Joyce, James.

the first letter in james joyce's "torrent of fantasy" written to nora barnacle during their separation of December 1909, discovered now for the first time, unseen by all Joyce scholars and unpublished.

"[Joyce] wishes to possess his wife's soul, and have her in his, in utter nakedness. To know someone else beyond love and hate, beyond vanity and remorse, beyond human possibility almost, in his extravagant desire" (Richard Ellmann, Introduction to Selected Letters, p.xxv)

The day after the present letter was written Joyce wrote again from Dublin to his beloved Nora  wondering whether he should apologise for the "extraordinary letter I wrote you last night". They were undergoing the second of two separations that year, when the writer had returned to Dublin for the first time since their elopement in October 1904. Joyce had returned to his native city to pursue one of his occasional entrepreneurial schemes (all, alas, unsuccessful), in this instance to bring the modern miracle of cinema to the inhabitants of Dulbin. In a footnote to the 2 December letter, published in Selected Letters of James Joyce (p.180) the editor Richard Ellmann remarks, "Joyce's letter of 1 December 1909 has not survived".  The present lot is that very letter, thus restoring the missing link in the most famous erotic correspondence in modern world literature.

The exchange of highly explicit letters, "this scalding marathon" (Edna O'Brien) was famously initiated by Nora either in a moment of extreme desire or, perhaps, "in a determination to keep [Joyce] excited and faithful to her in his absence" (O'Brien, p.71).  [Other factors, such as money (he would send her funds to purchase the drawers and frilly undergarments he loved) and a wish to keep Joyce away from the whores of Nightown during his prolonged absence, may have played a part.] The current letter, written from his father's house in Fontenoy Street that he shared with his family,  "his glands in a pandemonium" (op.cit.), is Joyce's first response to her cue. The letter testifies, in typically precise and almost exaggerated detail,  to his "ungovernable lust" (as Joyce terms it), his sexually intoxicated state as he describes how he wishes to satisfy his and Nora's expressed desire in a variety of sexual couplings, acts and circumstances, reflecting Joyce's sexual tastes, predilections and obsessions. In addition he importunes her about the state of her body and her clothing, and urges her to write to him again.

Joyce's next communication, written the following day on 2 December (and already quoted above) records that whilst writing the present  letter Joyce had Nora's famous cue lying open in front of him, with his eyes focused on a particular word, the letters of which had the look of something "obscene and lecherous".  (see Selected Letters, p.180) Nora's letter, together with her later apparently encouraging responses to Joyce's outpourings, has not survived.

From the comment at the end of the present letter asking Nora not to be offended at what he has written, and that in the letter of the following day which starts by begging her pardon, there was in Joyce's mind--despite Nora's bald injunction--a slight anxiety as to how she would now react to him. There is therefore a tension inherent in the current letter (will Nora hate me? will she think me depraved?) that one can see slowly diminishing in the nine later letters in the series, deliriously written in the short period between 2nd and 20th December (first published by Richard Ellmann in the Selected Letters, 1975). On the 3rd December he was still worried that the letters must look rather awful in the cold light of day and that the wildness of his reply to her first missive exceeded all bounds (see Selected Letters, p.182).

And although his anxiety normally surfaces only once the frenzy the letters express is over there is a countervailing swing back towards desire and lust as soon as Nora's next letter arrives and she provides permission for him to indulge his wildest fantasies; or more accurately reminiscences, since they had actively played out a number of sexual fantasies during the break between Joyce's first and second visit to Dublin in 1909. The scene has been evocatively described by Edna O'Brien in her short biography of Joyce:

"...The bucket had to be sent down into a woman's sexual department to know her at her most torrid and who best to meet his summons than Nora, she who had `made him a man' that first night in Ringsend. Just as Leopold Bloom would wallow in the inner organs of beast and fowls, Joyce wanted to wallow in the inner maelstrom of woman's desire....She was his lust-mad accomplice `with the whore's glow in her slumbrous eyes'. Their hectic copulations had to be relived in order to further their rabid desires and to substantiate his leap in literature" (James Joyce, 1999)

It is particularly noteworthy that in one passage of the present letter Joyce compares Nora to a "wild-eyed whore", and describes a sexual encounter very akin to that of their very first date together, 16 June 1904 (later immortalised by Joyce as the day on which Ulysses is set), when she had taken him to Ringsend, opened his trousers, and  "made a man of him".  Another aspect is the absence of corrections and revisions: like the other letters in the series, the present example is neat, and the handwriting small and careful--at least until the climactic finale, when a slightly more expansive style is in evidence. Brenda Maddox believes that Joyce "seized the opportunity to rehearse the techniques he was going to use in his future writing. He was going to tell the truth. He demanded of himself--and of Nora--exactly what Freud was asking of his patients in the new art of psychoanalysis: to put every thought, however shameful, into words without flinching" (Nora, p.141). She also speculates that, given "the clarity of the filthiest passages...Joyce may even have copied them from rough drafts he wrote during the day" (this would be in the same way that later, he would re-work and re-draft episodes of Ulysses). As already noted however, the letters are "punctuated by exclamations of relief" (op.cit.). In one later letter Joyce confesses that the need to change his trousers has prevented him from catching the last post. Over and above their content, style and appearance all the letters in the series have as much importance simply as erotic objects in themselves: see lot 199 for an account of Joyce's and Nora's belief in the healing, as well as the erotic properties of fur and other materials.

The content of the present, and of the other letters in the series, is perhaps all the more remarkable for the fact that Joyce was well-known for his hatred of obscene jokes and any obscene speech. In another passage in his 3 December letter to Nora he commented how much he avoided obscene phrases in speaking, and how she had never heard him utter anything unseemly in company: but Nora seemed to turn him into a "beast" (Selected Letters, p.182) Yet Joyce never made any effort, or gave any instructions for the erotic letters be destroyed: "It remains indisputable that if Joyce had not wanted the letters to survive, he would have destroyed them after returning to Trieste early in 1910" (Maddox, Nora, p.524). More tellingly, perhaps, he never hid the fact that for him, "the stuff of his literature was his own life and that, like Shem the Penman, he `wrote with the ink of himself over the skin of his body' " (op.cit, quoting from Finnegans Wake).

In publishing all of Joyce's known letters to Nora for the first time in 1974, Richard Ellmann commented that "the letters to Nora Barnacle Joyce...are psychologically the most important [of all his correspondence]."  It is remarkable that the most intense of these were confined to this short period between 1st and 20th December 1909, the first in the series now being re-discovered. Nora and Joyce never corresponded in this manner again.

"Having become partners in spiritual love, they must now share an onanistic complicity, agitating each other to sexual climax by means of their letters. In this way Joyce renewed the conspiratorial and passionate understanding that they had had when they first left Ireland together......" (Richard Ellmann, preface to Selected Letters in which the other erotic letters to Nora are published for the first time, 1974)