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Joyce corrected Gorman's description of her as 'blond' to 'rousse auburn' [e725] same as Rita Hayworth?
Barnacle name
1884: 21 March (or 22 or 24?) born 'Norah Joseph Barnacle' to 38yo Thomas (an illiterate baker) and ?28yo Annie (Honoraria Healy, dressmaker, n9 says '26yo')
1886 or 1889: sent to live with grandmother Healy
1889: starts school at convent
1891: graduates to national school
1893? held back in fourth year (ie flunked)
"It is Christmas, in Galway, a moonlit Christmas Eve with snow. She is carrying picture almanacs to her grandmother's house to be ornamented with holly and ivy. The evenings are spent in the house of a friend where they give her lemonade. Lemonade and currant-cake are also her grandmother's fare for her. She thumps the piano and sits with her dark-complexioned gipsy-looking friend Emily Lyons on the window sill." {JAJ notes for Exiles, 1913]
?: friend Emily Lyons moves to America
"It is the quay of Galway Harbour on a bright morning. The emigrant ship is going away and Emily, her dark friend, stands on the deck going out to America. They kiss and cry bitterly. But she believes that some day her dark friend will come back as she promises. She cries for the pain of separation and for the dangers of the sea that threaten the girl who is going away. The girl is older than she and has no lover. She too has no lover. Her sadness is brief. She is alone, friendless in her grandmother's garden and can see the garden, lonely now, in which the day before she played with her friend. Her grandmother consoles her, gives her a new clean pinafore to wear and buttoned boots, a present from her uncle, and nice bread and butter to eat and a big fire to sit down to." {JAJ notes for Exiles, 1913]
1896: Norah completes schooling; starts as porteress at convent; mother throws out father for drinking
1896: family moves to Bowling Green (street) [museum] ditto [tour]
1896: crush on 16yo Michael Feeney (d1897 of typhoid and pneumonia)
1897: death of grandmother, moves to convent?
1900: death of 20yo Michael Bodkin [grave]
1900: fondled by 29yo Father Moran
1900: ex-boyfriend Kearns dies of enteric fever at Bloemfontein (cf Gardner in U)
"At the convent they called her the man-killer" [JAJ in Exiles notes]
1901: living with mother, working as laundress
1903? living with mother and uncle Tom Healy
1903: 'walks' with Protestant Willie Mulvagh (cf Mulvey in U); thrashed by uncle; flees to Dublin, chambermaid at Finn's Hotel
"You told me that a gentleman named Holohan... wanted to fuck you when you were in that hotel, using what they call a 'French letter'." [SL158, JAJ to NB 07Aug1909]
1904:
10 June (Fri): meets Joyce in Nassau street [old pic]
15 June (Wed): stands up JAJ on first date: [SL21]
"I may be blind. I looked for a long time at a head of reddish-brown hair and decided it was not yours. I went home quite dejected. I would like to make an appointment but it might not suit you. I hope you will be kind enough to make one with me-- if you have not forgotten me! James A Joyce"
16 June (Thu): Bloomsday [info]
22 June (Wed): JAJ gets black eye from escort of girl he accosts on Stephen's Green (maybe thinking she's NB?)
23 June (Thu): NB's first surviving letter calls JAJ 'My Precious Darling'
Cosgrave's 1909 accusation: [SL158, JAJ to NB 07Aug1909]
"At the time I used to meet you at the corner of Merrion Square and walk out with you and feel your hand touch me in the dark and hear your voice... at the time I used to meet you, every second night you kept an appointment with a friend of mine outside the Museum, you went with him along the same streets, down by the canal, past the 'house with the upstairs in it', down to the bank of the Dodder. You stood with him: he put his arm round you and you lifted your face and kissed him. What else did you do together? And the next night you met me!"
21 July: JAJ replaces stolen glove
undated: JAJ complains she won't meet him Sat, Sun, or Mon [SL23]
letters to JAJ
15 Aug letter from JAJ
16 Aug: 'copybook' letter to JAJ
20 Aug letter from JAJ
(The Irish postal system could deliver such local letters the same day. Nora had sent 13 by September.)
late August: first frig
"It was you yourself, you naughty shameless girl who first led the way. It was not I who first touched you long ago down at Ringsend. It was you who slid your hand down down inside my trousers and pulled my shirt softly aside and touched my prick with your long tickling fingers and gradually took it all, fat and stiff as it was, into your hand and frigged me slowly until I came off through your fingers, all the time bending over me and gazing at me out of your quiet saintlike eyes... Did you never never, never feel a man's or a boy's prick in your fingers until you unbuttoned me?" [3 Dec 1909 to Nora]
27 Aug: Cosgrave escorts Nora to hear JAJ sing
29 Aug letter from JAJ [Spanish] [SL26]
"You have misunderstood, I think, some passages in a letter I wrote you and I have noticed a certain shyness in your manner as if the recollection of that night troubled you. I however consider it a kind of sacrament and the recollection of it fills me with amazed joy. You will perhaps not understand at once why it is that I honour you so much on account of it as you do not know much of my mind. But at the same time it was a sacrament which left in me a final sense of sorrow and degradation-- sorrow because I saw in you an extraordinary, melancholy tenderness which had chosen that sacrament as a compromise, and degradation because I understood that in your eyes I was inferior to a convention of our present society... It is not pleasant for me that I have to go to bed now remembering the last look of your eyes-- a look of tired indifference-- remembering the torture in your voice the other night... you can treat my words with painful rudeness ('I know what is talking now' you said)..."
Sept: JAJ lets Nora call him 'Jim'
15 Sept: Gogarty throws Joyce out of Tower; JAJ asks NB "Is there one who understands me?"
8 Oct: elopes to Europe
1904-05: Nora studies French ("very slowly") in anticipation of move to Paris [e186]
1904: circa 1 Dec Miramar dinner, see below #
winter 1904-05: Nora cooks English puddings at JAJ's request [e188] calls him "simple-minded Jim" [e189]
1905: 07Feb: JAJ to Stannie: "Her disposition, as I see it, is much nobler than my own, her love also is greater than mine for her. I admire her and I love her and I trust her-- I cannot tell how much. I trust her." [e191]
1905: summer: Nora has learned only 30 words of Triestino, cries a lot [e202]
07Jul: JAJ to Stannie: "Nora is incapable of any of the deceits which pass for current morality... she is really very helpless and unable to cope with any kind of difficulties." [e202]
1905: 04Dec, JAJ to Aunt Jo: "Nora does not seem to make much difference between me and the rest of the men she has known and I can hardly believe that she is justified in this." [e214]
1908: 4 Aug miscarriage
Dec 1922 notebook VI.B.10 p80 "incest made crime 1908"
JAJ to NB: "A few days before I left Trieste I was walking with you in the Via Stadion.. A priest passed us and I said to you 'Do you not find a kind of repulsion or disgust at the sight of one of those men?' You answered a little shortly and drily 'No, I don't.' You see, I remember all these small things. Your reply hurt me and silenced me. It and other things you have said to me linger a long time in my mind. Are you with me, Nora, or are you secretly against me?" [e304, 27Oct09]
1909: letters from JAJ [English] [French]
1911: flirtation with Prezioso (cf Exiles) [more]
1912: JAJ of William Blake's uneducated wife: "...in his unlimited egoism, he wanted the soul of his beloved to be entirely a slow and painful creation of his own, freeing and purifying daily under his very eyes, the demon (as he says) hidden in the cloud." [e189]
1913: Joyce's notes for 'Exiles' explore Nora (as 'Bertha'): [etext]
"The soul like the body may have a virginity. For the woman to yield it or for the man to take it is the act of love. Love (understood as the desire of good for another) is in fact so unnatural a phenomenon that it can scarcely repeat itself, the soul being unable to become virgin again and not having energy enough to cast itself out again into the ocean of another's soul...Bertha is fatigued and repelled by the restless curious energy of Richard's mind and her fatigue is soothed by Robert's placid politeness."
1922: 1 April: Nora to Ireland w/kids (GJ 16, LJ 14) "O my dearest, if you would only turn to me even now and read the terrible book which has now broken the heart in my breast..." L3-63
1922: Oct "In Nice, as in all their travels, and eye problems notwithstanding, the Joyces were diligent tourists, seeing the sights, buying souvenirs, and writing postcards to all their friends. One day they went from Nice to Menton and on the border between France and Italy bought cameos from old women on the bridge. Joyce had one mounted on a gold ring. In Nice Nora and Lucia amused themselves by going out to tea at cafes on the promenade. Back at their hotel Nora evaded secretarial duty, but Lucia was not so lucky. Joyce found plenty for her to do. Although Lucia's English was better than Giorgio's it was full of mistakes in spelling and punctuation, for which she had to take down his dictated apologies." (Maddox pp214-215, synopsizing letters, mostly to HSW)
1922: Scribbledehobble notes
"JJ was caudela for O.G. Tripcovich, Miss Popper, Miss Luzzatto, BR, Nora, Mr Sauter, Schaureck" pimp???
1923: to sister Kathleen: "He's a weakling, Kathleen. I always have to be after his tail. I wish I was married to a man like my father. Being married to a writer is a very hard life." Kathleen's contrast: "Nora all go and Jim all stand-still." [e554]
1920s? "I can't sleep anymore... I go to bed and then that man sits in the next room and continues laughing about his own writing. And then I knock at the door, and I say, now Jim, stop writing or stop laughing!" (WP255; JJQ1974)
1924? "I've always told him he should give up writing and take up singing. To think he was once on the same platform with John McCormack!" [e561]
1927: "Why don't you write sensible books that people can understand?" [e590]
no-date, when he was drunk: "I'll be taking the children and going back to Ireland." [e557]
1929: hysterectomy 05Feb
1930? NB to Beckett: "He knows nothing at all about women." [e629]
1931: 4 July married
1931: NB to her sister Kathleen: [e639]
"There's one thing I hate-- going out to dinner and sitting with artists till 1:00 in the morning. They'd bore you stiff, Kathleen."[of sex with JAJ] "I hate it, Kathleen."
1932: May: NB to Stuart Gilbert "It's all over. I won't live with him any more." to JAJ "I wish you would go drown yourself." [e687]
She said that he gave her and Lucia an unbearable life, that he wasted endless money on Sullivan and on tipping, that they had no settled home... [later:] "I've given in again." [e688]
1935: 01May: JAJ to HSW: [e683]
"...though I have the faithful support of my wife and Léon's loyal friendship and that of others here to say nothing of your own patience and sympathy there are moments and hours when I have nothing in my heart but rage and despair..."
1936: Nora frequently threatens to leave "I wish I had never met anyone of the name of James Joyce." [e687]
1936? NB to Hemingway: "Ah, Jim could do with a spot of that lion hunting." [e695]
summer 1938: "I've no energy. I don't bother about him any more. He can do what he pleases... I never get but three words out of him all day these days, with that chop suey he's writing. In the morning, 'The papers!' At lunch, 'What's that?' And the third... about his bottle of water on the floor, 'Don't touch that!'" [e710]
early 1940: [e730]
NB: "There sits a man who has not spoken one word to me all day."
JAJ: "What is there to talk about when you have been married 30 years?"
Jan 1941: Joyce dies, Nora stays in Zurich: "Things are very dull now. There was always something doing when he was about." [e743]
"Sure if you've been married to the greatest writer in the world you don't remember all the little fellows." [e743]
10 April 1951: dies of uremic poisoning after receiving last rites [e743]
16 June 1966: reburied next to Joyce [e743]
early doubtful? ditto small Aran costume, cartoon, watercolor
Book
The double-witness of the Dead and Molly's Glencree dinner makes it fairly certain that a night out, shortly before 3 Dec 1904, led to Nora's spilling out sad stories of her youth. At the Caffe Miramar, Joyce had left Nora alone at the table one night with a thoughtless young chap named Eyers, who brought Nora to tears, implying she wasn't worthy of Jim, forcing Joyce to send him away.
This undated note survives, which Ellmann guesses was passed under the table:
Caffe Miramar, Pola, Austria"Dear Nora For God's sake do not let us be in any way unhappy tonight. If there is anything wrong please tell me. I am beginning to tremble already and if you do not soon look at me as you used I shall have to run up and down the cafe. Nothing you can do will annoy me tonight. I will not be made unhappy by anything. When we go home I will kiss you a hundred times. Has this fellow annoyed you or did I annoy you by stopping away? Jim"
Presumably this is the same occasion described here months later:
12 July 1905 to Stannie: "She is also sensitive and in Pola I once had to turn the English teacher, a thoughtless young chap named Eyers, out of the room (much as I dislike the office) for making her cry."
And maybe this too?
07 July 1905 to Stannie: "One of the English teachers said that she was not worthy of me..." [e202]
And if this did indeed lead to an outpouring like Gretta's in The Dead, then it must predate this letter:
3 Dec 1904 to Stannie: "She has told me something of her youth, and admits the gentle art of self satisfaction. She has had many love affairs, one when quite young with a boy who died..."
But Bloom and Molly went thru the same thing after the Glencree dinner:
U13.889 "Molly, lieutenant Mulvey that kissed her under the Moorish wall beside the gardens. Fifteen she told me. But her breasts were developed. Fell asleep then. After Glencree dinner that was when we drove home. Featherbed mountain. Gnashing her teeth in sleep. Lord mayor had his eye off her too. Val Dillon. Apoplectic." [Nausikaa]
Molly's version:
U18.427, of Lenehan: "he was making free with me after the Glencree dinner coming back that long joult over the featherbed mountain after the lord Mayor looking at me with his dirty eyes Val Dillon that big heathen I first noticed him at dessert when I was cracking the nuts with my teeth I wished I could have picked every morsel of that chicken out of my fingers it was so tasty and browned and as tender as anything only for I didnt want to eat everything on my plate" [Penelope]
My reconstruction is that Nora, hungry and not-entirely-cultured, committed some etiquette gaffe (like cracking nuts with her teeth or devouring the chicken down to the bone) and Eyers made a rude comment.
This became a bonding exerience as Nora spilled her heart afterwards, including the Bodkin story (echoed in The Dead).
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