Volume 7, Number 3 · September 8, 1966
Joyce: A Postal Inquiry
By Richard Ellmann
Joyce did not regard the letter or its brazen sister, the postcard, as a literary form of any consequence, but almost every day he burdened mailmen in different parts of his hemisphere with his sedulous correspondence. At letter's length he felt comfortable, and wrote sparely and to the point. His letters adopt a stance which at first may appear the reverse of that in his books. His creative works are humorous, lyrical, daring. These qualities appear from time to time in his correspondence, but its prevailing tenor is wry, terse, pressed down. 'I am in double trouble, mental and material,' he writes, and says in another letter, 'my spiritual barque is on the rocks.' In both of these the statement has a sweep and finality which paradoxically imply that all may not be lost. His summaries of his condition are sometimes more epigrammatic: 'My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions.' And sometimes he relents a little to joke: 'Well! (as Mr. Pater beautifully says) I have reached the low-water mark in Xmases this 'ere time.' He is fond of deflating his life into a vista of ludicrous confusion. As Joyce writes later of Shem. 'O! the lowness of him was beneath all up to that sunk to!' In an early letter he wrote that he could not enter society except as a vagabond, and there is perhaps always a submerged pleasure in his not being an upstanding British subject.
Feature, 7519 words
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