Bloomin’ Marvellous! Joyce and Trieste.
As the world and his wife, in Joycean terms, turn their attention to Dublin, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the fictional event of Bloomsday, it seems almost as if a lone Irish voice is reminding us that Joyce wrote most of his work outside of Ireland, and in particular a large part of it in the Italian City of Trieste.
Dr. John McCourt, an Irishman who settled in Trieste, and who has worked on Joyce related material for over ten years, has recently published The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste 1904-1920. He’s at pains to point out, particularly now, as Dublin is taken over by Bloomsday Breakfast parties, that Joyce took a huge amount of influence from the Italian city on the Adriatic. “The received wisdom of it was that Trieste didn’t influence Joyce at all. That was what his brother Stanislaus said, and that was largely what Richard Ellman, and the critics who followed on from him, said. They depicted the Trieste years as very difficult years, years of poverty, of difficulties getting published, and all of that is true, but at the same time the years in Trieste were his richest creative period. It’s the period when he finished Dubliners, wrote all of Portrait of the Artist as a young man, wrote a good deal of Ulyssesand planned the rest of the novel, wrote Giacomo Joyce, so they’re very, very creative years, despite the personal problems he had here”.