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Journal of Modern Literature 26.1 (2002) 73-89



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"Non più andrai farfallone rumoroso"

"You Will Go No More, Noisy Butterfly": Joyce and Antheil 1

To Guy Livingston
Triests, Italy

At present I am leaving here tonight because I could not find anything but the most expensive hotel and all the others are filled to the jeans. I just simply can't afford it. If they find it necessary to find me in Trieste I'll come back in ten days, for a day—but I don't believe its worth it. I expected they'd pull the thing off long ago anyway. I can't afford to wait in jammed cities.2

Thus, the twenty-five-year-old American composer George Antheil—born in Trenton, New Jersey—wrote to Sylvia Beach (the publisher of Ulysses) in Paris from the Hotel Continentale in Trieste, Italy. The hotel is located in Via San Nicolò, in front of the Joyce family's apartments in the building formerly belonging to the Berlitz School, where in fact Stanislaus Joyce lived. What did he exactly mean by "they find it necessary to find me in Trieste" and "I can't afford to wait in jammed cities"? Or that the same day, an article appeared in the Paris edition of the New York Herald?

American Lost in Wilds of Sahara Sands

George Antheil, composer, Seeking New Themes, Sends no Word since End of August [End Page 73]

The article reports that "His last message . . . apparently had been sent by courier from the Matmada Plateau region, beyond the Troglodite Country." Other anglophone newspapers in Paris published the same news; the Daily Mail wrote: "Missing Composer Seeking Arab Music in the Desert," and the Chicago Tribune: "Friend of Composer Antheil Fears He is Lost in African Desert." 3 Since Antheil's letter testifies that in those days he was in Trieste, we can understand that this was a publicity stunt organized by Antheil and his friend Bravig Imbs, just to increase curiosity about his latest work, the now notorious Ballet mécanique which he had been composing and announcing since 1924.

Imbs explains in his memoirs that, after completing the work, Antheil took a month's vacation in Tunis. Before leaving, he planned everything to attract the papers attention. Then, while he was in Africa, on the eighteenth of September, the music was presented to some newspapermen and to a chosen audience including Sylvia Beach, Adrienne Monnier, Elliot Paul, and James Joyce. Antheil had imagined a work for sixteen pianolas and percussion. This version was never performed because of problems with the synchronization, but Pleyel had perforated the three rolls of music, and on that date the one-roll version was presented.

Imbs remembers:

The terrific thumping . . . electrified the audience. Joyce seemed gripped in spite of himself. . . . The Ballet was so intense and concentrated, so strange and even irritating to the ear, that there was a gasp of audible relief when the first roll abruptly finished. . . .
And then (at the end of the third roll) Mr. Joyce asked to hear a part of the second roll again! . . . The girl pumped now and again, making little spurts of sound until she found the measures which had interested Joyce. Heard away from their context these few bars lost none of their peculiar vitality. Mr. Joyce was highly satisfied. "That's like Mozart," he said. 4

It seems strange that Joyce, who liked Bellini, Rossini, Verdi, Puccini, and Strauss, was interested also in peculiar "ultramodern" music. Antheil had been labeled "pianist-futurist"; the author of pieces such as Airplane Sonata and Death of Machines was, moreover, a scandal-seeking enfant terrible. The likeliest explanation for Joyce's "strange connection" is thatthe Irish writer and the American composer were simply friends. As Antheil himself explained to Stanley Hart:

Another dear friend of mine is James Joyce, whose visits to this little place of ours is frequent, and one of the few places he really goes with enjoyment. Joyce likes me, and seeks me...

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