-
3. Love, Marriage, and Moral Adjudication: “That high unconsortable one”
- University Press of Florida
- Chapter
- Additional Information
3 Love, Marriage, and Moral Adjudication “That high unconsortable one” Chamber Music was Joyce’s first creative work. A development of some early lyrics, gathered under the titles Shine and Dark and Moods, it originated in some of his epiphanies and his reading of Yeats, Paul Verlaine, and Ben Jonson . A careful arrangement of thirty-six lyrics written 1901–4 (but mainly 1901–2), it is, in Yeats’s phrase that Joyce would make famous, “the poetry of a young man” (Letters II: 23). Joyce made several unsuccessful efforts to have this sequence published before turning it over to his brother Stanislaus, whose rearrangement of the poems finally found a publisher, Elkin Matthews, in 1907. By that time, Joyce had passed on to another phase in his own career and did not interfere with his brother’s arrangement. The Beinecke Library, Yale University, contains an autographed copy of Chamber Music, dated June 1905, following the last sequencing of the poems in which he took a personal interest. Within the following two months, as we have seen, he wrote “A Painful Case.” There is good reason to infer, from a comparison of Chamber Music and “A Painful Case,” why Joyce was no longer so concerned with the order, or indeed the fate, of Chamber Music, as he told Stanislaus on October 9, 1906 (Letters II: 172), and subsequently explained, “I have certain ideas I would like to give form to: not as a doctrine but as the continuation of the expression of myself which I now see I began in Chamber Music” (March 1, 1907, Letters II: 217). We know that an enthusiasm for vocal song—for example, the love songs of the Elizabethans, John Dowland, William Byrd, and Thomas Nashe (P 233.6–7)—was among Joyce’s artistic interests at the time he was writing Dubliners . He copied out some of these ayres and sang them on social occasions. During the first half of 1905, shortly before he wrote “A Painful Case,” he was drawing to the close of Stephen Hero. In chapter XXII (May, Letters II: 88), he wrote: One evening he sat [silent] at his piano while the dusk enfolded him. The dismal sunset lingered still upon the window-panes in a smoulder 62 / James Joyce’s Painful Case of rusty fires. Above him and about him hung the shadow of decay, the decay of leaves and flowers, the decay of hope. (SH 162) Still fumbling with the images that had carried him through Chamber Music, he was on the verge of conceiving the new language of Dubliners. This passage is a prose reformulation of the images and rhythms of Chamber Music that Joyce had written during the previous four years. From its motifs of evening, silence, piano, and decay of hope, we can also infer the gestation of “A Painful Case,” and, therefore, the close genealogical relations between Chamber Music and “A Painful Case.” If we observe the order governing the 1905 Yale manuscript, we can see that the “innocuous melody” of Chamber Music gives voice to a disappointed quest. William York Tindall summarizes: The thirty-six poems tell a story of young love and failure. At the beginning the lover is alone. He meets a girl and their love, after suitable fooling, is almost successful. Then a rival intrudes. The hero’s devotion gives way to irony and, at last, despair. Alone again at the end, the lover goes off into exile. (CM 41) Between his composition of these poems and his reading of the page proofs, he had met Nora Barnacle, really fallen in love, and matured to the point that he could write, “It is not a book of love-verses at all, I perceive” (Letters II: 219). What Joyce most likely meant by this is that neither of the figures in Chamber Music is really a lover, but a pair of narcissists, one of whom considers himself an artist, and each of whom experiences the “other” but fails to respond in the assimilative manner we call “love.” There is a relationship between the maturing of Joyce’s artistry from the self-delusions of Chamber Music to the critical acuity of Dubliners, just as there is a personal maturing of the dreamy and self-absorbed Joyce in the loving presence of Nora Barnacle. In Stanislaus’s tart summation, “As for his love poems, the fact is that when he did fall in love, he stopped writing them” (MBK 152). Just as Chamber Music...