You wait ages for a bus and then three come along at the same time. The odd time it’s the same for books. February and March are a crowded bus stop for me with three publications on the trot. The paperback edition of Penelope Unbound (Banshee Press) came out in late February – in the shops now, folks, in case you missed it first time. My new collection of short fiction, Twenty-Twenty Vision, (The Lilliput Press – https://www.lilliputpress.ie ) – lands on March 20, with launches in Dublin and Cork, and hot on its heels, a super anthology from Dedalus Books featuring myself along with five other Irish women writers – Rosemary Jenkinson, Geraldine Mills, Mary O’Donnell, Nuala O’Connor and Tanya Farrelly – who edited the anthology – also being launched in Ireland in March. (Details to follow)
‘. . .a novel of great brilliance and inventiveness. . .Penelope Unbound is a masterwork.’
John Banville
‘Sharp, pitiless and heartbreaking. . . (Twenty-Twenty Vision) is a marvellous book.’
Penelope Unbound, my new novel from Banshee Press, imagines an alternative life for Nora Barnacle without James Joyce. One of the challenges of writing speculative fiction is dealing with the domino effect. In other words, once you start tinkering with one life, all the other lives contiguous to it start to change too.
In the universe of Penelope Unbound, Joyce’s Ulysses has not been written, Dubliners has not been published and James Joyce and Nora Barnacle are no longer together.
As author of this universe, it was my job to find new partners for both of them. It’d be a spoiler to write at any great length here about Nora’s new partner, apart from revealing that he, like many of the characters in the novel, is a real person.
The other challenge was in finding a new wife for James Joyce. I chose Amalia Popper – pictured above – who was one of his many female English pupils in Trieste and who is generally considered to be the fantasy love object in Joyce’s short narrative fragment Giacomo Joyce, posthumously published in 1968.
Amalia Popper was born in 1891 into a prominent Jewish family in Trieste. Her father was a businessman, her mother a painter. Hers was a privileged upbringing, with a first-rate education supplemented by private tuition in English with Joyce. When she met Joyce first in 1908 she would have been 17 and in the last year of high school, although she studied with him again for entrance exams to university.
In Giacomo Joyce Joyce describes in elliptical terms his infatuation with the unnamed “lady of letters” who is pale of cheek, with ” long lewdly leering lips”, and eyes that “dim the breaking East”. He notes her “cobweb handwriting, traced long and fine with quiet disdain and resignation, a young person of quality”.
He is painfully uncertain in her presence, outside of the teacher/pupil scenario.
“I rush out of the tobacco shop and call her name. She turns and halts to hear my jumbled words of lessons, hours, lessons, hours: and slowly her pale cheeks are flushed with a kindling opal light.”
As the narrative continues his voyeuristic desire quickens. “I hold the websoft edges of her gown and drawing them out to hook them I see through the opening of the black veil her lithe body sheathed in an orange shift. It slips its ribbons of its moorings at her shoulders and falls slowly; a lithe smooth naked body shimmering with silvery scales.”
But the infatuation remains just that, and his feelings undeclared. At the end of Giacomo Joyce, the mystery” lady”, wearing a red hat and carrying a furled umbrella, walks out of his life.
But that was not the end of Amalia Popper’s association with Joyce.
In 1929, over 20 years later, she became Joyce’s first Italian biographer and translator. Joyce’s brother Stanislaus had commissioned her to write an essay but she opted instead to translate some of the stories in Dubliners – “Araby”, “A Little Cloud”, “Counterparts”, “Eveline”, and “The Dead.” Joyce revised and corrected the translated texts and in 1935 they were collected in Araby (pictured above) accompanied by a brief, authorised and, by all accounts, rather anodyne biography.
Given that Giacomo Joyce is a catalogue of the pains of infatuation, it’s ironic that Araby was chosen as the title of the translations. (It’s not clear whether Popper chose the title or Joyce insisted on it.) Either way, the story from Dubliners is perhaps Joyce’s most heart-rending take on the theme of unrequited love – a young boy who undertakes an odyssey to buy a trophy for the girl he’s afraid to approach.
If it was Amalia who titled it Araby, perhaps, subliminally, she knew of Joyce’s feelings and this was a nod to them. But that’s in the realm of speculation and I’ve done enough of that already!
However, if you were looking for the perfect literary wife for Joyce, Amalia Popper would have been a prime candidate. She was an intellectual, a scholar of Latin and Greek, with an abiding interest in literature. Conversely, Nora Barnacle left school at 12, never read Joyce’s work and in the early days of their association felt he’d have been much better off giving up writing and taking up singing as a career. But then, marriages are rarely made with such qualifications in mind.
Amalia Popper left Trieste in 1910 to study at the University of Florence. She subsequently married Michele Risolo, who was to become prominent as the editor of the Fascist newspaper Il Popolo di Trieste, and who was disapproving of the link between his wife and Joyce, even as she was translating his work. When Giacomo Joyce was published a year after her death, he consistently denied his wife was the mysterious woman described in it.
Amalia continued working as a translator, teacher and newspaper critic until her death in Florence after a long illness in 1967.
Penelope Unbound will be launched in Cork on Thursday October 12 at Waterstones @ 7pm, and in Dublin on Tuesday October 17 at Hodges Figgis @ 6pm.
In honour of Bloomsday, here’s an extract from Penelope Unbound, my speculative novel about Nora Barnacle that imagines a life for her without James Joyce. Here’s the assignation Nora and Jim fail to have before they reschedule for the iconic meeting on June 16.
They’d arranged to meet outside the Surgeon Wilde’s house, but she didn’t show. Told him a fib about having to work overtime, how Miss Fitzgerald came up to her on her way out the door, as she was trying to spear her hat with a pin in the hall mirror, and said that Molly Fowler was sick and couldn’t do her shift.
Sure what could I do?
It could have happened like that. Only it didn’t. Instead she’d said – But Miss Fitzgerald, I have a date with my young man.
As if they were an item but sure they’d only just met. He’d picked her up on Nassau Street only a few days ago with a saucy smile and a sailor’s suit. A boy with jamjar specs, not her type at all.
I see that, Miss Barnacle, says Miss Fitzgerald, looking into the glass behind her with a kind of smirk, more music-hall than spinster. And before Miss Fitzgerald had time to cajole, for she had a way of getting on the sweet side of you when she wanted something, Nora had pulled open the heavy front door of Finn’s and gone tripping out into the dusty sunlit lozenge of the street.
But as she hurried, hand on hat, towards Merrion Square, a strange desolate feeling overtook her, a pang of doubt. She slowed her tripping step to a heavy-footed stroll, and then to a halt. What had possessed her, to say yes? Yes to a college boy with a boater. Though he wasn’t the first college boy she’d had. Hadn’t Sonny Bodkin been at the university, even if he didn’t finish, too old for her, they said – no, she wouldn’t think of him now, not now. She darted around by Sweny’s Chemists and scurried across to the pillars of the Gospel Hall. She could hear singing from within. The Brethren must be at it, but I thought they didn’t hold with singing. But the place is thronged with them. Just as well, this way she can spy on yer man without him seeing her.
She remembered the specs he wore. He won’t pick her out from the crowd at this distance even though the sun is glancing coppery off her hair. And, sure enough, there he was, a stick of worry, standing at the corner, hands on hips. Then pacing a little this way and that. He had on the same get-up as the day he chatted her up. Not bad-looking up close, a bit skinny, pull-through for a rifle, when did he last have a square meal, I wonder, and his clothes had seen better days. Then she remembered she’d told him where she worked. He could duck down to Finn’s, if he had a titter of wit, and ask after her and then her fib would be exposed. He’d know then she’d stood him up. Deliberate like. And it wasn’t that she wanted to say no, she just wasn’t sure about saying yes. Outright.
And if he had come to Finn’s looking for her, would that have decided her about him? She just wasn’t sure, not like with Sonny Bodkin. Poor Sonny who had stood in the Pres garden and called out to her in the flogging rain. And she half-delighted, half-mortified by him standing there, loyal as a beaten dog while she hid in the darkness of the auntie-room letting on she wasn’t there. But this fella was no Sonny Bodkin, she could tell that even from afar. Sure, no one could be. No one could be the first after the first.
He was dithering now, she could tell. But so was she and the longer she waited the stranger he became. Was he a foreigner, was that what made her hesitate? A Swede maybe with those blond looks?
Reasons not to approach. Now that she was here she could find a dozen. The minutes passed, five, ten, and her delaying was like a jelly left to set. If she had a penny for every time he changed his mind she’d have a fortune. There he’d go, gathering himself up then doubling back like a dog at a post sniffing, then trying and sniffing again. The hum and the haw of him.
Hello, hello, she could have rushed up all breathless and false and full of sorrys and old excuses he wouldn’t even listen to because he’d be so relieved. Fellas forget themselves. She almost moved then but she didn’t. She was stuck to the spot as if she was the one being stood up. And as she stood there debating, didn’t he make her mind up for her. Fixed his cap on his crown and strode away up the west side of Merrion Square. In a temper, she’d have said, by the look of him.
And then she felt the let-down.
What did she go and do that for?
What was all the mirror-gazing in Finn’s for, and wondering will I do?
She remembered the lightness of her step as she had set off and now she was morose and cursing herself for being so perverse.
What ails you, girl? That’s what Mamo used to say. What ails you.
No, she told herself shaking her head, I did the right thing, a fella who’d pick you up on the street like that, what kind of fella would he be? Not a patch on Sonny Bodkin, that’s what.
She turned to go, checking one last time to see had he changed his mind. But he hadn’t – he was a cross white speck in the summer sunlight now. She trailed back the way she came, her hat in her hand, her hair dejected. She hadn’t the heart to do anything else with her precious night off. If she knew where Vinny Cosgrave was she might seek him out, but no, if he saw she was keen, he’d only get a swelled head.
Miss Fitzgerald was at the desk when she came in and raised an eyebrow.
Back so soon, Miss Barnacle? She was a prissy one.
He stood me up, Nora, said as she donned her apron, lucky for you.
mary morrissy 