Joycean Murmoirs: Fritz Senn on James Joyce 9781843512257, 1843512254

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CHRISTINE O’NEILL (ED.)

JOYCEAN MURMOIRS FRITZ SENN ON JAMES JOYCE

CONTENTS Title Page Illustrations Preface by Fritz Senn Preamble by Christine O’Neill Acknowledgments Beginnings Reminiscences One Thinks of Homer Language/Translation Procedures and Prejudices Joyce’s Other Works Odds Without Ends Excessive Aversions Annotation Going ‘Mis’ Theoretically Yours The Author Behind It All Gender and its Discontents Ochlokinetics Some Martial Flurries L’art d’être grandp… Our Zurich James Joyce Foundation Random Dramatis Personae Guardedly Personal A Belated Windfall Books Mentioned Index Copyright

ILLUSTRATIONS Photographs between pages 178 and 179 Frank Budgen, Fritz Senn and unidentified Maria Jolas Carola Giedion-Wecker Fritz Senn and May Monaghan Harry Levin Marvin Magalaner Thornton Wilder Heinrich Straumann James Atherton Adaline Glasheen Richard Ellmann Richard M. Kain Hugh Kenner Maurice Beebe Bernard Benstock Thomas E. Connolly Jack P. Dalton Ruth van Phul Nathan Halper Florence Walzl Mabel Worthington Norman Silverstein Margaret Solomon Father Robert Boyle SJ Robert Day John Garvin Niall Montgomery John Ryan Ulrich Schneider Gerardine Franken Leo Knuth Macjei Słomczynski Jacques Lacan Wolfgang Hildesheimer Saul Bellow Fritz Senn © Christian Scholz, Zurich

PREFACE FRITZ SENN So once more a book that I have not really written comes out under my name. In fact I am both ambivalent subject and self-conscious object. Once more it is the outcome of someone else’s initiative. The origin is in all those stories about long ago that were and are still exchanged in the evenings, usually during a Joyce conference, about the ancestors of the Joyce family — I mean the family of Joyceans — many of whom are no longer with us. The times before you youngsters were around. Meanwhile I have become even more of a Nestor, a commentator on far-gone days and events. Memories have accumulated over half a century and have no doubt changed in the process. Stories tend to take on a life of their own and become almost fixed in their formulation so that they, quite possibly, occult the original events. That, incidentally, is History — not so much what actually happened, but what someone remembered and passed on. At any rate, from time to time a listener, possibly out of politeness, proposed to have it all written down. This was never a viable option for me. I know myself too well: while I am struggling to put an incident into coherent prose, other reminiscences crowd in and have to be put aside for future use but most likely then fade into oblivion. I also find that, so different from a telling in inspiring company, as soon as I fix something verbally it becomes lifeless, no matter how fanciful the original anecdote may have been. That’s where Christine O’Neill comes in. And that’s a long story. She had drifted into a Joyce seminar I did for the University of Zurich in the anniversary year of 1982, and she volunteered to present a paper at very short notice. It had to do with translation, and she emerged with credit. Two years later, when she went to Trinity College, Dublin for a year, I was able to give her a few propitious contacts, among them my old friend Niall Montgomery and also Petr Škrabánek. After her return we remained in touch. When the Zurich James Joyce Foundation (ZJJF) opened, we employed her part-time for the next few years to help in the day-to-day running of the establishment. She came to use our research facilities extensively, in particular when she did her doctorate at Zurich University under the direction of Professor Andreas Fischer (who was not yet a member of our board of trustees) and my less official self. Her choice to focus on the ‘Eumaeus’ episode may have had something to do with my own predilection. In our weekly Ulysses reading group in the mid-eighties she came across a visiting Irishman, Tim O’Neill. He showed a lively interest and contributed many insights thanks to his comprehensive knowledge of manuscripts and Irish history. His interest — not that I noticed for a long time — was not limited to our reading of Ulysses. In due course Christine Bernhard became Christine O’Neill and finally settled in Dublin. For years the O’Neills have been a kind of Foundation outpost and have excavated an amount of relevant material that is now part of our holdings. It was Christine O’Neill who collected some of my essays and edited them for what became Inductive Scrutinies: Focus on Joyce in 1995. More recently, she resourcefully initiated the present project. With determination, she proposed the idea to Antony Farrell of The Lilliput Press, as well as to the Zurich James Joyce Foundation, and with untiring resolution descended on the Foundation at irregular intervals. She corralled me and set to it, microphone and notebook at the ready. On occasion the interviews were continued in Dublin. All along the way I had to be prodded. My enthusiasm for the project was intermittent. I often found myself procrastinating, indisposed and reluctant, especially when it came to dealing with her very faithful transcripts. From any given question or cue I could hardly restrict myself to the subject at hand but soon trailed off, associated freely and got bogged down in side issues. I often had to be called back to the topic at hand. All of which was part of the idea, or, at least, an inherent risk. In Act Two all the accumulated clutter had to be reworked into coherent sentences. It is excruciating to read what one has said spontaneously even when it sounded crystal clear at the moment of utterance. Then I found how much I had been repeating myself and how much I had left out. Next, some semblance of structure had to be imposed on the haphazard jumble of reminiscences. So the result, predictably, is a bit of a hybrid. Based on the interviews and transcripts, it had to be edited and filtered (syntactically), and many dates and references had to be checked. During all that time new memories cropped up and adaptations were necessary. All of this will no doubt show in the multiform retrospective arrangement. The impetus was Ithacan, with its question-and-answer procedure, but the result possibly comes all too close to the uneasy amalgamation of ‘Eumaeus’. Despite considerable reworking, there remains something of the as-you-go-along nature of the original interviews. So this is also an untastable apology for the chaosmos of it all. Or, to wind up all the caveats, whenever something appears to lack coherence, let us put it down to spontaneity. So I owe it all to Christine and her perseverance — encouragement, cajolery, coercion, scourges, thumbscrews, blackmail, forbearance and whatever else she astutely had at her disposal. The advantage for me is that I can evade responsibility and blame the topics and selection on her questions. She, in turn, might rejoin that I had both time and opportunity for ample modifications which, of course, I had. I am good at putting things off, so the months went by while she was breathing down my neck. There is nothing remotely complete about these chancy memoirs. Nor is there much justice in the space allotted to colleagues, Joyceans, friends and others in these pages. Some get scant mention or none at all, partly due to limitations of space, more often due to inadvertence and flawed memory. The

emphasis is on the earlier times as there is no way of keeping up with all the contacts of more recent years. At the moment I have twenty symposia under my belt and an even greater number of conferences in many countries and three continents. I have just calculated that since 1985 I must have had contact with at least 120 different participants at our annual workshops alone. In a few rare cases, incidentally, it may be an advantage not to be mentioned. Omissions abound, and a few complaints have already reached me before publication. Inevitably there has been a great deal of self-restraint, or call it internal censorship. Above all, I do not aim to intrude into the private or personal, not even in my own case. For better or worse, some of the more racy anecdotes remain the stuff of oral poetry, more appropriate in an intimate circle or at a latenight session in an Irish pub (where usually I cannot even hear what anyone is saying). What one remembers is often funny at the expense of an otherwise perfectly personable victim. By their nature, the more ludicrous events are more entertaining than straight admiration can ever be, as the narrator of the ‘Cyclops’ episode demonstrates so vigorously. I would not follow in his eloquent footsteps even if I had the skill. So there is at best, or is it worst, only muted scandal. It must be human nature that the less agreeable encounters loom larger in memory than many good and stalwart acts of friendship. This explains why some of the more colourful or wayward individuals that have crossed my path of old have come in for more limelight than many of those that are more like you and me. So the best friends may get undeserved short shrift. Still, a less than Christian impulse could not be entirely repressed. There are a few particularly fatuous statements that I did not have the heart to leave out, but their perpetrators will remain nameless. Had I foreseen at the time that decades later I would be subjected to a ruthless inquisition, I might have taken notes on many occasions when I asked diffident questions of some of Joyce’s contemporaries. Emphatically, this is neither an autobiography nor a history of Joyce criticism nor a panorama of Joycean activities. As usual, I cannot ever avoid going back to the Joycean texts on the slightest provocation, but since this is not an academic study it lacks all scholarly paraphernalia and appends only a list of books that have been referred to in passing, and an index where you can see if you are listed. Chances are you are not. My overall aim was to show how so much of what is now the Joyce Industry or mafia is not some powerful behind-the-scenes fraternity pulling strings. Rather it is something that grew initially from the personal enthusiasm of individuals who did not, at first, have academic promotion as their goal. I have tried to describe this from my own subjective angle. The reminiscences are larded with all sorts of opinions, prejudices, grievances and views on Joyce, including some unsolicited by Christine. All the codology of the Joycean business is destined for a small, inside audience mainly, those, in other words, to whom names like Frank Budgen or Richard Ellmann, or terms like ‘Epiphany’, do not have to be explained. For those entirely outside, it may grant insights into the sociology of professors of literature, amateurs, or just enthusiastic readers, and the rituals they give rise to. Possibly this haphazard chronicle may help to define such a vague and precise term as ‘Joycean’. At an early stage Rosa Maria Bosinelli in Forlì, Italy, gave valuable advice. Parts of the earlier rough typescript were subjected to the scrutiny of Katie Brown, Ruth Frehner and Sabrina Alonso. Ron Ewart of the Zurich Finnegans Wake reading group and Tim O’Neill in Dublin proofread the manuscript in its entirety. I am grateful to them all.

PREAMBLE CHRISTINE O’NEILL Joycean Murmoirs collects Fritz Senn’s memories as a Joycean and conveys his experiences, attitudes, prejudices and opinions. The book recounts some of the early activities on the Joyce scene and marks his place in a lively and still growing community. It portrays his involvement, endeavours and limitations. Aimed primarily at a Joycean audience, Joycean Murmoirs hopes to fill gaps and trigger memories. It is, however, neither a systematic biography nor a scholarly history of a developing academic industry. Wooden phrases and tedious comprehensiveness are anathema to Fritz Senn. Ill at ease with formality, he favours responding and engaging; hence Joycean Murmoirs is based on interviews. Instinctively judicious, he realized that, having someone else ask the questions in discussion, he could abdicate responsibility while remaining free to raise any topic he wanted. In one of Chesterton’s stories, Father Brown observes that people hardly ever answer the questions put to them, but at best respond to what they imagine was put to them. This is worth keeping in mind while reading a book based on interviews, when the vagaries of associative memory may have come into play. At the outset, Senn promised to tell the truth or else to say nothing, which, of course, didn’t preclude an occasional ‘very muted version, full of coy omissions’. It is fair to say that he clammed up only a few times, and probably not simply because of the recording device in front of him. Generally, the interviews ran smoothly in a relaxed atmosphere, and, due to the eminently verbal nature of his memory, he formulated his answers and comments with remarkable precision. Once the recordings were transcribed, the script was given back to him to work on. As we edited the text together, fashioning the material into related topics, Fritz, thinking of Joyce and Homer, often wished for some corresponding grid to give his outpourings some congruent shape. An air of ad hoc reminiscence and randomness remains, as well as some unavoidable overlaps (see a parenthetical ‘my rant occurs elsewhere’) as we made no attempt to contrive a unified story line. We did, however, delve into his private photographic archive to scatter portraits generously throughout the finished text. The visual images bring alive his era of Joyce scholarship (though the prime criterion for inclusion was that the subject was dead). There were many names I wanted to spring on him apart from those arising in our conversations. Needless to say he talked about more Joyceans than are assembled in this book, some of them close friends. However, there didn’t seem much point in recording names unless there was some tale to tell. Friendly relationships don’t always make for good stories, not even in a memoir. We agreed that the memoirs had to be tactful, and so, a considerable body of fine stories is destined to remain oral poetry. Similarly, a few opinions, recollections and anecdotes had to be toned down, to avoid causing offence. As with any biographical writing, some echo chambers had to be kept closed. Inevitably, there are people, events and pictures that ought to have been included but were left out or have been treated inadequately. We apologize for such omissions and shortcomings. Newspaper profiles of Fritz Senn of the past forty years are boringly consistent. Our subject is depicted as a tall, lithe figure with a fine mane of silvery hair in later years, agile, swift, a fleeting shadow; a distinguished, enthusiastic expert on Joyce. Regarded by many as Joyce’s ideal reader, this non-academic individual is an unpretentious scholar who found Joyce’s works a welcome distraction from his own sombre moods. These descriptions fit the character, and they concur because Fritz Senn is remarkably controlled and self-aware. If Joyce’s texts are ‘hyper’, as he puts it, so is he, in many ways, and so are his writings: hypersensitive and hyper-precise. Should he contradict himself, he’s the first to be aware of it; he is drawn in only when he wants to be drawn in. Although he thrives in company, he ‘never gianed in with the shoutmost shoviality’. The man is fiercely private and independent. Haines’ ‘I don’t know, I’m sure’, might summarize his attitude. His survival instincts are honed; he moves like a cat and may not be manoeuvred into a corner. He keeps moving. It is no surprise that the protean Joycean texts and the all-pervasive themes of misinformation and failed communication should strike resonant chords with him, as does Joyce’s empathy with human loneliness. The Wake’s ‘pollysigh patrolman Seekersenn’ has found a Swiss embodiment.

Acknowledgments My sincere thanks to Fritz Senn, first and foremost, not only for his willingness to co-operate in this project but for two decades of sharing knowledge, time and friends. I am grateful to Anne Fogarty who sparked the idea for such a book and indebted to Richard Brown, Jean-Michel Rabaté and John Paul Riquelme for communicating critical views of Fritz Senn; to Rosa Maria Bosinelli, Geert Lernout and Katrin van Herbruggen for reading the manuscript at a very early stage and making valuable suggestions; to Vivien Veale Igoe for allowing me access to archival material concerning the early symposia; and to the board of the Zurich James Joyce Foundation, especially Verena Füllemann, for prompt and enthusiastic support. Ron Ewart and Timothy O’Neill read and commented on the final draft. Thanks are due to them, and to Fiona Dunne for her careful editorial work. Thanks are also due to Antony Farrell of The Lilliput Press for his interest in the project from the outset. Special thanks to the late Katharina Ernst, a gracious hostess in Zurich on many occasions, and to Timothy, Brendan and Niamh O’Neill for giving me time and space to work.

B EGINNINGS What would you say is the motivation behind your unique involvement with Joyce? Motivation is what moves us, and I do not think I will ever know. But I never had any doubt that my preoccupation with Joyce — and I always mean the works and far less the author — is a substitute (or ‘Ersatz’) for a satisfactory life or the kind of success one dreams of in adolescence and can never stop desiring. Maybe a term like ‘sublimation’ comes close to it.

It sounds more like disappointment. If I needed a label for what must have been most on my mind, or psyche, it is frustration, which was allpervasive. And you see me, philologist at heart, diverge right away into the word itself. It derives from Latin frustra, in vain — as good a summary of life as anything, and revealingly, the noun that did not exist in German when I first knew it, now does. Within decades the foreign adaptation has even reached a colloquial level, it has been shortened to a simple ‘Frust’ and can easily be paired with its opposite: Lust. There must be a need for it. The lack of emotional and, in particular, amatory fulfilment was probably more common in my, still very much inhibited, generation, and I was very shy when I grew up. I can’t recall a time when I didn’t think of failure; the 1950s particularly were a bad time. Given such a feeling of deprivation, to absorb myself in reading Joyce seemed the next best thing within reach. If I had had a remotely satisfactory life you would not be asking me these questions. In all probability I would have ended up in Joyce, though hardly with a similar fixation. One has to cling to something, I imagine. If you asked me why I relate to Joyce — you did not as yet, but you may come near it or simply be too tactful to do so — I sense that his works show a great empathy with human failure. They are in many ways, whatever else, about just that. Along with Eveline, Little Chandler, Bloom, Gerty MacDowell, there goes Fritz Senn.

Did you ever seek help? I had a short spell of psychoanalysis in the sixties which did little to improve the situation. One effect was that I lost an earlier interest I had had in psychoanalysis. What remains is my analyst’s remark of long ago in relation to a perpetual lack of self-confidence. ‘Let others decide about the value of what you do or achieve,’ he said, ‘you can never believe in it anyway.’ (Not that one can ever stop doubting it.) However, I found out, and pass it on as caustic advice to other battered psyches, that momentary self-assurance, once it emerges as a result of a momentary achievement, cannot be put into an account for future retrieval when needed. In our human situation, ‘miseries’ are heaped upon us, and the best we can do is to ‘entwine our arts with laughters low’, as the Wake poignantly puts it. I know there is a depressive strain in many fellow Joyceans, which may be why we adhere to whatever comic relief can be found. We seem to need some drugs, and interacting with a text is better than many others. If Joyce is the anodyne, the side effects are relatively innocuous.

Do you find that substitute satisfactions are also a theme in Joyce? Bloom engages in a futile correspondence to get some thrills. Escapism with transient illusions infuse, in particular, the ‘Nausicaa’ episode. Bloom and Gerty MacDowell indulge in wishful thinking or in substitute satisfactions, and so do all those characters who find momentary solace in drinking or boasting, or the chimera of a change of location like exile. I wish I could look down on such short-range illusions from Olympian or scholarly heights, but I see myself uncomfortably mirrored. Reading may well be another form of escapism; it need not be Gerty’s cheap fiction, it can be Stephen’s concern with heresiarchs or our involvement with Joyce. So, for all I know, may be our conferences or workshops. For escapism, in other words, I would mount the barricades. An underlying principle may be heralded already in Bloom’s pork kidney, which has risen to almost global fame in its Bloomsday 2004 coverage. We almost overlook that what Bloom liked best was grilled mutton kidneys, but that he had to settle for the second best — and he still enjoyed it.

There must have been more than textual satisfactions? Joyce was not only a welcome and necessary distraction. There were plenty of side benefits, human ones that led to many contacts. The Old Joycean Boys Network (which includes a lot of younger female members and students) has never been a really potent network. It contains many friendships and relatively few enmities. We are almost too friendly, perhaps, and uncritically approving of each other. This becomes a handicap when we assess each others’ work in public. Does this get the confessional psychology out of the way?

Do you tend to see things happening by chance, as often as not? I often marvel at the chancy nature of events, how, to borrow a phrase, a small event, trivial in itself, can change the whole course of a life. Plans are often futile. Bloom in Ulysses plans to attend a funeral and to take care of hisadvertisement, and he seems to have intended to see a play in the evening. But things take a different turn; meeting Mrs Breen makes him think of looking into the Maternity Hospital to enquire after Mrs Purefoy. If he had not turned up there, he would not have run into Stephen and ended up in Nighttown, not a habitual haunt. At the funeral, he was enlisted to help the Dignam family, which brought him to Barney Kiernan’s pub and to Sandymount strand and its voyeuristic gratification. So most of the later episodes hang on accidental occurrences. Coincidences of this kind also brought me to Joyce and, in the end, led to our Joyce Foundation. I call the workings of fate ‘Tychomatics’ and will no doubt expound on that later. Tyche is Greek for ‘fate’ and seems to hint at a governing hit-or-miss procedure.

Talking of chance, of accidents: how reliable do you think memories are? I once had an excellent memory about certain matters. I knew what had happened when. Up to recently, I often teased someone, asking ‘What did you do this day seventeen years ago?’ Often I did know. I can still recall, no miracle, what I did on most Bloomsdays within the last thirty years or so. Yet the skill is rapidly fading. Memory, a triumph and a hazard, is a central concern for Joyce and for all of us. All history, and what we think we know, is based on its shaky foundations. In Ulysses Joyce gives us the memories of characters, of a city, a country, a tradition and so on. It is also defective, chancy, quirky. In one way Finnegans Wake is also a gigantic, amorphous heap of memory fragments with a seemingly universal, but still highly Eurocentric, scope. But there is nothing to rely on. If there is an Archimedean lever we are still looking for it. Reading the Wake is bringing our own chancy memories to bear upon its riddles. ‘Ah, here I recognize St Patrick, about whom I once read something’ — that’s how we proceed. We do not need Joyce to tell us that memory is not to be trusted. But he demonstrates how the mind selects, assimilates, changes and adapts, according to impulses we are not aware of. And it remains miraculous what exactly, out of all the welter of experience, the mind retains and twists, or why so many trifles are carried along. Ulysses is difficult to follow in certain early passages because the trivia fuse with momentous and crucial echoes in an outwardly random manner. Stephen Dedalus asks himself which events are remembered and recorded and thereby become history, and which ones are not. Human beings and Joyce’s characters continually forget or misremember. One of the highlights of Bloom’s career is an encounter with the great Parnell that he recalls with pride, and he does so twice. Did the great leader say ‘Thank you’ to Bloom or ‘Thank you, sir’? Or is the appended ‘sir’ merely put in by Bloom for better effect? Finnegans Wake is an orgy of memories gone astray. Which of the many rumours about what Earwicker did in the Phoenix Park comes closest to what happened, if anything did happen?

How about your own powers of memory? Of course, these truisms lead up to my questioning myself about how accurately I remember what I am revealing here. I am conscious that I often do not really and accurately recall all those events that have become stories, what I do remember are those stories. Many have frozen into an almost set form of expression. This needs to be said by way of caution for what is to follow. Unfortunately, I never took notes at the time and never kept a diary. I wish I had written down some of what Budgen or Maria Jolas said on certain occasions. Maria Jolas once described to Shari Benstock and me in detail just how exacting it was to deal with Lucia Joyce and her erratic, menacing conduct. But I have forgotten the drastic details themselves and only remember that it was Sunday morning, St Patrick’s Day 1974, the year the Paris symposium was in the offing. And, just to show the vagaries of memory, irrespective of significance, I remember that Maria Jolas two days earlier had attended a meeting in Paris that campaigned for the impeachment of Richard Nixon.

You once mentioned a flawed childhood memory of a picture from the Divina Commedia. Indeed, I came to question my powers of memory more than half a century ago. In the thirties my grandfather in southern Germany had a book with illustrations, which showed hell with devils who tortured the damned with three-pronged forks, like tridents (not that I knew the word at the time). This one specific detail was engraved in my mind for years and still is. It must have been the Divina Commedia. Some ten years later, after the war, I found that particular copy in my late grandfather’s library; there were many illustrations in it, but no pronged forks. My mind had superimposed them from somewhere else. It taught me a lesson. Though I do my hardest to call up what happened to me, or what was said to me, I am sure my murmoirs here will contain their share of such transpositions, and I will complain about those of others that have affected me.

Go on a little, if you would, about the ‘chanciness’ of memory: after all, it’s central to what we’re doing. I wonder what it is we do remember, and why. And what goes along the highway to oblivion, and what is

transformed along the road. Many of us have the experience of being reported or quoted. The result is disillusioning. At best, when things are slightly twisted, perhaps only in tone, one feels ridiculous. Sometimes they are turned around completely. One example that lingers is something that was written in Die Zeit, a prestigious German weekly, about the 1982 symposium, where I was reported to have said that, in earlier times, we, the Joyceans, were ‘a happy family’. I cannot imagine myself ever using such a phrase with a straight face: it is not in my vocabulary. Yet I can reconstruct what must have happened. It was late one night in a pub where old and racy stories were retailed (a few of which will find their gossipy way into my tales here), and I know that I must have thrown out casually, and with jocular exaggeration, that we, the Joyceans, are like a big family where everyone has something nasty to say about everybody else. I am sure the journalist did not mean any harm but relied on his impressions when he made me a maudlin apostle of the good old harmonious family. It is mildly annoying. My point here is that I am not immune to this sort of misappropriation. Some participants in the 1975 Paris symposium sensed a predominantly hostile atmosphere, but my impressions were quite different. Perhaps I was in the wrong place, but the symposium was a huge conglomerate of events, and no single witness could possibly survey the whole scene. I won’t be offering anything like whole scenes here in these recollections. Subjectivity and limited perspective are taken for granted. The wholly unoriginal upshot is that memory is a process that transmits and modifies according to rules we don’t know, and not so much a body of fixed items, or a set of files that can be consulted. It is, to repeat myself, one of Joyce’s thematic concerns. John Raleigh discovered this when he set out to align Bloom’s jumbled memories in neat order. He had a hard time straightening them out in his Chronicle of Leopold and Molly Bloom. When I was consulted, I was just as puzzled and found that an accurate sequence of events cannot be extracted beyond doubt, just as we can hardly lay out the causality of Father Flynn’s decline in ‘The Sisters’. Joyce often echoes the question, ‘Is that a fact?’, which at times is simply an acknowledgment that one has listened to a story. But it is an insidious and pertinent question. We once discussed some of the innumerable aspects of memory and its Joycean repercussions in one of our Zurich workshops.

One rarely sees you at Joycean events without your camera. Is this pursuit of yours to do with a need to gather mementos? Pictures trigger reminiscences. By definition, photographs write down scenes and events. Somehow I became a kind of pictorial chronicler of Joyce events and Joyceans (there must be more than two thousand items by now), but this was a side product of discovering a new medium. To me, it is still a miracle which, of course, technology can abundantly explain, that a scene can be optically retained, that light can be written and thereby preserved. Getting a real camera was an important step. It must have been in the late sixties or early seventies when, I think, on my first trip to the States, my father’s Instamatic couldn’t capture those huge majestic bridges and skyscrapers of New York, I decided I wanted something better. The camera was my only access to what one might call creativity. If I had any creative urge it’s buried under thick layers of concrete and inhibitions. Taking photographs was another way of looking at the world, and one involving time: the present moment is preserved for a future in which the event has become past. The 1971 symposium in Trieste was the first place I put it to use, and I think a first batch of Joyceans was published in the James Joyce Quarterly (JJQ). I also found out very soon that the kind of pictures I took were always stereotypes, imitations of what I had seen, motifs like a fence or a leaf. So I soon gave up any budding artistic ambitions and contended myself with just taking snapshots. Pictures, artistic or not, at least are something concrete that can be shown. Taking pictures is an anodyne and a substitute. I’m very kinetically nervous: you hardly see me in the same place for long. At parties, I am a dedicated circulator. When I wait for a bus or tram, I walk up and down, or when sitting at a meal I play with breadcrumbs. Other people smoke; I fiddle with a camera. This results in visual memoirs, whereas the side effects of smoking are potentially more harmful. Picturetaking is a way to pass the time, to move around or, in some situations, a polite excuse to leave a group and join another one in a far corner where I hope the action really is. (It is never in that other place, either.) The camera satisfies a kind of voyeuristic instinct. It does so, ideally. Taking pictures, at least, is better than getting nowhere. I have outlined already that I believe in substitutes.

What was your earliest introduction to Joyce? For better or worse, I never had the training or support of a university, simply because there was no such thing as Joyce studies in Zurich when I was a student. I was not really qualified in the first place. My English is what I learned at school, an acquired language. I knew next to nothing about Ireland except that it was somewhere beyond England, and, though formally baptized a Catholic, I was never exposed to the teachings of the Church and belong to none now, hence I lack an essential prerequisite. My first encounter with the name James Joyce was in a small history of English literature of 1930 where he was given a brief mention: Ulysses was ‘an obscene, squalid, in parts brilliant, in parts tedious study of the slums of Dublin’, a ‘cynical allegory on the story of Odysseus and Penelope’. Though the book clearly stated Dublin as the location, I dimly thought for a long time it was Edinburgh (so much for memory). On a wall of the very small English Department of the university hung a picture by Wilhelm Gimmi, the Swiss painter. It showed a man of unpleasing appearance with an eye patch. The painting, by

the way, is now in our Foundation on loan. That, I was told, was James Joyce. It was my first visual impression.

Professor Heinrich Straumann played a crucial role, didn’t he? Yes, it was he who introduced us to Joyce. 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. If it hadn’t been for Heinrich Straumann, however, I might never have taken up Ulysses in England in the autumn of 1951 and would not now be talking about what happened as a consequence. More about this later. After I had left, I still kept in touch with Straumann, and we were together on many occasions. One time, it happened to be exactly the twentieth anniversary of Joyce’s death, 13 January 1961, we went up to Joyce’s grave with Richard Ellmann. We met again at the unveiling of the Joyce statue in 1966, and when Joseph Strick’s Ulysses film was launched, we both said a few words to the press. There is even a booklet with his and my short memorial addresses given in the aula of the university on 2 February 1982. Incidentally I had first seen Professor Straumann escorting Winston Churchill, who, in the selfsame aula, delivered his famous speech about the need for France and Germany to forget their old grievances. The students of the local high schools, including me, lined the streets to wave at the illustrious visitor. Heinrich Straumann was one of the professors who still did survey courses. The outlines he provided have served me well ever since. His dissertation topic seems very much advanced even now: he had investigated the development of newspaper headlines in the twentieth century. In ‘Aeolus’, independently, Joyce had more or less done the same. Straumann may well have been the first European scholar, at least in German-speaking countries, to concern himself with modern American literature. He took a continued interest in Joyce and later also in our Foundation, and he attended most of our events or else, rather touchingly, excused himself when he couldn’t. In the two decades after the war, the English Department was fairly small and fitted conveniently into two library rooms. In the thirties the chair of English Literature had been held by Bernhard Fehr, who had been in contact with Joyce. In fact, Joyce asked in letters who would become his successor. It was Heinrich Straumann. I completely forget who told me of an occasion where Joyce and Professor Fehr were together in a local pub, though we call it a ‘restaurant’ even if you only go for a drink. From what was reported, Joyce never talked literature, but only music. And the story goes that the two were singing Italian opera arias at each other, in mounting enthusiasm, even jumping on tables, though the latter detail is probably an embellishment. Another professor who was familiar with Joyce’s works and who, for a time, took a protective interest in me, was Max Wildi, whose lectures were highly inspiring. In fact he tried to encourage me to go back to university and leave with a degree. He was the first to refer to me in one of his talks on Joyce, and I was proud to have a passing mention in a newspaper report on that talk, but, in the nature of things, my name was confused with that of a minor Swiss writer, Fritz Senft. I sympathized with L. Boom. While on the subject of local boasting, the first invitation to talk in front of a class came from a colleague of Heinrich Straumann’s, Hans Häusermann in Geneva, also a former student of Bernhard Fehr’s. He had seen a few articles on Finnegans Wake I had written for newspapers and asked me to speak to his Joyce seminar. This led to my first bow to a small academic public. It must have been in the early sixties. It shows my nervousness at the idea of speaking in front of a class that I went to Geneva one week earlier just to check out the conditions and the size of the room to allay my apprehension. Of course I then had a carefully prepared script and hardly looked at the audience to verify how they took it all.

Was it while spending a year in England that you turned to Ulysses? It was a sensible requirement for a student of English to spend a year in a country where you could learn the language, and at that time this automatically meant England. It brought me to Hampton Grammar School as an exchange student in 1951–2 where I was to teach German conversation for £24 a month. The pay did not allow me to travel and explore the country. So I decided to have a go at that author who was, after all, connected with Zurich. I bought a Bodley Head Ulysses in a department store in Kingston for one guinea and also, since it was on a shelf nearby, Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang, a good investment as it turned out. How exactly I dabbled and tried to cope with the book, I cannot remember. I do know I looked up ‘parapet’, which was in a dictionary, and ‘gunrest’, which was not. I probably skipped over ‘Chrysostomos’. Yet I must have persevered. I also experienced one of the last typical London fogs where you could hardly see your own hand stretched out, a bit like reading a dense paragraph in Finnegans Wake. I struggled bravely. There was not even a good dictionary to hand. I now wonder what exactly I could take in as I groped for my way through the book. My English wasn’t adequate, nor did Ulysses live up to its alleged promise of enticing obscenity. After a few months I borrowed Stuart Gilbert’s study from a local library, and it put inchoative understanding on a more solid basis. The book was an eye-opener for me. I have not forgotten the one sentence that made

me click. Gilbert discusses a passage from ‘Sirens’ in interior monologue (‘Tenors get women by the score’) and points out that ‘score’ is also a musical term. I, staunch unbeliever in epiphany, experienced something like a revelation. Somehow this semantic overlay tipped me over, the subsidiary implication affected me so much that I still remember the trivial gloss. Typically it was a formal element that excited me, something to do with language. Or was it? That there is an obvious undercurrent of sexual envy dawned on me only much later. I have since become quite aware that for many of us, textual intercourse is a substitute for the real thing. I do not mean the erotic passages, which for me generally have an odd and somewhat unpleasant taste in Joyce. The substitute is in the wrestling with a text that withholds and teases and reveals and seduces. It is textual copulation.

Did you get to Dublin at that time? As I wanted to see Dublin I took a weekend excursion train from Euston for 70 shillings, leaving Friday night and arriving at Dun Laoghaire at 7 am the following morning, to return at 7 pm the same day. My first day in Dublin was 2 May 1952, the Saturday when Newcastle beat Arsenal in the Cup Final. It was a long journey, and the crossing took about four hours; the boat was full of euphoric Irishmen singing, dancing and boozing on board, stamping their feet with annoying stamina — probably an appropriate introduction to the country. It was a drizzly day, and I inspected a great part of the city. A Frenchman of my age who was teaching conversation at the same grammar school came along and must have been excruciatingly bored being dragged to look at odd buildings. Oddly enough, my memory of the actual city blends with what I had gathered from the book and with later visits. I remember that the quays were rundown but that there was an Elephant House with an elephant still on show. We went to look at 7 Eccles Street, which was then still inhabited. Only a few months into the book, and hardly halfway through, I must have known where Bloom lived, probably from Gilbert, for I had not yet figured it out for myself. In fact, few readers do. We went to the Phoenix Park and climbed a low tree. We seem to have covered a lot of ground for we also made it as far as the Martello Tower in Sandymount. I already knew it was not the right one much further south, but still a genuine replica of identical shape. Whatever else I forget, I do remember a toilet in a restaurant in O’Connell Street that was so incredibly dirty that even the one in Westland Row railway station was preferable for two travellers in need. So much for memory and what it retains. Dublin did look drab and uninviting, but I was looking at the urban simulacrum of a book I had not even finished reading at the time, and certainly did not understand. Naturally I had also acquired a map.

How did your interest in Joyce develop from there? I had reached only midway in Ulysses when I graduated to Finnegans Wake. I believe it cost 32 shillings, more than 15 per cent of a month’s salary. But I did not read very far. Back in Zurich I continued with my hobby, Ulysses, and soon began to dabble in the Wake and lost myself in it. But before long things changed drastically when Life struck. A child was on the way, I got married and had to support the new family with a bread-and-butter job as a proofreader. So I never finished my studies that had dragged on aimlessly anyway and with little purpose. A dark period set in that I will not depict at any length; I try to block it out. For years it looked as if there was not much of a future, nothing worth making an effort for. Joyce was relegated to a hobby, but an abiding one that somehow got me through intermittently depressive times. Possibly the Wake was the best distraction in such a plight. It absorbed me, and I went through it, slowly, word by word, with the help of dictionaries and, later on, with the current Encyclopaedia Britannica. I took heaps of notes that just consisted of what I could grab from reference works. It was a sort of indiscriminate poking around in the text and clutching at straws without ever arriving at a coherent structure. There was little help apart from the annoying Skeleton Key — annoying because it often just quoted long passages instead of explaining them. Harry Levin’s study was pertinent and perceptive but fairly general and gave little practical help. I briefly encountered Harry Levin much later, when giving a talk at Harvard in 1975, and we exchanged a few words. John Kelleher, the expert on matters Irish at Harvard, was also there. It was rewarding to meet the masters in person, no matter how briefly. Our municipal library, the Zentralbibliothek, patronized by Joyce more than thirty years earlier, closed at 7 pm and was not accessible for someone with a fortyeight-hour working week. That meant that I avidly looked around for help and acquired what few books were then appearing on Joyce. I scanned the horizon as the few publications came out slowly and at great intervals, and I even joined the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) and subscribed to its journal, just for the ads of new publications. A decisive step was when I wrote to James Atherton. He had written a few articles on Finnegans Wake, and I chanced a letter to enquire where his articles could be obtained. The letter found him in a place called Wigan, Lancashire, and a fertile correspondence was initiated. I will come back to Atherton, my mentor, who sent me his pioneering essays and got me in touch with Adaline Glasheen in Farmington, Connecticut. One of the greatest letter-writers ever, she, in turn, had been exchanging glosses on Finnegans Wake with Thornton Wilder. This way an epistolary network originated and spread: it was joined by Clive Hart, then a student at Cambridge, who was putting together a concordance of Finnegans

Wake, by Bernard Benstock and many others. There was vibrant excitement of the kind that still affects new readers anywhere on the globe, and before long, we started to bundle the glosses in the venture of A Wake Newslitter, which Clive Hart and I had set in motion. The main motor and driving force, I emphasize, was Clive, as I had my slumps of inertia.

Why was James Atherton so important for you? He was the one who turned me from a reader and consumer of Joyce into someone who churned out comments, an active contributor to critical pollution. Naturally, it might have happened anyhow, given my own explorative compulsion. When Atherton replied to my letter, he suggested that I first look into references to Zurich in Finnegans Wake (he had already listed a few echoes of our ‘Sechseläuten’, the Zurich spring festival). This pushed me over the edge; maybe the edge had been waiting for me anyway. I took the hint, set to work and laboriously went through the Wake to cull references to my city and country. Like any fervent novice, I was grabbing at everything in sight. My juvenile enthusiasm has its current equivalent in the email exchanges concerning the Wake in recent years. It is one of the delights that we do get carried away. I sent drafts to Atherton and Adaline Glasheen, who both diplomatically curbed my zeal, weeded out a lot of tenuous chaff and stressed compositional stringency and reticence. The result was submitted to The Analyst, a mimeographed publication from Northwestern devoted to Pound and Joyce, and became ‘Swiss German Allusions in Finnegans Wake’. I now disown this piece of hitor-miss exuberance, a species still going strong and probably rampant in reading groups anywhere, manifestly including those on the Internet. When in London in 1958 I took the train to Wigan to meet Jim Atherton in person, and was welcomed into his family. He advised me to look up words first in Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary, and he strongly recommended Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, advice I have always passed on. Atherton was one of those who probably needed Brewer least, for he still commanded that knowledge that had once been common but was already rapidly dying out. It is amazing how, without a concordance, he managed to excavate all those references that he collected in his Books at the Wake, to me still one of the most informative studies around. Atherton later took part in the first Dublin symposium of 1967 and participated again in the Paris one of 1975. There Jacques Lacan, who had heavily relied on Books at the Wake for his famous opening lecture, whisked him away to a party and introduced him to Roland Barthes. Atherton, feeling out of place among top French intellectuals, was asked for a brief thumbnail sketch of Finnegans Wake. As he related, he uttered something like, ‘C’est une espèce de dédale.’ It must have been an odd constellation of experts. In later years the Athertons (Jim’s wife was called Nora) liked to spend their holidays near the Alps and often stayed with us in Unterengstringen, near Zurich. The last time was in the summer of 1975 when the Suhrkamp edition of Joyce was in its last stages and Hans Wollschläger, its translator, and Klaus Reichert, the co-editor, met for final revisions. We shamelessly picked Atherton’s brain for the coda of ‘Oxen of the Sun’, that baffling medley of voices. As it happened, we had the expert at hand who could give us insights that non-native speakers could never have had, a unique piece of luck. I am sorry to note that his crucial help was never acknowledged. Atherton, who had a Catholic background and was widely read, taught in a mining college, not a university, and so was never recognized academically as a Joycean. The one academic Joyce scholar at the time in Great Britain was Matthew Hodgart at Cambridge; he had published pertinent articles and later collaborated with Mabel Worthington on the songs. We did meet a few times, especially with the Finnegans Wake reading group in Brighton and Amsterdam, and I only wish I had come to know him better.

You mentioned that it was Atherton who put you in touch with Adaline Glasheen and Thornton Wilder. Adaline Glasheen was one of my earliest correspondents and very encouraging in my formative stages. She was one of those enthusiastic amateurs, motivated by her enjoyment of the Wake mainly, though not exclusively. Her particular hobby was to identify characters, and in this she reached out very far and tended to overread, as we all did. I think we owe more to her impetus than her actual findings, collected in three versions of her Census of Finnegans Wake. Its first supplement she called ‘Out of my Census’. Inevitably, she became one of the foremost contributors to our Wake Newslitter. Her extended correspondence with Thornton Wilder has become available in a book, supremely edited by Edward M. Burns, A Tour of the Darkling Plain (2001). Its value is not so much in particular glosses as in the atmosphere of the pioneering exploration of the Wake. I now realize that when one becomes a tiny part of such a book, which I did, since they reported on the letters Wilder and Glasheen had received from others, some details may become uncomfortably public. We can now read (correctly) that I did in fact do a great deal of whining, and my unspecified hints at depression may well have irritated my correspondents. Incidentally, it is ironic that we should have a meticulous edition of a marginal correspondence of two Wake pioneers, but not yet anything remotely like a reasonably complete collection of Joyce’s own letters. Adaline Glasheen was most encouraging to a timid newcomer at a difficult stage; I had only a few tiny Wake comments to my credit. She was entertaining and witty, one of the best letter-writers ever, brilliant, volatile, erratic, always playing her own game. To me she was the modern equivalent of those women who in previous centuries would have run a literary salon in Paris, London or Weimar.

The weekend I came to Buffalo in 1968, after years of corresponding, she was already on campus engaged in some research of her own, and we met in person. She struck me as wispy and witch-like — and this is entirely complimentary. There was something unpredictable about her. She would never do what was expected of her; on panels she was prone to change the topic and stray far afield, which went against my own centripetal bias. I remember that Hugh Kenner, who also admired her inspired volatility, once characterized her as Dionysian. In her home, oddly enough, she appeared rather shy and subdued. It was in Buffalo, incidentally, that I also encountered Jack Dalton, and we had our memorable excursion to Niagara Falls. In later years she also attended conferences and symposia. She struck up a friendship with Claude Jacquet, and this often brought her to Paris. I heard that she and Claude attended a Vico conference in Venice in 1988, but afterwards I lost touch. Her later years were overshadowed by a lingering disease, and I am sorry to say that I lost contact, due to a sort of negligence which I now find very hard to excuse.

And Thornton Wilder? James Atherton and Adaline Glasheen had been exchanging letters for years, and she in turn had been conducting a lively correspondence with Thornton Wilder, mainly about Finnegans Wake and, with less intensity, the rest of the world. So Wilder and I corresponded a bit. One Sunday morning in 1959 the phone rang, and at the other end was Thornton Wilder, calling from his Zurich hotel and asking me to join him there. We spent the whole day together. He carried his heavily annotated copy of Finnegans Wake with him, in which I could not even make out the page numbers amidst the minute pencil scribblings. In the evening he took me to the theatre: it so happened that Nestroy’s Einen Jux will er sich machen was showing, the play on which he had based his own The Matchmaker and which then was successfully turned into the musical Hello Dolly. Analogously, Finnegans Wake had served him as a stimulus. When he was attacked for the adaptation, or even plagiarism, he countered that he had always seen literature as passing on the torch, as Joyce himself had done. We remained in contact afterwards since he and his sister Isabel generally spent a few days in Zurich each year. He even became a sort of unofficial godfather of my younger son Beda. After the war, Thornton Wilder was among the most popular American writers in Germany when English or American contemporary literature became accessible to readers. During the war, his The Skin of Our Teeth had been performed in the Zurich Schauspielhaus, which was then the best theatre in the German-speaking area, as it employed refugee actors and ran plays that were forbidden in Germany, such as some by Berthold Brecht. I was told that those translating the play did not know what to do with its title — even a dentist was consulted — until Professor Straumann discovered that the phrase was a quotation from the Bible. It was aptly called Wir sind noch einmal davongekommen — we scraped through one more time.

Bernard Benstock crops up many times in your reminiscences. He must have been one of your earliest contacts. For me he surfaced as a name in PMLA, where a thesis on Finnegans Wake was listed in a small note. I wrote to him, c/o the university at Baton Rouge, LA, and the letter reached him. I suppose he must have been flattered, an unknown emerging scholar being approached by someone equally unknown across the Atlantic. He soon got one of those Fulbright scholarships to Iran, or was it Iraq (in those days they sounded almost the same), and on the way back he and Eve, with their daughter Kevin (I think they expected a boy but stuck to the name anyway) came to Switzerland and stayed with us in Unterengstringen, the first of a long series of visits. For me this was a rare opportunity to talk about Finnegans Wake. And talk we did, intensely. And we often went for walks either along the river Limmat or on the nearby hills. On one such walk his daughter put her hand on a nettle, and we admired her linguistic inventiveness when she cried out: ‘I bit myself!’, most likely analogous to ‘I hurt myself.’ Berni also told me of his experience in Iran, and I think it was Iran, teaching American literature. The difficulty was the concept of irony which, he said, his students did not grasp. In 1966 we met again in Dublin, and we, both professional pedestrians who did not even drive, spent most of the time walking its streets à la recherche of Joycean connotations. On Bloomsday we had dinner in the (entirely renovated) Ormond Hotel and coming out, we saw a rainbow spanning the Liffey. I thought the Joycean touch had been overdone, but we proceeded to The Bailey in Duke Street, since Niall Montgomery had given me John Ryan’s address. We found John Ryan and introduced ourselves and were soon introduced to Anthony Cronin, whose book, A Question of Modernity, I knew, and he regaled us with anecdotes concerning his friend Paddy Kavanagh in London. When once they came to the building that replaced the one that the poet Thomas Hood had lived in, Kavanagh lay on his back in front of it and began to recite: ‘I remember, I remember, the house where I was born’. Strange that I should remember just that. Of course, coming into The Bailey, Berni and I had both ordered a pint. John Ryan immediately offered another, ‘on the house’, and since it was close to chucking-out time, yet another round was offered. I was facing three pints and did not quite know how to cope. I must be one of those mixed middlings, with no capacity for accumulated stout, and would make a poor Irishman. The evening was entertaining, and John Ryan helped us a great deal a year later when the symposium was brought to Dublin.

I must have mentioned Berni in connection with the symposium of 1967 as he became its American coordinator (since Tom Staley spent the preceding winter in Trieste). Our triad, almost overnight, became the organizing committee and thereby achieved status. Berni’s first job was at Kent State, and he revelled in stories about Father Bob Boyle’s exploits as a visiting professor. He later moved to Champagne, Illinois, before he and Shari, his second wife, went on to Tulsa and from there to Coral Gables, Miami, where those memorable Miami J’yce birthday conferences were soon initiated. Berni, along with Zack Bowen, also started the James Joyce Literary Supplement. Berni Benstock was prolific and wrote many books and articles on Joyce and various other subjects; detective fiction was one of his sidelines. Once, on his way to a few weeks of teaching in Buffalo, he said that he would have to write three articles within days. And he could do it. He had a facile, perhaps at times a trifle too facile, way of gathering and presenting his material, and he always added a new twist. He is easy to read. Berni always had good, practical ideas. It was he who suggested (though the idea may not have originated with him) that the chair of any panel should speak last so that he or she would ensure that the others would not go much overtime. I believe that he, or we together, once decreed that every panel should have international representation, not just consist of a parochial group or a few buddies. And for a while it was enforced. He also instituted the Living Book Reviews, that is, live reviews of a Joyce book with the author ready to respond. It sometimes worked well, but not always, for the presence of a live author tends to favour backslapping or courteous praise and only muted disapproval. Absent authors are more prone to be in the wrong. Berni was an experienced traveller and knew most of the best restaurants in Europe. In fact, it became a rule of thumb at conferences never to go out with the Benstocks, not because they were not great company, but because the restaurants they selected were outside the ordinary Joyceans’ price range. Berni was also an excellent cook and, of course, a marvelous teller of stories. One winter he toured most of Europe, and some of Asia, and was also invited to Lyons where I and others, like Leo Knuth, joined him. He gave a talk to students on A Portrait entirely without notes and I remember it as a superb performance. He found the right tone for his audience, novices most of them, and yet he had something original to say to all of us. It was the type of non-lecture that I always wanted to become the norm. Berni was excellent on the open panels I favour; he was flexible, informative when it was needed, and he knew when to put in a joke to relieve tension. The last time we saw him was at the Seville symposium in 1994, after the trip to Gibraltar, and we had plans for the Joyce series of the University of Miami Press. As always we parted in the certainty of meeting again before long. At that time Berni, Jean Schoonbroodt and I were the only ones who had attended all the international symposia. A few weeks later I had a phone call from Murray Beja to tell me that Berni had died of a heart attack. We all remembered him as young and energetic, and none of us could imagine that he could ever even resign, let alone die so young. His funeral was held where Berni and Shari had lived last, in Massachusetts, but the Zurich Foundation also had a little memorial gathering in 1995, attended by Shari, Arnold Goldman, Rosa Maria Bosinelli, Paola Pugliatti and Ron Hoffman. What I think worth mentioning, looking back, is that Berni, for all his suavity, could be quite an acerbic critic and reviewer. He, in his turn, also got a few punches from others, but I never saw him bitter or vindictive. Joyce called Odysseus an all-round man, and Berni was a bit of that (leaving sports aside, which also goes for Bloom). As I once must have put it, I now understand better what Joyce meant when he called Bloom ‘a good man’.

How did you first get to know Clive Hart? It was in connection with the correspondence and the exchange of Wake glosses in the early pioneering days. A letter arrived from Cambridge. An Australian researcher, Clive Hart, wanted to know about SwissGerman words, probably because he was busy compiling his Concordance to Finnegans Wake, aside from what was to become Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake, the first book that dealt with an overall view. So there was another correspondent, someone really delving into the Wake, a most welcome addition. In 1958 I went to London principally to meet Clive, but I also went to visit James Atherton, my initiator. Clive knew of another Joycean then working in London, David Hayman. I was already familiar with his monograph on Joyce and Mallarmé, and as I went to inspect the Wake material in the British Library reading room I could easily identify the person poring over the same kind of material. So I introduced myself, and we had a convivial beer together in a nearby pub. To get to know three major Joyceans within a few days was quite a step forward.

How did the Wake Newslitter come about? The ensuing correspondence with Clive Hart was perhaps my most rewarding ever, and it had effects beyond myself. Those were the days of typewriters where at best one could hack out a few carbon-copies, the fourth one usually illegible, and these were sent to the pioneering circle by mail. When I noticed how some glosses that I had initiated came back to me, I found such epistolary redundancy inefficient, as no one in the chain could keep track of who had mailed what first, or to whom. I thought of an improvement and, sometimes being practical in matters outside my personal life, suggested somewhat rhetorically that a bulletin with such glosses might replace the randomness of individual letters. Clive took it up and carried it out, from his university (New South Wales, Dundee, or Essex), and the Wake Newslitter was on

the road. It was first distributed free to all correspondents and whoever was likely to join in the game. The first issues were mimeographed and, to fill empty spaces in the early issues, Clive and I concocted a detailed and somewhat profuse commentary on the ‘collideorscape’ passage (FW 143). We were leaving no word unturned (at least I was). Anyway there must have been a need for a vehicle of this sort. The number of subscribers increased, and the Newslitter soon went into letter press and appeared six times a year, with inevitable delays. I contributed many small notes, but as I was often not in productive shape, I must have let Clive down; he did practically all the editorial work and was wholly responsible for the printing and distribution. But I had become an ‘editor’, with my name on a modest publication and visible at least to a tiny circle. The Newslitter continued, and the number of contributors (Roland McHugh, Nathan Halper, Ruth van Phul, Leo Knuth et al.) and subscribers grew. We also put out some extra issues in pamphlet form. In the end, after a span of eighteen years, A Wake Newslitter was stopped simply because we found it had run its effective course. I understand that Clive Hart had become discouraged by the general direction of Joyce studies, I think he once mentioned a lack of aesthetic sense, and alas, after his and Leo Knuth’s extremely valuable Topographical Guide to Ulysses, he became absorbed in the history of flight and abandoned Joyce studies for a while. However, he was on a supervisory board of Hans Gabler’s Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition, and so became involved in the controversy over that text, and for a few years he served as a trustee of the Joyce Estate. I am happy to see that he may be coming back to the fold. Together with Ian Gunn he has put out a revised and enlarged topographical guide (James Joyce’s Dublin: A Topographical Guide to the Dublin of Ulysses), which, in my opinion, is the most useful book to come out in the prolific year of the Bloomsday centenary.

Is there still the same demand for careful Wake glosses and sources? Detailed Wake glosses, sources and scholia went out of fashion, and more panoramic views took over. Scholars turned their attention away from small-scale explication or source tracing; they clearly do not share my innate belief that an overall grasp of the many components of the text would first have to become a precariously solid basis for critical judgment. They were no doubt right, and a new and more abstract way was initiated, mainly by Margot Norris’s Decentered Universe of Finnegans Wake (1974). The focus of Wake studies changed. Even so, I think, we could still tolerate a lot of apposite minute notes. Painstaking, small-scale explications might help us in our task. Concretely put, there are still too many blanks in Roland McHugh’s Annotations, in passages where comments are sorely needed; this is not to find fault with Roland, who probably put the most valuable commentary so far at our disposal, so that his book has become one of the classic reference works. After all, he combined all our collective glosses, including very few of my own (I never wrote notes in the margin), and it is my own fault that I did not supply him with more or better notes. What worries me is our collective ignorance on a most fundamental level. It is easy to be misunderstood here. Accumulation of trees, or even individual leaves, will never make us see the forest. But sometimes I would feel content at least to recognize a few more leaves (words) or particular trees (whole paragraphs). All too often a paragraph loses me completely with its meandering rambles and digressions, and I wish to know why or how one sentence or paragraph follows the one before it. In any work of literature it might help to know the language first: in Finnegans Wake we do not yet know its language sufficiently. Its particular idiosyncratic darkness seems unworthy of critical scrutiny, at least that’s my impression, whereas the higher levels are extensively researched. Of course, one can pick out traces of Irish myth, homosexuality, syphilis or masculinity in the Wake and fuse them into a thesis, but as often as not this amounts to a judicious selection without regard to respective contexts. There are books on such topics as Heidegger and Finnegans Wake, and it leaves me wondering how one can apply a philosopher who is not easy to comprehend to a convoluted text that most of us admit is still largely obscure. There is evidence that it can be done, and more power to those who face such challenges. Which reminds me of some scholars who, in lecturing about the Wake, rely solely on their voices, as some of them do by quoting passages. The voice is simply unable to put across those details that only the eye can pick up: in ‘of the trying thirstay mourning’ one can easily hear ‘Thursday’ and ‘thirsty’, but the ear cannot suspect the supplementary meaning contained in ‘mourning’. Reading aloud (to an audience without a text in front of them) often consists in extracting the meaning that is to be demonstrated and orally eclipsing all it is embedded in, not just out of tactical considerations, but because of a disparity between sounds and letters. Fashionable approaches may take a high-handedly dismissive view of those below who still hunt for semantic clarification, but one inherent urge in reading still consists in an endeavour to replace the steadfastly opaque with the partially clarified. Of course, scrupulous close reading is still going on, mainly on an active reading circuit. I find that the procedures are still the same as they were when I started — inspired guessing.

Say more about the Newslitter. As it happens Clive and I did not meet so often, partly due to his teaching for so many years in distant Australia. The Newslitter, however, was a foot in the door. A scholar in Tulsa, Oklahoma, took the initiative to launch a vehicle for Joyce studies, named the James Joyce Quarterly and he kindly asked Clive Hart and me if he was trespassing on our turf. He was not, as the scope of our Newslitter was so much

narrower. Thomas F. Staley, assistant professor at the University of Tulsa, went ahead and started the Quarterly, little knowing, perhaps, how it would develop into our central organ and clearing house. So, right from the start, I was an external part of what became the mainstream magazine for Joyce studies. In a somewhat unusual bout of careerism I asked Tom Staley to give me an official function and was promptly featured as the ‘European Editor’. This made approaching people and institutions for information or help easier, and it gave me an official standing that otherwise an unknown amateur in Unterengstringen, Switzerland, would never have had. I have told elsewhere, far too often in fact, that in 1966 Tom and I tentatively and timidly instigated those gatherings that blossomed into the symposia on a grand scale. But when the eighty-odd symposiasts gathered in June 1967, I was one of the organizers and an editor of a Joyce publication to boot. Such distinctions are highly impressive, and I found myself, as a youngish dilettante (which has to do with delight) with very little to my credit, in the inner circle of the emerging Joyce mafia. Some attendants imagined me to be a venerable, hoary professor. Without any cv to show, I had become an Establishment figure in the Joyce world — while remaining a poorly paid proofreader at home. Clive Hart came to the second symposium in 1969 when he continued his exploration of ‘Wandering Rocks’ by walking the streets with a stopwatch at the estimated speed of the characters in Ulysses. He wanted to examine if their crossings and interpolations were realistically possible. As he found out, they were, but, as Ruth Frehner discovered when she followed every trace, the interlacing is not perfect and could hardly have been, given Joyce’s circumstances. Clive’s results became part of his essay on ‘Wandering Rocks’ in the book that he and David Hayman brought out, James Joyce’s Ulysses. It contains eighteen essays on the various episodes by different contributors and, though now more than thirty years old, is still valuable for a first orientation. A replacement, however, seems overdue, and I have failed to initiate one.

Didn’t Joyceans do a re-enactment of ‘Wandering Rocks’ in 1982? Yes, they did: Clive’s tabulation of ‘Wandering Rocks’ became the basis for its re-enactment in the Dublin streets on Bloomsday at 3 pm. He himself, appropriately, played Father Conmee, SJ, who sets it all in motion. The Dublin populace is conditioned to spot a priest when they see one, so perhaps, in his clerical habit, he was not convincing enough, as he later confessed. The superimposition of fictional perambulation on a live city, a literary premiere, was revealing for a number of reasons. The Ulysses characters had to be set apart from the normal inhabitants of 1982 and so were dressed up in period costume. Thus, characters who would have been drably commonplace in 1904 became picturesquely conspicuous, notably Bloom, who, in contrast to his fictional role, drew great crowds and was practically occulted. What was brought home to me was the trite fact that while I was in one place taking pictures, I could not, at the same time, be elsewhere. Fiction can range freely over remote locations. The cell phone nowadays enables us, not to be somewhere else physically, but at least to know what is happening in other places. I followed Lenehan and McCoy, one of them being played by Michael Groden in a bowler hat, from Crampton Court to the Metal Bridge. Fiction can step effortlessly across space in an instant. Such an unoriginal insight developed my sense of ‘elsewhereness’ or ‘allotopy’ as a reader. Simultaneity is a narrative miracle and can be faked in narratives or movies. The collective ambulatory translation of a Ulysses episode into streetwalking was revealing in many ways. In their strolling through Temple Bar the two ad hoc Joyce characters did not stop at Lynam’s office (where Lenehan enquires about the Gold Cup race) for the simple reason that there was no such office. In fact, Temple Bar was a slum, many houses shuttered and, in this particular area, no shop in sight. The omission of a trivial act was understandable, almost inevitable, and yet in the complex machinery of Ulysses it would have thrown the plot out of gear. For if Lenehan had not mistakenly surmised that Bloom gave out a tip, the ‘Cyclops’ episode would have been significantly changed.

Didn’t you and Clive Hart once plan a study of obscenity in Joyce? Ah yes, at one time long ago, warming up to the new calling, we decided to do a joint study of obscenity in Joyce and even announced the project. But we never even took the first steps, which was just as well. I was aware that my knowledge of the Wake was hopelessly inadequate and, alas, I was never an expert on obscenity; all we could probably have done would have been to draw up lists and venture a few shots in the dark. Up-to-date scholars are now much better equipped for a task that has been done repeatedly. As it happens, there are enough readers of Finnegans Wake who see in it almost nothing but obscenity. This has the deplorable side effect that sex is removed from the book.

How did you get to know Tom Staley better? I told you how Tom Staley and I corresponded when he put the James Joyce Quarterly in circulation. Very young then, he soon got a stipend, Guggenheim or Fulbright (I could never distinguish them), for a year in Trieste in 1966. In the autumn of 1966 he visited us in Zurich, and we did the usual Joyce tour to the then new grave and the other sites. At that time the old Gasthaus Hoffnung was still around. Joyce had spent a few days there on his first, short stay in Zurich in October 1904. It was an obvious place, not far from the Main Station, but on the cheaper side of town. When Joyce came back in 1915, it had changed

ownership and was called, again appropriately, Gasthaus Döblin, 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 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 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 this in a city known for its Zwinglian puritanism. In a letter to his brother Stanislaus, Joyce proudly proclaimed an event that he couched in frivolous French: ‘Finalement, elle n’est pas encore vierge: elle est touchée’ (11 October 1904, the rest of the letter was cut off). It seems significant that in his excitement he mixed up his temporal adverbs, no doubt he meant ‘no longer’ rather than ‘not yet’ (‘pas encore’). But in the meantime Jean-Michel Rabaté has found a much more sophisticated explication and an authorial profundity that I have forgotten. I do not think that, for once, semantic implications were uppermost in Joyce’s mind at that particular juncture. As for mixing up past and future, I am the last person to cast a stone. When, after the unveiling of Joyce’s grave in June 1966, Donagh MacDonagh and John Garvin went to the radio studio to report home, they took me along, and somehow I was asked to add a few words. Unused to speaking into a microphone with no audience to look at, I remember with embarassment that I confused ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’ in my first address to the Irish nation. Late that same night, after our visit to the hotel, Tom Staley and I, with escalating audacity, thought up that first symposium of 1967 and doggedly pulled it through. We remained in constant correspondence, and the new Quarterly soon became the main vehicle in a growing community. Incidentally it proved a great outlet for all my little notes and some longer pieces. To the dismay of up-and-coming scholars, its backlog is now very long. I was lucky that they accepted almost every little bit I sent in. Since I somehow belonged to the Quarterly, they probably thought they could not turn me down. I also spent quite a few days in Tom’s suburban house in Tulsa and have many fond memories of his family and the five, I believe, frisky children. A few times I was taken to the tennis club and thought, wrongly no doubt, that I knew what made a city like Tulsa tick. I admired Tom’s Joyce collection, much more comprehensive than mine and full of items I could never aspire to. The collection filled an adjacent garage. At the time we all believed that Tom Staley would one day become president of his university, but in the eighties, he took over the Ransom Library in Austin, Texas. I think that Tom, as one of the great initiators, was cut out for the job. In Texas he founded the Joyce Studies Annual in 1990, a serial in book form. The Quarterly, as it turned out, was lucky to find a highly competent editor in Robert Spoo. It has always had efficient assistant editors, starting with David Ward (who was in charge of the formalities of the inception of the Joyce Foundation), and continuing with John Van Voorhis, Charlotte Stewart, Maralee Frampton, Maureen Modlish and Mary O’Toole, all the way to Carol Kealiher. I got to know them as friendly, helpful, co-operative and efficient. Robert Spoo continued the Quarterly with new vigour, and in the course of time, due to the copyright muddles, branched out into law studies and has now become our much needed expert on the tricky issues of copyright. It is auspicious, perhaps, that his successor, Sean Latham, lost little time in visiting the Zurich Foundation in 2002.

Didn’t Staley organize a get-together in Tulsa to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Ulysses? He convened a handful of speakers to commemorate fifty years of Ulysses on a rather intimate scale: Berni and Shari Benstock, Mort and Annette Levitt, Mark Shechner, Robert Scholes and a flamboyant Father Boyle. The event had a very small audience, mainly local. I remember meeting Fred Higginson and, for the first time, William Schutte and Richard Pearce. It was there that Hugh Kenner first enunciated the Uncle Charles Principle and gave one of the most provocative talks on ‘Who Moved the Furniture?’ It was a typical performance, based on the premise that when words cannot be trusted (as in the ‘Ithaca’ episode), at least solid furniture can be relied on, and in Bloom’s absence it had been moved. But who did it? Kenner surmised a tentative scenario: Molly, not experienced in adultery, may have gotten cold feet (if feet is the word) and decided to deflect Boylan’s energy to physical work, though the stratagem in the end did not help. Like most answers, Kenner’s was speculative but memorable. When someone in the audience much later said, dismissively, that he did not care in the least about the furniture, I could only retort that Kenner didn’t either, but that, as always, he used a particular detail to put his finger on a basic issue.

Was the 1972 Tulsa gathering to set a pattern for the North American conferences? Not by design, but as it turned out, it was a starting point for American conferences in the off-symposium years. Some of us convened in Honolulu, Hawaii, two years later, in early August 1974. This brings in Margaret Solomon, who had been among the relatively small cast of the first symposium. I had never heard of her, but then most of us had not yet heard of most others at that stage. When she introduced herself in Dublin the evening before our sessions began, I first misunderstood the name as ‘Sullivan’ since Kevin Sullivan (who wrote on Joyce and the Jesuits) was also among the participants. But it was Mrs

Solomon from Hawaii, and she instantly asked me if her paper the following day, on the Phallic Trees in Finnegans Wake, should, perhaps, be toned down a little, as it was fairly outspoken. I steadfastly advised against any internal censorship, though I doubt if she needed my advice at all. Anyway her talk, suave in manner, was candid in its sexual points, and she shocked some of the more sedate members in the lecture room at Earlsfort Terrace. Even some of us seasoned readers looked at each other in mild amazement when the Wake seemed abristle with arboreal phalluses, testicles and, reciprocally, vaginas. So Margaret left her stamp upon the conference, and the local reputation of convened Joyce scholars did not noticeably rise. Margaret came to many of our conferences and may have been among the first American Joyceans to be won over by what was called post-structuralism. Much of it came through Jacques Aubert in Lyons, where she had spent some time. She seemed to know how to handle it. Also, it was Margaret who brought a Joyce conference to Hawaii. That was probably the outcome of one of those chance events that may determine phases of our lives. In Trieste in 1971 Margaret had taken part in a panel on sexuality in a fairly flamboyant group. When the panelists discussed incest, a very invigorating Nuala O’Faolain, who unfortunately only attended once, maintained that incest did not occur in Ireland because the Irish language had no word for it, which raised some intriguing issues. Looking back now, I wonder if I had misheard what was said, but others mulled over it as well. On the last Saturday, when a trip was scheduled to Pola (or Pula), where Joyce had spent a few months in 1904–5, it so happened that a group of German students from Köln, among whom was a particularly attractive girl, decided to go swimming instead. So I, too, stayed behind and missed the Pola trip. (I again missed the trip in 2002, at end of the second Trieste symposium, because the Italian railways had decided to go on strike, and the Zurich contingent hastened home a day early.) I did not join the swimmers but just hung around with many others, among whom was Margaret Solomon, who asked me casually if I’d ever like to visit Hawaii and teach there (she must have said ‘teach’ which, as you know, is not my term). Who would not like to go to Hawaii?, and so I must have expressed enthusiasm, never thinking that this would be followed up. Well, it was, and in August 1974 (it was shortly after Richard Nixon resigned, of which event I heard in Denny Hall, Ohio State University, en route to the west coast) I came to Honolulu for that one week ‘JoySymposium’ with Leslie Fiedler, the Benstocks, Father Boyle SJ, Phil Herring, John Raleigh, Morton Levitt and Jacques Aubert. The setting was great; on the first afternoon Father Boyle and I both got sunburnt among exotic scenery, and there were some good sessions that were largely impromptu. At one of them Father Boyle, on the point of asserting that his views were inspired from above, knocked over a chair to good dramatic effect. I stayed on for a whole wonderful semester. I had only two classes and, of course, no administrative duties. I could see how popular Margaret was among students and colleagues and how great a hostess to boot. As I had plenty of time on my hands, I attended other classes, also seeing what those graduate students did in their teaching, and found how many creative writing and poetry classes there were, something entirely new for a continental European. I often looked in to listen. My contributions were limited to suggesting a few times that a word in a poem might easily be left out for better impact. There were poetry readings almost every evening, and I had the impression that I knew about fifty poets in Honolulu alone and wondered how many there must be in the whole country. I also had a field day taking pictures on campus, when one still could do that without fear of being charged with harassment. In the English Department of Hawaii, the celebrity in residence was Leon Edel of Henry James fame. He did not quite seem to like Joyce whom he called, justly but almost exclusively, a ‘collector of injustices’. (One might, at this point, interject a remark on hereditary traits.) In his lecture he recalled that he had seen, if not met, Joyce at one of those readings chez Adrienne Monnier in Paris, where the great author had not taken much notice of him (‘I just sat there, in my little corner’). Edel’s seminars were famous, and he generously shared his great erudition. Once or twice, he came to our Wake reading, and somehow he was always half a page ahead of the others and found references before everyone else. Jack Unterecker, an authority on Yeats and Irish literature in general, was also a good companion who once took Margaret, me and Suzanne Wong on a tour of the Big Island. Suzanne Wong was a student from Hongkong who later came to stay with me for many delightful months. So Hawaii for many years to come was an ideal place to return to, and for a long time I had dreams that I was on the way there but could never make it. This is a recurrent dream: there is no transportation to where I want to go. I often wondered why something unconscious in me goes to such trouble to invent situations simply to tell me what I know without the help of any dream.

I believe Hawaii had further consequences? We initiated two Wake reading groups in the evening, one for more advanced readers, one for beginners. The one for beginners had unforeseen consequences. One of the students attending later went to Japan and started a sumptuous journal largely devoted to Joyce, the Abiko Quarterly, which, in a different format, is still continuing. She had great enthusiasm and called herself ALP or Biddy the Hen and was very active in Japan. She once came to the symposium in Monaco with a video camera (they were not all that common then) and asked me if she could interview me while I was still alive. Which, come to think of it, is the best possible time. But she never actually did. The Hawaii period was also significant because, had I not been there, I would not have come to know Phyllis Thompson, poet and friend, who was in Buffalo in late 1975, where I visited her on my lecture tour.

If we had not met there (it’s all very complicated) Tom Connolly would not have thought of a Buffalo conference in 1976 — and so on. Wheels within wheels; things happening by chance, rarely by design. Those American conferences, Tulsa 1972, Honolulu 1974, Buffalo 1976, set up a pattern so that the North American Summit Meetings became fixtures in the calendar, and now there has to be an American or Canadian conference every odd year. Two years later, in 1978, Archie Loss followed suit in Behrend College, Erie, Pennsylvania; in 1980 the conference was in Albuquerque (one of the few I missed); it was in Provincetown twice, followed by Milwaukee, Vancouver, and so on. We do get around.

You also met Breon Mitchell, but in Zurich, wasn’t it? The meeting with Breon Mitchell, a very good friend for many years, came about not quite by chance. On one of the afternoons when I was still working at the printing place, I paid my weekly visit to Rhein Verlag, who at that time vaguely entertained a project to retranslate all of Joyce: in the end it never came off. Occasionally there was some correspondence to attend to. The offices were located in the Seefeld area, very close to Joyce’s residences from 1915 to 1917. I was about to leave when a young couple walked in, he with a black beard, she with long blond hair. They enquired about Georg Goyert’s Ulysses translation and any material that might be around. They were Breon and Linda Mitchell, and, of course, I took them in tow. Breon’s thesis-in-progress was on Joyce’s impact on the modern German novel. For this purpose he had looked meticulously into the Ulysses translations and, in particular, into the changes from the original version of 1928 to a heavily revised one of 1930. As it happened, I must have been the only person who had also taken a close look at Goyert’s translation. So our meeting was lucky for both of us, and we had a lot to discuss when Breon and Linda, at that time studying in Oxford, visited us in the following years, and I, in turn, saw them in Germany where they also did some research. In this way Breon became one of the first participants in Dublin 1967. He was a collector mainly of Kafka and Beckett and spent a great deal of time scouring second-hand bookshops. It was he who found, which I should have, a special copy of Verbannte (Exiles, the first of Joyce’s works to be translated, Zurich 1918), with Joyce’s dedication. It was reasonably priced, and he let me buy it. He actually found it in the bookshop opposite the house where Joyce had lived in 1919, during the period described by Budgen. Much later, during one of the habitual Joycean Zurich tours that are part of our workshops, we were invited up into the apartment the Joyces had occupied, and from its windows we could see into the house where Martha Fleischmann’s window (or was it where ‘she pulled the chain’, according to Budgen?) could be discerned if one’s eyes were sharp enough. The layout of the apartment looked as though it had hardly changed, and one wondered, with an eerie feeling, where the table must have stood on which essential parts of Ulysses were drafted. Breon found a position in the Department of Comparative Literature in Bloomington, Indiana. It must have been he who nominated me to the university’s renowned School of Letters which had originated in the South with writers and authors like John Crowe Ransom and Allan Tate. By 1970, when I first took part, apprehensively, the summer school lasted six weeks and consisted of four visitors. I was there again in 1971, rubbing shoulders with reputable scholars who were only names to me. Bloomington, Indiana, was one of my favourite spots, and I often returned there until well into the eighties, also because my friend Erlene Stetson was teaching there. Breon Mitchell’s area is German and comparative literature. In the meantime he has become the head of the Lily Library and has translated some Kafka. Our interest in translation obviously persisted, but Breon tackled the task creatively, whereas I contented myself with heckling the way others had coped. To counterbalance what happens to Joyce in other languages, I have looked, on occasion, at how Kafka fares and found that Kafka presents just as many obstacles, though of a wholly different order. Unfortunately Breon and I have not met for years.

Wasn’t it Murray Beja who brought you to Ohio State? Morris (‘Murray’) Beja knew that I was in the country in the summer of 1970, and he invited me to Ohio State in the autumn semester. That, too, was a great experience, and I liked my classes and spent a great deal of time watching how my graduate students were teaching freshman English. I also got my introduction to American football and soon overcame the arrogance of someone brought up on soccer, a more refined game, I thought, until I was told of the intricate and elaborate tactics of American football. Like most others the game is chthonic. Mother Earth plays an important part; as soon as the ball drops to the ground everything stops. I got to know the Department very well and was invited to many parties. Walking to one of them through deserted suburban areas one evening, I was adopted by a stray dog who even waited for me outside the house, not because it found me particularly likeable but because there was simply no other creature out in the streets. One kind faculty member, knowing that I would spend a lot of time in a dormitory, gave me a radio and introduced me to Amanda Ros, the world’s best bad writer, an unending source of pleasure. I became a great fan of her three alliterative novels and two collections of poetry. I am happy to report that in the Foundation we have all her works, some in rare first editions, and the ritual of the Zurich workshop includes a Word for the Day by Amanda. Joyce unfortunately never heard of her, for if he had, he could hardly have passed up a writer of such stylistic mastery. She could, with seeming nonchalance, turn out phrases like ‘the poisoned dregs of concocted injustice’, and in her seriousness she can be even funnier than ‘Eumaeus’ or ‘Nausicaa’.

Murray Beja often invited me to his house and was a great host. I felt I belonged to Ohio State and returned in the winter of 1975 for another semester. For a long time I kept in touch with the students I had come to know.

Your various appointments in the US were real highlights, weren’t they? Don’t forget that at home I was still a proofreader in a very dull job, and the appointments constituted an intellectual holiday. Whatever I had done in the privacy of my closet now became live communication. The best thing that probably ever happened was that during an appointment in Buffalo in 1976 I met Erlene Stetson, an American Black Studies scholar. She was not into Joyce, but we became very close for many years, and they were among the best I ever had. I had come to like American academia and, for a time, entertained some vague hopes of becoming part of it, but I never made a constructive move. Also, it must have been around that time, with the onset of theories, that my chances diminished. The last thing that was or is in demand, is someone with a single tune like myself, so it may be just as well. Delaware in 1977 was the last American appointment. I was doing Joyce courses (you see, I avoid the misleading word ‘teaching’) in the States before Zurich University followed suit. Zurich courses began, I think, in 1972, and since then I have been doing Joyce courses or seminars, first intermittently, and since 1993 quite regularly, with introductions to Ulysses almost every semester. For many years I also conducted Joyce courses at the Zurich ‘Volkshochschule’ (continuing or evening university) thanks to the initiative of Carola Giedion. Those courses have been replaced by our continuous weekly readings of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake at the Foundation, where we have enough time to devote about three and a half years to a very close reading of Ulysses. Our first round of the Wake, two full hours every Thursday evening, lasted eleven years, and then, of course, it brought us back to ‘riverrun’.

You seem to have established a reputation for yourself quite early on? I sort of slipped, or rather, I found myself slipping into the establishment in my thirties, with next to no achievements to my credit, apart from a few articles. This was in part because my name was in the Newslitter, and I was attached to the emerging Quarterly and had become one of the symposium organizers. To my amusement, the academic community, in spite of its professional acuity in matters of human conduct and pomposity, is very much impressed by titles and distinctions. I suppose at heart we consider ourselves Shems, creative outsiders, but we present ourselves in public as Shauns, decorated with extensive CVs. I know, of course, that one needs them to push on in a competitive world. It was my advantage (of which I was unaware) to be outside and not to have to engage in that race. Still, and that’s the paradox, it was good to be known within the circle, it definitely helped, and it brought on invitations. So, on occasion, I became a ‘visiting professor’ in the States. It is thrilling to be called ‘professor’ when you are not one, though slightly embarrassing as well. This brought me to Buffalo and Indiana and all the other places mentioned earlier, and there were requests just to lecture. In 1975, when I was at Ohio State, the Goethe Institute (‘Goethe-Haus’) in Toronto asked me to come and speak, but it would have meant missing classes. It was deferred and extended the same year into a full lecture tour of more than twenty places in the States and Canada. It took me from South Carolina to San Francisco to Ottawa and Philadelphia. Imagine: a German cultural institute sending a Swiss amateur to the States to talk about an Irish writer — something almost inconceivable nowadays! As very little had been done on Joyce in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, I almost automatically became the person to consult or refer to. So, all in all, I profited from what I still consider a chancy and, as I indicated, premature reputation. No complaints there. It did get me around and helped to open doors. Once you are known you become known. I admit that there is a bit of a paradox in seemingly lamenting privileges I enjoyed. In the Joyce world as elsewhere, hierarchies do evolve, and they tend to perpetuate themselves. Even so I always claim that we, the Joyceans, are a bit more democratic and open, less academically exclusive. No one, to the best of my knowledge, was ever turned down at a symposium: scholar, amateur, translator, housewife or whatever. But still, the old dignitaries, like me now, are privileged, whether they deserve it or not, and are heaved into key positions at our conferences. The downside is that this tends to eclipse budding new talent. Actually, novices might often be a better bet than the seasoned and often jaded pundits; at least, they are likely to make an effort.

Last but not least: weren’t Tom Connolly and his summer school in Buffalo in 1968 your American academic initiation? I did indeed get a foot in the door mainly thanks to Thomas E. Connolly from Buffalo. If he had not come to Zurich in 1966 I might never have gone to the States, or perhaps only much later. At my suggestion, the city of Zurich had sent Connolly an invitation to attend the unveiling of Hebald’s statue over the new grave, though I never imagined he would be sent across the Atlantic just for the occasion. I simply thought that like me, Connolly liked to collect peripheral Joyceana such as a printed invitation. But in the glorious times of academic affluence, which certainly extended to the State Universities of New York, he was delegated to come to Zurich, and so, after some correspondence, we finally met at Joyce’s graveside. He was the initiator of the lavish Buffalo summer school at the time, and he had already brought some of

my Joycean friends there: Adaline Glasheen, James Atherton and Clive Hart. Connolly asked me whether I might follow in their footsteps, and it sounded more like a courtesy, never to be followed up. Yet I must have assented and was almost shocked when a serious invitation for 1968 actually reached me. It made me nervous and apprehensive; frightened, in fact. Not only had I produced very little, except that my name was connected with the Newslitter, but I had never even taken a Joyce course. After some wavering I decided to accept. I asked for advice among my correspondents, real professionals, but they did not understand the naivety of my question. I wanted to know, quite simply, what one does in a classroom. They imagined I was worried about didactic finesses. In the end I accepted, thinking that, after all, I might still find a pretext, if necessary, to chicken out. So in 1968, the year of many upheavals, I made the trip, stopping over in New York where I was to speak at the Gotham Book Mart, on 17 June, a Monday, when Bloomsday was celebrated. On the flight from Dublin (where I had been at a gathering in the Tower) a man sitting next to me, during the conversational part of most long flights, had asked the usual questions, and the cue ‘Joyce’ got him talking. At the Gotham in 47th Street, where the New York Joyce Society had its meetings, I brought up that talk on the plane and how my neighbour had mentioned that his father had been rector at Clongowes, the Jesuit College that Joyce had attended. It may show my nervousness that I did not even notice how my innocent leg had been pulled by an Irishman running true to form. Therefore my account of it must have been so deadpan that the audience thought that the joke was mine, not on me, delivered with great poise. During the break, Joyce’s wine, Fendant de Sion, was served, as part of the ritual. Mind you, this was mid-June in New York, and the wine had been kept at room temperature and was served in Styrofoam cups. Strange looks were exchanged at the odd taste of the author who was being celebrated, but no one said a word. Zack Bowen and Sid Feshbach were among those I had met before, and they made me feel very welcome. I felt the vibrations of New York when, afterwards, we went to a nearby bar for a sandwich, the largest one I had ever come across, and I had to eat it in instalments. After yet another meeting in a hotel (we were planning the 1969 symposium) I ended up in the Algonquin Hotel and spent most of the night trying to reduce the noise of the ancient air conditioner, which I finally managed to turn down to half its volume. There was, of course, also the excitement of the city humming outside, so I was wide awake at five in the morning. The few days in New York were exciting. I had made an appointment with an attractive employee at the Gotham Book Mart for one of the following days, and Vivian Mercier, author of The Irish Comic Tradition, whom I had just met there, also had an appreciative eye on her. Typically — or shall we call it tychomatically? — she never turned up. (Tychomatics, as you know and may hear again, is the science of the supreme fumbling of fate, tyche, to one’s disadvantage.) When I moved on to Buffalo, Adaline Glasheen was already there for the weekend. My apprehensions did not abate during the intellectual small talk of the first encounters and parties. I did not yet know the code, and my repertoire was limited to stating that I came from Zurich, but ‘from Zurich’ was misunderstood as ‘Missouri’. With trepidation I met my first class but soon found out that putting across what had fascinated me for years worked fairly well. Someone described it later on as a ‘no-nonsense approach’. Conveying my own enthusiasm to others was exalting. I had to learn a few things, the grading system for one, as I had given a student a C for an alright paper. I had been instructed that C meant alright, but when the exasperated student came to me almost in tears I realized that the standard had shifted. So the main uplift was that I could pass on something of my own subjective enthusiasm, from the privacy of my closet to a classroom, or, at least, to a few of the students in it. I vividly remember one of them who had just returned from Vietnam and appreciated the privilege of college instruction. He later sent me a picture of himself, his wife, and his car. One very bright student that I had in both classes spoke with a distinct and heavy accent and, on enquiry, I was told that this was Brooklyn, not the best way perhaps to recite Shakespeare when that student might become a teacher herself in the future. I considered advising her but decided against telling her, in my Swiss accent, that hers might not be conducive to a successful career. The proud roll-call of visiting professors included Hugh Kenner, whom I got to know well in many conversations. The most renowned scholar was William Empson, whose very British and a trifle quirky articulation was hard to understand, even in a classroom, so that I was not surprised when many years later, at the 1982 symposium in Dublin’s City Hall, no one in the large audience could make out what he was saying. There was Brian Vickers, an Englishman, who a few years later was to join the faculty of the University of Zurich. Ben Kiely, the Irish writer, was a great storyteller. He ended up having his class in the bedroom of the dormitory. Afterwards we agreed to travel to New York together on the same train. The morning of departure I was ready and impatient to proceed to the station. There was no sign of Ben. I knocked on his room and found him still sprawled on his bed, with all his belongings strewn on the floor. It is a miracle we ever made that train, which, incidentally, missed a stop and had to move backwards to the station. In New York I stayed for a few weeks with Berni and Eve Benstock. They had rented a flat close to Columbia where Berni was teaching during the summer. So I had a few weeks to explore the city. On our extended walks together, Berni explained his city to me with great inside knowledge, and he even tried to explain the niceties of baseball. One of the highlights during that summer in Buffalo was a debate that Connolly had set up between the three Joyce visitors, Empson, Kenner and myself. I did not consider it a highlight myself as I could not quite see how I, wholly inexperienced, would fit into the select company. All the more so when Empson started off with a fierce, personal attack on Kenner, who, by unmasking many features of the Portrait as ironic that had once been taken straight, had ‘destroyed the Portrait for a generation of readers’. Empson

was visibly upset and even questioned Kenner’s morals. The audience was taken aback at the unexpected virulence of the debate. I forget exactly how Kenner responded as I was busy pondering what to say and for a long time wisely kept silent. It was probably taken for diplomacy or even Swiss neutrality. In the end Connolly steered the topic into the safer waters of Joyce’s possible influence on contemporary writing, and I could throw in a few platitudes that no one present would ever remember, given the insidious scuffle that had preceded. Thomas Connolly organized the Buffalo Joyce Conference of 1976. It was the result of a visit I had paid the previous year during which the idea had taken shape spontaneously. Because of him and Mark Shechner and, naturally, the wonderful Lockwood collection of Joyceana, Buffalo became one of the Joyce centres. Connolly had catalogued the books and also edited Scribbledehobble, one of the Wake notebooks at Buffalo, the first one ever to be transcribed, though, without the techniques that have evolved since, it was not well received. He was a traditional scholar with an Irish background, and a very kind host.

Let’s leave the States and return to Finnegans Wake and the 1950s. How did you get on initially, and what kept you going? That hardbound copy I bought for thirty-two shillings is sturdy and has survived, battered, but intact. If any one book on earth should have a durable binding it is Finnegans Wake, and at present only paperbacks are available. On my return home from England in 1953 the Wake soon became my dominant concern, and I went into it with juvenile abandon and, in the way of most novices, ferreted remote and abstruse meanings out of the text. My naive assumption was that by patient accumulation of glosses we might ascend to a more general grasp, and somehow, I have never quite outgrown this innocence. Maybe it was those key ‘aha’ experiences that Finnegans Wake offers like no other book (and frequently withholds with coy aloofness) that set up expectations not to be fulfilled. One great excitement was when I stumbled over an anecdote in a book on Dublin theatres. An amateur actor named Luke Plunkett garbled the death scene of Richard III so badly that he had to rise from the dead and repeat the scene by unanimous request. This electrified an already amusing passage in the Wake: ‘when Dook Hookbackcrook upsits his ass booseworthies jeer and junket but they boos him oos and baas his aas when he lukes like Hunkett Plunkett’ (FW 127). A boisterous scene in a pub, with a streak of Humpty Dumpty, is suddenly overlaid with unexpected dramatics. It now emerges that the ‘Hookbackcrook’ is a bumbling Richard III on stage, the worthy boosers are his enemies at Bosworth fields, and perhaps ‘upsits his ass’ links up with an often-quoted horse. A specific, concrete angle sends out vibrations and, perhaps, I have never done anything else but pursue such dynamics. This is the opportunity to display an inherent defect of annotation. If you are told right away about the incident in a Dublin theatre (as I did just now) then everything in the passage is simultaneously present, and the meanings do not evolve scintillatingly in a bouncing process. For me, it is important that the forgotten anecdote of a distant event leads to a series of semantic rebounds. In notes everything is available right away, whereas reading progresses step by step and, in Joyce, often also backwards. In concrete terms: ‘booseworthies’ is not ‘Bosworth’, as Annotations must mislead you to assume, but in due course it becomes ‘Bosworth’. I am afraid you are going to hear more grumbles on the subject. One example that I encountered fairly early on serves well to illustrate in a local avatar the comic universality of the Wake. The sentence ‘mean fawthery eastend appullcelery, old laddy he high hole’ (FW 586) may vaguely call up a father, apples and celery, perhaps in the east end of a city (my own fleeting impression was of a fruit and vegetable market, Covent Garden perhaps). I still wonder if ‘fawthery’ includes ‘feathery’ and so may link up with ‘My father’s a bird’ of the Joking Jesus ballad in Ulysses — so far so representative of Wakean guessing. However, after some juggling and experimenting with rhythm, a well-known children’s song emerges to a Swiss-German ear: ‘min Vatter ist en Appezäller’ (‘Mein Vater ist ein Appenzeller’ in standard German), and the sequel (‘old laddy he high hole’) becomes sensuously transformed into a yodeling refrain. No doubt Joyce heard his own children sing the song in Zurich, probably returning from school. A chord is struck, mere words become sound and melody. From this provincial angle the workings of the Wake can be exemplified. Appenzell, the name of an eastern canton of Switzerland, derives from abbatis cella, the cell of the abbot, and abbas is also father. The abbot in question was St Gall, the Irish missionary who went east and Christianized parts of Switzerland. The surrounding canton, St Gallen, is indeed called after him. Appenzell was split up into two rival cantons in a religious war. The father’s cell is thus divided into rivaling and warring sons. In such a way, a process of explorative fumbling has been initiated, wholly different from static annotation. As a matter of fact, this particular Appenzeller passage has converted a few Swiss readers. One may grant me a subsidiary thrill in the ‘patrolman Seekersenn’ that follows right after, a variant of ‘Sickersen’ and similar approximations of an archetypal figure. A ‘Senn’ is an alpine cowherd and is (as I know from being teased about it in my youth) instantly associated with butter and cheese. In the song, that father, inhabitant of Appenzell, is said to ‘eat the cheese along with the plate’. And sure enough, in the Burrus and Caseus episode, Shem and Shaun, the twins, are dressed up in Swiss guise, something that children would sing: ‘Der Haensli ist ein Butterbrot, mein Butterbrot; und Koebi iss dein Schtinkenkot.’ Haensli and Koebi are diminutives of Hans (John) and Jakob (FW 163). The German conflates being (‘ist’) with eating (the imperative ‘iss’), and bread and butter (‘Butterbrot’, which was a common afternoon meal in my time) becomes not quite ‘Schinkenbrot’, bread and ham, but stinking dung, or excrement. Many of the configurations of the Wake could be unravelled out of such parochial minutiae. At any rate, minute textual flashes had a great emotional impact, but they also set high standards. In

practice, most Wake passages do not radiate to the same degree. Many obscure ones caused me much tribulation and continue to do so, hence I gave up any scholarly pretensions about Finnegans Wake.

What did you think of the early guides to Finnegans Wake, and what do you think of more recent ones? Initially there was little help apart from the Skeleton Key by Campbell and Robinson, that first and irritating thread through a labyrinth. It became a standard guide, which meant that later studies were constructed around it, and, for a long period, no basic study was undertaken to replace it. Incidentally, I think I once saw (not met) Joseph Campbell in the offices of Viking Press and wondered whether I should approach him, as he was by that time already a celebrity. In those pioneering days, we had Harry Levin’s compact monograph, pertinent and perceptive with clear outlines, but fairly general; it was the one thing to hold on to. The Skeleton Key was often reprocessed with a few additions and different slants. Tindall’s Reader’s Guide was a simple outline with many detailed and often witty glosses. I got most help out of Atherton’s Books at the Wake. Clive Hart’s Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake took a much wider view, away from individual particles, and it was a big step forward. But I also know that Clive no longer believes in its results and would now throw about 95 per cent of it overboard. At the time, it certainly widened the perspective and provided a badly needed overview, and there is no doubt that much more than a meager 5 per cent is still valuable. While on the subject, I am not happy with the plot summaries we have. The title Understanding Finnegans Wake (Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon) I feel is seriously misleading as their book often condenses what any reader could guess anyhow and does not clarify the opaque passages. Other summaries tend to heap their own complexities on those we are already facing. The one classic, John Bishop’s Book of the Dark, may well be the best study we have for those already far advanced. It pursues the topic of a sleeping body with perspicuity and conviction. John Bishop has a great gift for bringing seemingly disparate strands together in a coherent structure. His preface to the 1999 Penguin edition is supreme and possibly the best short introduction. For me it is an ideal way to start. I miss the kind of equivalent to what Stuart Gilbert did for Ulysses. Gilbert, of course, had Joyce’s schema for guidance but may well have trusted it too much. He mapped out Ulysses in a way that is an instructive overview even if in need of modification and not to be taken at face value. But then, nothing is, as Joyce can show us. Perhaps the Wake just does not lend itself to the kind of co-ordination that we have for Ulysses. A really convincing chart would be helpful, but perhaps the Wake is unchartable and so provides ample scope for argumentation.

You do seem bothered by things that don’t trouble most readers. I have always worried more than others about what we still do not know even in the earlier works. At one of our conferences, I set up a discussion panel on what we do not know in Ulysses (I think it was called ‘Cruxes’), but it fell completely flat and hardly anything was solved. I had in mind the number 16 that we find in ‘Eumaeus’; my concern is why a sailor should have that number tattooed on his chest, or what exactly Tom Rochford’s invention was with the ogling disks that we find in ‘Wandering Rocks’. There are no such cruxes, that is, erratic blocks, in an otherwise orderly landscape in Finnegans Wake, for that would suggest that most of it is charted and explored with only a few obscure patches sticking out here and there. To me it seems the Wake is omnicruxial. What I would like to see explored (I tried but failed) are those many passages that make us laugh in the Wake, though we cannot sufficiently account for this, or all we can say is that some chord is being struck. Sometimes we know what makes us laugh, but often, we do not. Frequently there seems to be a subliminal, even an almost physical impact that manifests itself in facial expressions, tittering, chuckles or guffaws, yet we cannot account for it intellectually. The phrase, already adduced, where ‘booseworthies jeer and junket’, has a humorous effect even without the illumination that a source can provide. It would be revealing to plug us in to some machinery to measure our heartbeat, blood pressure, perspiration or other physical phenomena caused by a mere text, but there would be no point to the experiment since natural behaviour under examination ceases to be natural. All of this is nothing new, but in Joyce every reader–author interaction seems to be magnified. Joyce shows us a lot that we could have known all along, but didn’t; now it can no longer be overlooked.

You mentioned earlier, almost in passing, that you gave up any scholarly pretensions about Finnegans Wake. Would you explain why you backed out? Up to a point I did, as a ‘scholar’, but emphatically not as a reader. Constitutionally I need something like a basic grasp, a prima facie understanding of a passage, and more often than I like, this is still missing. There are parts that remain opaque. Not that I ever expected the Wake to open up completely, or even remotely, but I became dissatisfied with my inability to get a basic foothold. Also those great and unique ‘aha’ experiences that we get in reading, intellectual orgasms of a sort, set up an ideal for me that cannot be attained in the majority of passages. When so many of them in the Wake yield a wealth of dynamic significance and grow more scintillating as we go along, the disappointment at not getting anything out of many other parts is all the more poignant. And so I backed out of Wake scholarship in what I call semantic despair. That despair also grew out of

our weekly reading groups, where we scrupulously leave no avenue unexplored in a search for meaningful provisional coherence. As an old hand at the game who has done a good deal of minute homework, I find it disconcerting to stare at too many blank passages. After many re-readings, also in our weekly groups, it is disheartening so often not to get the hang of a phrase, not to understand the syntax of what looks like a sentence, not to know why one sentence, or paragraph, follows another. Naturally I am still enjoying what I can grasp here and there, brilliant spells, lyrical passages, animated text. Lots of fun that I wouldn’t like to miss. But lots of fun, alas, I do miss. It is always conceivable that Finnegans Wake is as flat and unexciting as some summaries make it look. I find it hard to see the Wake as the outcome of a compendium of notes, or not more than what Joyce wrote to Harriet Weaver. In particular, I refuse to see it as as static as it is presented in many commentaries. Of course, what basically upsets me is my own insensitivity to those many parts where I suspect Joyce meant something — at least some thing! — but I cannot ever grasp it (nor, incidentally, can those I consult). But that, fortunately, is just my personal problem, and similar considerations do not inhibit a growing number of Wake scholars. So we have an increasing number of studies, insightful, pioneering, far-fetched or unnecessary as the case may be, while I still feel in need of a better elementary foundation. I admire some such studies from a resigned distance. I once voiced my discontent at a glorious Wake conference in Leeds, 1987, and to sound out others, I asked about a specific passage (the first sentences on page 48) and what it might mean, experts all, mind you, budding or seasoned. None of them had an answer, which caused relief (that I am not the only ignorant reader) and surprise — why weren’t they worried? So the defeat seems only to affect me. To put it differently, without a basis of operative insight, I am not yet ready to benefit from guesses about Homosexuality, Fetishism, the Void, the Suppressed, or the Sacred. What I would like to have solved first is how a pronoun often emerges without any apparent antecedent, why the gender is often changed grammatically and all those trivia that are puzzling and receive scant attention. At times I find clear references, unmistakable allusions in the text yet have no idea what they are doing within their context. Take, ‘Gestapose off cheekars or frankfurters on the odor’. What is the German city Frankfurt an der Oder doing in the context of secret police? Bad-smelling sausages do not help me. I am not criticizing the author for making things opaque, but I resent my own obtundity, or semantic or contextual deafness.

Go back to your early visits to Dublin in the 1950s and 1960s: what are your memories, beginning with Niall Montgomery? Apart from my venture in May 1952, my first real visit to Dublin, with the purpose of exploring the city, followed in 1965. I asked for contact addresses, and Jim Atherton gave me Niall Montgomery’s name; I most probably sent him a note of warning. That summer, after an unfortunate experience in London en route, I had very little money and stayed in a cheap bed and breakfast in Westland Row. I paid £1 in advance each day and passed up the greasy bacon in the morning. With my own towel over the pillow, I was woken in the night by a strange swishing sound: it was the wind moving the walls that were cracked and held together by the wallpaper only. The house, I was told, had been a former brothel. What struck me at that time was the awful, dilapidated state of the ruins along the quays, and I also noticed that many women had wide ladders in their stockings. Obviously it would have been a waste to throw away an otherwise good stocking. At any rate, I looked up Niall Montgomery in his office in Merrion Square, not far from where Samuel Beckett had once lived, and we got along very well. In fact, during the next few days, he drove me around Dublin, including the Martello Tower in Sandycove, and invited me to his home. He also gave me a list of people to contact, and all proved very fruitful contacts: John Garvin, John Ryan, Thomas McGreevy and Michael Gorman of Bord Fáilte. To me, Niall Montgomery represented the best of Dublin culture. His father had been a friend of Oliver Gogarty and his circle, and Niall had contributed a piece to transition in the thirties. He was an architect by profession and, from a remark he let drop, it seemed he did not think too highly of his contribution in that field. He seems to have known Beckett very well and took a lively part in the city’s cultural and occasionally spiteful activities. Apparently he sometimes wrote Flann O’Brien’s ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’ column in The Irish Times. He could be acerbic, and I remember that he entitled a review of a Joyce book ‘K.M.R.I.A.’. I overheard him saying about one of the mandatory controversies bedevilling the Abbey Theatre that there was nothing wrong with certain people that assassination wouldn’t cure: possibly a well-known phrase, but it was new to me then. At any rate, I liked this use of what must be a commonplace formula applicable to many situations. Niall had always been helpful to me, and I am sure he looked at our symposial efforts with charitable amusement — and probably kept his sarcasm within his own circle. But he became one of the organizers of the 1973 Dublin symposium, the first with active local participation and a host committee, but unfortunately a few undiplomatic moves alienated him, so that he withdrew from the board. He still welcomed us all in an opening speech which, probably to make a point — perhaps to alienate some of the Americans? — was entirely in French. Naturally some of us asked him, ‘Is it Gaelic you were talking?’ I was very sorry that he withdrew from subsequent festivities. I would have looked him up when I was in Dublin that same year in October, my main purpose being to take as many pictures as possible of what remained of Dublin. But a few weeks earlier one of his daughters had died in a horrible car accident, and I did not have the heart to disturb him. Niall Montgomery seemed to have had a classical education at his fingertips. He had a sincere and yet

qualified admiration for Joyce, but he never quite forgave him for not being Proust. I once sent him a little brochure that assembled a few articles I had written for newspapers, all in German. He wrote back that he would take up German, and a few years later he reported that he was reading Rainer Maria Rilke. The last time I saw and heard him was in 1982, the centenary year, in Paris, where he gave a talk in the traditional way, that is, he had learned his erudite, poised periods by heart, word-perfect. It was only fitting that when you, Christine, first went to Dublin I sent you to him, with good results, and you became a member of the family and now, I hear, you are taking care of his voluminous correspondence and editing his papers. Incidentally, during that summer of 1965, Berni and Eve Benstock were also in Dublin, and we did a lot of investigative walking and tried to cover as many Joycean sights as we could. From then on, I became fairly familiar with Dublin and have seen it change over the years. To me, the breaking point was 1973 when many old buildings disappeared. On one of my rambles I came upon an old shrine dedicated to the Virgin Mary, somewhere below Christ Church in a little lane. It was nothing outstanding aesthetically, but the inscription above the head was in cast iron, and I thought the message theologically askew (but was later told it was spoken at the Lady’s appearance in Lourdes). The spelling was memorable: ‘I am the immaculate conseption’. It has since disappeared, but I took a photograph. Joyce, I assume, never noticed it, for he could hardly have passed up ‘conseption’, which would fit so effortlessly into the Wake.

What were your impressions of John Garvin? It was Niall Montgomery who had given me John Garvin’s name and address, and I first saw him in the Custom House where he was a high civil servant. I was told that Flann O’Brien had worked under him. As a civil servant he had written on Joyce under a pseudonym, Andrew Cass, and was one of the first Irishmen to come out with a whole book on Joyce, The Disunited Kingdom, which is full of local detail. He found out the intriguing fact that Bloom’s epistolary pseudonym, Henry Flower, happened to be the name of a policeman who was accused of murdering a woman in a much publicized case. Such discoveries pose all sorts of problems. Assuming Joyce knew of this, as is likely, Bloom’s choice of a flirtatious alter ego would appear highly odd. It was my impression that his admiration for Joyce was tempered by serious reservations, but he, too, helped us in the preparation of the symposia. In 1966 Garvin, along with Donagh McDonagh, was delegated to go to Zurich to attend the inauguration of Joyce’s honorary grave (can graves be inaugurated?), and, as a result, he was responsible for inviting Giorgio and Asta Joyce to the first symposium in 1967. For a few years he was, I believe, city commissioner, something akin to the mayor. He and his wife were good hosts, and I spent some agreeable hours in their house.

Didn’t you also meet Eileen McCarvill and Roger McHugh? Eileen McCarvill attended our first symposia. I forget when in the sixties we really got in touch, but we certainly did in Paris, 1975. She had studied at the Sorbonne and written a dissertation on Joyce, as far as I can remember. Eileen lived in Fitzwilliam Square where she had a fine library with many rare items. She also employed a manservant who seemed to be both butler and cook, and in the seventies her place may have been where you got the best meals in Dublin. Unfortunately her documentation of Joyce’s exam papers with Liam Miller never materialized (the Zurich Foundation now has parts of them). She considered Miller the most difficult publisher she had ever met; he said the same about her as an author. Eileen claimed to have read Ulysses in 1922 in Kilmainham Gaol, which would have been the epitome of a decisive year in Ireland’s history. Somehow she and Roger McHugh of UCD did not get on too well, and both rarely missed an opportunity to find words for their mutual lack of appreciation. Roger McHugh was of the generation that was still sceptical about Joyce, and he never quite warmed to him. He chaired a session at our first symposium and was helpful. I remember him as kind and erudite, an expert on Joyce. We met a few times in Dublin and once, in 1971, at the School of Letters in Indiana.

You do like to stress your position as an amateur, don’t you? I do, mainly to justify my own limits. This is not modesty: there is nothing wrong with amateurs. They do things on a hedonistic principle, which I have never really given up. It has the advantage of immediate and lasting motivation. The amateur could stop at any given moment if the enthusiasm gives out. A professional who suddenly loses interest in literature would face serious problems. The advantage of a regular job is that it leaves all your spare time to yourself. Not that there was too much of it, but evenings and weekends I could devote to my hobby. As an academic, I would have had to attend committees and spend time on papers or exams. This, of course, is sour grapes: I would have preferred an academic position, but, given my narrow range and misgivings, I would hardly have been qualified. Not being attached to a university also had some long-term benefits. It is because I worked at home, in isolation, that I gradually assembled the books I needed. I could not frequent libraries when in need of information, because in those days, they were disobligingly closed in the evening or on weekends. I had to become autonomous, which meant hunting out pertinent publications on my own. In some way, the Zurich Foundation now is the exact opposite of my own situation then. I had nothing at hand that I had not

ordered and bought myself. In pointed contrast, or call it compensation, we now have much at hand in our library: not everything, but as much as we can assemble.

Collecting all those books and articles must have been a laborious and expensive pursuit? Acquiring books was very slow initially. They were few and far between. My personal expenses were minimal, and I could afford the books that came out as well as some journals that contained, or often just promised, instructive articles. Yet I’m still amazed that I could keep it up. Since many of us, at the pioneering stage, contacted (and helped) each other, there were also complimentary copies. For a time I subscribed to PMLA, mainly for the ads and its rare news on Joyceana, but in the long run, this became too expensive. However, one of the small announcements in PMLA led to that contact with Bernard Benstock which proved so fruitful.

Did you ever visit Joyce’s son Giorgio Joyce in Zurich? Once my enthusiasm had been roused and I returned from England in 1952, I heard that Nora Joyce had died the previous year, but I knew that Giorgio Joyce lived in Zeltweg, fairly close to the Pfauen restaurant of the Budgen period. I even wrote him a letter in which I probably asked somewhat bashfully if I could see him. Naturally there was no answer. I would have been far too timid to call on him and to frame relevant questions, and even more so if I had already known how unapproachable he was. His second wife, Asta Osterwalder, later told me that he hardly ever answered letters and, in fact, did not even always open them. I have spoken to people in Zurich who knew him. It appears that his resonant voice could easily be picked out in a restaurant.

Your long-time job was as a proofreader. Is there anything positive to be said about it? The proofreading job was just for survival, and it was far from fascinating. It meant dealing with prospectuses, advertisements, day-to-day matter, one dreary provincial weekly, the Swiss Shoe Traders’ Monthly, as well as a brewery review (which meant that I knew a lot of terms but not what they were in practice), but not with worthwhile books or essays. A proofreader can hardly be positively good: at best he does not miss a single error or misprint. Zero is the top score. Naturally I was in charge of punctuation and inflexion, but some authors (not in a literary sense) were too touchy to be corrected and thought they knew better. Some pretty awful style passed under my supercilious eyes. But I did observe what can happen in a composing room and with the printing press where all sorts of last-minute disasters may occur that need drastic measures. With such experience I could later on put myself on a high horse occasionally, claiming that I knew more about what can go wrong when type is set up, proofread and reset, than those who merely examine documents. Some changes could go completely undocumented. What if an apprentice dropped a whole page on the way to the printing press? A whole page meant a heap of leaden letters and spaces, with clichés (for illustrations, generally zinc plates mounted on wood) held together by a string. The upshot is a pile of lead on the floor that has to be reset in a hurry, hastily proofread because the presses are waiting. There would be no record of what happened, and no one would be able to reconstruct what went on. If any of this had happened in Dijon during the hectic activities to get Ulysses out in time, we would have no evidence. What I learned from Joyce was to give any peculiarity, or what looks like a mistake, in what we called ‘manuscripts’ (they were mainly typed, but it is interesting how words that have become outdated survive) the benefit of the doubt: an odd effect might be intended. And, of course, it is someone’s duty to scan everything at the last moment. So I understand the dilemma of that foreman at Darantière’s in Dijon who had to go through the page proofs one more time just before they went into print and who may have been responsible for that famous regularization of Joyce’s ‘Nother dying’ to ‘Mother dying’, in the telegram to Stephen in Paris as we find it in ‘Proteus’: I can sympathize. If you had ever seen a linotypesetter at work you would know that ‘.) eatondph 1/8 ador doarador douradora’ in the Evening Telegraph’s report of Dignam’s funeral is a botched line of type. When the typesetter notices an error in a line he fills the line with a mere quick jumble of letters and then throws it away. Sometimes, by oversight, it remains and may not be detected in last-minute checking. It was a common occurrence in newspapers. In one of his perceptive notes, Hugh Kenner once pointed out what I had often observed in practice. The line in Ulysses, come to think of it, is a Non-Throwaway.

I believe you have first-hand experience of dutiful proofreaders? I do, and it taught me an early lesson when I added my first tiny quota to Joyce studies. The occasion was that Switzerland, which then meant its male population, once again had to decide at the polls whether the right to vote should finally be extended to women. That Switzerland was lagging behind the rest of Europe must have struck Joyce in the thirties, for he included our ‘Frauenstimmrecht’ (women’s, ‘Frauen’; right, ‘Recht’; to vote, ‘stimmen’) in the Wake: ‘When every Klitty of a scolderymeid shall hold every yardscullion’s right to stimm her uprecht for whimsoever …’ (FW 239). So I sent a little note to a few newspapers to indicate that Joyce had put his caustic finger on a national issue, and one of them actually ran it. For the reasons I have just sketched out I knew of the pitfalls of getting non-existent words into print, and therefore, in an accompanying letter, I stressed that the text should not be rectified. But, of

course, they knew better and intervened and rectified the quotation. So I became the victim of a conscientious fellow proofreader who changed ‘whimsoever’ to a law-abiding ‘whomsoever’ and so took away its raison d’être. For the old argument had always been that women would vote according to whim and not reason, which in fact I had explained in my comments. (As it happens, when I went through my lines right now the computer’s spellchecker did exactly the same thing.) So the next time you see Finnegan’s Wake, with an errant apostrophe, don’t automatically blame the author, it may have been an officious proofreader doing his unenlightened best. In my experience Finnegans Wake was falsified by well-meant correction, but the process itself was Wakean. Joyce teaches us to get wrong things right but not to make them right.

Why did you never apply for a more interesting job? Oddly enough, I did those twenty-three years of proofreading in a period when it would have been easy to find a better job, but I just seemed unable to apply for something more adequate, as I would have had to advertize myself. So I stayed on. Of course, once I left the printing plant in the evening, all the spare time was my own, which is not true of academics or managers, so I could devote it to getting familiar with Ulysses and the Wake. Students during their college years generally do not have the luxury of engaging intimately with complex texts and are under pressure to produce something original before they are really ready for it. When the job is different from the hobby, the plus side is that you are not under the tyranny of premature publication and don’t have to produce a certain amount of pages for a CV. What we amateurs turn out has a different impetus, in addition to the obvious vanity of seeing one’s name in print, or the need for self-therapy. The motive is a notion that we have something to pass on. It may be, and often is, just as inept as anything else, but it is not connected with a possible career. The word ‘publish’, with its academic reverberations, always makes me feel ill at ease. Of course, evenings and weekends were filled with more and more Joycean correspondence and what you might term administrative chores within that unofficial community of scholars and amateurs.

Eventually you did join a publisher, didn’t you? I did, though it is amazing how much more we owe to chance than to planning. The release from the printing job came in a roundabout way. When Hans Wollschläger, whose Ulysses translation had just been enthusiastically reviewed, visited me in 1976, he had an appointment with Gerd Haffmans, the astute editor-in-chief of Diogenes Verlag, a dynamic publishing company that has come to be the largest in Switzerland. Somehow they must have been talking about my situation and, as a result, I was asked to join Diogenes. Life conditions improved when I switched over. I was still a proofreader, but instead of ephemera I was now dealing with books that were much more of a challenge. One of my first tasks was to oversee a complete edition of Arthur Schopenhauer, the one philosopher I have read completely, or rather haven’t read, but have attended to his spelling and punctuation. It is an arduous task to watch the spelling, and to make sure that nothing is omitted by inadvertence, and yet still not lose track of the content. Ideally it would take two separate runs. Soon, however, I was promoted to copy editor, ‘Lektor’, as it’s called in German. I mainly had to check translations from English, though there really never was time for comparing every sentence with the original. You learn a lot about a text when you see its translation fall short. I am not talking about mistakes, though they, too, can reflect back on the original, but about whatever is beyond the reach of a lexical, vocal, cultural or atmospheric transfer. (You will, no doubt, hear more about this.) What fascinated me most were the aspects of a literary work which could or should be privileged in a translation, a matter of subjective views and biases. There are always alternative ways of never achieving one’s goal. The relationship between translators and copy editors is precarious. Translators do not always like their support, which may amount, in their view, to insensitive interference. I often thought, in turn, that translators did not go far enough in their attempts to replicate some idiosyncrasies of the original text, which was clearly due to my being corrupted by Joycean intricacies. I also became a regular participant in the annual meeting of German-speaking translators, where I usually conducted a workshop. It consisted of an open discussion of how to do justice to a taxing English text. Eventually, of course, almost all literary texts are challenging.

Did you do any translating yourself? I have become a minor translator of Joyce, again by accident, not design. When I was in charge of the German edition of Ellmann’s biography, which mainly meant overseeing the translation and providing the quotations, it fell to me to put into German what had not yet been done. This included the epigraphs from Finnegans Wake, and I merely added an interlinear gloss to the original. But Ellmann also cited many of Joyce’s letters, and I put them into my best German. One of them is that charming letter to Joyce’s grandson about the Cats of Beaugency (10 August 1936). When it was turned into a children’s book as The Cat and the Devil, my version (Die Katze und der Teufel) was used (and revised) so that I can formally count myself among the Joyce translators. In the course of routine work for Diogenes and, later on, for Haffmans Verlag, I sometimes had to substitute a lost passage and, more often, had to knock a few paragraphs into shape (or into what I thought was a proper shape). So, inevitably, I did a lot of revising. I have almost forgotten that I was once assigned to translate Whistler’s The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, which must still exist somewhere as a

handsome little book. But apart from a few instant task-force duties (when something had to be done almost instantly), I never took up translating seriously, and this for a very cogent reason: I am not gifted enough (to say nothing of the Swiss handicap of always speaking in dialect). To put it differently, I find that in Joyce I am always fascinated by precisely those items which defy adequate rendering. So I wouldn’t try, even if I had the superior skills that I admire in many translators who have become friends. I almost forgot — and this shows that I do not think of myself as a translator — that I did try my hand at it after all. I am even a bit proud of one small achievement, a rendering of Edward Gorey’s Chinese Obelisks into German and a few fragments of P.G. Wodehouse. He is another author whose peculiarities do not travel well. The essential Wodehouse is untranslatable.

What did Diogenes Verlag specialize in? Were you rubbing shoulders with prominent authors? Diogenes Verlag began in a very small way, but then expanded and is now the major publisher of English fiction in Switzerland. They have done a lot, especially on Irish and American short stories, and have discovered many cartoonists, like the inimitable Loriot. Working for a publisher one gets to know authors and artists. Among them were Alan Sillitoe, John Irvine, Ross Macdonald and Patricia Highsmith, as well as the then Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt. ‘Knowing’ them usually amounts to exchanging a few words, but sometimes there were questions to ask about particular passages, and a few authors were grateful for the attention given to details. Others didn’t bother one way or the other. Occasionally they were taken to dinner at the Kronenhalle, a restaurant with great atmosphere and original paintings on the walls. It was a meeting place for artists in the thirties but has since become fairly exclusive: it is now the restaurant to be seen in. On Bloomsday 1966, when the new grave in Fluntern was unveiled, the Joyce families, the mayor of Zurich, and the Joyce scholars were lavishly entertained there at a final dinner. In my time I have taken some Joyceans there, or was invited by them (thank you, Michael O’Shea). Its proprietress, Hulda Zumsteg, and two waitresses, Schwester Emma and Schwester Klara, had known Joyce and were therefore often interviewed. The Zumsteg family, mentioned in several of Joyce’s letters, had helped Nora and Giorgio survive in the dark years, when no royalties were coming in. At the time of our interviews, Gustav Zumsteg, present owner of the Kronenhalle, is among the last persons I met who had known Joyce and his family. The restaurant now has a Joyce corner which is much in demand.

Talking about the dark years without royalties: weren’t you later dismissed rather ungraciously by Diogenes? The atmosphere at Diogenes was congenial, easygoing. It changed, however, when Gerd Haffmans quit; he was the editor-in-chief who was, and still is, discerning and inventive, with a flair for discovering authors and initiating books. At a certain time he and the owner of Diogenes, Daniel Keel, came to disagree about editorial strategies, and Haffmans left to set up his own publishing house. He had assembled a small but devoted editorial team, which included Thomas Bodmer, who had already been in my Ulysses class. Bodmer was young, very conscientious, meticulous about translation, and very enthusiastic. Another fellow ‘Lektor’ was Franz Cavigelli, who had also attended my very first Ulysses course at Volkshochschule some ten years earlier. Later on he put together some of my essays. In the end, the old editorial team at Diogenes no longer fitted in. In November of the Joyce year 1982, and ironically the exact day when a few students and I started the first private, slow reading of Ulysses, I was summoned into the head office and told that I was fired. It was a bit of a shock as it caught me unawares. Coming home the same evening I bumped into a neighbour to whom — in pedantic response to a casual ‘How are you?’ — I revealed my situation. For consolation he handed me a tract which proclaimed that the end of the world was near. That, of course, put worrying about a job into a larger perspective and made it far less perturbing. As it turned out, however, the end of the world once again failed to show up: it simply cannot be relied on; not even in the ‘Circe’ episode, where it comes and goes without leaving a trace. At that time in our still booming country, people were not fired as casually as they are nowadays. It put me, at fifty-four, in an uncomfortable position. I know full well that it is all too common, it was just that constitutionally I could never possibly advertize myself, or apply for a job, which would entail blowing my own trumpet. You can see what a poor figure I would cut among American academics. But some newspaper took up the issue, and attempts were made on my behalf. I was touched to hear that some of my French friends, along with Hélène Cixous, by now a celebrity, were trying to find a position for me in Paris.

So what happened next in Zurich? For two years (1983–5) I worked, part-time, for the new Haffmans Verlag. At first it consisted of just six people, and all of us, including the publisher himself, had next to no remuneration but plenty of devotion. The first harvests consisted of fine books, done with great care. Haffmans suggested publishing a collection of some of my Joyce articles, and Franz Cavigelli assembled them: Nichts gegen Joyce: Joyce versus Nothing (1983); some of the essays are in English. So I suddenly had a real book, not just articles and notes. It was received quite well, mainly, I believe, because it was something on a complex subject without jargon, or so some readers told me. It did me good to have a book as there was next to no income in those pioneering days of a new publishing venture. But during all that time, people in the background,

and I do not even know who, were at work trying to set up an institution, which eventually became our Zurich James Joyce Foundation, but that story will unfold elsewhere.

How did you juggle all those activities: a regular job, research, publications and everincreasing correspondence, not to mention your family? Perhaps I speak too much of depressive stretches, and my correspondents of the time must have been tired of hearing about it. But I am surprised at the bulk of letters that were exchanged over those years, and I suppose I will keep them and hand them over to our archives. Something that few might suspect is that, somehow, many of my former interests had evaporated in a kind of intellectual paralysis or neurosis. Joyce, however, kept me absorbed and provided the necessary distraction — the one workable substitute for living as I must have said several times already. The Joycean activities were the most rewarding. What we do of our own free will, and see a point in doing, is never a burden. The growing Joyce community also helped a lot. I always went to work, though, and it never seemed a strain. Of course, I never was very sociable and, on the whole, spent most of my time at home.

R EMINISCENCES What contacts did you make at home in Zurich? What of Carola Giedion-Welcker? Naturally I had heard of her, also because she had written on Joyce, and her introduction to the German Ulysses (Rhein Verlag) had become a standard essay. She was a prominent art critic who had early recognized the great painters of her age, and she had known Hans Arp, Kurt Schwitters, Max Ernst and many others. She got to know Joyce in Paris about the time I was born and became one of his best friends, so she was, of course, interviewed by Richard Ellmann. She felt she had not been reported correctly in the biography, and I was sent to her to find out what the inaccuracies were. We subsequently met on various occasions, often in her house, which was full of paintings, each one with its individual story. Her husband, Sigfried Giedion, was a famous architect, with Bauhaus connections, and the author of Time, Space, and Architecture. He once asked me to translate a short passage from the Wake, from the encounter of Jute and Mutt (‘Are you jeff?’), for a footnote he needed, and I have no idea how I managed and if it really made it into a book. In the sixties I did not know Mrs Giedion-Welcker very well, but enough to realize that she strongly objected to Milton Hebald’s statue of Joyce, which was to be put on the new, honorary grave. I forget what exactly her strictures were, but she was, as always, outspoken about the issue, and it was brought up at a meeting in Paris, where Maria Jolas was of the same opinion. Accordingly, the Giedions were not present at the unveiling of the statue at the cemetery on Bloomsday 1966. From remarks I had heard, I sensed some antagonism between the Joyce family and Mrs Giedion, which, in part, may have had to do with the death mask that was made after Joyce’s death at her prompting, and there must have been a dispute as to its ownership. Actually there is no ‘it’, for several death masks were made, but, for a time, I and others believed there were just two. Carola Giedion donated one to the Joyce Tower in Sandycove when it opened, while she kept the second. In 1985, her children gave it to our Joyce Foundation where it occupies a prominent place. Habent sua fati imagines. It was Carola Giedion-Welcker who, long ago, told me about a French thesis on Joyce by a young woman, Hélène Berger, to whom, as was my habit, I promptly wrote, and the ensuing correspondence brought me to the Joyce Celebration on 2 February in Paris, twenty-five years after his death. Some years later, when we knew each other better, Mrs Giedion arranged for me to do Joyce courses at the Zurich Volkshochschule, and from 1972 on there have been almost regular introductions to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. She often attended and listened benevolently, and in one semester there were three generations of Giedions in the audience, Carola, her daughter Verena Clay, and the grandson Oliver. Carola Giedion-Welcker came to the 1971 Trieste symposium and took a lively interest, but she declined to sit at the table of honour with Richard Ellmann: the resentment about those marginal distortions must still have rankled. In the Dublin 1973 symposium, she was more prominent, together with Maria Jolas, and she played along well and obviously had a great time, particularly when a man in the street approached her, admired her flamboyant wide hat and proposed to her, as she told me. Richard Kain and I put the two ladies on a panel and asked them questions in what must have been one of the most spontaneous sessions at any conference. We were much in touch in the seventies. Mrs Giedion-Welcker often had great, if modest, parties in her home, with all sorts of artists and people far above my station. One of them, whom I did not know at the time, was the young artist Harald Nägeli who turned into the notorious ‘Sprayer of Zurich’. For a few years, in nocturnal forays, he placed imaginatively adapted ‘wire frame’ figures on the walls of buildings, notably concrete ones, to the delight and admiration of many, and the chagrin of house owners and authorities. He was arrested just around the time of the 1979 Zurich symposium and was very much in the news; Nägeli showed Joyceans just how neatly order is kept in our city, or how closely art and defacement can live together. It was only years later, when Nägeli was an acknowledged genius, that he came to the Foundation and told me that we had met during those evenings chez Giedion. His was the kind of company they kept. When I had Joycean visitors, I tentatively asked Mrs Giedion-Welcker if they could visit her, which also meant seeing her Joyce collection and, even more, her numerous paintings. It turned out that she not only did not mind such intrusions, but actually liked them, irrespective of the supposed rank of the guests, and she freely showed us around. I remember taking the Athertons there, and Breon Mitchell, Klaus Reichert and Alison Armstrong. I should have asked her more questions, but I never saw myself as a Boswell or Eckermann, and I didn’t even take down what she told me. But I did enquire how she had come to Joyce in the first place, and it seemed she had heard of him, took up Ulysses, and it hit home. She compared the experience, quite a unique one, to a thunderstorm (‘Gewitter’ was her word): the impact was tremendous and led her to write an essay that was shown to Joyce in Paris, and a friendship was struck up. The Giedions became Joyce’s best friends in Zurich, and he often visited them in their house. I wish I could remember the comment she said he had made on a painting by Max Ernst which, at first glance, looked like a normal map of Europe, but then had it all twisted out of shape, no doubt a prediction of what was to happen to the continent. Naturally I probed her a bit about Joyce and what she remembered, including her memories of Beckett.

The Beckett she saw in Paris wasn’t yet the famous author, and she did not think too much of him. She felt Beckett was imitating Joyce’s mannerisms. Once Joyce asked her if she didn’t think Beckett had sex appeal. She answered, ‘No, you have much more sex appeal than Beckett!’ So much for a comparative study of sex appeal in Irish literature. One time in the Zürich Sihlpost (in Finnegans Wake as ‘sillypost’), our local GPO, Joyce, handing in a letter, saw that the clerk at the desk was reading a book in English. The clerk told Joyce it was Dickens, only to be advised by Joyce that he should not read Dickens, but Laurence Sterne — ‘He was Irish!’ All through 1940 the Giedions were taking care of the formalities needed to bring the Joyce family, without Lucia, back to Switzerland. It was a difficult time for our country and not the most glorious one, when thousands of refugees sought sanctuary, and many were turned back at the border to face an all too certain fate. It took a lot of red tape, permissions and visa applications, including a statement from the Society of Swiss Authors that Joyce would not become a threat as a competitor, and above all a hefty money deposit, to get it all through. Paul Ruggiero and others contributed, and towards the end of the year, Joyce, Nora, Giorgio and little Stephen finally made it to Zurich. Joyce had only a few weeks to live. Carola Giedion-Welcker died in 1979. Her daughter Verena Clay and her son Andreas Giedion, a pediatrician, later donated Joyce’s death mask, her correspondence and various documents to the Zurich Foundation, as well as the series of photographs that their mother had taken of Joyce in Zurich in 1938, in Platzspitz, at the meeting of the Sihl and Limmat rivers. From what she remembered, she was dissatisfied with the tie Joyce was wearing and gave him a more suitable one (the discarded tie now has its place in the Foundation). The photographs she took are among the best-known ones, and they have often been used without acknowledgment. In the autumn of 1976, Hans Wollschläger’s German translation of Ulysses made a big splash, rightly so, and he was invited to read in Zurich in the City Hall. The occasion was expanded into a little Joyce event, and Carola Giedion-Welcker, Professor Straumann and Professor Henri Petter of the English Seminar in Zurich were enrolled, as was Stephen Joyce who came from Paris. Elsewhere I describe how the grandson left his mark on the occasion. On the whole, the evening was not very exciting and, apart from grandsonly fulminations and the resonant reading by Wollschläger, it consisted mainly of a string of reminiscences. To my disappointment Carola Giedion-Welcker did not just let her memory take over: she had prepared a script from written sources, including Ellmann’s biography, and offered a fairly trite recapitulation of what we knew already. This would not be worth mentioning if the experience had not taught me a lesson; consequently, in these memoirs, we proceed in an oral format, with questions and cues to which I respond, despite all the hazards of spontaneous fumbles. Joyce left at least one tribute to his Zurich friend. Towards the close of Finnegans Wake we find ‘Dutiful wealker for his hydes of march … The man was giddy on letties’ (603). I think it was through Carola Giedion-Welcker that I once had a brief conversation with Hans von Curiel. He used to be the director of the Corso Theatre in Zurich, and Joyce may have paid him a tribute, at least Carola Giedion told me so, in the Wake, where ‘Hans the Curier’ may figure as an avatar of Shaun the Post. What he told me, and it is worth passing on, is that Joyce called on him one night and requested a childish drawing to be put at the end of The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies: it is the marginal illustration at the bottom of page 308 in Finnegans Wake. Joyce needed a genuine girl’s drawing, and it was done by Hans von Curiel’s daughter, significantly named Lucia.

And Paul Ruggiero? A Zurich friend of Joyce’s during the First World War was Paul Ruggiero. I now wonder when I first got in touch with him or even heard his name. It was probably in 1972, when our local library had an exhibition on Joyce, and I looked around for prime material like the letters Ruggiero had in his possession. This was the time when I got to know Lily Ruf, of the Brauchbar family, who also had some Joyce letters, at least one of which proves that he helped the writer Hermann Broch to get out of Austria. Ruggiero still lived in the same apartment in the Seefeld area of Zurich where Joyce spent some of his last evenings. Ruggiero had come back to Zurich from Turkey when the war broke out. He got to know Joyce and taught him some modern Greek. A postcard sent to Ruggiero on 31 December 1919 contains birthday wishes in wellaccented Greek. Ruggiero worked in a bank, the stalwart Schweizer Kreditanstalt at Paradeplatz, and he told me that Joyce knew when his payday came round and on such days often waylaid him right outside the bank for a loan. But, ‘He always paid it back!’ It was at the same Paradeplatz, in the midst of Zurich’s banking area, where much later, Ruggiero remembered, Joyce called out, ‘I can see again!’ after an eye operation when he was able to spot architectural details on the noticeable building of Grieder’s fashion store. For me, Grieder remains associated with that tiny anecdote. Ruggiero was among those who made great efforts, also monetary ones, to bring Joyce into Switzerland in 1940. It was he who owned the guitar that we see in one of the Zurich photographs, and, when Vivien Igoe came to Zurich to look for material, Paul Ruggiero donated it, along with some letters, to the Joyce Tower in Sandycove. For those interested in the kind of present Joyce would have given, we have a gramophone record Joyce had given to the Ruggieros, ‘Un rève’ (A. Nilson Fysher, Jean Lumière, His Master’s Voice). Whether that is the ‘canzone’ and the ‘disco’ Joyce writes about to Ruggiero (9 December 1938), I do not know.

You are talking a lot about the international Joyce scene. Haven’t you already written about the ‘Joyce Industry’? In fact I feel I have told this story so often that it becomes almost mechanical repetition. The first version was written for Mort Levitt’s Joyce issue of MLS and called ‘The Joycean Industrial Evolution’; a variant of it, ‘How Some of It All began’, was given at a conference in Forlì and has found its way into Joyce Studies in Italy, 7. Moreover, a whole issue of the Joyce Studies Annual is devoted to the beginnings of the industry. Since ours here is not a scholarly production with references and documentation, we are not going into minute bibliographical details, though we will list articles or books that come up in our talks in an appendix. One major aim of these recollections is to show that the Joyce industry was never a powerful centralized organization as some think, but that its various origins were due to personal involvement. At a certain time, and I cannot remember when, the term ‘Joyce industry’ came into circulation. There was a dismissive tone to the label as it implied something powerful and influential. It vaguely hinted at a gang of career-oriented busybodies, predominantly male, who use Joyce’s limelight for their own devious promotion. That, of course, did happen, given the nature of human beings, and we have had our fair share of it. On the whole, Joyceans (we will certainly talk about them in due course) have been industrious, hyper-active, and particularly gregarious. Over the years they found multiple occasions to gather, and out of such a proclivity there arose an international James Joyce Foundation with all the paraphernalia of statutes and by-laws and an imposing board of trustees. More noticeably, we have a fixed series of biannual Joyce symposia. Since other near-contemporary writers have not commanded the same sort of organized following, Joyce Unlimited has all the appearance of being impressive or even authoritative and is therefore a commodious target for satire.

You must have been considered a prime mover, at least in the early days? Oddly, I was very much part of many events and, at the same time, an outsider, not being attached to an academic institution. I am naturally biased and judge our diffuse developments positively since I profited from it all. Naive, perhaps, at the outset, I assumed that all of us were enthusiasts at heart who, for some reason or other, became fascinated and were in need of communication and outlets for new insights. Both ‘aha’ experiences and Joycean obscurities made us seek each other out. In the early days, we just liked to read Joyce and wanted to exchange what we had discovered and what puzzled us. Such devoted readers are always out there, and nobody may ever hear of them. Whenever one is invited to talk about Joyce, there is generally someone in the audience who afterwards approaches you modestly and shows more competence than many professionals. Unless I greatly delude myself, the Joyce symposia were always open to such readers.

Who and where were the charismatic teachers originally? From what I could survey at the time, eager to scan a dim horizon, there were certain clusters, often Joyce scholars of charisma who imparted their engagement to students, and some of those in turn became experts. Harry Levin must have been one of the earliest pioneers, and Richard Ellmann at Northwestern, later Oxford, certainly became a centre. There was William York Tindall in New York whose books, for all their overemphasis on symbols, were among the most stimulating at the time. Richard M. Kain in Louisville was one of the first to do field studies in Dublin. And, naturally, Hugh Kenner, first at Santa Barbara and later at Johns Hopkins; he was possibly the most inspiring disseminator. These scholars usually had disciples, and their generation, like me, is now on the way out. Bernard Benstock was another inspiring teacher. There must have been many others that I never heard of, as most of them would have been individual enthusiasts. American universities that acquired Joyce material, Buffalo, Cornell, Yale, Southern Illinois, automatically became strongholds of research. Then there was a very active James Joyce Society in New York in the Gotham Book Mart. But, at first, there was little communication, and certainly no efficient organization.

Does one have to distinguish between the Joyce Industry and the Joyce community? I have always been grateful for what I call the Joyce community, however you define it. It was initially a scattered bunch of readers who shared a common interest. I wouldn’t be where I am without all those contacts. In my isolation I needed kindred spirits. Harmless maniacs like the Joyceans tend to flock together, and flock we did, after extended correspondence gave way to more and more gatherings. What I refer to here is not a common or overlapping interest but the many friendships that grew out of it; they can last even if Joyce is given up, as has happened in some cases. I think I am not the only one who feels that in case of a real emergency, material or emotional, there would be Joycean friends to turn to, and this is reciprocal. Maybe some of us share an underlying despondency as well as some built-in irony. I am not talking about our views on the works or the author, but the people.

But it was and is not all sweetness and light? Some enmities within our amorphous flock stand out as anomalies, like the antagonistic positions that Kenner and Ellmann seemed to hold without ever achieving the reconciliation I had hoped for. From time

to time, personal insults surface in the Quarterly, but they are rare. Quite atypical were the so-styled Joyce wars, when Hans Walter Gabler became the butt of ad hominem attacks of considerable malice, and the subsequent public controversy took an unnecessarily venomous tone. Here I am not including the Joyce Estate, which would never see itself as part of a Joycean community anyway.

You were talking about real emergencies a moment ago. Have you actually been helped by Joycean friends in such a situation? During one of my downs, which I must have conveyed to my correspondents, Gerardine Franken and Leo Knuth invited me to spend a weekend in Amsterdam — at their expense — to cheer me up. A corporal and spiritual act of mercy. It was certainly not the only instance.

Apart from the charitable and the jovial, how about the romantic and the lustful? Shari Benstock once jokingly threatened to write a book on ‘Sex and the Single Joycean’, and I wondered where she would have found all the data or lurid evidence. Maybe she observed what was going on better than I did, or some bawdy gossip just does not reach me. There were a few relationships I saw develop, and odd transient pairings. I learned much later of titillating constellations in, of all places, Zurich, during the 1979 symposium in the Florhof Hotel, but, at the time, it escaped me and, presumably, everyone else. Some marriages grew out of Joycean pursuits originally, others broke up, and a series of realignments were to be witnessed over the years. One thing I learned when running into a Joycean friend after an interval is not to ask, ‘How is your wife?’ Nor to ask the companion of a Joycean: ‘Didn’t I meet the two of you six years ago?’

Many Joyceans who know of our project asked me specifically to enquire into the topic of Fritz Senn and (young) women? Don’t expect anything sensational. There were far fewer liaisons than I had avidly hoped for. I honestly wish I had more to report on that score (I think I’ve had a remark somewhere about ‘score’). I was, of course, frequently seen with a camera taking pictures, or just conversing, and in that there may have been a certain discrimination relating to age and sex. Indeed one would have seen me more often in the company of younger students than with old cronies. That easily led to speculation and erroneous conclusions whose optimism, alas, I cannot share. I cannot boast of spectacular successes, and readers may be disappointed in this respect. Then again, disappointment is the most common of all experiences. What remains as consolation is mainly what I call flirtual reality. So there will be no chronique scandaleuse.

On to a less ticklish topic. Talk about the first two symposia: things must have been rather adventurous? I feel I’m retelling the story of Buckley and the Russian General, something heard too often. It is the story of how Tom Staley and I, in my old apartment in Unterengstringen, in the autumn of 1966, valiantly, though also timidly, decided to set up a conference. It just happened when we found out that both of us would be in Dublin the following June. We thought we might find a few others around or might ask them to join us, so we drew up a mental list of possible candidates until the idea of a real, organized meeting that we termed ‘symposium’, or even ‘international symposium’, gathered the kind of momentum that you only get in the small hours of the morning. Anyway, we went ahead. Or not quite. I remember that Tom in faraway Trieste suggested we might wait another year until he could co-ordinate affairs much better from his home base in Tulsa. Somehow I wanted to go ahead. We had to enlist one organizer in the States, and that fell to Berni Benstock whom I knew and Tom knew through correspondence. When Berni heard of the plan and agreed with enthusiasm, he proposed that official stationery would help. This was no problem at all as I was working for a printer and could set up a logo with a heading, ‘International James Joyce Symposium’, and our three names and addresses. When I sent a bunch of sheets to Berni he wrote back that on that basis alone the Department had already supplied the funding for his trip. This shows the affluence of universities in the sixties; without the availability of money for scholars the symposia might never have come off. That first event was announced in our correspondence and also in the JJQ, and we were naturally apprehensive. None of us had any experience of such undertakings. I certainly had cold feet, but we persevered. We could not have managed without Vivien Veale (now Igoe) and Gerry O’Flaherty in Dublin, neither of whom had connections in high places; nor were they in a position to pull strings. Also it was a time when the name Joyce did not meet with universal approval in Joyce’s city. Vivien and Gerry did all they could at a time when phone calls were expensive and letters slow. We did have the mainly moral support of Bord Fáilte, the Irish tourist board, which possibly had become aware of Joyce’s potential. As I have often said, to arrange something in Dublin by remote control, via the good offices of Vivien and Gerry, was not a simple task. The meetings were scheduled in the old UCD in Earlsfort Terrace and, the following morning, in the Gresham Hotel. We also arranged excursions to Howth and a city tour. Dublin invited Giorgio Joyce and his wife, Asta Joyce-Osterwalder.

I had some support from Alice Schuster, a German lady living in Ascona, Switzerland, with whom I had been corresponding. I later learned that she had been in the entourage of Josef Beuys, whose own pervasive connections with Joyce have been dealt with extensively by Christa-Maria Lerm-Hayes in her monograph (James Joyce als Inspirationsquelle für Joseph Beuys). Alice Schuster donated CHF800, a handsome sum at the time, which allowed me to invite Frank and Francine Budgen. I already knew Jim Atherton and Breon Mitchell, who both participated, and at the symposium I got to know Norman Silverstein and Sidney Feshbach from New York. I only learned much later that Austin Briggs was among those attending. Indeed it was interesting to read his account of the first symposium, based on a sort of diary, and how he saw the whole affair, small as it was, from quite a different angle. Florence Walzl was a regular attendant early on. She had always concentrated on Dubliners and written many articles but, unfortunately, never a full-length study. I remember her musing one morning at breakfast that Dublin geography might be significant after all. It surprised me that she and others had not been walking as much of the streets and Joycean sights as possible. From then on we put a city walk on the agenda. Spirits ran high, we thought, and what in my view made the gathering successful was mainly the presence of Frank Budgen, of whom there will be much more to tell. It was great to have Joyce’s son there. He was handed a bronze replica of the death mask in the Tower and was both grateful and resentful, as I deduced from a remark that the original had been stolen from him. Giorgio Joyce must have referred to a conflict between the family and the Giedions in Zurich after Joyce’s death. Giorgio also met Constantine Curran and his daughter Elizabeth, but I did not approach them. Strange, all those missed opportunities: but then I would not have known what to say to all of those who still remembered the man. Details of that Ur-symposium will probably be dished out piecemeal as we go along.

It’s a small point only, but I read in Joseph Kelly’s Our Joyce that Berni Benstock reported how, after the first symposium, Fritz Senn cut the Irish ‘into small pieces’ during his speech of thanks, ‘without them ever being sure that he was being nasty. A great performance’. It doesn’t sound like you. I have almost forgotten this minor event but now remember that Berni commented on a short speech. We, the non-Irish importers of the first symposium, had felt not only a lack of support but almost hostility, certainly the sarcastic disdain from the press. After the two official days, some of us were invited to a lunch with a few local dignitaries. I was told that a polite speech was called for. I do not know why it fell to me, not a native English-speaker, or maybe I was prompted by Niall Montgomery, who knew me and not any of the others. Ever dutiful, I did say a few words that completely escape me now, the usual gratitude and all that, the Gabriel Conroy touch, but with my infinite tact I must have hinted at the lack of Dublin enthusiasm, so that Berni got the impression it was a diplomatic type of caustic doublespeak. I certainly was not nasty and did not feel I had been cutting anyone to pieces. But it is a good example of how reports, here around two corners, tend to exaggerate. Or possibly my own memory is at fault, yet I certainly would not forget if — in my first speech ever — special diplomatic skills had been called for. But all the same: the first symposium is the one I remember in most detail. I must add, however, that I never say anything formally that I do not mean, and I baulk at those obligatory current formulas. I even have great inhibitions addressing an audience as ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’. And certainly you will never hear me say, ‘It is my pleasure, or a great honour, to introduce …’

Was there a ‘guest book’ as early as 1967? Yes, I was already keen on guest books (in transcribing the word at first I wrote ‘quest book’, which is not inappropriate), and I took along a dummy, a book with empty pages, to collect responses and signatures, and I must have made a nuisance of myself when I buttonholed everyone in reach with my request. Most participants obliged, some even twice, so I still know who was present. Lucia Joyce had answered my invitation with a friendly letter saying that she could not attend but wished us good luck. Yet an illustrious bunch of family and old Dublin friends did leave their mark. Apart from Giorgio and Asta Joyce (‘ein grosser Tag für uns alle’) and Frank Budgen, I can now list or quote Pádraic Colum (‘Beneath your sayings there is incantation …’); Felix Hackett (‘… they may help Ireland to acquire the essential spirit of European culture’); Arthur D. Power (‘After 37 years remeeting his son Georgio — I find that still — a Joyce is a Joyce is a Joyce’); Bozena Delimata (niece); Kamilla Delimata (Joyce’s grand-niece: ‘I remember my grandmother saying that Jim had said to her, “When I am dead they will raise a monument to me”’), Jane Lidderdale (‘I am happy to attend’); the artist Saul Field (‘I won’t have trouble now completing my “Bloomsday Suite”’); Grattan Freyer, Donagh McDonagh, Milo O’Shea and John Garvin. John Ryan sketched a drawing of ‘Patrick Kavanagh shutting the holy door’. I am not implying that all the above compliments were wholly sincere. In The Bailey I overheard ‘Quidnunc’ (known for his columns in The Irish Times) remarking to a bystander: ‘I never met a greater bunch of phonies in my life’, so I asked him to put that in the book where it now remains. I must add that I met Quidnunc later on several occasions, and we became almost like old friends who had fought in the trenches together. At any rate he came to Zurich in 1978 for the opening of the James Joyce Pub.

There’s one entry that stands out, isn’t there?

Yes, the most memorable entry was from an Italian scholar, a mere spectator, who had written just one book touching on Joyce and who spoke with a heavy Italian accent. He had also equipped himself with a badge, ‘I like Proust!’ He did not hesitate when I pushed the book in front of him and, off the cuff, penned the following summary, all in capital letters: LILIATA DUBLINANTIUM TURBA NOS CIRCUMBLOOMSDAY HARPSY IN THART SYNJOYSIUM AND I WHIRLL SINNGN THIS PAGEE WHITZ MY ‘SHAUNTAIN PENNIS RIVECOLATING THE CHECKLOES OF THE HIPSTORY IN THE SMAG AND FROG AND SMEKE OF EYERISH SCOUT GUINEASS FOR STRANGE, REMEMBERSHIPRING TIM STALEY & FREEZE ZINN, & BEANSTOOK & PLANTREE, & WAKERTON & FLESHBACK, & MAKDGEN & RHEBALD & 16 GIAGNO, & FEATHER SHAUNBRED & AUBIRTH & MRSS FALLOMON & HEILMANN & THE SINNTIMENTAL SEANGERS OF CHAMBER SCHMUTZIG AND BERTOLT BREASTS THREEMOLLY OPERA, AND SOON, SO ON, SAW OWN, SHAWN, SCIO OM MANY PAWDMY HAM, LET GOOD BLISS IO, BRITHERS AND SEASTERS, IN THIS FLAMING FLEMING FOAMING FIRMING FAMIN HYSPHERIK LIMENRICK DAY’. It was Umberto Eco, ‘a playboy of the southern world, Bloomsday 16. 6. 1904’.

How did the first board of the International James Joyce Foundation come about? The International Foundation was born at the banquet in 1967 in the Gresham Hotel. The idea was that there should be some kind of efficient organizing body. This was naturally arranged from Tulsa, the headquarters of the Quarterly. David Ward became the executive secretary as he had prepared the formalities, including a seal. So the International James Joyce Foundation, with American by-laws, was initiated with its base in Tulsa. Any other procedure would not have been feasible. We also set up the first board of trustees, all chosen from attendants present. They included Jean Schoonbroodt from Belgium and the dapper Danish translator, Mogens Boisen, and one Englishman residing in Trieste who was never heard of again. To be a trustee was more of an accident than a distinction. Basically the new Foundation had to organize the following symposium, and possibly subsequent ones. Tom Staley fittingly became the first president, Berni Benstock followed him a few years later. By 1977 it was my turn, as the last of the original triad. The office then did not entail any tasks, let alone work, but it looked good on paper. It was only when the Foundation became much more active and its membership grew that we were at last developing into that semblance of a mafia. When Murray Beja took office in 1982 he put the whole organization on a firm footing, formulated statutes and rules and so became the first active and operative president.

What about the second symposium? We all agreed we would continue. The second symposium was still in the hands of the original triad, Staley-Benstock-Senn, and we had much time to prepare the 1969 event. In 1967 the local press had come down on us with astute sarcasm which we considered unfair, signs of a still hostile climate. We thought that unless some free drinks were offered, we would face the same comments again. So I approached the Guinness company with a diplomatic though diffident letter that asked, if not for money (as was implied), for a reception. This was granted and put in the printed programme. When I arrived in Dublin to stay with Gerry O’Flaherty, who again kindly put me up, he handed me a box of invitations. About 200 had been issued, and we had to fill them in with individual names; naturally Guinness would not just open its gates to every boozer in town. Yet about 80 cards had already been distributed among local dignitaries, so late at night we were faced with handing out 120 invitations among some 235 registered participants. It led to some bad feeling, but, as it turned out, I think everybody got into Dublin Castle and had a great time. Or was it that Gerry had to face those who did not get in? One of the Guinness directors who warmed to the occasion mounted a chair and kept hollering that ‘Genghis is ghoon for you’. He had this from a list of Guinness references in the works that I had sent to them, a list which later, in the carefree days when copyright was not watched over by an avenging angel, became part of their advertising.

Wasn’t an art exhibition part of it? We had put up a small exhibition of artwork in Mountjoy Square, but the exhibits were mixed, and not all artists represented considered the others their equals. I have a dim memory of a well-known Dublin figure, generally referred to as ‘The Pope’, bringing an electric bulb and some toilet paper to the dilapidated house at the corner of Mountjoy Square, along with a few kind words. Nevertheless the symposium went smoothly, in spite of my worries, but some conflicts were inevitable, and the only time when relations were not quite harmonious was when I, overreacting, felt that most of the unpleasant work had fallen to me and most of the pleasure to the co-organizers, Benstock and Staley. They probably wondered why I was worrying when everything was going well, and I thought things had gone well because I had been worrying. This rare, in fact, only spot of turbulence, the only rift in the lute I can think of, was temporary and soon blew over.

I believe that there were other areas of frustration?

A different kind of fretfulness were those presentations, generally called ‘papers’, a word I put on my tongue with almost physical reluctance. Some of them were not suitable to begin with. On our very first afternoon in 1967, one scholar mentioned Joyce in the opening sentence and then recited a typescript about Synge, obviously not even a new one. Not that there is anything wrong with Synge, of course, even at a Joyce conference, but then the presentation should be labeled as such and not palmed off as a contribution to Joyce, especially when only a few papers could be accommodated in less than two days. Maybe the paper itself guaranteed a ticket to Dublin. So many papers were off-target, irrespective of their intrinsic quality. Above all I felt that there was no occasion, not even an inclination, for questions and answers. The speakers just wanted to fill their slots. In my innocence I was disenchanted, as I had hoped for an exchange of ideas among professionals. The naivety has remained and perhaps given way to resignation, though in recent years there is a certain tendency towards a more open format. I persist in my belief that the chairpersons are mainly to blame, especially when they limit their duties to an introduction of each panelist and at best impose a strict time limit. I had assumed that each panel would demand its appropriate format, a format that does not have to be serial typescripts and each speaker’s neglect of what the others are saying. You’ve heard me rant on about this too much already. But I cannot forget one such chairman in 1969, a Joycean whom I found scribbling a few notes for the duty ahead, and he indicated that he was not going to take more than ten minutes over the whole issue. These ten minutes had secured him a trip and a week in the Gresham Hotel. I measured this against the hours I had had to put in, and the 800 individual letters on behalf of the symposium which I had hammered out, corrections and all, on my typewriter. Also, I had to come at my own expense and was offered bed and board in Gerry O’Flaherty’s home. There are inherent imbalances in the system.

You seem to be warming to the topic of frustration. Frustration about missed opportunities at our gatherings, the wasting of time and patience, has now become a study of the stupidity of otherwise intelligent people, who often show a complete disregard for the audience. Take those who never even look up from their typescript and mumble in a monotonous voice. Or those who forget what the audience is and address symposium participants as though they were undergraduates. I have heard a scholar giving a summary of ‘The Dead’ at a Joyce symposium. I still shudder to think of what happened in 1977 when the proceedings in Dublin were to open with Leslie Fiedler, the star speaker of a former occasion, flanked by a few satellite respondents. The problem was that Fiedler simply did not turn up and those others suddenly had the floor to themselves, this in the presence of some not overly well-disposed journalists of a still suspicious press. The first of the speakers (no, no name!) kicked off with an observation that in substance said: ‘The more I look at Joyce the more I find there’s more in it than meets the eye.’ He had a point, and when the second speaker, on matters narrative, explained that a sentence of the kind: ‘Stephen walked along the beach’, does not mean that Stephen thinks he is walking along the beach, I had learned enough for the day and left. So the newspapers were right: there have been some very poor performances. There is always a mixture of good, bad and worse, but the inflexibility of some scholars is astounding. Many do not relate to what has gone before even when it affects their own arguments. Berni Benstock told me about a session on Joyce and Virginia Woolf at which five speakers took turns. The first quoted those well-known statements Woolf made about Joyce; and so did the second, the third and the fourth in line, and even the chair who came last repeated the same passages. What I love most are those speakers who put in long extensive quotes and then do nothing with them. Oh, yes, and then all those dreary, additive titles, ‘Joyce and x’, which, as a humane protection against excessive boredom, we banned at least from the Zurich symposia. I sometimes felt a few speakers at our wonderful summer schools, in Dublin or Trieste, did not have a feel for the specific audience, presenting papers that would be suitable for a symposium. Those summer schools are not made up of experts, but a chance assembly of students, some very far advanced, others just setting out.

Lest we lose track of the symposia, wasn’t the third one in Trieste? Trieste was the first city actually to welcome Joyceans. Niny Rocco-Bergera, who had attended the Dublin conference of 1969 and knew Tom Staley from his earlier stay, was in charge of it. We had a real reception in the City Hall and one large lecture room in the building that also housed the Teatro Verdi. The opening took place in the aula of the university. It was the last time that all sessions were scheduled in sequence, so one could absorb everything. Hugh Kenner held us, at least me, spellbound about the nineteenth century ‘Linguistic Explosion’, including the Oxford English Dictionary and what Joyce might have learned about his own language by teaching it to foreigners. We buttonholed Kenner for an ad hoc meeting where questions were fired at him. The Trieste conference was the only one where I could speak briefly to Joyce scholars of yore who never showed up again, Marvin Magalaner, whose work I knew quite well, and Ellsworth Mason who had co-edited the Critical Writings. I am not even sure they stayed the whole week, but I had a chance to take their pictures. On Bloomsday a plaque was unveiled where on 16 June 1915, Joyce announced to his brother that he had started on a new book to be called Ulysses. There were a few telegraph messages from other Joyce

cities. I remember the day also because I was fined as I had crossed a street without paying attention to a very spruce and obviously self-important policeman. A Scala Joyce was inaugurated, one of these splendid Italian scalas; and it was appropriate that it rose from Piazza Vico. In recent years, however, the name ‘Scala Joyce’ has been moved to the corner of the house where Joyce began Ulysses.

Is it true that a total gender imbalance on the board was rectified only years later? At the first symposium the only female Joyce scholars were Margaret Solomon, still unknown, and Florence Walzl. Typically we did not give much thought to balancing the board, except geographically. The board remained totally male for a long time, but to be on the board meant very little and did not involve any duties. There was generally one board meeting every two years, during the symposium. In the early eighties, a move was made by a few of our foremost women Joyceans when they referred to the gender neglect in a formal letter to the president, Murray Beja. Some overdue steps towards equal opportunity were taken. Nowadays the board seems much more evenly balanced, and it is gratifying to report that the last presidents have all been female: Karen Lawrence, Rosa Maria Bosinelli and now Margot Norris. They all have been very effective.

From gender to nationality: in your opinion is there a US dominance? The American dominance was simply a matter of numbers. American universities had taken on Joyce long before others elsewhere. American scholars also benefited from a system that subsidized travelling and participation in conferences. So, naturally, there was a transatlantic bias, and thus the (later called International) James Joyce Foundation, launched on Bloomsday 1967 in Dublin, made its base in Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA, the seat of JJQ. Almost automatically, the MLA style of conference would have been imposed on our gatherings, but I think, in healthy compensation right from the start, the symposia were never exclusively academic. So American reflexes prevailed, but as far as I can see, there never was any conscious imperialism. Events just automatically veered that way. For one, the presidency of the International Foundation was generally in the States, and for the excellent reason that professors there have the sort of secretarial help that is uncommon in Europe. Without the generosity of American departments of English in the good old affluent times, the symposiums — I never know should I say symposia or symposiums? — would simply not have been possible. European scholars had fewer facilities and could hardly even get leave for Bloomsweek, as it usually clashes with ongoing semesters or exams. European academics were often not aware that everyone could join our conferences without many formalities.

Staying with issues of dominance: English is, of course, the prevalent language, but how about Joycean research published in other languages? We have a scholarly mainstream, books that come out in the States or Great Britain, and the respective journals. Though British reception was lagging behind, with Ireland bringing up the rear, most significant publications tended to be in English. That has changed, but generally, anything going on outside the anglophone world, let alone in other languages, on the whole does not register. The Pléiade Ulysse, for example, may have been the best annotated edition for a long time, but it was hardly noticed. Books or journals published in France, Italy, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, or now recently in Hungary, exist only marginally. I was quite disheartened when scholars from what you would call Joycean strongholds in California were not even aware of a series like our European Joyce Studies, which, in the meantime, has run to fifteen issues, each a book. Naturally I am piqued because I play a nominal and slightly decorative part in that series. But it shows that a growing body of Joyce scholarship remains ignored. A handicap is that scholars in many countries still have to write their theses in their own language, which deprives them of any practical impact. Important contributions therefore miss the mainstream entirely, and yet many offBroadway productions would deserve closer attention.

Could you give a few examples? Claude Jacquet and her circle in France have brought out a number of Scripsi and other publications; at one time the magazines Poétique, Tel Quel and Études irlandaises, to mention only a few, carried Joyce material. There is a sizeable collection of excellent Joyce in Italy volumes, due to Giorgio Melchiori and Franca Ruggieri, yet they all, outside their countries, tend to fall by the wayside. For some reason I have been singled out for special reminiscences, but you could have found similar points of gravity in Lyons (Jacques Aubert) or Paris; Spain (Francisco García Tortosa, to whom we owe Papers on Joyce); Antwerp (Geert Lernout); the Netherlands (Christine van Boheemen, Peter de Voogd); Germany (Hans Gabler, Klaus Reichert, Jörg Drews); Bologna-Forlì (Rosa Maria Bosinelli). Not to leave out a very active Joyce Society in Japan with their own conferences and journal (Japanese Joycean) and Korea. Naturally it is hard to keep up with dispersed publications, but the JJQ bibliographers have done a lot to facilitate information. I remember that long ago I suggested at a board meeting of the International James Joyce Foundation that we might install a tentacular service. Joyceans in the various countries would have

to report back on what is happening and acquire every relevant publication so that it could be stored in some central place. Maybe it was wholly impracticable, but a suggestion nevertheless, of the nature that ‘Someone Ought to Do It’, and that Someone is never around, nor would we have had the machinery.

Weren’t the early international Finnegans Wake reading groups singularly international and multilingual, and when and where did they take place? An archetypal one started in the autumn of 1969 when the Dutch Ulysses was launched with a little ceremony in Utrecht. I had been in touch with the translator, John Vandenbergh, and also his wife Gerardine Franken, who did Giacomo Joyce, Exiles and Portrait. They were among my earliest contacts, and they had both been at the first Joyce symposium in 1967. Anyway, a few Joyceans who attended the launch stayed on for a weekend, and we were invited by a Dutch lawyer by the name of De Leeuw, an amateur Joyce reader in Haarlem. To pass the time we took up a Wake passage and hit upon the weather forecast in the Butt and Taff section. Somehow this animated us so much that we decided to convene again and turn the pastime into something more regular. The following Easter weekend we assembled in the home of John Vandenbergh. We, that is Clive Hart, Matthew Hodgart, Leo Knuth, Rosa Maria Bosinelli, a young and very enthusiastic Roland McHugh and Riana Byrne (who became Riana O’Dwyer and later a professor in Galway) tackled a dense passage about the Russian General. It was at that time a fairly competent group. We all came, naturally, at our own expense, even from as far away as Bologna or Cambridge. A few more meetings followed at yearly intervals, once in Brighton, where Atherton and Arnold Goldman joined us, and again in Amsterdam, but logistics and expenses became too formidable for this to continue. The last gathering took place in Aachen, where we were joined by Macjei Słomczynski from Krakow and by Berni Benstock. A group from a technical college there had done some spadework and were willing to collaborate with us, but the effort somehow petered out. These few enthusiastic gatherings set up a prototype.

Would you say more about Roland McHugh? Roland McHugh surfaced at the second symposium in Dublin, a young biologist who had found time to study Finnegans Wake while he was recording the mating noises of crickets for his thesis. While the crickets were taking their time wooing each other (I learned, incidentally, that it is the female cricket’s part to take the initiative), Roland, a recent addict, could sit back, wait and study the Wake. And he did it scrupulously and with passion and thus became one of its most devoted experts and also the author of many pertinent notes in the Newslitter. He was most co-operative in Dublin where we needed all the practical help we could get. During the following months Roland toured Europe and so was able to attend that first Wake group in Amsterdam. For him it must have been an ideal set-up, never to be matched again. Roland McHugh looked up all the Wakeans he had met or heard of in Europe. He copied our notes for what became his Annotations. I considered the all too narrow margins of Finnegans Wake totally inadequate and could offer only little to Roland. I had in fact stacks of notes of my first pedantic run through the Wake, and they must still be somewhere, but they were just a bunch of philological straws I clutched at. Our pioneering days are recalled in McHugh’s Finnegans Wake Experience, those meetings among industrious, often amateur, Joyceans. He resented the fact that some of us devoted a part of our lives to things other than studying the Wake twenty-four hours a day, and he seemed the keenest of us all. He later moved to Ireland teaching biology, and he alternates between intense Finnegans Wake phases and long periods researching local, specific fungi. His Annotations to Finnegans Wake are a standard and solid base, the result of immense collective labours. I have my own reservations about all annotation, but those reservations refer to the nature of (stable, freezing) notes and not to Roland’s persistent efforts. He is definitely of the no-nonsense school of Wake readings, suspicious of imaginative speculation or, heaven forbid, symbolic extravagance. He is, as I think Matthew Hodgart put it at one of those early meetings, a ‘minimalist’ in a field where ‘maximalists’ abound, those who see few limits to what any passage might mean in all the languages of the globe. Most of us start out with uncritical exuberance until it dawns on many of us that meanings only make sense within a context of putative relevance. During a visit of Roland’s, probably in 1970, I asked Werner Morlang, then a very committed student and novice (who has since become an important critic and homme de lettres in Switzerland), to attend a little reading of the School Lessons chapter one evening. I recall one of those typical minor thrills when we found that a paragraph (the ‘LOCALISATION OF LEGEND’, FW 264—5) contained numerous names of houses in Chapelizod as they were listed in Thom’s Directory. To discover them, one by one, in a source book, is quite a different experience from seeing them served up in Annotations, where, of course, they belong.

What about the Colloques Joyce in Paris? The Colloques Joyce in Paris, usually in the spring, became a fixture on the Joycean calendar, at least for a number of years. They were initiated by Claude Jacquet of the Sorbonne and always lasted two days. They took place in the old Sorbonne building, or the English Department nearby, and on Saturday we usually assembled in the École Normale Supérieure of great reputation (I always wondered that the French think

superiority normal, their own presumably). It was a chance for us foreigners to meet the old guard of scholars who had worked on Irish literature: Patrick Rafroidi and Maurice René Fréchet. Jacques Aubert was already in his prime. I was a fairly regular participant. On these occasions I got to know the emerging group of the leading French Joyceans, André Topia, Daniel Ferrer, Jean-Michel Rabaté, its first generation, and then also Régis Salado, Jean-Louis Giovanangeli, later on Valérie Bénéjam, Marie-Dominique Garnier and many others. When I first took part, in the early eighties, I talked to a young student with white hair by the name of Laurent Milesi, who seemed particularly keen and acute. In the meantime he has come to the fore as one of our most accomplished scholars with an uncanny command of languages. Among the many guest speakers that the colloque invited from abroad over the years were Marlena Corcoran, David Hayman, Richard Brown, Hans Walter Gabler, Christine van Boheemen, Joe Schork, the Benstocks, Klaus Reichert and Carla Marengo. The colloques were not so much a workshop as a string of lectures. I had to chair an afternoon panel once, and, after a modest French lunch including red wine, afternoon sessions tended to be a trifle heavy. There were three speakers, the first one a French professor (name forgotten, honestly) who droned on endlessly about Epiphany and all the new, fascinating topics, and he went far over time. But I did not have the courage to stop a French academic on his home territory, and moreover, I was the next one to speak, and it would have looked like selfishness. All I could do when he finally finished was to sacrifice some of my own time (and announce it with the intention to sting, which I am sure it did not) so as to leave enough scope for the last speaker, a young scholar from England, by the name of Derek Attridge. It was, for all I know, his first bow to the international Joyceans. But now I remember in the telling that the occasion was not a colloque, but the commemoration of Joyce’s hundredth birthday in January 1982. It merely took place in the same Salle Bourjac in the Sorbonne, of dark, burgundy appearance, and so it may be mentioned in this connection. Sometimes the colloques had a thematic focus, such as Flaubert or the notebooks, and on occasion they were in tune with what is called ‘l’agrégation’: that is when all students of English are assigned certain authors for their exams, as was the case for Dubliners, Portrait or episodes from Ulysses. The Paris group soon branched out to decipher the Finnegans Wake notebooks. I happened to be present once at a session in Claude Jacquet’s home, along with, I think, Robert Day, who spent a research year in Paris. At that inceptive stage the procedure was inspired guessing, but the method has been much refined since, and Joyce’s handwriting quirks have been investigated and tabulated. Now Daniel Ferrer’s institute, ITEM, in rue Richelieu, proceeds with methodical precision. We owe many insights to that team’s devoted analyses and publications. Once or twice the colloques were devoted to notebook studies. At one of them, Laurent Milesi looked at a list where Joyce had jotted down the name of beverages, which included ‘akvavit’, and pointed out (as I would have done) that the term is the Scandinavian equivalent of ‘whiskey’, both terms meaning ‘water of life’. It led to an extended protest by Stephen Joyce, who took a lively interest and reiterated that these two strong liquors were by no means the same and that his grandfather would never have confused them. He was, of course, absolutely right, but Milesi had not commented on the drinks but, rather, on the words and metaphors for them. The academic events usually led to an invitation chez Claude Jacquet in the rue Vaneau of many literary associations. The apartment overlooked the expansive pleasance of the French prime minister. In later years, Daniel Ferrer was equally hospitable. At these gatherings we had time to talk shop or gossip. In recent years the colloques unfortunately have been sporadic or maybe discontinued entirely.

I believe you have special memories of the conference in Dubrovnik? The 1981 conference in Dubrovnik, that lovely medieval city surrounded by ramparts, stands apart from most others. Ivo Vidan and Mort Levitt — he had been teaching in Zagreb on several occasions — had set it up as the first one on the far side of what was still the Iron Curtain. The Yugoslavs were eager to open up towards the West, and we, in turn, could at last converse with Eastern European Joyce scholars like Péter Égri, whose monograph on Joyce and Thomas Mann was available in English, and a very young Péter Barta from Hungary, who spoke the most exquisite Oxford English I had ever heard and who could have taken any part in an Oscar Wilde comedy. He later wrote a book called Belyj, Joyce, and Döblin. It all seemed like a different kind of attitude — and intelligence — from ours, and there was clearly a need for Joyce even in countries where no translation of Ulysses had been allowed. The Czech one by Aloys Skoumal was printed in 1976 but kept under seal for years in a warehouse, and no Russian translation had yet officially appeared. Once the frontiers were open we could see how much talent and ingenuity there was in Croatia, Słovenia, Hungary, Poland and other countries.

What kind of exchange have you had with people from very different cultures? Interest in Joyce is clearly expanding. In recent years, many Eastern European scholars and students have joined our meetings, especially via Trieste. After 1989 the borders were open. I am glad to say that the first somewhat international Joyce conference in Eastern Europe was initiated in Zurich (but don’t tell anyone), and it took place in Szombathely in August 1993. It was very small and poorly advertised, and apart from a few local scholars there was a handful of externals, Pieter Bekker from Leeds, Dan Schiff from Berkeley, the late Uli Schneider from Erlangen, Germany, Arye Kendi from Israel, with Ursula Zeller and myself from the Foundation; Anthony Burgess’s widow also arrived, but a few days late. Only a few students had come from other cities, among them a young and attentive student from Budapest by the

name of Tekla Mecsnóber, whom I met again at the first Trieste summer school and whom we invited to Zurich. She is a good example of someone young and promising, deservedly rising to the forefront within a few years. The conference in itself was not spectacular, but it seemed to have been the foundation stone for a series of meetings in Szombathely, usually in October. From such meetings, generally organized by the very competent Zsuzsa Láng, a Hungarian James Joyce Society arose. Ferenc Takacs, a disseminator of Joyce studies in Hungary, is its grey eminence. There is by now a sizeable Hungarian contingent, with Marianna Gula, Márta Goldman and András Kappanyos moving increasingly to the fore. A carefully edited and revised translation of Joyce’s works is in progress. One building in the central square now has a plaque in honour of ancestral Bloom and one of the better statues of Joyce. In Poland, where Maciej Słomczynski did a lot to make Joyce familiar through his translations, we have the very active Katarzyna Bazarnik, who has turned Krakow into a Joyce centre, with conferences and publications as well as theatre performances. Prague, too, seems to have become a Joycean nucleus, with a few conferences to its credit, and more to come.

But what of people from vastly different cultures? Years ago the Zurich Foundation was contacted by someone from India who had found our modest announcements, and thus one of our first grant scholars was Chitra Panikkar, who had already translated passages from Ulysses into Malayalam, a Dravidian, that is non-Indo-European, language. We were all very much impressed by her delicacy and her proficiency in coming to terms with as Eurocentric an author as Joyce. Compared to hers, our own limited knowledge of a bit of European tradition seemed to pale. Naturally I wondered how she would proceed and solve certain inherent issues. For Joyce’s ecclesiastical Latin, for example, she was able to substitute Sanskrit. Chitra and I participated in a Joyce conference in Lyons where she recited her translations of some of Joyce’s poems. In her culture the poems had to be intoned in a sing-song voice, something quite unique. The translator Jin Di, to whom we owe one of two Chinese versions of Ulysses, spent a few months in Zurich, and he asked more specific questions about ‘Eumaeus’ than, to my lasting embarrassment, I could answer. I, in turn, tried to find out what a language that has no letters does with constellations like ‘IHS’ (spelled out as ‘I have sinned … suffered’) but I never quite succeeded. Jin Di, who is anchored in the States, has achieved international acclaim since and has turned up at several conferences to share his expertise. Judging from his Joyce’s memoirs, though, the Zurich Foundation appears to be completely blocked out. I wish there were Joyce scholars from Africa, Asia and Islamic countries. We are glad that so far we could offer our small scholarships to students from the Ukraine, Romania, Croatia, Hungary and Bulgaria, apart from, of course, Italy, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Ireland, England, the Netherlands and the USA. We also subsidized a translation of Ulysses into Albanian.

How about Turin? On a number of occasions, Carla Marengo invited a group of Joyceans to Turin. She was a former student of Giorgio Melchiori’s in Rome and has been very active from her place in the stately and sombre city of Turin. I was first made aware of her name by way of a monograph on Joyce, but the first encounter that comes to mind took place during the Zurich symposium of 1979. Since then Carla has often been responsible for gatherings in her university, often small ones with a definite focus. When I first came to Turin for one of these events, in 1981 I think it was, she met me at the station, and we went to some suburban place to get a spacious metal bed which was used for the theatrical performance of an Italian Molly. Once Carla convened Italian scholars to a lovely institute on the hills overlooking the city. The theme was ‘How to teach Joyce in Italian universities’. Klaus Reichert and, it so happened, Phillip Herring, were also present, and we split the participants into groups to do Dubliners, Portrait and Ulysses; it was all quite different from the usual run of lectures. Carla Marengo has often come to the Paris colloques. I see her always blowing in a bit late, and with many bags, and she always has to make phone calls. She contributed a lot to the colloques and often spoke French. In fact she likes to speak French. Her early research was original in areas which later came to be known as popular culture and long before it became a fad. She and her husband Pierro have a great collection of art and avant-garde magazines of the turn of the century. In her case, too, I hope that she will get the leisure (which Italian universities do not favour) to sit down and give us a major study. She has a lot to convey, but in oral presentations it doesn’t always reach the audience as it deserves. Scholarly and administrative achievements apart, Carla is a great hostess. No one who has ever been up on the hill at one of her lavish dinners will forget the occasion and, in all likelihood, will manufacture an excuse for a subsequent visit. Berni Benstock, a good friend of the Marengos, would have corroborated. She had me in Turin for a few days in 1997, I think it was, for a compact seminar on Ulysses. I had the impression that the class I had each day consisted of different students. The day I left for Zurich, the famous Shroud in Turin was almost burned and, at the other end, very close to where I lived, a kind of Japanese brothel also fell victim to flames. And then there was Luigi Schenoni. Schenoni was known to be at work on a translation of Finnegans Wake in the seventies, and he corresponded a lot and asked for advice. When I was still Waking he sent letters to me and Roland McHugh and no doubt to others, to probe us about details, leaving no strange

phrase unturned. He is zealously scrupulous and works very slowly. His translation has come out in instalments of bilingual editions, from Mondadori. To date he has covered half of the whole Wake. His health has always been precarious, and he has been dependent on support, for no one can make a living from translating Finnegans Wake. I have no Italian, except a bit by osmosis, but I can guess from what his language sounds like: it has a kind of pulsation that makes it come alive. I know from my Italian friends that his is really a great achievement, and I can only guess that his translation may well be the most successful of those in existence. To my shame I must confess that I was very unfair to him at the Paris symposium. His oral delivery was slow and dragging (so entirely different from the vivacity of his prose) and our panel was packed, so I awarded him next to nothing of the time that is always scarce, and he must have been disappointed. Since then we have met many times, often in Cicci Bosinelli’s place in Florence, where he lived for a time. We can only hope that Luigi will be strong enough to finish his task.

Aren’t you a regular participant in the Joyce summer schools in Dublin and Trieste? I assume that the Yeats summer school in Ireland set a pattern and spawned a fashion, and the James Joyce summer school initiated by Augustine Martin must have been an offshoot. Gus Martin, I believe, had come to Joyce fairly late but soon caught up, and now we may wonder that there could ever have been a time without the two weeks in Newman House that he set up. I was not aware of the inception and first came to the summer school in the late 1980s and liked it right away. It is always a very international affair with students of all ages from different countries who attend two lectures in the morning and a seminar in the afternoon. All kinds of social events fill the evenings and the weekend: theatre, excursions, city walking, a banquet, etc. Gus Martin and Terence Dolan had a very humane way of taking over when a speaker had ended and of commenting on what had been said. Terry Dolan in particular summarized the lectures and made them pointedly and concisely relevant or, in some cases, more interesting than they had been. Most lectures were varied and informative, and a few, such as those given by Terry Eagleton and Cheryl Herr, stand out vividly. Not all speakers realized what kind of audience they had. It is usually a mixed group of a few experienced Joyce scholars, some beginners and, now and then, students who just come for the ride and are quite willing to expose themselves to this writer, Joyce. Some papers might have been more suitable for a Joyce conference, but these were the exceptions, and, on the whole, the procedure worked and works very well, especially because of the animated discussions that always follow. One benefit is that the group stays together for two weeks. The technicalities, schedules and logistics were generally handled by one of Martin’s graduate students, a young John McCourt, and they always included a soccer match. During my first innings I noticed, and so did my camera, three young female students who had come from Trieste.

And Trieste? I had known Trieste from that 1971 symposium of precious memory where the extramural highlights had been Italo Svevo’s magnificent daughter and Catherine Berberian’s rendition of the Sirens Overture, part of her husband’s (Luciano Berio) Hommage à Joyce. In 1988 a day trip from Venice to Trieste was arranged, but it provided little opportunity to see the relevant sites. In the autumn of 1993, they organized an extended Joyce festival, with events in the Teatro Mielo. Christie Burns, the Foundation scholar at the time, and I, were asked to contribute. When we arrived at the station John McCourt was there to meet us. He had quietly moved to Trieste, in the footsteps of another Dubliner, and was married to Laura Pelaschiar, one of the three Triestine graces of years earlier. Consequently, a delegation from Zurich was tempted to explore Trieste for an extended weekend. We were shown around by John McCourt, who had been meticulously investigating the remaining traces of Joyce’s stay. I think our visit was his first chance to draw on his research in his own vivid way. As a result we invited him to Zurich for a talk at the Foundation. So John and Laura came in November 1995, and we were all so impressed by John’s presentation, one of the best ever, that the Friends of the Zurich James Joyce Foundation supplied the funds to make him a keynote speaker at the symposium the following year. It was the first time, I think, that a young and at that stage still unknown scholar was given such prominence (the other key speaker was Jean-Michel Rabaté). I had never been in favour of inviting external luminaries who just came, proclaimed the truth and then left on the next plane, but it is just as well that these views of mine did not prevail at those conferences that did feature such celebrities. In Trieste, John McCourt, with the backing of Renzo Crivelli of the English Department, had worked hard to set up a simulacrum of the Dublin summer school, and he managed to launch the first one in 1997. The Trieste variety lasts only one week but otherwise follows the same pattern: lectures in the morning by assorted Joyce scholars from many countries, always featuring at least one from Italy. As in Dublin, there are mandatory seminars in the afternoons. A novelty is the participation of least one Irish writer; Colm Tóibín, Edna O’Brien, Michael Longley and John Banville have been among them. John or Laura always show Joyce’s Trieste in a walk that includes the Greek Orthodox Church (whose service Joyce described in a letter), the Synagogue and the Cavana, the old quarter of the brothels. What I like best is the excursion to the Carso, the surrounding hills with a magnificent meal, and there is always one evening of singing (with ‘O sole mio’ as its high point) and sometimes a visit to the Teatro Verdi where Joyce spent many evenings listening to his favourite operas. During the first years, Kathleen Rabl from

Munich was actively involved, and we owe it in part to her that at one stage a small exhibition was set up on ‘The Women of Trieste’, which became a precious monograph. John’s research is now preserved in The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste 1904—1920 (2000), which not only supplements pertinent information that Richard Ellmann did not have the time to investigate during his relatively short stay in the city, but also shows how life in Trieste shaped Joyce and left its incidental traces in Ulysses. One casual remark that John once made, almost in passing, was that a person like Bloom, in his mood of resignation and yet quiet persistence as an outsider in Dublin, would have fitted perfectly into Trieste at the turn of the century. The same attitude can be found in the characters of Italo Svevo. At any rate, thanks to the efforts and devotion of Renzo Crivelli, John and Laura and the scrupulous archivist and scholar Erik Schneider (not to forget former students like Roberta Gefter), the city of Trieste is now aware of Joyce and has been put on the Joycean map. This made it possible to have a great symposium there in 2002. I would not miss any of the summer schools in Dublin or Trieste. Augustine Martin died suddenly in early 1997, and the Dublin School might have been discontinued. Luckily, Anne Fogarty of UCD took over and has handled it completely ever since. It is always a great gathering, where a few regulars mingle with newcomers from many countries, including, once, two nuns from Africa. Most of us stay in Muckross, in a dormitory run by gentle Dominican nuns who provide adequate rooms with layers of blankets for every soft bed, and a crucifix. The latter comes in two varieties — the standard Jesus with two arms or the onehandled saviour, and we always wonder what happened to the missing arms. Participants have a chance to come together, speakers are generally approachable, and there is a great deal of conviviality. Both the Dublin and the Trieste summer schools have been talent spotters. Students who have attended have been promoted to lecture in the following years, Marianna Gula, Tekla Mecsnóber, James Pribek, David Earle or Serenella Zanotti among them. For me it is a good opportunity to discover candidates for our Foundation’s research grants. Anne Fogarty has conducted the Dublin summer school with great success, usually seconded by a ‘Patron’. She is an expert in Renaissance studies who has ventured into Joycean territory, and one consequence of her taking charge is that she has become a Joyce scholar of the first rank who has since contributed to many of our conferences (and at least one of our Zurich workshops). When she took over the Dublin School, which comprises two weeks and about sixty students, she probably never imagined she would have to take on the sumptuous symposium of 2004 with its Bloomsday anniversary.

Before you get carried away, would you say that for all the talent and fruitful exchanges, even Joyceans can be fairly predictable? Joyceans and, exceptionally, that also includes genuine Joyces, like most other people, are predictable. We know fairly well what to expect from them, say at a conference. Zack Bowen will be humorous, Shelley Brivic tends to be abstract, we await something original from Jean-Michel Rabaté; Hugh Kenner always captivated us with insights that we should have had ourselves but never did, George Sandulescu would methodically enumerate his forthcoming topics, and I would never stray far from textual close-ups. Some of us are to the point, others tend to ramble incoherently. From quite a bit of experience I know who should be allowed into a general discussion fairly late or even left out of it altogether. Many of us know which panels to choose and which ones to avoid. But a larger audience does not have such privileged knowledge. The same is true of books and articles. We old hands have learnt to anticipate what will suit us, and we discriminate. But, for new visitors in our library, all books, side by side on the shelves, are equal. It takes a bit of familiarity to advise what can be ignored and what can be recommended. Titles, in particular, can be misleading. Of course, at conferences we delight in fanciful titles so that the actual content may not always correspond to the label, and one may easily end up in the wrong shop. With books, however, it would be preferable to know what we will get. This brings me to reviewing, the one quasi-legitimate outlet for animosities open to scholars. We are often unfair and vent our own predilections or just claim that a book should have been a different one (which no book ever is). I, too, have been unduly jaundiced. One author, who listed Colloquial English in Ulysses, rightfully complained that I had not reviewed his book according to his own clearly stated premises, but according to what I had hoped to get out of it by way of new information, which the title seemed to promise.

Have some approaches incurred your displeasure, even ire? We all tend to overreact against certain propositions. I always had great difficulty with scholars who judge Joyce’s characters morally (of course, anyone is free to do so, it is all included in the price of the books). I lose my sense of fairness when ultimate solutions are offered as I had always thought that Joyce was an anodyne against such attitudes. We seem to have a natural urge to uncover the underlying secret, the one lever from which you can unhinge a complexity like Ulysses. Long ago, I ingenuously thought that Joyce would make us immune to the absolute statements of scholars who indicate that now, at last, they will tell us what it is all about. There is nothing wrong with quintessential truths, I just believe that Joyce has injected us with a measure of caution about large-scale certainties, unless they are very trivial. Remember the fuss that was made about ‘Love’, that word, who knows, known to all men? It might be more profitable to frame our approaches something like this: I propose to look at Joyce, or A Portrait, or a source, etc., from a particular point of view and examine what we can get out of it, than to elevate our

findings to a superior truth. I know this sounds like the tritest of all platitudes, but just go and watch some performances. Unlikely as it may seem, some Joyce studies still take the form of: look, I’m finally telling you what it’s all about!

You mentioned earlier that relationships with Joyceans across the Atlantic weren’t always characterized by tact. Do you think there’s a better understanding now between continents? When airmail correspondence was the norm and long-distance calls were expensive, there was tension at times between the organizers on either side of the Atlantic, often about simple matters of communication or delays. Misunderstandings and misconceptions occurred. I have to admit that not all our dealings with Dublin were characterized by excessive tact. In 1973, a worthwhile effort of a local committee was rudely thwarted, and it resulted in some serious resentment. Lack of diplomacy is, alas, still an issue, and I am a trifle incredulous that the International James Joyce Foundation, on whose board I still have a decorative function, could divide its members into ‘North American’ and ‘non-North American’. I also concede that I would not know what designations might be appropriate. Of course, it is in the nature of things that even within the Joyce industry (which sounds like a rock-solid establishment) harmony did not always reign supreme.

You have a few books to your name, but they are all collections of essays and came relatively late in your ‘career’. Explain, please. It was always others who turned me into an author, and I am a completely edited one. The first initiator was Gerd Haffmans who started his own firm as a publisher and employed me at a bad point in my life. He suggested a collection of essays, and it was somebody else, a former student, Franz Cavigelli, who took charge of Nichts gegen Joyce: Joyce versus Nothing (1983). Cavigelli had stumbled into my Ulysses introduction years earlier. Nichts gegen Joyce: Joyce versus Nothing was my first book, and it combined a few essays in English with articles in German. Haffmans followed with a sequel which we ingeniously called Nicht nur Nichts gegen Joyce (1999), and this time it was Friedhelm Rathjen who took the blame for the selection. In a similar vein you, Christine, initiated a more scholarly book, Inductive Scrutinies (1995), and selected its contents. I detail this blurb here also to indicate that I don’t seem to have the guts to take responsibility for a whole book. Someone else has to step in to take the blame, and I can always wash my hands of it. In our present enterprise we proceed along similar lines, only here everything evolves from your questions. As it happens, an offer from Cambridge University Press had been sitting here, inviting me this time to select a few essays myself, but I simply could not make up my mind for ages, and when I finally did, the Press had to back out. My own dilatoriness. But my first ‘real’ book, Joyce’s Dislocutions (1984), was entirely due to John Paul Riquelme’s devoted efforts. I first heard him speak at the 1976 MLA conference in Chicago. He was the only one to speak on Joyce, and so I naturally listened to him and introduced myself. A few years later, he came to teach at the University of Konstanz, on the Swiss border, within commuting distance of Zurich, and we spent many weekends together in extended shop talk, a good memory. We had, for example, different ideas about the presence or usefulness of a ‘Narrator’. It was his idea to put some of my pieces together into a book, and he took the initiative. He contacted Johns Hopkins University Press and did the essential work, contracts and all, for what was to become Dislocutions. John Paul later moved to Southern Methodist University, where I once visited, and then to Boston University, but, as happens so often, our paths seldom cross nowadays.

O NE THINKS OF HOMER You always considered Homer a significant background to Ulysses, didn’t you? It is, for me, a resonant one. Maybe it has something to do with the way I became involved in the Odyssey long before I knew of Joyce. This happened, like almost everything, by deviation. I was never good at working towards one given goal but always let myself be sidetracked. There’s a lot of such laterality in Joyce, too (‘Eumaeus’ or Finnegans Wake are full of it). It is a tychomatic axiom that plans, generally, go wrong. Tychomatics, as everyone would know if I had ever written my groundbreaking fundamental critical principles, deals with the machinations of fate (Greek Tyche) with its particular sense of malicious irony; most people know Murphy’s law which is a subsection of it. In my schooldays I thought of taking up chemistry and once I even produced a small explosion, which injured my hand and eyes, but left no traces. At any rate chemistry was a passing phase. In my high school, which was oriented towards natural sciences and mathematics, I turned to classical languages and so I became an autodidact, just as I am in Joyce. At university I was interested, briefly and vainly, in German studies, before I took up English. Latin and Greek were done along the way. I still remember how one Saturday afternoon, on a sudden impulse, I scoured second-hand bookshops to find a Greek grammar. I later took two brief crash courses, but I never learned the languages systematically with the drill necessary to read with ease. At any rate I managed to spell out Homeric Greek with some fluency in my university days. On occasion a line in the Odyssey spoke to me almost directly, and I could feel how some Hellenic listener might have been affected. But after a period of such dabbling my life took a different turn, and the need to earn a living eliminated indulgence in luxuries like Homer in the original. Once I had taken up Ulysses on my own and, in a second stage, consulted Stuart Gilbert’s study of the Homeric dimension, I refurbished what dormant Greek I had. That Ulysses could also be read — among many other propulsions — as a cultural translation of an ancient and fascinating epic, practically the oldest piece of European literature, multiplied its resonances. I mean live resonances, I must add, for the Odyssey has often been related mechanically to Ulysses as though it were a matter of similar situations or, Zeus forbid, ‘parallels’ (my rant on this occurs elsewhere). I was fascinated by interactive rebounds. An inveterate close reader, I looked at that first line of the Odyssey, where the Muse is asked to tell about that man (unnamed) who is polytropos, and I wondered how various translators had dealt with such an epithet, which combines travelling in many directions with mental flexibility. It dawned on me that polytropy suffuses all of Ulysses, not just a few characters. It manifests itself in changing styles suitable for the situation at hand, and, above all, it infuses the very language. In Finnegans Wake almost every item is polytropic, turning in different ways. Thus the impetus of Homer made my reading more vibrant. Stuart Gilbert’s worthwhile aim in the thirties was to bring the apparent chaos of a scandalous book back into the humanist fold, but his tabulation and, in particular, that welladvertised schema also turned readers off and gave the impression that the Homeric dimension had been tediously exhausted, if it served any purpose in the first place. Having made such heavy weather of polytropos in an article of long ago, I was thrilled to find that Joyce had used the epithet himself, not alone in that first line in original Greek (and wrong accents) that he scribbled on a piece of paper in a Paris restaurant, but also in a congratulatory postcard to his versatile French translator. He called Auguste Morel a true and cunning disciple of Ignatius as well as polutropos, spelled in original Greek.

What do you think was Joyce’s knowledge of translations of the Odyssey? Naturally we all recreate Joyce in our own image; so he has been made a liberal, a nationalist, a Catholic malgré soi, a philosopher, a chauvinist, a feminist, a guru, and much more. We tend to highlight aspects that are close to our liking and distend accidental molehills to pseudo-scholarly mountains. But Joyce obliges only up to the point where our hobby horses become patent obsessions. I am inclined to see him as someone who looked at Greek with my own fascination, but he does not seem to have obliged me all that much. As I said, he was able to quote the opening line of the Odyssey off the cuff, and he could spell out words from a dictionary and copy them for his notes. He seems to have acquired at least one Homeric song in Greek with Italian comments; an intention to dig into the originals may have been there. Joyce was certainly familiar with some translations, notably Butcher and Lang’s. I am convinced he also looked into the Odyssey that has been attributed to Pope: it would have been available everywhere. Stanislaus Joyce reported that his brother also used Cowper’s translation, but if he did, I have not seen any evidence, nor of his borrowing from Samuel Butler’s translation. The original Greek was no doubt out of his reach.

For all of that, would you encourage researching apparent Homeric dimensions? It is the old question of whether the Odyssey is important to us readers. It certainly helped Joyce in the

process of composition. Do we have to know the recipe once the dish is on the table? For me the question is rather at which point, say in the classroom, is it profitable to bring in the Odyssey? I consider all efforts to put Homeric summaries before the Joycean text futile and dissuasive. In my view it is best to see the Homeric undercurrent mainly as a signpost: if you like, go and look at the earlier epic and figure out possible relationships. Ulysses may become the richer for it. But if it does not, one can profitably turn to many of its other facets. Once we are on the Homeric track, however, we may well overshoot and expand the work far beyond what its author had in mind, though this is, perhaps, in keeping with his tacit rules of the game. I find the game rewarding; others, with good reason, may not. My curiosity hinges on how the two epics electrify each other. In recent years I have been lured into investigating Joyce’s influence on Homer. Interacting with Joyce affects how a classic poet can be understood. Predecessors may undergo changes in the light of their followers. Over the centuries Homer has changed in many different ways: he was one poet or two, or a bunch of inept editors who interpolated and rearranged. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries are full of speculation as to which parts of the Odyssey are genuine and which are later additions. As W.B. Stanford has shown in his highly informative The Ulysses Theme, the figure of Odysseus himself was judged and evaluated in so many different ways; he was by far the most intriguing of all mythological characters. What I mean by Joyce’s influence on Homer is that he (the author, authoress, authors, editors, to whom we owe the Odyssey) was much more adept at ambiguities than he has been given credit for. One reason may be that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries sneered at wordplay as something low or vulgar, not classic and dignified. But Homer could ingeniously play with a fake name and misleading pronoun: ‘Outis’ is my name, as Odysseus said to the Kyklops. When his reluctant neighours were summoned to his aid, they mistook it for the pronoun ‘outis’. That well-known trick with Odysseus and Nobody may appear heavy-handed in translation, but in the original it is incredibly subtle and full of overtones. If Homer could do it there, he could and did (I think) do it elsewhere, and so I see the Odyssey full of semantic vibrations, double meanings or secret namings. I am fairly sure that Homer’s contemporaries were rolling in the aisles (and also crying at times). Surprisingly this has not been pointed out in the tradition of glosses. Some obvious verbal effects seem to have been simply ignored.

Would you give an example? I will, but I have to look it up for accuracy. The princess Nausikaa is sent by a manipulative Pallas Athene to a suitable place for washing, and she and her companions stop where beautiful water is welling out from the springs. The text uses a rare composite, a verb preceded by three prefixes: the water, hypekprorheen: it flowed (rheen) from under (hyp) out (ek) and forward (pro), a movement that we can visualize. The very next line says that Phaeacian maidens ‘loosed the mules from under the wagon’. The verb is hypekproelusan: they loosed (elusan) the mules from under (hyp), out of (ek) the harness and forward (pro). An identical yoking of hyp-ek-pro, a highly unusual similarity within two lines (Od. 6:87–8), draws attention to the wording itself. Some play is going on, a minuscule tour de force that can hardly be overlooked. Well, it has been overlooked consistently, for the commentaries that I have consulted merely point out the difference in the tenses (first present, then imperfect) and do not remark on the verbal antics. For me the effect is Joycean; we are diverted to the language itself, led beyond what it simply conveys. I have also been pleased to find feminist traits as well as obscene overtones in Homer’s intricate language, though there is always the possibility that I, not Homer, invented them. Conceivably, such vibrations have helped to keep a text alive over centuries. I may be airing my own predilections, the richness of language, the conflicts it hides. Another reason may well be that I am learning Greek — not knowing it — and outsiders pay more attention to chance constellations of letters than those familiar with the idiom. I say all this with the reservation that, although I do make a show of the original Greek, my grasp of the language is rudimentary, more enthusiasm than proficiency. When you learn a language you perceive its oddities, when you know it, they are taken for granted.

This particular line of inquiry is not open to many. Why don’t you say more about Homeric correspondences? If they are pursued flexibly rather than rigidly, surely insights can be gained. The correspondences, or analogies, or inversions, are not equally beneficial. They are significantly inspiring for, say, ‘Cyclops’ or ‘Hades’, but far less so for ‘Telemachus’ or ‘Scylla and Charybdis’. For each of his episodes, Joyce seems to have employed a different translation key; sometimes the action is similar, or else the reverse, or a principle may be the main link, such as ‘change’ in ‘Proteus’.

Could you give one specific example? Some scholars have been claiming that, by the time we get to ‘Eumaeus’, the Homeric correspondences (of course they call them ‘parallels’) are practically suspended or abandoned, since no easy, one-to-one, relationship can be made out. Contrary to prototype, there are no great recognition scenes, as between father and son, in ‘Eumaeus’. In marked contrast, Bloom and Stephen enter the episode together right from the start, talk at cross-purposes, and revelations are ludicrously absent. Odysseus invents several fictional biographies; Bloom, though he pretends to more erudition than he can muster, does not lie. The

role of a dubious yarn-spinner is taken over by the sailor, a subsidiary Odysseus. Bloom is as distrustful as Eumaios, in the old epic, who remained cautious of the tales and fake biographies that his guest served him. Yet what is incisively Homeric is a sense of overall distrust: tales, oral or in newspapers, cannot be trusted, and language least of all: similes and metaphors are awry (‘the bud of premature decay’). ‘Eumaeus’ has a high proportion of the word ‘fact’: yet is it hard to determine what the facts are, let alone truth. For me, at any rate, in the absence of parallels, ‘Eumaeus’ is the most Homeric of all chapters. There are also marginal grace notes, like the nickname of Skin-the-Goat, a real historical figure, not an invention. When Odysseus arrives at the hut of Eumaios, he is asked to sit down on a ‘derma … aigos’ — the skin of a goat (Od. 14:50). For once, myth and Dublin reality fortuitously merge. Such peripheral sparkles do not validate the stature of Ulysses (all the less so since they will be hardly noticed), but they add to a sense of something else that is generally lurking. It is probably the something-else-ness that explains my own fascination. Joyce scrambled the chronology of the Odyssey and put episodes in a different order. In the Odyssey, the first meeting of father and son is when Telemachos returns from his excursion and is directed towards the hut of Eumaios. Odysseus hears his footsteps and notices that the dogs, who attacked him fiercely on his arrival, do not bark (Od. 16:5; Sherlock Holmes used this motif). Later, Odysseus reveals himself to his son, and from now on they can act in collusion. In contrast, Bloom has known Stephen all along, they are together for three long episodes, and it is at the end, as Stephen takes his leave into the unknown, that we hear ‘the double reverberation of retreating feet on the heavenborn earth’ (U 17.1243), retreating, not approaching. The footsteps in the Odyssey initiate the meeting of father and son; in Ulysses they terminate it. While on the subject, the classical epithet ‘heavenborn’ may restore Stephen Dedalus to the mythical realm out of which he, with his ‘absurd name, an ancient Greek’, arose, but, paradoxically, Joyce fixes him firmly on the earth (‘hawklike forms’ do not produce resonant footsteps). Relationships, to repeat it ad nauseam, between the two epics are not geometrical, but flexible and polytropic.

How about those of us who have to read the Odyssey in translation? There’s another idiosyncrasy coming into play: my conviction that translations never give you the full effect. So, if at all possible, one should go to the original (even where Joyce may not have been able to do so, beyond looking up words in a dictionary). Few of us know what the Bible actually says in ancient Hebrew; Klaus Reichert tells me that there is much more play on words in the sacred text. Translations lose, but they also gain on one level, as obscurities tend to get ironed out. And, naturally, odd meanings creep in. This is all right as long as we know that translations are substitutes. Joyce’s works, moreover, are internal translations of their own material, a matter of constant reprocessing. On a small scale, ‘Wandering Rocks’, ‘Sirens’, ‘Nausicaa’, ‘Oxen of the Sun’ or ‘Ithaca’ are written in different languages. ‘Ithaca’ could be rendered back into colloquial English. Translations are less than their original, but can also be more. As a translation of the Odyssey, incidentally, Joyce’s Ulysses is a lamentable failure, falling short on most accounts, but it is also a creative expansion. But that would be another talk. Victor Bérard (Les phéniciens et l’Odyssée) maintained that the Odyssey is a Hellenic adaptation of Phoenician nautical guide books, which were turned into delightful anthropomorphic tales. In this perspective, Homer’s assimilation is already a linguistic, cultural and mythological translation. What played into Joyce’s hands, irrespective of what he accepted, was that the two major roots of European culture, the Greek and the Semitic, were entangled. In this light Ulysses simply continues an age-long process of wholesale metamorphosis. Therefore, maybe, the title ‘Ulysses’ is not just the common English equivalent of the Greek name Odysseus. One hybrid formation (it is neither ‘Odysseus’ nor Latin ‘Ulixes’) among several others, it may in itself signal the multiple transfigurations the name underwent.

Do you think the Odyssey was a crucial scaffold to Joyce in composing Ulysses? It obviously helped Joyce to impose cohesion on disparate material, especially the seemingly random interior monologue procedure. (I wish that in these memoirs I had some corresponding grid to give my outpourings a more congruent shape.) Moreover, as a highly ambitious artificer — if you take on Homer, Dante and Shakespeare you must be ambitious — he may have realized at an early stage that practically everything has happened before. It is one of the bases for Finnegans Wake, which both says it (‘nihil nuder under the clothing moon’, pace Ecclesiastes) and acts it out, almost line by line. But, in particular, everything has been said before; as Terence put it two millennia ago: Nullumst iam dictum quod non dictum sit prius. There is nothing left but to reprocess what is already around. For the ancients this was common practice. Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Shakespeare and a number of later writers reshaped their own Odyssey, and Joyce aligns himself with that tradition, just as in ‘Oxen of the Sun’ he re-enacts a literary evolution. Joyce has become the creator of remakes, and he generally put his cards on the table, or in this case, into the title. The Odyssey already spans the whole human experience: family, affection, loss, war, power-struggle, vanity, deceit, dissimulation, etc., and it also presents a cross section of society at its time. This is probably one of the reasons why it still appeals to us. Odysseus is by far the most intriguing, vacillating character within the Greek pantheon, an ‘allround man’, in Joyce’s words, with so many facets in the literary tradition. He was hero, paradigm, deceiver, cruel enemy, inventor, liar, glutton, survivor. As a character he had a mixed press in the course of almost three millennia. This, incidentally, happened to Bloom within a few decades.

The Odyssey is plugged into Ulysses as the Iliad (and Greek mythology) was plugged into the Odyssey. Our Western tradition is implicated since its beginnings: literature is a matter of confluence and evolution. Joyce was equally aware, I surmise, of linguistic insights, that language was not something rigid, handed down at birth, but rather like a living organism which develops, changes, adapts itself, takes wrong turns, and renews itself. Each word, potentially, has a changeful history, and older meanings can be revived. Before and during Joyce’s time, myths, fairy tales and customs were compared. Bloom, on a simple level, is a comparative anthropologist. Common threads were found; archetypal patterns. Myths, legends, stories have basic similarities; all great myths have a descent into the Underworld, like Hades or Hell. Again, what is left is retelling and reshaping. This may also be why Vico appealed to Joyce. Originality in the novel is a way of handling given material, to give new voice to ‘the seim anew’ — which thereby becomes the never quite the same anew. Maybe I am simply justifying myself, as I have concentrated more on the How than the What. I wonder if I might, in my old age, for therapeutic reasons, draw up a list of the Homeric correspondences I came across (or that I made up), just to get something out of my system.

Enough about Homer and Greek for the moment. How competent is your Latin? Unfortunately my Latin is even worse and more halting than my smattering of Greek. I was never disciplined in its grammar, and I wish I could spell out Latin syntax with more ease. I think that classical syntax can illustrate a typical feature in Joyce. In Greek and Latin, the inflections liberate the words from a strict logical or temporal order, and meaning often emerges at the end when all the disparate fragments of information fuse. The motto that Joyce borrowed from Ovid’s Metamorphoses foreshadows things to come: ‘Et ignotas animum’ is hovering unresolved in the foreground until its sequel, ‘dimittit in artes’, supplies a verb and an action and matches ignotas with artes, and all items are tied up neatly. This anticipates how we read Ulysses as well as Finnegans Wake, when meaning is achieved by hindsight, not right away, on the spot. Such dynamics for me are more important than the archaeological retrieval of certain Latin quotes, much as I like such rummaging myself. Somehow I always tried to figure out how meaning comes about, and I thought it might be a panel topic for one of our conferences, especially for Finnegans Wake. Along this line I put great emphasis on what is etymologically present in our words for ‘reading’, that intricate and precarious activity. In English the verb is related to acts of guessing, advising or riddles; Latin and German take their metaphor from collecting (‘legere’, ‘lesen’). The Greek word anagignoskein (related to ‘know’) takes it originally as a process of recognition, an ongoing one as its ending in -skein informs us. All of these mental acts seem at play in deciphering Finnegans Wake: we put items together, we guess, and we may chancily recognize something we knew already. You probably guess, or recognize, how such concerns of mine make me impatient, to be polite, with static annotation or, even worse, anticipatory notes that tell us something before it has been revealed in the text.

You mentioned the Metamorphoses. How familiar are you with Ovid? I wish I had a more intimate knowledge of the Metamorphoses, and I don’t simply because my Latin is not good enough to get all the implications without great effort, commentaries and dictionaries. I have only dipped into them a bit, looked at the line about Daedalus and also found a Cyclopean catalogue which Joyce may or may not have known. Ovid is another writer who entered a vast tradition late and was able to play with it, give it ironic twists and refractions. And then his subject was change, as it was Joyce’s, whose works do metamorphose. A Portrait shows a young Stephen Dedalus, with a name lifted from Ovid, who is undergoing transformations. And the whole is re-enacted linguistically, in tune with Stephen’s development, from infantile simplicity to adolescent sophistication. Concretely, we move from a plain verb, ‘met’, in the first paragraph, to a much more weighty ‘encounter’ towards the end. Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are metamorphoses, and they are considered resistant to comfortable consumption also because they do not keep still. I am sure there are further echoes of Ovid’s poems to be unearthed, but, more importantly, I think there are analogous narrative procedures and semantic twists. Ovid was banned into exile, Joyce exiled himself and made a public show of it. There is a story handed down from Roman times that, in despair, Ovid once threw a manuscript into the fire, but it was retrieved either against his will or with his connivance. Somehow that comes to mind when we hear that Joyce wanted to burn part of Stephen Hero but did not quite succeed; mere coincidence possibly, and just like what Joyce did when, in 1918, his troupe of English Players performed The Importance of Being Earnest in Zurich. It is the play after whose opening night Oscar Wilde sued the Marquis of Queensberry for libel and brought him to court, with dire consequences for himself. After the Zurich performances Joyce sued an employee of the British consulate, with much more ludicrous consequences. You never know.

L ANGUAGE/TRANSLATION You like to trace sources, don’t you? I do engage in source tracing, and with considerable delight. On occasion one stumbles over a remote phrase that illuminates a tiny bit of text, but many manifest quotations or allusions and all too vague echoes have not yet been acknowledged, or at least have not yet made it into our self-perpetuating mainstream. I am sure that the generation of James Atherton or Niall Montgomery would still have caught an incidental echo in ‘his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face’, the opening of A Portrait. What is called up is St Paul’s ‘For now, we see through a glass, darkly’ from the First Letter to the Corinthians. In a Glass Darkly also happens to be the title of a novel by Le Fanu. First of all, what is ‘through a glass’? For all we know, it could be a drinking glass, after all it is Simon Dedalus who is looking. An eyeglass is much more likely and will be borne out in the sequel (the word ‘monocle’ would have been too hard for a young boy). Is the echo relevant, however, or a nit-picking indulgence? Hard to tell. Still, the Biblical context seems appropriate: ‘For now, we see through a glass, darkly’, but later we will see ‘face to face’. This is preceded by ‘When I was a child, I spake as a child’. St Paul possibly assisted in the composition of the opening of Joyce’s novel. That ‘now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known’ (1 Cor. 13:11–12) might serve as a motto. Of course, in Joyce we generally see as if through a glass darkly, all the more so when we know that the Greek is en ainigmati, the Latin in aenigmate, in a riddle or else a blurred vision. The ‘glass’, incidentally, is a mirror. You can see in how many different ways we could proceed. If I did not consider this a valid resonance, the tiny tip of a significant iceberg, I wouldn’t bring it up as a sample of how I try to find my way in the riddling texts; nor would I if it were a standard entry in any annotation. Note that the (hypothetical) implications of ‘through a glass’ can hardly be salvaged in translation.

You seem attracted to that which resists you. My focus is and always was on the metamorphoses, from the Odyssey to Ulysses, from ‘glass’ to mirrors or Joycean techniques, translation processes. What we cannot understand, or resolve completely, remains an irritant, an itch which propels us, or me. That might explain my impatience with clinching notes or with those who sell their findings as terminal truths. To return to Homer: if Ulysses is also, as I indicate without originality, a reshaping of the Odyssey, it is totally askew, it falls saliently short; it is, in fact, a total failure. It is both far less and much more than the Odyssey. But then everything is askew: our lives (the paralysis in Dubliners), Bloom’s marriage, Ireland’s dependence, our accidental knowledge, all translation or the words in Finnegans Wake. In short, though the above was not short, I delight in the way in which Ulysses and the Odyssey interact and transform each other.

For all the obvious disadvantages, do non-native speakers have any advantages in your opinion? From one angle I have rarely gone beyond language and a fascination with what Joyce can do with it. This has something to do with my coming to English as a second, acquired language, and we foreigners can never quite catch up: a major handicap remains. But what is strange or foreign makes us observant and circumspect. Our advantage is that we know Joyce’s English is not our language. Native speakers may tend to believe that what they read is what they have been brought up with. What opened my eyes was that Edmond Epstein in his pioneering James Joyce Review once drew attention to the word ‘greenhouse’ in Ulysses, which, he explained correctly, is not something to grow plants in but a urinal (they were painted green in Dublin). Now this had never bothered me because, naturally on the alert, I had mistrusted the word from the outset and looked it up. So we foreign speakers see language probably before anything else (and on occasion not much more), while native speakers — and not seldom native scholars — may not notice it as language but look right through it. There is naturally much more than language in Joyce, but there is nothing that would not also be language. As it happens, foreign versus native is also an issue that Joyce deals with. From ‘gnomon’ and ‘simony’ (which, for practical purposes, are aliens that have become assimilated into English) to ‘tauftauf thuartpeatrick’, foreign elements abound. Joyce wrote more and more ‘foreign’ English and showed that every language is also foreign up to a point. He increasingly exposed English as a foreign language. ‘’Twas the prudent member gave me the wheeze’ or ‘Ditto MacAnaspey’ in ‘Cyclops’ is the code of a group, similar to gipsy terms or technical vocabulary (‘faints and worms’ in ‘The Sisters’). ‘Ithaca’ is written in abstract Latinate language and is mentally processed for our understanding via a translation into standard English. The Wake, at times, seems equidistant from any speaker: those familiar with English, above all the Hiberno-English variety, have a great advantage, but at least patches of egalitarian

global inaccessibility affect all of its readers. I can see Joyce taking his revenge on the colonizers, turning the tables upon them, writing better English than they could and also offering them a diction that is above their understanding. All of this does not detract from the serious handicap we foreign speakers face. We have to resort to dictionaries, which is not the same as the live idiomatic experience; in particular, we lose out on that which native speakers absorb in infancy, such as nursery rhymes, jingles, etc. Even so, there are misreadings that would hardly occur to us who had to learn English from scratch. In one extreme case a scholar, teaching at a university, claimed that the Blooms once had a famous actor as a guest in their house; this conjecture was based on Molly’s comment that Milly, at one time, was stage-struck: ‘and then we had Martin Harvey for breakfast dinner and supper’. It is comforting that someone else’s command of English is even poorer than one’s own.

Can Joyce appeal to readers with little sense of language, and if so, how? The off-the-cuff response is No, how could he? First of all, naturally, we all have some sense of language, otherwise how could we read? But I know what you mean, probably those who do not see language as language, who see through it to either a simulated reality or to chimeras like gender or masculinity, though valuable contributions have been made in this way. So yes, indeed, Joyce does appeal to those who are deprived of such a sense, or simply have no interest in language. There are dozens of excellent books to prove it, and some not so excellent ones as well. What you probably want to elicit is my own particular narrow focus, which is generally on language first, at times almost exclusively. Of course, ‘little sense of language’ may mean no more than that other readers respond differently to a text. It is always the others who have no such sense, pure arrogance. But differences there are. I even have some unstated rules of thumb to determine them, a few giveaway terms. (The indiscriminate use of ‘pun’ will come up sooner or later in our interviews.) I must have served up a few instances, samples of a restricted sense. Instances of logotyphlosis — yes, I know, this is made up for the purpose, since ‘word-blindness’ might sound too harsh. I mean phrases like ‘claustrophobic forces’, which I have come across in criticism. A force might put you into a confined space and make you, the victim, claustrophobic. Forces, I mean, do not fear (-phobic), but they may put fear in you. Such cases abound, and so do many of wrong readings, not matters of opinion or latitude, but readings that are plainly wrong. I just recently came upon an article dealing with that dream in ‘The Sisters’ in which the dead priest appears. The article claims that the word ‘simoniac’, employed for the priest, a carryover from that strange word ‘simony’ in the opening, is a ‘malapropism’. Not that dreams are known for scientific or terminological precision anyway, but the clinching argument was that what the boy really wanted to say was ‘sex maniac’. The term ‘sex’ has changed a lot since Joyce’s adolescence, and ‘sex maniac’ has such a modern, adult ring that it would hardly have been around at the end of the nineteenth century, and even if it had been, a timid Catholic boy at the time would not have known, let alone used, it. This is a gross example, but not entirely atypical. Verbal obtuseness is not uncommon, and it may matter when reading an author whose manipulation of nuances is superb. But then whose sense is decisive? There are cases that are hard to determine, for example Molly’s famous exclamation (and unwitting metafictional appeal to the author), ‘O Jamesy let me up out of this pooh’. Some readers take ‘pooh’ to be a noun (‘out of this pooh’); others, like myself, see ‘pooh’ as an exclamation. How would we settle the issue? We can dredge up analogous occurrences (‘Pooh!’, said by Mulligan or Lynch elsewhere) or contemporary usage. It is always hard to determine what meanings were current at which stage (take a word like ‘gay’). We probably go by our subjective feeling or sense.

Presumed sexual overtones can be particularly problematic …? The question suddenly reminds me that in the late twenties Georg Goyert translated A Portrait into German, and he misconstrued a remark that Pascal did not kiss his mother, ‘as he feared the contact of her sex’, as ‘he was afraid to touch her genitals’. One can see how this arose. The semantic leap owes something to a dubious premise that sex (now in the modern sense) is prevalent, even ubiquitous in Joyce. But words are tricky beings, and we had better be on our guard. I am warming to the subject. But you see where my interest lies, in such small matters, and I generally maintain that we are better off once we understand many of those.

Let’s return to those readers who lack a sound awareness of language: how do they fare? Joyce does have a wide appeal, even irrespective of a clear awareness of language. I often wonder what the appeal is, if it is one appeal or a multifarious aggregate. What is it about Joyce that fascinates so many different temperaments or tastes? Always assuming, of course, that we know it ourselves. Is there an underlying archetypal current, or is it just that Joyce can be all things to all readers, an opulent selfservice buffet? I tried to probe this once with a session on ‘Why Are We Here?’ in Monte Carlo, but somehow it did not come off, perhaps also because there is neither precedent nor a terminology for the question itself. A similar panel I tried in Seville in 1994 was a complete flop. The ‘appeal’ meanwhile has snowballed into global Bloomsday celebrations, which provoked voices of protest about the whole carnival of the jubilee year of 2004. Justified sardonic comments were made about an appeal that reached and moved multitudes who would never think of reading a book: public lip-

service to a commodity. It is revealing all the same that Joyce, who was blamed for sublime selfsufficiency, an Ivory-Tower attitude, literature for the elect, etc., has become what he also wrote about: popular culture, entertainment for the masses, panem et circenses, including nonsense, vulgarization, misappropriation and crass commercialism. Joyce does have an appeal, not only for some with little sense of language, but also for those who would not read him even at gunpoint. Had he been around to experience it all in 2004, he might well have made some caustic remarks and expressed sublime disgust, but I feel he would also have been utterly pleased. I am almost losing sight of language, our topic at hand. But I catch myself, when some essay is called for, going first to the text itself, trying to find the thematic terms there. Joyce is no doubt convenient in supplying a title for almost anything.

One might safely say you’re on intimate terms with Joyce’s texts: does this explain your interest in translation? In part it does, actually a large part. No doubt translations have always intrigued me. You will hear me refer to the topic time and again. Translations are inherently inadequate and yet they are necessary, simply because a large number of readers has no access to originals; in fact, that covers the majority of cases, and without translations all of us would be debarred entirely from large areas. Translations, whether appropriate or faulty, are substitutes, shadows, second-best. Theoretically a translation could be better than the original and improve it, but according to the ground rules it would still fall short since it would change the original, even if for the better. With writers like Joyce, however, the dangers of improving the works by a different rendering are minimal. The alternative to translation is not, as a rule, the original work, but nothing whatsoever, a complete blank. So every translation remains better than no insight at all into a foreign literature. Not to forget, all literature, possibly all culture, also depends on inadequate translation. We may never quite know what certain passages in Genesis or Job conveyed in their time, but the King James Bible, or Luther in Germany, turned them into words and notions that take on a partly independent and often radiant life. I once commented on Joyce’s fictional Father Purdon in ‘Grace’, who, as far as I could make out, misquotes the Gospel in his sermon when he substitutes ‘when ye die’ for the much more common ‘when ye fail’ (Luke 16:9). I thought it possibly significant that a potential business term (‘fail’) would be elided. So I guessed around Greek (eklipete) and Latin (defeceritis) to see whether there is any justification for ‘died’ and found none. Only recently did I look into various Bible translations and found the passage rendered in different ways (apart from a still dominant ‘when ye fail’): ‘when it [money] is gone — when it fails — when your money is spent — when your riches are gone — when riches are a thing of the past’, etc. The point here is not a new angle on ‘Grace’ but the fact, a fact, that we can hardly rely on translation even concerning a book considered an essential foundation of our culture. While trading in platitudes, let me add that all reading is already translation, from an array of traditional symbols on a page to thoughts, ideas, emotions, descriptions. The misreadings I expatiated on just a few moments ago are mistranslations. A word like ‘pooh’ in a passage is translated into a noun or an exclamation, and only one of them is meant by Molly and therefore ‘correct’ on the surface.

When did you begin to take an interest in translation? It all came naturally. Like everyone else I must have started out with the naive, unreflected premise, which is shared by publishers, that Shakespeare, for example, is Shakespeare even if I read the plays in German. But then I was drawn to Joyce early on, and I began to wonder how certain portions of Ulysses, the ones that intrigued me most, would appear in the German rendering by Georg Goyert. I also looked into the history. The Ulysses translation of 1927 was the first to appear. A substantially revised version was published in 1930, with many cues taken from the French Ulysse of 1929. The original three-volume edition of 1927 was a ‘Privatdruck’ to evade censorship; its subscription was (at least formally) limited to incorruptible persons like judges or doctors, members of respected professions less prone to depravity than the lower orders. I only knew the revised version, which afterwards was hardly changed. So my first probings drew me into the problematic nature of translation, and, as always, all the problems of old are magnified in Joyce and can no longer be overlooked. In the late twenties, only a few years after the original publication, a translator could hardly be familiar with the chaotic intricacies of Ulysses as there was practically no help at hand, nor were there dictionaries that went beyond standard English. Dublin and its institutions were largely unfamiliar, out of reach. I was just curious to see how a translator would cope with the delightful complexity of the original. When you do this the danger is simply to find fault and feel superior, a great temptation with practically all criticism of translations. Gleefully chasing inadequacies, though, is less profitable than determining what causes them. The German translation was ‘authorized’ by Joyce. It said, ‘vom Verfasser geprüft’ (‘examined by the author’), but Joyce hardly went through it word by word; his approval must have been legal and not a detailed literary sanction. There was a lot that Goyert simply could not have known, even though he had the opportunity to ask the author and made relatively sparse use of it (possibly he was not encouraged). From what evidence we have, he proposed a mere eleven questions for the ‘Oxen’ coda (in which practically every sentence is in need of specific explanation). To look at what Goyert had done, bravely, was both revealing and stimulating. It was precisely the deficiencies which taught me a lot about the original. Translation shortcomings often reveal a textual crux. Soon I extended my probing into that

classic French Ulysse, which had ended up being a common effort under the aegis of the author himself. Before long I acquired a Spanish and a Danish version. Not that I can read these languages, but they are close enough for me to guess at the attempts (at least sound effects or repetitions can be observed). The Italian Ulisse came out in 1960, by de Angelis with the help of Giorgio Melchiori. A correspondent at the time faulted it because it had not done to the Italian language what Joyce had done to English, because, in other words, it was not innovative and adventurous enough. So my activity turned into a hobby or obsession, and I got more and more involved. I ran a first translation panel in Trieste, 1971 and, perhaps, it was the first open one, without any scripts and with every participant responding to questions, and no one knew where we were going. In the meantime, translation studies in Joyce have become widespread, and there is hardly a symposium where we do not have a few sessions on the topic.

Could you describe what a translation should attempt? Not really, except that we can demand with nonchalant complacency that a translation should reproduce all possible effects of the original. Yet how to go about it can hardly be stated clearly. Just as well, perhaps. Translation depends on knowledge, craftsmanship, diligence, accuracy, perspicuity, etc. and on inspiration and creative impulses. Let me add that we talk about translation in metaphors (oddly enough ‘metaphor’ is already the exact equivalent of Latin translatio), and none of them is really appropriate. Translation is ‘carrying across’; it conjures up a kind of postal delivery, and the same is true for German (‘übersetzen’, as ‘across a river’) where something has to be transported under adverse circumstances. But in translation the content is not just brought to another place, safely wrapped; rather the packaged content itself changes substantially. In fact, every word of it is transformed, with the possible exception of names. The product, by nature, is something different — and yet, ideally, it has to be the same. To claim, in a long tradition, that translations are either ‘faithful’ or ‘beautiful’ and cannot be both, in another metaphorical illustration, does not greatly enlighten us, as no one can say what exactly verbal faithfulness would consist in. Similarly we can call a translation ‘close to the text’, and one is tempted to postulate it for Joyce, and I myself tend in that direction — but what is close to the text: word-byword correspondence, identical construction, same word order, identical resonances? Translation has become a well researched field and translation theories abound, but I have yet to meet a practitioner who confesses to having been helped by them. I also argue for the complete abolition of the terms ‘good’ or ‘bad’ translations.

What about particularly complex phrases? Epigraphic truths about translation are expedient and futile. I found, from practice and observation, there are only two things that are difficult: those passages we do not understand — and those that we do. Or, in Joyce, the very complex words, and the simple ones. Here I am using another label that should profitably be excised from common use: ‘difficult’. It goes without saying that there is a scale of difficulty as everywhere else, but the notion is misleading. It may be difficult to do a handstand on a moving bicycle and juggle champagne glasses with one’s feet, or near impossible, but a circus acrobat might bring it off; and it’s extremely difficult to break an Olympic record, but it is done. Translations are not often of that order: there is simply no way of getting everything across, and, of course, some makeshift solutions or compromises are better than others, some are ingenious, others are blunders. We do not even need Finnegans Wake to exemplify the impasses. Paul de Kock was a real writer, and Molly thinks his name ‘nice’. In her sense it is so only in English, yet if the name is retained, as it ought to be, Molly’s comment will be seen as aesthetic in other languages. One can substitute a different author, or an artificial name, but either way relations get out of kilter. ‘Queen Anne is dead’, thinks Bloom in the newspaper office. No big deal, every language can transact this, word by word, but what it cannot convey is that ‘Queen Anne is dead’ dismissively refers to news that is not worth bringing up, to something trite, common knowledge, no news in the guise of news. That again can be expressed, but it entails changes, even if only an irrelevant queen is removed and a minute historical flourish along with it. Also part of its impact is that a modern reader might not understand a saying no longer in use (it has to be annotated). At the same time, no one would seriously blame a translation for not assembling corresponding complexities in a short phrase. I even claim that a simple sequence of words can be outside a translator’s scope: Bloom at the funeral service deals with a Latin word he picks up: ‘What? Corpus: body. Corpse.’ Nothing less problematic: ‘Corpus: Corpo, Cadáver’ (to take Portuguese as representative of many practically identical, and ‘correct’ renderings). The series moves from Latin to its equivalent, Corpo, and then associates it with a dead body. This is not the same process as in Bloom’s awareness that Latin corpus in English means ‘body’, but that the word itself has survived as ‘corpse’. His is a comment on an accidental process in language. Small difference perhaps, but not an identical sequence of thought. In a jingling paragraph in ‘Sirens’, Bloom conspicuously strives to divert his mind away from home and muses about the waiter: ‘Hee hee. A waiter is he. Hee hee hee hee’ (U 11.917, with more repetitive ‘hee’s in the entourage). It looks like an extension of the pronoun ‘he’ (Bloom is trying not to think of a dominant he), but it has turned into a laugh. Translations without a male pronoun phonetically at hand restrict themselves to a laugh. ‘Hé hé hé hé’ for example, in French, and the laugh varies in ‘Circe’ where the whores go ‘Hii hii hii’, while in the original the shade of Boylan still hovers over it. Or what is one to do with the coincidental misleading ears in one of Stephen’s allusive runs in the Library: ‘singular uneared

wombs’ (U 9.664), an echo from Shakespeare’s sonnets? Predictably, translators substitute a correct equivalent of ‘unploughed wombs’, but they thereby suppress the erroneous ears and a concomitant ripple (in the same episode a librarian is ‘eared’ and wombs are ‘uneared’ by etymological coincidence.) It is those ripples that fascinate me. The stunning conclusion of the foregoing samples is simply that translation, by its nature, entails changes along with losses which are not just quantitative, but also dynamic. The point is not to blame translators, but to exonerate them.

Surely some passages are untranslatable? Let’s put it the other way, that some passages are translatable. Often a choice is involved between which of several ways to go if they cannot be combined by luck or ingenuity, always supposing a lurking secondary meaning is recognized in the first place. And indeed, it is precisely what is not translatable that attracts me in Joyce. And don’t ask me what is translatable. Well, the sheer bulk of Ulysses ensures that much gets across of what is inevitably lost in all the details. Thousands of readers have read Ulysses in some form without knowing any English, and they have not been cheated but just a trifle short-changed. ‘Transluding’, one of Joyce’s variants, seems to imply that another game (ludus) is being played in a translation, never an identical game but possibly worthwhile on its own terms. As a translation of the Odyssey, Ulysses is spectacularly deficient, but the omissions, excesses or modifications have proved highly rewarding. It all depends on the angle. At one end of the spectrum there is the ideal of analogous effects, which cannot be reached as I have underscored with laborious redundancy that would not be called for if so many scholars did not still take translations at face value; publishers do not go out of their way to advertise the innate defects of a translation. At the other end of the scale, and realizing what compromises are achievable, we can admire what has been done, against tremendous odds, and how many windows onto foreign cultures translators have brilliantly opened.

You wrote that Joyce ‘is’ translation already? Yes, a point I made often, too often perhaps. First of all, translations occur in Joyce. Stephen Dedalus gives a funny twist to the Latin of Joachim Abbas, with creative latitude, ‘Down, baldynoddle’. Bloom, for one, tries his hand at it: Don Giovanni, a cenar teco m’invitasti, he renders as ‘thou hast me invited’, but he fails with teco: ‘Tonight perhaps’. Bloom’s father in ‘Circe’ uses English words, but German phrasing: ‘What you making down this place?’ (‘Was machst du …?’). Finnegans Wake in part is translation: ‘Fee gate has Heenan hoity, mind uncle Hare?’ (FW 466) is nearly gibberish in English, but as ‘Wie geht es Ihnen heute, mein dunkler Herr?’, one of several renderings of a recurrent salutation, ‘How do you do today, my dark/light sir?’ What I have in mind is that Joyce’s later works are internal translations, or metamorphoses. Ulysses can be seen as a series of different transpositions, into, say, standard, musical, parodic or ‘Ithaca’ idiolects, not just eighteen episodes, but many more, diverse modes (tone, perspective, register, etc.). Take two successive paragraphs in ‘Cyclops’ where an epic description of a new arrival (‘a godlike messenger came swiftly in …’) is then retold in the vernacular: ‘Little Alf Bergan popped in round the door …’ Not everyone would succeed instantly in discerning the crude everyday act of a refined ‘eructation consequent upon depletion’. ‘Oxen of the Sun’ displays fake translations of a temporal kind: it takes the English language through the centuries combining both what became the tradition and also what fell by the wayside in the linguistic evolution. All of Ulysses radically transposes an ancient epic and this in a wholescale conversion rather than a verbal one: from Mediterranean to Dublin, across a few millennia. Finnegans Wake continually transforms its material, a sentence like ‘nobirdy aviar soar anywing to eagle it’ (FW 505.17) is written in bird lingo or, for our understanding, it has to be translated from it. Most of my work has consisted in converting items of text into some significance that the surface may not already show. Everything is trans. In dealing with Joyce, one has to translate the process of translation itself. This is one reason why episodes such as ‘Ithaca’ tend to be deprived of a tension between remote words and ordinary ones. Every German reader will understand ‘abendliches Spazierengehen’ at once, but ‘vespertinal perambulation’ has to be mentally processed first. The evening, ‘Abend’, is put right in front of the German reader, but has to be extracted from an embedded and therefore remote Latin vesper. The double nature of the English vocabulary (Germanic and Latin/French) provides opportunities that most other languages do not have at their disposal. Translation impossibilities reflect back on the original. Once you have to find an equivalent for an apparently unproblematic ‘there all the time without you’ (Stephen is wondering if the world still exists when his eyes are closed) you may waver between privation and location: should it be ‘sans’, ‘senza’, ‘ohne’ (in my absence), or is the world within contrasted with the one without? Because of its history, the English word effortlessly combines the two senses, though hardly any reader would notice. A translator who does notice stands at a crossroads — again not so much a difficulty as a choice.

It seems that you have learnt a lot from translations. Undoubtedly. First of all we can see how someone else understood passages that may puzzle us. The two ‘authorized’ Ulysses translations (the quotation marks indicate the doubtful nature of such authorization,

definitely not a word for wholesale approval), Goyert’s and Morel’s, could, conceivably, be based on the author’s tip-off, but, at times, they also contradict each other. What we can see is how a translator understands a passage: she (or he) cannot cheat but has to put all the cards (visibly) on the table, including her (or his) ignorance, while critics are selective and do not tend to flaunt their blind spots. When Bloom muses about the changes in his marriage, the sexual relationship, ‘Could never like it after Rudy’, some of us wonder who could never like it. Some languages have to determine the implied gender of ‘Could’. Morel, the French translator (and probably the whole team involved, possibly on Joyce’s advice?) settled for Molly: ‘Elle ne s’y plaisait plus après Rudy’; the Italian reading attributes the aversion to Bloom: ‘Non ci ho mai preso gusto dopo Rudy’. So translations may determine the sexual attitudes of the Blooms and rule out alternatives. A vague sense of dissatisfaction with a rendering can lead to closer scrutiny. If you have to study a Joycean passage and lack inspiration, it is a good trick to hold it against a translation and to articulate exactly what you object to. Translation insufficiencies are also portals of discovery. Plainly wrong solutions, or those that look particularly off-target, are most revealing; they often show turbulences in the original, nuances you may have overlooked. Or, from a different perspective, you may ask yourself how a translator could be instructed to tackle a tricky phrase: what must be conveyed, where is the emphasis, are there overtones, what can be neglected? Also, what should have precedence: realistic accuracy, sound effects, musicality, the preservation of motifs, vibrations? If you hold a translation next to the original you will discover a lot that you might otherwise have overlooked. Just transform vague misgivings into close observation. I often use translations as a control group in narrative investigations. The bungled convolutions of ‘Eumaeus’ tend to be rectified in French, and thereby flattened, so they stand out more clearly in the original. Translation tends to iron out flaws, and Joyce shows us flawed reality, including revealing slips of the tongue or the mind. In the Wake even the word ‘slip’ in itself slips to ‘O, foetal sleep’. Wherever something strikes us as particularly off-target, we can learn something about the original. A question in ‘Cyclops’, ‘Who is the long fellow running for the mayoralty?’, has been rendered in some languages as ‘Who is the long fellow who is running …’ rather than ‘whom is he supporting’. This shows a potential ambiguity which, again, thematically fits well into the chapter. Thematic tinges may be another issue. Arno Schmidt, the German author who high-handedly enjoyed finding fault with others, once denounced Goyert for translating the ‘vent’ of a jacket in ‘Aeolus’ as ‘Windschlitz’, which obviously is not sartorially accurate. But Goyert probably wanted to retain the etymological wind in ‘vent’ and concocted a makeshift compound, ‘wind-slit’, in a bold, though possibly misconceived, attempt to capture some Aeolian flavour. A translator cannot win, since every one else knows better. It is little use complaining about what gets lost, or that priorities, a matter of taste, differ. You won’t get a threefold alliteration in any language to render ‘you jejune Jesuit’, and hardly anything would fit ‘jejune’ (a word I keep looking up). The alliteration has to go and, with it, an essential trait of Mulligan’s cadences and rhythm (‘Joking Jesus’). A pity.

Would you single out more specific translation issues? English as spoken in Ireland is a good instance. So-called Hiberno-English seems to have a natural propensity to assonance and alliteration, more so, I think but cannot prove, than standard English or American. Joyce, at any rate, is full of it, and before long someone perhaps will document it statistically. This struck me first when a young Irish student, who is now a professor in Galway, Riana O’Dwyer, was telling me about her skiing adventures with a companion, and she said in her charming voice: ‘We both took the same number of tumbles.’ Number of tumbles: it struck me that only an Irish person would say that, though everyone else theoretically might. Riana, by the way, was sent to me from Lausanne by Jacques Mercanton, unfortunately my only indirect contact with so close a friend of Joyce’s. Timidity somehow prevented me from approaching him with nothing but curiosity. Now just imagine how you translate the peculiar inflection that goes with intonation and the tinge of vowels and the peculiar aspiration. Minor touches like the milkwoman’s speech (or Mulligan’s parody: ‘Is there Gaelic on you?’) cannot be carried along in transit. Just as it must be near impossible, say in Italian, to construct a whole sentence in monosyllables: ‘Bald deaf Pat brought quite flat pad ink’; in the original this also echoes the tonal scale (to say nothing of the musical overlay in ‘flat’). Phonetic orchestration, in this case ironically, falls flat; it disappears or has to be replaced by analogous but different effects. Translators have indeed been ingenious, particularly in the ‘Sirens’ episode, which, inevitable deficiencies apart, offers them great creative scope. In Joyce every issue of interpretation, and hence also translation, is magnified. The problems are not new, but compounded; they can no longer be ignored. What may have been marginal, like ambiguities or wordplay (real ‘puns’ or semantic overlays), becomes vitally central. In Joyce one may suspect (I do) that almost everything is quotation, déjà lu, recycled, derived from a general Western tradition but also a very special, English, Irish, Hiberno-English one, for which there is no equivalent. What could be a substitute for ‘The maid was in the garden … The king was in his counting house …’, which rings a bell with practically every English-speaker?

Somehow you don’t seem to believe in translation?

It is not a matter of belief, but of expectation. After the customary initial period of arrogant hairsplitting, I have come to adopt a far more tolerant attitude. The problems are inherent, translation involves choices, priorities, limitations, ingenuity. Translation is an opportunistic enterprise, dependent on the opportunities, the target language and cultural determinants. You can’t win. The cards, those so clearly on the table, are stacked against the translator. If a passage looks as though Joyce had slipped, or nodded, we tend to detect some latent profundity. The same creative benefit of doubt is not accorded to a translator: jarring oddities are attributed to his or her ignorance or incompetence. This is one reason why episodes like ‘Eumaeus’, which are flawed and incongruous by design, do not travel well. To achieve the same type of judicious warps in another language is a treacherous undertaking and, consequently, translations have a tendency towards amelioration. Unfortunately, inspired kitsch seems out of the translators’ reach, which means that, alas, a virtuoso of verbal misappropriation like Amanda McKittrick Ros, a patron saint of the Zurich Foundation, will never cross a linguistic border, but don’t get me started on her. One of my topics is ‘How to Translate Wrong Things Right’. Or, to put it differently, there is nothing wrong with things going wrong. It can’t be helped in any event. And otherwise there would be no stories. Joyce, too, focuses on errors. If the goddess Eris (of strife) had been invited to that party, her apple of discord would not have led to the primeval beauty contest, and Paris would not have abducted Helen. There would be no Trojan War, no Odyssey and no Ulysses. If Adam had resisted, there would be no Genesis and hardly any Revelation, as St Augustine would confirm. But Joyce puts particular stress on how what we understand, say or communicate goes wrong. ‘World’ for ‘word’ is a plausible slip in English on a typewriter; elsewhere the corresponding terms are far apart.

Can translations ever end up by being more difficult than the original? Dogmatic decrees are out of place. Is there any recipe for doing ‘Oxen’? There is no Korean equivalent to the style of Bunyan or Carlyle. In the German version of the episode, for instance, the spelling changes that echo the uses of Middle High German signal the chronological progression much more drastically than in Joyce’s already highly convoluted prose so that, for once, the German is more difficult to read than the original. It is, possibly, a questionable device, but the inevitable effect that translation flattens peculiarities is compensated for, and morphological change is emphasized. As I mentioned earlier, Chitra Panikkar from Kerala, who put parts of Ulysses into Malayalam, replaced Joyce’s Latin with Sanskrit. One may object that Mulligan or Father Conmee would never speak Sanskrit, but in this case a prime concern was marking the difference and conveying the sense of an older culture pervading the present. Is it permitted to change the names of real, existing persons? Paul de Kock, once a famous author and already referred to, may become Paul du Piq (Danish) or Paul de Basoche-t (Hungarian), because Molly would not find de Kock equally ‘nice’ in languages other than English. Matters of controversial expediency.

Didn’t you once say that translations are translations? Trivial as that sounds, not everyone has caught on to it, not even literary scholars. For some types of serious research, translations cannot be relied on, they falsify under the best of circumstances. Unreflected trust in their wording incited me to occasional testy remarks. One scholar used Fitzgerald’s Odyssey to make a narrative point about its preamble; the translation makes the bard implore the Muse: ‘Begin when all the rest … had long ago returned’. That is poetic licence, as Homer does the exact opposite and says explicitly, if casually, to begin ‘anywhere, any odd place’ (hamothen), an instance of art concealing art and quite a different and significant narrative device. I think, incidentally, that we should avoid using translations made after Joyce potentially could have used them. I was told that, at a congress devoted to Kafka, a German scholar pointed out that a far-fetched interpretation, which had been put forward, relied on a translated, and not an original, word. That point was countered by: why should we read the author in the original when our translations are so much better? If this exchange really did take place, it was a ludicrous extreme of a not altogether uncommon attitude. A titbit about the danger of idioms. Joyce once defended himself against charges of elitism by adducing that in his books nobody is ‘worth more than a thousand pounds’. This was taken up by a German journalist, not overly familiar with English phrases, in 1982 when the hundredth anniversary spawned a lot of comments; for him it demonstrated how little Joyce valued human life in monetary terms.

Weren’t you involved in a new German translation? The old Ulysses translation done by Georg Goyert (1928) was a considerable achievement in its time, but it was manifestly wanting in many respects after almost half a century and in need of an overhaul. It came under heavy fire from Arno Schmidt, a forceful, resonant German author who had just discovered and appropriated Joyce. His censure contained nothing new, but it was blunt and explicit, so that poor Georg Goyert issued a public statement in which he claimed that Joyce himself had judged certain parts of his translation ‘better than the original’. Schmidt’s often very pedantic and narrow-minded strictures serve as a good example of how precarious faultfinding can be. He took Goyert to task for rendering ‘Bending archly’ (a shop girl in ‘Wandering Rocks’) as ‘Sie beugte sich bogenförmig’; ‘archly’, Schmidt pontificated with some justification, does not mean ‘like an arch’ but something like ‘coquettishly’. But, whether by design or accident, Goyert’s bogenförmig at least catches a feature of the episode, which is spatial, architectural, with a possible tiny link to other arches. My point is that ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ are not the only

criteria; but many of Goyert’s solutions were wrong or off-target, to be sure. Also, a lot more had become known about Joyce in some forty intervening years of scholarship and commentary; thousands, yes thousands, of quotations or echoes, for example, had been uncovered. So Rhein Verlag, Zurich, owners of the German rights, under its director Daniel Brody (Joyce corresponded with him), decided to start from scratch and engaged a team of experts. I, too, was enlisted in the preparations which, as funds were lacking, were quietly aborted. Rhein Verlag was already on the way out, like so many small publishers. For Dubliners, an experienced professional translator, Kurt Heinrich Hansen, had been chosen. He submitted a sample of ‘The Sisters’, which both Erich Fried, a German-Austrian expatriate poet and translator living in London, completely bilingual, and I, thought not up to par. One particular case had an effect on me. The sentence, ‘He had often said to me that I am not long for this world’ in the first paragraph of the story, had been done very colloquially as ‘Lange werd ich’s nicht mehr machen’, and the wholly wrong register alerted me. I looked into the phrase, and it was then, and only then, that it dawned on me that it had a biblical flavour. This opened the door to a whole undercurrent of borrowings from the New Testament in the story, especially in its opening (the use of ‘idle’ for instance). This is what I mean by errors of translation sharpening our awareness. At any rate Rhein Verlag couldn’t pursue its project, and the rights were taken over by Suhrkamp at the suggestion of its young editor (‘Lektor’), Klaus Reichert, who had helped to translate Ellmann’s biography into German. A meeting in Frankfurt in 1967 (I remember the year as I was excitedly looking forward to our first symposium) convened the participants. The translations were assigned, Dubliners to Dieter E. Zimmer of Die Zeit, himself an expert translator (in later years in particular of Nabokov); Exiles, Stephen Hero and A Portrait to Klaus Reichert; the Letters to Kurt Heinrich Hansen. Ulysses was entrusted to the young German writer Hans Wollschläger, a disciple of Arno Schmidt’s; his rendering of A Hundred Dollars’ Misunderstanding by Gover had been praised enthusiastically for its adroit handling of a variety of black slang. My function was to filter and co-ordinate the translations in progress, and I also had to select and edit the letters. It became a part-time job for many years. Dieter Zimmer turned out to be an excellent craftsman, conscientious with a fine sense of nuance and accuracy (he went to Dublin for a feel of the city and the composition of place). The Letters, a generous selection in three volumes, were a laborious undertaking, especially their annotation, and the project took up a great deal of my time. I am still haunted by a few mistakes that I introduced. Reichert began with Giacomo Joyce which came out first so that there was something to show to the general public, waiting for the whole edition years later. He followed with Stephen Hero, A Portrait and finally Exiles. Our cooperation was next to ideal. He sent me his drafts, and I pedantically went through them, made notes and came to his home in Frankfurt for long and strenuous weekends that extended far into the mornings, though with a regular job that entailed getting up at six I was in no condition for extensive night shifts. I think we left no phrase unturned and pondered every issue. Klaus was tenacious and persevering and often looked up contemporary German authors to find the optimal nuance. I am confident that, for all the inherent inadequacies, at least we could (at the time) potentially justify every choice, the outcome of long deliberations. If at all possible, the same word would be used consistently throughout. Just try to think of one single German adjective that could do duty for the multiple uses to which Joyce subjects as banal a word as ‘nice’; in the first chapter alone it occurs numerous times and usually with a different denotation. The Portrait is full of such thematic words, and mastering them is part of Stephen’s development. What was particularly delicate was a range of adjectives, all derived from Latin, such as ‘languid, sordid, squalid’ (with nouns to match) that seemed to have moved from something concrete originally to a more metaphoric realm; ‘sordid’ is no longer ‘dirty’ but more an attitude towards it. Hans Wollschläger was going to undertake Ulysses. He is one of the most gifted stylists in German, a recluse and autonomous by nature, who tended to work on his own and never made use of Suhrkamp’s offer allowing for preliminary fieldwork in Dublin. He sent his drafts in instalments and I added my questions, comments, occasionally a suggestion, but the main job was to co-ordinate recurrent motifs. We could only work with parts, a few chapters, at any given time and never had the whole translation in front of us. And there was far too much for detailed discussion. At any rate, Wollschläger was little inclined to pore over details during the few visits he paid. We had to resort to correspondence, which is far from ideal. I was almost a bit disappointed that we did not sit together and turn over ambiguities and overtones. Proceedings were not facilitated by our using different editions, which made cross-references unduly laborious. Proportionally, therefore, far less time was spent on the minutiae that make all the difference. I wonder, incidentally, how the French team of the new Ulysse of 2004 dealt with their problems of harmonization; their communication would have comprised eight different translators in as many different locations. Reichert, with his own chores apart from professional work, entered the editorial process fairly late; he added his own remarks and queries. It was he who suggested that the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ passages could intimate chronological evolution by the orthographical tinge that I have mentioned. So the German Ulysses offers ‘wipes we’, for an already antiquated ‘Weibes Weh’ (for ‘Woman’s woe’, which is not at all obscure in the original). Communal translations are not without disagreement and tension, as was also evidenced by the French team around August Morel in the twenties. Since I generally did not offer specific improvements (just tentative directions) but simply acted as a pedestrian traffic controller, I was never a serious rival. In the end Reichert compared our participation to that of policemen in detective novels; they play by the rules, methodical and heavy-handed, and thereby cramp the detective’s inspired style. All in all, Wollschläger, with his stupendous command of German, has wonderful passages, and they

read very well. He is also an excellent performer and draws enthusiastic audiences. If anything he may be a touch too refined and elevated; he felt ill at ease with Joyce’s (as I call them) refractions and incongruities. Overall, the translation, when it came out in 1976, was instantly hailed as a success, in fact it became the ‘translation of the century’ and for at least one generation and thousands of readers it has become Ulysses. It became and has proved a classic in its own right, and first of all, every translation must stand on its own. What I regret is that he did not preserve the drafts, revisions, all our correspondence and the multiple revisions, since they would document a work in progress and would have been excellent material for comparative studies. Wollschläger also translated ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’ for Suhrkamp Verlag, to which Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s parallel rendering was added, as well as what Georg Goyert had done in the thirties, prompted and possibly helped by Joyce himself. ALP therefore exists in three fluent, attractive German versions. Such are the choices that the Wake offers: there is next to no overlapping, and it shows their individual approaches. Wolfgang Hildesheimer visited me several times to go through the whole text with scrupulous care, whereas Wollschläger had about a dozen questions that troubled him.

What about Dieter E. Stündel’s translation of the Wake? Dieter E. Stündel, a disciple of Arno Schmidt, translated all of Finnegans Wake into German, in a bilingual edition called Finnegans Wehg. The echo, ‘Wehg’, changed from an earlier ‘Wach’ (wake), combines the original sound with ‘Weg’, way, and ‘Weh’, pain. The effort alone — it took seventeen laborious years — deserves praise. However, few reviewers have been happy with the outcome. Finnegans Wehg does not exude the enticing charm of the original and turns reading into an obstacle race across unwieldy conglomerates of letters. As far as can be made out – for the translator refrained from comments – a basic meaning was made out for each sentence, the cues taken from Roland McHugh’s Annotations, and this was rendered into German. The resulting German sentence was then enriched by an overlay which is not thematically determined by the context, but by whatever phonetic possibilities there were at hand. Take ‘This is viceking’s graab’, which neatly encapsules Irish history from the invasion of the Vikings to the acquisitions of a British vice-king. This has become ‘Fickingörls Grahlp’ simply because ‘Wikinger’ lends itself to an irrelevant distortion and ‘Grahl’ can be awkwardly combined with ‘Grab’. But Viking occupation has nothing to do with copulating girls, nor is there a trace in the original that would warrant a gratuitous Grail. Single parts of the Wake have been done with more aplomb by Wollschläger and Hildesheimer, as already mentioned, and by various authors, best of all perhaps by Ulrich Blumenbach, who started out translating Finnegans Wake as a student and has since become a professional of the first rank. Chances are that once copyright restrictions are cleared away (DV) more attempts will see the light of print. In fact, every apprentice translator ought to try her hands at one paragraph of the Wake.

Your abiding interest in translation has meant that you got to know translators from many different countries. Once my curiosity was roused I tried to locate them and exchanged a lot of correspondence. In Amsterdam I found translations in a bookshop and enquired after their publisher, who in turn gave me the addresses of Rein Bloom and John Vandenbergh. I went to visit Rein Bloom, translator of Dubliners, and we conversed briefly. John Vandenbergh was not at home, but I got in touch with him and his wife, Gerardine Franken, the following year, and we became good friends. John Vandenbergh was then engaged in translating Ulysses (it was launched in 1969), while Gerry Franken did Giacomo Joyce, the theatrical adaptation Stephen D and (together with Leo Knuth) A Portrait. She was tenacious in the pursuit of details, as translators ought to be. It was in the home of John and Gerry Franken that the archetypal Wake reading group was initiated. In 1966, at the inauguration of Joyce’s new grave, a dapper and extrovert gentleman showed up and introduced himself as Mogens Boisen; he had translated Ulysses into Danish. I mention extrovert since one imagines translators to be reclusive intellectuals in the closet, but Boisen was outgoing and proud of his efficiency. He once claimed that he translated an average of twenty (twenty!) books a year, and his achievements are in fact substantial, including heavyweights like Homer and C.G. Jung. It is to his credit that he revised his Ulysses twice in a ten-year period, which in itself is a sign of awareness that such a job can never be finished. Boisen was also an officer in the Danish army. He was great company and, as I said, outgoing. One little episode has stuck in my mind. He attended the first symposium in 1967, and on the evening of the second and last day, I was standing outside a pub where we all had convened, taking the air and waving a genial hand at Margaret Solomon of ‘Phallic Tree’ reputation, who left in company. Shortly afterwards Mogens Boisen stormed out of the Silver Swan and asked me where she had gone. I reported and gave him directions. Muttering, ‘He is not the man for her. I am!’, he followed in hot pursuit up the quays. Not that I think anything developed from the chase, but it shows an ebullience that carried over into his translations. In 1970 he invited me to Copenhagen to talk to a very active Joycean contingent (in the meantime a Danish Joyce Society has been formed), and, years later, during the Copenhagen symposium of 1986, he invited Christine van Boheemen, Dr Hansruedi Isler and me to his house in the suburbs. We found the whole house plastered with big poster printouts, wall to wall, both of his former wife and his present wife who had somehow omitted to put on any clothes. His one visit to the Foundation took place only a few

months before his death. So much for this particular digression, but it is to show how eager I was to get in touch with translators, especially those beyond the Iron Curtain, where Joyce was still looked upon with suspicion. I corresponded with Zlatko Gorjan, whose Uliks is in what was once called Serbo-Croatian; Gorjan was also a poet. We eventually met in Trieste in 1971. Then there was Janez Gradisnik, who did the Slovenian Ulikses. He passed his Thom’s Directory 1904 on to me when he did not need it any more, in exchange for some books. It is now one of our treasures and one of the most consulted volumes in the Zurich Foundation. I first got in touch with Maciej Słomczynski from Krakow by writing, and then met him in Frank Budgen’s house en route to Dublin in 1967. At the time he was at work on Ulysses, which he made appear like child’s play; it did not seem to cause him much unrest, which was part of his flamboyant nature. A great celebrity in Poland, he was quite a character. His reputation was tremendous both as a translator and, even more so, as an author of detective fiction (as Joe Alex). When much later I got to know Jolanta Wawrzycka who had grown up in Poland, she was most impressed when I said that I knew Słomczynski. He had translated most of Joyce (including a beautiful ALP) and had adapted Ulysses for the stage. I saw the play at the Venice Theatre Festival in 1971 and could visually follow the plot. Since the audience did not understand Polish and had to rely on an ad hoc audio-rendering into Italian — just imagine! — there was little response, but I found the arrangement ingenious: everything revolved around Molly Bloom, whose bed was centre stage. Maciej Słomczynski was no doubt an original, full of ideas and projects. When he visited me in 1969 he proposed that we, he and I, would do a film script of the Wake for his friend Roman Polanski and that we would make ‘ten thousands of dollars’. Polanski, he said, might also show up at the second Dublin symposium of 1969. He did not. Słomczynski came all the way to Unterengstringen to divulge the secret of Finnegans Wake, which was the Book of the Dead, but he did not put forward the sort of detail that would convince me. Before that he had already told me, in a tired tone of voice: ‘Fritz, I have deciphered Finnegans Wake.’ Back home he had a secretary who had typed the whole of the Wake in reverse, so he could read it, literally, backwards as well, from ‘eht’ to ‘nurrevir’. The last time I met him briefly was in Copenhagen in 1986 where he asked me to do a lot for him, as his movements were restricted in Poland, but he never specified what exactly it was that I could do. We often talked at cross-purposes. I lost track of him, alas, in later years. For a time I corresponded with the Georgian translator of Ulysses, Nico Kiasashvili, but unfortunately in those days, he could never leave his country. During the Prague spring I got in touch with Aloys Skoumal, who was working on a Czech Ulysses; when it was finished, it was kept for years in a warehouse before it was released. I managed to get him to speak at the 1969 symposium, though unfortunately, from my point of view, he emphasized the cultural import of translation rather than showing us specific, concrete issues. It was a sad occasion when, after a few days, he approached me and confessed that he had run out of money, as Czechs were only allowed to take a certain amount out of the country. He had brought along a supply of Cuban cigars, and I traded them for him, anonymously. The cigars sold for a dollar each to Americans deprived of such political contagion, and the accumulated dollars allowed him to continue. It was a reflection on the state of the world then, and on financial imbalances.

Outside of Joyce: how about your relations with other German-speaking translators? Translation for me became a subsidiary occupation, not doing it but pontificating about it and conducting workshops with practitioners. The much-touted German Ulysses brought along an invitation to the annual meeting of German-speaking translators in November 1976. They were keen to know how Wollschläger, Klaus Reichert and I had proceeded and collaborated and to hear how the impossible task had been tackled. Wollschläger sidetracked a bit and spoke about the psychoanalytical prerequisites for artists of genius. Reichert demonstrated his own experiences with A Portrait and some of his guidelines. In ‘The Fruitful Illusion of Translatability’, I tried to show, by concrete example, how translators cannot juggle as many balls as Joyce had used. These translators’ meetings always lasted three days, with practical workshops following the lectures. I stayed on and saw how in their exchanges translators dealt with inherent problems and some particularly knotty items. I must have played some marginal part, for the following year, I was asked to conduct one of the English workshops, and so I went and ventured into a new area. Generally, the various professionals had a go at an insidious text, and the group compared their versions, then improvements were suggested, evaluated and balanced against each other. It is amazing how much inventiveness is at work and how stimulating such interaction with a text can be. Many brilliant solutions are found but do not work in the end, for one reason or another. I participated for about twenty years, with the meetings always taking place in Bergneustadt (near Cologne). On several occasions I also took part in seminars in the Collegium in Straelen, a European centre near the German-Dutch border for translators, with an excellent library. As I was then employed by Diogenes, the publisher, and later by Haffmans Verlag, I had the chance to scout out who would be suitable for certain tasks, and I got to know and appreciate many excellent translators, the majority of the profession being women. On the whole, translators are erudite, articulate, with a naturally good sense of language, generally modest and unassuming (in contrast, I was told, to writers). They work away quietly in isolation and advise each other on tricky questions. Translators, communicators across language borders, are humble by nature, as subordination to authors entails selfrestraint. As I have often said, they are in a way the best critics, at least the most conscientious ones, for

they have to deal with every single item in a text (while some of us can flaunt our skill in selected passages and simply pass over whatever is beyond our expertise). A lot of their ingenuity often goes unobserved, and they are certainly grossly underpaid. It is next to impossible to eke out a decent living from literary translation. Many of them became good friends. I can list only a few, certainly Klaus Birkenhauer, the doyen of the group, who did a lot to teach younger colleagues and to improve their situation in general. Thanks to the efforts of the Verband deutschsprachiger Übersetzer (Union of German Speaking Translators), overall conditions were significantly improved. In former times a translator was often not even mentioned on the title page, and it took a lot of concerted action and conflicts with publishers simply to put the efforts of translators at least on a contractual basis. I am pleased to be in touch with translators who do an extremely demanding job about which I can only talk and heckle. Some of the best in the field, apart from Wollschläger and Reichert, are Burkhard Kroeber, who has been responsible for Umberto Eco, Calvino, and many other Italian authors. Christa Schuenke is also in the top league and particularly proficient in poetry: she was awarded the most renowned prize for translating Shakespeare’s sonnets, named after the great Christoph Martin Wieland, but she also has translated Donne, Keats and Yeats, and is equally successful with Melville and John Banville. Seemingly an odd man out is Claus Sprick, professionally a judge, and an excellent translator with an uncanny flair for wordplay and out-of-the-way cases. Ulrich Blumenbach, whom I mentioned earlier, first passed by our Foundation as a student of Joyce; he had tried his hand at parts of Finnegans Wake. As an accomplished professional translator he is still a part-time Joycean and, incidentally, the initiator of a monthly gathering of translators living in Switzerland who meet and present their next-toinsoluble cases. One outstanding translator was Pike Bierman, of great originality and enterprise (she set up an annual Whores’ Ball in Berlin for a few years). We collaborated on Dorothy Parker’s stories, she as translator and I as copy editor, successfully so I think, but she has since become a renowned writer of detective fiction and a sharp observer of the Berlin scene. She attended one Bloomsday, in 1982 I believe, and at the Women’s Caucus she proposed a celebration of ‘Boomsday’ in which the ‘Boom’ was an abbreviation not of ‘Bloom’ but of ‘Broom’: she meant witches’ brooms.

What about theories of translation? They exist, as they should: but most practitioners are not helped by them in the least, to judge by what they say. At one meeting (it was in Austria where a branch organization now also regularly conducts seminars and workshops) a young translation theorist took part and was proficient in sticking labels on problems that have disquieted practitioners for ages. In a round-up discussion, I asked if in his course of studies he had ever actually translated a text, and he answered with a brief, dismissive ‘No’. He was not so much shocked at the question as rather surprised at the very idea.

To come closer to home: how about the German-speaking Swiss and their dialects? Indeed, my particular Swiss handicap is one reason why I would be a bad translator, though I may feel this more than many of my compatriots. It has to do with us Swiss always speaking in dialect among ourselves, not in standard German, and this irrespective of social rank. The written, standard language is taught at school and remains more passive, a not quite foreign language but one which is put on for special occasions and is never quite comfortable, like an ill-fitting, scratchy Sunday suit. For many reasons we are not good public speakers. It is why I admire the gift of most Irish people to express themselves vividly, with wit and punch, and this on almost any social or intellectual level (yes, I know, there are also boring Irishmen). I cannot get rid of a Swiss tinge. And if I could, it would feel affected. Once I had to speak to students in Düsseldorf, and afterwards I was approached by an American lady who congratulated herself on understanding my Swiss German without effort. It so happened that I had been using my best standard German, hence this was another blow to a battered ego. I am sure a Swiss intonation is audible in my English as well. I think I share with others an utter repugnance to hearing my own voice on tape, in fact I know that the tortures of hell are not what Father Arnall details with such loving emphasis in A Portrait. Hell is that for all eternity you have to watch yourself on video and listen to your own voice. I can’t imagine anything more excruciating than that. Mind you, other people don’t think it so bad. It’s like photographs: you take a good picture and the victim shrinks away from it in disgust, and this reaction is not always fake modesty. Some good fate probably prevents us from seeing ourselves as we really are physically. I think men have developed a technique to shave in the morning without really looking at themselves. It’s probably a survival trick. Come to think of it, Ulysses begins with a mirror, and in it Stephen Dedalus sees himself and thereby also initiates the interior monologue. However, I have found that foreigners like our Swiss intonation. So, perhaps, did Joyce who, with his acute ear, seems to have relished our dialectal peculiarities, some of which are to be found in the Wake: ‘All schwants (schwrites) ischt …’ (what he writes is also phonetically ‘Schweiz’). There is a gutsy kind of flutter of recognition when our reading group comes across ‘Like one man, gell’, with that familiar tag ‘gell’ that we add when we invite agreement. Don’t we? When I first met Joyce’s son and grandson, I noticed that both conversed fluently in Zurich dialect and no wonder since they spent a good deal of their lives in our city.

To come back to my handicap, it would disqualify me from writing any plausible dialogue which we always conduct in our own guttural dialect. This is not to say that our very rich local dialects do not have great potential. Some of our writers make excellent use of what is termed our ‘Helvetisms’, phrases and words that are not spoken anywhere else, though they may be understood. This is analogous, perhaps, to Hiberno-English. The Odyssey, for example, has been done wonderfully in Bernese dialect. Hansruedi Isler, from our Thursday Wake group, at times spontaneously translates Wake passage into Zurich German, and we now have the complete fable of the Ondt and the Gracehoper in our local vernacular. As Swiss we are at least aware that there are other languages. Small European countries have that advantage over the grand nations: we always knew there are foreign languages. Ever since childhood I’ve been reading in three languages that we are forbidden to cross railway lines; later, a clumsy unidiomatic English version was added. We knew we had to learn at least one other language, as our own did not get us very far abroad. I think there was a time when (in gross oversimplification) young Danish, Dutch or Swiss people spoke, on average, better English than their French or German neighbours, or with less of an accent. This has drastically changed, and present generations of students seem to speak much better English, with hardly any accent, than their professors, whose origins can easily be made out in their speech. In this context Laurent Milesi deserves special mention, a polyglot who seems to have no trouble picking up remote languages. Normally, I always thought, you can hear a Frenchman speaking English. Not in his case. I remember how in a Paris bar a group of outsiders guessed at his nationality and never suspected that he was French. For those of us who precariously learnt some Italian and have ever since tried to evade any conversation in it, such serene facility is unsettling. I once, with suppressed envy, heard him giggle over a humorous magazine written in Livornese dialect, and he sounded genuinely amused by the jokes. He is a great and perceptive scholar of the first rank, as much versed in recondite theories (I am sure he understands Lacan) as he is a fine close reader and philologist. He translated some of ALP into Romanian, as though it were a finger exercise, and if we are lucky he may give us a French Wake at some future stage.

What else, besides language, is involved in translation? Translation is one text poured into a different one, and both should be identical yet cannot ever be. But texts can also become music, theatre, performance; even dance, images or paintings. Joyce’s poems have been set to music, which is another form of translation. Different rules apply, and we cannot possibly know them. Book illustration is a subgenre. I have not seen many successful examples, but a great deal of awful ones. I cannot really imagine how Bloom or Molly should be drawn. Joyce’s little sketch of Bloom with a bowler hat seems to have become the prototype. Different criteria apply to transmedial changes: no close correspondence may be required, and there is scope for creative latitude. Perhaps the best transposition of Finnegans Wake I have witnessed was staged by a group from Berlin. Two actors moved about and spoke, but not even necessarily quotations from the Wake, and there was a young Asian woman who danced. Above, an artist projected drawings on the large white screen, or rather graphic superimpositions that kept changing. The whole synesthetic effect felt similar to me and others to how the Wake works, not as an arrangement of letters, but as a vibrant event. And then there is the link with films, moving pictures concurrent with words and their great potential. However, all of Ulysses is just too much to condense into a bit more than two hours. ‘The Dead’ was manageable in John Huston’s adaptation, which magnificently conveys the atmosphere of a period and a society. What is omitted, possibly due to the conditions of the medium, is interiority and time. How does one present thoughts or perceptions, fleeting erratic associations? The combination of sound and pictures can achieve much more than language on a page — yet also much less.

As for Ulysses as film: didn’t you know Joseph Strick? By total coincidence I saw something of how the movie was made. When I was in Dublin in 1966, Eileen Veale took me around the various Joyce residences, from Milltown to Dalkey, and introduced me to May Monaghan, Joyce’s last remaining sister. The three of us went to Clongowes Wood College where Father Burke-Savage showed us the school and, among other things, remarked that, ‘After all Joyce never wrote anything against us’. It was known that an American director, Joseph Strick, was shooting the Ulysses movie in Dublin. Of course, it was a much more modern Dublin of TV aerials and even miniskirts, which became part of a contemporary background. So we went to the sites, and Strick was pleased to get to know Joyce’s sister. I stayed on and, a novice in this medium, watched some of the scenes. It included the one in Nighttown, Stephen’s tussle with the two soldiers, and it was shot in a North Dublin slum, where the noisy onlookers nearly became a disturbance. I even spoilt one scene when my shadow fell over it, and it had to be done again. The ‘Oxen of the Sun’ site was not the Maternity Hospital, but a house in Harcourt Street, and my contribution to Hollywood was that I ran to the nearby College of Surgeons to borrow an anatomical chart (a foetus was not available at short notice), and I also went and bought a bottle of Bass (not easy to acquire before 11 am) which, I am sorry to report, is not featured among the miscast Guinness bottles that clutter the table. The scene in which Bloom meets Mrs Breen was shot under the Bank of Ireland pillars, and someone in the observing crowd asked what was on and at the mention of Ulysses exclaimed,

‘That filthy book!’ One thing I learned in brief conversations with Joseph Strick was the problem he had with an actor, in this case the one who played Simon Dedalus, who was not up to par and yet could not be changed, because it would have affected the whole cast. A year later, right after the first symposium, I went to London where the film was showing and was asked my opinion. After pointing out what I liked, I also threw in that, when Bloom and Stephen walk away into the distance from Nighttown, they would not have had the animated conversation with the lively gestures of the two actors, but that the conversation should have been rather one-sided. In the bedroom scene Bloom, Milo O’Shea (for whom the role was a breakthrough), playfully waves Molly’s bra, and I held that Bloom would hardly be so lighthearted and, moreover, that the locus of Bloom’s fixation was somewhere else, the female backside rather than her breasts. It just goes to show that we read scenes in the book, and even characters, according to our own nature. But I did leave an impact on the film world, and it occurred when Strick’s Ulysses came to Switzerland where films are never dubbed, but subtitled, and I was commissioned to look at the translation that had been provided, using the then current version of Georg Goyert. An additional problem is the length of a subtitle (both in German and French), which cannot exceed one line. So Stephen’s famous quip that history is a nightmare had to be left at that and ‘from which I am trying to awake’ fell to the cutting floor by force majeure. I will go down in Film History, most likely, as the one who introduced footnotes into subtitles. Against Joyce’s narrative procedure the film clarified what no reader of the novel could possibly find out: the incident with Bantam Lyons when Bloom repeats that he was going to throw the newspaper away. The movie jumps hundreds of pages ahead, as do many officious annotators, and shows the newspaper with ‘Throwaway’ in big letters. As it was in English, a clumsy footnote had to spell out a link from a visible ‘Throwaway’ to a German ‘wegwerfen’. It is futile to expand on the impossibility of turning Ulysses into an adequate movie, even to condense about eighteen hours into two. Interior monologue is tricky to put across, as are parodies and resonances, the past or the future. Where Joyce often proceeds by indirection, as in Molly’s affair, a film tends to move action automatically centre stage. By comparing book with film we may become better aware of what language can and cannot do and, conversely, what sound and pictures achieve and where they fall short. To me, only moving pictures could do justice to the ‘Circe’ episode with its pageants and instant transitions, or even the animated film. It fell relatively flat, but others liked it. The texture of ‘Oxen’ was not even tried, understandably. What could one do other than perhaps resort to period costumes? I imagine that a concise history of film, from the first attempts through silent movies and up to the sixties, might have served as a makeshift equivalent that at least would indicate the metamorphoses. Pointing out shortcomings is, of course, an easy game, there is no given limit to cavilling. I was naturally interested in the film’s reception, and it covered the whole gamut. An overall view was that Strick’s adaptation was not remotely as experimental as Ulysses (though the claim was made). An Italian student confessed that the film so impressed her that she took up Joyce; a Swedish student thought it so awful that she wanted to check the novel against it. They both ended up at the same symposium. No doubt the film brought readers to Ulysses. It is only recently that I have learned that Strick led Margot Norris to Ulysses (she even wrote a monograph on the film), and so the movie did have one major good effect. I often ponder upon what one could legitimately expect from a filmic translation of a book, and again I have become much more tolerant than I used to be. One possibility for a major project would be to have several directors doing one episode each in a unique mode. Ideally it would be eighteen autonomous directors, though of the eighteen episodes some of the early ones are not all that different, but it has become a cliché that Ulysses contains eighteen distinct styles. In the meantime another film has been made, an Irish production by Sean Walsh, and views again are wildly disparate. It is odd that neither Strick’s Ulysses nor Sean Walsh’s Bloom (or b,.m) seem to make much use of the ‘Cyclops’ episode, which in either version looks unduly condensed and its inherent possibilities thrown away. It would have been easy to just follow Joyce’s own script.

P ROCEDURES AND PREJUDICES As a self-confessed amateur, how would you describe your critical approach? For a long time I was not aware that mine was a specific approach; what I did, unthinkingly, just seemed natural — look at what’s on the page and make sense of it and, at a further stage, also abstract from it and extrapolate. Once I realized what I was doing (and more so what I had no talent for doing), I also noticed that it was what I call the text’s dynamics that enticed me. I often stressed what should need no underlining: that the works are not a static assemblage of properties but something live, full of tensions, contradictions, incongruities; something impossible to pin down (and therefore to translate). It always makes me cringe when I read that something in Joyce ‘is an allusion, is a symbol, is an epiphany’, as though these were stable objects or properties. Nothing, in exaggeration, ever ‘is’ an allusion, a quotation or whatever, but Joyce’s texts continually allude, quote, metamorphose, assimilate, alienate, question, undercut, parody, etc., etc. I would always prefer verbs with their moods, tenses, conjugations over static substantives. There was a time when such remarks were not yet the commonplaces that they have become and to which lip service has to be paid. But you see I am already talking language rather than content, which is what most others seemed to concentrate on: what the characters do, how they fit into society, their or the author’s assumed ideologies, what derives from Joyce’s own life or views. I do like tracing sources as well, but my concern is how those plugins affect their context. The news reached me with much delay, for example, that there was a whole slew of reader response, generally connected with Wolfgang Iser, I believe. But I had been curious about what happens between texts and us readers all along, though I was also aware that neither ‘we’ nor ‘the reader’ exist, about whom so many generalizations are being offered. In fact, when someone in public states how ‘we’ or ‘the reader’ respond to a certain passage, I have often felt like getting up and asking for an amendment: ‘the reader with the possible exception of Fritz Senn’. Nevertheless, I consider our subjective reaction the prime reality from which we start, even if we are not able to articulate it.

So is it gaps, ripples and the like that catch your attention and spark your critical imagination? What gets me going is the tension that I feel in reading, and I do not just mean dramatic suspense. I mean tension almost in an electric sense, where a current moves from one pole to the next, and in Joyce I feel a current, or drive, so propulsive that it overcomes all manner of syntactic obstacles and holds my attention. This can happen in the simplest sentence, like Bloom’s ‘Why did she me?’, or in the complex runs, electrified by incongruous digressions, that we find in Eumaean convolutions. Joyce may well spoil some of his readers for good, or not so good. Compared to his work, other writing may appear relatively flat. This is a great injustice, of course, to writers who have absolutely no obligation to produce literature that is cunningly wrought, allusive, involved or that feature whatever we see in Joyce. Which also leads to the question of how artistic quality (and there must be such a thing, not all writing is equal) can be detected or even proved. I have always been at a loss when asked to justify why Joyce and others may be in a superior league.

Didn’t your observations lead you to coin some neologisms? Reading Joyce resembles parsing complex Latin periods where word order may be at variance with systematic, neat dispensation of information, so that a later item may explain what precedes it (‘retroactive semantics’). I tried to deduce such ‘principles’ (I wish I had a better word), like what I called ‘dislocution’, and to apply them in selective samples. ‘Dislocution’ is a specific term for changes or displacements, like those interjected parts in ‘Wandering Rocks’ that belong to another place, or the asides in ‘Cyclops’. These are spatial, temporal, stylistic, etc. dislocations, and they show in what is being said, therefore ‘-locution’. Such observations move from very specific, single phrases, to the general, such as the salient techniques. Similarly ‘Provection’ designates something I consider pervasive in Joyce: certain traits begin low-key, almost unnoticed, and then increase, become magnified and varied, diverted or changed, grow out of proportion. Take Buck Mulligan, who injects a parodic note into Ulysses at the outset. Later on whole chapters are parodies; in ‘Oxen of the Sun’ practically everything is diverted. Or take the increasing complexity of Joyce, who never just simply repeated his devices.

How about neologisms as such? All logisms were neo at one time. New words appear every day and old ones widen their meaning. It is not that I wanted to invent a new term for the sake of it, but when I thought I had noticed a feature that needed to be named, and the existing terms would not work or would be misleading. A necessity arises because existing terms are diversely applied in the course of time and usage and tend to lose their defining edges. Think of some futile arguments concerning ‘Oxen of the Sun’: is it a series of ‘pastiches’

or ‘parodies’, or whatever? These inherited terms cause a lot of terminological jostling. So when I trace a particular feature I think it best to use a term that has no distracting historical heritage and can be defined on the spot. Nobody can say that ‘dislocution’, for example, means something altogether different when I explain what it is (I may, of course, fail in doing so). ‘Provection’ was another word for which I did not see an existing equivalent. Once I described Joyce as ‘symphoric’, since he is carrying (‘phoric’) diversities together (‘sym’). These might be reality and myth, multiple meanings, echoes, overtones, etc., and ‘pun’ would constitute a subsection. You would be surprised to see how many ad hoc terms I use in my notes and drafts; they are not to be made public but serve for internal differentiation. I once privately made up ‘heteroglossia’, which seems so convenient to characterize features of Finnegans Wake, until I heard by chance that Bakhtin had used the same word in quite a different and by now familiar sense, and that cut it out. Naturally we cannot produce too many new terms, the market can bear only a few. They, mine, have a short lifespan anyway, but they may serve a temporary purpose. Some catch on: survival of the fittest. See how handy Hugh Kenner’s ‘Uncle Charles Principle’ has become. What he described was not even new, but the label is unambiguous and close at hand. As I sit firmly in the classical tradition, all my nouns are derived from verbs with prefixes, and it is their verbal force that is important.

There appears to be a certain routine to such coining? I wish I could break out from such a mental framework, but time and again I abstract from observations and make up a tentative, provisional label. (I am sure much of this has been defined with much more theoretical expertise.) Joyce, in the wake of the arch constructor Daedalus, composed his work very meticulously, and part of our scholarship consists in uncovering hidden structures, but I am also struck by how Joyce works against such patterns, so I tentatively posited a ‘Disrupted Pattern Principle’. Patterns abound, at least one Homeric schema, the Mass as a potential base, the Stations of the Cross, etc., but something tends to counteract them. You don’t have to be a French philosopher to notice that ‘Wandering Rocks’ has nineteen sections and Ulysses eighteen episodes, so a near relationship is suggested which, with Procrustean zest, can be forced into a neat pattern, in this case by singling out one particular section and putting it aside, and a relation between any section in episode ten and any episode can be confected. The (critical) pendulum seems to swing from chaos (the way Ulysses or Finnegans Wake are first experienced) to Kosmos (patterns and schemata). ‘Chaosmos of Alle’ sums it up: the coincidence of opposites. But then the neat order we discover, or invent, or superimpose, again tends to fall apart due to elements that cannot be accommodated in a scheme. My prime example is the Litany of Bloom in ‘Circe’, from ‘Kidney of Bloom …. Flower of the Bath …’ to ‘Potato Preservative … Pray for us’ (U 15.1941), where the twelve episodes of Bloom’s adventures are tidily aligned, episode by episode. Well, on looking closely, maybe not all that tidily, for oddly enough, ‘Wandering Soap’ (which we may well take in our patterned stride) serves for the Library chapter where no soap is visible and Bloom does next to no wandering. But we naturally press this errant item into the overall design. So I see (and name) some ‘Black Hole Principle’ at its unsettling work. Most episodes whose configurations we have come to define with moderate accuracy (by this I simply mean that passages from ‘Sirens’, ‘Eumaeus’ or ‘Ithaca’ and, of course, ‘Penelope’, are distinct and immediately recognizable) appear to have some irregularities, possibly a paragraph that simply does not fit into the mood, style or perspective of the rest: erratic blocks. That ‘Quick warm sunlight’ that came running, ‘in slim sandals … a girl with golden hair on the wind’ (U 4.240), sticks out from its surroundings as it is not part of Bloom’s habitual internal rhythm, so suddenly a lyrical, perhaps epical, Homeric element intrudes. Black holes then are those patches that do not conform to our provisional notions, where different rules seem to be called for. So much for analogies with the black holes in our universe which, as far as I can tell, disturb traditional notions in physics. On occasion dormant terms are already there and just have to be found. St Paul provided one for me when he excoriated such vices as fornication, covetousness or filthiness and added ‘eutrapelia’ to the list, that is irreverent jesting (Eph. 5:4). This kind of turning (-trap-) holy things into jokes was naturally frowned upon. But the word comes in handy to describe Joycean features from ‘Introibo ad altare Dei’ to the fun Finnegans Wake engages in with rites and liturgies. The cultured Greeks considered witty eutrapelia clever and praiseworthy, and Buck Mulligan continues the technique and it may have become second nature to Joyce whatever the attitudes behind it may have been.

Would you say you have developed much over the years and decades of your Joycean pursuits? I wonder did I develop at all over the years. I feel I have been doing the same old thing all along, with very few changes of direction. The same old thing does not thereby lose all its value: it has some. Philological curiosity remains one of the bases, and to figure out what a passage might actually mean is a prerequisite for me, though, as many studies prove, one can also do well without it. I never moved into the higher spheres, if theoretical approaches are higher, and in a sense they are. So I have remained naive, trying to pick up as much as I can along the way. If one can judge one’s own unreflected procedures, I try to look close, to compare, to trace sources, to notice incongruities. Others have profited from breakthroughs in French philosophy, psychoanalysis, feminist insights or new ways of looking at history. An innate obtuseness has barred me from similar experiences. One of the New Testament parables that impressed me is the one about the talents; we have been allotted a few and have to put

them to optimal use. On the whole I have fared well with a continuous struggle to unravel textual complexities and thus to increase my pleasure. I have always taken it for granted that our aim, I mean my aim, is to get more enjoyment out of Joyce. Let me put it concretely: I got much more out of Marianna Gula’s discovery of an eighteenth-century parody of the Creed, which is a predecessor of its distortion in ‘Cyclops’ (‘They believe in rod, the scourger …’), than from rare dips into post-colonial revelations.

One of Petr Škrabánek’s medical articles is entitled ‘False premises, false promises’. Are you, too, a sceptic at heart? It is not the first time I say this, but my procedure is entirely the old, wholly unoriginal humanist one, as old as Socrates: how do we know? It is a basic scepticism that I believe Joyce may inculcate in us (not necessarily by intention). So, yes, I am a sceptic, one who doubts. I think Joyce is an education in skepsis, and skepsis is related to seeing, in the word family of ‘spectacle, inspect, speculations’. You observe phenomena, frame provisional speculations, and look again and find better ways to account for it all. Doubt is built into the system, and Joyce exemplifies it all along, semantically in the Wake; doubt infuses most of its verbiage, contradiction is integrated. In a phrase like ‘youlldied greedings’, a well-meant wish is at variance with a malevolent one. It may express psychological ambivalence and, in a selfcontradictory cluster, pits birth (‘Yuletide’, Christmas) against death. This is also Bloomian, since Bloom tends to see the other side, too. I remain suspicious of those scholars who come along and tell us what it is really all about. It is such a trite observation that we can only engage in provisional configurations to make sense of the world or of literature; it is so entirely banal as not to be worth expressing any longer. If it were not for all of those who still know what the truth is and proclaim it with dogmatic certainty. I have always wondered at that and broadcast my surprise with reiterated redundancy.

It always struck me that big claims really irritate you. Or do they? Somehow those large, possibly all-important, questions elude me — what is Joyce’s place in those various movements that claim him? How did he stand in relation to Catholicism, Irish nationalism, politics? Some Joyce experts know complex answers, others more simple ones, and I do not have anything but vague guesses. And I wonder how all those diverging views can be proved. In a discussion in Trieste I once threw out casually, I forget in response to what, that Joyce is ‘very much à la carte’ and was later taken to task by Edna Longley who strongly protested that Joyce was serious in his concerns. I have no doubt that he was, though I could not put a finger on his most essential traits. Edna Longley was right, but what I had meant, and what we agreed upon, is that we, in our idiosyncratic endeavours, certainly treat him à la carte and pick out what suits our purpose. True, some of us reduce the Joycean panorama to one particular essential set menu; but in practice we select from an immense buffet according to our purpose and temperament. That’s why so many approaches can peacefully overlap and coexist: psychoanalysis, new historicism, genetic studies or limited close and extrapolating scrutinies. So, as a pastime, I collect dogmatic statements on Joyce or mark them in the margin of scholarly books. They show our tendency for sweeping generalizations without sufficient evidence.

A few unrelated questions next. Have you ever been the victim of plagiarism? No, not really, or not that I know of. Of course, I sometimes see a point made that looks uncannily familiar. Older combatants in the field like myself often stumble on an idea or a simple observation of which they know the origin all too well. But these are generally small matters. There is no patent office for little discoveries that are bound to be made sooner or later. Many of us have seen, independently, that ‘language of flow’ contains a clipped ‘flower’ but also calls up the flow of language. I am sure many readers of ‘Eveline’, with Frank’s (real or invented) exploits of foreign countries, were reminded of an analogy with Othello. There may be scholars who are permanently afraid that their ideas might be stolen and published and hence are reluctant to reveal anything. I do not remember a case of plagiarism in our field but, on occasion, suspicion was raised. Plagiarism in scholarship is a tricky issue, with deadly consequences, and rightly outlawed. For writers it is different; Joyce, after all, freely used Gogarty and many contemporaries, often with indirect acknowledgment at best. A great infringer of copyright before the Lord, he was. But, as I said, I have been spared, possibly because I rarely deal in large issues.

Do you ever feel neglected? No, hardly ever. The very fact that you’re asking me all these questions about my life and opinions for a book of reminiscences would almost prove the opposite. In our vanity perhaps we want overall attention, and some of us display that need more blatantly than others. I have certainly not been neglected at all those conferences; if anything, I have had more than my share. It is different with what we write. Joyce studies come and go, sometimes we cannot even read each other’s books, and a lot will go unnoticed. Most of our profundities are destined to fall by the wayside. I have heard of scholars who celebrate an essay, its acceptance by a journal and then again its publication, which is ridiculous and grossly overestimates what we are doing. With few exceptions, we

have little impact on others. What we produce is secondary and, at best, will become part of a fund of pertinent footnotes. We are catalysts and, if successful, stimulate understanding and appreciation of literature.

How do you react to Hugh Kenner judging you to be ‘the best living Joyce critic’? After all, it’s supreme praise from one of the best. When you repeated Kenner’s blurb of me as ‘the best living Joyce critic’ I first thought that, no, Kenner could not possibly have said ‘critic’, it must have been ‘reader’, which for years I thought more appropriate. But I checked and, in fact, it does say ‘critic’. I am of two minds, or souls. The assessment is both flattering and embarrassing, especially since I am not comfortable with the tag ‘critic’, which tends to suggest a broad spectrum, and you hardly find me making pronouncements about Joyce’s place in the twentieth century; I shy away from perceptive generalities. I am, by nature, a commentator or scholiast. This is not hiding a radiant light under a self-denying bushel, as there is nothing wrong with a long line of scholiasts, those who ideally help us understand texts. As said elsewhere, naturally I try to reach out, from the specific to the more widely applicable. Now, when Kenner says something positive and I, in turn, consider him the greatest of critics, real critics, it is like patting each other’s backs. All I can say is that there is a certain affinity, but Kenner, incomparably more versatile, was playing in another league. I am happy that in some respects we went along similar paths: we like to pick up minutiae and extrapolate. There the similarity ends. Kenner casts his net so much wider. What struck me in him was what long ago was known as the Adler principle, that shortcomings can be turned into proficiency. Kenner suffered from a hearing defect and needed a hearing aid (when bored, he could easily or almost demonstratively switch it off). Yet in the end he developed the best ear for (not only) Joyce’s language and nuances. How others see us is intriguing, at times sobering. It can also make you wonder. In this context I must quote a remark: ‘More recent critics such as Fritz Senn and Brook Thomas and even Karen Lawrence, have taken the other path and argued that style becomes the motive behind the development of these later episodes, that our enjoyment of Joyce’s technical prowess becomes an end in itself.’ I see broadly what is meant though I would never pontificate about ‘the motive’ or ‘our enjoyment’; and I can’t answer for Thomas or Lawrence — who also are not all that recent. Watch, however, the sequel: ‘Such a conclusion is a result of the misappropriation of recent theoretical developments.’ This is the only instance I remember where I was charged of misappropriating theory — a salient slur on my innocence! I hereby publicly exculpate all theorists from ever warping my mind.

Would you agree that there is a very generous exchange of ideas among Joyceans? On the whole Joyceans exchange ideas perhaps more freely than others. There are hundreds of letters, now emails, where snippets are traded without insistence on specific credit. When, long ago, I maintained that efforts like Annotations should not be made by one or two authors but by us Joyce students collectively, pooling insights, Jack Dalton with his retentive streak asked me who on earth would pass on his discoveries in such a manner. I could easily point to the symposium crowd (it was in Paris, 1975) and see dozens of those around me to whom I had given, or from whom I had received, such information. Our major critical breakthroughs we will certainly keep to ourselves, but some of us are mortally afraid of plagiarism or that our precious ideas might be usurped. Most of us may have seen some of our ideas snipped away and blossoming in someone else’s garden. I have also noticed that great ideas tend to lose their sparkle in the cruel daylight of the morning that follows. When the computer became my routine tool, I had heaps of notes that I wanted to convert, but, on close inspection, I found they were not worth keeping. The glow of inspiration they once seemed to have just faded away. It is sobering to see how trite one’s old stuff may appear. Also, what seemed worth pointing out at one time may be utterly commonplace a few years later.

You mentioned how many drafts you’ve discarded and that so much ends up in the bin. Would you say a little more about your working methods? They have changed since the advent of the computer. And at first the computer frightened me. I think it was in 1985, while I was on one of those tours in the States, that Zack Bowen in Delaware showed me a new machine with a ‘word processor’ (a phrase that sounded like a thumbnail sketch of Joyce himself), and my reaction was one of fright: I would never be able to master such novel technology. But a year later I mustered courage and bought a machine myself, and by way of advice from the English Department and backed by Marilyn Reizbaum, who happened to be in Zurich at the crucial time, the choice fell on an Apple Macintosh, and the Foundation has operated with Macs ever since. Mac users are sometimes considered arrogant when in truth they simply use superior equipment and pretend to be tolerant of other religions. At any rate, I learned to use computers, and it suited my working methods, which consisted in little notes and jottings that can now be easily stored electronically, for further use. This allows me to fiddle with what is already there and that sometimes puts me in a frame of mind to knuckle down constructively. I am a slow starter. I have to get the engines running, and mental ignition always seemed to depend on the mood, a state of grace. Anyway, I have to fumble a lot with my sluggish compositions. They generally start from something

concrete, often one phrase or sentence, and then proliferate haphazardly. Putting the material into some order is always the problem — we have it now with these memoirs. What stands out in my mind is how I confected that essay on ‘Nausicaa’ for the Hart/Hayman collection. I was in my office in Ohio State with the deadline long past in the Fall semester of 1970, on successive Sundays, and the whole floor strewn with papers that I had to patch into some coherence. I was also a poor typist of mildly dyslexic proclivities. Letters have a way of getting out of step, the ‘r’ in particular always gets into the wrong place. There is one word that even in my handwriting just never will comply: ‘girl’ invariably comes out as ‘gril’, and dark unconscious forces may be at work. My gravestone inscription should read: ‘He was one who always typed “adn” when he wanted to write ‘dna”.’ Nowadays, of course, when I mechanically type ‘histroy’, a spellchecker takes care of it (in fact it just now instantly rectified ‘adn’). In the old days you couldn’t change and correct things easily. It was laborious drudgery, adding one word meant retyping the paragraph. I can sympathize with the French typesetters in Dijon when they had to cope with Joyce’s revisions. I generally had to rewrite everything. The worst was when, in the early morning hours after a long night, the essay was more or less ready and only the footnotes had to be done. And then, naturally, one forgot footnote number two, out of thirty-one, and had to retype them all with corrected numbers. Once copying machines were around, the cut-and-paste method took over. So technology facilitates certain tasks immensely. But I still need a lot of rewriting. Computers, of course, introduced new types of mistakes. It has become effortless to transfer whole blocks of text (which, to repeat, in the old times meant retyping, or resetting, with the risk of new errors), but the new surgery may derange the connections and result in dangling syntactical remnants.

Are you still writing? Not with the same intensity or frequency. Somehow I got into a phase of routine and recirculation, and I hardly have anything breathtakingly new to impart to the Joyce world. At some stage most of us probably reach the limits of our ingenuity; in the long run edges don’t cut as well as they used to. Naturally I can churn out the same type of philological commentary, and I do, there is even still a need for it on a basic level of glossing, or source tracing. As an old stager, however, one is invited to conferences and has to offer a talk or is asked for contributions to books or journals. I generally, and rashly, accept and then shelve the whole thing until a deadline, or an exigent editor, frowns at me. Mind you, I try to come up with observations that have not yet been circulated, as far as I know, but I will move along my own habitual track which is usually an attempt to throw some light, dim as it may be, on a particular passage or a Joycean feature. It will, however, be more or less the same thing, maybe not a bad thing (otherwise I would not do it), but certainly no major illumination. Nowadays I prefer to react to others, to expand or modify, to join in some ongoing discussion. Participation in a seminar, for example, is more rewarding than a prepared lecture. Lectures are outdated: if there is a mixed audience, as is usual, one manages to alienate everyone. The experts want something from the cutting edge, the newcomers need primary introduction. Often a vehement disagreement stimulates a new effort. This happens when I read a recent publication with fascinated disgust and start looking for arguments and digging up sources: a process that generally ends in a heap of notes no one will ever see. Seeing someone being wrong is a great incentive to write.

J OYCE’S OTHER WORKS In your examples you tend to refer to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. What are your thoughts about Dubliners and A Portrait? I didn’t follow Joyce’s path from Dubliners to Finnegans Wake, the recommended one. I did first look into Dubliners and was not overly impressed; it made its impact much later. Ulysses was the breakthrough and led me straight into the Wake which, for a few years, took over until I returned to Ulysses with vigour. A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man came afterwards, Stephen Hero trailed far behind. The poetry was always around but was never prominent. Of the major works, I have done least on A Portrait, where I am most fascinated by the first and the fourth chapters and am still a bit at a loss about the last diffuse one. I keep returning to that opening section about young Stephen or to the Christmas dinner scene which proves, along with ‘Cyclops’, just how dramatic Joyce can be. Stephen’s perfectly phrased aesthetic theory (did he memorize it?) has attracted a great deal of attention, though not mine, and I do not know what to do with it and whether it has any bearing on the work within which it appears or on those that follow. I think a distinction between the works an author did publish, or wanted to publish, and those he abandoned, is a valid one, though no justification for disregarding the latter, like Giacomo Joyce. At the very least they allow glimpses into the artist’s workshop. For me, Stephen Hero is more of a quarry of the author’s adolescence, and its amorphous quality is in contrast to the tightened, structured prose of A Portrait. Perhaps that simply means I haven’t got anything to say about these works. Dubliners remains of abiding interest. Looking back, I must have done full essays on at least half the stories. They really grow on one in the long run and become more and more lapidary in their style as though they could not be otherwise, and, incidentally, also more funny in a quiet and incisive way. ‘The Sisters’ may well be the most complex of them all. It circles around something we never learn enough about, Father Flynn and what happened to him. What caused what: doubt, some hidden sin, physical disease, some pathology. We only have highly unreliable information. It foreshadows much that is to come (which I cannot see in Stephen Hero, composed at roughly the same time). Of course I like the ambiguity, that ‘third stroke’ (no, not time, and yet it is also time). That words can be ‘idle’ we hear very early on, a Biblical echo, but if anyone never allowed words to be idle, that is, not to be working or effective, it was Joyce who made them work overtime. This plays into the hands of my overall view of Joyce’s dynamism, probably my main concern throughout. And then those ‘rheumatic wheels’ that could have signalled Finnegans Wake, but no doubt didn’t. No wonder we start overreading those stories. I know that both Kenner and I independently focused on the ‘black mass of the boat’ in ‘Eveline’, where a black mass emerges as a kind of gratuitous ghost-meaning that may or may not haunt the final scene. What fascinates me is how words or phrases already change by repetition. That ‘snow is general all over Ireland’ is first a neutral newspaper phrase and then a vibrating vision. The Misses Morkan’s annual dance is always ‘a great affair’, and it sounds like something polite and habitual. But in the course of the story an affair, hidden so far, does in fact emerge. Often the (grammatically) simplest statements are the most cryptic. ‘An Encounter’ tells us that Joe Dillon was reported to have ‘a vocation for the priesthood. Nevertheless it was true’. You don’t find many simpler sentences than this. But how can an outsider know that someone has a vocation, a wholly internal, spiritual matter, as will later be explained to Stephen Dedalus as a potential candidate for the priesthood? Most of this has spilled over into print already, and I mention these trivia not as pivotal insights but to show what fascinates me. It may well be much more momentous to figure out if Gabriel Conroy undergoes a major change. I once made heavy weather of one of the first utterances in Dubliners, an almost casual ‘How do you mean?’ spoken by the boy’s aunt, and treated it as though, once you shift the emphasis, Joyce had programmatically posed the question of how meaning comes about. This is obviously my concern and something that has intrigued me. How does Finnegans Wake produce, or suggest, meaning above conventional syntax and lexis? Often by contrast and opposition (if you see a shape that calls up ‘Mookse’ you are likely to extract a corresponding ‘Gripes’ in the vicinity), by patterns and motifs, etc. And how does the Wake induce us to overread, to project and invent echoes, in other words, to continue the game that the author has initiated, so that no clear lines can ever be drawn? As for the mood of the early works, there is an air of despondency, paralysis, if you want; after all Dubliners begins with ‘There was no hope …’. The stories are about lack of fulfilment, of not reaching goals, and their anticlimaxes at first left me disappointed with their sudden endings or fade-outs, or rather the characters’ disappointment affected me as a reader. Now I am more aware of their vibrancy and, incidentally, they get funnier as we interact with them. I must also confess that I lack a moral sense and cannot engage in the sport of condemning or justifying the characters. I have often put the tales into the customary framework of the ‘gnomon’ as defined in Euclid, by taking something away. But this geometrical figure could just as well be constructed by adding, and a gnomonic case can be made for the procedure of addition as well as subtraction.

You mentioned the amorphous quality of Stephen Hero: would you say more about it?

Stephen Hero to me is Joyce before he became Joyce. For someone constitutionally alert to how something is written rather than what it is about, it is a bit diffuse, like a hasty first draft, and a draft it is; hasty, perhaps not. As a quarry it is ideal: it contains material that was changed or adapted later on, and it is therefore useful for comparisons and studies of development. Let me put it like this: I could hardly call up any passage from memory (though I know what it says about epiphany or Ibsen, etc.). I am not drawn back to it, except for consultation. What has always struck me is Joyce’s eminent quotability — and that, for me, doesn’t apply to Stephen Hero.

Expand on what you mean by ‘eminent quotability’. What I mean is that so much in Joyce seems to stick in the mind, can be ‘reverbed’ (to borrow a verb from the Library chapter in Ulysses). I thought every reader, not to mention scholar, of Joyce could instantly call up whole sentences, or even more, for inspection, as I am doing just now (I will check them later, naturally). But then I was told that this does not hold true in general: one should never extrapolate from one’s own experience. Maybe, in this volume, I overestimate the readers’ (let’s assume there are readers) own live recalls. In June 1965, at the Zurich Theatre Festival, a Dublin group came to do what was called Stephen D, based obviously on A Portrait and Stephen Hero. It had lots of narrative parts, and the main actor who played Stephen also doubled as the narrator and was on stage for more than two hours, quite a challenging feat. He later told me that his long part was not at all difficult to memorize, summing it up with: ‘Every word is right.’ Not the mot juste in the literary way, but from the actor’s perspective, its speakability. Since he also quoted a lot from Stephen Hero, he must have found it easy on the tongue and therefore quotable, contrary to my own reaction. But the actor put most succinctly what applies to Joyce: that every word is right for those who have to learn and recite it. Long ago, in an airplane approaching Dublin, a phrase from A Portrait about clouds — ‘flying high over Ireland’ — echoed in my mind, and has ever since, and the secret of what makes such and other phrases so intensely vibrating has occupied my mind, often without any success, as in this instance. Possibly the assonant diphthongs (‘flying high over Ireland’) account for some, though not all of the effect. All the more strange then that when I verified the passage (after talking about it) I found I had changed it from ‘voyaging high over Ireland’, so I had added one diphthong myself. It tells you something about projection and the Protean nature of the mind. As it happens, Stephen Dedalus makes a similar mistake when he recalls ‘Darkness falls from the air’ and later on checks himself and realizes that it is ‘Brightness’. The memorability may be partly our own.

You once mentioned that you have nothing to say about Exiles. I have most difficulty with Exiles, which somehow fails to reach me. It is because I do not find those features in it that I think typical of Joyce: lexical turbulences, overtones. I have sat through several performances and was never absorbed. It is just not on my wavelength, it seems, and I may miss some vibrations. Well, some of the stage directions, the adverbs, are funny. What worries me is some of its tone. So when Richard declaims in his last speech: ‘I have wounded my soul for you — a deep wound of doubt which can never be healed … It is not in the darkness of belief that I desire you …’, what are we to suppose? That someone actually speaks like that (from a writer who knew so well which register we use in which situation, and with such a sharp ear for false tones)? Should we laugh at him or hit him over the head? Did Joyce intend this to be kitsch? I am at a loss. As for that ‘doubt’ in the play, I, who have always argued for doubt as vital in Joyce, cannot see it as effective. It is a doubt alright, but it could be dispelled at any moment, either she did or she didn’t, and she could tell him at will. This is not criticism but the articulation of a subjective inability to grasp the merit that the play must have. But one final note: at so many conferences or small events, parts of Joyce’s prose have been recited, from practically all the works — but never, to the best of my memory, from Exiles. And, before I leave the subject, it seems characteristic that most critics who do write about the play tend to focus on the appended notes.

One time you recalled actors who were genuinely affected by the play. Yes, I do know of at least two instances, performances of the play in German in Klaus Reichert’s translation (Verbannte). The productions were totally different, one stressed tortured souls (with, incidentally, a Richard who seemed a generation older than Robert, and so there was an Oedipal twist), the other was playful, artificial, with a light touch. While both performances left me relatively cold, in both cases the actors confessed how much they had been moved by the play and how it actually affected their lives at the time, more so than with any other play. So it got under their skin.

How about the poems? If, as easily might have been the case, Ulysses had never come out and would simply be a heap of drafts and typescripts abandoned in some attic, chances are that Joyce’s poetry would not attract the attention it deserves. The poems, somewhat traditional, have been neglected; they rarely are the subject of a symposium panel. One expert is Myra Russel who showed that Chamber Music has had a great appeal for

composers, in particular Molyneux Palmer. There is a sentimentality about them that makes them a bit hard to relate to. You will not get much mileage out of me about them, in other words, as I am not qualified. It may be typical that William York Tindall posited an undercurrent of micturition in them, which may well be there — or else the two ubiquitous, urinating girls in Finnegans Wake have been retroactive. At any rate Tindall spiced the poems up considerably. Much of Joyce’s later prose is perhaps more effectively poetic than Chamber Music. Pomes Penyeach are much more intriguing and challenging, and by no means simple to absorb. Some of them, ‘Bahnhofstrasse’ being the best-known locally, were written in Zurich, and a few depend on biographical notes. Ilaria Natali from Florence, one of our grant students, has looked at them closely and opened my eyes to facets that would have escaped me.

You are more interested in Giacomo Joyce, aren’t you? I remember when it came out in 1959, neatly boxed with facsimiles, and I had to review it for a local paper and was wondering, like all other first readers, how to classify it — as prose-poems, drafts, epiphanies, exercice de style, or whatever? Categorization is our problem, not the author’s, and Joyce did not seem to want to become the author of this precious piece. Giacomo Joyce is deeply rooted in Joyce’s experience and vain infatuation in Trieste, and the ambiguous femme fatale at its centre has been variously identified among Joyce’s Triestine female students of good family, no doubt a kind of woman he had not come across in Dublin. For such reasons alone, Giacomo Joyce is a happy hunting ground for psychoanalytical probes. It is now rightly a cornerstone of the Trieste summer school. As it is intimately linked to the other works (quite apart from the biography), it would be an ideal object for an electronic, hypertextual presentation.

What about the Critical Writings? If you want to know Joyce’s earlier views and strategies, you go to the essays and Trieste talks that are assembled in Critical Writings. These are a quarry for all those interested in what Joyce thought or, in his public lectures or newspaper articles, considered strategic. He was not above doctoring the facts about, say, Galway or the Maamtrasna Murders (‘Ireland at the Bar’). In the Critical Writings we find evidence for our arguments about Joyce’s aesthetics or his views on Ireland, and it would be unwise to ignore that rich store of information. As Joyce’s views are not my priority, you don’t find me there very often. If my bearings are right, here, it seems that post-colonial studies have unearthed views in Joyce’s Triestine lectures that coincide with those of the Citizen in ‘Cyclops’. That insight, of course, has been around for years. Joyce’s collected writings are important for certain types of studies. As in Stephen Hero, they contain views that are much closer to Joyce’s own than in his other fiction, and to me it seems typical that Joyce became less theoretical in later years. Epiphany is explained in Stephen Hero, there is a lecture (to an audience of one) on aesthetics in A Portrait, and Stephen holds forth on Shakespeare in Ulysses. We also have the early Pola and Paris notebooks. More, in fact, have come to light, and once we have the possibility of collecting all of Joyce’s aesthetic notes, scholarship will be greatly helped. But all I can say is that it is just not my area. We also have the essays that Joyce had to write for an examination at the University of Padua in 1912, which Louis Berrone discovered, published and annotated in James Joyce in Padua. Joyce had to write on Dickens in English and on the Renaissance in Italian. That latter essay is obviously a case of impressive name-dropping. I don’t think it’s possible to deduce just how familiar he was with Dickens or gauge his evaluation of the novelist. Berrone, himself a Dickens scholar, claimed that Joyce admired Dickens a great deal, but I was not so sure, and the two of us once had a discussion where I conjectured that in an exam situation one would do better expressing positive views rather than being dismissive. Berrone held that Joyce was always straightforward and would not equivocate.

Would you explain why you carefully avoid the phrase ‘teaching Joyce’? I have always baulked at the phrase ‘teaching Joyce’, for ‘teach’ is a transitive verb that seems to know what it is doing and to presume that we know. In other words, under which conditions is Joyce, or Ulysses, ‘taught’? What has to be brought up? What can be left out? I always assumed that if, say, European history of the eighteenth century is taught, the French Revolution can hardly be left out. What is it, correspondingly, that has to go in and what may be omitted when the subject is Ulysses — Irish history, religion, music, the Jewish question, father-son relationships, styles, the Odyssey, feminism, advertising, Joyce’s life, etc., etc.? We have the one overall consolation that everything we choose to do is wrong, by inevitable selection, emphasis, assimilation, bias, limited competence. It is also our great chance and gives us liberty. I always like to see what other Joyceans do in the classroom, and what we do is as varied and idiosyncratic as our written studies. Perhaps my aversion to such a resolute word as ‘teach’ is simply that in German you couldn’t use a correspondingly direct verb. You can teach (‘lehren’, ‘unterrichten’) chemistry, history, literature, but hardly a single author or a work.

Are you seriously claiming that Joyce is unteachable? It appears we ‘teach’ (if one has to use the term) Joyce in so many different, subjective ways. We have few stringent guidelines, if any, and fortunately, therefore, great scope. The dilemma is similar to educating our children. No one knows how we should ideally go about it, but we have to do it anyway. Joyce can be defined in terms of impossibilities: he is indomitable, unmanageable, unreadable, untranslatable and so on, and consequently incites us to manage, read or translate his works. And, to repeat myself, what would be required to justify the claim that one is teaching Ulysses? Apart from the fact that Joyce is an academic misfit, a godsend for academia, prompting innumerable theses, he is also a nuisance and cannot be accommodated. For one thing, there is no representative shortcut. At a pinch, one can choose two Dickens novels or even three Shakespeare plays to convey an idea of their authors, but none of Joyce’s relatively few works is representative. One semester, already a luxury in some institutions, is not remotely sufficient. I know of colleagues (I use the word a bit vaguely) who have to squeeze Joyce in along with other writers and can hardly go into depth. If I can devote one whole semester just to Joyce, it is a rare privilege. In an extracurricular reading group one can proceed, as we do in Zurich, sentence by sentence, and the whole takes about three and a half years. But that also keeps our noses close to individual items, and it may prevent a more panoramic view. It is a great consolation that there is no single way ever to do Joyce ‘right’. Joyce is unteachable in the same way as his works are untranslatable. This means simply that our attempts fall short. Yet we are left with the obligation, and the chance, to teach as well as to translate. On the other hand, what makes any instructive process easy is that one may start from any random point and, from there, unravel more and more strands in the gigantic network. Very little pars can point towards an immense toto. A part ‘so ptee does duty for the holos’, as the Good Book says, and it is an excellent procedure. Maybe I have never done anything else. Questions help, and there is hardly anything allowing more insight than a wrong answer; ‘wrong’ on some surface level. Errors are portals of discovery and invention, and we may have nothing but errors (as in the Wake). I recall a case where a Joyce scholar mentioned a student’s term paper where the boy who narrates ‘Araby’ was referred to as Jack. Why? Well, his uncle says: ‘All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.’ The incident was used to show the limited grasp of a few hopeless students. Yet such a misreading could precisely serve as a lever to show the intricacies of Joycean naming. There are real names, nicknames, those from stories or myths, and many more. One confusion in Ulysses stems from the variety of names, Buck is Malachi Mulligan; ‘Kinch’ is Stephen Dedalus; ‘Algy’ is not a close friend but a famous poet. There is also ‘Billy Pitt’; Clive Kempthorpe surfaces in a report (or possibly a name made up on the spot); Sir Peter Teazle is from a play; ‘Chrysostomos’ may be the name of a Church father or just a Greek compound, and so on. This is foreshadowed in a story like ‘Araby’ where, conceivably, the boy’s name might actually be Jack (in which case the uncle’s admonition would have a different resonance). Pyrrhus is not ‘a pier’ as one of Stephen’s pupils associates, but the conjunction Pyrrhus—pier may become fruitful. Wrong answers or misinterpretations can also be consequential, as Bantam Lyons could testify. In this connection I always ask myself how teachers of Finnegans Wake can grade their students. What is wrong, what makes sense, according to whom? In the same vein, I often wonder, when there is disagreement about a reading in the Wake, how we should then proceed, what premises we could try, the very method of argument. I once asked ‘How (by which procedure) can we disagree about Finnegans Wake? This came back as a rhetorical ‘How can we disagree about Finnegans Wake?’

O DDS WITHOUT ENDS Having read my way through an impressive number of recorded Senn appearances in connection with Joyce in Switzerland, I was struck as much by the sheer number of your performances as by some rather unexpected locations, such as the Schatzalp or Brig. You must have looked into forgotten archives, but now a few memories come back. I began dabbling in Joyce fairly early, starting in 1951, and the first signs of it appeared in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. I became the local person who was doing Joyce in Switzerland, and then in the German-speaking countries, when few others were known to do so. It became a sort of label that has stuck. In such a role one gets invited to talk at functions, it could be a university, it could be – and was, now that you mention it – a small place like Brig (in the alpine canton of Valais). I vaguely remember I was there, because of the long journey by train, but I have no recollection of what I said. In this context I must mention the Neue Zürcher Zeitung which provided a convenient outlet for reviews as well as articles. Its cultural editor, the late Werner Weber, always gave me plenty of scope, without any editorial interference. Faber and Faber once sent me for review volumes II and III of Joyce’s Letters, very expensive to buy at the time, and with unusual efficiency I wrote a review over one weekend. It ran to thirty typewritten pages, narrow spaced, and the paper published it all in its Saturday ‘Feuilleton’, as it was called, without a single cut. This is something hardly conceivable today. So again, I was lucky.

Who would have invited you? Sometimes it was a local organization. I’ve forgotten about such events; generally they were introductory talks and, at times, I tried to give an idea of Finnegans Wake by way of persuasive samples. It was always awkward to find a topic for what was inevitably a mixed audience. There are generally a few people with considerable knowledge, and there is always a real expert tucked away in the audience, someone you never heard of but who really likes his or her stuff. Most listeners had next to no previous knowledge and may want the quintessence of Joyce in fifty minutes. And so to whom do you talk? The old-fashioned lecture optimally alienates everybody: the experts are disappointed, and the novices are easily left out in the cold. Giving a talk under such circumstances is always an uneasy compromise, and that is probably why most of those events have faded from my memory. I much prefer, by the way, to join an ongoing seminar and just continue what is in progress, a short story or an episode. You know that I’ve always been in favour of more interactive events at our gatherings.

You must surely remember your very first public appearances as a Joycean critic. Do you have any disasters to report? For the first years, of course, I prepared carefully and wrote everything down and read it all off from a typescript – the sort of thing I have spent my recent years preaching against. But I was scared, and I do understand timid newcomers who clutch their scripts. My very first invitation was to the university of Geneva, to Professor Häusermann’s Joyce seminar. The worst thing happened a few years later, after Jean Schoonbroodt, the lovable Belgian priest who has attended every symposium so far, had visited me in Zurich as he was preparing his thesis. He invited me to Louvain, again to present Finnegans Wake (I was then in my enthusiastic Wake phase). But I had hardly arrived in his college when he said, casually, that the ‘Romanistes’ would turn up in half an hour’s time and that I had to talk to them as well, the catch being that they only spoke French. I had no script, no notes and only those rudiments of French that I had learnt at school, interlaced with plenty of oblivion. I do not know how I weathered that ordeal, mumbling off the cuff as best I could. The group was indulgent and attentive, they sometimes supplied me with the verb (and its conjugation) that I had been silently groping for to complete a sentence. There must even be a tape of the disaster but I took great care never to listen to it. Masochism has its limits.

Is it fair to say that you rarely quote other scholars? It is fair. I have a few reasons, apart from rampant amateurism. One is that I dislike when a book is patched together with extracts from previous publications. As an outsider, I was never forced to survey a topic and list everything that was ever written about it, the kind of summing up that constitutes the obligatory first chapter of any dissertation. I also find it futile to use others’ arguments to bolster my own, except in cases of essential disagreement. But then generally and unprofessionally I start from the base, the passages, not from what someone else has said. So, to the best of my knowledge, the concrete examples that I often use are my own choice, or if not, I attempt to get a new angle, trivial as it may be. Then I also find, wrongly perhaps, that anything already said by Stuart Gilbert or Frank Budgen is now part of our common equipment and does not have to be acknowledged again.

Of course, not quoting others much also means you don’t have to bother with comprehensive bibliographies. I love bibliography when it’s provided free, by Alan Cohn of former times, William Brockman or Willard Goodwin nowadays, but I detest doing it. If you have to give all the details of a publication in a prescribed format, you can only get it wrong, you have to pay great attention and you learn nothing in the process of writing. Bibliographing is like proofreading: at best you make no mistakes. So I am grateful to those who are competent and offer their indispensable services. Since I do not refer all that much to other scholars, I can get off relatively easy. We are not documenting references here in these reminiscences, so as not to generate a spurious academic air.

I feel slightly awkward asking this question, but why do you think your knowledge and mind are not exploited more? The question is embarrassing. It is not something that occurred to me. But I know what you mean. Of course, a fair share of requests come in, often by email, and we generally try to oblige, though it can be time-consuming. In recent years an assumption is gaining ground that just everything is electronically available and can be passed on. Information is, of course, given out free, within reasonable limits, which are overstepped in an email request such as: ‘Can you tell me about Ulysses?’ Actually there now are websites that try to do just that. It is a job that becomes easier the less you know about the book.

But to return to my question … One does not only make friends. A long time ago a medical doctor from Germany spent weeks at the Foundation on a research project with a psychological focus, and he used many of the resources in our library. We also had extensive conversations. He then asked me to read through the typescript for suggestions, which I did, and we both devoted a strenuous weekend to the job at hand. Revisions were called for, also from a prospective publisher. After a few months, which I had spent in hospital, the author asked me to read the revised version, and I declined as I really could not spare the time for another reading. The result was that I received a card which indicated that certain people just didn’t want to face the truth. When the study came out in print, the Foundation, which had provided most of the material, was not even acknowledged. Such bad experiences are rare. I think it is our duty to help and encourage scholarship. Often a visit to the Foundation is the most economic solution, even considering Zurich expenses, for when practically everything is at arm’s length a fair amount of time and, eventually, money, can be saved.

But how about the lack of exploitation as I see it? Perhaps it is the word ‘exploit’ that’s wrong, it sounds like taking undue advantage. I am thinking more of an exchange where, of course, the one with more experience may have more to offer. But the traffic is two ways, and invitations to the Zurich Foundation, for example, are not entirely altruistic: we, too, want to learn from our scholars and their expertise. Also, don’t forget that my potential usefulness is more or less limited to philology, source studies, close reading, stylistic approaches, as well as, perhaps, the distilled precarious wisdom of decades of engaging with Joyce, which I am pouring out here. The basic stuff, in short. For the wide angle, the study of any kind of ‘-ism’, you need someone else. If ever we do a workshop on something theoretical, someone else has to take charge as guest-initiator. We had one such workshop on maternity, and I hope this will be done more often.

E XCESSIVE AVERSIONS Let’s turn to what I know will be a stimulating topic: your ‘allergies’. Let’s start with scholarly intolerance: how does it manifest itself? Our allergies surface predominantly in reviews: they are the one outlet for the aggressions that are normally denied to scholars. As often as not we may simply have to judge something we are not interested in. I really think that if our publications, with their immense backlog, had the necessary space, every book should be reviewed by two readers from different camps. Say you have a book on feminism: a feminist scholar should contribute an expert view and someone outside should judge it and see what the noninitiated can get out of it. Like most of us, I tend to overreact. We all have our individual allergies that override scholarly tolerance. It upsets me when an author — unbidden — quotes classics and quotes them incorrectly (I don’t mean typos), or when, for instance, a basic Anglo-Saxon word is said to be derived from Sanskrit, or, in particular, when there is uncritical reliance on a translation. My own tolerance is greater for a certain type of thesis, which I think wholly askew but which may still offer a few perceptive titbits (the Blind Hen Principle) that add to my knowledge. Such tolerance does not extend to reference works; those we depend on, and there I have sometimes been very high-handed. Reference books ought to be as accurate and reliable as possible. The first edition of the standard Ulysses Annotated was simply too full of wrong information, especially on foreign languages. It has been much improved since, but I remain stubbornly uncharitable because of the heavy-handedness of static information. So I have been notably unfair to Don Gifford’s Annotations and have hardly appreciated its unique service in saving us so much research time.

I think a particular favourite of yours is ‘Homeric parallels’? We all have our sore spots and may overreact with disproportionate passion. I have been conducting a futile fight against the term ‘Homeric parallels’, those particular windmills that Stuart Gilbert has introduced or at least firmly installed. I think it an ill-fated designation which may have led to more misunderstandings than any other. The geometrical term ‘parallel’ denotes an exact one-to-one relationship that simply does not exist in multiple, criss-cross Joycean correspondences. Even on the surface there are more inversions than parallels: Odysseus has a son, Telemachos, and no daughter; Bloom’s son Rudy died years ago, but Milly is alive. Penelope is mother of Telemachos, Stephen feels the guilt of his mother’s death. Molly doubles as Penelope and Kalypso; she is also arguably a Siren, and is brought in line with Helen. Bloom is not the only Odysseus, Buck Mulligan is versatile from the start; so, on their levels, are Lenehan, Simon Dedalus or the sailor who calls himself Murphy. The whole book is what characterizes Odysseus, polytropos, versatile, flexible, adaptable, of changeable shape and appearance. Take the respective Cyclops/Kyklops adventures: Odysseus saved his life by verbal cunning, he passed off a word that disguises itself as a pronoun (Outis, nobody) as his name, whereas Bloom has no idea that his innocent phrase about ‘throwing away’ a newspaper was taken to be a verbal hint. So what? One consequence is that Ulysses is often introduced as something that parallels situations and persons in the Odyssey, and this is put forward too forcibly and turns readers off. In commentaries the Homeric analogies often precede the text, telling the reader what to expect.

You seem to bristle at doctrinal approaches. I do have great difficulty with any kind of doctrinaire stand or firm basic premise. When I vented my distaste, long ago in 1976, in a talk, ‘Dogmad or Dubliboused?’ in which I expatiated on the oddity of so many Joyceans making all these orthodox claims, given the generally open, ambiguous, versatile, alternative, sceptical (and so on) nature of Joyce’s works as I see them, I really felt embarrassed bringing this up at all. It seemed so superfluous. What could be more commonplace than an argument in favour of at least an undercurrent of uncertainty (moreover, one would in all likelihood have the sanction of most theorists for this)? But certainty is still there, for example when someone claims the pivotal point of Ulysses is that Stephen sees in Bloom the traditional figure of hypostasis, from which point everything else falls into transcendental place. This occurs in a sentence in ‘Ithaca’ full of pseudo-patristic lore, and it even describes Jesus Christ as ‘sesquipedalian’ — an obvious and intentional error round several corners. Those who know exactly what Joyce is all about and are willing to tell us are still around. We still come across the kind of simple-mindedness where everything is clear or becomes clear once the right angle is applied. Naturally we want intricate, chaotic verbal artifacts to fall into line, we want to disclose hidden structures, we strive for an ultimate Einsteinian formula. I am just not sure that Joyce will oblige. Yet contrary to all expectation, we still find such propositions. Truths are revealed, at least on smaller scales.

Are you yourself beyond simplifications? Of course, it is the others who are dogmatic. I proclaim myself the level-headed sceptic and then, in a report, find myself quoted as saying that ‘nothing linguistic was alien to Joyce’, the sort of absolute statement that I campaign against. I am fairly sure I must have thrown this out and now naturally regret its unqualified form. It is so easy to fall into such traps. On the other hand I assume everyone, if anyone does read it in the first place, would understand it as a loose way of saying that in Joyce’s linguistic competence one might find almost anything (as distinct from ‘absolutely everything’). I stand corrected. On occasion I also say, by way of illustration, that Finnegans Wake is the place outside where all parallels meet. I assume this is some sparkling way of adding one more illuminating description to those already in circulation, but the encapsulation has little concrete meaning. I also proclaimed on several occasions that with writers like Joyce, time ‘lost its innocence’. Sounds great, and I always hope no one will take me up on it.

Now that you mention it, the term ‘pun’ is another red rag, isn’t it? No, I don’t object to the term itself, but only its widespread, indiscriminate misapplication. I really have developed an allergy, and I cringe when any sort of ambiguity is called a pun. Alright for the world outside, but we, relishing verbal nuances, dealing with literature and language, had better sharpen our tools. Just to call everything that combines more than one meaning (assuming that anything can have only one meaning) a ‘pun’, blunts the edge. Ambiguities in language are not the exception, but the norm: just look at any dictionary and see how many meanings flow together in, for example, ‘sound’. Joyce utilizes such confluences throughout, almost as though he were unable to throw away any particular, even coincidental, sense. I have at times come out with a manifestly wrong dogma, a challenging overstatement, interrupting a discussion with the remark, ‘There are no puns in Joyce!’ It is intended as an over-emphatic caveat and has, in fact, caused slight consternation. When I was asked once what exactly I meant by the assertion, I was forced to articulate an almost physical repugnance at the common misuse. As a result I now maintain that ‘pun’ is only a subsection, though a prominent one to be sure, of a larger feature. Joyce is what I then termed constitutionally ‘symphoric’, which means no more that that he rarely kills a bird with just one stone. He brings (-phor, as in metaphor) things together (sym): extreme realism with metatextuality, parochial Dublin with Greek myths, and, in particular, meanings and ambiguities. I prefer to characterize this part of Joyce as something like semantic overlays (or ‘symphora’). Puns, or play on words, are one particular category among many, some of which, perhaps, are as yet unnamed. Of course, real puns do occur. Lenehan’s riddle which doubles ‘Rose of Castile’ with ‘rows of cast steel’ is one, and a fairly poor one at that: it characterizes the speaker. And precisely because it is an obvious and intended pun, it can be judged good or bad on a scale of wit. So the label ‘pun’ had better be confined to where there is a semantic discharge, often a surprise effect, something intellectually stimulating or revealing another angle. Genuine puns tend to result in genuine laughter or else in a dismissive groan, as in Lenehan’s example. Bloom’s thought on the lot of breeding mothers (if it is his own), ‘Life with hard labour’, seems of the intellectually stimulating kind: it economically and acutely combines the continuous pains of birth labour with a court sentence: such women are really condemned for life. Such a focus or thematic knot is wholly absent from, say, the imposition of river names in ALP: ‘don’t you kennet …’. A dialect word for ‘know’ is combined with the river Kennet, without any focal revelation; it is simply part of the chapter’s fluvial undercurrent (or overlay). It would be idle to say it is not funny since it is not meant to be. Readers not familiar with the Wake might groan at ‘mouldaw stains’, but we tend to read it as an instance of a typical thematic reinforcement. Different strands are entwined, a common occurrence not only in the Wake.

But it’s not always just black and white, is it? Naturally there are countless borderline cases, and it may all be a matter of definition or taste. Leo Knuth once aptly said, and possibly wrote, that the pun is the linguistic equivalent to a miracle, and I quite agree when it refers to efficacious puns. The test may indeed be whether a minor verbal miracle comes into play. To my mind it does in ‘Life with hard labour’, but not in ‘don’t you kennet’. Pun, in my view, should entail some dynamic eruption. We may find this in a phrase like ‘their right renownsable patriarch’ (FW 581.6), which shows (whatever else) an ambivalence towards those in power or fame. Some person with renown (instanced in a right honourable member of parliament) had better renounce and step down. Rise and fall are condensed. By contrast, ‘In Dalkymont nember to’ (FW 390.29) runs together several strands that are not (or at least do not seem to be) sparklingly interconnected; geography (Dalkey and Dollymount) mingles with Irish history (‘Document Number Two’, echoing the troubles following the Treaty of 1922), and ‘member’ is thrown in for good measure. Conceivably someone might find illuminating links so that the bundle of disparate items would be electrified into a bona fide play on words, whether pungent or feeble. My conviction is that Joyce is inherently and economically symphoric. This reminds me of a famous discussion between Heidegger and my old teacher Emil Staiger about a line in one of Eduard Mörike’s poems about a lamp: ‘Was aber schön ist/selig scheint es in ihm selbst’ (‘That which is beautiful, it seems/shines blessed in itself, in its own being’, in clumsy transposition). They argued about the meaning

of the verb ‘scheint’: one contestant claimed it must mean ‘shine’, the other opted for ‘appear’. In Joyce such a debate would be futile as it might easily denote both, without, incidentally, thereby constituting a pun (I do not think German readers would be amused). Joyce increasingly tends to be ‘both and’ — both Molly Bloom and Penelope (and also Kalypso), and literal, real and metaphorical (or even symbolic) meanings converge. I called this: ‘symphoric’. ‘Horne/horn’ in Ulysses refers to cattle, possibly to Moses, to a musical instrument, to an erection and includes the name of the master of a maternity hospital. Is ‘Cape Horn’ in ‘Oxen’ therefore a pun, simply because it carries some of these implications? You are free to call it that since no law can protect the semantic range of a word. I am simply contending that a more acute set of terms might be profitable. Just one more example. Father Flynn’s life in ‘The Sisters’ was, ‘you might say, crossed’. We can hardly overlook the apt ecclesiastical echo in Joyce’s symphoric economy. What one of the priest’s sisters says coincides with, and yet differs from, what Joyce signals to alert readers. But now imagine someone like Buck Mulligan uttering, perhaps with a wink, ‘His life, you might say, was crossed!’ — then the identical sentence would constitute a pun.

You seem to have more on this topic … Somehow I cannot stop on this issue. Take also the thematic tinges of the episodes in Ulysses, the superimposed layers that add wind to ‘Aeolus’ or music to ‘Sirens’. Bloom thinks that music is numbers but that numbers in a love letter would ‘fall quite flat’; ‘flat’ also happens to be a musical term, especially following a strictly musical ‘One flat’ and preceding ‘Want to listen sharp’. Three further repetitions are in the ‘flat pad’ Pat brings (U 11. 602–848). As ‘puns’ such topical overlays, not aiming at any joke or witty insight, would, well, fall completely flat. Naturally my doughty fight against this persistent windmill, a widespread lack of sensitivity, is, to remain within the first story, ‘idle’. The biblical word implies that it has no effect whatsoever. I would like to add that for a translator it does not matter at all whether an item is a genuine pun, a slip of the tongue or just one more of Joyce’s semantic impositions: the problem remains frustratingly the same.

You also have reservations about ‘Epiphanies’, don’t you? They are of a different sort. There is nothing wrong with ‘epiphany’; it meant a lot to Joyce in an early period so that he offered us a term in resonant Greek with liturgical overtones. Joyce certainly used it at a formative stage to characterize a number of prose sketches. From what I can make out, he then distanced himself from it and used the word once in ‘Proteus’ as a comment on a juvenile ambition; it also occurs in Stephen Hero where it is defined, but Stephen Hero is a work that was never finished and which survives by propitious accident. The word did not make it into A Portrait; in the Wake it is scurrilously coupled with ‘culious’. That the author’s bait was taken up with zeal is understandable enough, and so ‘epiphany’ has had a luminous critical career. It is just that I cannot see the relevance of it all. Would not every writer, poets above all, hope for an effect of ‘sudden spiritual manifestation’, the revelation of a whatness? New indeed is that Joyce applied it to trivial, non-spectacular sketches, low-key happenings. An ‘exact focus’, as one learns in Stephen Hero, can achieve the epiphanizing of an object. Joyce had an uncanny skill of bringing this about in his writing: it always impressed me how each word or phrase, when it moves into our visual or aural focus, seems to come into its own and achieve its full splendour. It is one reason for Joyce being so memorable and eminently quotable. I have my doubts when critics single out specific passages as epiphanies, often simply because they occur in the collected sketches with that label. Many such passages already have the kind of intensity that makes them more vibrating, as, for example, the end of ‘Araby’ or ‘The Dead’, and the label does not much more than designate what is felt anyway. Then there are those parts in A Portrait that are implanted from the collected ‘Epiphanies’. From many of these I cannot get, for the life of me, any special insight, let alone spiritual revelations. So whoever applies the term to them cannot just stop there, as critics often do, but has to go on and explain to me what the spiritual insight actually is that I am blind to. Going through the texts as with a Geiger counter or divining rod and marking passages ‘epiphanies’ therefore looks to me like a futile exercise, even if, by itself, it does increase perception. What, ultimately, in Joyce is not epiphanic? I do use the word about some of our reading experiences, however, those sudden flashes of insight accompanied by excitement. Somehow, but I could be wrong, it seems to me that those who still talk or write about epiphany never seem to have any. As happens to me here. Perhaps once again, in my prejudice, it might be more opportune to shelve the noun and use the verb ‘epiphanize’ for acts of recognition.

I know you have taboo words, too. There are some taboo terms that I would never use and, for that very reason, I do not list them here. But I do remember that once, almost like Farrington, I found myself having uttered one such fashionable and meaningless word (it begins with ‘d’). I have never quite gotten over it, and I still blush. No one, naturally, even noticed.

A NNOTATION Annotation is another pet irritation of yours. Would you mind beginning with a few general remarks? Let me confess at the outset that I am at heart an annotator, and most of what I have provided are notes, sometimes extended ones, or generalizations that derive from specific glosses. Annotation is in the same category as translation: something essentially inadequate which, at the same time, we cannot do without. It is both necessary and wrong by nature. No one can tell, or decree, what should be annotated, and how, or where to stop. Notes, as is implicit in their name (‘what is known’), or comments, have something authoritative about them; someone who knows informs those who do not. Annotation divides a text into two categories, one that needs comment and one that does not. Glosses are illuminating, stimulating, superfluous, redundant or intrusive. At which point does which reader need to know what, and where does annotation glide into interpretation? How does one help first-time readers? They are involved in a temporal progress with the text’s whole future still hidden away, and I strongly argue against glimpses ahead (explicatio praecox). The need of first-time readers is different from that of readers who have read the book and potentially have a panoramic view. Notes freeze complex potential into brief static summaries, pertinent at best, always in doubtful fixation. Above all, notes have a spurious finality about them, as though clinching the matter, when more often than not we do not even know what the matter is. ‘That’s it!’ they seem to say. I know what I am talking about, because one time I had to provide glosses for a bilingual edition of ‘Hades’, so that here my aim is to describe the prevalence of glasshouses rather than to throw stones at them.

Don’t annotations have a way of becoming facts by recirculation? There was a time when the German word ‘Frauenzimmer’ in ‘Proteus’ was on the point of acquiring the meaning of ‘midwife’, which it never had, but some early gloss claimed it. As it happens, ‘Frauenzimmer’ is a telling instance of just how laborious annotation would have to be. The word fits into ‘Proteus’ as it underwent substantive changes through the centuries. It seems to mean a room, ‘Zimmer’, and so it did, when it denoted the room where the women (‘Frauen’), say, of a palace, commonly lodged. By some vagary it was then used for all those women in the room collectively, and later on it was narrowed to just one person. So its appearance is deceptive: it meant different things at different times, and it looks like a room (‘Zimmer’) but it is a woman. It also changed in stature. In the eighteenth century it was perfectly respectable; nowadays it is either derogatory or jocular — all in all the kind of word that would fascinate Stephen Dedalus and his creator, the treasurer of verbal oddities. So a lot of circumambient comment is needed, an adequate note would swell out of proportion, and would one really want to know all that? On the other hand ‘a nitwit, drab, sloven, wench’ is wide off the mark; for one thing ‘Frauenzimmer’ cannot be condensed into a string of synonyms. Such are the hazards of annotation.

Well, you’ve been known to hurl stones before so you might as well sling some now! Okay, here is another futile barrage. When we had our workshop on annotation, in connection with an electronically annotated Ulysses, I was disappointed by the broad assumption of assembled experts that the work had been done by Gifford/Seidman, Weldon Thornton, Declan Kiberd and their predecessors. All we needed, it appeared, was to take over those existing notes and perhaps expand and supplement them a bit. (The ‘How’ of organizing them did get its due attention.) My claim is that the work of those scholars naturally should be utilized, but that the basic task has to be done from scratch, starting from where annotation is called for. Who, for example, would glean just those potential Homeric references? That is a job that, contrary to expectation, has not yet been done. At bad moments I feel that those who engage in annotation (I had to do it myself, in fact) are not aware of the problems. If they were they wouldn’t do it in the first place; like me they would be in the role of the indecisive ass between two stacks of hay.

I remember you talking about one particularly tricky situation: annotating passages where one would not even suspect a ripple of necessity. Would you give an example? There may be little to be said about the first word in Ulysses, ‘Stately’. Its partner, ‘plump’, does not match it too well, the two epithets are an oddly assorted couple, but every reader can see that. (No, come to think of it, not every reader has detected it, since many of them do not see words but look through them.) It so happens that ‘Stately’ does contain a ‘state’, and the last word in the sentence is based on ‘cross’ as though the main authorities were bracketing the sentence (this has become a common view). This would constitute a marked overreading for a start. But before long Stephen Dedalus will call the British state and the Roman Catholic Church his two masters; ‘Wandering Rocks’ is enclosed by the clerical Father Conmee and the British viceroy. Whoever hears, in ‘Stately … crossed’, an echo of the

Stations of the Cross is going very far in forcing meaning on an innocent opening, yet, as it happens, Buck Mulligan will soon quote: ‘Mulligan is stripped of his garments’ (and continue this later on). One could, as I once did, connect ‘Stately’ with Odysseus (via some translations of Homer), and so on. The upshot of such speculation is that nothing, certainly, of all the above should go into basic annotation: it would be distracting, misleading, putting dead weight on a sentence that can easily stand on its own. At the same time, a reader might prefer to be informed of such insinuations in the limbo of possibilities. As I want to show here, the problem can be described in lengthy argument, but hardly condensed into a brief, pertinent note. The trouble is that many Joycean passages induce me to use an easy-way-out formula like ‘it so happens that’. It indicates that the text may indeed have pertinent vibrations, or else, that I am just inventing and superimposing them. It would be wrong to put them in but not quite right either to leave them out.

Wasn’t another favourite annotation of yours to do with ‘The Parable of the Plums’? Yes, indeed: in another Ulysses Annotations project, now aborted, I was sent the ‘Aeolus’ episode for comment. A reading of the so-called ‘Parable of the Plums’, which Stephen tells, was taken over from mainstream publications in the JJQ. Actually Stephen never tells such a parable, but he makes up a story and then, afterwards, when prompted for a title, he provides one, which then almost demands the sort of attentive interpretation that parables in the New Testament do: this shows the retroactive potency of titles. In the project draft, one of the most inept readings that I have ever come across was to be included. A contributor to the JJQ had found a ‘pun’ in the plums based on Victor Bérard’s view that the Odyssey was a Greek adaptation of Semitic nautical instructions. Bérard writes of periplus (periplous, a sailing-around, an account of coasting voyages). The plums were linked to the word’s accusative periplum. Not that this could be of any relevance whatsoever, nor could it possibly be termed a pun (especially since no one would ever get it), but there is no such thing as periplum; the accusative would be periplun (better to be transcribed as periploun; this is not a Latin ending —us, but plous is the Greek root). The example is so awful that it has stuck in my mind for decades, and I mention it here to show what silly items could get into annotation simply because they already exist in printed form. Some notes in existence are plain wrong. Stephen’s Bous Stephanoumenos has fared particularly badly, and you can still read that is means ‘Ox- or bull-soul of Stephen’, though there is no trace of a soul in what might be glossed as a garlanded, or crowned bull. Annotators of ‘Periplipomenes’ (as well as its alternative ‘Periplepomenos’ in other texts) still foist an inexcusable ‘itinerant fruit merchant’ on an unsuspecting public. No, I do not know what it is supposed to mean, but my guess is that the word, in the form of a Greek participle, approaches something like ‘sailing around’. I often came up against the question of what deserves annotation in print. I tend to write little notes, often an echo in a text, the shade of a possible quotation or link that I think worth mentioning (otherwise I would not hand it in). But by doing so I do not propose it as a candidate for standard notation. Much remains in that limbo of possibilities where our findings merge with our inventions. Annotation, with its essential brevity, cannot quite deal with the problem. Perhaps an asterisk might signal such cases, but even so no clear lines can be drawn as Joyce is not one to advance neat categories. A case in point: when I mentioned Bous Stephanoumenos, I was not aware of a possible echo in Acts 14:12: ‘the priest brought oxen and garlands unto the gates’ (it was pointed out by Tim O’Neill). To me this is a gain and worth mentioning, but it need not therefore deserve its place in a commentary, all the less so since, for all the similarity, the Greek for ox is tauros and for garland stemmata, not bous and stephanos. Take the first three entries in Gifford: ‘bowl: … will become the chalice’; ‘razor: sign of the slaughterer, the priest as butcher’; ‘yellow’ is linked to priestly vestments. Nothing in this is ‘wrong’, but all is premature: such symbolic readings may surface once Buck Mulligan starts his Latin intonation, and not before. Moreover, if every object or adjective has symbolic reverberations, as it may well have, complete annotations would swell to gigantic, impractial proportions, even if the interpretations were impeccably valid. Wisely, a German adaptation of the original Annotations, judiciously undertaken by Dirk Vanderbeke, does not abduct us into corresponding ridiculous bypaths.

Isn’t one of the issues the effect annotations have on the gradual process of recognition? Notes are indeed shortcuts, but it is also pleasant to dander along the way, to stroll through Dublin or history or encyclopedias; ‘googling’ (FW 212, 620) is a kind of compromise. Notes inevitably deprive us of the pleasure of finding out. That applies in particular to Finnegans Wake, where one of the delights is the vigilant exploration of a jungle, with tentative guesses and sudden intuitive flashes. This is a far cry from getting information served up, ready-made, on a platter. In other words, or in my favourite phrasing, it takes time to ferret out thematic relations, and that explorative time is removed in instant notes. In ‘Jambuwel’s defecalties is Terry Shimmirags upperturnity’, Shaun and Shem are once more pitted against each other, and it is easy to see the intestinal nature of the former’s difficulties. One may see the opposition between (well-fed) England and lowly Ireland at once, or it may emerge from the proverbial saying that England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity. Then we can transform ‘Jambuwel’, incidental noises apart, into ‘John Bull’, and correspondingly ‘Shimmyrag’ into shamrock, or even the Irish ‘Tír na Seamróige’ (the land of the shamrock). But annotations cannot do more than provide a list of items. In itself ‘Jambuwel’ is not ‘John Bull’ (or should every jam in the Wake automatically become a John/Shaun?), but by contextual reinforcement it metamorphoses into it, with a reciprocal unveiling on the other side. It

makes an emotional difference whether a rather well-disguised ‘John Bull’ slowly evolves by a ricochetting effect or whether it is put bluntly before us. In its nature, annotation replaces a groping process by fixed results, and it removes the probing vitality. I have always argued for trying one’s own, or collective, wits before having recourse to assembled gleanings. But, as indicated when you first asked, we cannot break out of the vicious circle. ‘Wipe your glosses with what you know’, advises the Wake, and it encompasses another paradox. It is good to wipe one’s glasses for a more precise look, glosses come afterwards, and once we subtract what we know already, we can research the as yet unknown. This is not meant to be an adequate comment, just an illustration.

G OING ‘MIS’ Let’s move on to how things go wrong: misreadings, misquotations, misconstructions. Start, maybe, with misappropriations. The ‘erroriboose’ that pervade Joyce’s works and our world have been a constant preoccupation. They are ubiquitous and keep coming up in my rambles. Misappropriations do occur, and perhaps this is the seed for a study on Joyce the Misappropriator, but it dovetails into the metamorphoses of apprehension (how’s that for a title?), the fact that what is launched is not identical with what is received. The Wake exemplifies it multifariously. I wanted to sneak in ‘multifarious’ because it is close to the Vulgate’s rendering of Greek polytropos (Heb. 1:10), a word that I once tried to patent. When I argued (in ‘Dogmad or Dubliboused?’) that nothing seemed entirely certain in Joyce and wondered how Joyce scholars could ever put their fingers on one particular quintessence, the ultimate formula, against all evidence, I was charged with claiming that every statement on Joyce was equally valid when, on the contrary, I tried to articulate that it is close scrutiny that undermines dogmatic claims. I was surprised that two years later, in Provincetown, my tentative suggestion that there might be some Uncertainty Principle at work (an illustration, not a definition), ‘Uncertainty’ had practically been elevated into a dogma by Father Boyle, and someone even referred to that ‘uncertainty we are all looking for’, as though we had to discover it devotedly when, in fact, it jumps at us from all sides. Joyce misappropriates the Odyssey and the Mass, Stephen Dedalus follows suit with Shakespeare, and we all trail behind. Culture may be a series of misappropriations. This is not the same as having something attributed to us that we clearly did not claim. It happens all the time: Murphy, the lawgiver, and Morpheus, demiurgos of changing shapes, merge in potent unison.

How about misconstructions? For his first alter agon Joyce chose Daedalus, the mythical artist and engineer of perfect constructions: a labyrinth (with no guiding signs), a wooden cow that fooled a bull, and functioning flying tackle. Joyce may have been aware that perfect construction does belong to the realm of myth: few of the designs of any of his characters ever work out. Bloom will hardly manage a concert tour, we don’t even know if he will succeed with the ad for Alexander Keyes. Stephen Dedalus may or may not become that great artificer, and most figures resort to substitute satisfactions such as drink, daydreams, illusions, or, perhaps most significantly, ingenious talk. (Boylan may be the exception.) My emphasis was always on mental misconstructions, and I come back to them time and again. It is particularly annoying to become the butt of possibly inevitable misunderstandings. Locally I have become known as one who takes on a supposedly difficult but certainly renowned author, and this has often been expressed with undue pathos. I have read a few times that I ‘have devoted my whole life to Joyce’ which is pure mushy nonsense. There is no devotion, with almost religious overtones, nor much dedication, except tritely as occupation. I have continued to read Joyce because it seemed the best way to pass my spare time, later on more and more full-time; it distracted my mind and got me through hard times. Perhaps from being a sort of drug at first, it became beneficial by getting me in touch with others, and I could transmit my own enjoyment. In the long run it turned out to be lucky. Thirty years ago I would never have dreamed there would be a Joyce Foundation. There may be a devotional streak in every pastime or commitment, but I shy away from any sign of religious devotion.

You do have some charming examples of being misquoted, don’t you? If you did pick up a few practical lessons from reading Joyce (whose aim, I assume, was not primarily didactic) or have been the object of some sort of publicity, you will never automatically believe anything you read or hear. Quotation marks, especially in newspapers, are insidious weapons, even when used with the best intentions. A few years ago an editor from Leipzig approached me for a quick interview, and, of course, publicity for the Foundation is not passed up. When the report came out, weeks later, it showed my picture with the caption: ‘Fritz Senn is reading Ulysses every morning, like a newspaper.’ There was an air of a devotional act about it. I can reconstruct what happened. I tactfully fended off the initial question, ‘How often have you read Ulysses?’, by stressing that after a certain time one doesn’t read the book from cover to cover all over again, but dips into it here and there, and I must have added, as one reads a newspaper. That got transformed to a solemn morning ritual. My remark that people who have actually read the daunting book from beginning to end almost expect some official recognition, like a diploma, was transformed into an opinion of mine that, yes, such diplomas should be provided, in all seriousness. In Seville, a journalist lured me aside and asked whether I thought Joyce was a kind of Pope in literature. I must have squirmed visibly and responded, with what politeness I could muster, that this was not my outlook but, given the terms of the inapposite question, if anything, Joyce might possibly be an antipope. So the next day I found myself saying in big letters: ‘Joyce is an antipope!’ Annoying, but inevitable, and it

is also what Joyce writes about, as L. Boom and M’Intosh could testify in court. The mechanics of misunder-standing are detailed in Ulysses and become a verbal jumble in the Wake. I call it the Eumaeus syndrome. There is also outside interference. It is the case of the well-meaning man in Dijon who, at the last moment, changed ‘Nother dying’ in the telegram Stephen remembers in ‘Proteus’ to an orthodox ‘Mother dying’ (at least that is Hans Gabler’s opinion, and I concur). A few years ago the British Home Office revealed how Ulysses was banned in Great Britain: it was given to an elderly staid judge to read and disapprove. I was asked to report on this for a newspaper, the reputable Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. I quoted from the letter to Morris Ernst, where Joyce detailed the precarious publication of Ulysses (it was part of all Random House editions for a long time) and closed with ‘habent sua fata libelli’. Where I had credited the quote to the ‘little known Latin poet Terentianus Maurus’ (and rightly so, for I had done a note on it for the JJQ), an officious editor changed this to ‘the well-known Latin poet Terentius (Terence)’. Then there were about forty improvements of my phrasing, perhaps rendering clumsy Swiss German into its elegant mainstream variety. One’s vanity is piqued that way, but, in consolation, one does see on a trivial level what can happen to texts. When you see ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ spelled with an apostrophe, the fault is not automatically the author’s, it may be an editorial intervention.

I must say that it all does have a Eumaean ring to it. We are both fond of ‘Eumaeus’, where little can be taken at face value, and some faces have value. We learn on newspaper authority that Stephen Dedalus, McCoy and M’Intosh attended Dignam’s funeral. I have no assurance that my own memories and anecdotes are free from unintentional shifts or decorative elaborations. Selection, condensation and a need for pointed contours all come into play. Stories based on memory have a way of taking on a life of their own and obscuring the events that gave rise to them.

Aren’t there also different kinds of misreadings? It is not exceptional that Joyce is pressed into some conceptual framework: we probably all do this. Some gross oversimplifications are a bit extreme. That Joyce took practically everything (meaning everything) from Bernard Shaw or possibly from William Stead – such claims have been made – is all good clean fun, and we can take it in our magnanimous stride. That in a post-colonial study the narrator of ‘Cyclops’ is presented as a spy in the pay of the Castle who reports on the events in Barney Kiernan’s, is just a reading of the episode that differs from mine, but it does take some liberties with what Joyce wrote. As to close reading, our servants can do that for us. Then there are overall views that are next to impossible to refute. One book claims that a (fictionally real) Stephen Dedalus meets one real Leopold Bloom late in the day and from the ensuing conversation picks up enough hints to invent Bloom for the earlier chapters, so that Bloom is in part Stephen’s creation. This is hard to disprove, one can only apply Occam’s razor. What is gained by a complex account when simpler ones look sufficient? And what new difficulties are raised? But you asked about misreadings of Joyce. Not that anyone could tell what a correct reading is, even outside of Finnegans Wake. Joyce provokes discerning minds to go astray. That he put so many enigmas into his books that scholars would be busy for centuries has often been quoted and, at times, even been taken at face value. In the mid-nineties Paul van Caspel devoted a whole book to errors and mistranslations (Bloomers on the Liffey). His listing could easily be updated. I did learn from his book of censures that I had misread ‘Fair day and all the beef to the heels were in’ in Milly’s letter to Bloom; ‘fair’ does not refer to the weather (as I had thought, along with many readers, including most translators), but to a country fair. Gross errors still abound. A German introduction to Ulysses has Bloom and Stephen meet in Glasnevin cemetery. The most glaring textual gloss I have come across recently paraphrases a sentence in ‘Sirens’: ‘Simon Dedalus blows two five notes from the stem of his pipe’, which appears to translate: ‘He blew through the flue two husky fifenotes.’ I’ve noticed a different kind of misreading, especially in reading groups, where one particular notion becomes an obsession with some readers, say, for example, sexual references in Finnegans Wake. A Berkeley Wake reading group jocularly sported a ‘Subcommittee on Sexual Innuendo’, or something similar. A few stalwarts in our Zurich group find sexual undercurrents in almost every passage – ad nauseam, a nausea not induced by the obscenities themselves but by their dreary sameness. My prudish view on this take is that if you insist that everything is sexual, and a lot of it undoubtedly is, you also remove sexuality from the book. Naively perhaps, I would have liked Finnegans Wake to be more erotic than it is, and I find the sexuality in all of Joyce’s works rather repressive, for all the liberation they may have caused. Nothing, of course, is more subjective than such a view. I tend to concur with Judge Woolsey when he acquitted Ulysses of an aphrodisiac effect: for him this exonerated the book and made it suitable for public consumption. It could also be seen as a flaw.

But Ulysses undoubtedly did have a liberating effect. Its ban looks like a comment on past eras, and we owe a lot to Joyce’s defiance of censorship. It is a testimony to his skill that in all his works he did not rely on cheap erotic thrills, the kind of thing I was hoping for half a century ago. It seems to me, but one is inevitably exposing oneself, that there is hardly a

single erotically attractive figure in all his works, male or female. Boylan, to Bloom’s chagrin, does have considerable attraction, but we see little of him except for his dandyish outfit. Molly was certainly seductive, especially on Howth sixteen years earlier (that pulpish seedcake notwithstanding) but now, though she still has plenty of game, she seems past her prime, with ample curves that may attract or repell (‘a fat heap’). Gerty MacDowell, expedient for Bloom’s orgasmic highlight, is slightly anaemic and marred by a limp. The three whores in ‘Circe’ seem singularly unattractive. Joyce’s triumph may be that he does not have recourse to the time-proven, standard, sexy, alluring person (as we find it in most novels or movies), nor is Joyce dependent on the sensational. Daily, trite experience seems to suffice. In this connection I remember a conference somewhere in the States where Father Boyle, with his customary charisma, pointed out a mystery in the text (I forget which particular one), and someone got up from the audience and proclaimed that whenever there is a mystery in psychoanalysis, incest is at the bottom of it. Which naturally opened our eyes and closed the issue. It reminded me of gravity, which is ubiquitous but can be insufficient as a specific explanation of just about everything.

Do you want to mention the account of your visit to Clongowes many years ago? I even have newspaper evidence for my exemplary story of Clongowes and the Bed. The Sunday after the third Trieste symposium of 1973, a group of us visited Clongowes Wood and were shown around by Father Savage SJ. I had taken the tour before and lagged behind when we came to the very old infirmary. It did not appear to have changed much since Stephen Dedalus spent a few days there in A Portrait. Our guide must have remarked that Joyce might well have slept in one of those very old, rundown beds. A journalist leapt on cue and had John Ryan of Dublin and myself, who was kind of officiating, sit down on such a bed for a photograph. We happened to be in one of numerous rooms, all in turn with numerous beds, and we were asked to sit on the bed that had sufficient light from the window for a picture. I would have forgotten the occasion if Mary Power had not sent me the newspaper clipping which shows John Ryan and me sitting on the bed, visibly attempting to look non-concerned, with a caption that I can quote verbatim: ‘Fritz Zinn, president of the Zurich James Joyce Society, and John Ryan, president of the Dublin James Joyce Society, sitting on James Joyce’s bed in Clongowes.’ You see how much misinformation can be crammed into a few harmless lines: there was, at the time, no Zurich James Joyce Society, and no Dublin one either, moreover, no one had ever claimed that there was. John Ryan’s name was correct, ‘Zinn’ (as it happens, German for tin or pewter) is the equivalent of ‘L. Boom’. And certainly we were not sitting on Joyce’s bed. Such is life, of which Joyce’s fiction is a plausible replica.

T HEORETICALLY YOURS It could be said that you have a precarious relationship with theory. You are often perceived as being antagonistic to it. Call it being intimidated and fearing inadequacy. I may have adopted an aggressive attitude as a defence strategy. When theory becomes all the rage, it does not feel good to be left out in the cold. I gave up early in the game, possibly a psychological freeze, a cop-out reflex. I’d like to emphasize that I never maintained that there is anything intrinsically wrong with ‘theory’, or harmful about it; I just mean that for the life of me I would not be able to decide if there was. It might be great to weigh it scrupulously in the balance and then, high-handedly, find it wanting, but that is not my situation: I just could not figure out most of it.

How would you describe yourself then? I would describe myself first as a philologist, one who loves words and language and, second, as one who pays attention to them. This one aptitude I have is also my limitation. I happily interact with, though am often puzzled by, Joyce’s texts and have a kind of flair for language and nuances. I never noticed this myself until I found that various Joycean scholars can get along perfectly well without such a sense and still produce excellent work (and also less excellent work). No, I won’t mention any names. It’s a matter of constitution perhaps, or one’s talents. The sad truth is that I cannot deal with abstractions. I shy away from general assertions about Joyce, in fact I have made it a self-defensive axiom that overall statements that are more than external (‘Joyce moved to Paris’) are next to impossible to verify or falsify. Basically, one does not expect profound general insights from a close reader like me. Someone in a discussion once labelled me a New Critic, obviously meaning to put me in a place I may well deserve, and I may have some affinities with what was called New Criticism. But it definitely never affected me as I never looked into its tenets; nor into any other ‘-isms’ or dogmas of whatever trends were en vogue at one time or another. Some of them had a great impact on Joyce scholarship, and there were times when I poignantly reproached myself for a lack of comprehension. An obvious defect, similar to my inability to drive a car, which I never learnt. This is a handicap not to be confused with being able to drive a car but not doing so for ulterior reasons.

So theory was never an option for you? This is no joking matter. It occurs to me that if I were a student of English now at certain universities, not only could I never possibly pass an exam but I might be a candidate for suicide. All of this would be my personal trauma entirely if I did not know, or had not been told, that others, often young, and not overly blessed with self-confidence, share my plight and are possibly cut off from a career. I do not know when I first realized starkly and brutally that I am simply too dumb for theoretical abstractions. This almost came as a relief and allowed me to withdraw into a state of resignation (though not quite equanimity). I felt absolved from even trying any longer, which is again the privilege of an amateur. In the kindness of their hearts most Joyceans took my confession, that I am too dumb, as an act of coy and pretended modesty meant to elicit a reassuring pat on the back. I can only say I wish they were right. Others incidentally tried to allay some of my anxieties by assuring me that I, for some reason, do not really need theories. I do not follow the argument that theories, though possibly indispensable for some scholars, should be of no relevance to others. Long ago, in high school, we had to read Friedrich Schiller’s classical essay on aesthetics, ‘Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung’, and even then, though I was fairly adept at German, I simply did not grasp what presumably everyone else in class found little difficulty in. So it is a defect, maybe a neurotic block of the intelligence. In my university days I was so put off by German abstract terminology that I switched over to English which, at that time (before the inroads of French philosophy), looked much more honest and straightforward. In fact I found refuge in the comforting obscurity of Finnegans Wake, which no one is expected to understand. What I mean, and I wish I could joke about it now, is that there were periods of serious torment and despondency. Similarly I was never greatly taken by those utterances of T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound on Ulysses that are so often recirculated; nor, for that matter, by what Beckett wrote about Finnegans Wake: I mention this not to dismiss essays that are no doubt pivotal but to draw a line of competence. I never got the hang of Wyndham Lewis’s strictures of Joyce and other adherents of what he called ‘time cult’. That is also why I find many critical arguments fairly unprofitable, a sort of inter-critical shadow-boxing or an infinite regress of criticism. What I am expressing here is merely my apology for not substantially quoting others.

When did that particular misery set in for you? Like many others, I felt lost when in the seventies, as far as I was aware, a no-doubt necessary, corrective

wave of different, more sophisticated approaches swept over Joyce studies. Up until the sixties, approaches had indeed been a bit naive and unquestioning about their implied premises. There was biography, source tracing, annotation, symbol hunting, moralistic readings and a lot more, so the pendulum had to swing the other way. A widening of perspective was called for. Unfortunately — and this is my only legitimate complaint — the promulgators of the new ways of approaching a text, if approaching texts is what they did, were not skilful at communicating their innovative insights to those not yet initiated. The ones who know the code should speak, I always felt, in a way that those outside can follow. It would be foolish to reject a whole body of Joyce scholarship, including some of its elite, due to personal blinkers. What convinced me all along that there may be something of value in that whole wide area is simply my trust in some fellow Joyceans who were converted.

Didn’t Jacques Aubert give you an early introduction to emerging theories, though? Jacques Aubert is indeed the case in point, the doyen of French Joyce scholars, whose work, in an early phase traditional, I greatly respect. In our engagement in the late sixties and early seventies, we were talking Joycean shop. I often went to see him in Lyons when he was translating Dubliners, and we worked together, nominally, on a Joyce issue in the magazine L’Herne. This is not quite accurate, as he did all the meticulous work. I profited a great deal from his knowledge. Gradually, however, he threw in names that he considered relevant for Joyce studies and who provided a new impetus. He was the first ever to mention Jacques Lacan to me; later Derrida and names like Deleuze and no doubt many more. I confused them all anyway. If someone of the calibre of Jacques finds such scholars, philosophers and thinkers inspiring and of relevance, there must be something in them. At any rate all those names soon surfaced in criticism in the following years.

It sounds as if somehow you had missed the boat right from the start? No one likes to be deprived of a good thing such as alternative keys to Joycean profundities. In the winter of 1971–2 Bernard Benstock was touring Europe and also lecturing in Lyons. Jacques Aubert invited him and others, including Leo Knuth and Romana Paci, to a small gathering at his university. There, for the first time, we were exposed to Lacanian ways of thinking and terminology. A smart class of local students had already been initiated and were both enthusiastic and visibly fascinated, but we external novices remained intrigued and could not grasp the new techniques that were applied, not really to the texts, but above them. In my innocence I asked what was to become my naive customary question and which has annoyed many illuminati for years: what is it that you, with your particular theory, can do that we, the more traditional ones, cannot? What different insights do you gain? And I generally added: please tell me in a language I can understand, not in your insider code. And: if at all possible, please, please, show me in particular instances, ideally by textual demonstration! I took this to be a basic and permissible question, and for a long time I was disappointed that no answer was forthcoming or even attempted. I have come to accept it as inevitable. I later imagined that if really new revelations, no matter how inexplicable at the time, were to emerge they would, in the course of years, percolate down all the way to more simple-minded readers like myself. Just as in psychoanalysis, for instance, of which all of us have some idea and can see what it might achieve. But then, of course, one can agree or disagree with Freud for he writes lucidly. In matters theoretical, as it happens, no such insights have seeped down to my level yet, and so I have slowly consoled myself with the illusion that I may not have missed all that much. Jacques was clearly ahead of his time, and I know that he was instrumental in bringing his namesake Lacan into the Joycean fold at the Paris symposium of 1975. Later he was equally involved in the legendary Joyce seminar in Paris. I also know that they became friends, and I am sure that Jacques Aubert is among those who understand Lacan, in so far as is possible. To come back to your question: I never really missed the boat but found out it was not likely to go in any useful direction for me.

To be fair, you must have experienced the occasional break in the clouds of theory? It appeared to me at any rate that theories tended to take over. Quite manifestly, as is always the case with fashions, there would be scholars jumping on the bandwagon. And, as I said, for a long time it was disheartening that the concomitant revelations were not put across with clarity. There was some comfort, however, for the faint of heart. What alleviated my humiliation up to a point was my experience, which I reiterate here, that if, exceptionally, a theoretical adherent does become clear and, moreover, does present a concrete textual example (possibly defying union rules), then and only then I always felt that I could have reached similar conclusions by more pedestrian roads: perhaps something as odious as an oldfashioned close look at the text. An immense machinery seemed to grind away and, in the end, did not turn out anything new or worthwhile. Soon there were all those quibbles on the peripheries about what modernism was as opposed to postmodernism. Here I am suddenly interjecting a term I would never use, even at gunpoint; you won’t find many composites with ‘post-’ in what I write, as I have been trying to lead a clean life. But one would, if one is not careful, hear a lot about these terms in all seriousness, so they must have some meaning. An amateur or dilettante (both terms indicate a delight in what one is doing) of my own variety benefits from being free of any obligation to engage with what has already been written, profoundly, on their

subject. I never worried about charges levelled against Joyce, say by F. R. Leavis or S. L. Goldberg (whose Classical Temper for a long time was the best book written against Joyce). Perhaps Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses sums it up best in his lie to Mr Deasy: I, too, fear those big words that make us so unhappy and also those wide, broad, general views. But then they don’t hurt, the views I mean, we can take them, if conducive, or leave them. I can, and did, dismiss all those views that do not interest me or for which I have no ability. Long ago, at the Tulsa gathering entitled ‘50 Years of Ulysses’, I unfolded some more observations about the well-known Homeric undercurrents, and I stressed, as usual, not textual or situational correspondences. Bob Scholes then commented that he had recognized, in what I had said, a ‘structuralist’ perspective. Now I had heard of structuralism in a vague sort of a way during that one weekend in Lyons but had little idea of what it might be and less inclination to find out. And here, in my innocence, I had become overnight, not doing anything I had not done before, a structuralist myself. I felt like that character in Molière who found that he had been talking prose all his life. And possibly, as the soul, anima, was once declared ‘naturaliter Christiana’, the alert Joycean reader may be a structuralist by constitution. A great impetus to Joyce studies was, as I noted from reverberations, Colin McCabe’s James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word (1979). It appears to have paved the way for theories to stimulate, fructify and infiltrate Joyce criticism and helped them to usurp it. One of his perceptions was that ‘it was only after Derrida and Lacan that Joyce became readable’. This may or may not be the case, but if that claim is right it authoritatively disqualifies me from even going near Joyce studies. For such reasons I could hardly understand why the same Colin McCabe invited me to his college in Cambridge to speak to his students. It seems one can have it both ways and, in fact, I have hardly ever been ostracized by the theoretically oriented Joyceans. So there may be a place for a pedestrian freelance philologist. This is not dismissive modesty as there is nothing wrong with either the love of words (‘philology’) or with feet.

As I remember, you botched a reviewing opportunity. I did meet one particular Waterloo in the early 1990s when I was asked to review Joyce studies for Books Ireland, and I gleefully accepted. Among the first batch of Joyceana was Garry Leonard’s Reading Dubliners Again: A Lacanian Perspective. I set out with some hope, which soon dissipated as I found that I, an old hand at the game after all, could not understand anything in the introduction (which was supposed to introduce), and I had to back out ignominiously with an apologetic note to the editor. That was the end of my reviewing career in Ireland. I gave vent to one of my prejudices only: that we critics, or scholars, should be as clear as the topic permits. In particular I have remained perturbed by one definition of a term that must have paraded as clarification. A ‘phallus …’, I read there, is ‘a (nonexistent) transcendent signifier that is presumed to bestow monadic self-sufficiency and mastery of the Symbolic Order on the masculine subject.’ When an unknown is in need of an explanation and it is defined by three (or is it five?) other unknowns, I wave the white flag. In a desperate attempt not to be the only obtuse one in the community, I have shown this sentence to many Joyceans and never got more than a laugh from them (the laugh may have been on me). Maybe I only consort with the dumb ones. But there must be some scholars out there who do understand it all. Leonard’s book has been well received by scholars I respect (and who must have understood it). Still my blurred impression remains that the phallus is a kind of Swiss army knife with which you can do anything — and nothing.

For all your reservations, what was your experience of Lacan? Jacques Lacan was the highlight of the Paris symposium in 1975. His appearance at the Sorbonne, insiders later reported, was itself the talk of intellectual circles in Paris. He opened proceedings to a huge crowd in the main aula and celebrated, as far as I could see, a poststructuralist mass. It was a thrilling performance alternating between rapid verbal bursts and long silences. A hiatus of six seconds of silence can be a very long and tense spell. I accurately timed the silences as I could not follow Lacan anyway and seized the occasion for some shots of his fascinating gestures. (I am pleased that they are now part of a pictorial volume on Jacques Lacan.) I was told that the gestures (or blowing the nose) were also meaningful signals to the cognoscenti. Lacan had obviously brought his following along, but most Joyceans were puzzled. Some thought the performance a revelation, others a joke. I picked up scattered references to ‘Monsieur As-ser-tong’, and I knew that he had fortified himself with Atherton’s Books at the Wake. The lecture about ‘Joyce le Symptôme’ was published later on, but not, I believe, exactly in the form in which it had been given. It radiated a lot and must have opened many eyes. Within a few years, Lacan reached American shores and incited a range of scholarship. There is no question that a great deal of stimulation was provided. Naturally all of this merely reflects my bafflement. Jim Atherton, incidentally, was at the symposium, and he told us later that he had been introduced to Lacan who whisked him away and took him to a party where he was presented to Roland Barthes as the expert on Finnegans Wake (with good reason). Barthes then asked him something profound about the Wake, and Atherton remembered that he could only stammer something in French about it being ‘un dédale’. One consequence of Lacan’s taking on Joyce was that famous Joyce seminar in Paris the following winter, probably also a society event. His shadow certainly fell over Joyce criticism, possibly with illuminating results. Some repercussions have even reached me. I recall an editorial comment on an essay that was

submitted: ‘After Lacan you cannot use “real” any more!’ Maybe so, but I think that toothaches or taxes have a spurious air of grim reality about them that cannot be airily dismissed. Under close inspection, of course, no term can ever hold up, any label in the long run loses its seemingly clear outlines, and ‘reality’ is particularly tricky. One effect of criticism is semantic attrition, a sort of scorched earth effect. It is hard to agree on terms in the first place, but in recent developments words that once were common property seem to abstract themselves into mystifying dimensions. I once thought I knew the meaning of ‘desire’, ‘body’ or ‘space’, but now I wouldn’t go near them any more. I also used to think I had extended experience with the ‘male gaze’, but it has changed into something much more complex than I could ever have imagined.

How about that other giant, Derrida? In the nature of things, I cannot judge his momentous stimulation, any less than I could judge quantum physics. Joyce scholars, and some close friends, have got a lot from him, and I sometimes get the impression that he initiated an Einsteinian breakthrough. And I will never bother anyone any more to tell me what exactly it all consists in. Just for the record: I was the first to invite Jacques Derrida when we were getting ready for the Zurich symposium in 1979. Aubert had underlined Derrida’s significance, the name had already surfaced here and there, and so I wrote an invitation, only to get back a polite, brief refusal, that no, he did not feel ‘compétent’ to participate, in perhaps not quite sincere modesty. It was five years later that, having become competent no doubt in the meantime and with a tremendous reputation, he was the great attraction at the Frankfurt symposium where he delivered the opening keynote lecture. He insisted on being given two of the habitual slots for sessions, two and a half hours instead of just one and fifteen minutes, and naturally the request was granted. I stayed just long enough for the opening to take a few pictures. You can gauge the precariousness of my ego when I tell you how I clutched at one particular straw in self-defence. Since no human being, I comforted myself, can be attentive to even the most brilliant speaker for more than fifty-five minutes at the utmost, I deduced that communication was obviously not the speaker’s prime motive. As good an excuse as any to leave an event that I would not have been able to follow anyway. But most of the audience did follow, and Derrida also kindly took part in a panel of which he was the subject. Again I have no doubt that Jacques Derrida provided insights, and again the evidence is circumstantial. As to my own reading, I generally give up when the first sentences do not make sense to me. I believe in a former student from Bangladesh, Yasmin Haq, in Paris who was not only a good friend but my most perceptive and critical reader ever. She insisted on finding out every little nuance I had long forgotten or, to my embarrassment, pointed out sloppy ambiguities or inaccuracies. She studied Derrida and participated in his seminars, in French, by the way (I am by no means sure that French sophistication translates unproblematically into any other language), and she went back to the sources, like Plato, because Derrida had bought some ideas in his pharmacy. She really left no stone unturned. Not that she ever tried to explain Derrida to me (she knew I knew my limits), but she actually argued with him in those seminars and criticized him. So when an American participant at a workshop intimated to me that Yasmin misunderstood Derrida, I felt sure that someone as perceptive as she and who, moreover, had spent years interacting with the master in French, may have come closer to the core. But one also learns that such seminal philosophers can be misunderstood and misapplied. In any case, Yasmin’s inchoate study of Derridian aspects of Joyce would have been worth having.

Did you actually know Derrida? I did not. I had first heard the name from Jacques Aubert. He discovered those pioneers and their importance on his own, before they became fashionable. I first saw Derrida from a distance in the jubilee year of 1982 in Paris with celebrations going on in the Centre Pompidou, and he was on with Hélène Cixous, chaired by Jean-Michel Rabaté. Hélène Cixous analyzed the opening of A Portrait and did it quite well, more or less the way some of us would have conducted a close reading. Derrida took up a sentence from Finnegans Wake (‘he war’) and tossed it around with brilliant ingenuity. Thus far I could follow, but I must have whispered to Daniel Ferrer that we might have played around with two words just as well, possibly with less aplomb, but all I meant was that some of us can free-associate on a phrase as well as the next exegete. My casual remark somehow got into the preface of Poststructuralist Joyce and was misconstrued and led to a minor ripple in the JJQ. I naturally never claimed that Derrida did not reveal anything new, for I would be the last to know, but that what I understood was within my own province. Jacques Derrida once turned up at Claude Jacquet’s home when she invited the participants of a Paris colloque, but there were enough others to cluster around him. We did have a short conversation though once in Irvine where I stayed with Margot Norris for the weekend, and it so happened that a conference was in progress in which he took part. So we exchanged a few polite words. Actually I was surprised that he knew who I was as we had never been together, but all in all, I cannot say that we knew each other.

Returning to misunderstandings. Is it fair to say that your principal grievance against theory is to do with its apparent unwillingness to communicate? Yes, and this is where my real complaint comes in: communication. I keep wondering why it is that those

who follow sophisticated theories, perceptive as they must be, cannot imagine the minds of those who have not yet been initiated; why, in other words, they are such poor translators. They seem to side with Stephen Dedalus who rarely cares whether his audience can follow, and not with Bloom who at least tries to make himself understood. One of Bloom’s qualities is that, with naive empathy, he imagines the view from the other side. My complaint is that many theoretical statements can hardly be falsified. Take a relatively, at least lexically, simple ‘Hybridity also inscribes sexual reproduction, the sexual division of labour, within the mode of colonial reproduction.’ Hybridity may well do this, or again it may not, always assuming that hybridities can inscribe, but how could anyone tell? And yet this must be meaningful to some. The same cosmic law seems to apply to the experts, often young ones, of the expanding electronic world. They know about computers and their applications. For some reason they, too, cannot instruct laypeople in terms that they could follow. We are often told what an application can do and not what we can do with the application. This has initiated a new criminal offence of the twentieth century, the computer manual. Ironically it was exactly the computer manual, with its bland inability to project itself into the minds of beginners, that relieved me of some apprehensions. If you want to put a computer or some of its programs to practical use and cannot follow the instructions — its words may be simple but, collectively, they make no practical sense — you are at a complete standstill. If I do not understand any of the literary theories, I am also stopped in my tracks, but the tracks are optional, and I can still pursue my own naive explorations of the text and survive. In certain situations manuals are indispensable, but theories are not. My theoretical ignorance does not debar me from Joyce. And so it has been. Which does not entirely prevent a defensive outburst from time to time.

Would you say you avoid theory altogether? I often say that I avoid everything that even remotely tastes of ‘theory’ (quotation marks), since I do not need yet another feeling of incompetence, of non-comprehension. It is also due to the experience that I have never learned anything from this direction which, of course, is more of a comment about me than the theorists. I have to qualify my claim that I never learnt anything: I did once, and it was from Lacan. I must have picked it up from his long sermon in the Sorbonne, for I never heard him anywhere else. To the best of my memory, he remarked on Joyce’s borrowed phrase, ‘Agenbite of Inwit’, which plagues Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses. He took ‘inwit’ literally, as I have done, too, in the sense of an inner knowledge, and applied it to us readers. Our desire to know keeps biting at the text again and again and leads to renewed conjectures. And the texts keep titillating our own inwit. That, in my opinion, is concrete, textual and constructive. But I may also have grossly misapplied what I heard, and so I have to correct what I said a few moments ago. I have learnt something that I should have found out for myself but did not and perhaps never would have. Now the record is set straight.

But surely you yourself are theoretical, too? That, of course, has been said, and it is true; a truism even. If theory simply means a wider angle, larger perspectives, some conceptual framework, moving from the particular to the more universal or questioning our own procedures, then we are all theoretical. Including myself. But in my subjective vocabulary, ‘theory’ has come to mean something very abstract or obscurantist, couched in a special jargon that is hard to penetrate. Depicting some Joycean features, or principles, was naturally meant to be a theoretical contribution, but on a more accessible level.

You also introduced terms that could be called theoretical. It’s inevitable. I am not theoretical in the sense that I do not start from some premise and then try to find it exemplified in Joyce. Rather I observe what I read and attempt to generalize, the ‘inductive’ attempt, from the small to the large, from the concrete to the abstract. I might now even move to the other extreme and remark that, if theory is taken in its widest sense, my cautious abstractions, under various labels (Dislocution, Provection, Retroactive Semantics, the Middle Voice, ‘Symphoric Joyce’, Disrupted Pattern Principle’, ‘Corrective Unrest’, etc.), have not been deemed theoretical though they may tell us about characteristic Joycean propulsions.

Do you think your own theoretical impulses reached the serious theorists? My own dabbling or reaching out to larger issues has had no impact on the real theorists in our field; for example, they did not make it into Alan Roughley’s overview of Joycean theories. In my darker moods I often find everything I have done nothing but self-evident and that anyone else could have made the same observations: it is all in the text. Of course, since this is also an Apologia pro Stultitia Mea, we all do what we do without knowing why, we simply have our inclinations and genetic potential. With all the blinkers at my self-protective disposal, I know that I must have a penchant for idiosyncrasies that would ensure me a safe place in the various brands of the Taurocopric Schools of Criticism that I try to stay aloof from. If we saw the glass in a glasshouse, we would be more careful with stones. I find myself using the term ‘text’ since we don’t have a better one. But text is a metaphor, it refers to something woven. This is illuminating when, for example, Molly’s monologue adds another texture to

those we already have in the preceding seventeen episodes of Ulysses. For Penelope was the weaver who tricked her suitors, at least for a time, by weaving by day and undoing it by night and starting all over again. So Molly also re-textures Ulysses. But for Joyce, ‘text’ is also a misleading metaphor. The point, after all, of mechanical weaving is to achieve uniformity, the effortless perpetuation of the same pattern. When you see one end of a woven fabric, you know what the other end must be like. This emphatically does not apply to Ulysses, where no single pattern can be predicted. An analogy like ‘quilt’ or something stitched together might be more appropriate. In this view Ulysses is, literally, a rhapsody, different songs (ode) stitched (rhapsis) together.

Essentially you argue for lucidity? Yes I do, and at least I try my damnedest to achieve it. I recall readers telling me, with some sort of relief, that my unassuming collection of essays, Nichts gegen Joyce, could be understood; that one does not have to engage in jargon to show something not entirely superficial. On the whole, I think you can say where I am wrong and put a finger on it. That, at least, was my illusion for years until it was shattered. Patrick McGee, well at home in theories current and conventional, once wrote that theorists have generally treated us others with more tolerance than the other way round. I once took this up as something quite obvious, since they, the theorists, can understand what we try to say, but conversely, we cannot follow them. Yet he observed that my own writing could be difficult to follow. This was a real blow. If this is so, and I have no reason to doubt it, I am ashamed; I have been remiss and want to mend my ways. I just wonder if many theorists are troubled by analogous qualms. Still on the subject, I keep being surprised at how often, at conferences or in publications, our Joyce scholars nonchalantly refer to philosophers like Hegel, Heidegger and their ilk. They apparently understand the quintessence of those not easy to read German philosophers with superb ease. I have met few German speakers, unless they have invested years of study, who would pretend to such familiarity. Someone, I don’t know who it was, compared Hegel, notoriously difficult to understand as Schopenhauer incessantly rubbed in, with Finnegans Wake: the best you can do is to study one single paragraph in great detail for a few hours, to sample the procedure, and then skim over the rest. Whether the analogy is justified I cannot say, but it comes to mind when Joyceans have Hegel or Kant at their sagacious fingertips and no visible compunctions.

In conclusion I notice that you haven’t mellowed much on the topic of theory. Is this so? In my serene senescence I may have come to terms with theories, and I am even going to pay them a compliment that puts them on a par with Ulysses, borrowing the words of Judge Woolsey in his famous acquittal: their effect may be somewhat emetic, but they do not tend to be an aphrodisiac. And already I am wrong again for, obviously, they must be a widespread aphrodisiac, otherwise they would not be as popular as they are. As a parting defensive shot I add a subjective question: assuming, for the sake of argument, that all the intellectual shadow-boxing about masculinity, identity, post-colonialism, fetishism, the suppressed, etc. really is of crucial significance — how is it that I can still enjoy Joyce’s works so much?

One major approach that has some affinities with your pursuits is textual-genetic studies. How seriously are you interested in it? Like every other approach, it has its uses, and textual studies are at least of the no-nonsense sort. Walton A. Litz, Michael Groden, Phillip Herring, Daniel Ferrer, Vincent Deane, Geert Lernout, Danis Rose, David Hayman or Joe Schork have all shown how texts grew from notes to drafts to galleys to what we have now, and all the hazards involved. I attended many meetings in Antwerp or Paris and, more a spectator than a participant, could observe a refinement from random guessing to methodical procedures. When drafts were transcribed or the first facsimiles were printed, it was exciting to witness what looked like organic though also chaotic evolution. Long ago, at Clive Hart’s suggestion, I ordered the British Museum Wake documents on microfilm and started going through them with enthusiasm and perplexity. Clive’s Concordance made it possible, though still laborious, to find the respective passages in the Wake. Fortunately, I was sent review copies of the Ulysses part of the Garland Archive that are now sadly out of print, and this allowed me to come as close to imagining the processes in Joyce’s mind as anything ever will. So it has become routine to see how any paragraph increased and, in my terminology, provected: it became longer, more complex and sometimes changed its nature. Earlier stages can corroborate a guess. I was quite thrilled to see that Joyce added, practically at the same stage of revision, Buck Mulligan’s taunting advice to Stephen that he ‘must read’ the Greeks ‘in the original’ in the early morning, and, reciprocally, Stephen’s remark in the Library that he enjoys reading Thomas Aquinas ‘in the original’. This emphasizes the rivalry between the two: Stephen responds with a tiny Latin tit for an earlier Greek tat. Occasionally a reading can be changed. Bloom in All Hallows church finds it reasonable that the congregation is not partaking of the wine at Mass, but only the priest is; such a ‘pious fraud’ is justified after all because otherwise the boozers would come along for a free drink. Joyce originally wrote, ‘Spoil the whole atmosphere of the.’ But at some point he changed ‘Spoil’ to ‘Queer’, and from that genetic perspective it is obvious that ‘Queer’ is a verb. But I had always read ‘Queer the whole atmosphere of

the.’ in line with many similar ones, a remark that the atmosphere is ‘queer’. Practically all translators treated it as an equivalent of ‘Queer I was just thinking that moment’ (U 5.393). Conceivably Joyce, exchanging one verb for another, was not aware of how readers would understand it. Or, who knows, perhaps Joyce wanted to replace a verb with an adjective and change the direction of Bloom’s thought. Which just indicates that even ‘genetic evidence’ is not automatic.

You seem hesitant about the value of textual-genetic studies. I remain a bit ambivalent about genetic pursuits. Their value is unquestionable. At the same time it seems to be an axiom, an aesthetic one, that literary works must be autonomous and therefore not depend on notes or drafts that have been accidentally preserved. Joyce took good care of all his notes and evidently considered them of value and worthy of preservation, possibly towards the use that is now being made of them. We would understand a lot more of Homer if we saw his notes or had his conversation with an Ionic Budgen, but, for better or worse, he or she erased the hard disk, and the epics we have must speak for themselves. I sometimes get the impression that for some scholars the notes are as important as the finished work itself, which is then seen merely as one coincidental, if terminal, stage within an elaborate and fascinating process. I really admire those who decipher those next to unreadable volumes of notes, some of which look utterly trite and non-specific (‘neat’ or ‘muck’) and meticulously trace their sources. From what I can judge they, in their totality, do not throw all that much light on Finnegans Wake, in fact, much of what the notes significantly contribute we could, and in part did, find out elsewhere. Emotionally it is much more rewarding to discover sources in our reading than to have it served up from the author’s own scribbles. But should all those voluminous notebooks really elucidate a substantial part of the still largely obscure Wake, it would argue against the Wake as a self-subsistent work of art. The ambivalence remains. And yet it is such an advantage to have those scribbles neatly transcribed (and indexed), and I do wish we had everything at our fingertips, so that the term ‘digital’ could revert to its original sense.

What about the National Library of Ireland’s latest acquisition of Joyce manuscripts? Each cache of autograph material, like the one that came to the National Library of Ireland, can throw new light on Joyce’s procedures and the works themselves. In a reasonable Joycean world, such new material should become accessible to all as a stimulus for scholarship. Electronic devices now display the geological layering of texts for the benefit of all. I have myself toyed with the stratification of chosen passages. On the other hand, the more pre-publication material we have, the more impossible it becomes to do our conscientious homework. There is too much around for anyone to survey.

T HE AUTHOR BEHIND IT ALL I’d like you to talk about biography next. Maybe start with some more general observations. Biography is the genetic study of an author. I have some reservations, similar to those that I have just aired, but they relate simply to overemphasis. It would be silly, in a patchy, retrospective disarrangement of my own doings, to disparage all we can get from knowing about an artist’s life. I admire writers who can do biography, that is, to have a human being as their subject. It is something beyond my own skills. I would hesitate to intrude and wouldn’t know what questions to ask, or what to do with the responses. I never took any notes when I met people who had been close to Joyce or eminent as scholars, and so many reminiscences unfolded here are rather sparse. Imagine all the questions I should have put to Frank Budgen or Maria Jolas, and never did. Come to think of it: what we are doing is biographical after all. To the best of my memory, at least. And there’s the rub. All memories entail distortion as we have to put into words what we seem to remember, and whoever listens will adapt it into a framework and again have to verbalize it, as I do in these murmoirs. They are selective, chancy, modified in the course of time (and occasionally by the retelling), quite apart from a certain reticence, call it delicacy or faintheartedness: a matter of multiple refractions. I have become more interested in how in Joyce (and in life) everything is refracted, modified, twisted. Oral reports are always around several corners. And to rely on documents is dealing with fictions, no matter how honest they are. Every letter Joyce wrote (or we write) has a specific purpose and a strategy — love, money, support or a bid for sympathy, and it is interesting to observe how certain utterances of Joyce’s, for example, assuming he actually made them, have been taken at some supposed face value. Like the remark, probably jocular, that he put so many riddles into Ulysses that scholars would be busy for centuries: some people believe that he seriously thought of complicating his prose so as to make it more intriguingly obscure, waking up every morning and wondering which issues, perhaps, might give more scope for obfuscation.

How did you react to Ellmann’s biography initially? Richard Ellmann’s biography burst onto the Joycean scene in 1959 and drastically changed it. Deservedly, it became the biography of the century, at least at the time, and a model. At long last we had Joyce’s life laid out in detail with decisive contours and ample documentation. At the very least Ellmann provided a grid and what looked like a solid basis as well as coherence. Reading Joyce now also became extracting Joyce’s life from his works or projecting it onto the books.

Didn’t you become intimately familiar with Ellmann’s biography through your work for Rhein Verlag Zurich? I was as avid to peruse the sizeable volume as any Joycean must have been and, as it happened, the biography became my first job in the field. Rhein Verlag in Zurich (Joyce’s publisher in German) had acquired the rights and must have heard of my inclination, so they asked me to supervise the translation and to supply the quotations from the German version of Georg Goyert. I also had to translate whatever did not yet exist in German, such as many letters and, above all, passages from Finnegans Wake. Many occurred in the text; others were used as mottos for individual chapters. Not qualified for the task, I had recourse to an interlinear approach and just supplied German glosses to the original. It was a tough assignment, and I vividly recall my distress about ‘our pettythicks the marshalaisy’ (for example), a struggle which told me a lot about what the Wake passage might mean and the limits of what can be salvaged in another tongue. The progress of the German adaptation was laborious and full of obstacles. The first translator appointed was Siegfried Lang who had known Joyce (he is mentioned in the biography and in at least one letter). I visited him in Basle where he showed me his translation of the first chapter of A Portrait, which he had undertaken at the time. When Joyce wrote he wished Lang would return his novel (3 January 1920), he may have referred to the copy that Lang needed for the task. In the fifties one could not copy documents, and I did not have the courage to ask for the typescript outright, so that now it is probably lost beyond retrieval. A contemporary translation of the first chapter would be of considerable interest. Siegfried Lang remembered meeting Joyce and how he had once called Goethe ‘the grand master of platitudes’, but, Lang immediately added, Joyce went on to quote something from Goethe with great reverence. It may have shown a not uncommon ambivalence towards a dead rival which is still echoed in the opening of the Library espisode in Ulysses. Anyway, we soon found Lang’s sample translations unsuitable, and a young man, Albert W. Hess, took over, but he died very suddenly in an accident. The publishers looked around and found two Germans versed in English, Karl H. Reichert from Frankfurt and his son Klaus Reichert. Together they finished the translation. That was also how Klaus Reichert entered the lists and ultimately became one of the most perspicacious Joyce scholars, this among many other achievements; he is a good friend and companion on a common journey.

Very early on in the proceedings, Rhein Verlag received a phone call from Carola Giedion-Welcker, one of Joyce’s Zurich friends who had got to know him in Paris in the twenties and had written about him extensively, in particular a highly instructive preface to the German Ulysses. She wanted to know if the corrections that she had submitted to Ellmann were to be included. We did not know of any such corrections, and so I went to see her. Her name was, of course, familiar to me, but we had not met. She was disturbed by a few inaccuracies that Ellmann had introduced into her information. One thing she rectified was that it was not Joyce who spoke of Jung to Carola Giedion-Welcker as ‘Your friend, my enemy’, but that Jung had said this to her about Joyce. The revised biography of 1982 does not mention the incident any more. Her main complaint was to do with events right after Joyce’s death as she was leaving the hospital. According to Ellmann ‘Frau Giedion-Welcker’s cabdriver, observing his passenger in tears, said to comfort her, “Il y a d’autres”’. This was wholly misplaced from a much earlier incident when she had indeed been shedding tears, but that was when she first met Joyce in Paris in 1928 and was so moved by his near blindness that she cried; and a Paris taxi driver spoke the displaced words. Paris taxi drivers do speak French. As always in publishing, such complications occur at the last moment, just before going to print, and all we could do was to cable Richard Ellmann about ‘those corrections’. He rejected any changes he had not seen and later wrote to me that some people did not ‘understand the subtleties of the biographical method’. Yet, as I now see, we did omit the dislocated incident in the German biography.

How well did you actually know Richard Ellmann? Richard Ellmann came to Zurich in January 1961 for a lecture at the English Seminar, and that is where we first met and spent a good deal of time together, also discussing the biography. Together with Professor Straumann we visited Joyce’s old grave in Fluntern. Alas I did not yet have a camera. Richard Ellmann was a gentleman scholar of great erudition, urbane and friendly towards newcomers and not at all condescending. Naturally we remained in touch, and our paths crossed several times later on. During that first meeting I brought up Mrs Giedion’s intercession and was taken aback when Ellmann quite matter-of-factly conceded that he had knowingly tampered with the chronology and transferred the Paris event to the death scene more than a dozen years later. Without the mention of her tears and the taxi driver’s comment at that point, there wouldn’t have been any reason to clinch the paragraph in that way: Carola Giedion had been put in for dramatic effect. The incident is, of course, entirely marginal and does not concern Joyce himself at all; it is a decorative flourish, a rhetorical device. I am convinced that Ellmann did not take analogous liberties with Joyce’s life. Yet my confidence in the factual basis of biography did suffer slightly. I know that other witnesses, who had given information, had similar experiences and complaints. Budgen told me that Paul Suter had become very bitter.

How much does such tampering with the accounts of witnesses affect the standing of his biography? I think that all of this does not detract from the magnitude and impact of Ellmann’s opus. He had a gift for making things cohere, and he gave us a Joyce that we can hardly replace in our minds. He came at the right time and could still consult many of Joyce’s contemporaries, and he had a refined interviewing technique. Much would have been lost without him. Ellmann was also highly efficient, and he completed the biography within a few years, far less time than I would have allowed. But then I have no aptitude for such research at all and would never come to an end. It surprised me that Ellmann only spent three days questioning Frank Budgen, one of the most important eyewitnesses or, as Budgen himself called it, ‘synoptics’. It is amazing what he got out of such encounters. Naturally, he could hardly have afforded the extended stay in Trieste to look profoundly into Joyce’s ten years there as John McCourt did half a century later. This also shows how competent Ellmann was in gathering and co-ordinating his material. For the Zurich periods he corresponded with Alfred Dutli and instructed him to make local enquiries and report back; he must have had many such delegates in other places.

Ellmann doesn’t seem to have been all that open to criticism? It certainly was not Ellmann’s fault that the biography instantly rose to the status of gospel truth, the hard rock on which to build interpretations, but it may have been a disadvantage that his greatest achievement came relatively early in his career and thus could never be topped. Many of us wished that he had responded to the criticism that inevitably was raised. It’s a pity he wouldn’t descend from the mountain to discuss the tables of the law. We would have loved to hear him argue about issues both of detail (naturally new details came to light) and principle at one of our conferences. He seemed to move in a higher sphere. When in the spring of 1967 I mentioned, full of enthusiasm, our first imminent symposium, he sounded rather offhand and dismissed it as ‘goody-goody’ (as I had never heard the phrase before I still have it in my ear). He may have sensed that for us the pioneering venture was — also — a platform for lesser lights to get some attention. But later on he did join in, the first time in Trieste, 1971. He was a key speaker and did not engage in live discussions. The one exception I know was the conference in Monaco in 1985 devoted to the Gabler edition, and there he took a very lively part. At that time he was already marked by illness, and it was, alas, the last occasion on which I saw him. He had once invited me to speak in Oxford where I also met

his ailing wife, Mary. From what I know, it was during Mary’s extended illness that Ellmann worked on his study Ulysses on the Liffey — in part to distract his mind. It is a device that some of us know all too well. Ellmann’s biography remains monumental: it is still prevalent in our discussions on Joyce, and hardly anyone would dispute the unique achievement. But these days any praise is usually followed by a ‘but’ (I have added a few of my own). This may not seem fair, but it is worth considering that most of us may not have anything to show that would merit such a trailing ‘but’. There was a certain inflexibility. The revised biography of 1982, twenty-three years later, added new material, especially the missing link of another prototype for Gerty MacDowell, Gertrude Kaempffer, and the link, not all that accurately documented, fits almost too perfectly. But the overall view or structure of the biography was not fundamentally modified. It seemed to me that Ellmann had not quite grasped that biography, too, is largely fiction based on statements that are inevitably also strategic. It is Joyce who taught us that. I remain sceptical about biography, which can be so instructive and yet has a way of interacting with interpretation. Life generates art (sometimes) from which then, in turn, the artist’s life can be extrapolated in a vicious circle. We do need biography, the more the better, and should really gather all available material, but with caution. No doubt I will expatiate on this somewhere else. As I said, the unreliability of statements and documents is a pervasive Joycean theme. I wonder how biographers can ever claim to know what someone ‘thought’ or ‘felt’. I have always claimed that in every biography there is more ‘graphy’ than ‘bio’. A life does not translate into text. Yet we need biographies and want to have as many facts, or what approaches facts, as possible. Since I was never as thrilled by the biography (don’t forget I supervised the German edition), I was also never as disenchanted as some scholars were in the long run. Other biographies have supplemented Ellmann: Morris Beja did a balanced compendium and Peter Costello looked into the Irish background, sometimes, it seems to me, transferring Joycean fictions into bio-speculation. I understand that Ron Bush is at work on something along different premises, I assume. What I would like, and will not live to see, is a collection of all available material, arranged in chronological sequence, with perhaps a few glosses but no persistent theory.

Despite the problems associated with them, we need biographies, surely? Biography is one of those paradoxes: we need biographies, and yet they are impossible — trying to grasp a shadow. Every scrap of information may be valuable, but not all of them, if any, can be trusted, for we never get the whole context. You learn this when you become the subject yourself; I have had my own small-scale experience. When the Wollschläger translation of Ulysses was reviewed in the newspapers, the translator was visited and interviewed. Two editorial ladies extended their visit to my suburban dwelling with a list of questions. It must have been an expensive trip for the newspaper, Die Welt, for they also took me out to the Kronenhalle restaurant of Joycean memories. When the report was published later I found that the two ladies, unnecessarily, had depicted the atmosphere of my home, probably for local atmosphere. Almost the first thing they noticed was a Thai kind of chair which my daughter indeed had put somewhere in the hall, though I had hardly paid any attention to it. More mysterious was the mention of a strange oriental water pipe which I myself had never seen. The newspaper also said this strange character had a kind of phobia about entering department stores. To the best of my knowledge such a topic had never come up, and I can, in fact, stride into any department store with utter sangfroid. The reporters, who incidentally had never looked at either Ulysses or its translation, meant well, there was no intention to caricature. But imagine if you have to extrapolate from such facts: Thai chair, oriental water pipe and fear of department stores; details that seem to cry out for a psychologically lurid extrapolation. As for biography, I cannot think of any person around me who would know what were the most decisive moments in my life, the most stirring concerns. We know so little even of those close to us. Which is not to say we should not collect as many reports as we can. It is in the nature of things that we generally know very little of the early life of a great person when, as yet, very little memorable attention was paid to her or him. Once fame is achieved everything becomes worthy of notice. The Paris circles around Joyce assumed he was a genius or else a charlatan. Distortions are inevitable. Then there is an interrelationship between life and work: how much of Joyce is there in Stephen Dedalus? Did Joyce ever consider entering the Jesuit order? And so on.

One biographical surmise has had a great impact, and I know that you for one doubt Ellmann’s assertion that Ulysses is an epithalamium. I always wondered about Ellmann’s claim that 16 June commemorates Joyce’s first outing with Nora and whatever happened on the occasion, and that therefore Ulysses is an epithalamium, a tribute to Nora. Perhaps it is. Still, one would like to have it documented, exactly documented. The two did go out into some rural privacy around that time, and it may or may not have been 16 June. After all, one or two days off would matter. Furthermore, if Ulysses indeed celebrates a turning point in Joyce’s life, it is odd that the epic features no equivalent of Nora, someone who would meet a hapless Stephen and change his life. Molly, in some sense, is Nora, but hardly the one of sixteen years earlier. She has become a trifle alienated, a cherished memory has turned into a poignant resignation. And yet, Joyce’s first rendezvous has, by now, become a historical fact which perpetuates itself in many thumbnail sketches. It is understandable that biographers want to establish relations of this sort; it is their vocation. But, in my doubts, I now find myself walking right into the biographical trap which consists in relating the life to the

works.

I believe you’d like to add some personal snippets of peripheral biography? We are unlikely to unearth many more facts about Joyce’s life, accidental discoveries apart. I can offer a few crumbs, reminiscences of people who have been in touch. In May 1985, an elderly couple walked into the still new Foundation, and the husband told me with some pride that as a waiter he had known Joyce, and he committed his experience to our guest book: ‘I, Adolf Oetiker, as a piccolo [apprentice] in the Carlton Elite Hotel in 1932, have waited on the great poet James Joyce [underlined] in room service and also attended on his wife Nora in the Elite Grill. I also got to hear some of his great singing at midnight.’ Such memories, insignificant in themselves, add little colourful touches. What is obvious is that Joyce liked to converse with people such as waiters, without condescension. What my witness told me, but refrained from committing to writing, was that he was first summoned to a certain floor to look after a ‘loud Englishman’ who had taken a drop too many. Long ago it was Helen Hart, Clive’s wife, to whom I showed the Hotel Carlton Elite in Bahnhofstrasse, where Joyce had stayed in the thirties, who remarked on the pivotal letters HCE. Signs of superstition? Much more recently Armin Kesser’s widow called me. Armin Kesser was a journalist of some reputation who was present at Joyce’s funeral and wrote a few articles about him. She then came to show me fragments of his diary, which contained a few references to Joyce, whom he had not himself met. On 13 January 1941 he noted: James Joyce died in Rotkreuzspital (cancer). I never got to know him, only heard his voice, a ghost-clear, high, almost female voice. Marli told me: On December 12 – hours only before Joyce was transported to the hospital — she finds him in the hallway of the small guesthouse where he has his rooms lying on the floor and fumbling to try to open an indescribable crate of Ulyssean appearance. He wanted to take a book out of it. ‘Can you step over me?’ he asks Marli who wants to gain her room. ‘I have some trouble getting up’ — As he fumbles clumsily at the lock — being half blind — she offers her help and puts herself next to him on the floor. She notices at once that the key does not fit the lock. Well then, says Joyce, he would leave it for today and resignedly enters his room. (My translation.)

Marli, according to my enquiries, was Armin Kesser’s first wife, who at the time lived in the Pension Delphin, Mühlebachstrasse 69, Zurich, Joyce’s last resort, long since gone. What the mysterious ‘unsagbare Kiste von ulyssehaftem [sic] Aussehen’ (in the original wording) was is a matter of speculation. ‘Kiste’ generally refers to a wooden crate, but could also be a large box, most likely one of those travelling trunks of the time; possibly it was the battered suitcase that Nora Joyce later left to another resident who, in the early nineties, donated it to our Foundation. The epithet hints at a muchtravelled object. A few items need correction immediately. Understandably the cause of Joyce’s death could not yet have been known and was attributed to cancer. The date of the anecdote (12 December) is obviously wrong. Joyce arrived in Zurich on 17 December 1940. ‘December 12’ might be a slip for ‘January 12’, but Joyce had already been taken to hospital on the 10th. It is reasonable to think the witness had her encounter shortly before Joyce was hospitalized. The note deserves passing attention as it seems to depict one of the last episodes in Joyce’s life, and a plausible one, as it was clearly not invented as an anecdote for publication, and it was never made use of. There is symbolic potential in a vignette that shows half-blind Joyce lying on the floor, alongside a co-operative woman, failing to open a lock with the wrong key. Readers of Finnegans Wake might empathize. The reliability of witnesses and the nature of biographical turbulences inevitably move into focus. This also surfaces in a marginal event at Joyce’s funeral that has been promulgated. I heard from Heinrich Straumann that when Joyce’s coffin was lowered, a man who was not among the funeral guests asked who was being buried. The name James Joyce was whispered to him, but he could not hear well and enquired again so that ‘James Joyce’ had to be shouted at him with unseemly clamour. Armin Kesser in his account of the funeral remembers a man intruding into the solemn stillness asking, ‘How do you pronounce the name?’ The proper answer was supplied and, on demand, repeated in more distinct articulation. (As I heard from Mrs Kesser, the so far unidentified person was also a resident at the Pension Delphin.) The significance of this phonetic variant was that the episode ended in a question of sound, voice and pronunciation. In either case, the vocal intrusion reminded readers of Ulysses of the man in the mackintosh at Patrick Dignam’s fictional interment in Glasnevin, the uninvited guest, though a silent one — Life imitating Art. We have it on irate family authority that Ireland’s representative in Switzerland during the war did not attend Joyce’s funeral, a blemish on the country’s history, but Armin Kesser pointedly noted that neither the city of Zurich nor the Swiss government was officially present. One unattributed memory in Armin Kesser’s epilogue is that Joyce, on seeing the name of the guesthouse he was to spend some days in, Pension Delphin, exclaimed: ‘Delphin [dolphin]! That’s the fish that saved Arion!’ As far as I can see, this bit of apocrypha, which would show the later Joyce’s mind still engaged in Greek myths (Herodotus, I.24), has not been perpetuated. In the tangle of events, reports, rumours, memory, facts and fiction we will never know who exactly said what, when and with what intent, but whatever happens to be passed on can direct us towards conjectures. What Stephen Dedalus does with what tradition preserves about Shakespeare is a precedent.

G ENDER AND ITS DISCONTENTS I’d like you to talk about gender and feminism. Are these areas of interest to you, and have they opened up new perspectives as far as you’re concerned? Here you get me at a disadvantage. I talk about insensitivity elsewhere. I have nothing to contribute, feminism passed me by. All I have is a few recollections. Ruth Bauerle organized the first feminist panel in 1973, although it wasn’t called ‘gender’ or ‘feminism’, and one sequel was a book edited by Suzette Henke and Elaine Unkeless, Women in Joyce, a pristine study. Originally I was asked to contribute an essay on, ALP but soon realized I had nothing to offer in that particular context. I never really reflected on ALP as a woman, or an archetype or cliché, and so I wisely backed out. Then I watched Bonnie Kime Scott at close range doing her pioneering work in Delaware, when she looked into the conditions that women of Joyce’s generation faced in Ireland: at the time it was a different approach. As it happened, Bonnie Scott was also the first to give a talk in the new Zurich Foundation, and it was on feminist issues. I must admit, to my shame, that I simply never got the hang of it all, hence I am not qualified to judge what has been achieved. This, of course, is connected with my blind spot for predominantly theoretical approaches. Maybe it all comes down to the fact that after a certain time one is incapable of learning anything new. I am evading the question. I know full well that Joyce is a male author, with most of the implications, and that as a person he did exploit the women around him who made his work possible. And he held strange views at odd times, with no obligation whatsoever to remain consistent all his life. Whether his women are stereotypes or projections is something I cannot determine. We male commentators are certainly caught in some inherited framework, perhaps unable to break out. In A Portrait women are hovering marginally around a self-centred Stephen Dedalus, whose attitude in Ulysses still strikes me as misogynist. I see that Leopold Bloom, not a chauvinist except in a few fleeting macho flashes, has great empathy for women; he imagines, for example, what childbirth might feel like. Given the context of her time and place, Molly is relatively emancipated but cannot fulfill every requirement that was projected on to her decades later. I suppose we all become fools when we pontificate about the other sex. What I would have wished, perhaps, is that a few avant-garde women scholars would not take up the abstract male vocabulary to prove that they can be as obscurely transcendental as the next man, but again, I speak only from limited experience and from the quotes I have seen. The same seems to be true of the patron saints of post-colonialism who, again judging from a few rare quotes, seem to vie with the intellectual colonizers and beat them in a jargon that is even more complex. I hear talk of feminine language as different from ours, and so I would appreciate some rules of thumb as to what its characteristics are and how I can recognize it. I cannot tell if Molly Bloom, on the other side of the fence, and fictional to boot, is a true, plausible picture or just one more male projection. Long ago I did ask women readers, and their responses, predictably, were diverse, sometimes extremely so. As I did not venture into that tricky territory I did not, I think, come in for reprimands. Except perhaps once. In that old piece I did on ‘Nausicaa’ in the seventies I pointed out, in passing, that Ulysses moves into a female world, along with the oncoming of night (feminine in most languages) and that three subsequent chapters deal with the Virgin, the Mother, and the Whore, conventional facets of womanhood. This was neither original nor new, and the pointers are in Joyce’s schema anyway. But one reviewer, Grace Eckley, took me to task for recirculating chauvinist clichés, perhaps rightly, and ever after I have refrained from similar pronouncements. At the 1990 symposium in Monaco a prominent feminist, Sandra Gilbert, was invited as a key speaker. As she had attacked Joyce in a book, I was looking forward to her raising a few provocative points and was, like many others, disappointed when she deviated completely to Virginia Woolf and left Joyce untainted. What we need is not more adoration but pertinent attacks from non-believers, or, in this case, advocatae diaboli.

Inasmuch as you can follow them, are you interested in any of the questions feminists raise? What interests me is mainly the fervour and heated controversy that Molly Bloom, true to life or figment of the male imagination, has incited: as though she were a real person. A Dublin doctor once said that, surely, no man would ever dream of going near someone like Molly Bloom, but I know at least one man who salivated at the mere mention of her name. It may be asking too much of her to shoulder the burden of subsequent feminist obligations. In this connection I wonder how earlier readers could ever have taken that catalogue of potential lovers in ‘Ithaca’, from Mulvey to Boylan, at face value. It was David Hayman who, for one, deflated that myth, and this convinced a few scholars who were grateful for the discovery. I wonder why we need circuitous criticism to find out what the text already implicates.

You must be familiar with some feminist studies, though? I know of investigations that have counted, for example, how often men and women speak in Dubliners,

and the expected conclusion is that women speak much less. Whether that tells against Joyce, as one claim went, is another matter. One reason they speak less is that they were often confined to their dreary homes and were not welcome in pubs, scene of so much action, nor were they hanging around in the streets; in stories like ‘Ivy Day’ there aren’t any women at all. As against bare statistics one might argue that, at times, what they say is more weighty than the extensive palaver of men. What Lily, Miss Ivors or Gretta say in ‘The Dead’, is not voluminous, but effective; it shakes Gabriel out of his complacency and crumbles his own, lengthy, ‘foolish’ speech into platitudes. If anything, in Dubliners Joyce perhaps shows that much of what men say, and they do talk a lot, tends to be palaver. I am glad to report that in Zurich in 1993 we staged a feminist workshop about maternity, not of course labeled ‘feminist’. It was well attended, with Marilyn Reizbaum in charge. I wish we had more such guestedited workshops in our Foundation on all of those subjects that are beyond our, or my, ken. During the maternity workshop it occurred to me that an effort of women scholars could replace the old volume on Ulysses that Hart and Hayman had edited and that came out in 1974. It is outdated and was written by seventeen male authors and just one woman, Adaline Glasheen; obviously nobody had given a thought to equal representation. I believed that enough had happened in the meantime for eighteen qualified female Joycean scholars to collaborate on a book, an up-to-date modern comprehensive introduction to Ulysses that would cover most of its aspects, taking recent, also theoretical, developments into account and serving as a welcome impulse. The project was taken up, though not the idea of limiting the authors to one sex. The outcome was a study with many perceptive essays, but it seems to me strategically unwise that the collection was made to sail under the flag of ‘En-Gendered Perspectives’ (1999). With such a title it is likely to be relegated to a category, whereas without such a proclamatory title, it might have gotten under more of those male skins that need getting under.

I’d like you to talk about women Joyce scholars, especially the first and second generation. There was clearly a male dominance at the first symposia. Margaret Solomon, as I have detailed elsewhere, left her mark on the first one. Florence Walzl was a regular participant; I had always hoped she would finish her perceptive work on Dubliners with a book-length study, but it never came off, and we are left with her valuable essays. I didn’t know her too well. It happens all too often that one meets, exchanges a few words, possibly throws in a bit of Joycean shoptalk, knowing there will be further occasions. But when fate never really throws you together again, there is little to remember except general but vague appreciation. This is one reason why these chancy memoirs cannot be a roll-call of everyone ever met at a conference. I do remember putting a question to her that has often troubled me: I sounded out her opinion on just what happened between Polly Mooney and Mr Doran in ‘The Boarding House’. Her instant reply was ‘Oh, Polly is pregnant’, and Robert Boyle seconded her with equal assurance. They took intimacy, copulation and pregnancy for granted. I seem to be the only one who doesn’t know exactly what happened in Mrs Mooney’s boarding house. Unwittingly, she also caused me to put a tour through the streets of Dublin on the agenda for 1969. When in 1967 I heard her remark at the breakfast table that she thought Dublin geography might be important, it occurred to me that she probably had never walked, at the crack of dawn, and looked at a few relevant locations mentioned in the stories. So by 1969 we had a city walk on the programme. Gerry O’Flaherty was to guide us, but many more Joyceans signed up than he could accommodate, and we split the crowd into three groups. I took the second one and Clive Hart brought up the rear. I remember that I pointed out those sights (Little Britain Street, St Mary’s Abbey, etc.) with an apologetic tone, assuming I was saying what everyone knew anyway. However, I found to my surprise that many of the professionals had no clue. Evidently not all of us share the same curiosity. Clive Hart later systematically covered all the locations of ‘Wandering Rocks’ and was thus able to tabulate the itineraries and to time the episode, practically minute by minute. Clive and I also wanted to verify long ago if a person of average height, which we were, could drop down to the area of 7 Eccles Street, hanging from its railings. There still is a photograph showing us hanging like this, but not letting go. Topographical verification as a pastime.

But back to women Joyce scholars, please. Karen Lawrence, with whom I had corresponded (and I think I saw her dissertation in typescript) made such a good impression on everybody at the 1979 symposium that she rose to the top ranks almost immediately. The same happened with Christine van Boheemen from Leiden (now in Amsterdam), also a newcomer in 1979, but by now one of the foremost Joycean theorists; this already showed in her first presentation. I must have challenged and probably annoyed her, simply because I could not follow her gist and obstinately tried to make her engage in my kind of discussion. I think I was forgiven. At that first Zurich symposium we had students who provided free accommodation to young and budding Joyceans who could otherwise not have afforded our expensive city. This is how Marilyn Reizbaum from Madison surfaced and Michael Gillespie, both students of Phil Herring. They emphatically have made their way. Marilyn later spent a good deal of time researching in Zurich where she looked into the Jewish background and was still able to interview a few of Joyce’s contemporaries. I also hope that Mary Power, who knows the Irish background so well, will summarize her findings in a book, especially about Dubliners and Ulysses. She started working with what is now known as ‘popular culture’ long before it became a trend or even a label. Mary had taken part in a panel on medievalism in Trieste in 1971, and she turned up again in Dublin two

years later where I got to know her, and more so when I spent two weeks in Dublin, mainly to do a full coverage of Dublin with my camera. We walked most areas, sometimes guided by Gerry O’Flaherty, and I think we also covered most of the ‘Wandering Rocks’ itinerary. One morning we stood outside 9 Newbridge Avenue, the house of the late Patrick Dignam, RIP, and I was shooting away when a man came out of the house towards me, asking ‘James Joyce, eh?’ He volunteered some information: ‘James Joyce lived here, and he used to take the Starflight to London almost every week.’ (The Starflight, for younger readers, was a plane service between Dublin and London in the seventies.) There will be more comments on the reliability of information scattered in these reports. I think it is only fitting to add that Gerry O’Flaherty much later (when I had again taken pictures of the house) told me that it was the wrong location, since the houses had long since been renumbered. On one occasion Mary and I travelled to Cork to take pictures of the Mardyke and the university for a documentary volume on A Portrait. Like Simon and Stephen Dedalus we had dinner in the Victoria Hotel, not long before it was demolished. In 1973 many sights in Dublin were still around; to me it seemed a turning point when urban development really set in. As it happened that year there were many signs in evidence, put up by a company appropriately called Demolition Ireland. Mary has always been good at concrete research. She has come up with a lot of sources, like ads for Alexander Keyes, and it was she who excavated that rare Victorian novel that Molly has been reading in pursuit of something smutty, Ruby, Pride of the Ring, which actually is Ruby: A Novel. Founded on the Life of a Circus Girl, by Amye Reade. For a while she sent me copies of newspaper advertisements, and I always thought that she had found the prototype of ‘What is Home Without Plumtree’s Potted Meat?’, but, since she herself does not remember it, I must have imagined it. She has always come up with something concrete, like the minute detail that in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, which Miss Dunne is reading in ‘Wandering Rocks’, there is a diary which also features a June 16th. With such interests — but not only with such interests — Mary always fitted very well into our Zurich workshops. Marilyn French also rose from the ranks. As an unknown Joyce scholar (I had not seen any essay or article of hers before), her The Book as World, an independent study of Ulysses, came out of the blue, and I think I wrote her a letter with my views on the book, mainly positive. She then took part in some conferences, first in Dublin, 1977, but she soon emerged as an author of bestsellers. The Women’s Room was her breakthrough. In Frankfurt 1984 she resided in the prestigious Frankfurter Hof, and in Venice, 1988 she was a key speaker and gave a panoramic view of feminism. Maybe one day she will come back into the fold. I dimly remember some argument I had with her over the use of the term ‘Narrator’, which she favoured, and I think it is because of her personification, or rather emotionalization, of that Narrator (he, she or them?) that I became scared of the term, which, of course, is my problem, not hers.

Would you venture a guess as to how Joyce studies may develop in the future? I am the wrong addressee for such a question which, I suppose, is often answered in accordance with one’s own requirements. Since new approaches are future developments, they are as unpredictable as they always were, at least for me. No doubt it all depends on what new horizons will open, assuming they do, and this, no doubt, will start with theoretical impulses. Perhaps, if I could foresee them, they wouldn’t be necessary. Here again, by genetic structure, I am on the conventional side, wishing that we collectively — also — continue to do some more basic, even trivial, homework and find out more on a textual level of what, for lack of a better word, I still call understanding. This doesn’t apply to Finnegans Wake only, where we still have too many lexical gaps where we cannot afford them. I also wish someone would comment, in detail, on the more murky passages in ‘Circe’, not symbolically or psychologically, but simply spell out what, say, Stephen Dedalus is trying to convey or what old Virag is up to. There is one single word at the end of ‘The Dead’ whose import still eludes me. Gabriel Conroy muses about how ‘the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling’. What is the exact meaning or implication of ‘reared’? Has the world been reared by those dead, and would that make it solid? You see the philological pedant, who in cases like this checks with translators who cannot evade the issue. Some settle for that meaning of ‘build up’, ‘erect’, ‘create’; some paraphrase it as ‘where they had passed their time’; others use ‘procreate’ (implying ‘children’ as an object). So there is a whole spectrum. Such is the plight of those, like me, who look at the trees, even the leaves, and never see the wood. But I have whined about this elsewhere. Others know much better what the future ought to bring us, and it has often been discussed at conferences.

O CHLOKINETICS For a bit of light entertainment: would you recall for posterity a less than perfect symposium performance? It shall go unnamed but not unrecorded. We do not always produce exorbitantly brilliant or even minimally profitable stuff. Joyce attracts some bright and many pedestrian minds, a number of dull ones and an ample lunatic fringe, as well as some adorable eccentrics. One of the most memorable presentations — apart from John Kidd’s collage of quotations on Bloomsday 1992 — was in Erie, Pennsylvania, in 1978, where one scholar who had already published results of his findings, discussed Joyce’s notations in the books that are preserved in Buffalo. Joyce had put pencil marks in the margins, or rather, such marks can be detected, and they are likely to be Joyce’s. These dots are very small; one could hardly make them out in a big overhead projection. We were shown such dots in profusion and, quite often, there were three of them fairly close together. One conclusion was that such three dots formed a triangle, which indeed they did, and had to (unless they were all in one line). I had already gone through the speaker’s previous publication, which was along the same lines, or dots, and was prepared for imminent revelations, but the others in the audience felt let down when the dot constellations turned out to be the substance of the lecture. It actually had to be cut short. One question asked was how Joyce, with his ailing eyes, could ever make out these minute dots for which the very latest optical equipment of the Buffalo Library was just sufficient. This was ‘a good question’. When I asked if, perhaps, there was a relation between the marginal configurations and the content of the pages, this, too, was considered ‘a good question’, which, come to think of it, it was. I cannot let this topic go without working in my favourite statement on Joyce that, even to an inveterate sceptic like me, is irrefutably true. It is still to do with Joyce’s marginal notations: ‘On other occasions a dot is formed on both sides by the ink working its way through the porous paper from the side on which it was first put.’

You do have strong views on panels and conference speakers in general, don’t you? An inherent problem is to square tolerant openness with necessary discipline, and to remain aware of time, of one’s co-panelists, of the audience and the topic at hand. Some topics are unsuitable and should be reserved for individual papers. Long ago a session on something like ‘Shelley’s Rienzi and Giacomo Joyce’ was proposed, if I remember correctly; one can hardly round up a number of scholars who have something new to say on such minor issues, important as they may be in themselves. I never understood how such boring titles as ‘Joyce and x’ can be devised. For our Zurich symposiums we outlawed them in a decree of rank censorship. However, this was done in a spirit of pure charity to make the perpetrators conceive of something a trifle less insipid. As for charity, I have set up a list, Ten Commandments, of how, in our presentations, we can achieve the greatest possible boredom: tedium maximum guaranteed (or money back)! No one can be fascinating at will, or by instruction, but we can avoid a few elementary mistakes. So I might as well put the Decalogue here, for everyone’s benefit.

Ten Simple Rules 1. Read from a typescript. 2. Do not omit to spell out how the title in the programme changed from its original concept, nor that it is not what you are actually going to talk about, and how the whole misunderstanding came about. Your correspondence with the chair about it is a topic that has stood the test of time. 3. Unfold in detail how the present paper fits into your current research work, that it is, for example, the third chapter from your forthcoming study, and give its probable publication date. 4. Apart from the topical names you’re obliged to drop into your introduction, adduce a few unexpected ones. If pre-avant-garde ones are not available, you can always fall back on German philosophers. 5. If, as is likely, no one in the audience has any text at hand, be sure to give the exact page and line reference, if possible of your own parochial edition. 6. Insert lengthy quotations, especially secondary ones, with which you then do nothing. Be not deterred if, by any chance, your predecessor has already recited the same quotations. 7. Bibliography is suitable for lateral expansion: indicate where and when the sources you are quoting from, or just referring to in passing, were published, and by whom. 8. Fight for your allotted portion of time and add at least 20 per cent. Most chairs are too timid to interfere before you are well over your limit, so you may get away with much more. If you are stopped, you can always ask for five minutes more to make your point. The average of ‘five’ minutes is about seventeen. 9. Take nothing for granted and put everything in. 10. Make sure that your paper is as much as possible a written one. A monotonous voice without emphasis or pause helps a great deal. Bear in mind the primary meaning of ‘paper’: a piece of material for signs

to be put on. Show a lot of it. (Parenthetically, it is up to you whether you want to show the audience how many sheets are still looming ahead, or whether you prefer to create suspense by putting the used sheet at the bottom of your pile.) 11. Read from a typescript. Hardly anyone would disagree with such platitudes, but go and suffer the redundancies of many presentations! Naturally we cannot just be terse and sparkling on demand. ‘Don’t be a bore!’ may be the only valid advice for speakers, but it cannot be put into practice at will. At best we may learn to avoid mistakes. It is a safe rule, for example, that any sentence containing three or more nouns ending in ‘ation’ is dead beyond resuscitation (the ‘Ithaca’ episode and the Wake make fun of such clusters). Once you lose your audience’s attention, you can hardly hope to get it back. See how Joyce can condense. Notice how much emotion is caught in a simple fragment, Miss Douce’s sigh in ‘Sirens’ when Boylan leaves abruptly ‘(why did he go so quick when I?)’ What I am aiming at is ‘tension’ or ‘suspense’ (not in the detective novel sense), something like an electric current going from one pole to the other, propulsive enough to overcome obstacles along the way. At every conference you meet someone who retires early to the hotel room ‘because I have to complete my paper’. My advice has always been ‘Never shorten a presentation’ and, of course, this is misunderstood to imply that the audience should be tortured to the presentation’s full length. What I try to convey is never to have a paper to shorten, but to extend it from its nuclear idea to its appropriate, usually limited, time. In other words, get your main points in fairly early, and then expand them to the allotted space. The key is flexibility, and adaptation to the needs at hand, including those of the audience. If they look puzzled, explain a bit, if they look bored, try to condense. Which brings us to the issue of handouts: it is good to have something concrete in front of one’s eyes which helps one to follow the argument. But many handouts are just too long and contain much more than could ever be profitably chewed. A rule of thumb would be to cut down the items on the handout to their absolute minimum — and then take off two thirds of what remains.

One of your abiding areas of interest is ‘Ochlokinetics’. It all arose from my impatience with motion being unnecessarily obstructed physically. It first occurred to me in the London underground, where, in these fairly wide passages, two people would occupy the middle so that no one could pass them. I always felt an urge to kick them but, with Christian forbearance, I never did. I like to proceed at my own speed, but human lack of consideration generally prevents this. Gradually I channelled my suppressed annoyance into an anthropological study of how people in crowds move. They don’t. They block each other’s way. We all know the person in front of us on an airplane who stops in the aisle and wonders where to put the luggage. The non-operative words are ‘in the aisle’. All others have to wait until they, in turn, can create their own jam, and so departure is delayed even further. People stand where others have to pass; whoever fights his way to the drinks table freezes there into a static obstacle. Why we have this inter-obstacular gene is something I do not know, but we do have it. I mentioned a lack of consideration. Do you notice how Bloom, as usual, has more empathy than most? When talking to Mrs Breen and noticing the man Cashel Boyle with the string of names, he gently moves her aside to ‘let this man pass’. If more of us were like that, we’d have a better world. This needed a label. I called this ochlo (Greek for crowd, group) kinetics. This now exact science also grew out of Senn’s law that a group (say of more than six people) is practically immobile, even if they know where they want to go (say to have dinner together).

You’ve just described physical Ochlokinetics, but the concept has its verbal equivalent, does it not? Yes, we set up obstacles in speaking and writing and waste everybody’s precious time — which brings us once more to conferences and the superfluity of extended lectures. Or think of all those who, at question time, take minutes to present a muddled non-epiphanic ramble. This is why, in the goodness of my heart, I drew up those rules of How to Become a Bore that I unleashed a moment ago. Remember those who have long quotations and do nothing with them, those who spout bibliography in a talk? Some scholars offer six pages of handouts for a twenty minute presentation and then, moreover, go through them, one by one, in that order, so that everyone knows what’s ahead. Many professionals are not aware of the difference between oral delivery and print. All this merely goes to show that I am not a patient audience and don’t like to be consigned to boredom. How often do we hope that the speaker would skip to the sentence ahead (or, better, paragraph), for we anticipate it anyhow. A ground rule is that listeners get bored while speakers apparently do not. Quite apart from the axiom that what I have to say, but cannot say at the moment, is much more significant than what is being divulged right now. I always thought the only rhetorical guideline is to create, right from the outset, the illusion that what we are going to say might be worth listening to. We may not achieve this at will, but one might avoid certain procedures. To begin with ‘OK, eh, can you hear me?’ may not always do the trick. The oral medium also demands both simplification and clear outlines. Not everybody can enunciate well when a typescript is read, though some, in my mind often the British, can excel at it. For a joke I have been going around at conferences asking how many of those present use their computer, and contrary to the answer of something like ninety out of a hundred, I claim, just one, and that is me. Few of us (I am talking about the

less than rhetorically perfect) use the computer to help them guide their voices by replacing run-on text by the arrangement of a score, in other words, in speaking lines that are easy to scan, possibly with indents for subordination or parenthetical remarks; that way they can also verify if the audience is still with them. Let me illustrate this by graphic realignment of the foregoing sentence, with possible emphasis for good measure: Few of us (I am talking about the less than rhetorically perfect) use the computer to help them guide their voices by replacing run-on text by the arrangement of a score, in other words, in speaking lines that are easy to scan, possibly with indents for subordination or parenthetical remarks; that way they can also verify if the audience is still with them. The point is merely that this could be read out much more easily, and between (speaking) lines one might ascertain by looking up if there still is an audience.

S OME MARTIAL FLURRIES There were some conflicts, though, that became public? On the whole, as I said, the Joyce lot is a congenial and gregarious one, from which I have profited greatly. Naturally there are always some personal incompatibilities, squabbles over a reading, contentious arguments, nasty reviews and acerbic replies, petty or more fundamental disagreements and, perhaps, some rare individual enmities. But a few major adversities are on record.

Such as the tensions between Ellmann and Kenner? The first inkling I had of this was when I heard that Kenner, whom I did not yet know and was rather in awe of, had reacted virulently to Ellmann’s biography. A few pungent, dismissive remarks in a private letter were quoted to me, and I did not quite understand why the biography irritated him so much. Not so long afterwards, when Richard Ellmann spoke in Zurich and we spent some time together, I tried to sound him out on this. At the end of a long day I saw him off at our train station and briefly referred to Kenner’s strictures. He instantly changed his voice – his countenance fell – and, in parting, just said tersely: ‘He never liked anything I did.’ I had evidently touched a sore spot. I never heard Hugh Kenner’s side of the early tensions. From what I heard (but hadn’t seen) Kenner had initially reviewed the biography with some caustic remarks soon after it had come out. I cannot vouch for this, and I forget who reported it, but apparently Kenner wrote that Ellmann’s description of Joyce was of someone who would never have gotten tenure at Northwestern. At any rate, there seemed to be some rivalry from the outset. Hugh Kenner considered the displaced mention of Carola Giedion-Welcker after Joyce’s death unprofessional, and it may well have reinforced his bias. I realize just now that Kenner never gossiped about other Joyceans the way most of us do. Relations were undoubtedly strained, and it showed mainly in the published disputes. Kenner’s review of Ulysses on the Liffey in the JJQ was certainly incisive and memorable, and no one would like to have his weaknesses exposed with such acuity. The stings must have hurt, and all the more so since Richard Ellmann wrote his (no doubt overdone) study to absorb his mind during long and painful night watches during the illness of his wife, Mary.

Kenner and Ellmann must have met at some of the symposia, though? Both sides told me they never met before 1971, at the symposium in Trieste where Ellmann was giving his after-dinner Bloomsday speech. The next morning he, with Mary in a wheelchair, was leaving in Walt Litz’s car when Kenner came on the scene. They shook hands politely, and Kenner apologized for not attending the previous evening’s speech as he had overslept. We all felt a strain in the atmosphere, and I was told afterwards that Ellmann had expressed himself in very bitter terms. From all that I know (I had asked them both), Kenner and Ellmann only met three times, and always at symposia, and by some coincidence, I always happened to be present. Here I must interpose a warning: with increasing age, people reminiscing tend to move ever closer to crucial events and imagine themselves to have been part of the action (‘when Winston Churchill told me …’), and I wonder if I am suffering from the same illusion. However, my presence was not so much of a coincidence maybe as the fact that the occasion was always a symposium. The second meeting consisted in brief courteous nods in passing within a crowd as rooms were changed, at the Dublin Centenary symposium in 1982. Naturally they may have spoken to each other later on during a busy week. Both again were present in Frankfurt in 1984. Richard Ellmann used the opportunity of the publication of Gabler’s new synoptic Ulysses, launched on Bloomsday, to reiterate ‘Love’ as his answer to the ‘word known to all men’, as against ‘Professor Kenner’s’ previous speculation that it might be ‘death’. Somehow an old account was being settled in public. However, that same day in the evening, at a sumptuous (and free) city reception in the ‘Römer’ (a historic city hall), we all found ourselves seated around the same table, and the atmosphere was precariously amiable and almost on the brink of harmony. Stephen Joyce, who in his formal address had criticized Ellmann severely, in fact had almost condemned him for editorial misdemeanours, was at the same table. In a photograph of what looks like conviviality, Stephen Joyce has his arms round Murray Beja and me. I told you I would be honest.

But they were never really reconciled, were they? During this physical proximity it struck me as a pity that these two top figures in our field, to whom we owe so much (you could not leave them out of any roster of significant Joyce scholars, no matter how small), had always been seen in opposition, as illustrious antagonists. I thought it might be possible to bring them together at the next conference and to have them speak to each other, in relaxed tranquility. I put it to Marianne Kenner who thought it might well come off, and, indeed, Hugh later assented. For some time then I toyed with a vague plan to convene them at the same table, non-polemically, not as opponents, but as eminent scholars. A year later in Monaco, the last Joyce event that Richard Ellmann attended (it was about the Gabler Ulysses), I approached him as well, but he declined with unusual

bitterness. He felt he had been ‘hurt too much’. So, sadly, a sweltering conflict was never resolved. Many of us still wonder what may have caused such deep-rooted alienation. Maud Ellmann, whom I once asked, did not have an answer.

Please recount, from your angle, the well-publicized controversy between Hans Walter Gabler and John Kidd. The question was bound to crop up, but I emphasize that is not appropriate for the two names to be thus paired. Hans Walter Gabler holds an important place in Joyce studies and has contributed substantially to our understanding of Joyce, whereas John Kidd’s transient prominence is almost entirely linked, and due, to Gabler’s work. The two are not on the same level, but a resonant public controversy has conjoined them, deplorably. At the 1973 symposium in Dublin, three young newcomers hailing from Munich were seen as a group. They had collaborated on a volume on A Portrait in German which Wilhelm Füger, who was already a professor, had edited and to which the other two had contributed. Hans Walter Gabler originated from the Munich School of Textual Studies of Shakespeare (my name for it) and had been trained in textual scholarship of the German type; he later also learned the methods of the great Fredson Bowers in Virginia. The third participant in the triad soon faded from the scene. Hans Gabler had taken the trouble to inspect the Portrait fair copy in the National Library. It was he who found that the garbled version of the song on its first page should read: ‘O, the geen wothe botheth’ while in all printed editions Joyce’s accurate infantile phonetics had been officiously emended to ‘green’. (Jack Dalton had made the same discovery independently but never revealed it, except through vague hints.) Hans Gabler attended a panel on the text of Ulysses. This 1922 text, from Random House or Bodley Head, had always been known to be corrupt. A number of emendations were circulating that we copied into our books. Norman Silverstein, who had done textual studies of the ‘Circe’ chapter (and supplied some emendations), reported on what had happened, or rather not happened, to the corrected version that Jack Dalton was under contract to deliver to Random House. Given Dalton’s belligerent reputation there was a tacit and, I felt, jocular collusion not to utter his name. Silverstein tactfully referred to ‘a man under contract with Random House’, whom we then collectively named ‘Macintosh’. Dalton’s fame had not yet reached Munich, and so Hans Gabler enquired about this person: he would come to know in time. The impetus to straighten out the text of Ulysses may well have originated right there. Back home, Gabler, combining the textual methods and skills of the German and the American traditions, set to work very efficiently. Funds were supplied by the German Forschungsgemeinschaft to undertake a ‘Critical and Synoptic Edition’ of Ulysses, for the first time with the aid of computers, a pioneering enterprise. A team of young experts was called in. The new procedure that Gabler applied was not to choose a customary ‘copytext’ as a basis, but to trace Joyce’s own handwriting from first drafts through revisions, corrections and additions, right to the last stage. It was called a ‘continuous manuscript’ which, of course, was a construct based on the copious, though not comprehensive, material dispersed in libraries. Joyce’s hand had to be deciphered first and double-checked in a tedious procedure before the computer took over. And then, naturally, documents were missing and guesses had to be made. This brought Hugh Kenner into the fold; he had been an electronic wizard and pioneer from the start. Avidly awaiting a Ulysses free from its notorious contaminations, we had full trust in the team of Munich experts, which comprised Wolfhard Steppe, Claus Melchior, Harald Beck, Walter Hettche, John O’Hanlon and Danis Rose, who all became our friends in the end. They came to the Zurich symposium of 1979 where a sample of the text (‘Lestrygonians’) was presented to us. The episode was distributed in a separate booklet for our inspection and opinions. I think Hans was disappointed that hardly any valuable suggestions were forthcoming in the session that was devoted to the project, but we simply were not qualified to give expert advice at very short notice, and the new and original procedures, in particular the apparatus, needed getting used to. It was there that I learned that Joyce had not written ‘Mighty cheese’ when Bloom is choosing his lunch in Davy Byrne’s, but ‘Mity cheese’. Some officious person in the printing works of Dijon was probably ignorant of the cheese mite (odd in a country that produces Roquefort) and had dutifully replaced an unfamiliar word by a correct one. At any rate, we all had the impression that the edition in progress would weed out both the intrinsic errors and the well-meant interferences that texts are heir to. The three substantial volumes of the Critical and Synoptic Edition made their public appearance on Bloomsday 1984, the climax of the Frankfurt symposium in the presence of the grandson, Stephen James Joyce, to whom they were formally handed. Ellmann spoke, as did Stephen Joyce, who reiterated his grudge against invasions of privacy, as in the Selected Letters. Richard Ellmann came in for both praise and public censure. I was gratified to get a set of the edition (priced about $200) as I had been asked to write a few lines for the Garland prospectus. My wording there was guarded, as naturally I had not yet seen the edition. Like most of us I was excited in advance: what a great feeling to have, at long last, a replacement of all the Ulysses texts that we knew were demonstrably faulty and unreliable. We now finally held in our hands something much closer to what Joyce had in mind during the tortuous process of writing, editing, revising, expanding and proofreading. I zealously scoured the new, pristine Ulysses, with its numerous and mity improvements. I am convinced that Gabler gave us the most reliable edition that we have. But, human nature being what it is, we accept all the improvements with a friendly wave and start to quibble right away. No edition could satisfy all of us in every respect, and we had grown used to

some readings we did not want to give up. What disheartened me was that I came to grief over the apparatus and the array of diacritical markings, especially their explanations, if they were explanations. The three-volume edition was not user-friendly, and the elaborate, meticulous afterword not a model of lucidity (I know, I have always been lamenting terminological obstacles). Few of us are in the enviable position of having the Rosenbach facsimiles and the Garland volumes at our elbow so that we can look up what remains murky on the synoptic, left-hand page, which condenses stages in complex stratification. I did a small-scale survey and asked every Joycean within reach if they understood the method and were able to translate the left-hand page into textual development. Few academics are eager to confess what they do not understand, so most answers were evasive; they had not yet had time to look at the text. I found only three persons (outside the editorial team itself) who claimed to be able to decipher the apparatus; but at least one of them failed to elucidate the cruxes that I pointed out. Our failure to handle the apparatus needed to use the painstaking edition profitably had negative consequences once the edition came under attack, as it slowly did. I think if basic principles had been clearly stated, much otiose criticism could have been forestalled. From what I understand, any ‘transmissional departure’ from Joyce’s own writing (what copyists, typists or typesetters had changed) was considered a mistake unless there was compelling evidence to retain it. Joyce himself could err in his role as a ‘scribe’, when he merely copied his own words. A much discussed instance is to be found right at the beginning. Buck Mulligan is looking down the dark winding stairs and ‘calls up coarsely’; Joyce had written ‘called out’ and the ‘up’ that emerged at the next stage cannot be traced to the author. So the edition considers ‘up’ an erroneous anticipation of a subsequent ‘Come up’, a so-called ‘eyeskip’, and therefore reinstalls ‘out’. Since I had used ‘called up’ with far-fetched ingenuity in an earlier over-reading of the passage, I regretted to have an expedient preposition replaced by a blunt one. I used this example at the time to show how our own emotional prejudices affect our views, as happens in many critical responses. An editor has to make choices according to principles and the evidence at hand, and whether Fritz prefers ‘up’ or ‘out’ is supremely irrelevant. Individual preferences are easily elevated to textual dogma. In this case, Joyce plainly wrote ‘out’, and there is no trace of his ever changing it to ‘up’, and no one knows what happened, and so we can only speculate. But speculate we did, and even if, at worst, the edition had done nothing more than stimulated new interest, it would be a great achievement. But it did much more than that. There is no doubt that the edition carried lots of improvements, and we have every reason to be grateful. Gabler’s Ulysses has practically become the accepted standard. I also applaud the new referential usage, so that we can quote by chapter and line number. There was some objection to this, since lined numbers suggest work, study and scholarship and not so much pleasure. But there is a plain reading edition as well as the one with line numbers. The latter is a great help and in accordance with biblical or classical texts with a standard numeration that is independent of any particular edition. I am convinced that the Munich team worked conscientiously according to their principles, even if those are not always clear, and they supplied all the material, even if it is not easy to find. Inevitably there were a few oversights and errors. Most reviews were enthusiastic and reached a wider public. For once a scholarly edition hit the front page of newspapers, something rarely accorded to our work. But, inevitably, reservations (like mine above) were also voiced; in many cases an older reading was preferred over an emendation, often a matter of subjective priorities and, as often as not, of the mere inertia of habit. Of course, there were many more fundamental, theoretical issues, and the patron saints of textual criticism were freely cited. From what I heard, textual scholars through the ages have been characterized by personal acrimony. And one can always argue about the size of the final dot in ‘Ithaca’, the size of the headlines in ‘Aeolus’, or the indentation of dialogue. I am glad that I do not have to decide which of the commas in ‘Eumaeus’, most of them put in by a typist, should be retained, as Joyce himself appeared very inconsistent when he dealt with the messed-up punctuation. It is so much more convenient to heckle and register disapproval. What got most attention was the restoration of ‘Love, yes. Word known to all men’, together with a Latin sentence, in the Library chapter (U 9.429). This was the prodigal son returned and so became the most significant part of Ulysses. To some it seemed to prove that ‘Love’ is the ‘word known to all men’, a tenet still adhered to, and possibly with justification. For me the whole issue remains a muddle. The question is whether Joyce took out the sentences, or whether they got lost by inadvertence. My own take is practical and, again, textually immaterial. If the passage that matches ‘Love’ with ‘the word known to all men’, is indeed essential, it is odd that the author never noticed its accidental disappearance. Moreover, before the restoration, no commentator ever pointed out a textual flaw or omission. My experience is to double-check foreign elements, where mistakes are more likely to occur. The Latin passage is something that might be earmarked for special attention in proofreading, and so I assume, without much reason, that Joyce might have done the same. But textual scholarship has other, more stringent criteria, and a choice has to be made. A choice, I am relieved to say, that is not my responsibility. And just for the record, I never understood Stephen’s question in the first place, what is the word known to all men? Is it men or human beings? Is it one particular word, either of deep mystical impact, or an emotionally charged one? Someone still has to enlighten me, as I would claim innocently that every word in this present sentence is known to all men, and women, who know English. It must be emphasized that the Critical and Synoptic Edition of Ulysses is by no means Hans Walter Gabler’s only achievement. He also edited Dubliners and A Portrait and wrote extensively, and not exclusively, on Joyce; among other areas, he is an expert on Shakespeare.

Enter John Kidd, who, of course, must claim some space. At some stage, towards the end of 1984, John Kidd zeroed in on the Gabler edition, rose to prominence and made a career out of it. Kidd is the sort of person around whom stories are generated. A few are offered here, and generally, I have muted them. It all began in 1980 when I was doing one of those introductory courses on Ulysses at our Volkshochschule and received a phone call from an American at the Jung Institute who wanted to join the class. John Kidd did join the course (we were doing the chapters in weekly instalments), and as he had already studied Joyce at Santa Cruz, he was obviously ahead of the others. When he visited me in my place, he surprised me by saying that I reminded him of Californians (who, I assume, are a mixed lot) and proposed to open any academic doors for me in whichever Californian university I preferred. Apparently I reminded him of one of his professors, a former monk, who – and here I had some difficulty following – always got twice the normal salary when John Kidd was present. I did not enquire into this; such manifest signs of importance or, at least, exaggerations, made me a trifle uneasy. I mentioned a Jungian scholar who had once taken part in a symposium by the name of Hillman, and Kidd immediately responded that Hillman, no longer at the Institute, was considered to be to Jung what Jung had been to Freud – ‘and, by the way, they consider me the new Hillman’. The proportion (Jung squared divided by Freud equals John Kidd, if my mathematics are correct) bemused me and set me on edge. Setting people on edge was to become Kidd’s dominant skill. Soon I was being promoted to someone of distinction simply because I was becoming enmeshed in John Kidd’s biography, and therefore had to be important, but it was less flattering than awkward. A few weeks later Kidd lost his apartment and invited himself to stay with me for a while. In effect it turned into three weeks, not the shortest ones in my life. On the positive side, we did have some highly stimulating conversations, mainly about his numerological postulations. Certain key words in Ulysses occurred, significantly, thirteen or twenty-two times, crucial numbers for him as the first sentence contains twentytwo words (Hugh Kenner had remarked on this as well). The count, by the way, depended on Hanley’s Word Index to the old Random House Ulysses, which was not, as we always knew, a reliable reference work. By the laws of probability some words have to occur a certain low number of times, but one cannot put it past Joyce to have embedded numerological relations in his intricate structures. I insisted that it is hard to imagine how Joyce, in the hectic months of composition, revision and proofreading – and without even the facilities to copy a document! – could keep track of the frequency of certain words. I presented the facsimiles with Joyce’s ample additions, but Kidd countered that Joyce might well have added a few lines in order to get one particular word in one more time, for a numerological effect. At some stage, even externals like the pagination of the 1922 Ulysses fitted into the pattern, and it was of no avail for me to point out that subsequent printings of the Shakespeare & Co. edition would have thrown the elaborate system out of gear. I distinctly recall that I put myself on a very high horse when Kidd argued that the last page of the 1922 edition significantly contained twenty-two lines (though by 1924 already there were 735 pages and twenty-five terminal lines). I referred to my experience both as a proofreader and an old-time editor when the addition of just one word could upset a whole paragraph and even whole pages. Seeing the massive additions in the page proofs of ‘Penelope’ (there were only 723 pages at the penultimate stage), I maintained there would be no way to calculate accurately pages or even lines. I suggested that Kidd should take advice from the editorial team in Munich who would best know all the changes involved. Kidd was genuinely committed, and I enjoyed the animated exchanges we had late into the night, both about matters of detail and principles. The reverse side was that, at the time, I was going through one of my depressions for entirely different reasons, independent of Kidd and definitely not caused by him. But when he wanted to set himself up as my psychoanalyst (as well as manager of my affairs) and have me report my dreams (I generally don’t tell them to anyone), conditions did not improve. He told others, and he managed to meet a great number of people, even at my work place, that he would make me take up driving: it was, no doubt, a kind intention that might have yielded results (I still don’t drive). Entirely unprompted, he told me one of his dreams – he had been Muhammed Ali. All in all, my guest was a bit overpowering in his self-confidence, a selfconfidence I could only envy. Somehow he was the best Jungian analyst on the horizon and, from what I could gather at that stage, not yet the best Joycean, but certainly a great lover into the bargain. I asked him about sports. Yes, he had taken up track-running one time, and the following year they wanted to select him for the Olympic team. I really don’t want to go into further details of an eventful period (or rather, I would like to, but won’t). At one critical point I did lose my composure, and the visit came to an abrupt end. Within a few weeks I had the impression that I knew John Kidd, and I was hardly surprised by future displays of grandiloquence. We had already arranged for him to participate in the current Colloque Joyce in Paris (1981). We had been arguing whether, as he claimed, Joyce had known and used Rabelais for Ulysses (Joyce denied it), and so Rabelais was a suitable topic and later became Kidd’s dissertation. His maiden performance at the Sorbonne was accomplished and well-poised, but it lacked substance, and the audience applauded politely. Kidd had been put on the map, and at subsequent conferences (particularly the 1982 symposium in Dublin) he quickly brought himself to notice. I believe it was his concern for the assumed numerology in Ulysses that made him inspect Gabler’s changes in the 1984 Critical and Synoptic Edition where, naturally, pagination, or the frequency of words, were no longer toeing his speculative line. From then on, by strenuous efforts on his part, he became entangled with the Gabler edition. His concerted attack became Kidd’s object and, before long, his career. The controversy dominated public attention for a few

years. Ironically, it was Hans Gabler who had been most sympathetic to the numerological speculations. Hans Walter Gabler and his edition became Kidd’s target, possibly also because it was conspicuous and worthy of being taken on. I had heard rumbles of his campaigning when in the winter of 1984–5 he went around Europe to interview textual experts and persuade them of the inadequacies he had found. I heard he even visited his opponent’s headquarters in Munich and talked to Gabler, Wolfhard Steppe, Claus Melchior and Harald Beck. When he stopped by in Zurich, he also told me he had looked up Hans Zeller, a textual scholar of reputation whom I had once witnessed debating editorial issues with Hans Gabler, and they appeared to be in basic agreement. Kidd, as I remember, had to wade through deep snow to find Zeller in a remote alpine spot, and I think their common language was halting French. There was no doubt that Kidd was vigorously determined, and he believed in his new mission. A first volley in print was launched in an issue of the Irish Literary Supplement which focused on names and the spelling of Gaelic words. Kidd was unremitting in his efforts, and he made Georges Sandulescu, director of the Princess Grace Library in Monaco, redirect a spring conference in 1985 towards the new challenges. It was a small, intimate, superbly organized gathering. The main protagonists, Gabler and Kidd, were not present, which was just as well, as tempers might have gotten out of hand. An international group of experienced Joyceans with an interest in textual matters, but not specialists, assembled for a few intense days. Clive Hart and Richard Ellmann had been a part of the Critical and Synoptic Edition, but did not always remain in agreement with it. On the whole, most of the participants were appreciative but also critical. Most of us raised a few objections, or at least questions, in suitable non-polemical terms. Charles Peake went into most detail and was mostly positive; he emphasized that, where he disagreed, Gabler had provided all the information for the disagreement. As it happened, the meeting was the last one that Richard Ellmann attended. In his contribution he still maintained that the lost passage proved him right, that ‘Love’ was the word known to all men, but that he would have preferred the text without the disputed passage. George Sandulescu and Clive Hart edited our contributions for Assessing the 1984 Ulysses in the Princess Grace Irish Library Series (1986). The essays vary greatly in scope and attitude, but, at least, they show that textual controversies can be conducted with fairness and respect, something that was lost sight of soon after. Gabler’s procedures were praised, evaluated and criticized. But John Kidd attacked in a direct personal way, more and more ad hominem. In my amateur psychologizing I also felt that with the emergence of the Critical Ulysses Gabler had become Joycean of 1984 and hence a handy, Oedipal target. Kidd found slips and mistakes, errors and inconsistencies, and tabulated them with great energy and stunning propagandist skill. Yet editorial errors or oversights, even if all were attested beyond doubt, are not crimes, and disagreement is in the nature of the subject. In the spring of 1985 – it was just before our Zurich James Joyce Foundation opened – I was in the States, touring a few universities thanks to the efforts of James Maddox in Washington who had arranged and masterminded a long series of lectures. Somewhere en route I had a phone call from Walt Litz that the Washington Post would carry an assault by John Kidd and that the journalist had tried to phone everyone whose opinion might count. The article was on the front page of one of the newspaper’s sections, with pictures of Joyce, John Kidd and (it so happened) the Pope. Its caption ran something like, ‘What I am going to say is going to blow the Joyce establishment wide open.’ The metaphor was out of place for scholarly debate and possibly set the pugnacious tone for many altercations to follow. The attack was well-placed, efficient, vigorous, hyperbolic with bold claims – the first major volley. Here was a young freedom rider who took on the whole establishment. Someone knowing nothing about the edition or, for that matter, the establishment, could be impressed, and Kidd has always excelled at impressing outsiders, as well as a few Joyceans. What I remember best offhand is his public question about a gathering of top textual experts to celebrate Fredson Bowers’ eightieth birthday: ‘How could they not invite me?’ As it happened, Hans Gabler and I were both scheduled to discuss the edition at Columbia. I have almost completely forgotten what we said there, apart from my presenting a few doubtful cases and my boast that I, with years of proofreading experience, had better inside knowledge of what can happen to a text in the process of typesetting and printing than perhaps anyone present. Our dialogue there was totally eclipsed by the disputes that soon broke loose. I went home, and Gabler was on the way to a conference of bibliographers in Virginia in honour of Fredson Bowers. Before that, however, Gabler participated in a conference in New York where Kidd, out of the blue, unveiled the ‘Errors of Execution’ in the edition. Gabler replied in somewhat haughty terms and dismissed the strictures outright as beneath his scholarly notice. It is my firm belief that Gabler’s continuous reaction to Kidd’s onslaught, as it followed, was strategically unwise and, in fact, disastrous. I do not mean to arbitrate on the controversial issues themselves such as editorial principles and premises; lots of authorities were quoted and, to judge from the contestants, generally misunderstood by the other side. Hans Gabler’s mistake was a blanket rejection of his opponent’s views; an opponent who had indeed been blunt, obstreperous and hitting below the belt all along. Since Gabler did not stoop to take up concrete issues or even textual samples, but brushed aside any criticism as conceptually naive, his attitude appeared high-handed and Olympian and may have turned off bystanders. Kidd, wrongly, was not considered worthy of serious attention. Stonewalling on a high level unquestionably stepped up Kidd’s pressure: he felt he could get no hearing and suspected a conspiracy against him by what he considered a Joyce establishment, which included Gabler, Ellmann, Hugh Kenner, Clive Hart, Peter de Sautoy, Michael Groden and the Joyce Quarterly. More and more nasty, gratuitous notes crept in. One evening, as we were getting ready for the 1988 Venice symposium, Kidd complained on the phone

that he was practically ostracized by a powerful mafia. So I proposed an open debate between him and Gabler to have it out. I seriously thought cards should be put on the table in public so that we could determine what the concrete issues were. Invitations were sent out to the protagonists. But when he heard of the plan, Hans was genuinely shocked at the very idea of such an unequal combat, again given Kidd’s supposed lack of credentials. I must confess that in my cowardice I didn’t have the heart to tell Hans that I had initiated the panel, which then, of course, did not come off. What I had in mind was strict moderation (the right word for the occasion, given the temperaments involved), short time spans for discussion, all issues pre-announced, and all the evidence clearly presented to the audience. I still wish it had come off, as events might have taken a different turn. The panel eventually featured Hans Gabler, Paola Pugliatti and Christine Froula (she had written a favorable review of Gabler but then accepted Kidd’s censures), but not Kidd, who, of course, could have come to Venice and presented his views like everybody else. I was frustrated in that session because all three speakers took too much time for general principles of editing and left no room for questions and concrete examples. As it happened, the panel was also back to back with that famous biographical one where Carol Shloss brought together Michael Yeats, the poet’s son; Mary de Rachewiltz, Pound’s daughter; and Stephen James Joyce, the grandson. In a memorable discussion that I only heard about, Yeats’ and Pound’s descendants took quite a different view from Joyce’s about documents left behind. They held that the more the world knows about those authors the better. That Michael Yeats remarked afterwards, ‘Oh, he’s only a grandson’, I only heard from an ear-witness. Kidd must have felt slighted and excluded, and he was provoked to his masterpiece of tactical warfare. He wrote a belligerent piece on ‘The Scandal of Ulysses’ and contrived, through Heaven knows what channels or machination, to have the New York Review of Books get it ready in time to be delivered in Venice just before Bloomsday. A stupendous coup of publicity, one of Kidd’s supreme gifts. Ruefully, I still think that if Gabler had accepted the invitation to cross swords fairly, such an ambush would not have been conceivable. The article was cleverly done in the view of the outside world and in the best tradition of florid invective. Kidd had a field day with one inadvertent change from Harry Thrift (a real Dubliner in Joyce’s time) to ‘Shrift’; it was a mere misreading and oversight and textually irrelevant, but it was insidiously drawn out. Some points raised were pertinent, others were not. Often the issues of debate were merely on different methodical procedures. But how could the general public, to whom the ‘Scandal’ was promulgated in newspapers, tell? The gauntlet was down. The edition was branded. The ‘Scandal’ had its effect, newspapers took up the issues, Gabler’s edition (true, for a certain time it had been the only one available) was withdrawn and the old (faulty) Random House Ulysses went back into circulation. The following months brought attacks and counter-attacks. It naturally hurt Gabler far beyond whatever might be criticized in civil scholarly debate. The ‘Joyce wars’ (I believe they were both Kidd’s instigation and his own term) were unleashed. Bitter recriminations followed, even nationalist slurs crept in occasionally. Bruce Arnold has covered the controversies adequately in his Scandal of Ulysses (1991, revised 2004), from the point of view of a perspicacious spectator who, at least in his earlier account, tended to side with Kidd, who could sound extremely persuasive. As I knew both contestants from the beginning, there is inevitably a subjective edge to my views and memories, and Arnold’s presentation should be taken as a not quite neutral corrective. In my shorthand I always said that Kidd had only one enemy, Kidd, and only one supporter, Hans Gabler. The Miami J’yce conference in 1989 finally brought the protagonists together in several, partly heated sessions. Our memories of the debates vary considerably, everyone judged them differently. In my recollection, Kidd came across as very aggressive, Gabler as still evasive, not I think by strategic design, but because of his orientation towards underlying principles, which generally have an air of being abstract. One additional angle had been brought into play: that the Joyce Estate’s chief aim had been an extension of copyright rather than textual integrity. I am convinced that this certainly was never Hans Gabler’s objective. Incidentally, ‘Joyce Estate’ at that time did not have the associations it has nowadays; its representative was Peter de Sautoy, who dealt with the complexities of the issues as best he could. No settlement was reached at the conference, nor had it been expected. There were controversies, tensions, a final handshake – but positions did not change and were not really clarified. As a consequence of the 1988 bombshell, the ‘Scandal’, a James Joyce Research Institute was set up for Kidd at the University of Boston. Kidd, with the help of a team of young scholars, could now engage fulltime in bibliographical studies and prepare his own edition. Later on, an annotated electronic version was also in the works. John Kidd’s Ulysses was to be launched on Bloomsday during the 1992 symposium in Dublin, with The Lilliput Press issuing The Dublin Edition. Antony Farrell had approached me years earlier to enquire about Kidd’s credentials. I forget what cautious advice I gave at the time; in any case, The Lilliput Press went ahead, and by June 1992 a text did exist. I saw it, and since Antony Farrell let me stay in his house, I slept near a pile of typescripts and furtively peeped at them. But it was not yet ready to be released, awaiting further refinements. That was in 1992; as it happens, we are still waiting for it. Nevertheless, Kidd was made the star of the 1992 symposium. On Bloomsday, apart from street games and ambulant recitations, Kidd’s memorable extended keynote speech was the only item on the academic programme. It was a collage made up of quotations from Joyce and from critics and paid no respect to an unwritten law that a lecture should contain at least one original, or at least novel, idea. It did not capture all of the audience for all of the time. At a dinner the night before this speech, I had an opportunity to talk to John Kidd, if talk is the right word. I did not, and never did, believe in the image he projected of himself as sacrificing everything for the sake

of Ulysses, though I know that he had collected, at his own cost, as many editions and printings as he could lay his hands on. According to his own words in a phone call years earlier, he had got an advance of $300,000 for the edition. I reminded him of when he had told me in autumn 1988 of his new James Joyce Research Institute at Boston University, and I quoted what I had not forgotten in four years: ‘Fritz, we have that institute now and my salary is higher than the budget of your Zurich Joyce Foundation.’ No, that could not be, he said, for he did not even know what our budget was. And that was precisely why I had remembered his words almost verbatim. But, ‘You must have imagined this, I never said it!’ is where we left it, and, indeed, it is possible that I did imagine it all, though it is not the sort of thing I could make up. Kidd never did himself a service by making boastful claims of this sort. In 1992, Kidd’s Ulysses, published by Norton, did not look far away. But there were delays, partly to do with funding, partly copyright problems. It is unlikely that we will ever see it. Even when it was in the offing I always guessed that Kidd would hesitate, perhaps because of a vague sense that, when you have built a whole career out of throwing stones, you may have second thoughts about erecting your own conspicuous glasshouse. A sporting instinct alone would have tempted many of us to do to Kidd as he had done to Gabler, though, possibly, with a bit more tact. In the heyday of the Joyce wars, the challenger’s harsh, malicious, personally polemical tone poisoned the atmosphere. One effect of the onslaught was that some of us kept back our own criticism of Gabler’s editorial procedures, generally minor issues, so as not to be drawn into one of the rival camps. On the whole, the Joycean community is almost too friendly and lenient. For once the pendulum swung the other way. Gabler’s edition, however, has prevailed. Before Gabler there was great paginal confusion between the 1922 edition and its reprints, the two Random House ones (with differing pagination), the old and the new Bodley Head, and the cheap Penguin ones. The Quarterly, for one, took over Gabler’s system and raised it to a standard. A Handlist to James Joyce’s Ulysses allowed us to find every word before computer searches made it redundant. If only the three volume edition had been more amenable it could have been used to trace how the text grew. Maybe two-dimensional book pages are not suitable to present multilayered genetics, and electronic media will take care of this with so much more ease. Electronic editions of Ulysses, with notes, illustrations, sound and all the rest, are still, however, in the stranglehold of extended copyright. I emphasize that Kidd, given all his flair for self-promotion and publicity, did learn the trade of textual research and went into its minutiae with great concentration. He acquired remarkable expertise. He is able to call up variants in dozens of different printings. I know that he would have made personal names conform to the outside world, a practice that later on was followed by Danis Rose. Somewhere among my papers there must be Kidd’s introduction that he sent me and where he detailed his principles. I promised not to divulge anything, and I never did, but I also forgot most of what he wrote, except that he wanted to spell Martin Harvey correctly hyphenated, ‘Martin-Harvey’, but I had seen the poster of the actor in the office of the Quarterly in Tulsa and knew that for the stage ‘Martin’ had become a first name. He later faulted Rose for reinstalling the hyphen. John Kidd became a victim of his own overestimation. He might have fared better if he had allowed us to form a high opinion of him, rather than taking on the job himself. It is deplorable that nowadays younger Joyce scholars do not know his name and that he has faded into oblivion. Then again, there are still staunch followers who believe in his second coming with the Ulysses that has cast nothing but its shadow before. The latest reports on John Kidd were sad. The Boston James Joyce Research Center seems to have ceased to exist, with its large collection tucked away somewhere. The last phone call I had (they were always extended) was confused, many old grudges were still rife, and I got no clear indication of what he was doing or what his plans were. No one seems to know his whereabouts, there are rumours that he is somewhere in Asia. John Kidd could have contributed something for us all. The edition he and his staff have been preparing might be worth having. Given one of Kidd’s premises, that numerological concerns co-determine pages or layout, his edition could not have differed substantially from the 1922 Paris first edition. If the 732 pages and twenty-two last lines are still to be counted essential, there is hardly scope for major additions that would alter the text’s length. The Joyce wars might have ended with a return to a slightly changed version of 1922. Yet it was precisely the notorious flaws of the first Ulysses that set off Hans Walter Gabler’s efforts in the first place and led to all the ensuing scrimmages. ‘Habent’, indeed, as Joyce famously quoted Terentianus Maurus in his letter to Bennett A. Cerf on 2 April 1932, a letter appended to all Random House editions of Ulysses, ‘sua fata libelli’. Books, too, have a fate of their own. Including nonexistent ones. And their editors.

Then there was Danis Rose and his Reader’s Edition of Ulysses? The repercussions of Danis Rose’s Reader’s Edition of Ulysses in 1997 never reached the acerbity of the preceding Joyce wars, partly because the edition never became available in the States and partly because there never arose a Kidd to spearhead the opposition, though Kidd predictably raised his voice in print about a rival attempt. But Danis Rose did cause a few tremors in the Joyce world. He lives in Chapelizod and, to me, was always a recluse who seldom ventured forth and only sporadically looked into the many Dublin symposia practically on his doorstep. He works in isolation, with his brother John O’Hanlon, both early adepts at using computers. A certain intransigence was noticeable from the start. When his first note appeared in the Newslitter I thought for a moment it was Jack Dalton under a pseudonym, and I mean the Dalton of rigid standards and pedantic commitment, not the abrasive one.

Rose is extremely committed and, in his line, a conscientious, almost self-sacrificing scholar with meticulous attention to archival facts and details. He has worked in silence for many years. As a textual expert he was on the Munich team that prepared Gabler’s Ulysses. One of his main concerns has been an improved version of Finnegans Wake, which, he contends, has been seriously corrupted in its protracted hazardous genesis under adverse circumstances. Above all, he places momentous significance on Joyce’s notes. I had the impression that notes might almost be more important to him than the finished product. His story of how Finnegans Wake arose from notebook entries, The Textual Diaries of James Joyce (1995), is considered idiosyncratic and highly controversial, but I find it, argumentation apart, eminently readable, which is more than can be said of many similar studies. In his discoveries, Danis Rose has a way of challenging entrenched views and has at times jerked me out of my complacency. I once had to characterize him for The Lilliput Press and thought that ‘autonomous’ would be apt: he is his own lawgiver and remains blissfully aloof of the strictures he incites; ‘autonomous’ might translate into stubborn or opinionated, with a touch of self-righteousness. He certainly holds strong opinions and is not easily dissuaded from them. For some of his projects, it does take such a quality. It can become an obstacle, too. What probably got Rose off on the wrong track (by ‘wrong’ I mean what did lasting damage to his career and even livelihood) was Finn’s Hotel, not the place where Nora Barnacle worked when she met Jim, but a projected publication. At the time of a Frankfurt Book Fair, rumours of a new book by Joyce made the rounds. On closer view it boiled down to Danis Rose editing a collection of drafts, composed soon after Ulysses, that eventually found their way into Finnegans Wake and had always been known, but his claim was that Joyce had wanted to publish the seven fragments separately, with the title Finn’s Hotel. The strategic mistake was to announce – with fanfare – ‘a new work by James Joyce’. The Joyce Estate immediately vetoed the enterprise and was indeed justified in doing so, as there is no such ‘book’ and little evidence for it. If these early fragments had been collected with an introductory conjecture that Joyce, at some stage, may have toyed with the idea of a separate publication, but then abandoned it, the Estate’s tenacious animosity might not have been roused, and Danis Rose might not have made it to the top of a long list of misdemeanants. He became the Estate’s arch enemy. He was not allowed to pursue his research on Finnegans Wake and had to deal with all kinds of threats. I was vaguely aware of lawsuits looming on the horizon. All of that was reinforced by the Reader’s Edition, which came out in the spring of 1997. Rose wanted to give us a better, more accessible version of Ulysses, and with the expiration of copyright in 1992 this seemed feasible. A lot of poor editions, simple reprints, also hit the market in the early nineties. Macmillan undertook the project, together with The Lilliput Press in Dublin, and they solicited views from some of us. I only heard of it when I agreed to look at the preface; I was sent a version of it, but not the text itself. As far as I remember, the introduction as it then was did not indicate the radical changes envisaged. I delayed my response until the publisher needed a statement almost immediately and so, in a short letter, I emphasized, truthfully, my trust in Rose’s meticulous procedure and his scholarly integrity. But careful always, from bitter experience, I limited myself to a rather non-committal statement: that the edition (which I had not seen) ‘may give us the handy usable Ulysses we have been looking for’ (10 May 1996). I also wrote that the edition, like any other, would be ‘controversial’. Much to my surprise a slightly altered sentence (‘This may be …’) was put on the back of the dust jacket. No sooner had I received my one and only copy (and fortunately never a fee) than I had two phone calls in rapid succession. The first was from John Kidd (how on earth he knew I had just received my copy I have never found out) who obviously was up in arms about it. The second was from Stephen James Joyce and will be dealt with in due course. A few glances only convinced me that the editorial policy was entirely out of tune with my own feel for Ulysses. Maybe that had been foreshadowed in the introduction that I had read not too attentively, but I am sure it did not give an idea of the extent of Rose’s interferences: they go against my grain and notion of what Ulysses is. My subjective response is not at all original; in fact, I uneasily string along with the majority view. For what it is worth, I cannot see the point of hyphenating typically Joycean compounds (the untightening of ‘scrotum-tightening’ is a glaring specimen), or the capitalization of names, or the meddling with punctuation. Danis Rose opted for clarification where he thought Joyce had failed to provide it. External reality thus becomes decisive in Joyce’s work of fiction. Where Joyce had put in a shop, Henry Price, with the attributes, probably wrong, ‘basket and fancy goods, chinaware and ironmongery, manufacturer, 21, 22, 23 Moore street’, the Reader’s Edition substitutes: ‘china merchant, 16A South City Market’. One implication is that Joyce’s ‘fancy goods’, for example, are textually irrelevant. Maybe they are and maybe they are not, but this is a book where most minutiae are potentially meaningful, and if they are not it would not be worth labouring over a new edition. Pre-existing names were rectified: Joyce had consistently written ‘Agendath Netaim’, and it had long been established that the correct Hebrew for ‘planters’ company’ is ‘Agudath Netaim’. True to principle, in more than a dozen places the literal Hebrew transcription came to override Joyce’s usage. But if this is Bloom’s misreading there is no need to step in; if it is Joyce’s own negligence (and who is to tell?) do we have to turn the author into someone ideally careful? Above all, Danis Rose stepped in where Joyce had been guilty of ‘textual faults’. Where a sentence did not say what it was supposed to say, the editor straightened it out. Such usage stridently deviates from editorial practice and against our, certainly my, sense of what Ulysses is. Or, to put it differently, even where the author may be wrong, according to whatever criteria, I prefer his errors to anyone else’s corrections; not because the text is sacred but because I am reading Joyce.

I never understood why Danis Rose, in his scrupulousness, would replace a word towards the end of ‘Scylla and Charybdis’. A well-poised cadence describes two ascending plumes of smoke, which ‘… in a flaw of softness softly were blown’. His text substitutes a ‘flow’ of softness for no apparent textual reason; there is no trace in either a note or a draft. Not only is ‘flaw’ a perfectly respectable word for a blast of wind, it even occurs in Shakespeare (‘expel the winter’s flaw’; ‘gusts and foul flaws’). It is questionable to remove flaws in Joyce’s own wording, but to remove the word ‘flaw’ is downright ironic. The edition came in for a lot of adverse criticism, to which I contributed my mainstream share, a conservative position. Macmillan soon made a handsome offer to me to write a preface for a paperback edition, which, of course, I had to turn down, not only because I could not possibly back so many of the decisions (this was simply not ‘my’ notion of the book), but also because I think that Ulysses should not be prefaced by anyone’s subjective biases. Who should tell readers what to expect? Controversy soon set in, and though it was milder than in the Gabler-Kidd days, there was a considerable rumpus and angry letters. Most reviews were negative: somehow we don’t want our Ulysses doctored. At the same time I know that Danis Rose did his best, according to his lights. He genuinely thinks he has given us a better, more readable novel, free of gratuitous obstacles. I think the choices are wrong-headed, but they are not criminal offences. If we did not have such crippling copyright restrictions, one odd variety of Ulysses on the shelves would not cause great damage (we have them with many writers anyway), but with so few alternatives any idiosyncratic edition carries much more weight. Some attacks also exaggerated. The most inane one was that Ulysses ‘had been raped’, an insult to any woman who has ever had to undergo that ordeal. Even if one particular edition of Ulysses had damaged its text, there are still all the others, untampered ones, as alternatives. It was also circulated that Rose’s meddling was the equivalent of someone painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa. If anyone did that you would spot it right away, before you’d even notice anything else. But for the uninitiated it would be hard to find out where Rose seriously disfigures Joyce’s wording. ‘Agudath’ does not stare you in the face. Once more, the Estate went to court in an expensive lawsuit that dragged on. I nearly became part of it when the Estate’s lawyers wanted written statements from me and faxed about sixteen pages of documents to sign and complete. They did not accord with what I was a witness of, so I spent the better part of a day putting down in my own words what I knew; I also added a few comments. However, my detailed testimony was not used as I had given ‘opinions’, not just facts, and they did not need any more opinions. Of course, I can be as opinionated as the next fellow, but I felt relieved not to be enlisted in litigation, and this on the wrong side. In the end the Reader’s Edition had to be withdrawn and each party had to defray its own heavy costs. One result of the partly self-induced problems is that Danis Rose is deprived of the returns of his diligent, meticulous work and devotion. Danis Rose has always been concerned about the poor textual state of Finnegans Wake and the attendant capricious, unbridled interpretations we base on an adulterated text. For years he, with the help of John O’Hanlon, has devoted himself to its laborious evolution from notes to drafts, fair copies and typescripts and through galleys. He has become one of the foremost textual authorities. Not surprisingly, given the chaotic conditions under which Joyce laboured, many passages have gone wrong, that is to say, they deviate from whatever the author’s intentions were at a given stage, in hundreds of instances. So Rose’s project was to put matters right in an electronic presentation. It had the backing and funding of the Irish government, and I attended two advisory meetings. In the electronic version, each layer of the Wake could be inspected separately, the development of the text could be traced, even down to single words. The result also would not be one particular authorized version (which got Rose’s Ulysses under fire) but a choice of alternatives. There would be an ‘editorially preferred version’, but readers could also opt for the 1939 text, or make up their own minds about particular passages. It sounded like an ideal tool. But, once again, the Estate in its all-embracing charity put down its ponderous foot and the project was stopped or, at least, seriously postponed. If anyone has reason to feel ostracized, it is Danis Rose. Only a small part of his immense devotion, commitment and expertise has come to fruition for our collective benefit. He has no doubt been thwarted in part by his own at times messianic attitudes and a noticeable intransigence. That made it easier for the Joyce Estate, which at one stage even appeared determined to crush him with an injunction to hand over all documents and his complete research work. Most of us will never understand the niceties of autocratic copyright. In its confused state it is ideal for lawyers and despots, but stifling for scholars. Unfortunately, the courts tend to treat what we might call artistic values exactly like material ones. There is no intrinsic obligation to share inherited material property with anyone. By contrast books or sonatas or pictures by their nature want to come out into the open. We remember to what lengths Joyce went, against heavy odds, to see his works in print to make them accessible. Adequate remuneration, naturally, has to be made, at least for a reasonable period. However, impediment, most of us would think naively, should not become an aim in itself. As far as I can follow, the Reader’s Edition lost its case and its right to exist because Rose had retrieved some few words and phrases from the early drafts, and those are still private property. Rose seems to have taken up this particular game since, and amidst the Bloomsday celebrations of 2004, a second, revised Reader’s Edition appeared on the scene. In this version the offending passages have been removed and the standard words and phrases (inferior, in Rose’s views) reinstalled. In English, ‘Revised’ Copyright (affecting those authors who, like Joyce, were once out of, but have by retroactive jurisdiction been brought back into, private property) cannot be withheld when an adequate fee is paid, and the courts can prevent exorbitant charges, such as characterized the jubilee year. So a Reader’s Edition is in circulation again, pending, as far as one can guess, a new move by the ever litigious Estate. This forces some of us into a Voltairean position. I may not go along with the majority of changes that the

edition introduces, and in particular I do not believe that Joyce’s overall aim was to smooth the path for his readers. A well-meant project seems to have gone seriously astray. Yet, although I disagree with the choices that were made, it is no argument for suppression.

L’ ART D’ÊTRE GRANDP… Then there is the grandson, Mr Joyce. The question was bound to come up and, even if you did not have that smile while asking, I would be aware of the pitfalls, so I will tiptoe with diplomatic caution. Which also means that some of the more vibrant episodes have to be skipped, partly because so much depends on memory and oral poetry, and above all because there is a dearth of written or printed documentation. In particular, I do not know, nor, it seems, does anyone else, the outcome of lawsuits or the threats of litigation hovering over almost everything. Joyce’s grandson has become the pervasive absence, a menace lurking in the wings. He, a Joyce but not a Joycean, does not encourage us in our efforts, whether they are worthwhile (a few, theoretically, might be), trivial or ridiculous, as we ourselves know all too well. He is not the most supportive or sociable person to have around, and his (existing) amiable side is, I believe, only intermittently disclosed to a small circle. We may not always be able to imagine what it is like to be in his position, so allowances have to be made. Great and famous people’s offspring don’t always have a commodious life, as Carol Shloss’s recent study of Lucia Joyce poignantly proves. It cannot be easy to live perpetually in the genitive case, even though the case is partly of one’s own volition. The situation can be handled in different ways, as we learned, for example, at the Venice symposium in 1988, already mentioned, when Ezra Pound’s daughter, burdened with a not entirely unblemished heritage, and W.B. Yeats’s son Michael demonstrated how amiably co-operative relatives can be in helping, or at least not obstructing, scholarship. So the predominantly acerbic (it has been called ‘abrasive’) attitude of Joyce’s grandson seems to have a gratuitous, petulant edge to it, especially bearing in mind that any relative of Joyce’s would normally be welcomed with open arms and treated with more tolerance than any of us mortals could ever expect. The point has to be made that we read Joyce as a great author who, incidentally, happened to become a grandfather fairly late in his life, as grandfathers do. But we are not generally giving our attention to Joyce as the grandfather he happens to be. For a professional grandson, however, Joyce is a grandfather who as an illustrious author happened to prompt a horde of nosy scholars and pretenders in pursuit of their motives of self-aggrandizement. Coincidentally, the Library chapter of Ulysses features a defective ‘L’Art d’être grandp …’

When did the two of you first meet? My own first meeting was not really a meeting. We were simply among those present at the unveiling of the new grave in Zurich on Bloomsday 1966, with the statue made by the sculptor Milton Hebald. Lee Nordness from New York, who had donated it to the family and the city, was present, as were Richard Ellmann, a delegation from Dublin (which included Donagh McDonagh and John Garvin), Jacques Aubert and Thomas E. Connolly, who had expressly been sent from Buffalo. Also present was the then popular mayor of Zurich, Emil Landolt, to one of whose predecessors Joyce had written a letter of gratitude when he returned to Zurich in 1940. Above all, there was the Joyce family: Giorgio Joyce with Asta Osterwalder, his second wife, and Stephen Joyce with his wife Solange, both then in their thirties. The long day included several ceremonies, from morning till long past midnight. The city of Zurich has a venue for such occasions, the Muraltengut overlooking the lake, where we had a civic lunch. A lavish meal was followed, inevitably, by speeches by the mayor of Zurich, who warmed to the occasion, by Richard Ellmann and possibly by a few others too. At the end of the speeches, young Stephen Joyce stood up in a far corner and added a short and, on the whole, appreciative note, which, however, ended in a slightly unsettling demurrer along the lines that there was also the family and its privacy to consider. The exact words have escaped me, but there was an uneasy edge to them so that Richard Ellmann afterwards remarked how he, too, had been wondering to which side Stephen Joyce would jump. A faint, but ominous undercurrent was unmistakable. Parenthetically: at the time the name was simply Stephen Joyce, as it is to be found in early letters. The snarling insistence on the middle connective ‘James’ to my knowledge appeared years later. For a considerable period he was Stephen Joyce, as he remains in common parlance. The question of consistency might be raised, and I have never heard anyone (outside of a reference work), including the grandson himself, refer to James Augustine Joyce, or James Aloysius Joyce. The emphasis on the middle name heralds a descent and is used as a weapon against predatory scholars: ‘Les joyciens, je les méprise’ is what a newspaper reported him saying in 2004.

What is your next memory? I remember that he put in a very brief appearance at the Paris symposium of 1975, at an exhibition in the new Centre Pompidou, and there was definitely no attempt to fraternize with the assembled multitude. On the whole, though, he kept a low profile while his father was still alive. Subsequently, to the best of my knowledge, Giorgio Joyce never took part in any Joycean event other than the unveiling of the statue in

Zurich and the first symposium in Dublin, as already mentioned. The next distinct memory is of an occasion in the autumn of 1976, when Hans Wollschläger’s translation of Ulysses was very much in the public limelight. With his wonderful, resonant readings, Wollschläger was touring many cities. In Zurich the performance was combined with a round table on Joyce. The city invited various speakers who had known Joyce: Carola Giedion-Welcker, Professor Heinrich Straumann, and, at my suggestion, Stephen Joyce, who came from Paris to join us. What I had in my naive mind was a kind of open discussion with reminiscences and views, the sort of spontaneous interaction which, of course, never comes off. Stephen Joyce, guest of special honour, was the first to speak, and he did so in French (he tends to change languages in the middle of a scream). He voiced his righteous indignation at two recent invasions of privacy. The notorious letters to Nora of 1909 had come out in the Selected Letters the previous year, and then Claire Goll, a beauty in the twenties in Paris, had published her memoirs in which Joyce did not fare too well (it appears he never fell victim to her erstwhile charms). The gist of the objections was, ‘Can’t you leave my grandfather’s bedroom alone? It’s nobody’s business — and don’t trespass on the family’s affairs!’ It is a valid, if debatable, claim. In response I tried to point out that having to put up with peeping under the bedclothes and digging into secrets is the price to pay for people who have become famous. Moreover, Joyce himself in Ulysses had scandalously initiated curiosity in such processes, though mainly as fiction; this assured his reputation as a writer of obscene books. In Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus, who has umbilical relations with his author, ingeniously interprets Shakespeare in psychological terms and pries into what little we know of Shakespeare’s home and love life. A fictional offspring of Joyce’s makes use of Shakespeare’s supposed traumas, and in the twentieth century it has become the common procedure of biographers. It is also evident that for an extended time in his life, the author did not consider the destruction or the safeguarding of his very infamous (if they are in the first place) letters a priority; he left them in the uncertain custody of his brother when he faced an unknown future in wartime Zurich. For better or worse, celebrities attract attention and prurient curiosity. Some tact in dealing with delicate issues is no doubt called for, but then, how can unwanted invasions of privacy be prevented? One hardly wants a rigid system of surveillance, and what on earth, in this case, could prevent frustrated widows from concocting their reminiscences?

Didn’t Mr Joyce utter some threat on that occasion? After the event, while drinks were being served, he took me aside and warned me — possibly but not solely as a consequence of what had been discussed — that he would destroy the letters in his possession from Samuel Beckett (or possibly the letters Lucia sent to Beckett?) to save them from prying eyes. The destruction of documents appears to have been an intimidation ready at hand even then. It emerged anew in 1988 when newspapers reported that he would destroy his aunt’s letters in collective retribution. (The wording in the papers was ‘burn’; Joyce, after all, wrote a broadside to this effect.) Everybody, of course, has a perfect right to destroy personal letters, other, scholarly, considerations notwithstanding. We have probably all done it, but, in general, we do not broadcast it to the world at large, and perhaps less so when our manifest aim is the protection of our family’s privacy.

Were there any further encounters? In the jubilee year of 1982 a commemorative conference was set up in Paris, a few days before Joyce’s actual birthday. I remember Richard Ellmann, John Montague, Niall Montgomery, Charles Peake, whom I then met for the first time, and a newly emerging bright scholar named Derek Attridge, and naturally the pick of the French Joyce scholars. Jacques Chuto gave a talk on colours in A Portrait, certainly not below average. Mr Joyce added the terse comment that, if his grandfather had heard the paper, he would have died laughing. Since I heard the identical utterance on several subsequent occasions, I got the impression, rightly or wrongly, that this had become a kind of standard reflex, irrespective of what was said. Scholars in bulk seemed to be considered unworthy or trifling pedants, at best coming up with unnecessary insights (we all know how right he is there), at worst to be compared to ‘parasites, scavengers’ or ‘muckrakers’. They all need Joyce, but Joyce does not need them. Possibly the first real public appearance was at the Frankfurt symposium in 1984, when Hans Walter Gabler’s Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition was launched in a ceremony on Bloomsday. Richard Ellmann was gratified to see his central idea of Love (the word supposed to be known to all men) confirmed, while Joyce’s grandson, in the same breath, praised Ellmann for his achievement and condemned him for earlier intrusions into family concerns. Even so, this did not prevent a very friendly, almost chummy mood among all concerned at the end of the day at a marvellous reception in Frankfurt’s Römer restaurant. As I said, photographs of the occasion show something like festive harmony which, however, was not destined to last.

How would you say Mr Joyce’s presence tends to affect Joycean get-togethers? Without either fear of contradiction or libel, one may state that the presence of Stephen James Joyce at a gathering is not inevitably conducive to a relaxed atmosphere. Dozens of anecdotes are circulating, but few are in writing or in print. So I tend to be a little wary and confine myself to what I have witnessed. At

the 1986 symposium in Copenhagen, Mr Joyce was invited by the local organizers, and we were all taken aback when, in his plenary speech, he began by thanking the Danish nation for their behaviour towards the Jews during the Second World War. Ordinary people don’t normally thank whole nations officially at scholarly conferences. The speaker ended by reading out the closing words of ‘The Dead’ with great emotion: ‘You don’t have to listen to me, but you must listen to this!’ (to the best of my recollection). There was a vague feeling that the passage served mainly to punish us misguided Joyceans. I heard the same finale again at a Paris colloque where Stephen Joyce joined in mid-session and took part in the discussion afterwards. As it happened, he had the text with him and read it out again, closing with an emphatic ‘Ça, c’est la vérité!’

How about his involvement in the setting up of the Zurich James Joyce Foundation? I want to put it on record that Stephen Joyce was constructive when attempts were made to set up the Zurich James Joyce Foundation. It was never my own initiative, but once the first steps had been taken, we elicited letters of support, and a very favourable one came from him. He rightly pointed out some rough spots in my personality. In consequence, we proposed him as a member of the board of trustees, and he accepted, and even became its first vice-president. It was before a constitutional meeting on 19 May 1985, that I first learned, by way of a vocal protest, that the full name was Stephen James Joyce. His main concern at the time was the campaign against the sale of Joyce’s death mask in Sandycove. It had been given to the Tower, not to a private person, but then it suddenly turned up in an auction, an action which no doubt was unjustified. The Foundation’s support was enlisted, and I pointed out in a letter to The Irish Times that the death mask had clearly been Carola Giedion’s gift to the Joyce Tower. By that time the mask had been withdrawn from the auction and safely restored to the museum, a trifle yellowed by the sea air. Incidentally, it has never been quite clear how many original, that is plaster, cast copies were made in 1941. The Foundation has one that was given by Andreas Giedion, MD and Verena Clay of the Giedion family; the second one is in the Tower. The sculptor, Paul Speck, obviously made one for himself, which is now in the Zurich Zentralbibliothek. But then I have also seen plaster masks, believed to be originals, at the universities of Basle and Lausanne that had been kept there for decades. Since then numerous reproductions, in plaster or bronze, must be in circulation.

How did you find Mr Joyce as a board member? As a board member, Mr Joyce was conscientious in his duties, paid meticulous attention and never missed a meeting. He was, naturally, critical of our first tentative steps. It was my impression, at close range, that almost every move we tried to make was questioned and that hardly anything positive could be achieved. As a mere employee, I had a tough time getting some suggestions accepted, such as setting up a board of consultants, which only came about many years later. I am inevitably biased in my recollections, but I did feel that Stephen Joyce (you must feel how inevitably ironic the full name, ‘Stephen James Joyce’, would sound in such a sentence) tended less to debate the issues than to become them. There was a traumatic element (for me) in those board meetings. What struck me early on was that rational argument did not work when an issue was debated. For example, in those early months, it was essential for us to become known (and receive financial support) first and foremost, and I tried to put it across to the board that this would best be achieved by scholarly activities. Those, in turn, depended on international attendance, and Zurich hotel prices made it difficult. So I mentioned that I had heard that even an established French academic could hardly afford a few days’ stay in our expensive city. The answer still rings in my ears. What I had said was brushed off as ‘claptrap’; a French academic could very well afford a Zurich hotel, for, when some weeks earlier a plaque had been unveiled in St-Gérand le Puy (France) in a ceremony, none of the French academics had shown up. I never quite understood the stringent logic behind this and so deduced that in all further dealings, traditional reasoning might not be effective. Many of my Joycean friends had to learn this, or they have still not caught on to it and are vainly trying to argue rationally. The president of the board, Dr Robert Holzach, a stern and efficient banker, had to bear the brunt of verbal and epistolary censure. He was uncharacteristically tolerant and conciliatory and did everything in his power to mitigate and pacify. But Mr Joyce became increasingly disillusioned with the Foundation and resigned from his position in 1987 (‘got the hell out of it’, in a later formulation). He was replaced by Klaus Reichert, a Joyce scholar and translator. From then on board meetings had a different, relaxed tone. Naturally Mr Joyce will have quite a different take on this, and of necessity my remarks have to be taken with caution, as I was an affected party in a highly uncomfortable situation and am therefore biased.

Wasn’t there a quibble one time over the use of a Joyce photograph? We once allowed an agency to use one of the Joyce photographs in our archives, and it became part of an advertisement, which also sported Joyce’s famous comment on the cleanliness of Zurich (that one could eat minestrone soup off Bahnhofstrasse). Umbrage was taken at the Foundation and at myself (I had never heard of, and had definitely not seen the advertisement), and we certainly did not — and could not possibly — authorize the use of a quotation. This non-event put me severely in disgrace. At the Venice symposium of 1988, Stephen Joyce refused to shake hands or speak to me. It was during that symposium

that he openly defended the destruction of Lucia’s letters, and the board of the International Foundation made a futile attempt to prevent it (I could have told them). The silence lasted for several years. No words were exchanged between us when our paths crossed a few times in Paris.

This then changed again? Communication was resumed when the Foundation celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of Joyce’s death in 1991. Routinely, the grandson was informed of such occasions. Still I was surprised when on 1 February the bell rang and Stephen and Solange Joyce stood outside the door, almost affable, so that once again we were on speaking terms. I thought he would announce his participation in the events of the following day, Joyce’s birthday, but he had come to tell me that he would not attend. So on Sunday morning he did turn up and take part, not in the commemorative reading of Joyce texts, but in the preceding lunch. The mayor of Dublin had come expressly for the purpose (and brought us a trophy) and was greeted with the words: ‘Your predecessor insulted me.’ Mr Joyce entertained the company by reading aloud his letter to our local newspaper, which attacked the Foundation for its delinquencies; a letter which, to my regret, the paper had turned down. At the lunch, which was a bit less than relaxed, the Irish ambassador from Rome, in an attempt to ease the atmosphere, mentioned that Stanislaus Joyce had paid them a visit years ago, but was silenced by an abrupt ‘He [Stanislaus] is not a member of the family!’ There is no denying that Joyce’s grandson has great courage and no fear of antagonizing a whole group, or a conference, single-handedly. Some of his grandfather’s intransigence is clearly at work and, in fact, many similarities can be observed.

Forget the minor faux pas, what particular misdemeanours did you chalk up? As I am looking back, a series of offences comes to mind, offences which I committed, or so he thought, as the case may be. Mary Robinson, then president of Ireland, was going to pay us a brief official visit, and Mr Joyce had signalled that he wanted to be part of the event. We felt, to judge from his track record, this might not improve the atmosphere of what was for us a significant occasion, the first and only state visit ever. Our president wrote to him explaining, truthfully, that no one was especially invited. The visit turned out to be a pleasant event, and President Robinson obviously took a lively interest in the Foundation. She visited us privately again a few years later, and we also had a few drinks together in the Joyce Pub. After the first and official visit I sent a few of the photographs to Paris and, in return, we received an incensed letter that, while the grandson had not been invited, a Chinese translator had attended. Actually Jin Di just happened to be doing research with us at that time and was included; so, too, was Katharina Hagena who was pursuing her research at the time in the Foundation. All of this did not bode too well for the coming James Joyce symposium in Zurich. Nor did a letter in which he made it quite clear in writing that he would be on the scene (‘come hell or high water’) in two years’ time — ‘with bells on!’ In 1985 there was a spacious and splendid Joyce exhibition in Barcelona: ‘El Dublín de James Joyce: Necròpoli — Metròpoli — Heliòpoli’. It consisted of a simulated walk through Dublin and Ulysses, and was set up with great ingenuity. At a late stage I got an alarmed phone call to the effect that the exhibition would be stopped by an edict from on high, but things were somehow smoothed over. The grandson was formally invited, but he declined to take part. When on the day of the opening he did announce his participation, it caused the appropriate nervousness and apprehension and, true to form, he did turn up, missing the beginning, but not an occasion to find clamorous fault. I remember that one of the directors commented afterwards: ‘Il a fait son numéro.’ Stephen Joyce later on warned me that how he had acted then was nothing compared to what we would experience at our Zurich symposium the following year and that I would (future tense) regret the day he was born. At the same gathering I was also blamed for perpetrating the mistaken view that Joyce, during the First World War, had favoured the Swiss wine, Fendant de Sion. The correct, authorized wine is a Neuchâtel variant. This, of course, had always been known, since the white wines of the western part of Switzerland, from the cantons of Vaud, Valais and Neuchâtel, are similar in taste. We also tend to believe what Frank Budgen reported and what can be extracted from a passage in Finnegans Wake indirectly, and directly from a letter (‘Fendant du Valais’). At any rate the Fendant de Sion has become the standard for our ritual libations. In 2004 a wine company wanted to cash in on the connection; they imported a special consignment of the wine to Ireland and promptly ran into a lawsuit which, according to the newspapers, they won. The poster by the artist Lawrence Lee that advertised the Zurich symposium contained a likeness of our Zurich death mask, which was seen in sand surrounded by letters; there was, as I and others thought, a Protean flair to it. The Estate tried to suppress it via the bank, which by that time no longer had any connection with, and certainly no influence on, the Foundation. In a second move, a peremptory letter reached us that the poster should be stopped as it was ‘in bad taste, immoral’, and it offended the memory of the grandfather. I replied that there was no accounting for taste and that interestingly the charges against our poster were quite in tune with those originally levelled at Ulysses. So no one expected cordial amicability when the symposium came round, and nervous tension was in the air. I had invited Mr Joyce to become part of the programme of events, but he declined. He did not want to speak, and he resented my phrasing that he would be welcome to ‘attend or interfere’, as I had put it somewhat strongly in anticipation. In subsequent developments ‘interfere’, possibly provocative and unforgiven, proved to be the mot juste.

Well, Stephen James Joyce did turn up and, at the last moment, demanded to have his say, which, of course, was granted. In his address he corrected the rector of the university who, in his opening address in the aula of the university, had obviously said something wrong or omitted what he should have said. Mr Joyce soon changed to French, and I am not sure what the audience made of subsequent remarks about the problems of the Swiss soccer team at the World Championship in England. On the positive side, he offered a guided tour through his Joycean Zurich and, in fact, on the third day, did lead a select group (not everyone was admitted) to various locations that he remembered. Those who attended report that he was instructive, amiable and generous (he offered the right kind of wine). During the evening ceremony in the City Hall on the first day, he made a very notable, loud exit when the Foundation’s president spoke, and, leaving, he conveyed his opinion of the president in a few not very flattering remarks. They were, according to ear witnesses (I did not hear them myself) both in English and Zurich dialect — or else someone translated them. At any rate, the wording itself has to be censored: ‘*****!’ During the following days he attended various sessions and told those responsible for some panels what was wrong with them. One session was devoted to the translation of a Wake passage into German, and the participants were faulted for not including French. But somehow he gradually softened and even read two poems when a local ‘Joyce Corner’ was inaugurated in a very modest, low-key ceremony. One might almost have gathered, erroneously, that the symposium had not been all bad. The clouds had lifted. For the moment.

I suppose that Danis Rose’s Reader’s Edition of Ulysses in 1997 was the next irritation? As I have said elsewhere I had been asked by Macmillan, the publisher, for a kind of appraisal of the forthcoming edition that I had not seen, and I limited myself to a short wholly non-committal statement. When I got my copy I received a phone call from Mr Joyce, who had not himself seen a copy but was obviously well informed about what was going on. He mainly wanted to know if Rose had put a ninth sentence (a parody he had once composed) into Molly’s monologue, which, of course, he had not. There were some further phone calls, and for once we, Mr Joyce and I, agreed in our disapproval of Rose’s standardizations, creative interferences and what looked like gratuitous changes. My stand has always been that, though I am convinced that Danis Rose meant well and, in fact, imagines he is doing the book and its readers a favour, his Ulysses is not the one I have come to like. Mr Joyce was more vehement in his rejection. The Estate took legal steps and managed to have the Reader’s Edition stopped. From what I understand, Rose had introduced words and phrases from the earlier drafts and those are still under copyright (this was adapted in 2004 in a New Reader’s Edition). On the whole, the Rose edition fared badly and came in for heavy criticism; I have stated my own objections both in talk and in print. But as Robert Spoo once pointed out, it is the deplorable situation that restricts alternative editions outright that gives the errant one by Danis Rose so much weight. Under normal circumstances, different versions, according to individual preferences, could exist side by side and allow readers to choose, as is the case with most classical authors. Disagreements about texts might be discussed without venom. Anyway, at least for the time being, relations between the Estate and the Zurich Foundation were neutral and untroubled. I was given to understand that my strictures of the Reader’s Edition had not gone far enough.

Didn’t you meet Mr Joyce in Paris? This happened several times, even when we were not on speaking terms in the late eighties. But then our paths crossed again at the last revival (so far) of those Colloques Joyce in Paris that had taken place regularly in the eighties and early nineties, and sporadically afterwards. In January 2001, French students were assigned Dubliners for their exams, and so the stories became the topic of the two-day conference in the Sorbonne. The organizers were ‘pleased and honoured’ to have Joyce’s grandson taking part. Relations between us had been relatively neutral for some years, but when I greeted him I was curtly told that he would not speak to me any more. I naturally asked for a brief explanation. This, he said, he would reveal to the audience at the table ronde that was to conclude the conference the following day, and I would remember it for the rest of my life. He only added succinctly: ‘You are a fake.’ Naturally I wondered how I had come by such a designation, but I never found out, except that I heard it was connected with my attitude concerning Danis Rose, though I could never verify this. As it happened, my misconduct was never made public to the audience, as the round table was disrupted by Mr Joyce’s vociferous protests and his quarrel with the organizers who, I understand, had not allowed him an ad hoc opportunity to speak at the conference. Though, in fact, he did offer an additional session in which he spoke, so I heard, instructively about his grandfather. By strange coincidence he scheduled this extra session at exactly the time of my presentation.

Whether you’re a fake or not, didn’t you have other orders, decorations or titles bestowed on you? My other accolade dates back to 1966 when the Veale family, with whom I was staying for a few days in Churchtown, took me to The Bailey in Duke Street and introduced me to Patrick Kavanagh, whom they had known for some time. Apparently he had proposed to Eileen, Vivien and Gay Veale in rotation, but then married somebody else. I had heard a lot about him and knew his fine novel about provincial Irish

life, Tarry Flynn. Anyway, in a move that even at the time I knew was not a strategic one, since Patrick Kavanagh had never left any doubt about what he thought of Joyce scholars, Eileen Veale introduced me as someone with an interest in Joyce. Not entirely sober, he did not turn to me, but to them, and said, ‘He is a fucking cunt!’ This was a situation for which my upbringing had not prepared me. So, to overcome my awkwardness, I asked about Anthony Cronin, whom I thought to be a friend, because the previous year Cronin had told me an amusing anecdote about Kavanagh in London. The response was terse and identical: ‘He is a fucking cunt!’ I later learnt that this punch phrase was simply part of the vocabulary of the poet’s sad, waning days, and so I cannot claim to have been singled out individually. All the same I can now boast of two authentic distinctions in my CV and wonder if I should have a T-shirt to proclaim them to the world at large.

You declared initially that you would answer honestly or not at all. Does this apply to the foregoing? All of this is very much a muted version of my encounters, full of coy omissions. What makes the whole situation precarious is that we have dozens of reminiscences of other events, but little written evidence of what happened. As Joyceans we know we cannot trust hearsay. We cannot trust memories either, but I am trying my best to report accurately what was said on these various occasions.

When was your most recent encounter? For three years, silence reigned between Stephen James Joyce and Fritz Senn, the fake, until, on 2 February 2004, he convened a press conference in the Zurich James Joyce Pub. We, from the Foundation, heard of it and went to listen. I have no idea whether the international press was expected to turn up in full force, but some twenty-odd people were present, including, I believe, two reporters (and the same number of lawyers). We were treated to a very mild address, free of the invective that is reserved for the Joyceans. Its main purpose may have been to emphasize that Joyceans perversely choose to celebrate the day of Ulysses (and nobody ever pointed out that the action extends to the following day, we also learned) and not, as they ought to, the author’s birthday. Oddly enough, birthdays come much closer to the privacy that we are so often warned to respect than dates in a work of fiction. Predictably, the ‘Irish Circus’ of the events of Dublin 2004 came in for disapproval. Ireland does not deserve to engage in such commercial exploitation, and the point was reiterated with Cyclopian emphasis. After all, no representative of Ireland showed up at Joyce’s funeral in 1941, and, for decades, Joyce was neglected in his native country. But now, in 2004, celebrations would be held on a gigantic and ridiculous scale. Their only motive was money, nothing else — cultural tourism. An Irish newspaper wrote that in 1941 Joyce was ‘tossed into a pauper’s grave’. But then, newspapers always report wrongly. In spite of many strictures, Switzerland fared much better. It provided a home for the Joyces in straitened times. The relations with the city of Zurich were generally good, less so those with the Zurich Foundation. The grandson’s full name is Stephen James Joyce, and the middle name, generally ‘suppressed’, causes much annoyance among Joycean scholars. Equally suppressed is the fact that Joyce preferred to drink a Neuchâtel wine (we are wrong about the Fendant de Sion); proof is that Joyce considered it a good omen that two blood donors for the transfusion before the final operation were from Neuchâtel (this is to be found in the first edition of Ellmann where, obviously, it was not suppressed). Jacques Mercanton’s book is ‘the best ever written on Joyce’, a claim no doubt based on a thorough familiarity with the whole range of Joyce criticism. It is a disgrace that at the opening of the Zurich symposium of 1996, Mercanton’s name was not even mentioned. It was never quite clear what the proclamation was in aid of. Some truths did emerge, though. Stephen James and Solange Joyce are the only remaining descendants, any others do not belong to the family. The second line of ‘Ecce Puer’ should read ‘A boy is born’ (not ‘child’, this is documented in an emendation not yet made public). Ulysses is a funny book and people should just read it. Mr Joyce later requested from me a list of people from the Foundation that I had ‘dragged’ to the event, and I, for the sake of the experiment, played along and sent a list of those of who did not object to having their names put down. This supplied him with a document which, he told me on the phone, would prove to the world how ‘gutless’ and ‘perverse’ those so-called Joyceans are. We were then compared to Nazi Germany. I could not elicit how we deserve such an accusation. I do not know whether my simple list of about six people was ever circulated to the wide world in evidence of the Foundation’s, let alone all Joyceans’, pusillanimity.

You seem to feel amused rather than threatened, but how about the Joyce Estate’s power concerning questions of copyright? The truculent clout that is wielded with increasing vigour is the murky copyright situation: legally, literary copyright seems to be on a par with material property. This has to be accepted, like earthquakes, tidal waves, or political supremacies. The power thereby exercised (whether based on legal fact or just growling menace) has a detrimental effect on scholars or anyone who wants to use some of Joyce’s wording. Authors, editors and publishers are often just scared and choose the way of no resistance. It is quite on the cards that some of the decrees from on high are not as arbitrary or even spiteful as they appear to the victims. I know of just one case, when we, the Foundation, modestly supported an Albanian

translation of Ulysses in progress, only to hear from the translator that his prospective publisher had received a threat that ‘all and any translation of Joyce’s works into Albanian in Albania, in Kosovo or Macedonia’ would be refused. I do not know whether whole countries can be debarred from access to an author by mere whim or an accidental grudge. As always, there may be solid rational considerations behind decisions of that kind, unfathomable to the rest of the world, but such a refusal of copyright in national or ethnic bulk looks wilful and, by the way, contrary to the interests of a literary estate. At any rate, a first edition of the Albanian Ulysses sold very well and has been reprinted. Its translator, Idlir Azizi, was given an award for the best translation of 2004 in Albania. There is no doubt that the Estate has a paralyzing grip over certain matters with the existing copyright laws. Letters in particular seem to be taboo. Marilyn Reizbaum, when doing her research in Zurich, found a few letters that proved clearly how Joyce had helped the Jewish writer Hermann Broch to escape from Austria, something eminently positive and worth knowing. She, too, was refused point-blank permission to publish. In this context it is ironic that there is no reliable, or remotely complete edition of the correspondence of one of the leading writers of the last century. Hundreds of letters are dormant, awaiting transcription and editorial care. Control, however, can hardly extend over everything, though as a matter of deplorable fact the ban and the fear of possible and expensive litigation are a blight even for the less prurient Joyce scholars. Possibly, the Joyce Estate and its sole beneficiary overestimate its peremptory power, and the Joyce community seems apprehensive that, at any moment, a furious bark may turn into a vicious bite. Therefore, few of us take up the challenge. In fact, I often think that we, the Joyceans, deserve all the bad treatment we get when we take it all hands down, or even cringingly try to ingratiate ourselves. Some, in the face of all available evidence to the contrary, still resort to rational argument. A great deal of entertainment value is clearly provided. The grandson appears to take special delight in showing us that we do not even know our own business. One president of the International James Joyce Foundation was censured for not using the correct name of her predecessor, Morris Beja, but ‘Murray’. The rector of our university did not say the right things about Joyce in Zurich in 1996. I was once lectured that I had mistranslated the title of my own book: Nichts gegen Joyce: Joyce versus Nothing (some essays in it are in English). The correct translation of ‘Nichts gegen Joyce’ should not be ‘Joyce Versus Nothing’, as I had it, but ‘Nothing Against Joyce’. It is gratifying to get a free English lesson from an offspring of one of the greatest writers ever (who once also taught English to foreigners). Applicants seeking permission are frequently reproved for their misspellings. This may be odd from someone who lodged a protest in the Foundation guest book — unbidden — that ‘the abuse’ of his ‘grandfather’s death mask is scanalous’ (17 June 1996). So a lot of scanalous diversion is provided free of charge. It probably climaxed in Monaco in 1990, in a session when Mr Joyce attacked Brenda Maddox’s book on Nora and criticized it for having ‘no sense of humour’. To be fair, there is on occasion, on wholly non-controversial occasions, a sense of humour, and I know that a few, with a stress on few, of my friends do in fact get along well with Mr Joyce, on and off, generally after an initial outburst. Giorgio Joyce, incidentally, though I experienced him as generally gruff and brusque, never went after anyone as long as he was left alone. I must also add in fairness that so far I have never been the butt of those vituperative phone calls that others have reported.

What do you reckon is the motivation behind the Estate’s often hostile vigilance? One can only speculate or engage in futile analysing. In other words, I don’t know and so can’t tell. In recent months we have all heard of its exorbitant demands for fees. I heard indirectly of one German visitor who had called up a radio station to enquire why a scheduled reading from Ulysses on Bloomsday 2004 was called off and who was told the fee charged was that of a whole year’s budget for that station. A newspaper reported that for one reading, €23,000 was charged — probably an exaggeration, and I am not at all sure that such figures are correct. But they are in circulation, and we were told that Joyce’s German publisher, Suhrkamp, has been instructed to charge €300 for one minute (one minute) of text read in public. I emphasize that none of this is confirmed, it is all hearsay.

But there is a dominant motive in the accumulated reports? My view is that such outrageous demands are indirect refusals rather than serious demands, so permission has been formally given, but could not be acted on. Still, I do not think money is a dominant motive. Possibly a sense of power, fuelled by a dislike, I mean the opposite of love, of Joyceans, provides some gratification. It may be a thrill to some to wield destructive power, to thwart us in our despicable endeavours. I see it as a kind of force majeure that reminds me of some divine arbitrariness in the Old Testament. I am sure, by the way, that from his perspective Mr Joyce’s mission and all the assaults are moral ones, that we Joyceans are nasty-minded, exploiting the works as well as the private life of a grandfather, perhaps in some kind of conspiracy. Messiahs have a way of seeing themselves all the more in the right the more they are criticized. One great strength is an immunity to ridicule: it is the world around that is unreasonable. I have it on his own voiced authority; ‘I am not gaga’, I was told on the phone. Not that I had put the question. I cannot help being reminded of James Joyce’s own enraged and relentless campaign against the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1931 when, by mistake, they had put his name under an article. Even after their apology he spent an inordinate amount of time, energy and irritation on what seemed a trivial

inadvertence; he also wanted to engage his lawyers in the affair. It must have been part of that determined dedication that served him so well as an artist.

Where does Mrs Solange Joyce come into all of this? I don’t know. At times I have seen her acting as a kind of buffer, not seldom with an indulgent smile, at times she seemed to endorse whatever assault was at hand. In this connection, a word has to be put in for the Estate’s executor who handles the daily business, Seán Sweeney, a really kind gentleman, agreeable and of great charm and knowledge. He often visits our Foundation, and we get on very well. It is not easy to picture his situation and his attitude as a loyal servant.

Do you think things may be getting worse? Yes. They will, judging by the track record and the acceleration during the Bloomsday year 2004. Trying to sum up, I think there is a strange relationship of interdependence. Stephen James Joyce seems to need us collectively and individually as scapegoats, and very excellent scapegoats we are indeed. His public reactions and public appearances are generally predictable and have a high entertainment value. We would miss him and all the anecdotes he gives rise to, if it were not for all those obstacles and blanket refusals regarding music and artwork. Here we see enforced paralysis at its deadly work. Inevitably we can also see traits that we recognized, often faintly, in Joyce himself, repeated or magnified in his grandson. Paradoxically, the defiant advocate of a writer’s privacy affords insights into precisely the personality of that writer. Whenever I read the first chapter of Ulysses it seems that Stephen’s (the fictional Stephen’s) rebuffs of Mulligan’s or Haines’ occasional advances have a familiar ring — possibly a wholly subjective impression. In the Reader’s Edition period I once wondered aloud why Mr Joyce singled out Danis Rose for privileged animosity, as the two seem to have something in common, including a messianic streak. Something only, let me emphasize, for Danis Rose up to now never went out of his way to obstruct any kind of research, so the comparison is highly unfair, uttered at a particular moment. Stephen James Joyce asked me to explain. Urbanely (to comfort them?) I said that both he and Danis Rose are characterized by ‘a bristling kind of independence’. On such a euphemism we might close this extended but subdued bunch of recollections.

O UR ZURICH JAMES JOYCE FOUNDATION I suppose that against personal inclination you’d have to call yourself lucky in how the Zurich James Joyce Foundation came about? From time to time I have to tell myself that in recent years I have indeed been lucky to be active in our Joyce Foundation where Joyce is being researched and collectively read and which has become a meeting place. It all came about by a concatenation of odd circumstances. It could never have been planned; I certainly did not plan it, it was not even my own idea.

Maybe you’d start with the history of the so-called ‘James Joyce Pub’? In the sixties an officer in the Swiss army entertained notions of a secret service (possibly also James Bond fantasies). He became notorious by publishing a book, a kind of moral defence, which was issued to the whole army during the Cold War: it was patriotic and right-wing and aroused quite a bit of comment, but it must have enabled its author, who happened to be a fan of Ireland, to run hotels in west Cork. In the case of a communist attack on Europe, an exiled Swiss government could have administered its occupied country from Irish exile. That, at least, was the rumour. When Jury’s Hotel in Dame Street, Dublin, was demolished in the early seventies, it was he who bought the interior of its antique bar, stained glass, mosaics and all, and shipped it to Zurich. It already sailed under the name of ‘James Joyce Pub’, long before it was installed. My guess is that at the auction a likely selling point may have been that Joyce had frequented that bar; not that there is any evidence of intense patronage, and I suppose Jury’s must have been expensive at the time. I believe the hotel was the first old building that had to make way for urban modernization in historical Dame Street. Anyhow, I was contacted, the one who knew who Joyce was, and vaguely indicated I might give peripheral advice, but the plan was never put into effect. Opening a pub or restaurant in Zurich involves a lot of red tape, moreover there was a slight recession in the seventies, so I forgot all about it. Until in 1976 the City Hall staged a Joycean evening (with Hans Wollschäger, Carola GiedionWelcker, and Stephen Joyce, as reported elsewhere), and a man introduced himself as Urs Rinderknecht, of the then Union Bank of Switzerland. The bank, with a licence on one of its premises, had acquired the material in dozens of crates and now wanted to know more about the author whose name the pub carried. I became an aloof advisor to the project in a number of sessions. Only once had I been in Jury’s Bar, in 1970, and retained but a vague memory of rather cheap, wine-dark plastic seats. I could provide little inspiration to a group of very devoted interior designers. However, I was asked to contribute a little brochure (one of my best-paid jobs ever). The pub opened in 1978, with a gathering of top bankers, city magistrates and those who had still known Joyce, like Heinrich Straumann. The Irish Times sent ‘Quidnunc’ who, eleven years earlier, had attacked the assembled Joyceans in Dublin with whimsical invective, but by now we had become old cronies. Banks do not automatically set up pubs that are named after foreign authors. The man who made it all possible was the general manager of the bank, Dr Robert Holzach, who later became the chairman of its board. He still carried on a tradition of patronage of culture. I am sure it was not easy for him to get the project through, but the pub became a success and a novelty. The bank, at the time, even offered a prize for work done on Joyce. The James Joyce Pub really lived up to its name and its latent atmosphere (we sedate Swiss are less exuberant and eloquent than the Irish) during the first Joyce symposium in 1979 when it naturally was the meeting point. Such singing as that of Zack Bowen and Eddie Epstein has probably never been heard since on the somewhat sombre premises. If Joyce could not be claimed as a Zurich writer, nothing of this would have come about. Perhaps now is the time to toast a man I never met and whose full name I do not even know. I owe a lot – and so by implication do these memoirs – to a Mr E. Gilford of the Midland Scholastic Agency in Lincolnshire who was trying to find a teaching job for Joyce. If he had not summoned Joyce to Zurich by telegramme (4 October 1904) for whatever reason, with all attendant consequences, I might not have developed that particular absorption in an Irish writer at a crucial stage. So I am grateful to the mysterious Mr E. Gilford – and to whoever lent Joyce the sum of £ 2/2, which he charged for his services, money that turned out to be well invested.

Maybe you’d like to sketch your paid work previous to the setting up of the Zurich James Joyce Foundation in 1985, and the accumulation of a library? For a while, in the early sixties, I was working part-time at the printing plant; the rest of my time was given over to the internal editing of the Suhrkamp edition of Joyce’s works. In 1976 I was asked to join Diogenes publishers, but after a few years lost that job very suddenly, as I have told elsewhere. Some agencies behind the scenes were astir, and I never quite knew who first approached the bank that was now connected with a Joyce pub and who proposed to turn my quite comprehensive assemblage of Joyce

books into a public institution. This collection (which, at first, I didn’t think of as a collection) had slowly come together ever since I had to work for a living in 1953. Out of insecurity I wanted to have as many books and articles around me as I could afford, and in due course (not that I thought the course was all that due) I received books from authors (in those days most of us active in Joyce knew of each other), or review copies, and the rest I bought. I now wonder how I ever had the money, for scholarly books were never cheap. At any rate, I somehow managed to keep up with Joyce studies, as they came out at fairly long intervals. Quite a lot accrued from my correspondence. I also contacted scholars and translators behind the Iron Curtain and found there was a widespread interest. A few such contacts originated during the days of the Prague Spring, when Czechoslovakia tried to look westward. Slowly, a substantial library gathered at home.

Didn’t you think of trying to get an academic position on the strength of your Joyce collection at one time? There was a period when I would have liked to get a position in the States, and I even toyed with the idea of announcing the collection for such a purpose. Apart from a brief notice in the Quarterly I think I never made a real effort. In the survival of the fittest self-promoters, I would not have had a chance. Which reminds me of a conversation with Berni Benstock long ago when I pointed out that Zurich, a Joyce city, and the English Department really ought to put up an institute, given the local associations and the friends of Joyce that were still alive. Benstock suggested that I myself should take the initiative. I hesitated because such a step would be considered my personal application, but he countered that in the States this would be taken for granted, with no stigma attached.

Luckily for us, you and your books were still in Switzerland when you were contacted by the Schweizerische Bankgesellschaft about the setting up of a Zurich James Joyce Foundation. Dr Robert Holzach, general manager of the Schweizerische Bankgesellschaft (‘SBG’, the old Union Bank of Switzerland) was approached by whoever it was, and by whatever internal processes he convinced management that a Joyce Foundation could be set up. The bank already had an analogous foundation that supported, and still supports, Swiss artists. Once a plan was underway, then, and only then did I become active and enlisted supportive letters all round. Those friends and many scholars rallied round to back such a research centre, and many letters were sent to the bank. Stephen James Joyce – not a Joycean, we know – was well-disposed and added a very positive letter, which was one of the reasons why he was elected onto the board of trustees. On 9 May 1985 the Zurich James Joyce Foundation was officially inaugurated, and it found a temporary habitat in Augustinergasse 28, in one of the buildings that the Bank had helped to renovate and save from imminent dilapidation. So in the summer of 1985 we were installed in one big and a few small rooms, with shelves that rapidly filled as all my material was transferred from my home to the new location. During the weeks we were settling in, I had a phone call from a young Irishman who then visited us. It was Vincent Deane, a very avid reader of Finnegans Wake of whom I had not heard before and who was to produce a Finnegans Wake Circular for several years before he devoted himself to tracing sources in Joyce’s notebooks. He came to be a regular member of our early workshops. In the meantime he has become one of the foremost experts on Joyce’s notes. He has an uncanny ability to trace remote sources in obscure places.

Isn’t it true that no sooner did you have the premises in the city than you set out to convene the first Zurich workshop and to translocate various other Joyce-related activities? From the first I knew that our most important activity would be to bring scholars together for small, expert gatherings with a specific focus and intense scholarly intercourse, for lack of a better word. We improvised the first August workshop at very short notice. It turned out to be our first international endeavour, and its theme was charting the unfamiliar depths of ‘Oxen of the Sun’. Naturally, during the early months, when hardly anyone knew of the Foundation, we had few visitors. They were mainly those who were part of the Ulysses reading group, which used to meet in private apartments but now had a fixed location. The Volkshochschule courses were practically transferred to the Foundation. We were already unofficially connected to the Department of English since Professor Henri Petter sat on our board and naturally announced our activities to students. As I was doing an introductory course for the university it, too, took place in our library, not in the least because of our convenient array of audio-visual toys.

You should expand a little on those famous, or infamous as the case may be, reading groups of yours. Very slowly we were gathering force. Right from the outset we had a Tuesday evening group that was looking at Ulysses, sentence by sentence. It proceeds by discussion, but in practice it may well deteriorate into my running commentary, punctuated by questions and suggestions. One run usually lasts three and a half years, and we are now probably on our seventh round. Those who join somewhere along

the rocky road usually start again from the beginning, and some have done several readings. But there came a time when something else had to be put on the agenda, and so a few experienced Ulysseans graduated to the Wake. We started a tentative reading group in the autumn of 1986, and I imagined it would peter out very soon, but it increased and gathered its own momentum and new adherents. Every Thursday night a few diehards (the number fluctuates, but we have on occasion assembled close to twenty) sit around a table and puzzle out meanings. After eleven years we reached the final ‘the’ and, having no methadone at our disposal, had no alternative but to circle back to ‘riverrun’. To be in charge of a bunch of keen-witted, enthusiastic Wake readers, whose offerings are not always strictly relevant, is not without its strain on human forbearance. The balance is between freedom of speech and a minimal quota of relevance. I vacillate from chagrined intolerance to a resigned awareness that the multivocal muddle of Wake glosses is, after all, caused by the nature of what we are trying to understand. A group-reading taxes the brains of each exponent: at every moment one has a baffling text in front of one’s eyes that leads to dispersed associations, one deliberates what one might contribute, and simultaneously someone (at least some one!) is always speaking. It is no wonder that the outcome is acoustic and intellectual chaos. Perhaps it is futile to try to impose provisional conversational order on the apparent but titillating verbal turbulence. In fact, I once canalized my recurrent annoyance into a talk about the dynamics of Wake reading groups. I find it irritating when a vociferous group of readers offers their findings at cross purposes, often simultaneously, but it is, after all, merely a consequence of the Wake’s congenital impetus.

What is the financial basis of the Zurich James Joyce Foundation? For the first six years the bank took care of the salaries, the material, new acquisitions, current expenses. At a time when the SBG seemed installed for eternity, Dr Robert Holzach had the foresight that we needed financial independence. He made great efforts to collect funds by contacting individuals and institutions, which proved fortunate once the bank changed completely in a merger. It is next to impossible to get it out of the minds of some that we are no longer at the new bank’s apron strings. We are often advised that, to launch some project, we should ‘ask the bank to …’ as though we could just walk across the street and hold out our hand. I want to put it on record here that the bank, now Union Bank of Switzerland, no longer funds the Zurich James Joyce Foundation, though some indirect benefits remain. The Foundation now has its own modest funding, enough to get by. A few privileges remain, particularly during the 1996 Zurich symposium when we were able to use the up-to-date convention centre of the bank, whose normal charges would have priced the participant charges out of any scholar’s range. A name like ‘Zurich James Joyce Foundation’ can be misleading. From time to time we get letters asking for support: the applicants imagine no doubt that James Joyce was some rich person leaving a fortune to fund other projects. Thanks to Dr Holzach’s endeavours the Foundation now has its basis. The funds enable us at present to keep a small staff more than busy. We can keep up with new publications, though first editions, original drafts or artwork are spectacularly out of reach, at least until a bountiful donor walks in.

How is the Foundation organized? Our board of trustees still consists of six members. After Dr Robert Holzach’s term as president, Urs Rinderknecht (who had first approached me in 1976) took over. From 1985 until his resignation in 1987, Stephen James Joyce was a regular member on the board. He was replaced by Klaus Reichert, a bona fide Joyce scholar of wide range (recently president of the Akademie für deutsche Sprache und Dichtung). The creative element was represented by Wolfgang Hildesheimer, writer, draftsman of great reputation (outside of Germany his study of Mozart may be his best-known book, one of many); he had also translated ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’. After Hildesheimer’s death in 1991 Adolf Muschg, one of Switzerland’s foremost authors, was in office for a few years until he was replaced by our visual artist Hannes Vogel. Vogel had been asked to design a cafeteria, part of the Zurich University Hospital, and he based his design on Medical Dick and Medical Davy in Ulysses (from a poem that Joyce plagiarized from Oliver Gogarty) and decorated the ceiling with the Cassiopeia constellation from ‘Scylla and Charybdis’; relevant quotations from Ulysses in several languages adorn a semicircle of columns outside. In an earlier encounter with Joyce he engraved the name ‘Throwaway’, along with many other famous literary horses, on stone slabs in the historical Rosshof in Basle. One board member ex officio is from the English Department, first Professor Henri Petter, then Professor Andreas Fischer who, though primarily a linguist, has himself published on Joyce. For the first few years Mrs Renée Wolf, who had acted as liaison between the incipient Foundation and the bank, also served on the board. She was beneficially replaced by Verena Füllemann.

Would you mention some of Hannes Vogel’s Joycean work? He had seen the reference to the canton of Appenzell in that children’s song (I’ve expatiated on it elsewhere), and when he was asked to restore a historical building in Trogen he put the quote (‘mean fathery eastend appullcelery’) on its vault so that Joyce’s reference has come home to roost in Appenzell, bringing light to the gentiles. The Zurich rivers Limmat and Sihl, both part of the fluvial texture of ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’, flow together in the Platzspitz. It is the site of those often-reproduced photographs by

Carola Giedion-Welcker; according to her it was Joyce’s favourite spot in Zurich. When the Foundation commemorated it, Hannes Vogel inscribed the riverine fragments from the Wake on a wall. He made the names of the two rivers visible in big letters; he also fused them with the author’s initials: ‘Ljmmat’ and ‘Sjhl’. However, on a recent inspection I noticed that someone had broken off the descender of the ‘j’ in ‘Sjhl’ to make it conform to orthodox nomenclature. This is the equivalent of those proofreaders in early Ulysses editions who correctified (my term for well-meant ameliorations) the errant ‘world’ in Martha’s letter to a law-abiding ‘word’. In the meantime the salient ‘j’ has been restored.

When was it that the Foundation moved to its present wonderful premises? It was in 1989 that we left the small premises in Augustinergasse 28 and settled in Number 9, the Strauhof, an old building in the Altstadt that is used for literary exhibitions. The Zurich Foundation is an oasis, slightly extraterritorial, not quite under local jurisdiction (but don’t tell anyone), and signally international. It is loosely, but not formally, connected with Zurich University, and as a member of its staff I still do courses (notice how I pointedly avoid the term ‘teaching Joyce’!) as a ‘Lehrbeauftragter’ (‘semester labourer’), generally an introduction to Ulysses, from time to time a seminar. Our administration is relatively simple, with a minimum of distractive red tape, as compared to the committee work that most academics have to undergo at the cost of their research.

Initially what did it feel like to be director of the Foundation? There were some rough spots during the early years, along with a sense of emptiness when suddenly my books, many with a personal history, were out of my hands. During that time the board was still very formal and did not quite know what course the Foundation should take. I felt constricted and was not always resolute enough to assert myself, especially with one less than constructive member. The initial atmosphere of the very formal and legalistic half-yearly meetings has changed completely, especially since the ever helpful Dr Verena Füllemann, director of the UBS Kulturstiftung, joined the board and has become a devoted supporter, to whom we owe many suggestions and kindnesses. And, in ample compensation, I had a decent, regular income.

Would you please talk about your team and describe its activities? There is a constant, though irregular, flow of visitors, tourists looking in, students, Joyce scholars, naturally, and groups, often high-school classes that have read Dubliners. You never know who may turn up. A number of writers or artists of reputation have looked in, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Richard Hamilton, Julian Barnes, Péter Esterházy, Mario Vargas Llosa, as well as a fair number of Swiss artists. We have always had excellent relations with the Irish Embassy in Berne, and since 1985, every single one of the Irish ambassadors has visited us frequently and even taken part in our events. Luckily, a former student of English, Ruth Frehner, who had followed an apprenticeship with Swissair and was competent at administration and bookkeeping, of which I was totally innocent, took things in hand and proved highly efficient, also keeping my chaotic ways in intermittent order. She is adept both at administrative chores (of which she is now relieved) and at Irish literature, quite apart from Joyce. She has a fine knowledge of Gaelic, with which we can impress Hibernian visitors. In 1997, she received a doctorate for a perceptive study of The Colonizers’ Daughters: Gender in the Anglo-Irish Big House Novel, and she taught at the College of Teacher Education in St Gallen, dexterously combining her two jobs. A lot of time is taken up with correspondence, nowadays much facilitated by email, but in the early years letters had to be typed and, in my case, frequently retyped. We dispense information freely, timeconsuming as it may be. Fortunately we have always had a very good team, which has gradually increased to five, though we wish we could employ more students for temporary tasks. Margrit Fritschi, also a former student (she, in fact, had initiated the Ulysses readings in 1982 in her own home), joined us for the first years and, when she left us, was replaced by Ursula Zeller, who had also been a member of the original Ulysses group. Ursula had been an assistant at the English Seminar and, for a few years, worked as a proofreader (like myself) and a reviewer for our local but reputed Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Thanks to Ruth and Ursula’s commitment and proficiency, which went far beyond the routine administrative chores, the Foundation has been running smoothly all these years. Special tasks have taken up a lot of their attention and creative ingenuity, tasks for which there really is never any time set apart, but which, nevertheless, have to be done. When I was in hospital, undergoing treatment for some back problem and therefore out of action for weeks, the Foundation’s day-today business, including the reading groups, was conducted with nonchalant efficiency. Ursula Zeller has developed her interest in Jewish literature, become a specialist, and has also taught a few courses in the field. For several months she did research in Israel while still managing to take care of some Foundation projects. Margrit Neukom is taking competent care of finances and administration. For one day a week we have been able to employ a student to take care of all the paraphernalia, flyers, offprints, typescripts, playbills, catalogues; trivia that at first was heaped in random stacks. They were sorted, in this order, by Antonia Fritz, Ladina Bezzola and, in recent years, Frances Ilmberger. All of them had first been attending a reading group and were then drawn into our activities. Thanks to them we can now find almost

everything, literally thousands of documents, in its appropriate box and in the databases. We are now able to produce a list of relevant topics in our library. All in all, we are a reliable team of considerable autonomy. Frances Ilmberger has been a valuable addition. Not only did she finish the work initiated by her predecessors, but she has also set up and expanded our website and is bringing it up to date. It is something I would not have dared to touch myself. She and her husband, Hans Zappe, often invite the participants of our workshops to their home. When her son Max was in his infancy, he was often brought into the Foundation and felt in charge of proceedings. Day-to-day business keeps us busy. Above all, we catalogue laboriously all our books, articles, tapes, CDs, videos etc., so that everything, except perhaps what’s on my desk, can be found. We have to keep up with new acquisitions. Bibliographical requests are frequent, and we try to oblige but have to draw the line when orders become very large. The weekly reading groups go on all year round; for many years now there have been two on Finnegans Wake, simply because those retraversing Ulysses could not leave off, and we did Dubliners, A Portrait, then even the Odyssey and ended up, ineluctably, in the Wake. More such readings could be offered, for example Ulysses in German, but there are simply not enough evenings in the week. Over the years we have settled into a precarious kind of routine. But every now and then a special effort is called for. In fact, such tasks have greatly increased. Take the 1996 symposium in Zurich, managed, I believe, with quiet proficiency; no nonsense, no frills. We were still able to benefit from a very modern bank conference centre with all necessary appliances, close to the Foundation, most hotels and the James Joyce Pub. The hotel bookings and logistics were in excellent hands. All the academic administration was concentrated in the Foundation, and so everybody always knew what was happening; in other cities, several agencies were often at work and could not be co-ordinated that easily.

Weren’t you regaled with a generous Festschrift a few years ago? It was a major effort that went on behind my back as I was approaching the biblical age of seventy. Ruth and Ursula devised and initiated an elaborate, voluminous Festschrift. I still wonder how they could mastermind such a gigantic undertaking without giving anything away. So cunning were their clandestine activities that for a long time I did not suspect anything. Only once, when I came across a misdirected letter, did I suspect that something was afoot, but I never guessed that it was concocted practically in our own kitchen. Hand in hand with it went preparations for a gathering, which convened a number of Joycean friends who had undertaken the journey to Zurich for the unique occasion. We even had a oneday workshop of which I became the topic, an odd feeling of mixed emotion, exaltation, vanity, embarrassment. Naturally I was touched. It was, apart from everything else, a living testimony to the community that has accrued over the years. Later on some complaints came in from scholars and friends who had not been enlisted for the book, but this was natural under the circumstances, since the judicious editors could not possibly know who was especially close to me, and for obvious reasons I could not be consulted.

Didn’t another book also come out of the Festschrift endeavour? The Foundation produced one book, a new translation of the ‘Penelope’ episode by Harald Beck which originally should have been part of the Festschrift but was denied copyright permission. Since Switzerland did follow the disastrous European extension of copyright to seventy years, but did not reimprison authors who had moved into the public domain after 1992, such a venture was possible, though sales are restricted to Switzerland and mail orders. Harald Beck opted for a more colloquial rendering of Molly’s monologue, aiming at a lower register than Wollschläger’s. In concrete terms he consistently used the perfect tense, which, at least in southern German usage, replaces the more literary imperfect form. In substantial revisions the translator, together with Ruth Frehner and Ursula Zeller, scrupulously went through the text, almost word by word. The result, Ulysses Penelope (2001) in a handsome, bibliophile volume, is naturally much less known than Goyert’s and Wollschläger’s translations. Ursula and Ruth developed their histrionic potential and read from the new translation in several cities. Harald Beck’s ‘Penelope’ has already inspired a few artists in their work.

Then there were Joyce-related exhibitions at the Strauhof and elsewhere? Another major venture was a display in the Strauhof, a museum where the city of Zurich arranges literary exhibitions, from Goethe to Rimbaud (via Jules Verne, Petrarcha or Heidi), and where we occupy the second floor. This time it was devoted to Joyce. How does one visually present an author to an audience that would not be disposed to read a great amount of challenging text? The problem became the topic, ‘James Joyce: gedacht durch meine Augen/thought through my eyes’, and it ran from December 2000 to February 2001. Conception and execution were skillfully and autonomously done mainly by Ruth Frehner, Ursula Zeller and the artist Hannes Vogel. I chipped in marginally with bits of advice and ideas, but it was the ingenious triad that invested most of their time and creative energy in the project. They wisely decided not to focus, one more time, on documenting Joyce biographically in Zurich, the usual and obvious procedure. They found multiple ways to show how thoughts are generated by what the eyes pick up. Hannes Vogel,

inventive at graphic presentation, knows how to transform ideas into sights. Ursula Zeller devised the idea of projecting pictures onto the fat letters of HCE. To see changing images in rapid succession, some of which were known, others puzzling, rendered the visual experience into an equivalent of a mind facing the perplexity of Finnegans Wake when sudden flashes of recognition punctuate the darkness. She also showed Ulysses literally as a walk through an oversized book where motives are parallactically varied, and concretely illustrated the book’s cubist aspects. All three collaborated on a visual and aural presentation of the thunderwords in the Wake. Ruth Frehner transfigured the ‘Wandering Rocks’ episode of Ulysses into a panorama which exposed the cross-references, the interpolations and the simultaneous events in nineteen panels with luminous coloured threads. A spectator could follow the movements in minute detail, but the whole also gave an impression of the engineering intricacy of that particular episode, vignettes of a city. Naturally there were many side shows. Credits for a hyperlinked toy go to Frances Ilmberger who devised a sample demonstration that allowed visitors to play with cross-references in the coda of ‘Wandering Rocks’ on a computer screen. The steps of two flights of stairs transformed the names of HCE and then, via Everyman, those of Leopold Bloom, up to ‘Old Ollebo, M.P.’ Ours may well have been one of the few exhibitions where even the simple toilet was incorporated. It displayed how various translations come to term with ‘POST NO BILLS’ being transformed into ‘POST 110 PILLS’. In the nature of transient exhibitions, this one too had a short lifespan but attracted a good deal of notice. As it had to fit into the given space of the building and was, moreover, based on German translations, the exhibition could not be exported. In 2004 another exhibition was arranged for the local Zentralbibliothek, which Joyce had extensively used in his Zurich years. Long ago Phil Herring, who was transcribing Ulysses notebooks at the time, found words that he surmised Joyce had jotted down in the library, and one was ‘fubsy’ (epithet for a widow in ‘Proteus’). He also found what he rightly took to be a call number, and sure enough, it turned out to be the works of Thomas Otway, and it so happened that I saw a thin pencil mark right opposite that particular word in the margin. Though it can hardly be proved, we hereby declare this pencil mark authentic. These holdings of the library had been shown long ago, in 1972, when the first Joyce exhibition was staged, with the help of Rainer Diederichs, one of the directors. This time Ursula and Ruth again worked together to set up their visually attractive and informative contribution to the Bloomsday anniversary. They have become adept at presenting Joyce to a public that knows little about him, and both their exhibitions were successful and well attended.

Didn’t you do what must have been a fairly novel electronic demonstration of a Wake passage in the late eighties? For an earlier Joyce exhibition in the Strauhof, devoted to Joyce and John Cage, I had tried my inexperienced hand at a hypertext demonstration of Finnegans Wake, assuming that younger visitors would not tackle its profundities, but that by fiddling with a computer, they might be drawn into its delights. The Wake paragraph about a wake, from ‘Shize?’ to ‘fuddled, O!’ was a pars pro toto sample. The technicalities were beyond me, but we got expert help from a specialist who rose to the challenge and set up the display. The short text could be read and heard by two voices and also compared to a German and a French translation, and, of course, explanatory notes could be consulted. This would hardly appear sensational in our enlightened age, but it proved to be an exciting literary toy. The novelty at the time was that innocent players witnessed how ‘plubs and grumes and cheriffs’ became edible plums, prunes or cherries by way of ‘Mrs Hooligan’s Christmas Cake’. The real ‘aha’ experience was that one unexpectedly heard the actual tune and experienced how a text burst into melodic life. The inaccessible Wake became music and fun and alive. Whenever we heard ‘Brian O’Linn’ or ‘Phil the Fluter’s Ball’ from below stairs we knew someone was fiddling with the (perhaps first?) electronic Wake. All of this sounds trite and old hat now, but at the time it worked, and the display was even shown at the Dublin symposium of 1992.

You have mentioned, on and off, an electronic Giacomo Joyce. The Foundation’s small staff is usually engrossed in day-today business. So with the exceptions noted earlier, we cannot set aside a team for comprehensive projects. One of those, at the moment more a concept than a reality, is to co-ordinate a hyperlinked edition of Giacomo Joyce, the one work by Joyce that could be managed electronically. I have already set up a few hyperlinked didactic toys to demonstrate thematic networks on the smaller scale (the coda of ‘Wandering Rocks’, the Sirens Overture, ‘Metempsychosis’, for example). The scope may look narrow and limited, but since everything appears to be linked with everything else – and a lot outside in the big wide world – it can already swell to gigantic proportions. Or just imagine a passage, a chapter, let alone the whole of Ulysses, which would include some or most of the available translations! Anything larger would spread out exponentially, beyond reasonable limits. A modest, fairly inclusive, hyperlinked Giacomo Joyce, to be called HyGiac, would be a joint effort with various scholars or amateurs, each adding their quota and their ideas. A Trieste team, under the able guidance of Silvia de Rosa, seems willing to take up the idea, at least the collocation of material. Publication on the web might prove problematical, given the paralyzing stranglehold on copyright, but it’s on the cards that, perhaps, communal scholarship cannot be curbed for ever.

How about the project of an electronic Ulysses? The future is certainly in electronic devices, with hierarchical structures and any number of links, a welcome way to get around linear, sequential presentation. One such communal endeavour is devoted to an overdue electronic Ulysses with annotation, pictures, sound, documents and comments, as has been originated by Michael Groden in collaboration with a number of Joyce scholars. A core team convened at a special Zurich workshop to outline the procedures. The inherent danger is always the Gifford syndrome: static annotations disguised as relevant comments. The project may well founder on the basic twin requirements, funding and copyright permission, so that the venture looks suspended for the time being. A similar project was started at the Boston James Joyce Research Center but has been aborted. Such ventures are of Herculean dimensions and are potentially endless. I see no danger of any CD or DVD telling us everything or exhausting the subject. An electronic Ulysses will have to be reduced to practical proportions. It will facilitate research but never replace it.

You mentioned the financial basis of the Foundation earlier. What about scholarships and student exchanges? Perhaps the Foundation’s most rewarding opportunities are the scholarships that we can offer. So far they have been of two kinds, or three, actually, for there are grants from outside that enable scholars to work at the Foundation. A generous federal scholarship enabled Marianna Gula, from Debrecen, Hungary, to spend many months in our research centre. A grant from the Daimler-Benz Stiftung brought Katharina Hagena to us for an extended and fruitful stay. She was doing her studies at the University of Freiburg with Professor Willi Erzgräber, one of the authorities on Joyce in Germany. Katharina became very involved in our activities (we also shared an interest in soccer). Her research area was the sea in Ulysses, and when she joined us on one of the pilgrimages I introduced her to the Irish Sea in Sandycove. She later put in a few semesters at Trinity College, Dublin and returned to Freiburg to finish her thesis, which resulted in a study Developing Waterways (1996). I hope that in the course of time there will be more such opportunities offered by institutions. The European Erasmus students’ exchange has brought a few young enthusiasts to our Foundation. Some of them used their sojourn in Zurich to look in, and they often joined either my introductory courses or the Ulysses reading group. One of them was a young Irish student from Bray, Conor Wyer, who, like others, found a kind of home from home on our premises, and it appears an earlier dormant interest in Joyce was revived. Conor Wyer has been with us ever since he first looked in; we later gave him one of our scholarships, and he took part in two of our workshops. He has become an excellent Joyce scholar who has lectured at the Dublin and at the Trieste summer schools and talked Joyce in the Foundation (where we avoid the term ‘lecture’). He is now engaged in a study of the Irish reception of Joyce.

How about the Zurich Scholarships? This brings me to our own scholarships. The first one was a donation by the city of Zurich and was spontaneously offered by its mayor, Thomas Wagner, at a meeting. I thought the money (CHF25’000) would be best employed by giving promising young scholars an opportunity to do research in our library, and the trustees concurred. The sum given was sufficient for two scholarships of half a year each. In subsequent years the city renewed its contribution twice. The first to apply was Marlena Corcoran, originally from Brown University. She fitted in well and even initiated and organized an ad hoc workshop on Dubliners (her field of expertise) in 1988. She also acted as a kind of diplomatic service for the Foundation, and it was there that we discovered her journalistic talent, one among many. She set some standards, including a sartorial one. This grant, jointly offered by the city of Zurich and the Foundation, was also given to Chitra Panikkar from Trivandrum, Kerala, India, who had heard of it and applied. She is mentioned elsewhere. During her stay she translated parts of ‘Eumaeus’ (she participated in our workshop on the episode) and, in particular, the Water Hymn in ‘Ithaca’. Years later, at the symposium in London 2000, she was a keynote speaker and told us of Indian attitudes to Joyce and censorship. Everybody loved Chitra, who has returned to the Foundation a few times and found a position teaching in Hyderabad. Andrew Treip was an English scholar whose interest was in Finnegans Wake and genetics, so he was a welcome addition to the Wake reading group. Together we went to one of the Paris colloques. Unfortunately Andrew could not pursue what looked like a promising career and had to make a living outside of Joyce studies, so we have lost track of him. We then had Dan Schiff from Berkeley, who was primarily an artist and draftsman, but equally an amateur who, with his infectious enthusiasm, greatly animated not only the reading groups but the entire institution. He may have been the only person apart from our staff who looked at every single object we had, from artwork to a ticket from Joyce’s Volta Cinema of 1909. He is also an avid collector of Joyceana and curiosities, and we have never had anyone who did more for our guest book. (My persistent efforts to make visitors and regulars commemorate themselves in that guest book has been a failure to which I have grown resigned.) Dan has often returned to Zurich and on each occasion entertained us with a vivid presentation. It was he who designed one of our book-bags. Christie Burns came from the College of William and Mary in Virginia, and her research focused on

Finnegans Wake. She and Dan Schiff were residents during our workshop on repetition and negation, and she added some of those theoretical aspects that are generally given short shrift at the Foundation. She joined me on a trip to Trieste where we both took a transient part in a Joyce festival that lasted for several weeks. Susan Bazargan also made use of a scholarship. I remember first seeing her in Provincetown in 1983, where she stood out in a panel of graduate students, and we exchanged a few words and, later on, letters. We met again in Frankfurt the following year and kept in touch. I sensed a kind of similar wavelength, so she was an obvious candidate for a scholarship. But her stay in Zurich was interrupted by numerous journeys to Spain where her parents were in poor health. The Friends therefore offered her one of our minor scholarships later on. So Susan has been in the Foundation, on and off, over several years, and she also joined at least one workshop, devoted to annotation. The last of the city scholarships went to Christa Maria Lerm-Hayes from Cologne whose specialty is in the arts. She looked at the intricate and often recondite relationship of Josef Beuys, the German painter, sculptor and perpetual work of art, and Joyce. I think she left no stone unturned and few books untouched. Her work is the comprehensive study, James Joyce als Inspirationsquelle für Josef Beuys. Her stay coincided with the second Zurich symposium of 1996, where she conducted several tours of the local Kunsthaus and demonstrated potential influences. She then settled in Dublin with her husband and has been teaching in Ireland ever since. In the anniversary year of 2004, she was responsible for a pertinent art exhibition in Dublin and assembled an amazing number and range of pictures and sculptures related to Joyce. Its voluminous catalogue, Joyce in Art, is a witness to her dedication. Réka Gáborjáni Szabó came from Budapest, Hungary, and became interested in Jungian synchronicities. It appears that conditions in Hungary did not allow her to pursue an academic career; we lost track of her, and she never showed up at the Szombathely conferences. Marilyn Reizbaum, from Bowdoin College, Maine, spent a few weeks in Zurich as early as 1993. She still found Jewish connections of Joyce in Zurich, including Lily Ruf of the Brauchbar family who, for many years, was a regular participant in a Wake reading group. As a young girl, Lily had seen Joyce but had hardly talked to him. Marilyn was among the first to give a talk to the Friends, and it was she who chaired an extra workshop on maternity in Joyce. Her study of Joyce’s Jewish Other was a landmark, but unfortunately its publication was delayed many years so that it might well appear as though she had followed other scholars on the subject who had actually been able to profit from her earlier work. In the autumn of 1990 I had an opportunity to run a short Joyce course in Bowdoin College, and we started a short-lived Finnegans Wake group.

I believe that when the city of Zurich discontinued the scholarship, the Friends of the Zurich James Joyce Foundation fortunately stepped in. The Friends of the Zurich James Joyce Foundation are a supportive group who, through their modest annual fee, help the Foundation with occasional acquisitions. They also invite scholars, or anyone who has something relevant to say, for events in our small conference rooms. These are called ‘Strauhof Lectures’, after the building we are in, but all performers are warned not to lecture. A number of reputable Joyceans and a few translators have taken up the offer, including younger and emerging scholars. Among the writers who have come are Robert Anton Wilson, Gerald Dawe, Michael Longley, John McGahern and John Banville. We cannot fly them in, but the Friends offer a modest fee. Most importantly the Friends of the Zurich James Joyce Foundation provide scholarships of two months or less (pro rata) for emerging new talent, often students who have shown promise. Ever since 1999 we have had a series of mainly younger researchers. Almost all of them have blended in well, and we have generally gained a lot by what they brought to us: ideas, knowledge or just an enhancement of the atmosphere. From Germany we had: Anke Schuckmann, who approached Joyce as a linguist and looked at word formations; Catrin Siedenbiedel, whose work was on the female figures in Finnegans Wake (now available as Metafiktionalität in Finnegans Wake; in spite of its title it is highly readable and, in fact, probably the best introduction to the Wake in German); Vike Plock finished her studies on medical aspects in Joyce. Susana Pejares Tosca came from Spain and is an expert on computer techniques applied to literature; Olga Fernandez Vicente is also Spanish, or rather (and proudly) Basque and so compared Joyce to the writer Pio Baroja. We naturally accorded a scholarship to Conor Wyer from Ireland. So far there have been two students from Italy: Ilaria Natali who devoted herself to the neglected Pomes Penyeach, and Serenella Zanotti, who looked into early translations of Ulysses. It is gratifying to know that both of them continue their research. Susan Bazargan has already been mentioned. Jared Greene came from Harvard and was followed by Keri Ames, whose enthusiasm is always catching and who, since her first spell in 2003, has not missed a Zurich workshop. Naturally she, a classical scholar, and I, an amateur trying to spell out the Odyssey with autodidactic Greek, took the opportunity to compare notes on Homer. Katie Brown, from Montana but studying at Trinity College, Dublin, was the last of our American scholars to date. She, a great singer, was looking at Joyce’s music. Maria Kager from Amsterdam had a similar topic: under the aegis of Christine van Boheemen she compared Joyce’s and Thomas Mann’s use of music. Incidentally, most of our young grant scholars were recruited at the summer schools in Trieste or Dublin.

Didn’t you decide to give priority to students from Eastern Europe?

Since the funds of the Friends of the Zurich James Joyce Foundation are not unlimited, we decided to privilege students from Eastern European countries who otherwise could hardly afford the expenses in Switzerland even for a short stay. We have had students from Hungary. The first was Tekla Mecsnóber from Budapest, whom I had seen at the conference in Szombathely of 1993. She attended summer schools and has quickly risen to prominence in her own country and in the Joyce community. We were also glad to have Marianna Gula back as a grant scholar, and I am fairly sure that she now knows more about Irish nationalism and the ‘Cyclops’ chapter than anyone else. We also had Zsuzsa Csikai from Pécs where, thanks to Mária Kurdi, there is an emphasis on Irish Studies, drama in particular. Zsuzsa looked at dramatic adaptations of Ulysses. Arleen Ionescu came from Romania and researched the Joyce part of a comparative study. Beata Golenska from Poland focused on Portrait and Dubliners. Ilonka Persić is based in Split, Croatia, and her area is Joyce and Svevo. Irena Grubica, also from Croatia, spent one month in Zurich after she had often been to the Trieste summer school, and I was glad that she could finally follow up our invitation. It so happened that when Stacey Herbert and her film crew looked in at the Foundation to cover Joyce’s Zurich years, Irena could contribute something about Joyce in Pula, and it filled what otherwise would have been a gap in the documentary film, Following James Joyce: From Dublin to Buffalo. Diana Stefanova from Sofia, Bulgaria, was particularly appreciative of the opportunity to do research in our library, and it greatly helped her in her study of Dubliners, which she pursued with extraordinary devotion. Though a relative novice, she could hold her own in our workshop on Joycean naming. Olena Fomenko hailed from the Ukraine; her orientation was linguistic. Lists are always a trifle tedious unless they are enlivened by Cyclopean incongruities, yet I bring in this enumeration to indicate the scope of our visitors.

What, ideally, would you wish for, beyond what’s possible at present? Everything depends on money. As I said, we were lucky that a powerful bank stepped in and got us on the road. Thanks to the old Union Bank of Switzerland and to Dr Robert Holzach, enough capital accrued so that we can continue modestly. What would still be desirable are funds to provide free accommodation for visiting scholars and especially students, in particular from countries that are less well off than many parts of Europe or the US. Our workshops would benefit if we could subsidize participants. However, I do feel that some commitment is also required. Some scholars make their participation in whatever event entirely dependent on departmental funding, and I ruefully remember how, for many years, I paid my own way, an expensive way on a proofreader’s salary, even to conferences I had helped to initiate. Many enthusiasts have done the same as a matter of course. I think of Jean Schoonbroodt, the priest from Louvain, Belgium, an old friend who has come to every one of the nineteen symposia, and the many amateurs that keep turning up and whom we would miss: Judith Harrington, Dan Schiff or Friedhelm Rathjen, to mention just a few that come readily to mind. (Alas, my listing is far from complete or systematic.) So I wish we could offer subsidies for Zurich, a city almost as expensive as Dublin these days. But on balance, those who spend some time at the Foundation at their own expense actually save a lot of time that eventually can make even considerable expense worthwhile. Incidentally, all events at the Foundation (except when whole groups come to visit) are free, in particular our weekly Ulysses and Finnegans Wake readings. Since we have such an institute it is only fair that a larger public can profit from its resources. But what I said is not quite true: we have recently charged a nominal fee for our August workshop, a modest CHF50, which compares well with the fee of €250 for the Dublin symposium (which was of equal length).

I know how important the workshops are for you. What makes them special? I consider them our highlights. Once a year, at least, we want to have real experts, along with promising newcomers, investigating one significant theme in depth and detail. Personal gratification comes in as well. Looking back at my own motivation, I am aware (which for a long time I was not) that my overall fascination is with dynamics (for lack of a better word). I try to find such features in the text, particularly disruptions and incongruities, and I turn to these time and again. Therefore I am for as much interaction and live modification as possible. You have often heard me say that verbs should have precedence over nouns; processes over objects with certain properties; discussions over monologues. This sounds so atrociously trite, hardly worth repeating – who, after all, would be against that? – but our general practice is still tediously inert. On our home territory at least we can set up our own rules, partly in contrast to the ineluctable (I wanted to get this word in) procedure of major conferences. It is a game not always understood, the game to include the others, to incite continuation, expansion and constructive disagreement.

The workshops as outlined seem not to favour monologues. The ideal, quite simply, is to facilitate the exchange of ideas as against a string of monologues. Monologues do have their use and function, and we have all profited from some scholarly lectures and were bored by others. When we are condemned to passive silence, interest is much more likely to flag, and, as we know, usually everyone perks up when questions take over, assuming that the questions are real and pertinent, not the meandering amplification of non-epiphanies (why can’t questioners mentally

rehearse and condense what they are going to say?). We have all been animated by live discussion, in seminars or ad hoc, and we have all been bored by long lectures. But the format of conferences perversely favours the lecture system, I mean, the lecture only system. Fortunately more and more sessions become less constricted and allow for a lively give and take. Of course every participant has to be given a slot and the opportunity of a tight presentation. Through no one’s fault, there is often no time for discussion – discussions, moreover, are generally at the end of a series of short papers, and naturally tend to focus on the last one. At our Zurich symposiums we set aside a room for follow-ups: when a discussion had to be cut short, as usual, those interested could come together later on and thrash things out. That may mean missing attendance somewhere else, but it gave those with a vibrant interest a chance to develop a theme. The impatience to be excluded is also reduced by the awareness that one can still have one’s say, after all. At our workshops we generally assign our morning sessions to follow-ups or to topics that crop up in the proceedings. When I say I enjoy our symposiums and practically all our Joycean gatherings, this is merely a tautology: I like what I help to bring about. I am fully aware of the drawbacks, the crowds, self-aggrandizement, the pomposities here and there, the dreary recital of typescripts and the à la carte menu of topics, none of which can ever be given enough attention. Smaller, more intimate gatherings with a narrower, specific focus can allot more time to each speaker and more scope to the arguments and their expansion. If something is worth talking about, it can hardly be limited to the twenty minutes that have become the average at conferences. To cut down my own preceding ramble into concise form: what have been my prejudices or obsessions in our own workshops now turn into the rules of the game.

You are, of course, not unique in your quest for focused get-togethers. Indeed, there have always been workshops with a given focus. Claude Jacquet’s regular Colloques Joyce in Paris often concentrated on one topic: once it was Flaubert in comparison with Joyce, Joyce’s notes, or one specific work. Geert Lernout has been responsible for a series of gatherings in Antwerp, a Joycean stronghold, and I remember some very animated presentations there, many of them on problems of genetics. The respective Ulysses reading groups of London and Leeds, much more academic (in the good sense) than ours in Zurich, have devoted single-day conferences to specific episodes. I recall ‘Ithaca’, ‘Wandering Rocks’, ‘Scylla and Charybdis’, with nostalgia.

Could you sketch the earliest workshops in Zurich and recall some of the participants? When our Foundation was launched in May 1985 and only a few of my books had been transferred to stillempty shelves, I wanted to open with a workshop and make it an annual fixture on our calendar. We quickly settled for August as a compromise (which, to my disappointment seems to cut out, for ritual reasons, the French and the Italians). We, that is Ruth and myself, put the least assimilated episode of Ulysses, ‘Oxen of the Sun’, on the agenda and hastily sent out invitations, and a competent group was assembled at short notice. We were lucky to have Charles Peake from London (I had first met him in Paris, 1982), an excellent scholar of the old school and a rich source to be tapped. From Munich we had Hans Gabler with Claus Melchior and Harald Beck (both had collaborated on the synoptic Ulysses). A new scholar from England turned up, Andrew Gibson, as well as Carla Marengo and Claude Jacquet. Because of the biases expatiated upon just now, we instituted, or at least strongly encouraged, short presentations with extended discussion. Enough time was allotted to spontaneous arguments, and, in any case, a small group (we cannot accommodate more than twenty) was practically together for the whole week. The workshops are now part of our (unwritten) constitution, and, with two exceptions, we have had one every year. Charles Peake came to the first three, until his premature death in 1988, and almost by himself made them a success, so all subsequent ones have been in memoriam Charles Peake. Ulrich Schneider from Erlangen was another dependable standby who always contributed something substantial. In the early years of the Foundation, we also had a few weekend meetings devoted to Homer’s impact. The participants came mainly from Germany. Jörg Drews attended them before he became a regular at the workshops. In common with many German scholars, he became a Joycean via Arno Schmidt. Of panoramic scope, Jörg Drews is also well versed in German literature, philosophy and theories, but he never forced any jargon on us and remains refreshingly informative.

Tell me more about Ulrich Schneider. I had known him ever since he visited me in the sixties as a young student from Bonn, one of several who studied under Professor Arno Esch, at a time when few German academics graduated to authors like Joyce. The initiative came from Eberhard Kreutzer, who was the first to come to visit me for consultation about his study of wordplay (Sprache und Spiel im Ulysses von James Joyce, 1969). He was followed by Viktor Link who looked into ‘Circe’ in order to decide what was ‘real’ and what was imagination or hallucination. He later attended the Trieste symposium of 1971 but then moved to other pastures, until he surfaced again a few years ago and made me come to his university in Braunschweig. He was also present at Wolfgang Wicht’s sixty-fifth birthday celebration in Potsdam, Germany, in 2003. Uli Schneider and I stayed in touch. He brought Joyce studies to his university in Erlangen, and he generally made me speak to his students once a year. Ulrich was one of those who improved every occasion by his mere presence. His dissertation on the function of quotations, written in German,

deserves much more attention than it has received. He was a solid and unpretentious scholar of the nononsense sort, who always did good work. In later years he focused on Dubliners. Another specialty of his was the music hall, the topic of his last talk in Zurich. It was a great and sudden loss when he died in 1995. He is sadly missed. Georgia Herlt joined the ranks in Dublin, 1977 as a young student with a permanent interest in Finnegans Wake, then went to Southern Illinois before finishing her dissertation in Frankfurt. For many years we were in close contact until she changed tracks and entered the service of the Goethe Institute, which brought her to various cities, so that our paths occasionally still cross. Among the students from Bonn, Germany, who were engaged on theses dealing with Ulysses and who came to spend a few days in Unterengstringen, where I lived, was a young woman with an aristocratic name, Christine ZU Mecklenburg. I commented on it, but there was no response, and I left it at that. It turned out later that she was indeed German aristocracy, as I discovered when an invitation reached me to her wedding, which was to take place in Schloss Hohenzollern. I passed that one up as I might not have been able to cope with the dress code. I merely throw this in to show in which circles I could move, at will.

There was also Katie Wales, with whom you shared some interests. For me she is connected with Charles Peake whose student I believe she was. What we had in common was an interest in language. She is a trained linguist, I an amateur philologist, and we learned from each other. It was great to have her at our Eumaeus workshop long ago, and we met in London or Leeds on several occasions. But she, too, has drifted to other fields and has become an authority on linguistics, where she is much in demand. I wish we could have her back in the fold, a prodigal daughter. She always has something concrete and illuminating to say. This should not be worth special mention but, as a matter of fact, it is.

How do you decide on your workshop topics? Our workshop topics must have a focus and yet allow for diverse approaches, in parallactic variety. Relevant points should be raised and presented in as open a fashion as the topic allows, with instant questions or clarifications if necessary. The main part is reserved for critical and friendly disputation. One advantage is that even a fairly poor exposition (we have had a number of those, too) may trigger inspired arguments. A few times we zeroed in on a particular chapter (‘Eumaeus’ or II.2 of Finnegans Wake; more recently ‘Cyclops’), but more general topics soon took over: synaesthesia, songs (with a performance of Joycean music), repetition and negation, expectation, alienation – this sounds rather static and abstract, but it wasn’t. Once we looked into ‘Homer behind Joyce behind Homer’, or ‘Dreaming’ (notice the emphasis on the act). We may well have been the first to single out ‘kitsch’, which plays such an important part in Joyce and in our lives. One workshop was devoted to Michael Groden’s project of an annotated Ulysses and the problematic issues it entailed. At the end of a workshop the following year’s topic is generally decided, and it often clusters around a hardcore group of experts in a particular area. For the workshop on kitsch in 1989 we engaged a professional singer to perform such songs as the aria in Martha, Irish ballads like ‘The Croppy Boy’– pieces that potentially could verge on kitsch. ‘Love’s Old Sweet Song’ has meanwhile become the official Joycean anthem and often is the maudlin climax when another Bloomsday is nearing its convivial end. The performance was held in Dorothea Isler’s house in the foothills of the Alps, with its collection of wonderful old instruments. Dorothea was Hansruedi’s sister, a trained musician. This outing became a fixture of the workshops on the Wednesday afternoon when we call a break and take a boat trip down the Lake of Zurich to Rapperswil. For many summers, a main attraction of the barbecue at Dorothea’s was her swimming pool, which facilitated euphoric infantile regression. There never was a happier bunch of Joyceans than us splashing in that pool, and all that was required was an inflatable duck. Later in the evening, when the sun had set behind the hills, there were musical performances. Dorothea, alas, contracted a malign form of cancer, and she died after a short but intense illness. We still take the Zürichsee boat for Rapperswil, a pleasant old town with a castle. The boat trip also set the scene on Bloomsday 1996, the opening day of the Zurich symposium, and Joyceans had a chance to come together and relax on the water before the conference started. Of all Joyce’s cities, Zurich is the only one that can boast a lake, the subject of his poem ‘Alone’. Also, we all remember the fabulous parties in Guido Würth’s spacious apartments. For a while he had attended the Wake reading group, more observing than participating, and he generally invited us and served excellent white wine. He had done some pioneering work in cinema techniques and had some strange appartuses in his apartment, and also an African chief’s wooden bed. He usually showed us his collection of Egyptian antiquities, including at least one bona fide mummy and a lot of figurines, and when we had our workshop on kitsch he demonstrated, by way of objects or inscriptions, that something like kitsch may have existed for millenia.

Are there still many regulars? Mary Power has often been with us and, in recent years, John Bishop, Jolanta Wawrzycka, Jörg Drews,

Friedhelm Rathjen, Michael O’Shea, Greg Downing, Keri Ames and (the way all enumerations end) more than can be mentioned by name. Even if the Muses were at hand, or our archival records, a comprehensive list would be tedious, and some names might still be left out. The workshops are listed on our website.

Why don’t you recall, for posterity, those popular Dublin pilgrimages? For about ten years the Zurich Foundation arranged a Dublin Pilgrimage over an extended weekend, generally in spring, including a holiday like Ascension or Whitsuntide. The excursion always included a trip to the Tower with a walk by the sea at Sandycove, with a lunch in Fitzgerald’s pub with all its Joyce illustrations. Our ‘Lotuseaters’ walk was always on Sunday morning, sometimes under the expert guidance of Gerry O’Flaherty, winding up in Bewley’s Oriental Café. A Saturday excursion might have taken us along the course of the Liffey (also conducted by Gerry O’Flaherty), or to Clongowes or Glendalough, and once we visited the Museum of the Dublin Metropolitan Police in Phoenix Park. They were obviously gratified to have a group visiting with a real interest, and all the more so since we enquired after ‘Old Troy’ (who was ‘in the force’). And, sure enough, their records showed one particular Troy who, in 1904, however, was still in the force, and so he may or may not have been the real one. I felt a bit like Heinrich Schliemann excavating the real Troy. We naturally saw many museums, or Marsh’s Library, or walked all the way to Glasnevin, with a stop in Brian Boru’s. I was thrilled to find there an old poster of July 1904, announcing the liquidation of the pub, which has since changed ownership. It is unlikely that Joyce knew of this event, but it so happens that when the funeral carriage passed it, the pub was about to undergo a commercial death. The evening of our arrival we usually met a few Dublin friends in a pub and, of course, they, the natives, true to form when seeing a guest from Switzerland, or from anywhere for that matter, immediately offer a drink. It happened that when one of our Swiss contingent was asked, ‘Can I get you a drink?’, the guest declined and the explanation was considered one of the funniest ever heard in Dublin: ‘No, thank you. I’ve had one!’

Do you feel enough work has been done on Joyce in Zurich? Yes, I think so. I can’t imagine that any more prime facts could be unearthed. An occasional letter may turn up, or a witness, though by now it is more likely to be someone who remembers one of Joyce’s contemporaries. I always thought there might be a cache of material in some remote Zurich attic, like the one that turned up in Alex Léon’s apartment (and is now in Ireland’s National Library), but chances look slim. We sometimes get a request, like the recent one about Joyce’s stay in Zurich, when he went to see Troilus and Cressida, and whether we had any records of it. Now, of course, we don’t have any records in Zurich; whatever records Joyce had he took with him. A few years ago a request came to ferret out documents about the lawsuit that Joyce had had with Henry Carr at the Bezirksgericht in 1919, but nothing could be found. Long ago, when I was busy with Ellmann’s biography, I found that a lawyer who was involved in the case still had his office. But I was told that no records survived, as Joyce at the time was not yet a celebrity but simply someone petulant with a paltry and wholly non-memorable grievance. I already mentioned the widow of Armin Kesser and a few biographical glances by way of his diary. There are still those who want to find a connection between Joyce and the Dadaists, but there does not seem to be any documentation of a mutual interest.

Isn’t it a pity that the Faerber/Luchsinger book, Joyce in Zurich, isn’t available in English? Yes, Thomas Faerber and Markus Luchsinger’s Joyce in Zurich of 1988 has long been out of print and will hardly be revived without another substantial subvention. During the golden old times, the former bank had actually initiated the project and offered a grant for a study of Joyce’s Zurich period. I heard of it almost by chance at a staff meeting of the English Department where it appeared no one had taken up the offer. So I suggested two of my former students – incidentally they had helped a great deal with the symposium of 1979 – who then went to work efficiently and first produced a little monograph that was issued by the Bank. They later expanded it to a full-length study that was launched in the James Joyce Pub and then brought to Venice in 1988. Unfortunately it has never been translated, and that would still be a worthwhile effort. Biased as I am, I think the book would deserve more attention. Faerber and Luchsinger had access to Ellmann’s correspondence with Alfred Dutli, who acted as a local agent and reported back. When they did their research, we had not heard of a forgotten witness, Otto Luening, and his autobiography (The Odyssey of an American Composer). Luening’s autobiography has a long chapter on his activities in Zurich and on Joyce, especially the English Players and the Henry Carr entanglement. Some of us briefly met Otto Luening at the second Philadelphia conference where Ruth Bauerle introduced us. His memories of Zurich were still vivid. Joyce in Zurich does for Zurich what John McCourt has done for Trieste, but since Joyce spent more years in Trieste and was more influenced by his prolonged stay in Austria than he was in our city, McCourt’s Years of Bloom (2000) is much wider in scope and has more material to deal with. When Joyce returned to Zurich in 1915, his mind was much more made up than ten years earlier, and the impact of Zurich is less significant than that of Trieste.

Why don’t you talk about some of the prize items in your collection? A few books deserve special mention. There are a small number of first editions, even one poorly preserved first Ulysses. We did get the letters Joyce had written to Carola Giedion-Welcker, also many postcards, and a few to Felix Béran and others, even unpublished ones, two, incidentally, from Lucia Joyce. It is a shame that in the near future no reasonably complete, well-edited edition of Joyce’s letters looks possible. We were also given some material that was left behind by Frank Budgen. Psychologically the most treasured little item is a tiny note on which Joyce scribbled the nucleus of what later was elaborated into ‘Elenfant has siang his triump …’ (FW 244), a snippet from Joyce’s own workshop that also shows how a simple idea later developed. Dan Schiff singled out a ticket to Joyce’s Volta cinema as, in his view, the most prized object. We display two of Joyce’s walking sticks, one tie and a battered suitcase as personal relics, but what I never fail to show our guests is a genuine Jacob’s biscuit tin, identical in shape to what the Citizen aimed at Bloom, but a later model. Many readers have never seen a ‘moustache cup’ (Milly’s birthday gift) and we can produce one, as well as a few Plumtree’s Potted Meat jars and some genuine Eugen Sandow dumbbells. Once more, the emphasis is on the work, not the individual, James Joyce. Since we could never boast of many rare books, much as we’d like to have more of them, I find source books like Thom’s Directories or old histories of Dublin more important for our purposes as a research library. We have been trying to assemble Bloom’s library, The Story of the Heavens, Three Trips to Madagascar, When We Were Boys and In the Track of the Sun, in their original editions, but also Eugen Sandow’s Physical Strength. So far we have assembled about half of the books that are listed in Bloom’s library, where many do not have exact bibliographical credentials. My best buy ever was probably the Latin Prosody by the Portuguese priest Emanuel Alvarez, from which Joyce quotes in A Portrait, which also contains an Ars Rhetorica in Latin and English listing the rhetorical forms as they must have been taught in Joyce’s time. Books, not so much to treasure and lock away, but to work with. I mustn’t forget those dummy books that I took to the first symposia with many signatures, now our guest books where visitors are cajoled into recording thoughts for posterity. In helping us assemble Joyceana, especially Irish material, there is no one like Tim O’Neill with his antiquarian interests and intuitions. I once tried to set up a team of what I called ‘consultants’ who would scout around and find books, magazines and realia in their respective countries. Tim was the most active, and among the items he sent us was contemporary documentation of the Phoenix Park Murders of 1882, still awaiting investigation. The Foundation has been able to acquire an almost complete run of the Little Review and a few copies of Culotte Rouge, the mildly frivolous French publication that Stephen Dedalus remembers bringing from Paris.

I know that the Foundation does not have the intriguing Martha Fleischmann letters: are they still in Zurich? They are. Heinrich Straumann allowed Ellmann to use them in the second volume of the Letters and gave an account of how he had been approached by Martha Fleischmann after Joyce’s death in 1941, when his name was in the papers, and she must have realized the fame of her epistolary admirer. They now belong to Ursula Straumann, who has been willing to lend them for exhibitions. Such holographs have become so valuable and expensive that they are out of reach of scholarly institutions. When some of the Fleischmann letters were exhibited at the Zentralbibliothek in 1972, the library’s first Joyce exhibition of three so far, the librarian told me that a relative of Fleischmann’s had turned up and complained. The complaint was not that she may have had an affair (in itself somewhat doubtful, for we will never know what exactly happened on Joyce’s thirty-seventh birthday, when he met her in Budgen’s improvised studio and the two later went out) – but that she had died a pauper. The letters to Martha are revealing not only because Joyce imitated Bloom’s clandestine technique using Greek epsilons – or is it the other way round? – but also because of their dripping sentimentality, pure undiluted kitsch even! I always wondered if Joyce had devised a style that he considered propitious for whatever intention he had, or if he engaged in a practice run for Gerty MacDowell’s indirect style. Better psychologists than I should probe this. It is possible to reconstruct how Joyce from his apartment in Universitätstrasse 29 could see her window in Culmannstrasse. Frank Budgen told us that Joyce saw her ‘pull a chain’, which would indicate that Joyce’s eyes were quite good when he needed them. From what we know from Ellmann, Martha or ‘Marthe’, as Joyce addressed her in his letters and as Budgen refers to her, was protected by a ‘guardian’ (the legal term is ‘Vormund’ in German) by name of Rudolf Hiltpold. Many years ago, when Marilyn Reizbaum was tracing some of Joyce’s Jewish connections in the municipal archives, we found in the Directory of 1919 that the house where Martha Fleischmann lived listed several Hiltpolds; a whole clan seems to have assembled there, and one can only speculate on possible relationships.

The holdings of the Foundation include a substantial collection of ‘Documentary InSights’. In the first place this is something that Dublin ought to have initiated some sixty years ago, when a lot of material was still around. In the sixties, Thom’s Directories of the early years of the century could still be obtained; soon after books of Irish interest became priced out of range. Postcards, now €10 apiece, were practically given away for sixpence a dozen. As late as 1969 I bought a bunch of Dublin newspapers,

everything between 1900 and 1904 I could quickly grab in a few minutes, and I found some trifling documentary items in every one of them. One such paper of 1903 has a detailed report of the by-election in south Meath which was fiercely contested by John Howard Parnell and David Sheehy, with a lot of vituperation on both sides, but nothing of this shows in Bloom’s recollection that still ‘David Sheehy beat him for south Meath’ in ‘Lestrygonians’. I wondered if it would be worth reprinting the whole article just to show, in one tiny example, how sizeable disturbances often leave only a ripple on the surface of Ulysses, tiny tips of potentially momentous icebergs. It is a matter of diminishing returns in textual archaeology. I think our particular project started when Hans Walter Gabler, who knows of my eagerness for such realia, encouraged one of his students, Kathleen Rabl, to direct her dissertation to this area, and a small grant allowed her to survey the Foundation’s holdings, documents, especially pictures, scattered over many books on Dublin, and objects. Kathleen Rabl went far beyond that task and looked around wherever she could, especially in Dublin, and she managed to round up a number of helpers. She got, for example, two pairs of drawers as mentioned by Molly (one ‘closed’, one ‘open’; the difference is revealing). The project had its apotheosis during the Dublin symposium of 1992 when Kathleen staged a fashion exhibition. We also devoted a workshop to ‘Documentary InSights’, with the daughter-in-law of Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, Andrée. I remember that she told us that male and female students in Joyce’s time could only meet on the steps of the National Library. This would explain why there is always a heightened excitement when Stephen passes there, but I find it hard to believe that students did not mix in the classes as well. I probably misunderstood and did not ask the right question. Kathleen Rabl’s initiative manifested itself again when she came to the first Trieste James Joyce summer school in 1997 and instantly got started on clothes in Giacomo Joyce, a project which, of course, comes in for special attention in Trieste. She was instrumental in getting up a marvellous exhibition on the Women of Trieste a few years later. It is enthusiasts like Kathleen whose energy and voluntary efforts contribute much to our dispersed community. On several occasions she has brought a group of students to Zurich, and one such group, I believe, she even took to Trieste in a boat. As there are not sufficient funds to pursue the project with determination, it has been dormant of late, except for a database that lists photographs and drawings in our books and the postcards and similar material. This adds quick visual aids to our reading groups; we can show, for example, the ‘sundial’ that Tom Kernan passes in ‘Wandering Rocks’. By some coincidence, on one of our pilgrimages to Dublin I was taken to a pub that Kernan passes, Crimmins, which, of course, has long been replaced by a newer one but whose location was known. The present owner was redecorating his pub and found the board with the old name, Crimmins, under more recent ones, and so he proudly displayed it. I was pleased (and thought I may have been the first to do so) to order ‘a thimbleful of [their] best gin’ (in the steps of Kernan in ‘Wandering Rocks’), to celebrate the minor excavation.

Speaking of ‘Documentary Insights’: what does Dublin, the real city, mean to you? It meant and means a lot to me, and it is Joyce who brought me there, along with thousands of others in their time. Joyce has become revenue and revenant. You too, Christine, I guess would not now live in Dublin if it had not been for your drifting into a Joyce seminar, in 1982. Naturally we readers look at the city from the wrong end and quibble if and where it departs from its fiction to renew itself as all cities must. The actual city, alive and changing, has beome a fringe benefit to us Joyceans. We discover its charms and its friendliness independent of our point of departure, nowadays also its prices and commercial aspects to which, of course, no city is immune. We cannot expect the city of 1904 to remain unchanged. That Dubliners claim only they can ever understand Joyce is both true and untrue. All it can mean is that specific features are meaningful to them and not to us, and we therefore fasten onto other items. The prejudice is just as valid as the often heard assertion that one must read Joyce, usually meaning Finnegans Wake, aloud, and that it then opens up. It certainly does, but only to the point to which the reading voice, inspired by the reading mind, picks up rhythms and implications. Just giving voice to an opaque passage that I do not already absorb in some conscious or subliminal way does not make it automatically clear. So my understanding of Dublin, to return there, is third-hand. I first heard of it through Ulysses, then, secondly, went to check and do archeological fieldwork. Of course, the Dublin I found and continue to find in constant transition, is far removed from the old one we seek. But then chasing chimeras is fun.

R ANDOM DRAMATIS PERSONAE I will spring some names on you at random and somewhat capriciously, hoping to conjure up memories and stories. Needless to say, we cannot attempt to mention everyone who played a Joycean part during the last half-century. This leads to a bit of a problem. Lists are often characterized not by what they contain but by what, perhaps, they ought to. There is an element of chance in the names that come to your mind, Christine, and those that I remember. Not inviting someone to a party is a risky matter. Having looked at my file of relevant photographs I found that I have pictures of at least 800 people worth remembering. Apart from inevitable omissions and oversights, many whose paths crossed mine were good friends, perhaps generous hosts, good or not so exciting scholars, but there is not much to report except that they were or are good friends. Of necessity there is something arbitrary in what you ask me and in what I recall, even over many months as these reminiscences came together. Some who might feel neglected may, in fact, be lucky to be spared nasty reports.

Frank Budgen Next to Stuart Gilbert’s book, Frank Budgen’s James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses was what helped us in our early struggle to find our way around Ulysses. In passing, I wonder if he initiated the now common pattern ‘x and the making of y’. His account is one of the freshest we have, eminently readable, with no trace of hero-worship. I was therefore happy to hear him speak to a group of guests in the house of one of his former students. It was in late 1959, and I was too shy to approach him after his talk. Some of what he said I knew from his book, other memories later found their way into his autobiography, Myselves When Young. What I never forgot was that, when asked point-blank if he had liked Joyce, he did not launch into lavish praises but stood silent for a few moments, long ones, it seemed to me, reflected and then, with some hesitation, said, ‘Yes, I think I did.’ One could feel him judiciously weighing the pros and cons. Being close to Joyce could at times be trying. Budgen never posed as one of Joyce’s closest confidants. It was on this occasion that I first heard his account of Joyce’s entanglement with Martha Fleischmann. He talked about it only because the story had become known through Ellmann. Budgen did not pretend to know, any more than we can, what exactly happened when Joyce and Martha departed from the artist’s studio where the meeting took place, except that Joyce boasted of some physical contact. When I first met Clive Hart in London in 1958, we wanted to contact Frank Budgen and scanned the phone directory, but we did not know his middle initial, so that we could not choose between two possible Frank Budgens and desisted. Clive traced him later and became a good friend; I think it was he who persuaded Budgen to write his memoirs. So, on later occasions, I got to know Budgen during his holidays in Zurich, and when I was in London, en route to Dublin, he kindly invited me to stay in his house, in the company of Francine, his wife, who was originally Belgian, and his daughter Joan. Joan later donated some Budgen papers and photographs to the Foundation. When the first symposium was on the agenda, Alice Schuster, a German lady living in Ascona, Switzerland (I later learned she had been close to a circle around the artist Josef Beuys), had given me some money towards expenses. The modest sum was sufficient to bring Frank and Francine Budgen to Dublin in 1969, and it was probably the best investment ever. When I met the Budgens at Busáras, the taxi driver did not know the way to Buswell’s Hotel at the corner of Molesworth and Kildare Street, right opposite the Dáil, and had to be directed by me, the foreigner. The hotel did have a reservation but no spare room, and the receptionist was highly apologetic and rang up one hotel after the other to find accommodation, until I suggested there might be a central agency to take care of such emergencies; there was and it worked. This was the easygoing, somewhat haphazard, Dublin of the time with its own charm, which has long since given way to European Union efficiency and prices. In the same vein I remember that I once looked for Leo Knuth who I knew was staying in another hotel, and I asked for him at the desk. The girl, on not finding his name in the list, obviously did not want to disappoint me and asked in her friendliest voice: ‘Would he be here under his own name, sir?’ Budgen never showed off but answered our questions as honestly as he could. His observation was very sharp, as I found out when he described a bird in his garden or gave practical directions about the logistics of London. His description of Zurich in 1918–19 feels true even today and his no-nonsense attitude to Joyce was remarkable. As it happened, I had known the old Pfauen Restaurant more or less as it must have been when Budgen and the others around Joyce sat together and drank the preferred Swiss white wine, ‘Fendant de Sion’. Budgen told me that in the seventies the Joyce Estate still encouraged visits to Lucia in her institution in Northampton and would even pay the taxi fare from the city limits. I was never in the vicinity and probably would not have wanted to intrude anyway. But later, something must have gone wrong when Joyce scholars went to interrogate Lucia, to judge from vague rumours, and it must have had bad effects. As a consequence, restrictive conditions were imposed. In the summer of 1966, after the statue on Joyce’s grave was put up, Budgen met his old friend Paul

Suter, the brother of the sculptor August Suter, for whom Budgen had been a model during the First World War. Joyce had known him and referred to him in his letters. Paul Suter worked for Maggi, manufacturer of very popular dried soups. At one time, writing to Giorgio and Helen in the States, Joyce promised them a small cube of Maggi’s ‘Allerleigemüslisuppe’ (Letters III, 348). Such a coinage shows how Joyce could handle our Zurich vernacular; he turns vegetable soup (‘Gemüsesuppe’) into a typical, though in this case not habitual, diminutive, ‘gemüsli-’, and prefixes it with the very German ‘allerlei’ (all sorts of). Budgen, Paul Suter and myself went to the restaurant, Der weisse Wind, where they had convened long ago (it still retains its former flavour). They started reminiscing about those bygone Zurich days; how, for example, Joyce used to chant, late at night in the streets, ‘et unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam’. From which I gathered, victim of a biographical fallacy, that those words in Stephen’s mind (when Haines examines him in his beliefs toward the end of ‘Telemachus’) are meant to be intoned. I regret that when the three of us went to the new grave in Fluntern cemetery, I did not have a camera to document the occasion: Budgen looking at Joyce’s statue. What stands out in my mind is one of Budgen’s off-hand remarks, that Joyce was ‘a great window dresser’, good at putting on a show, which may serve as a healthy corrective against claims that Joyce read everything thoroughly. August Suter, the sculptor, had used Frank Budgen for a statue in the nude, representing ‘Work’. It is still on view, close to the Urania Observatory (which may or may not be in Finnegans Wake, where, right after ‘arch-diochesse’, it may fittingly become ‘Urinia’). It is easy to recognize Frank Budgen. I said elsewhere that Frank and Francine Budgen as guests of honour helped to make the first James Joyce symposium the success that encouraged us to continue. Budgen was also present at the opening of the second symposium in 1969 but suffered an eye attack and died the following year. The least we could do, Clive and I, was to have a commemorative issue of the Newslitter devoted to him.

Stuart Gilbert I can’t say that I ever knew him. His book on Ulysses was the first piece of criticism I could lay my hands on, and it definitely helped me as an introduction, though I’m sure I didn’t take everything at face value even then. As a pioneering, eye-opening study it had the air of being authorized; it also became part of a pseudo-establishment that had to be attacked by later scholars. Gilbert’s aim was to show that the apparent chaos of the scandalous book was based on traditional structures, and he wanted to anchor it firmly in the Western humanist tradition. The book showed me that it may pay off to look at minutiae closely and, perhaps, find some valid resonances; by ‘valid’ I mean those that make reasonable sense and increase our enjoyment. I have often reiterated that I wish Stuart (an amateur, not a professional critic, by the way), had not circulated that tenacious misnomer of Homeric ‘parallels’ — but now they are here to stay. Stuart’s is a good example of how criticism, with an air of authenticity, can override readers’ own observations. The framework that Stuart first divulged has often been taken over indiscriminately. It is not profitable to put the Homeric analogies before the book’s own experience. Some details have had great repercussions: Stuart lists Bloom’s cigar in ‘Cyclops’ as a muted equivalent of the olive pole that was put into the eye of the giant, and in this role it may have a peripheral function. But this cigar now almost serves as the crown witness for Homeric echoes; it is hardly ever left out and is, for example, implemented by such a sophisticated scholar as Wolfgang Iser. One might, to mention just one instance, also connect it with an earlier thought of Bloom’s, appropriate for the ‘Lotuseaters’ episode, that a cigar ‘has a cooling effect’, and by five o’clock in the afternoon Bloom needs all the cooling effects he can get. This aspect is emphatically not the only comment to be made about that cigar, and possibly of little relevance; it just goes to show that once an item becomes part of the mainstream, it retains its fake status. At the Paris meeting in February 1966 (to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of Joyce’s death), on his birthday, I shook hands with Gilbert very briefly and also saw his wife, Moune. I later wrote to him with a question that he dutifully answered; it was probably in connection with the French translation. In an aside, Gilbert reported that Joyce liked to watch women on bicycles, as he himself did; ‘Don’t we all?’, he implied. When his memoirs came out a few years later we learned that any admiration he had for Joyce as a person had soured considerably in the mid-thirties. Joyce seems to have become more standoffish and, on top of that, was monopolized by different cliques. Because Stuart Gilbert had been part of my initiation I always took his findings, or tips from the stable, for granted; things that don’t have to be attributed any more.

Maria Jolas It was at that Paris meeting in February 1966 that I first saw Maria Jolas, a legendary name for me. At that time she was in agreement with Carola Giedion-Welcker about the statue that was soon to be erected over Joyce’s new grave in Zurich: both found it inappropriate. It shows Joyce with a cigarette, a book, a cane, and with glasses. Over the years we kept in touch and exchanged some letters, especially after she attended the 1973 symposium at which she and Carola Giedion, the two grand old ladies, were lively and full of reminiscences. Both were wearing elaborate, wide hats, and they really enjoyed themselves. At the banquet — we always have a banquet — a duet of singers did some Joycean melodies, including a final

‘Love’s Old Sweet Song’, in a light-hearted way, close to a parody of Victorian drawing-room music. At that point Maria Jolas got up and reminded us that for Joyce this song was not comical at all but would evoke serious sentiments. She started singing it again, with most of the banqueteers joining in; it may not have been the most trenchant rendition ever, but was certainly a moving experience. In the meantime, ‘Love’s Old Sweet Song’ has become the Joycean anthem and a sentimental set piece to wind up Bloomsday celebrations. It was the symposium of 1973 during which a new term, new for some of us anyway, was put on the agenda: ‘Poststructuralism’. Jacques Aubert and Norman Silverstein introduced the notion with a list of names and concise summaries. Maria Jolas, who must have shared my dissatisfaction with a non-descriptive, cop-out label (‘post’ means nothing else than that it follows something), asked in a resonant voice, ‘What are you going to call the next movement?’ She took an active and possibly, at times, over-dominant part in the preparations for the 1975 symposium in Paris. Jacques Aubert, Berni and Shari Benstock and I had visited her the previous spring in her little French village and stayed for a weekend, in connection with one of the Colloques Joyce. The previous day she had taken an active part in an ‘Impeach Nixon’ campaign, when Watergate loomed large. On Saturday evening we all went to a nearby bistro where Jacques Lacan, scheduled to make an appearance at the symposium, appeared on television. What I retain is that when he enunciated solemnly, it appeared to me, but possibly tongue-in-a-French-cheek, the phrase ‘l’autre de l’autre’, most of the audience smiled knowingly. It so happened that this was my introduction — not that I noticed at the time — to that famous ‘Other’ so prominent in criticism since, though he, if it is a he, hasn’t showed up at the Foundation yet. I also remember that Natalie Sarraute paid a visit, but she was silent and refused to have her picture taken. The next morning (it happened to be St Patrick’s Day), Maria told us vividly of her experiences with Lucia Joyce and all the tribulations that Joyce’s poor disturbed daughter caused those around her. Maria Jolas was a great and helpful correspondent. I once asked her if she remembered anything about Goyert’s German translation of Ulysses, and she wrote back that she and her husband had got a great laugh out of Goyert’s literal rendering of ‘in a brown study’ as ‘in einem braunen Studierzimmer’. The phrase is a well-known translator’s trap, and Goyert may have walked right into it. Alerted to the passage, I found that in Gerty’s mind, where the phrase occurs (‘as she mused by the dying embers in a brown study without the lamp …’), she — in so far as it is her phrase — may well have taken it literally in a context of interior decoration. If so, but how could we prove it, it is one case where the wrong translation is also right and the right one not quite in tune, and either solution would be inadequate. Maria Jolas, incidentally, was a translator herself. She liked to have guests in her apartment in Boulevard Raspail, and the last time I saw her there was months before her death. Our discussion hinged around those letters (the ‘dirty’ ones) that Joyce had written to Nora in 1909. When Faber and Faber were bringing out volumes II and III of the Collected Letters (1966), I had heard from Peter de Sautoy, then director whom I visited briefly in his office, that the publishers were still unsure about putting them in. They finally decided against it. Typescripts of them had been circulating, and from what I heard, Maria Jolas had fallen out with the up-and-coming bright star Hélène Cixous (or Berger) who had published them in a French magazine. The letters became available in Ellmann’s edition of the Selected Letters of Joyce (1975). Maria Jolas brought up the topic and related how Joyce in his last years had been worried about certain ‘documents’ he wanted to have back. She assumed he meant those letters that Joyce long ago, in 1915, had left in the custody of his brother Stanislaus. Too late, she was strongly opposed to their publication, all in accordance with what she gathered would have been Joyce’s decision. I saw the problem not so much as a moral one, the preservation of privacy, but more akin to critical or textual decisions about different versions of a literary work. Some authors insist that later variants of their novels should completely replace earlier attempts, but critics may prefer an earlier version. Legally, Joyce’s later intention to take the compromising (if he thought so) letters out of circulation would no doubt have been decisive. The conflict seems to be between an older, more respectable Joyce of the thirties, and a younger one who casually, in the uncertainty of a war, left such documents in his brother’s hands — and to chance. Even after his return to Trieste he seems to have made no attempt to take them back into his own custody. This argument of twenty years ago is not offered in favour of a controversial publication (which cannot be undone now anyway) but because I am interested in how a rebellious, iconoclastic young writer later became proper, respectable and bourgeois. It might happen to any of us. The Joyce that emerges from some of his letters (not the ones just mentioned) or memoirs or the biographies is, unsurprisingly, less than a paragon. However, I often think that he must have had something going for him, having had friends like Frank Budgen, Maria Jolas and Carola Giedion-Welcker.

Richard M. Kain Dick Kain must have been one of the first American Joyce scholars to visit Dublin and to forage for relevant sources. His highly informative and down-to-earth Fabulous Voyager showed in detail how Ulysses is anchored in Dublin reality. He also pointed out the use Joyce made of newspapers like the Freeman’s Journal. Coming early, he was able to acquire many source books. We must have met before 1970, when I was doing six weeks at the School of Letters in Indiana, and he invited me down to Louisville, Kentucky, as far south as I had ever been at the time. I vividly remember sitting on the veranda, or is it called porch, being served fancy drinks in what I assumed was genuine Southern style. His wife, Louise, had done a lot for the musical life of the city, and she came to many of

our conferences. For the 1971 Trieste symposium, he arrived on the transatlantic steamer called, I believe, Andrea Doria, and those already in town awaited his and Norman Silverstein’s arrival at the harbour. The Dick Kain I heard at conferences, already the grand old man, tranquil and erudite, was no longer engaged in detailed research but usually presented cultured snippets and urbane observations about Joyce’s Dublin. He did so at McMaster in 1970 and at the last meeting he attended, in Monaco 1985, which George Sandulescu had arranged to discuss the Gabler edition of Ulysses. Dick Kain had still known some of Joyce’s contemporaries and was on excellent terms with an older generation in Ireland. At the fourth symposium he was visited by a friend of old, Denis Donoghue who, at that time, appeared to think little of our Joycean activities and merely looked in to see Dick. But, by 2002, Donoghue contributed substantially to our Trieste symposium.

Ruth van Phul Ruth van Phul was another amateur dabbler in Joyce whose motivation was explorative curiosity, and I always felt an affinity with her. She belonged to the New York group of Joyceans in the sixties and seventies, gifted dilettantes, regulars at the James Joyce Society meetings at the Gotham Book Mart, all with their own distinct style. I often saw her together with Vicky Pomeranz and Jack Collins, all greatly missed at our gatherings, and with Myra Russel. Ruth van Phul, like myself, had tackled Joyce on her own, but much earlier, and with great, often uncritical, enthusiasm. In the 1920s she had been a world crossword puzzle champion, and during the war she had been working on cryptography, all of which rubbed off on the way she approached and expanded Joyce. She wrote many notes on Finnegans Wake, but she had an overall thesis which was sort of psycho-biographical. She saw Joyce as being motivated or conditioned by the fear of being homosexual. Since many men may have such worries, it was not per se a dead end, and, in fact, Ruth had brilliant insights, but, alas, not the gift of translucent exposition. Nor was she hampered by a sense of relevance, and she tended towards digression. Her major study never made it into print. When she first visited me in the late sixties she brought along some 600 pages of typescript for comment. I had to admit that I could not get the gist of it (nor could others), and she thought, erroneously, that an additional 150 pages would make everything click into place. She was brimful of jostling ideas and, no doubt, would have had something to tell us but could not cut it down to size. It is a pity that she left us nothing but a series of notes and articles, but never her complete study from a particular angle and with many pertinent observations. Ruth van Phul became the bête noire of another New Yorker, Nathan Halper. Where he wanted to pare down meanings in the Wake, she engaged in idiosyncratic far-flung speculation. Such basic attitudes belong to Finnegans Wake, and controversies between minimalists and maximalists (I think Matthew Hodgart coined these labels) will never cease. She and Nat sometimes had it out in the Newslitter. She lived in Park Avenue and was almost too generous and motherly a hostess for comfort. Her husband Bill was an engineer, and much more interested in baseball than literary interpretation, and he had developed protective deafness. What told against Ruth’s genuine benevolence and her critical contribution was verbal excess. Frank Budgen told me how hard he had worked to bring Bill into the conversation when the van Phuls visited him in London, and I remember a long night in her apartment when Berni Benstock and I took our leave and stood talking for another hour outside her door. An hour and a half later we were in her kitchen, and she was still going on, with her hand in the icebox, but never taking out the mineral water we were pining for. The stories that we exchanged over her incessant talking were numerous. It was hard to keep up with her, and the patience of even as charitable a person as the late Father Boyle SJ was severely tested. Her tendency just never to stop sadly told against her. The fourth Joyce symposium was again in Dublin, in 1973, and I ran a continuous workshop (on Finnegans Wake II.1). To set an example, I wanted to ban the reading of papers from that event at least. I was young and naive. I assembled the troupe in a hotel room the night before and, once again, laid down the rules. After my intensive coaching, Ruth gave me her written paper for approval. I knew it was far too long but let her have her way. On top of her reading she also kept improvising and went far over time. I looked at the strained expressions of an audience that was trying hard to appear attentive. It was a tough choice — to be ruthless or Ruthless and so I intervened and made her cease. This deeply offended and even wounded her, and I am not sure she ever really forgave me.

Jack P. Dalton Thirty years ago we would have swapped stories about Jack Dalton. He was the most talked-about Joycean of his time. It is disturbing, almost sad, how someone uniquely gifted, eminently committed and very prominent at the time has now faded almost completely out of collective memory. I first heard of him from Clive Hart who mentioned a strange up-and-coming young scholar in New York who wrote him weird letters. Later I was told that Dalton used to call up Joyceans in the middle of the night merely to test their knowledge of the Wake and to find them wanting. Anyway, I got his address and sent him an offprint of my first piece in English, ‘Zurich Allusions in Finnegans Wake’, in the old mimeographed Analyst that issued from Northwestern. My first inroad into the Wake is full of sweeping attributions, but I thought Dalton might be interested. A letter arrived in which he thanked me curtly, but he wasn’t going to read the stuff as he wanted to keep his mind free of such speculation. This did not stop

him, however, from pointing out some inconsistencies. He ended by submitting me to a test (short passages from the Wake) to determine whether I was worth corresponding with. This intimidated me, especially when a second letter soon followed, in which he chided me for impolitely not responding by return mail. Months later, Clive Hart let me have a copy of what he had written to Dalton, the gist of which was that he was severing all relations, and any Newslitter correspondence would have to be done through me. Dalton and Hart had, up to that point, been jointly editing a volume of essays which was to commemorate twenty-five years of Finnegans Wake, finally published as Twelve and a Tilly. I learned much later that Dalton had composed a preface for it in which he maligned every one of his contributors; Faber and Faber regrettably turned it down. Dalton’s fulminating letters became notorious, as did stories of his behaviour. Diplomacy was not his strength, and he did not mince his words. He was one of the pioneers in studying notes and drafts. For a time he was entrenched in the rare book room of the University of Buffalo. He considered its Joyce holdings his own territory and guarded them fiercely. When Jim Atherton (close to sixty) came to the Lockwood Library, Dalton (in his thirties) told him that he, Dalton, had ‘forgotten more British slang’ than Atherton had ever known. As a scholar Dalton was highly conscientious and pedantic, almost impeccable. He held strong, no-nonsense views on how Joyce should be read. He did not accept sources that were not in print. Above all, his polemics were not tempered by any of the usual human courtesies. He once was impatient with an essay on Giordano Bruno that Thornton Wilder had written for our Newslitter and, in a review, he tactfully put it that the desert sun of Arizona ‘must have burnt out Mr Wilder’s brains’. Still, Wilder helped Dalton to get a scholarship at Buffalo. Dalton savagely swiped at some transcriptions of David Hayman’s First Draft Version of Finnegans Wake, where Hayman had committed the iniquity of attributing a tiny squiggle to a wrong line, or something of the sort, and Dalton added a footnote that the death penalty would not be sufficiently suitable punishment. No kid gloves there, or even, as I later found out, any tongue-in-cheek. In the early days of the Newslitter Philip Wolf, a Swiss who had lived in Africa, supplied us with a list of Swahili words in the Wake that he had picked up first-hand. After its publication, Dalton irately corrected the list on the grounds that Wolf didn’t mention that all these Swahili words were added to the Faber galleys at a late stage (of course, Wolf, like most people, had never heard of such notes or drafts). Dalton then rewrote the whole list, though about 80 per cent of the items were identical (and therefore confirmed Wolf’s individual findings); he claimed that some Swahili words were misspelled and others had the wrong meaning (‘palm wine’ should have been ‘native beer’, or the other way round). His crowning argument was that some of those words were not Swahili at all because he couldn’t find them in the twenty-one dictionaries in the New York Public Library. It is not surprising that he gave rise to lots of anecdotes. Coming to Buffalo I knew that Dalton was on the premises, guarding the Joyce material in the Lockwood Library like a dragon. When I arrived I met Adaline Glasheen and a younger English scholar who was visiting for a weekend. She had encountered Dalton the previous year; during the race riots of 1967 he had forced her on a tour through the cordoned-off parts of Buffalo. Finally and with apprehension, I came face to face with him. He was very cordial the first evening, or almost so, but he was thrilled to catch me on a pronunciation mistake (it was the word ‘situation’, and I have no idea how I mangled this particular word when, surely, I must have made so many other mistakes). It appeared that he had scored. The great revelation came on Sunday, when Dalton took Adaline Glasheen, the English scholar and myself to see Niagara Falls. I learnt that Dalton was at the time annotating Ulysses as well as Finnegans Wake, also freeing their texts from their well-touted corruptions; furthermore, he was engaged on a book on ‘Oxen of the Sun’. I was daunted. After extended sightseeing, Dalton wanted to show us the even more impressive Canadian view of the Falls, but the two ladies were already tired and feebly declined. So he drove us across the bridge to the Canadian side where a customs officer obligingly warned us that we two non-Americans, from England and Switzerland, could not re-enter the States without certain forms which we did not have. Dalton somewhat brusquely interfered and tried to argue with the officer (never a good idea with customs people on their home territory) and had to be quieted. When we drove off, back from where we had come, with written documentation that we had not in fact left the United States, Dalton lowered the window of his Volkswagen and offered a curt ‘We’ll drop a H-bomb on you!’ in farewell. He had his own sense of humour. To the US immigration officials he joked that we carried ‘nothing but drugs’ with us — which, at the time, had no consequences. This all goes to show that Dalton did not create a universally pleasant atmosphere. One Sunday in Buffalo he called me to say that he would come to my place in the dorm. I knocked on Kenner’s door, next to mine, to announce the impending visit, since Dalton had already acquired a reputation. Kenner was out, but it so happened that soon after, he and Dalton arrived in the elevator together as I stood in the corridor. I quickly introduced them to each other; this was before my camera days, and it is one of two shots that I regret most not having been able to take. Hugh Kenner was tall, straight, upright, in fact stately; next to him was Jack Dalton, a bit short, stocky, in shorts and sandals, with a crew cut and protruding ears, working through a big ice-cream cone. It looked like something from the silent movies, and a photograph would have been a delight to many. Dalton had come to make me read out the first story of Dubliners, which he had put on a computer. This was in 1968, and he was obviously a pioneer in that novel procedure. I read the first story so that he could proofread the text. He did it, he told me, letter by letter, and he probably came closest to the precision of a computer. His commendable accuracy and pedantry made him intolerant of us fallible mortals who did not command the same skills. He also brought along more than a hundred pages of

corrections to Scribbledehobble, the notebook at Buffalo, which Thomas Connolly, an American-Irish gentleman and scholar of the old school, had transcribed not too accurately and which had already evoked a few harsh reviews. Dalton’s lengthy corrections amounted to a complete rewriting: they would have filled our Newslitter for at least a year, as one issue ran to only fourteen pages. I bided my time until Dalton called again to enquire how I was going to proceed. I recommended simplifications and abbreviations; Connolly had separated Joyce’s short entries by commas, Dalton wanted periods, and he listed every one of them in a separate line. I suggested that one comment would suffice, and that a punctilious list of hundreds of occurrences would be futile and wasteful. He would have none of it — either all should be printed as it was, or nothing! I then remarked that the polemical, personal diatribes against the previous editor in his extended preface were unnecessary, but Dalton practically admitted that his main objective was not to give all of us an impeccable reading, but to attack Connolly, with whom, as I knew, he had fallen out. He then wanted the material back so that he could send it elsewhere, with a report on those who had rejected his emendations and ‘betrayed the cause’; that again was meant in all seriousness, without a trace of irony. By way of parting advice I gently indicated that if he went out of his way to revile a former editor, he would have difficulty getting his material published. He replied that Beethoven had encountered the same problem with his Fifth Symphony and went on to compare me to Grant Richards who had rejected Dubliners. All I could reply was that I saw his point but that, perhaps, there were a few differences between Joyce and Dalton. He just replied that this may well be so, but that there were also many similarities. He then hung up. Not surprisingly, Dalton’s corrections never came out anywhere, nor did the other major projects we had heard about, including a computerized Dubliners. Our correspondence continued nevertheless. I was always a bit amused and treasured his vituperations; I still have them tucked away somewhere. Dalton’s belligerence was well-known. He found a position in South Carolina but — and here I can only rely on hearsay — he lost it because he was insulting students (I understand it is not polite to call a student a ‘son of a bitch’). Rumour had it that he once fell asleep during a lecture by Fredson Bowers, one of the few scholars he admired. Berni Benstock reported how a colleague at South Carolina wanted his opinion about the new man they were going to hire, and Berni said simply that ‘Dalton is mad’. One year later that same man approached Berni furiously, shook him violently and shouted, ‘Why didn’t you tell me about Dalton?!!!!!’ ‘Mad’, obviously, was not an adequate characterization. Dalton had attended the 1969 Symposium and read an excellent paper on the corrupted text of Ulysses (which he was going to edit). As an essay it became a classic. When, much later, the controversies over the Gabler edition were rife, many commentators relied entirely on the examples that Dalton had offered. One day he buttonholed me about that article on Swiss allusions (the one which he was not going to read) and censured me for claiming that ‘sommerfool’ (in the fable of the Ondt and Gracehoper) contained the Swiss-German ‘Summervogel’ (literally ‘summer-bird’: a butterfly). He corrected me: it was not SwissGerman but Danish, which, in the meantime, I had picked up, too. I admitted that the Danish variety (‘sommerfugl’) was possibly closer but that, after all, I had discerned a dialectal Swiss butterfly which had brought me to the same meaning. He austerely disparaged my local variety and so, after a protracted argument, I finally proposed I would get up in front of the assembled Joyceans and publicly withdraw my Swiss butterfly in favour of a Danish one. He eyed me suspiciously and said he wasn’t sure if I wasn’t being facetious. Incidentally, the flutter of Germanic butterflies never led to repercussions in the Joyce world. There was something amusing and almost endearing about Dalton’s pedantry, but less so about his manners. After a notorious car trip to Galway before the 1969 symposium, Norman Silverstein and Nat Halper had many stories to tell, for example how on the way back Dalton nearly came to blows with an Irishman who did not elucidate Irish place names to his satisfaction. I also thought that telling Polish jokes, the first that ever reached my ears, at the Bloomsday dinner in order to pay court to an attractive young woman, may not have been the best tactic, especially in the presence of her husband. The young woman was Pat Cooke, an artist who had done wonderful drawings and paintings of Ulysses, and who exhibited some during the symposium. After a long hiatus of silence Dalton joined the Paris symposium of 1975, and in a panel on the Wake attacked Atherton for irregularities in a list of Lord Mayors of Dublin which, of course, he set right by applying, I remember well, an Aristotelian ‘principle of parsimony’. Dalton brusquely resented fanciful readings of Finnegans Wake, and though a line is hard to draw, one can sympathize with some of his strictures, but I always found that laws of parsimony might not inherently apply to the Wake. Somehow the quality of the paper of his handout elicited a remark, and he simply said that ‘the Froggies’ had given it to him — this was in Paris. He complained that his work on the Ulysses text had received next to no attention and hinted at some conspiracy. So we set up an impromptu session expressly for him to detail his experiences with the Ulysses text. This made him even more suspicious. He just briefly reported that he had sent his emendations to Random House, but they had not moved ahead. My own suspicion is that if he had sent the sort of invective letters to Random House that he had sent us, the publisher might well have opted for a simple life and dropped the project. Dalton himself seemed reluctant to press forward, and he mentioned serious copyright obstacles. To a final suggestion, merely to run a list of his emendations in JJQ, which would entail no breach of copyright, he replied with disarming openness: ‘But you realize, if my corrections are published, everyone can see them.’ His remark brought back to me how he had ended his very first letter warning me that he would not show any of his own work; ‘I sit on it,’ he wrote. A clear case of retention.

Which may well explain why in the end, the sad end, there was almost nothing left behind of all of Dalton’s multiple projects except a box of filing cards, which Hans Gabler could put to some use. If he had been communicative, Dalton could have contributed substantially to our knowledge: he was devoted, meticulous, rigid in his principles; if only he had been able to co-operate. It was inconceivable to him that one would share one’s knowledge and put it into a common pool (as most of us tried in our letters and also talking shop in private). However, I feel a great affinity: we were the same kind of amateur, committed and caring for details. Dalton was just too quarrelsome and abrasive. He was the aggressive neurotic, I (at least outwardly) am an amiable one. Dalton died in early 1981, and the news reached me just as another Joycean was staying in my apartment in Unterengstringen, someone who has since risen to fame and notoriety, but who then was yet unknown to the wider world, John Kidd. Historical patterns have a way of repeating themselves, but no Joycean ever after, and I stress ‘Joycean’, has ever reached the same heights of acerbity.

William York Tindall Tindall’s books were among the few that inspired me a great deal in my first efforts. He made us, at least me, enjoy Joyce’s works. His books have since gathered dust and are considered outdated, but they passed on the excitement of reading Joyce. He wrote reader’s guides for Joyce and for Finnegans Wake, and both still serve as handy introductions. He also took photographs of Joyce’s Dublin and caught a few sights that have since gone, like Waterhouse’s Clock, or the Crampton Memorial. He must have been a provocative teacher: Berni Benstock was in his class, and many of the Joyceans of the time came from his stable. Some of them were assigned chapters of Ulysses for their theses, and a few looked into the drafts and galleys available at the time and so became genetic pioneers. One of them was Norman Silverstein, who consulted earlier versions of ‘Circe’. Silverstein was among those who attended the 1967 and later the first Trieste symposium. He was also a visitor in our home, and I, in turn, stayed twice in his New York apartment. He died very suddenly of a heart attack just before I came to look him up again on my way to Hawaii in 1974. Jim Card was assigned the ‘Penelope’ episode, and his research resulted in a book. I had not known him when, as it turned out much later, we had shared the same coach on the 1966 Bloomsday in Dublin, together with the Benstocks. Inevitably I had written to Tindall for advice, and when I first went to the States I was taken to his house by Patrick Farrell, of whom more anon. He was kind to the newcomer, and we conversed pleasantly about Joyce and Zurich, where he had been. A timely thunderstorm prolonged the talk. Unfortunately I can recall hardly any details, except that he mentioned a former student, Robert Martin Adams, who, he felt, had turned against his bias for symbolic readings. The term ‘symbol’ remains connected with Tindall in my mind. His study, The Literary Symbol, had an impact in his day and may have reinforced a trend. I had my reservations when symbol hunting became the preferred pastime and tended to be done mechanically, especially when it was reduced to a formula ‘x’ (like the snow in ‘The Dead’) is a symbol for ‘y’ (death, for example). No self-respecting symbol can be reduced in that way. In fact, I became determined never to use the term myself (though I hold that there may be some excuse for using the adjective symbolic as a hint). Some scholars seemed to be going through the texts as with a Geiger counter to mark symbols or, for that matter, epiphanies, a heavyhanded exertion and a trifle futile. Symbols have had their run and now seem replaced by other fashionable stereotypes. During a lecture long ago (in those bygone days I, too, used to read what I had pre-formulated on paper) I emphasized the vapidity of tracing solid symbols in a one-to-one relation, only to be asked in the questions afterwards what I thought Stephen’s ashplant was a symbol of. So much for putting a point across. Adams’s Surface and Symbol (1962) can be seen as a sane corrective. The reality that Joyce processed in Ulysses could be at odds with symbolic implications, and as the study showed, the surface does not always oblige. Adams, who I think never came to any of our conferences and whom, alas, I never met, had looked up concrete sources and found inconsistencies. He raised pertinent questions yet did not always provide the right answers. That sounds arrogant, as though I know which answers are the right ones, and I don’t. But Adams liked to expose Joyce nodding. Bloom is made to remember, ‘far beyond the bounds of his possible experience’, that Mario the tenor looked like ‘Our Saviour’ (U 7.49); but Mario’s last stage appearance was 1871: ‘thus Bloom remembering him in Martha is clearly a surface impossibility’, Adams maintained. So it might seem, but Ulrich Schneider found and reproduced a music sheet of Martha, with Mario the tenor depicted with what Bloom fairly accurately thinks of as a ‘beardframed oval face … Steered by an umbrella sword … doublet and spindle legs’ (in Schneider’s Funktion der Zitate im ‘Ulysses’ von James Joyce, 1970). What Bloom has in mind is not the tenor himself but a specific music sheet with his picture, as fine an instance of realism as one can find. One lesson is simply not to jump to conclusions. As an aside: Gifford’s Annotations duly note the last stage appearance, but not the relevant music sheet; this merely indicates that criticism outside the Anglo-Saxon mainstream is generally ignored. Back to Tindall, who found and invented profundities. He was corrected in part by Adams whose strictures in turn led to new discoveries: that’s the way scholarship should go. At any rate I learned a lot from Tindall’s highly readable books, without necessarily accepting all of his findings.

Nathan Halper

Tindall generally cited Nathan Halper as his grey eminence regarding Finnegans Wake. No wonder that Halper became one of the early regular contributors to our Wake Newslitter. He was not an academic scholar, he owned a gallery, and his wife was an artist. Halper was lucid and to the point and fairly dogmatic about the Wake. He understood its basics, so he claimed, and had little sympathy with our more whimsical readings, far-fetched and sometimes tangential. Because he was strict and wouldn’t tolerate what he considered nonsense, I thought him a kind of superego of Wake studies. He was at one extreme of the spectrum which, at the other end, featured Adaline Glasheen and Ruth van Phul. Halper was excellent to argue with. He always made his points succinctly, in short statements, that often were like axioms; I heard him refer to them as ‘syllogisms’. I had a few friendly scuffles with him that I am sure both of us enjoyed. He took me up on my view that Joyce entails choice and heresy, rather than dogma which, in itself, may have come across as a little dogmatic. He visited me once in Zurich, and we attended the Sechseläuten together, our local spring festival that Joyce put into the Wake several times, notably in ‘there’s the belle for Sexaloitez’ (FW 213). Just for the record, there is very little of ‘belle’, and even less of ‘sex’ in our demure April spring ritual. It takes place when winter gives way to spring and when the bells ring (‘läuten’) at six o’clock, which ties the festival to the Catholic angelus. A ‘Böögg’ (a cotton wool snowman, containing explosives) is ceremoniously burnt, and the historic crafts’ guilds ride around the pyre. One can see what attracted Joyce and also Nat Halper. His, Nat’s, integrity made him an austere but fair reviewer, and he made no concessions even to good friends. He lived in New York and later in Provincetown, and thanks to his initiative we had two very good American meetings in Provincetown, first in 1980, when he also enlisted Norman Mailer, and again in 1983. He died very soon after the second get-together.

Patrick Farrell And then there was Patrick Farrell, a professional American Irishman and gifted storyteller of flamboyant appearance, which included a wide, black hat. When he descended on Zurich the Aer Lingus office, knowing of my interests, passed him on to me to do the Joyce sights. At the grave, still the old one of 1941, Farrell knelt down and said a prayer; he told me that he had already done so the previous day to be photographed by a journalist. He had great tales of his exploits. He managed to bring out a book of John Quinn’s correspondence, which was under seal in the New York Public Library; he had made Peter Kavanagh (brother of Patrick) memorize them in short bits and then jot them down in the lavatory. The letters were hand-set and printed as a book, which was then confiscated by the police. If I had any book of that sort, he offered magnanimously, he would liberate it in the same fashion. Not all his adventures sounded true to life, but in this case he had newspaper clippings to document his exploits. Farrell wrote on stationery of a Museum for Modern Irish Art which, New Yorkers told me, never existed; its board of patrons featured St Patrick, St Lawrence O’Toole and similar dignitaries. It was he, as I mentioned, who managed an invitation to Tindall when I first came to New York in 1968. He brought me to the house in Morningside Heights, delivered me on the doorstep and left. I was sceptical when he related how he, Farrell, had introduced Giorgio Joyce in person to President Roosevelt at a garden party when Giorgio was in the States in the thirties. The following year when I first saw Giorgio Joyce in Zurich, the only thing I dared to ask was if he remembered Patrick Farrell and the event. And sure enough he did remember; he had been taken to such a garden party and had, in fact, been introduced to the President by Patrick Farrell, who then left right away. The President had asked who the gentleman was who had brought Giorgio there. In the sixties I was sometimes asked to show visitors around. One I took to Joyce’s old grave was the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal. At that time his short novel, Closely Watched Trains, had much publicity and had just been made into a film. I was told later that in one of his memoirs he mentioned this particular visit to the grave.

Harry Pollock Harry Pollock was prominent during the first three symposia. He was Canadian and also an amateur of ample enthusiasm and not too much reticence. He had started a James Joyce Society in Toronto and enlisted Marshall McLuhan for it. In particular, he put parts of Ulysses on stage and generally played Leopold Bloom for whom he felt a great affinity as he, too, worked in advertising. In a way he put Toronto on the Joycean map. I had heard of his expansive activities even before he turned up at the first symposium in Dublin in 1967. Immediately he rounded up three actresses (among them Rosaleen Linehan and Meryl Gourley, who had performed in Strick’s Ulysses film) and, after an improvised rehearsal, made them read from Molly’s monologue in their nightdresses. We have a picture of the Bacchanalian trio exuberantly surrounding a rather unamused Giorgio Joyce. Umberto Eco, at that time known as the author of Opera aperta, was coerced by me into writing something in the guest book I carried around, and he summarized its performance as ‘Bertolt Breast’s Three Molly Opera’. Also at the second symposium in 1969, and then again in Trieste, 1971, Pollock staged a play he had written for the occasion. I wasn’t on the scene on Bloomsday 1967 when, at 5 o’clock, the Holy Door, rescued from 7 Eccles Street, was unveiled in The Bailey, which was then managed by John Ryan. Patrick Kavanagh officially pronounced ‘the door closed’. Pollock, possibly not the most sensitive or diplomatic transatlantic tourist, wanted to interview Kavanagh on the spot, with camera and microphone, but the poet, with his well-

known distaste for Joyce scholars and not overly well-mannered at the best of times, must have made some pointed remarks about Pollock’s Jewishness. Bystanders felt that history was repeating itself when at five o’clock on a Bloomsday an angry Irishman insulted a Bloomian kind of a Jew; or, at least, so we were told when we returned from our own trip to Sandycove. Life appeared to imitate fiction. Pollock was colourful, kind-hearted and well-meaning, but he didn’t suffer from excessive self-criticism and liked to be in the limelight. He seemed to consider the academic events of a symposium a kind of side show to his own theatre performance. During the week in Trieste he asked me to hold the lights for his rehearsals. He wasn’t always aware of local sensibilities, which proved to be a general problem during the first Dublin conferences. After the first three symposia we lost sight of him. I know, though, that he was instrumental in getting the German Goethe-Haus to invite me to Toronto, but when I got there in 1975, I did not meet him. He seemed to have fallen out with the local branch. For a while Harry Pollock was a librarian at McMaster University where he convened a fine, small conference in November 1970 that I was able to attend from my temporary hangout at Ohio State. The results were gathered in the now almost forgotten Litters from Aloft (1971). Richard Kain spoke about ‘Treasures and trifles in Ulysses’ in his usual vein, quoting friends he had met in Dublin; Maurice Beebe’s favourite subject was modernism, and it must have been there that I became aware of the term; Michael Begnal was already interested in narrative aspects of the Wake. I have completely forgotten what I talked about and so now have to look it up: it was, once again, about translation. Harry Pollock’s principal scholarly contribution was that he had discovered and interviewed the original Eileen Vance of A Portrait who then lived in Canada.

Mabel Worthington I only knew Mabel Worthington from a few meetings in Dublin, but I visited her at Temple University in Philadelphia and also in her home. She was a warm, helpful person and was obviously well-liked by her students. Mabel was perhaps the first to focus on musical elements in Joyce. She and Matthew Hodgart joined forces on Song in Joyce, without ever meeting, I believe. This was an early catalogue that directed us towards the many songs Joyce had embedded, but often we did not learn much more than that a passage referred to a song of which only the title was known. Zack Bowen was one of Mabel’s students who determinedly carried on the torch she had lit. For one semester they were together to collaborate on a musical project, but I think it left Mabel disappointed. In 1973 a few of us met in Dublin to discuss further projects. Ruth Bauerle was present and went on from where Mabel and Hodgart had left off. Her James Joyce Song Book has become one of our major sources. She had studied under Ellmann years earlier at Northwestern and was already an experienced Joycean at the time, but she still attended my Ulysses class at Ohio State in 1970. It may have helped to motivate her in her arduous task of collecting hundreds of songs, words and music. I was a guest in her house in Delaware, Ohio, on several pleasant occasions, and it was good to have her participate in our one Zurich workshop on song.

Father Robert Boyle, SJ Long before I ever met Robert Boyle, he took me to task in his review of a not very good book. I had politely and unenthusiastically contributed to a blurb: I had wanted to be positive about the author whom I knew and so was too tolerant. Father Boyle was quite right in his review, though the publishers had taken a quotation out of context, so that my few sentences looked like wholesale approval. I learnt my lesson in how texts can be extracted and deflected strategically and, in fact, had to resort to the same trick when working for a Zurich publisher. Ever after I have tried to be cautiously non-committal — or else either genuinely enthusiastic or guardedly disparaging. Not that Robert Boyle ever minded my seeming faux pas, if he even remembered it in the first place, when he showed up at the second symposium of 1969 in Dublin, with Father William Noon, a fellow Jesuit and the author of Joyce and Aquinas. From Buffalo, Hugh Kenner and I had visited Father Noon in Rochester the previous year. He was already ailing and, in fact, died, I think, in 1971, a great loss. American Jesuits were the first to take on Joyce, long before the Irish ones followed suit. Father Noon and Father (later Bob) Boyle were the only Jesuits I had ever come across; for historical reasons connected with conflicts in the nineteenth century, Jesuits were not allowed to teach or preach in Switzerland until fairly recently — we never let them in. In 1969, Robert Boyle was still in his black clerical habit and we only exchanged a few words. Two years later, at the Trieste symposium, probably along with current changes in attitudes, he had discovered the pleasures of sartorial variety. He dressed differently every day, at times flamboyantly (Bermuda shirt or French artist-type with beret) and only reverted to his Roman collar for a session on medievalism. The next year in Tulsa (fifty years of Ulysses) I did not recognize him at first, as in the meantime he had cultivated a sumptuous red beard. But Bob Boyle was a blessing not just pictorially. He must have been one of the most lovable people around, a genial, charismatic person, who always got our undivided attention when he spoke. (Shouldn’t that be the norm? Well, just look at the audience during some of the run-of-the-mill lectures at our meetings.) His enthusiasm caught on. Once he admitted that his opinions had been inspired by the Holy Ghost, which would prove that the Holy Ghost is full of common sense. To judge from a visit to his haunt, Marquette University in Milwaukee, he may have run into a few difficulties among his confraternity, at

least it seemed so when he talked to a much more decorous and discreetly shocked fellow priest in the cafeteria. I was then also introduced to his parrot, the only one in the world, Bob claimed, who had heard Finnegans Wake recited three times. The parrot even quoted from it, though it must have been from a different edition, or it may have been the Milwaukee parrot accent. I can still hear him, Bob, proclaim on one occasion, almost verbatim, that all his life he had been trying to reform the Society of Jesus in the light of the writings of James Joyce. Though our paths did not cross too often there was a great deal of sympathy between us, and no doubt between him and countless others. He brightened every occasion by his radiance, quite the opposite of some (whose names, as it happens, completely escape me). However, he could also be quite cutting. Once, as I happened to attend an MLA gathering as an anthropological onlooker, he had to read the paper of an absent scholar. Bob did so with great commitment; he also elaborated and interspersed his own comments and, with increasing vigour, voiced his disagreement with what he had to read out. At one point he uttered a warning: ‘Look at what the fellow is going to say next!’ His health became precarious, however, and his doctors diagnosed multiple sclerosis and other serious illnesses and forbade him strenuous exertions or journeys, but, according to Berni Benstock, Bob insisted that he would still take part in the Zurich symposium of 1979, and I am glad to say he did. The Zurich hotels providing for Joyceans are often in the Niederdorf area of the old city (‘and fast broke down in Neederthorpe’, as the good book has it), which also hosts whatever nightlife we have. Father Boyle reported how he once walked down towards the bridge to be accosted by a lady who, to open proceedings, asked him about the time: ‘Wie spät ist es?’ He, mustering all his German, as he gleefully told us, tersely responded, ‘Zu spät!’ Too late. Among his students were Thomas Staley, Patrick McCarthy, Michael O’Shea and many others who, I am sure, have similar memories. He did a lot, unknowingly, to counteract some prejudices I had had about the Catholic clergy. At the Milwaukee conference of 1987, which was held in his and Florence Walzl’s honour, he was confined to bed, and in one of the most poignant moments, we could only see and hear him on video. I recall that in my talk I referred to his last touching appearance as ‘a provection of agape’.

Marshall McLuhan Among early and perceptive Joyce critics in the sixties there was one by the name of Marshall McLuhan in Canada, a medievalist from what I heard, and I must have struggled with some of his articles long before he became a cult figure. When he visited the University of Delaware in 1977, invited by Zack Bowen, I attended his lecture in a class where he was fencing with students who fired provocative questions. What has troubled me ever since is that he said it was precisely those who think themselves above the lure of advertising who are really most deeply affected. It troubles me because I can hardly remember that I ever bought any product that I saw advertised, and yet I am sure McLuhan knew what he was saying. At the lunch he maintained that Joyce’s Dubliners owes a lot, an essential lot, to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and it appeared he might work all of it out one day in detail. His son, he said, was studying the thunderwords in Finnegans Wake.

Charles Peake When Charles Peake from London showed up in Paris for the commemorative conference in the anniversary year, January 1982, I did not yet know him or have any idea that he had been teaching Joyce courses for a long time. One of his students, he told me later, was David Lodge. His excellent book, The Citizen and the Artist, covering all of Joyce’s works, came out years after it was written, and it remains one of the best overall, unassuming introductions we have. Charles Peake had also arranged a musical performance of the ‘Sirens’ episode, which was played in Zurich in 1979, though without his presence. A similar musical presentation was given at the Joyce conference in Leeds in 1987. When the new Zurich James Joyce Foundation set up its first workshop on ‘Oxen of the Sun’, he joined us, and I think we owe it mainly to him and his contributions that the workshop became the lively exchange I had hoped for. He not only had English literature at his fingertips (he was an expert on Swift), but he was familiar with countless songs and the kind of lore that has fallen into oblivion. In this respect he was much like Jim Atherton. We now have to have recourse to the indispensable Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, which I universally recommend; however it can never replace what had been part of Charles Peake’s or Jim Atherton’s education. Whenever Charles Peake took part, I knew that the success of the workshop was assured. This was particularly true when we focused on song in Joyce. Ruth Bauerle and Ulrich Schneider, who had written a book about the English music hall, participated in that workshop. It was a sad moment when I heard that Charles, far too young, had died suddenly, of a heart attack. I remember it was Katie Wales who sent us the bad news. Our August workshops are still ‘in memoriam Charles Peake’, as are the monthly Ulysses readings that the London circle holds.

Michael Begnal He was one of the Americans who, early on, worked mainly on Finnegans Wake, and he contributed to the Newslitter. In 1971, en route to the first Trieste symposium, he, his wife and two children travelled in a

van, stopped in Zurich and spent quite some time with us. He then suggested we collaborate on a ‘Conceptual Guide to Finnegans Wake’ and, as was my habit, I rashly agreed. In the end my contribution was merely nominal as I realized I was not in a position to say anything much in a general way about Finnegans Wake, so the job was left to Michael, and I do not think he ever resented it. He has produced a number of good books. His work has always been solid, the kind that helps you appreciate the Wake. I saw him at Penn State on various occasions and at several conferences, including one at McMaster in 1970. He didn’t often come to the European ones, but there was a tacit understanding that we would bump into each other fairly regularly. And then, at the end of 2003, I got an email from him which said, very briefly, that he had been diagnosed with a serious form of cancer, and he just wanted to say that he owed some insights to me. And sure enough, a few days later I heard about his death, fairly young. Though we hadn’t met very often, he was a very good friend, and it is, of course, reassuring to know that I had made an impact and touching that he expressed it. He was a very good and humorous companion.

Jacques Aubert It must have been in the 1960s that a letter came from France from a student of Professor Bonnerot, then the grand old man of Joyce studies. Jacques Aubert was engaged in his dissertation, which actually looked like two to me: one on the French elements in the Wake in the Buffalo notebooks (he was among the first to consult them), and one on Joyce’s aesthetics. So we corresponded on and off until at the memorable unveiling of Joyce’s new grave on Bloomsday 1966, somebody tapped me on the shoulder, and Jacques and I met face to face. Later on he was translating Dubliners which, along with other projects to come, brought me to Lyons several times for consultation. One of my visits coincided with the celebration of his doctorate being awarded amidst the assembled festive clan, and, according to what must have been local custom, champagne seemed to be à discretion. We collaborated on a Joyce issue of the magazine L’Herne, although ‘collaborated’ is a euphemism: with his usual diligence he did all the essential work, while I watched him lethargically from a distance during one of my habitual slumps and gave benign assent to his plans. In this context Jacques had discovered letters that Joyce had written to his translator Auguste Morel, and in one postcard Joyce called Morel polytropos. This gratified me immensely as I had made heavy weather of the epithet that Homer bestows on Odysseus in the first line of his epos and had tried to describe Ulysses as the polytropical book (of many turns). Translators, of course, have to be versatile and capable of turning in many ways. Because of our connection Jacques took part in the first symposium of 1967, and I remember his lecture, in the best resonant French in the Gresham Hotel. Jacques Aubert has become the doyen of Joyce studies in France. He was the obvious choice to mastermind the adaptation of Joyce into the renowned Edition Pléiade, together with a team of the best scholars then emerging, Daniel Ferrer, Jean-Michel Rabaté, André Topia and Danielle Vors, who were assigned specific chapters. In 1986, the team met in our Joyce Foundation to agree on fundamental procedures. At least for a time, the Pléiade must have been the best annotated edition around. Its first volume had assembled the early work, and Aubert lost a brave fight to impose Joyce’s preferred punctuation over the Gallimard house style: the publisher insisted on the quotation marks that Joyce detested, and so these quotations marks mingled redundantly and confusingly with Joyce’s own dashes. The Pléiade Ulysse, however, conforms to Joyce’s and Aubert’s wishes. In 1987, a plaque was unveiled in Saint-Gérand le Puis, where the Joyces had spent their last months in France before finding asylum in Switzerland. Jacques and I drove there and attended (what seemed to me) a typical provincial occasion, with political delegates, a brass band and a local beauty queen, all of which reminded me of those old movies by Tati (I was still watching movies). The site was a corner with a little grass plot and a wall, where an Irish flag hid the plaque that was to be unveiled. Stephen James Joyce removed it and handed it over to the Irish ambassador in a simple ceremony with a few appropriate speeches and a luncheon in a newly opened Valery Larbaud Museum. Jacques Aubert has a vineyard in the South of France and a simple old renovated chapel. I once learned from him that wine must never be bottled when the south wind is blowing, and ever since, I have hoped for an occasion where I could apply such expert knowledge and impress a refined company with my savoir-vivre. I have never seen the vineyard but I stayed at his house. Ever meticulous and steadfast, and very conscientious, Jacques was at ease with texts, notes and conventional scholarship, but he could also hold his own in all the emerging theories. My own obtuseness is on record. I emphasize again that he was the first to bring some of them to my notice, as early as the late sixties when they had not yet become a fashion. Though this is completely out of my range, I have no doubt that Aubert, if anyone, does understand Jacques Lacan, whom he after all drew into the Joycean fold, beginning with the Paris symposium in 1975. Jacques was one of the organizers of the 1975 Paris symposium, not an easy chore from provincial Lyons (as the Parisians would see it). During the preparation he often called me, less for advice than for consolation and moral support, and he usually began, ‘Fritz, the thing is …’. The thing was generally the intricate, centralized French academic system with its entrenched hierarchies, and on this score, naturally, I could not be of any use. (I do have experience in setting up such conferences, however, a multiply burnt child.) Ultimately the dispersed organizers, with the sometimes peremptory Maria Jolas and a whole staff in Paris, which included the ever helpful Katherine Bernard, managed supremely. The Paris symposium had a different tone from all the others. It was attended by French Joyce scholars and intellectuals, yet they seemed to turn up within their own watertight compartments and did not mix.

There must have been factions, connected with two rival magazines, Poétique and Tel quel. Notable was Philippe Sollers, a big name already; he conversed in French, and I remember his pontifical pronouncement: ‘La langue anglaise est morte’ — which then duly had to be translated into precisely that dead language. He put his hand on the red cover of Finnegans Wake and declared it the only book in English that was alive, and the most anti-Fascist one to boot. I mention Hélène Cixous and her disciples elsewhere. I must add that my entirely subjective view of the Paris symposium is at variance with that of others; to judge from some reports, we must have attended different occasions. I never sensed any of the hostilities that others seem to have felt, tensions between the conventional Joyceans and the evolving French theories. Theories, French or otherwise, never hurt anyone unless one is compelled to cope with them. I can hardly think of anyone present who was extrovertly intolerant. The one drawback was the building, which contained thin partitions separating the rooms so that one could hear everything going on elsewhere but not one’s own session. No meeting place had been assigned either so that we tended to scatter all over Paris. And then Paris, as a city, is just so attractive that it is hard to remain focused. Maria Jolas was in great form but also, I was told, tended to have her own way, grand old lady that she was. In recent years Jacques became close to Lacan, I think even a fairly close friend, and they sometimes appeared together. Jacques also occupies a precarious position as he has to come to terms, if terms is the word, with the Joyce Estate. He was put in charge of a new translation of Ulysses, a work that was completed within three years and is a collective effort. Various writers and scholars devoted themselves to separate chapters, all under his expert supervision. He also translated and harmonized what his colleagues submitted. It cannot have been an easy assignment.

Vivien Veale/Igoe It must have been in 1965 that a letter arrived from the first curator of the Joyce Tower, which had newly opened to tourists. Vivien Veale asked about material that might be in Zurich, and she visited me to collect a few items, including the guitar that is seen in a well-known picture. Paul Ruggiero generously donated it, along with other documents that are now on display in the Tower in Sandycove. The following year I paid a return visit and stayed with the Veales in their house in Churchtown. Eileen Veale, Vivien’s mother, showed me around Dublin in pursuit of all the places where the Joyces had lived, from Bray to Drumcondra. She usually took a piece of wood or a stone away as a souvenir. One afternoon Eileen and Vivien introduced me to Patrick Kavanagh in The Bailey, and his welcome was not, as I have related elsewhere, exuberant, and he had a ready thumbnail phrase for the likes of me. Joyce scholars were not among his favourites (though, at that time, I had been guilty of very few offences). Through Vivien Veale I also got in touch with Ulick O’Connor and above, all, with Gerry O’Flaherty. She and her mother were wonderful guides and great at making introductions. Eileen Veale knew May Monaghan and her son, Ken, and introduced us. She took May Monaghan and me to Maynooth and (though I am no longer sure, which just shows) possibly also to Clongowes. There is even a picture of May Monaghan with me, which in a roundabout way, has now returned to Zurich from the Joyce Centre in Dublin. May Monaghan, in Ken’s view, is possibly Boody in ‘Wandering Rocks’, that is if anyone outside a book can ever be anyone in it. But then one does not get to talk very often with characters in Ulysses. I think that Ken was almost a bit embarrassed when he was introduced as Joyce’s nephew. The following year, 1967, Vivien Veale became our main support when we apprehensively set up the first symposium. She made the necessary connections, and without her and Gerry O’Flaherty we could never have brought it off. Vivien, now Igoe, has written a number of books about literary Dublin and has become one of the experts and archivists. I have recently dug up the letters we exchanged during the preparation of that symposium and was surprised to see how many there were, all, of course, typed out individually on our typewriters.

Ulick O’Connor It is always great to talk to a visitor from Dublin and to mention Ulick O’Connor, for he serves as a point of reference. Everyone is sure to know him. Vivien put me in touch with him, and we nearly brought him to Zurich for the unveiling of the grave, but it did not come off. It was at the early symposium that we had a little run-in. He had not been put on the programme, the reason being that we had to accommodate those scholars who needed funding from their home universities. Anyway he took umbrage and declared himself my ‘enemy for life’. This, in a way, made me a bona fide Dubliner, for Ulick’s somewhat irascible nature was a byword. The enmity, however, did not last. He signed a copy of his life of Gogarty for me, and whenever our paths crossed I felt as though we had once fought in the trenches together. As it happened I saw him fairly recently when we took a walk along the Dodder. He has mellowed much and was full of reminiscences. I hadn’t been aware that it was he who took up the case of Reuben J. Dodd junior against the BBC in 1954 when the respective passage from ‘Hades’ had been broadcast, and Dodd’s reputation seemed damaged because of a (fictional) attempted suicide.

Gerry O’Flaherty Gerry O’Flaherty is one of my best contacts ever. Vivien Igoe brought us together in 1966. It turned out

that Gerry had been reading Joyce in Ireland long before it was appropriate to do so and mainly kept silent about it. He loves his city and has observed and partly lamented many of its changes. In my opinion he is the best authority on Joyce’s Dublin, with a fine collection of books and documents. When he heard, at our first brief meeting, how interested I was in documentation, he brought along his own copy of Thom’s Directory (1905), which, by then, was almost impossible to find, and later gave us his own copy of Aristotle’s Masterpiece. Together we have walked many Ulyssean paths, and he took me to Mary’s Abbey before it became a national monument. On our Dublin pilgrimages, his guided tour of ‘Lotuseaters’ was a fixture on the programme and a highlight to boot. Once the Zurich visitors were taken to the source of the Liffey and along its nearly circular course to Dublin. Gerry also researched where houses had been renumbered since Joyce’s time, and I remember he spent a good deal of time explaining to us which house would have been no. 7 St Peter’s Terrace in Cabra. I wish Gerry would write down what he, and often only he, knows. He would be the ideal participant at our workshops, but he does not want to become part of the Joyce industry and, in fact, has been very much put off by some of its crasser aspects and its more strident and often tactless activities. He sticks to the concrete ‘whatness’ of what Joyce wrote about and is wary of our habitual overreaching and fanciful symbol hunting. I do not know of anyone more generous than Gerry, he is almost compulsively so. I could not have afforded participation in the first symposia if I had not been able to stay in his house in Rathmines, and I must have mentioned elsewhere that without his and Vivien’s support, the 1967 symposium would not have taken place. And neither Vivien nor Gerry occupied positions of power or had much leverage in the city. Gerry became great friends with the Polish translator of Ulysses, Maciej Słomczynski, a famous writer in his country and somewhat eccentric. They shared a few prejudices and tended to be critically aloof. But Gerry became part of the organization of the 1973 symposium in Dublin. He and Niall Montgomery were put out when we, the importers of Joyce conferences to Dublin, did not always proceed with excessive diplomacy. He later kept his distance. Gerry also was on good terms with Stephen Joyce as they, in turn, shared a few dislikes. I am glad that in recent years I have seen more of him again. We were asked to collaborate on a project in connection with Bloomsday 2004. To accompany the radio broadcast of Ulysses, RTÉ decided to rebroadcast the 1982 dramatized reading of the complete Ulysses in, I think, weekly instalments, and those were introduced not by an academic lecture but by Gerry and me simply exchanging views about the episodes. Neither of us are satisfied with our off-the-cuff comments, but responses have been polite, probably due to the judicious editing of Ann-Marie O’Callaghan and Ed Mulhall. The Ulysses reading was not aired in 2004 due to the usual copyright problems, but our thirty-minute introductions to each chapter went out each week.

David Hayman When very few books on Finnegans Wake were around I heard of a publication in France, Joyce et Mallarmé, written by an American scholar, David Hayman, who had studied in Paris and compared Finnegans Wake with an equally mystifying book, Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés. It did not, and was not meant to, illuminate the Wake, but I conscientiously plodded through that pristine, comparative study. So when I first met Clive Hart in London and he told me that David Hayman was working in the British Museum, I knew whom he meant. I was going to look at the Finnegans Wake material there anyway, just out of curiosity and with no aim (or time) to do research. To see the actual pages on which Joyce had written, or assembled, Finnegans Wake was a wholly novel and invigorating experience. The huge, bound volumes made it easy to identify Professor Hayman, who was poring over another lot. So I introduced myself, of whom, of course, he had not heard, and we went out and had a beer in a pub round the corner. Our paths have often crossed, and as it turned out he was the first speaker at our pioneering symposium of 1967, at the old University College, Dublin, in Earlsfort Terrace. He once came to Zurich, or rather Unterengstringen, where I lived and, I am fairly sure, we did the routine tour together. As it happened I once visited him and his wife Lonnie in Paris at the exact moment he received his appointment to the University of Wisconsin, where he then held a chair in comparative literature. I found his concise and perceptive study of the Mechanics of Meaning in Ulysses one of the best of its kind, and I feel it has been neglected. What has caught on is Hayman’s notion of a narrative ‘arranger’, a more refined and therefore more appropriate variant of our old stalwart friend, the cunning, personified Narrator of multiple skills. It is one way of illustrating the episodes as ever new, protean arrangements. David Hayman is also a pioneer in what is now called genetic studies. A (hypothetical) First Draft of Finnegans Wake is to his credit, the first effort of its kind, and serves as a starting point for the abundant subsequent additions and revisions. Hayman has often taken part in small, intimate workshop-like gatherings devoted to notebook and genetic studies in Antwerp or Paris. Though he is less gregarious than most of us, he has taken part in several symposia, on and off. In Paris he introduced the French critic Philippe Sollers in one of the major sessions. Hayman is certainly a major Joyce scholar, though a somewhat pontifical streak has, on occasion, worked against general appreciation of his exceptional competence and his substantial achievements.

Leo Knuth

It must have been around 1968 that a letter arrived from a professor of linguistics in Utrecht who had ordered a run of the Newslitter for the library. So Leo Knuth, who obviously had engaged with Joyce’s works for years, was drawn into the fold. During the war he had been in the Dutch colonies and was arrested by the Japanese and put into a prison camp. There someone had a copy of Ulysses and Leo Knuth, with ample time on his hands, started to read it. He also told a story that I wish I could repeat in his inimitable manner. A Japanese general had come to inspect the camp, and for once, everyone was fed well, and the prisoners were lined up to listen to him. Elevated on an improvised dais, he spoke rapid Japanese for a quarter of an hour in front of the assembled captive multitude. His interpreter, lower in rank and elevation, summarized it all in a concise: ‘Ee say, Ollanda vely bada!’. The performance was repeated in another speech and similarly condensed: ‘Ee say, Englanda vely bada’, only to be followed by the next routine that came across as ‘Ee say, Amelicana vely bada.’ Then the general spoke for half an hour and the interpreter offered the climactic gist of it: ‘Ee say, Nippona vely gooda!’. A translation concentrating on essentials. Leo Knuth settled in the Netherlands and taught phonetics in Utrecht. He soon became part of that original Wake reading group in Amsterdam and was prominent at the 1969 symposium, and again in Trieste, 1971, and for a few years after. When he was invited to the Buffalo summer school, I think it was in 1970, they assigned an assistant to him, Carole Brown (I, too, had been given an assistant during my spell, but I was hardly aware of it, and when the assistant showed up, he made it quite clear that he had no intention of being of any assistance). Carole, together with Thomas E. Connolly, jointly set up the conference at Buffalo in 1976. Carole and Leo got on well, and, in the end, they became a couple, and Leo went to live in Buffalo, out of sight. I heard of his death in 2002. His health had always been delicate. Leo Knuth was a new impetus; of the classical school and discipline, he approached Joyce as a traditional philologist well versed in language and etymology. There was something charismatic about his talks, at times also dogmatic. He was invigoratingly argumentative in the best sense and sometimes less than tolerant. Geert Lernout once attempted to straighten out Knuth’s list of Dutch, Flemish and Afrikaans words in Finnegans Wake and soon saw himself entangled in a prolonged controversy about the exact provenance of some of these terms. I could have told him, and probably did. Leo Knuth also became a translator of Joyce and, in collaboration with Gerardine Franken, a good friend, translated Exiles and A Portrait. His study, The Wink of the Word (1979), is now unjustly forgotten. Clive Hart and he collaborated on the Topographical Guide to Ulysses, for which he drew the maps. I have already mentioned that Leo and Gerry Franken once invited me to Holland just to cheer me up, in an act of spiritual charity during a bad patch. (An aside for the cognoscenti: it was then, in 1969, in Leo Knuth’s house in Utrecht, that I first tasted Sambal, the Indonesian spice of many variants, which changed my life and which now is the mainstay of those notorious Foundation salads.)

A. Walton Litz His name first showed up in the Kain/Magalaner book, Joyce, the Man, the Work, the Reputation (1956), which came at a very opportune moment, for it told me what was going on. Litz along with Nathan Halper and James Atherton were listed as pioneers in Finnegans Wake studies; it enabled me to contact Atherton in Wigan. Walt Litz was working on his study of Joyce’s development, The Art of James Joyce, a standard work in its time (1961) when only a few scholars had access to Joyce’s notes and drafts. How we first met or had contact I can’t recall, but once we got to know each other he invited me to speak at Princeton on several occasions. He was from the South, for me a gentleman scholar, and he was very much into the modernists. A Joyce conference in March 1982 (the centenary year) in Seville assembled about 400 Spanish scholars and students and included only four foreign speakers: Walt Litz, Clive Hart, George Watson and myself, so there were many opportunities to be together. Also present was a young scholar by the name of Cheryl Herr, still a graduate student. Her talk on censorship was a pioneering approach which later was extended into her Anatomy of Culture. It was what we always hope for and rarely get, a breakthrough, in this case into what came to be known as cultural studies. That conference, which included a trip to La Linea with a view of Gibraltar (where the British Empire takes a last conspicuous stand, and we could only peep across the fence), was one of the loveliest, under orange blossoms and with students, chaste groupies, who most evenings entertained us with some flamenco and then, around 11 at night, all went home to mother. For one session the four foreign speakers were put on an open discussion panel which, as it happened, was joined by what for me was a wholly new name, Terry Eagleton, who instantly fitted into what we said about Finnegans Wake and yet sounded caustically critical of our doings. Walt Litz’s contributions were always of a wide range, cultured and, from what I saw, he generally led the opening session at MLA events. He was also consulted for some problematic issues of the Gabler Ulysses edition. I know that he was very good to his students and took great care to find positions for them. Above all, Michael Groden emerged from his classes. His Ulysses in Progress taught us all about the designs and vicissitudes that brought the book into being. He is now one of the authorities in this area. Others that I first met in Princeton are Robert Spoo and Sebastian Knowles. I heard Walt went through some rough periods, and I was relieved to hear that he was recently travelling in Ireland.

Brook Thomas

It must have been at the Paris symposium that Brook Thomas, then I believe still a student in the final throes of graduate ordeals, introduced himself. He had studied with Hugh Kenner at Santa Barbara and was just branching out. Not being part of any academic system, I could not help or even advise him, but soon after, he got a position in Konstanz in southern Germany, only an hour away from Zurich. He frequently came to visit us over extended weekends. He was also a runner who soon got to know every path within miles — and all the dogs that went for his calves. We got on extremely well, and our conversations, often long into the night, were among the most inspiring I have ever had. Much of what we discussed together surfaced again in what either of us wrote. We shared a kind of wavelength even though Brook was much more sophisticated and abreast of current tendencies than I (and could write about them with refreshing clarity). His Book of Many Turns never quite got the appreciation it deserved, partly because it was delayed and had to undergo numerous revisions so that some of its originality went largely unnoticed. Perhaps I am merely acknowledging constitutional similarities. Brook then moved to Hawaii and later to Irvine, California, and, alas, away from Joyce. The last appearance I remember was his illuminating talk in Monaco, 1990. The Ulysses of 1922, he reminded us, was under suspicion of corrupting its readers; but by the time Gabler’s edition was under fire, the corrupted state of the text itself had moved into the centre. I have always wished Brook had come back to the fold, a prodigal Joycean.

Zack Bowen I first was aware of the name Zack Bowen through those early Caedmon recordings of several Ulysses chapters that he had initiated. They consisted of the text read out with the melodies sung in the background, so one got an idea of what the songs were like. Most of them were new to me at the time. In the sixties hardly anyone, at least outside the English-speaking world, knew the songs that have by now become a part of our Joycean heritage, thanks to the efforts of Mabel Worthington, Ruth Bauerle, Zack and many other forerunners of our electronic facilities. Zack Bowen had had a musical education; on these records he took the tenor part. He and his family came to Zurich in 1966, I believe. What I remember best is that on our Joyce tour we went up to Lindenhof, which offers a view of the Limmat and our Old City, and we exchanged views on our respective states of depression. In the evening all of us, three children included, took a walk in Niederdorf, and it so happens that whenever Joyceans are in town more prostitutes cluster in the streets than on ordinary evenings, and I think the Bowens were a bit taken aback. It was not the sort of thing they expected of Zurich, the city whose patron saints are St Felix and St Regula, and whom Joyce once characterized to Budgen as ‘prosperity and order’. When I went to the States on 17 June 1968, Zack was among the people who were at the Gotham Book Mart where I was to speak. He was encouraging when I confessed my apprehension about having to ‘teach’ Joyce without previous experience. That summer he invited me to his university in Binghamton where, after my talk, which I have blissfully forgotten, there was the usual party in his home with his students. I am sure many of us see Zack in such a context, in his kitchen with a guitar, surrounded by students, singing Irish or American songs, though hardly ever finishing them. Zack is one of the warmest people around and endearingly charming. Our regular conferences, symposiums and American inter-symposiums provide a useful mnemotechnic grid, thus I know that Zack participated in the second Dublin symposium in 1969 and in many subsequent ones. He became chairman of the Department at the University of Delaware, and when Anthony Burgess should have become a distinguished visitor but backed out at the last minute (I vaguely think he was asked to adapt the Gospels for Hollywood or something equally remunerative), I got a phone call late one night and was asked to substitute, faute de mieux, so that Newark, Delaware, became my last American appointment in early 1977. Zack Bowen had a great reputation as an efficient chairman, and I could now observe at close range how he handled departmental affairs with a sort of quiet placidity, cutting matterof-factly through Gordian knots. Not that I understood what the issues were. Zack was conducting his graduate Joyce seminar, and we sort of shared it between us. The bifocal approach worked quite well, as it showed students that their teachers have different perspectives and priorities. Our views at times complemented each other and occasionally diverged. Zack Bowen was next engaged by the University of Miami, which thus became the American Joycean stronghold. Patrick McCarthy, a top Joyce scholar, was already in residence, and so was Hermione de Almeida (she had entered the lists with a book on Homer, Byron and Joyce). Zack, by that time, had married Lindsey Tucker, a former graduate student at Delaware whom I knew well from that round table seminar. She had written on food and eating in Ulysses: Stephen and Bloom at Life’s Feast, but before long moved into feminist studies. Shari and Berni Benstock were soon lured to join the Department. No wonder that out of such a constellation the Miami J’yce conferences arose. They took place around Joyce’s birthday and became an enjoyable fixture on the Joyce calendar, not only because it was a welcome chance to break the severity of our winters. We often convened in a room that was set up like a court, with a bench and jury box, an excellent angle for photographs, where portraits of solemn, dignified judges on the walls frowned sternly on our frivolities. It may be fitting that a lawsuit did arise there when the Joyce Estate sued a scholar for reading from (as I recall) an essay that a younger Stephen Joyce had written in college. This was considered a breach of copyright, but I never found out what exactly happened. It was the first instance that I knew of the Estate showing its claws. The most memorable event of the Miami conferences was probably the confrontation of

Hans Gabler and John Kidd in 1989 when the acrimonies around the Ulysses text were in full swing. Zack Bowen and Berni Benstock also set up the James Joyce Literary Supplement, which has become a welcome vehicle for reviews. For a few years the fulcrum of Joycean gravity was in Miami, and many excellent scholars served their apprenticeship there and now continue the good work in the diaspora. Zack’s specialty has always been music, songs in particular, and his study of musical allusions is a standard work. Some of his discoveries were particularly important to me. Always eager for exact references, I once bought the English libretto of Martha, the German opera so prominent in the ‘Sirens’ episode, but its text differed from Joyce’s wording. It was Zack who traced the version we find in ‘Sirens’ (‘When first I saw that form endearing’). When a highly allusive writer makes use of a German opera, one might imagine a German translator to be lucky in just inserting the words from the original. But ironically, Joyce’s intricate network of variants — ‘feeling that flow endearing … First night when first I saw her at Mat Dillon’s … Bosom I saw … First I saw … first I saw … second I saw’ (in ‘Sirens’) — cannot be based on the German original, which contains no vision whatsoever, but begins ‘Ach so fromm, ach so traut’; ‘fromm’ (literally, ‘pious’) does not lend itself to corresponding operatic elaboration. So ironically a synthetic back-translation had to be concocted to preserve some of the variations. The same year that Zack told me of the discovery of the libretto text that found its way into Ulysses, I had an opportunity to meet May Monaghan, Joyce’s last surviving sister. Always the pedant, I enquired about ‘When first I saw’, and she immediately began to sing it with vivid memories of that melody as part of her childhood. It was one of Zack’s students, Kevin McDermott, who (no doubt at his prompting) discovered ‘Seaside Girls’ and revived it for Joycean recirculation. It was first staged in Buffalo in 1976, in real music-hall fashion, an electrifying ear-opener that seemed to recreate the old music hall, and ‘Seaside Girls’ has now become part of our legacy. McDermott’s tenor performance was so impressive that he was brought to the next Dublin symposium in 1977. He was scheduled in the evening, after a long day of papers and lectures, but a professor at Trinity College wanted to divert us by prefacing the music with a history of song, beginning in the middle ages and dragging through subsequent centuries, so that, in fact, he did divert the audience, many of whom left, and the remaining contingent was far too tired to appreciate a first-rate performance. Zack himself is a kind of Bloom figure, good-natured, jovial, with the same sense of humour, and it is that humour that Zack has passed on ever since. He is one of the most genial and popular Joyceans. I certainly never meant to comment on him, or people like him (if there are any), when I once pointed out that the opening pair of adjectives in Ulysses, ‘Stately’ and ‘plump’, are ill-matched. I never implied that persons with a certain plumpness could not be stately as well. My remarks were aimed purely at the linguistic register as the two adjectives move in different social spheres and, in this way, faintly forecast two dominant strains in Ulysses, the realistic one, a descriptive ‘plump’, and an elevated one that is often characteristic of the parodies to follow. Of the stateliness of Zack Bowen there is no doubt, nor of the affection that he awakes everywhere.

John Bishop In the eighties a rumour made the rounds that somebody, somewhere — for some reason I thought of a recluse in the Canadian Rockies — was engaged on a basic study of Finnegans Wake and dreams. After some searching I was given the address of one John Bishop at Berkeley and not in some remote backwoods. His Book of the Dark was a major breakthrough, not so much on dreaming as in taking the Wake as a sleeping body. This put John Bishop right into the front rank of Joyce scholars. He then turned up at the conference in Milwaukee in 1987, with his own coffee machine, because he liked his coffee strong. So we finally met and, from then on, kept in touch. That same summer he went to the Wake event in Leeds, where I remember some lively discussion between Derek Attridge, sceptical about the Wake being based on a dream, and John defending his position. He then went on to the Zurich Foundation in its previous location, further down in Augustinergasse. We got to know each other fairly well, and I sensed an affinity, also in attitudes. Since then John has often been in Zurich. Indeed he is one of the cornerstones (corner trees?) of the workshops he tends to join, often at the last minute. His mere presence is a guarantee of success. In 1990 he also delivered a ‘James Joyce Lecture’ at Zurich University which the Friends of the Zurich James Joyce Foundation instituted but which was never continued. John had scribbled lengthy additions in minuscule handwriting into the margins of his typescript, but he read it all with perfect ease (and speed) and no fumbles whatsoever. I have also seen him at work in class in Berkeley and in the local reading group, which met on the terrace of a restaurant and later shared a delicious Chinese meal. The ‘Fiftyfication of Finnegans Wake’ conference of 1989 in Berkeley was one of the best. Since I had already backed out of the Wake in semantic despair as I have detailed elsewhere, I cannot see myself as one of the experts. I focused instead on the dynamics, which, I think, I termed ‘dysdynamics’, of reading groups, that is to say, I sublimated my irritations about the chaotic proceedings of our Zurich reading groups into a characterization of the Wake itself. With the brain taxed to the utmost, facing a perplexing passage and trying to make sense of it, one or more people begin to offer guesses, so that much is not heard and has to be repeated, with the most forced readings generally uttered first. What I admire in particular about John is his uncanny knack of pulling threads together. Often in workshops or conferences, when we were confused about a passage and bandied criss-cross tangentialities around, he got up and linked the various strands in a way that we thought we should have done ourselves, only we couldn’t. The same is true of Hugh Kenner. To say that it is always worth listening

to John does not sound like exorbitant praise, but once you have heard other speakers, you know what I mean.

Morris Beja I wonder what would have become of the international James Joyce Foundation if it hadn’t been for the efficiency of Murray Beja, but such a characterization may make him look too much like a first-rate administrator. I first appreciated him as a scholar and, of course, I still do. It was an early Quarterly, in the late sixties, that ran an article called ‘The man with the stick’, I think, by a newcomer. I thought it very well done and informative: it had a theme and it was something to learn from. No, I am wrong about the title and have to look it up: it is ‘The wooden sword’. It does not often happen that I write to a newcomer who has something to say, but I did. I wrote a similar letter to an as yet unknown Marilyn French, whose The Book as World had burst on the scene without warning, and I told her what I liked a lot and where disagreement was possible; perhaps she valued the praise more than the muted reservations. Morris Beja must have written back, and he made it to the second symposium in Dublin. Not that it is of particular importance, but I remember him on the city walk. He later showed me slides he had taken of the interior of St Mary’s Abbey, so I must be correct. The following year Murray Beja invited me to Ohio State where he, at heart a New Yorker, was corralled. Still a bit of a novice at ‘teaching’, I had an exciting semester there. In those days of inexperience, I lugged along all my notes, several volumes of them (Ulysses and Finnegans Wake interleaved). I remember Murray’s hospitality with great affection. He and other members of the Department often invited me to their homes, aware that I had to spend many evenings in a dormitory room. I kept on good terms with a number of students there, notably Alison Armstrong who later burned some bridges and went to Ireland and England for a few years. Ruth Bauerle was also in the Ulysses seminar. Once, as I returned to Columbus, Ohio, on the Greyhound bus from Cambridge, Mass., where I had visited Ulrich Schneider, President Nixon did some campaigning downtown, and even if I had not been tired from the long trip I would only have seen him briefly and from a distance. I heard that he later came to the campus and was not made welcome. This was in 1970, and I also went to Kent State to see Berni and Eve Benstock. Berni told me all about the Kent State shootings, which had taken place months earlier. In early winter 1975 I had another delightful spell in Ohio State, coming from Honolulu, and again remained on excellent terms with some of students I had there. One weekend I took a trip on the Greyhound to Buffalo to see Tom Connolly and Carole Brown, and arrived around 4 am. It was too early to call on my hosts, and the bus station featured the usual group of derelicts hanging around drowsily, reminiscent of the cabman’s shelter, and a border patrol walked around, stopped by me and asked where I was from. Hearing Switzerland, he did not chat about mountains or chocolate but asked for identification, and I handed him my passport. He did not seem to be familiar with that sort of document and asked all kinds of questions. When I explained my moves from the University of Hawaii to Ohio and now Buffalo he indicated I might have some student, or was it faculty, identification, and once I produced my little card things were all right, and I felt relieved. I had had visions of calling in local university professors to identify me and bail me out. When I asked why he had singled me out for special investigation and whether I looked suspicious, he handed me back my passport and said: ‘No, you look continental.’ So over the years Murray and I got to know each other very well, transcontinentally. He spent a sabbatical year in Dublin in, I believe, 1972–3, and so could help set up the third Dublin symposium. Ever since, he has been highly competent at organizing, and he rose through the ranks of our International James Joyce Foundation. To be a trustee probably looked well on paper but initially carried few responsibilities and fewer privileges until Murray became president of the Foundation in 1982, following my own sinecure. He was the first to be constructive: he instigated regulations, by-laws and real elections. For one thing, strict rotation rules were introduced. With him the James Joyce Foundation became a real organization and more than a decorative overhead. Murray also may have had a shaping hand in more symposia than anyone else; he is someone to fall back on, and when his term ended, he was made a permanent executive secretary. He brought the files of the Foundation to Ohio State, now its headquarters. All presidents that followed him, Karen Lawrence, Zack Bowen, Rosa Maria Bosinelli and Margot Norris, had important functions and left their mark on our network. At panels and discussions I always found Murray outstanding; he makes his point succinctly and clearly and then stops and lets others put their arguments forward. I rub it in once more that this should be the norm and not, as it turns out, a rare exception worth special mention. I hear that Murray Beja is now retired, but I do not really believe it.

Shari Benstock I first saw Shari on 13 January 1972 when she arrived with Berni, who, that winter, was touring Europe and stopped for one of his many visits. I remember the exact date as it happened to be the day my divorce came through. Shari was a graduate student at Kent State who had become fascinated with Joyce and with her teacher. She and Berni turned up again the same year at the celebration of fifty years of Ulysses in Tulsa. From then on they were always seen together. I do not remember when exactly they married, probably on one of their trips after a conference. In 1973 Shari was already co-organizing the third

Dublin symposium, and she became part of the inner Joycean circle quickly and deservedly rose to prominence. She and Berni seemed an ideal combination and helped to animate many conferences; they also collaborated on the book of names (Who’s He when He’s at Home?). The Benstocks moved to Champaign, Illinois, and I remember staying with them for Christmas in 1974 when we all went to New York for the MLA conference. To watch proceedings and rituals at such an event is interesting for a mere onlooker, whereas for those who depend on job interviews it must be a gruelling experience. Outside the market, I could afford to wonder why human beings do this to each other. The Benstocks later moved to Tulsa for a while and eventually settled in Miami. They often came to Zurich, also on the centenary of Joyce’s birth, when we had a little gathering that included Jörg Drews, Gerardine Franken, Carla Marengo and Hans Walter Gabler. Actually the Benstocks were in Zurich under the pseudonyms of Fingal and Fiana O’Flahertie as they were supposed to take part in a Joyce conference in, of all places, Beirut, but had chosen the safety of Zurich. As it turned out, Beirut soon after became a battlefield and stayed so for many years, wholly unsuitable for any Joyce meetings. Shari was never limited to Joyce. She profited from the theories that were around and soon turned to feminist subjects. Her first major effort in this line was her study, Women of the Paris Left Bank, followed by a biography of Edith Wharton, and she has made a name for herself in this field. Joyce is no longer a main concern of hers, but she has decidedly left her mark. She came to a little intimate gathering in Zurich in 1995 in honour of Berni who had died the previous year; also assembled were Arnold Goldman, Rosa Maria Bosinelli, Paola Pugliatti and Ron Hoffman from the Netherlands.

Margot Norris I first met Margot Norris in 1975 in Tulsa where she was teaching, though our paths may have crossed before. I think she was the first ever to point out that even as a novice, Joyceans had treated her in a nonhierarchical way, something I had always taken for granted. Her study, The Decentered Universe of Finnegans Wake, was one of the first breakthroughs in the area. I am not surprised that she made her way to the top Joycean ranks. She can combine abstract perspicuity with a lucid and supple prose and always has something to say. Some of her former students now carry the torch. In 1982–3 she spent a year at Basle University, and I went to see her and her son for a weekend. She cheered me up during a bad period: I had lost my job with the publisher, and Mia, my daughter, and my son Mischa had been seriously injured in an accident. I remember a walk we had in the woods around Basle where the drums could be heard practising for the imminent and famous Basler Fasnacht, a local carnival characterized by wit and ingenuity. I also remember that she once joined our private Ulysses reading group. In Monaco in 1990 we did a cross-talk together, and I think she was caught a bit off balance when Stephen Joyce, who was in the audience, asked her a few penetrating questions that were not conspicuously connected with the subject at hand. Margot is now based at Irvine, California, and as we shall all be known by our fruits, she has launched many excellent Joyce scholars, Kim Devlin being perhaps the most notable. Margot has a great reputation, and we all like to hear her and read her books, always instructive, one of the most recent dealing with undercurrents in Dubliners. When she succeeded Rosa Maria Bosinelli as president of the International James Joyce Foundation, she initiated a few practical steps in dealing with the ever present James Joyce Estate.

Hélène Cixous I do not know when Hélène Berger became Hélène Cixous and at which point she rose to fame and radiance. In the sixties I had heard that a French student was working on a Joyce thesis, a rare event then. I found out her name and address, Hélène Berger in Paris, and we exchanged a few letters. I believe she was instrumental in setting up a small conference in Paris, around 2 February 1966, the first of its kind. Clive Hart, though stationed in Australia at the time, was then in England, and it was a good opportunity for us to meet, especially since such names — and they were names — as Maria Jolas, Stuart Gilbert, A.J. Leventhal, Michel Butor, the scholars Jean-Jacques Mayoux and George Steiner took part. Professor Mayoux, I think, threw in early on that Joyce makes fun of scholars, and most others were in agreement, arguing against pompous academics taking over Joyce, until George Steiner proclaimed his pride in being one. It was also Steiner who, in stark outline, pitted Joyce’s ‘Yes’ against Kafka’s ‘No’ with little apparent need for qualification. I introduced myself to Hélène Berger, but there was little time for conversation during the interval, and she did not attend the party afterwards. She was already of notable importance in a French scene of which I was entirely innocent, and her name was soon circulated. In some performances in the States I heard she had polarized the audience. Reports were mixed: some were impressed as she was clearly heralding the provocatively new theoretical French impetus; others remained puzzled, but unanimously impressed by a brilliant performance. A year later, on my return from the States, I stopped in Paris and went to her apartment near Les Invalides. Her book, the voluminous thesis, L’Exil de James Joyce ou l’art de remplacement, had come out almost that very day. She was also engaged in those ongoing university reforms of the eventful and chaotic year 1968. I felt that she didn’t quite know what to make of me as I could not be academically classified — and certainly would never become a rival. We arranged that she would participate in the

following year’s symposium, the second one. It appeared she had fallen out with Maria Jolas over the notorious letters of 1909, still under ban, that she had published. So either she or Maria Jolas could attend the symposium, but not both. In the end, unfortunately, though she was listed on the programme, she did not turn up in Dublin where, no doubt, she would have made a big impact within a very traditional set-up. Her extensive, at times rambling study is uneven, full of acute flashes jostling against effective asides amidst less than punctilious documentation. I dutifully plodded through the book until an invented bibliographical reference to a non-existent translation, Dublinois, made me give up. We had to wait six years for Hélène Cixous’ next appearance, which took place at the Paris symposium in 1975 where each of the various French factions had their own afternoon, almost hermetically sealed off from the others. I was slightly late for her session, as the trustees’ lunch was unduly prolonged, and we found her on stage flanked by seven of her male students. Reports had it that she introduced the group as ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ without revealing who Snow White was. Some of the dwarfs, whom we then saw for the first time, have since become leading French scholars, including André Topia, Daniel Ferrer and Jean-Michel Rabaté. Others, like Dublin-born Michael Beausang, pursued different careers. It was quite obvious that these young talents owed a lot to their resplendent, innovative, dazzling and perhaps unorthodox inspiratrice to whom, I am sure, they remain deeply indebted. The last time I saw her was in the jubilee year of 1982 when she and Jacques Derrida appeared together in the Centre Pompidou. She then gave a detailed reading of the opening pages of A Portrait. When I lost my publishing job later that year I heard that she, together with a French friend, was trying to find a position for me. I was very much touched. I am sorry that Hélène Cixous, moving on to higher spheres and into stellar fame as a creative and feminist writer, has not ocasionally returned to the fold. Joyce has sometimes served as a launching pad for incandescent careers.

You mentioned the Colloques Joyce in Paris earlier on. Would you talk about some of the French scholars involved? I mentioned that André Topia, Daniel Ferrer and Jean-Michel Rabaté had put in an appearance at the 1975 Paris symposium, under the aegis of Hélène Cixous, but I did not know them individually nor had I any idea of what exactly they were engaged in. It was at the first Colloque Joyce that I saw them at close range. They, still in their ‘promising’ state, became the backbone of those meetings that I think started in the spring of 1980. Daniel Ferrer not only became an expert on Joyce’s notebooks and an innovator in presenting them electronically, but I always saw in him the scholar who was best at holding a mirror up to the ‘Circe’ episode. André Topia was working, or so it appeared, on an extensive thesis over a long time. He published some highly instructive articles but, alas, his magnum opus has never appeared. He always spoke with great concentration in rapid, machine-gun bursts that were hard to follow, and even harder when he, like many of the local participants, spoke in sophisticated French. It frequently left some of us foreigners in the dark, and we never quite succeeded in our demand that a conference about an author who wrote, one might almost agree, in English, also be conducted in that language. There may have been some national pride involved, as on one occasion when the law was laid down quite forcefully (not by a French Joycean, incidentally) that French should be the language used in France. It was probably a dig at the linguistic incompetence of most of us Joyceans, yet it is a valid point. Even so, for some reason, the conference language at the Zurich symposium was not a Swiss dialect.

Jean-Michel Rabaté I have always been overawed by Jean-Michel Rabaté, right from when I first heard him at an early colloque in Paris. I am not alone in this, for his talent (I rarely use words like genius) is manifest. With the immense range that he commanded even then, he talked about Hermann Broch, not an easy Austrian writer, and a follower of Joyce. Jean-Michel, disciple of Hélène Cixous, seems so utterly sophisticated and knowledgeable, at home with the French elite as well as German philosophers, and yet he does not seek to impress; it just comes naturally. He is totally at ease on the humble level of philology and not above looking perceptively at the texts. Jean-Michel took part in the Pléiade edition of Ulysse, which meant attending to minutiae. He is also the only French Joycean (Claude Jacquet excepted) who ever came to one of our workshops, the one on ‘Eumaeus’. (I may be sneaking in a point here because, for some reason, we have never quite managed to get someone from France, or, for that matter, Italy, to Zurich. It may be that the holy month of August is firmly devoted to family holidays.) Jean-Michel has published prolifically and, as far as I can tell, always on a high and inspiring level. Some of it is above my head. There was no question but that he should be a key speaker, one of only two, at the Zurich symposium of 1996. It is also little wonder that he became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and rumour has it that he will move on soon.

Giorgio Melchiori Long before I even started, his name was around, and when I groped for footholds I came across his essays in which Joyce figures among other ‘tightrope walkers’ of twentieth-century literature. I also knew he was one of the advisors to Ulisse, the Italian translation. We first met at the 1969 Dublin symposium,

and then again in Trieste, 1971. He and his English wife Barbara, both traditional scholars in the word’s best sense, have the sort of wide-flung erudition and a solid background in philosophy that are dying out. I have only a small part of it myself, but I can pretend. We were always on excellent terms, and he was very kind towards me, a relative newcomer. We really got to know each other, also his daughter Miranda, at the centenary gathering in Rome 1982, with a predominantly Italian attendance. Richard Ellmann took part, as did Seamus Deane and George Sandulescu. This was the only occasion, I think, that I met Dominic Manganiello, whose pioneering study Joyce’s Politics into what was then new territory, had just risen to prominence. At least from that time on, Joyce was a political author. Melchiori’s Scritti Italiani shows Joyce as an Italian writer; he also wrote Epifanie: Joyce in Rome, and many inspiring essays. His health has not been too good of late, and he is no longer able to come to our meetings. I was pleased to see him at our Zurich symposium in 1996, the last one he travelled to attend, but he and his fellow Joyceans convened the Rome symposium in 1998, and since then he has joined us in Trieste and in Forlì. Once in Forlì, Rosa Maria Bosinelli’s stronghold, both of us presented our view of how tiny origins gather momentum; he the Grand Old Man of Italian Joyce studies, and me a rookie Nestor beside him. The Roman contingent, where Franca Ruggieri is now carrying the torch, has been active all along. We owe them an excellent series, Joyce Studies in Italy. Various issues focus on a theme, or else gather the contributions of a meeting such as ‘Romantic Joyce’ in April 2002. Unfortunately, European publications from Italy, France, Spain or the Netherlands (quite apart from what happens in Poland or Hungary, let alone Japan or Korea), never quite make it into the anglophone mainstream, and their seeds tend to fall by the wayside. In part this is true because of the language barrier. Christine van Boheemen once vaguely talked of assembling the more significant of such contributions and of having them translated, but such projects never come off.

Umberto Eco In the sixties I bought a book by someone called Umberto Eco: it was the French translation of his Italian book L’opera operta, and I read through it as well as my French allowed. Its angle was termed semiotic, and it had a lot about medieval aspects of Joyce. So when Eco turned up in Dublin for the first symposium I knew who he was, one more author, though I sensed something of his potential when he summed up the conference in an allusive passage in Wakese, off the cuff, in my ‘symposium book’ (I have quoted it elsewhere). Eco then came to Trieste in 1971 but did not, as far as I can remember, participate actively. He was at that time an original scholar of great reputation, but not yet the author of The Name of the Rose, which catapulted him to literary fame. We saw him again in Venice, 1988, and since then he has come to Forlì. I know that Tom Staley discovered him early on and brought him to Tulsa; he is also a great friend of Rosa Maria Bosinelli’s. Incidentally, Eco is fortunate in having Burkhard Kroeber as his German translator, one of the best of his craft, whom I have met on many occasions. Eco is aware of the importance of those who make his work available in other languages, and he sometimes discusses his books with translators.

Rosa Maria Bosinelli Oddly enough, the better you know a person the less, perhaps, there is to say, since tales of harmony are tedious by nature. We, Cicci Bosinelli and I, have been friends for a long time, and in the early involvement and common activities I would have liked to be more than just a good friend. For Joyceans, chronology is relatively unproblematic, even when memory begins to fade. Our regular biannual symposia, like the Olympic games in Ancient Greece, provide a mnemonic grid which allows me to determine most Joyceans’ vintage. A letter reached me when the second symposium of 1969 was in the works, and it came from an Italian student, or so it seemed, and I think she was surprised that participation in our conference was so informal. So Rosa Maria Bosinelli from Bologna came as an onlooker. She had done her graduate work investigating Joyce’s traces in Trieste and had a good grounding in psychology. The symposium must have changed a lot for her, not an entirely uncommon experience, and, at any rate, her enthusiasm brought her to that archetypal Wake reading group that assembled in Amsterdam during the Easter weekend of 1970. Since then she has done a lot in connection with Finnegans Wake. Another dominant interest of hers is translation, which is what her university at Forlì specializes in, and I do not know how many translation panels we have sat on together in our time. Her background is not literature, but social sciences and linguistics, and we, both non-native speakers who speak non-native fairly well, manifestly share a few perspectives. Rosa has made the University of Forlì a Joycean centre; it also holds the Bernard Benstock Memorial Library which was inaugurated a few years ago. Rosa Maria Bosinelli was one of three organizers of the 1988 symposium in Venice, along with Christine van Boheemen and Carla Marengo. Carla had to bear the brunt and make all the arrangements by remote control, from Turin, and as I had gone through similar ordeals with the first Dublin conferences, I knew all about remote control. One extended weekend in 1987, we all assembled in Cicci’s home to line up the academic programme, and we had just learned the use of computers. I think Cicci has been at most of our symposia and certainly at the 1976 conference in Buffalo. She became president of the International James Joyce Foundation, the second woman to do so, and the second non-American president. Living in Bologna, she knows Umberto Eco very well and is also in close touch with Luigi

Schenoni, the painstaking and inspired translator of Finnegans Wake.

Have you met many celebrities over the decades? Well, I did not really bump into many celebrities except in our own little Joycean garden. Naturally some turned up at our gatherings. Jorge Luis Borges attended the 1982 symposium, along with many writers and poets that Dublin had invited. I remember talking to Hans Magnus Enzensberger briefly. Norman Mailer spoke in Provincetown and was interviewed by Nathan Halper, but I never pushed near them. We also had some visitors of renown looking into the Foundation: Cy Twombly, Robert Anton Wilson, Péter Esterházy, Mario Vargas Llosa, Richard Hamilton, John Cage with Merce Cunningham, the widow of Marcel Duchamps and a number of Swiss and German authors. I have not really ‘met’ many famous people, famous in our category, not film stars and their ilk. Well, perhaps Milo O’Shea, who played Bloom in Joseph Strick’s Ulysses and whom I asked for an autograph. At that stage, he was not yet known outside Ireland; this only came about as a consequence of the movie.

Thomas Mann and Emil Staiger Somehow celebrities did not come my way, or my rather secluded ways, in Zurich. Thomas Mann, who had returned to Switzerland, once gave a lecture at the university about the German writer Heinrich von Kleist. It was impressive and ended, as far as I can recall, with a resonant peroration on how Heinrich von Kleist tortured himself and his readers and, at the same time, made them, or us, ‘praise God for such tortures’. Otherwise Mann, in whose library, incidentally, there is a wholly untouched copy of Finnegans Wake, had no more to say than what I had already heard from Emil Staiger, probably the most renowned ‘Germanist’ of his generation. It was in his packed seminars that I learned, along with many others, how to deal with a text and sound it for its implications. His reputation was jeopardized when, in a famous speech in the seventies, he came down forcefully on present-day writers because of their predilection for decay, perversion or indecency, prostitution and all the rest, and he publicly asked the authors (among whom he numbered the newly emerging Samuel Beckett) what company they kept (‘Wo verkehren Sie?’). This led to an extended controversy in which many took part. Staiger did not yet use the term ‘modernists’, which must have surfaced much later and has the great advantage that it does not mean anything. Emil Staiger’s example shows that all of us, probably, cannot follow developments, aesthetic or otherwise, beyond a certain point. But he was a powerful influence after the war and always lectured to packed audiences; a few rows generally contained fashionable ladies from the better areas in and around town. When my first piece on Joyce came out, a note on early Russian history in Finnegans Wake, in Eddie Epstein’s Joyce Review, I proudly sent Staiger one of my few copies and received a courteous note where he wrote that he admired the Wake but that it also put him into a veritable rage. Among those present-day writers that he exempted from his charges was Thornton Wilder who, after the war, may have been the most read American writer in Germany, second to Hemingway. But Wilder confessed that he was less than pleased to be classified as one of the more traditional ‘harmless’ authors that Staiger had championed against the more shocking up-to-date ones.

Anthony Burgess Anthony Burgess was a prolific writer and, perhaps, the only one who also descended to Joyce criticism with two excellent, informative and readable introductory books. I first saw him in Monte Carlo when the Princess Grace Library set up a commemorative meeting in 1982. We were sitting far apart at a long table, the kind of thing that is usually called a ‘round table’. There was a banquet later on in the hotel opposite the Casino, and during the lavish meal Burgess sat at the piano and entertained us with Irish songs before he disappeared to work at home, obviously a habit of his. That same year Carla Marengo, always competent in this respect, arranged a three-day conference in Cesena, Italy, and this in the best setting ever, a monastery on a hill where we sat and talked in the cloister by waning daylight. I remember that Burgess, who was most affable, became furiously indignant that the audience did not listen to his music, a composition that he had written for the Joyce anniversary in 1982. He saw himself as a composer as well as a writer, and a writer with an immense output. Burgess was a powerful and gifted talker and could easily hold forth in French or Italian, as the case might be. He entertained a spellbound audience in Zurich talking about his life and work and how he found his wife in Hollywood. The next day, he and Livia Burgess turned up in the Foundation, just as our reading group was finishing ‘Scylla and Charybdis’, the Library chapter. He joined in freely, considering this particular episode of Ulysses not very successful. But he instantly added that he had treated the same subject (more or less Stephen’s speculations about Shakespeare) in a book. He had a forceful presence and was not above some ambivalence towards a rival predecessor. From time to time he indicated that attention might also be devoted to contemporary writers. His was obviously a dilemma that writers had to face after the landslide that Joyce released: one cannot ignore what Joyce showed to be possible, or one might be written off as a traditionalist. But how can one profit from his breakthroughs? How can one follow, imitate, or expand Joyce? Burgess was honest about this. What still rings in my ears is one of his exclamatory asides: ‘Joyce is a damned nuisance!’

Saul Bellow It must have been in the eighties that Saul Bellow lectured in Zurich. That evening he, Henri Petter (professor at the English Department) and I had dinner together. Naturally we touched on Joyce (not that Bellow seemed too keen on this), and he strongly denied that his character, Moses Herzog, in his novel Herzog, was lifted from Ulysses, a point that a critic had once made. The name apparently originated in a much more personal biography. I was a trifle surprised when he dismissed Joyce’s techniques in the later episodes of Ulysses as somewhat gratuitous intrusions that artistically were neither necessary nor justified. He thus aligned himself with those critics who consider some essential Joycean features as extraneously contrived. I had assumed a craftsman like Bellow might have insights beyond those of pedestrian scholars, but maybe this was just his mood of the moment, and, of course, it may not be conducive to an author’s self-esteem when his views are solicited about a dead predecessor. He was quite affable, however, and by no means condescending, even though he must have been exposed to the same type of question for years.

Arnold Goldman I wish he would come back into the fold that he left, on and off, after his highly perceptive (for me almost too perceptive) book, The Joyce Paradox (1966). He was far ahead of most others. I remember I understood every alternate chapter, but I did sense that here was something new and different. We first spoke on the phone when I was visiting Atherton in 1958, and Arnold had been in touch with him and must have been living somewhere nearby. He participated in one of our incipient European Finnegans Wake meetings in Brighton around 1970, and at some conferences thereafter. When we convened in Miami to discuss the Ulysses controversy (1989), he took an active part and showed just how much he had kept up with recent developments. He attended our little commemorative meeting in Zurich in 1995, the year after Berni Benstock’s death. I wish I had more to say about him, which means I wish that Joyce had been more than a passing, if important, phase for him.

Geert Lernout It must have been at those Colloques Joyce in the eighties that I first came across a young Belgian who took part. He was well qualified since, thoroughly grounded in French, he could follow sophisticated and theoretical argumentation delivered at rapid speed and yet seemed to keep a critical distance. Thus he was able to write a book, The French Joyce, about what had happened to Joyce at the hands of French academics and philosophers. He could judge their theoretical premises as well as many details of their interpretations. Reading his book in hospital when immobilized by a severe back problem, I was fascinated by how he dealt with those Joyceans that I also had heard at the colloque and whose work he could characterize from quite a different angle. Geert Lernout is an extremely scrupulous scholar and, in subsequent years, turned his department at the University of Antwerp into a vital centre of predominantly genetic research. Significant discoveries have been made by him or under his aegis. Several times he has convened scholars who engage in the study of notebooks for short intense workshops. I am the passive witness among experts like Daniel Ferrer, David Hayman, Vincent Deane, Michael Groden, Joe Schork and others. In particular I admired Bill Cadbury’s work on the geology of one chapter in Finnegans Wake; it would, if ever permission were miraculously granted, show the vicissitudes of a chapter in progress. One result of the dedicated Antwerp labours, in conjunction with Paris (Daniel Ferrer) and Dublin (Vincent Deane), is the series of The Finnegans Wake Notebooks at Buffalo, a huge undertaking where each single note is carefully reproduced, transcribed, examined, and commented on. The editors, notably Vincent Deane, went to immense trouble to trace sources, often Irish newspapers of the twenties, and devoted meticulous care to the job. I wish someone would accord the same intensity to some abstruse passages in, say, the ‘Ithaca’ episode of Ulysses — on the level of mere surface understanding. Geert has developed a healthy no-nonsense approach to Joyce with a strong emphasis on facts, though he can easily hold his own on more abstract levels. He is not just a scrupulous investigator of notes; he has written monographs, translated Exiles, and written books about many non-Joycean subjects. He is also very good at directing his students, and many of his protégés have risen to become front-rank Joyceans: Wim van Mierlo, Dirk van Hulle and others who unfortunately had to find appointments in other fields. He has also sent some of his students to Zurich and has himself taken part in at least one workshop, ‘Teems of Times’, which was devoted to time in the Wake. For a long time I did not know that Geert is also an author in his own right, with several books on diverse subjects, including one on Johann Sebastian Bach — a versatile scholar and author.

Cheryl Herr I have talked about meeting her for the first time during the conference in Seville in 1982, one of the anniversary events, and since then, naturally, on various occasions. Cheryl is an excellent speaker: bright, invigorating and often concrete; entirely non-boring in her slide shows. I have heard her talk about jazz in

Dundee (1996), and she amazed us one time in Dublin by showing how much mileage one may get out of a functioning razor, for shaving or interpretation. For years I have been hoping she would take part in one of our Zurich workshops.

Michael Groden It must have been in the sixties that a young student by the name of Michael Groden came to visit us in Zurich with his wife. We all went to Joyce’s grave in the snow. Michael was engaged, I believe, on some comparative study, but Walt Litz must have redirected him, fortunately, towards the genesis of Ulysses. The outcome is his by now classic Ulysses in Progress (1977), which details how an intricate novel-epos laboriously developed over many years, a fascinating story of the vagaries and growth of what we now imagine could hardly have become anything else. Michael Groden was next put in charge of the voluminous James Joyce Archive. It enabled us to see how Joyce’s works grew and expanded. Before the Archive, this would have involved expensive travelling to the dispersed locations of the material, the privilege of only a few scholars. Deplorably, the Archive has been allowed to go out of print. With his expertise on Joyce’s notes and drafts, Michael Groden became an adviser to Hans Gabler’s Critical and Synoptic Edition, which, along with his participation in the ensuing controversies, also incited the animosity of John Kidd. Groden is supremely qualified to undertake an electronic annotated edition of Ulysses, and he has assembled an impressive cast of co-editors. Some of them once came together at a Zurich workshop where some strategies and procedures were outlined. But it looks as though, for as long as the copyright dark ages last, the project may have to be shelved, and an electronic Ulysses, to which numerous scholars would have contributed without remuneration, will remain a requirement, but not a reality. Naturally Mike’s and my paths have often crossed, at many symposia, conferences (often on genetics) and workshops and in one formal ceremony in the famous former Physics Theatre of Newman House.

Christine van Boheemen We had an ongoing workshop at the first Zurich symposium (1979) on narrative issues in Ulysses, and I had only partial success in dissuading participants from reading papers, the old story. In the first session there was a newcomer from Amsterdam, Christine van Boheemen-Saaf. Actually we must have met briefly, years earlier, at Rice University, Houston, where I had been speaking, incidentally, on Joyce in relation to German literature, certainly my least inspired performance ever. Christine was much more sophisticated than the other participants, or rather ‘discussants’, than I had expected. She, in turn, must have hoped for a more theoretically versed group, and I remember dimly that I asked a few very simple-minded questions when I could not quite follow her. Anyhow she, of a new and far less philologically oriented generation, did not seem to hold this against me. She became a welcome, at times overpowering, new force who was able to take up where the current French philosophers seem to have left off. Christine has set up a few conferences in Leiden, her first university position before she moved to Amsterdam where she is now teaching. On one occasion she took me to Antwerp, where a still young Geert Lernout held sway, along with Joris Duytschaever, whom I had once encountered in Bloomington. Christine took part in one Zurich workshop, and I wish she would do it more often. Her books are generally way beyond me, but we seem to have a kind of mutual estimation in different camps. As a coorganizer of the Venice symposium she was able, for example, to invite Jean-François Lyotard, and she also initiated our European Joyce Studies, an irregular periodical of book size devoted to certain specific topics like episodes of Ulysses, genetics, medieval Joyce or ‘masculinities’. What I like or admire in Christine is that she is frank rather than diplomatic in her opinions of others, irrespective of their grade of relationship. At the end of a lecture she once told the speaker, ‘I thought you would be more interesting.’ In such cases I prefer to say nothing, but I wish I had the same straightforward integrity. Then these memoirs might be a trifle different. But De viventibus nil nisi decorum.

Would you talk about Judith Harrington as an exemplary amateur? I feel a great affinity with amateurs; their motive is not a career, and Judith is one of those who are very good at presenting things vividly. She usually starts with something historical, factual, which she then manages to apply to the text. We owe her many specific and, above all, useful insights. I think that from her performances most people wouldn’t know that she isn’t a professional. She is an artist, and she has created a figure of HCE, titled the Great Stiff, which was a ceremonial point of gravity at the Berkeley conference in 1989. It is now at the Zurich Foundation. Judith brought quite a lot of material to us: she has a good sense for what we call ‘Documentary Insights’. She is one of those people who is always good to have around. All of us improve all occasions, but some contribute more.

Jörg Drews Many German scholars became Joyceans via Arno Schmidt who had introduced Joyce to German readers in his own sonorous, idiosyncratic and highly ambivalent manner. Among those who drifted into the Joycean camp was Jörg Drews, whose name was familiar as he had an editorial position in the renowned

Süddeutsche Zeitung; also he was, and still is, a prominent book reviewer and was often on television when literature was discussed. Drews was, I believe, the initiator of a Schmidt equivalent to our Wake Newslitter called Bargfelder Bote (Schmidt had lived in Bargfeld). Hence there were obvious connections before we met, which was, I believe, in 1976 when he, Wollschläger and I discussed the new German Ulysses together on the radio. He has since joined us and participated in many conferences. With his wide scope he can conjure up comparisons and analogies that are outside my own ken. Jörg is able to tune into almost any literary subject and has often widened our horizons at our workshops. In the early days of the Foundation we started a little group that was to look into Homer and Joyce, but we only met a few times.

David Norris It is odd that I cannot recall when I first became aware of David Norris, for David — scholar, senator, performer, feisty fighter for gay liberation in Ireland, orator and organizer — has never cultivated himself as a wallflower. I have heard him say that he was among the audience at an early Dublin symposium. By 1977 he was sufficiently prominent never to be overlooked again. His is one of the most animating presences, and we owe it to his drive and perseverance that we now have a James Joyce Centre in North Great George’s Street, Dublin, opposite where he lives. The Centre was formally opened on Bloomsday of the jubilee year 1982 when it was still a ruin. It remained so for many years, and we followed its slow renovation during our annual Zurich pilgrimages. In those years Ken Monaghan occupied the dusty rooms on the third floor. But he and David Norris persevered and convinced the authorities that the least Dublin could do was to establish an active James Joyce Centre. It began to flourish in the nineties and has been going strong since. David’s vocal dexterity is almost too Irish, and Joyce’s Citizen in ‘Cyclops’ seems to have provided him with a declamatory voice that we now may take to be the Dublin ur-dialect. It has always been a pleasure to meet David with his uninhibited cordiality, not only in Dublin, but in Copenhagen, Zurich, Rome, Trieste or Monte Carlo. He seemed to have a propensity for having his wallet stolen, maybe due to an overly open nature. We Swiss are not particularly gifted in public speaking, and I admire David’s histrionic talent. It is also hard for a Swiss to imagine a senator putting on a one-man show. I have seen and heard David’s in several places, and his performance is always different and adapted to the occasion. A versatile man and bristling with energy, polytropos indeed, David is a teacher, a scholar, a senator, an actor, an initiator and a great suggester of ideas. I admire the story he has been telling ever since 1982, when a plaque was put up at Bloom’s birthplace, 52 Clanbrassil Street Lower. The idea had come from Hugh Kenner, who was responsible for the wording on the plaque. He and many others traipsed to a place where few tourists ever lose themselves. The plaque was duly unveiled; Hugh Kenner, in a short speech, quoted that finally the Scriptures had been fulfilled. We stood in or outside the suburban garden and blocked the streets. A man enquired what we were doing and then said something like: ‘But the Blooms didn’t live here, they lived over there!’ I did not witness the incident myself, not being in the right spot, if there was a right spot. Since then the anecdote has expanded in David’s retelling and has taken on an inspired life of its own: it grows bigger and more colourful as time goes by. A live instance of oral poetry. I assume the Odyssey had a similar growth.

Alison Armstrong, Richard Brown, Pieter Bekker and Maud Ellmann Alison Armstrong, who had been my student at Ohio State and who had caught the virus, spent a few years in Ireland and England, and she was excellent at spotting Joycean talent. It was she who enticed David Lodge, Colin McCabe and Maud Ellmann to the Zurich symposium of 1979. I may have met Maud when she was a child, in the sixties: Dick Ellmann and two of his small children had dinner together, and we were in the restaurant Oepfelchammer, traditionally patronized by students. It had been made famous by the Swiss writer Gottfried Keller, whose novel Der grüne Heinrich, in the Bildungsroman tradition, was a forerunner of A Portrait, and this had been brought to Joyce’s attention. Joyce also misquoted and freely translated one of Keller’s poems, ‘Lebendig begraben’, which was set to music by Othmar Schoeck in the thirties. The Zurich symposium of 1979 was Maud Ellmann’s entry into the Joyce world, and I remember all too well how she raised a question from the audience that I was too obtuse to understand or adequately answer. Colin McCabe and David Lodge were already known through their work; David Lodge not yet as a novelist (at least to me). He made good use of his days in Zurich: he put the real James Joyce Pub into his novel Small World, and a few Joyceans were never quite sure whether some of his jet-setting characters were modelled on them. Two young scholars also came to the conference, prompted, I think, by Alison: Richard Brown and Pieter Bekker, both at the time at the University of London. I did not get to know them then, which is one of the problems of conferences: so many new faces. I said elsewhere how surprised I was when, the following year, I had an invitation from Colin McCabe; surprised that a scholar tarred with the poststructuralist brush, or so it seemed, would want me on his turf. Anyway, I did go to Cambridge in January 1980, and he met me at the gate of King’s College, walking me right across the wet lawn of a quadrangle. It was only when I read, the next morning, that visitors were not allowed to step on the lawn ‘unless accompanied by a senior member of the College’, that I realized that this shortcut had been a privilege. It was a pleasant occasion. Later on it transpired that Colin and Cambridge University did not see eye to eye, and he left; unfortunately he did not often return

to the Joycean fold. He took a very active part again in Dundee in the summer of 1996, at a conference that had an exclusive air about it. Due to the good offices of Alison Armstrong, who was at that time in Oxford, Richard Ellmann asked me to speak there. It was the last time that I saw his wife Mary, ailing and in a wheelchair. Both made me very welcome, and I remember a very kind introduction by Dick Ellmann. The same trip also took me to London where a variant of the same talk was delivered. The young scholars there were Richard Brown and Pieter Bekker (he had grown up in South Africa). After an Indian meal in Soho, we went to Richard’s house in North London where the first issue of the James Joyce Broadsheet was waiting for us, or rather, we first had to fold the large sheets in half, a collective piece of work. Richard, Pieter and Alison had initiated a Joyce publication in England, one that gave great scope to reviews and to artwork, and it is gratifying to know that it has survived and is as lively as in the beginning. I had got to know Pieter and Richard when both of them settled in Leeds and made the university, along with the Leeds Polytechnic, another centre of Joyce studies. They also set up a reading group, and on a few occasions they convened scholars from the similar London group and some outsiders, like me, to a weekend gathering devoted to a particular episode. One was on ‘Ithaca’ at which Antonia Fritz, at that time working at our Foundation, gave a well-poised talk on Echo and Narcissus. Pieter and Richard, along with Alistair Stead, got up a lively Leeds conference in 1987, which was devoted to Finnegans Wake and which brought together more Wake scholars than any other (Laurent Milesi, Bruce Stewart, the Benstocks, Charles Peake, Derek Attridge, and two emerging scholars, Andrew Treip and Terence Killeen. It was also John Bishop’s first visit to Europe. One of the highlights was the singing in Pieter Bekker’s basement).

Petr Škrabánek A new force emerged in the old days of the Wake Newslitter. There was someone who knew not only Slavonic languages (and could distinguish them), but also many others and was almost as phenomenal as Laurent Milesi. It was Petr Škrabánek from Prague, who was vacationing in Ireland when the Prague Spring at home was quashed by troops, and he decided to stay. He contributed many exact glosses to the Wake and also enriched at least one of our Zurich workshops. He was not professionally a philologist (though his wife, Vera, is), but a medical doctor, if an unusual one. He irritated his colleagues by proclaiming that doctors at best help us very little and may even do more harm than good. Nature seems to take care of most ailments. But, tragically, Nature let him down, and he died very suddenly and prematurely of cancer. Fortunately his essays have been collected recently in Night Joyce of a Thousand Tiers.

R.J. Schork At the Milwaukee conference in 1987 I must have been holding forth during a workshop panel and asked a question, mainly to show off, about a Latin word. Someone got up and had the answer pat, the answer that I was going to spring on the audience. It came from Joe Schork, from the University of Massachusetts, a classical scholar. I then remembered that he had identified the mysterious Latin phrase, ‘Coactus volui’, which Cashel Boyle etc. (the one with the many names), mutters in ‘Wandering Rocks’ – the sort of information I like best. It was indeed just what we needed, for classical scholars on the whole hardly cared about what went on in Joyce studies, and the Joyceans, in general, were not well grounded in Greek or Latin, with the result that a few dabblers like myself can easily pass as connoisseurs. Joe Schork has since joined us at many meetings, and we have profited by his participation in some of our workshops. We owe him books on Latin and Roman as well as Greek and Hellenic Culture, and he is on easy terms with the saints (Saints Above!). He has also become involved in genetic studies which generally form part of his pertinent research. Once, at a Paris conference with an emphasis on drafts and notebooks, Joyce’s not excessively appreciative grandson praised one of Joe’s talks. I wish more of us would take Joe as a model speaker: he is always clear, precise, to the point and yet witty and entertaining, with no superfluities. In recent years his engagement with the Smithsonian Institute often seems to take him to Egyptian antiquities and therefore away from Joyce.

Robert Day Two newcomers were at the Dublin symposium of 1973, and they always formed a pair. The first one to turn up was usually Robert Adams Day, and you knew when he saw him that Milton would not be far behind (it was always Milton, with no second name). Bob Day taught in New York, and I was told his expertise was Smollett, but his erudition ranged wide, and he seemed to me a polyhistor to whom I always listened with attention. He spoke quietly and to the point. He joined us several times at the Colloques Joyce in Paris where he and Milton spent a few months. It was a pleasure to be on a panel with him. Actually, it now occurs to me that I first saw him in a café in Greenwich Village, New York, where I sat with Berni Benstock, who knew him. I had forgotten this because what remained from the encounter is that the owner of the café came out to ask, in the most casual way, whether anyone had just been shot there. No one had, or I would have noticed. I always liked Bob Day and Milton around, and I also knew there would be a good discussion. He was a keynote speaker at the anniversary Dublin symposium of

1992, where he spoke on Joyce’s ‘aquacities’. It was a great shock when Bob died not long before the 1996 Zurich symposium, and we were all sorry for Milton.

Many Joyce scholars were clustered in Philadelphia and environs, and I believe two marvelous conferences there resulted from this. Philadelphia always had a number of prominent Joyceans. The first one I visited was Mabel Worthington at Temple. I remember attending at least one of Sheldon Brivic’s Joyce classes; our paths often crossed, and we have remained in distant admiration of what the other is doing. He and Barbara have always been kind and hospitable. Maurice Beebe (from whom I first heard the term ‘modernism’), someone I remember as quiet and always in control of his material, was the initiator of Modern Fiction Studies whose first issue featured the 1969 Dublin symposium. Maurice died unexpectedly soon after the first Philadelphia conference, and Morton Levitt became his successor. Mort and Annette Levitt had made their first appearance at that same Dublin symposium of 1969, and have become regulars at conferences, from Dubrovnik to Honolulu. I was often their guest in Philadelphia, first in their sombre old apartment house in the suburbs, then on 21st Street, not far from the Rosenbach Museum. The Levitts were often teaching in Zagreb, former Yugoslavia; they were good friends of Ivo Vidan, the Joycean-in-residence there, and we owe the Dubrovnik conference of 1981 to Ivo and Mort. It lasted three weeks, but I only stayed one: it was a kind of top level seminar with only about twenty participants and was the first occasion to meet scholars from beyond the Iron Curtain, Yugoslavs and Hungarians like Péter Égri (who had written books on Joyce and Thomas Mann). What stands out in my memory is the walk on the ramparts of Dubrovnik, three quarters around the huddled city. A sign at the entry of a historic church said that women were not allowed in if they were wearing ‘abbreviated shorts’. Once on their way from Zagreb to the 1975 symposium in Paris, the Levitts stayed in our apartment in Unterengstringen and brought me some Croatian books. In such a way my Joyce collection kept growing. Carol Shloss also lived in Philadelphia and on several occasions put me up in her home. She was involved in both Philadelphia conferences, 1982 and 1985, and devised life-size effigies of Bloom, Molly and Stephen. She has paid several visits to Zurich and took part in our maternity workshop of 1993. She initiated an exhibition of Gisèle Freund’s photographs as a sideshow to the Frankfort symposium, and I remember that Klaus Reichert and I had a tough time making her open the proceedings with a speech she had actually prepared and typed out. Carol devoted many years to scrupulously researching Lucia Joyce and her sad fate, which inevitably led to a protracted tussle with lawyers of the Joyce Estate. But the study has meanwhile been published and, not unexpectedly, caused quite a stir. Another (part-time) Philadelphian is Michael O’Shea, who taught at Drexel. He first turned up in Provincetown with a presentation on heraldry in Joyce, which also became his dissertation and book study. Michael is a scholar and an excellent and meticulous organizer, as well as a gifted editor (of Studies in Short Fiction), but he increasingly turned into a talented entertainer. His academic demonstration that the Wake’s HCE is really Elvis Presley was certainly one of the all-time highlights at conferences (I heard it both in Miami and Seville). He was at times referred to as ‘the third funniest Joycean’, but he can easily move to the top. I am glad we had Michael in Zurich on several occasions, particularly for the workshop on ‘Eumaeus’. It was in Philadelphia that I met Richard Beckman in whose house the local Finnegans Wake group assembled. They were real professionals and, of course, proceeded quite differently from the mixed assembly we have in Zurich where the guessing is less academic. Once, during a Philadelphia conference, a whole group went up to Dick’s house and went through number 9 of the Questions chapter (with the ‘panaroma of all flores of speech’). I was amused to observe how predictably we all proceeded: Shelly Brivic was not averse to Lacanian sidelights, Kimberly Devlin focused on recirculated elements, Vince Cheng (whose book on Shakespeare and Joyce had come out fairly recently) spotted Shakespearean echoes, John Bishop concentrated on the sleeping body, and I rode my particular hobby horse of retroactive semantics or postponed understanding. It was a delightful session among experienced readers. Timothy Martin was also engaged in organizing the Philadelphia conferences (and he may be the only foreigner ever to visit the Zurich Foundation by bicycle while touring Europe, including the Alps). Tim is a gifted singer who has contributed to evening entertainment at home, in Dublin and especially in Zurich in 1996. One year in Trieste he talked about the opera in relation to Joyce, and I think I learned more from that particular lecture than most others, at least I remember significant points that I can apply. Vicki Mahaffey was one of many students who emerged from the school of Walt Litz. She invited me to Philadelphia when I was on a tour in 1985, and I stayed in her house on a very pleasant visit where I also spent some time ferreting out Homer translations in the various bookstores around the University of Pennsylvania campus. The same year she helped to organize the first Philadelphia conference, but Vicki was in hospital giving birth to her daughter and could not attend the proceedings.

Could you give a brief survey of the Joycean scene in Holland? My first contacts in the Netherlands were the translators John Vandenbergh and Gerardine Franken; later on, Leo Knuth became a strong force until his withdrawal from Joyce events. Christine van Boheemen first taught at Leiden (and masterminded a series of Joycean meetings there) and later, and still, in

Amsterdam. It was she who enlisted me as general editor of European Joyce Studies; my position would be mainly decorative and she was (and is) practically and efficiently in charge. I count her among the foremost of those who are deep into theory, and wholly at ease there, and I won’t hold it against her that once, in Philadelphia I think it was, she called me a ‘Derridian critic’. Don’t ask me what it was based on, some inherent attitude perhaps; I am even sure she intended it as a compliment. One prominent Joyce scholar, Peter de Voogd, lives in Utrecht, and he has been to many conferences. For me he belongs to the no-nonsense school of scholarship: solid, lucid and perceptive. His loyalties are divided between (though not limited to) Joyce and Laurence Sterne. What the Odyssey is for me, Tristram Shandy is for him (though he commands much more intimate knowledge than I with my dilettante Greek), and we share an interest in investigating the influence of Joyce on his predecessors. Onno Kosters is another excellent scholar with his feet firmly on the textual ground, and so is Ron Hoffman who, alas, has never tried to pursue his Joycean interests academically. They are both firmly grounded in the nonexistent no-nonsense school of criticism. A brief look at the Netherlands would not be complete without a fleeting reference to Mrs Wijffels from Utrecht. She was an extraordinarily devoted amateur who attended conferences well into the eighties. When I conducted what may well have been the first semi-official tour of the ‘Lotuseaters’ episode in 1969, she was by far the best informed about fictional events, and she may even have brought along notes. She also criticized John Vandenbergh’s Ulysses translation and, it appears, suffered few rivals beside her. She did tend to impose herself beyond our patience. I once had a hard time containing her on a panel (I was on the panel, not she). Berni Benstock told the anecdote that the first evening of a symposium of which he was in charge he felt some pain in his arm, and he realized that it came from Mrs Wijffels tapping his shoulder all day — no doubt a gross exaggeration of a characteristic trait. Naturally she meant well and was motivated by genuine curiosity and enthusiasm. People like her are always around; they lend colour to our meetings and are food for stories like the muted ones that I have just sketched. In Paris, long ago, a woman in the audience violently disagreed with what I had said. She had wanted to join the panel on foreign languages in Finnegans Wake with a paper on Joyce’s influence on a Greek writer and was turned down. So she was, understandably perhaps, furious that the panel went ahead without her, and she voiced strong, though general disagreement even though, up to that point, I had not said anything except to introduce the speakers. But I imagine we, that is to say, the busybodies in residence at conferences, often incur the wrath of those who are, or feel, neglected.

Could you similarly sketch the scene in Germany and Austria? Apart from Klaus Reichert, Jörg Drews and, of course, Hans Walter Gabler, the German Joyce scholars that I knew in the early days were Eberhard Kreutzer, Ulrich Schneider, of whom I have spoken already, and Viktor Link. They all came from Bonn and were among the first visitors to spend a few days browsing in my then private library. Helmut Bonheim, originally from Columbus, Ohio, and later Santa Barbara, and whom I therefore thought American for a long time, wrote to me and announced his visit as he was listing German words in Finnegans Wake. He also brought me a much treasured edition of Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary. He became a professor in Cologne, and I have often spoken to his class and he, in turn, often came to Zurich; once he brought a whole seminar group to our Foundation. He, too, unfortunately (for me), drifted away to other scholarly areas. Wilhelm Füger, whose entry into the Joyce community was in Dublin in 1973, moved from Munich to Berlin and was deeply engaged in Joyce studies. He gave us a concordance to Dubliners and an eminently complete compilation of Joyce’s reception in Germany up to 1941. Therese Seidel-Fischer from Düsseldorf wrote a perceptive early study. She must have heard of the 1969 symposium, came, stayed, and continued. It was at one of the subsequent symposia that she enlisted many of us for a volume of German essays on Ulysses. In Graz, Austria, Franz Stanzel had been an authority on narratology for years, and it obviously made him also a Joyce scholar. He joined the community in Zurich in 1979 where we had a lively session on issues of narrative, in which he applied his method and terminology. I remember a heated discussion about the validity of a notion like the ubiquitous ‘Narrator’ in Joyce. Franz Stanzel, along with the majority, was in favour; a minority consisting of the Benstocks and myself, opted for less. Professor Stanzel has unearthed a lot of pertinent information connected with Joyce’s vagaries in Austria and the descent of the Blooms. One of his disciples is Monika Fludernik from Vienna; I was impressed by her competence in Dubrovnik when she was still a graduate student. She has since taken a chair in Freiburg, Germany, where extended duties seem to detract her from Joycean pursuits.

G UARDEDLY PERSONAL What does the Bible mean to you? As one of the books, or rather a collection of books, Biblia, its impact as one main source of our culture has been immense. Some familiarity with it is necessary, not only to follow Joyce: it is part of our tradition. Newer generations who don’t have a notion, let alone knowledge of it, are at a disadvantage. Oddly enough even readers of Joyce, many students unfortunately, do not even have a sense of the biblical tone, which would allow them to trace an allusion. I would advise anyone to go through Genesis at least, and perhaps all of the Pentateuch, in which Western culture is grounded. Many of these early key figures, Cain, Jacob and others, are an intriguing lot of criminals and imposters, which may mean no more than that only transgressions are worth recording. I have never made it through all of the Bible; much of it is confusing, redundant, of merely historical interest. Also, there is hardly a person that I find particularly likeable. My all-time favourite in the Bible is Gideon, the one who asked for proof in the face of the Lord and still remained steadfastly unconvinced. Joyce gives him his due, actually his dew, in the Wake. Incidentally, I do not observe any special, let alone higher, truth in the Bible, but its myths certainly have proved pervasively potent.

Would you describe yourself as religious? Do you belong to a Church? My guess is that your question aims at my religion. Well, there isn’t any. I was technically baptized a Catholic as my mother came from Bavaria, and in mixed marriages the Catholic side prevailed. In my case, it did not have any effect, and I never had any religious instruction. I was never exposed to a priest, apart from the christening, I suppose. I was five years old when our family moved from Basle to Zurich in 1933, and when my mother saw that most other children in the school were Protestants, she just called the local pastor, and I was silently transferred into the Protestant, Zwinglian, camp which was called ‘Reformed’. So we had classes in ‘Religion and Ethics’ that did not do much harm, and I was confirmed the day, I remember, after British or American airplanes bombarded the Swiss town of Schaffhausen, which was on the wrong, northern, side of the Rhine river during the war. What I recall from the ceremony is that we were equipped with a suit (which for a long time did duty on formal occasions), and I had to wear a tie, and my mother thought it de rigueur for me to put on sock suspenders. I survived the humiliation. As an adult I formally left the Protestant church simply because I did not want to be listed as a statistical Christian. As an outside spectator any opinion I have will hardly count. If there is a truth behind everything, which all those diverse sects claim, then it is of utmost importance as it extends beyond a mere lifespan into a potentially distressing eternity. Father Arnall in A Portrait is concretely eloquent on the matter. But then it is odd that the all-important message is couched in a linguistically remote manner, one that needs explanations, commentaries and homilies for the points to be put across. As though Divine Providence had opted for a style appropriate to Joyce’s presentation in ‘Oxen of the Sun’, something to be guessed at or laboriously updated into contemporary understanding. The message has never been translated into contemporary jargon. Few of us are troubled, for example, by the neighbours coveting our ox or ass, but, perhaps, credit cards or hard-disk data are implied in an ancient metaphor. What I mean is, if the Message is so crucial that it may affect eternities in an afterlife, why is it not clearly put across in contemporary terms? I do not think that if there had never been any religion our world would be an essentially better place to live in. The design of the the human model is not an unqualified success. It appears that we, human beings, make up religions, perhaps out of fear, and then become their victims. If curses like violence or terrorism were not based on erratic brands of fundamentalism, alternative justifications would be invented. Perversely, enough pleasure can be derived from descriptions of the deplorable state of the world, which brings me back to Finnegans Wake and Environs. What Biblical studies have positively taught us is to interpret, to look closely for implications. So literary texts have come in for the same type of scrutiny, often collective scrutiny as in reading groups; something that in olden times was accorded to sacred documents. All of the foregoing means that, to begin with, I am not qualified to follow the ubiquitous vestiges of Joyce’s own Jesuit education. Of course, I picked up a lot about Catholicism from books and catechisms, and think I even caught some of Joyce’s priests at fault in their knowledge of sacred texts. Father Dolan, in his act of contrition, leaves out ‘for Thy infinite goodness’, an essential part (unless Joyce was nodding). But for me, ‘sin’ is a fairly abstract notion rather than the traumatic, emotional experience shown in the tribulations of Stephen Dedalus and, no doubt, many Catholics. I also believe that Father Purdon in ‘Grace’ is misquoting the Gospel of St Luke: where he says ‘when you die’, all the Bible translations I consulted use ‘fail’ or some equivalent. It is a requirement for those who were brought up in the faith to look up the sources carefully. Joyce is not a substitute religion, though engaging in Joyce may have similar effects or even benefits. There is nothing divine in Joyce, but much that is all too human, which brings to mind a conversation I

once had with Frank Budgen. Though I never tried to pester him with intrusive questions, I must have asked him about Joyce’s attitude towards the Catholic Church. Joyce at times grandiloquently renounced it, but also was never able to shake it off. I have seen him characterized as a liberal or atheist as well and often as a perennial Catholic malgré soi. Budgen’s off-the-cuff response was along the lines of Stephen Dedalus confiding to Bloom that Ireland was important because it belonged to him. Joyce’s feelings towards the Church may have been analogous: the Church remained significant because it belonged to Joyce. Perhaps we would not put such shaky self-assurance past him.

Are you superstitious? In one respect, definitely. I timorously avoid anticipating something good before it has happened — counting the chickens before they are hatched; in German a similar proverb warns against praising the day before the evening thereof. It may be a deep-down suspicion about what Fate has up its malicious sleeve. What is ardently hoped for will not come to pass. Sometimes hopes are fulfilled, though that may be the worst case. The phone never rings while you are waiting for that call. This disposition probably led me to Tychomatics, the machinations of Fate, something along the lines of Thomas Hardy’s ‘President of the immortals’ (who had had his sport with Tess), or possibly Greek Tragedy, or maybe Beckett’s outlook. The well-known Murphy’s Law would be a subsection of it. Ulysses sees trivial failures as part of our experience. Bloom is a victim of small-scale tychomatic strokes, beginning with minor voyeuristic frustrations. On my guard against premature optimism, to give one important instance, I remain doubtful of the confident expectation that by 2012 the Joyce copyright will finally expire, in spite of pressures, lobbying and parliamentary decisions. The copyright situation saliently shows the prevalence of the Worst Case Scenario. Incidentally, religions of all shapes and guises, from esoteric sects to dogged fundamentalism, seem to be universally on the upswing. My attitude of blaming personal failures on malevolent spectral agencies is, of course, an easy way out. In spite of my pessimism, however, I must admit to having been extremely lucky in my middle and later years, simply by moving into such a supportive Joyce community. Brenda Maddox has repeatedly characterized it as the best club in the world. Superstition apart, it is all a case of selective perception: successes are taken for granted, as no more than one’s due, whereas failures are blamed on obscure adverse forces outside of one’s control.

Has Joyce made you see life differently? Yes, I think it has. Perhaps it is a kind of Bloomian resignation. One does not ever reach one’s most important aims. Frustration is the norm, but things could always be worse. And every now and then one can laugh at it all; what else is there? To be grateful for small mercies may sum it up, and to find distraction in literature or music is such a mercy. As I said, I find the attitude close to Ecclesiastes, the one part of the Bible that seems to reach across directly: there is nothing new under the sun, there is no justice, and there is a time for everything. Be cautiously merry while it lasts and make the best of it. Perhaps I said elsewhere that what comforts me in Joyce’s works is a profound empathy with failure (not necessarily in Joyce’s own attitudes later in life). One run in Molly’s monologue always struck home with me: ‘here we are as bad as ever after 16 years’, a faint but vital rhythm or cadence contradicting the inherent gloom. Finnegans Wake helps us to laugh at almost anything without ever forgetting the dark undercurrent. Which is not to say I ever arrived at stoic forbearance.

You must be aware that when speaking English, you frequently, though unconsciously, use a phrase from Joyce’s works. I am hardly aware of it, but it may be inevitable that we echo and adapt. Readers of Joyce can hardly avoid it because the works are memorably quotable. Look at any symposium programme: one third of the titles are borrowings from the works. Just imagine how access to the inaccessible Wake could be promoted by a calendar with a quote for every day. As soon as certain items, say ‘sweet bad cess to you archetypt!’, are isolated and displayed in big legible print, they would set minds in motion, from puzzlement to gradual, chance revelation and usually an itchy incitement not to stop: it would be an ideal promotion. Such a project would probably never get the approval of the Joyce Estate, though it would be to their immense benefit. So that’s an element: the memorability of Joycean wording. I always wondered why certain phrases reverberate, stick in the memory, are active, when most of what we read will be totally forgotten.

In a different context you said that you like to control just how ridiculous you appear. Would you say something more about your sense of control and self-presentation? I think you come across as extremely controlled. You tell the most insightful anecdotes, and tell them wittily, but you’re hardly ever caught off-guard. Well, the reminiscences that we are eliciting now are a special case, but in interviews, when the questions are often general and not particularly productive, I tend to fall back on stereotypes, and this frequently results in the accustomed platitudes. More concrete statements inevitably drift out of their anchorage.

For obvious reasons: whenever you are being interviewed, you are aware of your context, but the interviewer is not. In our particular case here it’s different because you are, in a way, part of the context. Distortions can be annoying. Zurich once devoted its annual cultural June festivities (Juni-Festwochen) to John Cage and Joyce, with an exhibition. The opening ceremony took place in the Kaufleuten Theatre, the site where Joyce’s English Players long ago had performed Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, and after which Joyce sued Henry Carr. After the mayor’s address, it was my turn to say something, and I bent over backwards to get as far as possible away from anything in the way of an academic lecture and tried the offhand touch. There is no need to simulate familiarity with Joyce, I meant to say, but at least for that one evening one might notice his name (and then, the implication was, forget it again). Generally it was understood, but the reviewer in the local paper transformed it all into a pathetic appeal for transient veneration at least, as though I had begged on my knees that the audience should be aware of the name. The blatant misconstruction made me look a ponderous fool. It is an inherent danger of all reports, and we could have learned that from Joyce, too. I have consistently avoided pathetic, dignified solemnity when talking about Joyce, but it has a way of creeping into the interviews by some editorial back door. The worst, I find, is when words are put into my mouth that are never part of my vocabulary. Quotation marks are among the most insidious weapons.

But apart from misrepresentations, would you think of yourself as very controlled? I have never really asked myself this question. I mean, in some way, yes, I am. I have an inherent fear of looking ridiculous, or worse, of losing control. So you would never see me drunk. I wouldn’t like that, stumbling over things or making a public disgrace of myself. Not so much a matter of principle, and observations, but there is only so much alcohol that I can enjoy, and then I simply stop. I wouldn’t make a good Irishman in a pub. In the privacy of my own four walls I am far from controlled, and I swear vulgarly and viciously at objects that I get entangled in or that somehow do not comply, through no fault of their own. I also take erroneous software behaviour very personally, and some little hitch can spoil my mood for days. It is hard to come to terms with one’s own aggression, and I generally try to hide it in public. So don’t trust appearances.

Could people ever get you into a situation where you would talk and later regret it? I have been in situations I later regretted, naturally, but few, if any, people know much about me. Not that they are missing much. I am not very confessional. Come to think of it, I do not think anyone knows what in my life has affected me most. I am also, and I am not sure this belongs here, mortally afraid of being a bore. I am awful at small talk, and I dislike having to sit at a table and make conversation when there is nothing to say. In mixed company, among people I do not know, I am timid and tend to be silent, but definitively not among Joyceans. Silence may invest you with an air of aloofness or else sapience. Since stupid people often talk a lot, some inverse logic assumes that reserved silence implies intelligence. I emphatically never force the topic of Joyce on outsiders. Long ago Eckhard Henscheid, an author with Haffmans Verlag, for whom I worked in the eighties, wrote a humorous skit in which the publisher’s whole staff and some writers were sent on a fictional excursion to a brothel in Paris. Not everyone involved liked it. On the way to Paris in a bus, Hans Wollschläger and I were described as in profound conversation about Joyce. This is what is being assumed, but I am sure Hans Wollschläger would not automatically bring up Joyce, in fact, we would tend to avoid it. So the conversation was just as imaginary as, alas, the adventures in a Paris brothel.

How about topics that you don’t really want to talk about? Could you ever be drawn, do you think? Not really. I do feel a kind of hesitancy, reservation, a shy retention. It’s been my old take on biography: there is simply nobody who would know what has moved or affected me most; I don’t talk about it. Or maybe no one ever approached me with the right questions. Also I think that I am simply not a very profitable subject for biography. It may be characteristic that people rarely tell me the racier type of jokes: I don’t seem to invite them. What sticks in my memory is a minor occurrence when some of us, all the same age, in our twenties, were watching a soccer game and a sexually explicit joke was passed round. The speaker then turned to me and apologized. I was shocked to have given the impression of being a prude, or someone hyper-delicate or frail. I enjoy a good obscene joke as well as the next man. Though I must confess, and blush a little, that with old-fashioned timidity I find it hard to use coarse, directly sexual words. Outside the Foundation, the Joyce connections or my family, I haven’t got much of a social life, as I hardly go out. I have no small talk, and it happens as often as not when I’m invited that I’m presented as someone with an interest in Joyce, and others then feel compelled to draw me out on that topic. I repeat that I do not begin to talk Joyce to innocent outsiders. You asked me once: I never asked or prompted my children to read Joyce, and they didn’t and were wise not to.

Could you talk a little about your sense of humour?

What about my sense of humour?

I think it tends to be connected with language mostly; also you have an acute sense of comical situations. That’s for others to judge. There is, of course, nothing new in saying that in many awful situations it is better to be able at least to laugh. I wove in Joyce’s ‘Loud, heap miseries upon us …’ early on in our dialogue; it may console us when looking at the state of the world, or at politics. It’s a Bloomian attitude, which can, at times, become downright cynical.

Well, your definitions of Ochlokinetics and Tychomatics have helped me laugh through situations that I would have found totally annoying otherwise. I think that in the usual annoying situations, and we all know them, it helps to realize that these things are common and can be put into a kind of category. To label something makes us feel temporarily less at the mercy of it. From a certain distance, if you really can achieve it, everything is also amusing. To put the day-today experience of being crowded into a formal framework like ‘Ochlokinetics’ — doesn’t it sound impressive? — was an anodyne against my overriding impatience. In this context I was oddly touched to find that my term ‘Ochlokinetik’ (in the German original) has made its way into Google. There, apparently, it has become technical and is applied to serious investigations of obstructions such as traffic jams. A scientific pose goes a long way.

I never asked you about your taste in music. This is a blank spot. First of all I know nothing about music. I have a poor sense of melody, couldn’t even tell sometimes whether the melody goes up or down. And how people can translate notes on a page into something they then produce vocally has always been a mystery to me. Singing, the mere idea that I would ever have to sing, is my deepest-rooted inhibition. I’d be ashamed to be heard, not because I would sing badly, which I would, but because I would sing at all. The worst ordeal in school was when we were graded in singing, and two of us had to do it in front of all the others. I don’t remember how I cheated myself out of it. I would say: I’d sing, perhaps, to save the life of my children. So there’s a handicap. I also don’t understand much music and know little of the great composers except their names. Musical terminology is beyond me. A recent essay dealt with counterpoint as an essential feature in Joyce, but, typically, it did not resonate with me at all. Maybe because I never had any musical education, I acquired no knowledge whatever. Since music looms large in Joyce, I am glad we have all those experts who can tell us what Joyce does: Zack Bowen, Sebastian Knowles, Tim Martin. What I like is the old type of jazz that I discovered when I was in high school. It so happened that when my fascination with jazz started, I joined the Zurich Jazz Club, and we listened to records in the upper room of the old Pfauen Café. This is where Joyce, Budgen and their cronies gathered for conversation and white wine during the First World War. The premises have changed a great deal since, but I must have experienced it very much as it had been in the early days. Not that I had even heard of Joyce then. As for the rest: it is a blind spot, or, rather, a deaf spot.

Would you go to jazz concerts still? Well, of course, nowadays they don’t play that sort of music any more. Or if they do, they are old men like me. There is little occasion, but if there was something nearby, I would probably go.

Are you not playing all of this down a little? I always enjoyed the jazz records you used to play at the Foundation early in the morning. Yes, I used to, but not any more.

But you do have a good jazz collection, don’t you? Yes, I do, or rather did before I moved. The music I like best is what was played roughly round the time I was born. Which just shows.

Wouldn’t you see any connection between your appreciation of jazz and your sense of language, of sounds and rhythms? I cannot produce anything melodic or rhythmic, but I can appreciate it, and I do appreciate it in Joyce, that’s probably what you mean. Oddly enough Joyce did not like jazz, as Carola Giedion-Welcker once told me. She just said curtly, ‘He hated it.’ Possibly it was a momentary mood, not to be taken at extended face value. There would have been so much jazz around him in Paris. But his disregard for what Paris had to offer in the twenties and thirties has always surprised me.

You did talk about workshops in terms of ‘jam sessions’ and ‘solos’. This is an analogy to illustrate a point. People who speak don’t get bored and can go on for hours, beyond the allotted time on panels at any rate. In a small workshop the advantage is that everybody can potentially participate all the time. That’s why I illustrate our procedure with a jam session where the speaker, the one thematically in charge, takes on the solo parts, but everyone else plays in the background, ready to take over for a few short beats. This is not literally the case, as, when one persons speaks, the others shouldn’t murmur, but they know they can chip in if clarification is called for or a basic utterance has to be factually corrected. The mere feeling of not being condemned to utter silence or passive suffering improves the attitude of an audience. This all sounds banal, but conference practice tells a different story.

What was it like when you first heard about your honorary degrees? I emphasize that it is you who brings up the subject. Awards are pleasant, even if the way to accept them is to simulate modesty. The first degree was in 1972; it coincided with a prize I got from the GeilingerStiftung, a local prize that came opportunely with a bit of money. This local foundation awards a prize to someone of some merit in connection with English literature. My predecessor was my old English teacher Fritz Güttinger, who was also a renowned translator, with Moby Dick to his credit. The first degree came from the University of Cologne relatively early on, when I was in my forties, and was, I believe, prompted by Helmut Bonheim, with, I suspect, a kindly nudge from Klaus Reichert. I was flattered, of course, and it removed the handicap of not having an academic degree. Not having a degree is more of a hindrance than having one is an advantage (just as it is much worse to be without money than it is good when you possess it). The ceremony in Cologne actually took place in Helmut Bonheim’s apartment, in the presence of the Dean (to be formally addressed, I learned, as ‘Spektabilität’), and it was painless. To be called ‘Doctor’ is slightly embarrassing but can come in useful on some occasions. By the way, I remember a Joycean commenting on it: ‘Did you get a real degree or just an honorary one?’ The second one was conferred by my own University of Zurich, in 1988. This time there was a real ceremony in the aula as part of the Dies academicus, and I even had to present a short speech of acknowledgment. This was easy since the Rector had already delivered the ritual official address which contained what I thought a particularly inept emphasis on ‘timor Dei — the fear of God’, of all things. I did not think then, and still do not, that fear is what the world needs most, so I took this up and made the audience pay attention at least. Somehow these things happen every sixteen years. The third came when Joyce’s own University College, Dublin awarded degrees to Michael Groden and myself on Bloomsday 2004. We, the two Joyceans, along with the writers Harold Pinter, Roddy Doyle and Jennifer Johnston, became part of a sumptuous ceremony in the narrow confines of the former Physics Theatre (of ‘firelighting’ fame in A Portrait) in Newman House — with gown, Latin and all. There is inevitably a mixture of pride and embarrassment. Once again, looking back, I have been lucky.

Let’s talk about gratitude: in a different context you mentioned fake modesty and also a revulsion towards clichés. Is there a similar reticence when it comes to expressing gratitude? Gratitude is mainly noticed when it is expected and fails to show up. I bear few grudges in this respect and could not even list a disappointment. Gratitude is hard to express without becoming a stereotype. And that’s the other part of your question: clichés. Clichés loom large in cases where one has to write, say, a letter of recommendation, and one does it out of kindness, having very little to say about a candidate, who may be a former student or an almost forgotten scholar. Then one has to fall back on the platitudes that I wish I could erase entirely from what I am about to say. In the essential life-situations, love and death, there is hardly anything other than stereotypical phrases. One does not aim at originality in letters of condolence (a printed card, ‘sincere condolences’, is selfrevealing) and may not achieve it in love letters. Joyce’s 1918–19 letters to Martha Fleischmann in Zurich are good specimens. Thornton Wilder called them ‘Tristan und Isolde, with a fifth-rate cast’; actually he said it in German (‘fünfte Besetzung’, which means the fifth understudy). One can write sentimental drivel and still be a competent writer. Clichés, those committed by others, of course, are great in allowing us to display our intellectual superiority, and excellent for put-downs. I think that we foreigners possibly fare a bit better, that the clichés we reproduce may be condoned by native speakers who sense an underlying naivety. I hope this applies to mine here all along. Which is not to say that we can accurately define what clichés are: worn expressions, lifeless phrases, etc. The trick, if we use them knowingly, is to surround them with invisible quotations marks to divert the blame from us; they propel us to a higher, ironic sphere. Joyce showed us how, but we don’t always rise to the occasion. Perhaps that is characteristic of clichés: when ‘rise’ emerged in the first half of the sentence. You knew that ‘to the occasion’ would follow. We can recognize some of their breed in that having heard the beginning, we can predict the rest. That reminds me of a suggestion I once made in print, essentially to improve the state of the world, but the world paid scant attention. I still think it is not worth stating something of which the opposite would either be nonsense or a position that no one would maintain in the first place, e.g., ‘we are against war’, or ‘for justice’ or ‘freedom’, or we argue for reason or condemn some atrocious act. Sometimes such

utterances are necessary for a low-key transition or to pause to take rhetorical breath, but if we curtailed such efforts, a lot of time might be put to more productive use.

I know it’s not your favourite topic, but talk a little about your family, please. You know I was never one to show around pictures of my children. From my not particularly happy marriage, three children emerged. Mia was born in 1953, three days before Bloomsday (which meant I was often away when her birthday came round). Mischa followed four years later, in 1957, and he was born in the old Maternity Hospital that Joyce must have had in front of his eyes in 1918 when he lived in Universitätstrasse 38. Beda followed in 1960 after we had moved to Unterengstringen. Beda and Mischa are sons: we chose the masculine ending in ‘-a’. I must say all three have turned out well, which is something to be grateful for when so many lives go wrong. Growing up they must have seen me at home most of the time as I rarely went out. I suppose I was always within reach, and we did a lot together, though I was never overly effusive with them. As I cannot remember any momentous conflicts, I may not have done my Oedipal duties. Of course, I am happy that the children turned out so well, out of what I would call a neurotic marriage, in the chancy constellation of parental care, schools, milieu, temptations and danger. So we were lucky. Up to the seventies we were often visited by Joyceans, and Mia, who was around, got to know a good few of them: Clive Hart, Jacques Aubert, the Benstocks and, in 1975, many Hawaiians. Mia, Mischa and Beda now live and work in Zurich. In fact I have moved into the same twelve-storey building as Mia and her husband Beat and am well taken care of. Together they run a limousine service. Mia, when she was young, often cooked for the Joyce scholars who stayed with us. Mischa has a degree in law and is legal adviser to an art academy. He specializes in legal issues around satire in the media. I occasionally consult him on questions of copyright. Beda has been in all kinds of jobs and is now in the musical department of Swiss television. His son, Dimitri, has turned me into a grandfather. Which brings me back, full circle, to the art of being a grandfather, ‘l’art d’être grandp …’. You notice that I am brief and slightly uncomfortable, and say little about my youth. I am not a good subject for a biography anyway, there is little to report, and I prefer not to go into the dark period of the fifties and some of the sixties. My private life, for better or worse, was somewhat unexciting. The older I get, the more I think it was for the better. Somehow, I am not good at families and, borrowing a phrase from the ever readable Dorothy Parker, I cannot count beyond first cousins.

How about your parents? Both came from a simple background. My father, also named Fritz Senn, came from Buchs, canton of St Gall, in the upper Rhine Valley, on the Austrian border. I have a dim image of my grandfather at home, with a big loom in the house, for home textile manufacture was the main industry in that area, and it declined drastically in the first decades of the century. So, like many others, my father came to the city to find employment and by sheer determination worked his way up into a responsible and comfortable position in a company that made printing plates (‘clichés’ and ‘stereotypes’). My mother, Cäcilie Edelmann, was born in Bavaria, Kempten im Allgäu, and came to Switzerland after the war to find employment. She took various jobs, one with a pig farmer in Appenzell, but also, like Nora Barnacle, in hotels, including the Hotel St Gotthard on Zurich’s Bahnhofstrasse. As it happens, the hotel, right near the station, was where Joyce stayed in April 1930. It was there that he embroidered a sentence in Finnegans Wake that contains Prague, Athens and Zurich (‘in Neederthorpe’) amongst other additions — a small local touch. My mother met my father in the late twenties when both were working in a hotel in Basle. I was born there on a Sunday in the municipal ‘Bürgerspital’ which, I am told, is no longer there, or not under the same name. I remember my mother’s father with fondness. He worked as a typesetter and was very witty. He sometimes came to visit us in the thirties, and through him I had some impressions of the conditions in Nazi Germany. Going home he once wrapped his gifts in newspapers and remarked that if those newspapers were found at the border, he might risk his life. When in Kempten I was passed around the relatives, for I brought along some current Hitler jokes; they usually began with ‘Hitler, Goebbels and Göring …’, and of one of them, the most successful in my repertory, had a punchline in our dialect. In 1933 we moved to Zurich where my father’s company opened a branch office. It was a ‘cliché factory’ (‘Klischeefabrik’) where printed plates were manufactured. So I know what a cliché originally was, a metal stereotype for illustrations in printing. They were mounted on wooden blocks, which proved to be excellent building blocks in my childhood. We were definitely lower middle-class, but I never had any sense of class differences. That the world and Switzerland went through years of an economic depression was something that I never noticed, though it must have meant hard work for my parents. We did not have much, but enough, partly because my mother worked in the evenings. It is only looking back that I can appreciate what it meant then to have a child to bring up and put through university, though not all the way through as marriage intervened and brought my studies to an abrupt halt in 1953.

I remember you saying how puberty brought its share of misery and frustration for a timid adolescent. Didn’t you take an interest in chemistry at that time? Indeed I passed through a chemical phase in my secondary-school days and became fascinated by

elementary experiments; I even had a few substances and tinctures at home to play with. One Saturday morning (my mother was out) a small tin containing sulphur and other ingredients exploded in my hands, and the noise brought a few neighbours to my aid, though one just rang the bell to tell me that it served me right. The explosion left a scar in my palm, and my cornea suffered passing damage. When I came to high school (‘Oberrealschule’, a very good school at the time), I realized that my type of chemistry — put something into a liquid and it all turns green — had gone out of fashion more than 150 years earlier. Chemistry had become something quite different and far less explorative, and others were much better at it than I would ever have been. Ironically, the school focused on mathematics, natural sciences and modern languages. I soon digressed into Latin and Greek but never with the discipline that the classical languages demand. I can spell out Homeric Greek with glossaries and a dictionary and also grope my way along Latin sentences. Whatever I did was never straightforwardly in pursuit of one set goal. In fact, this still holds: I always branch off laterally and lose sight of the main object.

So how did you manage as a soccer player and coach? As a boy and young man I used to play football, that is to say, soccer, then predominantly the sport of the lower classes. The interest has remained, and I still follow games from a distance. As an aside, our symposia always coincide with a European or World Championship, and I noted with dismay how nationalistic some of the Joyceans can be. I thought the likes of us to be above primitive affiliations and not to sympathize with a team simply because it happens to be that of our own country. But possibly it is me who is Cyclopean here. Nationalism is unfortunately not restricted to sports. For me it remains a negative term. This may have to do with my coming of age when the Second World War was ending, and one brand of nationalism had drastically shown what it was capable of. I had learned a lesson earlier on, when, in the thirties, I heard what had happened to one of my uncles, a young man in Kempten, Bavaria. He and some companions returned from a mountaineering excursion when right outside the railway station some Nazi parade was taking place. The group of young men neglected to salute the flag, probably due to mere inattention, and they were viciously beaten up by the storm troopers. So, in my mind, national flags are always associated with this event. I think the world would be better off without them, but this is not my day for improving the fate of humankind. Flags and national anthems are part of international sports and will not go away, but they make me uncomfortable. I liked to play soccer, but I was too self-conscious ever to excel. To think first and then kick was always a bad idea. In my student days I coached the junior team in the local football club, and I continued to play into my thirties. I have now acquired a kind of armchair expertise. I sometimes throw in that I am a certified soccer coach, a distinction that dates back to the fifties when I took a few courses and was provided with a third-rank diploma. So when one of the great European teams, say Manchester United or Real Madrid, need a coach, I am ready to take over. They pay quite well, and as for excuses after a defeat, I can spout the appropriate stereotypes like a real pro. The excuse, always, is based on one formula: if events hadn’t gone the way they did they would have been different. As for Joyce, he practically neglected football in Ulysses and only has some passing touches in the Wake: no author is perfect.

Did you do any other sports? In high school I was a fairly competent middle-distance runner, but I never pursued this. I would have liked the hurdles, possibly because I try to economize movement.

Do you realize that you often use metaphors from sport in an academic context? Sports provide metaphors. I use soccer to illustrate what our workshop should be — a quick passing of the ball, which you sometimes lose but generally regain before long. American football, captivating in itself, requires prolonged possession of the ball or else a complete turnover may result, so you hold on to it for dear life: just like the lecture system, or the territorial fights in the habitual panel. I am back at my hobby horse, the quick give-and-take of discussion. If a speaker has, say, fifty minutes, it would be better not to have them all in one monolithic block, but, rather, an initial run of twenty minutes and then many more short runs in exchange with the listeners. I sometimes wish at conferences that we could introduce the yellow and the red card that football referees carry. First you get a warning (yellow), and then you are sent off the field (red; one might switch off the microphone). Slipping across a note is fairly ineffective.

Volleyball is a game that must appeal to you, I would think? Once in the States a few former students took me out to play. Wholly inexperienced, I realized, when looking up at the ball high above and near the net, that I ought to be up there as well to hit it, and not looking at it from below. Too late; twenty years earlier I might have taken to it. I do not mean to digress into the loss of youthful bounce but to work in yet another illustrative analogy for our scholarly gatherings. In those games I expect that the ball is set up for others to take over: to hit the volleyball across. Such game spirit is often lacking in our scholarly sessions where speakers have a way of taking their topic into a dead corner. And while on this subject one piece of humanitarian advice: as a speaker

never ever say, ‘To conclude …’ and then introduce yet another topic. Bad sport. Given that we are all vain and want to impress by our brilliance, it is amazing how stupid, to use a euphemism, some of us scholars are in discussions, even on a physical level. Often those who want to take part sit in the front row at a short distance from the dais and then address the speakers without turning back, so that the whole audience sitting behind is deprived of their wisdom. From any periphery you have a much better chance to address the whole audience by turning to them, and standing up. We all know that oral communication is chancy even under ideal circumstances.

We’re back at scholarly gatherings again. How about your other interests? I do have other interests, but maybe not as many as I should. A sore point, really. The reason is not that Joyce sets up high standards and tends to spoil us, and we become snobbish since other writers may come across as flat by comparison. Something that few might suspect is that many of my former interests atrophied at an early stage, for clinical, therefore highly personal reasons. (‘Frustration’ or ‘depression’ is my habitual euphemistic label.) The gloomy truth is that when someone asks me, ‘Have you read …?’ I can answer ‘No’ without listening to the sequel. I have simply lost the ability to concentrate for long, get past the first few paragraphs of anything printed. I am not tempted to go and see movies (except for what television delivers free on my doorstep); I haven’t been to the cinema in recent years. To hear people talk about films is usually quite enough. My sons, from time to time, try to resocialize me and drag me to some movie or theatre. Still, there are some authors who interest me. A few of them found their way into Nicht nur Nichts gegen Joyce, in essays on writers that often had to do with my former job with a publisher (Dujardin, Orwell, Saki, Wodehouse, Wilde). For a time I wrote columns for newspapers, and I enjoyed that, but I am simply not informed enough about current affairs to come up with suitable comments. I have expressed myself somewhere else about the particular handicap of a German-speaking Swiss and his uncouth handling of the German language. Then there is Amanda McKittrick Ros, the supremely best of all bad writers with her unerring sense for the wrong note. If you ask someone whether they know Amanda Ros and they hesitate for just a fraction of a second, you know they don’t. For if you know her, you know her. She has a unique gift of language which always goes wrong. The Zurich workshop day often begins with a reading from Amanda. ‘What a world we doubtless live in!’ But, all in all, my interests have a limited spectrum.

As an able-bodied man you must have served in the Swiss army. Would you share some of your military secrets? Indeed I had to serve. The initial training in the Swiss army (Rekrutenschule) and the subsequent series of annual calls to refresh one’s martial skills, must have added up to at least twelve months, so, in reality, I am one year younger than the calendar claims: for army time cannot count as life. As far as external pressures go, it was the worst of times (which also shows how sheltered my life has been). For understandable reasons, orders had to be obeyed absolutely (no time for democratic decisions in war), and that can be, and often was, humiliating, as it was to be at the mercy of vain or vindictive superiors. Swiss soldiers take all their equipment home including rifle and ammunition. This makes sense in a small country when the enemy might have invaded before one reaches the assembly place. If, for one year, we did not have to do military service, we had to produce all our equipment, including a specific number of buttons and needles, for inspection. Once I had to do this while the Benstocks were visiting, and since I had to leave very early in the morning, I did not even bother to inform them. Berni was sitting at breakfast when I returned in full panoply: rifle, bayonet, camelhide knapsack and helmet. His countenance fell, and I don’t know if he ever recovered from the spectacle of Fritz in all his martial splendour. I believe that the knapsack and bayonet are now in retirement in Kerry. It would be unfair to leave an unpleasant topic without giving praise to armies in one specific instance. An army can get a group of people quickly assembled and move them almost instantly from one place to another. This in pointed contrast to real life: just try to get a bunch of people, say Joyceans at a conference, to where they want to go, always assuming they have already decided on their goal. Groups are almost immobile and pay no attention; this is one of the axioms of Ochlokinetics. The army of course has an arsenal of measures like drills, discipline, punishments and fatigues at its menacing disposal. So grudging credit where grudging credit is due.

Would you say something about your political tendencies? You have heard me already on nationalism. I suppose I am probably an old-fashioned, naive liberal without much push and a rather dim outlook on a future that I will not have to face myself. I never took part in political life, and in conservative Switzerland I generally voted on the losing side. Possibly the best, though feeble, consolation is that, at least, we can make fun of those in power. I know one should take action if one knew what action might be even minimally effective. In my generation most of us as students were not political, which meant we did not greatly care about party disputes. In the wake of the 1968 social upheavals, we learned that everything is (also) political and somehow ideological; that one cannot escape and every position, especially that of snobbish aloofness, is politically wrong. I must have led a sheltered life, for Political Correctness passed me by in its initial virulence. The first time I heard of

it was in 1991, at an IASAIL conference in Leiden, oddly; by that time it must have been around for years.

You’re more forthcoming than that, though, in your political opinions. I side with Socrates: I do not know nor do I have a remedy for the world. Not that I do not join in a discussion once in a while. A few years ago an article in a local paper featured the piety of leaders like President Bush. That triggered me to compose a short letter to the editor that raised a question which I thought of some importance: since so many of our world leaders profess to be Christians or Moslems, or whatever, are they merely pretending, or are they serious (and really mean it)? And above all: what would be worse? This was before 11 September, and it would sometimes be reassuring to have been wrong. So I preserve a vague and idle humanist attitude and am glad to have found a garden to cultivate: the subject of these reminiscences.

How political do you think Joyce was? According to Richard Ellmann’s characterization, Joyce was not political, and criticism seemed to take that on trust for a long time. But the tide turned, possibly with Dominic Manganiello’s study of Joyce’s politics, and suddenly Joyce found himself eminently and essentially political.

What do you think were his views about Irish nationalism, and when did they change, or did they? Nationalism after the Second World War has acquired negative connotations, but these seem to change as well. A lot has to do with what we mean by political, and since the term has become more comprehensive, Joyce could not remain immune. I believe that post-colonial studies have re-examined the area and raised pertinent questions, even if the answers elude me. At a Dublin summer school a speaker asked rhetorically, how could one ever think Joyce was not political? I just observed that one could, and that he was not; and now, possibly, one cannot, and he was. Another lecturer claimed that after post-colonial criticism the older, naive, liberal views — a narrow-minded Citizen pitted against a more open-minded Bloom in the ‘Cyclops’ episode — could never be held again. And I could only ask if, assuming the axiom to be true, readers like myself were therefore disqualified and should be debarred from further participation. I was not blacklisted but neither was I acquitted, I gathered. You see I am copping out. Not a good subject for biographical probes, which is in tune with what I’ve said about biography elsewhere.

A BELATED WINDFALL I understand that since our last interview, the Foundation has been given a substantial cache of prime Joyce material. Will you elaborate? It was a surprising windfall, and like all good things (and many bad ones) it came out of the blue, unexpected and undreamed of. A few years ago, on the last day of the year which we call Silvester, two visitors dropped in, a Mr Hans Jahnke, professor in Berlin, and his companion, Irina Gillwald. I had seen members of the Osterwalder-Jahnke family among those who attended the inauguration of the Joyce grave in 1966 (I seem to keep coming back to this pivotal event). Giorgio Joyce’s second marriage was to Asta Osterwalder-Jahnke, who had children from her first marriage, including our visitor. Hans Jahnke came to take a look at the Foundation, and we had a pleasant talk during which we learned that one quarter of the Joyce copyright accrued to him by hereditary right. Consequently he was in permanent consultation with the Estate, and he remarked casually that he was not too sanguine about all the resultant lawyers’ bills. Naturally I wanted to draw him out about his relations with the Estate’s main beneficiary, but as the visit was short and purely social, we never got around to it. In May 2005 — when our murmoirs were receiving their finishing touches — I had a call from Professor Jahnke. He had come across a suitcase that contained odd Joyce material of possible relevance. To me it sounded as though that suitcase had been tucked away in an attic and lost sight of, though I cannot imagine that it was not on Professor Jahnke’s mind all along. He mentioned that a number of letters might prove of interest (including some Joyce had written to Gustav Zumsteg in his protracted effort to enter Switzerland in 1940), and other bits of paper, clippings, and various items, maybe not of great importance. Would we, perhaps, want to inspect the material and see if there was anything worth preserving? With bated breath, I put on my most composed manner and calmly replied that, sure, we would be delighted to examine the documents and report on what we found. In a matter of days the suitcase was sent, and it arrived one June morning. It was a small, old, battered, yellowish suitcase, manifestly much travelled. But a lot of paper can fit even into a tiny suitcase. We opened it and carefully went through the contents with a mounting excitement I hadn’t experienced before (I am not good at describing emotions, one reason why I never thought of becoming a writer). It was like discovering a treasure chest on a remote island. What emerged were dozens of letters, many written to Giorgio, usually in Italian and in Joyce’s green ink, and many typewritten ones, mainly to Nora or Giorgio Joyce. They mostly concern family matters. A number of postcards show where Joyce had travelled and how he often stayed in top hotels.

Are there any spectacular revelations? No, there is nothing sensational, no skeletons in the family cupboard. Most letters are day-today reports on journeys and ordinary matters. The letters to Helen Fleischmann (or to her and Giorgio) are more interesting as Helen was obviously catching up on Joyce’s literary pursuits; those letters are written in English. The Italian ones still await transcription and translation. Perhaps the choicest item is a postcard on which Joyce parodies the emigration song, ‘Off to Philadelphia in the Morning’: it becomes ‘Off to Copenhagen …’, so it is a minor original poem by the master. And, no, I cannot quote its five lines here or else the proprietary Erinyes will pursue me to the ends of Erebos.

Apart from personal letters, what else did you find? Above all we found corrections of transition and other proofs and additions for Finnegans Wake, in Joyce’s and also (as it turned out) in Lucia’s hand. A whole bunch of letters were written to Joyce by Sylvia Beach (in a very legible hand); usually concerning the sale of Ulysses and various favours she had done, willingly or after gentle coercion. There is a letter from Samuel Beckett from 1940; he also wrote a few to Nora and Giorgio Joyce. One batch is from Louis Gillet, the French critic who was one of the first to take an academic interest in Ulysses. There are about ten photographs, a few of which we had not seen before, and various legal and medical documents; quite a few we could not identify. A curiosity is a cheque for Fr50 signed by Joyce and never cashed, probably because of the war. All in all it is a stupendous treasure, which includes prime original material. It may have an impact on scholarship. It is, of course, not on the scale of the recent acquisitions of the National Library of Ireland, but the Wake material will fill a few gaps in the James Joyce Archive, and the letters are of biographical interest. There is also the Prodigal Son Effect by which what has been lost or forgotten acquires all the more significance on its unexpected return. Remember how that ‘word known to all men’ became the prodigy of the new Gabler edition, and its most discussed feature, simply because it had the air of a new discovery. But for the Zurich Foundation it is thrilling to have a few hundred Joyce autographs and sundry documents. The new material will cause a few ripples in the community.

Weren’t there always some rumours about a trunk? Might your suitcase be that long-lost object? I, too, had heard of the trunk, and what I know about it comes from Ellmann and a presentation by Will Brockman at a conference. It emerged that a trunk, the word always used, was left behind somewhere in Paris and that finally Maria Jolas brought it to Giorgio Joyce in Zurich. Brockmann listed letters addressed to Joyce, by Beach and Gillet, and documents relating to his marriage, financial situation and to his health and then death. After Giorgio’s death in 1976 it went to his widow and, subsequently, to her son of the former marriage. Our little suitcase (which, if it is identical with the trunk, has become a truncated trunk) has some but not all of the items that Brockman listed. More material may still await discovery.

Was this windfall given to the Zurich Foundation? Not right away, the material was simply handed over in trust. In our institution it would be appreciated, well taken care of, and made accessible to scholars. This, naturally, is one of the obligations of a Joyce library. But in subsequent phone calls and lively exchanges, Hans Jahnke intimated that he might turn the transaction into a formal donation; this was entirely his initiative, with no promptings whatsoever from us. A formal contract of donation was drawn up and legally formalized at a little ceremony on 31 March 2006, in the Zurich Foundation. Present were Hans Jahnke (whose life companion, Irina Gillwald, sadly had died a few weeks earlier) and his daughter Patrizia, the Foundation board of trustees, the Irish ambassador Joe Lynch and his wife, and representatives of the city and the Zurich Zentralbibliothek. We were also pleased to welcome Verena Clay, the daughter of Carola Giedion-Welcker. She, together with her brother Andreas Giedion MD, had earlier donated one of the death masks, a cache of Joyce’s letters and various other items (including her mother’s irate letter to C.G. Jung after his lecture on Ulysses which revealed he had understood next to nothing, either of Ulysses or of art in general). It is stipulated that suitable care has to be taken of the material and that none of it can ever be sold or given away. The main injunction is that the documents must be accessible to scholars who, at least, are welcome to inspect it. The overarching impediment to Joyce scholarship is that the despotic powers that be will veto the publication of anything in the handwriting of Joyce or his family perhaps not only in the near future. Yes, I know, we once naively assumed that Joyce had won his extended fight against official censorship, and we forgot that censorship can also be personal and arbitrary or — at least hypothetically — spiteful.

How do you explain the extraordinary generosity of Professor Hans Jahnke? In my biased view I am tempted to suspect that at least in part the gift amounts to a tribute to our research centre. But Hans Jahnke in his charming and whimsical address intimated that in his view, royalty fees had accrued to which he and his side of the family essentially had no claim. In this light, some of Joyce’s posthumous earnings might be offered to those with genuine commitment to, and often enthusiasm for, what the author had given them. It is ironic that an in-law branch of the Joyce clan did what many would consider the intrinsic purpose of a James Joyce Estate — to promote research as well as understanding (and thereby enjoyment) of the works and to facilitate distribution. All the more so since Joyce himself went to such elaborate pains to get into print and to be read and studied.

In the long run, what is your policy regarding the Jahnke donation? It is our welcome obligation to assist scholars and dedicated readers. Knowledge must be shared and research initiated. This has always been a main concern of the disparate Joyce community. Any proprietary interests would militate against this aim. In concrete terms, a few biographical gaps can be filled in and some of Joyce’s financial situations clarified. We will hear Silvia Beach’s side of her often uneven deals with the author she helped to become famous; which, in turn, put her on the literary map, though at some cost. There are draft versions of some of Joyce’s occasional poems including one of ‘Ecce Puer’, to which one stanza, now the third, was added later. There is also a French version of the poem, signed (but not necessarily translated) by Joyce himself. An Italian translation of ‘At the Beach of Fontana’ in Joyce’s hand poses the same problem of authorship. A handwritten variant of ‘Epilogue to Ibsen’s Ghosts’ differs in a few instances from the published version we know. We will understand more about the intricate, genetic growth of the Wake. Some of the additions, incidentally, were thought of (and, in part, dictated) in the Hotel St Gotthard (where my mother had once worked as a chambermaid) and the Hotel Carlton Elite (note its appropriate initials!), both on Bahnhofstrasse. It is exciting to have something to offer to the Joyce community. Of course, a lot still has to be sorted, catalogued and in part identified, and for this we need expert outside help, especially from those scholars who have been dealing with Joyce’s notes and drafts for years. By the time our talks make it into publication some of these questions will have been answered.

BOOKS MENTIONED Adams, Robert Martin, Surface and Symbol: The Consistency of James Joyce’s Ulysses (New York: Oxford University Press 1962). Atherton, James S., The Books at the Wake (New York: Viking 1959; expanded 1974). Aubert, Jacques and Fritz Senn (eds.), James Joyce (Paris: Herne 1985). Aubert, Jacques, The Aesthetics of James Joyce (Baltimore; London: The Johns Hopkins University Press 1992). Barta, Péter, Belyj, Joyce, and Döblin: Peripatetics in the City Novel (Gainesville, Fla.: University Press of Florida 1996). Bauerle, Ruth (ed.), The James Joyce Song Book (New York: Garland 1982). Beja, Morris, James Joyce: A Literary Life (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan 1992). Benstock, Berni and Benstock, Shari, Who’s He when He is at Home: A James Joyce Directory (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 1980). Benstock, Shari, Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press 1986). Bérard, Victor, Les phéniciens et l’Odyssée (Paris: Armand Collin 1902, 1903). Berrone, Louis (ed.), James Joyce in Padua (New York: Random House 1977). Bishop, John, Joyce’s Book of the Dark (Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press 1986). Bowen, Zack, Musical Allusions in the Works of James Joyce: Early Poetry through Ulysses (New York: State University of New York Press 1974). Budgen, Frank, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (London: Grayson and Grayson 1934). Reissued with additional material and an introduction by Hugh Kenner (Indiana University Press: Bloomington 1960). —, Myselves when Young (London: Oxford University Press 1970). Burns, Edward M. and Gaylord, Joshua A. (eds.), A Tour of the Darkling Plain: The Finnegans Wake Letters of Thornton Wilder and Adaline Glasheen (Dublin: University College Press 2001). Campbell, Joseph and Robinson, Henry Morton, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company 1944). Commune di Trieste, Le Donne di Giacomo: il mondo femminile nella Trieste di James Joyce. The Female World of James Joyce’s Trieste (Trieste: Hammerle Editore 1999). Connolly, Thomas E. (ed.), Scribbledehobble (Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1961). Dalton, Jack P. and Hart, Clive (eds.), Twelve and a Tilly: Essays on the Occasion of the 25th Anniversary of Finnegans Wake (Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1966). de Almeida, Hermione, Byron and Joyce through Homer: Don Juan and Ulysses (London: Macmillan 1981). Dent, R.W., Colloquial Language in Ulysses: A Reference Tool (Newark: University of Delaware Press 1994). Devlin, Kimberly J. and Reizbaum, Marilyn (eds.), Ulysses: Engendered Perspectives: Eighteen New Critical Essays on the Episodes (University of South Carolina Press 1999). Eco, Umberto, The Name of the Rose (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1983). Égri, Péter, Avantgardism and Modernity: A Comparison of James Joyce’s Ulysses with Thomas Mann’s Zauberberg and Lotte in Weimar (Tulsa, Oklahoma: University of Tulsa and Akadémiai Kiadó 1972, joint edition). Ellmann, Richard, Ulysses on the Liffey (New York: Oxford University Press 1972). Faerber, Thomas and Luchsinger, Markus, Joyce in Zurich (Zurich: Unionsverlag 1988). Fischer, Therese, Bewuβtseinsdarstellung in Werk von James Joyce von Dubliners bis zu Ulysses (Frankfurt: Athenäum Verlag 1972). —, James Joyces Ulysses: Neuere deutsche Aufsätze (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1977). Frehner, Ruth and Zeller, Ursula (eds.), A Collideorscape of Joyce: Festschrift for Fritz Senn (Dublin: The Lilliput Press 1998). French, Marilyn, The Women’s Room (London: André Deutsch 1978). —, The Book as World (London: Abacus 1982). Füger, Wilhelm (ed.), Kritisches Erbe: Dokumente zur Rezeption von James Joyce im deutschen Sprachbereich zu Lebzeiten des Autors (Amsterdam: Rodopi 2000). Gabler, Hans Walter, Melchior, Claus and Steppe, Wolfhard (eds.), Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition, 3 volumes (New York and London: Garland 1984 and 1986). Garvin, John, James Joyce’s Disunited Kingdom and the Irish Dimension (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan 1976). Gifford, Don and Seidman, Robert J., Notes for Joyce: An Annotation of James Joyce’s Ulysses (New York: Dutton 1974). Gilbert, Stuart, James Joyce’s Ulysses (New York: Random House 1930). Glasheen, Adaline, A Census of Finnegans Wake (London: Faber and Faber 1957). —, A Second Census of Finnegans Wake (Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1963). —, A Third Census of Finnegans Wake. (Berkeley; London: University of California Press 1977). —, Third Census of Finnegans Wake, 3rd edition (Berkeley: University of California Press 1977). Goldberg, Samuel Louis, The Classical Temper: A Study of James Joyce’s Ulysses (London: Chatto and Windus 1961). Goldman, Arnold, The Joyce Paradox: Form and Freedom in his Fiction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1966). Groden, Michael, Ulysses in Progress (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1977). —, The James Joyce Archive, 63 volumes (New York and London: Garland Publishing 1978). —and Hayman, David (eds.), James Joyce’s Ulysses: Critical Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press 1974).

—and Knuth, Leo, A Topographical Guide to James Joyce’s Ulysses (A Wake Newslitter Press 1981). New edition: Gunne, Ian and Hart, Clive, James Joyce’s Dublin: A Topographical Guide to the Dublin of Ulysses (London: Thames and Hudson 2004). —, Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press 1962). —, A Concordance to Finnegans Wake (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1963). Hayman, David, Joyce et Mallarmé, 2 volumes (Paris: Minard 1956). —, A First-Draft Version of Finnegans Wake (Austin: University of Texas Press 1963). —, Ulysses: The Mechanics of Meaning (Englewood, N. J.: Prentice-Hall 1970). Henke, Suzette and Elaine Unkeless, Women in Joyce (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 1982). Herr, Cheryl, Joyce’s Anatomy of Culture (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press 1986). Hodgart, Matthew J.C. and Worthington, Mabel P., Song in the Works of James Joyce (New York: Temple University Press 1959). —and Bauerle, Ruth, Joyce’s Grand Operoar: Opera in Finnegans Wake (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press 1997). —, James Joyce: A Student’s Guide (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1978). Joyce, James, The Finnegans Wake Notebooks at Buffalo, eds. Vincent Deane, Daniel Ferrer and Geert Lernout (Turnhout: Brepols 2001). Kain, Richard M., Fabulous Voyager: James Joyce’s Ulysses (Chicago: Chicago University Press 1947). Kelly, Joseph, Our Joyce: From Outcast to Icon (Austin: University of Texas Press 1998). Leonard, Garry, Reading Dubliners Again: A Lacanian Perspective (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press 1993). Lerm-Hayes, Christa-Maria, James Joyce als Inspirationsquelle für Joseph Beuys (Hildesheim; New York: Olms 2001). —, Joyce in Art: Visual Art Inspired by James Joyce (Dublin: The Lilliput Press 2004). Lernout, Geert, The French Joyce (Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press 1990). Levin, Harry, James Joyce: A Critical Introduction (London: Faber and Faber 1944). Levitt, Mort (ed.), Joyce and the Joyceans: Journal of Modern Literature (Special Issue) XXII, 2, Winter 1998/99. Litz, A. Walton, The Art of James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press 1961). McCabe, Colin, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word (London: Macmillan 1978). McCourt, John, The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste 1904–1920 (Dublin: The Lilliput Press 2000). McHugh, Roland, Annotations to Finnegans Wake (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1980). —, The Finnegans Wake Experience (Dublin: Irish Academic Press 1981). Magalaner, Marvin and Kain, Richard M., Joyce: the Man, the Work, the Reputation (New York: New York University Press 1956). Manganiello, Dominic, Joyce’s Politics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1980). Nestroy, Johann, ‘Einen Jux will er sich machen’ in Werke (München: Winkler 1962). Noon, William T. SJ,. Joyce and Aquinas (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press 1957). Norris, Margot, The Decentered Universe of Finnegans Wake (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1976). Peake, Charles, James Joyce: The Citizen and the Artist (London: Edward Arnold 1977). Raleigh, John, A Chronicle of Leopold and Molly Bloom (Berkeley: University of California Press 1977). Reade, Amye, Ruby: A Novel. Founded on the Life of a Circus Girl (London: Author’s Co-operative Publishing Co. 1889). Rose, Danis and O’Hanlon, John, Understanding Finnegans Wake (New York: Garland 1982). Rose, Danis (ed.), James Joyce Ulysses (Dublin: The Lilliput Press 1997). —(ed.), James Joyce Ulysses: A New Reader’s Edition (Mousehole, Cornwall: Houyhnhnm Press 2004). Schneider, Ulrich, Die Funktion der Zitate im ‘Ulysses’ von James Joyce (Bonn: H. Bouvier 1970). Schork, R.J., Latin and Roman Culture in Joyce (Gainsville: University Press of Florida 1997). —, Greek and Hellenic Culture in Joyce (Gainsville: University Press of Florida 1998). —, Joyce and Hagiography: Saints Above! (Gainsville: University Press of Florida 2000). Senn, Fritz, Nichts gegen Joyce: Joyce versus Nothing, ed. Franz Cavigelli (Zurich: Haffmans Verlag 1983). —, Joyce’s Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translation, ed. John Paul Riquelme (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press 1984). —, Inductive Scrutinies: Focus on Joyce, ed. Christine O’Neill (Dublin: The Lilliput Press 1995). —, Nicht nur Nichts gegen Joyce: Aufsätze über Joyce und die Welt 1969–1999, ed. Friedhelm Rathjen (Zurich: Haffmans Verlag 1999). —, ‘From Zurich to Forlì: how some of it all began’ in Joyce Studies in Italy, 7 (2002), 21–33. —, ‘The Joyce industrial evolution according to one European amateur’ in Journal of Modern Literature, XXII, 2, Winter 1998/99, pp. 191–7. Škrabánek, Petr, False Premises, False Promises: Selected Writings of Petr Škrabánek (Whitthorn: Tarragon Press 2000). —, Night Joyce of a Thousand Tiers: Petr Škrabánek: Studies in Finnegans Wake, eds. Louis Armand and Ondřej Pilný (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia 2002). Staley, Thomas F., Joyce Studies Annual (Austin: University of Texas Press 2001). Stanford, W. B., The Ulysses Theme: A Study in the Adaptability of a Traditional Hero (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1954; 2nd revised edition 1968). Steppe, Wolfhard and Gabler, Hans Walter, A Handlist to James Joyce’s Ulysses (New York: Garland Publishing 1986). Sullivan, Kevin, Joyce among the Jesuits (New York: Columbia University Press 1958). Thomas, Brook, James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Book of Many Happy Returns (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press 1982). Thornton, Weldon, Allusions in Ulysses: An Annotated List (New York: Touchstone-Simon and Schuster 1968). Tindall, William York, The Literary Symbol (New York: Columbia University Press 1955). —, A Reader’s Guide to James Joyce (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy 1959).

—, A Reader’s Guides to Finnegans Wake (London: Thames and Hudson 1969). Tucker, Lindsey, Stephen and Bloom at Life’s Feast: Alimentary Symbolism and the Creative Process in James Joyce’s Ulysses (Columbus: Ohio State University Press 1984). van Caspel, Paul, Bloomers on the Liffey: Eisegetical Readings of James Joyce’s Ulysses (Baltimore; London: The Johns Hopkins University Press 1986). Wilder, Thornton, Three Plays: Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth, The Matchmaker (London: Longmans, Green 1958).

INDEX Abiko Quarterly, 1 Adams, Robert Martin, 1 Aich, Dimitri, 1 Alex, Joe, 1 allotopy, 1 Ames, Keri Elizabeth, 1, 2 annotation, 1, 2 Aquinas, Thomas, 1, 2 Appenzeller song, 1, 2, 3 Armstrong, Alison, 1, 2, 3 army, 1 Arnold, Bruce, 1 Atherton, James, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 Attridge, Derek, 1, 2, 3, 4 Aubert, Jacques, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 1 Banville, John, 1 Barnes, Julian, 1 Barta, Péter, 1 Barthes, Roland, 1, 2 Bauerle, Ruth, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Bazargan, Susan, 1 Bazarnik, Katarzyna, 1 Beach, Sylvia, 1 Beausang, Michael, 1 Beck, Harald, 1, 2, 3, 4 Beckett, Samuel, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Beckman, Richard, 1 Beebe, Maurice, 1, 2 Begnal, Michael, 1, 2 Beja, Morris (Murray), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 Bekker, Pieter, 1, 2 Bellow, Saul, 1 Belyj, Andrej, 1 Bénéjam, Valérie, 1 Benstock, Bernard, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25 Benstock, Shari, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Béran, Felix, 1 Bérard, Victor, 1 Berberian, Catherine, 1 Berio, Luciano, 1 Berrone, Louis, 1 Beuys, Josef, 1, 2, 3 Bezzola, Ladina, 1 Bible, 1, 2, 3, 4 Biermann, Pike, 1 Biography, 1 Birkenhauer, Klaus, 1 Bishop, John, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Black Hole Principle, 1 Bloom, Rein, 1 Bloomsday, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28 Blumenbach, Ulrich, 1, 2 Bodmer, Thomas, 1 Boisen, Mogens Peter, 1, 2 Bonheim, Helmut, 1, 2 Borges, Jorge Luis, 1 Bosinelli, Rosa Maria (Bollettieri), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Bowen, Zack, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Bowers, Fredson, 1, 2, 3 Boyle, Father Robert, SJ, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 Brauchbar family, 1, 2 Briggs, Austin, 1 Brivic, Shelon, 1, 2, 3 Broch, Hermann, 1, 2, 3 Brockman, William, 1 Brody, Daniel, 1 Brown, Carole, 1, 2 Brown, Katie, 1 Brown, Richard, 1, 2 Budgen, Francine, 1, 2 Budgen, Frank, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 Buffalo, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 Burgess, Anthony, 1, 2 Burgess, Liana, 1 Burke-Savage, Father Roland, SJ, 1 Burns, Christie, 1, 2 Burns, Edward M., 1 Bush, Ronald, 1 Butler, Samuel, 1 Butor, Michel, 1 Byrne, Riana (O’Dwyer), 1

Cadbury, Bill, 1 Cage, John, 1, 2, 3, 4 Calvino, Italo, 1 camera, photography, pictures, 1, 2, 3, Campbell, Joseph, 1 Card, Jim, 1 Carr, Henry, 1 Caspel, Paul van, 1 Cat and the Devil, The, 1 Cavigelli, Franz, 1, 2 Chamber Music, 1 Cheng, Vincent, 1 Churchill, Winston, 1 Chuto, Jacques, 1 Cixous, Hélène (Berger), 1, 2, 3, 4 Clay, Verena, 1, 2, 3 Clongowes Woods College, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Cohn, Alan, 1 Collins, Jack, 1 Collins, Wilkie, 1 Colloque Joyce, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 Colum, Pádraic, 1 computer, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 conferences: Buffalo 1976, 1, 2, 3; Dubrovnik, 1, 2, 3; Erie 1978, 1, 2; Honolulu 1974, 1, 2; Leeds, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; Milwaukee, 1, 2, 3; Miami J’yce, 1, 2, 3; Philadelphia, 1, 2; Provincetown, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; Szombathely, 1, 2; Tulsa 1972, 1, 2, 3 Connolly, Thomas E,, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 copyright, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 Corcoran, Marlena, 1, 2 Costello, Peter, 1 Cowper, William, 1 Crimmins (pub), 1 Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Critical Writings, 1 Crivelli, Renzo, 1 Cronin, Anthony, 1, 2 Csikai, Zsuzsa, 1 Cunningham, Merce, 1 Curiel, Hans von, 1 Curiel, Lucia, 1 Curran, Constantine, 1

Daedalus, 1, 2, 3 Dalton, Jack P, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Darantière, 1 Dawe, Gerald, 1 Day, Robert, 1 de Angelis, Giulio, 1 de Rachewiltz, Mary, 1 Deane, Seamus, 1 Deane, Vincent, 1, 2, 3, 4 death mask, Joyce’s, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Delaware, University of, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Delimata, Bozena, 1 Delimata, Kamilla, 1 Derrida, Jacques, 1, 2, 3, 4 de Almeida, Hermione, 1 De Leeuw, 1 de Sautoy, Peter, 1, 2 de Voogd, Peter, 1, 2 Deleuze, Gilles, 1 Devlin, Kim, 1, 2 Di, Jin, 1, 2 Dickens, Charles, 1, 2 Diederichs, Rainer, 1 Diogenes Verlag, 1, 2, 3 dislocution, 1, 2 Dislocutions, 1 Disrupted Pattern Principle, 1, 2 Divina Commedia, 1 ‘Documentary InSights’, 1 Döblin, Alfred, 1, 2 dogma, dogmatic, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Dolan, Terence, 1 Downing, Gregory, 1 Doyle, Roddy, 1 Drews, Jörg, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Dublin, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30 Dubliners, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 Dubrovnik, 1, 2, 3 Dujardin, Edouard, 1 Dutli, Alfred, 1 Duytschaever, Joris, 1

Eagleton, Terry, 1, 2 Earle, David, 1 ‘Ecce Puer’, 1, 2, Eco, Umberto, 1, 2, 3, 4 Eckley, Grace, 1 Edel, Leon, 1 Edelmann, Cäcilie, 1 Égri, Péter, 1 Ellmann, Mary, 1, 2 Ellmann, Maud, 1, 2 Ellmann, Richard, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 Empson, William, 1 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, 1 Epiphany, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Epstein, Edmond, 1, 2, 3 Ernst, Max, 1 Esterházy, Péter, 1, 2 errors, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Erzgräber, Willi, 1 European Joyce Studies, 1, 2, 3 Eutrapelia, 1 Exiles, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Faerber, Thomas, 1 Farrell, Antony, 1 Farrell, Patrick, 1 Fehr, Bernhard, 1 feminism, 1, 2, Fendant de Sion, 1, 2, 3, 4 Ferrer, Daniel, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Feshbach, Sidney, 1, 2 Fiedler, Leslie, 1, 2 Field, Saul, 1 Finnegans Wake, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Finnegans Wake Circular, 1 Finn’s Hotel, 1 Fischer, Andreas, 1 Flaubert, Gustave, 1, 2 Fleischmann, Martha, 1, 2, 3, 4 Fludernik, Monika, 1 Fogarty, Anne, 1 Fomenko, Olena, 1 Frampton, Maralee, 1 Franken, Gerardine, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Frauenstimmrecht, 1 Fréchet, Maurice René, 1 Frehner, Ruth, 1, 2 French, Marilyn, 1, 2 Freud, Sigmund; 1, 2 Freyer, Grattan, 1 Fried, Erich, 1 Friends of the Zurich James Joyce Foundation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Fritschi, Margrit, 1 Fritz, Antonia, 1, 2 Froula, Christine, 1 Füllemann, Verena, 1 Füger, Wilhelm, 1, 2

Gabler, Hans Walter, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 Garnier, Marie-Dominique, 1 Garvin, John, 1, 2, 3, 4 Gasthaus Hoffnung, 1 Gefter, Roberta, 1 gender, 1 genetic criticism, 1 Giacomo Joyce, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Gibson, Andrew, 1 Giedion-Welcker, Andreas, 1, 2, 3 Giedion-Welcker, Carola, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 Giedion-Welcker, Sigfried, 1 Gifford, Don, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Gilbert, Sandra, 1 Gilbert, Stuart, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Gilford, E., 1 Gillespie, Michael, 1 Gillet, Louis, 1, 2 Gillwald, Irina, 1, 2 Giovanangeli, Jean-Louis, 1 Glasheen, Adaline, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1 Gogarty, Oliver St John, 1, 2, 3, 4 Goldberg, S.L., 1 Goldman, Arnold, 1, 2, 3, 4 Goldman, Márta, 1 Golenska, Beata, 1 Goll, Claire, 1 Goodwin, Willard, 1 Gorey, Edward, 1 Gorjan, Zlatko, 1 Gorman, Michael, 1 Gotham Book Mart, 1, 2, 3, 4 Goyert, Georg, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 ‘Grace’, 1, 2 Gradisnik, Janez, 1 Groden, Michael, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Grubica, Irena, 1 Gula, Marianna, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Gunn, Ian, 1 Güttinger, Fritz, 1

Hackett, Felix, 1 Haffmans, Gerd, 1, 2, 3, 4 Hagena, Katharina, 1, 2 Halper, Nathan, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Hamilton, Richard, 1, 2 Hansen, Kurt Heinrich, 1 Haq, Yasmin, 1 Hardy, Thomas, 1 Harrington, Judith, 1, 2 Hart, Clive, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 Hart, Helen, 1 Harvey, Martin, 1, 2 Häusermann, Hans, 1, 2 Hawaii, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Hayman, David, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Hebald, Milton, 1, 2, 3, 4 Hegel, Friedrich, 1 Henke, Suzette, 1 Henscheid, Eckhard, 1 Herbert, Stacey, 1 Herlt, Georgia, 1 Herr, Cheryl, 1, 2, 3 Herring, Phillip F., 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Hess, Albert W., 1 Hettche, Walter, 1 Higginson, Fred, 1 Highsmith, Patricia, 1 Hildesheimer, Wolfgang, 1, 2 Hitler, Adolf, 1 Hodgart, Matthew, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Hoffman, Ron, 1, 2, 3 Holmes, Sherlock, 1 Holzach, Robert, 1, 2, 3, 4 Homer, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 Hood, Thomas, 1 Hrabal, Bohumil, 1 Huston, John, 1

Ibsen, Henrik, 1, 2 Igoe, Vivien (Veale), 1, 2, 3 Iliad, 1 Ilmberger, Frances, 1, 2 International James Joyce Foundation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Ionescu, Arleen, 1 Iser, Wolfgang, 1, 2 Isler, Dorothea, 1 Isler, Hansruedi, 1, 2

Jacquet, Claude, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Jahnke, Hans, 1 James Joyce Broadsheet, 1 James Joyce Pub, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 James Joyce Estate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 James Joyce Literary Supplement, 1, 2 James Joyce Quarterly, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 Japan, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 jazz, 1 Johnston, Jennifer, 1 Jolas, Maria, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Joyce, Giorgio, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 Joyce, Lucia, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 Joyce, Solange, 1, 2, 3, 4 Joyce, Stanislaus, 1, 2, 3, 4 Joyce, Stephen James, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 Joyce-Osterwalder, Asta, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Joyce’s grave, Zurich Fluntern, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 Joyce industry, 1, 2, 3 Jung, Carl Gustav, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Kaempffer, Gertrude, 1 Kafka, Franz, 1, 2, 3 Kager, Maria, 1 Kain, Richard M., 1, 2, 3, 4 Kappanyos, András, 1 Kavanagh, Patrick, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Kavanagh, Peter, 1 Kealiher, Carol, 1 Keel, Daniel, 1 Kelleher, John, 1 Keller, Gottfried, 1 Kelly, Joseph, 1 Kendi, Arye, 1 Kenner, Hugh, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 Kesser, Armin, 1, 2 Kiasashvili, Nico, 1 Kiberd, Declan, 1 Kidd, John, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Kiely, Benedict, 1 Killeen, Terence, 1 kitsch, 1 Kleist, Heinrich von, 1 Knowles, Sebastian, 1, 2 Knuth, Leo, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 Kock, Paul de, 1, 2 Kosters, Onno, 1 Kreutzer, Eberhard, 1, 2 Kroeber, Burkhard, 1 Kurdi, Mária, 1

Lacan, Jacques, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Lang, Siegfried, 1 Láng, Zsuzsa, 1 Latham, Sean, 1 Lawrence, Karen, 1, 2, 3, 4 Leavis, F. R., 1 Lee, Lawrence, 1 Le Fanu, Sheridan, 1 Léon, Alex, 1 Leonard, Garry, 1 Lerm-Hayes, Christa-Maria, 1, 2 Lernout, Geert, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Leventhal, A.J., 1 Levin, Harry, 1, 2, 3 Levitt, Morton, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Levitt, Annette, 1, 2 Lewis, Wyndham, 1 Lidderdale, Jane, 1 Link, Viktor, 1 Litz, A. Walton, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Llosa, Mario Vargas, 1, 2 Lodge, David, 1 Longley, Edna, 1 Longley, Michael, 1, 2 Loriot, 1 Loss, Archie, 1 Luchsinger, Markus, 1 Luening, Otto, 1

McCabe, Colin, 1, 2 McCarthy, Patrick, 1, 2 McCarvill, Eileen, 1 McCourt, John, 1, 2, 3 McDermott, Kevin, 1 McDonagh, Donagh, 1, 2, 3, 4 MacDowell, Gerty, 1, 2, 3 McGahern, John, 1 McGee, Patrick, 1 McGreevy, Thomas, 1 McHugh, Roger, 1 McHugh, Roland, 1, 2, 3, 4 McLuhan, Marshall, 1, 2 Maddox, Brenda, 1, 2 Maddox, James, 1 Magalaner, Marvin, 1 Mahaffey, Vicki, 1 Mailer, Norman, 1, 2 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 1, 2 Manganiello, Dominic, 1, 2 Mann, Thomas, 1, 2, 3, 4 Marengo, Carla, 1, 2, 3 4, 5, 6 Mario, the tenor, 1 Martha (opera), 1 Martin, Augustine, 1, 2 Martin, Timothy, 1, 2 Mary, Virgin, 1 Mason, Ellsworth, 1 Maurus, Terentianus, 1, 2 Mayoux, Jean-Jacques, 1 Mecklenburg, Christine zu, 1 Mecsnóber, Tekla, 1, 2, 3 Melchior, Claus, 1, 2, 3 Melchiori, Barbara, 1 Melchiori, Giorgio, 1, 2, 3, 4 memory, 1, 2, 3, 4 Mercanton, Jacques, 1, 2 Mercier, Vivian, 1 Miami, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Milesi, Laurent, 1, 2, 3 military service, 1 Milton, 1 misquotation, 1, 2 Mitchell, Breon, 1, 2, 3, Modlish, Maureen, 1 Monaghan, Ken, 1, 2 Monaghan, May, 1, 2, 3, 4 Monnier, Adrienne, 1 Montague, John, 1 Montgomery, Niall, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Morel, Auguste, 1, 2, 3, 4 Mörike, Eduard, 1 Morlang, Werner, 1 Müller, Beat, 1 Muschg, Adolf, 1 music, 1, 2, 3, 4

Nägeli, Harald (‘Sprayer of Zurich’), 1 names, naming, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Narrator, 1, 2, 3, 4 Natali, Ilaria, 1, 2 nationalism, 1 Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 1, 2 Neukom, Margrit, 1 New Criticism, 1 Nixon, Richard, 1, 2, 3, 4 Noon, Father William, SJ, 1 Norris, David, 1 Norris, Margot, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

O’Brien, Edna, 1 O’Brien, Flann, 1 Ochlokinetics, 1, 2, 3, 4 O’Connor, Ulick, 1 O’Dwyer, Riana (Byrne), 1, 2 Odysseus, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Odyssey, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 O’Faolain, Nuala, 1 O’Flaherty, Gerard, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 O’Hanlon, John, 1, 2, 3, 4 O’Neill, Timothy, 1, 2 O’Shea, Michael, 1, 2 O’Shea, Milo, 1, 2, 3 Oetiker, Adolf, 1 Orwell, George, 1 O’Toole, Mary, 1 Otway, Thomas, 1 Ovid, 1, 2

Paci, Francesca Romana, 1 Palmer, Molyneux, 1 Panikkar, Chitra, 1, 2, 3 Parable of the Plums, 1 parallels (Homeric), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Parker, Dorothy, 1, 2 Parnell, John Howard, 1 Partridge, Eric, 1 Peake, Charles, 1, 2, 3 Pearce, Richard, 1 Pelaschiar, Laura, 1 Penelope, 1 Persić, Ilonka, 1 Petter, Henri, 1, 2, 3, 4 Pinter, Harold, 1 Plock, Vike, 1 Plunkett, Luke, 1 Polanski, Roman, 1 politics, 1 Pollock, Harry, 1 Pomeranz, Vicky, 1 Pomes Penyeach, 1, 2 Pope, Alexander, 1 Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, A, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27 Pound, Ezra, 1, 2 Power, Arthur D., 1 Power, Mary, 1, 2, 3 Pribek, James, 1 proofreading, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Proust, Marcel, 1, 2 Provection, 1, 2 Pugliatti, Paola, 1, 2, 3

Quinn, John, 1

Rabaté, Jean-Michel, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Rabl, Kathleen, 1, 2 Rafroidi, Patrick, 1 Raleigh, John, 1, 2 Rathjen, Friedhelm, 1, 2, 3, Reade, Amye, 1 reading groups, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 Reichert, Karl H., 1 Reichert, Klaus, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 Reizbaum, Marilyn, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 religion, 1, 2, 3, 4 retroactive semantics, 1, 2, 3, Rhein Verlag, 1, 2, 3 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 1 Rinderknecht, Urs, 1, 2 Riquelme, John Paul, 1 Robinson, Mary, 1 Rocco-Bergera, Niny, 1 Roosevelt, F.D., 1 Ros, Amanda McKittrick, 1, 2, 3 Rose, Danis, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Ruf, Lily, 1, 2 Ruggieri, Franca, 1, 2 Ruggiero, Paul, 1, 2 Russel, Myra, 1, 2 Ryan, John, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

St Felix, 1 St Regula, 1 Saki, 1 Salado, Régis, 1 Sandulescu, George, 1, 2, 3, 4 Sarraute, Natalie, 1 Schenoni, Luigi, 1, 2 Schiff, Dan, 1, 2, 3, 4 Schiller, Friedrich, 1 Schmidt, Arno, 1, 2, 3, 4 Schneider, Erik, 1 Schneider, Ulrich, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Schoeck, Othmar, 1 Scholes, Robert, 1, 2 Schoonbroodt, Jean, 1, 2, 3, 4 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 1, 2 Schork, R.J., 1, 2, 3, 4 Schuckmann, Anke, 1 Schuenke, Christa, 1 Schuster, Alice, 1, 2 Schutte, William, 1 Schweizerische Bankgesellschaft, 1 Scott, Bonnie Kime, 1 Seidel-Fischer, Therese, 1 Senft, Fritz, 1 Senn, 1 Senn, Beda, 1, 2 Senn, Fritz, senior, 1 Senn, Mia (-Müller), 1, 2 Senn, Mischa, 1, 2 Senn-Edelmann, Cäcilie, 1 Seville, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Shakespeare, William, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 Shaw, George Bernard, 1 Shechner, Mark, 1, 2 Sheehy-Skeffington, Andrée, 1 Shloss, Carol, 1, 2, 3 Siedenbiedel, Catrin, 1 Sihl, River, 1, 2 Sihlpost, 1 Silverstein, Norman, 1, 2, 3, 4 Skeat, W.W., 1, 2 Skin-the-Goat, 1 Skoumal, Aloys, 1, 2 Škrabánek, Petr, 1, 2 Słomczynski, Maciej, 1, 2, 3 Soccer, 1 Socrates, 1, 2 Sollers, Philippe, 1 Solomon, Margaret, 1, 2, 3, 4 Speck, Paul, 1 Spoo, Robert, 1, 2, 3 sports, 1 Sprick, Claus, 1 Staiger, Emil, 1, 2 Staley, Thomas F., 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Stanford, W.B., 1 Stanzel, Franz, 1 Stead, Alistair, 1 Stead, William, 1 Stefanova, Diana, 1 Steiner, George, 1 Stephen D, 1 Stephen Hero, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Steppe, Wolfhard, 1, 2 Sterne, Laurence, 1 Stetson, Erlene, 1 Stewart, Charlotte, 1 Straumann, Heinrich, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 Straumann, Ursula, 1 Strick, Joseph, 1 Stündel, Dieter E., 1 Suhrkamp Verlag, 1, 2, 3, 4 Sullivan, Kevin, 1 Suter, August, 1 Suter, Paul, 1, 2

Svevo, Italo, 1, 2 Sweeney, Séan, 1 Swiss German, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Symphoric, 1, 2, 3, 4 Symposia: 1; Dublin 1967, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10; Dublin 1969, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12; Trieste 1971, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12; Dublin 1973, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12; Paris 1975, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11; Dublin 1977, 1, 2, 3; Zurich 1979, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11; Dublin 1982, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18; Frankfurt 1984, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; Copenhagen 1986, 1, 2, 3, 4; Venice 1988, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10; Monaco 1990, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; Dublin 1992, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; Seville 1994, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; Zurich 1996, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; Rome 1998, 1; London 2000, 1; Trieste 2002, 1, 2; Dublin 2004, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 Synge, John Millington, 1 Szabó, Réka Gáborjáni, 1 Szombathely, 1, 2

Takacs, Ferenc, 1 Terence, 1, 2 theory, 1, 2, Thomas, Brook, 1, 2 Thompson, Phyllis, 1 Thornton, Weldon, 1 Throwaway, 1, 2 Tindall, William York, 1, 2, 3, 4 Tóibín, Colm, 1 Topia, André, 1, 2, 3 Tortosa, Francisco García, 1 Tosca, Susana Pejares, 1 translation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23 Trieste, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23 Treip, Andrew, 1, 2 Troy, Old, 1 Tucker, Lindsey, 1 Tulsa, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 Twombly, Cy, 1 Tychomatics, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Uncle Charles Principle, 1, 2 Union Bank of Switzerland, 1, 2 University of Zurich, 1 Ulysses: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9; ‘Telemachus’, 1, 2; ‘Proteus’, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; ‘Lotuseaters’, 1, 2, 3, 4; ‘Hades’, 1, 2, 3, 4; ‘Lestrygonians’, 1, 2; ‘Scylla and Charybdis’, 1, 2, 3 4, 5; ‘Wandering Rocks’, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11; ‘Sirens’, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12; ‘Cyclops’, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16; ‘Nausicaa’, 1, 2, 3, 4; ‘Oxen of the Sun’, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15; ‘Circe’, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10; ‘Eumaeus’, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14; ‘Ithaca’, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13; ‘Penelope’, 1, 2, 3, 4 Ulysses (electronic), 1 Unterecker, Jack, 1

van Boheemen-Saaf, Christine, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 van Caspel, Paul, 1 van Hulle, Dirk, 1 van Mierlo, Wim, 1 van Phul, Ruth, 1, 2, 3 Van Voorhis, John, 1 Vandenbergh, John, 1, 2, 3, 4 Vanderbeke, Dirk, 1 Veale, Eileen, 1, 2, 3 Veale, Vivien, see Igoe Vicente, Olga Fernandez, 1 Vico, Giambattista, 1, 2 Vidan, Ivo, 1 Virgil, 1 Vogel, Hannes, 1, 2 Vors, Danielle, 1

Wagner, Thomas, 1 Wales, Katie, 1, 2 Walzl, Florence, 1, 2, 3, 4 Ward, David, 1, 2 Walsh, Sean, 1 Watson, George, 1 Wawrzycka, Jolanta, 1, 2 Weber, Werner, 1 Whistler, James Abbott McNeill, 1 Wicht, Wolfgang, 1 Wijffels, Bernhardine, 1 Wilde, Oscar, 1, 2, 3, 4 Wilder, Thornton, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Wildi, Max, 1 Wilson, Robert Anton, 1, 2 Wodehouse, P.G., 1, 2 Wolf, Philip, 1 Wolf, Renée, 1 Wollschläger, Hans, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 Wong, Suzanne, 1 Woolf, Virginia, 1, 2 Woolsey, John M., 1, 2 workshops, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 Worthington, Mabel, 1, 2, 3, 4 Würth, Guido, 1 Wyer, Conor, 1, 2

Yeats, Michael, 1, 2 Yeats, William Butler, 1, 2

Zanotti, Serenella, 1 Zeller, Hans, 1 Zeller, Ursula, 1 Zentralbibliothek Zürich, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Zimmer, Dieter E., 1 Zumsteg, Gustav, 1, 2 Zumsteg, Hulda, 1 Zurich James Joyce Foundation, 1

Copyright First published 2007 by The Lilliput Press 62–63 Sitric Road, Arbour Hill Dublin 7, Ireland www.lilliputpress.ie Copyright © Fritz Senn and Christine O’Neill, 2007 ISBN: 978 1 84351 225 7 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the publisher. A CIP record for this title is available from The British Library. The Lilliput Press receives financial assistance from An Chomhairle Ealaíon / The Arts Council of Ireland. 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Set in 10/12 on Georgia by Hurix Systems