Winner of the Premio Commisso in Italy for Best
Biography 2004.
'McCourt has opened a whole new vista on Ulysses.
No other critic or biographer has so clearly identified the cosmopolitan,
indeed, the Oriental, aspects of Joyce's great symphony of cities. .... His book
is a revelation.' - John Banville, The New York Review of Books
Since the publication of Richard Ellmann's James
Joyce in 1959, Joyce has received remarkably little biographical attention. The
Years of Bloom, based on extensive scrutiny of previously unused sources and
informed by the author's intimate knowledge of the culture and dialect of
Trieste, is possibly the most important work of Joyce biography since Ellmann,
re-creating this fertile period in Joyce's life with an extraoridinary richness
of detail and depth of understanding. Now available in paperback.
WHAT THE CRITICS ARE SAYING ABOUT THE YEARS OF
BLOOM
'The Years of Bloom is an engaging, readable, and
meticulous study. By scrutinising unpublished material and undertaking an
elaborate survey of local sources McCourt has added much to our sum of knowledge
about Joyce. More importantly, he has enriched our reading of Joyce's works
... this absorbing book encourages us to expand the contexts in which we engage
with Joyce's fiction.' - Anne Fogarty, The Irish Times
'John McCourt brings to his task a uniquely rich
and balanced sense of the real city inhabited by Joyce and the remembered city
about which he was always writing. Joyce is given to us in this book in the kind
of loving detail his talent deserves, though without papering over his often
reprehensible behaviour and character.' - Bruce Arnold, Irish Independent
'John McCourt has lived and worked in Trieste for
the past 10 years. His researches into its life, and the politics of the
intensely interesting period when it was the major Austro-Hungarian seaport in
the Mediterranean, have yielded a rich and well-told narrative.' - Daily
Telegraph
'John McCourt's book is a must for all Joyce
scholars, but it will interest and entertain many common readers as well.' -
Masolino D'Amico, Times Literary Supplement
'One of the many delights of McCourt's book is
the way he makes creative curiosity a literary imperative in the Irishman's
self-exiled life. ...McCourt is even in judgement, generous in opin-ion, and
wonderfully informative about events and attitudes in Europe a century ago.' -
Hayden Murphy, The Herald
'McCourt's excellent local knowledge of Trieste
is documented to great effect in The Years of Bloom. It provides a compelling
case for re-evaluating the importance of Trieste for Joyce's work by relating
his artistic development to the cosmopolitan life of the city.' - John Nash,
Sunday Business Post
ADVANCE CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR THE YEARS OF
BLOOM
'This book changes our entire view of Joyce's
Trieste. It establishes the city as a vibrant crossroads of cultures, languages
and religions. Joyce was born in Dublin, but as McCourt shows, he grew up in
Trieste.' - Colm Toibin
'The Years of Bloom is a fundamental contribution
to the study of Joyce's life and work, presenting it in a largely new light. The
outstanding feature of the work is McCourt's ability to see all the background
material that he has unearthed in Trieste as a major contributory element in
Joyce's creative faculty. The publication of The Years of Bloom is an extremely
important cultural event.' - Giorgio Melchiori
'As an Irish scholar living in Trieste, McCourt
has uncovered a wealth of information on Joyce that others have missed.
McCourt's detailed study of Joyce's life in Trieste illuminates the creative
process that informed his work during this crucial period when Joyce came to
maturity as a writer.' - Michael Patrick Gillespie
John McCourt was born in Dublin in 1965 and
educated at Belvedere College and University College Dublin. Since 1991 he has
lived in Trieste, where he teaches at the University of Trieste and where he
founded and directs the annual Trieste Joyce School. He is the author of James
Joyce: A Passionate Exile (an illustrated biography), Dubliners: A Guide to Text
Analysis, and, with Renzo Crivelli, Joyce in Svevo's Garden.
Bloomin' Marvellous! Joyce and Trieste
by Andrew Lawless [June,
2004]
As the world and his wife, in Joycean terms, turn
their attention to Dublin, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the fictional
event of Bloomsday, it seems almost as if a lone Irish voice is reminding
us that Joyce wrote most of his work outside of Ireland, and in particular a
large part of it in the Italian City of
Trieste.
Dr. John McCourt, an Irishman who settled in
Trieste, and who has
worked on Joyce related material for over ten years, has recently published
The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste 1904-1920. He’s at pains to point
out, particularly now, as Dublin is taken over by Bloomsday Breakfast parties,
that Joyce took a huge amount of influence from the Italian city on the
Adriatic. “The received wisdom of it was that
Trieste didn’t
influence Joyce at all. That was what his brother Stanislaus said, and that was
largely what Richard Ellman, and the critics who followed on from him, said.
They depicted the
Trieste years as very difficult years, years of poverty, of difficulties
getting published, and all of that is true, but at the same time the years in
Trieste were his richest creative period. It’s the period when he finished
Dubliners, wrote all of Portrait of the Artist as a young man, wrote
a good deal of Ulysses and planned the rest of the novel, wrote
Giacomo Joyce, so they’re very, very creative years, despite the personal
problems he had here”.
Joyce famously remarked that if Dublin were razed
to the ground Ulysses could be used as a blueprint for rebuilding it, so
the emphasis that McCourt wishes to give
Trieste may at first
seem strange. “I’ve been described by the Irish Times as a ‘Maverick’.
But I’m clear to point out that Ireland was Joyce’s primary source. Nobody could
challenge that. What I’m pointing out is that Joyce was a little like a vacuum
cleaner who sucked up whatever he needed, to write, wherever he was.
Trieste was
obviously a place where he felt he could write, where he felt he could gather
material for his writing”.
And what in particular were the influences and
material that he picked up, and for example how is it manifested? “The influence
of Trieste is there
on all levels. To take one example, the influence of the Jewish culture of
Trieste, which is fundamental. Leopold and Molly Bloom owe more to
Trieste possibly even than they do to Dublin. They’re both middle-European
characters if you like. Leopold has this Hungarian background which corresponds
very much to the background of many of the Triestine Jews that Joyce was
meeting, and it doesn’t correspond to the type of Jewish background that was
typical in Dublin at that time. Joyce is more faithful to what his Triestine
friends were telling him, rather than what was going on in Dublin. Also,
Trieste, a Mediterranean port, the only one that Joyce knew, becomes a
surrogate for Gibraltar for Molly Bloom and her recollections, which she
remembers in her monologue. “The Greeks and the Jews and the Arabs and the
devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe”[Editor’s note Ulysses
Molly Bloom’s soliloquy]. She’s talking about Gibraltar, but it could well
have been Trieste –
the
Trieste that Joyce
lived in. A cosmopolitan city with people from all over Europe living there.
Joyce creates a very European Dublin from
Trieste, far more European than Dublin probably was at that time. A far more
European Dublin than for example, the dirty, provincial, city of
Dubliners.”
How did McCourt come to study and work on Joyce?
He was educated at Belvedere College (one of Joyce’s schools) and arrived in
Trieste, a
deliberate following in Joyce’s footsteps? “(Laughs) Well, I had the good
fortune to meet my wife, while I was attending the James Joyce Summer School in
U.C.D, and it was for her that I moved to
Trieste, not for
James Joyce, and that’s important to underline! My first approach to Joyce was
in school, in religion class in fact. We did a small course on Joyce and Thomas
Merton, two men struggling with problems of faith. Joyce in Portrait of the
Artist as a young man, Merton in The Seven Storey Mountain, and that
was the first time that I read Joyce at all – it was an important beginning.
After moving to Trieste
it was a couple of years before I returned to Joyce, and the idea came to me for
the book. After living here a couple of years, I began to realise that he
couldn’t have lived here for all those years and not have been influenced by the
place”.
McCourt has ably detailed the influence of
Trieste on Joyce,
but as someone resident there, what influence has James Joyce had on
Trieste? “I came
here 13 years ago, when to be honest there was only one plaque here, which was
on the wall of the Department in Via Bramante, since then a lot has been done,
by the City. Renzo Crivelli, who is the Director of the Department here, did a
mapping of all the Joycean sites in the city, and so 57 plaques were put up
around the city, showing where he lived, where he drank, where he shopped etc.
So all the places of Joycean interest are clearly signalled. There’s a numbered
Joycean itinerary that tourists can follow around the city. In addition to that,
on Bloomsday, we will open the
Trieste Joyce
Museum, which contains some first editions of Joyce’s work, but also a virtual
tour of Joyce’s
Trieste. The
presence of Joyce is clearly much more felt in
Trieste
now than once before. We even have a James Joyce Hotel and Pub! The city is
trying to cash in on the writer certainly, but they’ve always been very
supportive of initiatives related to Joyce, and in general the Triestini are
proud of the fact that Joyce lived and wrote here”.
And what of the Joyce industry, that seems to be in
overdrive in particular this year? “I have major problems with it. I’m not going
to the Dublin symposium, not because I don’t agree with the symposium - it in
itself is fine - but the more touristic events, arranged around the symposium,
arranged primarily by the Irish Department of arts and culture, have very little
to do with Joyce. I’ve read about a Bloomsday breakfast for example for 10,000
people on O’Connell Street – and I can think of nothing worse!!(laughs)
It’s difficult, because without the industry, and the critics, and Bloomsday
etc, there would undoubtedly be a smaller readership for Joyce, because he is a
notoriously difficult writer. In some ways the critical attention has been a
good thing. The critical interest Joyce has received in Ireland over the last 20
years has been essential, because it’s made us realise exactly how important
Ireland was to Joyce, because with critics like Ellman sometimes his 'Irishness'
has been played down. I do have problems with Bloomsday – I don’t like the idea
of Bloomsday being a dressed up alternative to St. Patrick’s day, which seems to
be what they are doing. At the same time, two years ago, the Irish Government
invested 14 million in recovering Joyce Manuscripts which they brought back to
the National Library, so it’s understandable that they might want to cash in on
that investment”.
Certainly Joyce is known as a notoriously
difficult writer, but at the same time, in a number of sources, including Three
Monkeys Online, writers have questioned his reputation as the most important
writer of the 20th Century. What does McCourt think of the hullabaloo over Roddy
Doyle’s comments for example? “I don’t think much about it, to be honest. I know
Roddy Doyle made some comments that were taken out of context to some extent. I
think it’s understandable that a contemporary Irish writer would feel slightly
slighted by the continuous presence of Joyce in the background. That’s
understandable. But the vast majority of Irish writers are hugely indebted to
Joyce. He’s the one who put the Irish novel on the stage, and paved the way for
so many who followed. The polemics come and go, and they bring attention to the
writer. I remember Dermot Bolger making similar comments about 20 years ago. I
think Joyce would find it laughable, people getting hot under the collar about
him 100 years on. I don’t think there’s any point in responding to these
criticisms, like David Norris did. There’s no point”.
What is it about Joyce that appeals to McCourt?” I’ve been
working with Joyce for over 10 years, and I’ve grown to like the man less and
less, while I’ve grown to admire the writer more and more, particularly in
relation to Ulysses which is just so incredibly rich. First and foremost
it’s a tremendously funny book, particularly if read out loud. If you start with
the Calypso episode it’s hard not to be taken by Bloom and his
humanity.And then there’s the extraordinary use of language, the re-invention of
the whole way of telling stories, this re-invention becomes almost obsessional,
with each chapter which invents a new style, the whole destruction of the
traditional novel as we know it. It’s also a book that, while being extremely
funny, has at its sense of tragedy, and Bloom’s situation can be read one way or
the other. There’s no doubt that he created an everyman in Bloom whom it’s hard
not to warm to. From my point of view, Bloom is Joyce’s single greatest
achievement”.
His praise for Joyce is not uncritical though, he
continues “I have problems with Finnegan’s Wake in that I couldn’t say
that I’ve read and understood it. I don’t think anyone has completely. While I
admire much of the prose, and of the humour, again particularly if you read it
aloud, there are huge black holes there that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to
penetrate”.
And in terms of the man? What is it that has made you
dislike the man, as opposed to his work? “He had an amazing sense of his own
talent or genius, which on the one hand was extremely positive in so far as he
dedicated his life to his writing, but on the other hand there’s no doubt that
there was an amazing amount of selfishness in that dedication, and the people
around him paid a heavy price for that total absorption in his own writing. For
example, his family, particularly in the Triestine years, Stanislaus his
brother, who spent 10 years paying the rent for him, looking after him, getting
him out of trouble, carrying him home. Joyce tended to take people like
Stanislaus, and later on Harriet Shaw Weaver, and Sylvia Beech, totally for
granted, the more they gave the more he demanded. There was an extraordinary
selfishness in the man, but then again, would he have been able to write what he
did had he not been so completely focussed on that. It’s too easy to judge the
man on his own shortcomings, but at the end of the day they don’t matter so
much. Dante was not a particularly nice character either from what we can see,
but what he left behind is of tremendous importance, and so it is with Joyce. So
at the end of the day my opinions are largely irrelevant: the writing stands up
for itself.”
Sources:
-
Review -
http://www.threemonkeysonline.com/threemon_articleJoyce%20and%20Trieste.htm.
Copyright © June, 2004 ThreeMonkeysOnline.com
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