James Joyce, With His Eyesight Failing, Attracts a Cartoon of Leopold Bloom (1926)

James Joyce had a ter­ri­ble time together with his eyes. When he used to be six years outdated he won his first set of eye­glass­es, and, when he used to be 25, he got here down together with his first case of iri­tis, an overly painful and poten­tial­ly blind­ing inflam­ma­tion of the col­ored a part of the attention, the iris. A little while lat­er, he named his new­born daugh­ter “Lucia,” after the consumer saint of the ones with eye trou­bles.

For the remainder of his existence, Joyce needed to undergo a hor­rif­ic collection of oper­a­tions and deal with­ments for one or the oth­er of his eyes, includ­ing the elimination of portions of the iris, a reshap­ing of the scholar, the appli­ca­tion of leech­es direct­ly at the eye to take away fluid–even the elimination of all of Joyce’s tooth, at the the­o­ry that his recur­ring iri­tis used to be con­nect­ed with the bac­te­r­i­al infec­tion in his tooth, caused by years of pover­ty and den­tal overlook.

After his sev­enth eye oper­a­tion on Decem­ber 5, 1925, accord­ing to Gor­don Bowk­er in James Joyce: A New Biog­ra­phy, Joyce used to be “not able to look lighting, suf­fer­ing con­tin­u­al ache from the oper­a­tion, weep­ing oceans of tears, prime­ly ner­vous, and not able to suppose immediately. He used to be now depen­dent on type peo­ple to look him around the highway and hail taxis for him. All day, he lay on a sofa in a state of com­plete depres­sion, need­i­ng to paintings however somewhat not able to take action.”

In ear­ly 1926, Joyce’s sight used to be improv­ing a lit­tle in a single eye. It used to be about this time (Jan­u­ary 1926, accord­ing to 1 supply) that Joyce paid a vis­it to his buddy Myron C. Nut­ting, an Amer­i­can painter who had a stu­dio within the Mont­par­nasse sec­tion of Paris. To demon­strate his improv­ing imaginative and prescient, Joyce picked up a thick black pen­cil and made a couple of squig­gles on a sheet of paper, along side a automobile­i­ca­ture of a mis­chie­vous guy in a bowler hat and a large mus­tache–Leopold Bloom, the professional­tag­o­nist of Ulysses. Subsequent to Bloom, Joyce wrote in Greek (“with a minor error in spelling and char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly skewed accents,” accord­ing to R. J. Schork in Greek and Hel­lenic Cul­ture in Joyce) the open­ing pas­sage  of House­r’s Odyssey: “Inform me, muse, of that guy of many turns, who wan­dered all over the place.”

NOTE: Joyce’s draw­ing of Bloom is now within the Charles Deer­ing McCormick Library of Spe­cial Col­lec­tions at North­west­ern Uni­ver­si­ty. Nut­ting used to be a sig­nif­i­cant supply for the biog­ra­phy of Joyce that was writ­ten by Richard Ell­mann, a professional­fes­sor at North­west­ern. Accord­ing to Scott Krafft, a cura­tor on the library, Ell­mann bro­kered a deal in 1960 for the library to pur­chase Nut­ting’s oil paint­ings of James and Nora Joyce, his pas­tel draw­ings of the Joyce chil­dren Gior­gio and Lucia, along side Joyce’s cartoon of Bloom, for a complete of $500. The supply for the Jan­u­ary 1926 date of the Bloom cartoon is an arti­cle, “James Joyce…a handy guide a rough cartoon” from the July 1976 edi­tion of Foot­notes, pub­lished through the North­west­ern Uni­ver­si­ty Library Coun­cil. Our due to Scott Krafft.

Be aware: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this put up seemed on our web site in 2013.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

James Joyce: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to His Lifestyles and Lit­er­ary Works

What Makes James Joyce’s Ulysses a Mas­ter­piece: Nice Books Defined

James Joyce’s Cray­on Cov­ered Guy­u­script Pages for Ulysses and Finnegans Wake

Learn the Orig­i­nal Seri­al­ized Edi­tion of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1918)

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