the last book I ever read (Property: A Novel by Valerie Martin, excerpt one)

from Property: A Novel by Valerie Martin:

I could not bear another lecture on my failings as a wife. “How long can it take to warm a bowl of soup?” I said, rising from my seat. Just as I reached the door, Sarah appeared with the tray. “At last,” I said. “What makes you so slow?” I reached out to take the tray, but as I did so I saw that Sarah was looking past me with a grimace of revulsion. She backed away, allowing the tray to slip from her fingers and crash to the floor. Hot soup flew up onto my skirt; a few drops burned my ankles. I shouted, turning away to pull a towel from the washstand, and, as I did, I saw a sight so terrible it will haunt my dreams until I die. Mother was sitting just as she had been, propped on her pillows, her hands folded in her lap, but from her mouth, nose, eyes, and ears, a black fluid gushed forth. I screamed. Sarah ran, calling for Peek. I took up a towel and went to Mother, pressing it to her mouth and nose. She didn’t struggle. Perhaps she was already dead. “My God,” I said, over and over, mopping the viscous fluid away, but to no avail. I took her hand to find even her fingernails blackened and wet, and when I looked down, I saw two stains unfurling like black flowers at the toes of her linen slippers. “Can you hear me?” I said, as the towel turned slippery in my hands. Peek came running in, trailing towels, went straight to the washstand, filled the bowl, and brought it to me. Together we washed Mother’s face and neck as best we could. Soon the water in the bowl was black, and still the liquid seeped from her eyes and mouth. Her skin had turned blue, as if she were suffocating, and the veins in her neck and hands stood out against the flesh like spreading black tentacles. “Mother,” I pleaded. “Please speak to me. Please try to speak to me.” Peek put her hand on my arm and said, “She gone, missus. Nothing more you can do.”

the last book I ever read (If This is a Man by Primo Levi, excerpt ten)

from If This is a Man by Primo Levi:

“I have a ration of bread under the mattress. Divide it among the three of you. I won’t be eating anymore.”

We couldn’t find anything to say, but for the time being we didn’t touch the bread. Half his face was swollen. As long as he remained conscious, he was closed in a bitter silence.

But in the evening, and for the whole night, and for two days, without interruption, the silence was broken by his delirium. Following a last, interminable dream of submission and slavery, he began to murmur “Jawohl” with every breath, regularly and continuously like a machine, “Jawohl,” every time his poor rib cage subsided, thousands of times, so that you wanted to shake him, suffocate him, or at least make him change the word.

I never understood so clearly as at that moment how laborious is the death of a man.

the last book I ever read (If This is a Man by Primo Levi, excerpt nine)

from If This is a Man by Primo Levi:

Once the broken window was repaired and the stove began to spread its heat, something seemed to relax in everyone, and then Towarowski (a Franco-Pole of twenty-three, with typhus) proposed to the others that each of them offer a slice of bread to the three of us who had been working. And so it was agreed.

Only a day before, such an event would have been inconceivable. The law of the Lager said “Eat your own bread, and, if you can, that of your neighbor,” and left no room for gratitude. It really meant that the Lager was dead.

This was the first human gesture that occurred among us. I believe that that moment marked the start of the process by which we who had not died slowly turned from Häftlinge into men again.

the last book I ever read (If This is a Man by Primo Levi, excerpt eight)

from If This is a Man by Primo Levi:

When it rains we feel like crying. It is November, it has been raining for ten days now, and the ground is like the bottom of a swamp. Everything made of wood has the smell of mushrooms.

If I could take ten steps to the left, I would be sheltered by the roof; all I’d need is a sack to cover my shoulders, or the mere prospect of a fire where I could dry myself; or maybe a dry rag to put between my shirt and my back. From one swing of the shovel to the next I think about it, and I really believe that to have a dry rag would be positive happiness.

the last book I ever read (If This is a Man by Primo Levi, excerpt seven)

from If This is a Man by Primo Levi:

The personages in these pages are not men. Their humanity is buried, or they themselves buried it, under the abuse received or inflicted on someone else. The evil and stupid SS men, the Kaps, the political, the criminals, the Prominents great and small, down to the indistinguishable Häftlinge slaves—all the grades of the mad hierarchy created by the Germans are paradoxically united in a common inner desolation.

But Lorenzo was a man; his humanity was pure and uncontaminated, he was outside this world or negation. Thanks to Lorenzo, I managed not to forget that I myself was a man.

the last book I ever read (If This is a Man by Primo Levi, excerpt six)

from If This is a Man by Primo Levi:

We have arrived at the Kraftwerk, where the cable-laying Kommando works. Engineer Levi must be here. There he is, only his head is visible above the trench. He waves to me, he is a spirited man, I have never seen his morale low, he never talks about eating.

the last book I ever read (If This is a Man by Primo Levi, excerpt five)

from If This is a Man by Primo Levi:

… The canto of Ulysses. Who knows how or why it comes into my mind. But we have no time to choose, this hour is already less than an hour. If Jean is intelligent he will understand. He will understand—today I feel capable of so much.

--- Who Dante is. What the Comedy is. What a curiously novel sensation, to try to explain briefly what the Divine Comedy is. How the Inferno is divided up, what its punishments are. Virgil is Reason, Beatrice is Theology.

the last book I ever read (If This is a Man by Primo Levi, excerpt four)

from If This is a Man by Primo Levi:

When he finished writing, he raised his eyes and looked at me.

Since that day, I have thought about Doctor Pannwitz many times and in many ways. I have asked myself about his inner workings as a man; how he filled his time, outside of the Polymerization Department and his Indo-Germanic conscience. Above all, when I was once more a free man, I wanted to meet him again, not out of a spirit of revenge but merely out of my curiosity about the human soul.

Because that look did not pass between two men; and if I knew how to explain fully the nature of that look, exchanged as if through the glass wall of an aquarium between two being who inhabit different worlds, I would also be able to explain the essence of the great insanity of the Third Reich.

the last book I ever read (If This is a Man by Primo Levi, excerpt three)

from If This is a Man by Primo Levi:

Null Achtzehn is very young, which is a grave danger. Not only because it’s harder for boys than for men to withstand fatigue and fasting but, even more, because long training in the struggle of each against all is needed to survive here, training that young people rarely have. Null Achtzehn is not even particularly weak, but all avoid working with him. He is indifferent to the point where he doesn’t trouble to avoid labor or blows or to search for food. He carries out every order he is given, and it’s predictable that when they send him to his death he will go with the same total indifference.

He doesn’t even have the rudimentary cunning of a draft horse, which stops pulling just before it reaches exhaustion; he pulls or carries or pushes as long as his strength allows, then gives way suddenly, without a word or warning, without lifting his sad, opaque eyes from the ground. He reminds me of the sled dogs in books by Jack London, who labor until their last breath and die on the track.

But, since the rest of us try by every possible means to avoid excess effort, Null Achtzehn is the one who works more than anybody. Because of this, and because he is a dangerous companion, no one wants to work with him; and since, on the other hand, no one wants to work with me, because I am weak and clumsy, it often happens that we find ourselves paired.

the last book I ever read (If This is a Man by Primo Levi, excerpt two)

from If This is a Man by Primo Levi:

Only much later, and gradually, a few of us learned something of the funereal science of the numbers of Auschwitz, which epitomize the stages of destruction of European Judaism. To the old hands of the camp, the number told everything: the period of entry into the camp, the convoy one belonged to, and, consequently, the nationality. Everyone will treat with respect the numbers from 30000 to 800000: there are only a few hundred left and they represent the few survivors of the Polish ghettos. You’d better watch out in commercial dealings with a 116000 or a 117000: they now number only about forty, but they represent the Greeks of Salonika, so make sure they don’t trick you. As for the high numbers, there is something essentially comic about them, like the words “freshman” and “conscript” in ordinary life. The typical high number is a corpulent, docile, and stupid fellow: you can make him believe that at the infirmary leather shoes are distributed to all those with delicate feet, and persuade him to run there and leave his bowl of soup “in your custody”; you can sell him a spoon for three rations of bread; you can send him to the most ferocious of the Kapos to ask him (it happened to me!) if it’s true that his is the Kartoffelschalenkommando, the Potato Peeling Unit, and if it’s possible to enroll in it.

the last book I ever read (If This is a Man by Primo Levi, excerpt one)

from If This is a Man by Primo Levi:

With the absurd precision to which we later had to accustom ourselves, the Germans held the roll call. At the end the officer asked “Wieviel Stück?” The corporal saluted smartly and replied that there were six hundred and fifty “pieces,” and all was in order. They then loaded us onto buses and took us to the station at Carpi. Here the train was waiting for us, with our escort for the journey. Here we received the first blows: and the thing was so new and senseless that we felt no pain, in either body or spirit. Only a profound amazement: how can one strike a man without anger?

the last book I ever read (Ulysses by James Joyce (The Gabler Edition), excerpt twenty-one)

from Ulysses by James Joyce:

His justifications?

As a physicist he had learned that of the 70 years of complete human life at least 2/ 7ths, viz., 20 years passed in sleep. As a philosopher he knew that at the termination of any allotted life only an infinitesimal part of any person’s desires has been realised. As a physiologist he believed in the artificial placation of malignant agencies chiefly operative during somnolence.

the last book I ever read (Ulysses by James Joyce (The Gabler Edition), excerpt twenty)

from Ulysses by James Joyce:

Such as never?

What is home without Plumtree’s Potted Meat?

Incomplete.

With it an abode of bliss.

Manufactured by George Plumtree, 23 Merchants’ quay, Dublin, put up in 4 oz. pots, and inserted by Councillor Joseph P. Nannetti, M. P., Rotunda Ward, 19 Hardwicke street, under the obituary notices and anniversaries of deceases. The name on the label is Plumtree. A plumtree in a meatpot, registered trade mark. Beware of imitations. Peatmot. Trumplee. Montpat. Plamtroo.

the last book I ever read (Ulysses by James Joyce (The Gabler Edition), excerpt nineteen)

from Ulysses by James Joyce:

In Bernard Kiernan’s licensed premises 8, 9 and 10 Little Britain street: in David Byrne’s licensed premises, 14 Duke street: in O’Connell street lower, outside Graham Lemon’s when a dark man had placed in his hand a throwaway (subsequently thrown away), advertising Elijah, restorer of the church in Zion: in Lincoln place outside the premises of F. W. Sweny and Co (Limited) dispensing chemists, when, when Frederick M. (Bantam) Lyons had rapidly and successively requested, perused and restituted the copy of the current issue of the Freeman’s Journal and National Press which he had been about to throw away (subsequently thrown away), he had proceeded towards the oriental edifice of the Turkish and Warm Baths, 11 Leinster street, with the light of inspiration shining in his countenance and bearing in his arms the secret of the race, graven in the language of prediction.

the last book I ever read (Ulysses by James Joyce (The Gabler Edition), excerpt eighteen)

from Ulysses by James Joyce:

All the same Bloom (properly so dubbed) was rather surprised at their memories for in nine cases out of ten it was a case of tarbarrels, and not singly but in their thousands, and then complete oblivion because it was twenty odd years. Highly unlikely, of course, there was even a shadow of truth in the stories and, even supposing, he thought a return highly inadvisable, all things considered. Something evidently riled them in his death. Either he petered out too tamely of acute pneumonia just when his various different political arrangements were nearing completion or whether it transpired he owed his death to his having neglected to change his boots and clothes after a wetting when a cold resulted and failing to consult a specialist he being confined to his room till he eventually died of it amid widespread regret before a fortnight was at an end or quite possibly they were distressed to find the job was taken out of their hands. Of course nobody being acquainted with his movements even before, there was absolutely no clue as to his whereabouts which were decidedly of the Alice, where art thou order even prior to his starting to go under several aliases such as Fox and Stewart, so the remark which emanated from friend cabby might be within the bounds of possibility. Naturally then, it would prey on his mind as a born leader of men, which undoubtedly he was, and a commanding figure, a sixfooter or at any rate five feet ten or eleven in his stockinged feet, whereas Messrs So-and-So who, though they weren’t even a patch on the former man, ruled the roost after their redeeming features were very few and far between. It certainly pointed a moral, the idol with feet of clay. And then seventytwo of his trusty henchmen rounding on him with mutual mudslinging. And the identical same with murderers. You had to come back—that haunting sense kind of drew you—to show the understudy in the title rôle how to. He saw him once on the auspicious occasion when they broke up the type in the Insuppressible or was it United Ireland, a privilege he keenly appreciated, and, in point of fact, handed him his silk hat when it was knocked off and he said Thank you, excited as he undoubtedly was under his frigid expression notwithstanding the little misadventure mentioned between the cup and the lip—what’s bred in the bone. Still, as regards return, you were a lucky dog if they didn’t set the terrier at you directly you got back. Then a lot of shillyshally usually followed. Tom for and Dick and Harry against. And then, number one, you came up against the man in possession and had to produce your credentials, like the claimant in the Tichborne case. Roger Charles Tichborne, Bella was the boat’s name to the best of his recollection he, the heir, went down in, as the evidence went to show, and there was a tattoo mark too in Indian ink, Lord Bellew, was it? As he might very easily have picked up the details from some pal on board ship and then, when got up to tally with the description given, introduce himself with, Excuse me, my name is So-and-So or some such commonplace remark. A more prudent course, Mr Bloom said to the not over effusive, in fact like the distinguished personage under discussion beside him, would have been to sound the lie of the land first.

the last book I ever read (Ulysses by James Joyce (The Gabler Edition), excerpt seventeen)

from Ulysses by James Joyce:

Stephen, patently crosstempered, repeated and shoved aside his mug of coffee, or whatever you like to call it, none too politely, adding:

—We can’t change the country. Let us change the subject.

the last book I ever read (Ulysses by James Joyce (The Gabler Edition), excerpt sixteen)

from Ulysses by James Joyce:

PADDY DIGNAM

(Earnestly.) Once I was in the employ of Mr J. H. Menton solicitor, commissioner for oaths and affidavits, of 27 Bachelor’s Walk. Now I am defunct, the wall of the heart hypertrophied. Hard lines. The poor wife was awfully cut up. How is she bearing it? Keep her off that bottle of sherry. (He looks round him.) A lamp. I must satisfy an animal need. That buttermilk didn’t agree with me.

(The portly figure of John O’Connell, caretaker, stands forth, holding a bunch of keys tied with crape. Beside him stands Father Coffey, chaplain, toadbellied, wrynecked, in a surplice and bandanna nightcap, holding sleepily a staff of twisted poppies.)

the last book I ever read (Ulysses by James Joyce (The Gabler Edition), excerpt fifteen)

from Ulysses by James Joyce:

Cissy said to excuse her would he mind telling her what was the right time and Gerty could see him taking out his watch, listening to it and looking up and clearing his throat and he said he was very sorry his watch was stopped but he thought it must be after eight because the sun was set. His voice had a cultured ring in it and though he spoke in measured accents, there was a suspicion of a quiver in the mellow tones. Cissy said thanks and came back with her tongue out and said uncle said his waterworks were out of order.

Then they sang the second verse of the Tantum ergo and Canon O’Hanlon got up again and censed the Blessed Sacrament and knelt down and he told Father Conroy that one of the candles was just going to set fire to the flowers and Father Conroy got up and settled it all right and she could see the gentleman winding his watch and listening to the works and she swung her leg more in and out in time. It was getting darker but he could see and he was looking all the time that he was winding the watch or whatever he was doing to it and then he put it back and put his hands back into his pockets. She felt a kind of a sensation rushing all over her and she knew by the feel of her scalp and that irritation against her stays that that thing must be coming on because the last time too was when she clipped her hair on account of the moon. His dark eyes fixed themselves on her again drinking in her every contour, literally worshipping at her shrine. If ever there was undisguised admiration in a man’s passionate gaze it was there plain to be seen on that man’s face. It is for you, Gertrude MacDowell, and you know it.

the last book I ever read (Ulysses by James Joyce (The Gabler Edition), excerpt fourteen)

from Ulysses by James Joyce:

The catastrophe was terrific and instantaneous in its effect. The observatory of Dunsink registered in all eleven shocks, all of the fifth grade of Mercalli’s scale, and there is no record extant of a similar seismic disturbance in our island since the earthquake of 1534, the year of the rebellion of Silken Thomas. The epicentre appears to have been that part of the metropolis which constitutes the Inn’s Quay ward and parish of Saint Michan covering a surface of fortyone acres, two roods and one square pole or perch. All the lordly residences in the vicinity of the palace of justice were demolished and that noble edifice itself, in which at the time of the catastrophe important legal debates were in progress, is literally a mass of ruins beneath which it is to be feared all the occupants have been buried alive. From the reports of eyewitnesses it transpires that the seismic waves were accompanied by a violent atmospheric perturbation of cyclonic character. An article of headgear since ascertained to belong to the much respected clerk of the crown and peace Mr George Fottrell and a silk umbrella with gold handle with the engraved initials, coat of arms and house number of the erudite and worshipful chairman of quarter sessions sir Frederick Falkiner, recorder of Dublin, have been discovered by search parties in remote parts of the island, respectively, the former on the third basaltic ridge of the giant’s causeway, the latter embedded to the extent of one foot three inches in the sandy beach of Holeopen bay near the old head of Kinsale. Other eyewitnesses depose that they observed an incandescent object of enormous proportions hurtling through the atmosphere at a terrifying velocity in a trajectory directed south west by west. Messages of condolence and sympathy are being hourly received from all parts of the different continents and the sovereign pontiff has been graciously pleased to decree that a special missa pro defunctis shall be celebrated simultaneously by the ordinaries of each and every cathedral church of all the episcopal dioceses subject to the spiritual authority of the Holy See in suffrage of the souls of those faithful departed who have been so unexpectedly called away from our midst. The work of salvage, removal of debris, human remains etc has been entrusted to Messrs Michael Meade and Son, 159, Great Brunswick Street, and Messrs T. C. Martin, 77, 78, 79 and 80, North Wall, assisted by the men and officers of the Duke of Cornwall’s light infantry under the general supervision of H. R. H., rear admiral the right honourable sir Hercules Hannibal Habeas Corpus Anderson K. G., K. P., K. T., P. C., K. C. B., M. P., J. P., M. B., D. S. O., S. O. D., M. F. H., M. R. I. A., B. L., Mus. Doc., P. L. G., F. T. C. D., F. R. U. I., F. R. C. P. I. and F. R. C. S. I.

the last book I ever read (Ulysses by James Joyce (The Gabler Edition), excerpt thirteen)

from Ulysses by James Joyce:

—What is your nation if I may ask, says the citizen.

—Ireland, says Bloom. I was born here. Ireland.

The citizen said nothing only cleared the spit out of his gullet and, gob, he spat a Red bank oyster out of him right in the corner.

the last book I ever read (Ulysses by James Joyce (The Gabler Edition), excerpt twelve)

from Ulysses by James Joyce:

And whereas on the sixteenth day of the month of the oxeyed goddess and in the third week after the feastday of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, the daughter of the skies, the virgin moon being then in her first quarter, it came to pass that those learned judges repaired them to the halls of law. There master Courtenay, sitting in his own chamber, gave his rede and master Justice Andrews sitting without a jury in the probate court, weighed well and pondered the claims of the first chargeant upon the property in the matter of the will propounded and final testamentary disposition in re the real and personal estate of the late lamented Jacob Halliday, vintner, deceased versus Livingstone, an infant, of unsound mind, and another. And to the solemn court of Green street there came sir Frederick the Falconer. And he sat him there about the hour of five o’clock to administer the law of the brehons at the commission for all that and those parts to be holden in and for the county of the city of Dublin. And there sat with him the high sinhedrim of the twelve tribes of Iar, for every tribe one man, of the tribe of Patrick and of the tribe of Hugh and of the tribe of Owen and of the tribe of Conn and of the tribe of Oscar and of the tribe of Fergus and of the tribe of Finn and of the tribe of Dermot and of the tribe of Cormac and of the tribe of Kevin and of the tribe of Caolte and of the tribe of Ossian, there being in all twelve good men and true. And he conjured them by Him who died on rood that they should well and truly try and true delivrance make in the issue joined between their sovereign lord the king and the prisoner at the bar and true verdict give according to the evidence so help them God and kiss the books. And they rose in their seats, those twelve of Iar, and they swore by the name of Him who is from everlasting that they would do His rightwiseness. And straightway the minions of the law led forth from their donjon keep one whom the sleuthhounds of justice had apprehended in consequence of information received. And they shackled him hand and foot and would take of him ne bail ne mainprise but preferred a charge against him for he was a malefactor.

the last book I ever read (Ulysses by James Joyce (The Gabler Edition), excerpt eleven)

from Ulysses by James Joyce:

By went his eyes. The sweets of sin. Sweet are the sweets.

Of sin.

the last book I ever read (Ulysses by James Joyce (The Gabler Edition), excerpt ten)

from Ulysses by James Joyce:

Haines opened his newbought book

.—I’m sorry, he said. Shakespeare is the happy huntingground of all minds that have lost their balance.

the last book I ever read (Ulysses by James Joyce (The Gabler Edition), excerpt nine)

from Ulysses by James Joyce:

Flatter. Rarely. But flatter.

—Himself his own father, Sonmulligan told himself. Wait. I am big with child. I have an unborn child in my brain. Pallas Athena! A play! The play’s the thing! Let me parturiate!

He clasped his paunchbrow with both birthaiding hands.

the last book I ever read (Ulysses by James Joyce (The Gabler Edition), excerpt eight)

from Ulysses by James Joyce:

In mourning for Sallust, Mulligan says. Whose mother is beastly dead.

the last book I ever read (Ulysses by James Joyce (The Gabler Edition), excerpt seven)

from Ulysses by James Joyce:

Holy water that was, I expect. Shaking sleep out of it. He must be fed up with that job, shaking that thing over all the corpses they trot up. What harm if he could see what he was shaking it over. Every mortal day a fresh batch: middleaged men, old women, children, women dead in childbirth, men with beards, baldheaded business men, consumptive girls with little sparrow’s breasts. All the year round he prayed the same thing over them all and shook water on top of them: sleep. On Dignam now.

—In paradisum.

Said he was going to paradise or is in paradise. Says that over everybody. Tiresome kind of a job. But he has to say something.

the last book I ever read (Ulysses by James Joyce (The Gabler Edition), excerpt six)

from Ulysses by James Joyce:

Martin Cunningham whispered:

—I was in mortal agony with you talking of suicide before Bloom.

—What? Mr Power whispered. How so?

—His father poisoned himself, Martin Cunningham whispered. Had the Queen’s hotel in Ennis. You heard him say he was going to Clare. Anniversary.

—O God! Mr Power whispered. First I heard of it. Poisoned himself!

the last book I ever read (Ulysses by James Joyce (The Gabler Edition), excerpt five)

from Ulysses by James Joyce:

Evening hours, girls in grey gauze. Night hours then black with daggers and eyemasks. Poetical idea pink, then golden, then grey, then black. Still true to life also. Day, then the night.

He tore away half the prize story sharply and wiped himself with it. Then he girded up his trousers, braced and buttoned himself. He pulled back the jerky shaky door of the jakes and came forth from the gloom into the air.

the last book I ever read (Ulysses by James Joyce (The Gabler Edition), excerpt four)

from Ulysses by James Joyce:

Quietly he read, restraining himself, the first column and, yielding but resisting, began the second. Midway, his last resistance yielding, he allowed his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he read, reading still patiently that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone. Hope it’s not too big bring on piles again. No, just right. So. Ah! Costive one tabloid of cascara sagrada. Life might be so. It did not move or touch him but it was something quick and neat. Print anything now. Silly season. He read on, seated calm above his own rising smell. Neat certainly. Matcham often thinks of the masterstroke by which he won the laughing witch who now. Begins and ends morally. Hand in hand. Smart. He glanced back through what he had read and, while feeling his water flow quietly, he envied kindly Mr Beaufoy who had written it and received payment of three pounds thirteen and six.

the last book I ever read (Ulysses by James Joyce (The Gabler Edition), excerpt three)

from Ulysses by James Joyce:

His pace slackened. Here. Am I going to Aunt Sara’s or not? My consubstantial father’s voice. Did you see anything of your artist brother Stephen lately? No? Sure he’s not down in Strasburg terrace with his aunt Sally? Couldn’t he fly a bit higher than that, eh? And and and and tell us Stephen, how is uncle Si? O weeping God, the things I married into. De boys up in de hayloft. The drunken little costdrawer and his brother, the cornet player. Highly respectable gondoliers. And skeweyed Walter sirring his father, no less. Sir. Yes, sir. No, sir. Jesus wept: and no wonder, by Christ.

the last book I ever read (Ulysses by James Joyce (The Gabler Edition), excerpt two)

from Ulysses by James Joyce:

Sitting at his side Stephen solved out the problem. He proves by algebra that Shakespeare’s ghost is Hamlet’s grandfather. Sargent peered askance through his slanted glasses. Hockeysticks rattled in the lumberroom: the hollow knock of a ball and calls from the field.

the last book I ever read (Ulysses by James Joyce (The Gabler Edition), excerpt one)

from Ulysses by James Joyce:

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:

—Introibo ad altare Dei.

Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called up coarsely:

—Come up, Kinch. Come up, you fearful jesuit.

the last book I ever read (James Joyce (Penguin Lives) by Edna O'Brien, excerpt fourteen)

from James Joyce (Penguin Lives) by Edna O'Brien:

“I can do anything I like with words,” he once said and yet he was helpless to do that one thing he so desperately wished for: to make Lucia of sound mind. Hearing that a nearby hotel would soon be requisitioned as a maison de santé he went and saw the doctor to secure a place for her. He can hardly have been assured by the doctor at Ivry who had come to believe that the night alerts of the air raids could prove beneficial to highly strung patients. In her violent moments she broke windows, assaulted nurses or other patients but her father still believed that if she were near him there would be deliverance. Without her and without writing he was stranded. A writer, and especially a great writer, feels both more and less about human grief, beign at once celebrant, witness and victim. If the writing ceases, or seems to cease, the mind so occupied with the stringing together of words is fallow. There was nothing he admitted but rage and despair in his heart, the rage of a child and the despair of a broken man. It is not singular to Joyce. Tolstoy in his later years renounced his works and peopled his estate with Rasputin-like zealots who split the family. When Tolstoy left his house and walked through the snow, Sonya, who had borne many children and copied War and Peace by hand three times, followed but was refused admission to the waiting room where he lay dying. Eugene O’Neill came to see his wife Carlotta as his enemy and moreover his mad enemy. Virginia Woolf put stones in her pocket and one morning drowned herself in the River Ouse in Sussex. Charles Dickens became lonely and morose, marshaling his children against his estranged wife Kate.

Joyce did not leave Nora and in fact became more dependent on her as time went on. Stuart Gilbert describes a scene a year or so earlier, Mrs. Joyce packing in order to go to a hotel, Joyce curled up in a chair, dejected, saying that he could not look after himself, that he must have her, and Nora suggesting that he drown himself. Then the old arguments about drink and money, the money spent on the Irish tenor John Sullivan when his son Giorgio could have done with such patronage. In order to let them thrash things out, Gilbert left the apartment but at Joyce’s request phone at six o’clock to be answered by Nora who said, “I’ve given in again.” Joyce loved his family and insisted that they were all that mattered to him but as he got older he became less attached to the things of this world; they were, as with Anna Livia, “becoming loathed to him.” Words had been his mainspring. He told Ole Vinding that while Finnegans Wake had been insuperably difficult it had given him immense pleasure and it had for him a “greater reality than any other.” The fulfillment which the work brought was countered with a devouring emptiness. Camus has written of the actor’s tenor and even more so of the actor’s impotence but the barren writer is even more enfeebled. Because of being able to conjure up worlds, to depict emotions so passionately, to make characters as animate as Anna Karenina or Leopold Bloom, the writer seems invincible but is in fact potentially the most stranded of all. The cliff face is the daily port of call. It is ironic that the righteous André Gide who returned his copy of Ulysses said after Joyce’s death that what he most admired in him, as in Mallarmé and Beethoven and the very rarest of artists, was that the work completes itself with a cliff, the steep face of its genius an enigma to the end.

the last book I ever read (James Joyce (Penguin Lives) by Edna O'Brien, excerpt thirteen)

from James Joyce (Penguin Lives) by Edna O'Brien:

There is one thing in Joyce’s life which defies belief. Never in all the years since her death did he allude to his mother. It is hard to think that she who had such a lasting influence on him was not mentioned in any of his letters home and not referred to after his father’s death or his daughter’s breakdown. It is a fierce and determined repudiation. Her death he had described “as a wound on the brain” and elsewhere he spoke of words as being the sea “crashing in on his breaking brain.” Mother’s words and sea inseparable. Bloom would muse on the womb-state—“before born babe bliss had. Within womb won he worship”—but James Joyce went on to disavow that. At the time of her death he seemed to show no grief and when he first met Nora a few months later he said that his mother had died from his father’s ill treatment and his own “cynical frankness of conduct towards her.” But it was more complicated than that. His banishment of her was absolute and when she came back in his fiction it was as persecutor. Stephen Hero says, “Thou has suckled me with bitter milk. My moon and my sun though has quenched forever. And thou hast left me alone forever in the dark ways of my bitterness and with the kiss of ashes thou hast kissed my mouth.”

the last book I ever read (James Joyce (Penguin Lives) by Edna O'Brien, excerpt twelve)

from James Joyce (Penguin Lives) by Edna O'Brien:

Joyce believed that his genius had cast its shadow on Lucia’s psyche and perhaps it had. But his guilt reeks of something darker and more incriminating, and as if her malady was not the consequence of his genius but his early youthful dissipation. The sins of the fathers. Samuel Beckett when he met her saw the father’s mind running rampant in the daughter. He thought she was like a charmed snake, cut off from those around her and with a longing to create. She resented her mother, would shout at her and say she was sex-starved, in short, Joyce-starved. A slender, dark-haired girl will brilliant blue eyes, she was so highly strung that her conversations would skid from one topic to another. Beckett was first drawn to her because of this acceleration but soon began to feel alarmed over her growing attachment to him. He saw that she was going insane but said that no one else saw it, especially her besotted father. Beckett had sat with Joyce at the Bal Bullien watching Lucia dance in a shimmering silver fish costume, Joyce chafing when she was not awarded first place and putting it down to a vogue for Negroid dancing. Not having succeeded at that she decided to quit dancing, took to her bed for days, then poured all her energies into the conquest of Beckett. She would wait for him inside the door, arrange lunches in restaurants, while he resorted to the male strategy of evading her affections by bringing a friend along. At one of these lunches her disappointment was so great that she stared into space, ate nothing, cried, then ran out leaving two penniless would-be poets confronted with the bill. For Beckett her feeling were not only too overt, they were, as he put it, “like incest.” When he told her frankly that it was her father whom he came to see, she lapsed into one of her catatonic states, adding this failure to so many others. She had studied singing, drawing, and seventeen different kinds of dancing but was a helpless, floundering girl with no man to pay court to her, only her father. Nora blamed Beckett for his advances and he was barred from visiting the family.

At Joyce’s fifty-third birthday party she threw a chair at her mother and George had to hold her down as two orderlies strapped her into a straitjacket. Her father, helpless to do anything, watched her being carried out to an ambulance. Within days she discharged herself but Nora was in dread of being alone with her ever again. Her father refused to concede that she might be mad and said she was just a young girl who was “prey to sudden impulses.” Joyce was not afraid of madness. It was a word he often used, just as his father used it when asked what he thought of Jim’s work. But madness on the page is one thing, madness in the other room is quite another. There was Lucia either sitting listlessly by a window, or throwing furniture at her mother and hurling abuse, saying her mother had made her a bastard by not having been married when she was born. Her father was absolved from any wrongdoing.

the last book I ever read (James Joyce (Penguin Lives) by Edna O'Brien, excerpt eleven)

from James Joyce (Penguin Lives) by Edna O'Brien:

Do writers have to be such monsters in order to create? I believe that they do. It is a paradox that while wrestling with language to capture the human condition they become more callous, and cut off from the very human traits which they so glisteningly depict. There can be no outer responsibility, no interruptions, only the ongoing inner drone, rhythmic, insistent, struggling to make a living moment of both beauty and austerity. For Joyce, people were becoming more remote and would eventually be specters. He was not the only one. Flaubert’s mother thought that her son’s love of words had hardened his heart and all who met Joyce found that though he could be humorous, he lacked warmth. Nora complained of an impossible life, minding a difficult daughter and sitting up with artists till all hours, “bored stiff.” “Men,” she decreed, “were only up in your tail.”

the last book I ever read (James Joyce (Penguin Lives) by Edna O'Brien, excerpt ten)

from James Joyce (Penguin Lives) by Edna O'Brien:

The story has been told again and again, the fairy-tale encounter as she came upon him at a party in his tennis shoes and old jacket, standing somewhat aloof. She approached him and said, “Is this the great James Joyce?” “James Joyce,” he replied. When she handed him her card he had to cross to the window, on account of his poor eyesight, to read it. In keeping with his ever-superstitious nature he was pleased to find the word “Shakespeare” and took it to be a good omen. A year later he called on her to hear a proposal which she had been nurturing. Would she pay him the honor of allowing her to publish Ulysses? Joyce was incredulous. For all his burgeoning fame, he was living in an old flat with no electricity, no bathtub and a few cracked plates and here was a woman assuring him that she could find enough subscribers, and important ones at that, to bring Ulysses to the world. The printer she had already decided on, an intellectual in Dijon called Maurice Darantiere whom she knew through her companion Adrienne Monnier who also owned a bookshop. She proposed that they print 1,000 copies, 100 signed on Holland paper, 150 on de luxe paper and the remaining 750 on linen. She would give the author 66 percent of the net profits.

Neither Miss Beach nor M. Darantiere could have guessed the complication which lay ahead because neither of them knew James Joyce. In his possession there was only a carbon copy of Ulysses which did not carry the changes he had made from the various published version in serial form. As he set about embodying these changes from memory he added so much that the book expanded by one-third during that dizzying period. Moreover his correction were almost illegible, written in his cramped, weblike handwriting. His demands about paper, binding and typeface were inflexible. Typists were somehow procured—and lost—in this fever of work and revision. Joyace was in a state of “energetic prostration” but so were some of his helpmates. Some were so shocked by the material that they dismissed themselves. A Mrs. Harrison ran into trouble with her English husband who was so scandalized by what he read that he threw the pages into the fire. Another Vernonica to Joyce’s Jesus, this brave crusader rescued them but some particles were lost and the missing lines had to be retrieved from John Quinn in New York. Wherever Joyce went there was chaos. He was still writing to friends to borrow “bits” of them for his Jarvey or his sailor impersonations as well as finishing the last chapter which he called “his most secret conception.”

the last book I ever read (James Joyce (Penguin Lives) by Edna O'Brien, excerpt nine)

from James Joyce (Penguin Lives) by Edna O'Brien:

Language is the hero and heroine, language in constant fluxion and with a dazzling virtuosity. All the given notion about story, character, plot, and human polarizings are capsized. By comparison, most other works of fiction are pusillanimous. Faulkner thought himself Joyce’s spiritual heir and while the breathlessness of language in Faulkner is sometimes comparable, Joyce’s characters are more graspingly human and Dublin not merely backdrop for their veniality but as rich and musical as themselves. No other writer so effulgently and so ravenously recrated a city.

To each chapter he gave a title, a scene, an hour, an organ, an art, a color, a symbol and a technique; so that we are in tower, school, strand, house, bath, graveyard, newspaper office, tavern, library, street, concert room, second tavern, a strand again, a lying-in hospital, a brothel, a house and a big bed. The organs include kidney, genitals, heart, brain, ear, eye, nose, womb, nerves, flesh, and skeleton. The symbols vary from horse to tide, to nymph, to Eucharist, to virgin, to Fenian, to whore, to earth. The technic ranges from narcissism to gigantism, from tumescence to hallucination, and the styles so variable that the eighteen episodes could really be described as eighteen novels between one cover.

the last book I ever read (James Joyce (Penguin Lives) by Edna O'Brien, excerpt eight)

from James Joyce (Penguin Lives) by Edna O'Brien:

Ulysses is a quintessence of everything he had seen, heard and overheard, consecration and descration, at once serious and comical, hermetic and skittish, full of consequence and inconsequence, sounds and silences, lappings and anapests, horse hoofs and oxen thud; a motley crew of Dubliners on 16 June 1904—in acknowledgment of Joyce and Nora’s first tryst.

Taken baldly the story is quite conventional, the characters neither tragic nor heroic: a host of Dubliners and in particular Stephen Dedalus, Molly Bloom and her husband Leopold Bloom; depicted in “an uninterrupted unrolling of thought”—a method which Joyce first came across in a novel by Edouard Dujardin but, as he said, he was giving Dujardin “cake for bread.”

the last book I ever read (James Joyce (Penguin Lives) by Edna O'Brien, excerpt seven)

from James Joyce (Penguin Lives) by Edna O'Brien:

Like any great artist Joyce had radical and shifting thoughts about everything. In an article about A Doll’s House he said that Ibsen had dealt with the most important revolution possible, the relationship between men and women. Concurrently he was saying that Irishwomen were the cause of all moral suicide. The marriage of Socrates and Xanthippe he commended only because it helped Socrates to perfect the art of the dialectic, having to contend with a shrew. Yet he claimed that a man who had not lived daily with a woman was in his opinion incomplete. He cited Jesus, Faust and Hamlet as being lacking for this very reason.

the last book I ever read (James Joyce (Penguin Lives) by Edna O'Brien, excerpt six)

from James Joyce (Penguin Lives) by Edna O'Brien:

Much has been written about the impropriety of publishing the infamous letters and Richard Ellmann, who selected them, was castigated. Years earlier far less incriminating ones were published with the permission of Nora and George, and Samuel Beckett fumed against literary widows, saying that they should be “burned on a pyre along with the writer himself.” But do they make us think any less of Joyce or of Nora? Do they demean the marriage? Hardly. True, they are as outright in their earthiness as the mystics are in their ecstasies, yet they share the mystic’s longing for a coupel to dissolve into one. Joyce’s chaos is our chaos, his barbaric desires are ours too, and his genius is that he made such breathless transcendations out of torrid stuff, that from the mire he managed to “bestir the hearts of men and angels.” Moreover he was a young man filled with a scalding passion and at that very same time attending a hospital in Dublin to be treated for a “damned dirty complaint,” an infection which he had picked up from a prostitute.

These letters are about more than smut. First and foremost they are a measure of the inordinate trust that he had in Nora to allow him to be all things, the child-man, the man-child, the peeping Tom, and the grand seducer. But there is also her own sexual prowess, no small thing for a convent girl from Galway and a radical thing in defiance of that male collusion whereby women are expected to maintain a mystique and conceal their deepest sexual impluses. Sexuality and maternity being thought to be contrary.

the last book I ever read (James Joyce (Penguin Lives) by Edna O'Brien, excerpt five)

from James Joyce (Penguin Lives) by Edna O'Brien:

All his life he was a voracious reader. He read books, pamphlets, manuals, street directories, everything and anything to feed his eclectic tastes and his lust for knowledge. In his library after his death there were almost a thousand volumes, books as diverse as A Clue to the Creed of Early Egypt, Apuleius, Aeschylus, Psyche and Cupid, Thomas Aquinas, Plato, Nietzsche, Irish melodies, Historic Graves of Glasnevin Cemetery, Cowper’s translation of the Odyseey, a pocket missal that had belonged to his cousin, Fanny Hill’s unexpurgated memoirs, a book on uric acid, another on masturbation, a little handbook on fortune-telling by cards, and the catalogues from the modish shops in Lond and Dublin.

Without knowing it he had conceived of his novel Ulysses—“It is an epic of two races (Israelite-Irish) …” --and he had given voice to his daring manifesto. To Stanislaus he wrote that if he were to put a bucket down into his own soul’s sexual department, he would also draw up the muddied waters of Arthur Griffith (leader of Sinn Féin), Ibsen, Saint Aloysius (his own saint name), Shelley and Renan, in short, cerebral sexuality and rank bodily fervor run amok. Not since the Jacobeans would sex be so openly and so rawly portrayed. Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontë sisters, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Proust, all had dwelt achingly on love, unrequited love, and by implication on sex, but Joyce was determined to break the taboos—to depict copulation, transvestism, onanism, coprophilia and all else that was repellent to Victorian England, puritanical America and sanctimonious Ireland. If people did not like it he couldn’t help that either. On the “saince” of a certain subject, he said that very few mortals did not wake up each morning in dread of finding themselves syphilitic. “Talk about pure men, pure women and spiritual love” was all bunkum. There was no such thing. Sexuality was central to human impulse. More importantly sexuality was a universal trait and not just an Irish one—he would Hellenize, Hebrewize, demonize and immortalize his native city and for his crimes he would be punished and long after his death he would be rewarded by having snatches of his Ulysses transcribed on small bronze plaques and beveled into the pavements which Leopold Bloom and others had trodden.

the last book I ever read (James Joyce (Penguin Lives) by Edna O'Brien, excerpt four)

from James Joyce (Penguin Lives) by Edna O'Brien:

When they arrived in Zurich there was no vacancy in the Berlitz School, the Miss Gilford of Lincolnshire having deceived Joyce. They managed to stay one night in a guest house which bore the auspicious name of “hope.” It was there the “adventure” was consummated and James, still half-embroiled in the family matrix, told Stanislaus in a letter that she was no longer a virgin, she had been “touched.” The pun can hardly have been lost on either of them. The bloodstains on the sheet, he was later in a moment of insane jealousy, to question. And later still Molly Bloom was to say drolly that any woman could simulate her virginity with a drop of red ink or blackberry juice. And so it was on to Trieste where there was no vacancy either, his skills as borrower sorely tried. He found two pupils to whom he gave English lessons. As usual there were some incidents. He managed to get himself arrested when he intervened in a fight between three drunken British sailors and was almost deported back to Ireland. In the midst of such precariousness he wrote the twelfth chapter of Stephen Hero and began a story called “Christmas Eve.”

The head of the Berlitz School took pity on them and within a few days found a teaching post for Joyce in the naval town of Pola one hundred and fifty miles away. An official who met them at the boat said he did not know whether to contemplate murder or suicide, upon sighting a ragged couple dragging a torn suitcase with bits of clothing sticking out, “the bride” in a man’s long overcoat and a straw hat pulled down over her head. Joyce was in his element—here was a milieu of several languages, a hotpotch of tongues, Italian, Serbian, German, all of which would be threaded into his future work. For Nora it was quite a different story. She felt lost, far from home and with no one to turn to, only her wayward liege. “James Joyce, Bachelor of Arts” proved to be an idiosyncratic teacher. His employers thought him gifted but also conceited and absurd, a man of contradictions, fragile and hysterical, refined and ascetic yet one who gravitated toward the mud. Soon they saw his great partiality for drink.

the last book I ever read (James Joyce (Penguin Lives) by Edna O'Brien, excerpt three)

from James Joyce (Penguin Lives) by Edna O'Brien:

In his youth James was deaf to the cries of his family, knowing that if he had listened he would have been swallowed up by them. He determined to live vicariously, or as Stanislaus ruefully put it, he made living his end in life. Nevertheless the secret life of his mind was already in full and prodigious spate. He was notorious in the bars, an arrogant young man in frayed clothes, white rubber shoes and a yachting cap, eager to parry, to dissimulate, to discuss Euclid or Aquinas or Nelly the Whote and to warn adversaries that he would lampoon them in his satirical verses. So sure was he of his gifts that he had written to Lady Augusta Gregory, who was at the helm of the Irish literary revival, assuring her that he meant one day to be “somebody.” The story goes that he called on W. B. Yeats at a hotel in Rutland Square and sympathized with Yeats, who was thirty-seven on that day, as being too old to learn from him. His talents, he said, would burn “with a hard and a gem-like ecstasy.” That he was insufferable is probably true, but that he had the trepid intensity of a poet was also true, he who walked in the violet night “beneath a reign of uncouth stars.” He generated envy. Stanislaus envied him the purity of his intention. In his diary he observed everything James did, everything James said, conceding that he might have genius, then retracting it, believing James to be too reckless, too unsettled. Stanislaus, nicknamed “Brother Stan” on account of his ponderousness, seemed to take on all the woes and humiliations of the family. He admitted that James used him as a butcher uses a whetstone to sharpen his knife. How terrible it was to have a cleverer elder brother and, moreover, one who held him in as much regard as he might an umbrella.

the last book I ever read (James Joyce (Penguin Lives) by Edna O'Brien, excerpt two)

from James Joyce (Penguin Lives) by Edna O'Brien:

Discovering Ibsen ranks for Joyce as definitive as Saint Paul’s conversion on the way to Damascus. Ibsen he placed above Shakespeare as a dramatist, Ibsen he revered because of his contempt for falsity and hypocrisy. A letter written to Ibsen’s translator reveals Joyce the intending warrior identifying with Ibsen’s battles, those as he said “fought and won behind your forehead.” Ibsen had set an example to him to walk in the light of his inner heroism. “But we always keep the dearest things to ourselves,” he wrote, a telling confidence sent to a famous man who was unable to read English and a poignant admission of how emotionally bereft Joyce really was. The equivocation, the sarcasm, the hauteur was merely a mask. At the end of the letter he wrote, “Your work on earth draws to a close and you are near the silence. It is growing dark for you.” He was nineteen at the time. Young men do not usually know such things unless there is already on them a premonition of their own darkness. The rows, the deaths, the hunger, a constant scraping for money had been his bitter schooling and led to disdain for family and for country. Coming away from a play by Sudermann in which a family were pitilessly dissected, he told his parents that they need not have gone, the genius that they had seen on stage was breaking out in the house and against the home. He warned that it would happen in their own life.

the last book I ever read (James Joyce (Penguin Lives) by Edna O'Brien, excerpt one)

from James Joyce (Penguin Lives) by Edna O'Brien:

After the death of yet another child, Frederick, the desperate father tried to strangle the mother, seized her by the throat, shouting, “Now by God is the time to finish it.” As bedlam broke out, with younger children in terror, James knocked his father to the floor and pinioned him there while his mother escaped to a neighbor’s house. A few days later a police sergeant called to give the father a severe talking-to and while the beatings may have stopped, the threats and the shouting went on. For John Joyce, finding no outlets for his wayward gifts, his frustration had to be vented on his family. Walking across Capel Street Bridge half drunk one night, escorted by the young James, he decided that the boy needed a formative experience and held him upside down in the Liffey for several minutes. Yet no wrong done by that father wrankled because they were both “sinners.”

the last book I ever read (Cousin Bazilio by Jose Maria Eça de Queiroz, excerpt fourteen)

from Cousin Bazilio by Jose Maria Eça de Queiroz (Translated by Margaret Jull Costa):

‘Was there some accident?’ asked the servant solicitously‚ following them up the stairs.

And Reinaldo‚ walking gingerly over the rough mats in the corridor‚ said:

‘This whole country is one great accident! Everything was derailed. It is only by a miracle that we are here at all! What a pathetic place!’ And he vented his spleen on the servant; he was in such a foul mood that he would have vented it on the cobbles in the street if necessary. ‘For a year now‚ my one prayer has been: “Please‚ God‚ send another earthquake!” Every day I read the news to see if the earthquake has arrived … but no! A minister has fallen or a baron has risen. But no earthquake! The Almighty turns a deaf ear to my prayers. He protects this country. Well‚ all I can say is that they deserve each other!’ And he smiled‚ vaguely grateful to a nation whose defects supplied him with so much material for his jibes.