Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Paris Residences of James Joyce by Martina Nicolls

2022; University of Tulsa; Volume: 59; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/jjq.2022.0013

1938-6036

Conor Fennell,

Modernist Literature and Criticism

Reviewed by: The Paris Residences of James Joyce by Martina Nicolls Conor Fennell (bio) THE PARIS RESIDENCES OF JAMES JOYCE, by Martina Nicolls. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishers, 2020. xii + 209 pp. £61.99 cloth. James Joyce moved home around fifty times during his lifetime. It was a custom he inherited from his father, whose profligacy resulted in his changing house every couple of years, so that, by the time Joyce left Ireland in 1904, he had lived in eighteen houses, generally each one smaller than the last.1 The process must have become ingrained, for Joyce continued the practice in Trieste (where he moved home ten times, excluding his stay in Rome), in Zurich (six times, excepting his time in Locarno), and in Paris where Martina Nicolls tells us that "Joyce lived in ten apartments and eight hotels" during his twenty [End Page 534] years there (3). Once Ulysses was published in February 1922, Joyce was able to reverse the downsizing of his childhood given that he could now afford to rent more comfortable accommodation, thanks to his royalties and the extraordinary generosity of Harriet Shaw Weaver. Nicolls uses Joyce's many residences as a structure on which she relates his time in Paris. She does not limit the story to this location but expands it to bring in his experiences in Zurich and Trieste and his connections with the Little Review and transition. The result is a panegyric to both Joyce and Paris. Joyce was 38 years old when he arrived with his family in Paris in July 1920. His first lodging was a room in a small private hotel where Ezra Pound, who was responsible for bringing him to the city, had arranged for him to stay. Hotel Lenox was at 9 rue de l'Université near the river Seine in the seventh arrondissement. It is no longer a hotel but is an impressive and comfortable restaurant that Nicolls describes as a "neo-bistrot" (10). The bedroom the Joyces stayed in was small and uncomfortable for a family that included two teenage children. The author describes in considerable detail the quartiers around Joyce's residences and their relationship to places nearby. She even gives us the precise distances from other places of Joycean interest. In the case of Hotel Lenox, Joyce was only a five-minutes' walk from the home and salon of the American writer Natalie Clifford Barney (11), which is of interest to anyone following either a Joycean or an American writers' trail. Yet in the twenty years he was in Paris, Joyce went only once to Barney's weekly salons (she was quite rude to him). But Pound, who told him about Barney, also introduced him to Madame Ludmila Bloch-Savitsky who translated A Portrait and offered Joyce the use of her flat in Passy, rent-free (18). More significantly, she arranged for Joyce and Nora to be invited to a literary get-together at the home of her friend, the poet André Spire, at which Joyce first met Sylvia Beach. Each residence is allocated a chapter which opens with a Google map of its location in relation to the Eiffel Tower, showing the time the average person (Joyce?) would take to walk there. It is, perhaps, a good point of reference for the general tourist, but a more appropriate epicenter in the Joycean context might have been rue de l'Odéon where he spent a vast amount of his time at the bookshops of Shakespeare and Company and La Maison des Amis des Livres. The inclusion of numerous photographs of the residences gives an intimate sense of the streets and buildings that were part of Joyce's life in Paris. These were taken by the author and are in black and white (all the sharper for that), many of them aimed from different angles. They illustrate well the streetscape and beautiful architecture [End Page 535] of the period and are accompanied in the text by detailed descriptions of the buildings. There are some errors and inconsistencies in the text that could have been avoided by closer editing: Joyce was not in London in 1914, for example (he was in Trieste); he...