James Joyce's Correspondence: Friendly Missives and Poisoned Darts

James Joyce, with a life as suggestive as it was eventful, remains an undisputed reference in contemporary literature. His writings, including his letters, offer surprises and shed light on some literary secrets of the writer's craft. The publishing house Páginas de Espuma now completes the publication of James Joyce's complete correspondence, an endeavour that began two years ago and now culminates with the release of a volume of nearly 1,200 pages on bible paper. The book, translated and edited by Diego Garrido, includes letters sent and received by the Irish writer between 1920 and 1941, some friendly and others bordering on insult.

The book now released covers the years of recognition and fame, overwhelming adulation from friends and critics, but also those of murky solitude, discouragement, and misunderstanding, years in which a decisive event occurred: the irreversible illness of his daughter Lucia. The many pages of the volume create a fascinating portrait that combines biography with the vicissitudes of the publication of 'Ulysses' and the chronicle of the writing of 'Finnegans Wake'.

The volume includes the section 'Joyce in the Eyes of His Friends', a revealing series of profiles - not always compassionate or friendly - of the author, written by other colleagues. The volume is accompanied by abundant graphic material and an exhaustive index of names in which the editor has poured over.

Nor are the comments of his brother Stanislaus indulgent when he read 'Finnegans Wake', a real puzzle that tested his patience. "I don't know if all that delirious verbiage about the medium high hat and modern women's toilets (practically the only thing I managed to understand from this nightmare production) is written with the deliberate intention of mocking the reader or not."

James Joyce's letters have had two great editors: Stuart Gilbert, a friend of the prose writer, and Richard Ellmann, an obsessive and persevering man who made a fascinating description of the literary and artistic scene of Joyce's time, although unfortunately he did not know the Dublin genius, only his brother Stanislaus.

Gilbert brought to print a volume in 1957, not long after the writer's death, which showed a somewhat bored James Joyce, already at the peak of his success, always stern, though not discourteous. However, such an enterprise had a gap: the most pornographic letters, as well as others especially brutal.

For his part, Ellmann, who had the advantage of not being a family friend, produced in 1966 a second and third volume, both much more extensive, that captured the temperament of the novelist and poet, with his contradictions and introspections. After a life dedicated to study, Ellmann had time to achieve compensation. In 1975 he published 'Selected Letters of James Joyce', a broad anthology of his letters and the celebrated incorporation of what has since been called, with a somewhat inaccurate euphemism, Love Letters to Nora Barnacle, his wife, epistles that both used to express their most lewd and erotic desires. Nora burned hers upon her husband's death, but not his.

If the first volume addressed the intimate territories of the author of 'Dubliners' and the thoughts that haunted the writer after creating 'Stephen Hero' and 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man', this second instalment paints a picture of an already established Joyce. It recounts, then, his Parisian years, spanning two decades, after having found refuge in Zurich during the First World War. Only the last letters, those signed from 1940 onwards, refer to Joyce's stay in Saint-Gérand-le-Puy, near Zurich, before his death in 1941.

During those years, Joyce maintained a copious epistolary exchange, the result of the many commitments he was obliged to due to the publication of 'Ulysses', which made its author a known and recognised figure. At the same time, clouds loomed over his spirit, a product of the schizophrenia diagnosed in his daughter, who led a wandering life from asylum to asylum.

The letter that opens the volume is a postcard dated 12 July 1920 in Paris, shortly after Joyce's arrival in the city, and is addressed to Stanislaus. The last one signed by the author is another postcard sent to the same person, this time from Zurich, on 4 January 1941, shortly before his death. Between one and the other, there are numerous letters to the same brother, but also to Ezra Pound, to Harriet Shaw Weaver (Joyce's patron), and, of course, to Sylvia Beach, who played a decisive role in the publication of 'Ulysses', a work considered obscene in the USA.