James Joyce

James Joyce is presented through a handful of Paris encounters that bring literary stature into contact with everyday limits. He is praised as a great writer and remembered as a good friend, yet the scenes also show him negotiating meals, family life, impaired eyesight, and the ordinary companionship of a drink. That balance makes him more than a distant literary name: he is both an object of admiration and a person the narrator knows closely enough to miss.

Identity and Literary Standing

The book situates James Joyce between two major works: his friendship with the narrator belongs to the period after he had finished Ulysses and before he began what was for a long time called Work in Progress. The account does not describe the writing of either work, but this interval gives their friendship a distinct literary setting: Joyce is encountered at a moment when one major undertaking is complete and another has not yet begun.

His standing is stated with unusual simplicity during a meal with Ernest Walsh. Walsh calls Joyce great three times, and the narrator agrees, adding that Joyce was a good friend. The repetition conveys the force of Walsh’s admiration without turning Joyce into an abstract emblem. The narrator’s agreement is personal as well as evaluative: he speaks not only as a witness to Joyce’s reputation but as someone with a history of friendship with him.

Family Life and Public Encounters

The narrator and his wife have seen Joyce eating with his family at Michaud’s. They do not stare at him while he is dining, both because they consider it impolite and because the restaurant is expensive. The brief account places admiration within the manners and finances of everyday Paris: Joyce is recognizable, but the narrator’s response is restraint rather than intrusion, and the cost of the restaurant marks a limit on where the couple can comfortably eat.

A later, more detailed view shows Joyce at the same restaurant with his family. He sits with his wife, Nora, against the wall and peers at the menu through thick glasses, holding it up in one hand. Nora is described as a hearty but delicate eater; their son Giorgio is thin and sleek-headed, and their daughter Lucia, with heavy curly hair, is not yet grown. The family talks in Italian. These observed details give the scene its intimacy: Joyce is not isolated as a celebrated author but seen among family members, attending to a menu and sharing a meal in the language of the household.

The restaurant’s expense matters to the narrator, who associates Michaud’s with a special outing rather than routine dining. The account’s restraint about looking at Joyce is therefore also a small portrait of the couple’s own position. They can recognize the writer and notice his family, but they remain outsiders to his meal, observing from a distance rather than claiming familiarity in public.

Friendship, Admiration, and Scarcity

The friendship is marked by affection and by an awareness of material hardship. While dining with Ernest Walsh, the narrator misses Joyce and wishes he were there; he adds that Joyce could not afford marennes either. The detail does not explain Joyce’s finances more broadly, but it makes scarcity present even within a conversation about literary greatness. The oysters are a measure of what the friends cannot simply assume they can buy, and the narrator’s wish for Joyce’s company gives that shared limitation emotional weight.

Joyce is remembered as a friend during the period between Ulysses and Work in Progress, while the later meeting confirms that the relationship continues beyond recollection. The book does not supply a full account of their friendship or specify how often they met. Instead, it lets the bond emerge in a few gestures: the narrator’s sense that Joyce is a good friend, his absence felt at the table, and Joyce’s own invitation to have a drink.

Sight, Listening, and the Later Meeting

Much later, the narrator encounters Joyce walking along Boulevard St.-Germain after attending a matinée alone. Joyce likes listening to the actors, although he cannot see them. This detail makes his impaired sight concrete without reducing the encounter to it: the theater remains available to him through listening, and he has gone there by himself. Afterward, he asks the narrator to join him for a drink, turning a chance meeting into a quiet act of fellowship.

They go to Deux-Magots and order dry sherry. The narrator notes that accounts of Joyce commonly say he drank only Swiss white wine, then records the drink they actually chose. The contrast is modest but revealing: the remembered person complicates the received anecdote. Joyce’s character emerges not through a dramatic revelation but through the particularity of this meeting—his solitary outing, his attention to what he can hear, his invitation, and the sherry shared with an old friend.

Narrative Role

Joyce’s appearances are brief, but they connect the narrator’s literary world to its social texture. His reputation is voiced directly by Walsh and affirmed by the narrator; his private presence is conveyed through family details, the cost of a restaurant meal, a shared awareness of limited means, and the later drink. These scenes resist separating the monumental writer from the everyday person. The result is a portrait assembled through looking and remembering, in which affection is expressed less through explanation than through what the narrator notices—and whom he wishes were present.