James Joyce - Rome and Other Stories

By Giuseppe Cafiero

James Joyce, Rome and other Stories outlines the months in which Irish author James Joyce (Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) lived in Rome, between 1906 and 1907. Accounts of meetings between Mr. Joyce and detective Herr David Mondine, and the letters written by Mr. Joyce to his brother Stanislaus, as well as and a diary kept by Herr Mondine, lead to an enthralling reconstruction of those days.
Joyce becomes frustrated with life in Trieste --then part of Austria-Hungary and today part of Italy-- and so he, with his unwedded wife Nora Barnacle and their little son Giorgio, flee s the port town on the Adriatic for a fresh adventure to Rome, that most Catholic of capitals, which he loathes on account of its vulgar ritualism and immoderate liturgical pomp. Mr. Joyce wanders about like a wayfarer captured by a city he finds ghastly, ghostly even, hanging about the taverns and inns, eating and drinking. The artist draws fascinating similarities between his native Dublin and Rome, the legitimate daughter of a city of old myths and mummified glories set amid majestic ruins and ridiculous buildings erected in honor of a new century.
"The book is enriched with about 140 old photographs that show people and places frequented by James Joyce and Mr. David Mondine, his alter ego."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palibrio
• Release date: Sep 21, 2012
• ISBN: 9781463337544

Giuseppe Cafiero

Giuseppe Cafiero is a prolific writer of plays and fiction who has has produced numerous programs for the Italian-Swiss Radio, Radio Della Svizzera Italiana, and Slovenia's Radio Capodistria. The author of ten published works focusing on cultural giants from Vincent Van Gogh to Edgar Allan Poe, Cafiero lives in Italy, in the Tuscan countryside.

Book preview

Chapter 1

In which the narrator, David Mondine, is engaged by the Angus Craston Detective Agency to shadow James Joyce, an Irish writer living in Trieste, on behalf of the publisher Grant Richards.

I crossed Piazza della Ligna and, following Via del Corso and Via delle Beccherie, headed for Piazza Grande and the Konditorei Oriental café, which stands beside the Maria Theresa fountain. I sat down at a table in the window on a little wooden balcony that smelt of damp decay and coffee and ordered a glass of white Nesmelyer: the sea was only a glance away. It could be seen even from the corner of one’s eye, embraced within the tranquility of thoughts and troubles, one’s own or those of others.

I ordered the deci of sparkling white wine, which I asked to be served to me, as usual, in a champagne glass of Schwanhard crystal, so that I could look forward to savouring—at this moment of midday relaxation in a place of warmth and laziness—the golden colour of the wine, its sharp and penetrating fragrance and sparkling robustness.

I waited for the waiter to offer me, together with the ice-cold refreshment fresh from the cellar and the rumpled pages of the Piccolo della Sera, the usual tittle-tattle and gossip about the Oriental’s customers. In this way I quickly obtained, together with the Nesmelyer in its chalice of crystal emitting a silvery tinkling, an unexpected boon, in that the waiter’s confidences, emitted along with his drunkard’s breath, were minimal as to gossip and in story-telling brief and detached—as not infrequently occurred in the Oriental. Il Piccolo, badly folded from distracted readings and left open on painful and guilt-ridden obituaries by offspring now orphaned, or by already inconsolable widows, or by friends and colleagues bewildered by unforeseen departures, at this moment and on this day offered nothing but boring news items devoid of gossip or intrigue. I drank down the wine in a single gulp, though the raging intensity of its twelve degrees first froze then burned my throat and chest.

I looked around me, breaking into an ambiguous smile that expressed my mood of mocking ridicule and ill will. Barely visible, lurking in a corner of the square, an old bearded man in tatters was sheltering behind a bench facing the Adriatic Sea. He was begging and attempting to elicit sympathy by rocking six smutty and neglected puppies in a wicker cradle that was being consumed by time and decay. The animals were suckling on the flabby udders of the skeletal bitch. Many people were standing around taking pity on the sad scene and offering a few cents. A floppy hat on the ground filled up quickly with tinkling coins, which disappeared swiftly into the beggar’s overcoat pockets. This was a man whose face I knew. I had often seen him waiting, ever more tattered, in other corners of other squares: in the Piazza della Borsa, in Largo della Barriera Vecchia, in the area of the Church of S. Antonio Taumaturgo. He diligently studied those spaces of the city where he carried out one of his trades of survival, working with a different litter every time, even more grimy and smelly than the one before. For it was the filth and fistulation that excited pity and other merciful emotions. This wily man would mesmerize the passers-by into paying out large quantities of coins by emitting mournful whines in such a way that they were overcome by agony, a public anguish which resulted in a considerable custom from passers-by who frequented Piazza della Borsa, or Largo della Barriera Vecchia, or the area of the Church of S. Antonio dei Miracoli.

At once I looked away and gazed instead at what surrounded me; at the sea that opened up a short distance away, an immensity of turquoise marked in places by white foam caused by an east wind that grazed both air and water.

The boats were lined up along the pier or anchored to the sea floor with their sails folded up, the landing stage full of loafers, gas lamps on the corners of the quay illuminating military defense installations of massive stone with arrow-slit openings, on platforms roughened by the salt air, the jetties merged with the horizon opening out past the port.

I glanced furtively at two or three people who were watching me quite openly, then hastened to nod and exchange cursory greetings with a gentleman in a tail-coat and top hat who I had noticed paying me polite attention while sipping his chocolate among the mirrors and stucco decoration of the café interior.

Finally, I sank back into my thoughts and began fiddling with the contents of my overcoat pockets, fishing out dog-eared pieces of paper with hastily scribbled notes, paper clips, headache powders and copper kronen. Digging to the bottom of my left pocket, I eventually came up with a crumpled letter bearing English postage stamps and postmark, with the sender’s address embossed on the envelope in green ink, and which I had already read and reread many times, I smoothed out the envelope and drew forth a thick sheet of parchment paper. Unfolding the letter, I read it again several times as if trying to imprint the words on my mind, while slowly and deliberately mouthing them with my lips. It was as if I still needed time to chew over the peremptory demands and instructions of a letter written in the careful hand of a scrupulous, highly experienced secretary.

HENDERSON & CRASTON⁹

Detective Agency

Osnaburg Street, Regent’s Park,

London, England

30 June, 1906

Dear Mr. Mondine,

I have urgent and pressing reasons for contacting you—again in connection with the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Italy—and ask if you would exercise your valuable and reliable services on behalf of our agency. The task I have in mind involves an investigation that is somewhat unusual in character. What I need is a detailed and rigorous report on a particular individual, his life past and present, his family and friends, including the stories he has had the impudence to write—no one knows to what purpose or profit.

No one is better fitted than yourself, Mr. Mondine, to carry out this task, as you are well acquainted with literature, writers and their caprices, having in the past worked as a salesman—as you noted in your curriculum vitae when we first engaged you as a correspondent—at the bookshop of F.H. Schimpff, in Piazza della Bors, in your native city. You will of course be paid for undercover work on this individual, but you are to perform your task with all due circumspection, taking care not to cause scandal or annoy him by your presence.

You will therefore be required—once you have accepted what we are about to set out (could you ever question our invitation of operation now that Henderson & Craston have made an exclusive and binding commitment with us?)—to spy, shadow, and follow your mark. Your commission will be collectable once your mission is accomplished. You will however have to act sparingly and wisely during your investigation, should you wish to receive your recompense, taking care not to cause scandal or to be noticed or to act as an annoying presence.

Our client, Mr Grant Richards, is a highly respectable person, of excellent reputation and perfectly solvent (as you would expect of any decent individual who has the sense to consult us and pay a large advance for our services). For this commission—should you wish to accept it—your fee, as on previous occasions, would be one shilling and tuppence a day, not including travelling expenses, board and lodging, which are to be calculated separately and paid on presentation of supporting documents.

Mr Richards is a well-regarded publisher and is planning to bring out a series of stories under his imprint (currently 14, though the figure may increase to 15) written by an Irishman by the name of James Joyce. This man, now resident in Trieste (and until quite recently in Pola) is thinking of moving to Rome in July to take up employment with a banking establishment in that city.

What Mr Richards wants is a detailed report on the said Mr Joyce covering his habits and acquaintances. Your investigation may take weeks or months, but you are to continue until such time as he has sufficient information to form a clear, indisputable judgment of this Irish writer. At present—and this is just rumour, of course—Mr Richards has heard that Mr Joyce is a hot-headed, outspoken, disloyal sort of man who produces irreverent and insulting opinions of people, countries (especially Ireland), and world events. It would also seem—as Mr Richards tells us with touch of both envy and arrogance—that Mr Joyce has no time for compromise, academic writin,g or conventional good manners: in his stories he tends to dwell on matters not acceptable in polite society, possibly unlawful and certainly deserving of disapproval.

In publishing and commerce generally, a man’s good name is of course sacrosanct, and Mr Richards wishes to avoid any possible censure or litigation on the grounds of offence against public morals, even though he recognizes in Mr Joyce a definite talent, good intentions and a sharp mind.

You will therefore watch Mr Joyce closely on our behalf, informing us of any matter of significance regarding him, any vital circumstance or meeting, and any piece of writing he may carelessly leave lying about. In short, you are to use all your skill in following him and, as a trained observer, report your impressions and opinions to us.

To ensure that you are properly informed, I attach the stories written by the said Joyce, copied with considerable industry by three of my secretaries. You will see that, as Mr Richards notes at the end of his commissioning letter, they do express incorrigible arrogance and effrontery.

Please use all your patience and perception in reading these stories, as they may provide you with valuable clues regarding their author, if it is true (as is often claimed, though perhaps without due consideration) that a person’s writings reflect his state of mind and propensities, likes and dislikes, desires and principles, morals and immorality, originality or banality of mind and spirit.

You will find our man residing at 1 Via Giovanni Boccaccio, Trieste, where he teaches English at the Berlitz School—how competently we do not know.

Treat this as a matter of urgency. Identify him and follow him in his wanderings, rumblings of discontent, and restless outbursts, as well as his ignominious literary activities, devil-may-care arrogance, and acts of bilious rudeness.

This Mr Joyce is an awkward non-conformist. I say this both to warn you and to stimulate your interest as a bibliophile and assiduous reader of modern literature—or perhaps I should say of the obscenity and license that passes for literature nowadays.

We look forward to receiving the results of your investigations and intuitions in due course. That will be all for now.

Yours faithfully,

Angus Craston

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Trieste, Piazza della Borsa

Chapter 2

In which Joyce leaves Trieste for Rome with Nora Barnacle and their young son Giorgio to take up a post with the Nast-Kolb & Schumacher bank; the train journey from Trieste to Fiume.

30 July 1906. It must have been a Monday, and it was definitely an Austrian Lloyd vessel that steamed away in the twilight of a hot July evening, leaving Fiume for Ancona. Up on deck, Mr. Joyce mimicked the silence, toying with memory, solitude, melancholy, and the foolishness of the anguished. The ship was ploughing the waters now that the night covered the sky, and dreary were the men inside in the gloom. At the rail, beyond the foamy backwash of the waves against the broadside, there was a dull sound, persistent, indiscrete; and dreary too was Joyce’s lost soul, its shadows wandering in the darkness and sadness that pervaded his mind, enveloping him in the sweat of the hot summer night.

Beside him sat his unwedded wife Nora Barnacle. She was from Galway, in the West County facing the ocean with its steep and bleak coastline running down disfigured into the foamy waters. She was daughter to a land where people spoke with a singsong drawl. She had lived with her grandmother in Whitehall near the harbour of Galway, and was a caretaker in the Convent of Presentation in Galway and a maid in Finn’s Hotel in Dublin. She couldn’t conceive how a word or a concept could possibly be argued or discoursed in different ways, and was therefore fearful and suspicious of all writers, those skilful jugglers of words. She was of an uncultured intelligence, yet sharp. She could extricate herself from the inanity of daily difficulties. She knew nothing of art or literature. She was haughty looking, and possessed zeal and wit when retorting to those without those qualities. She could not understand how one could consume so much paper and ink just to make a fair copy of something that was already written but marked with corrections or notes. She had learnt to tolerate Mr. Joyce’s unreasonableness and irresponsibility. She had that ridiculous and amusing surname: Barnacle.¹⁰ Sometimes she descended into a strange and depressing triviality, and was often foul-mouthed and vulgar. She had copper-red hair and a provoking and seductive stride, as well as a very attractive and desirable figure. Her name was Nora Barnacle and she came from the West, from County Galway.

Beside Joyce on the deck of a ship ploughing through the Adriatic Sea, sat little Giorgio, now just one year old, the non-baptised son, a bastard but in great health, who was prompt to let the father of divinity and eternity take part in his life—the father, Mr. James Joyce, whose son’s birth had triggered a great and lasting fear of death. Little Giorgio seemed to have taken on the same tenor voice possessed by his father James and grandfather John. The child would eventually see his father drown himself in a never-ending excess of alcohol, showing off with his pen and putting words together to summon up the plot of some dirty old story about Dublin or the whole of Ireland.

Joyce forgot the excitement of recent events and withdrew into his thoughts, cerebral pleasures, the eroticism of sounds heard on others’ lips, remembrance of others’ voices.

Now barely perceivable, the whisper was to be his reliable and faithful companion in travels and imagination. Old lullabies in Julian dialect or in Gaelic, memories of gestures and episodes that had taken place on the Emerald Isle: the island of the mad and the wise, of the Irishmen.

Mr. Joyce was stirred and agitated on this pilgrimage, losing himself among the smouldering embers and poetry of memories, with his civilized man’s way of proceeding: a concoction full of entangled, senseless elements which, with any instinct of rationality or healthful thought, ought to have repelled each other. But, on the contrary, by some kind of miraculous economy and factitious aggregation of attunements, they adhered together within this slender individual, as curved as a pilgrim’s staff, as needling and irritable as a gust of north wind, as vulgar as a profanity and as devout as a preacher. Many were the memories his mind visited, though with some difficulty and a great deal of melancholy. Many memories danced in his mind, arranging themselves and disarranging themselves in newfound guises, in antique figures, in joy and in pain, ready to celebrate a familiar sense of nostalgia and to compensate for weakness and an existential desperation which, for now, were essential in order to carry on leading his disorderly life at its best and to move forward with his cultivated hopes and fantastical anticipations.

Memories of towns, most of all those where one has experienced love and hatred among tedious compatriots and foolish foreigners. Towns that mirrored themselves in resplendent seas or towns defended by old city walls. One by one, with their enchanted appearances, they seemed to construct—casting away all silent anguish and recklessly disregarding the painful memories rising up from the viscera—insistent new orderings, however painful and melancholy.

Present and past, the towns first of all. Dublin, Paris, Pola, Trieste and Fiume, an intimate itinerary of past to present which, slowly unravelling in a miasma of forgetfulness, nevertheless helped Joyce construct a new identity, to forget his singularity in an exile which was scarcely Catholic but very Irish.

Fiume, only a few sea miles away. Behind him, a course already traversed; beyond, a parapet which looked out on the dark brown sea glimmering with starlight. The city was now distant, lost beyond a horizon barely sketched by the shadows of night. The city had bewitched Joyce, certainly. Fiume had pleasantly disturbed him, a rapprochement barely adumbrated and perhaps only skin-deep, summoning up the ancient canal port of Fiumara long before the new port made its resplendent appearance with its large warehouses, the Whitehead torpedo factory, and the Smith & Maypier paperworks.

Yes, this city had made a profound impression on Joyce. A town which honoured—with an intensely devout cult—St. Vitus the miracle-worker; always sacred, this saintly figure was shrouded and sealed with epic legends, with convincing testimonials and well-established myths.

Vito, Mr. Joyce had discovered—most certainly from someone who enjoyed the glamour of the supernatural—from the time he was a young child used to listen to all the venerable and holy men of the saintly Roman Catholic Church and, brought up as he was by devoutly Christian parents, learnt to bring about miraculous cures, most of all those for nervous frenzy and obsession, which he eliminated with the natural and simple imposition of his hands. Saint Vito the thaumaturge was always ready to heal those also suffering from pernicious incontinence, rabies, poisonous reptile bites, lethargy, and sullen and careless folly.

Mr. Joyce had a great respect for the miracle-worker and saint who restored and healed, with pertinacity and solicitude, the transience of health, particularly those who suffered from weakness of the nerves and of the spirit. And even more, many other illnesses and the ill-omened carelessness of negligent men. And drunkenness? Mr. Joyce wondered, considering himself. For this, he didn’t trust in even the thaumaturge’s powers, for such a malady was a spiritual defect, an aptitude for being hopelessly dissolute and dissolutely hopeless.

Mr. Joyce was, however, greatly and indiscreetly impressed by that saint for whom he felt veneration and the highest respect. Likewise Fiume, the city of Quarnaro, had the great merit of honouring that venerable man and making him their patron saint. Fiume, ever since that moment, had received protection and assistance (and would forever more), as well as the assurance that all men who visited the town, if conferring honour and bestowing due homage, would receive the saint’s protection and attention by rights.

Fiume had seemed magical to Mr. Joyce above all because it was splendidly crowned by the Zità Vecia, where tortuous, winding alleys conveyed a fictional ancient valour, such as the old determination to be part of the Patriarchate of Aquileia, both before and after its bishop had started to busy himself—it was the year 554—with sharing in the acts and contents of the Tria Kefalaia or Three Chapters, those essays by ecclesiastical writers who were heretical and blasphemous: Theodore of Mopsuestia and Theodore of Cirio—accompanied by a letter written by the theologist Iba from Edessa. Few were the disputes in question, but the theoretical contrasts were substantial, for, with the Three Chapters, Iba denied—with incautious ruthlessness and grievous impiety—the legitimacy of the role of deipara, Mother of God, to the Virgin Mary. He furthermore sustained, with absolute determination and vigorous arguments, the attribution of two distinct natures to Christ Himself.

The Zità Vecia had then submitted itself to the will of the Patriarch, now that the latter, in his turn, had submitted himself to the will of Nestor, Patriarch of Constantinople and Master of Theodore, Deodorato, and Iba. Until Justinian, the Emperor had solemnly decreed that a synodic excommunication be carried out, and that the patriarchate of Aquileia was to be exposed as an errant province, corrupted by heresy.

The Zità Vecia had acquiesced in silence, prohibiting all memory of St. Vito, the thaumaturge and Patron saint of the town for over one hundred years. But then, when the saint was recalled and re-invoked because of a general lack of well-being and affluence, he had the power to redeem and repay in health and faith all those who remembered and prayed to him.

The Zità Vecia had settled down, divided into districts by little alleys and walls, hoping that St. Vito would perform some miracle to help it regain its blessedness in the comforting arms of the Holy Roman Church.

It was tranquil there, now that Aquileia, returned to its common sense, had become an ecclesiastical principality and had obtained in concession and in dowry the jurisdiction of peninsular Italy and all of Istria.

Fiume had returned to its old freedom, but retained an awareness of being a town oppressed by the sea, by salty reflections, by the sound of waves crashing against the rocks.

In this turmoil of memories, tangential and inappropriate, the summoning-up of still other memories, equally inaccurate, the welling-up of stories adrift from any anchorage, Mr. Joyce remained seated, he remembered distinctly, for a three-hour journey at the mercy of a puffing, smoke-belching train. It cut across Istria from west to east, from Trieste to Fiume, between magnificent coastlines, limestone hills, and cliffs defined by light and shadow—lands on the Habsburg periphery, with Italian as their common language, even if there were three languages interwoven in these maritime cities. So many syllables of these languages had Joyce heard on every corner of the streets: a hubbub and its echoes, a symphony of sounds overheating the air, ending finally in a consonance which seemed to give birth to an imaginary language, seductive and fanciful.

Indeed, there was a great diversity of cadences and a dance of sounds, or many distinct dances: now German began to weigh everything down with a suspect marriage of occluded, aspirated consonants—and now Italian preened itself, articulating distinctly seven tonic and five atonic vowels—and now Serbian, or Istrian Slavic, which with all its vowels and consonants imposed the solemn march of the ancient Slavic of ecclesiastical memory.

Joyce’s eyes, keeping pace with his ears, gathered up images of their own based on mere glimpses: stirring, vivid images, from the first instant that he had abandoned Trieste and the station of Sant’Andrea. First his gaze was entranced by the docks, jetties, and old harbour; then, in the suspension of the senses of unexpected bewilderment, his eyes skimmed over a Carsican fortification of sharp, jagged peaks, in a natural setting both harsh and languid, skeletal, carved by nature’s sculptor into forms both sensual and ascetic.

The train then climbed among majestic projections of rock just beyond the agglomeration of Basovizza, surrounded by breathtaking cliffs, limestone caverns, and deep natural shafts. As the plateau country revealed itself, noble, unspoilt, and radiant as far as San Pietro, there the train made a sharp turn southwards to join the line from Postumia in the north.

Next appeared the valley of Tivano amid poplars, elms, and willows, forming a patch of intense, intoxicating green, which was troubling in its stillness. Dissolving the tensions of the spirit, this green-ness allowed to spring forth sensations which had heretofore succumbed to the intense summer heat and to an overbearing, demanding nature, wounding even the eyes, which had had been made to examine the fields detail by detail in a slow circular motion, or—terrified by the dazzle—sought relief in the sky.

Villa del Nevoso stood guarding a mountain that rose on the left to over 1,700 metres: the last outpost of the Julian Alps and the Liburnian Carso. It was the mountain of farewells, the mountain that presided over a banquet of resplendent colours, salty air, hillsides punctuated by the odours of the sea, a benign nature pregnant with perfumes, with gentle winds. Its presiding spirit was that of fata morgana, dedicated to illusion.

Then came the winds, which danced on the sea in a beckoning circle, exciting even if one had a fear of the sea that stifled the body, bestowing upon it death by water. The wiles and enchantments of nature were unceasing among valleys and hillsides combed by vegetation, which sucked its sap from water gently filtered in the depths of ancient rock. Next came the enchantment of hillsides set ablaze, laden with sensual humours, with enervating fierceness, with the dry seeds of future fertility.

There was a view of Abbazia in the distance before the train turned left to follow the coast, drawn by the sweet perfume of the warm, welcoming sea. Of Abbazia there was just a seductive glimpse of olive and palm-dotted slopes made fragrant by acacias and magnolias. Abbazia slept its drowsy slumber, draped sinuously along the shoreline, wooed and caressed by the Adriatic, which wrapped it in temperate breezes and the transparency of its unique, enviable climate.

Next, the dazzling enchantment of the clear blue waters of a warm, flat sea, from which oak and vine-clad slopes rose to the gates of the ancient city of the Liburni—the Illyrian tribe that had settled in that temperate basin lulled by slow currents and tides, protected by its pattern of islands and sheltered by a secure, deeply indented coastline. Here, at the mouth of the Eneo, where the primitive river lapped the narrow coastal plain, gentle breezes caressed the Mediterranean vegetation around the immense bay.

Fiume, whose civilisation was defined by its Roman ramparts, had been a bulwark against the barbarism and obscurantism of the peoples of the East. Time and the wisdom of its inhabitants had gradually softened rivalries, turning Slavs, Italians, Romanians, Germans, and Hungarians into a new tribe that the terra fluminis had proudly welded together, offering promises and lies to make it everyone’s Tale of Distant