djuna and james

And then one day I came to Paris.

Sitting in the café of the Deux Majots,

that faces the little church of St. Germain des Pres,

I saw approaching out of the fog and damp,

a tall man, with head slightly lifted

and slightly turned, giving to the wind

an orderly distemper of red and black hair,

which descended sharply into

a scant wedge on an outthrust chin.

He wore a blue grey coat,

too young it seemed,

partly because he had thrust

its gathers behind him,

partly because the belt which circled it

lay two full inches above the hips.

He sat down opposite me, ordered

a white wine and began talking at once.

"The pity is the public will demand

and find a moral in my book--

or worse they may take it in some more serious way,

and on the honour of a gentleman,

there is not one single serious line in it."

There was silence. His hands

peculiarly limp in the introductory

shake and peculiarly pulpy,

running into a thickness

that the base gave no hint of,

lay, one on the stem of the glass,

the other, forgotten, palm out,

on the most delightful waistcoat,

purple with alternate doe and  dog heads.

The does, tiny scarlet tongues

hanging out over blond lower lips,

downed in a light wool,

and the dogs no more ferocious

or on the scent than any good master

who adheres to his master through

the seven cycles of change.

He smiled, "Made by the hand

of my grandmother for the first hunt

of the season".  He lit a cigar.

"All great talkers have spoken

in the language of Sterne, Swift,

or the Restoration. Even Oscar Wilde.

He studied the Restoration through

a microscope in the morning and

repeated it through a telescope

in the evening.

In Ulysses, "They are all there,

the great talkers, them and the things

they forgot. In Ulysses I have recorded

simultaneously what a man says sees thinks

and what such seeing thinking saying does

to what you Freudians call the subconscious,--

but as for psychoanalysis its neither more nor less

than blackmail."

People say of him that he looks both sad and tired.

It is the sadness of a man who has procured some

medieval permission to sorrow out of one time

and in no place;

the weariness of one self-subjected to the creation of

an over abundance in the limited.

If I were asked what seemed to be the most

characteristic pose of James Joyce I should

say that of the head; turned farther away

than disgust and not so far as death,

for the turn of displeasure is not so complete,

yet the only thing at all like it, is the look in the throat

of a stricken animal.

Think of him as a heavy man yet thin,

drinking a thin cool wine with lips

almost hidden in his high narrow head,

or smoking the eternal cigar,

held slightly above shoulder level

and never moved until consumed.

We have talked of rivers

and of religion

of the instinctive genius of the church

which chose for the singing of its hymns

the voice without overtones

the voice of the eunuch.

We have talked of women,

he seems a bit disinterested.

Were I vain I should say

he is afraid of them but

I am certain he is only

a little skeptical of their existence.

We have talked of Ibsen, Stringberg,

Shakespeare: "Hamlet is a great play

written from the standpoint of the ghost."

Strindberg: "No drama behind the hysterical raving."

We have talked of death, of rats

of horses, the sea;

languages, climates and offerings,

of artists and Ireland.

"The Irish are people who

will never have leaders

for at the great moment they always

desert them.  They have produced

one skeleton---Parnell--never a man.

Joyce has few friends.

Callers have often found him

writing into the night, or drinking

tea with his wife Nora.  I myself

once came upon him as he lay

full length on his stomach poring

over a valise full of notes

taken in his youth for Ulysses.

Once he was reading out of the  book

of saints(he is never without it)

and muttering to himself that his day's saint,

"A devil of a fellow for bringing on the rain,

and we wanting to go for a stroll."

He described Stephen Daedalus

"Alone, not only separate from all others,

but to have not even one friend," stating

"I will not serve that which I no longer believe,

whether it will call itself my home,

my fatherland, or my church:

and I will try to express myself

in my art as I can, using for defense

the only arms I allow myself to use,

silence, exile and cunning."