Starting in the 1990s, the Irish community in Paris was steadily growing as their resident American counterparts befriended young writers who, in turn, started to give their own readings in Paris. The Ulster conflict that dragged on at home may partially explain why they crossed the Irish Sea (hopping over England) in great numbers at this time, but Ireland’s joining the European Union a decade beforehand certainly facilitated staying on in our city. In fact, the two countries’ cultural ties went back to the sixteenth century, with the founding of the Irish College in the Latin Quarter, renamed the Irish Cultural Center in 2002.
A small island battered by ocean winds and known for its traditional Celtic storytelling, Ireland has always enjoyed the reputation of having the greatest density of writers per square mile. Yet, because of this turbulent history of censorship and continued warfare with Great Britain, its authors had written many of their great works in exile or self-exile abroad, particularly in France.
The illustrious figures of the twentieth century, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, once considered unabashedly avant-garde, are now viewed as the mainstay of contemporary world literature. Our bookshop largely reveled in their success by organizing several events around their plays, poetry, and novels.
James Joyce in Pula
The name of James Joyce is inseparable from Paris, where he published his monumental opus Ulysses. And so, connecting the young Joyce to a place as relatively unknown as Pula in Croatia may seem a bit far-fetched. But it will all make sense. Failing to get a promised teaching position at the Berlitz School of Paris and, accompanied by his future wife Nora, in 1904, Joyce agreed to take a comparable job in Pula on the Adriatic Coast.*
Strangely enough, one day in 1984 a young Slovenian film-maker, Željko Ivanjek, arrived at the Village Voice and suggested he show us his short documentary about the six months Joyce spent in this hidden seafront city.
Produced by Zagreb Television and titled A Day of Dappled Seaborne Clouds after a line from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the projection took place in our bookshop on November 28, 1984. Crucial to the young writer, Pula’s exceptionally rich library offered a wide range of books written in its official languages—Croatian, German, and Italian. Joyce learned German, translated Italian literature and wrote a critical essay on the Italian poet and playwright Gabriele D’Annunzio, all the while working on his future novel Stephen Hero. He also completed several short stories, later incorporated in Dubliners. In a letter to his brother Stanislaus, he described himself as “a hell of an industrious chap.”1
Ivanjek’s camera followed its imagined recollections of Joyce and Nora in their comings and goings around the Coliseum, the center of the antique city where they lived, here and there catching a glimpse of their various lodgings. Among the people interviewed, a few older ones provided snippets of faded memories of the place at that time. The camera went along, imagining the couple’s journey to the Brioni islands where, at the Miramar Café, the two celebrated the writer’s twenty-third birthday, peppered with their passing erotic notes under the table. In their intimate language, Pula became synonymous with such hidden pleasures.
Unexpectedly, six months into their stay, a spy scandal forced the foreign community, including the Joyces, to pack up their bags, leaving behind this “Naval Siberia,” as Joyce nicknamed the city. The couple set off for Trieste, farther north on the coast.
A big crowd attended this screening, attracted by such an unusual topic. There were officials from the Irish and British embassies, the writer Hélène Cixous who had written her PhD on Joyce, the filmmaker Agnès Varda who had produced a short documentary entitled Ulysse (having no relation to the novel), and the legendary photographer Gisèle Freund who, in 1938 and 1939, had photographed Joyce in his Parisian apartment.
Yet the true star of the evening was Stephen Joyce, the writer’s grandson, who drew as much attention from the curious audience as the film itself. After the showing was over, the crowd pressed around him, but he quickly slipped out of sight. I never knew what he thought of the documentary, this modest but sensitive and informative attempt to resurrect a chapter of Joyce’s life left in the dark for so many years.
Samuel Beckett, the other giant of twentieth-century Irish literature, lived in Paris his whole adult life. On different occasions he was honored in our bookstore by two of his lifetime friends: John Calder, his British publisher, and the American poet Anne Atik, the author of How It Was, her memories of Beckett that recounted thirty years of their friendship only interrupted by his death in December 1989.
John Calder
Britain’s Scottish independent publisher with a prestigious literary catalog boasting eighteen Nobel Prizes, Calder gave four talks at the Village Voice about Beckett’s novels and plays. On March 29, 2012, he presented his most recent essay The Theology of Samuel Beckett2 that focused on Beckett’s vision of a world without God. It highlighted the writings of the nihilist/existentialist writer, inspired by Arnold Geulincx, a seventeenth-century Flemish philosopher Beckett had discovered in his student years at Trinity College in Dublin. According to this theologian, “God was so far away that he couldn’t hear us or care about us, leaving us human beings in a quandary.”
Not wanting to offend his religious mother, Beckett never openly admitted to being an atheist, even though his writings clearly reflect the conviction that “man’s future was nothingness and his tragedy was to have been born.” He was a writer of philosophical thought, but Calder stressed that, above all, he was a writer who “out of the blackness of this world, has created an unparalleled literature, suffused with dry, gallows humor.” “This underlying humor,” he went on, “emphasizes Man’s awareness of his tragedy. Humor is part of life, one of its traits, and Beckett could laugh, but tragedy is also the reality and intrinsic part of human nature.”3
Samuel Beckett lived until the very end of the year 1989. For a number of years, we would have loved to organize a reading or book signing with him. However, Calder told us that he was too frail and would never be able to endure a signing session. The only contact we had with the author was, on his publisher’s suggestion, sending him a complete Oxford English-French dictionary mailed to his retirement home. It meant a lot to us, knowing that Beckett was still fascinated by the world of words, wanting to probe their secrets and invent language games in English and French.
Anne Atik
A Parisian since 1959, the American poet Anne Atik launched How It Was: A Memoir of Samuel Beckett,4 her own memoir of lifetime friend Samuel Beckett, at the Village Voice on December 4, 2003. Her portrait of him was very different from that of the dark, pessimistic philosopher Calder had cited. She remembered a warm, convivial person who spent a lot of time with his friends, showing a genuine interest in their children and even real affection for them.
Anne had met Beckett in the early sixties through her husband, Avigdor Arikha, the distinguished painter and art historian who was a very close friend of his. In her talk at our bookstore, she recounted the frequent dinners the three of them shared at the couple’s home—Beckett, Avigdor, and herself, discussing literature, playing and listening to music and, most of all, reading poetry aloud. As they were all multilingual, they recited Yeats in English, Goethe in German, Dante in Italian, and contemporary French poetry in French, delivering their lines the way Beckett directed his actors. He would ask them to “keep the voice flat, leave off acting, and transmit the structure of the sentence as well as the pace and the music of the words themselves.”5 After dinner and their readings, Anne noted down details about their evening while her husband accompanied Beckett to his nearby home on boulevard Saint-Jacques.
Throughout her talk, she emphasized Beckett’s revolutionary style. To him, words were like musical notes, each one with its own weight and resonance. Anne recalled a brief encounter between him and Stravinsky, the latter wanting to know how Beckett, “the maestro of language,” had written his silences in Waiting for Godot.
In another vein, she told us that Arikha, convinced that “integrity in art was the artist’s golden rule,” admired his friend Beckett for “giving the ethics of aesthetics . . . For him, every dot, every word had to be justified. It was a question of truth.” In all, she said, Beckett was the perfect example of the artist’s “life and work meshing together so perfectly,” both requiring “integrity.”
In November 1989, the French Ministry of Culture organized Les Belles Étrangères, a festival of contemporary Irish literature, to enhance its visibility in France.6 The Irish Cultural Center, an extension of the Irish College, was still several years away. One of the venues chosen for this important encounter was our bookshop, where novelists Jennifer Johnston and John McGahern, alongside poets John Montague and Derek Mahon, gave a joint reading on November 27, 1989.
Born into the interwar generation, these authors had started to publish in the sixties, when censorship in Ireland was still in effect. As a result, and like their predecessors, they had spent part of their writing lives abroad. For example, Johnston had lived for twenty years in London prior to returning home in 1980. Her novel Fool’s Sanctuary (1987), presented that night, portrayed the tragedy of an Irish family torn in their allegiance between the Irish War of Independence and answering the call of the British military draft at the start of World War I. She was followed by John McGahern, one of the great Irish voices of the second half of the twentieth century, who had also lived many years abroad after his novel The Dark was banned for obscenity in 1965.
As for the poets, John Montague split his time among Ireland, Paris, and the South of France while Derek Mahon moved back and forth between Belfast, London, and Paris, always looking for “an elsewhere with beauty.”7
By an extraordinary coincidence, this first Irish literary festival took place within a month of Beckett’s death on December 22, closing one era and marking the beginning of a new one.
In the coming decades, along with the revival of Irish folklore, music, and literature, writers the likes of John Banville and Colm Tóibín who gave readings at our bookstore were being acclaimed by an international readership. An Irish artistic renaissance was in the air, and here we turn our attention to two young writers who lived in Paris for a full decade, from 1994 to 2004.
Harry Clifton and Deirdre Madden
A poet and a novelist respectively, Harry Clifton and Deirdre Madden arrived in the city from Italy, where they had spent a year in the rugged mountains of the Abruzzi. Seeking a quiet area to write, they settled down on the southern border of Montparnasse, and, within a decade, had completed and published seven books between the two of them, confirming their talents and rightful place in contemporary Irish letters.
Their first reading at the Village Voice took place on April 11, 1995, as a joint presentation of their works. Harry read from two of his poetry collections, The Desert Route and Night Train Through the Brenner,8 and Deirdre discussed Nothing Is Black,9 her fourth novel. In his preface to the poetry collection, Mahon had written that Clifton was a poet who “had taken the world as his province”10 while it was clear that Madden was immersed in the private and intimate realm of women who were mothers, sisters, friends, and artists. Yet for each, their roots were inseparable from the landscapes and history of Ireland.
Lured to “other wheres” since youth, Harry had lived twenty years abroad, traveling through Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia, teaching and working with aid agencies. “The seventies were a time when we were getting out of university and felt there was little for us in Ireland,” he told us, “but there was also a personal element in my continual wanderings . . . I come from a mixed background, an Irish father and a South American mother . . . representing an unknown country to me . . . My life has been polarized between Ireland and the world at large for twenty years. The ideal place for me is to exist between two places, between two polarities.”11
On June 21, 2001, at his launch of On the Spine of Italy: A Year in the Abruzzi,12 he was asked why as a renowned poet he had not written it in verse. He explained that “poetry was a way of looking inward while the year in the Abruzzi had been one of looking outward. . . . It was not a book about us, but about the people in the village. The place was unwritten, and I felt that there was something invaluable here to write about.”13 However, in her introduction, the American poet Ellen Hinsey praised his book as “pure poetry,” comparing Clifton’s lyrical language to the egg tempera technique used by the painters of the Italian Renaissance, “one suited to capture essential details and arresting images, such as a stitch in the sewing line of a garment, or the reflection on the face of a tear globe. Such a technique allowed a skilled rendering of the roughness of the place, filled with extraordinary descriptions and emotions.”14 Indeed, in his poem “Abruzzo” he expressed the physical, sensuous contact with this stony place and its villages: “All that was tangible, tasted, felt / Restored us to our senses / Like freezing mountain water / From the spigots . . .”15
Deirdre had shared that year in the Abruzzi with her husband, experiencing firsthand the harshness of the place: rain coming through the roof, freezing nights, and heavy snowfalls causing power cuts. In Remembering Light and Stone, her own memoir of their mountainous village, she recalls “the pleasure and fascination of other countries . . . yet,” she confessed, “I do not belong here,” but “I found out more about my own country, simply by not being in it.”16
This country that she calls “my own” is Northern Ireland, a land of wild, sensuous beauty described with great affection and subtlety in all her works of fiction. It is also a country that has suffered from its colonial history, including the violence and senseless killings of the Ulster Troubles, depicted in her novel One by One in the Darkness, which she presented at the Village Voice on June 14, 1996.17
Introducing her work, Deirdre warned her audience: “It is not a book on the terrorists or the actions going on between the two camps. There are many accounts of those, thrillers essentially, but,” she insisted, “what is most important for me is to talk about the ordinary lives of people, how they lived and died through the Troubles. I have a responsibility to it. I have a very strong connection with Northern Ireland, and I wouldn’t want to lose it.”18
In this story about a family tragedy caused by the random killing of the father, the narrator portrays his widow and their three daughters in their home setting. The love among them is the source of their resilience in the face of an uncertain future that, for one of them, includes the difficult path of an artistic calling.
Asked why she, a writer paying particular attention to language, often wrote about art and not the writing process, Deirdre replied that it would be “too self-referential. Also, I love painting, for example, a landscape in paintings and how to do the narrative of it.” For her, painting means a physical, even intimate contact with the natural world of Northern Ireland and its elemental forces that include the debris of pebbles and shells cast on the sea coast and going back millions of years.19
Julia, the protagonist of her novel Authenticity, is a conceptual artist, building an art installation around the word “peat” or “turf,” that clod of earth reminiscent of Ireland and commonly used until recent times as its domestic fuel. Engaged in her project, she is curious about what such a word means to people nowadays. Did it evoke the particular smell of its smoke or anything else? The responses varied widely but none of them bore a direct relation to the object itself: it could be “an odor of clean linen,” “the memory of a betrayal,” or “a day at sea with a father.” For the author, one saw a landscape “as one remembered it or through something remembered.”20
During their ten years in Paris, this couple never mentioned writing about the city, but in 2007, three years after going home, they were back in Paris to visit friends. On this occasion, Harry presented me with his new collection of poetry, Secular Eden: Paris Notebooks 1994-2004, actually written in his earlier Paris days. He opened it, pointing to a poem, “To the Fourteenth District”: “a place to live and die, and go mad in.”
Although dedicated to me as it was my neighborhood, more specifically it was a tribute to the writers and artists who, like Beckett, had lived in this part of the city. Likewise, this neighborhood had a particular resonance for Harry: it meant the memory of the three of us getting together at Le Bouquet d’Alésia for a drink, a bite to eat and a chat, enjoying an early evening where “the everydayness [was] raised to holy rite / at café tables.”21
Harry Clifton, Odile Hellier, Deirdre Madden, editors Maggie Doyle and Cynthia Liebow. Village Voice Bookshop, April 11, 1995. © C. Deudon