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

suppose it never happened; and just as there is no reason to judge Nora because of it, there is even
less reason to see the situation through Joyce’s poor eyes and condemn Cosgrave. Peter Costello
puts it best:
This universal denigration of Cosgrave is odd, for he emerges in Gogarty’s
memories as a more attractive fellow. And indeed what more had he said to
Joyce than the truth? He had gone about with Nora, accompanying her to Joyce’s
concert. He would not have been the first man to make a pass at a friend’s new
floozy.... As we have only Joyce’s version of this history, we can allow Vincent
Cosgrave a generous thought or two. 106
Joyce and Giorgio also went to Galway to visit Nora’s mother, and before returning to Trieste
he signed a contract with Mansel & Co., who agreed to publish Dubliners. But he was in Trieste
barely a month before he returned to Ireland in October. A chance remark that Dublin, unlike
Trieste—a major film distribution center—had no cinemas, lit Joyce with a sure-fire scheme to
make some real money. He approached a group of investors, saying, “I know a city of 500,000
inhabitants where there is not a single cinema.” 107 He offered to be the agent in Dublin—all he
needed was the money. They agreed, and after finding and renovating the site and hiring the staff,
Joyce left the management of the Volta Theatre to one of the investors and returned to Trieste in
December.
While still in Dublin his letters to Nora, first in the expected accusatory, jealous, pious and
worshipful tone, finally became astonishingly explicit. Even his dirty letters, “an extreme of
Joyce’s, and perhaps of human, utterance,” 108 bear his unmistakable stamp. But, as extreme as the
letters are, there is no use in either of making too much out of them or being too respectable
(really just squeamish) to say much about them at all. Peter Costello is right that the letters
“distort what he know about Joyce,” 109 but only if we focus on the letters more than we should. To
say, as Edna O’Brien does, that “they are as outright in their earthiness as the mystics are in their
ecstasies, yet they share the mystics longing for a couple to dissolve into one” 110 is a bit silly. H.
G. Wells, writing to Joyce many years later, said it was Joyce’s Catholic upbringing that focused
his mind on dirty words, and these remarks say more about the true natures of the letters—far
from erotic and more adolescent:
You really believe in chastity, purity, and the person God and that is why you are
always breaking out into cries of cunt, shit and hell. As I don’t believe in these
things except as quite provisional values my mind has never been shocked to
outcries by the existence of water closets and menstrual bandages.... 111
Nora’s side of the correspondence do not survive, the fact that any of this was put to paper
shows, if anything, the immense amount of trust there was between the two.
Soon after accepting Dubliners for publication, it was apparent George Roberts, the director
at Manusel, was having the same fears as Grant Richards before him. Now objections were raised
to Joyce’s favorite of the stories, “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” where, amid perceived
insults on Edward VII, the Queen Mother is referred to as a “bloody old bitch.” Joyce rightly (as
usual) pointed out that Richards hadn’t objected to these passages when Edward VII had been
alive; now that he was dead, there was even slimmer chance of offending him. Joyce offered a
concession, Roberts refused, and publication was again delayed.
In July, he sent a detailed history of all the troubles he’d had with the book to various Dublin
newspapers. He hoped that by publishing his letter as well as the supposedly offensive passages
(as the Sinn Féin did) he would prove that they weren’t obscene at all. Roberts’ only response
was, in part, “I don’t think you quite realise a publisher’s difficulties.” 112
Now Nora decided to visit Ireland, and Joyce asked her to talk to Roberts on behalf of
Dubliners. Once she arrived Joyce flooded her with angry letters for not writing to him