Sinking Stones

GIACOMO JOYCE by James Joyce. With an introduction and notes by Richard Ellmann. 16 pages. Viking. $10.

Discovered in a dusty trunk in Trieste, a hitherto unpublished manuscript by James Joyce has been treated by Viking and the academic Joyce industry as if it were a combination of a new Dead Sea Scroll, the Rosetta stone, and a papyrus by Parmenides the Eleatic. All for ten bucks a throw --a throw being exactly 16 pages.

It seems that some 50 years ago, when Joyce was a language tutor in Trieste--just about the time of the publication of Dubliners and just before A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was completed--the susceptible Irish emigre fell in love with one of his students, a young, solemn Jewish girl of dark and fragile beauty. Giacomo Joyce is the title that Joyce Scholar and Biographer Richard Ellmann found written on the cover of the notes and diary in which the author recorded his amorous experience.

In an unprecedented letter, the publishers asked that reviews of Joyce's notes do not quote more than 200 words of text. (The usual request: not more than 500 words without special permission.) As Joyce's manuscript runs to only 3,000 words, the request seems not only reasonable but prudent. Sample: "The heart is sore and sad. Crossed in love?" This is followed by a blank quarter-page, then: "Long lewdly leering lips; dark-blooded molluscs." (Joyce appears, quite properly, to have clammed up at this bluepoint.)

At another stage, Joyce reaches a pitch of unconscious absurdity when, like many another teacher of English, he wonders whether he is getting through to the dim minds hypnotized before him: "My words in her mind: cold polished stones sinking through a quagmire." After this, it is hardly gallant for him to accuse the quagmire thus: "Her body has no smell: an odourless flower."

This is Joyce at his worst, in his plush, provincial "poetic" vein, which even the captain of the Joyce industry, Dr. Ellmann himself, delicately refers to as a "rather anemic style." And Giacomo gets no better:

She coils towards me along the crumpled lounge. I cannot move or speak. Coiling approach of starborn flesh. Adultery of wisdom. No. I will go. I will.

--Jim, love!--

Soft sucking lips kiss my left armpit: a coiling kiss on myriad veins. I burn! I crumple like a burning leaf! From my right armpit a fang of flame leaps out. A starry snake has kissed me: a cold nightsnake. I am lost! --Nora!--

The wonder is not so much that it was all done so badly but that it was done at all. The further wonder is that the author of such lines could have created the great, intricate and coherent canvases of Ulysses.

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