And A Very Good Time It Was: A Short Life of ... - The Modern Word

for her, he told Joyce, “Don’t wait and don’t hesitate. Ask Nora, and if she agrees to go away
with you, take her.” 75
Nora accepted, and they began their feeble plans to leave as soon as possible. Conveniently
leaving Nora out of the equation (since he knew his father would not accept his son running away
with a Galway girl with no name or money), John Joyce approved of the plan. Joyce then
contacted anyone he could for help. He secured the possibility of a teaching position in a Berlitz
school in Europe, and at Arthur Symons’ suggestion he submitted Chamber Music to Grant
Richards for publication. “Now I will make my own legend and stick to it,” Joyce wrote to Lady
Gregory, 76 and on October 6, 1904, they left Ireland. Brenda Maddox’s Nora is so good partly
because she doesn’t mind second-guessing the inflated myth Joyce crafted for himself:
As they turned their backs on Ireland, at twenty-two and twenty, Joyce and Nora
had enormous courage. But so had 37,413 other people from Ireland that year.
Apart from the fact that he was going to forge the uncreated conscience of his
race and that Nora had put aside a life of religious training to go as his unwed
bride, they were absolutely typical Irish immigrants. 77
They only had enough money to get to Paris, but a doctor Joyce had known there two years
before gave them enough to get to Zurich. Once there he found the Berlitz School didn’t have a
job for him to fill, and neither had they been expecting him. The director suggested trying a
school in Trieste, but with no luck. Finally Joyce found a job at the Berlitz School in Pola, an
international harbor south of Trieste. Aside from living in Rome a few years later, either Pola,
Zurich, or Trieste were to be the Joyce’s home for the next sixteen years.
Teaching English at the Berlitz Schools in Pola and Trieste provided Joyce with a far from
normal job. Its advertisements boasted qualified teachers available for “classes or private lessons,
or in the students’ homes, at any hour.” 78 The irregular schedule this kind of guarantee brought
about no doubt appealed to Joyce’s nature, and as most of his lessons were held in his own or
students’ homes, he was able to absorb as much from his surroundings as his students were from
his lessons.
For all this, it’s a shame that the already financially-irresponsible Joyce was paid so little. In a
city whose average salary ranged from 150 to 400 crowns, Joyce made 190. 79 And as most of his
students were upper-class, either in military or in business or, in a few cases, the children (more
specifically the daughters) of elite families, his difference in class from them was embarrassing.
However, as John McCourt says, the arrangement did have its creative advantags:
In order to teach English grammar, syntax, phonetics, and pronunciation, Joyce
was forced to analyze patterns that he had always taken for granted, so as to
render them understandable to students. In thus distancing himself from his own
language Joyce was in fact deepening his appreciation of it, and this process
cannot but have helped him as a writer. 80
For now, though, he and Nora were newcomers in Pola. Joyce continued to write more stories
for Dubliners, which he sent back to Stanislaus, the two of them arguing points between letters.
Nora brushed up her French on the eventuality that they become rich from his books and move to
Paris.
Instead, Joyce was transferred to the Berlitz School in Trieste in March, 1905. At the time
Trieste’s population was 45,205, which broke down to 24,056 Italians, 10,388 Serb Croats, 4, 654
Germans, and 1,543 Slovenes. 81 A good list of the languages spoken there are Armenian, English,
Spanish, Turkish, Sicilian, Maltese, German, Hungarian, Slovenian, Croatian, Czech, Greek,
Italian, and various dialects of Italian—all of which contributed to the Triestino dialect (and
McCourt isn’t far off calling Finnegans Wake “an exaggerated, exploded version of Triestino” 82 ).
With this mix of culture and language, Trieste was also the gateway city to an exotic East, and