On James Joyce – Eyesight, Family, Biography, New Book

1932

Seen And Heard In New York

BY WILLIAM GAINES

New York — James Augustin Aloysius Joyce, at 49, is about to become a grandfather. What's more, after a long and valiant struggle against blindness, he will be able to see his grandchild.

Do the middle names confuse you? Surely you've had a curiosity to read — or try to read — James Joyce's "Ulysses," that strangely worded and unorthodox novel. But, of course, you can't get it in this country unless you buy a bootleg edition.

Herbert Gorman, authorized biographer of the Irish iconoclast, tells me about Joyce. Gorman has just returned from Paris, where he spent much time with him.

The wife of Joyce's son, Giorgio, is an American. Preparations for a new arrival at their home in Paris share the author's interest with the book on which he labors furiously against the odds of his affliction.

Since the severe attack of glaucoma, in Zurich in 1916, he has undergone nine operations on one eye and two on the other.

Joyce now is able to see to write, Gorman says. He uses glasses, of course, and must keep his eyes close to his paper, fashioning large letters into an esoteric language of his own.

Did you say there were insurmountable difficulties in your path?

A Newspaper Man

Joyce, native of Dublin, but virtually an exile because of political differences with fellow Irishmen, never granted an interview or authorized an article about himself until Gorman, an American newspaperman, got hold of him.

Gorman is a Springfield, Mass., product. He learned how to go out and get his man when he began work on a newspaper there in 1915. In 1918 he landed on his first paper here.

Two years ago he went abroad and met Joyce in London. It took considerable persuasion to win the Irishman's confidence. A factor in Gorman's success was his book published here in 1924, "James Joyce — His First Forty Years."

Gorman went to Paris with Joyce, worked with him, even took dictation for him in the darkest period of his struggle. Now he is back with trunksful of material for the biography.

500 Joyce Letters

The material includes about 450 copies of letters written by Joyce and more than 60 originals. Most of this correspondence was addressed to his brother, Stanislas, a professor of English in Trieste.

Gorman has months of work ahead of him. He was itching to get out of his cramped hotel room into an apartment, so he could get busy. He has the enthusiasm (and appearance) of a youth. He is 38.

Joyce's new book is even more complex than "Ulysses," Gorman says. Provocative parody and symbolism streak through the jumble of activity in a man's mind during a night of sleep. Joyce coins new words and dislocates old ones to suit his purpose.

The book is divided into four parts, which Joyce associates with the "four watches of sleep." They are the light, early sleep; the deeper sleep; the profoundest sleep of all, and the last light sleep before awaking, with traces of daylight penetrating consciousness.

Strangely, the degrees of Joyce's blindness have corresponded to those watches of sleep, with the return of vision as his labor nears its end.

—Appleton Post-Crescent, Appleton, WI, Jan. 4, 1932, p. 6.