James Joyce spent a terrible moment with his eyes. At the age of six, he received his first series of glasses and, when he was 25, he fell with his first case of iritisA very painful and potentially blinding inflammation of the colorful part of the eye, the iris. Shortly after, he named his newborn “Lucia” daughter, after the patron saint of those who have eye problems.
For the rest of her life, Joyce had to undergo a horrible series of operations and treatments for one or the other of her eyes, including the elimination of the parts of the iris, a remodeling of the student, the application of leeches directly on the eye to eliminate the fluid – even the elimination of all the teeth of Joyce, on theory, which was linked to the irritant and the irritant irritant Povery with the Pavery with the Povery with the Povery with the Povery with the Poverty, the Poverty, the Poverty was linked to the bacterial infonction in the years of Poverty and Pavery with the Poverty with the Povery with the Poverty, the Poverty Aristal with the Poverty, the Poverty was linked to the Povery and Povery Povery and the Povery Stay with the Povery Stay with the Povery Recyth Negligence.
After its seventh eye operation on December 5, 1925, according to Gordon Bowker in James Joyce: a new biographyJoyce was “unable to see lights, suffering from continuous pain from the operation, crying from the oceans of tears, very nervous and unable to think directly. He now depended on nice people to see him through the road and hail the taxis for him. All day long, he was on a sofa in a complete state of depression, wanting to work but quite the fact. ”
At the beginning of 1926, Joyce's sight improved a little in one eye. It was at that time (January 1926, according to a source) that Joyce visited her friend Myron C. Nutting, an American painter who had a studio in the Montparnasse section of Paris. To demonstrate her improving vision, Joyce picked up a thick black pencil and made some scribbles on a sheet of paper, as well as a caricature of a playful man in a bowler hat and a large mustache –Léopold BloomThe protagonist of Ulysses. Besides Bloom, Joyce wrote in Greek (“with a minor error in spelling and typically biased accents”, according to RJ Schork in Greek and Hellenic culture in Joyce)) Homer's opening passage Odyssey: “Tell me, muse, of this man many turns, who wandered far away.”
Note: the drawing of the flowering of Joyce is now in the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections in Northwestern University. Nuts were an important source for tThe biography of Joyce who was written by Richard EllmannProfessor in Northwestern. According to Scott Krafft, preservative at the library, Ellmann negotiated an agreement in 1960 for the library to buy James nutting oil paintings and Nora Joyce, her pastel drawings of Joyce Giorgio and Lucia, with the sketch of Bloom de Joyce, for a total of $ 500. The source of the date of January 1926 of the Bloom sketch is an article, “James Joyce … a quick sketch” of the July 1976 edition of Floor notesPosted by the Northwestern University Library Council. Our thanks to Scott Krafft.
Note: a previous version of this article appeared on our site in 2013.
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