Morris Beja

A World Without Cicci: Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli, 1940–2016

Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli (Cicci) passed away after a short and sudden illness on 20 March 2016, a little over three years after the death of her beloved husband Marino, whom she had cared for so devotedly ever since he had had a stroke. The loss of Cicci has profoundly moved friends and colleagues all over the globe. Actually, with Cicci there was no distinction between “friend” and “colleague”: everyone who knew her felt close to her. Certainly Ellen Carol Jones and I did, and we have sadly regretted not having been able to take advantage of her frequent invitations to repeat the one visit we made years ago to Marino’s and her lovely home in Bologna, in the center of town right next to the Two Towers; from the top of one of the towers you can look down to their patio, where we had a wonderful meal that she had prepared for us. Cicci was a friend and colleague not solely within the Joyce world. Her academic titles impressively show that: she was the founder—and Dean—of the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies in Translation, Language and Culture (Dipartimento di Studi Interdisciplinari su Traduzione, Lingue e Culture) at the University of Bologna-Forli, and, for example (only one example), she served a term on the Executive Board of the Italian Association of English Studies. When Raffaella Baccolini, Delia Chiaro, Chris Rundle, and Sam Whitsitt edited a festschrift in her honor in 2011, they published two volumes, one devoted to Joyce (A Joyceful of Talkatalka from Friendshapes for Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli) and the second, with almost twice as many pages, to a number of her other chief interests, Minding the Gap: Studies in Linguistic and Cultural Exchange. Among those interests was film. When she came to Ohio State to give a lecture, her argument was surprising and even, to me anyway, heretical: that in presenting a film to an audience in a foreign country, dubbing is preferable to subtitles. Cicci was in Ohio as a visiting professor at the University of Cincinnati; she also had that role (just to mention institutions in the U.S.) at Stanford University, the University of Wyoming, and the University of Miami. Of course her interests even within just (just?) the Joyce world were, to borrow the title of one of her books, no less myriadminded. She was especially though far from exclusively fascinated by the Wake. Her own essay in the volume she co-edited with Paola Pagliatti and Romana Zacchi, Myriadminded Man: Jottings on Joyce, begins, “Among Joyce’s works Finnegans Wake is the least read and certainly the least understood. Intellectuals, insulted by its difficulty, students, frightened by its obscurity and common readers, incapable of cop-

Work in Progress: The Years of Finnegans Wake , 1922–1941

Ulysses ended with Leopold and Molly Bloom late at night, asleep or about to sleep: for Joyce as for his Shem the Penman in Finnegans Wake, ‘fame would come … twixt a sleep and a wake’ (FW 192.20). On 10 March 1923 he wrote two pages which he described in a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver as ‘the first I have written since the final Yes of Ulysses’ (LI 202), which had been published more than a year earlier; those pages, dealing with the Irish King Roderick O’Conor, provided the inception of the book to which he would devote untold numbers of hours of his creative life during the decades of the 1920s and 1930s: Finnegans Wake.

The Curve of an Emotion: The Years of the Portrait, 1904–1914

Joyce began the earliest versions of what was ultimately to become A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man even before the first of the Dubliners stories. He wrote a sketch, or story, which Stanislaus suggested he call ‘A Portrait of the Artist’, in one day, 7 January 1904, after he heard that a new journal was being started, called Dana. He showed it to one of the editors, W. K. Magee (also called ‘John Eglinton’, as in Ulysses) one evening at the National Library; Magee records that he read it in Joyce’s presence and then ‘handed it back to him with the timid observation that I did not care to publish what was to myself incomprehensible’ (Workshop 200). The sketch is indeed dense, and one could be forgiven for feeling that not much was lost to the world of literature when Magee turned it down (aside from Magee’s chance to publish the future Great Writer); in fact the rejection gave Joyce the impetus to pursue his subject — himself — at length, in an autobiographical novel. He began, Stanislaus reports in his diary, ‘half in anger, to show that in writing about himself he has a subject of more interest than their aimless discussion’. Again, it was Stanislaus who supplied his brother with his working title: Stephen Hero (Diary 12), after the unlikely name of its protagonist, Stephen Daedalus.

Standing by the Door: The Early Work

It is largely on faith that we regard Stephen Dedalus as an artist; in the Portrait we see only one poem, his villanelle, about which perhaps the best that can be said is that its lushness is not to everyone’s taste. In Ulysses we see even less; the closest he comes to publishing anything is his helping Mr Deasy get his letter about foot and mouth disease into the newspaper. We hear nothing about Stephen’s writing any short stories, much less a novel. At the same age, James Joyce was already working on his collection of stories, Dubliners, had published literary and aesthetic criticism in the Fortnightly Review and elsewhere, and had begun to write his autobiographical novel Stephen Hero.

A Touch of the Artist: The Years of Ulysses, 1914–1922

In Ulysses, the Blooms live at 7 Eccles Street. Joyce came to know the address because he visited J. F. Byrne there, notably on that afternoon and evening, into the night, when Byrne had reassured him about Nora’s loyalty and Cosgrave’s ‘blasted lie’; Byrne lived in the house from 1908 to 1910, with two female cousins. Shortly before Joyce left Dublin in 1909, he visited the house once again, and he and Byrne took a long walk through the streets of Dublin. At one corner, they weighed themselves in a penny weighing machine and then walked back to Eccles Street — where Byrne discovered that his key was in his other trousers, up in his bedroom. Unperturbed, and not wanting to disturb his cousins, he climbed over the area railing, dropped down to the basement level and opened an unlocked door. Byrne was five feet, nine-and-a-half inches tall, and his weight according to the machine was eleven stone and four pounds (that is, 158 pounds), precisely the height and weight of Leopold Bloom, who had — in Joyce’s fictional world — lived in the house a few years before Byrne moved in.2 (Fortunately, no one ‘really’ lived there in June 1904, so Joyce could feel free to use it for the Blooms’ address.)

As All of Dublin: The Years of Youth, 1882–1904

In James Joyce’s life, as in his work, the concept of the family, and his family, were of primary importance. Throughout his adult life, like his own father before him, Joyce carried with him the family portraits, through all his wanderings and his many addresses. All the pictures, with the exception of one of his mother, were of the Joyces — that is, of James Joyce’s paternal ancestors.2