I Saw Joyce Only Once

Abstract

I saw him only once. When I first went to Paris, in February 1932, he was already world-famous, half-blind, surrounded by friends all faithful to him, apparently, but jealous of each other, watching him for signs of favour, each claiming to be first, trying to prevent any one new from coming near him: and on the outer rim of this group was a massed ring of eager followers trying to get into the sacred circle: it was pretty grim to witness even from a safe distance: but he had reached that point of near defencelessness against the peculiar race of people who live in reflected glory: I did not wish to see him, or to speak to him — what was there to say? And it was no doubt true that no new acquaintance could do more than disturb or bore him. But I never went near him, and this idea of him was presented to me as the true state of affairs by Sylvia Beach, Eugene and Maria Jolas, by Ford Madox Ford, by all of the many persons I knew there who had known Joyce, and befriended him for years. I think, too, that most of them had quarrelled more or less among themselves about Joyce, and in a way, with Joyce himself. Sylvia most certainly had good cause for her belated resentment of his callous use of her life; but no one I knew was really easy in regard to him: he seems to have been a preposterously difficult man to get along with. His blindness was like the physical sign of his mind turning inward to its own darkness: after all, if the accounts now given are true, it seems not to have been the optic nerves but his teeth: and at last his intestines killed him.

Extracted from ‘From the Notebooks of Katherine Anne Porter’, The Southern Review, 1 (July 1965) 571–2. Reprinted in her Collected Essays and Occasional Writings (New York: Delacorte Press, 1970) pp. 299–300. Editor’s title.