Wild, tortured and lustful Joyce appears in his letters

The wild, lustful and tortured genius of James Joyce (Rathgar, Dublin, 1882 – Zurich, 1941) appears in his letters, mostly unpublished in Spanish. Diego Garrido (Madrid, 1997), a young and enthusiastic expert on Joyce, translated the author’s letters from Ulyssesthe first volume of which he has just published—Cards. 1900-1920 (Foam pages)—with over a thousand pages. Some lyrics that show the most intimate and brutal human Joyce, the one asking his wife Nora Barnacle to wear black underwear, unleashing his desire on her childishly shaved bikini bottom, or desperately asking his brother for money. Garrido worked with three volumes of letters from two authors. The first was signed in 1957 by Stuart Gilbert, a friend of Joyce’s, who cleaned up the wildest letters, highly embarrassing to his successors, to offer a measured and somewhat boring profile of the Irish genius as a man who was almost always serious and polite. Richard Ellmann, Joyce’s great biographer and without any ties to the family, did not hold back and in 1966 published two volumes of uncensored letters. He also published an anthology of his favorites and added some of those that Gilbert had hidden away, especially the steamier ones directed at Nora.

Ellmann finds Joyce obsessed with his work and his urges and “preoccupied with being mysterious and obscure,” according to Garrido. He did not give interviews and refused to lecture in the US, but “his letters make him the man.” Joyce claimed to be “very sentimental, but he didn’t want it to show in his literature,” Garrido says. His edition contains “everything that has been preserved”. That is, more than 1,500 letters, at the expense of surprises from public or private archives.

sexual high voltage

The “most morbid and less literary value” part, according to Garrido, is in the cross-correspondence with his long-suffering and patient wife, Nora. Some cards that both used for some type gender determination letters to masturbate when they are physically apart. Nora burned hers after her husband’s death, but Joyce’s high sexual tension, openly onanistic and with very intimate details, remained preserved. “Did you remove your hair between your legs to look like a girl? I would like you to wear black underwear. I would like you to study how to please me, how to make me want you. And you will, dear, and now we will be happy, I’m sorry,” he writes. “You will take me now in your bosom and you will protect me, and perhaps you will pity me for my sins and folly and you will lead me as a child is led,” he prays. I hope that you drink your cocoa every day and that your little body (that is, some parts of it) is a little fuller. I laugh now when I remember those small breasts of yours in childhood. You are a funny person, Nora! […] And yet, how my heart grows soft when I think of your slender shoulders and your girlish limbs. Look what a scoundrel you are!”, says Joyce in an extensive letter that he sent from his native Dublin to his “little silent girl”. Away from Nora and without any news from her, he begs her to read what he writes “over and over”. “Some things are ugly, obscene and bestial, some are pure, holy and spiritual: they are all me. And I think now you see how I feel about you. You’re not going to argue with me anymore, are you, my dear? You will keep my love alive forever,” he asks.

Between economic insecurity and disease

Desperate for money to escape poverty, spendthrift Joyce has her brother Stanislaus as her lifeline. On a postcard from Rome, author of Finnegan’s Vigil he tells her she has a “mouth full of rotten teeth” and a “soul full of broken ambitions.” For God’s sake, send the money now unless you want to see me in an insane asylum. Nothing can be done there,” he claims to his brother. Nearly blind, his lack of sight compounded by the rheumatic fever he suffered from as a young man humbled and inspired him, as evidenced by his letters. While recovering from one of his many operations he wrote Deadwho turned Diego Garrido into joyceomano when, at the age of 22, he attended a screening of John Huston’s film of the same name, based on the latest story of Dubliners. Obsessed with the Irish genius, he collected and translated for the first time into Spanish all of Joyce’s short stories and texts in a volume also published by Páginas de Espuma. Garrido’s edition includes some of Nora’s few surviving letters to her husband, those from the writer’s mother, those from Ezra Pound (defender of the iconoclastic talent of the creator Leopold Bloom), Stefan Zweig, Italo Svevo, HL Mencken and William Butler Yeats. The project will be completed in 2024 with a second volume of post-1920 correspondence, right up to the last postcard Joyce wrote to his brother on January 4, 1941, shortly before the stomach infection that took him to his grave. “The Spanish edition will have more letters than the English one,” celebrates Juan Casamayor, editor of Páginas de Espuma.