Truth and fiction collide in Cork author's new novel

BLOOMSDAY is celebrated every year on June 16 to mark the day in 1904 when writer James Joyce met his future wife, Norah Barnacle, for their first date in Dublin.

My new novel, Penelope Unbound (Banshee Press) concentrates on another date in 1904 - October 20 - when James and Norah, having eloped from Dublin together, arrived in Trieste where he’d been promised a job teaching English at the Berlitz School.

Joyce left Norah outside the railway station while he went to find accommodation for the hard-up couple. He got embroiled in a fight with a couple of sailors and was locked up for his troubles.

A penniless 20-year-old Norah was left alone for almost an entire day and night, sitting on their suitcases at the station in a city where she knew no-one and where she didn’t speak the language.

In real life, she waited for him. My novel asks - what if she hadn’t?

Penelope Unbound is a literary mash-up where real and fictional characters from Joyce’s life and work are ‘sampled’ and appear in new guises to create a fresh destiny for Norah, not as the muse of a great writer but as a woman in her own right.

So, in my version of events, it’s Norah who becomes a teacher of English in Trieste and develops a close relationship with the Austro-Hungarian writer, Italo Svevo - as Joyce did in real life.

Joyce championed Svevo’s work, helping to have his novel, The Conscience Of Zeno, published in Paris in 1923 after his own success with Ulysses. That novel is now regarded as a classic of Italian literature.

(Norah knew Svevo too, but only from doing his laundry, which she took in to supplement the Joyces’ meagre family income when they were in Trieste.)

In the novel, however, Norah fares better economically. She returns alone to Dublin as an independent businesswoman, the proprietor of Finn’s Hotel. Ten years after they ‘lose’ one another, Norah and Joyce meet again.

But to see what happens next, you’ll have to buy the book.

Another ‘what if’ about Joyce’s life, is how he narrowly missed out on being the son of a Cork merchant prince.

The Joyces were salt merchants and owned properties around Douglas Street, Dunbar Street, White Street and South Terrace.

If his father had been more prudent with his finances, James Joyce might have been a Cork business tycoon.

John Joyce, an only child, born in 1849, lived a charmed existence for the first 25 years of his life. He was a rich young man about town, heir to a fortune, albeit diminishing through bad management.

He attended Queen’s College, now UCC, to study medicine, but the distractions of his social life meant he failed to finish. He spent his summers at the family’s holiday home at Glenbrook.

As a child he’d suffered from typhus and his father arranged to have him sent out on the pilot boats to meet the transatlantic liners calling into Cobh (then Queenstown) to inhale the bracing salt air of Cork Harbour.

When John’s father died in 1866, he inherited a considerable amount of property in Cork, but by 1891 he had moved to Dublin, married against family advice, mortgaged his properties away and was the unemployed father of ten children.

The rest, as they say, is history.

In the course of writing the novel, I discovered another unlikely Cork connection.

Three years before Joyce arrived in Trieste, his friend and fellow author, Italo Svevo, mentioned above, visited Cobh, an unlikely destination for an Italian tourist at the time.

But this was a business trip. Svevo worked for his wife’s family paint manufacturing business. The Veneziani firm had patented a soap-based paint which protected the hulls of ships from seaweed and marine growth.

In 1901, Svevo came to Cobh to supervise the painting of Lord Muskerry’s yacht which was docked at Carrigaloe. He and his wife, Livia, enjoyed what they described as a second honeymoon in Ireland “delighting in all that beauty and peace” of east Cork.

“From the terrace of our hotel, we could catch a glimpse of the distant blue Atlantic, an intense blue like that of the Mediterranean, which surprised me,” Livia wrote in her memoir.

“I accompanied him to the little works and rested in the guard’s house, a small house covered in bright fuschias.

“The guard’s fair-haired little girl would come out holding a lamb in her arms, which she would dip into the sea water.”

It’s hard to imagine this idyllic scene in present-day Carrigaloe, though it’s likely from Livia’s description that the couple stayed in the Commodore Hotel, which is still in business.

But the story of Svevo’s visit raises another ‘what if’.

If Joyce’s father hadn’t squandered his inheritance, Joyce and Svevo might have met as businessmen in Cork, rather than as struggling writers in Trieste.

And their work, which became masterpieces of early 20th century European literature, might never have been written.

Luckily, we only have to imagine this scenario - which is where Penelope Unbound comes in.

Mary Morrissy will be reading from Penelope Unbound at the Kinsale Words by Water Festival on Sunday, October 8 at the Lord Kinsale at 2pm.

See https://www.wordsbywater.ie/