(Works in Indian ink, Indian ink wash, gouache, marker & pencil)
PROUST
James Joyce famously met Marcel Proust at the Majestic Hotel, Paris, in 1922, not long before Proust’s death. By all accounts Joyce was drunk, but there was little to no agreement on just what two of the century’s greatest writers discussed (apart from it being very little and generally banal). Neither had ever read the other’s work. In the above illustration, Proust’s ‘Salut” (rather than the expected ‘Santé’) and Joyce’s deafness to the solecism accentuates the complete lack of interest each held for the other. Irish art critic and friend of Joyce, Arthur Power observed: “Here are the two greatest literary figures of our time meeting and they ask each other if they like truffles.” Except that they probably did not, because no one account of their brief exchange jibes with another.
In his Joyce biography, Ellman doesn’t long dwell on Richard Wagner, devoting some small attention to Joyce’s apparently mixed feelings and seemingly studied indifference to the composer: “Joyce had no patience with the current adulation of Wagner, objecting that ‘Wagner puzza di sesso‘ (stinks of sex); Bellini, he said, was far better.” And: “The opera was Tannhäuser, the plot ridiculous to Joyce (‘What sort of a fellow is this Tannhäuser who, when he is with Saint Elizabeth, longs for the bordello of Venusberg, and when he is at the bordello longs to be with Saint Elizabeth?’).” … Apart from a reference to Joyce calling Tristan ‘magical’, that’s about it for Wagner in Ellman’s hands, and that includes the new and revised edition of James Joyce published in 1982. And yet, in 1981, a young American scholar, Timothy Peter Martin, had published his dissertation “The Influence Of Richard Wagner And His Music Dramas On The Works Of James Joyce” (University of Pennsylvania), followed a decade later with his book Joyce And Wagner (CUP). It is now generally accepted that Wagner was a major influence on Joyce. From the Penn Libraries ‘Abstract’ of Martin’s thesis: