‘O, there you are,’ Mr Bloom said, turning from the fire.
ULYSSES, James Joyce
Joyce read his poems to Lady Gregory
in Dublin. She was impressed and gave him five pounds
to help fund his escape to Paris
from the ‘coherent absurdity’ (his words)
of Catholicism. She wrote to Yeats –
her close friend and patronee, who had lodgings
a five minute walk from Euston – to meet him
off the Holyhead train at six a.m.,
give him breakfast, look after him and then
give him dinner before he took the boat train
from Victoria. She was afraid James
‘would knock his ribs against the earth’. Imagine
these two bespectacled Irishmen,
Orange and Green, very amiably
walking along Woburn Place! No doubt
Yeats introduced him to Bloomsbury neighbours
Eliot and Pound, amongst others,
to ‘help him on his way’. What if James
had torn up his ticket, kept the fiver,
of course, and stayed in this extraordinary
two thirds of a square mile – with its leagues
of floors of books and artefacts,
its revolutionary exiles,
its assorted geniuses, blue plaques,
handsome, greensward squares, cohorts
of multicultural students and tourists?
From the window of our budget hotel
we can almost see Yeats’ lodgings.
Before us is St Pancras Parish Church –
in Greek Revival style with terracotta
caryatids and cornices embellished
with lions’ heads. On Euston Road the world
passes – endless pedestrians, black cabs,
red buses. How I longed, as a youth,
to be here – to live and work among these
acres of ideas, the palpable shades
of literary men and women, shakers
and movers in that enduring tradition!
Our train passed the same blackened walls
he would have seen – perhaps even the same
stunted buddleia! Not until just before
Bexley did there seem to be some woodland –
or, until after Bletchley, ploughed fields
with murders of crows in the furrows.
We watched a shower of rain move towards us
through the obsolete radio masts
near Rugby, and I thought of James Joyce
creative in exile.
By David Selzer