Ernest Hemingway Talks of James Joyce
“ Once upon a time and a very good time it was…”
The above photograph of James Joyce, probably taken in the Dublin family garden in the 1890s, is still the best ever taken of him, because it shows a young man of strength and determination, who can’t wait to get away from a suffocating Ireland governed by a repressive religion and lackadaisical politics, plus a rising spirit of violent revolution, the very thought of which he despised. It is a photograph of a prototype Teddy Boy, albeit a well educated one steeped in philosophy, languages, classical history and literature(and a love of the work of playwright Henrik Ibsen), who was already writing short stories and poems that were undefinedly different, yet familiar.
Undefinedly different, yet familiar, remained at the heart of Joyce’s work.
During the latter stages of WWII ( three or four years after Joyce’s death), Ernest Hemingway, now a war correspondent, was sleeping in an old hunting lodge in a forest when a shell from a German 88 blew the tops out of six trees less than a hundred yards away. Then, hearing heavy gun fire, Hemingway ran to the window of his room only to see his driver, Archie Pelkey, rushing outside, completely naked, firing a Browning sub-machine gun.
