James Joyce Picked Drunken Fights, Then Hid Behind Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingmanner appeared to feud with many of the prominent male artists of his time, from Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot to F. Scott Fitzgerald. He had a “very unusual relationship” with Orson Welles—the 2 got here to blows at the very least as soon as—and he reportedly slapped Max Eastman within the face with a e book. All his bluster and bravado make his heat good friendship with James Joyce appear all of the extra commentready. They’re a literary odd couple if ever there was one: Joyce the labyrinthine thinker of Byzantine ideas and creator of symbolic systems so dense they constitute a whole discipline of examine; physically weak and—regardless of his infamous automotivenal appetites—intellectually monkish, Joyce exemplifies the artist as a reclusive contemplative. Hemingmanner, on the other hand, effectively… we all know his reputation.
Hemingway’s 1961 obituary in The New York Instances characterized Joyce as “a skinny, wispy and unmuscled man with defective eyesight” (perhaps the results of a syphilis infection), and in addition notes that the 2 writers “did a certain quantity of drinking together” in Paris. Because the narrator of the uncommon movie clip of Joyce informs us above, the Ulysses writer would choose drunken fights, then duck behind his burly good friend and say, “Cope with him, Hemingmanner. Cope with him.” (That scene additionally will get malestioned in The Instances obituary.) Hemingmanner, who convinced himself at one time he had the makings of an actual pugilist, was likely happy to oblige. Joyce, writes Hemingmanner biographer James R. Mellow, “was an admirer of Hemingway’s adventurous way of life” and worried aloud that his books have been too “suburban” subsequent to these of his good friend, of whom he mentioned in a Danish interview, “he’s an excellent author, Hemingmanner. He writes as he’s… there’s way more behind Hemingway’s type than people know.”
Joyce, notes Kenneth Schyler Lynn in Hemingmanner, actualized that “neither as a person nor as an artist was [Hemingway] as simple as he appeared,” although he additionally remarked that Hemingmanner was “a giant powerful peasant, as robust as a buffalo. A sports activitiesman. And able to reside the life he writes about. He would never have written it if his physique had not allowed him to reside it.” One detects greater than a touch of Hemingmanner in Joycean characters like Dubliners’ Ignatious Gallaher or Ulysses’ Hugh “Blazes” Boylan—robust, adventurous varieties who overawe introverted foremost characters. That’s to not say that Joyce explicitly drew on Hemingmanner in constructing his fiction, however that within the boastful, outgoing American, he noticed what lots of his semi-autobiographical characters did of their extra bullish counterparts—a natural foil.
Hemingmanner returned Joyce’s compliments, writing to Sherwooden Anderson in 1923, “Joyce has a most god-damn gainedderful e book” and professionalnouncing Joyce “the niceest author on the earth.” He was “unquestionably… staggered,” writes Lynn, “by the multilayered wealthyness” of Ulysses. However its density could have confirmed an excessive amount of for him, as “his interest within the story gave out effectively earlier than he finished it.” In Hemingmanner’s copy of the novel, “solely the pages of the primary half and of Molly Bloom’s concluding soliloquy are minimize.” Hemingmanner tempered his reward with some blunt criticism; not like Joyce’s reward of his writing, the American didn’t admire Joyce’s tendency in the direction of autobiography within the character of Stephen Dedalus.
“The weakness of Joyce,” Hemingmanner opined, was his inability to belowstand that “the one writing that was any good was what you made up, what you imagined… Daedalus [sic] in Ulysses was Joyce himself, so he was terrible. Joyce was so rattling romantic and intellectual.” In fact Stephen Dedalus was Joyce—that a lot is evident to anyone. How Hemingmanner, who did his utmost to enact his fictional adventures and fictionalize his actual life, may fault Joyce for doing the identical is tough to reckon, besides perhaps, as Joyce certainly felt, Hemingmanner led the extra adventurous life.
Related Content:
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James Joyce’s “Soiled Letters” to His Spouse (1909)
Josh Jones is a author and musician based mostly in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
