Monthly Archives: December 2011

Genesis of “The Dead” by James Joyce

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For “The Dead” James Joyce drew upon an incident in Galway in 1903. There a young man named Michael (“Sonny”) Bodkin was courting Nora Barnacle (Joyce’s eventual wife), but he had tuberculosis and was soon bedridden. When Nora resolved to leave Galway for Dublin, the boy stole out of his sickbed and in the rain under an apple tree sang to Nora . Later, in Dublin, Nora learned that Bodkin was dead. When Nora first met Joyce, as she told her sister, what attracted her to him was his resemblance to “Sonny” Bodkin.

Apparently, Joyce was jealous of the dead suitor and grilled Nora ceaselessly about him. What bothered him was that her heart was still moved by the recollection of the boy’s love for her. This notion of a man in rivalry with a dead boy lying in a cemetery appears to be the genesis of Joyce’s most famous story.

Besides basing his story only on this incident, Joyce borrowed heavily from the ending of a book which is hardly read anymore, George Moore’s Vain Fortune. In that book a young bridal couple learn that a young woman whom the groom jilted has committed suicide. Both are tormented, and the bride asks her husband not to kiss her. She falls off to sleep, their marriage unconsummated, and the husband stares out the window at “the melancholy greyness of the dawn.” In that instant he realizes that his life is a failure and that his wife lacks the passion of the girl who killed herself. He does, however, achieve a sort of redemption through his agony: a resolution to try to make his wife happy. This is clearly the situation from which Joyce adroitly lifted: the dead lover who comes between the living lovers, the husband’s realization of his failure, his acceptance of mediocrity, the resolve to be at least sympathetic — it all came from this other book. Nonetheless, Joyce rarefies the story by having it arise not from the suicide of a former love but from the simple memory of the young love itself.

John Dos Passos — Three Soldiers

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The defining moment in the life of John Dos Passos came between August 16 and 20, 1917, when he experienced combat firsthand as an ambulance driver in France at the Battle of Verdun. Three days later he wrote to his friend Rumsey Marvin:

The war is utter damn nonsense—a vast cancer fed by lies and self seeking malignity on the part of those who don’t do the fighting.

Of all the things in this world a government is the thing least worth fighting for.

None of the poor devils whose mangled dirty bodies I take to the hospital in my ambulance really give a damn about any of the aims of this ridiculous affair.

Before his wartime experiences, Dos Passos had only intellectualized his feelings of rebellion nurtured at Harvard, and later embellished during his bohemian days in Greenwich Village with its political radicals such as John Reed. These were heady days for someone who wanted to work in the arts. Dos Passos saw the Armory Show, which introduced Americans to the work of Picasso and Matisse; he attended performances of the Ballets Russes; and he was deeply affected by the literary radicalism of the poets Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot.

He had become a pacifistic, but knew that for a young man hoping to be a writer, he must experience the war firsthand. He volunteered for an ambulance unit and shipped to France on June 20, 1917. Near the end of July he joined a section of drivers headed toward the front. What he saw there was, he wrote in one of his journal entries, “horror . . . so piled up on horror that there can be no more. How damned ridiculous it all is! . . . All the cant and hypocrisy . . . all the vestiges of the old truth now putrid and false infect the air, choke you worse than German gas — the ministers from their damn smug pulpits, the business men — the heroics about war — my country right or wrong — Oh infinities of them!”

Mountain Interval by Robert Frost (1916)

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The first edition of Robert Frost’s third collection of poems, Mountain Interval, was published in 1916 by Henry Holt and Company and was dedicated “To you who least need reminding that before this interval of the South Branch under black mountains, there was another interval, the Upper at Plymouth, where we walked in spring beyond the covered bridge; but that the first interval of all was the old farm, our brook interval, so called by the man we had it from in sale.” The “you” Frost refers to is his wife, Elinore, to whom he dedicated most of his books. The “South Branch” is the Frosts’ farm in Franconia, New Hampshire. The “Upper at Plymouth” is a reference to their time spent together in Plymouth, New Hampshire. “The first interval” is another reference to time spent together, this time in Derry, New Hampshire. And the brook is Hyla Brook, by Frost’s farm in Derry, which provided the title of one of the poems in this volume. According to Jay Parini in his biography of Robert Frost, Robert Frost: A Life (1999), an interval is a “New England dialect term for land in a valley.” Therefore “mountain interval” provides a double meaning, suggesting a “pause in a journey as well as a dip in the landscape” (278). “The Road Not Taken” opens the volume and perhaps makes reference to this “mountain interval.”

Initially the collection did not sell as many copies as Frost’s previous collection, North of Boston, probably because his publisher rushed the book into print. Nevertheless, it contains some of Frost’s best-known and most celebrated poems, such as “The Road Not Taken,” “Birches,” and “Out, Out—.” Frost wrote the majority of the poems during his stay in England; whereas he wrote a few before leaving for Europe and reworked them for book publication, such as “Birches” and “Putting in the Seed.”

Naturally, Frost was disappointed by the book’s lack of sales, but it was to be expected of a third volume following so quickly on the heels of two previous collections, A Boy’s Will and North of Boston. Despite the book’s abysmal sales figures, most scholars agree that it was a seminal book in the history of modern poetry, virtually on the basis of “The Road Not Taken” and “Birches.”