These are the last thing you would expect from the author of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses.
Cornell Joyce Collection/Wikimedia CommonsJames Joyce
At first glance, that doesn’t seem like the sort of thing one of the greatest writers of all time would produce, does it? But that passage actually came from the pen of James Joyce in a letter addressed to his wife Nora Barnacle.
Joyce was an Irish writer in the early 20th century, and his modernist novels like Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are often cited as some of the best literary works of all time. And if it’s strange to think of such a respected novelist penning graphic passages about farts to his wife, Joyce seems to have agreed. In another letter, he wrote:
But in many ways, Joyce and his wife had a relationship that was unusually physically passionate.
Nora Barnacle, the wife of James Joyce with their children.
James Joyce and Nora Barnacle met on the streets of Dublin in 1904. Joyce was immediately struck by Barnacle, or at least what he could see of her since he was famously near-sighted and wasn’t wearing his glasses at the time. Joyce asked Barnacle on a date, only to be stood up.
“I may be blind,” he wrote to her, “I looked for a long time at a head of reddish-brown hair and decided it was not yours. I went home quite dejected. I would like to make an appointment… If you have not forgotten me.”
James Joyce and Nora Barnacle eventually met again for a walk to the Ringsend area of Dublin, and the date seems to have gone very well according to how Joyce later described in a letter:
By the end of the year, the couple had moved together to Trieste in what was then Austria-Hungary. Over the next few decades, Joyce shuttled from city to city trying to make a living as a struggling artist. Nora, meanwhile, remained in Trieste raising their children. It seems to have been Nora Barnacle herself who first began the erotic correspondence with her husband, perhaps hoping to keep him from straying into the arms of prostitutes.
Joyce himself was a mild-mannered man who felt uncomfortable using coarse language in public. But a different side of the writer emerges in the passionate letters to his wife.
“As you know, dearest, I never use obscene phrases in speaking. You have never heard me, have you, utter an unfit word before others. When men tell in my presence here filthy or lecherous stories I hardly smile,” he wrote to Nora. “Yet you seem to turn me into a beast.”
The letters also offer a very private glance into Joyce’s particular tastes when it came to sex, which seem to have run to the scatological at times.
Other letters make the connection even clearer:
We can get a sense of what Nora was writing back from references Joyce made to her letters in his own. They seem to have been just as erotic as his own.
“You say when I go back you will suck me off and you want me to lick your cunt, you little depraved blackguard,” he wrote in one letter. In another he said,
James Joyce’s letters were eventually sold by his brother Stanislaus’ widow to Cornell University in 1957, which is the only reason we know of them. Nora’s replies haven’t come to light. They may yet be sitting in a box or pressed between the pages of a book somewhere.
1934 Paris, France. James Joyce, pictured with his family in their Paris home. Mr. Joyce and his wife are standing. Seated are Mr. and Mrs. George Joyce, the author’s son and daughter-in-law, with their child, Stephen James Joyce, between them.
The letters we do have aren’t just a titillating glance into Joyce’s sex life. Taken with his other letters to his wife, they give us an idea of the sort of personal changes Joyce was going through.
These early letters are full of eroticism, but as Joyce experts have pointed out, there’s a sudden turn in the content of the letters in Joyce’s middle age. No longer do we see the same kind of passion. Instead, Joyce’s letters speak of marital difficulties caused by his financial position and a shift toward a more dutiful kind of love for his wife.
Joyce died in 1941 at just 58. His letters toward the end of his life suggest he was going through the same sort of transformation that everyone does as they see the end coming. For people interested in his life, the letters offer a unique perspective.
They’re a look at the most intimate details of his life, and they help us see a famous artist as a real person, embarrassing fetishes and all.
After reading the salicious letters of James Joyce to his wife Nora Barnacle, read Benjamin Franklin’s thoughts of farting. Then learn about wife-selling – the 19th century alternative to divorce.
