{"id":151452,"date":"2021-03-15T16:55:48","date_gmt":"2021-03-15T20:55:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=151452"},"modified":"2021-03-15T16:55:48","modified_gmt":"2021-03-15T20:55:48","slug":"imagining-nora-barnacles-love-letters-to-james-joyce","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/03\/15\/imagining-nora-barnacles-love-letters-to-james-joyce\/","title":{"rendered":"Imagining Nora Barnacle\u2019s Love Letters to James Joyce"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

James Joyce and Nora Barnacle, seated on a wall in Zurich. Image from the UB James Joyce Collection courtesy of the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York.<\/p><\/div>\n

The fact is no one should be able to read the intimate words that anyone writes to their partner\u2014those outpourings are composed for two people only: the lover and the loved. But when you\u2019re writing a novel about Nora Barnacle and James Joyce, and the letters are published and are, well, just there<\/em>, they become impossible to ignore.<\/p>\n

Whenever I told anyone I was writing a bio-fictional novel about Nora and Joyce, they would remark, with glow-eyed glee, \u201cOh, no doubt you\u2019ll include the letters.\u201d And, yes, I have included them. But not quite as you might think.<\/p>\n

The first challenge for me as a novelist was that the letters are still under copyright\u2014they were first published in 1975. The second challenge was that Nora\u2019s half of the correspondence was not available, missing\u2014perhaps destroyed\u2014and I had to fill those gaps with imagined letters of my own. I mimicked Joyce\u2019s real letters as closely as I could. I wrote Nora\u2019s part of the correspondence using Joyce\u2019s letters as a call-and-response guide. When he praised her for using certain stimulating phrases and words, I included them in her letters to him, in the voice I had invented for her. <\/p>\n

People often react in a jokily titillated way to Joyce\u2019s erotic utterances, or the \u201cdirty letters,\u201d as they are commonly referred to in Ireland and in Joyce circles. \u201cMy love for you allows me to pray to the spirit of eternal beauty and tenderness mirrored in your eyes or to fling you down under me on that soft belly of yours and fuck you up behind, like a hog riding a sow, glorying in the open shame of your upturned dress and white girlish drawers and in the confusion of your flushed cheeks and tangled hair,\u201d he wrote to her in 1909. Of course, Joyce was enchanted by words and used them brilliantly, and the letters reflect that. He and Nora weren\u2019t a pair of Edwardian prisses. They were Roman Catholic, yes, and both suffered the quashing of sexuality that the clergy excelled at, but privately, many Irish people were more pagan and earthy in their customs and thought processes than they let on. Eroticism existed in early twentieth-century Ireland, and Joyce and Nora were probably not the exceptional, lusty mavericks we might consider them to be.<\/p>\n

Joyce frequented prostitutes as a teenager, and Nora had some experience of young men by the time she met her beloved Jim; she had walked out with at least three men that she told Joyce about. Both Joyce and Nora enjoyed the erotic writings of Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch, for whom masochism was named. They were two young people, proud of their bodies, in touch with their sensuality, and unafraid of sharing themselves wholly with each other.<\/p>\n

The sensual letters that the two shared began in 1909 when Joyce, in Ireland on business, missed Nora terribly\u2014she had remained in Trieste. He hinted to her that she might write something private to him, words that he didn\u2019t dare write himself. Nora understood him perfectly and apparently she did write such a letter. In my version, she writes, among other things: \u201cYou think me too small and girlish, perhaps, to discipline a man. But when you get here I will order you to take off your clothes and, if you disobey me, I will sit on you and pin your arms down until you howl for forgiveness, and until your prick quivers and begs for my mercy, until I let it fuck me.\u201d<\/p>\n

I wonder if Joyce and Nora thought they had invented this lewd behavior\u2014I thought I had when, as a teenager, I wrote frank letters to my boyfriend who lived about a mile away. I wonder if everyone has done this, especially now that so much of our communication happens through texts and emails. Certainly, those of us who are passionate about the power of words are often comfortable marking pages with smoldering sentences for our beloveds. When that former boyfriend emigrated, my letters were left behind\u2014his mother told me that she had read and kept them, and I was a little appalled. Much as Joyce\u2019s letters should not be ours to digest, I wanted to say, But they\u2019re not yours to read or own. I didn\u2019t, though. I didn\u2019t say anything at all.<\/p>\n

When researching my bio-fictional novel about Emily Dickinson, I read the erotic letters between Emily\u2019s brother, Austin, and his mistress, Mabel Loomis Todd. The letters were direct, steamy, and quite mad in parts\u2014for their paranoia and plotting\u2014and I thought uncomfortably, No one on earth should be privy to these kinds of intimacies! When I first read Joyce\u2019s letters to Nora, I was similarly gobsmacked. I recognized the frank language and the explicit, obscene imaginings. I liked, too, the intimate, tender spillover into poetic trances. But I was made wide-eyed, particularly, by his obsession with defecation as an erotic act. There are numerous references to Joyce\u2019s love for what he calls \u201cthe most shameful and filthy act of the body.\u201d Over and over he refers to being turned on by \u201cshit,\u201d \u201cfarts,\u201d and \u201cbrown stains.\u201d Even now, more familiar with the letters, I squirm a bit when I read this from Joyce to Nora: \u201cThe smallest things give me a great cockstand\u2014a whorish movement of your mouth, a little brown stain on the seat of your white drawers, a sudden dirty word spluttered out by your wet lips, a sudden immodest noise made by you behind and then a bad smell slowly curling up out of your backside. At such moments I feel mad to do it in some filthy way, to feel your hot lecherous lips sucking away at me.\u201d This was an utterly private sharing between lovers, the things they traded to bind themselves together, and Joyce\u2019s fetish ought not bother me at all, as I shouldn\u2019t know about it. Although, anyone who has read Molly Bloom\u2019s wondrous speech in the Penelope episode of Ulysses<\/em> might reasonably guess at Joyce\u2019s delight in the coprophilic. When Molly wants money, she plans to let Bloom kiss her bottom, saying he can \u201cstick his tongue 7 miles up my hole as hes there my brown part then Ill tell him I want \u00a31.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Joyce\u2019s letters, he blames Nora for making an animal of him, while begging her to write ever more impure things. He reminds her that he never uses obscene phrases in speaking. \u201cWhen men tell in my presence here filthy or lecherous stories I hardly smile. Yet you seem to turn me into a beast. It was you yourself, you naughty shameless girl, who first led the way.\u201d This was not strictly true, as the letters seem to show that he planted the seed for the correspondence himself, but Joyce never let the truth get in the way of a good story.<\/p>\n

Stephen Joyce, grandson to James and Nora, was naturally upset at the publication of the erotic letters, particularly when a missing letter\u2014from Joyce to Nora\u2014emerged at a Sotheby\u2019s auction in 2004. Stephen, Joyce\u2019s literary executor, made it clear he would not permit the publication of the letter, calling its sale an invasion of privacy. Saying he thanked God he had no children of his own, he remarked, \u201cCan you imagine trying to explain certain things to them? That would be a nice job, if their whole family\u2019s private life was exposed.\u201d When Stephen Joyce destroyed correspondence between his aunt Lucia and Samuel Beckett, he said, \u201cI didn\u2019t want to have greedy little eyes and greedy little fingers going over them.\u201d And who could blame him? Few would relish the exposure of the pet names their grandfather had for their grandmother\u2019s private parts, or hearing their beloved granny referred to as \u201cdarling brown-arsed fuckbird.\u201d<\/p>\n

Joyce worshipped Nora, and he wanted her to understand the wildest, worst parts of him; he wanted her collusion, while needing Nora to remain a compassionate and ever-loving spouse as well. His biographer Richard Ellmann said Joyce wanted Nora as \u201chis queen and even his goddess; he must be able to pray to her.\u201d The letters make all this clear\u2014one moment he dreams of her \u201cin filthy poses\u201d provoking him with bawdy touches and expressions, the next he wants time to fly on quickly so he can be with her again: \u201cI want to go back to my love, my life, my star, my little strange-eyed Ireland!\u201d<\/p>\n

Nora Barnacle was clearly a willing participant in the to-and-fro of the erotic letters. Her beloved Jim may have suggested the correspondence, but he didn\u2019t need to school her. Nora knew, from their shared bed, exactly what would delight and titillate him. Once, when Joyce asked to watch her defecate and she complied, her shame meant she couldn\u2019t look him in the eye afterward, so she may not have been as devoted to brown stains, and so on, as he was. But Nora\u2014ever earthy and pragmatic\u2014no doubt knew how to keep Joyce tethered to her. In my versions of her letters, Nora feeds back to Joyce some of his own sexual phrases and, crucially, is masterful with him, knowing that erotic dominance is a way to keep him bound tight to her while they are far apart. She also mentions their shared bed in Trieste, in case he forgets where he truly belongs.<\/p>\n

We know we only have access to this most private world because we recognize the importance of every James Joyce utterance; the letters are literary artifacts as well as insights into Joyce\u2019s sensual self. But what of Nora\u2019s missing letters? The Joyces were wanderers\u2014they moved house frequently and, in the war years, often suddenly. Who knows what got left behind and might yet turn up in a forgotten valise or trunk. How wonderful it would be if Nora Barnacle\u2019s erotic letters were to be found, so that we might hear her voice and gain a penetrating insight into the woman that James Joyce loved, body, heart, and mind.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Nuala O\u2019Connor was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1970. A graduate of Trinity College Dublin, she is a full-time writer and lives in County Galway with her husband and three children. She has won many prizes for her fiction, including the Short Story Prize in the UK and Ireland\u2019s Francis MacManus Award, and is an editor at the flash e-zine <\/em>Splonk. Her fifth novel,\u00a0<\/em>Nora, was published earlier this year by Harper Perennial.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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