#written lives

“As well as being a heavy drinker when he drank (for he had periods of abstinence too), he was a great devourer of books and had, in his youth, been a frequenter of prostitutes. Although he used to go with prostitutes, he did not like them, which is perhaps why, when he wrote to his wife, Nora, he chose to imagine scenes which, for all their theatricality, may well have borne some relation to reality. Joyce had, after all, once said that he “longed to copulate with a soul”. These obscene letters achieved notoriety some years ago, and in them the author expressed his high hopes for the day he and Nora would be together again (he was in Dublin and she in Trieste, where they usually lived), and in them he even found some momentary happiness, given that at the end of more than one letter he confesses that he came (his words) while he was writing her this filth: he is doubtless one of the few writers to have achieved such intense gratification with his pen. To judge by this correspondence, James Joyce wanted his wife to put on weight so that she could beat him and dominate him and practise other excesses, and he had very precise ideas about what undergarments she should wear (his invariable preference was that they should be slightly soiled) and showed a clear predilection for the aerial or even depository capabilities of the woman he had met as Nora Barnacle; in short, he was a coprophiliac. This, however, is not the most lurid aspect of the letters, but, rather, the inquisitive spirit in which he interrogates Nora about her past and her present, in order to feed his books. The interrogation resembles, more than anything, that of a Catholic priest in the confessional, as one can see from this extract: “When that person … put his hand or hands under your skirts, did he only tickle you outside or did he put his finger or fingers up into you? If he did, did they go up far enough to touch that little cock at the end of your cunt? Did he touch you behind? Did he ask you to touch him and did you do so? If you did not touch him did he come against you and did you feel it?” Or in another letter: “Tonight … I have been trying to picture you frigging your cunt in the closet. How do you do it? Do you stand against the wall with your hand tickling up under your clothes or do you squat down on the hole with your skirts up and your hand hard at work in through the slit of your drawers? Does it give you the horn now to shit? I wonder how you can do it. Do you come in the act of shitting or do you frig yourself off first and then shit?” No one can deny that Joyce was a scrupulous man with a love of detail.” -Javier Marias on James Joyce, from Written Lives

“The gravest threat to family safety was . . . [Joseph] Conrad’s deep-rooted need to have a cigarette clamped between his fingers at all times, although this was usually only for a matter of seconds, since he would immediately put it down somewhere and forget about it. His wife, Jessie, resigned herself to the fact that books, sheets, tablecloths and furniture were all covered in burn marks, but she lived for years in a state of high alert lest her husband burn himself, for even when he gave in to her pleas and got into the habit of throwing his cigarette ends into a large jug of water placed there for that purpose, he had constant incendiary mishaps. On more than one occasion, his clothes nearly got scorched when he sat too close to a stove, and it was not unusual for the book he was reading suddenly to catch fire after prolonged contact with the candle illuminating it.” -Javier Marias on Joseph Conrad, from Written Lives

“[Joseph] Conrad did not get married until he was thirty-eight and when he finally made his proposal, after they had known each other and been friends for several years, it proved to be as pessimistic as some of his own stories, for he announced that he did not have very long to live and had absolutely no intention of having children. The optimistic part came afterwards and consisted in him adding that, such as his life was, he thought that he and Jessie might spend a few happy years together. The bride-to-be’s mother commented that: “she didn’t quite see why he wished to get married”. Conrad, nevertheless, was a devoted husband: he often brought his wife flowers and, each time he finished a book, he would make her some generous gift.” -Javier Marias, from Written Lives