by John Updike
Stubborn silence was dear to Hamsun; he fled from publicity, played no games but solitaire, and kept silent during his trial. His laconic style feels engraved upon silence. Speech, and events in general, have a peculiar, exceptional air in his work. It is not merely that the characters do odd things—the hero of Pan, asked by the heroine, whom he loves, for the gift of his pet dog, shoots the dog and sends her the body; in Victoria, Johannes, needing a pipe cleaner, wrenches a hand from the face of a clock—but that very simple objects hop onto the page with an enigmatic, trollish wink. Victoria halts at a shopwindow and moves away; Johannes spies her and stops at the same window:
Why was she standing there? The window was a mean one, a small shop window displaying for sale a few bars of red soap, grain barley in a glass jar, a handful of cancelled postage stamps.
How oddly charged and sharp and potent is this little inventory of the inconsequential! Of Johannes’ fiction we are told, “Often, his imagination played crazy tricks on him, obtruding into his book irrelevant conceits which he afterward had to strike out and throw away.” For example, he imagines, “A man is at the point of death, he writes to a friend, a note, a little request. The man dies, leaving this note. It is dated and signed, it has capital letters and small letters, though the writer would die within the hour. Very strange.” Later, when he receives Victoria’s note, he sees that “there were capital letters and small letters, the lines were straight, and she who had written them was dead!” This interest in not merely peculiar circumstances but the peculiarity of circumstance deflects his prose from the path of high seriousness and rounded intention but does give it a continuous quirky life and stabs of unexpected power. In Victoria, a long dream is recounted to no immediate purpose but with a concrete wildness given to few dreams in fiction:
He wades out into the ocean and dives down. He finds himself standing in front of a great doorway where he meets a huge barking fish. It has a mane on its back and barks at him like a dog. Behind the fish stands Victoria. He reaches out his hands toward her, she has no clothes on, she laughs at him and a gale blows through her hair.
Dreamlike also is Victoria’s explanation of why, at the party, she rudely interrupted Johannes’ speech: “All I heard was your voice. It was like an organ, and the power it had over me made me frantic.” In Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, the heroine relates how as soon as she heard a certain man’s voice she knew she would sleep with him. What is mere confession in a female writer amounts to intuitive genius in Hamsun.
Just as dreams and passionate impulses erupt into our conscious lives, so the flow of this novel is interrupted, at the end, by a gratuitous spate of anecdotes on the topic of love. One of them describes a cuckolded husband who knowingly returns when his wife is entertaining her lover. He knocks, the lover sneaks away, the husband enters, and a strange conversation ensues—a groping amid mutual compassion and deceit. Then:
But suddenly he threw his arms around her, in an ironlike grip of terrifying strength, and whispered in her ear, “What do you say, shall we put horns on him … on the fellow who left.… Shall we put horns on him?”
She screams for the maid, and in the morning describes his proposal as “a very strange attack.” He answers, “Yes, it’s a strain being witty at my age. I’m giving it up.” The entire encounter, in its comic knottiness, in the depths and turns of uxoriousness it reveals, is quite startling, and shows the degree of psychological complexity Hamsun’s strange simplicity could conjure with. Strindberg and Nietzsche were his tutors, but he drew upon the Nordic cultural tradition that underlies the realism of the sagas, the anti-philosophy of Kierkegaard,* and the films of Ingmar Bergman. Like Hamsun, Bergman loves plain textures and tangled minds, renders details with surreal clarity, indulges a savage streak of fantasy, and sometimes depends ingenuously upon fable and a mysticism of brooks and saplings. Scandinavia, untouched by Hellenism and only lately and lightly submissive to Christianity, sees things in its own slant of sunlight. Platonic precedences do not obtain; the riddle and not the Idea lurks behind phenomena. The wish to “grant the individual soul its due” has roots in an ancient Germanic individualism: the 6th-century Strategicon says of German warriors, “Headstrong, despising strategy, precaution, or foresight, they show contempt for every tactical command.” The Viking god of battle, Odin, was the god of inspiration, whether as battle frenzy, intoxication, or supernatural wisdom; Hamsun is a literary Viking whose reliance upon inspiration is his strength and his weakness. Born in a rural valley, by predilection a recluse and a farmer, he belongs in the company of those tanned, clear-eyed truants (the Basque Unamuno, the Algerian Camus, the Egyptian Cavafy, the Russian Tolstoy) who jeer into the classroom of European civilization. A heathen visionary, he sees peculiar particulars that resist being smoothed into plots, exemplary characters, or slogans to live by. The moral of Victoria is profferred as “There’s always a catch somewhere,” or “God has fashioned [love] of many kinds and seen it endure or perish.” Such an inconclusive conclusion, a standoff, well caps this intensely static love story, whose characters, though immersed in bookish circumstances, proudly reject the dynamism of characters.
* “I am anything but a devilish good fellow at philosophy … I am a poor, individual existing man.…” “[Philosophy] is disinterested; but the difficulty inherent in existence constitutes the interest of the existing individual, who is infinitely interested in existing.”—Concluding Unscientific Postscript.
JOYCE AND PROUST
Questions Concerning Giacomo
WHAT IS “GIACOMO JOYCE”?
It is (a) a tiny prose work of some twenty-six hundred words, whose first sentence is interrogative—“Who?”—and whose substance is so evanescent with tentativity and mysteriousness that the reviewer, like the heroine, finds it handy to don “quizzing glasses.” Variously described as a “short story” and “the notebook” and “a love poem which is never recited” and “this most delicate of novels,” Giacomo Joyce was probably copied out, in his best schoolbook hand, by James Joyce (1882–1941) in 1914 in Trieste.
(b) It is also an elegantly produced, boxed, ten-dollar object of veneration published by Viking Press on January 1, 1968—a saint’s bone whose marrow is (a) and whose surrounding calcium consists of nine pages of introduction by the foremost of American Joyce scholars, Mr. Richard Ellmann; four and a fraction pages of notes amplifying and exemplifying correspondences and echoes already noted in the introduction; and, most delightfully and luxuriantly, a photographic facsimile of the manuscript pages, two of them full size (13¼ inches by 10¼ inches) and folded quarto, the six others reduced by half but still legible.
DOES THE SUMPTUOUS FORMAT OF (B) ENTIRELY SUIT THE MODEST TEXT OF (A)?
It is a pleasure to handle, in an age when the crafts languish, so fine a piece of book production. Mr. Ellmann, as master of scholarly ceremonies, writes gracefully, employing his matchless intimacy with the Joycean universe to demonstrate how phrases from this slender text were dispersed, with surprising transmutations, through A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Exiles, Pomes Penyeach, and Ulysses. The decision to print, however, this text line for line as it appears in the manuscript, with all the spaces, not only compels a rather stingy size of type but somehow weakens the voice of the prose; the sections of this notebook quoted in Ellmann’s massive biography of Joyce (Oxford, 1959) and set in orthodox justified lines, read more vividly, with more of the narrative energy whose lack is the most puzzling aesthetic quality of Giacomo Joyce. Departing from normal typographic procedures seems chichi, since the facsimile manuscript is also bound into the volume.
The facsimile is doubly welcome, as a specimen of Joyce’s fluent, lucid hand and as light upon the central riddle—of what the work wishes to do; we seem to draw a little closer to Joyce’s intention in examining the graphic texture of these paragraphs and phrases spaced and scattered upon large sheets of art paper. There is no crossing-out or emendation, though there is some trouble with “websoft
” on page 7. This indicates a fair copy from preëxistent notes, yet on some pages the tone of ink (page 10), or the size of the writing (page 15), or the speed of the penmanship (page 13) changes between paragraphs. Mr. Ellman’s suggestion is that, “perhaps with Mallarmé in mind,” Joyce was indicating “pauses of varying duration measured by spaces of varying length.” If that is so, this pictographic intention is indifferently carried out; the amount of waste space—the lower third of the sheets is frequently blank, and some of the space gaps, as on pages 5 and page 8, are huge—seems inartistic and its distribution rather random. More likely that this enterprise, whether of copying or composition, was executed at several sittings, with a mixture of purposes, among them crystallization and formal ordering for the author’s own benefit, as a way of pinning these images to a surface from which they could be later plucked and employed in published works. I doubt that Giacomo Joyce was ever intended for print. It is too personal, too unformed and febrile; it would scarcely be published now were its author not a classic. Publication in a very private sense, however, may have been intended: these pages, one’s impression grows, were copied out to be shown or given to someone, like the parchment sheets upon which Joyce five years earlier copied out the poems of Chamber Music as a gift for his wife.
SHOWN OR GIVEN TO WHOM?
One possibility is Italo Svevo, Joyce’s fellow-author and fellow-Triestine of the time, who contributed so much information and temperament to the character of Leopold Bloom, and who had written and shown to Joyce a novel called Senilità (the English title, at Joyce’s suggestion, became As a Man Grows Older), concerning a middle-aged man’s love for a young woman, and who had asked Joyce, in a letter dated June 26, 1914, “When will you write an Italian work about our town? Why not?” Joyce had recently shown Svevo a typescript of the first three chapters of Portrait of the Artist, and Giacomo Joyce could be his response to Svevo’s challenge. The story’s complex tone, literary and personal and polyglot and arch, and its distinct Triestine locality are congenial with this thesis; any clear-cut echo of Senilità would be virtually clinching. But Mr. Ellmann offers none, and Svevo’s elegiac and wry psychologizing belongs to a different literary era from Joyce’s compacted personal imagery. The friendship between Svevo and Joyce was a curious one. The letter of June 26th, read in full, is stilted even beyond the stiltedness of Svevo’s English; his inquiry in context seems more polite than spirited. Svevo was in his fifties, a prosperous and amiable businessman who had diffidently abandoned writing after two early, neglected novels; Joyce was in his early thirties, an impoverished and unamiable Berlitz instructor, full of faith in his own genius and, as his brother Stanislaus put it, “that inflexibility firmly rooted in failure.” Joyce’s fierce enthusiasm for Svevo’s novels—tinged, perhaps, by the generosity authors feel toward non-competitors and by Svevo’s usefulness to him as a hoard of Jewish lore—seems to have rather baffled the older man. They came together as student and teacher, since Svevo wanted to improve his English. His letters retain a student’s shyness and tact.
A more piquant possibility is that the intended readership of one was the work’s subject herself. Giacomo Joyce tells us that she had been shown some of A Portrait, including the third chapter, wherein Stephen’s erotic sins are described, for “She says that, had The Portrait of the Artist been frank only for frankness’ sake, she would have asked why I had given it to her to read.” On the next page the author broods, “Those quiet cold fingers have touched the pages, foul and fair, on which my shame shall glow for ever.” It can be objected that within Giacomo Joyce its heroine is sometimes mocked and sometimes hymned in physical terms she could only have found embarrassing. But Joyce was peculiarly fond of this mode of wooing—courtship by shamelessness. He detailed to Nora Barnacle his sexual life before he met her. In the long letter of August 29, 1904, he refers to another letter, in which he dwelt on the details of their first liaison: “You have misunderstood, I think, some passages in a letter I wrote you and I have noticed a certain shyness in your manner as if the recollection of that night troubled you.” And, amid that extraordinary torrent of letters he directed toward her from Dublin in 1909, while she remained in Trieste, he beseeches her, “Now, my darling Nora, I want you to read over and over all I have written to you. Some of it is ugly, obscene, and bestial, some of it is pure and holy and spiritual: all of it is myself.” He dotes on the “something obscene and lecherous in the very look” of certain words, and hopes that “you too will write me letters even madder and dirtier than mine to you.” It was always one of his marital sorrows that she would not read his books. Voyeurism and exhibitionism both were exercised by his performance of writing. In 1918, Joyce, seeing Martha Fleischmann on a Zurich street, sent her four ardent and presumptuous letters in French and German. In the first, he tells this unknown lady she is “un joli animal,” likens himself to Dante espying Beatrice, and concludes by saying, in French, “I believe you are good at ——.” The word, evidently obscene, was torn from the corner by the recipient. He also sent her a copy of Chamber Music, and Ellmann’s biography describes how Joyce “from his vantage point on the street had watched her take it from the letter box and sit down with it in her front room.” Among Stephen Dedalus’ sins are “the foul long letters he had written in the joy of guilty confession and carried secretly for days and days only to throw them under cover of night among the grass in the corner of a field or beneath some hingeless door or in some niche in the hedges where a girl might come upon them as she walked by and read them secretly.” When, in Exiles, Robert Hand rebukes Joyce’s alter ego Richard Rowan for waking his wife from sleep and confessing the night’s infidelity, Rowan answers, “She must know me as I am.” But one suspects that in Joyce’s case candor was an act not merely of integrity but of concupiscence. It would not have been out of character for him to display this delineation of passion to its young but intelligent and nubile object.
One is forced into these conjectures by the definite omissions of Ellmann’s introduction. He tells us at the outset of the manuscript that “The present owner … wishes to remain anonymous.” He goes on to discuss the “title” of these pages, which are “loosely held within the nondescript gray-paper covers of a school notebook.… On the upper left-hand corner of the front cover, the name ‘Giacomo Joyce’ is inscribed in another hand.” Well, whose hand? Can no comparison be made of the handwritings of Joyce’s intimates at this time? Is it a matter of indifference who was permitted to bestow this ironical title? It looks to me, assuming that the label on the Viking volume is an accurate reproduction, as if the word “Joyce” were written in the center, with a spidery “Giacomo” added above it, perhaps in the “cobweb handwriting” of the little book’s heroine. Ellmann declines to speculate. And he withholds two points of information given in his biography of Joyce. “Giacomo” was Casanova’s first name and “a familiar epithet in Italy for a great lover” and the lady, the young student with whom Joyce fell in love and who inspired this work, also had a name. She was Amalia Popper, the daughter of a Jewish businessman called not quite Leopold Bloom but Leopoldo Popper.
HOW MUCH—ER—ACTUAL CONTACT DID JOYCE MAKE WITH SIGNORINA POPPER?
A good question. Ellmann assumes that the affair is “of eyes rather than of bodies” and that the sexual episodes of the manuscript represent “morose delectation—diet of writers.” This is not hard to believe of overheated passages like
Soft sucking lips kiss my left armpit: a coiling kiss on myriad veins. I burn! I crumple like a burning leaf! From my right armpit a fang of flame leaps out. A starry snake has kissed me: a cold nightsnake. I am lost!
But there are quieter passages with an air of reality:
Whirling wreaths of grey vapour upon the heath. Her face, how grey and grave! Dank matted hair. Her lips press softly, her sighing breath comes through. Kissed.
Joyce observes that “her body has no smell: an odourless flower” and describes a seduction with a soft clarity of detail tha
t belongs either to reality or to an imagination of genius:
I hold the websoft edges of her gown and drawing them out to hook them I see through the opening of the black veil her lithe body sheathed in an orange shift. It slips its ribbons of moorings at her shoulders and falls slowly: a lithe smooth naked body shimmering with silvery scales. It slips slowly over the slender buttocks of smooth tarnished silver and over their furrow, a tarnished silver shadow.…
True, Joyce was an imaginative genius. True, his adventures with women, Nora Barnacle excepted, appear to have tended toward either plain whoring or timid, voyeuristic adoration. But his attentions to Martha Fleischmann, of which only the correspondence remains, caused her lover and Vormund, Rudolph Hiltpold, to write Joyce (all this is confided in a note to Frank Budgen) “a threatening violent letter” leading to a “long interview” in Hiltpold’s apartment with “violent gestures” on Hiltpold’s part and “that timidity which yet is courage” on Joyce’s, ending in a return of Martha’s letters and a “Waffenstillstand.” The photographs of these years* show a somewhat rakish dandy; in 1915, the Joyce strumming a guitar is positively handsome. Richard Rowan of Exiles says he has betrayed his wife “grossly and many times.” The one moment of psychological tension in Giacomo Joyce occurs when the heroine’s father tells Joyce in Italian that “My daughter has the greatest admiration for her English teacher.” This assertion, whose manner purportedly combines “suspicion, naturalness, helplessness of age, confidence, frankness, urbanity, sincerity, warning,” is inwardly greeted by Joyce with the exclamation “Ignatius Loyola, make haste to help me!” The girl’s susceptibility is as moot as the strength of his advances. Concerning the percentage of wealthy middle-class Jewish girls seduced by their instructors in prewar Austria-Hungary, there was no Kinsey to gather statistics. The elliptical, fraught allusiveness of Giacomo Joyce and the powerful resonance with which the experience reverberates through Joyce’s work (Signorina Popper not only is credited with being Beatrice Justice of Exiles and the Irish girl of the last chapter of the Portrait but is supposed to have contributed the something Mediterranean in the character of Molly Bloom) do seem insufficiently explained by a one-sided infatuation. The relationship, at any rate, made an impression upon Signorina Popper. Nineteen years later, in 1933, now Signora Risola of Florence, she wrote Joyce asking for permission to translate Dubliners into Italian. Permission was granted, and a book entitled Araby did appear in Italian, but the standard Italian translation was done by other hands. She died not much longer than a year ago, and perhaps her death (again we must resort to speculation) released Giacomo Joyce to posterity.