I’m sitting miserable on her couch, and mom, reclined upon the old Eames Chair with cat scratched leather, found for sale cheap at Hinman’s Farm on Route 5 near Oneida, observes, and reads something from early pages of Ellmann’s Joyce, droning on, reading aloud, almost as if drunkenly, a passage on Joyce’s father’s meaning, and after she tells me, “you know, when you’re down, it helps, just to read a book.  It will help.”

Yeah, mom.  She goes back to half talking self talk, and I’ve had each day a predictable day of repetitive phrases, beginning with, did you sleep well, do you have any reunions coming up, who was your favorite professor...  I for my part go back to my worries, considerable, financial, professional.  “Everybody is going through the same thing you’re going through,” she tells me, but I feel sick, haunted, and by now hunted almost.

By dinner hour, another repetitive round of talk.  I was a very fussy eater, my poor mother...

But later, a few evenings, I see the thick paperback book near her chair and the ottoman. I open  it up.  The cover, blue, needs some tape, to hold it to the binding.  I find the clear tape in the kitchen.  James Joyce is a thick book.  The binding is not as steadfast.  I tape  the blue cover back on carefully.  I took a class with Ellmann’s daughter, Maud, once upon a time, in the old Octagon.

Why has it taken me so long, to see, to get Joyce.  Here I am, my life falling apart, nowhere to find anywhere to save Mom and her books and all her stuff.  Here I am, a car rented, for a week, but now I’ve been here for a month, and each day rises and tells me that leaving today is impossible, and all the world’s traffic of problems is still rising higher around and before me.

Read a book, she says.  That’s what I tell my students.  Read a book and it will help.

So I pick up the story.  James Joyce and Nora Barnacle have eloped, at the promise of a job at Berlitz,  Paris, then Geneva...


“At the age of twenty-one Joyce had found he could become an artist by writing about the process of becoming an artist, his life legitimizing his portrait by supplying the sitter, while the portrait vindicated the sitter by its evident admiration for him.”

Ellmann, p. 149. Oxford University Press paperback, 1965. New York (USA)


“As his faith in Catholicism tottered, a counter-process began:  his faith in art, which is written by people with faults, grew great.”

Ibid. p.50