Joyce and Beckett in Paris

In the 1920s and 1930s, Paris was home to many European and American avant-garde and modernist writers.

It was an exciting place for artists wanting to attempt new things and this is largely why Joyce’s friend Ezra Pound described Paris as the place that would enable Joyce to complete Ulysses. If you start looking at biographies of artists who lived in Paris then, you’ll quickly see that it was also a small world in which writers and artists were interconnected in various ways, through the artists’ workshops, the cafes and restaurants of the Left Bank.

Around Ulysses an extraordinary network, both anglophone and francophone, formed quickly. Joyce developed lasting friendships with the booksellers Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach, the French writer Philippe Soupault, who had been involved with Dada and Surrealism, and with many expatriate writers – particularly American writers such as Robert McAlmon, Eugene Jolas, editor of the modernist little magazine transition, and Maria Jolas, a translator; with Irish writers such as James Stephens, Arthur Power, Padraic and Mary Colum, Thomas MacGreevy and Samuel Beckett. This tightly-knit circle was very much Joyce’s own, and had to do with the admiration that his writing generated. Friendship shaped the publication and dissemination of Joyce’s work: it is Sylvia Beach, owner of the bookshop Shakespeare & Co, who first published Ulysses in 1922. To Joyce, friendship always mattered, but it is certain that it mattered even more as he lost his sight. The more experimental his writing became, and the more pronounced his disability became, the more his surroundings and the practical help given by friends mattered. There was the matter of money, of course: Joyce was notoriously profligate with money and extravagant in his spending, particularly in Paris, where he and his family lived largely thanks to wealthy benefactors such as Harriet Shaw Weaver; throughout his youth and early adulthood, money was lacking, sometimes tragically, and when he had money he would spend it in a flash. There was also the matter of writing; Joyce’s poor eyesight made it difficult, and gradually impossible, to write. Samuel Beckett, who was then a young and inexperienced writer, stepped in to help; in the late 1920s, he would read aloud for Joyce and help him with daily tasks, sometimes writing chunks of text to Joyce’s dictation for what became Finnegans Wake.

Joyce had a profound impact upon what Beckett thought writing should achieve, and it took him a long time to find a style that was truly his own after that. Later, he defined himself in opposition to Joyce: Joyce, he said in the New York Times in 1956, was ‘a superb manipulator of material,’ who made ‘words do the absolute maximum of work’. His own writing, he said, involved refusing mastery, working with ‘that whole zone of being that has always been set aside by artists as something unusable, something by definition incompatible with art.’ Nevertheless, the friendship with Joyce has left many traces. Beckett’s first publication in 1929 was an essay largely on Finnegans Wake, then called Work in Progress; the essay entitled ‘Dante… Bruno. Vico.. Joyce’ describes very well the unique effects produced by Joyce’s literary language:

‘Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read – or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something; it is that something itself.’

We can perhaps see the ghost of Joyce in a wonderfully evocative play entitled Ohio Impromptu, a typical example of Beckettian minimalism. The play centres on a silent listener and a reader who relates warnings from the departed and memories of walks by the Seine river. Beckett certainly worked hard to undo Joyce’s influence, but we can see the same striving towards musicality in much of Beckett’s writing, particularly in his late experimental prose; here, too, the words seem to follow an implacable logic of their own, and there is no subject as such: the writing is that something itself.

Pause for thought

Now that you’ve read the article, we want to read your thoughts on the following question:

• To what degree does our understanding of place in Joyce’s work change if we think about him as an exiled writer?

As always, feel free to discuss your thoughts in the comments.