If James Joyce Went Ins Bordell
Stand: 18.05.2022
He became a world writer in Trieste: James Joyce
Quelle: Pictures From History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
James Joyce moved from Dublin to Trieste in 1904 to work as an English teacher. But his girlfriend Nora Barnacle has nothing to laugh about at first. As soon as she arrives, Joyce leaves her at the train station with her luggage for hours.
EIt is October 20, 1904, in the evening in Trieste. In front of the train station, a lonely woman is lounging nervously on a park bench, with massive stacks of luggage around her. The woman’s name is Nora Barnacle, 20. Her boyfriend, James Joyce, left her here when she arrived. He wants to get them a place to stay for the first night, he told her, and now he’s been gone for hours. It’s getting dark and there’s no sign of James while Nora is eyed by shady characters. She looks at the station clock, then back towards the city center, down the sloping street that is still called Via Carlo Ghega today – named after Carl Ritter von Ghega, the builder of the railway line from Vienna to Trieste.
A lot went wrong on the trip from Zurich to here. Yesterday they stupidly got off in Laibach (Ljubljana) because they thought that was already Trieste. And it’s not the first time on this trip that James has left Nora alone for hours somewhere. It is, as James’ brother Stanislaus later notes, the third time in two weeks that this has happened. But why are you in Trieste at all? Because James has a job prospect at the Berlitz Language School. English teachers are in great demand in the Habsburg port and trading metropolis in 1904. A couple is moving from Dublin to Trieste. But where is James?
Where is James Joyce?
On his way to the Piazza Grande, he got into a fight in a bar with drunken Englishmen, sailors. Joyce is arrested by the local police. When he asks for the British consul at the police station, he doesn’t feel like coming at first. His compatriots (Irish, too, still belong to the Empire in 1904) were notorious as drunkards in Trieste at the time. The consul can hardly believe that Joyce is not a sailor but is moving to Trieste as a language teacher. In any case, James is finally free after hours and can pick up his Nora at the train station at night.
James Joyce in 1904
Quelle: Getty Images
At Berlitz, however, it turns out that the job doesn’t even exist. There is only one vacancy in the Pola branch office (today: Pula, Croatia). So James taught there for a few months before the couple returned to Trieste in April 1905 and Joyce, who was notoriously in debt (he drank away a lot of money), hired both at Berlitz and as a private tutor. From then on, Joyce lived in Trieste for about ten years, until the outbreak of the First World War. The language courses flourished, and he got to know many interesting, inspiring people.
James Joyce and Italo Svevo
Thanks to Joyce, his most famous student, Ettore Schmitz, becomes the writer known to the world as Italo Svevo. Much of Schmitz’ influence flowed into Leopold Bloom, the main character of Ulysses, Joyce’s most famous novel. The Irishman completed several works in Trieste, including “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” and “The Dubliners”. It’s just, well, difficult for Nora. Although they have two children in Trieste, it’s like this with James: When he’s drunk, he goes to the brothel.
As a port city, Trieste offers around 40 corresponding establishments. Writer Jan Morris, who wrote a wonderful book about Trieste, marvels that the same Joyce, who taught English by day and wrote world literature, who loved his wife and children, staggered drunk through the pubs and to the prostitutes almost every night . She explains it like this: “I believe that lust is one of the more mundane urges and is fundamentally functional, it is not only inherent in birds and busy bees, but in every old lop-eared tomcat. And in Trieste the greatest genius.”
It is said that all writer’s life is paper. In this series, we present evidence to the contrary.