BOOKS: Night Thoughts

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"Can't hear with the waters of. The chittering waters of. Flittering bats, field-mice bawk talk. Ho! Are you not gone ahome? What Thorn Malone? Can't hear with bawk of bats, all thim liffeying waters of. Ho, talk save us! My foos won't moos. I feel as old as yonder elm. A tale told of Shaun or Shem? All Livia's daughter-sons. Dark hawks hear us. Night! Night! My ho head halls. I feel as heavy as yonder stone. Tell me of John or Shaun? Who were Shem and Shaun the living sons or daughters of? Night now! Tell me, tell me, tell me, elm! Night night! Telmetale of stem or stone. Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!"

The Author. With the publication of Finnegans Wake, James Joyce has probably closed the cycle of his great works. Ulysses took seven years to write, Finnegans Wake, 17. At this rate of progression another book would take 41 years, making Joyce 98 when it was finished.

Joyce left Ireland ("the old sow that eats her farrow") 35 years ago and went to Trieste, then in Austria-Hungary, to live by "silence, exile and cunning." In Trieste his children were born. In 1915 Joyce was so busy with Ulysses that he scarcely noticed that Italy and Austria were about to fight until frontiers began to close. A Greek friend (Joyce is superstitious about Greeks, believes that they bring him luck, that nuns do not) got him permission to leave through Italy. Along the frontier, each time he passed a station, it was dynamited behind him.

Resettled at Zurich, Joyce taught at the Berlitz school, as he had at Trieste. Mrs. Joyce remembers poverty and small apartments, "long on mice, short on kitchen utensils." But Joyce was happy, worked hard on Ulysses, enjoyed drinking white wine with English Painter Frank Budgen at the Cafe Pfauen. Lenin used to frequent the same cafe, but the literary and the proletarian revolutionists never met.

Joyce's admirers, George Moore, W. B. Yeats, Edmund Gosse, meanwhile began to worry about his perennial poverty, succeeded in getting him £100 from the Privy Purse, thought that Joyce should show his gratitude by aiding the Allied cause. Joyce, who was under oath to the Austrians not to bear arms and is resolutely unpolitical, thought he did enough by spreading British culture. He founded the English Players and put on his play Exiles.

The annoying War over, Joyce returned to Trieste, but the Italians had got there first. There was constant turmoil while one of Joyce's favorite authors, Commendatore Gabriele D'Annunzio, seized nearby Fiume. So in 1920 Joyce took his family to Paris, where he has lived almost continuously since.

Europe in 1920 was still a shell-shocked continent in a state of suspended war. It was impossible to travel in most directions without traveling through armies, or in northern France and Belgium through heaped wreckage and broken walls. Revolutions threatened and populations starved. Joyce in Paris was close to starving too. But help came to him from U. S. and English expatriates. American Poet Robert McAlmon lent him money, Bookshop Owner Sylvia Beach began publishing Ulysses. Ezra. Pound, Idaho's great expatriate, introduced him to Harriet Weaver.