Times 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 Times 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" < To: < 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 -----