James Joyce Was a Filthy Perv

I first tried to read Ulysses in the second year of university. It was a Big Book. Thick and literary, bristling with endnotes and references. Each page was a slog, each paragraph an achievement. And while I felt terribly, terribly smart toting my copy of it around the student union, I didn’t really get much joy out of it. And I didn’t finish it. That thing weighed about as much as a brick, and was approximately as fun to read.

What I didn’t know then was that James Joyce’s finest work didn’t appear in any of his novels. In fact, it was to be found in his correspondence. Specifically his correspondence with his lover, Nora Barnacle… or, as Joyce prefers to refer to her, his “dirty little fuckbird” Nora Barnacle.

James Joyce’s letters are rife with filth. They are obscene. And they are gorgeous. Reading them (the urgency, the raw need, the absolute unfettered thirst of them) filled me with the kind of delight for language that Ulysses so completely failed to convey.

Sometimes it’s just that the words themselves are particularly beautiful. Like this extract:

The last drop of seed has hardly been squirted up your cunt before it is over and my true love for you, the love of my verses, the love of my eyes for your strange luring eyes, comes blowing over my soul like a wind of spices. My prick is still hot and stiff and quivering from the last brutal drive it has given you when a faint hymn is heard rising in tender pitiful worship of you from the dim cloisters of my heart…

And sometimes it’s just the rawness of the need so evident in the words:

Yet you seem to turn me into a beast. It was you yourself, you naughty shameless girl who first led the way. It was not I who first touched you long ago down at Ringsend. It was you who slid your hand down inside my trousers and pulled my shirt softly aside and touched my prick with your long tickling fingers, and gradually took it all, fat and stiff as it was, into your hand and frigged me slowly until I came off through your fingers…

And that’s not to mention the sheer enthusiasm. You might think of Joyce as a serious literary fellow, prim and sophisticated. But in his letters he gets so carried away, so swept up by lust, that all reserve goes out the window. He even resorts to a double exclamation mark at one point:

Then to feel your hands tearing down my trousers and inside clothes and turning up my shirt, to be struggling in your strong arms and in your lap, to feel you bending down (like an angry nurse whipping a child’s bottom) until your big full bubbies almost touched me and to feel you flog, flog, flog me viciously on my naked quivering flesh!!

Alongside the lust and the beauty there are moments of the absurd, cartoonish romance too. He describes how he is convinced that he could detect Barnacle’s farts in a room full of farting woman. Is that not love? It’s certainly something close to it.

Hopefully these extracts have piqued your curiosity. If so, you can read several letters in full in The Paris Review. For free, no less. No, they don’t come with the same literary street cred as Ulysses or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but trust me – you’ll have a much better time.