Two Irishmen in Paris

Innovations in literature are born from the author’s natural drive to create. There is an audience that quickly tires of being sold the same story, told the exact same way, over and over again. This claim, however, is countered by the many authors who, once they stumble upon a fictional character that lets them churn out a series, prefer not to risk their good name in the slightest.

Look no further than the fictional detective Jules Maigret, to whom Belgian writer Georges Simenon dedicated no fewer than 75 novels and 28 short stories over four decades of cyclopean output.

Assuming risks, being willing to lose the favor of an audience that just wants more of the same—meaning the author would have to suppress their natural drive to create—is the succinct reason why modernist writers remain so fascinating. This holds true even when they openly mocked all those cowardly authors who defaulted to writing whatever happened to be trendy at the time.

For a good laugh, look at Virginia Woolf’s delightful essay Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. Or the pastiches a young Marcel Proust wrote in Le Figaro, “Filial Sentiments of a Parricide”, a psychological piece written in 1907 analyzing an acquaintance who murdered his mother, exploring guilt and maternal bonds with dark precision.

Of course, for savage mockery aimed at cheap, baby-rattle prose—neatly folded and clean as laundry in a drawer, meant for quick consumption without taxing the intellect too much, once known as commercial entertainment—nothing beats two Irishmen in Paris who took the City of Light as their adopted home.

Rivers of ink have been spilled over their work, of course, because their innovations were truly mind-bending. While one wanted to trap the entire world within a single day, the other wanted to strip time of all meaning, leaving it in an infinite loop where absolutely nothing happened.

Between these two Irishmen settled in Paris—far removed from the suffocating, idiotic nationalism that had taken over their island—a relationship formed that nearly ended in family ties during the first half of 1930. The first was at the very pinnacle of the literary ziggurat following the publication of Ulysses, thanks to Sylvia Beach, an enthusiastic bookseller who poured her soul into the work to publish it with meticulous care. The second was a 23-year-old sorcerer’s apprentice with no published work, save for two pieces in literary magazines dedicated to enthusiastically buttering up the first. I am talking about James Joyce and Samuel Beckett.

Let the record show I’ve avoided mentioning either author until now precisely to keep myself from buttering them up. While I always crack up reading “Circe”, the 15th chapter of Ulysses, or lose myself in Molly Bloom’s final monologue, the rest of the book is relentlessly over the top. As for Samuel Beckett, I can’t stand his later mental tailspins, nor was I ever a fan of the Theater of the Absurd. Still, his organic transition from English to French is fascinating, as is the reason he gave for it: to write “without style”—the primary motivation for so many other transnational authors. It must be because beautiful books are written in a kind of foreign language, when they strain syntax, alter rhythms, and bring an unprecedented cadence, forcing readers out of their comfort zone to project their own imagination into the gaps of the text.

Joyce was in a highly delicate spot as a writer because he had gone completely blind in his left eye and only had about ten percent vision left in his right. This was the result of a severe bout of glaucoma, iritis, and cataracts—a nightmare in that pre-antibiotic, pre-laser-surgery era. Just picturing it makes me blink out of sheer apprehension.

On top of that, alongside Nora Barnacle, he had founded the most dysfunctional family imaginable. Even so, his devotion to his daughter Lucia was boundless: possessing an artistic personality just like her father’s, she was already on the verge of being declared schiz