James Joyce's (and John Huston's) The Dead “is the greatest Christmas story."

Probably I read James Joyce's Dubliners during college or shortly thereafter. It is a compelling collection of short stories completed by Joyce during his pre-WWI residency in Trieste, and published in 1914.

For me Dubliners is a must-read, and I plan to make it a re-read during the coming weeks. Also, a re-watch; somewhere in a box secreted in our house's dusty nooks you'll find a video cassette of The Dead, John Huston's final film. The Dead is a long story, perhaps a novella, and Huston's adaptation is a short film, although no less compelling for its brevity.

The Economist's pseudonymous columnist plainly gets it, and so should we all: "The festive season has summoned every weeping ghost." So it will remain for me, always.

Forget “A Christmas Carol” — “The Dead” is the greatest Christmas story, by Prospero (The Economist)

James Joyce’s captivating tale is one of love, loss and loneliness

ALMOST EVERYONE who watches television in Ireland will have seen a Christmas commercial for Guinness—first aired in 2004—in which snowflakes drop softly over a variety of Irish landscapes. Although the writer got no credit from the advertising agency, this panorama of longing and nostalgia draws on James Joyce’s short story “The Dead”. Joyce’s tale concludes (freakishly, in purely meteorological terms) with snowfall “general all over Ireland”. His snow unites past and present, memory and desire, as it blankets “all the living and the dead”.

“The Dead” is among the finest short stories in the English language. Astonishingly, it came from the pen of an impoverished and insecure 25-year-old language teacher in Trieste. In that Italian city, ruled then like the Dublin he had left by a haughty imperial power (Austro-Hungary rather than Great Britain), the self-exiled Joyce lived and wrote. He sought for years to find a reliable publisher for the collection eventually released, in 1914, as “Dubliners”. Written in 1907, “The Dead” displays all the virtuosity of an author who can already do anything he wants in conventional fiction. Like Pablo Picasso, his near-contemporary, Joyce would soon break all the rules of the art he had so precociously mastered.

For more than a century, readers have loved “The Dead” for its bittersweet melancholy and its mingled threads of festivity and mourning. It inspired John Huston’s film of 1987, the great actor-director’s poignant swansong ...

As for Huston's adaptation, this from film critic Pauline Kael:

"Huston directed the movie, at eighty, from a wheelchair, jumping up to look through the camera, with oxygen tubes trailing from his nose to a portable generator; most of the time, he had to watch the actors on a video monitor outside the set and use a microphone to speak to the crew. Yet he went into dramatic areas that he'd never gone into before - funny, warm family scenes that might be thought completely out of his range. Huston never before blended his actors so intuitively, so musically."

Baylor Family Croatia, Slovenia and Trieste 2019, Chapter 18: James Joyce, Italo Svevo and Trieste in the literary sense.

The sun was shining on Tuesday, and we climbed a hill.

Trieste was a place I wanted to visit three decades ago. Accordingly I passed through the city in 1987, after a delightful two weeks in Italy. My dim memory of this very brief visit was that the preferred budget lodging in Trieste was booked; given that I was eager to cross into Yugoslavia, my decision was to keep moving.

In 1987 I'd have known about the Irish expatriate writer James Joyce, but not Ettore Schmitz, a native Triestine who used the pen name Italo Svevo. The story of how these two men met and became friends is the subject of a book I was reading as we were staying in Trieste in 2019.

James Joyce and Italo Svevo: The Story of a Friendship review, by Terence Killeen (Irish Times)

Stanley Price’s book describes how Svevo – real name Ettore Schmitz – gave Joyce Leopold Bloom, and how Joyce gave Svevo fame

The very name of Ettore Schmitz is a testimony to the multicultural nature of the Trieste in which he lived. The Christian name is Italian, the surname is German and the family was Jewish.

His parents had arrived in Trieste in the 1840s, and Ettore (born in 1861) went to a Jewish school there, so his Jewishness adds to the mix of Italian (linguistically), Austrian (by citizenship) and German (by origin) from which he came. In religion he was a nonbelieving Jew who became a nonbelieving Catholic in order to accommodate the anxieties of his wife, Livia Veneziani.

I'd submit that Trieste's multiculturalism is what makes the city fascinating even today.

Joyce came to Trieste in 1904 to take a job as an English teacher. Svevo was older, known not as a writer, but a businessman who ran his wife's family manufacturing firm.

This company had developed a secret formula for maritime paint that kept the hulls of ships free from fouling barnacles and rust -- at precisely the period prior to WWI when an international naval arms race was under way. In short, Svevo's company was making money hand over fist, and soon would land its biggest contract yet with the British navy.

Svevo knew he needed to speak better English, engaged Joyce, and so their friendship began as pupil and teacher.

Fairly early in their encounters Schmitz disclosed to Joyce, who he quickly realised was essentially a writer, that he himself was the author of two novels published under a pseudonym, which had sunk without trace. Joyce was most surprised and asked to see them. He told Schmitz how impressed he was with their dark power, thereby encouraging a delighted Schmitz to write again.

Joyce was too obscure at this time to be able to do much to aid his pupil: his efforts to promote him in Triestine literary circles fell on deaf ears. Later, though, when Schmitz produced his masterpiece, La Coscienza di Zeno, Joyce was much better placed to help him, the upshot being that Schmitz, under the name Italo Svevo, is now recognised as a major modern Italian novelist. Both he and Joyce are honoured in Trieste with statues and foundations devoted to them.

Those statues weren't there in 1987, and I'd have known no better, anyway. In 2019 the writers' memorials were easy to find, and this time I was mentally prepared for them.

Svevo:

Joyce (and above):

I reread Zeno's Conscience earlier this year, then Price's biography of the friendship between Svevo and Joyce. Presently I'm reading Joyce's first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which he wrote while living in Trieste and during the time the two men became friends.

Taking all these factors together, I'm invigorated.

Triestine time was running out, and on Wednesday we hopped a bus to Miramare.

12 Days of Slovenia & Trieste (Part 10): "In Trieste, words feature more prominently than art."

James Joyce and Italo Svevo:
The story of a friendship.

Earlier this year I did something I very rarely do and reread a novel: Zeno's Conscience, by Italo Svevo (real name Aron Ettore Schmitz, 1861-1928), a Triestine businessman, writer and favorite son. It was a wise decision on my part, and an enjoyable experience.

In addition to Stanley Price's chronicle (above), I chose Yugoslavia, My Fatherland by Goran Vojnovic as my trip texts. As noted so many times previously, "pleasure" travel in the conventional sense is a concept I simply can't fathom. An opportunity to go anywhere, especially overseas, is a time for learning. In this sense, a place like Trieste is a fastball down the middle of the plate.

A Trip to Trieste: Italy’s Most Beautifully Haunting City, by Tara Isabella Burton (Wall Street Journal)

A heady and historic stew of many influences, Trieste is a languid, literary place like no other

BLENDING INTO THE smoky stone edifice of Caffè Stella Polare, a tiny plaque, barely 3 inches across, announces that this is a caffè filosofico, a salon of sorts for philosophical debate. Next to it, another sign marks the popular lunch spot as a stop on the literary “Italo Svevo Itinerary,” for devotees of that titan of Italian modernism. Sharing the wall, a portrait of James Joyce is accompanied by a quote from the writer: “I came here habitually.”

Italy is justly famous for its visual splendor: gilded angels, riotously bright frescoes, sunrise-colored facades. But in Trieste, a port city of latticed alleyways and hushed boulevards just a 20-minute drive from the Slovene border, words feature more prominently than art.

In Trieste, Svevo wrote “Zeno’s Conscience,” his best-known novel, which was published in 1923. His statue stands at the edge of the Medieval old town, in a piazza that is filled most weekends with antique dealers. Joyce, who lived in Trieste for close to a decade and wrote most of “Dubliners” and all of “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” there, also gets a statue, on a narrow bridge crossing the city’s Grand Canal. Sir Richard Francis Burton and Jan Morris are among other noted writers who have felt the city’s pull.

Trieste has been called the ultimate nowhere-place: officially part of several successive countries and empires through the ages, yet spiritually bound to none of them. Many of the 200,000 Triestine, I came to learn, do not see themselves as truly Italian. They belong to Trieste, and Trieste alone ...

Baylor Family Croatia, Slovenia and Trieste 2019, Chapter 10: Ljubljana's grand old train station and the current status of my ghosts.

Previously, Thanksgiving dinner in Ljubljana.

One of the bedrock, greatest-hits-variety stories from my Euro odysseys during the era of the 1980s is the tale of arriving Friday evening by train in Ljubljana and being greeted by scores of drunk young Slovenian army conscripts.

12 Days of Slovenia & Trieste (Part 4): In 1987, Ljubljana was an introduction to Yugoslavia.

Diana is sick and tired of hearing me repeat the saga, so it will suffice to say that 32 years later, I was thrilled to revisit the scene. The station building dates to 1849 when the railroad from Vienna to Trieste was being completed.

I didn't realize that since 2003 there has been a small commemorative plaque at the station honoring a migratory writer's mistake.

On 19 October 1904 (James) Joyce and Nora Barnacle spent the night in Laibach. En route from Zurich to Trieste Joyce and Nora got off the train in Laibach (now Ljubljana in Slovenia), thinking it to be Trieste, and had to spend the night in a park.

These days it's probably difficult getting away with spending the evening in a park. Not that I've ever done that sort of thing traveling ...

And so we were off to Lake Bled.

Of Bloomsday and Ulysses, with a pinch of Anthony Burgess.

The Economist reminds us that June 16 is Bloomsday.

​Some will start their day with Leopold Bloom’s breakfast of “thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart [and] liverslices”. They might don a straw hat or a bowler, and stroll through Dublin, past Martello Tower and Sandymount Strand, ending at Kildare Street. The annual celebrations of “Ulysses” are not confined to James Joyce’s native Ireland: those in America, Australia, Canada, Italy or France can partake of dramatic readings, tea parties and plays. But many argue that this civilised annual knees-up is not true to the spirit of the notorious novel, first serialised in 1918 and banned for its frank portrayal of sexual desire and extra-marital affairs. Indeed, many tactfully ignore the reason Joyce set his masterpiece on June 16th 1904: it marked his first date with Nora Barnacle, his future wife, when she slid her hand into his trousers and “made [him] a man”. Best not to think about that over breakfast.

It's an apt segue for me, seeing as I've just completed reading Anthony Burgess's novel Earthly Powers.

History's nightmare -- the ongoing tale of human cruelty and oppression -- animates much of the work of both James Joyce and his most prolific disciple, Anthony Burgess.

The narrator in Earthly Powers is an English novelist named Kenneth Toomey, and it must suffice to say that Toomey has a pivotal experience in Dublin at the age of 14 -- on June 16, 1904, with one of Joyce's characters from Ulysses. For Toomey, this suggests a gaping hole in the plot of Joyce's novel, which of course is fiction. But is it?

Both Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake have defied my best efforts at reading. Many years ago I made it most of the way through the former, but did not finish, and as we used to say at the pub, finishing is crucial.

My question now: which version of Ulysses is my choice when the time comes to cross this book off the bucket list once and for all?

The Strange Case of the Missing Joyce Scholar, by Jack Hitt (New York Times)

Two decades ago, a renowned professor promised to produce a flawless version of one of the 20th century’s most celebrated novels: “Ulysses.” Then he disappeared.

Some 16 years ago, The Boston Globe published an article about a jobless man who haunted Marsh Plaza, at the center of Boston University. The picture showed a curious figure in a long overcoat, hunched beneath a black fedora near the central sculpture. He spent his days talking with pigeons to whom he had given names: Checkers and Wingtip and Speckles. The article could have been just another human-interest story about our society’s failing commitment to mental health, except that the man crouched in conversation with the birds was John Kidd, once celebrated as the greatest James Joyce scholar alive.

Kidd had been the director of the James Joyce Research Center, a suite of offices on the campus of Boston University dedicated to the study of “Ulysses,” arguably the greatest and definitely the most-obsessed-over novel of the 20th century. Armed with generous endowments and cutting-edge technology, he led a team dedicated to a single goal: producing a perfect edition of the text. I saved the Boston Globe story on my computer and would occasionally open it and just stare. Long ago, I contacted Kidd about working on an article together, because I was fascinated by one of his other projects — he had produced a digital edition, one that used embedded hyperlinks to make the novel’s vast thicket of references and allusions, patterns and connections all available to the reader at a click.

Joyce once said about “Ulysses” — and it’s practically a requirement of any article about the novel to use this quote — “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant.” And that has always been part of how the novel works. For most of the book, what you are reading are the fractured bits of memory and observation kicking around in the head of a single schlub named Leopold Bloom as he wanders about Dublin on a single day, June 16, 1904. It’s the sensation of putting these bits together and the pleasure, when it happens, of suddenly getting it — the joke, the story, the book — that compels you throughout.

This is why “Ulysses,” through most of the 20th century and into this one, still catches up all kinds of nonacademic readers who form clubs or stage readings on June 16. I remember wandering into an all-night read-a-thon on the Upper West Side, at Shakespeare & Co. on 81st Street, when I moved to New York in the 1980s. I arrived at the beginning, in the late afternoon, with good intentions, but staggered home and then returned the next day for the final chapter and suddenly realized that, read aloud, the 24 hours of the book’s action take 24 hours to read. The running time in your head is the same as the running time in the book. For a few minutes, I thought I was onto something brilliant, until another yawning fan in the bookstore mentioned a set of connections she had found and I realized, Oh, right, we’re all doing this ...