Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère, this morning I placed a book in your mailbox that weighs even more than it appears: Cartas (1920–1941) by James Joyce, published by Páginas de Espuma (2025), and the sequel to the first volume from 2023: Cartas (1900–1920). A volume that, instead of offering answers about the Joycean universe, contains the residual and mundane vibration of a temperament that lived prosaically while everyone tried to read him from his brilliant narrative traps.
Here we find not only the monumental Joyce, but also the one who fights with bankers, translators, doctors, publishers, relatives, his liver, his eyesight, and destiny. The man who writes letters as if they were brief earthquakes. Paris—with its cafés, publishing conspiracies, and salon enthusiasms—Trieste, Zurich, Nora, Lucia with her “irreversible illness,” Stanislaus, Pound, Eliot, Sylvia Beach, Harriet Weaver… all orbit this correspondence as witnesses to a life that unravels between glory and gloom.
The nearly 500 letters gathered here are breadcrumbs left in a forest with no way out. Some are written from cheap rooms, others from fever or recognition, but all exude that unmistakable mixture of irony and weariness, calculation and exhaustion, greatness and decay. Diego Garrido’s detailed and sober editing and translation give these voices a precise framework: just enough so as not to invade, enough so as not to lose us completely.
We are faced with a collection of letters in which an intelligence that refuses to be shut down resonates. There are letters in which Joyce writes as if improvising private music for familiar ears, but without renouncing artifice. Certain letters are minor essays, miniature reflections of his great novels. Epistles that become fragments of displaced oratory, where sometimes the most domestic request is covered with the veneer of a syntax alerted by style. There are moments when the emotional architecture becomes visible. A comment about Nora, an outburst against Ireland, a silence that builds up around Lucia… There, the trained reader can glimpse drama and structure.
Hypocrite lecteur, listen to this excerpt from a letter to Robert McAlmon (dated February 11, 1922):
“Ulysses was published on February 2, my birthday. That morning I sent you a telegram to let you know and also to thank you for your kind help over the past year. It seems that you left Paris that same morning, so the telegram must still be at your address because it has not returned here. Only four copies of Ulysses were sent out in the first week after publication due to an error on the cover. You can imagine the scenes in the bookstore. A disturbing outcome. Finally, 80 or 100 fresh copies arrived, but I am still living in a whirlwind of packing and jealousy and scissors and wrapping alongside Miss Beach—with innovative techniques. The British Museum has requested a copy, as has the Times: I recommend that you go to confession, because the Final Day must not be far off.”
And then there is the last postcard. Zurich, January 4, 1941. Joyce writes in Italian to his brother Stanislaus: addresses, favors, an almost mechanical tone. Less than ten lines, not a word too many. Days later, peritonitis, the hospital, and the funeral. And what follows in the book is a polyphonic requiem: “Joyce in the eyes of his friends” is a cubist painting that reveals a James who is all too human—the one with “a small, compressed head and a straight nose, [without] lips,” in the words of William Carlos Williams—and a Joyce the writer who, according to Alessandro Francini Bruni, “stretches language to express common vices in such a desolate and ruthless way that it sends shivers down your spine” and where “language becomes rotten teeth.”
At the end of the volume, the index of names is welcome. Cold, orderly, as if the world had responded to his last letter with a list of names and a prolonged silence. One closes the book with the impression of having witnessed not only a life, but its wear and tear through language. The Joyce here asks for patience, health, a good lamp, an afternoon without interruptions, and money, money, and more money. Ergo, he asks for the same thing as true literature.
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At noon, between a delivery of Walter Benjamin and a brief discussion about commas with a retired postman who only reads Pascal, I ran into Monsieur Antoine Marigny, a pocket watch collector who insists that each of the ones he owns is linked to a 19th-century realist novel. He offered me one—small, blackened copper—in exchange for “something by Joyce that talks about no one but himself.” I read him this passage about him, from a letter by Sylvia Beach, dated 1927:
“Meanwhile, I’m afraid that neither I nor my little shop can bear the struggle to keep you and your family here until June, and to finance Mrs. Joyce’s and your own trip to London ‘with money jingling in your pocket.’ It’s a very frightening prospect for me. I already have many expenses for you that you can’t imagine, and everything I have I give you freely. Sometimes I think you don’t realize this, as when you told Miss Weaver that my work was ‘slacking’. The truth is that, just as my affection and admiration for you are boundless, so is the work you pile on my shoulders. When you are away, every word I receive from you is an order. The reward for my incessant work on your behalf is to see you pull long faces and hear you complain. I too am poor and tired.”
Satisfied, Monsieur Marigny gave me the watch and disappeared down Rue Dauphine with the calm of someone who no longer lives in time. Now I keep it in my bag, between an underlined Tractatus and a letter I never intend to deliver.
[Cover image: detail from a photograph by Gisèle Freund, 1938]
