and breath. Ridiculous.
—
He carries it with him like the stone in his pocket, cold and hard and unassimilated; it jolts against him with each footfall. He’s aware of very little else. James Joyce is dead.
His stride takes him without thinking through the streets and through the fog, as it used to take him along the lanes and tracks and paths up into the mountains back at home, away from his mother and her blue scrutiny and all those domestic entanglements. It’s a January afternoon and it hasn’t been properly light all day. He passes braziers where men shuffle chestnuts, and the damp posters on the flank of a building, and graffiti, and the smell of drains, and the pâtisserie with one solitary galette des rois in the window, and the warm chatter from a café by the Métro Charles Michel— And so I told him he could go to hell, and Excellent idea, I was just thinking that myself and It really is the most extraordinary thing— that he realizes only afterwards was in German. The Boches. The Chleuhs. The Haricots Verts. And German is still and always beautiful.
He finds himself where he should have realized he was going: the rue des Vignes; he stares up at the Joyces’ old apartment. The windowpanes reflect the fog and look opaque. This is the last place of their own in Paris: Shem’s books, he said, were still in there; maybe they still are. He recalls rubbed wallpaper, fingerprinted light-switches, the greasy brown telephone set: all of them polished by Joyce’s hands, grazed by Joyce’s shoulders, haunted by his breath. The people living here will have no idea that they’re buffering up against this extraordinary ghost.
Because James Joyce has died in Switzerland. But it’s Paris that he’ll haunt.
Police, gendarmes, coming round the corner from the rue Bruneau. It doesn’t do to be seen loitering. He steps down on to the road. He feels the weight of an arm on his, catches the click of a walking stick, a voice whispering in his ear. The inconvenience; what a panic over the latest bobard, he doesn’t believe a word of it, not a word. Can the world not get by without another war? His Wake may as well have been published in secret for all the notice it’s received.
All that brilliance tied to a failing body, to be dragged round like a tin can on a string.
He walks on.
In the cold, in the fog, his feet measuring out distances, he tugs at his cuffs, turns his head against his collar. Still, faintly, there is the scent of the old man’s pomade and cheroots and lemon soap. There’s a song in his head, “The Salley Gardens,” sung in that astonishing quavering voice, and the taste of whiskey at the back of his tongue, and, and, and—that thrill in the blood at finding himself favoured, at being accepted into that charmed circle. Of being useful to a man like that. And then the sick lurch of the hand-me-down coat, and the favour by proxy.
He rubs his hands over his head; the hair stands up in fuzz.
He walks on.
But Paris isn’t Paris any more. He walks past the closed shops and the stripped trees, and a confiserie with a display of pasteboard confections, an étalage factice, and the quiet, skinny kids on their way back home from school, and the off-duty German soldiers strolling past in their good coats, and the lean women with their shawls and baskets and their pinched looks, and the potholes in the road and the red banners hung like washing from the balconies, and the nervy scavenging dogs and the flights of shabby pigeons and the sandbags stacked on the pavement, where policemen stand and watch him pass. Let them ask for his papers. He has papers. He doesn’t care who sees them.
He walks on.
It is a cold world, and Joyce has turned away from it and finally woken from the nightmare.
And with Shem gone, everything is different. After Joyce, what is the point of writing? What else is there to say?
—
He keeps a tally in his head; he keeps an eye out. Neighbours, acquaintances, familiar
—
He carries it with him like the stone in his pocket, cold and hard and unassimilated; it jolts against him with each footfall. He’s aware of very little else. James Joyce is dead.
His stride takes him without thinking through the streets and through the fog, as it used to take him along the lanes and tracks and paths up into the mountains back at home, away from his mother and her blue scrutiny and all those domestic entanglements. It’s a January afternoon and it hasn’t been properly light all day. He passes braziers where men shuffle chestnuts, and the damp posters on the flank of a building, and graffiti, and the smell of drains, and the pâtisserie with one solitary galette des rois in the window, and the warm chatter from a café by the Métro Charles Michel— And so I told him he could go to hell, and Excellent idea, I was just thinking that myself and It really is the most extraordinary thing— that he realizes only afterwards was in German. The Boches. The Chleuhs. The Haricots Verts. And German is still and always beautiful.
He finds himself where he should have realized he was going: the rue des Vignes; he stares up at the Joyces’ old apartment. The windowpanes reflect the fog and look opaque. This is the last place of their own in Paris: Shem’s books, he said, were still in there; maybe they still are. He recalls rubbed wallpaper, fingerprinted light-switches, the greasy brown telephone set: all of them polished by Joyce’s hands, grazed by Joyce’s shoulders, haunted by his breath. The people living here will have no idea that they’re buffering up against this extraordinary ghost.
Because James Joyce has died in Switzerland. But it’s Paris that he’ll haunt.
Police, gendarmes, coming round the corner from the rue Bruneau. It doesn’t do to be seen loitering. He steps down on to the road. He feels the weight of an arm on his, catches the click of a walking stick, a voice whispering in his ear. The inconvenience; what a panic over the latest bobard, he doesn’t believe a word of it, not a word. Can the world not get by without another war? His Wake may as well have been published in secret for all the notice it’s received.
All that brilliance tied to a failing body, to be dragged round like a tin can on a string.
He walks on.
In the cold, in the fog, his feet measuring out distances, he tugs at his cuffs, turns his head against his collar. Still, faintly, there is the scent of the old man’s pomade and cheroots and lemon soap. There’s a song in his head, “The Salley Gardens,” sung in that astonishing quavering voice, and the taste of whiskey at the back of his tongue, and, and, and—that thrill in the blood at finding himself favoured, at being accepted into that charmed circle. Of being useful to a man like that. And then the sick lurch of the hand-me-down coat, and the favour by proxy.
He rubs his hands over his head; the hair stands up in fuzz.
He walks on.
But Paris isn’t Paris any more. He walks past the closed shops and the stripped trees, and a confiserie with a display of pasteboard confections, an étalage factice, and the quiet, skinny kids on their way back home from school, and the off-duty German soldiers strolling past in their good coats, and the lean women with their shawls and baskets and their pinched looks, and the potholes in the road and the red banners hung like washing from the balconies, and the nervy scavenging dogs and the flights of shabby pigeons and the sandbags stacked on the pavement, where policemen stand and watch him pass. Let them ask for his papers. He has papers. He doesn’t care who sees them.
He walks on.
It is a cold world, and Joyce has turned away from it and finally woken from the nightmare.
And with Shem gone, everything is different. After Joyce, what is the point of writing? What else is there to say?
—
He keeps a tally in his head; he keeps an eye out. Neighbours, acquaintances, familiar
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