Word: stanislaus
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Just as Joyce was obsessed by Dublin and needed to get it out of his system, so Stanislaus was obsessed by James Joyce, and this book was his exorcism. With the true Joycean alchemy, he took truths that were ugly, sordid and violent and composed a memoir that is grave and serene. Yet he did not wholly escape his brother. He died in 1955, on June 16-Bloomsday, i.e., the day in the life of Leopold Bloom chronicled in Ulysses. It was a day Stanislaus himself annually celebrated with a party...
...Stanislaus became indignant when Jim took to boozing and wenching with Oliver St. John Gogarty, the "stately plump Buck Mulligan" of Ulysses. Recalls Stanislaus of his brother: "I hated to see him glossy-eyed and slobbery-mouthed." Gogarty confessed to another friend that he wanted "to make Joyce drink in order to break his spirit," and celebrated the occasions of sin with a limerick...
...himself, says Stanislaus, "I determined to give continence a fair trial." He also generalizes that "women do not interest Irishmen except as streetwalkers or housekeepers...
Ulysses or Madness? Joyce's junior by nearly three years, Stanislaus 'makes no unseemly claims for his own influence on his brother during these apprentice years. He does report having arranged the order of the poems in Chamber Music and suggested the title. This gives the lie to Gogarty, who claimed that Joyce was inspired by the tinkle of a night pot in a brothel. For Joyce, the incomparable word-distiller, the charm doubtless rested in the title's double meaning...
...Stanislaus lived to complete his memoir, Editor Richard Ellmann is certain that he would have pressed the claim that he saved his brother from the triple threat of dissipation, dubious friends and inertia. Joyce never admitted the need to be saved from anything, but Jung himself is reported to have said after reading Ulysses that Joyce would have gone mad had he not written the book...