Riding the Yellow Trolley Car

by William Kennedy

  Here is some of what the women remembered:

  Madame Jolas: She met him in 1927 and found him an “extraordinarily dignified man,” even when drunk. Only Nora called him Jim; others called him Mr. Joyce. He was an “immense gentleman and comprehending friend” who didn’t make friends easily, for that entailed the responsibility of empathy. He loved parties with intimates and they always ended in singing, often in a duet with Madame Jolas, and sometimes the party ended in dancing. He wouldn’t drink until 7:00 P.M. or let anyone else in the house drink either. He was told by doctors to stop drinking white Swiss wine, that it would advance his blindness; but he kept on drinking.

  He was “both father and mother,” especially to Lucia, who did not get along with her mother and once threw a chair at her. Socially, Joyce “wouldn’t move without his wife”—Nora was “absolutely essential” to him, although she wore down emotionally after Lucia’s illness—schizophrenia. Joyce, when talking of the illness, once remarked: “And I’m supposed to be writing a funny book,” meaning the Wake. Lucia is now sixty-five, in an English sanitarium, and “rather touchingly attached to this period of her life.” Samuel Beckett took care of Lucia in France after Joyce was forced to leave her behind when he fled to Zurich, the Nazis having withdrawn permission for him to take her at the last minute. Beckett was, and remains now, “absolutely, inevitably loyal.”

  Madame Jolas went with Joyce’s son Giorgio to make arrangements for the burial of Nora. The Swiss priest asked, without commenting, for birth dates of Giorgio and Lucia, both born out of wedlock; for Joyce had resisted formalizing his marriage religiously. Madame Jolas recalled that the priest behaved sympathetically. But at the graveside, after leaping off a trolley and donning his clerical garb as he walked toward Nora’s open grave, he delivered the funeral prayers with the gratuitous remark that this was “a great sinner who is being buried.”

  And so in Joyce’s long feud with the church, the church had the last, bitter word.

  Dr. Giedion-Welcker: She said that at one stage in the writing of the Wake, Nora complained she couldn’t sleep. Why not? “That man,” she said, “he sits in there at his desk, writing and laughing out loud.” Joyce, she said, had plans to write another book after the Wake, one on the order of a Greek tragedy or comedy, based on the Greek resistance to the Nazis.

  Mrs. Delimata: She was close to Lucia and still communicates with her. “She writes to me every fortnight, always one letter: ‘Please come and fetch me. I want to go to Ireland with you. My father and mother are in heaven and I’m all alone.’ But there is no chance of letting her out; I asked about it and they won’t.”

  A few years ago Lucia came to herself and said to Mrs. Delimata: “Was I much trouble? I’m sorry I was so much trouble to my father.”

  “Uncle Jim was so happy Lucia was getting better when she stayed with us in Ireland. But then she’d get spasms of wanting to commit suicide. Everybody wanted to keep her free as much and as long as possible but twenty doctors examined her. She used to go around half-dressed and went into the sea naked. People here would say, ‘Of course it would be James Joyce’s daughter that would do this.’ Jim never stopped writing to Lucia to read this book and that book and go to this play and that.

  “When my mother died in 1963 I started a guesthouse in Bray and called it Ulysses, but my heart didn’t behave and I had to give it up.… I want to start a Joyce house in Bray, the one where he set the Christmas-dinner scene. The house is just the same as when he lived in it but I haven’t been able to raise the money.

  “The family? Some said Uncle Jim only wrote when he was drunk and they said he was half crazy. He loved my mother but years ago some of his other sisters would pretend he wasn’t their brother at all. Aunty May came around and eventually kept a correspondence with Jim. Aunty Florry [who was eighty-one and dying in a nursing home] had nothing to do with Jim and blamed him for their mother’s death.… Giorgio is in Germany and I understand he’s very ill.… Jim was such a madcap. He’d get money from somebody and he’d go and buy a scarf, or some flaming thing. He wasn’t very good with money.… But in 1938 he said to my mother he would get a beauty salon in Paris if I would study beauty culture in Ireland. I was starting in it when the war came.… He never forgot my birthday and he called himself my godfather, but by proxy he was, really.… He called me Baby. Lucia still calls me Baby. Lucia got a dressing gown from Beckett last Christmas.”

  A letter from Lucia: “Dear Baby, I hope you are all well. I wrote to Mr.—my solicitor to send you 25 pounds. Did you get it I wonder? Mrs.—says it is a lot of money so I don’t know if he will let you have it.… I hope he will send you the money so that you can come to see me. I have a small room and there is a big tree just outside my window with lots of birds flying about all day. With lots of love, from Lucia.”

  The symposium ended on Bloomsday, with an early evening visit to the Martello Tower and then a dinner at the Royal Marine Hotel in Dun Laoghaire. The Joyceans descended from chartered buses and came up the walkway toward the tower, some in their new tweed caps and knitted sweaters bought the day before yesterday on Grafton Street. They stood hip to hip in the small museum, which was busy with photos, letters, Joyce’s death mask by sculptor Paul Speck (that detail arranged immediately after his death by Frau Giedion-Welcker).

  There in showcases, like rare Etruscan pottery, lay Joyce’s last walking stick, his brocaded vest donated by Beckett, the guitar his friend Ottocaro Weiss photographed him playing, his books in so many languages.

  Ulick O’Connor, the biographer of Oliver St. John Gogarty (the Buck Mulligan of Ulysses), recollected in a monologue for the tower visitors the days when Gogarty and Joyce had lived in this room. O’Connor had planned to bring back both their voices via recordings, to be heard here together for the first time since 1904, but Gogarty’s son invoked a copyright and so Joyce alone, in his squeaky, simulated brogue, welcomed these benevolent invaders of his soul.

  At the dinner which followed, two stunningly talented Irish singers, Anne Makower and Bill Golding, evoked for an hour the long-gone Joycean time with superbly rendered songs and patter, songs that were in the air in Joyce’s day and which he used in his books—“I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls,” “Love’s Old Sweet Song,” part of Don Giovanni, and, of course, “Finnegan’s Wake,” before which the singers gave the audience the compulsory Irish jab: “Let us remind these scholars who take him too seriously that concert Joyceans are aware that Joyce was a great comic novelist.”

  Madame Jolas said it was the kind of evening she’d often spent with Joyce, this music their common ground, and, “What a good account of this evening he could have given!” Paris was announced as the site of the 1975 symposium, two short Joyce films were shown, the symposium’s organizers cracked in-group jokes, and since everybody was surfeited with song, literature, food, fellowship, and also deep into the French wine, the mood was as mellow and lyrical as a Tom Moore melody; and, some would say, just about as relevant to the contemporary world.

  The most vituperative argument I heard against the Joyceans is not that they are solemn, which they generally are not as often as they are, but that as a group they are like Joyce: cultural imperialists and moral neuters; elitists turning up pointless esoterica and framing it in prose that is often brilliant, often redolent of rancid socks. I heard an Irish Marxist denigrate Joyce as irrelevant today to the Irish masses who are still trying to overturn British colonialism in Northern Ireland and British economic imperialism in the Irish Republic. Marxists similarly attacked Joyce in his lifetime.

  Benedict Kiely, the Irish short-story writer, told a story at lunch one day during the symposium about an Irish master of ceremonies at a Belfast musicale who came on stage and announced that “Mary Ann McGattigan will now sing ‘The Londonderry Air.’” Someone from the balcony shouted down: “Mary Ann McGattigan is a whore!” The emcee, taken aback, stepped away, composed himself, and then returned to the microphone.

  “Nevertheless
,” he said, “Mary Ann McGattigan will now sing ‘The Londonderry Air.’”

  The stalwart Joyceans, like that emcee, know that neither the artist nor his partisans ever bow to vituperation. The quest for heliotrope will continue.

  1974

  Bernard Malamud:

  On the Short Story

  On The Fixer

  Pictures of Fidelman: A Review

  On the Short Story

  “It has many enticements.…

  “Like a poem, it contains multitudes.…

  “Its brief quality relates it more fittingly to our short lives.…

  “Time flies because so much happens so quickly.…

  “With a dozen or few more pages whole lives are implied and even understood.…

  “When you put a dozen good ones together, you have a good book.”

  This is Bernard Malamud talking about the short story, a literary form he has worked in with more originality than almost any contemporary American writer. His newest book, Idiots First, is a collection of a dozen short stories. His first such collection, The Magic Barrel, won the National Book Award in 1959. The new work includes two fantasies, a section of a play, four stories with an Italian setting, “and the rest done in a realistic, expressionistic mode.”

  “I say expressionistic for I never really write a fully realistic tale,” Mr. Malamud said in an interview at his office last week on the Bennington College campus, where he teaches literature.

  “Fiction does not deal with pure, dead, documentary realism. As a fiction writer you take a realistic fact and abstract it and distort it and perhaps even fantasy it, and it comes out realism if it tells the truth about life.”

  Mr. Malamud puts his characters in a grocery store with no customers, in a railroad station where death is an employee, in a rooming house with a despondent writer, in Harlem searching for a Negro angel named Alexander Levine.

  In these situations, in the words of the National Book Award jury, he “captures the poetry of human relationships at the point where reality and imagination meet.”

  Generally his characters are long-suffering, almost defeated, incredibly sad, pitiable. But he warns against misinterpreting his aims:

  “Many people are victimized but some are gifted enough to pluck victory out of defeat, or even partial victory. A bad reading of my work would indicate that I’m writing about losers. That would be a very bad reading. One of my most important themes is a man’s hidden strength. I am very much interested in the resources of the spirit, the strength people don’t know they even have until they are confronted with a crisis.”

  This hidden strength, he explains, “is stored up through experience, you might say. A man lives through something and he learns. A man reads something and he learns. And some people use what they learn.”

  In The Assistant, Mr. Malamud’s second novel (the first was The Natural, about a baseball player; the third was a story of a college professor, A New Life), he etched in stark events the life of a vagrant Italian, Frank Alpine, who becomes a clerk in a Jewish grocery store and encounters enough obstacles to give even a God-like hero the blind staggers. Circumstances and his own weaknesses send Alpine to his knees. But he always rallies, and in the long run achieves victory of a kind.

  Mr. Malamud feels that “a man is always changing. And the changed part of him is all-important. I refer to the psyche, to the spirit, the mind, the emotions. I feel that a man’s way out is his imagination and his will. He frequently does the impossible.

  “In these times there is so much of a belief in unconscious determinism that people feel there is nothing they can do with their lives simply because they’ve had a past. I don’t believe this. I believe that in a sense we are imprisoned, but that the chains have locks and the locks are openable.”

  Mr. Malamud at the moment is between works, a time when he generally produces short stories while a new novel is germinating. When you finish a short story, he says, “you breathe,” whereas with a novel “there is a long time under water.”

  Mr. Malamud, now forty-nine, began writing as a child, but dates his “intensive, purposive apprenticeship” from 1940 to 1949, when he lived in a Brooklyn rooming house and later in Greenwich Village. In this period he wrote “dozens” of short stories and a novel, the latter eventually destroyed intentionally. He sold his first story in 1950 to Harper’s Bazaar. Called “The Cost of Living,” it is included in the new collection and was one of the bases for The Assistant.

  “The artist’s strongest protest against injustice,” he says, “his best defense of the underprivileged of the world, is to tell their stories as works of art.”

  1963

  On The Fixer

  Bernard Malamud has written with his new novel, The Fixer, what he considers the best book of his life. It is an imaginative tour de force that shows the great power of his creative talents.

  But he finds himself, through a publishing quirk, linked with the historical situation on which his plot is very loosely based. And the result is painful for this eminent literary man.

  He talked of this during an interview in his office in a converted barn that is now a main building on the Bennington College campus.

  Malamud’s book is just published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and it is no secret that it is the author’s version of the imprisonment (from 1911 to 1913) of Mendel Beiliss, a Jewish laborer in Kiev, Russia, who was accused of “ritual murder.” Anti-Semitic conspirators used Beiliss, an innocent man, as scapegoat in their plan to fan anti-Semitic Russians to the frenzy of a pogrom. The murderers were known, and the crime had nothing to do with Jews. But Beiliss was nevertheless accused of stabbing a young boy forty-seven times to drain his blood for use in the making of matzos for Passover.

  The story of the conspiracy against Beiliss, and his absurd trial, is told in scholarly detail by Maurice Samuel in Blood Accusation, a book just published by Knopf. Samuel, however, tells little of Beiliss’s personal life or attitudes. That is Malamud’s province.

  But Malamud, who stands in the first rank of American novelists and short-story writers, has not merely transcribed Beiliss’s circumstances into fictional form. He has created a new character, a product of history, myth, and the fertile Malamud mind.

  Yet the linking of the novel with the Samuel book tends “to cut down the imaginative invention” in the minds of others, Malamud believes.

  “I don’t want my novel treated as a case history,” he said.

  Anyone who knows anything about literature will know from a reading of the novel that it is not a case history. It is an exploration of a man’s mind as he suffers excruciating tortures of brutality, deprivation, and humiliation. Yakov Bok’s jailers trick him, intimidate him, even try to kill him in ways that would not appear to be murder. But he survives through what Malamud terms “resistance of the mind.”

  A reading of the story, the author said, should make you “feel that you’re in the presence of a man, and that he’s using his resources as a man to stay alive.”

  Some readers, he says, have found the story “too depressing,” but he terms these people “inadequate readers” who do not see “these elements of the story which are the sources of power.”

  Neither, apparently, do they see the Malamud humor, which is one of the author’s great strengths. Yakov Bok is tragic, but Malamud makes him a ragtail, a gagster, has him walk into a closet by mistake, like Stan Laurel. As he contemplates the idea of a month in jail Bok thinks: “A month in jail is not a year and three weeks are less; besides if you wanted to look at it that way, rent was free.”

  Also, after excruciating months of prison and torture Yakov sees his attorney and finds out many in Russia are sympathetic to his plight.

  “Should I hope?” he asks the attorney.

  “If it doesn’t hurt, hope,” the attorney retorts.

  The capacity to ask such a question, and the witty language of its answer, are part of the means by which Mr. Malamud feels that he “protects the
reader from sheer laceration and gloom.” The story is unquestionably painful to read. Malamud allows Yakov, nevertheless, to be almost comical in the midst of torture, a means, he says of being “objective and protective at the same time.” This allows Bok, says the author, “to turn what is unpleasant into what a person can tolerate.”

  Bernard Malamud first heard of Mendel Beiliss from his father. The story of the man’s suffering remained intriguing to him, but when he began to research it Beiliss proved to be fictionally inadequate. “He didn’t fit the message I wanted to get across,” the author recalled. “His suffering came to less than it should have come to. I had to invent a character—a folk hero, so that much that didn’t happen to Beiliss could happen to him.”

  Beiliss’s story was the outline. But Malamud also drew on the Dreyfus and Sacco-Vanzetti cases. Beiliss was never put in chains, but Yakov Bok is chained for months, as was Dreyfus. Bok’s hallucinations were suggested by a line in an article about Vanzetti’s hallucinations in prison. Many characters are total inventions by Malamud, others are composites; but the finished product is a panorama of fictional people who come to life through the author’s talent. “They are more than the sum of their parts,” he feels, and adds: “You cannot put anything together that you don’t invent.”

  The story of Yakov Bok reaches back half a century for its plot, but its meaning is richly contemporary, most specifically in that the hero is the victim of a political situation involving civil rights. Bok is also an existential Jew, a confessed atheist who wrestles with the power and mythology of religion in his prison cell, trying to discover a meaning for what is happening to him, nurtured only by his own inner strength that refuses to yield to meaninglessness.

  Malamud sees it further as “dealing with unprotected man—the way we feel unprotected before the A-bomb,” and being modern in that. “But it’s timeless too, I would hope,” he added.