Content area
Full Text
Give time to time, my mother would say admonishing my impatience to get things wrapped up immediately, conclusively. Now, having waited over thirty years to conclude my exchange with Richard Ellmann on his identification of the mystery woman in James Joyce's manuscript work known as Giacomo Joyce, I find that I am finally done with it. I had never doubted Ellmann's mastery in gathering together the essentials of James Joyce's life and work and presenting them in the eruditely packed and immensely pleasurable biography that is his James Joyce. But his reluctance to set the record straight on Giacomo Joyce has been a long-time, nagging irritation.
My original exchange with Prof. Ellmann appeared in the New York Review of Books on November 20, 1969. He seemed to have covered everything in his over 800-page biography, I wrote: "Every fact in Joyce's life . . . tracked down, every person connected with the writer . . . approached and tapped. The list of acknowledgements alone makes up some 330 names divided geographically by thirteen countries. Decades-old remarks of cab-drivers, hotel porters, and landladies . . . somehow preserved fresh in people's memories, waiting for Ellmann to call them forth." Certainly his work endures. But is it definitive, as the first awed reviewers called it, untouchable for all time? Or the firm cornerstone on which to build, adding new findings and interpretations of James Joyce and his work.
It was while living in Rome that I first read the 1968 publication of Giacomo Joyce, a sixteen-page prose piece in Joyce's own hand written sometime between 1912 and the summer of 1914. It has been called a love prose-poem, a novelette, a jotting of visual notes, a kind of diary excerpt, an anticipation of the use of internal monologue so present in Ulysses. It is also Joyce's only creative work whose subject matter is located outside of Dublin. It discloses an infatuation for one of his Trieste students that came to nothing since the young woman did not return his ardor.
The object of Joyce's attention is never named in his manuscript but it contains descriptive clues of persons and locales that led Prof. Ellmann in his monumental 1959 biography of Joyce, where almost the entire text of...