Subject
Re: Fwd: Re: Joyce, coarseness of; and Nina/Nora
From
Date
Body
Quoting Sergey Karpukhin <sergei_karpuhin@mail.ru>:
>
> ---------------- Message requiring your approval (242 lines)
> ------------------
> Mr Drescher and List,
>
> Incidentally, March 11 (1923) is the day on which Joyce began
> FINNEGANS WAKE. I got the (longish, sorry) quote below from the JJ List.
> There are a few words concerning Nora Joyce's attitude towards her husband's
> work. At the close of Joyce's bio Richard Ellmann says that after Jim's
> death Nora's most salient memories of him were his restlessness and his
> musical talents. It is difficult to suppose in this context that she
> "followed her husband's creative convolutions and loyally shared his
> artistic tastes," as Nina does follow and does share her husband's. Just a
> thought. On the other hand, Joyce was present at one of VN's public readings
> in Paris: a Hungarian female author writing in French had to read her stuff,
> but she fell ill, and VN was asked to read "Mademoiselle O". I don't have my
> books at hand now and cannot tell the exact date, but it seems that
> "Spring in Fialta" (it is marked "Paris, 1938") was written around the time
> this public reading occurred. Again, just a thought.
>
> On this day in 1923, James Joyce wrote to his patron, Harriet Weaver, that
> he had just begun "Work in Progress," the book which would become Finnegans
> Wake sixteen years later: "Yesterday I wrote two pages -- the first I have
> written since the final "Yes" of Ulysses. Having found a pen, with some
> difficulty I copied them out in a large handwriting on a double sheet of
> foolscap so that I could read them. . . ." Though increasingly plagued by
> eye problems -- ten operations, and counting -- Joyce's lifestyle had
> improved from the Ulysses years, thanks to Weaver's continued support, and
> money given by Sylvia Beach against future royalties. He and his wife, Nora,
> were able to get new clothes, a new flat, even new teeth: "The dentist is to
> make me a new set for nothing," wrote Joyce to Miss Weaver, "as with this
> one I can neither sing, laugh, shave nor (what is more important to my style
> of writing) yawn. . . ."
>
> Nora was not fond of her husband's style of writing, and not usually content
> with a yawn. When she discovered that he was "on another book again," just a
> year after the misery of Ulysses, she asked her husband if, instead of "that
> chop suey you're writing," he might not try "sensible books that people can
> understand." Although she did not tighten her purse, Weaver was also
> unimpressed by those sections of "Work in Progress" which Joyce sent her,
> and by his explanation that he was attempting to go beyond "wideawake
> language, cutanddry grammar, and goahead plot": "I do not care much for the
> output from your Wholesale Safety Pun Factory nor for the darknesses and
> unintelligibilities of your deliberately-entangled language systems. It
> seems to me you are wasting your genius." Ezra Pound agreed with her --
> "nothing short of a divine vision or a new cure for the clap can possibly be
> worth all the circumambient peripherization" -- but Samuel Beckett did not:
> "You cannot complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not
> written at all. It is not to be read.... It is to be looked at and listened
> to. His writing is not about something. It is that something itself." [which
> echoes VN's "literature is not about something: it is the
> thing itself, the quiddity" from his lecture on Dickens - SK]
>
> Sergey
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Donald B. Johnson
> To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
> Sent: Friday, March 11, 2005 6:20 AM
> Subject: Fwd: Re: Joyce, coarseness of; and Nina/Nora
>
>
>
>
> ----- Forwarded message from bunsan@direcway.com -----
> Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 14:44:29 -0500
> From: Alexander Drescher <bunsan@direcway.com>
> To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum
> Andrew, List -
>
> The London letters to which we refer capture but a moment in time, as
> you indicate. I think that Joyce intended them as love missals, but
> that Nora did not find them fetching; and to fetch was their purpose.
> Particularly, they express the manic anxiety Joyce experienced when
> alone for several months; a trip in which happily he learned how
> Nora-at-his-side was a necessity for personal and artistic well-being.
> Today, readers of Joyce accept the conjunction of the excretory and
> amorous as a matter of taste and culture. Bloom is a great and loveable
> creature, even though this old gent would have preferred the genteel
> [when sober] Mr. Dedalus as a pub companion. "Coarseness" is no longer
> the point.
> Would it be too great a stretch to suggest that Joyce intended both to
> draw in his readers and also to hold them at a distance, in parallel
> with his uxorial stance? And is this not central to the wonderfully
> manic quality of Joycean humor?
> Perhaps we agree that the whatever-it-is that keeps couples together
> is valuable and resistant to explanation.
>
> Tangentially, might you or the List know whether Nabokov had the
> Joyces in mind when he wrote:
>
> At the time we met, his Passage à niveau was being acclaimed in Paris;
> he was, as they say, "surrounded", and Nina (whose adaptability was an
> amazing substitute for the culture she lacked) had already assumed if
> not the part of a muse at least that of a soul mate and subtle adviser,
> following Ferdinand's creative convolutions and loyally sharing his
> artistic tastes; for although it is wildly improbable that she had ever
> waded through a single volume of his, she had a magic knack of gleaning
> all the best passages from the shop talk of literary friends. [Spring
> in Fialta, p 421, Stories]
>
> -Sandy Drescher
>
>
>
>
>
> On Wednesday, March 9, 2005, at 08:03 PM, Donald B. Johnson wrote:
>
>>
>> Sandy,
>>
>> I don't know if I've ever seen the Joyce/Nora letters of 1909
>> described as
>> "erotic," though it wouldn't surprise me that some not-very-deep
>> thinker
>> would so describe them. I learned about them in 1991, from Jane Flood,
>> the
>> Joyce scholar with whom I studied Finnegans Wake. The reason I was not
>> turned off by them may simply be my own incorrigibly coarse nature. I
>> did
>> not find the letters "distancing" though, nor exploitative. Jim may
>> have had
>> infantile needs, but he seems to have had adult needs as well, as
>> seemingly,
>> did Nora. In any case, they stayed together through life's two major
>> calamities: failure and success. And that has seemed more to me than a
>> handful of lunatic letters written in the course of less than one
>> month out
>> of over thirty years.
>>
>> Andrew
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Donald B. Johnson" <chtodel@gss.ucsb.edu>
>> To: <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
>> Sent: Monday, March 07, 2005 7:27 PM
>> Subject: Fwd: Joyce
>>
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Some readers are turned off by Joyce's "erotic" letters to Nora - and
>>> in parallel by Bloom's musings; and this response is probably evidence
>>> of careful, empathic reading. The apparently "intimate" letters are
>>> surprisingly distancing, concerned with Nora's physiological functions
>>> and Jim's infantile needs. Apparently, only the genius was to have
>>> feelings of interest. Great book; difficult author.
>>>
>>> -Sandy Drescher
>>>
>>> ----- End forwarded message -----
>>
>> ----- End forwarded message -----
>>
>
> ----- End forwarded message -----
>
>
>
>
>
> Andrew, List -
>
> The London letters to which we refer capture but a moment in time, as you
> indicate. I think that Joyce intended them as love missals, but that Nora
> did not find them fetching; and to fetch was their purpose. Particularly,
> they express the manic anxiety Joyce experienced when alone for several
> months; a trip in which happily he learned how Nora-at-his-side was a
> necessity for personal and artistic well-being.
> Today, readers of Joyce accept the conjunction of the excretory and amorous
> as a matter of taste and culture. Bloom is a great and loveable creature,
> even though this old gent would have preferred the genteel [when sober] Mr.
> Dedalus as a pub companion. "Coarseness" is no longer the point.
> Would it be too great a stretch to suggest that Joyce intended both to draw
> in his readers and also to hold them at a distance, in parallel with his
> uxorial stance? And is this not central to the wonderfully manic quality of
> Joycean humor?
> Perhaps we agree that the whatever-it-is that keeps couples together is
> valuable and resistant to explanation.
>
> Tangentially, might you or the List know whether Nabokov had the Joyces in
> mind when he wrote:
>
> At the time we met, his Passage à niveau was being acclaimed in Paris; he
> was, as they say, "surrounded", and Nina (whose adaptability was an amazing
> substitute for the culture she lacked) had already assumed if not the part
> of a muse at least that of a soul mate and subtle adviser, following
> Ferdinand's creative convolutions and loyally sharing his artistic tastes;
> for although it is wildly improbable that she had ever waded through a
> single volume of his, she had a magic knack of gleaning all the best
> passages from the shop talk of literary friends. [Spring in Fialta, p 421,
> Stories]
>
> -Sandy Drescher
>
>
>
>
>
> On Wednesday, March 9, 2005, at 08:03 PM, Donald B. Johnson wrote:
>
>
>
> Sandy,
>
> I don't know if I've ever seen the Joyce/Nora letters of 1909 described as
> "erotic," though it wouldn't surprise me that some not-very-deep thinker
> would so describe them. I learned about them in 1991, from Jane Flood, the
> Joyce scholar with whom I studied Finnegans Wake. The reason I was not
> turned off by them may simply be my own incorrigibly coarse nature. I did
> not find the letters "distancing" though, nor exploitative. Jim may have had
> infantile needs, but he seems to have had adult needs as well, as seemingly,
> did Nora. In any case, they stayed together through life's two major
> calamities: failure and success. And that has seemed more to me than a
> handful of lunatic letters written in the course of less than one month out
> of over thirty years.
>
> Andrew
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Donald B. Johnson" <chtodel@gss.ucsb.edu>
> To: <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
> Sent: Monday, March 07, 2005 7:27 PM
> Subject: Fwd: Joyce
>
>
>
>
>
> Some readers are turned off by Joyce's "erotic" letters to Nora - and
> in parallel by Bloom's musings; and this response is probably evidence
> of careful, empathic reading. The apparently "intimate" letters are
> surprisingly distancing, concerned with Nora's physiological functions
> and Jim's infantile needs. Apparently, only the genius was to have
> feelings of interest. Great book; difficult author.
>
> -Sandy Drescher
>
> ----- End forwarded message -----
>
>
> ----- End forwarded message -----
>
> ---------------- Message requiring your approval (242 lines)
> ------------------
> Mr Drescher and List,
>
> Incidentally, March 11 (1923) is the day on which Joyce began
> FINNEGANS WAKE. I got the (longish, sorry) quote below from the JJ List.
> There are a few words concerning Nora Joyce's attitude towards her husband's
> work. At the close of Joyce's bio Richard Ellmann says that after Jim's
> death Nora's most salient memories of him were his restlessness and his
> musical talents. It is difficult to suppose in this context that she
> "followed her husband's creative convolutions and loyally shared his
> artistic tastes," as Nina does follow and does share her husband's. Just a
> thought. On the other hand, Joyce was present at one of VN's public readings
> in Paris: a Hungarian female author writing in French had to read her stuff,
> but she fell ill, and VN was asked to read "Mademoiselle O". I don't have my
> books at hand now and cannot tell the exact date, but it seems that
> "Spring in Fialta" (it is marked "Paris, 1938") was written around the time
> this public reading occurred. Again, just a thought.
>
> On this day in 1923, James Joyce wrote to his patron, Harriet Weaver, that
> he had just begun "Work in Progress," the book which would become Finnegans
> Wake sixteen years later: "Yesterday I wrote two pages -- the first I have
> written since the final "Yes" of Ulysses. Having found a pen, with some
> difficulty I copied them out in a large handwriting on a double sheet of
> foolscap so that I could read them. . . ." Though increasingly plagued by
> eye problems -- ten operations, and counting -- Joyce's lifestyle had
> improved from the Ulysses years, thanks to Weaver's continued support, and
> money given by Sylvia Beach against future royalties. He and his wife, Nora,
> were able to get new clothes, a new flat, even new teeth: "The dentist is to
> make me a new set for nothing," wrote Joyce to Miss Weaver, "as with this
> one I can neither sing, laugh, shave nor (what is more important to my style
> of writing) yawn. . . ."
>
> Nora was not fond of her husband's style of writing, and not usually content
> with a yawn. When she discovered that he was "on another book again," just a
> year after the misery of Ulysses, she asked her husband if, instead of "that
> chop suey you're writing," he might not try "sensible books that people can
> understand." Although she did not tighten her purse, Weaver was also
> unimpressed by those sections of "Work in Progress" which Joyce sent her,
> and by his explanation that he was attempting to go beyond "wideawake
> language, cutanddry grammar, and goahead plot": "I do not care much for the
> output from your Wholesale Safety Pun Factory nor for the darknesses and
> unintelligibilities of your deliberately-entangled language systems. It
> seems to me you are wasting your genius." Ezra Pound agreed with her --
> "nothing short of a divine vision or a new cure for the clap can possibly be
> worth all the circumambient peripherization" -- but Samuel Beckett did not:
> "You cannot complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not
> written at all. It is not to be read.... It is to be looked at and listened
> to. His writing is not about something. It is that something itself." [which
> echoes VN's "literature is not about something: it is the
> thing itself, the quiddity" from his lecture on Dickens - SK]
>
> Sergey
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Donald B. Johnson
> To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
> Sent: Friday, March 11, 2005 6:20 AM
> Subject: Fwd: Re: Joyce, coarseness of; and Nina/Nora
>
>
>
>
> ----- Forwarded message from bunsan@direcway.com -----
> Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 14:44:29 -0500
> From: Alexander Drescher <bunsan@direcway.com>
> To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum
> Andrew, List -
>
> The London letters to which we refer capture but a moment in time, as
> you indicate. I think that Joyce intended them as love missals, but
> that Nora did not find them fetching; and to fetch was their purpose.
> Particularly, they express the manic anxiety Joyce experienced when
> alone for several months; a trip in which happily he learned how
> Nora-at-his-side was a necessity for personal and artistic well-being.
> Today, readers of Joyce accept the conjunction of the excretory and
> amorous as a matter of taste and culture. Bloom is a great and loveable
> creature, even though this old gent would have preferred the genteel
> [when sober] Mr. Dedalus as a pub companion. "Coarseness" is no longer
> the point.
> Would it be too great a stretch to suggest that Joyce intended both to
> draw in his readers and also to hold them at a distance, in parallel
> with his uxorial stance? And is this not central to the wonderfully
> manic quality of Joycean humor?
> Perhaps we agree that the whatever-it-is that keeps couples together
> is valuable and resistant to explanation.
>
> Tangentially, might you or the List know whether Nabokov had the
> Joyces in mind when he wrote:
>
> At the time we met, his Passage à niveau was being acclaimed in Paris;
> he was, as they say, "surrounded", and Nina (whose adaptability was an
> amazing substitute for the culture she lacked) had already assumed if
> not the part of a muse at least that of a soul mate and subtle adviser,
> following Ferdinand's creative convolutions and loyally sharing his
> artistic tastes; for although it is wildly improbable that she had ever
> waded through a single volume of his, she had a magic knack of gleaning
> all the best passages from the shop talk of literary friends. [Spring
> in Fialta, p 421, Stories]
>
> -Sandy Drescher
>
>
>
>
>
> On Wednesday, March 9, 2005, at 08:03 PM, Donald B. Johnson wrote:
>
>>
>> Sandy,
>>
>> I don't know if I've ever seen the Joyce/Nora letters of 1909
>> described as
>> "erotic," though it wouldn't surprise me that some not-very-deep
>> thinker
>> would so describe them. I learned about them in 1991, from Jane Flood,
>> the
>> Joyce scholar with whom I studied Finnegans Wake. The reason I was not
>> turned off by them may simply be my own incorrigibly coarse nature. I
>> did
>> not find the letters "distancing" though, nor exploitative. Jim may
>> have had
>> infantile needs, but he seems to have had adult needs as well, as
>> seemingly,
>> did Nora. In any case, they stayed together through life's two major
>> calamities: failure and success. And that has seemed more to me than a
>> handful of lunatic letters written in the course of less than one
>> month out
>> of over thirty years.
>>
>> Andrew
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Donald B. Johnson" <chtodel@gss.ucsb.edu>
>> To: <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
>> Sent: Monday, March 07, 2005 7:27 PM
>> Subject: Fwd: Joyce
>>
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Some readers are turned off by Joyce's "erotic" letters to Nora - and
>>> in parallel by Bloom's musings; and this response is probably evidence
>>> of careful, empathic reading. The apparently "intimate" letters are
>>> surprisingly distancing, concerned with Nora's physiological functions
>>> and Jim's infantile needs. Apparently, only the genius was to have
>>> feelings of interest. Great book; difficult author.
>>>
>>> -Sandy Drescher
>>>
>>> ----- End forwarded message -----
>>
>> ----- End forwarded message -----
>>
>
> ----- End forwarded message -----
>
>
>
>
>
> Andrew, List -
>
> The London letters to which we refer capture but a moment in time, as you
> indicate. I think that Joyce intended them as love missals, but that Nora
> did not find them fetching; and to fetch was their purpose. Particularly,
> they express the manic anxiety Joyce experienced when alone for several
> months; a trip in which happily he learned how Nora-at-his-side was a
> necessity for personal and artistic well-being.
> Today, readers of Joyce accept the conjunction of the excretory and amorous
> as a matter of taste and culture. Bloom is a great and loveable creature,
> even though this old gent would have preferred the genteel [when sober] Mr.
> Dedalus as a pub companion. "Coarseness" is no longer the point.
> Would it be too great a stretch to suggest that Joyce intended both to draw
> in his readers and also to hold them at a distance, in parallel with his
> uxorial stance? And is this not central to the wonderfully manic quality of
> Joycean humor?
> Perhaps we agree that the whatever-it-is that keeps couples together is
> valuable and resistant to explanation.
>
> Tangentially, might you or the List know whether Nabokov had the Joyces in
> mind when he wrote:
>
> At the time we met, his Passage à niveau was being acclaimed in Paris; he
> was, as they say, "surrounded", and Nina (whose adaptability was an amazing
> substitute for the culture she lacked) had already assumed if not the part
> of a muse at least that of a soul mate and subtle adviser, following
> Ferdinand's creative convolutions and loyally sharing his artistic tastes;
> for although it is wildly improbable that she had ever waded through a
> single volume of his, she had a magic knack of gleaning all the best
> passages from the shop talk of literary friends. [Spring in Fialta, p 421,
> Stories]
>
> -Sandy Drescher
>
>
>
>
>
> On Wednesday, March 9, 2005, at 08:03 PM, Donald B. Johnson wrote:
>
>
>
> Sandy,
>
> I don't know if I've ever seen the Joyce/Nora letters of 1909 described as
> "erotic," though it wouldn't surprise me that some not-very-deep thinker
> would so describe them. I learned about them in 1991, from Jane Flood, the
> Joyce scholar with whom I studied Finnegans Wake. The reason I was not
> turned off by them may simply be my own incorrigibly coarse nature. I did
> not find the letters "distancing" though, nor exploitative. Jim may have had
> infantile needs, but he seems to have had adult needs as well, as seemingly,
> did Nora. In any case, they stayed together through life's two major
> calamities: failure and success. And that has seemed more to me than a
> handful of lunatic letters written in the course of less than one month out
> of over thirty years.
>
> Andrew
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Donald B. Johnson" <chtodel@gss.ucsb.edu>
> To: <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
> Sent: Monday, March 07, 2005 7:27 PM
> Subject: Fwd: Joyce
>
>
>
>
>
> Some readers are turned off by Joyce's "erotic" letters to Nora - and
> in parallel by Bloom's musings; and this response is probably evidence
> of careful, empathic reading. The apparently "intimate" letters are
> surprisingly distancing, concerned with Nora's physiological functions
> and Jim's infantile needs. Apparently, only the genius was to have
> feelings of interest. Great book; difficult author.
>
> -Sandy Drescher
>
> ----- End forwarded message -----
>
>
> ----- End forwarded message -----