James Joyce on Kitty O’Shea

Sir, – Norma Clarke, in her most interesting review of Elisabeth Kehoe’s biography of Kitty O’Shea (Ireland’s Misfortune, June 27), says that James Joyce called her “that bitch, that English whore”. Indeed Joyce did write those words in Ulysses, but put them into the mouth of the proprietor of the Cabman’s shelter to which Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom repair after their adventurous night at Bella Cohen’s whorehouse in Dublin’s Nighttown.

Now, Clarke could be right. Joyce’s father was a passionate Parnellite, and Joyce as a child wrote a poem (perhaps his first venture into verse) attacking Michael Healy, the man who brought down “Ireland’s King” and split the Irish party following the O'Shea divorce. In 1912 Joyce wrote a long article about the case (“The Shade of Parnell”) for the Triestine newspaper Il Piccolo della Sera, and the tragedy of Parnell became a leitmotif in his fiction.

But in a novel as polyphonous as Ulysses, distinguishing the author’s voice from those of his characters requires not just a sharp ear but some wider understanding of the author’s views.

In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, over a vividly re-created Christmas dinner, the hero’s father, Simon Dedalus, based on Joyce’s father, exchanges bitter words with “Dante” Riordan, a venomous religious bigot who has denounced Parnell. A friend of Simon’s, a fellow Parnellite, then describes gleefully how he had spat in the eye of a woman who had insulted Kitty O'Shea. That, we might conclude, was also the voice of the author – or at least a clue to where his sympathies lay.

“That bitch, that English whore” sounds more like the censorious Dante than the loftily libertarian Joyce. Speaking as himself he is more tolerant and detached about the whole affair. In notes to his play Exiles, in which he toys with the idea of adultery and its deceptions (a play written coincidentally with Ulysses), he writes: “The relations between Mrs O’Shea and Parnell are not of vital significance for Ireland – first, because Parnell was tongue-tied and secondly because she was an Englishwoman. The very points in his character which could have been of interest have been passed over in silence. Her manner of writing is not Irish — nay, her manner of loving is not Irish. The character of O’Shea is much more typical of Ireland. The two greatest Irishmen of modern times – Swift and Parnell – broke their lives over women. And it was the adulterous wife of the King of Leinster who brought the first Saxon to the Irish coast”.

I think this gives us a stronger clue to what Joyce really thought than do the words of one of his Ulyssean characters.

GORDON BOWKER
4 Hillgate Place, London W8.

Greek leftists

Sir, – In his review of Bernard Wasserstein’s Barbarism and Civilization, Mark Mazower (April 30) makes a series of critical remarks which most European historians would consider quite unexceptionable. But he then overstates his case, perhaps projecting his studies of wartime Greece on to the whole of Europe.

Few Eastern European (and especially Balkan) historians would accept the view that the Soviet–Yugoslav split was due to a “clash of egos”. But that does not prove that “the Kremlin’s ongoing political experiment” consisted “of trying to control Eastern Europe not (pace Wasserstein) through the Red Army, which was rapidly demobilized, but through what were effectively new national Communist Parties of doubtful reliability”. Communist Parties were undoubtedly unreliable (as most human institutions are) and Stalin was well aware of this. But for true Communists (Yugoslavs included) there was no contradiction between wanting a national revolution and accepting the fraternal help of the Red Army. Mazower is looking from an Athens perspective of 1944, as seen through the eyes of the New Left of the 1970s.

As if to confirm his Greek perspective, he also states that “Civil liberties were more secure for most people in the West after 1945 (though not for Italian, Greek, or Iberian leftists)”. On what basis does he include Italian leftists as an endangered species? Italian leftists may well have to live their fair share of scares, but they certainly never approached the dangers experienced by Greek leftists.

GUIDO FRANZINETTI
Faculty of Political Sciences,
Università del Piemonte Orientale, Via Cavour 84, 15100 Alessandria.

Hitler’s aim

Sir, – There are a couple of mistakes in Mark Harrison’s review of Chris Bellamy’s Absolute War (June 20). Hitler did not aim for a colonial empire stretching to the Urals: he planned for the Wehrmacht to advance to a line running Archangel–Gorki–Astrakhan, after which the “rotten” Russian regime was expected to collapse. This and much more is explained in Colonel Albert Seaton’s neglected classic, The Russo-German War 1941–45 (1971). And as Adam Tooze has shown conclusively in The Wages of Destruction (2006), Hitler’s aim was not to drive European Russians into Asia but to work and starve them to death in situ through the “Hunger Plan”.

Harrison echoes the familiar theme that the Germans would have been better off forging alliances with the subject peoples of the USSR. This is to misunderstand the Nazi project: Hitler was clear from the beginning that the war in the East was to be a war like never before, in which whole armies would be annihilated and populations exterminated wholesale. His own Wehrmacht High Command understood this immediately, and issued criminal orders to fulfil the Führer’s aims.

DAVE BENNETT
24 Hilda Street, Ottawa.
Ghetto references

Sir, – For early literary descriptions of the Holocaust (see Patrick McGrath’s article on Koestler, June 6, and Anthony Rudolf’s letter, June 13), I would like to draw your attention to the poem “Vogn shikh” by the Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever (written in 1943 in the ghetto of Vilna) about the cartloads of shoes being driven to Berlin, asking what happened to the feet those shoes belonged to.

JOKE STERRINGA
Ruyschstraat 92, Amsterdam.

Sir, – I recommend that Anthony Rudolf expand his search for allusions to “these terrible events and places” to American cinema. For example, there is the strong implication that Victor Laszlo (played by Paul Henreid), in the 1942 film Casablanca, has been in a concentration camp and escaped. Moreover, although the film Mr. Skeffington was not released until 1944, Mr Skeffington (played by Claude Rains) certainly has experienced both the “events and places”. (Mr. Skeffington is based on the 1941 novel by Elizabeth von Arnim.) Also, a close viewing of some films directed by Ernst Lubitsch (eg, To Be or Not To Be, 1942) and early films directed by Alfred Hitchcock (eg, Sabotage, 1936, The Lady Vanishes, 1938) demonstrate that plenty of people knew that things in Europe were veering in a horrific direction, although they spoke about them in muted ways.

DIANE M. CALABRESE
1000 Robin Road, Silver Spring, Maryland 20901.

Mistitled

Sir, – Since I have been accused of “sneering innuendo” and “contemptible behaviour” in your letters column (June 27), I think I deserve the opportunity to reply. I am sorry that I did not have enough space to include Professor Paul Collier’s full distinguished cv in my 350-word review of a book written by somebody else (In Brief, June 20). I certainly intended no insult by referring in passing to his role as a World Bank adviser. However, I notice that in the course of his diatribe Collier made not a single point against my substantive criticisms of his reductive theory of conflict.

MARK LEOPOLD
Department of Anthropology, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton.

Franz Rosenzweig

Sir, – John McDade writes (Letters, June 27) that “there is nothing in [Franz] Rosenzweig’s writings that warrants” my suggestion (Commentary, June 20) about why Rosenzweig decided to return to Judaism on Yom Kippur 1913. Indeed there is not, and I do not suggest that there is. But the question remains: why did Rosenzweig make that decision? I offer the plausible suggestion that he was influenced by an important hymn, and its context, in the Yom Kippur service that we know him to have attended, together with what seem to me good reasons for thinking that he knew the story of the hymn’s origin. McDade’s praise of David Novak’s formula, “something Jewish revealed itself to him”, seems misplaced: Novak simply restates the problem. In my essay I sought to solve it.

I am grateful to Johannes Saltzwedel (Letters, June 27) for reminding me that I should have taken account of Tur-Sinai’s Heilige Schrift of 1934–7. His remark that it was reprinted as recently as 2003 is worthy of special note.

DAVID J. WASSERSTEIN
Department of History, Vanderbilt University, 2301 Vanderbilt Place, Nashville, Tennessee 37235.

‘Going Dutch’

Sir, – I refer to Jonathan Clark’s review of Going Dutch by Lisa Jardine (June 13). I am not a historian and shall express no opinion about Jardine’s thesis, but when reading the book I was shocked to find it written so badly. It is full of repetitions, often on the same page, and could easily be reduced to half its length without loss of information. Also, in quite a few cases sentences are badly constructed. Example:

"Since it is a while since Sir Constantijn Huijgens has made an appearance in this story, his correspondence provides us with a more elite example of long-distance gift-exchange in the Dutch trading company context." (page 333)

One wonders if any editing has taken place. I am saddened by such bad writing by an academic, and the fact that it is not remarked on in the TLS review. By the way, the illustrations are excellent.

GERARD DEKKER
PO Box 24129, Karen, Nairobi.

Petty Heidegger

Sir, – In his restrained and useful essay (June 27), George Steiner writes that to Hans-Georg Gadamer, Heidegger “ . . . was simply ‘the greatest of thinkers’”. However, not quite so simply, Gadamer had added, “. . . and the most petty [kleinlich] of men”.

WILLIAM S. WILSON
458 West 25th Street, New York 10001.

Rose Heilbron

Sir, – The character Rose Hebron QC (referred to in Michael White’s review, June 27) deserves to exist in some appropriately romantic fictional Middle Eastern setting, but Cherie Blair’s heroine is more likely to be Rose Heilbron DBE, QC.

ORAN HABUSH
11 Nablus Road, Jerusalem 97200.

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