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to the Austrians, sl, p. 232). He had not obtained the protection and
redress from the insult of violence that he had sought (l 2, p. 425).
Rumbold offered no support. For Joyce, there was more than a
matter of law at stake. Even more than with Roberts, the row with
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Carr was a question of pride and humiliation: hence the fact that,
in the scene in Ulysses, Joyce makes Stephen not only supercilious
and gorgeously articulate, but deliberately obtuse to Carr s violent
rage. As with Gogarty, Longworth and Roberts on previous occa-
sions, a personal squabble was inseparable from questions of race,
class and cultural power. It was also inseparable from the question
of national standing. Joyce was well aware of this, as the Ulysses
scene again makes clear.
Once Bennett took Carr s side, Joyce stopped behaving like an
independent Irishman and began to behave like a pro-German one.
He praised the German offensive of July 1918 and started taking
the pro-German Zürcher Post. He even claimed the Consulate was
spying on him. In effect, during the course of the war, his position
on it changed from one close to that of the Irish Labour movement
in 1914 to a radical nationalist one. The process began when the
representative of British power clearly and shamelessly took the
English rather than the Irish side in what Joyce devoutly believed
was a question of justice. In the case of Joyce versus Carr, Britain
had merely identified itself with the English cause. Significantly,
too, the Carr affair was winding to its end as Joyce was contemplat-
ing the shift from the comparative realism of the early chapters in
Ulysses to the radical experimentation of the later ones.
The Carr affair continued to rankle with Joyce. But it was
Bennett, Rumbold and British institutions that increasingly came
to mind more often than did Carr himself. In an open letter of 28
April 1919, Joyce claimed that the Players had had to face calumny
and detraction, disseminated by the British authorities here (l 2,
p. 439). He also claimed that Bennett had wanted him expelled
from Switzerland on military and political grounds (l 2, p. 440).
The Consulate had persecuted him both legally and financially.
When Pound heard that British government censors thought
Ulysses was written in enemy code, Joyce not only believed him. He
assumed that Bennett was responsible for the rumour. In August
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1920 he was identifying Rumbold with imperial British power in
Ireland. He summed up the symbolism of the whole incident in a
bit of doggerel verse he sent on a postcard to Stanislaus in August
1920:
. . . the pride of old Ireland
Must be damnably humbled
If a Joyce is found cleaning
The boots of a Rumbold [l 3, p. 16].
In the twelfth chapter of Ulysses, Joyce cast Rumbold as a hangman.
As late as June 1921 he was still making caustic jokes about the
representatives of British power abroad. By then, however, Ireland
itself was finally on the verge of independence, and its Rumbolds
were in retreat.
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13
Writing Ulysses
Joyce planned a short story called Ulysses as early as 1907, though,
in his own phrase, it never got any forrader than the title ( jj, p. 230).
The idea may have first occurred to him on the Mediterranean coast,
but it did so at a time when he had not been long away from Dublin,
and whilst he was still focused on the world of Dubliners. At the
same time, this idea needed years by the Mediterranean to make it
flower, which it did just before Joyce left Trieste. Suitably enough,
on 16 June 1915, he sent a postcard to Stanislaus announcing that
the first episode of my new novel Ulysses is written (sl, p. 209).
Joyce wrote chapters 13 and 14 of Ulysses when he went back to
Trieste, and the last four chapters of the novel in Paris. But it took
on solid bulk in solid, bourgeois Zurich. Trieste had been raffish.
Zurich was respectable. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Joyce led an
increasingly divided life. He would continue to do so for the rest of
his career. From the time he left Dublin in 1904, he was very careful
to protect and indeed to foster an inner life that had worked loose
of external circumstance. Certainly, he was much absorbed in
his daily life in Trieste, Zurich and Paris. It was rich in experience
and human warmth, and often eventful. He learnt a great deal
from it that was important for his fiction. Nonetheless, his novels
remained strangely remote from it. Unlike some of his contempor-
aries Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Pound Joyce did not turn his
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