73. See Senn, “Schweizerdeutsches in ‘Finnegans Wake’”, “Some Zurich Allusions in Finnegans Wake” and “Joyce, das Sechseläuten und der Föhn”.
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74. See Senn, “Universal Word”. Also Faerber and Luchsinger, Joyce und Zürich, 77f. and Joyce in Zürich, 129f. 75. Some of these spellings suggest words other than cheib that may also be implied (kibosh, Khyber). 76. “From a Banned Writer to a Banned Singer” (1932) in Mason and Ellmann, eds., Critical Writings, 258–268. The passage on Guillaume Tell is on 262f. 77. “Sykos” = “Psychos”? According to Faerber and Luchsinger (Joyce und Zürich, 77; Joyce in Zürich, 129) “we grisly old Sykos” may also be a playful variant of the Swiss German “mir gruusige alte Sieche” “we revolting old geezers”.
1.04 Zurich after Joyce
The work of remembering Joyce began immediately after his death, and it was headed, initially, by Carola Giedion-Welcker. She commissioned the making of a death mask, she organised the funeral at Fluntern Cemetery, and she edited a brochure entitled In Memoriam, which contains the speeches given by Lord Derwent and Heinrich Straumann, an obituary she had written for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, some further texts on Joyce, two of his Zurich poems (“Alone” and “Bahnhofstrasse”), some pictures and a list of his publications. Giedion-Welcker’s solicitousness did not include Nora, however: Scarcely was Joyce in his grave than Nora suffered another blow familiar to widows: the defection of friends. Carola Giedion-Welcker, who had danced attendance on both Joyces for more than a decade, had no interest in or even sympathy for Nora alone. Before the month of Joyce’s death was out, she had demanded that Nora repay the 15,700 Swiss francs that the Giedions had contributed toward the financial guarantee enabling the Joyces to enter Switzerland. […] The debt weighed heavily on Nora’s mind, and bitterness set in between the two families when Mrs. Giedion-Welcker followed her demand for repayment with a refusal to let Nora and Giorgio have either of the Joyce death masks. She had paid for them and would not relinquish them while the Joyces owed her money.1
Nora stayed on in Zurich after James’s death. Going back to France was not an option, she did not want to return to Ireland, and she knew Zurich © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_4
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from the more than four years spent there during World War I. Changing addresses frequently at first, she lived in small pensions and furnished apartments.2 In 1946, after a stay in hospital, she moved to the new and more comfortable Pension Neptun at Seefeldstrasse 15, which would be her home for the rest of her life.3 She suffered from arthritis and lived in very straitened circumstances, at least until Joyce’s estate was settled.4 She did have friends, though, notably the actress Evelyn Cotton, who had acted with the English Players, Paul Ruggiero’s wife Bertha, Hulda Zumsteg, the proprietress of the Kronenhalle and Klara Heyland, a waitress in that restaurant.5 Nora died on 10 April 1951, with Giorgio at her side, and was buried at Fluntern Cemetery like James, though initially in a separate grave. Giorgio, uprooted by the war, estranged from his wife (who had been taken back to the United States by her brother in 1940)6 and unsuccessful as a singer, remained in Zurich until and beyond Nora’s death. After divorcing Helen he married Dr Asta Jahnke-Osterwalder in 1954 and the couple settled in Munich, where they lived until Giorgio’s death, in Konstanz, on 12 June 1976. He and Asta, who died in 1993, are also buried in what has become the Joyce family grave in Fluntern Cemetery.7 Giorgio and Helen’s only son Stephen, born in Paris in 1932, was just under nine years old at the time of his grandfather’s death. He first attended a boarding school in Zug and then, at age 14, went to the United States to be with his mother.8 He began his studies at Phillips Andover Academy in Massachusetts, graduated from Harvard in 1958 and then worked for the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. After his retirement in 1991 he lived on the Île-de-Ré near La Rochelle on the Atlantic Coast. After his aunt Lucia’s death 1982 he was the last of the Joyces and managed his grandfather’s estate. He died on 23 January 2020. In the 1950s Richard Ellmann began to collect material for his comprehensive biography of Joyce that would be published in 1959. Heinrich Straumann, whom Ellmann had asked for help regarding Joyce’s time in Zurich, directed him to Dr Alfred Dutli, a teacher at the Städtische Töchterschule, a grammar school for girls. As their correspondence shows, Dutli did extensive work for Ellmann between August 1953 and December 1956, collecting material and interviewing people, among them Giorgio and Othmar Schoeck. Ellmann visited Zurich in July 1954, whereupon Professor Ellmann and Dr Dutli became Dick and Alfred.9 It was also in the 1950s and early 1960s that journals devoted exclusively to Joyce began to be published. There was a short-lived James Joyce
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Review (1957–1959), A Wake Newslitter was established in 1962 and the James Joyce Quarterly in 1963. As it happened, Vol. 2. 1–2 (1958) of the James Joyce Review contained a brief note entitled “Early Russian History in Finnegans Wake”. This was the first publication by Fritz Senn, a 30-year old Swiss living in Zurich whose fascination with Joyce had grown ever since he encountered him in an introductory course at the University of Zurich and, in 1951, bought a copy of Ulysses.10 More notes and articles, all of them original and lucid, followed in quick succession and Senn thus, slowly but certainly, made a name for himself in the growing community of Joyceans worldwide. He was one of the founders of A Wake Newslitter and the first European editor of the James Joyce Quarterly. However, it was Bloomsday 1966 that would prove to be a “pivotal event”11 for Zurich—and for Fritz Senn. Twenty-five years had passed since Joyce’s death, and the city of Zurich had decided to move James’s and Nora’s bodies to a new honorary grave which was unveiled on that day. Many people attended, among them Giorgio and Stephen Joyce accompanied by their wives, Richard Ellmann and a delegation from Dublin. The occasion was celebrated by a day-long series of events, including a commemorative ceremony in the University’s main auditorium and a dinner at the Kronenhalle.12 The day was pivotal for Zurich, as it demonstrated how proud it was of being one of the four “Joyce cities”. It was also pivotal for Senn, since it enabled him to renew his contact with Joyceans he had met before13 and also to meet new ones. The 1960s not only saw the start of journals devoted to Joyce studies, but also of the biennial James Joyce Symposia. The venue of the first meeting in 1967—appropriately—was Dublin, and subsequent Symposia also took place in “Joyce cities” for a while: Dublin was host city in 1969, 1973, 1977 and 1982, Trieste in 1971, Paris in 1975 and, last but not least, Zurich in 1979. It so happened that a year before, in 1978, a pub called the James Joyce Pub had opened in Zurich, and this event would have far-reaching consequences. Implausibly as it may sound, the pub was operated by a Swiss bank, the Schweizerische Bankgesellschaft, and its Director General Dr Robert Holzach, a man with a wide range of interests, wanted to know more about James Joyce. He was introduced to Fritz Senn and soon realised not only how important Joyce was for Zurich, but also how important Fritz Senn was as an ambassador for Joyce. He developed the idea of a foundation as a place where the memory of Joyce could be kept alive, with Fritz Senn as its director, and so the Zurich James Foundation was established in 1985. Already three years before, on 2
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February 1982, Zurich had celebrated Joyce’s 100th birthday in style, with a ceremony in the University’s main auditorium and a public reading of the complete text of Ulysses, by 40 people in 16 places.14 It would go too far to enumerate all Joyce events organised in Zurich since the 1980s by or with the help of, the Zurich James Joyce Foundation. A list of the more important ones must suffice15: 1991—“Allspace in a Nutshall. Eine Reise durch das Labyrinth des James Joyce”, exhibition curated by Markus Luchsinger at the Museum Strauhof as part of the Junifestwochen 1991 (“James Joyce und John Cage”) 1996—15th International James Joyce Symposium16 2000/2001—“James Joyce: «gedacht durch meine Augen» / ‘thought through my eyes’, exhibition curated by Ursula Zeller, Ruth Frehner and Hannes Vogel at the Museum Strauhof17 2004—«joyce@zürich.zb», exhibition at the Zentralbibliothek 2016—“JoyceDada”, theatrical production curated by Ursula Zeller as part of the Festspiele Zürich 2016 (“Dada–Zwischen Wahnsinn und Unsinn”) 2018—“‘Ein Feuer in ihrem Hirn’: James Joyce und seine Tochter Lucia”, theatrical production curated by Ursula Zeller as part of the Festspiele Zürich 2018 (“Schönheit / Wahnsinn”) More than a hundred years have passed since Joyce lived in Zurich during World War I, but the city he experienced is still essentially unchanged. The public buildings of his time (the Pfauen, the Stadttheater, the Tonhalle, the Sihlpost and so on, also most restaurants) are still there and even some of the houses in which he lived are still standing. One of them, Universitätsstrasse 38, is marked by a plaque reading “The Irish writer James Joyce lived in this house from January to October 1918. He worked on his novel Ulysses here”.18 Other visible reminders of Joyce are found throughout the city. On the occasion of the 15th International James Joyce Symposium held in Zurich in 1996 a building at Augustinergasse 14, opposite the Zurich James Joyce Foundation, was named “James Joyce Corner”. Furthermore, Joyce is commemorated by two works of conceptual art by Hannes Vogel, “Dick and Davy”, a staff cafeteria in the University Hospital (1990) and “Ljmmat Sjhl, Hommage à James Joyce” (2004), an installation at Platzspitz. Joyce is now also honoured by the street name James Joyce-Strasse.19 When a
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former industrial area in the district of Oerlikon was redeveloped and revitalised in the 1990s, a series of streets and squares were named after illustrious men and women who shaped Zurich’s cultural life in the first half of the twentieth century. In Oerlikon, Joyce finds himself in the company of, for example, Elias Canetti, Max Frisch, Therese Giese, Kurt Hirschfeld, Ricarda Huch, Erika Mann, Emil Oprecht and Sophie Taeuber.20 However, the best place to remember and to meet James Joyce in Zurich is undoubtedly Fluntern Cemetery, where he is buried together with most of his family. There is a life-like statue marking the grave.21
Notes 1. Maddox, Nora, 347f. 2. Maddox, Nora, 348. Nora moved from Pension Delphin to a furnished apartment at Dufourstrasse 30, to a pension at Irisstrasse, and then to Pension Fontana at Gloriastrasse 57. 3. Maddox, Nora, 355. 4. See Maddox, Nora, 348–353 for details. Nora received a great deal of help from Miss Weaver who acted as the “administrator of Joyce’s personal estate as well as executor of his literary one” (Maddox, Nora, 349). 5. Maddox, Nora, 157, 354, 355f. and 370; Senn in O’Neill, ed., Murmoirs, 43. 6. Maddox, Nora, 339. 7. On Giorgio and Asta Jahnke-Osterwalder see Fargnoli and Gillespie, Critical Companion, 298f. 8. Maddox, Nora, 348 and 353f. 9. Copies of the Dutli—Ellmann correspondence are kept at the Zurich James Joyce Foundation. 10. Senn in O’Neill, ed., Murmoirs, 6–8. 11. Senn in O’Neill, ed., Murmoirs, 311. 12. Senn in O’Neill, ed., Murmoirs, 42f. and 198. 13. Senn first met Ellmann in 1961 when he was invited by Professor Straumann to give a lecture in the English Department (Senn in O’Neill, ed., Murmoirs, 161). 14. For details see Max-Geilinger-Stiftung, James Joyce: Zum 100. Geburtstag. 15. Activities and events up to 2005 are documented in Zeller and Frehner, eds., 20 Jahre Zürcher James Joyce Stiftung. 16. This was the second time, after 1979, that Zurich hosted the Symposium. 17. This exhibition was accompanied by a book with the same title, edited by Ursula Zeller, Ruth Frehner and Hannes Vogel.
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18. My translation; the text on the plaque is in German. According to Faerber and Luchsinger (Joyce und Zürich, 21) the plaque was unveiled on 20 August 1965. See also Faerber and Luchsinger, Joyce in Zürich, 60. 19. Guyer, Saladin and Lendenmann, Die Strassennamen der Stadt Zürich, 136. 20. Elias Canetti (1905–1994), was a writer, Max Frisch (1911–1991) also a writer, Therese Giese (1898–1975) an actress, Kurt Hirschfeld (1902–1964) a theatre director, Ricarda Huch (1864–1947) a writer and historian, Erika Mann (1905–1969) an actress and writer, Emil Oprecht (1895–1952) a publisher and Sophie Taeuber (1889–1943) an artist. Information on Zurich’s street names is to be found in Guyer, Saladin & Lendenmann, Die Strassennamen der Stadt Zürich and at https://www. nzz.ch/zuerich/stadt-zuerich/in-den-strassen-von-zuerich-vom-aemmerliweg-zur-zwinglistrasse-ld.5453, last accessed on 8 February 2019. 21. See the article on Fluntern Cemetery for details.
PART II
2.01 Walter Ackermann
When living in Zurich during World War I the Joyce family had Swiss neighbours and a few Swiss friends such as August and Paul Suter. The children went to local schools and must have had Swiss school friends and playmates, but little is known about them. A notable exception is provided by Walter Ackermann (1903–1939) who knew Giorgio. Ackermann was one of Switzerland’s aviation pioneers: He obtained a pilot’s licence in 1927 and then became an airline pilot, flying for Ad Astra Aero and its successor Swissair until his untimely death in a plane crash in 1939. He was also a writer. Like his more famous contemporary Antoine de Saint- Exupéry (1900–1944) he turned his experiences as an aviator into books which were widely read at the time: His Bordbuch eines Verkehrsfliegers (1934) was followed by Flug mit Elisabeth (1936, a love-story between a pilot and young women written in epistolary form) and Fliegt mit! Erlebnis und Technik des Fliegens (1937, an introduction to flying for young readers).1 In his Bordbuch eines Verkehrsfliegers Ackermann remembers Giorgio and a visit to the Joyce household in 1918 or 1919: Every now and again we [Ackermann and Fritz Meier, a friend of his] met on the street with a boy of the same age, whom we called the “Englishman”. This annoyed him and he then always claimed that he was Irish. His name was Tschoiss [the Swiss pronunciation of Joyce, AF], but he wrote the name quite differently. He wore glasses, had a beautiful voice, and when we visited © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_5
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Fritz Meier, he would sing whole arias from “Troubadour” or “Rigoletto”, accompanying himself on the piano. Once we asked him what his father actually did for a living. The Tschoiss said to our surprise that his father was a writer. We looked at him with in disbelief and wonder. […] We asked him to bring along some of his father’s books. The “Englishman” shook his head, said that we could not read them as they were written in English and that, anyway, his father was working on a big book that had taken him five years and would probably take another ten to finish. […] We also asked him how his father made a living when it took him fifteen years to write a book? When money was running out, the Tschoiss said, his father would write to England and then a Lord would send him a couple of hundred pounds. […] Once the Tschoiss took us home with him. We were very curious to see what the home of a real life writer would look like. But we were very disappointed, because it looked exactly like our homes […]. It also smelled of lunch, just like at home. His mother gave us a very friendly welcome, and the Tschoiss played the piano and sang to us. When we left, we met a completely black man in the corridor. He wore a shiny black jacket, had a black goatee and black bristly hair on his head. He shook our hands and looked at us with black eyes from behind very thick glasses. We found his gaze uncanny and left the apartment as soon as decency allowed it. On the stairs we agreed that Tschoiss’s father looked exactly like the devil. We had imagined a writer to be rather different.2
Ellmann reports that Ackermann’s Bordbuch eines Verkehrsfliegers, inscribed to Joyce by the author, was among Joyce’s books at the time of his death.3
Notes 1. For Ackermann’s career as a pilot and writer see Linsmayer, “Liebe und Tod am Himmel Europas”. 2. Quoted from Ackermann, “Flug mit Elisabeth” und andere Aviatica, 214–217; my translation. The episode is summarised in Ellmann, Joyce, 434f. Young Ackermann and his friend were not alone in thinking that Joyce “looked exactly like the devil”: Budgen (Joyce, 36) reports that his landlady “was afraid of Joyce” and that the “chorus girls in the Stadttheater were more definite. They nicknamed him ‘Herr Satan’”. 3. Ellmann, Joyce, 782, note 21.
2.02 Bahnhofstrasse
In the course of Zurich’s modernisation and expansion in the second half of the nineteenth century, Bahnhofstrasse was built in 1864/65 over a filled-in moat which had been part of the medieval fortification of the city. Connecting the railway station and Paradeplatz and later extended as far as the lake, it soon developed into one of Zurich’s busiest and most elegant streets. An enthusiastic description by Budgen gives an impression of it during Joyce’s time in Zurich, even though it may be coloured by a certain amount of nostalgia: There is no street in London that can equal the Bahnhofstrasse for metropolitan smartness. But let the smart shops and broad pavements go as a matter of course. Its crowning glory is its avenue of lime trees that on summer evenings enrich the air with a delicious scent of lime blossom. […] No town in Europe is more cosmopolitan than Zurich in war time, and of all streets in Zürich the Bahnhofstrasse is the most cosmopolitan. And it is everybody’s promenade, stranger and citizen, millionaire silk merchant and Aussersihl proletarian.1
Joyce himself, commenting on Zurich’s cleanliness, is supposed to have said that “if you spilled minestra on the Bahnhofstrasse you could eat it right up without a spoon”.2 He knew the street well, both during World War I and also later, in the 1930s when he stayed at hotels on or very near it, the St Gotthard and the Carlton Elite. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_6
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Bahnhofstrasse was also the site of a traumatic experience: On Saturday 18 August 1917, when walking along it, Joyce suffered a “violent Hexenschuss” (lumbago), followed the next day by an attack of glaucoma.3 Medical treatment alleviated the pain, but the event lingered in his memory and he turned it into a poem entitled “Bahnhofstrasse” (1918), which would later be published in Pomes Penyeach (1927).4
Notes 1. Budgen, Joyce, 27. At the time Aussersihl was a working-class district of Zurich. 2. According to Ellmann (Joyce, 390) this was “[t]he first thing Joyce said to his friends from Trieste, the Bliznakoffs, when he met them at the station in Zurich in August [1915]”. 3. Described in a letter to Ezra Pound dated 20 August 1917 (SL, 226; see also a postcard by Nora to Pound postmarked 28 August 1917, in LII, 405). 4. See “Zurich in Joyce” for details.
2.03 Bellevue
Bellevue or Bellevueplatz, the open space where the shore of Lake Zurich becomes the right (eastern) bank of the river Limmat, was the heart of Joyce’s Zurich: He would get there on his way into town from his Seefeld apartments or down from Universitätsstrasse and the Pfauen Café. Several places frequented by him are found within a stone’s throw from it, the Stadttheater (now called Opernhaus), and no fewer than three restaurants or cafés, the Kronenhalle, the Odeon and the Terrasse. Adjoining Bellevue is the Sechseläutenplatz where during Sechseläuten, Zurich’s spring ritual, the effigy of a snowman filled with petards called Böögg is burned on a pyre. Bellevue and Sechseläuten have found their way into Finnegans Wake.1 Bellevue, which takes its name from a stately building, originally a hotel, on its northern side which affords a good view (“belle vue”) of the Alps, was developed in connection with the construction of a new bridge across the Limmat, the Quaibrücke (1882–1884). It soon became a hub for pedestrians, motor cars and also the trams, which were introduced at the same time (Fig. 1).
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_7
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Fig. 1 Bellevue with, from left to right, Hotel Bellevue, Café Odeon, Rämistrasse and Kronenhalle, postcard, 1934 (courtesy Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich)
Note 1. See “Zürich in Joyce” for details.
2.04 Felix Beran
Born in Vienna and trained as a mechanical engineer, Felix Beran (1868–1937) first held jobs in Mexico and Brazil (Rio de Janeiro), but in 1895 the Austrian gaslighting company he was working for in Rio (Österreichische Gasglühlicht-Gesellschaft) transferred him to Zurich. In 1896 he became self-employed, but his business foundered when World War I broke out, and he spent the war years as a freelance writer, translator and editor. In 1919 he became director of the Swiss branch of Elektro Lux A.B., the Swedish home appliance manufacturer, but he continued to write. He and his second wife became Swiss citizens in 1927, and he died in Zurich in 1937.1 Together with the fellow Austrian Siegmund Feilbogen (1858–1928) Beran edited the Internationale Rundschau/International Review, a journal which was published in Zurich between 1915 and 1918.2 It must have been in this context that he met Joyce, who worked as a translator for the Review.3 Beran was witness to a happy moment in Joyce’s life: In late February or early March 1917, when Beran was visiting Joyce, a registered letter arrived from a London firm of solicitors with the surprising and most welcome news that “an admirer of [his] writing, who desires to be anonymous” was giving him £200 in four instalments of £50. The admirer turned out to be Miss Harriet Shaw Weaver.4 Between 1916 and 1921 Beran published three volumes of poetry.5 According to Budgen the only poem on World War I that interested Joyce was Beran’s “Des Weibes Klage”, which fascinated him so much that he © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_8
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translated it, giving it the title “Lament for the Yeomen”.6 Joyce was especially intrigued by the word Leib at the end (“Wer wird nun küssen / Meinen weissen Leib”), feeling that “[i]t was a sound that created the image of a body in one unbroken mass. From the liquid beginning it passes over the rich shining double vowel till the lips close on the final consonant with nothing to break its blond unity. He spoke of the plastic monosyllable as a sculptor speaks about a stone”.7 Beran responded in kind much later,8 in the early 1930s when Joyce came to Zurich to be treated by Professor Alfred Vogt. He wrote on Joyce in articles published in newspapers, the Zurich Tages-Anzeiger and the Neues Wiener Tagblatt,9 and the two men also met a number of times.10 Anticipating the meeting on 8 August 1932 Joyce wrote to Lucia: “Beran dines with me this evening. He is a very charming person. He sends his greetings to you and mama”.11 From letters written by Joyce to Daniel Brody, the owner of Rhein-Verlag, on 12 August and 29 August and to Beran on 28 August and 22 October we learn what was being discussed on that occasion: Only a few days after the meeting Joyce suggested to Brody that Beran translate his verse, a task that “should be taken off Goyert’s shoulders. At my suggestion he is making a version of P.P. [Pomes Penyeach] which might possibly replace the A.L.P. [“Anna Livia Plurabelle”] you proposed to do”.12 Beran went to work: In a letter dated 22 October Joyce commented on his translation of “A Flower Given to My Daughter”.13 Beran’s translations of the three Zurich poems “Alone”, “A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight” and “Bahnhofstrasse” were published in 1932,14 but it appears that the project then came to a halt. Rhein-Verlag never published a German translation of Pomes Penyeach, and Felix Beran died in 1937.
Notes 1. The personal information on Beran comes from the files of the Zurich registry office (Einwohner- und Fremdenkontrolle der Stadt Zürich) and from papers relating to his naturalization (Einbürgerung), both via the city archive (Stadtarchiv). 2. See the article on Siegmund Feilbogen for details. 3. Ellmann, Joyce, 397f. and 422f. Beran reported on his first meeting with Joyce in an article in Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 12 April 1931 (personal communication Andreas Weigel 7 April 2020).
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4. Gorman, Definitive Biography, 244 and Ellmann, Joyce, 413. For the letter dated 22 February 1917 see Ellmann, Joyce, 413 and LII, 389. 5. Krieg: Gedichte (1916), Die Tage des Fluches: Gedichte 1914–1916 (1919), Gedichte (1921). 6. Budgen, Joyce, 12f. and Ellmann, Joyce, 431f. Both Budgen and Ellmann quote the text of Beran’s poem. Ellmann also prints Joyce’s translation, which was recovered from Mrs Beran by Alfred Dutli; see Dutli’s letter to Ellmann dated 1 November 1955 (Dutli papers in the Zurich James Joyce Foundation). 7. Budgen, Joyce, 13. 8. This paragraph relies on information kindly supplied by Andreas Weigel, who has done intensive research on Beran and Joyce (personal communication 7 April 2020). 9. “James Joyce in Zürich”, Tages-Anzeiger, 21 June 1930, “James Joyce”, Tages-Anzeiger, 22 November 1930 and “James Joyce. Ein Dichter, der am Erblinden war”, Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 12 April 1931. Excerpts of two Tages-Anzeiger articles are published in Füger, ed., Kritisches Erbe, 248–251 and 376f. 10. There were at least three meetings, one in June 1930, one in November 1930 and one on 8 August 1932. 11. The letter (LIII, 255f.) is in Italian: “Beran cenerà con me stasera. È una persona che ha molto charme. Ti manda ed a mamma I suoi saluti”. 12. Letter (from Zurich) to Daniel Brody dated 12 August 1932. 13. Letter (from Paris) to Felix Beran dated 22 October 1932. See Faerber and Luchsinger (Joyce in Zürich, 56f.) for a facsimile with transcription. Joyce objected to Beran’s translation of the last line of the poem (“My blueveined child”): “I do not like the version of ‘blueveined’. Blaublütig suggests to me duke of Portwine or some other descendant of Charles II’s mistresses”. 14. See Füger, ed., Kritisches Erbe, 431.
2.05 Karl Bleibtreu
Karl (also Carl) August Bleibtreu (1859–1928), now largely forgotten, was an immensely prolific German writer, who published more than a hundred works ranging from epic and lyrical poems and plays to critical and scholarly writings. In his younger years he was an ardent champion of naturalism in literature, but after 1890 he wrote mostly historical novels and books on military topics, especially the Napoleonic wars. In 1907 he published a volume entitled Die Lösung der Shakespeare-Frage: Eine neue Theorie, his “solution” being that the plays attributed to Shakespeare were actually written by Roger Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland (1576–1612). For reasons unknown, Bleibtreu moved to Switzerland around the year 1906.1 It is also unknown how he met the actor Claud Sykes, who came to Zurich in 1915, although the two men’s mutual interest in Shakespeare may have been the reason. Sykes, at any rate, must have introduced the Bleibtreus to the Joyces, for Joyce, writing from Locarno in December 1917, asked Sykes to “convey [his] wife’s excuses for her taciturnity both to Mrs Sykes and Mrs Bleibtreu from whom she had a card today”.2 Through Sykes, Joyce got to know Bleibtreu’s book on Shakespeare, and in November 1918, when he was working on “Scylla and Charybdis”3 containing Stephen’s discussion of Hamlet, he wrote Bleibtreu two letters. In the first he states: In the book I am writing Ulysses there is an allusion to your interesting Shakespearean theory, but, in order to refresh my memory, I should be glad © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_9
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to have your book for 2 or 3 days. Mr Sykes has mislaid his copy and I cannot get one at the libraries. Would you be so kind as to let me have your book for a day or two?4
Joyce also wanted to know when Bleibtreu’s book was published (he would eventually bring the date back from 1907 to 1904 or earlier) and also what Bleibtreu remembered from his visit to the present duke of Rutland. Bleibtreu’s reply to Joyce’s first letter has apparently been lost, but the information he received must have satisfied Joyce, and Bleibtreu’s theory thus found its way into “Scylla and Charybdis”.5 Here is John Eglinton, speaking to Stephen: —Well, in that case, he [John Eglinton] said, I don’t see why you should expect payment for it [Stephen’s theory of Shakespeare] since you don’t believe it yourself. Dowden believes there is some mystery in Hamlet but will say no more. Herr Bleibtreu, the man Piper met in Berlin, who is working up that Rutland theory, believes that the secret is hidden in the Stratford monument. He is going to visit the present duke [of Rutland], Piper says, and prove to him that his ancestor wrote the plays. It will come as a surprise to his grace. But he believes his theory.6
No further contacts between Joyce and Bleibtreu are recorded. The Joyces left Zurich in October 1919; the Bleibtreus stayed in Switzerland, but moved to Locarno in 1920, where Karl died in 1928. However, he was remembered by Sykes, who paid homage to his theory in a book published in 1947 (Alias William Shakespeare?). In passing it may be noted that a different Bleibtreu is commemorated, indirectly, in Ulysses. When buying kidney and sausages in “Calypso”, Bloom picks up a sheet of newspaper at the butcher’s, glances at it on the way home and finds an advertisement for an agency that promotes settlements in Palestine: “Agendath Netaim: planters’ company. To purchase waste sandy tracts from Turkish government and plant with eucalyptus trees”. The agency’s address is “Bleibtreustrasse 34, Berlin, W. 15”.7 Bleibtreustrasse was named after Karl Bleibtreu’s father, the painter and graphic artist Georg Bleibtreu (1828–1892), who had lived nearby.8 German “bleib treu”, incidentally, means “stay faithful”, an imperative with special resonance for Bloom, given that his eyes have just rested on the “vigorous hips” of “the nextdoor girl at the counter“9 and that Molly will be unfaithful to him in the afternoon.
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Notes 1. The personal information on Bleibtreu in Switzerland comes from the files of the Zurich registry office (Einwohner- und Fremdenkontrolle der Stadt Zürich), via the city archive (Stadtarchiv). 2. LII, 415. 3. “Scylla and Charybdis” was first published in the Little Review in April and May 1919. 4. Skinner, “Two Joyce Letters”, 376. 5. Gorman (Definitive Biography, 238) knows more: “Joyce passed an entire afternoon discussing the Rutland theory with this author. Whether or not he took any stock in it is a mystery. He was sufficiently impressed, however, to introduce it in Ulysses”. 6. U 9.1071–1077. 7. U 4.191–193 and 199. 8. See Mulhall, “James Joyce in Deutschland: Ein Meinherr aus Teutschland”. 9. U 4.145–151, also 164–190.
2.06 Georges Borach
Like Edmund Brauchbar and Victor Sax, Georges Borach (1892–1934) was one of Joyce’s language students who became a lifelong friend. In the files of the Zurich registry office his occupations were listed as bank clerk, confidential clerk at the firm of E. Pollak (1919), Consul of Peru (1932) and writer.1 “The small, deformed man” was a bachelor who seems to have lived with his parents all his life. He was a patient, sympathetic listener during the gatherings of Joyce and his friends at the Pfauen and he accompanied Joyce “on his daily walks with the same energy and unreserved interest that he followed the strange Joycean mental journeys, and up to the end provided him sympathetically and unselfishly with whatever material he desired”.2 Borach’s recollections are entitled “Conversations with James Joyce”3; like those of August Suter and Frank Budgen, they give interesting insight into the working of Joyce’s mind during his Zurich years. Readers learn, for example, that the poem “Alone” (1916) was composed “during a walk along the lake”.4 Borach was among Joyce’s Zurich friends who, in 1930, when his eyes problems worsened, urged him to consult Professor Alfred Vogt5 and later made arrangements for his meeting with the skilled Zurich surgeon. He also sent some suggestions in connection with Joyce’s campaign to forward the singing career of John Sullivan. Never one to leave a willing hand idle, Joyce asked his help in several other matters, and he complied.6 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_10
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Joyce and Nora were deeply moved when they learnt of Borach’s death in an automobile accident, on 30 March 1934,7 which happened while they were on their way from Paris to Zurich. Having been invited to accompany René and Kathleen Bailly and their two nieces on a motor tour, they left Paris around 24 March, travelled through the south of France, Monaco, Ventimiglia and Grenoble and arrived in Zurich around 10 April.8 Carola Giedion-Welcker reports that Borach’s sudden death obsessed his friend’s mind for days. It happened on Good Friday, and the circumstances under which he died, in a sporty racing car on the Riviera, appeared to Joyce especially grotesque for a man who had moved through his whole life with the painful steps of a cripple. I will never forget the way Joyce pronounced the word ‘Pietà’ after having met the sorrowing mother who had lost her only son. That night as usual we were sitting in the Kronenhalle. While Joyce intensively considered the recent happening, now and then alluding to the biblical Passion and humming quiet passages from Bach’s Passion, this whole fantastic and tragic world, wherein the extraordinary is closely mixed with the trivial, was suddenly interrupted by a piercing call, ‘Closing time!’9
Even though the facts of Borach’s death appear to be clear, there is some confusion concerning when and where it occurred. There is no doubt that Borach died on 30 March, which was Good Friday. However, based on an interview with Carola Giedion-Welcker, Ellmann reports that Joyce asked why Borach had to die “on a Good Friday and on the thirteenth?”10 Giedion-Welcker or Ellmann must have misheard “on the thirtieth” for “on the thirteenth” or Joyce, who was “obsessed” by Borach’s death, felt that Friday the 13th was a more appropriate date than Friday the 30th. Regarding the place of Borach’s death, Giedion-Welcker says that Borach died “in a sporty racing car on the Riviera”, which agrees with Joyce’s remark that on their journey they “had to pass where he was killed a few days before”. According to the Einwohner- und Fremdenkontrolle der Stadt Zürich, however, Borach died in Lambèse, Algeria (then part of France). I have no explanation for this puzzling discrepancy. Less than a month after Borach’s death Joyce remembered him, fondly but a little condescendingly, in a letter to Miss Weaver: [On the way to Zurich, in the Baillys’ car] I had to conceal from my wife the facts about Borach as we had to pass over the place where he was killed a few
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days before. I told her in Zurich and then had difficulty in keeping her there as she found the place haunted by him. Every place we used to go [to] he seemed to be there. The old parents are pitiable. The mother found a bundle of photographs of me locked away by him, taken at all ages from two on. I often made the poor fellow laugh, thank goodness, by pretending to be a little bit more sceptical, commonplace and uneducated than I really am. He was a very good son and with him in the car in one of his pockets he had a prayerbook with a bookmark at the page ‘Prayer for Parents’. Alas. […] In twenty years I never found out what his business was (roads in Peru, somebody said).11
Notes 1. The personal information on Borach comes from the files of the Zurich registry office (Einwohner- und Fremdenkontrolle der Stadt Zürich) and from papers relating to the Beran family’s naturalisation (Einbürgerung), both via the city archive (Stadtarchiv). 2. Both quotations in this paragraph are from Giedion-Welcker, “Meetings with Joyce”, 263. 3. The text is quoted here from Potts, ed., Portraits. Entitled “Gespräche mit James Joyce” it was originally published in Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 3 May 1931, the English translation in College English 15 (March 1954), 325–327. 4. Borach, “Conversations”, 72 and note 13. 5. Ellmann, Joyce, 622. On 24 April 1934, after Borach’s death, Joyce wrote to Harriet Shaw Weaver (LI, 339): “Anyway it was [Borach] too who urged me always to see Vogt”. 6. Borach “Conversations”, introduction by Willard Potts, 68. 7. See Ellmann, Joyce, 669, Giedion-Welcker, “Meetings with Joyce”, 263 and Maddox, Nora, 297. Joyce wrote to Frank Budgen on 25 April 1934 (LIII, 303) that he was “upset by the tragic death of [his] friend Borach”. 8. Norburn, Chronology, 165. See also Ellmann, Joyce, 669. 9. Giedion-Welcker, “Meetings with Joyce”, 263. 10. Ellmann, Joyce, 669 and 806, note 90. 11. Letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver dated 24 April 1934 (LI, 339).
2.07 Edmund Brauchbar
Born in Vienna, the Austrian Edmund Brauchbar (1872–1952) came to Zurich to work in the textile business. In 1912 he co-founded the firm of Abraham, Brauchbar & Co., his partner being Jakob Abraham and, from 1921 onwards, Abraham’s son Ludwig. The company traded in silk fabrics and operated very successfully for 30 years.1 In 1942/43 it was split into two companies, Rud. Brauchbar & Co. on the one hand (Rudolph Brauchbar being Edmund’s son) and L. Abraham & Co. Seiden AG on the other.2 In the early 1940s Edmund Brauchbar had moved to New York, where he died in 1952. In Zurich, Brauchbar was one of the friends of Rudolf Goldschmidt, some of whom took English lessons from the newly arrived Joyce, “in some instances not because they wanted to learn the language but because they wanted to help him discreetly”.3 Brauchbar’s willingness to help is further documented by a letter dated 13 September 1917, in which Joyce thanks Brauchbar for an unspecified “kind offer”, but implicitly rejects it by stating that he is “still able to live”.4 According to Carola Giedion-Welcker, Brauchbar may even have been one of the models for Leopold Bloom. “[His] outstanding characteristics—vitality, sense of reality, spontaneous human warmth and wit”, she writes, “were woven into the traits of the central figure in Ulysses, Leopold Bloom”.5 While this may be speculation, it is certain that Joyce, in Finnegans Wake, immortalised Brauchbar’s company Abraham, Brauchbar & Co. as “Abrahamsk and Brookbear!”6 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_11
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Though living in far-away New York, Brauchbar helped Joyce again in a time of real need. In 1940, when Joyce applied for permission to move back to Switzerland, the Zurich Fremdenpolizei demanded 20,000 Swiss francs as a guarantee. Joyce did not have this kind of money, and in the end it was raised by the Giedions, who contributed 15,700 Swiss francs, and by Brauchbar, who donated 1000 dollars (4300 Swiss francs).7 “‘I thank you very much for having remembered me, whom so many seem to have forgotten,’ Joyce wrote Brauchbar”.8 After Joyce’s death Brauchbar bought one of the death masks commissioned by Carola Giedion-Welcker and in 1946 gave it to the Library of Congress in Washington.
Notes 1. See Schweizerisches Nationalmuseum, Soie pirate: Geschichte der Firma Abraham. 2. In 1968 L. Abraham & Co. was taken over by Gustav Zumsteg (1915–2005), who was also the owner of the Kronenhalle. 3. Ellmann, Joyce, 396. 4. The letter is printed in Faerber and Luchsinger, Joyce in Zürich, 46. On other items of correspondence between Joyce and Brauchbar see Reizbaum, “Swiss Customs”, 204f. 5. Giedion-Welcker, “Meetings with Joyce”, 263 6. FW 481.24. 7. For details see Ellmann, Joyce, 736f. and Faerber and Luchsinger, Joyce in Zürich, 134f. and 141. 8. Ellmann, Joyce, 736.
2.08 Frank Budgen
The Englishman Frank Budgen (1882–1971) was one of Joyce’s closest friends in Zurich. Born in Crowhurst, Surrey, he received little schooling and acquired most of his education autodidactically. Having worked, inter alia, as a sailor and as a postal worker, he went to Paris in 1910 to study painting at the Académie Julian.1 He also earned some money as an artists’ model and in this way met August Suter, a Swiss sculptor from Basel. The two men became friends, and Budgen followed Suter to Mannheim, Heidelberg and—in 1914—to Basel, where he became a de facto member of the Suter family for a while.2 And it was Suter again who was instrumental in Budgen’s moving to Zurich: August had been invited to submit a plan of figure decoration for the Amtshaus in Zurich, and was eventually commissioned to design and carry out sculptures for the terrace. He found a workshop near Zurich, in the village of Zollikon. I went with him as model and general studio factotum, glad to be able to earn a regular wage for services August in any case needed.3
Budgen served as the model for one of these six statues, which became a favourite of Joyce’s: [O]ften late at night [Joyce] would say to a group that included Budgen, ‘Let’s go and see Budgen,’ and would conduct them to the statue which depicted his not too industrious friend in the nude with a hammer and a © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_12
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long beard as an allegory of labor. Sometimes he would honor this idol with his spider dance.4
Budgen also modelled for one of the “ornamental motifs” Suter sculpted for the façade of the Swiss National Bank; according to Budgen himself, it is “stylized, but sufficiently a portrait for the likeness to be discernible”.5 Eventually Budgen found employment, through the British Consulate General, with the Ministry of Information. The Ministry, according to his memoirs, was an institution for the spread of British propaganda in neutral countries. […] The idea was to convince the Swiss that it was pleasanter and more profitable to be friends with the Allies than with the Germans. The printed word was our principal instrument. […] Generally speaking […] the method was to send out articles and pars [= paragraphs, AF] of all kinds, and on their own merit, or with the aid of a friend at court, they would usually find a place in some paper or the other.6
In the early summer of 1918, Budgen was introduced to James Joyce by Horace Taylor, who was in Zurich “on a cultural mission. […] A collection of modern British pictures had been got together for exhibition in the principal towns in Switzerland and Taylor was in charge of it”.7 Taylor and Budgen met Joyce in Taylor’s pension “high up on the Zürichberg beyond the Fluntern tram terminus”. This is how Budgen describes the moment when he first laid eyes on Joyce: Following Taylor’s look I saw a tall slender man come into the garden through the restaurant. Swinging a thin cane he walked deliberately down the steps to the gravelled garden path. He was a dark mass against the orange light of the restaurant glass door, but he carried his head with the chin uptilted so that his face collected cool light from the sky. His walk as he came slowly across to us suggested that of a wading heron. The studied deliberateness of a latecomer, I thought at first. But then as he came nearer I saw his heavily glassed eyes and realised that the transition from light interior to darkening garden had made him unsure of a space beset with iron chairs and tables and other obstacles.8
Joyce later confessed that he came to the dinner thinking that Budgen was “a spy sent by the British Consulate to report on me in connection with my dispute with them”,9 but the two men took to each other
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immediately and became close friends. When Joyce went back to Trieste together with his family in October 1919, he tried to get Budgen to move there, too, but could not persuade him. Budgen left Zurich for London in August 1920,10 and the two men kept in touch mostly by post.11 During their time in Zurich, Budgen frequently visited Joyce at the Joyces’ apartment in Universitätsstrasse 38 and later in Universitätstrasse 29, and they also met in restaurants, the Pfauen café being their favourite place. We have a record of their intense contact in Budgen’s book James Joyce and the Making of ‘Ulysses’, first published in 1934.12 The book is an interesting combination: It records the conversations of the two men, thus giving insight into Joyce’s thinking, but at the same time it is a useful, inspired guide to Ulysses, which complements Stuart Gilbert’s “Ulysses”: A Study of 1930. In his preface to the 1960 edition Budgen states: I had never looked upon myself as a Boswell or an Eckermann, and therefore it had never occurred to me during my almost daily contact with Joyce in Zürich to take notes of his conversation or indeed to keep a written record of any kind. All that I had to supply both material content and form for my own text was a copy of Ulysses.13
When he started work in 1931/32 he was unsure of how to proceed and Joyce, whom he consulted, was equally sceptical, but supportive.14 Then out of the fog I was moving in I saw emerging the shapes of a man, a book, a place, a time. I was able to begin at the beginning and my memory was set free. It is remarkable how much hindsight it takes to perceive the self-evident.15
Budgen was to write more. The penultimate chapter of Myselves When Young (1970), a poetic memoir of his early life, is entitled “Mr. Joyce”, and Clive Hart’s re-publication of James Joyce and the Making of ‘Ulysses’ in 1972, one year after Budgen’s death, contains three additional essays (one of them being an introduction to Finnegans Wake). Budgen has also left an artistic record of his encounters with the Joyce family, for example a drawing of himself and Joyce at the Pfauen café, a portrait of Nora16 or one of Joyce (reproduced here, Fig. 1). Budgen’s personality and his achievements are characterised, movingly, by Clive Hart:
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Fig. 1 James Joyce, oil painting by Frank Budgen, Zurich James Joyce Foundation (courtesy Jane Rowell, Executor Estate of Joan Alida Catherine Budgen)
Budgen sometimes spoke of himself, deprecatingly, as having been a Shaun to Joyce’s Shem, but the pattern was more complex than that and, despite his awareness of Budgen’s otherness, Joyce recognized that he could never be reduced to a simple anti-self. For Budgen was also an artist, and an artist in a medium which Joyce never claimed to understand. That kind of otherness could not be written off as Joyce sometimes tried to write off the otherness of his brother Stanislaus. Budgen commanded respect, and he did so not only because of the complete seriousness of his approach to his art, but also because he was never in the least inclined to be subservient to Joyce. In Joyce he recognized a master of words, and this he admired and enjoyed. But being self-taught he belonged to no schools, had not time for cliques, cultural fashions or critical movements and was totally without affectation of any kind. For Budgen James Joyce was not only Joyce the writer to whose work one paid due homage, but also Joyce the man, with many faults as well as many virtues. Furthermore, Budgen, the self-taught man, had taught himself remarkably well. He had spent some years painting in Paris in the great days before the First World War, and he was quite as much at home among writers and artists as was Joyce. He was a rare and interesting m ixture
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of artist and practical man, in some respects a more complete person than Joyce could ever be.17
Notes 1. Budgen calls it Académie Julien. 2. Budgen, Myselves, 137, 139 and 167. 3. Budgen, Myselves, 175. The terrace in question, part of the Amtshaus IV complex, is at Uraniastrasse 7. See the article on August (and Paul) Suter for a picture. 4. Ellmann, Joyce, 430f. There is a picture of the statue in question in Faerber and Luchsinger, Joyce in Zürich, 66. The illustration in Ellmann (Joyce, xxviii) does not show the Suter statue, but a relief—one in a series on the subject of war and peace—by the sculptor Adolf Meyer (1867–1940). Like Budgen’s statues, Meyer’s reliefs are part of the sculptural decoration of the city’s administrative buildings (Amtshäuser). 5. Budgen, Myselves, 175. 6. Budgen, Joyce, 34f. 7. Budgen, Joyce, 10. 8. Budgen, Joyce, 11. 9. Budgen, Joyce, 14. 10. Budgen, Joyce, 231. 11. Budgen occasionally visited the Joyces in Paris (Maddox, Nora, 172, 180 and 186). Joyce’s last letter to Budgen is dated 13 March 1940 (LIII, 469f.). 12. It was reprinted in 1960 with a preface, and in 1972 with an introduction by Clive Hart. 13. Budgen, Joyce (introduction to the 1960 edition), 4. 14. See, for example, Joyce’s letter to Budgen dated 1 March 1932 (LI, 315f.): “I suggest that you first have a look at Gilbert’s book and Paul Jordan Smith’s Key to Ulysses so that you can strike a line for yourself. […] I think your method of approach will probably be an original one but I think you will have to be on your guard with any English publisher for all he wants is claptrap and gossip. Can you outline your book to me a little more precisely after this letter”. 15. Budgen, Joyce (introduction to the 1960 edition), 4. 16. The former is reproduced in Faerber and Luchsinger, Joyce in Zürich, 69, the latter in Maddox, Nora, between pages 204 and 205. As far as I can see there is as yet no catalogue of Budgen’s paintings and drawings. 17. Clive Hart’s introduction to James Joyce and the Making of “Ulysses”, viii–ix.
2.09 Carlton Elite (Hotel)
During his many trips to Zurich in the 1930s Joyce stayed at altogether three hotels, the St Gotthard, the Habis and the Carlton Elite. He must have especially liked the Carlton Elite off Bahnhofstrasse (established in 1913), which he frequented, sometimes for long periods.1 In his sketch of Zurich during World War I Budgen ranks it highly: The cafés, wineshops and restaurants are numerous, good and to suit all tastes. For the élite there are the Élite and the Baur au Lac; for the strong there are Spanish and Swiss wineshops and Swiss beerhouses; for the indifferent, the impecunious or the teetotallers there are the alkoholfreie restaurants of the Frauenverein, and for the lover of good wine there is, among others, the Pfauen restaurant-café.2
However, in August 1937 and again in March 1938 Joyce was not pleased with the service at the Carlton Elite, as evidenced by outbursts of unusual vehemence. On 9 and 10 March 1938 Paul Léon wrote to Carola Giedion-Welcker: [Joyce] thanks you for having run down the hall so quickly with the 300 frs the morning he left; evidently you have more trust in him, he says, than the cashier of the Elite who on Saturday afternoon last August refused to cash a check—a draft of Lloyd’s Bank London, on the Kredit Anstalt next door— until it had been honoured. Of course it was honoured the first thing on
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Monday morning, but in the meantime he was left for the week-end with a couple of francs in his pocket—all his Zürich friends being on vacation and even the concierge Phillipe having a day off. It is this same cashier or receptionist who refused to remove him for one night to quiet rooms in the hotel until he heard that they had engaged rooms by telephone at the Hotel Neuer Schlop [sic, recte Neues Schloss, AF], and finally tried to charge him double or treble prices for the two very frugal meals he took in his room. As he has been going there for a dozen years and has sometimes made stays of 3 and 7 months in the hotel besides bringing friends there (one night I believe he entertained the whole staff with a champagne supper which lasted till morning) besides being extremely liberal with his gratuities such treatment is really unexampled in his experience of hotels.3 I forgot to say that Mr J. will be glad if you personally will see that the volume of his poems and paper-jacket are returned to Dr Schoeck. He thinks it likely that some of the verses will please him for musical setting. He says the hotel people have a cyclist chasseur and a telephone, but they would not use either though they know how anxious he was about the arrival of the book. Incredible as it may seem he assures me that during all his many residences in the hotel besides paying his bill with his 10 or 15% service he has as regularly as the clock paid no less than 1000 french francs in tips beginning with 50 Swiss francs per month to the concierge and so on down to the chasseur. He suggests that the 1939 Ausstellung give the hotel a diploma as the ‘Gemeinste Kneip in Swindlerland’.4
Joyce echoed this in a letter written also to Carola Giedion-Welcker on 28 March 1938, prompted evidently by Hitler’s annexation of Austria earlier that month: All I can say about the future in Z’ch is I hope whoever has it will respect Villa Giedion, Othmar Schoeck, Vogt’s clinic and the Kronenhalle. But he can hang all the staff of the Elite Hotel in comfortable sacks out of their own windows for all I care and meanwhile Heaven help the poor jews who fall into the hands of Mr Prager’s cashier.5
In the absence of other witnesses it is impossible to say whether Joyce was, indeed, treated as badly as he claims. The Carlton Elite lived on, but in the late 1990s it ceased to be hotel and became the Carlton Restaurant & Bar.
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Notes 1. Fritz Senn has noted (personal communication 28 January 2020) that the hotel (Hotel Carlton Elite, HCE) has the same initials as Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, one of the characters in Finnegans Wake. 2. Budgen, Joyce, 171. 3. LIII, 416. 4. LIII, 417. Ellmann correctly translates “Gemeinste Kneip” as ‘Meanest Dive’. With “the 1939 Ausstellung” Léon refers to the National Exhibition (Landesausstellung) that would take place in Zurich in 1939. 5. LIII, 418. See also Giedion-Welcker, “Meetings with Joyce”, 267f., for a slightly different version of this correspondence.
2.10 Henry Carr
The Englishman Henry Wilfred Carr (1894–1962) was the protagonist in what must be one the most bizarre episodes of Joyce’s time in Zurich.1 Carr was born in Sunderland, County Durham but at the age of seventeen [he] went to Canada where he worked for a time in a bank. In 1915 he volunteered for military service and went to France with the Canadian Black Watch. He was badly wounded the following year and—after lying five days in no-man’s land—was taken prisoner. Because of his wounds Henry was sent by the Germans to stay at a monastery where the monks tended him to a partial recovery, and then as an ‘exchange prisoner’ he was one of a group who were sent to Switzerland.2
In Zurich he held a small job at the British Consulate, and it was during his time there that he was to meet James Joyce. In 1918 Joyce recruited him to play the role of Algernon Moncrieff in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, the first production of the English Players, a newly formed theatrical company, for which Joyce acted as manager and treasurer. The troupe operated on a shoestring budget,3 and it was over relatively trivial financial issues that Carr and Joyce came to blows: Disappointed at receiving a fee of only ten francs, Carr demanded to be reimbursed for the clothes he had bought for his role, while Joyce claimed that Carr had received twenty tickets to sell, but had given Joyce money for only twelve. Tempers ran high, there was an altercation in the consulate, attempts to © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_14
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settle the quarrel failed, and less than a week after the première of the play on 29 April 1918, the irate Joyce had a lawyer, Dr Konrad Bloch4 institute two suits against Carr […]. The first was for 25 francs owing for five tickets; against this Carr counterclaimed 450 francs as his share in the company’s net profits, which he alleged to be 2600 to 3000 francs, or, if this claim were disallowed, 300 francs as a fee for his acting and his expenses for costume. Joyce’s second suit was for libel, based upon Carr’s insulting words in the consulate.5
The two suits, in which the Consul-General A. Percy Bennett took Carr’s side, dragged on and ended in a draw. In October 1918 Joyce won the first: The court declared his claim for 25 francs due on tickets was valid; it rejected Carr’s counterclaims for salary and expenses, on the ground that he had agreed to act for nothing, and that his clothes were not stage costumes but ordinary wearing apparel capable of further use. Carr had to pay court costs of over 39 francs, and to pay Joyce 60 francs for his trouble and expenses.6
The second case was tried in December. As Joyce’s allegations could not be backed by witnesses, his lawyer withdrew the complaint in February 1919, and the court ruled that Joyce, in turn, had to pay court costs, Carr’s expenses and his lawyer’s fees.7 Joyce refused to pay and the court then proceeded against him by distraint.8 The case finally came to an end in May 1919, when an officer of the court who was sent to collect the money owed found Joyce in straitened circumstances, took fifty francs from him “and closed the proceedings”.9 Joyce, in Tom Stoppard’s words, thus “won on the money and lost on the slander, but he reserved his full retribution for Ulysses”,10 where he gives his main opponents unflattering bit parts in Episodes 10 (“Wandering Rocks”), 12 (“Cyclops”) and 15 (“Circe”).11 Joyce further vented his anger at British officialdom through occasional verses: Bennett, the Consul-General is ridiculed in “The C. G. Is Not Literary” a song to the tune of “Tipperary”,12 and Sir Horace Rumbold, British Minister in Berne, to whom Joyce had also appealed, is featured in a short poem entitled “The Right Man in the Wrong Place”.13 The Carr case, painful as it was, did not diminish Joyce’s appetite for litigation, as is shown by an episode that took place in the early 1930s,
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described in full by Ursula Zeller.14 In 1931 the German newspaper Frankfurter Zeitung published a short story entitled “Vielleicht ein Traum”, which was mistakenly attributed to “James Joyce, the author of the great English novel Ulysses”. When Daniel Brody of Rhein-Verlag, the publisher of Joyce’s works in German, read about this by chance, he discovered that the author of the story was a certain Michael Joyce whose translator Irene Kafka had mixed up the two names. Joyce was deeply upset, and “[w]hat followed was a big whirl of excitement that lasted for nearly three months and turned an embarrassing, but minor, mistake into an international affair, involving people in Ireland, England, Germany, Austria, France and Switzerland”.15 Joyce wanted to sue the Frankfurter Zeitung for damages, but his lawyers, having considered the case, refused to proceed and “[i]n the end, instead of getting him any redress, Joyce’s campaign in this whole affair cost him £48 of lawyers’ fees or some £8,000 in today’s terms”.16 Carr plays a small role in Ulysses, but he was to take centre stage in Tom Stoppard’s 1974 play Travesties, where he “appears as a shabby and very old man and also as his youthful elegant self”.17 As a “very old man” he is the unreliable narrator of the plot, (mis-)remembering his time in Zurich during World War I when he met Joyce, but—supposedly—also Lenin and Tristan Tzara, a leading member of the Dada movement: My memoirs, is it, then? Life and times, friend of the famous. Memories of James Joyce. James Joyce As I Knew Him. The James Joyce I Knew. Through the Courts With James Joyce. […] Lenin, there’s a point … Lenin As I Knew Him. The Lenin I Knew. Halfway to the Finland Station with V. I. Lenin: A Sketch. I well remember the first time I met Lenin, or as he was known on his library ticket, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. […] To those of us who lived through it Dada was, topographically speaking, the high point of Western European culture—I well remember as though it were yesteryear (oh, where are they now?) how Hugo Ball—or was it Hans Arp? yes!—no—Picabia, was it?—no, Tzara—yes!—wrote his name in the snow with a walking stick and said: There! I think I’ll call it The Alps. […] Carr of the Consulate!—first name Henry, that much is beyond dispute, I’m mentioned in the books.18
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When writing his play Stoppard had to rely on the few “meagre facts” known about Carr at the time. However, in addition to giving him a central role in Travesties, he also inadvertently saved him from near-oblivion in a second sense: Soon after the play opened in London he was contacted by a Mrs Noël Carr, who turned out to have been Carr’s second wife and who supplied him with information on Carr’s life after Zurich. Stoppard then wrote a brief biographical note on Carr, which he published together with the play.19
Notes 1. For details, see Gorman, Definitive Biography, 248–254 and Ellmann, Joyce, 426–428, 440–447 and 455–457. 2. Stoppard, Travesties, xf. 3. According to Ellmann (Joyce, 426) “[p]rofessional actors were to receive thirty francs, while amateurs were not to receive anything; but Sykes suggested to Joyce that they be given ten francs to reimburse them for tram fares to rehearsals, and this amount was settled upon”. 4. Bloch was Rudolf Goldschmidt’s lawyer; Carr was represented by Dr Georg Wettstein. See Ellmann, Joyce, 427, 440 and 452. 5. Ellmann, Joyce, 427f. 6. Ellmann, Joyce, 445. 7. Faerber and Luchsinger, Joyce in Zürich, 90. 8. Ellmann, Joyce, 455. 9. Ellmann, Joyce, 457. 10. Stoppard, Travesties, x. 11. See “Zurich in Joyce” for details. 12. Printed in Ellmann, Joyce, 445f. and in Mays, ed., Poems and “Exiles”, 83f. 13. Printed in Ellmann, Joyce, 458 and in Mays, ed., Poems and “Exiles”, 85. 14. Zeller, “The Frankofurto Siding”. Brenda Maddox (Nora, 95) notes that Joyce “had a need to feel deceived (the critic Leon Edel has called him ‘The Injustice Collector’) for which world literature is the richer”. 15. Zeller, “The Frankofurto Siding”, 335. 16. Zeller, “The Frankofurto Siding”, 344. 17. Stoppard, Travesties, list of characters. 18. Stoppard, Travesties, 6, 7 and 9. 19. Stoppard, Travesties, ix–xi.
2.11 Dada
The Dada movement began at the Meierei tavern at Spiegelgasse 1 in Zurich on 5 February 1916, when a group of—mostly emigré—young artists and writers inaugurated a series of evening entertainments they called Cabaret Voltaire. Most of them had come to Zurich after the outbreak of World War I to avoid military service, and Dada, spontaneously and informally at first, developed as a wild, chaotic protest against traditional cultural values, the pre-war world and the war itself. The Zurich Dadaists were a loose group, their most prominent members being Hugo Ball and his partner Emmy Hennings, the Romanians Marcel Janco and Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp, Sophie Taeuber (who was to marry Arp in 1922), Hans Richter and Richard Huelsenbeck. Towards the end of the war the movement petered out in Zurich, but it spread to Berlin, Paris and many other cities and is now recognised as one of the artistic revolutions that ushered in modernism.1 Cabaret Voltaire events at the Meierei ran from February 1916 until the summer and then moved to other locations, for example the Zunfthaus zur Waag,2 the newly established Galerie Dada at Bahnhofstrasse 193 and others. (The eighth and last Dada soirée in Zurich took place at the Kaufleuten on 9 April 1919.)4 Cabaret Voltaire evenings were essentially vaudeville events with “numbers” ranging from the traditional to the utterly avant-garde and iconoclastic, but there were also exhibitions of paintings, graphic art and sculptures, publications, and so on. Performances included the spoken word, song and instrumental music as well as dance, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_15
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presented by a wide range of well-known and lesser-known people. Soirées at the Galerie Dada in spring (March to May) 1917, for example, featured the writer Ferdinand Hardekopf reciting his own poetry, Tristan Tzara reciting “negro verses” translated by himself, Sophie Taeuber dancing, wearing masks by Hans Arp, a musical programme put together by the Swiss pianist and composer Hans Heusser, or the première of “Sphinx und Strohmann” a play by Oskar Kokoschka directed by Marcel Janco.5 This is how the composer Otto Luening describes the “Soirée H. Heusser”, the sixth in the series, which took place on 25 May 1917: The program included one of my compositions for cello and piano, known as the “Wet Dream Gavotte”! We also played an aria and a one-step. Why Rubinstein and I also played Saint-Saens’ “The Swan,” I don’t know, but Heusser found it suitable for his interesting programs. These included his own works for piano, voice, and harmonium, which were much hated by the Establishment. African dancers with masks were accompanied by Arabian tunes and tambourines. One-steps, ragtimes, noise music, balalaika concerts, music with magic lantern slides, piano improvisations, folk songs, brothel songs, and bass drum solos rounded out his programs. There was a huge crowd, and unearthly din, and blue smoke clouds, and everybody talked. Nobody listened except Heer, the Swiss poet.6
Luening also describes the performances of Tristan Tzara, one of the leading figures of Dada: [H]e was too mad for me and I too square for him. He declaimed poetry and sometimes sang. He used bells, drums, whistles, and cowbells, beating the table to punctuate his declamations and to incite the audience to participate in his performance. He would curse, sigh, yodel, and shriek when the spirit moved him. His famous prescription for a poem—cut out words from a newspapers article, shake them in a hat, and spill them on a table, using their random order to reveal the poet’s mind—smacked of the I Ching. His constant mobility was tiresome.7
Joyce was living in Zurich and writing Ulysses during the Dada years, and the historical coincidence of these two “modernist moments” happening in Zurich around the same time has been commented upon by many. However, there is no evidence that Joyce knew any of the Dadaists or that he attended Dada events during his Zurich years.8 In a letter dated 14 September 1920 written to Stanislaus from Paris he even explicitly
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denies the rumour that he “founded in Zurich the dadaist movement which is now exciting Paris (report of Irish press last week)”.9 Both Joyce and the Dadaists were iconoclasts that upended traditional conventions of literature and art; they sometimes used similar techniques,10 but they did so with very different intentions. The Dadaists, in a nutshell, smashed conventions to exhibit their hollowness and meaninglessness, whereas Joyce took them apart to re-assemble them in a new, carefully crafted fashion intended to invest them with concentrated meaning. Hugo Ball’s oft- quoted poem “Karawane”, for example, which he recited at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916, is a fascinating piece of nonsense poetry whose meaning remains completely opaque.11 By contrast, Joyce’s prelude to the “Sirens” episode in Ulysses may appear to be nonsensical at first, but it is actually a collage of motifs that reappear in context, meaningfully, later in the episode. Joyce, the Dadaist Tristan Tzara and the Russian revolutionary Lenin, who also lived in Zurich in 1916/1917, are brought together by Tom Stoppard in his clever 1974 play Travesties. The three men probably never met in real life, but Stoppard depicts them as representatives of widely different, conflicting ideas of art and politics.12
Notes 1. For a comprehensive overview see Schrott, Dada 15/25. 2. Hugo Ball recited the first “Dada Manifesto” at the Zunfthaus zur Waag on the occasion of a public soirée on 14 July 1916; see Schrott, Dada 15/25, 51–53. 3. First called Galerie Corray after Hans Corray, the man who rented the place. 4. Schrott, Dada 15/25, 205–209. 5. These randomly selected examples are taken from the complete programme of Galerie Dada published in Dada 1, Recueil Littéraire et Artistique of July 1917; for details see https://digital.kunsthaus.ch:443/ viewer/image/25071/20, last accessed on 17 September 2018. There were altogether six such soirées at the Galerie Dada; see Schrott, Dada 15/25, 10f. 6. Luening, Odyssey, 127. Rubinstein was the cellist David Rubinstein, nephew of the pianist, composer and conductor Anton Rubinstein (Luening, Odyssey, 125); Heer was the Swiss writer Jakob Christoph Heer (1859–1925). 7. Luening, Odyssey, 128.
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8. Much the same may be said about Joyce and the Futurist movement in Italy. In his book on Joyce’s Trieste years, McCourt mentions a “spectacular Futurist meeting” held on 12 January 1910 in Trieste and states that “[i]t is very likely that Joyce was present, but even if he was not, the event could not but have caught his attention” (The Years of Bloom, 156). He discusses parallels and similarities between Joyce and the Futurists in great detail (The Years of Bloom, 154–169). 9. LIII, 22. Joyce mentions this rumour in a list of “reports at present in circulation about [him]” which he asks Stanislaus to contradict “whenever they present themselves”. 10. In an article on Joyce, Dada and Stoppard’s Travesties, Ira Nadel presents his view of “Dada Joyce [who] may be seen in the puns, neologisms, and intertextual references that litter his work, especially the Wake”. He also sees Giacomo Joyce as a “pivotal Joycean text coinciding with the development of Dada and displaying a number of its features” (Nadel, “Travesties”, 485 and 487). Michael Levenson maintains that Joyce was conscious “of dadaism and its cultural effects: its taste for outrage, its mockery of fine style, its fondness for extravagant gestures. Given the timing of the letter [to Stanislaus] there is good reason to see dada as a confirming event when, soon afterwards, Joyce turned to the audacities of ‘Circe’ and the headlines/captions inserted into ‘Aeolus’” (“Modernisms”, 272). 11. See Ball’s note dated 23 June 1916 quoted in Schrott, Dada 15/25, 44. 12. See the article on Travesties for details.
2.12 Death Mask
Only hospital staff were present when Joyce died in the Rotkreuzspital at 2.15 a.m. on 13 January 1941. Nora, Giorgio and Carola Giedion-Welcker soon rushed to his bedside, and it was Giedion-Welcker who suggested to Nora that Joyce’s face be immortalised with a death mask. Nora consented, and the sculptor Paul Speck (1896–1966) then made probably several plaster negatives of Joyce’s face either on 13 or on 14 January. Speck was well qualified for the task. Having been trained in Munich by the painter and sculptor Stanislaus Stückgold he moved to Karlsruhe in 1924, where he specialised in ceramics, working and teaching at the Grossherzogliche (from 1927 onwards Staatliche) Majolika-Manufaktur. He lost his post at the end of 1933, moved back to Zurich and lived there until his death in 1966.1 Speck was assisted in the project by the stucco specialist (Stukkateur) Victor Dallo.2 The mask was photographed by the photographer Hans Finsler (1891–1972).3 Several death masks exist, and their history is rather convoluted. It is uncertain, first, how many masks were made, and second, how many of them were originals, that is cast from the dead Joyce’s face and how many were copies made from the original(s). The history of four masks now in Zurich (two), Dublin and Washington is clear. Two masks went to Giedion-Welcker, the person who had commissioned them, and remained in her possession for a long time. She donated one to the Joyce Tower & Museum at Sandycove when it opened in 1962, while the second one was given to the Zurich James Joyce © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_16
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Foundation by her children in 1985. Another mask was acquired by Edmund Brauchbar who subsequently gave it to the Library of Congress in Washington: Edmund Brauchbar, formerly a pupil of Joyce’s in Zurich, acquired a plaster death mask and arranged for his son, Rudolph, to ship the item to the United States in January 1942. Paperwork required to facilitate the shipment indicates that Paul Speck produced the mask and that is was valued at 300 Swiss francs. Brauchbar, who was living in Forest Hills, New York at the time, subsequently gave the mask to the United States Library of Congress on April 19, 1946, where it resides today.4
A fourth mask went to the photographer Hans Finsler and after his death was given to Zurich’s Zentralbibliothek.5 In addition to these four masks whose provenance and present location is certain there is incomplete evidence of at least another four.6 A fifth was in the possession of Professor Rudolf Stamm, Basel (1909–1991) and is now kept in the English Department of the University of Basel.7 A sixth belonged to the painter Wilhelm Gimmi who had received it from the sculptor Hans Gisler (1889–1969);8 its current whereabouts are unknown. I have also not been able to locate a seventh which Fritz Senn remembers seeing in Lausanne9 nor do I know what happened to an eighth which was sold at an auction in 2001 and then taken back by Sotheby’s (see below). The death masks have been the source of controversies. For one thing, they caused a certain antagonism between the Joyce family and Carola Giedion-Welcker. Giedion-Welcker soon after Joyce’s death asked Nora to repay the 15,700 Swiss francs the Giedions had contributed to the sum demanded by the Fremdenpolizei in 1940 and “followed her demand for repayment with a refusal to let Nora and Giorgio have either of the Joyce death masks. She had paid for them and would not relinquish them while the Joyces owed her money”.10 The Joyces never received one of the original masks, and Giorgio later lamented that “the original had been stolen from him”.11 Giedion-Welcker, on the other hand, maintained that she herself “had only intended that the masks be made so that they might go to a museum or a library[.]”12 Controversies of a different kind erupted when death masks were offered for sale. According to Fritz Senn, the mask which had been given to the Joyce Tower & Museum “suddenly turned up in an auction, an action which no doubt was unjustified”.13 Also, in 2001 the National
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Library of Ireland bought one of the death masks at an auction at Sotheby’s for no less than £55,000—on the understanding that it was one of the originals. When it turned out that the mask was, in fact, only a copy of one of the originals, Sotheby’s agreed to cancel the sale.14 Copies of the mask in bronze and silver are also in circulation, but are valued less despite being made of more valuable material. A silver mask also offered at the 2001 auction “failed to reach its much lower reserve price of £7,000-£9,000”.15 A silver mask was on display at the Limerick Museum in 2012, and the Zurich James Joyce Foundation has a bronze mask which was among the Joyceana donated by Hans E. Jahnke.
Notes 1. On Speck see SIKART Künstlerlexikon der Schweiz, http://www.sikart.ch, last accessed on 6 February 2019. 2. Giedion-Welcker, ed., In Memoriam, 5. 3. The photograph is reproduced in Giedion-Welcker, ed., In Memoriam, frontispiece and in Ellmann, Joyce, liv. 4. This information, from a typed text found in the curatorial file for the mask, was made available to me by Richard North, Head, Reference and Reader Services of the Library of Congress (private communication 23 November 2018). 5. This information was made available to me by Dr Jochen Hesse, Leiter, Graphische Sammlung und Fotoarchiv of the Zentralbibliothek Zürich (private communication 18 February 2019). 6. My numbering of the masks is random. 7. Dr Renate Wiemken-Stamm, Rudolf Stamm’s daughter, kindly went through Stamm’s papers in the Universitätsbibliothek Basel for me, but found no documentation that could have shed light on how and when Stamm acquired the mask. 8. See the article on Gimmi for details. On Gisler see SIKART Künstlerlexikon der Schweiz, http://www.sikart.ch, last accessed on 2 March 2019. 9. Senn in O’Neill, ed., Murmoirs, 201. 10. Maddox, Nora, 347f. 11. Senn in O’Neill, ed., Murmoirs, 53. See also 209. 12. Maddox, Nora, 366. 13. Senn in O’Neill, ed., Murmoirs, 201. Senn further reports that the mask was withdrawn from the auction and was “safely restored to the museum, a trifle yellowed by the sea air”. 14. My information on this auction comes from Kathy Donaghy, “Fake Joyce death mask sale cancelled” in The Independent, 18 July 2001, http://
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www.independent.ie/irish-news/fake-joyce-death-mask-sale-cancelled-26080645.html, last accessed on 6 February 2019. 15. Jane Wildgoose, “The business of the flesh” in The Guardian, International Edition, 31 October 2002, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2002/oct/31/1, last accessed on 6 February 2019.
2.13 English Players
The English Players were an English language theatre company founded in wartime Zurich for partly propagandistic, partly commercial reasons. The British Consulate General in Zurich supported the war effort by staging or encouraging activities that would show Great Britain in a positive light: The painter Frank Budgen, for example, was engaged in placing articles in Swiss newspapers with the aim of convincing the Swiss “that it was pleasanter and more profitable to be friends with the Allies than with the Germans”,1 in 1918 a collection of modern British paintings was exhibited in the “principal towns of Switzerland”,2 and in late 1917 or early 1918 the Consulate General encouraged the actor Claud Sykes to set up a local theatre company.3 Sykes contacted Joyce,4 and the two men thus formed a partnership, Sykes to be producer and director, Joyce […] to be business manager of the new company, which at his suggestion was named the English Players. The enterprise had from the start a patriotic air; Joyce had received letters from the consulate in 1916 and 1917, asking him if he would be willing to serve and ordering him in any event to report for a physical examination, and he had also received Edmund Gosse’s hint that his Treasury grant implied an obligation.5
The enterprise was also commercial, the expectation being that the company would support itself and that it would be a source of income at least for some people: The professionals among the actors would earn an © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_17
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actual fee, while the amateurs would receive a small sum for their expenses.6 As described by Otto Luening, a direct witness, Joyce took a very active role in the company from the very beginning until the Joyces’ departure for Trieste in October 1919: He was entrepreneur, then founder, and later business manager and treasurer. He was active in one way or another in every production during his stay in Zurich, even after he had severed his official connection with the company.7 He assisted Sykes in directing and costuming the plays, gave suggestions about the sets and the actors’ movements, served as prompter in every production and as an incomparable diction coach for what was a heterogeneous group, and personally sold tickets. He exerted great influence on Sykes in choosing the plays. […] His devotion to the English Players was obviously rooted in his love of the theater, for it took much energy to sustain the company. Joyce’s relationship to most of the actors was less that of the famous literary figure he later became than that of a brilliant Irish writer and English teacher who sang, was dedicated to the English theater, and wanted it to be properly represented in the international artistic circles of Zurich.8
The English Players did not have a stable ensemble. Some of the actors were professionals, for example Claud Sykes, his wife who went by the name of Daisy Race, Charles Fleming, Ethel Turner or Tristan Rawson, a singer at the Zurich Stadttheater. Others were amateurs, such as Henry Carr, an employee at the Consulate General who played Algernon Moncrieff in The Importance of Being Earnest, Joyce’s wife Nora, who performed in Synge’s Riders to the Sea,9 or the American musician, composer and conductor Otto Luening, who used the stage name James P. Cleveland because of his “sometimes conflicting duties as a member of the opera and symphony orchestras”.10 The company also did not have a permanent home. The plays were performed in one of two Zurich theatres, the Kaufleuten or the Pfauen, and there were a number of “additional performances in perhaps a dozen other Swiss cities during 1918 through 1919”.11 The English Players started with a production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest in April 2018 and despite difficulties of all kinds the company existed until early 1920.12 In the first programme an ambitious plan for future productions was announced: She Stoops to Conquer, Pippa Passes, The Pigeon, The Heather Field, Riders to the Sea, The Dark Lady of the Sonnets and Joyce’s own Exiles.13 As the following
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complete list of productions shows, most of them and a series of others did in fact see the light of day (Table 1):14 The most memorable part of Joyce’s involvement with the English Players is certainly his quarrel with Henry Carr, but all told it was probably a positive experience: He came into contact with others speakers of Table 1 The English Players in Zurich: A list of productions Date of the Zurich performance 29 April 1918 17 June 1918
Programme
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest triple bill: J. M. Barrie, The Twelve-Pound Look John M. Synge, Riders to the Sea George Bernard Shaw, The Dark Lady of the Sonnets 30 September 1918 George Bernard Shaw, Mrs Warren’s Profession 3 December 1918 Stanley Houghton, Hindle Wakes 11 December 1918 triple bill:a Felice Cavallotti, Il Cantico dei Cantici Théodore de Banville, Le Baiser Robert Browning, In a Balcony 1 February 1919 G. K. Chesterton, Magic 10 March 1919 Edward Martyn, The Heather Field 17 April 1919 Hubert Henry Davies, The Mollusc 7 May 1919 double bill: Davies, The Mollusc (revival) H. C. Sargeant and Arthur Morrison, That Brute Simmons 26 May 1919 Oliver Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer 23 June 1919 triple bill: J. M. Barrie, The Twelve-Pound Look (revival) Stanley Houghton, The Dear Departed George Bernard Shaw, Overruled 6 October 1919 Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (revival) 10 November 1919 double bill: Arnold Bennett, The Title H. C. Sargeant and Arthur Morrison, That Brute Simmons (revival) 8 December 1919 double bill: George Bernard Shaw, The Man of Destiny Stanley Houghton, Fancy Free
Venue Kaufleuten Pfauen
Kaufleuten Kaufleuten Kaufleuten
Kaufleuten Kaufleuten Pfauen Pfauen
Pfauen Pfauen
Pfauen Pfauen
Pfauen
a This trilingual triple bill was performed by three different sets of people: Il Cantico by Italian amateurs coached by Joyce, Le Baiser by two actors from the Théâtre-Français de Zurich, In A Balcony by the English Players
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English, he could use his knowledge of English and Irish literature for selecting plays15 and for writing programme notes,16 and he contributed to the productions as manager, voice coach and prompter. In 1918, until his withdrawal because of the Carr affair, he devoted a good part of his time to it and also supported it financially.17 In a minor way, aspects of his theatrical adventure also found their way into his works: One of his strangest poems, “A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight”, was inspired by the performance of Browning’s In a Balcony,18 and some protagonists in his quarrel with Henry Carr ended up as minor characters in Ulysses.19
Notes 1. Budgen, Joyce, 34f. 2. Budgen, Joyce, 10. 3. Gorman (Definitive Biography, 241) writes: “All the belligerents adopted the tactics of trying to justify themselves and their causes by intensive cultural and artistic propaganda. During this year, 1917, for instance, the Zurich municipal theatre received visits from Max Reinhardt’s dramatic company, the Comédie-Française, the Burgtheater, the Theater an der Wien, and the Milan Scala. Other companies from France, Germany and Austria visited the town”. 4. Sykes and Joyce had met in 1917 and Sykes had helped Joyce by typing the first three episodes of Ulysses; see the article on Sykes for details. 5. Ellmann, Joyce, 423. 6. According to Otto Luening (Odyssey, 187) “members of the company were offered the opportunity to purchase shares for fifty francs. In addition to sharing the profits, they were paid a nominal fee and expenses”. 7. Note AF: This happened in December 1918 as a result of Joyce’s quarrel with Henry Carr who had played Algernon Moncrieff in the company’s production of The Importance of Being Earnest. 8. Luening, Odyssey, 200. See also Budgen, Joyce, 201. 9. According to Luening (Odyssey, 186) she was “remarkably convincing in the Synge play”, while “the others needed much coaching”. There is a photograph of Nora as Cathleen in Maddox, Nora, between pages 204 and 205. 10. Luening, Odyssey, 186 and 189. 11. Brockman and Alonso, “Exit Carr”. 12. The last documented performance took place in Zurich on 8 December 1919. According to Gorman (Definitive Biography, 258) the “organization continued […] until 1920 and gave a number of excellent performances”. In a letter to Budgen dated 3 January 1920 (quoted by Ellmann, Joyce,
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473; also LI, 134 and SL, 245) Joyce wrote: “I heard nothing more from Sykes—thank God—or the English foulplayers but people tell me they still perform”. 13. Gorman, Definitive Biography, 250. 14. The list here is based on Brockman and Alonso, “Exit Carr”. It is complete for Zurich, but omits the additional performances in other Swiss cities also documented by Brockman and Alonso. 15. However, his hope that the English Players would produce his own play Exiles did not materialise. 16. Joyce’s programme notes on The Twelve-Pound Look, Riders to the Sea, The Dark Lady of the Sonnets and The Heather Field are printed in Mason and Ellmann, eds., Critical Writings, 249–252. 17. Gorman (Definitive Biography, 256 and 258f.) reports that the company’s tour through Switzerland with The Importance of Being Earnest in the summer of 1918 “resulted in a financial loss which was borne by Joyce and Sykes” and also that Joyce turned over to the English Players “the greater part” of the sum of a thousand dollars which he had received from the American Schofield Thayer in 1919 to help him in his difficulties with Carr and the British Consulate. 18. In Pomes Penyeach “A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight” is dated “Zurich, 1917”, but the performance of In a Balcony only took place on 11 December 1918. 19. See “Zurich in Joyce” for details.
2.14 Bernhard Fehr
Having held posts at the universities of Dresden, Strassburg and St Gallen, the Swiss Bernhard Fehr (1876–1938) was made Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Zurich in 1922 and taught there until his death in 1938. He was a brilliant, highly productive scholar and teacher whose interests ranged widely, including the modern literature of his time.1 He was among the first scholars in the German-speaking world to recognise the momentousness of Ulysses, as is demonstrated by a long article published in the journal Englische Studien in 1925/26. In rhapsodic language he calls the novel “a work of boundless genius” and “a gigantic statue in the fog, a sphinx in the desert, a sinister comet in our modern sky”2 and then discusses in detail three features that in his opinion make Ulysses such an extraordinary book, namely Joyce’s handling of space and time, his presentation of states of consciousness and his use of different styles.3 Fehr also praised Ulysses in an article in the daily Basler Nachrichten (1925) and in his survey Die englische Literatur der Gegenwart (1930).4 Given Fehr’s high opinion of Joyce and Joyce’s occasional presence in Zurich in the 1930s it is not surprising that the two men became personally acquainted. It is not known exactly when and how they met, but accounts of Ellmann and Giedion-Welcker give us the flavour or their meetings. Ellmann reports that during one of Joyce’s visits to Zurich
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Bernard [sic] Fehr, professor of English at the University of Zurich, brought [Joyce] to a concert where they heard Othmar Schoeck’s Lied-Zyklus Lebendig-Begraben (opus 40), a suite of fourteen songs by Gottfried Keller for male voice and orchestra. Joyce was amazed by them and later translated them. He made a point of meeting Schoeck, the only modern composer besides Antheil for whom he had any taste. He congratulated Schoeck on composing for the singing voice, unlike Stravinsky, whose works, he said, ‘not even a canary could sing.’ With his usual pertinacity, he sought to persuade Schoeck to write the opera based on Byron’s Cain which Antheil had abandoned, and searched second-hand bookstores in Zurich until he found it in German translation. But Schoeck was not attracted.5
Giedion-Welcker adds a few more details: In 1935 Joyce accompanied Professor Fehr to a concert of songs by Schoeck (1886–1957) and was so impressed by them that he bought the music, had Schoeck autograph it, and then sent it to Giorgio. He told Giorgio that Schoeck stood ‘head and shoulders over Stravinsky and Antheil as a composer for orchestra and voice’. (Letters I, 356)6
Giedion-Welcker also recalls a meeting, undated, which shows the two men as friends in a very relaxed, even boisterous mood: Another evening at a cafe […] seemed destined to produce literary discussion since the small group of friends gathered there included a poet and a professor of English literature, James Joyce and Bernhard Fehr. However, the two, who were great connoiseurs [sic] of opera and lovers of Verdi’s music, would not allow the least bit of ‘shop talk.’ The dialogue was exclusively about music, and the two partners, unconcerned about the others in the cafe—probably to their delight—sang to each other part after part from various of the master’s operas. As we were leaving the mood of gaiety reached its peak when the poet lay down on the roof of our car and, pointing to the stars, insisted on being driven to our house in Zurichberg in that precarious horizontal position. After an elegant balancing act on the way up, we landed safely in the Doldertal with our precious load. There the discussion turned to lighter kinds of music, while Professor Fehr began playing dance tunes. After executing an original waltz step—more with himself than with me—Joyce then took the stage as solo dancer, belaboring the inside of his stiff straw hat with wild jumps and kicks so that in the end, after these rhythmical and astonishingly acrobatic exercises, he was left with only a straw wreath in his hand, which he triumphantly held aloft and then as a finale placed on his head.
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[…] Hardly had the dance interlude ended, however, when the singing began, with Joyce delivering Irish folk songs and some he himself had composed.7
In 1936, Stanislaus feared that he might be expelled from Italy because of his anti-fascist stance and was looking for a post in Switzerland. When applying for a job as a teacher in a private school on Zugerberg he named Fehr as one of his references.8 When Bernhard Fehr died on 30 May 1938 Joyce lost a sympathetic supporter in Zurich. In a letter dated 5 March 1939 he asked Carola Giedion-Welcker: “Who has Prof. Fehr’s place as Professor of English at Z’ch University now? Can you find out?”9 Fehr’s successor Heinrich Straumann, appointed at the beginning of the winter semester 1938/39, would help Joyce move back to Zurich in 1940.
Notes 1. See Fischer, Es begann, 52–54 for details. 2. Fehr, “James Joyces Ulysses”, 181; my translations. In the original German Fehr calls Ulysses “ein grenzenlos geniales Werk” and—even when compared with the works of Petronius, Sterne, Byron, Flaubert, Baudelaire and Proust—“eine Riesenstatue im Nebel, eine Sphinx in der Wüste, ein unheimlicher Komet an unserem Zeithimmel”. 3. Fehr’s assessment of Ulysses can be compared with that of Carola Giedion- Welcker (1928); it contrasts sharply with the more critical judgements of well-known men of letters such as Stefan Zweig (1928) or Carl Gustav Jung (1932). 4. Fehr’s writings on Joyce are collected in Füger, ed., Kritisches Erbe. 5. Ellmann, Joyce, 669. The account is based on an interview with Othmar Schoeck by Dr Alfred Dutli, 1955. Ellmann dates the concert to April 1934, but it took place on 14 January 1935 and Joyce visited Schoeck the following day. See the article on Schoeck for details. 6. Giedion-Welcker, “Meetings with Joyce”, 268, note 19. 7. Giedion-Welcker, “Meetings with Joyce”, 273f. 8. Letter to James dated 15 November 1936 (LIII, 392f.). For details see “Joyce in Zurich”. 9. LIII, 437. Joyce repeated the question in March 1940 (LIII, 470).
2.15 Siegmund Feilbogen
Siegmund Feilbogen (1858–1928) was a distinguished Austrian academic who was one of Joyce’s many Jewish friends in Zurich. From 1888 onwards he had been a professor of political economy at the Wiener Exportakademie (now the Vienna University of Economics and Business), but was sidelined in 1908 after a scandal with antisemitic overtones: On a visit to Rome, Feilbogen’s sister-in-law erroneously accepted a consecrated wafer and disposed of it in her handkerchief. This incident became a scandal in the press and in the Austrian Parliament, as a result of which Feilbogen was put on leave and then forced to retire early. He was a pacifist and came to Zurich as an émigré in 1915, where he made a living as a writer, translator and editor until his death in 1928.1 Soon after his arrival he became the editor of a “neutralist”2 periodical named Internationale Rundschau/International Review which was published in Zurich between 1915 and 1918.3 Joyce found work there as a translator of articles into English, and through this he also met Felix Beran, another Austrian, who assisted Feilbogen in editing. Joyce’s financial situation improved in the course of 1916 and he did not need to work as a translator any longer, but he “continued to see a good deal of Feilbogen, whom he liked[.]”4 The feeling was obviously mutual: In 1917, 1918 and 1919 Feilbogen published three articles on Joyce in German and Austrian newspapers, which may well mark the beginning of Joyce criticism in the German-speaking world.5
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One of a series of notes entitled “Zurich Figures” composed by Joyce for Frank Budgen (and written out by Lucia) contains a mischievous sketch of Feilbogen: Sigmund [sic] Feilbogen Ear trumpet which he oriented and occidented night and day to catch rumours of peace anywhere at any hour. The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune had hit him hard. Said to have lost his proffesorship [sic] in the higher school of Commerce in Vienna because his wife (Rubens type with one eye gone West) urged by female curiosity half consumed the host the pope gave her in St. Peter’s and then spat it into her handkerchief.6
In his book Budgen omitted Joyce’s references to the scandal, however, and made Feilbogen simply one of a series of colourful figures that populated wartime Zurich: One time professor in the higher school of commerce in Vienna, Sigmund Feilbogen haunts the Café des Banques, with an eartrumpet which he orients and occidents night and day to catch rumours of peace anywhere at any hour.7
Late in life Joyce immortalised Feilbogen in the Wake,8 and was greatly amused to see that in Herbert Gorman’s Definitive Biography the economist and journalist “was alluded to as an astronomer! An ear trumpet has been mistaken for a telescope!”9 Gorman had written: [Joyce] was to be seen often in the streets and restaurants of Zurich, sitting […], walking […] or mounting to the Observatory with his son to see the stars and listen to the old Austrian astronomer Siegmund Feilbogen, the pacifist, say, ‘How can people look at them and say there is no God?’10
Notes 1. The dates of Feilbogen’s arrival in Switzerland and of his death come from the files of the Zurich registry office (Einwohner- und Fremdenkontrolle der Stadt Zürich), via the city archive (Stadtarchiv). 2. See Manganiello, Joyce’s Politics, 151. 3. According to Ellmann (Joyce, 398), the review, which “was devoted chiefly to proving that the atrocity stories on both sides were groundless […] was
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short-lived: while the Germans allowed it to circulate freely, the English and American authorities considered it enemy propaganda and refused to admit it”. Ellmann is wrong in stating that the Review “failed early in 1916 after less than a year of publication”; even though the Central Powers banned it for a while in 1916, it was published until 1918 (personal communication Andreas Weigel 7 April 2020). The politics of the Review and Joyce’s own political views are discussed in Manganiello, Joyce’s Politics, 150–160. The translations into English were overseen by the Englishman Cecil Palmer (Ellmann, Joyce, 422f.). 4. Ellmann, Joyce, 398. 5. See Weigel, “Porträt des Künstlers als Österreich-Tourist”, 142. The three items are a review of A Portrait in Berliner Tageblatt of 2 June 1917, a review of Exiles in Berliner Tageblatt of 12 September 1918 and an article entitled “Ein Dichter im Exil. James Joyce und seine Werke” in Neues Wiener Tagblatt of 29 June 1919. They are not contained in Füger’s otherwise very comprehensive anthology Kritisches Erbe. Füger must have missed these items, for he writes in his “Introduction” (6) that the earliest item documenting the reception of Joyce in the German-speaking world is a review of the German translation of Exiles in Neue Zürcher Zeitung of 31 March 1919. 6. Budgen, Joyce (“Introduction” by Clive Hart), xivf. 7. Budgen, Joyce, xv and 29. 8. “Not forgetting the oils of greas under that turkey in julep and Father Freeshots Feilbogen in his rockery garden with the costard?” (FW 464.28–30). 9. Letter to Daniel Brody dated 3 March 1940 (LI, 409 and SL, 405); so also in a letter in French to Edmund Brauchbar dated 30 July 1940 (LIII, 479). 10. Gorman, Definitive Biography, 237.
2.16 Martha Fleischmann
Somewhat surprisingly, the name Martha Fleischmann (1885–1950) does not occur in Frank Budgen’s James Joyce of 1934. In his “Joyce and Martha Fleischmann” of 1967 he admits that he “had not intended ever to allude to the Martha Fleischmann episode in Joyce’s life”, were it not for “the publication of Ellman’s biography and, later the publication of the Professor Straumann collection of Joyce’s letters to Martha “which “render[ed] any further discretion on [his] part otiose”.1 What, then, was the “Martha Fleischmann episode” and why did Budgen feel that he had to be discreet? From October 1918 onwards the Joyces lived in an apartment in Universitätstrasse 29, a house from which one can see the backs of houses in nearby Culmannstrasse. Budgen reports that Joyce saw Martha for the first time “at the back of the house. She was in a small but well-lit room in the act of pulling a chain”.2 This chance encounter gave birth to “the Martha Fleischmann episode”, which according to Ellmann introduced “a half-comic, half-pathetic note” into Joyce’s life.3 He developed an infatuation with Martha, the two exchanged letters and eventually met. Three of Joyce’s four surviving letters to Martha are dated, by Straumann, to December 1918.4 Written in elaborate, somewhat wooden French and partly in even more wooden and sentimental German they testify to Joyce’s romantic infatuation and to his attempts to get to know her.5 In the first letter he writes: “I had a fever yesterday evening, waiting for a sign from you. / But why do you not want to write even one word to © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_20
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me—your name? And why do you always close your shutters? I want to see you. […] I would like to talk to you. […] Write to me at the address I give you”. In the second letter: “What is the matter? / You gave me no sign of greeting!” And in the third: “What has been the matter with you? / I am still not sure, but I think I saw you this evening. / I was afraid to write to you, since I did not know who was with you, and thought my letters might fall into the hands of strangers. / I have watched for you every evening”.6 On 2 February 1919 (Candlemas and also, not coincidentally, his birthday) Joyce arranged a romantic meeting in Budgen’s studio near Bellevue. From Rudolf Goldschmidt he borrowed a seven-branched candlestick (in one of his letters he had wondered whether Martha was Jewish) and he wanted the studio decorated with a picture “with a nude woman on it[.]” Since Budgen did not have one, he made a charcoal drawing, choosing “for Joyce’s benefit and to simplify matters for myself […] a recumbent position and a rear aspect, to which I accorded as much bulk as I reasonably could. Try to please the customers”.7 Joyce then went to fetch Martha, who turned out to be “of an agreeable appearance even if no great beauty. […] She was comely but not at all sprightly, certainly no bleaching lassie of a Nausikaa, no sex kitten”. The meeting in Budgen’s studio lasted for only about half an hour, “our conversation was limited to the usual banalities”, and when “Joyce’s timetable demanded closure […] they left. […] I met Joyce again with others later that same evening and he told me in an aside that he had explored that evening the coldest and the hottest parts of a woman’s body”.8 Joyce’s last surviving letter to Martha, ending with “O rosa mistica, ora pro me!” is (also) dated 2 February.9 He gave or sent her a copy of the German translation of Exiles, with a dedication dated 28 March.10 The affair (if it can be called that) came to an end in June 1919, when Rudolf Hiltpold, the man Martha was living with and who called himself her guardian (Vormund),11 sent Joyce “a threatening violent letter”. Martha, he wrote to Joyce, had been “in a madhouse or Nervenanstalt but [was] now back again threatening suicide”. Joyce, who had not seen Martha “since the feast of candles” went to see Hiltpold and returned all letters; in his own words the result of the obviously tense meeting was “stasis: Waffenstillstand”.12 A few months later, in October, the Joyces left Zurich for Trieste. In December 1941, 11 months after Joyce’s death, Heinrich Straumann, then professor of English language and literature at the University of
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Zurich, was contacted by an unknown lady who introduced herself as Martha Fleischmann. She told him that she was “in possession of four letters and a postcard addressed to her by James Joyce, and of a copy of Chamber Music inscribed by the poet”.13 Being “financially not in the best circumstances” she was looking for a buyer of these items. Nothing came of it then, but in 1948 they were offered to Straumann again by Martha’s sister Elsa, and Straumann subsequently bought them.14 The sisters, both unmarried, had fallen on hard times; Martha died in 1950, Elsa in 1951. In his introduction to the edition of the letters Straumann reports on what he could find out about Martha. She had grown up in comfortable circumstances. Her education, however, was rather slighter than that of the average Swiss girl of that time. She knew very little French and no English, but devoted a good deal of her time to reading German books. After the death of her mother she inherited enough money to live independently. […] During the first World War she made the acquaintance of a business man who lived in the same house [the Rudolf Hiltpold mentioned above, AF] and to whom she became profoundly and permanently attached.15
Despite the clash with Hiltpold in June 1919, Joyce and Martha appear to have been in touch again in 1930 and perhaps later. Their contact was renewed by Martha, who wrote to Joyce in February 1930 to recommend the eye surgeon Alfred Vogt.16 Joyce reciprocated in April by having two [!] copies of the German Ulysses sent to Martha and to Rudolf Hiltpold.17 Martha furthermore would mention to her relatives that Joyce “had several times come to tea with her at her flat, and he again used to call on her on his visits to Zürich from Paris in the 1930s when he was receiving treatment for his eye-trouble. He also invited her to visit him in Paris”.18 For his writing Joyce drew inspiration from life, and occasionally—as in this case—he appears to have stage-managed life to create experiences. This is evident from the way Budgen introduces his memories of Martha Fleischmann: Leaving the Pfauen one night I walked in company with Nora Joyce. She became tearful and through her tears she told me that Jim wanted her to ‘go with other men so that he would have something to write about’. Joyce, pretending to be more drunk than he was, was shuffling up in the rear, hoping, presumably, to catch some helpful words. […] To my mind there were in Joyce’s affair with Marthe [sic] Fleischmann similar literary intentions.19
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The results of these “literary intentions” are to be seen in Ulysses: Joyce’s “affair” (especially the clandestine exchange of letters) with Martha shows similiarities with that of Bloom and Martha [!] Clifford,20 and Martha Fleischmann is clearly one of the models for Gerty McDowell in “Nausicaa”.21
Notes 1. Budgen, “Joyce and Martha Fleischmann”, 194. “Joyce and Martha Fleischmann” was incorporated, almost verbatim, in Budgen’s Myselves, 187–196. In Ellmann, Joyce, the episode is discussed on 448–452. 2. Budgen, “Joyce and Martha Fleischmann”, 191. Martha Fleischmann lived at Culmannstrasse 6. 3. LII, 347. 4. In the one dated 9 December 1918 he addresses her as Marthe (“Arme liebe Marthe”). 5. They may also be seen as exercises for the style Joyce would later use in “Nausicaa”. 6. Straumann “Four Letters”, 431–436: “J’avais de la fièvre hier soir, en attendant votre signe. […] Je voudrais vous parler. […] Ecrivez-moi un mot à l’adresse que je vous donne”. Later “Qu’y a-t-il? Vous ne m’avez pas salué! / Je descends avec cette lettre a la porte”. And, probably on 9 December, “Ich bin noch unsicher aber glaube dass ich Sie gesehen habe heute abend. / Ich hatte Angst Ihnen zu schreiben weil ich wusste nicht wer bei Ihnen war und dachte dass meine Briefe in die Hände von fremde Leute kommen könnten. / Jedes Abend habe ich geschaut”. The English translations are by Christopher Middleton. 7. Budgen, “Joyce and Martha Fleischmann”, 192. 8. Budgen, “Joyce and Martha Fleischmann”, 193. 9. This is from the Litany of the Blessed Virgin, dear to Joyce and also a cherished prayer of Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait (Ellmann, Joyce, 393). 10. The book is kept in the Zentralbibliothek Zürich. 11. Dr Alfred Dutli, Ellmann’s researcher in Zurich, learned from a friend of Martha’s, a Mrs Gisi, that Hiltpold was “a braggart, conceited, impertinent, arrogant, brutal” and also “excessively jealous”, while Martha was “amiable, sensitive, frank, like a shy bird” (letter to Ellmann dated 2 September 1954, Dutli papers in the Zurich James Joyce Foundation). 12. Budgen, “Joyce and Martha Fleischmann”, 194, where he cites a letter of Joyce’s dated 19 June 1919. Ellmann, Joyce, 452f. quotes the same passage and also gives a facsimile of the letter. The whole letter is printed in SL, 238f.
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13. Straumann, “Four Letters”, 427. 14. Straumann could buy the four letters, but the postcard, unfortunately, was missing. According to notes he made when he was first contacted by Martha (“Four Letters”, 428), it contained “greetings sent to ‘Nausikaa’ by ‘Odysseus’. There was no proper signature of James Joyce”. 15. Straumann, “Four Letters”, 429f. 16. See Ellmann, Joyce, 622: “Then in February 1930, as a result of an article about Joyce in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, he had letters from two Swiss friends. George Borach wrote to urge Joyce to see Professor Alfred Vogt, a brilliant Swiss surgeon in Zurich who took spectacular chances and often achieved spectacular results. The second letter was from a stranger source, Marthe Fleischmann; it was written with formality, recalling that they had once been ‘neighbours’ in Zurich, and told of several of Vogt’s miraculous cures. She signed the letter, ‘Mit den freundlichen Grüssen’”.According to Ellmann, Borach’s letter is dated 11 February 1930, Martha’s 14 February 1930. 17. Letter by Lucia Joyce to Adrienne Monnier dated 16 April 1930 (LIII, 511). 18. Straumann, “Four Letters”, 430. 19. Here quoted from Budgen, Myselves, 188. This version of events is clearer than the one in “Joyce and Martha Fleischmann”, 189. 20. One telling detail is the fact that both Joyce and Bloom use “Greek ees” (U 11.860) when writing their letters. 21. For a subtle explication of the connections between the Fleischmann affair and the portrait of Gerty McDowell see Senn, “Nausicaa”, 287–290.
2.17 Fluntern Cemetery
Fluntern Cemetery on Zürichberg is one of Zurich’s smaller graveyards. It was opened in 1887 as the cemetery of the then independent village of Fluntern, and was subsequently enlarged three times. Having died in the Rotkreuzspital in Fluntern on 13 January 1941, Joyce was buried there on 15 January. His first grave was a simple one, marked by a plain slab.1 Nora, who remained in Zurich after James’s death and died there on 10 April 1951, was also buried in Fluntern, but the people attending her funeral were “dismayed that there was no room in the grave beside Joyce; Nora had to be buried in a new plot about fifty yards away”.2 Twenty-five years after Joyce’s death, however, the bodies of James and Nora were moved to a new honorary grave (Ehrengrab) in the central, older part of the cemetery,3 which was unveiled on Bloomsday 1966.4 The most prominent feature of the new grave is a bronze statue of a seated Joyce by the American sculptor Milton Elting Hebald (1917–2015) donated to the family and the city by the gallerist and art dealer Lee Nordness (1922–1995). Hebald, better known in the United States than in Europe, specialised in figurative bronze works, some of which are on display in public spaces: Two of his sculptures, “Romeo and Juliet” and “The Tempest”, are to be found in front of the Delacorte Theater in New York’s Central Park, and a large 12-piece “Zodiac Screen” once decorated the Pan-American Terminal at Idlewild (now John F. Kennedy International Airport).5 Hebald’s statue of Joyce initially did not meet with everyone’s approval,6 but it has stood the test of time: Instead of a © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_21
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plain slab or an abstract monument, visitors to the grave encounter a life- size, relaxed Joyce, seated with crossed legs, a cigarette in his left hand and an open book in his right, looking at them almost as if he was alive (Fig. 1).7 Joyce and Nora’s grave later became a family grave: In 1976 their son Giorgio was buried there, and in 1993 also Giorgio’s second wife Asta Joyce-Osterwalder.8 In 1994 the writer Elias Canetti (1905–1994) was laid to rest near Joyce, and that part of Fluntern Cemetery has thus become a kind of “Poets’ Corner”. Over the years there have been several initiatives, all unsuccessful, to have Joyce’s remains taken to Ireland. Commenting on the latest of these, John McCourt has written:
Fig. 1 Ezra Pound at Joyce’s grave in Fluntern Cemetery, photograph by Horst Tappe (© KEYSTONE-SDA/Horst Tappe)
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When he was asked whether he might ever return to Ireland, Joyce’s answer came in form of a question: ‘Have I ever left it?’ In many ways he never did leave and in any case, Dublin will always belong to Joyce. It is fitting that Zurich, the last European city to give Joyce and his family refuge, should be the one where he lies in rest, eternally.9
Fluntern Cemetery lies very near the Zurich zoo (opened in 1929). When visiting Joyce’s grave together with the journalist Sandy Campbell in 1948, Nora said: “I often think he must like the cemetery he is in. It is near the zoo and you can hear the lions roar”.10 According to Brenda Maddox, this image reveals the power of Nora’s imagination. The woman whose memory of a dead lover in a lonely graveyard led to one of the most beautiful passages in English literature casually conjured up for a total stranger a vision of her husband lying in his grave, enjoying the sound of lions, perhaps chuckling to himself. It suggests that Nora herself may have evoked for Joyce the final scene in ‘The Dead,’ the snow falling on the grave of Michael Furey.11
Nora’s “vision” of Joyce in his grave and the roar of lions has inspired later writers, from Derek Walcott (“Volcano”) to Raymond Carver (“In Switzerland”)12: Volcano Joyce was afraid of thunder, but lions roared at his funeral from the Zurich zoo. Was it Zurich or Trieste? No matter. These are legends, as much as the death of Joyce is a legend, or the strong rumour that Conrad is dead, and that Victory is ironic. […]13 In Switzerland First thing to do in Zurich is take the No. 5 “Zoo” trolley to the end of the track, and get off. Been warned about
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the lions. How their roars carry over from the zoo compound to the Flutern [sic] Cemetery. Where I walk along the very beautiful path to James Joyce’s grave. […]14
Notes 1. See the picture in LIII, facing page 505. 2. Maddox, Nora, 371. 3. This central part is in the shape of the plan of a Romanesque cathedral with a semicircular “apse” at the upper end; Joyce’s honorary grave is in the “apse”. 4. See “Zurich after Joyce” for details. 5. It is now owned and stored by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. For Hebald see the obituaries in The New York Times of 15 January 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/16/arts/design/miltonhebald-sculptor-in-plain-view-dies-at-97.html, and in The Telegraph of 16 January 2015, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/ 11351698/Milton-Hebald-sculptor-obituary.html, both last accessed on 22 April 2020. 6. Senn (in O’Neill, ed., Murmoirs, 45) reports, for example, that Carola Giedion-Welcker “strongly objected” to it and that Maria Jolas agreed with her. 7. Joyce was fascinated by Othmar Schoeck’s song cycle “Lebendig begraben”, which is based on poems by Gottfried Keller. At Fluntern, Joyce is buried (“begraben”), but through Hebald’s statue he appears to be alive (“lebendig”). 8. Lucia, who died in 1982, is buried in Northampton, “by her own choice” (Maddox, Nora, 400). 9. https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/james-joyce-should-be-left-torest-in-peace-in-zurich-1.4059420, last accessed on 4 March 2020. On an early attempt, by Nora, see Maddox, Nora, 362f. 10. Quoted from Maddox, Nora, 362. 11. Maddox, Nora, 362. The penultimate chapter of Maddox’s biography is entitled “The Sound of Lions”.
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12. I would like to thank Martin Mühlheim, who drew my attention to these (and other) texts inspired by Joyce in Zurich. 13. Derek Walcott, “Volcano”, Collected Poems 1948–1984 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986), 324f. 14. Raymond Carver, “In Switzerland”, Where Water Comes Together with Other Water (New York: Vintage, 1986), 69–71.
2.18 Max Geilinger
Trained as a lawyer, Max Geilinger (1884–1948) worked in the Zurich civil service from 1913 through 1930, but then devoted himself to literature as a poet, dramatist and translator. He was active in the literary life of Zurich, for example as president of societies such as the Lesezirkel Hottingen or the Literarische Club. Having married an Englishwoman, Frances Dalton (1884–1961), in 1913 he took a particular interest in English language and culture, evidenced by Englische Dichtung (1945), a volume of translations, and by Wandertage in England (1946).1 His Englische Dichtung contains translations of two of Joyce’s Zurich poems, “Alone” and “Bahnhofstrasse”. As a representative of the Swiss Society of Authors Geilinger spoke on the occasion of Joyce’s burial on 15 January 1941.2 In 1962, one year after Frances Dalton’s death, the Max Geilinger- Stiftung was founded to keep alive Geilinger’s work and to support literary and cultural activities which serve to connect Switzerland and the anglophone world. Two of the prize winners are Fritz Senn (1972), for his work on James Joyce, and Christopher Walton (2009), for his studies of the musical life in Switzerland and, in particular, of the composer Othmar Schoeck.
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Notes 1. On Geilinger’s life and works see Häsler, Max Geilinger, on the Max GeilingerStiftung see Fischer, Es begann mit Scott und Shakespeare, 115 f. 2. Ellmann, Joyce, 742. Geilinger’s address is not printed in Giedion-Welcker, ed., In Memoriam.
2.19 Carola Giedion-Welcker
In January 1928 an article entitled “Zum Ulysses von James Joyce” appeared in the magazine Neue Schweizer Rundschau. Its author, the art historian Carola Giedion-Welcker (1893–1979), had encountered the novel in 1925, and she was immediately fascinated: “For me [the book] was like a naked, honest revelation of life, of what is really happening; man seen through to his most secret, still embryonic thoughts – and all this with inner clairvoyance. To me it was a revelation”.1 Giedion-Welcker’s essay was not the first review of Ulysses in the German-speaking world,2 but it is easily one of the most insightful ones. Giedion-Welcker was proud of it and in the spring of 1928, only a few months after its publication, she personally took it to Sylvia Beach in Paris. By sheer coincidence Joyce was also at Shakespeare and Company at that moment and Beach introduced them to each other. This meeting was to be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.3 Carola Welcker, born in Cologne in 1893, studied art history in Munich and Bonn, where she took a PhD in 1922. In Munich she met the Swiss Sigfried Giedion (1888–1968), a fellow art historian and architecture critic; they married in 1920 and moved to Zurich in 1925, where their home in the Doldertal became a meeting place of avant-garde artists and architects.4 Giedion-Welcker and Joyce remained in contact after their first meeting and she was among those who, in early 1930, urged Joyce to come to Zurich to have his eyes examined by Dr Alfred Vogt. Vogt operated on Joyce in May 1930 and Joyce subsequently travelled to Zurich © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_23
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regularly. He became a frequent visitor at the Giedions’ home, he made new acquaintances and friends through them, and the two couples went on outings together. Giedion-Welcker was an accomplished photographer: Her pictures of Joyce at Platzspitz and of the Joyces on trips in Switzerland have become iconic instances of the pictorial record we have of Joyce (Fig. 1).5 Giedion-Welcker was also instrumental in making it possible for the Joyces to return to Switzerland in 1940 when their stay in
Fig. 1 James and Nora Joyce, Carola Giedion-Welcker and, seated front right, Hans Curjel in Lucerne, photograph by Sigfried Giedion, October 1934 (Courtesy Zurich James Joyce Foundation)
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Saint-Gérand-le-Puy became increasingly risky. A letter of invitation from her which Joyce received in the summer was more than welcome; in his reply of 28 July he thanked her for her “gentil offre d’hospitalité” and inquired “pour combien de temps il est valable”.6 The Joyce family’s return to Switzerland would prove to be arduous, but it was due mainly to Giedion-Welcker together with Paul Ruggiero, Edmund Brauchbar and others that all bureaucratic and financial obstacles were finally overcome. On 15 December 1940 the Joyces arrived in Lausanne; two days later Giedion-Welcker and Ruggiero welcomed them in Zurich. After Joyce died on 13 January she took matters in hand: She had several versions of a death mask made, she co-organised the funeral at Fluntern Cemetery, she wrote an obituary in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and she edited a booklet entitled In Memoriam. With Carola Giedion-Welcker, Joyce had gained not only a friend, but a sympathetic, enlightened critic who introduced him to a German- speaking readership7: “Like only few other people [she] had genuine insight into Joyce’s literary universe, and in her critical essays she was also able to interpret his works in the light of contemporary art”.8 Following her 1928 article on Ulysses she published one on “Work in Progress”, again in Neue Schweizer Rundschau.9 In 1930 she attended a lecture on Ulysses given in Zurich by Carl Gustav Jung and was taken aback by his hostile attitude to the novel and its author. A letter she subsequently wrote to him probably caused him to revise the lecture for its eventual publication, in 1932.10 Jung’s essay had been intended as an introduction to Georg Goyert’s German translation of Ulysses; when a revised version of the translation was published in 1956, it was accompanied by a text by Giedion-Welcker instead. Giedion-Welcker wrote in German. An English translation of her memories was published in 1979.11 In 1985 and again in 2016 Giedion-Welcker’s children donated a large number of valuable Joyceana to the Zurich James Joyce Foundation.
Notes 1. Quoted in Debrunner, “Erste Begegnung”, my translation: “Es war für mich wie eine nackte, ehrliche Enthüllung des Lebens, von dem, was wirklich geschieht, der Mensch durchschaut bis in seine geheimsten, noch embryonalen Gedanken, und dies alles mit einer inneren Hellsicht. Es war für mich etwas Ungeheures”.
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2. See, for example, the enthusiastic assessment by Bernhard Fehr (1925/26). The critical reception of Ulysses in the German-speaking world is documented, chronologically from 1921/22 to 1940, in Füger, ed., Kritisches Erbe. 3. Giedion-Welcker describes this first encounter in “Meetings with Joyce”, 256 f. In an interview given in 1973 (Kain, ed., “An Interview with Carola Giedion-Welcker and Maria Jolas”, 103 f.) she says that she was touched by the bad state of his eyes and, on leaving him, cried a little, whereupon a taxi driver comforted her with the words “Madame, ne pleurez pas. Il y en a d’autres”. In the first edition of his biography Ellmann placed this episode after Joyce’s funeral, but omitted it in later editions (Giedion-Welcker, “Meetings with Joyce”, 258, note 9 and Senn in O’Neill, ed., Murmoirs, 161). 4. For the Giedions in general see Grunewald, ed., The Giedion World, for Carola Giedon-Welcker see Bruderer, Das Neue Sehen. Giedon-Welcker’s many publications have been collected and edited by Reinhold Hohl (Giedion-Welcker, Schriften 1926–1971). For a picture of the Doldertal house see Faerber and Luchsinger, Joyce in Zürich, 108. 5. Some of these pictures are reproduced in Faerber and Luchsinger, Joyce in Zürich, 105, 111 and 124–126. See also the article on Platzspitz. 6. LI, 414. 7. For chronological lists of her publications on Joyce see Giedion-Welcker, Schriften 1926–1971, 519 and Bruderer, Das Neue Sehen, 409. The texts themselves are collected in Giedion-Welcker, Schriften 1926–1971, 11–100 (1. Themenkreis: “Prähistorie und Epos – Joyce und Brancusi”) and in Füger, ed., Kritisches Erbe. 8. Bucheli, “Grenzüberschreitende Freundschaft”, 81, my translation: “[W]ie nur wenige sonst fand Carola Giedion-Welcker einen genuinen Zugang zu Joyces literarischem Universum und besass ausserdem die Gabe, in kritischen Essays dieses Werk im Horizont des zeitgenössischen modernen Kunstschaffens zu beleuchten”. 9. “Work in Progress: Ein sprachliches Experiment von James Joyce”, Neue Schweizer Rundschau 22 (1929), 660–671. 10. See Shloss, “Joyce, Jung and Carola Giedion-Welcker”. The letter was published in Neue Zürcher Zeitung 18/19 March 2000. 11. Giedion-Welcker, “Meetings with Joyce”, in Potts, ed., Portraits. The text, translated by Wolfgang Dill, is “the result of several essays” published between 1941 and 1957. For the German version, see Giedion-Welcker, Schriften 1926–1971, 53–74.
2.20 Wilhelm Gimmi
The Swiss painter Wilhelm Gimmi (1886–1965) spent a good part of his life in France. Born in Zurich, he went to Paris between 1908 and 1910 to train as a painter at the Académie Julian, the school that was also attended by August Suter and Frank Budgen at about the same time. After a brief period back in Zurich he moved to Paris again in 1911 and stayed there until he had to leave France in 1940 on account of World War II. He spent the rest of his life in the village of Chexbres above Lake Geneva between Lausanne and Montreux. According to the art historian Gotthard Jedlicka, who reports on a meeting with Gimmi,1 the painter first encountered Joyce via an introductory article by Valéry Larbaud in the Nouvelle Revue Française.2 Sufficiently encouraged, he bought Ulysses in the French translation published in 1929 and read it at least three times. He even met the author, whom he regarded as a “writer of genius”, at a dinner party given by August Suter and his wife.3 The evening was unremarkable: There was “polite conversation”, Joyce played the piano and sang some Irish tunes and, on parting, said to Gimmi “‘j’espère qu’on se revoie”, a phrase that “is used when one does not expect to see that person again”.4 Gimmi would see Joyce again, however, if only fleetingly: Several times during walks near the École Militaire
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and the Champ de Mars, he saw Joyce in a café talking to the critic and art historian Louis Gillet.5 He went in without making himself known and made a series of sketches, “many small sketches, mostly just a few lines, which have become important for my paintings”.6 Gimmi thus knew Joyce, but was not a personal friend; his attitude towards the writer was one of great admiration combined with respectful distance.7 This might explain why it was only after his return to Switzerland and after Joyce’s death that Gimmi turned his sketches into a series of seven oil paintings and one lithograph.8 To represent Joyce’s face he relied on the death mask, a copy of which he had before him when Jedlicka met him in 1947.9 Six of the paintings10 and the lithograph show a three- quarter-length Joyce, alone and elegantly dressed, leaning against some sort of parapet, with the sea behind him. Joyce seems to be musing, his eyes, hidden behind glasses and a black eye patch, are half-closed, presenting him in “splendid isolation”.11 The paintings, in Jedlicka’s judgement, are “painted visions, overlaid with and enriched by memories, and so have a density of soul, spirit and form which is almost unique in contemporary painting”.12 Not everybody would agree with this assessment, however, as is documented by an anecdote also related by Jedlicka. One day, both Gimmi and Joyce’s son Giorgio were dining at the Kronenhalle in Zurich. Giorgio (who presumably did not know Gimmi personally) was made aware of the painter’s presence, went to his table and said: “Votre portrait de mon père est terrible!” Gimmi, unfazed, “took this as a compliment”.13 The seven oil paintings are held in different public and private collections. One of them (Nr. 997, reproduced here) was bought by the Canton of Zurich on the suggestion of Heinrich Straumann.14 For a long time it was kept in the English Department of the University and is now on display at the Zurich James Joyce Foundation (Fig. 1).
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Fig. 1 James Joyce, oil painting by Wilhelm Gimmi, Kunstsammlung Kanton Zürich (courtesy Kunstsammlung Kanton Zürich)
Notes 1. Unless indicated otherwise all information in this article is taken from Jedlicka’s Begegnung mit Wilhelm Gimmi, 40–47. Jedlicka’s account is in German; the translation of the quotations is mine. 2. For details on Larbaud’s article see Ellmann, Joyce, 530. 3. This is confirmed by Suter (“Some Reminiscences”, 64). 4. Jedlicka, Begegnung, 44 (“genau das, was man sagt, wenn man nicht damit rechnet, jemand wiederzusehen”). 5. Joyce had first met Gillet in January 1931, through Sylvia Beach (Ellmann, Joyce, 633 f.). 6. Jedlicka, Begegnung, 47; my translation: “Ich betrat das Café und setzte mich so hin, dass ich den beiden, die sich wohl nicht leicht hätten stören lassen, nicht auffallen konnte, zog meinen Zeichenblock aus der Tasche und machte mir kleine Notizen; viele kleine Notizen, meist nur wenige Striche, die mir für meine Bildnisse sehr wichtig geworden sind”.
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7. In his Catalogue raisonné of Gimmi’s paintings (212) Georges Peillex paints a rosier picture, however. He writes that Gimmi and Joyce met in Zurich as well as in Paris, that “leurs rapports étaient extrêmement cordiaux” and that “les deux hommes avaient beaucoup d’affinités”. 8. In Peillex’s Catalogue raisonné they have the numbers 893 (1942), 894 (1942), 933 (1944), 996–998 (all 1947) and 1017 (1948). The lithograph (see Cailler, Catalogue raisonné, number 51) was also made in 1947. There are also drawings and watercolours, which have not been catalogued. 9. Jedlicka, Begegnung, 40. See also the article on Joyce’s death mask. 10. In number 933 Joyce, in a position similar to that in the other paintings, is accompanied by a seated Molly Bloom wearing a Spanish headdress, a reference to her roots in Gibraltar. 11. Jedlicka, Begegnung, 43 (“herrliche Einsamkeit”). 12. Jedlicka, Begegnung, 40 (“gemalte Visionen, von Erinnerungen überlagert, mit solchen angereichert, und darum von einer seelischen, geistigen und auch formalen Dichtigkeit, wie sie kaum ein anderes Bildnis der Gegenwart zeigt”). 13. Jedlicka, Begegnung, 47 (“Ich nahm die Bemerkung als ein Kompliment auf”). 14. Jedlicka, Begegnung, 40.
2.21 Rudolf Goldschmidt
Rudolf Goldschmidt (1880–?) played an important role in helping Joyce settle in Zurich, but not a great deal is known about him. From Ellmann one learns that [t]hrough Weiss Joyce met Rudolf Goldschmidt, a grain merchant, and Goldschmidt introduced him to the circle of his friends. These men were well-to-do and they agreed readily to take lessons in English from Joyce […] By November 1915, Joyce inscribed a copy of Dubliners to Goldschmidt ‘with gratitude,’ and he had good reason. For his sympathetic pupils often paid for lessons they never took.1
Research in Swiss archives has brought to light a few additional facts. Goldschmidt was a citizen of Kostel-Göding, a small, originally Jewish municipality in Moravia.2 He came to Zurich from Vienna in 1903 and married Gemma Weiss, from Trieste, in 1913. The Goldschmidts had two children and they became Swiss citizens in 1917. In 1921 they moved to Italy, but returned, from Trieste, in February 1939. In late 1939 or early 1940 they moved to Lausanne, but a year later, on 1 April 1941, they left Switzerland for Cuba.3 I have not been able to trace Goldschmidt’s movements after this, but he was still alive in 1954 as Ellmann interviewed him in that year.4 What follows is speculation: Goldschmidt’s wife was born as Gemma Weiss in Trieste in 1891 and she may well have been the older sister (or at least a relative) of the Triestine Ottocaro Weiss, who was born in 1896. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_25
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The presence of a relative would explain why Ottocaro Weiss came to Zurich to study in 1914. And according to Ellmann it was Weiss who introduced Joyce to the well-connected Rudolf Goldschmidt. If this was indeed the case, then Joyce’s relatively rapid settling in in late June 1915 was due to a very small group of Jewish Triestines: Ottocaro Weiss and Rudolf and Gemma Goldschmidt-Weiss. Having introduced Joyce to his friends, Goldschmidt helped him out on at least two occasions later on: In late 1917 he lent Claud Sykes a typewriter which he needed to type the first three episodes of Ulysses and on 2 February 1919 he supplied the ceremonial candlestick for Joyce’s romantic meeting with Martha Fleischmann. Goldschmidt was the treasurer of an Austro-Hungarian benevolent society (Oesterreich-Ungarischer-Hilfsverein) set up to help citizens of the dual monarchy who might be in need.5 Sykes went to their office to borrow the typewriter, whereupon he must have described the members of the Hilfsverein as draft dodgers since, as Gorman reports, their work “exempted them from army service and therefore they took care to make it seem as arduous as possible”.6 This prompted Joyce to write a jocular, but rather mean poem modelled on “The Amorous Goldfish”, a song from the Edwardian musical comedy The Geisha. He changed the opening “A goldfish swam in a big glass bowl / As dear little goldfish do” to “A Goldschmidt swam in a Kriegsverein / As wise little Goldschmidts do” and implied a few lines later that the members of the “Kriegsverein” were Jewish and that they did their work for the Kaiser’s as well as their own benefit: “Herr Rosenbaum and Rosenfeld / And every other Feld except Schlachtfeld / All worked like niggers, totting rows of crazy figures, / To save Kaiser Karl and Goldschmidt, too”. The poem comes out strongly against the war, but it does so at the expense of the man who had helped Joyce freely and generously and who was exempt from military service.7
Notes 1. Ellmann, Joyce, 396. 2. Now Podivín and Hodonín in the Czech Republic. 3. The information on the Goldschmidts in Zurich comes from the files of the Zurich registry office (Einwohner- und Fremdenkontrolle der Stadt Zürich) and from papers relating to his naturalisation (Einbürgerung), both via the city archive (Stadtarchiv). For details on the Goldschmidts in Lausanne I am grateful to that city’s Service du contrôle des habitants.
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4. Ellmann, Joyce, 780, note 16. 5. Similar Hilfsvereine existed in other cities outside the Austro- Hungarian Empire. 6. The episode is reported by Gorman in his Definitive Biography, 246f.; the quotation is from 246. Ellmann (Joyce, 419f.) basically repeats the story as told by Gorman. The poem is also printed in Mays’s edition of Poems and “Exiles”, 79, with notes on 308f. 7. Ellmann (Joyce, 419) only comments that the verse “seems rather hard on the man who lent the typewriter”. In the papers relating to Goldschmidt’s naturalisation it is stated clearly that he was exempt from military service.
2.22 Hoffnung (Inn)
When Joyce and Nora arrived in Zurich on 11 October 1904 they found lodging at the Hoffnung, a modest Gasthaus at Reitergasse 16 near the train station.1 Joyce was encouraged by its auspicious name (‘hope’),2 but his hopes were dashed almost immediately as he discovered that there was no open position at the local Berlitz school. It was at the Gasthaus Hoffnung, however, that—four months after their first encounter in Dublin on 10 June—he had intercourse with Nora for the first time: They had arrived in the morning and on the same day he wrote to Stanislaus: “Finalement, elle n’est pas encoure vierge; elle est touchée”.3 The Hoffnung was Joyce and Nora’s only address during their brief stay in Zurich in 1904 (11–19 October) and so it is not surprising that when the Joyces, now a family of four, came back to Zurich on 30 June 1915 they took up lodging there again, “briefly and nostalgically”.4 This second stay at the Hoffnung lasted no longer than the first: On 7 July they moved to an apartment at Reinhardstrasse 7 in the Seefeld district. In accounts of Joyce’s time in Zurich there is some confusion regarding the inn’s name. In his correspondence in June and July 1915 Joyce still calls it Gasthaus Hoffnung,5 but according to Ellmann “it had been changed to Gasthaus Doeblin”.6 Taking up this note Senn remarks that this was not only an echo of Joyce’s native city but also, as no one could anticipate at the time, the name of a German author, Alfred Döblin, whose city novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) owes something to Ulysses. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_26
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The little guest house has since given way to a modern business building. In its final years it was called Hotel Speer and was a dumpy hotel with a small restaurant for locals, where Tom [Staley] and I had our lunch and where they had probably never heard of James Joyce. Though I had taken Joycean visitors to see it for years as a matter of routine, it was only on that day that I asked if they had a guest book. By some misfortune, it had been lost only a few years previously, during a flood. So we could never find out how Joyce and Nora Barnacle had signed in, during perhaps their first comfortable and real intimacy and in this city known for its Zwinglian puritanism.7
The inn itself was never called Doeblin: The Adressbuch der Stadt Zürich (published annually, the Zurich equivalent of Thom’s Official Directory) lists a Gasthaus Hoffnung at Reitergasse 16 until 1919, nothing in the three years after, and a Gasthaus Speer from 1923 onwards. However, we learn from Carola Giedion-Welcker that when the Joyces came back to Zurich in 1915 the inn had “a new owner named, much to Joyce’s amusement, Doeblin. The sound of that name had, of course, rich associations for Joyce”.8
Notes 1. At the time Gasthaus or Gasthof was the usual German term for a hostelry or inn. In the Index of Ellmann’s biography the Hoffnung is listed under G as Gasthaus Hoffnung. 2. Giedion-Welcker (“Meetings with Joyce”, 262) reports: “As Joyce told me later, the auspicious name of the inn attracted him more than the zealous recruiting by hotel porters at the Zurich train station”. 3. Letter to Stanislaus dated 11 October 1904 (LII, 66 and SL, 40). The passage quoted is at the end of the letter and was cut off by Stanislaus “so he could show the rest of it to his family”. 4. Ellmann, Joyce, 407. 5. A postcard and a letter to his agent, James Pinker, dated 30 June and 7 July, respectively (LII, 349 and 350f.). 6. Ellmann, Joyce, 184: “The name [Hoffnung], which means hope, seemed a good augury and became a better one in 1915 when they returned there and found it had been changed to Gasthaus Doeblin”. 7. Senn in O’Neill, ed., Murmoirs, 20. 8. Giedion-Welcker, “Meetings with Joyce”, 262.
2.23 James Joyce Pub
In the “Hades” episode of Ulysses, Bloom, on his way to Paddy Dignam’s funeral, is seated opposite Jack Power and speculates about the latter’s mistress: “Nice fellow. Who knows is that true about the woman he keeps? Not pleasant for the wife. […] What is this she was? Barmaid in Jury’s. Or the Moira, was it?”1 The two Dublin hotels in question, Jury’s in Dame Street and the Moira in Trinity Street, no longer exist, but Jury’s bar lives on in Zurich as a memorial to Joyce. Jury’s Hotel in Dublin closed in the early 1970s and the Victorian interior of its Antique Bar was subsequently put up for auction. It was bought by Albert Bachmann (1929–2011), a maverick colonel in the special services (Spezialdienst) of the Swiss army who spent time in Ireland during the Cold War to secure land for a Swiss government in exile should the country be overrun by Soviet forces.2 The material, which “sailed under the name of ‘James Joyce Pub’, long before it was installed”3 was eventually bought by the Schweizerische Bankgesellschaft (Union Bank of Switzerland), which had a licence on one of its premises in Pelikanstrasse. The bank then “wanted to know more about the author whose name the pub carried”; Fritz Senn “became an aloof advisor to the project in a number of sessions” and “was asked to contribute a little brochure”.4 The brochure was written, the pub was opened in September 1978 and a year later it served as a meeting place for the participants of the 7th International James Joyce Symposium held in Zurich. The pub is still in operation and is even featured in a novel. In David Lodge’s Small World (1984) the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_27
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protagonists, all of them university teachers of English, fly from conference to conference, one of which takes place in Zurich: It is the 15th of June, the eve of Bloomsday, halfway through the International James Joyce Symposium in Zürich, and they are standing at the bar of the crowded James Joyce Pub on Pelikanstrasse. It is a beautifully preserved, genuine Dublin pub, all dark mahogany, red plush and brass fittings, rescued from demolition at the hands of Irish property developers, transported in numbered parts to Switzerland, and lovingly reconstructed in the city where the author of Ulysses sat out the First World War, and died in the Second. Its ambience is totally authentic apart from the hygienic cleanliness of everything, especially the basement toilets where you could, if you were so inclined, eat your dinner off the tiled floors—very different from the foetid, slimy hellholes to be found at the bottom of such staircases in Dublin.5
Senn’s advisory work for the James Joyce Pub would bear fruit in unexpected ways. Dr Robert Holzach (1922–2009), Director General of Schweizerische Bankgesellschaft and later its Chairman of the Board took a personal interest in Joyce and Fritz Senn, and he was the prime mover behind the Zurich James Joyce Foundation which was established a few years later in 1985.
Notes 1. U 6.244f. and 248. 2. On Bachmann see Meier, Widerstandsvorbereitungen, 197–238, especially 231–234 (“Exilvorbereitungen”). Meier mentions Bachmann’s contacts with the Schweizerische Bankgesellschaft, but not his purchase of the interior of Jury’s Antique Bar. 3. Senn in O’Neill, ed., Murmoirs, 212. 4. Senn in O’Neill, ed., Murmoirs, 213. The brochure, published in 1978, is entitled James Joyce Pub Zürich. An English version was published in 2016. 5. Lodge, Small World, 234. In his “Author’s Note” Lodge stresses the fact that his novel is peopled “by figments of the imagination”, but that some places featured in it are real: “There really is an underground chapel at Heathrow and a James Pub in Zurich”.
2.24 Philipp Jarnach
The composer and music teacher Philipp Jarnach (1892–1982) was born near Paris, the son of a Catalan father and a Flemish mother. A child prodigy, he studied piano and music theory and later worked at the Paris Conservatoire as a song accompanist and coach. He was also a self-taught composer. He had a German wife, and when Germany declared war on France in 1914 he emigrated to Zurich. About a year later he befriended the Italian composer Ferruccio Busoni (1866–1924), who made him his private secretary and helped him to get work in Zurich, first as coach and conductor at the Stadttheater and later as a teacher of theory at the Zurich Conservatory. In 1921 he followed Busoni to Berlin, where he completed his late mentor’s opera Doktor Faust (first performed in 1925). From 1927 onwards he taught composition at the Kölner Musikhochschule and in 1950 became director of the newly founded Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Hamburg. Joyce and Jarnach met by coincidence in 1916 when the Joyces moved into one half of a furnished apartment at Seefeldstrasse 73 and thus became neighbours of Jarnach, who lived in the other half.1 The two men, music lovers both, became friends, and Joyce left a lasting impression on Jarnach, even though they did not stay in contact after leaving Zurich.2 The beginning of their acquaintance was not auspicious: [Joyce, the new neighbour] disturbed me a lot when I was composing, because he sang every morning for several hours, accompanying himself on © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_28
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a bad piano. He had an incredibly strong, but rough and unbeautiful tenor voice. And listening to him through the wall was anything but a pleasure. So I approached him in order to reach a gentlemen’s agreement. That's when our acquaintance began, and when we moved into other apartments the following year, we often visited each other.
On Joyce and music he has the following to say: He appeared to love music very much and went a lot to concerts and to the opera, although he made fun of the ‘orchestral business’ (‘Orchesterbetrieb’) again and again. But I think he had a rather bad taste in music. It is probably one of the contradictions of this strange man that he, probably the boldest innovator in the literature of his time, had a penchant for sentimental, even kitschy poetry. He has probably never attempted to deal with the trends of modern music in any other way than superficially.
As a young man, Jarnach (who was only 24 years old at the time) was very critical of Joyce the music lover, but he respected him as a thinker and writer: [Joyce’s] erudition was tremendous, the critical sharpness of his mind incomparable, with a tendency towards paradox. Of Shakespeare, for example, he said that he was the greatest poet of all time, but of course not a playwright, which led Busoni to retort in my presence: ‘First you deny the main thing, and then everything else is easier’. But Busoni did him wrong. He knew Joyce too little and didn’t see what was hidden behind such statements: the passionate questioning of too easily accepted and thus conventional values. Joyce knew the whole Shakespeare by heart: When one quoted any passage from any play he could continue literally from then on and for as long as he liked. I suspect that his knowledge of Dante was as great or almost as great as his knowledge of Italian and his mother tongue. He spoke French very well. And French was our language of conversation, because he didn't know a word of German and knew very little about German literature. He once asked me what to think of [Gottfried Keller’s] Der Grüne Heinrich, since a critic had apparently compared this novel with A Portrait. […] […] Joyce lived a very retired life in his Zurich years. Probably not for financial reasons: he received a considerable state scholarship from England at the time. There were other reasons. He did not understand the language (I often wondered why he had not settled down in the French speaking part of
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Switzerland), and he worked hard on Ulysses at the time. He was a very slow but uncommonly minute worker. I think that he surpassed even Flaubert in this respect. I cannot help smiling even today when I remember that he once wanted to know everything, literally everything about the sirens (because he thought that a musician must know that), from singing water-nymphs to factory sirens (for the corresponding chapter in his book). That was how far he went in his attempt to write an exhaustive encyclopedia of life in novel form.
Notes 1. Ellmann, Joyce, 408f. 2. The following quotations are from a letter by Jarnach to Ellmann’s researcher Alfred Dutli dated 6 July 1954 (Dutli papers in the Zurich James Joyce Foundation). The letter is in German, the translations are mine.
2.25 Carl Gustav Jung
In William Walcott’s succinct formula,1 Joyce’s contacts with the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) can be summarised as “a narrative in three encounters” which took place in 1918/19, in 1930–1932 and in 1934/35, respectively. Two of these encounters were indirect and all three were unfortunate. The first encounter had to do with Edith Rockefeller McCormick, an immensely wealthy American who had come to Zurich in 1913 to be near Jung. Mrs McCormick, “besides heavily endowing the psychologist Jung, had patronized a great many writers and musicians”.2 In early 1918 Joyce learnt that she had given him a stipend of 12,000 francs, to be paid out in instalments of 1000 francs from March onwards. Payments continued beyond May 1919, but in October of that year, shortly before his departure for Trieste, he was informed by the bank in question that there would be no more money. Joyce indirectly blamed Jung; he had earlier rejected a suggestion by Mrs McCormick to submit to an analysis by the famous psychiatrist and suspected that Jung might have influenced Mrs McCormick in retaliation. Ellmann, who gives a detailed account of this first “encounter”, concludes that “while Jung [who did not know Joyce personally at the time] may have had a share in Mrs. McCormick’s decision, his intervention is not essential to explain it. Her caprices were well known and needed no special instigation”.3 Joyce did not forget Jung even after leaving Zurich. In a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver dated 24 June 1921 he wrote: © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_29
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A nice collection could be made of legends about me. Here are some. […] A batch of people in Zurich persuaded themselves that I was gradually going mad and actually endeavoured to induce me to enter a sanatorium where a certain Doctor Jung (the Swiss Tweedledum who is not to be confused with the Viennese Tweedledee, Dr Freud) amuses himself at the expense (in every sense of the word) of ladies and gentlemen who are troubled with bees in their bonnets.4
The second encounter between Joyce and Jung was as indirect as the first. Jung had not met Joyce in person in 1918/19, but “had heard reports of Ulysses which did not impress him; he was probably aware of Joyce’s heavy drinking, and sceptical of his ability to write well”.5 From 1922 and especially from 1927 onwards, when Ulysses was available in German, Jung was able to form his own impression of the novel, and made it public in a lecture given in 1930. This lecture, in turn, formed the basis of an essay commissioned by Dr Daniel Brody, owner of the Rhein-Verlag which had published the German translations of all of Joyce’s prose works except Exiles.6 As it turned out the great psychiatrist saw no value in the novel: In the essay he explained at considerable length that reading it bored, confused and disgusted him. Brody sent the text to Joyce who replied with a curt “Niedrigerhängen”.7 To Goyert he wrote: “Did you see Jung’s article and letter to me. He seems to have read Ulysses from first to last without one smile. The only thing to do in such a case is to change one’s drink!”8 And he asked Brody: “Why is Jung so rude to me? He doesn’t even know me. People want to put me out of the church to which I don’t belong. I have nothing to do with psychoanalysis”.9 Brody did not publish the piece and in December 1930 Jung “freed the Rheinverlag from its responsibility to publish the essay, and asked for the return of the manuscript”.10 Jung later revised the text (possibly influenced by a letter written to him by Carola Giedion-Welcker),11 and it was finally published in September 1932 as “Ulysses. Ein Monolog” in the journal Europäische Revue.12 Ellmann states that this revised version was “greatly improved” and “not devoid of respect”,13 but as the following three excerpts will show, Jung had not really come to appreciate Ulysses: Ulysses is a book that pours along for seven hundred and thirty-five pages, a stream of time seven hundred and thirty-five days long which all consist in one single and senseless day in the life of every man, the completely irrelevant sixteenth day of June, 1904, in Dublin—a day on which, in all truth, nothing happens. The stream begins in the void and ends in the void.
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[Jung admits to having fallen asleep while reading Ulysses and then continues:] When I awoke quite a while later, my views had undergone such a clarification that I started to read the book backwards. This method proved as good as the usual one; the book can just as well be read backwards, for it has no back and no front, no top and no bottom. […] The whole work has the character of a worm cut in half, that can grow a new head or a new tail as required. This singular and uncanny characteristic of the Joycean mind shows that his work pertains to the class of cold-blooded animals and specifically to the worm family. If worms were gifted with literary powers they would write with the sympathetic nervous system for lack of a brain. I suspect that something of this kind has happened to Joyce, that we have here a case of visceral thinking with severe restriction of cerebral activity and its confinement to the perceptual processes. I had already taken up Ulysses in 1922 but had laid it aside disappointed and vexed. Today it still bores me as it did then. […] Had this book slipped noiselessly and unsung into the shades of oblivion I would certainly never have dragged it back again; for it annoyed me thoroughly and amused me only a little. Above all, it held over me the threat of boredom because it had only a negative effect on me and I feared that it was the product of an author’s negative mood.14
In a letter accompanying a copy of the essay he wrote to Joyce: “Your book as a whole has given me no end of trouble and I was brooding over it for about three years until I succeeded to put myself into it. But I must tell you that I’m profoundly grateful to yourself as well as to your gigantic opus, because I learned a great deal from it. I shall probably never be quite sure whether I did enjoy it, because it meant too much grinding of nerves and of grey matter”.15 Jung’s reaction to Joyce, like that of Stefan Zweig a little earlier, was (and remains) a story of complete non-comprehension. Even a Jungian who sets out to defend Jung as a critic of literature and art has to admit as much: Utterly exasperated by the novel, [Jung, in his essay] first indulges in a series of ex cathedra assertions about both novel and novelist and then, as if to excuse himself, turns to his own responses to the text, upon which he comments more interestingly than on either. Soon after finishing it, he wrote an article on Picasso for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung […], in which he comments on the same absence of ‘feeling’ as he had found in Joyce’s work.16
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Written in the early 1930s Zweig’s and Jung’s views of Ulysses contrast unfavourably with earlier, far more differentiated assessments by other people living in Zurich, notably Bernhard Fehr in 1925 and Carola Giedion-Welcker in 1928. The third encounter between Jung and Joyce finally brought the two men into direct contact, but it was to be no more propitious than the first two.17 Lucia’s condition had worsened in 1932/33 and Joyce had her examined at the Burghölzli mental hospital in Zurich. It was decided that the best place for her would be a clinic in French-speaking Switzerland, Les Rives de Prangins at Nyon, in the care of Dr Oscar Forel. Lucia spent time there, briefly, in the summer of 1933 and then again from February 1934 onwards.18 However, when James and Nora visited her in late summer of 1934 it turned out that she “was worse, and the several treatments attempted had all failed”.19 Another examination at Burghölzli led to her being transferred to the private sanatorium of Dr Theodor Brunner at Küsnacht, where Jung became “the twentieth psychiatrist”20 to supervise her treatment. It was in this context that the two men finally met in person.21 Jung was no more successful than any of the other doctors who had treated Lucia, but he detected a special bond between father and daughter. According to Ellmann, he commented later that “she and her father […] were like two people going to the bottom of a river, one falling and the other diving”, and he thought their relationship “to be a kind of mystical identity or participation”, Lucia being “her father’s anima inspiratrix”.22 These ideas must have pleased Joyce, who felt that he was the only person who could truly understand Lucia and who always saw her as an artiste manquée. The more sober Ellmann disagrees: “[Joyce] punished his imaginary guilt for her illness by a subservience to her wishes, however capricious. But she was his daughter, not his muse”.23 Lucia stayed in Küsnacht until January 1935, when “Joyce dismissed Jung and took his daughter back to Paris, where the downward spiral of her disease eventually resulted in her permanent institutionalization”.24 Joyce’s scepticism with regard to Jung and Freud in general resonates in three passages in Finnegans Wake: “and so wider but we grisly old Sykos who have done our unsmiling bit on ‘alices, when they were yung and easily freudened”, “while m’m’ry’s leaves are falling deeply on my Jungfraud’s Messongebook” and—perhaps a last echo of his “first encounter” with Jung—“I can psoakoonaloose myself any time I want”.25 The tensions between Jung and Joyce are dramatised wittily by Anthony Burgess in his The End of the World News (1982).26 Burgess imagines a
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meeting of the two men at a Zurich restaurant27 in 1917, during which Jung fails to persuade Joyce to subject himself to psychoanalysis. Also present in the restaurant are Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari, Lenin and Joyce’s family. The German-Italian composer Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari (1876–1948) had moved, like Joyce, to Zurich as an émigré at the outbreak of World War I, but as far as one knows the writer and the composer never met. However, Jung had been more successful with Wolf-Ferrari than he was with Joyce: “[He] had just effected a cure, as he thought, of Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari, another recipient of Mrs. McCormick’s patronage, by urging her to withdraw her subsidy: Wolf-Ferrari had pulled himself out of dissipation and inertia and had begun to compose music again”.28
Notes 1. Walcott’s article published in Vol. 1 (1970) of Psychological Perspectives is entitled “Carl Jung and James Joyce: A Narrative of Three Encounters”. 2. Ellmann, Joyce, 422. 3. Ellmann, Joyce, 468f. In his autobiography the composer Otto Luening, who also benefited from Mrs McCormick’s munificence, gives a lively account of her patronage (Odyssey, 134–155). 4. SL, 282. 5. Ellmann, Joyce, 468. 6. Jugendbildnis (1926), Ulysses (1927/30), Dublin: Novellen (1928), all translated by Georg Goyert. For the German translation of Exiles see the articles on Rascher-Verlag and Hannah von Mettal. 7. Ellmann (Joyce, 628) translates this as “Ridicule it by making it public”, but as Andreas Weigel (personal communication 7 April 2020) points out correctly it means something like “Not to be given much weight”. According to a frequently quoted anecdote the expression was King Frederick II of Prussia’s reaction to a pasquil pinned to a wall. 8. LIII, 262. Ellmann quotes the letter as if it was Joyce’s reaction to the 1930 version of Jung’s essay, but is dated 22 October 1932, which means that Joyce wrote it later, immediately after the essay was published in Europäische Revue. 9. All the above quotations are from Ellmann, Joyce, 628. 10. Shloss, “Joyce, Jung and Giedion-Welcker”, 218. 11. In “Joyce, Jung and Giedion-Welcker” Shloss argues (218) that the revision was not Jung’s response “to some imagined displeasure from an author he had never met, but to the very real criticisms of a Zürich woman of intelligence and cultural prominence who had no compunction about articulating what she considered to be the drawbacks of his work”.
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Giedion-Welcker had attended Jung’s lecture on Ulysses, and Shloss bases her conclusions on a letter Giedion-Welcker wrote to Jung in October 1930. The letter is kept at the Zurich James Joyce Foundation; it was published in Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 18/19 March 2000. 12. It is reprinted in Jung, Über das Phänomen des Geistes, 121–149 and in Füger, ed., Kritisches Erbe, 285–299. For the English translation, see Jung, The Spirit, 109–132/134. The complicated history of this text is discussed in Jung, The Spirit, 132–134, by Ellmann, Joyce, 628f., and by Shloss, “Joyce, Jung and Giedion-Welcker”. 13. Ellmann, Joyce, 629. 14. Jung, The Spirit, 109, 111f. and 115. The translation is by R. F. C. Hull. 15. Jung, The Spirit, 133f., Ellmann, Joyce, 629 and LIII, 253. 16. Dawson, “Literary criticism”, 272. 17. My summary is based on Ellmann, Joyce, 675–681 and Bair, Jung, 405–407. For a much fuller discussion, see Shloss, Lucia, 259–299. 18. Ellmann, Joyce, 668. 19. Ellmann, Joyce, 675. 20. Ellmann, Joyce, 676. 21. See Joyce’s letter to Giorgio dated 29 October 1934 (LIII, 326 f.). Joyce writes: “Jung personalmente fece una buona impressione su me. Credo che abbia avuto molti successi con altri casi. (Jung personally made a good impression on me. I believe he has had many successes with other cases.)” 22. Ellmann, Joyce, 679. 23. Ellmann, Joyce, 680. 24. Bair, Jung, 407. 25. FW 115.21–23, 460.19–21 and 522.34–35. 26. Burgess, The End of the World News, 279f. 27. Following a mistake in the 1st edition of Ellmann’s biography he calls it Zum Roten Kreuz. The restaurant Joyce is known to have patronised is the Weisses Kreuz. 28. Ellmann, Joyce, 468.
2.26 Kaufleuten (Theatre)
Like the Pfauen (1888/89), the Kaufleuten was built to serve the needs of a rapidly growing city. Originally called Vereinshaus Zur Kaufleuten, the complex was constructed in two stages, from 1909 to 1915 and from 1927 to 1929, as the headquarters of the Zurich Mercantile Association. In addition to offices and schoolrooms it also contained shops, a restaurant and a theatre-cum-ballroom. Completed in 1915, the Kaufleuten theatre was fairly new when the English Players started operating in 1918. Their first production, Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, premièred at the Kaufleuten on 29 April 1918, their second one at the Pfauen. For their subsequent productions the English Players used the Kaufleuten (September 1918 to March 1919) as well as the Pfauen (April to December 1919).1 The Kaufleuten was also the venue of the eighth and last official Dada soirée in Zurich, which took place on 9 April 1919.2 While the Pfauen stage eventually became the home of the city’s playhouse (Schauspielhaus), the Kaufleuten remained in private hands. It was sold in 1992, but the restaurant, a club and the stage are still popular venues. The stage is used for a range of cultural events such as readings, panel discussions and concerts.
Notes 1. See the article on the English Players for details. 2. Schrott, Dada 15/25, 205–209. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_30
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2.27 Gottfried Keller
In Zurich, Joyce came into contact with the works of Gottfried Keller (1819–1890), arguably Zurich’s—or even Switzerland’s—most important nineteenth-century novelist and poet. Judging by the available evidence, he did not particularly like Keller the prose writer, but he was definitely fond of Keller the poet. Ellmann reports that one of Joyce’s first friends in Zurich, the Triestine Ottocaro Weiss, made an unsuccessful effort to interest Joyce in the writings of Gottfried Keller, assuring him they would make him look at Zurichers as less stolid. Joyce did not respond, perhaps because he found Keller technically conventional; but when a reviewer compared Keller’s Der Grüne Heinrich to A Portrait of the Artist, he evinced more attention, and later he translated some of Keller’s poems into English. For the moment, however, literature in German did not attract him, and he scoffed even at Goethe as ‘un noioso funzionario’ (a boring civil servant).1
One of Joyce’s Swiss friends, the sculptor August Suter tells a similar anecdote. During a walk along the river Maggia near Locarno in May 19192 Joyce told him that he would like to read something in German that was like Flaubert. I answered that I could imagine Flaubert only in French and recommended Gottfried Keller. ‘O no,’ said Joyce, ‘I don’t like Keller’s style of derjenige © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_31
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dessen welcher.’ I suggested that he should read Goethe or Kleist and that I did not know of any German Flaubert.3
Keller’s poetry was a different matter, however, for Joyce clearly rated some of his poems very highly. One poem that Joyce was especially fond of was “Jugendgedenken”, “a ‘look back in melancholy’ at childhood days”.4 He admired it greatly, so that when Budgen was about to finish his memoir, Joyce suggested the poem as a suitable motto for the book. Quoting it from memory Lucia wrote to Budgen on 3 September 1933: [Joyce] suggests as motto for your [Budgen’s] book these lines of Godfried [sic] Kellers Ich will spiegeln mich in jenen Tagen, die wie Lindenwipfelwehen entflohen, wo die Silbersaiten angeschlagen, zart doch bebend gab den ersten ton.5
Budgen did not use it, however, sensing probably that the melancholy, wistful tone of the poem was at odds with that of his book. How much Joyce loved the poem is also attested by Carola Giedion-Welcker: In Gottfried Keller’s Memory of Youth, which he recited fluently, [Joyce] found a bright, clear resonance sounding above this—in general—deeply threatening zone of human development [i.e. puberty, AF]. A word like ‘Lindenwipfelwehn’ could enchant him completely and seem to him a concentrated ‘aroma of the whole’.6
We do not know how Joyce first encountered “Jugendgedenken”, but it may well have been in its musical incarnation as a “Lied” by the Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck. Schoeck’s “Jugendgedenken”, composed in 1914, was first performed, in Thun on 30 April 1916.7 It is clear, however, that Joyce’s interest in Keller’s set of 14 poems entitled Lebendig Begraben was mediated by Schoeck. Joyce heard Schoeck’s suite for male voice and orchestra in Zurich on 14 January 1935 and asked Helen on the next day to “please go out and buy Cassell’s German-English, English-German Dictionary and sit down with Giorgio and study, first of all, the text of Gottfried Keller’s poem sequence Lebendig Begraben which I forward under separate cover together with the piano score for bass voice by Othmar Schoeck, autographed by the composer. […] I did not know Keller wrote this kind of gruesome-satiric semi-pious verse but the effect of it on any audience is tremendous”.8
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A second piece of evidence that Joyce liked Lebendig Begraben comes from Gorman, who writes that “while laboring at Work in Progress, Joyce amused himself occasionally by the translation of poetry either from a foreign tongue into English or from English into a foreign tongue”.9 As an example of the latter he gives Joyce’s translation of James Stephens’s “Stephen’s Green” into French and as an example of the former his translation of Keller’s Lebendig Begraben into English:10 Nun hab’ ich gar die Rose aufgefressen Die sie mir in die starre Hand gegeben. Das ich nur einmal wuerde Rosen essen Das haett’ ich nie geglaubt in meinem Leben. Nur moecht’ ich wissen ob es eine rote Od’ eine weisse Rose da gewesen. Gib taeglich uns, O Herr, von Deinem Brote Und, wenn Du willst, erloes uns von dem Boesen!11
And now, Joyce’s English version: Now have I fed and eaten up the rose Which then she laid within my stiffcold hand. That I should ever feed upon a rose I never had believed in liveman’s land. Only I wonder was it white or red The flower that in this dark my food has been. Give us, and if Thou give, thy daily bread, Deliver us from evil, Lord, Amen.12
In “Kleine irische Metamorphose”, his essay on Joyce and Keller, Fritz Senn calls Joyce’s translation a “skilful off-the-cuff version, with some poetic liberties”, but concedes that “unsolicited translation is a collegial form of recognition”.13 In his wide-ranging “Opus Posthumous” Sebastian D. G. Knowles goes further: He looks at the cultural and literary roots of the fear of premature burial, he probes “Joyce’s deep connection with Keller”14 and he also takes into account music, that is Othmar Schoeck’s and Samuel Barber’s settings of poems by Keller and Joyce.
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Notes 1. Ellmann, Joyce, 394. Joyce actually translated only one—not “some”—of Keller’s poems; see below. 2. Joyce was in Locarno with Budgen from 8 to 14 May 1919, during which time he also visited the Baroness Antonietta de Saint-Léger (Norburn, Chronology, 87). 3. Suter, “Some Reminiscences”, 62. 4. Walton, Schoeck, 51f. 5. LIII, 283f. (the quotation is from page 284) and SL, 366. The quotation is not quite accurate; Ellmann (note in LIII and SL) gives the correct text and an English translation. Budgen’s James Joyce and the making of ‘Ulysses’ was published in 1934. 6. Giedion-Welcker, “Meetings with Joyce”, 272, with note 27 on the term Lindenwipfelwehn. The poem actually has six stanzas, the one partly quoted by Lucia being the first: “Ich will spiegeln mich in jenen Tagen, / Die wie Lindwipfelwehn entflohn, / Wo die Silbersaite, angeschlagen, / Klar, doch bebend, gab den ersten Ton, / Der mein Leben lang, / Erst heut noch, widerklang, / Ob die Saite längst zerrissen schon[.]” 7. Walton, Schoeck, 51f. and 359. 8. Letter dated 15 January 1935 to Giorgio and Helen Joyce, written from the Carlton Elite Hotel in Zurich (LI, 356). See the article on Schoeck for further details. 9. Gorman, Definitive Biography, 341. 10. Lebendig Begraben is actually a sequence of 14 poems of which the one translated by Joyce is number 8. 11. Note AF: This is the text as quoted by Gorman. It contains actual mistakes (e.g. “Das” for “Dass” in line 3) and differs from the version in Keller’s Collected Works, which runs as follows: “Da hab’ ich gar die Rose aufgegessen, / Die sie mir in die starre Hand gegeben! / Dass ich noch einmal würde Rosen essen, / Hätt’ nimmer ich geglaubt in meinem Leben! // Ich möcht’ nur wissen, ob es eine rote, / Ob eine weisse Rose das gewesen? / Gib täglich uns, o Herr! von deinem Brote, / Und wenn du willst, erlös’ uns von dem Bösen!”. 12. Gorman, Definitive Biography, 342. In his edition of Joyce’s Poems and “Exiles” Mays (326) dates the translation to “after April 1934”, adopting Ellmann’s faulty dating of the concert in question. He also notes that “Gorman implies that Joyce translated the complete suite, but he records only one of them”. 13. Senn, “Kleine irische Metamorphose”, 177f.; my translation. 14. Knowles, “Opus Posthumous”, 120. Knowles’s essay supersedes Kreiling’s “A Note on James Joyce, Gottfried Keller, and Music”.
2.28 Eduard Korrodi and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung
Zurich’s most important daily quality newspaper was and is the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ). One of its hallmarks is the Feuilleton, the feature section, which offers a wide range of reviews of concerts, theatrical performances and books. For more than 35 years, from 1914 to 1950, the Feuilleton was headed by Eduard Korrodi (1885–1955), who had graduated from the University of Zurich with a PhD in German literature. Because of his long reign and his judgemental attitude he was called Zurich’s prime arbiter of literature (Literaturpapst). At the beginning of his career, Korrodi was a champion of the avant-garde and of experimentation in Swiss literature, but in his later years he became more and more critical of modernist authors or those whose political position was not conservative.1 The Neue Zürcher Zeitung treated Joyce with respect. The German translation of Exiles was reviewed positively in the edition of 31 March 1919, a few days before it went on sale on 4 April and well before its disastrous première in Munich on 7 August: The play is rich in psychologically elaborate details (“reich an psychologisch fein ausgearbeiteten Einzelheiten”), which could only be hinted at here. It is to be hoped that it will make its way. Perhaps the English Amateur Players of Zurich will eventually delight us with a production.2
On 26 September 1926 Bernhard Fehr discussed Ulysses in an article entitled “Neukräfte des englischen Gegenwartsromans”3 and on 5 July © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_32
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1928 Carola Giedion-Welcker wrote on Dubliners and A Portrait in “Der frühe Joyce”.4 Korrodi himself reviewed Ulysses in 1927, the year in which Goyert’s translation was published,5 and mentioned Work in Progress in 1931.6 He was impressed and rather awed by Ulysses: The magnificent frightfulness (“grossartige Schrecklichkeit”) of Joyce’s achievement is revealed by the fact that we cannot imagine someone imitating his technique without shuddering. This limitless book, which penetrates (“durchschaut”) the twenty-four hours of a day in a human life, cannot be imitated; this is what legitimizes its exceptional status.7
Joyce was familiar with the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, referring to it once, jokingly, with a newspaper vendor’s cry as “Zirri-zittig, Morgenblutt”.8 He must have also known Korrodi personally, as evidenced in a letter written by Lucia to Frank Budgen in 1933, when he was about to finish his James Joyce and the making of ‘Ulysses’: [Joyce] says if all the germans have gone daffed by then a Swiss firm might do the translation [of Budgen’s book]. In any case copys should go to Dr. Edward Corrody literary editor of the N Z Z and Prof. Bernard Fehr of the University of Zurich 24 Eleonora Strasse both of whom are personal friends of his.9
Notes 1. “Eduard Korrodi”, in Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, http://www.hlsdhs-dss.ch, accessed on 9 February 2019. On Korrodi the critic see Münch- Küng, Der Literaturkritiker Eduard Korrodi. 2. U. in NZZ 31 March 1919; reprinted in Füger, ed., Kritisches Erbe, 63; my translation. 3. In NZZ 26 September 1926; reprinted in Füger, ed., Kritisches Erbe, 118f. 4. In NZZ 5 July 1928; reprinted in Füger, ed., Kritisches Erbe, 21 and 48–50. 5. In NZZ 11 November 1927; reprinted in Füger, ed., Kritisches Erbe, 39f. 6. In NZZ 25 August 1931; reprinted in Füger, ed., Kritisches Erbe, 382f. 7. Füger, ed., Kritisches Erbe, 140; my translation. 8. Letter to Lucia (in Italian) dated 8 August 1932 (LIII, 255). Morgenblutt is Morgenblatt “morning edition”, with a pun on blutt (Swiss German for “naked”) rather than—as Ellmann seems to think—Blut (“blood”). Budgen (Joyce, 30) remembers that “[a]ll through the war the newspaper seller o utside the central railway station […] cried monotonously: ‘Zürizitig Extrablatt!’”. 9. Letter by Lucia dated 3 September 1933 (LIII, 284 and SL, 366).
2.29 Kronenhalle (Restaurant)
In 1924 Hulda Zumsteg (1890–1984) and her husband Gottlieb took over the Hotel de la Couronne near Bellevue and turned it into a restaurant they named Kronenhalle. It soon became one of the top addresses in Zurich, its reputation resting not only on its cuisine and its prominent patrons, but also on the art hung on its walls, which came from the collection of Hulda’s son Gustav. Gustav Zumsteg (1915–2005) had started work at Abraham, Brauchbar & Co., a highly successful silk trading company founded by Jakob Abraham and Edmund Brauchbar, one of Joyce’s earliest friends and supporters in Zurich. Zumsteg lived in Paris between 1936 and 1943 and there met a great number of designers and artists; he eventually became head designer and then owner of L. Abraham & Co., a firm that succeeded Abraham, Brauchbar & Co. In 1957 Gustav Zumsteg also took over the management of Kronenhalle. He was among the people who campaigned for the Joyces to return to Switzerland in 1940.1 The Kronenhalle has always been famously patronised by writers, artists, actors and other celebrities. On his visits to Zurich in the 1930s Joyce often dined there together with the Giedions, and he came to like it so much that he included it in his short list of people and places that he wanted preserved in case Switzerland was ever taken over by a foreign power.2 During his final days in Zurich, in late December 1940 and early January 1941, he dined at the Kronenhalle at least five times,3 usually in company.4 As it turned out, the Joyces’ visit to the Kronenhalle together © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_33
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with Ruggiero on 9 January would be Joyce’s last: He fell ill the day after and he died on 13 January.5 The Joyces’ connection with the Kronenhalle did not end with James’s death: Nora was a welcome guest there until the end of her own life.6
Notes 1. Ellmann (Joyce, 736) writes: “Crossing to Switzerland was not so easy in this war as it had been in the last, and Joyce had to marshal all kinds of heavy and light artillery in his support. Early in August he mobilized his old friend Paul Ruggiero, who could help with the financial details because of his position in a Zurich bank. Joyce had already written a general statement of his plight to his old friend Edmund Brauchbar, an exporter now in the United States but in control of branch offices in Zurich and Lyons, and Brauchbar instructed his son Rudolph and his son’s business associate, Gustav Zumsteg, in Zurich, to give all possible support. ‘I thank you very much for having remembered me, whom so many seem to have forgotten.’ Joyce wrote Brauchbar”. See also Maddox, Nora, 342f. 2. On 28 March 1938 he wrote to Carola Giedion-Welcker (LIII, 418): “All I can say about the future in Z’ch is I hope whoever has it will respect Villa Giedion, Othmar Schoeck, Vogt’s clinic and the Kronenhalle”. See also Giedion-Welcker, “Meetings with Joyce”, 267f., for a slightly different version. 3. The Joyces stayed at the Pension Delphin, but according to Ruggiero (“Joyce’s Last Days”, 284) “it was [Joyce’s] habit never to dine where he was staying[.]” 4. See Ellmann (Joyce, 740), Ruggiero (“Joyce’s Last Days”, 284f.), Straumann (“Last Meeting with Joyce”) and Walton (“Schoeck und James Joyce”, 89 and Schoeck, 240). 5. Ruggiero, “Joyce’s Last Days”, 285. 6. See “Zurich after Joyce” for details.
2.30 Lenin (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov)
During World War I the Russian revolutionary, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin (1870–1924), was an exile in Switzerland like Joyce.1 Having lived in Finland and fearing arrest by the Russian secret police he fled to Switzerland, where he arrived at the end of August 1914; he and his wife first took up residence in Berne and then relocated to Zurich, where they lived from February 1916 until their departure in April 1917. While in Switzerland, Lenin attended the Zimmerwald Conference in September 1915 and the Kienthal Conference in April 1916, where he met a number of Swiss socialists such as Robert Grimm and Fritz Platten. When the Revolution broke out in February 1917 in St Petersburg (then called Petrograd) he decided to return to Russia to take charge of the Bolsheviks, a plan that could not be realised easily since most passages into Russia were blocked because of the war. On 9 April 1917, after complicated negotiations, Lenin, his wife and a group of fellow Russians boarded a sealed train that took them from Zurich through Germany to the port of Sassnitz on the island of Rügen, then by ferry to Trelleborg in Sweden and finally via Finland to Petrograd, where they arrived on 16 April. The rest is, or rather was, history. While in Zurich, Lenin and his wife lived in a small apartment in Spiegelgasse 14 in Zurich’s old town, not far from the Meierei restaurant in Spiegelgasse 1, where the Dada movement was “born” on 5 February 1916, only a few days before Lenin’s arrival. Lenin was known to and was in lively contact with fellow Socialists and Communists, but otherwise © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_34
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kept a low profile. There is no evidence that Joyce, who at the time lived in the Seefeld district, ever took any notice or even met Lenin.2 It is true that he took an active interest in the political situation in Trieste while he was living there, but this was mostly because he saw parallels between Ireland’s struggle for independence and Italian irredentism.3 In Zurich he waged a “private war against the British” personified by the Consul General A. Percy Bennett and by Sir Horace Rumbold, the British Minister in Berne,4 but otherwise kept out of daily politics. Lenin, Joyce and the Dadaist Tristan Tzara are brought together by Tom Stoppard in his clever 1974 play Travesties, as representatives of widely different, conflicting ideas of art and politics.5
Notes 1. On Lenin in Switzerland see Gautschi, Lenin als Immigrant in der Schweiz. 2. Ellmann (Joyce, 409) states that “[i]n the Café Odéon, where Joyce frequently went, Lenin was a constant customer, and on one occasion, it is said, they met”. His source was indirect, an “[i]nterview with Signora Vela Bliznakoff Pulitzer, 1954, by Lucy von Hibler” (781, note 10). 3. See Manganiello, Joyce’s Politics, 43–66 and McCourt, The Years of Bloom, 92–121. 4. See Manganiello, Joyce’s Politics, 148–160; the quotation is from page 148. See also the articles on Henry Carr and the English Players. 5. See the articles on Dada and Travesties for details.
2.31 Otto Luening
In accounts of Joyce in Zurich, Otto Luening plays a very minor role at best: Joyce himself never mentions him in his letters, he features neither in Budgen’s book nor in Gorman’s Definitive Biography, and Ellmann only quotes Joyce’s remark to “the young Otto Luening” that “among composers only Palestrina and Schoenberg interested him”.1 Luening’s lively autobiography The Odyssey of an American Composer (1980), however, shows that the two men knew each other quite well and it adds interesting facets to what we know of Joyce’s life in Zurich. Otto Luening (1900–1996) was born and brought up in Wisconsin as the son of musical parents of German descent; his mother was a singer, his father a music teacher and conductor. In 1912 his father decided to take a leave of absence from his post as director of the School of Music at the University of Wisconsin and to move to Germany to work as a private teacher. In Munich, Otto Luening was educated privately, receiving a good general as well as an intensive musical education: he studied the flute, the piano and composition. In 1917 he suffered the same fate as Joyce two years before: “On February 3, 1917, the United States broke off diplomatic relations with Germany. […] I was almost seventeen—of military age, and ripe for internment. The Spanish consulate represented the United States, and Father arranged exit visas for Helen [Luening’s sister] and me for Zurich, Switzerland”.2 Being an unusually resourceful young man, Luening gained admission to the Zurich Conservatory of Music, at the time headed by the composer © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_35
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and conductor Volkmar Andreae (1879–1962). It was Andreae who suggested that he contact Edith McCormick, one of the richest women at the time who had come to Zurich to be near the psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung and who was a benefactress of artists. Luening received several stipends from her, and in his book he gives a lively account of the meetings he had with her. Eventually Luening joined the Zurich “Tonhalle and opera orchestras as third flute, piccolo, and deputy first flute”3 playing under the auspices of renowned conductors, notably Richard Strauss, Arthur Nikisch and Ferruccio Busoni.4 He was also taught by Busoni’s musical secretary Philipp Jarnach, who was “a superior pianist, a magnificent sight reader, and a score player of the first rank. He knew a great deal about the voice and could himself sing most expressively”.5 By coincidence, Jarnach was also Joyce’s neighbour and friend,6 and it was from him that Luening first heard about Joyce, “a real artist”. “He never writes one single word that does not stem from the inner world of his subconscious self. Like a sculptor, he shapes his words into sentences and makes his imagined world become alive and vivid to his readers. Like all great artists he works slowly”.7 Luening, a man of many parts, also joined the English Players using the stage name James P. Cleveland,8 and it was as a member of that company that he got to know Joyce personally. Luening gives a sympathetic portrait of Joyce’s activities for the English Players and of Joyce as a person: After rehearsals some of the actors enjoyed meeting in the Pfauen Café for food, drink, and conversation. Contrary to the expectations of many people who came to the Pfauen to chat with Joyce, he was most of the time more of a listener and observer than a lecturer or propagandist for his favorite ideas. Although he enjoyed the relaxed atmosphere on these occasions, he made many notes and wrote comments on envelopes, menus, and odd bits of paper to keep the ideas and images that came to him from being forgotten or blurred by our indulgence in good food and heady wine. Joyce was a remarkable mimic. Sometimes after a few glasses of wine he would rise and do a kind of pantomimic dance—willowy, graceful, and with great suppleness. He danced as if he had trained at Mary Wigman’s studio. Sometimes he would lead a number of us in a group charade, or, on our way home from a café, in a snake dance—to the astonishment of any Zurich burghers still on the street.9
2.31 OTTO LUENING
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Luening also reports on long conversations about plays in the company’s repertoire, about religion, about Dublin and of course about music: Joyce’s actual experience with music was so different from his intellectualizing about counterpoint that he seemed to be two people. He had heard Hans Zimmerman [sic, recte Zimmermann], a student of mine and later director of the Zurich Opera, conduct a chamber orchestra for which I had arranged and performed a suite of Gluck’s music, including the famous flute solo ‘Dance of the Departed Spirits’ from Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice. Afterwards, Joyce said that he considered this solo to be the greatest piece of music ever written. He began going through the piece, note by note and phrase by phrase, literally transposing it first into word inflections and then into verbal images. At the end of this evening with Joyce I had learned more about the relationship of language to music than ever before or since.10
One of Mrs McCormick’s “semicondition[s] for her patronage” had been that Luening should “eventually return to America and settle in Chicago”.11 He did so in 1920 and went on to have a highly successful career as conductor and composer, which took him from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester via the University of Arizona at Tucson and Bennington College in Vermont to a professorship at Columbia (1949–1968), to name only his more important posts.
Notes 1. Ellmann, Joyce, 430. This is confirmed by Luening, Odyssey, 194. 2. Luening, Odyssey, 117. 3. Luening, Odyssey, 143. 4. Luening, Odyssey, 156–185. 5. Luening, Odyssey, 153–155; the quotation is from 154. 6. See the article on Jarnach for details. 7. Luening, Odyssey, 185. 8. Luening’s account of the activities of the English Players in 1918/19 (Odyssey, 185–200) is detailed and vivid. 9. Luening, Odyssey, 191. For Joyce’s dancing see also Budgen, Joyce, 195 and Ellmann, Joyce, 429f. and 433, Ellmann listing it under “bizarre actions” in the Index. 10. Luening, Odyssey, 197. 11. Luening, Odyssey, 142.
2.32 Edith Rockefeller McCormick
Edith Rockefeller McCormick (1872–1932) was the daughter of John D. Rockefeller, the co-founder of Standard Oil and one of the wealthiest men in America. In 1895 she married Harold McCormick, the son of Cyrus McCormick, the co-inventor and producer of a mechanical reaper and other agricultural machines.1 The McCormicks lived in Chicago, where they had a grand country estate, the Villa Turicum, built on Lake Michigan.2 Edith McCormick, who suffered from depression, travelled to Zurich in 1913 to be treated by Carl Gustav Jung and ended up staying—at the Baur au Lac, “the most fashionable hotel in Zurich”3—until 1921. During her eight years in Zurich she supported Jung and was one of the founders of the Psychologischer Club established in 1916,4 but she was also a generous supporter of the arts. The artists benefitting from her largesse included Joyce, Otto Luening, Philipp Jarnach and Frank Budgen.5 Luening, whom she began to support when he was barely 17 years old,6 portrays her in a very positive light: Mrs. McCormick never interfered with my studies in any way. She seemed to enjoy my visits. She listened to my adventures with obvious interest and was often quite complimentary about my development as a human being. She liked the way I tackled my problems and managed my studies. I did not, as she put it in German, have much Wahn (madness) about me. […]
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Mrs. McCormick had come to Zurich to be psychoanalyzed by Dr. Jung. After her analysis, she became a lay analyst herself. I heard from others—and I agree—that in her relations with many of us she functioned partly as therapist. She let us talk without trying to direct us, but she gave us some guidance, assurance, and reassurance in our work. For me, this was very helpful. She was definitely not a patroness of the ordinary kind. One felt from her a strong understanding and an empathy that were often unspoken.7
Joyce was another beneficiary of Mrs McCormick’s, but he was 18 years older than Luening, less docile—and he definitely had a little Wahn about him. The surprising and wonderful news that he was to receive 1000 Swiss francs per month from March 1918 onwards freed him from financial worries, but he would not let Mrs McCormick or anyone else function as his therapist.8 Her stipend was initially limited to 12 months, but it ran on and its sudden termination at the end of September 1919, possibly caused by his unwillingness to be analysed by Jung, came as a shock. Joyce wished to speak to her, but she refused to see him and was not even swayed when he sent her part of the manuscript of Ulysses, which was probably meant as a token of gratitude.9 In the early 1930s, when Budgen was working on his book, Joyce supplied him with notes, some of them under the heading “Zurich Figures”. One of the people portrayed in these sketches was Mrs McCormick: The King of Oil’s daughter, born Edith Rockefeller, ill favoured, malsaine fantastic distinguished and benevolent, she stalked about the town distributing charities houses and jachts.10
Mrs McCormick returned to the United States in 1921 and got divorced in the same year. She died of cancer in 1932. When Joyce received the news he wrote to Daniel Brody, in a mellower mood: I am sorry to learn of the death of Mrs McCormick. She was very kind to me at a difficult moment and was a woman of considerable distinction. I do not know what happened afterwards though I suspect, but this does not obliterate her act prompted by humanity and generosity.11
2.32 EDITH ROCKEFELLER MCCORMICK 179
Notes 1. Cyrus’s company, McCormick Harvesting Machine Company was merged with another firm in 1902 to become International Harvester Company. 2. The villa, designed by the well-known artist, landscape designer and architect Charles A. Platt (1861–1933), was finished in 1912, that is before Edith McCormick went to Zurich, and I have not been able to establish why it was called Turicum. 3. Luening, Odyssey, 136. She did not stay “in a flat in the Old City” (Maddox, Nora, 153). 4. The Psychologischer Club still exists; since its foundation it has been domiciled at Gemeindestrasse 27 in Zürich. See http://www.psychologischerclub.ch/de/club-geschichte, last accessed on 2 March 2019. 5. See Luening, Odyssey, 142 and Budgen, Joyce, 28. 6. See Luening, Odyssey, 134–155 (“Edith Rockfeller McCormick and the Zurich Conservatory 1917–1920”) for details. 7. Luening, Odyssey, 142. Luening was recommended by Volkmar Andreae, the director of the Conservatory and conductor of the Tonhalle orchestra. 8. It appears that Mrs McCormick tried to help Joyce in other ways as well. According to Andreas Weigel (“Porträt des Künstlers”, 143f. and personal communication 10 April 2020) she received a copy of Exiles immediately after its publication on 25 May 1918 and then, in June, commissioned two Austrian writers, Rudolf Lothar (1865–1943) and Georg von Seybel (1886–1924), to find a publisher for the German translation of the play and also a theatre that would produce it. Hannah von Mettal’s translation of Exiles was published by Rascher-Verlag in 1919, but I have found no evidence that this was the result of Lothar and von Seybel’s efforts. 9. On 13 October 1919 she wrote to him (LII, 454): “Thank you for the fine manuscript—which I am glad to keep for you with the understanding that, when for any reason, you want it, you have only to write for it”. 10. Budgen, Joyce (“Introduction” by Clive Hart), xiii. The four sheets headed “Zurich Figures” were written out by Lucia. Budgen took the passage over in his book (Joyce, 28), but toned it down considerably, omitting, for example, the adjectives “ill favoured” and “malsaine” (‘ugly’ and ‘unhealthy’) or by replacing “she stalked about the town” by “she walks the town”. 11. Letter dated 29 August 1932 (LI, 324).
2.33 Jacques Mercanton
When Joyce lived in Zurich during World War I, Jacques Mercanton (1910–1996) was a mere boy growing up in Lausanne, but in the 1930s he would become Joyce’s friend and a “principal expositor” of Finnegans Wake.1 In October 1935 he was a student of literature in Paris and there visited Joyce, apparently on his own initiative. They talked about Switzerland, about Ulysses and, since “[i]t was plain to see he had no wish to return to [that novel]”,2 above all about his “Work in Progress”: When I was on the point of leaving, he became almost cordial, noted carefully, magnifying glass in hand, my name and my address, pressed me to send him my study as soon as it was finished,3 gave me the latest number of transition wherein fragments from “Work in Progress” appeared. “Come back and see me. Or perhaps I shall come to see you in Lausanne.” At the time, I did not think he would keep his promise.4
But he did, more than two years later in February 1938.5 Three more meetings were to follow in the same year, one over Easter in Paris,6 another, longer one in late August and early September in Lausanne,7 and a third in October in Paris,8 when Mercanton was about to leave for Florence to take up a post as Lecturer in French. The two men were also to meet twice in 1939. Over Easter9 Mercanton got a first glimpse of the newly published Finnegans Wake (“bound in boards with a huge title”),10 and there was a surprise meeting in August: © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_37
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Stopping at Montreux for lunch [on the way home from a stay in the mountains], I chose a table on the terrace of the restaurant where Joyce and I had lingered so long on a fine, late-summer day the year before. Suddenly I saw his tall form standing there before me, and I heard Mrs. Joyce cry out in delighted surprise. They had been drawn there by the same memory.11
Mercanton’s last meeting with Joyce took place in less auspicious circumstances.12 In late 1940 when the Joyce family had finally received permission to move back to Switzerland, they travelled to Zurich via Lausanne, and Mercanton got together with them for dinner and a farewell in the street the next morning. Joyce had also met the critic Edmond Jaloux and had enquired whether he had received and read his “latest book”: “He seemed rather embarrassed,” said Joyce thoughtfully, as we went down to the railroad station. “Perhaps the book took him by surprise.” Then, looking aloof and malicious: “Perhaps, too, he was not the only one.”13
Mercanton may also have been taken by surprise when he first encountered “Work in Progress” in 1935. However, he was one of the first critics who tried to understand and appreciate Joyce’s final work, and he published a seminal essay on it 1939.14 Joyce, who was very anxious about how Finnegans Wake would be received, appreciated this very much. In a letter to Mercanton dated 9 January 1940 (from Saint-Gérand-le-Puy) he wrote: You talk of a certain “novel” I wrote. Here no one has breathed a word of its existence. I have received some more reviews among which is one very odd “contribution” from Helsinki where, happily and as the prophet foresaw, the Finn again wakes. […] In short, a complete fiasco up to the present as far as European criticism is concerned.15
After taking his doctorate in Lausanne in 1940 Mercanton became a teacher at the local grammar school, and from 1955 until his retirement in 1979 he served as Professor of French literature at the University of Lausanne, with an active interest in non-French literatures and cultures. He also made a name for himself as a writer of short stories and novels. In the Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz he is called “one of the most brilliant representatives of a French-speaking Switzerland that sees itself as a
2.33 JACQUES MERCANTON 183
mediator between the different cultures of Europe”.16 All his publications on Joyce are worth reading,17 but he is remembered chiefly for his lively “Hours”.
Notes 1. Most of the information in this article comes from Mercanton’s “The Hours of James Joyce”, here quoted from Potts, ed., Portraits. Entitled “Les heures de James Joyce” it was originally published in Mercure de France 348 (1963), 89–117 and 284–315, the English translation in the Kenyon Review 24 (Autumn 1962), 700–730 and 25 (Winter 1963), 93–118. 2. Mercanton, “Hours”, 207. 3. Mercanton’s first two publications on Joyce were the articles “Ulysse” (Europe 46, 15 April 1938) and “L’Ésthétique de Joyce” (Études de Lettres 13.1, October 1938). Regarding the first, Joyce wrote to Viscount Carlow on 3 June 1938 (LIII, 423): “There is a long article on me in [Europe] which I have not read but I learn that the last ten pages on W i P are very intelligent. Gott sei Dank!”. 4. Mercanton, “Hours”, 208f. 5. Mercanton, “Hours”, 210–214, Norburn, Chronology, 181. 6. Mercanton, “Hours”, 214f. 7. Mercanton, “Hours”, 215–241, Norburn, Chronology, 183. 8. Mercanton, “Hours”, 241f. 9. Mercanton, “Hours”, 242–247, Norburn, Chronology, 186. 10. Mercanton, “Hours”, 243. 11. Mercanton, “Hours”, 248f. and Norburn, Chronology, 188. The quotation is from Mercanton, “Hours”, 249. 12. Mercanton, “Hours”, 250–252 and Norburn, Chronology, 194–197. 13. Mercanton, “Hours”, 252. 14. “Finnegans Wake”, Nouvelle Revue française 27 (1 May 1939). 15. SL, 403; the letter is in French. 16. “Jacques Mercanton” in Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, http://www.hlsdhs-dss.ch, last accessed on 11 March 2018. The translation (from German) is mine. 17. There are eight of them, all collected in Mercanton’s Écrits sur James Joyce (2002): “Promenade avec James Joyce” (1944), “Les Heures de James Joyce” (1963), “La Mort de James Joyce” (1941), “Ulysse” (1938), “Finnegans Wake” (1939), “Gens de Dublin” (1944), “L’Ésthétique de Joyce” (1938), “Présence de Joyce” (1962).
2.34 Museumsgesellschaft
Founded in 1834, the Museumsgesellschaft on Limmatquai 62 is a venerable institution that offers its members a lending library and a reading room with a large range of Swiss and foreign newspapers and magazines. When Joyce was forced to leave Trieste in June 1915 he left behind a furnished apartment with his personal library, making the use of libraries in Zurich an absolute necessity. He lost no time and on 10 September 1915, a little more than two months after his arrival, he joined the Museumsgesellschaft as an associate member (ausserordentliches Mitglied). A few months later, on 22 February 1916, Nora also applied for an associate membership and on 8 January 1918, soon after the Joyce family’s return from Locarno, Joyce became a regular member.1 Being a member of the Museumsgesellschaft enabled Joyce to keep abreast of current events, but he almost certainly needed access to more books than were available there, in particular for his work on Ulysses. For these purposes Joyce may have used the city library (Stadtbibliothek, founded in 1629) and the younger cantonal library which also functioned as a university library (Kantonsbibliothek, founded in 1835), but the situation was to change in 1917. In 1914 it had been decided to merge these two libraries and to build new premises. The new library, called Zentralbibliothek, opened on 30 April 1917, and Joyce became a member soon afterwards, on 3 August.
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Note 1. I owe this information to Mirjam Schreiber, co-director of the Museumsgesellschaft (personal communication dated 20 February 2020). Joyce’s application form as an associate member is reproduced in Faerber and Luchsinger, Joyce in Zürich, 87.
2.35 Odeon (Café)
For a good part of the twentieth century Zurich had two establishments that were chiefly patronised by artists, writers and other intellectuals, many of them foreigners: the café Odeon, opened in 1911, and the restaurant Kronenhalle, in 1924. Both still exist. The Odeon, by Bellevue, at the corner of Limmatquai and Rämistrasse, opened on 1 July 1911 as a lavishly decorated grand café on two floors in the Viennese tradition.1 Popular from the beginning, it functioned as a meeting place for locals and in particular the many émigrés that passed through or lived in Zurich during World War I. One of them, the Austrian author Stefan Zweig, who lived in Zurich between 1917 and 1919, writes in his autobiography The World of Yesterday: I have never since faced a more motley and zealous medley of opinions and people in a form so concentrated and steaming, as it were, than in those Zurich days, nights, rather, for the debates in the Café Bellevue or Café Odéon lasted until lights were switched off, and often we would go to someone’s home after that.2
The list of its patrons during World War I is a long one: In no particular order it includes the founders of Dada, writers such as Leonhard Frank, Andreas Latzko or René Schickele, the painter Marianne von Werefkin, the composers Ferruccio Busoni and Eugène d’Albert, the actors Elisabeth
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Bergner and Alexander Moissi and the two communist revolutionaries Leon Trotsky and Lenin.3 Joyce’s favourite watering hole, especially in 1918/1919, was definitely the Pfauen, but he also patronised the Odeon.4 Stefan Zweig, a frequent visitor who actually met Joyce there, remembers their first encounter as follows: A young man with a little brown beard, with keen eyes behind strikingly thick lenses, sat, usually alone, in a corner of the Café Odéon; they told me that he was a highly-gifted English author. When I became acquainted with James Joyce a few days after that, he harshly rejected all association with England. He was Irish.5
The Odeon retained its role in Zurich’s public life in the 1920s and 1930s, through World War II and beyond. In the late 1960s, however, it suffered a decline, partly because an open drug scene had established itself in its vicinity, whereupon it closed in May 1972. In December of that year it was re-opened as a much smaller establishment, since part of the space it once occupied is now a pharmacy. The café is not the centre of intellectual activity it once was, but its splendid décor has largely been preserved.
Notes 1. For details of the Odeon throughout its history see Riess and Scheidegger’s— highly anecdotal—Café Odeon; for the period 1914 to 1919 see Huonker, Literaturszene Zürich, 27–32. 2. Zweig, World of Yesterday, 209. 3. These and many other names are mentioned in Riess and Scheidegger, Café Odeon, 49–146. See also Huonker, Literaturszene Zürich, 27–32 and—on Joyce—33–36. 4. Joyce’s biographers state that he went there “often” (Gorman, Definitive Biography, 238) or “frequently” (Ellmann, Joyce, 409). This cannot be verified, since according to Dr Alfred Dutli “no records of guests are kept” at the Odeon (letter to Ellmann dated 20 July 1955, Dutli papers in the Zurich James Joyce Foundation). 5. Zweig, World of Yesterday, 210. The two men first met at the Odeon on 10 October 1918 after Joyce had contacted Zweig about Exiles.
2.36 Pfauen (Theatre and Café-Restaurant)
The representative “Pfauen complex” on Rämistrasse 32–36 is a set of buildings comprising a theatre, a restaurant, shops and apartments.1 Replacing an older jumble of buildings, it was built in 1888/89 by the renowned architects Alfred Chiodera and Theophil Tschudy. Its heart was and still is a theatre, which began its existence as Volkstheater zum Pfauen. It soon proved to be inadequate for the needs of the rapidly growing city and was modernised and enlarged by Ferdinand Fellner and Hermann Gottlieb Helmer, the architects who had built the new Stadttheater and the Tonhalle a few years before. The renewed Pfauentheater opened its doors in September 1899 and, operated by the private Genossenschaft zum Pfauen, was used for theatrical productions of various kinds for a quarter of a century. It could be booked by groups such as the English Players, but between 1901 and 1921 it also served as the city’s playhouse.2 In 1922 the wine merchant Ferdinand Rieser (1886–1947) bought it together with his brother and ran it as an independent private theatre from 1926 until 1938.3 In the years after 1933 many actors and directors came to Zurich from Germany and Austria for political reasons, and the Pfauen stage became one of the leading playhouses of the German speaking world, a role it could maintain even after the war. The theatre, now called the Schauspielhaus, is still the city’s main playhouse with its own repertory company. The English Players, operating in Zurich in 1918 and 1919, performed their plays in two theatres, the Kaufleuten and the Pfauen. Their first © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_40
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production, Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, premièred at the Kaufleuten on 29 April 1918, their second, a triple bill with plays by Barrie, Synge and Shaw, at the Pfauen on 17 June 1918. The English Players used these two theatres for later productions as well: the Kaufleuten from September 1918 until March 1919 and the Pfauen from May to December 1919. Joyce, who was the English Players’ business manager in 1918, thus knew the Pfauen theatre well, and so did Nora, who played the role of Cathleen in Synge’s one-act play Riders to the Sea.4 Joyce probably knew the adjoining Pfauen Café-Restaurant even better, since it became his favourite place for spending an evening out, especially in 1918 and 1919, often in the company of Frank Budgen and August and Paul Suter.5 The location of the Pfauen, on Rämistrasse leading up from Bellevue, was ideal especially after the Joyces had moved to Universitätstrasse further up the hill (Fig. 1).
Fig. 1 The Pfauen complex with the gateway leading to the theatre (middle) and the Pfauen Café-Restaurant (on the right), photograph by Wilhelm Gallas, c. 1925 (courtesy Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich)
2.36 PFAUEN (THEATRE AND CAFÉ-RESTAURANT) 191
Notes 1. The information in this paragraph comes from Nievergelt and Schläpfer, Schauspielhaus Zürich, from the article on Ferdinand Rieser in Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch, and from https://neu. schauspielhaus.ch/de/1397/chronik, both last accessed on 24 April 2020. 2. This was the time of Alfred Reucker (1868–1958), who was director of the Stadttheater as well as the Pfauen. 3. Since 1938 it has been operated by the Neue Schauspiel AG. 4. Before the remodelling in 1926 the theatre was actually a separate building accessed from Rämistrasse through a gateway in the main building and a beer garden. Two photographs in Nievergelt and Schläpfer (Schauspielhaus Zürich, 16f.) give an impression of what the Pfauentheater looked like at the time of the English Players. 5. Budgen (Joyce, 171) writes: “The Pfauen was Joyce’s favourite and our general rendezvous”.
2.37 Platzspitz
Joyce had a special relationship with rivers, and they became more important to him in the course of his life. While the Liffey, which runs through his native Dublin, is one aspect of many in Ulysses, it takes a central role in Finnegans Wake. Its “Anna Livia Plurabelle” section is an ode to the Liffey and the rivers of the world, the names of which are spread throughout the chapter. Zurich’s two main rivers, the Limmat and its smaller tributary the Sihl, are also to be found there: “Yssel that the limmat?” and “legging a jig or so on the sihl”.1 Joyce was very conscious of his Zurich river references as shown in a letter to Carola Giedion-Welcker dated 28 March 1938: “It’s a pity you didn’t quote the sentences about Sihl and Limmat in your article on me? They are in Anna Livia Plurabelle”.2 The Platzspitz, a small platform above the place where the (smaller) Sihl merges with the Limmat, is the best spot to appreciate the two rivers. According to Giedion-Welcker, to Joyce “the confluence of the Limmat and Sihl was an elemental and dramatic meeting, and when I once wanted to take a picture of him in Zurich, it had to be exactly at this spot and with this river background”.3 This happened in February 1938 and the pictures Giedion-Welcker took on that occasion have become iconic. They show Joyce wearing a black coat, either facing the photographer or, with his back turned, looking downriver (Fig. 1).4 In 2004 the Platzspitz was turned into a subtle memorial for Joyce with a work entitled “Ljmmat Sjhl, Hommage à James Joyce” by the artist Hannes Vogel. The words “Ljmmat” and “Sjhl” mounted on the walls © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_41
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Fig. 1 James Joyce at Platzspitz, photograph by Carola Giedion-Welcker, February 1938 (courtesy Zurich James Joyce Foundation)
supporting the platform identify and pay homage not only the two rivers, but also the writer whose first and last names begin with a J.
Notes 1. FW 198.13 and 200.23–24. 2. LIII, 418. 3. Giedion-Welcker, “Meetings with Joyce”, 265. See also Senn in O’Neill, ed., Murmoirs, 47. Platzspitz may also be alluded to in “an litlee plads af liefest pose” (FW 265.14).
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4. According to Fritz Senn (personal communication), the “meeting” of the Limmat and the Sihl at Platzspitz may also have reminded Joyce of a favourite poem of his, Thomas Moore’s “The Meeting of the Waters”, which is alluded to, ironically, in Ulysses (U 8.414–416).
2.38 Rascher-Verlag and the First German Translation of Exiles
Joyce’s Exiles was published on 25 May 1918 in England and in the United States, followed less than a year later by a German translation. Entitled Verbannte, it went on sale on 4 April 1919 as the first of Joyce’s works to be translated into German. The publisher was Rascher-Verlag in Zurich. For more than 60 years, from 1908 until its closure in 1971, Rascher- Verlag in Zurich was one of Switzerland’s most important publishing houses. Having taken over his father’s bookstore in 1901 Max Rascher (1883–1962) complemented it with a publishing business, “Verlag Rascher u. Co.”, in 1908. At a time when German nationalism was rampant, Rascher became a forum for Swiss literature and art, publishing established as well as up-and-coming Swiss authors ranging from Carl Spitteler (1845–1924), winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1919, to Robert Walser (1878–1956). Rascher was also the publisher of Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961). In the tense atmosphere of World War I Max Rascher championed pan-European, pacifist ideas. “Rascher u. Co” was domiciled in Leipzig as well as Zurich, but when German authorities, who were highly critical of pacifism, threatened to interfere, he founded a separate business, “Max Rascher Verlag AG”, domiciled only in Zurich.1 By virtue of its location in neutral Switzerland as well as Max Rascher’s political stance, the Rascher-Verlag also became the publishing house for many exiled or ostracised writers, one of them being the Austrian Stefan Zweig.2 It was possibly Zweig who helped Joyce to place the translation of his play Exiles with Rascher, but the evidence is circumstantial: Joyce had © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_42
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sent Zweig a copy of Exiles in summer or early autumn 1918, Zweig reacted favourably on 12 September and the two men met on 10 October, the very day on which the contract between Rascher and Joyce was signed.3 The play was translated by Hannah von Mettal, but it is not known how Joyce met her, and she is not mentioned in the contract.4 The contract, in French, states that Joyce gives Rascher the exclusive right to publish the German translation of Exiles (§ 1) as well as the right of first refusal for “his novel” (§ 4). Rascher will print 1400 copies of the play plus 200 (later amended to 300) “theatre copies” on cheaper paper. Joyce will receive 20 free copies as well as all theatre copies; he will pay 1700 Swiss francs as soon as the book is on sale and will receive 1.45 francs for every book sold. After some delays caused by Hannah von Mettal not sending back proofs in time, the play was published as Verbannte: Schauspiel in drei Akten on 4 April 1919,5 and on 15 April Joyce paid Rascher an instalment of 1000 francs.6 The story of Joyce and Rascher-Verlag after that is not a happy one. The play itself did not do well: No English stage showed interest, and it flopped when it was first performed in Munich, on 7 August 1919. Joyce also did not pay the rest of the money owed, which came to 904 francs. He ignored reminders sent to him on 19 June and 3 October and left Zurich for Trieste on 16 October. A third reminder dated 27 February 1920 may not have reached him since like the previous ones it was sent to his last Zurich address at Universitätstrasse 29. The matter rested unresolved for more than five years. In July 1920 Joyce had moved to Paris, and Ulysses was published as a book by Shakespeare and Company in 1922. In late 1925 or early 1926 Max Rascher must have contacted Sylvia Beach about the money owed and about § 4 of the 1918 contract referring to the rights for Joyce’s “novel”— which, disingenuously I think, he now understood to be Ulysses. He received a reply dated 22 March 1926 from Dr Lohmeyer, the manager of Rhein-Verlag. Lohmeyer quoted a letter by Sylvia Beach in which she rejected Rascher’s debt claim, blamed him for not having done anything for Verbannte and also denied that Rascher had the right to publish a German translation of Ulysses. This was reinforced by a personal letter from Joyce to Rascher, in German, dated 29 March 1926.7 In the meantime Rascher had done the accounts: only nine copies of Verbannte had been sold, and Joyce now owed them 1331 francs (the original 904 francs plus interest, minus 13 francs for the nine copies sold).8 Exasperated, Rascher wrote to Joyce on 9 April stating that the disappointing sales were
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not the publisher’s fault and offered to give up on § 4 in return for the 1331.95 francs owed. Further letters with new proposals followed in 1927, 1928 and 1932, but neither side yielded. In 1927 Rhein-Verlag published the first German translation of Ulysses,9 and it appears that Joyce never paid his debt. What he thought of the whole affair can be gleaned from a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver he dictated on 20 September 1928: “There is a case pending in Germany and Switzerland between Rasher [sic] of Zurich (I wish somebody would make bacon of him for he is an impossible escroc.) and the Rheinverlag but I need not weary you about that nor with an account of my holidays”.10 That was still not to be the end of the story of Exiles in German. In 1960 the Verlag der Arche in Zurich paid Rascher a licensing fee of 400 francs for the right to republish Hannah von Mettal’s translation,11 and a few years later Suhrkamp Verlag in Frankfurt bought all rights pertaining to the German version of the play for 1600 francs.12 Thus, late in the day and a few years before its own closure, Rascher-Verlag finally made some money from Verbannte. The case of Joyce and Rascher is a painful one, but in sum it has to be said that both parties benefitted in their own way: It is a fact that Joyce never fully paid his debt and that Rascher was mistaken when he claimed in 1925/26 that the 1918 contract gave him the right to publish Ulysses in German. On the positive side, Joyce had Verbannte published quickly and Rascher-Verlag eventually made a small profit from the play in addition to recouping its initial outlay.
Notes 1. “Max Rascher” in Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch, last accessed on 19 March 2020. See also Rascher, Fünfundzwanzig Jahre and Witz, Der Rascher Verlag Zürich. 2. Zweig’s customary publisher was Insel-Verlag in Leipzig, but during his stay in Zurich he published one book with Rascher, a 16-page booklet entitled Das Herz Europas. Ein Besuch im Genfer Roten Kreuz (1918). 3. See the article on Edith McCormick for her attempt, in June 1918, to help Joyce find a publisher for the German translation of Exiles and a theatre that would perform the play. 4. The rest of this article is based entirely on documents in the archive of Rascher-Verlag which is now kept at the Zentralbibliothek. I was made aware of the story of Joyce and Rascher by a remark of Ruth Frehner’s, in “Through the Reading-Glass”, 321.
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5. Several copies are kept in Zurich libraries; in one of them, at the Zentralbibliothek, there is a handwritten dedication to Martha Fleischmann. 6. The final bill came to 1904 francs (the 1700 francs mentioned in the contract plus 120 francs for the additional 100 stage copies Joyce had requested plus 40 francs for author’s corrections plus 44 francs for corrections slips that had to be printed and glued into all copies). This was a stiff sum, but Joyce was obviously eager to have the German version of his play published. Also, he was in a relatively comfortable financial position since he had been receiving a monthly stipend of 1000 francs from Mrs McCormick since March 1918. 7. Lohmeyer, Beach and Joyce argued that the unnamed “novel” mentioned in § 4 was a reference to A Portrait and not to Ulysses which was far from finished in 1918. 8. Statement (Abrechnung) dated 24 March 1926. 9. See the article on Rhein-Verlag for further details. 10. LI, 268f. and SL, 337. The phrase “for he is an impossible escroc” is only found in the version printed in SL. French escroc means “cheat”. 11. The contract is dated 11 August 1960. Arche never published Verbannte, however. 12. The contract is dated 22 March 1967, the purchase being effective as of 1 November 1966. Suhrkamp bought the rights as publisher of the new “Frankfurter Ausgabe” of the works of Joyce. The translation of Exiles in the “Frankfurter Ausgabe” is by Klaus Reichert.
2.39 Rhein-Verlag
Exiles, Joyce’s first work to be translated into German, was published by Rascher-Verlag, Zürich (Verbannte, 1919). The play was unsuccessful both on the stage and on the page, and it was only after the publication of Ulysses in 1922 that German translations of other works followed. The publishing house for these was Rhein-Verlag, established in Basel in 1920 with the aim to serve a new, postwar Europe.1 Its representative in Paris was the French-German poet Ivan Goll (1891–1950), “whom Joyce had known slightly in Zurich”.2 Goll visited Joyce in Paris in July 1920, immediately after his arrival there from Trieste, “to talk about publishing A Portrait in a German translation”.3 Nothing came of the project for a while, but then three translations by Georg Goyert (1884–1966),4 followed in quick succession: Jugendbildnis (1926), Ulysses (1927, private printing, in three volumes) and Dublin: Novellen (1928). Goyert’s translations came in for a great deal of criticism, but they were not replaced until much later. In 1929 the Rhein-Verlag was bought by Daniel Brody (1883–1969),5 a Hungarian who, after studying law, had taken over his uncle’s publishing ventures in Budapest, chief among them the Neues Pester Journal. He left Hungary after World War I and for a while worked as a commercial director of Kurt Wolff Verlag in Leipzig. For Brody, a highly cultured man, the chief attraction of Rhein-Verlag was Joyce. In 1930 he published the 2nd and 3rd editions of Ulysses, followed by the translations of Stuart Gilbert’s
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Ulysses: A Study (as Das Rätsel Ulysses: Eine Studie, 1932)6 and, much later, Ellmann’s biography (the 1st edition, 1959).7 Rhein-Verlag also published the works of the Austrian Hermann Broch (1886–1951), whose writing (e.g. the trilogy Die Schlafwandler, 1930/32) was strongly influenced by Joyce. Brody, a Jew, was forced into exile by the Nazis: He moved to Switzerland in 1936, then to Vienna, to the Netherlands and in 1942 to Mexico. After the war he briefly lived in New York and finally came back to Switzerland, where he died in Sorengo near Lugano in the Canton of Ticino in 1969.8 In 1966 the publishing rights to Joyce and Broch were sold to Suhrkamp-Verlag. Suhrkamp subsequently published all of Joyce’s works9 and the letters, newly translated or translated for the first time, in its “Frankfurter Ausgabe” (1969–1981).10
Notes 1. Unless indicated otherwise, all information in this article comes from two texts by Bertold Hack in Broch and Brody, Briefwechsel: “Der Verleger Daniel Brody und seine Familie” (columns 1175–1192) and “Kurze Geschichte des Rhein-Verlags” (columns 1225–1234). 2. Ellmann, Joyce, 491. 3. Ellmann, Joyce, 491. 4. On Goyert, see Barlach et al., Georg Goyert. 5. Brody moved the seat of Rhein-Verlag from Basel to Zurich, but the actual work was done in Munich. 6. The translator was also Georg Goyert. 7. For the story of the German adaptation of Ellmann’s biography, see Senn in O’Neill, ed., Murmoirs, 160f. Several translators (Albert W. Hess, Klaus and Karl H. Reichert) worked on the project and Fritz Senn was asked “to supervise the translation and to supply the quotations from the German version of Georg Goyert. [He] also had to translate whatever did not yet exist in German, such as many letters and, above all, passages from Finnegans Wake”. The process was “laborious and full of obstacles”. 8. See also Giedion-Welcker, “Daniel Brody”, an article published in 1963 on the occasion of Brody’s 80th birthday. 9. Vol. 4.2 contains two translations of “Anna Livia Plurabelle”, by Hans Wollschläger and Wolfgang Hildesheimer, respectively, but Finnegans Wake has not been translated in its entirety. 10. For Fritz Senn’s account of how Suhrkamp’s “Frankfurter Ausgabe” edition came about, see O’Neill, ed., Murmoirs, 94–97.
2.40 Paul Ruggiero
Little is known about Paul Ruggiero (1887–1972), a bank employee whom Joyce met at the Club des Étrangers1 and who became one of his best friends in Zurich. Ruggiero was Swiss, but he must have lived abroad when young. Budgen writes that he was one “of the Zürich Greeks of those days”,2 according to Ellmann and Potts (who probably follows Ellmann) he knew Greek because he had spent several years in Greece3 and Senn states that “he had come back to Zurich from Turkey when the war [i.e. World War I] broke out”.4 His brief memoir “James Joyce’s Last Days in Zurich” is written in French,5 and Joyce’s letters to him are in Italian or French.6 He is characterised as “an amiable man, and as resourceful as he was amiable”7 and as “a simple, modest man, [who] found Joyce simple and modest too”.8 In 1940 Joyce himself described him as “a Zurich friend of mine of a very modest station of life who is a clerk at the Zurich Kreditanstalt”.9 He was a man for all seasons: On Joyce’s birthday night he prepared Middle Eastern exotic dishes,10 he was “a fairly accomplished musician”,11 he advised Joyce not to lend money to the dubious Jules Martin12 and when in January 1917 Joyce complained that their flat at Seefeldstrasse 54 was too small he offered them his father’s old one.13 How good a friend he was became apparent in 1940 when he, together with the Giedions, worked indefatigably to enable the Joyce family to return to Switzerland. Ruggiero and the Giedions were at the train station when the Joyces finally arrived in Zurich on 17 December, and Joyce told Ruggiero, who had also arranged their accommodation: “Ruggiero, we © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_44
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can never repay what you have done for us”.14 In the days to come Ruggiero saw Joyce almost every day and he was the practical man until the end: On Saturday 11 January 1941, when it became apparent that Joyce would die soon, he organised a power of attorney for Giorgio to give him access to Joyce’s funds.15 He was also present at Joyce’s funeral, but “found it impossible to convince Nora that it would be good to have a priest come for the final benediction”. At the end of the ceremony, however, he made the sign of the cross and withdrew with a “Requiem aeternam dona ei Domine”.16 Ruggiero’s wife Bertha was a friend of Nora’s and would meet her for tea after Joyce’s death.17 Around 1965 Ruggiero himself donated Joyce’s guitar and some letters to the Joyce Tower & Museum in Sandycove.18 After his death his wife gave a small collection of letters and postcards by Joyce, a series of books and some other items to the Zentralbibliothek.19
Notes 1. Ellmann, Joyce, 408. See also the article on Weisses Kreuz. 2. Budgen, Joyce, 174. 3. Ellmann, Joyce, 408, Potts, Portraits, 281. 4. Senn in O’Neill, ed., Murmoirs, 48. 5. The English translation, based on an unpublished typescript left by Ruggiero, is found in Potts, ed., Portraits, 283–286. 6. One telegram sent to Ruggiero on 25 November 1940 (LIII, 501) is in English. 7. Budgen, Joyce, 174 8. Ellmann, Joyce, 408. 9. LIII, 496. This was the Schweizerische Kreditanstalt, now Credit Suisse. Ruggiero told Senn (personal communication) that Joyce sometimes waited for him on payday to borrow money: “But he always paid it back”. 10. Budgen, Joyce, 174. 11. Potts, Portraits, 281. 12. Ellmann, Joyce, 410. 13. Ellmann, Joyce, 408. 14. Ruggiero, “Joyce’s Last Days”, 284. 15. Ruggiero, “Joyce’s Last Days”, 285. 16. Ruggiero, “Joyce’s Last Days”, 286.
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17. Maddox, Nora, 356 and 370. Bertha, born 1903, was a good deal younger than Paul. The Ruggieros were married in 1923. 18. Senn in O’Neill, ed., Murmoirs, 48 and 262. 19. The letters and postcards are available online, at https://www.emanuscripta.ch/doi/10.7891/e-manuscripta-15671and-15672, last accessed on 10 March 2020.
2.41 Baroness Antonietta de Saint-Léger
Twice during his years in Zurich, Joyce spent some time in Locarno, a town on the shores of Lago Maggiore. Joyce was “laid up with tonsillitis” in July 1917, and when his doctor advised “the family to pass the winter in the warmer climate of Italian-speaking Switzerland”, he sent Nora to Locarno “intending to join them later”.1 In August he suffered a violent attack of lumbago followed by severe eye problems which necessitated an operation. It was after recovering from this operation, on 12 October, that he travelled to Locarno and stayed there with his family until the end of the year.2 Joyce’s second visit to Locarno was much shorter: Together with Budgen he stayed there from 8 to 14 May 1919.3 At the beginning of the twentieth century the region around Locarno, which is favoured by not only a mild, almost Mediterranean climate but also great natural beauty, began to attract people from all over Europe, many of them seeking alternative lifestyles. On Monte Verità, a hill above nearby Ascona, a group of Germans had established a colony devoted to a new, reformed way of life involving uncooked food, bathing in the sun and free, expressive dance. The Brissago Islands, a few miles to the south in Lago Maggiore, were the home of the legendary Baroness Antonietta de Saint-Léger (1856–1948), supposedly an illegitimate daughter of Tsar Alexander II. She studied at the ‘Smolny Institute for Noble Maidens,’ the prestigious girls’ school in St. Petersburg, but for reasons unknown had to flee Russia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_45
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after having been given only forty-eight hours to do so. She married at least four times, her third husband being the rich Irishman Richard Flemyng de St. Leger. It was with him that she bought the Brissago Islands [in 1885] and there built a villa and a park. She had supposedly studied with Liszt in Rome in her youth; she certainly cultivated friendly relations with artists of different kinds thereafter. The composer Ruggiero Leoncavallo and the artists Giovanni Segantini and Daniele Ranzoni were on occasion her guests on the island, […]. Her interests were wider still, however: in 1913 she published an article about her park in the Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society (in English), and she was busy learning her fourteenth language when she died in Intragna several years later, bankrupt.4
Joyce either had no knowledge of the colony on Monte Verità or chose to disregard it,5 but he certainly took an interest in the Baroness: He made her acquaintance during his first, long stay in Locarno in late 19176 and he visited her in May 1919 together with Budgen: Along the near mainland [the Baroness] was called Circe and many far- fetched stories went to make up her Circean legend. During our stay in Locarno, in the spring of 1919, he met her again by chance in front of the post office and she invited us to visit her on her enchanted isle. This was a cunningly devised jungle paradise, holding, among other wonders, a grove of superb eucalyptus trees. I asked permission to paint them, which permission was given together with an invitation to spend a whole day on the island. Behind the house the Lady of the Lake had set up a doll factory wherein a Japanese artist struggled vainly to produce a doll, not after his own image, but after the image of western child beauty suitably commercialised. The portrait of a very beautiful young woman, that of our hostess, hung in the salon, the walls of which were further hung with oil colour drawings depicting scenes from the Odyssey, and with a tapestry bearing the words [kalos philos kai echthros kalos] (good friend and good foe). The long table bore a mountainous litter of paper, string, casts, fruits, books, vessels, silk stockings, letters and other gear such as no bachelor’s table in Europe might hope to equal. When we assembled on the terrace for tea, the Lady of the Lake regaled us with a liqueur distilled by herself, tasting like a cross between Kümmel and Cointreau. Before we left she entrusted to Joyce a packet of letters and a valise of books on the theme of erotic perversion, remarking that he might find the contents useful as documentation for his writing. She was afraid too that in the event of sudden death these might be found and give rise to misunderstandings. All this material was no doubt useful enough to Joyce when a month or two later he began the composition of Circe.7
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There is no doubt, therefore, that the Baroness was one of the models for Circe in Ulysses, but Budgen’s vivid account, unfortunately, is the only detailed evidence we have of their meeting. The intriguing “packet of letters” and the even more intriguing “valise of books on the theme of erotic perversion” seem to be lost. Based on a note by Djuna Barnes, Ellmann reports that Joyce listened to the Baroness’s adventures “with much interest”, but found the tale “too extraordinary for his use”.8 It should also be noted that while Joyce met the Baroness in May 1919, he wrote the “Circe” episode a good deal later, from late spring 1920 onwards. He did not forget the Baroness, however: While writing “Circe” he consulted her about a detail that bothered him (the magic flower Moly that Ulysses received from Hermes)9 and in 1932 he asked Stanislaus what he had done with a photograph of the Baroness.10 By a curious coincidence the Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck also stayed in Ticino in May 1919. He did not know Joyce at the time and unlike Joyce he did not meet the Baroness, but she nevertheless provided the inspiration for his opera Venus (composed 1919–1921).11
Notes 1. Norburn, Chronology, 76. See also Ellmann, Joyce, 417. 2. In Locarno the Joyces first stayed at Pension Villa Rossa, then at Pension Daheim. When returning to Zurich in early January 1918 they moved into a new apartment there, at Universitätstrasse 38. 3. Norburn, Chronology, 87. According to Maddox (Nora, 164) “Joyce took Budgen off to Locarno as part payment for Nora’s portrait”. 4. Walton, Schoeck, 85. 5. According to Lucia he later called Ascona “the most boring place in Switzerland” (letter by Lucia to Frank Budgen dated 3 September 1933, LIII, 285 and SL, 367). 6. According to Shloss (Lucia, 68) Nora and the children met the Baroness even before Joyce did: “Lucia remembered the lake outing to visit an elderly lady, the Baronessa Saint Leger, when a thunderstorm came up while they were in the little boat. Nora, praying for their safety, was terrified that they would not get to the Isola Saint Leger safely, but fate was kind. They got there, bought jam made of figs and apricots for their father, and returned unharmed to Locarno”. 7. Budgen, Joyce, 247f. Budgen’s report is confirmed by Suter, “Some Reminiscences”, 62.
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8. Ellmann, Joyce, 456f.; the quotations are from 457. Ellmann’s account is based on Budgen’s book, but also on “interviews with Frank Budgen, Paul Suter, and August Suter”. However, in the process of advising Budgen on what to put into his book, Joyce wrote to him in a letter dated 17 July 1933 (LI, 336): “Allude to the Baroness (?) S.L. as the Lady of the Lake (she was also Lord of the Isles). She gave me a whole trunk full of stuff which I used largely in Circe”. 9. Ellmann, Joyce, 496f. 10. LIII, 241. 11. See Walton, Schoeck, 82.
2.42 Victor Sax
Victor Albert Sax (1892–1962) belonged to the circle of friends of Rudolf Goldschmidt who helped Joyce after his arrival in Zurich in 1915 by taking English lessons with him. Ellmann tells us that [t]he relationship of teacher and pupil frequently turned into friendship, as with Victor Sax, Edmund Brauchbar, and Georges Borach. With all three, Joyce’s lessons went far afield. Once with Sax he proposed that they write limericks for their lesson that day, and after overseeing the productions of Sax in this form he turned out two of his own: There is a young gallant named Sax Who is prone to hayfever attacks For the prime of the year To Cupid so dear Stretches maidens—and men!—on their backs.1
Ellmann also says that Joyce “continued to be friendly with these men for the rest of his life”, but the evidence of his friendship with Sax is sketchy. Having grown up in Zurich and having spent time abroad as a young man, Sax worked in his father’s silk business. From early on, however, he was drawn towards writers and artists and, when his father’s firm was liquidated he became a freelance writer.2 In later life he lived in Sicily and New York and he died of a heart attack in Paris in 1962.3 A volume of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_46
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“selected descriptions, tales and verse” published after his death shows him to have been a conventional writer of modest talent.4 Joyce does not feature in the book. In the published Letters there are traces that the Joyces and the Saxes kept in touch somehow, but the details are unclear. Nora appears to have met Mrs Sax’s sister in Paris and Joyce wrote to her in July and August 1939.5 In his letter of 28 July 1939 he informs her that “[t]he case of wine has now come” and asks her to thank Mr Sax “but he is on no account to send me any more of anything”.6 On a postcard sent to Victor from Saint- Gérand on 14 March 1940 he tells his “dear pupil” that he will find himself “alluded to a few times in the text and notes of my biography by Herbert Gorman […] which is now on sale in Europe”.7 Two postcards written to Mrs Sax in April 1940, finally, indicate that she was in Italy and organised volumes of the monthly Prospettive for him.8
Notes 1. Ellmann, Joyce, 396. The second limerick quoted by Ellmann is “a parody of the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy”. The two limericks were in Sax’s possession when Ellmann interviewed him (Ellmann, Joyce, 780, note 17); neither is printed in Mays’s edition of Poems and “Exiles”. 2. Short prose pieces of his were published in Swiss newspapers and magazines. According to an obituary found by Andreas Weigel (email to the Zurich James Joyce Foundation dated 7 August 2011) he became a member of the Poetry Society of America in 1958. 3. The information on Sax’s life comes from the obituary published in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (evening edition) of 21 March 1962. 4. Entitled Ausgewählte Schilderungen, Erzählungen und Verse, the book was published by his widow Sylvia (New York, 1964). The dedication on page 7 reads: “In giving pleasure to others Victor found his greatest joy. These pages have been selected as a remembrance for his friends”. 5. LIII, 447, 450 and 451. 6. LIII, 450. 7. LIII, 471. However, as far as I can see, Gorman mentions Sax only once (Definitive Biography, 231). 8. LIII, 474, 476f. Joyce was interested in Prospettive mainly because Vol. 4.2 (15 February 1940) contained the Italian version of “Anna Livia Plurabelle”, translated by himself together with Ettore Settanni.
2.43 Othmar Schoeck
During his Zurich years Joyce took a lively interest in the city’s musical life, and he must have encountered the music of the Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck (1886–1957) then.1 Four years younger than Joyce, Schoeck was already an established conductor and composer at the time: He conducted several choirs, and a number of his works were first performed while Joyce lived in Zurich.2 The composer Otto Luening writes in his memoirs: In the Pfauen, [Joyce] began questioning me more and more about music. His tastes were unconventional. He thought that the Swiss song composer Othmar Schoeck, who was also greatly admired by Hermann Hesse, was one of the greatest composers in the world—an opinion that may yet prove to be valid, since Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in 1970 recorded Schoeck’s songs.3
Luening’s book was only published in 1980, and his memory may have deceived him, for according to the evidence of the letters Joyce’s enthusiasm for Schoeck only developed in the 1930s. On 15 January 1935 Joyce wrote to Giorgio and Helen from the Carlton Elite Hotel in Zurich: Helen, please go out and buy Cassell’s German-English, English-German Dictionary and sit down with Giorgio and study, first of all, the text of Gottfried Keller’s poem sequence Lebendig Begraben which I forward under separate cover together with the piano score for bass voice by Othmar Schoeck, autographed by the composer. I heard this [?] sung last night by © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_47
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the Bernese bass Fritz Loeffel (the leading bass in this country), bought the score just now and have rung up Prof. Fehr to ask O.S. to sign it for Giorgio. He is a youngish Zurich composer of about 42, principal works are lieder and two big operas Penthesilea (book by Kleist) Don Ranudo (comic). If I can judge by last night he stands head and shoulders over Stravinsky and Antheil as composer for orchestra and voice anyhow. I did not know Keller wrote this kind of gruesome-satiric semi-pious verse but the effect of it on any audience is tremendous. The singer got 8 to 10 calls. No voice but a bass could carry the text and music. The whole thing, without break, lasts 50 minutes. Schoeck is a type rather like Beckett who gets up at 2.30 p.m. his wife says. But I hope to catch him before he falls asleep again. But he can write music all right.4
The concert mentioned did, in fact, take place in the Tonhalle on 14 January 1935, with Schoeck himself conducting Bruckner’s fourth symphony and his own Lebendig Begraben, a work for voice and orchestra set to Gottfried Keller’s eponymous sequence of poems.5 Joyce visited Schoeck soon after, and the two men may have met again on other occasions. Joyce certainly attended one or more performances of Schoeck’s opera Massimilla Doni in spring 1937.6 His attempt to interest Giorgio in Schoeck’s music failed, however,7 and he tried, also unsuccessfully, to get Schoeck to compose an opera based on Byron’s Cain or to set his own poems to music.8 Schoeck was on Joyce’s mind when the future of Europe—and his own—began to look bleak. On 28 March 1938 he wrote to Carola Giedion-Welcker: “All I can say about the future in Z’ch is I hope whoever has it will respect Villa Giedion, Othmar Schoeck, Vogt’s clinic and the Kronenhalle”.9 And when Joyce applied for a permit to move to Switzerland in the autumn of 1940 and needed to provide references he mentioned “Giedion, Vogt, Moser et Schoeck”.10 He was still waiting in Saint- Gérand-le-Puy when, by a happy coincidence, he heard Lebendig Begraben on the radio,11 and in late November the long-awaited visas for Switzerland finally arrived. According to Walton, there was a last meeting in Zurich: “[S]hortly before Christmas [Joyce] was back in the Kronenhalle with Schoeck and his drinking companions, telling them the whole story [of his return]”.12
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Notes 1. For Schoeck see Chris Walton’s Othmar Schoeck und seine Zeitgenossen (2002) as well as Othmar Schoeck: Life and Works (2009). The first of these volumes contains three essays which are relevant in the context of this book, “Verklärte Sommernacht: Othmar Schoeck und Gottfried Keller” (17–28), “La Vénus des îles: Die Baronin Antonietta von St.-Léger” (76–86) and, above all, “with the twinx of their taylz … Schoeck und James Joyce” (87–91). 2. For example, Trommelschläge, op. 26 for choir and orchestra (March 1916) or the operas Erwin und Elmire (November 1916) and Don Ranudo (April 1919). See “Othmar Schoeck: Eine Kurzchronologie” in Walton, Schoeck und seine Zeitgenossen, 182–185. 3. Luening, Odyssey, 192. 4. LI, 356. In “Opus Posthumous” Sebastian D. G. Knowles explores the connections between Joyce, Keller, Schoeck and Samuel Barber in great detail and demonstrates how hearing Schoeck’s Lebendig Begraben affected Joyce deeply (122): “For Joyce the experience of Keller via Schoeck was like an electric shock”. 5. See Giedion-Welcker, “Meetings with Joyce”, 268, note 19, Walton, “Schoeck und James Joyce”, 87f. and Walton, Schoeck, 204f. Ellmann (Joyce, 669) also tells this story, but dates it—wrongly—to April 1934. Lebendig Begraben was first performed in 1927; for details see Walton, Schoeck, 155–159. 6. Walton, “Schoeck und James Joyce”, 88. Walton writes (my translation): “It is to be assumed that after 1935 there were further—coincidental— meetings, but the next documented encounter took place in March 1937, on the occasion of the Swiss première of Schoeck’s new opera Massimilla Doni”. 7. LI, 358 and 361. 8. Ellmann, Joyce, 669 and LIII, 417. See also Walton, “Schoeck und James Joyce”, 90. 9. LIII, 418. See also Giedion-Welcker, “Meetings with Joyce”, 267f., for a slightly different version. 10. Postcard (in French) to Carola Giedion-Welcker dated 18 September 1940 (LIII, 488).
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11. Letter to Carola Giedion-Welcker dated 11 November 1940 (LI, 424): “P.S. J’ai écrit un petit mot à Schoeck lui disant que j’ai entendu l’autre soir son oeuvre Lebendig Begraben à la radio, et qu’on m’avait défendu, à moi, de fouler le sol de son Zurich où je voulais aller le féliciter”. See also Walton, “Schoeck und James Joyce”, 89 and Walton, Schoeck, 239f.; according to Walton, the performance was broadcast on 21 October. 12. Walton, “Schoeck und James Joyce”, 89 and Walton, Schoeck, 240. Walton does not mention a source, however.
2.44 Sechseläuten and Sechseläutenplatz
Sechseläuten (Sächsilüüte in Zurich dialect) is a traditional and popular Zurich event with a long history.1 Held usually on the third Monday in April every year, it celebrates the end of winter and the beginning of spring. Sechseläuten is organised and carried out by the guilds of the city of Zurich. Wearing traditional costumes and accompanied by wagons, animals and bands, they march through the streets of Zurich in a huge procession, watched and applauded by thousands of spectators. The procession ends on the Sechseläutenplatz by the lake, where at exactly six o’clock an effigy of a snowman filled with petards (the Böögg) is burned on a pyre. The length of time it takes for the head of the Böögg to explode is thought to indicate how long it will take for spring to arrive.2 Sechseläuten literally means “the ringing [of bells] at six o’clock”, which was a signal to indicate the end of the working day. It is first documented by a decision of the city council dated 11 March 1525.3 Sechseläutenplatz is an open space between Bellevue and the Stadttheater, and the Böögg was burnt there for the first time in 1904.4 It was a meadow in Joyce’s time (Fig. 1), but as part of a redevelopment finished in 2014 it is now paved over with quartzite and has become a popular venue for other activities and events in addition to Sechseläuten. We learn from Ellmann that Joyce saw Sechseläuten for the first time when the Joyces lived in Zurich and that he “often timed his arrival in Zurich in later years so that he might see this ceremony”.5 Carola Giedion- Welcker knows more: © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_48
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Fig. 1 Sechseläutenplatz during the burning of the Böögg, postcard, 1935 (courtesy Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich) Because he often was in Zurich during the spring, [Joyce] frequently attended the Sechseläuten, whose name he used for his audacious word plays in Finnegans Wake. From his window on Bellevue-Platz he registered precisely all phases of the ceremonial burning. The mixture of genuine commonplace reality with the fantastic rituals around the winter symbol struck him as highly amusing.6
When Ellmann states that “in Finnegans Wake, also a fertility rite, and probably also taking place in April, the washerwomen hear the bells announcing the Bögg’s death[,]”7 he implies that Sechseläuten is a fertility rite. However, it can be called that only insofar as a rite of spring connotes the re-awakening of nature. Joyce’s punning references to saks-, sax- and especially sex- make the connection with sexuality obvious, but it is worth emphasizing that it is not there in German Sechse-läuten.
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Notes 1. See Baumann and Niesper, Zürcher Sechseläuten, for a good overview. 2. For the guilds Sechseläuten is an all-day event: They meet for drinks and lunch before the procession, have dinner afterwards and then visit each other in their guildhouses according to a strict protocol. 3. Baumann and Niesper, Zürcher Sechseläuten, 167. 4. Baumann and Niesper, Zürcher Sechseläuten, 178. 5. Ellmann, Joyce, 409f.; the quotation is from page 410. Ellmann seems to imply that Joyce first witnessed Sechseläuten in April 1917, but because of World War I there was no burning of the Böögg in the years 1917 and 1918. 6. Giedion-Welcker, “Meetings with Joyce”, 267. Joyce was in Zurich in April 1930, 1934 and 1937, so Giedion-Welcker’s statement that he attended Sechseläuten “frequently” is somewhat overstated. For Joyce’s “audacious word plays” see “Zurich in Joyce”. 7. Ellmann, Joyce, 410.
2.45 Fritz Senn
Fritz Senn, born in Basel in 1928 and raised in Zurich, began to study English and German at the University of Zurich in the late 1940s. He remembers his first encounter with Joyce in an introductory course taught by Heinrich Straumann: A very bright young student in a ‘proseminar’ had presented ‘The Dead’ in a paper, and the professor took up the theme and told us about his meeting with Joyce. When he heard of Joyce arriving in Zurich in late 1940 he went to see and interview him and so became the last important witness. He gave us his impression of Joyce as he had seen him, weeks before his death, and he briefly sketched Joyce’s impact on literature. It inspired me enough to get hold of Dubliners, and I diligently read the stories, but they did not then affect me in any particular way. They seemed a bit unsubstantial and, very often, came to an end when I turned the page; there was no surprise or clinching ending. A bit anaemic they looked, at the first go.1
Not entirely discouraged by this experience, Senn bought a copy of Ulysses when he spent an exchange year in England in 1951/52. At the time his English was not adequate to understand it fully, “nor did Ulysses live up to its alleged promise of enticing obscenity”,2 but working his way through the novel would be the beginning of his lifelong fascination with Joyce. For family reasons he broke off his studies, which “had dragged on aimlessly anyway and with little purpose”3 and subsequently worked as a proofreader in a printing house and then as a publisher’s reader for © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_49
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Diogenes-Verlag (1976–1982) and Haffmanns-Verlag (1983–1985). He immersed himself in Joyce and his works all the while, assembled a library and a collection of Joyceana, contacted and became friends with other specialists, and thus became the well-known and highly respected Joycean he is today.4 He was one of the founders of A Wake Newslitter (published since 1962) and, from 1963 onwards, European editor of the James Joyce Quarterly. He was among those who initiated the biennial Joyce-Symposia, two of which, in 1979 and 1996, took place in Zurich. Having started as a “reader and consumer of Joyce” he turned into “someone who churned out comments, an active contributor to critical pollution”.5 In this capacity he has published innumerable articles and a number of books, all distinguished by originality and wit, close attention to the texts and—as he is ready to admit—a certain aversion to or unwillingness to deal with fashionable theories.6 Fritz Senn also played an important role as supervisor of the German translation of Ellmann’s biography (1959) and as coordinator and editor of the “Frankfurter Ausgabe” of Joyce’s works and letters (published by Suhrkamp-Verlag between 1969 and 1981).7 In 1985 he became the director of the newly established Zurich James Joyce Foundation, which has enabled him to lead a life as a full-time Joycean and to share his knowledge with university students, visiting Joyceans and young researchers who avail themselves of the Foundation’s scholarships. He also directs an annual high-level workshop on specific themes. Fritz Senn’s achievements have been recognised nationally and internationally. He holds three honorary doctorates, from the universities of Cologne (1972), Zurich (1988) and University College Dublin (2004) and he has been awarded the prize of the Max Geilinger Foundation (1972), the Johann Jakob Bodmer medal of the city of Zurich (1997), the golden medal of the Canton of Zurich (2000) and the Zürcher Festspielpreis (2014). He has also been honoured with two Festschriften.8 A series of interviews with him conducted by Christine O’Neill has resulted in an informal memoir entitled Joycean Murmoirs (2007; German translation entitled Zerrinnerungen, also 2007).
Notes 1. Senn in O’Neill, ed., Murmoirs, 6f. There is also a German version of Murmoirs, entitled Zerrinnerungen. 2. Senn in O’Neill, ed., Murmoirs, 8. 3. Senn in O’Neill, ed., Murmoirs, 9.
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4. See Senn in O’Neill, ed., Murmoirs, 8ff. for details. 5. Senn in O’Neill, ed., Murmoirs, 10. 6. Senn’s publications dealing with Joyce in Zurich are listed in the Bibliography. 7. O’Neill, ed., Murmoirs, 94–97 and 160f. 8. Frehner and Zeller, eds., A Collideorscape of Joyce: Festschrift for Fritz Senn (1998) and Paparunas, Ilmberger and Heusser, eds., Parallaxing Joyce (2017).
2.46 Stadttheater
Zurich’s first theatre, in operation since 1834, was the Actientheater, which was housed in a former monastery. When it burnt down in 1890 its replacement was planned and built with astonishing speed: The new Stadttheater on a site near the lake on the southern side of Sechseläutenplatz was inaugurated on 30 September 1891, followed by a performance of Wagner’s Lohengrin the day after.1 For many years the Stadttheater served as the city’s opera and playhouse. Alfred Reucker (1868–1958), who ran it between 1901 until 1921, also took over the Pfauen and could thus offer a rich and varied programme of operas (presented in the Stadttheater) and plays (in the Stadttheater and the Pfauen).2 In-house productions were complemented by “Gastspiele” of renowned companies, especially during World War I: There was a “Stagione italiana” with Italian operas sung in Italian and there were guest performances by the Mannheimer Hoftheater, the Darmstädter Hofoper, the Opéra-Comique from Paris and the Theater an der Wien. From 1926 onwards the two theatres operated separately: The Pfauen became the city’s playhouse and the Stadttheater Zurich’s stage for operas, operettas and ballet. It was renamed Opernhaus in the late 1950s. The repertoire of the Stadttheater throughout its history is on record, but unfortunately we know next to nothing about what operas Joyce saw in Zurich.3 However, any operas that he did see, for example Othmar Schoeck’s Massimilla Doni in 1937, would have been performed at the Stadttheater. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_50
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Notes 1. For the history of the Stadttheater see Opernhaus Zürich, Festschrift zum 175-jährigen Jubiläum and Zingg, Das Opernhaus Zürich. The Stadttheater is the work of the Viennese architects Fellner and Helmer who also built the Tonhalle (1893–1895) and modernised and enlarged the Pfauen stage (1899). 2. See Opernhaus Zürich, Festschrift zum 175-jährigen Jubiläum, 37–41 for details. For Reucker see the article in Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch, last accessed on 24 April 2020. 3. I have found no details in the letters, and Joyce’s biographers are vague. From Ellmann (Joyce, 393), for example, we only learn that Ottocaro Weiss and Joyce “began to attend operas and concerts together, and Weiss was able to get Joyce into the Tonhalle with a student ticket”.
2.47 Heinrich Straumann
Heinrich Straumann (1902–1991) was Full Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Zurich from 1938 until his retirement in 1971.1 As a student he had been introduced to Joyce’s early works by his teacher Bernhard Fehr, but the two only met in 1940 and 1941, shortly before Joyce’s death. Straumann has reported on these meetings:2 Between Christmas and New Year 1940 he visited the Joyce family in the Pension Delphin, the Joyces’ first residence when they came to Zurich from France. Among the topics of their conversation was music and specifically Othmar Schoeck, the Swiss composer whom Joyce admired. Straumann’s second and last meeting with Joyce, in early January 1941, was a dinner at the Kronenhalle restaurant, attended also by Ernst Howald, former vice- chancellor of the University of Zurich. According to Straumann, Joyce conversed “with the friendly serenity of a philosopher who states facts, with a dose of irony but without judging them”, and he seemed to be interested principally “in his art and his family. […] Although we did not realize it at the time, he was approaching the end of his life”.3 In December 1941 Straumann was contacted by an elderly lady who purported to own letters by Joyce that she was willing to sell. The lady, as it turned out, was Martha Fleischmann, whom Joyce had met in 1918/19 and who would be one of the inspirations for Gerty MacDowell in “Nausicaa”. Straumann bought the letters from Martha’s sister Elsa in 1948 and published them, with an introduction, in vol. 2 of Letters to James Joyce (1966). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_51
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Straumann’s main interest was American literature; he was not primarily a Joyce scholar, but he kept Joyce’s memory alive in Zurich. He spoke at Joyce’s funeral and together with Fritz Senn was one of the speakers at a ceremony in honour of Joyce’s 100th birthday, held at the University of Zurich on 2 February 1982.
Notes 1. See Fischer, Es begann, 54–59 for details. 2. Straumann, “Last Meeting with Joyce” and “James Joyce: Reminiszenz und Ausblick”. “Last Meeting with Joyce”, here quoted from Jolas, ed., A James Joyce Yearbook, was first published, in German, in Du, kulturelle Monatsschrift 8 (December 1948). 3. Straumann, “James Joyce: Reminiszenz und Ausblick”, 11; my translation.
2.48 August Suter and Paul Suter
The sculptor August Suter (1887–1965) and his younger brother Paul (1895–1977) were among the few truly Swiss people among Joyce’s friends. August Suter started his training in his hometown Basel, but moved to Paris in 1910 to study at the Académie Julian. He met the Englishman Frank Budgen there, and the two young artists became friends. Budgen followed Suter first to Mannheim and Heidelberg, then, in 1914, to Basel, and finally to Zurich, where Suter had a series of commissions for sculptures on public buildings.1 Budgen met Joyce in the early summer of 1918 and it must have been soon afterwards that August and Paul met Joyce “in Budgen’s room in the ‘Schipfe’ [a row of old houses on the left bank of the Limmat, AF], over a glass of wine”.2 This encounter was followed by many others: As described by both Suter and above all Budgen, the group3 would spend convivial evenings mostly at the Pfauen Café-Restaurant, enjoying each other’s company and the Swiss white wine that Joyce loved. Joyce used these meetings to be inspired and to try out ideas: “[I]n the way a painter uses his models for his compositions, Joyce was assigning roles to the members of his company and […] he imperceptibly brought on the conversation that he happened to need for his work”.4 In a letter to Budgen dated 10 December 1920 he mentions “a little Christmas reminder” which he is going to send Paul “in memory of our Pfauennights”.5 Through the Suters, Budgen and Joyce also got to know other Swiss people like Daniel Hummel, “another Basler friend and colleague”,6 or Fritz Fleiner (1867–1937), professor of law first © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_52
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at the University of Heidelberg and then at the University of Zurich. Fleiner’s wife became a friend of Nora.7 The two Suter brothers had very different careers. After a trip to Greece in 1921 August returned to Paris, where he lived until 1939. From 1920 onwards, Joyce lived in Paris too, and Suter “consequently saw much of Joyce, spending many evenings with him”.8 Another guest of the Suters, the Swiss painter Wilhelm Gimmi, would later paint a series of posthumous pictures of Joyce. In Paris, according to his own testimony, Suter made a bust of Joyce, which was sadly destroyed during World War II.9 Joyce was not a very cooperative model. He demanded an easy-chair to be comfortable, he was particular about the weather and once, when he did not find Suter in his studio he left a note: “I am sorry about missing your company,—but I am delighted at not being obliged to pose”.10 After the war Suter lived in both Paris and Basel until his death in 1965. There is a small museum devoted to him in the village of Eptingen,11 and a number of his public sculptures are still in place, for example six human figures decorating a terrace which is part of a series of administrative buildings in Zurich (Amtshäuser, 1915–1918, Fig. 1),12 reliefs on the façade of the national bank (Nationalbank, 1919–1922) also in Zurich and a sculpture commemorating the Swiss poet and Nobel laureate Carl Spitteler in Liestal (1931). From 1919 onwards Paul worked for Maggi, a company that produced comestibles such as bouillon cubes, instant soups and seasonings.13 In a jocular letter to Giorgio and Helen dated 8 March 193814 Joyce reports on a reunion with Paul that involved food, drink and his “notorious potboiler” Ulysses: At a concert in the Tonhalle I met Paul Suter who is publicity chief for the Maggy [sic] soup factory at Kempthal for the lat [sic] twenty years and sintead [sic] of talking about the music I began to sing a song of souppans. etc. Bref, he told the manager next day at the works who promptly opened his desk and revealed a copy of Ulysses which apparently he reads between spoonfuls. We were invited down to visit the works, commodious motor car being placed at our disposal i.e. we two, Paul Suter, Brauchbar and the manager. An excellent lunch put up for us starting with real turtle soup and accompanied by the best swiss white wine and old french claret hanging in cobwebs and old liqueurs. Alas I drank water. The Manager was like a young lady being introduced to the long haired violinist of her dreams. I think they are going to call one of the new soups after my notorious potboiler. Then we visited the works, I was very interested and he wrote in a book the adverse criticism I had to make of their soup à l’oignon after which I had to
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Fig. 1 Terrace at Uraniastrasse 7 with sculptures by August Suter, one of them (the fourth from the left) modelled on Frank Budgen, photograph, 1945 (courtesy Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich) write him am [sic] inscription in his copy of Ulysses after which we had a motor drive through the country in the snow.15
Joyce was familiar with Maggi instant soups even before this visit, be it because the family used them during their stay in Zurich or because of his friendship with Paul Suter. In an earlier letter, also to Giorgio and Helen, he praises the young couple for their frugality and recommends ways of being even more economical: I was so overjoyed to see that you are now at last doing things on the cheap and having glueplate lunches. After years my teachings and preachings have borne fruit. But the good work is only begun. I am sending you something even better. It is a small cube of Maggi’s Allerleigemüslisuppe. You take off the wrapper and let the square-inch cube drop into a ten gallon copper washing pot filled with inexpensive water. Leave it to boil gently for an hour […]. Eat a bowl a day and the potful ought to last till the middle of next month.16
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Notes 1. For details see Budgen, Myselves, 166–180 (Chapter VII “A New Family”) and the article on Budgen. In 1917 Suter married Helene Moser, daughter of the well-known architect Karl Moser (1860–1936). When applying for a visa to Switzerland in the autumn of 1940 Joyce mentioned a “Moser” among the people who might provide a reference (postcard to Carola Giedion-Welcker, LIII, 488); this was probably Helene Moser’s brother Werner M. Moser (1896–1970), himself an architect. 2. Suter, “Some Reminiscences”, 61. August Suter’s “Some Reminiscences of James Joyce” is quoted here from Potts, ed., Portraits. It was first published in James Joyce Quarterly 7 (Spring 1970), 191–197, with the prefatory remark: “August Suter left the following notes, written in German and translated here for the first time”. 3. In addition to Joyce, Budgen and the Suter brothers, others also took part sometimes, for example Nora or Claud Sykes and his wife. 4. Suter, “Some Reminiscences”, 61. See also Ellmann, Joyce, 438f. 5. LI, 152 and SL, 274. 6. Budgen, Joyce, 173. 7. For Fleiner see Suter, “Some Reminiscences”, 62 and Budgen, Myselves, 175f. 8. Suter, “Some Reminiscences”, 63. See also Maddox, Nora, 178. 9. Suter, “Some Reminiscences”, 65. During the war, Suter lived in Switzerland, but he kept his studio in Paris. 10. Suter, “Some Reminiscences”, 66. 11. See https://www.baselland.ch/politik-und-behorden/gemeinden/eptingen/euses-dorf/copy_of_august-suter-museum, last accessed on 3 May 2020. 12. See the article on Budgen. 13. The company was bought by Nestlé in 1947, but the Maggi brand still exists. 14. Between May 1934 and April 1938 Giorgio and Helen lived in the United States (Maddox, Nora, 299 and 329). The tone of Joyce’s letters to them during that time was generally light-hearted. 15. LI, 399; the letter is “typewritten—not by Joyce”. 16. Letter written in Zurich dated 16 October 1934 (LI, 348). “Glueplate (meals)” is a pun on “blueplate”, a North American term for low-priced diner specials. Senn comments on “Allerleigemüslisuppe”, a term made up by Joyce, in O’Neill, ed., Murmoirs, 242.
2.49 Claud Sykes
Like Frank Budgen, Claud W. (for Walter) Sykes (1883–1963) was an expatriate Englishman who became a good friend of Joyce during their exile in Zurich and stayed in contact with him even after the war. Not much of his early life is known. He was born in Ipswich in 1883, and in his younger years he was an actor in the companies of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree and Mrs Bandman Palmer.1 Having come to Zurich in 19152 he “was supporting himself [there] by teaching English but longed to return to the stage”.3 He and Joyce met in 1917 when “a typical Zurich World War I adventurer”4 named Jules Martin tried to get them involved in the making of a film to be entitled Wine, Women and Song. This project came to nothing,5 but in November and December of that year Sykes helped Joyce by typing the first three episodes of Ulysses on a typewriter he had to borrow from Rudolf Goldschmidt, a friend of Joyce in Zurich.6 The two men really became close in 1918 when they set up and managed a local English-language theatre company called the English Players with Sykes as producer and director and Joyce as business manager.7 Judging by a limerick written by Joyce, Sykes was a sporty person.8 Sykes “disbanded the English Players in the February of 1920”.9 He and his wife subsequently returned to England and settled in Letchworth, Hertfordshire, where he put on plays again.10 Joyce wrote to Budgen in January 1920 that he had heard “nothing more from Sykes—thank God— or the English foulplayers”,11 but he and Sykes stayed in loose contact © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_53
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nevertheless. In early 1926 Sykes reported on a production of Exiles at the Regent Theatre in London (which Joyce could not attend), in 1929 the Joyces visited the Sykeses in Letchworth,12 and in August 1936 they sent them a postcard from Denmark with the message “Greetings to the English Players from here in Elsinore”.13 It is not known when Sykes stopped producing plays in England, but his acting experience and his knowledge of German were a good basis for his career after 1930 as author, translator and, later, spy:14 During the 1930s, Sykes established himself as an author and translator, creating a distinct niche as a translator of books about First World War aviation, with English versions of various memoirs by German airmen […]. Sykes was also the author of several books on the same theme […]. Sykes’ publications during this period show an interesting distinction between works he translated and those he actually wrote. Whereas the former all credited Claud W. Sykes as translator, all his authored works, whether factual or fictional, appeared under the pseudonym ‘Vigilant’. Sykes had first resorted to the disguise of a pen-name for the publication in 1930 of the book Secrets of Modern Spying, a title which announced his own fascination with espionage. […] Sykes gave further proof of his penchant for espionage in the three ‘Lynx’ novels, recounting the adventures of the fictional British air ace ‘Lynx’, which effectively married his interest in aviation with his fascination for spying.15 […] by the mid-1930s at the latest Sykes was an MI5 agent, charged with infiltrating German refugee circles in London, a task of growing importance for MI5. His work as a translator gave him a very plausible pretext for contacting German refugee authors in Britain.16
Sykes worked for the British Security Service from the mid-1930 onwards and was an MI5 agent between 1940 and December 1944.17 His main target was the activist and writer Karl Otten, who lived in Britain from 1936 onwards and who headed a group of German refugees calling themselves “The Primrose League”. Sykes appears to have gained their trust easily—helped no doubt by his association with Joyce: Sykes was of course a former actor, who undoubtedly played his role with conviction. His specialist knowledge of aviation literature and his publishing contacts made him an apparently ideal translator for an exposé of German aerial rearmament. But he had an even more priceless asset. His literary
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credentials rested above all on his friendship and collaboration with James Joyce—a magical name in the pantheon of literary modernism.18
It was Sykes who introduced Joyce to the German writer Karl Bleibtreu, the author of a theory that the plays attributed to Shakespeare were actually written by Roger Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland. Joyce was intrigued and so was Sykes himself, because he returned to the topic late in his life: Claud Sykes had left the Security Service by December 1944 and had resumed life in Letchworth, where he became once more a pillar of local society, an active Rotarian who was entrusted with writing the foreword to the official guide for Letchworth, published in 1951. But he had lost neither his penchant for assumed identity, nor his taste for detective mystery. In 1947, he published the book Alias William Shakespeare, in which he set out to prove that the real author of Shakespeare’s works was Roger Manning, Earl of Rutland. His book did not close the argument about the authorship of Shakespeare’s works, but it may well have caught the attention of Richard Ellmann, the biographer of James Joyce. While researching his biography, Ellmann interviewed Sykes in 1954 about his collaboration with Joyce in Zurich during the First World War. In fact, the passages in Ellmann’s book concerning this collaboration rest purely on Sykes’s own testimony, in which he may have been as economical with the truth as he had been with the ‘Primrose League’. Ellmann evidently had no inkling that Sykes had ever been a spy. If he did ask Sykes how he came to be in Zurich in 1917, the reply is not recorded.19
The versatile Claud Sykes, actor, producer, writer and spy, died in Sliema, Malta, in 1963.20
Notes 1. For the place and date of his birth see Brinson and Dove, A Matter of Intelligence, 63, for his early acting career Gorman, Definitive Biography, 242 and 245 as well as Ellmann, Joyce, 411. 2. “James Joyce and the English Players” typewritten notes for Herbert Gorman, March 1931, 1. Sykes does not say why he moved to Zurich. According to Richard Dove (personal communication 2 March 2018) “[c]onscription was introduced in Britain in March 1916 and it is possible that [Sykes] went abroad to avoid military service”. Dove finds this unlikely, however, since Sykes’s father was a former army officer.
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3. Ellmann, Joyce, 410. Ellmann’s information on Sykes comes mostly from a personal interview with him and Mrs Sykes in 1954. 4. Luening, Odyssey, 185. 5. On Jules Martin, whose real name was Juda de Vries, see Ellmann, Joyce, 410, 412, 419, 426 and 579f. 6. Ellmann, Joyce, 419. J. M. Barrie’s play The Twelve-Pound Look hinges on a typist who saves 12 pounds to buy a typewriter. When the English Players produced the play in June 1918, Joyce wrote a programme note which ends with the sentence “Typewriters, however, are rather scarce at present” (Gorman, Definitive Biography, 255). 7. For details see the article on the English Players. 8. “There is a clean climber called Sykes / Who goes scrambling through ditches and dykes. / To skate on his scalp / Down the side of an Alp / Is the kind of diversion he likes.” See Gorman, Definitive Biography, 247 and Mays, ed., Poems and “Exiles”, 99 and 330. 9. “James Joyce and the English Players” typewritten notes for Herbert Gorman, March 1931, 12. 10. In The Worker, a socialist monthly published in Letchworth, dated 19 October 1922 there is a review of Henry Arthur Jones’s comedy Dolly Reforming Herself produced by Claud Sykes (Bill Brockman, personal communication 17 March 2018). 11. Quoted in Ellmann, Joyce, 473, also LI, 134 and SL, 245. 12. Ellmann, Joyce, 575 and 617. Maddox (Nora, 180) writes that the Sykeses looked up the Joyces in Paris, but she does not provide dates. 13. LIII, 387. 14. The following is based on Brinson and Dove, A Matter of Intelligence, 63–78 (Chapter 7: “Flying and spying: Claud W. Sykes, MI5 and the ‘Primrose League’”). 15. Brinson and Dove, A Matter of Intelligence, 64. 16. Brinson and Dove, A Matter of Intelligence, 65. 17. Brinson and Dove, A Matter of Intelligence, 65, 76 and 169. 18. Brinson and Dove, A Matter of Intelligence, 71. 19. Brinson and Dove, A Matter of Intelligence, 230. 20. Personal communication Richard Dove 2 March 2018.
2.50 Tonhalle
Tonhalle (‘tone hall’) is the name of Zurich’s main concert hall as well that of its symphony orchestra. The orchestra, established in 1868 as successor to the Allgemeine Musikgesellschaft (AMG), first performed in the original Tonhalle on Sechseläutenplatz.1 In 1893–1895 a new Tonhalle, designed by the architects Feller & Helmer, who had built the Stadttheater and who would soon upgrade the Pfauen theatre, was built by the lake on the other side of the river Limmat. Its two concert halls, arguably among the best in Europe, have been preserved and are still used, while the so- called pavilion next to it, an elaborate structure inspired by the Palais du Trocadéro in Paris, was replaced by the Kongresshaus, a convention centre built in 1937–1939.2 The first two conductors of the Tonhalle orchestra were formidable figures. As conductors and composers they shaped Zurich’s musical life for more than 40 years each. Friedrich Hegar (1841–1927) was the founder of the orchestra and its conductor from 1868 until 1906 (Fig. 1); he was succeeded by Volkmar Andreae (1879–1962), who conducted the orchestra from 1906 until 1949, that is, during all the years that Joyce spent in Zurich.3 For a very long time, the orchestra did double duty as the city’s symphony orchestra and as the opera orchestra at the Stadttheater. Joyce the lover of music in general and of opera in particular4 had enjoyed the rich musical life of Dublin and Trieste. Zurich did not rank behind these cities and Joyce was a frequent patron of the Tonhalle as well © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_54
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Fig. 1 Tonhalle during an orchestra rehearsal with the conductor Friedrich Hegar, photograph by Camille Ruf, 1906 (courtesy Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich)
as the Stadttheater both from 1915 to 1919 and during his visits in the 1930s. He was especially taken by the former: I shall have a word to say in a few yards about the acoustic and orchidectural management of the tonehall.5
There is work to be done on this subject: While concert and opera life in Dublin (1888–1904) and Trieste (1905–1915) has been researched in detail,6 corresponding lists of the Tonhalle and Stadttheater programmes have yet to be compiled. We know, for example, that Joyce attended a concert at the Tonhalle on 14 January 1935,7 but only a complete list will show what concerts Joyce might have heard.
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Notes 1. The city’s first Tonhalle was established in a former granary (built 1838/39) on Sechseläutenplatz. It was in operation from 1867 onwards and was torn down in 1897 after the opening of the new Tonhalle. 2. Kongresshaus and Tonhalle are currently being renovated. Both will open again in 2021. 3. See “Friedrich Hegar” and “Volkmar Andreae” in Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch, last accessed on 25 April 2020. 4. See Hodgart and Bauerle, Joyce’s Grand Operoar and Knowles, ed., Bronze by Gold. 5. FW 165.8–9. 6. See Reilly, “James Joyce and Dublin Opera” and McCourt, “Joyce’s Trieste: Città Musicalissima”. 7. See the article on Schoeck for details.
2.51 Travesties by Tom Stoppard
In his 1974 play Travesties Tom Stoppard (*1937) brings together three exiles who spent time in Zurich during World War I, all of them engaged in “revolutionary” activities of various kinds: the Irishman James Joyce, who was writing Ulysses,1 the Romanian Tristan Tzara, one of the founders of the Dada movement, and the Russian Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov alias Lenin, who would lead the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. All three men lived in Zurich in 1916/17, but as far as one knows, they never met in reality.2 The action of the play is “remembered” by Henry Carr, who was a part-time employee at the British Consulate in Zurich. He was a passing acquaintance of Joyce and was involved in a quarrel with him when acting in Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest which was performed by the English Players in April 1918. In the play, Carr appears as “a very old man” some of the time, but also as “his youthful elegant self”. His memory as a very old man is highly unreliable and marred, additionally, by his vanity which makes him exaggerate the role he played during his time in Zurich. Also featured are Bennett, his manservant (who in reality was A. Percy Bennett, the British Consul-General and thus Carr’s superior) as well as Gwendolen and Cecily, the two female protagonists of The Importance of Being Earnest. Gwendolen, “Carr’s younger sister”,3 acts as Joyce’s secretary, while Cecily is a librarian in “The Library”, a section of the Zurich Public Library, where most of the action takes place.4
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_55
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The play is a sophisticated farce, but a serious play of ideas at the same time.5 As a farce it is a deliberately jumbled take on The Importance of Being Earnest, with Carr in the role of Algernon Moncrieff,6 Tzara as Jack Worthing (alias Ernest) and Joyce as Lady Bracknell. As a play of ideas it serves as a platform for some central ideas of the three protagonists. Joyce and Tzara are artists, and towards the end of Act I they present their very different ideas of the function of art. Tzara accuses Joyce of having “turned literature into a religion”, while for him art in this time of war is “as dead as all the rest, […] an overripe corpse”: It’s too late for geniuses! Now we need vandals and desecrators, simple- minded demolition men to smash centuries of baroque subtlety, to bring down the temple, and thus finally, to reconcile the shame and the necessity of being an artist! Dada! Dada! Dada!!7
Joyce disagrees violently, making a case for art and incidentally for Ulysses as “the most complete of all heroes”: An artist is the magician put among men to gratify—capriciously—their urge for immortality. The temples are built and brought down around him, continuously and contiguously, from Troy to the fields of Flanders. If there is any meaning in any of it, it is in what survives as art, yes even in the celebration of tyrants, yes even in the celebration of nonentities. What now of the Trojan War if it had been passed over by the artist’s touch? Dust. A forgotten expedition prompted by Greek merchants looking for new markets. A minor redistribution of broken pots. But it is we who stand enriched, by a tale of heroes, of a golden apple, a wooden horse, a face that launched a thousand ships—and above all, of Ulysses, the wanderer, the most human, the most complete of all heroes—husband, father, son, lover, farmer, soldier, pacifist, politician, inventor and adventurer … It is a theme so overwhelming that I am almost afraid to treat it. And yet I with my Dublin Odyssey will double that immortality, yes by God there’s a corpse that will dance for some time yet and leave the world precisely as it finds it.8
Lenin does not take part in this debate in Act I of the play, but is given centre stage in Act II. As part of a long speech on politics he in turn presents his view of art:
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Today, literature must become party literature. Down with non-partisan literature! Down with literary supermen! Literature must become a part of the common cause of the proletariat, a cog in the Social democratic mechanism. […] Socialist literature and art will be free because the idea of socialism and sympathy with the working people, instead of greed and careerism, will bring ever new forces to its ranks!9
He also outs himself as a cultural conservative10 who is unable or unwilling to keep up with modern art. Well, as for me I’m a barbarian. Expressionism, futurism, cubism … I don’t understand them and I get no pleasure from them.11
Travesties is a play of ideas, but in the debate about art it does not take sides, at least not overtly. Tzara and Joyce represent two progressive, but opposing views of what art should do: According to Tzara it should “bring down temples”, while according to Joyce art is there to celebrate and immortalise both the construction and destruction of temples.12 Lenin, by contrast, is a cultural conservative who enjoys traditional art, abhors the modern art of his time (“expressionism, futurism, cubism”) and at the same time advocates a new, political art which “must become a part of the common cause of the proletariat”. The young Carr in the play, who is neither an artist nor a revolutionary, witnesses the debate without taking sides,13 and when, as an old man, he has the last word, he is so befuddled that he cannot decide: I learned three things in Zurich during the war. I wrote them down. Firstly, you’re either a revolutionary or you’re not, and if you’re not you might as well be an artist as anything else. Secondly, if you can’t be an artist, you might as well be a revolutionary … I forget the third thing.14
Carr’s indecisiveness and the burlesque traits of the play apart, the three protagonists of Travesties are given a fair portrayal. Stoppard’s Joyce, his Tzara and his Lenin are fictional characters, but the fiction in this case probably reflects some truth.
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Notes 1. In the first scene of the play Joyce is in the process of dictating the beginning of the “Oxen of the Sun” episode of Ulysses. The real Joyce actually finished the episode after his time in Zurich, in 1920. For details, see “Zurich in Joyce”. 2. Joyce and Tzara were both in Zurich from 1915 through 1919. Having lived in Berne since 1914, Lenin and his wife moved to Zurich in February 1916; they left for St Petersburg on 2 April 2017. 3. In The Importance Gwendolen is Algernon Moncrieff’s cousin. 4. Stoppard, Travesties, list of characters. For details of the library see Zentralbibliothek. 5. “What happens in my plays is a kind of marriage of categories. […] I want to marry the play of ideas to farce”. Interview with Tom Stoppard quoted in American Conservatory Theater, “Travesties by Tom Stoppard”, 18. 6. In The Importance of Being Earnest, Algernon and Cecily are engaged to be married, in Travesties, Old Carr is married to Old Cecily, who “is about 80 of course, like Old Carr” (Stoppard, Travesties, 70). 7. Stoppard, Travesties, 41. 8. Stoppard, Travesties, 41f. 9. Stoppard, Travesties, 58f. 10. From his wife Nadya we learn that Lenin liked the stage version of Dumas’ La Dame aux Camélias (performed in London in 1907) and Tolstoy’s War and Peace (Stoppard, Travesties, 59). 11. Stoppard, Travesties, 60. The second sentence is spoken by both Carr and Lenin. 12. Stoppard also presents Tzara as a destroyer and Joyce as a creator in a bit of stage business (Stoppard, Travesties, 1 and 40): Tzara cuts up a sheet of paper and puts the pieces into a hat. Joyce later, like a magician, reverses this act of destruction; he “conjures from the hat a white carnation, apparently made from the bits of paper (he turns the hat up to show it is empty)”. 13. One does learn, however, that he likes Gilbert and Sullivan; see Stoppard, Travesties, 33 and 50. 14. Stoppard, Travesties, 71.
2.52 Hannes Vogel
Among the memorials to Joyce in Zurich two works by Hannes Vogel, a Swiss conceptual artist born in 1938,1 are especially noteworthy: “Dick and Davy” and “Ljmmat Sjhl”. Though publicly accessible they are not very well known, and they convey their meaning very subtly. When creating art for the public domain, Vogel always takes his inspiration from the place itself, its history but also its cultural context. This is especially true for the two works dedicated to Joyce to be presented here: In both of them the artist has managed to express an intricate web of literary and cultural allusions in a visually striking way.2 In 1990 Vogel won a competition to design a staff cafeteria near an auditorium (Hörsaal Ost) in a newly renovated wing of the University Hospital. His inspiration had two sources, the proximity of the University Hospital to “Joycean” locations on the one hand and medical references in Ulysses on the other. The cafeteria is situated not far from Universitätstrasse where Joyce lived in 1918/19, and close to the Rotkreuzspital (now torn down) where he died in 1941. As regards medical references in Ulysses, Vogel took his main inspiration from Episode 14, “Oxen of the Sun”, which is set in a maternity hospital and features Stephen Dedalus drinking with, and talking to, his student friends at night. The Joycean theme in the cafeteria is realised subtly and a visitor will need time to take in all its aspects. The room is crescent-shaped and has panorama windows on its outer side. On its black inside wall the name of the cafeteria, “Dick and Davy”, is marked in strikingly blue neon letters. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_56
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Neon signs, as Vogel points out, are “the language of the city”. He chose the individual letters from signs displayed across Zurich: “As words [Dick and Davy] are a small piece of Ulysses and as letters they are a small piece of Zurich’s sea of lights (‘Lichtermeer’)”.3 “Medical Dick and medical Davy” also feature on inscriptions carved into a series of supporting pillars on the outside, which one can see from the inside. Dick and Davy are not among the young men Stephen talks to in the hospital, but they are present in Ulysses as “medical Dick and medical Davy”, two characters repeatedly referred to by Stephen’s friend and rival Buck Mulligan, who is a medical student himself.4 Buck Mulligan is modelled on Oliver St John Gogarty, and “Mulligan”, in Ulysses, actually quotes from an unpublished bawdy poem of Gogarty’s entitled “Medical Dick and Medical Davy”.5 The inscriptions mentioned above represent a quotation from “Scylla and Charybdis”, in eight versions, that is in the English original and in seven translations.6 In “Scylla and Charybdis” Stephen Dedalus presents his interpretation of Hamlet, but his meandering thoughts also touch on the night sky: “Read the skies. […] Where’s your configuration?”7 This question, in turn, may lead the visitor to look up to the ceiling of the cafeteria, where the lights, even in daytime, evoke a star-studded sky. While “Dick and Davy” with its many allusions is one of Vogel’s more complex works, “Ljmmat Sjhl, Hommage à James Joyce” (2004) is comparatively easy to read. The memorial commemorates the Platzspitz, a little platform at the end of a park situated between the confluence of two rivers, the Limmat, which drains Lake Zurich, and the Sihl. The Platzspitz was one of Joyce’s favourite places in Zurich; it will forever be linked with the writer, not only because it has found its way into Finnegans Wake (“an litlee plads af liefest pose”, FW 265.14) but also because of a set of iconic photographs by Carola Giedion-Welcker showing Joyce at Platzspitz in 1938.8 The memorial itself consists of white letters on the retaining wall of the platform, spelling out the names Limmat and Sihl—except that j replaces i in both words, so that Ljmmat and Sjhl not only identify the rivers, but also James Joyce. A metal plaque set into the parapet explains the memorial: “Platzspitz, where Sihl and Limmat merge, was one of the favourite places of the Irish author James Joyce during his time in Zurich (1915–1919)”.9 “Dick and Davy” and “Ljmmat Sjhl” are by no means Vogel’s only works that pay homage to Joyce. Four others may be mentioned here: In his design for the courtyard of a building complex called Rosshof in Basel
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(1987) he commemorated the names of horses in mythology and literature, one of them being Throwaway, the surprise winner of the Ascot Gold Cup in Ulysses.10 In 1991 he curated an exhibition in Zurich entitled “J & J: Die Farben im Ulysses, gespiegelt im Zufall”.11 In 1997 he created “Wylermeer”, ten photographic panels that combine views of Wylerberg, “an expressionist country house situated on the Dutch/German border between Nijmegen and Cleves” with the ten thunderwords distributed across Finnegans Wake.12 Vogel was also one the curators of “James Joyce: «gedacht durch meine Augen» / ‘thought through my eyes’”, an exhibition at the Museum Strauhof in Zurich (December 2000 to February 2001).13
Notes 1. On Vogel, see his homepage http://www.hapevogel.com, last accessed on 3 May 2020. He was one of the trustees of the Zurich James Joyce Foundation from 1997 until 2014. 2. Pictures of the two works can be found at http://www.hapevogel.com under “Kunst im öffentlichen Raum”. “Dick and Davy” is documented in detail in Vogel and Pfeifer, Dick and Davy. 3. Vogel and Pfeifer, Dick and Davy, 7; my translation. 4. See U 9.908–09, 9.1183–85 and 14.1578. 5. A few lines of the poem are also quoted in U 9.22–26. 6. The passage quoted is U 9.920–946 and 9.1183–85. 7. U 9.939–940. 8. See Giedion-Welcker (“Meetings with Joyce”, 265): “To [Joyce] the confluence of the Limmat and Sihl was an elemental and dramatic meeting, and when I once wanted to take a picture of him in Zurich, it had to be exactly at this spot and with this river background”. See also Senn in O’Neill, ed., Murmoirs, 47 and the article on Platzspitz. 9. My translation; the text on the plaque is in German. 10. U 5.526–541, 12.1215–1228, 16.1242–1244. Vogel uses the name Weggeworfen, the German translation of Throwaway. For the whole work, see Vogel, Der Rosshof-Hof. 11. See Vogel, J & J. 12. See Vogel and Lerm Hayes, Wylermeer. The quotation is from page 8. 13. This exhibition was accompanied by a book with the same title, edited by Ursula Zeller, Ruth Frehner and Hannes Vogel.
2.53 Alfred Vogt
Throughout his life Joyce was plagued by severe eye-problems: “From as early as 1907 and into the 1930s, Joyce suffered from an illness that caused bouts of iritis (a swelling of his iris), which in turn brought about episodes of acute glaucoma and other complications that withered his eyesight almost to the point of blindness”.1 In Zurich the year 1917 was especially difficult. On 4 February, two days after his 35th birthday, Joyce suffered “a painful attack of rheumatic iritis complicated with synechia which render[ed] him inactive for the rest of the month”.2 Worse still, on Saturday 18 August 1917, when walking along Bahnhofstrasse, he suffered a “violent Hexenschuss” (lumbago), followed the next day by a renewed attack of glaucoma.3 An operation became necessary, and on 23 August he was operated on by Dr Ernst Sidler, then the senior physician at the university’s eye-clinic.4 Two years later Sidler became director of the clinic, but he died in 1922, aged only 53. His successor was Professor Alfred Vogt, who would play a very important role in Joyce’s life. In Paris Joyce’s eye problems became worse; he was treated by Dr Louis Borsch, but again with no real success.5 In February 1930 he received two letters from Zurich acquintances, Georges Borach and Martha Fleischmann, telling him of Professor Vogt and his remarkable achievements. Their praise was echoed by Carola Giedion-Welcker and her husband Siegfrid Giedion, and Joyce then “made arrangements through Borach to consult Vogt in April 1930”.6 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_57
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Born in Menziken, Aargau, Alfred Vogt (1879–1943) studied medicine at the universities of Zürich and Basel and then had a stellar career as a practising eye surgeon and as a researcher. He was made Associate Professor at the University of Basel in 1917, and in 1923 was appointed as Sidler’s successor at the University of Zurich. He was head of the clinic7 for about 20 years; in August 1943 he had to take early retirement because of health problems and he died on 10 December of that year. A tireless researcher and an excellent surgeon, Vogt was “an impressive personality who helped determine the course of ophthalmology for a quarter of a century, not only in Switzerland but also internationally. Alfred Vogt possessed a natural gift of observation, which worked in concert with his tremendous memory for facts, details, and a thorough knowledge of the medical literature; he also possessed an enormous capacity for work”.8 Joyce’s trip to Zurich to consult Vogt in April 1930 was his second visit to Zurich since his departure in October 1919. Vogt operated on him on 15 May at the Rotkreuzspital, and after a lengthy stay in Vogt’s clinic and at the St Gotthard Hotel, Joyce returned to Paris in mid-June. On 30 June he attended a performance of Guillaume Tell at the Paris Opera with his favourite singer John Sullivan singing the title role. In the middle of the performance a man in one of the boxes, whom many recognized as James Joyce, the Irish novelist and poet, dramatically leaned forward, raised a pair of heavy dark glasses from his eyes, and exclaimed: ‘Merci, mon Dieu, pour ce miracle. Après vingt ans, je revois la lumière’.9
Ellmann calls this stunt a “spectacular bit of publicity [for Sullivan]”, but the newspaper articles also mentioned Vogt, who was of course the real miracle worker. Joyce was not cured for good, however, and returned to Zurich a number of times between late 1930 and 1939, almost always to be seen by Vogt.10 Vogt and his clinic had a special place in Joyce’s heart. He called him “probably the greatest eye-doctor in the world”,11 and when he speculated about the possibility of a foreign power invading Switzerland in the spring of 1938,12 he expressed his hope that “whoever has [Zurich] will respect Villa Giedion, Othmar Schoeck, Vogt’s clinic and the Kronenhalle”.13 Vogt owned a series of early editions of Joyce’s works, which remained in the family after his death. Georg Wiederkehr, the son of Vogt’s daughter Helene Wiederkehr-Vogt (†1984), generously donated them to the Zurich James Joyce Foundation in January 2014.
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Notes 1. Birmingham, Most Dangerous Book, 9. On Joyce’s eye problems in general see Ellmann, Joyce, passim, Birmingham, Most Dangerous Book, 96–99 and 100–102 and Lyons, Joyce & Medicine, 185–210 (Chapter 16: “The Miltonic Affliction”). 2. Norburn, Chronology, 74. See also Ellmann, Joyce, 412f. 3. Described in a letter to Ezra Pound dated 20 August 1917 (SL, 226; see also a postcard by Nora to Pound postmarked 28 August 1917, in LII, 405). See also Ellmann, Joyce, 417 and Norburn, Chronology, 78. 4. Joyce’s traumatic experience on 18 August underlies his poem “Bahnhofstrasse”; see “Zurich in Joyce” for details. 5. Birmingham (Most Dangerous Book, 254–259 and 289–295) gives a graphic account of Joyce’s eye problems in Paris; see also Ellmann in SL, 261. 6. Ellmann, Joyce, 622; see also LIII, 280, note 4. 7. The clinic was established in 1862; between 1895 and 1952 it was housed in a specially built, attractive neo-Renaissance building in Rämistrasse 73. See Gloor, “Geschichte” and Bandle, “Baugeschichte” for details. 8. Gloor, “Alfred Vogt”, 655. 9. Ellmann, Joyce, 624f., based on reports in two newspapers. See also Budgen, “Further Recollections” in Joyce, 362f. as well as LIII, 413f. and SL, 390–392. 10. See “Joyce in Zurich” for details. Ellmann in LIII, 5 and SL, 261: “The last of these [operations], the only one performed by Professor Alfred Vogt of Zurich, proved fairly successful; but Joyce continued to have severe eye attacks and was never free of anxiety on the score of possible future operations”. 11. Letter to F. V. Morley dated 10 November 1932 (LIII, 266). 12. Joyce’s fears must have been prompted by Hitler’s annexation (“Anschluss”) of Austria in March 1938. 13. LIII, 418. See also Giedion-Welcker, “Meetings with Joyce”, 267f., for a slightly different version.
2.54 Hannah von Mettal
Hannah von Mettal (1884–1966) was the translator of Joyce’s Exiles, the first of his works to be translated into German and the only one to be translated while he was living in Zurich. Very little is known about her, and the information below is based mostly on unpublished research by Andreas Weigel.1 The daughter of a politician, lawyer and professor of economics, von Mettal was born near Pardubice in Bohemia (then part of the Austro- Hungarian empire, now part of the Czech Republic). In 1911 she translated an English novel, Elinor Glyn’s Three Weeks, into Czech, but then appears to have concentrated on singing. In 1915/16 she took lessons with the Italian music teacher and composer Alfredo Cairati in Berlin and followed him to Zurich when he moved there in 1916. In Zurich, where she lived until 1920,2 she was registered as a student of music. It is not known how she and Joyce met and how she came to translate Exiles.3 In a letter sent from her address at the time (Bellerivestrasse 7) on 20 March 1918 she informs him that she can only send him the first act of her translation because she has been “so terribly busy”,4 but work must have progressed and the translation was duly published, as Verbannte, by Rascher-Verlag in April 1919. Ellmann speculates that Stefan Zweig “may have been instrumental in securing a German translator, Hannah von Mettal”,5 but this cannot be true since von Mettal’s letter of March 1918 predates Joyce’s first contact with Zweig.
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Probably because of her sympathies for the Czechoslovak cause, the German and the Austro-Hungarian authorities regarded von Mettal as politically suspect, and letters addressed to her were intercepted by the surveillance division of the German postal service.6 Von Mettal’s residence permit for Zurich expired in 1920 and she moved back to Bohemia in August. She had not given up translating nor had she forgotten Joyce: On 4 April 1925 she wrote to Sylvia Beach and inquired about the possibility of translating Ulysses into German and Czech,7 but nothing came of it. However, her translation of Three Weeks was re-published in 1919 and 1925 and further translations of hers from English and French appeared in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Von Mettal married an engineer named Moritz Maisner and spent her life after Zurich in the Czech Republic, Poland, Berlin, London and New York.
Notes 1. Personal communication dated 7 April 2020. 2. During this time she also occasionally lived in Munich. 3. According to Weigel, von Mettal may have been recommended by Cairati, who was also the singing teacher of Helen Suter-Moser, August Suter’s wife. 4. The letter, unpublished, is part of the Cornell Joyce Collection. 5. Ellmann, Joyce, 444. 6. See Mährle, “Ein verdächtiger Brief”, where he documents a letter to von Mettal containing military information written in invisible ink. According to Mährle, an archivist at the Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart, other such letters had been intercepted earlier, but this one, dated 8 July 1917 and posted in Stuttgart, is the only one that has survived. 7. The letter, unpublished, is part of the James Joyce Collection of the University of Buffalo.
2.55 Ottocaro Weiss
The Triestine Ottocaro Weiss (1896–1971) was one of Joyce’s first acquaintances in Zurich and one of his best friends until a quarrel severed their friendship for ever. Having attended schools in Trieste, Weiss came to Zurich to study political economy. He enrolled at the University in the autumn semester 1914, and when Joyce arrived in Zurich in June 1915 the two men met on the recommendation of Joyce’s Triestine pupil Oscar Schwarz.1 Despite the age difference between them (in 1915 Joyce was 33 years old, Weiss only 19) they became very good friends: A tall, handsome, warm-hearted young man, he could discuss music expertly, and had a good knowledge of literature. One of his brothers was Dr. Edoardo Weiss, who was among the earliest disciples of Freud and the first psychoanalyst in Italy; from his brother, and from Dr. C. G. Jung, with whom he was also acquainted, Ottocaro Weiss had a knowledge of psychoanalysis which Joyce disparaged but found useful. Weiss and Joyce, who lived fairly close to each other, began to attend operas and concerts together, and Weiss was able to get Joyce into the Tonhalle with a student ticket. At home Joyce impressed Weiss with his fine, pleasant voice, but scandalized him by a totally unacceptable accompaniment, played at that time on a guitar, and later on an old upright piano badly out of tune.2
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They also talked about political science and literature and Weiss persuaded Joyce, “who was physically lazy”,3 to take long walks on the hills surrounding Zurich and along the lake. In January 1916 Weiss was drafted into the Austrian Army and he served until November 1918. He re-enrolled in Zurich in the summer semester 1919 and completed his studies with a doctorate in November 1920.4 His dissertation entitled “Triest und die Wirtschaftspolitik Österreichs zur Zeit Karls VI.: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Merkantilismus” (“Trieste and Austria’s Economic Policy at the Time of Karl VI: A Contribution to the History of Mercantilism”) was published in 1921. After Weiss’s return to Zurich the friendship between him and Joyce continued as before, but came to an abrupt end in the autumn of 1919.5 Weiss, who was still a student, could not always pay for the wine he and Joyce consumed together: “Joyce offered to pay for the extra bottle and keep a record of what he spent, so that Weiss could repay him. Weiss agreed, and on several occasions they shared a bottle with this understanding”.6 In October 1919, however, shortly before his departure for Trieste, Joyce sent Weiss a postcard demanding the immediate repayment of the sum owed (about 50 Swiss francs). Weiss pawned his watch and repaid the sum. Put out by the suddenness of the request, he went to the Pfauen Café a few days later and demanded an explanation from Joyce, but received none. Joyce needed money because he had just learnt that his monthly subsidy from Edith McCormick had been cut, and he may have suspected that Weiss had something to with this.7 Joyce left Zurich for Trieste, angry letters were exchanged8 and although Joyce later became less certain about who was to blame, their friendship never recovered. The above version of the breakup is called into question by Brenda Maddox in her biography of Nora.9 According to her, Weiss “spent much time with the Joyces in 1919”,10 he “may have been in love with Nora”,11 and “jealousy over Nora”12 was the real reason why Joyce fell out with Weiss. Maddox also points out the different treatment by biographers of Joyce’s infatuation with Martha Fleischmann and Weiss’s with Nora: The suppression of any mention of the Weiss attachment is an example of the distortions of fame. Because of Joyce’s celebrity and the continual quest for the backgrounds of Ulysses, the Fleischmann escapade was chronicled and written into the record of Joyce’s life and the history of Ulysses. Because Nora was considered unimportant, because a woman’s reputation was so much more easily tarnished by rumor than a man’s, and also because Weiss
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himself, by the 1930s when Gorman was collecting biographical information on Joyce’s past, was an important figure in international banking and insurance, his youthful fondness for a married woman (and her husband’s resentment of it) remained buried in unpublished notes in libraries hundreds of miles apart.13
May Weiss himself have the last word. In a letter to Budgen dated 8 April 196414 he recalls their (i.e. Weiss’s and Budgen’s) last meeting at the end of October 1919, goes over the story of the breakup, denies having influenced Mrs McCormick and regrets that he and Joyce never made up. There is, perhaps naturally, no mention of his feelings for Nora whatever they may have been. Weiss calls the idea that he may have been involved in the McCormick affair “absurd”: At the same time I felt relieved because I knew I could easily convince Joyce of his error: I had seen Mrs. McCormick only once in my life, for fifteen or twenty minutes, on 12th May 1919—and never again. Joyce did not give me the opportunity of talking to him, and he never answered my letters. The experience hurt me deeply at the time. […] I saw Joyce only once after that, in Paris (in 1923 or 1924, I believe). The meeting had been arranged by Italo Svevo. […] When I asked [Joyce] why he had linked me with the McCormick affair, he answered that he had been at a loss for an explanation and that I was the only one among his friends who knew the lady. We had quite a friendly conversation about other matters; but when we parted I felt he was no longer the old Joyce I had known in Zurich.
Weiss returned from Zurich to Trieste a little later than Joyce and built a career there, but he eventually emigrated to the United States, where he died in 1971: He joined the Assicurazioni Generali, a Trieste insurance company, in 1929. Anti-Semitic measures in Italy forced Mr. Weiss to leave the country in 1938. After two years in Switzerland and England, he went to the United States and became active in the anti-Fascist Italian colony. In 1950 he became chairman of the board of the Buffalo Insurance Company, and from 1952 until his retirement in 1970 he was manager of the United States branch of Assicurazioni Generali.15
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Even though he felt that Joyce “was no longer the old Joyce [he] had known in Zurich”, Weiss was loyal to him in a different way. While in New York he met the young Richard Ellmann, recommended him to Stanislaus as the best person to write a biography of Joyce16 and later helped Ellmann with the notes for his edition of Giacomo Joyce (1968) and with the compilation of Selected Letters (1975).17
Notes 1. For Schwarz see Ellmann, Joyce, 381f., 393 and 472 as well as McCourt, The Years of Bloom, 218, 226, 244 and 250. According to Ellmann (Joyce, 393), “the notion of someone named ‘Black’ (Schwarz) introducing him to someone named ‘White’ (Weiss) amused Joyce and eventually found its way into Ulysses”. 2. Ellmann, Joyce, 393. A photo taken by Ottocaro Weiss (Ellmann, Joyce, xxiv) shows Joyce playing the guitar. A second photo by Weiss (Ellmann, Joyce, xxv) shows the Joyce family at a Zurich restaurant in 1915. 3. Ellmann, Joyce, 394. 4. The information on Weiss’s studies in Zurich is based on the list of enrolments at the University of Zurich available online (http://www.matrikel. uzh.ch, last accessed on 24 March 2018). It conflicts with the information given on the homepage of the Joyce Museum in Trieste (http://www. museojoycetrieste.it, last accessed on 24 March 2018): “In 1915, Ottocaro was conscripted into the 97th Regiment and sent to the Russian front where the regiment, made up primarily of Triestines, was decimated in Galizia. In 1916 he resumed his studies in Zurich, where he befriended Joyce”. 5. See Ellmann, Joyce, 467f. 6. Ellmann, Joyce, 467. 7. Joyce suspected that Mrs McCormick was influenced by the psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, with whom Weiss was also acquainted. Joyce had no sympathy for psychoanalysis in general and for Jung in particular. 8. “As regards W[eiss] he seems to be threatening libel proceedings by his letter in which case possibly yourself, Hummel [Daniel Hummel, a friend of Budgen’s] and I will be led forth shackled ‘for they were malefactors’. Since I came here I wrote a long letter to Mrs M[cCormick], asking her very urgently to consider the ‘advisability of the revivability’ of her aid. That distinguished lady never answered. W[eiss] pretends he did not know my address here—another piece of fooling. He forgets only what he dislikes to remember, viz., that he promised me as a gift DOKTOR JUNG’S (prolonged general universal applause) Wandlungen der LIBIDO (shouts
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Hear! Hear! from a raughty tinker and an Irishman in the gallery). For God’s sake give those louts the go by” (letter to Budgen presumably written in December 1919, in LI, 131 and SL, 244; the quotation is from SL). 9. Maddox, Nora, 162f. and 167. See also Shloss (Lucia, 72), with additional evidence. 10. Maddox, Nora, 162. 11. Maddox, Nora, 162. 12. Maddox, Nora, 167. 13. Maddox, Nora, 163. 14. The letter, unpublished, is part of the Budgen Bequest at the Zurich James Joyce Foundation. 15. Obituary in The New York Times dated 9 June 1971, https://www. nytimes.com/1971/06/09/archives/ottooaro-weiss-friend-of-jonoeitalian-insurance-executive-and-arts.html, last accessed on 21 March 2018. 16. http://www.museojoycetrieste.it/english/weiss-ottocaro, last accessed on 21 March 2018. 17. Ellmann in his edition of Giacomo Joyce, xxxvii; Ellmann in SL, viii and Maddox, Nora, 394f.
2.56 Weisses Kreuz (Restaurant) and Club des Étrangers
The Weisses Kreuz was a restaurant at Seefeldstrasse 5 at the northern (that is city) end of the Seefeld district where Joyce lived from 1915 to 1917. Ellmann reports that it was one of Joyce’s “favorite meeting places” and that “a group calling themselves the Club des Étrangers used to assemble [there] once a week”.1 Joyce became friendly with some of the members, for example, the Greek Pavlos (or Paul) Phokas, a Pole named Czernovic, the wine merchant Paul Wiederkehr, a German named Marquis and, in particular, Paul Ruggiero, who would become one of his closest Zurich friends. In 1919 or 1920 the Weisses Kreuz moved to its present location at nearby Falkenstrasse 27.2 There is no evidence that Joyce went back there during his visits to Zurich in the 1930s. I have found no archival evidence of the Club des Étrangers mentioned by Ellmann. I have no doubt that it existed, but it must have been an informal group that has left no tangible traces. However, the Weisses Kreuz was and still is a place where itinerant tradesmen meet regularly. Photographs on its walls document, for example, a meeting of itinerant foreign carpenters in 1896 and one of itinerant foreign and local carpenters and bricklayers in 1931.
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Notes 1. The quotations and all information in this paragraph come from Ellmann, Joyce, 407f. The address given by Ellmann (“a short way up the Seefeldstrasse”) is very approximate. In the first edition of his biography (1959, 420) he gave the name of the restaurant, wrongly, as Zum Roten Kreuz. This error, corrected in the second edition (1982), has found its way into Anthony Burgess’s novel The End of the World News (1982); see the article on Carl Gustav Jung for details. 2. According to the Adressbuch der Stadt Zürich, the Weisses Kreuz was at Seefeldstrasse 5 until 1919 and has been at Falkenstrasse 27 since 1920. For pictures of the “old” Weisses Kreuz see http://www.joycefoundation.ch/ weisses-kreuz, last accessed on 12 April 2020.
2.57 Zentralbibliothek
Having no personal library at his disposal in Zurich, Joyce made good use of the libraries the city had to offer. Soon after his arrival he joined the Museumsgesellschaft and possibly also used the city library (Stadtbibliothek, founded in 1629) and the younger cantonal library which also functioned as a university library (Kantonsbibliothek, founded in 1835).1 The situation improved markedly in 1917: In 1914 it had been decided to merge these two libraries and to build new premises. The new library, called Zentralbibliothek, on Zähringerplatz 6 opened on 30 April 19172 and Joyce leapt at the opportunity: The library’s register of users (Benutzerbuch) shows that he inscribed himself, as user number 814, on 3 August 1917.3 He had ample time to work during that summer, for Nora and the children had left for Locarno in July. However, health problems (a lumbago on 18 August followed by a new attack of glaucoma) made work impossible for a while and Joyce spent the rest of year in Locarno with his wife and children. The family returned to Zurich in early 1918 and Joyce made again good use of the Zentralbibliothek in 1918 and 1919. How much time he spent there must be left open, however. In her book The Irish “Ulysses” (1994) Maria Tymoczko shows in great detail not only that Joyce worked his way through Irish mythology and the ancient past of Ireland with the help of books, but also that he found practically all of them in the Zentralbibliothek:
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On the whole, evidence suggests that even after leaving Ireland, Joyce continued to deepen his knowledge of early Irish myth and literature. […] Though in Trieste, as Kelleher points out, Joyce had access to few Irish books, necessitating requests to his Aunt Josephine for Irish materials, in Zurich Joyce found a different set of resources, extensive materials that make it unnecessary to suppose that Joyce was dependent on either his personal library or his memory of texts read long since for his use of Irish myth in Ulysses.4
Tymoczko’s claim that Joyce used the Zentralbibliothek extensively is convincing, but her statement that he did so “almost daily from 1915 to 1919”5 is almost certainly an exaggeration—quite apart from the fact that there was no Zentralbibliothek before 1917. There is more, very concrete evidence of Joyce using the Zentralbibliothek. Notebook 5 of the so-called Zurich Notebooks contains excerpts he made from books while working on Ulysses in 1918. Two of them must be books he consulted at the Zentralbibliothek: the 1733 edition of La Rhétorique d’Aristote en françois, translated by François Cassandre and the two-volume 1736 edition of the Plays of Thomas Otway, the latter identified in the notebook with a shelf mark which is used to this day.6 The Zentralbibliothek has been significantly renovated in recent years and, except for the lobby area and its uppers floors, it is quite different from the library that Joyce knew and whose setting is inferred in Stoppard’s Travesties.
Notes 1. According to Dr Urs Leu of the Zentralbibliothek (personal communication 18 February 2020) no information concerning the users of these two libraries in the years 1915 to 1917 has survived. 2. See Brändli et al., Wissen im Zentrum, for details. 3. Reproduced in Brändli et al., Wissen im Zentrum, 36. 4. Tymoczko, The Irish “Ulysses”, 316f. On pages 318 to 323 of her book Tymoczko lists the books and journals on early Irish literature and culture that the Zentralbibliothek had, but also those that were missing. 5. Tymoczko, The Irish “Ulysses”, 39 and again on 317. 6. See the article on the Zurich Notebooks for details.
2.58 Zurich James Joyce Foundation
It seems entirely natural that Zurich as one of the four Joyce cities, the place where he spent more than four years of his life, where he wrote a good part of Ulysses and where he is buried, should have an institution devoted to keeping his memory and work alive. However, the Zurich James Joyce Foundation came about by pure serendipity, when a Zurich banker and a self-taught Joycean met in the process of the bank’s setting up a pub in Zurich. In the 1970s the Schweizerische Bankgesellschaft (Union Bank of Switzerland)1 decided to use the interior of Jury’s Antique Bar in Dublin for a new pub, called James Joyce Pub, to be opened in the centre of Zurich. The then Director General of the bank, Dr Robert Holzach (1922–2009) wanted to know more about the Dublin history of that pub and was directed to an expert, Fritz Senn, who at the time was a part-time reader in a Zurich publishing house. Senn was familiar with Dublin and knew even more about James Joyce, who had fascinated him the better part of his life. As a result of their meeting, the Zurich James Joyce Foundation came into being.2 Fritz Senn had assembled a large private library as well as a collection of Joyceana. Having been made aware of the importance of Joyce for the cultural history of Zurich, Holzach decided to set up a foundation with Senn as its director and with Senn’s library and collection as its base. He began to raise funds, and in 1985 established the Zurich James Joyce Foundation. Overseen by a Board of Trustees, it is run by Fritz Senn, its © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_62
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director since the beginning, and a staff currently consisting of two curators, Ruth Frehner and Ursula Zeller, an administrator and an archival assistant. The Foundation, housed in a historical building owned by the City of Zurich, is financed partly by income from its capital and for the years 2012 to 2021 by a very substantial annual grant from UBS AG. In 1987 the “Friends of the Zurich James Joyce Foundation” was established to support the Foundation “morally as well as financially”, for example by sponsoring the fees for guest lecturers and by offering research grants to promising young scholars. In the more than 30 years of its existence the Foundation has fulfilled its purpose to keep alive Joyce’s memory and his work “for the literary world in general, and in particular for Zurich” in a variety of ways. Its library and archive attract Joyce scholars and students from all over the world, many of them supported by the programme of scholarships mentioned above. There is also an annual August Workshop whose aim it is “to focus on a Joycean topic offering a wide range of interests and to approach it from various angles. Emphasis is on interaction and discussion, thus making the Zurich occasion different from the large conferences based on serial monologue performances”. The Foundation does a great deal to keep Joyce alive in Zurich. The team offers guided tours and introductory meetings for high school classes among others, and Fritz Senn teaches university courses and leads weekly reading groups where Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are studied and discussed in great detail. There are guest lectures and Ruth Frehner and Ursula Zeller occasionally curate exhibitions and theatrical productions. As mentioned above, the core of the Foundation’s library and archive consists of Fritz Senn’s private collection, which has become augmented by purchases and by substantial material donations, the four most important ones being the Giedion-Welcker, the Budgen, the Jahnke and the Wiederkehr Bequests.3 In 1985 Carola Giedion-Welcker’s “daughter Verena Clay and her son Andreas Giedion, a pediatrician, […] donated Joyce’s death mask, her correspondence and various documents […], as well as the series of photographs their mother had taken of Joyce in Zurich in 1938, in Platzspitz, at the meeting of the Sihl and Limmat rivers”.4 A second donation of notes, books, letters and photographs was made in 2016 by Verena Clay and Andreas Giedion’s widow Monica Giedion-Risch. In 2001 the Foundation received Frank Budgen’s papers which include “letters, drafts and photos including 2 telegrams from Joyce, 2 letters
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from Joyce, 5 letters from Lucia”. The bequest was made by Budgen’s daughter Joan (†2018) via Clive Hart.5 A suitcase sent to the Foundation in 2005 came from Prof. Dr Hans E. Jahnke (1943–2010), the son of Asta Osterwalder-Joyce, Giorgio Joyce’s second wife. It turned out to contain a veritable treasure trove consisting of letters and cards (most of them from and to Joyce), materials pertaining to his works (primarily Finnegans Wake), other documents, photographs, pictures and two bronze casts, one of Joyce’s death mask and a miniature replica of Milton Hebald’s statue.6 In 2013/2014 Georg Wiederkehr (1938–2017), the son of Alfred Vogt’s daughter Helene Wiederkehr-Vogt (†1984), donated a series of early, first and bibliophile editions of Joyce’s works, which had belonged to Alfred Vogt and had remained in the family after his death.7
Notes 1. In 1998 the Schweizerische Bankgesellschaft merged with the Schweizerischer Bankverein (Swiss Bank Corporation) and became UBS AG. 2. Unless indicated otherwise, all information in this article and all quotations come from the Foundation’s website, http://www.joycefoundation.ch. A brochure published in 2005 (Zeller and Frehner, ed., 20 Jahre Zürcher James Joyce Stiftung) lists all activities of the Foundation until that year. On Holzach, see Senn, “Robert Holzach”. 3. For comments on a number of “prize items” in the collection, see Senn in O’Neill, ed., Murmoirs, 235f. 4. Senn in O’Neill, ed., Murmoirs, 47. Andreas Giedion died in 2013. 5. See www.joycefoundation.ch/library, last accessed on 19 March 2020. 6. A complete list of the Jahnke Bequest is to be found at http://www.joycefoundation.ch/jahnke-bequest-2, last accessed on 2 November 2018. See also Frehner and Zeller, “The Hans E. Jahnke Bequest” and Senn in O’Neill, ed., Murmoirs, 311–314. 7. The Wiederkehr Bequest is documented in the minutes of the Board of Trustees of the Zurich James Joyce Foundation (meeting of 6 November 2013).
2.59 Zurich Notebooks
The Zurich Notebooks are part of the so-called La Hune materials “consisting of manuscripts, letters, paintings, personal effects, and the personal library of James Joyce […] originally left by Joyce in Paris on his flight from that city in the winter of 1939 and cared for during the German occupation by Joyce’s friend Paul Léon and his brother-in-law Alexander Ponizowsky, both of whom died at the hands of the Nazis”.1 The materials were sold in 1950 and are now part of the Joyce Collection of the University of Buffalo.2 The Zurich Notebooks material consists of five actual notebooks and a set of loose sheets, all dated to between June 1915 and October 1919, that is the time Joyce spent in Zurich during World War I.3 Notebooks 1, 2 and 4 and the loose sheets are evidence of Joyce trying to learn modern Greek; they contain individual sentences and phrases, vocabulary, short texts and the like. Notebook 1 also contains copies of two letters to Joyce from Pavlos (or Paul) Phocas, the Greek Joyce got to know through the meetings of the Club des Étrangers at the Weisses Kreuz. Notebook 5, used in 1918 while the Joyces were living at Universitätstrasse 38, is the most interesting in that it contains notes showing Joyce at work on Ulysses. It has been edited by Philip F. Herring,4 who links every entry to its source and to the passage or passages in Ulysses in which it was used: “This notebook is important both as a document pertinent to the creative evolution of Ulysses and as an example of Joyce’s use of source books, without reference to which the notebook is all but © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_63
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unintelligible”.5 The most important source books excerpted in Notebook 5 are Victor Bérard’s Les Phéniciens et l’Odyssée, W. H. Roscher’s Ausführliches Lexikon der griechischen und römischen Mythologie, the plays of Thomas Otway and La Rhétorique d’Aristote en françois, translated by François Cassandre. Beyond their value as sources the last two items are interesting for another reason: They are evidence for Joyce making use of Zurich’s Zentralbibliothek. On page 16 of the notebook Joyce wrote “Otway (Thos) / Plays 2 vols BB 1265/6” noting the shelf mark BB 1265/6 that is used for the Library’s two-volume 1736 edition of the Plays of Thomas Otway even today. And for his Rhétorique d’Aristote, as Herring shows, Joyce used the 1733 Amsterdam edition which is “the only edition of Cassandre in the Zentralbibliothek Zürich, where Joyce presumably worked”.6 The Notebooks are thus concrete evidence of three aspects of Joyce at work in Zurich: He was learning modern Greek, he was looking for words, phrases and ideas to be used in Ulysses, and he used the resources of the Zentralbibliothek.
Notes 1. Spielberg, comp., James Joyce’s Manuscripts & Letters at the University of Buffalo, vii. 2. See Shloss, Lucia, 23 f. for details. 3. They are catalogued in Spielberg comp., James Joyce’s Manuscripts & Letters at the University of Buffalo, 161–167. 4. Herring, “Ulysses Notebook VIII.A.5 at Buffalo”. This chapter was first published “in somewhat different form” as “Ulysses Notebook VIII.A.5 at Buffalo”, Studies in Bibliography 22 (1969), 287–310. 5. Herring, “Ulysses Notebook VIII.A.5 at Buffalo”, 5. 6. Herring, “Ulysses Notebook VIII.A.5 at Buffalo”, 10.
2.60 Stefan Zweig
James Joyce (2 February 1882–13 January 1941) and the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig (28 November 1881–23 February 1942) were almost exact contemporaries and also shared the experience of exile in both World Wars. When World War I broke out, Zweig, a prolific and already highly successful novelist, playwright, journalist and biographer, but also a pacifist, was declared unfit for service.1 Looking around “for some activity in which [he] could serve to advantage without being militarily active”2 he found a post in the library of the Austrian war archives. He moved to Zurich in 1917, initially because the local Stadttheater had decided to produce his anti-war tragedy Jeremias and invited him to attend the first night.3 He returned to Austria (Salzburg) in March 1919, but left the country for England (London, later Bath) in 1934 and even became a British citizen at the outbreak of World War II. However, fearing that the English might treat resident Germans and Austrians as enemy aliens, he left England for New York, then Argentina, Paraguay and, finally, Brazil. In his Brazilian exile he committed suicide on 23 February 1942. Zweig and Joyce’s paths crossed in Zurich, where both lived in exile; the former between 1917 and 1919, the latter between 1915 and 1919. It appears that Joyce made the first move: In late spring or summer 1918 he sent Zweig a copy of his newly published Exiles.4 Zweig replied on 12 September from the Hotel Belvoir in Rüschlikon near Zurich, writing that the play was “a great artistic revelation” for him and that he had “a very strong impression” of it. He promised that everything he could do for it © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5_64
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“on the German stage” would be done and he was certain that “after the war a translation could be placed immediately on a first theatre”.5 It is possible, therefore, that Zweig had a hand in finding a publisher for the German translation of the play and also a theatre that would perform it. The play was actually translated by Hannah von Mettal, a Czech-Austrian singer and translator who was living in Zurich at the time.6 It was published by Rascher-Verlag in Zurich in 1919 and first performed in Munich, in August 1919. The first actual meeting of the two men took place on 10 October, about a month after Zweig’s encouraging letter. We do not know how Joyce reacted to Zweig when they met in person, but Zweig’s own impression, recorded in his diary, was highly critical: Spent the afternoon with James Joyce, the Irish writer, gaunt, petty bourgeois, sharp, clever, but very ‘quaint’. He lived in Trieste for 14 years and he loves this city, because it did not tax him: […]. Now a literary magazine is publishing an Irish Odyssey even though he has not finished it—this is strange, just as it is strange that no publishing house in England has been willing to take it on. He seems eccentric and, like all such ego-fools, focused entirely on himself: in 14 years in Trieste he did not once visit Fiume, Agram or Vienna, here also he lives as in a cave.7
Not surprisingly perhaps the two writers did not become friends, but they remained in loose contact nevertheless.8 In April 1919 and again in May 1920 Joyce wrote to Zweig asking him for help finding theatres that would perform Verbannte, and he met him again in the summer of 1928 in Salzburg, where Zweig was living at the time.9 No details of the meeting are available, but it can be dated by a copy of Ulysses Joyce signed for Zweig on 27 August 1928.10 In that same year Zweig reviewed Ulysses, which he must have read in Goyert’s German translation first published in 1927. The review published in Neue Rundschau shows a mixture of repulsion and admiration. Zweig sees hatred as one of Joyce’s primary motivations: Joyce must have been traumatized in Dublin, his native city, by its citizens, whom he hates, by the priests, whom he hates, by the teachers, whom he hates, by anybody, because everything this wonderfully creative man has written is a revenge on Dublin—his earlier book, the beautifully uninhibited autobiography of Stephen Dedalus and now this brutally analytical Oresteia of the soul. Among its 1500 pages one finds barely ten that contain warmth,
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devotedness, goodness, friendliness; all characters are cynical, scornful and filled with hurricane-like fury […] Here a man does not only free himself by means of a shout, a word of scorn or a grimace, but he spills his resentments from all his entrails, vomits his feelings with a force and vehemence that makes one shudder.
Joyce’s greatness, according to Zweig, lies in his mastery of the word: Joyce is a magician of the word, a Mezzofanti of language—I believe that he speaks ten or twelve foreign languages and extracts from his native one a completely new syntax and a teeming vocabulary. […] His linguistic achievement alone shows Joyce’s genius: In the history of modern English prose Joyce has opened a new chapter, of which he is the beginning and the end.11
Zweig’s reaction to Ulysses is very much like Carl Gustav Jung’s four years later: Both men, well-known and highly respected men of letters in their own right, recognised the uniqueness of Ulysses, but—reading it primarily as a record of Joyce’s supposedly distorted state of mind—misunderstood the book completely. In hindsight their emotional, even visceral reactions compare unfavourably with those of other early critics in the German-speaking world such as Bernhard Fehr or Carola Giedion-Welcker. Despite his mixed feelings for Joyce, Zweig invited him in 1936 to join a committee of eminent writers who were planning to publish an address to Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) on the occasion of his 80th birthday. The address was formulated by Zweig and Thomas Mann, and the other members of the committee were Romain Rolland, Jules Romains, H. G. Wells and Virginia Woolf. Joyce, who was no friend of psychoanalysis and who had once called Freud “the Viennese Tweedledee”,12 declined the invitation to join the committee, but he had his signature added to the address.13 Zweig’s last words on Joyce are to be found in his memoirs Die Welt von gestern (The World of Yesterday), published posthumously in Stockholm in 1942.14 Again he characterises the Joyce of 1918 as a bitter exile, as a representative of (as he puts it) people […] without a country or, worse still, who instead of one had two or three fatherlands and were inwardly uncertain to which they belonged.[…] He was inclined to be testy, and I believe that just that irritation produced the power for his inner turmoil and productivity. His resentment against Dublin, against England, against particular persons became converted into dynamic energy and actually found release only in literary creation. But he
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seemed fond of his own asperity; I never saw him laugh or show high spirits. He always made the impression of a compact, sombre force and when I saw him on the street, his thin lips pressed tightly together, always walking rapidly as if heading for a definite objective, I sensed the defensive, the inner isolation of his being even more positively than in our talks. It failed to astonish me when I later learned that just this man had written the most solitary, the work with the least affinity to any other—meteor-like in its introduction to the world of our time.15
Notes 1. According to Andreas Weigel (personal communication 10 April 2020) Zweig initially showed great enthusiasm for the war and became a pacifist only later. In several publications (notably “Das Ende einer langlebigen Legende” and “Porträt des Künstlers”) Weigel has pointed out that Zweig’s memories of his contacts with Joyce contain discrepancies and contradictions. 2. World of Yesterday, 177. 3. This, the world première of the play, took place on 27 February 1918, but Zweig read selected scenes, also in Zurich, on 12 December 1917 (see NZZ, 14 December 1917, 27 and 28 February 1918). Jeremias had been published at Easter 1917 and become an immediate success, but a German production during the war was “out of the question” (World of Yesterday, 196f.). 4. Did he do so because he had seen a performance of Zweig’s play Jeremias at the Stadttheater? See Gorman, Definitive Biography, 238. 5. Printed in Ellmann, Joyce, 444 and in LII, 420f. In the letter Zweig also apologizes for his less than perfect English: “I read [English] perfectly, have even a fairly developed sense for the refinements of the language, but quite out of exercise since several years, I am a little ashamed to explain my sentiments and ideas in a scolars way, who just learned the langue without to possess her”. Andreas Weigel (“Porträt des Künstlers”, 142) has suggested that Zweig wrote to Joyce because he had read Siegmund Feilbogen’s review of Exiles in Berliner Tageblatt published on that day (12 September 1918). However, it is evident that Zweig had actually read the whole play and not just read about it. 6. According to his memoir (World of Yesterday, 210) Zweig had planned to translate Exiles himself “in order to be of use to [Joyce]”. Probably based on this remark Ellmann states that Zweig helped Joyce to find a translator
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for the play, but Joyce was in contact with von Mettal before he met Zweig; see the article on von Mettal for details. 7. Zweig, Tagebücher, 328; my translation. Joyce actually lived in Pola for about half a year and in Trieste for a little more than ten years. Fiume is now called Rijeka, Agram Zagreb; both cities are in present-day Croatia. 8. The following is based on Weigel, “Das Ende einer langlebigen Legende” and “Meteorit trifft Zweig”. 9. For details of the Joyce family’s trip to Salzburg in 1928, see “Joyce in Zurich” and especially Weigel “Porträt des Künstlers”, 134–146. 10. According to Weigel (“Porträt des Künstlers”, 144) the book was already in Zweig’s possession; it was not a present from Joyce. 11. “Anmerkungen zu Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’” in Neue Rundschau 39.10 (October 1928), 476–479, here quoted from Zweig, Begegnungen mit Büchern, 218–222 (219f., 221); my translation. The essay is also reprinted in Füger, ed., Kritisches Erbe, 214–216. 12. SL, 282. See the article on Carl Gustav Jung for details. 13. The address was signed by about 400 people. See Weigel (“Das Ende einer langlebigen Legende”, 51–54) for details. 14. It was first published in English as The World of Yesterday in 1943. 15. Zweig, World of Yesterday, 210 f. The passage from Zweig’s diaries quoted above shows that he had learnt already in 1918 that Joyce was working on Ulysses.
PART III
3.01 Joyce in Switzerland: A Chronology
For details see Chapter 1.02 “Joyce in Zurich”. With few exceptions the dates given here are from Norburn, Chronology; the names of the hotels in Zurich are from Faerber and Luchsinger, Joyce in Zürich, 163 f. Table 1 Joyce in Switzerland: A chronology 1904 11–19 Oct. 1904 1915–1919 30 June 1915 July–Oct. 1915 Oct. 1915–March 1916 March 1916–Jan. 1917 Jan.–Oct. 1917 Oct.–Dec. 1917 Jan.–Oct. 1918 Oct. 1918–Oct. 1919 16 Oct. 1919 1928, 1930–1939 14–17 July 1928 c 1–14 April 1930 c 13 May–17 June 1930 23–27 Nov. 1930
at Gasthaus Hoffnung arrival from Trieste, at Gasthaus Hoffnung at Reinhardstrasse 7 at Kreuzstrasse 19 at Seefeldstrasse 54 at Seefeldstrasse 73 in Locarno, Pension Villa Rossa, then Pension Daheim at Universitätstrasse 38 at Universitätstrasse 29 departure to Trieste in Zurich en route from Paris to Innsbruck and then Salzburg at Hotel St Gotthard at Hotel St Gotthard and (c 14 May–5 June) in Vogt’s clinic at Hotel Carlton Elite (continued)
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Table 1 (continued) c 6 July–c 14 Aug. 1932 c 14 Aug.–8 Sept. 1932 8–c 19 Sept. 1932 22 May–10 June 1933 c 15–30 July 1933
c 10–20 April 1934 c 20 Sept. 1934 31 Jan./1 Feb. 1935 c 1–17 April 1937 c 23 Aug–c 2 Sept. 1937 8 (or 9) Feb.–early Mar. 1938 21 Aug.–12 Sept. 1938 c 8–c 25 Aug. 1939 1940/1941 14–17 Dec.1940 17 Dec. 1940–9 Jan. 1941 9–13 Jan. 1941 15 Jan. 1941
at Hotel Carlton Elite in Feldkirch at Hotel Carlton Elite (c 19 Sept.: departure to Nice, back to Paris in October) at Hotel Habis at Hotel St Gotthard and, from 22 July onwards, at Hotel Habis (30 July: departure to Nyon and then Geneva) at Hotel Carlton Elite at Hotel Carlton Elite at Hotel Carlton Elite at Hotel Carlton Elite at Hotel Carlton Elite in Lausanne and Montreux (and also in Zurich?) in Lausanne and Montreux (and also in Berne and Zurich?) from France (St-Gérand-le-Puy) via Geneva and Lausanne to Zurich at Pension Delphin, Mühlebachstrasse 69 at Rotkreuzspital burial at Fluntern cemetery
3.02 Joyce’s Zurich: A Map
Fig. 1 Joyce’s Zurich: A map (Designed by Studio Roth&Maerchy)
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Index1
A Ackermann, Walter, 65–66 Anderson, Margaret C., 38 Andreae, Volkmar, 174, 237 Arche (Verlag der Arche), 199 Arp, Hans, 21, 97, 99, 100 Ascona, 207 B Bachmann, Albert, 149, 150n2 Bahnhofstrasse, 21, 37, 41, 57, 67–68, 91, 99, 133, 249 Bailly, Kathleen, 22, 80 Bailly, René, 22, 80 Ball, Hugo, 97, 99, 101 Bankgesellschaft, 150 Barber, Samuel, 165 Basel, 6, 23, 85, 104, 201, 221, 229, 230, 246, 250 Baur au Lac (hotel), 91, 177 Beach, Sylvia, 19, 20, 135, 198, 254
Bellevue, 11, 12, 46, 69–70, 122, 169, 187, 190, 217 Bennett, A. Percy, 42, 43, 96, 172, 241 Beran, Felix, 12, 21, 71–72, 117 Bergner, Elisabeth, 187–188 Berne, 16, 42, 96, 171, 172, 280 Bleibtreu, Karl, 14, 18, 19, 75–76, 235 Bliznakoff, Olga, 11 Bliznakoff, Vela, 11 Bloch, Konrad, 96 Bodmer, Hans, 30n80 Borach, Georges, 11, 20, 21, 36, 79–81, 211, 249 Borsch, Louis, 249 Brauchbar, Edmund, 11, 21, 24, 44, 50, 79, 83–84, 104, 137, 169, 211, 230 Brauchbar, Rudolph, 83, 104, 170n1 Brissago (Islands), 45, 207, 208 British Consulate General, 42, 86, 107
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.
1
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Fischer, James Joyce in Zurich, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51283-5
295
296
INDEX
Broch, Hermann, 202 Brody, Daniel, 72, 97, 156, 178, 201, 202 Browning, Robert, 36, 37, 110 Brunner, Theodor, 22, 158 Budgen, Frank, 4, 13, 14, 18, 21, 36, 41–44, 47, 67, 71, 79, 85–89, 91, 107, 118, 121–123, 164, 168, 173, 177, 178, 190, 203, 207–209, 229, 231, 233, 257, 266, 267 Budgen, Joan, 267 Burgess, Anthony, 158 Busoni, Ferruccio, 14, 152, 174, 187 C Cabaret Voltaire, 99, 101 Cairati, Alfredo, 253 Canetti, Elias, 61, 62n20, 128 Carlton Elite (hotel), 23, 67, 91–92, 213, 279, 280 Carr, Henry, 13, 18, 42, 95–98, 108–110, 241–243 Carr, Noël, 98 Chalas, Antonio, 12 Chiodera, Alfred, 189 Clay, Verena, 266 Club des Étrangers, 12, 203, 261, 269 Compton, “Private,” 42 Corray, Hans, 101n3 Cotton, Evelyn, 58 Credit Suisse, 208n9 Culmannstrasse, 121 Curjel, Hans, 136 Czernovic, Mr., 12, 261 D Dada, 13, 97, 99–101, 161, 171, 187, 241 d’Albert, Eugène, 187
Dallo, Victor, 103 de Vries, Juda (Jules Martin), 12, 26n27, 203, 233 Death mask, 57, 84, 103–105, 137, 140, 266, 267 Delphin (pension), 24, 227, 280 Derwent, Lord, 25, 57 Diogenes-Verlag, 222 Dublin, 3, 9, 10, 33–35, 38, 40–42, 44, 45, 59, 103, 129, 149, 150, 156, 175, 193, 222, 237, 238, 265, 272, 273 Dutli, Alfred, 4, 58 E Egoist, 15, 34 Einstein, Albert, 16 Ellmann, Richard, 4, 7n5, 12, 13, 16, 36, 43, 47, 58, 59, 66, 80, 113, 121, 143, 144, 147, 155, 156, 158, 163, 173, 202, 203, 209, 211, 217, 218, 222, 235, 250, 253, 258, 261 English Players, 12–14, 17, 18, 34, 36, 42, 58, 95, 107–110, 161, 174, 189, 190, 233, 234, 241 Ernst, Max, 21 F Faber and Faber, 45 Faerber, Thomas, 5, 31n101, 32n114, 32n121, 41, 52n23, 54n59, 55n69, 62n18, 84n4, 89n4, 89n16, 138n5, 186n1, 279 Fehr, Bernhard, 21, 113–115, 158, 167, 168, 214, 227, 273 Feilbogen, Siegmund, 12, 15, 21, 50, 71, 117–118 Feldkirch, 22, 280 Fellner, Ferdinand, 189, 230n1, 243
INDEX
Finsler, Hans, 103, 104 Fischer-Dieskau, Dietrich, 213 Fleiner, Fritz, 13, 229, 230 Fleischman Kastor, Helen, see Joyce, Helen Fleischmann, Martha, 18, 20, 43, 44, 121–124, 144, 227, 249, 256 Fleming, Charles, 108 Fleming de Saint-Léger, Richard, 212 Fluntern (Cemetery), 25, 57, 58, 61, 127–129, 137, 280 Forel, Oscar, 22, 158 Frank, Leonhard, 187 Frankfurter Zeitung, 97 Franz Carl Weber (toy shop), 41 Frehner, Ruth, 5, 60, 266 Freud, Sigmund, 50, 156, 158, 255, 273 Frisch, Max, 61 G Galerie Dada, 99, 100 Gann, Joe, 54n49 Geilinger, Max, 25, 133, 222 Geneva, 18, 22, 280 Giedion, Andreas, 266 Giedion, Sigfried, 21, 23, 24, 50, 57, 84, 104, 135, 136, 169, 203, 249 Giedion-Risch, Monica, 266 Giedion-Welcker, Carola, 20, 21, 23, 44, 50, 57, 80, 83, 84, 91, 92, 103, 104, 113–115, 135–137, 148, 156, 158, 164, 168, 193, 194, 214, 217, 246, 249, 266, 273 Giese, Therese, 61 Gilbert, Stuart, 20, 87, 89n14, 201 Gillet, Louis, 140 Gimmi, Wilhelm, 19, 104, 139–141, 230 Gisler, Hans, 104
297
Glenning, Bernard, 18 Goldschmidt, Rudolf, 11, 12, 21, 83, 122, 143–144, 211, 233 Goll, Ivan, 201 Gorman, Herbert, 4, 13, 18, 52n25, 118, 144, 145n6, 165, 166n11, 166n12, 173, 212, 257 Goyert, Georg, 72, 137, 156, 168, 201, 272 Grand Café des Banques (café), 187 Grimm, Robert, 171 Guillaume Tell, see Rossini, Gioachino H Habis (hotel), 21, 91 Haffmanns-Verlag, 222 Hardekopf, Ferdinand, 100 Harmsworth, Desmond, 35 Hart, Clive, 55n62, 87, 89n12, 89n17, 179n10, 267 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 14 Heap, Jane, 38 Hebald, Milton, 127, 267 Heer, Jakob Christoph, 100, 101n6 Hegar, Friedrich, 237, 238 Helmer, Hermann Gottlieb, 189, 226n1, 243 Hennings, Emmy, 99 Hess, Albert W., 202n7 Hesse, Hermann, 213 Heusser, Hans, 100 Heyland, Klara, 58 Hildesheimer, Wolfgang, 202n9 Hiltpold, Rudolf, 44, 122, 123, 124n11 Hirschfeld, Kurt, 61, 62n20 Hoffnung (inn), 147–148 Holzach, Robert, 59, 150, 265 Howald, Ernst, 24, 27n42, 227 Huch, Ricarda, 61, 62n20 Huebsch, Benjamin W. (‘Ben’), 16, 34
298
INDEX
Huelsenbeck, Richard, 99 Hummel, Daniel, 13, 27n41, 29n71, 229, 258n8 I The Importance of Being Earnest, see Wilde, Oscar Innsbruck, 20, 29n76, 279 Insel-Verlag, 51n8, 199n2 International James Joyce Symposium, 60, 149, 150 International Review, 12, 15, 71, 117 J Jahnke, Hans E., 105, 266, 267 Jahnke-Osterwalder, Asta, 58 Jaloux, Edmond, 182 James Joyce Pub, 59, 149–150, 265 James Joyce Quarterly, 59, 222 James Joyce Review, 58–59 Janco, Marcel, 99, 100 Jarnach, Philipp, 14, 151–153, 174, 177 Jolas, Maria, 22, 24, 130n6, 138n3 Jolas, Eugene, 22 Joyce, Eileen, 10, 23, 25n10 Joyce, Eva, 10 Joyce, Giorgio, 10, 15, 21, 23, 27n45, 29n71, 31n104, 32n118, 57–59, 65, 103, 104, 114, 128, 140, 160n21, 164, 166n8, 204, 213, 214, 230, 231, 267 Joyce, Helen, 22–24, 58, 164, 166n8, 173, 213, 230, 231, 232n14 Joyce, James, works (in alphabetical order) “Alone,” 36, 37, 57, 72, 79, 133 “Bahnhofstrasse,” 37, 41, 52n25, 53n40, 57, 67–68, 72, 99, 133, 249, 251n4
Dubliners, 6n2, 6n3, 10, 15, 33, 34, 40, 143, 168, 221 Exiles, 10, 13, 16, 18, 33–36, 108, 111n15, 119n5, 122, 156, 159n6, 166n12, 167, 179n8, 188n5, 197–199, 201, 212n1, 234, 253, 271, 274n5, 274n6 Finnegans Wake (“Work in Progress,” “Anna Livia Plurabelle”), 19, 23, 24, 31n107, 33, 34, 40, 45–50, 55n63, 59, 69, 72, 83, 87, 93n1, 137, 138n9, 158, 165, 168, 181, 182, 193, 202n7, 202n9, 212n8, 218, 246, 247, 266, 267 “From a Banned Writer to a Banned Singer,” 49 Giacomo Joyce, 102n10, 258 “A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight,” 36, 72, 110 Pomes Penyeach, 34–36, 51n15, 68, 72 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 10, 34, 51n17, 52n27 Ulysses, 3, 10, 12, 13, 16, 18–20, 33, 34, 37–45, 52n25, 53n47, 54n54, 59, 60, 75, 76, 77n5, 83, 87, 96, 97, 100, 101, 110, 110n4, 113, 115n2, 123, 124, 135, 137, 138n2, 139, 144, 147, 149, 150, 153, 156–158, 160n11, 167, 168, 178, 181, 185, 193, 195n4, 198, 199, 200n7, 201, 202, 209, 221, 230, 231, 233, 241, 242, 244n1, 245–247, 254, 256, 258n1, 264–266, 269, 270, 272, 273, 275n15 Joyce, Lucia, 10, 15, 18, 21–23, 29n74, 30n89, 30n90, 31n92,
INDEX
32n118, 35, 41, 58, 72, 118, 158, 164, 168, 179n10, 209n6, 267 Joyce, Michael, 97 Joyce, Nora, 5, 9–11, 15, 20–24, 25n12, 28n56, 30n84, 30n89, 32n118, 43, 52n24, 52n25, 57–59, 61n4, 80, 87, 103, 104, 108, 123, 127–129, 136, 147, 158, 170, 185, 190, 204, 207, 209n6, 212, 230, 232n3, 256, 257, 263 Joyce, Stanislaus, 10, 23, 25n10, 27n41, 31n104, 40, 88, 100, 102n10, 103, 115, 147, 148n3, 209, 258 Joyce, Stephen, 22, 24, 32n118, 41, 58, 59, 75, 76 Jung, Carl Gustav, 22, 50, 115n3, 137, 155–159, 174, 177, 178, 197, 255, 258n7, 273 K Kaempffer, Gertrude, 43, 44, 54n52 Kafka, Irene, 97 Kantonsbibliothek, 185, 263 Kaufleuten (theatre), 99, 108, 161, 189, 190 Keller, Gottfried, 114, 130n7, 152, 163–165, 213, 214, 215n4 Klöti, Emil, 24 Kokoschka, Oskar, 100 Korrodi, Eduard, 167–168 Kreuzstrasse, 11, 15 Kronenhalle (restaurant), 25, 55n65, 58, 59, 69, 70, 80, 92, 140, 169–170, 187, 214, 227, 250 Kurt Wolff Verlag, 201 Küsnacht, 21, 22, 158
299
L Labyrinthspiel (board game), 41 Latzko, Andreas, 187 Lausanne, 6n1, 18, 23, 24, 104, 137, 143, 144n3, 181, 182 Lenin (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov), 28n57, 97, 101, 159, 171–172, 188, 241–243, 244n2, 244n10, 244n11 Léon, Paul, 23, 54n58, 55n62, 91, 93n4, 269 Leoncavallo, Ruggiero, 208 Lesezirkel Hottingen, 30n80, 133 Limmat, 23, 38, 46, 55n63, 69, 193, 195n4, 229, 237, 246, 247n8, 266 Little Review, 38–40 Locarno, 6n1, 11, 12, 16, 38, 43, 44, 52n25, 75, 76, 163, 166n2, 185, 207, 208 Lodge, David, 149, 150n5 Lohmeyer, Dr., 198, 200n7 Lothar, Rudolf, 179n8 Lucerne, 23, 31n101, 136 Luchsinger, Markus, 5, 31n101, 32n114, 41, 52n23, 54n59, 55n69, 56n77, 60, 62n18, 84n4, 89n4, 89n16, 138n5, 186n1, 279 Luening, Otto (James P. Cleveland), 108, 174, 175 M McCormick, Edith Rockefeller, 16, 155, 159, 174, 175, 177–178, 200n6, 256, 257, 258n7 Maeglin, Rudolf, 13, 29n71 Maggi, 230, 231, 232n13 Maier, Hans Wolfgang, 22 Mann, Erika, 61, 62n20 Marquis, Mr., 12, 261 Martin, Jules, see de Vries, Juda
300
INDEX
Meierei (restaurant), 99, 171 Meili, Max, 25 Mercanton, Jaques, 20, 23, 24, 26n22, 181–183 Meyer, Adolf, 89n4 Moissi, Alexander, 188 Montreux, 6n1, 18, 22–24, 182 Moser, Karl, 232n1 Moser, Werner M., 232n1 Museumsgesellschaft, 40, 185, 263 N Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 5, 20, 57, 81n3, 119n5, 125n16, 137, 157, 167–168 Neuhausen, 23 Niederdorf, 11, 46 Nikisch, Arthur, 174 Nordness, Lee, 127 Nyon, 21, 22, 158 O Odeon (café), 11, 13, 69, 70, 187–188 Opernhaus, see Stadttheater Oprecht, Emil, 61 P Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da, 173 Palmer, Cecil, 119n3 Paris, 3, 9, 13, 19–24, 33, 35, 38, 58, 59, 80, 85, 88, 99–101, 123, 135, 158, 169, 181, 198, 201, 211, 212, 225, 229, 230, 250, 257, 269, 279, 280 Pfauen (theatre and café-restaurant), 11, 18, 43, 47, 60, 69, 79, 87, 91, 108, 123, 161, 174, 188–190, 213, 225, 229, 256 Phokas, Pavlos (Paul), 12, 261
Pinker, James, 10, 15 Platten, Fritz, 171 Platzspitz, 23, 46, 60, 136, 193–194, 246, 266 Pola, 9, 14, 38 Ponizowsky, Alexander, 269 Pound, Ezra, 15, 18, 19, 35, 38, 128 Psychologischer Club, 177 Q Quinn, John, 16 R Rämistrasse, 11, 70, 187, 189, 190, 191n4, 251n7 Ranzoni, Daniele, 208 Rascher, Max, 35, 197–199, 199n4 Rascher-Verlag, 35, 159n6, 179n8, 197–199, 201, 253, 272 Rawson, Tristan, 14, 108 Reichert, Karl H., 202n7 Reichert, Klaus, 200n12 Reinhardstrasse, 11, 15, 147 Reucker, Alfred, 191n2, 225 Rheinfelden, 23 Rhein-Verlag, 72, 97, 156, 198, 199, 201–202 Richards, Grant, 6n3, 34 Richter, Hans, 99 Rieser, Ferdinand, 189 Rossini, Gioachino (Guillaume Tell), 49, 250 Rotkreuzspital, 25, 30n82, 103, 127, 245, 250 Rubinstein, David, 100, 101n6 Ruggiero, Bertha, 58, 204, 205n17 Ruggiero, Paul, 12, 21, 24, 32n119, 36, 51n20, 58, 137, 170, 170n1, 170n3, 203–204, 204n9, 261 Rumbold, Horace, 42, 54n49, 96, 172
INDEX
S Saint-Gérand-le-Puy, 24, 137, 182 St. Gotthard (hotel), 21, 30n82, 54n58, 67, 91, 250 Saint-Léger, Baroness Antonietta de, 45, 166n2, 207–209 Saint-Saëns, Camille, 100 Salzburg, 20, 29n74, 271, 272, 275n9 Santos, Nikola, 12 Sauermann, Charlotte, 14 Sax, Victor A., 11, 26n21, 79, 211–212 Schaurek, Eileen, see Joyce, Eileen Schickele, René, 13, 187 Schmitz, Ettore (Italo Svevo), 27n38, 54n56, 257 Schoeck, Othmar, 21, 23, 24, 32n119, 58, 92, 114, 115n5, 130n7, 133, 164, 165, 209, 213–214, 225, 227, 250 Schwarz, Oscar, 11, 255, 258n1 Schweizerische Bankgesellschaft, 59, 149, 150n2, 265, 267n1 Schweizerische Kreditanstalt, 204n9 Schweizerischer Bankverein, 267n1 Schwitters, Kurt, 21 Sechseläuten, 48, 69, 217–218 Sechseläutenplatz, 48, 55n65, 69, 217–218, 225, 237, 239n1 Seefeldstrasse, 11, 14, 58, 151, 203, 261, 262n1, 262n2 Segantini, Giovanni, 208 Senn, Fritz, 4, 6, 49, 54n58, 54n59, 55n66, 59, 93n1, 104, 105n13, 133, 138n3, 147, 149, 150, 165, 195n4, 202n7, 203, 204n9, 221–222, 228, 232n16, 265, 266 Settanni, Ettore, 212n8 Shakespeare and Company, 20, 35, 135, 198 Sidler-Huguenin, Ernst, 52n25, 249, 250
301
Sihl, 23, 38, 46, 55n63, 193, 195n4, 246, 247n8, 266 Sihlpost, 46, 55n64, 60 Smith, “Toad,” 54n49 Speck, Paul, 103, 104 Spitteler, Carl, 197, 230 Stadtbibliothek, 185, 263 Stadttheater (Opernhaus), 14, 60, 66n2, 69, 151, 189, 191n2, 217, 225, 237, 238, 271, 274n4 Stamm, Rudolf, 104, 105n7 Stephen, James, 165 Stoppard, Tom (Travesties), 96–98, 101, 102n10, 172, 241–243, 264 Straumann, Heinrich, 24, 25, 32n119, 57, 58, 61n13, 115, 121–123, 125n14, 140, 221, 227–228 Strauss, Richard, 174 Stückgold, Stanislaus, 102n9, 103 Suhrkamp-Verlag, 202, 222 Sullivan, John, 49, 79, 250 Sumner, John, 38 Suter, August, 13, 19, 21, 29n71, 65, 79, 85, 86, 89n4, 139, 163, 190, 210n8, 229–231, 254n3 Suter, Paul, 13, 21, 29n71, 47, 65, 190, 210n8, 229–231 Suter-Moser, Helene, 254n3 Svevo, Italo, see Schmitz, Ettore (Italo Svevo) Sykes, Claud W., 12, 14, 21, 38, 75, 76, 98n3, 107, 108, 110n4, 111n12, 111n17, 144, 232n3, 233–235, 236n8, 236n10 Sykes, Mrs. (Daisy Race), 75, 108, 236n3 Symons, Arthur, 36 T Taeuber-Arp, Sophie, 21 Taylor, Horace, 86
302
INDEX
Terrasse (restaurant), 69 Thayer, Scofield, 16, 111n17 Tonhalle, 14, 17, 23, 60, 174, 189, 214, 230, 237–238, 255 Transatlantic Review, 45 Transition, 22, 45, 181 Travesties, see Stoppard, Tom Trieste, 3, 9–15, 19, 33–35, 37, 38, 40, 45, 59, 87, 102n8, 108, 122, 143, 155, 172, 185, 198, 201, 237, 238, 255–257, 264, 272, 279 Trotsky, Leon, 188 Tschudy, Theophil, 189 Turner, Ethel, 108 Tzara, Tristan, 97, 99–101, 172, 241–243, 244n12 U UBS AG, 266, 267n1 Uehlinger, Max, 13 Universitätsspital, 5 Universitätstrasse, 11, 44, 87, 121, 190, 198, 245, 269, 279 V Vogel, Hannes, 60, 193, 245–247 Vogt, Alfred, 21–24, 72, 79, 92, 123, 135, 214, 249–250, 267 von Mettal, Hannah, 35, 51n6, 159n6, 179n8, 198, 199, 253–254, 272 von Seybel, Georg, 179n8 von Werefkin, Marianne, 187 W Waag (Zunfthaus zur Waag, restaurant), 99 Wake Newslitter, 59, 222
Walser, Robert, 197 Weaver, Harriet Shaw, 15, 16, 20, 29n78, 38, 71, 80, 155, 199 Wedekind, Frank, 13 Weiss, Edoardo, 255 Weiss, Ottocaro, 11, 47, 143, 144, 163, 255–258 Weisses Kreuz (restaurant), 11, 12, 261, 269 Wettstein, Georg, 42 Wiederkehr, Georg, 250, 267 Wiederkehr, Paul, 12, 261 Wiederkehr-Vogt, Helene, 250, 267 Wilde, Oscar (The Importance of Being Earnest), 12, 13, 18, 42, 43, 95, 108, 161, 190, 241, 242 Wolf-Ferrari, Ermanno, 159 Wollschläger, Hans, 202n9 Y Yeats, William Butler, 15 Z Zeller, Ursula, 6, 60, 97, 266 Zentralbibliothek, 5, 40, 60, 104, 185, 204, 263–264, 270 Zimmerleuten (Zunfthaus zur Zimmerleuten, restaurant), 18 Zimmermann, Hans, 175 Zumsteg, Gustav, 169, 170n1 Zumsteg, Hulda, 58, 169 Zürichberg (hotel), 86, 114, 127 Zurich James Joyce Foundation, 5, 6, 30n80, 41, 54n58, 60, 88, 103–105, 136, 137, 140, 150, 194, 222, 250, 265–267 Zurich Notebooks, 264, 269–270 Zweig, Stefan, 13, 35, 157, 158, 187, 188, 197, 198, 253, 271–274