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

James Joyce had a ter­ri­ble time along with his eyes. When he was six years previous he acquired his first set of eye­glass­es, and, when he was 25, he got here down along with his first case of iri­tis, a really painful and poten­tial­ly blind­ing inflam­ma­tion of the col­ored a part of the attention, the iris. A short while lat­er, he named his new­born daugh­ter “Lucia,” after the patron saint of these with eye trou­bles.

For the remainder of his life, Joyce needed to endure a hor­rif­ic collection of oper­a­tions and deal with­ments for one or the oth­er of his eyes, includ­ing the elimination of components of the iris, a reshap­ing of the pupil, the appli­ca­tion of leech­es direct­ly on the attention to take away fluid–even the elimination of all of Joyce’s enamel, on the the­o­ry that his recur­ring iri­tis was con­nect­ed with the bac­te­r­i­al infec­tion in his enamel, introduced on by years of pover­ty and den­tal neglect.

After his sev­enth eye oper­a­tion on Decem­ber 5, 1925, accord­ing to Gor­don Bowk­er in James Joyce: A New Biog­ra­phy, Joyce was “unable to see lights, suf­fer­ing con­tin­u­al ache from the oper­a­tion, weep­ing oceans of tears, excessive­ly ner­vous, and unable to assume straight. He was now depen­dent on form peo­ple to see him throughout the highway and hail taxis for him. All day, he lay on a sofa in a state of com­plete depres­sion, need­i­ng to work however fairly unable to take action.”

In ear­ly 1926, Joyce’s sight was improv­ing a lit­tle in a single eye. It was about this time (Jan­u­ary 1926, accord­ing to at least one supply) that Joyce paid a vis­it to his good friend 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, together with a automobile­i­ca­ture of a mis­chie­vous man 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 man of many turns, who wan­dered far and large.”

NOTE: Joyce’s draw­ing of Bloom is now within the Charles Deer­ing McCormick Library of Spe­cial Col­lec­tions at North­west­ern Uni­ver­si­ty. Nut­ting was 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, together with Joyce’s sketch of Bloom, for a complete of $500. The supply for the Jan­u­ary 1926 date of the Bloom sketch is an arti­cle, “James Joyce…a fast sketch” from the July 1976 edi­tion of Foot­notes, pub­lished by the North­west­ern Uni­ver­si­ty Library Coun­cil. Our due to Scott Krafft.

Be aware: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this submit appeared on our website in 2013.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

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

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

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