James Joyce's erotic letters to Nora Barnacle

In late 1909, the Irish poet and novelist James Joyce wrote a series of erotic love letters to his romantic partner Nora Barnacle, including nine in December 1909 which were initially deemed too obscene for posthumous publication. Joyce and Barnacle met in Dublin in 1904 and moved to the Austro-Hungarian city of Trieste the following year, although Joyce frequently travelled for work. Joyce was in Dublin in 1909, an acquaintance falsely confessed to him that he had been in an illicit affair with Barnacle. Joyce initially believed this and wrote various letters accusing her of infidelity, but was later convinced the allegations were false. After apologizing to Barnacle and coming back to Trieste, Joyce returned to Ireland and began writing increasingly obscene letters to her. Joyce expresses sadomasochistic fantasies and erotic references to defecation and flatulence. Barnacle's responses were implied to have been similarly erotic, but are no longer extant. Generally taking a sexually submissive posture, Joyce contrasts in the letters an idealised and romantic view of Barnacle with deviant imagery, often using long streams of contradictory adjectives and descriptions.

After Joyce's death in 1941, his brother Stanislaus Joyce held many of his letters. Biographer Richard Ellmann discovered and purchased this collection in 1955, negotiating exclusive publishing rights. He discovered the 1909 erotic letters and recommended that they be published in full, noting the potential for scandal if they were published without context. This was overruled by the Joyce estate, and they were published in a censored form in 1966, with two letters removed entirely. The same year, French writer Hélène Cixous published portions of the letters. Ellmann was allowed to publish the unredacted letters in the 1975 Selected Letters of James Joyce. Their publication invited widespread media attention, including reviews in the pornographic magazines Screw and Hustler.

Background James Joyce was an Irish poet and novelist, later known for works such as Dubliners (1914), Ulysses (1922), and Finnegans Wake (1939). Born in Dublin in 1882, he first began writing while attending Belvedere College, a Jesuit secondary school. During his teenage years, he came to strongly reject his Catholic upbringing in favour of an individualistic worldview which prioritised the pursuit of pleasure. He first became sexually active in 1896 with a prostitute in Dublin; he went on to frequent brothels throughout both his secondary education and his study at the University College Dublin. After graduating from Dublin in 1902, Joyce briefly stayed in Paris, before returning to Dublin to care for his terminally ill mother. After her death in 1903, Joyce became increasingly aimless, turning to alcoholism, and intermittently pursuing work as a writer while distancing himself from his family.

Nora Barnacle was born in Galway in 1884, and spent much of her childhood under the care of her grandmother. She attended a Catholic school operated by the Sisters of Mercy in her youth, afterwards finding work as a porter at a local convent. Around the beginning of 1904, she moved to Dublin to escape abuse and found work as a hotel chambermaid. In June of that year, Barnacle and Joyce arranged a meeting after a chance encounter. They went to Ringsend, a deserted area near the harbour, where Barnacle masturbated him. The two quickly fell into a romantic relationship. Four months later, with Joyce strongly critical of marriage as an institution, the two left Ireland in hopes of living together unmarried. In early 1905, the couple settled in Trieste, then under the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After they had a son in 1905 and a daughter in 1907, Joyce was increasingly pressured by financial concerns, and frequently travelled in various attempts to secure money for his family.

Early 1909 letters Joyce's letters in 1909 reached a more hostile and abrasive tone. According to his responses, Barnacle chastised his frequent consumption of alcohol and lack of income, especially taking issue with his inability to write profitable books; she did not enjoy or understand his literature, although she took a liking to his poems. Joyce felt he had a duty to educate Barnacle, and failing this, help her understand him. Barnacle was receptive to Joyce's frequent portrayal of himself as impulsive and childish, with Joyce suggesting in the letters that he needed her as a strong, controlling presence in his life.

In June 1909, Joyce visited Dublin alongside his young son Giorgio to visit his family. While there, an acquaintance claimed that Barnacle had also been romantically involved with him after she first began seeing Joyce. Feeling betrayed, Joyce wrote several letters to Barnacle accusing her of infidelity. Afterwards, a friend convinced him that the allegations were a lie, and he wrote again to her in apology. He briefly returned home to Trieste in September, but was soon motivated to go back to Ireland the following month, seeking to organise a cinema in Dublin. This opened as the Volta Cinematograph.

Erotic letters The tone of Joyce's attested letters to Barnacle shifts in the aftermath of his false allegations of infidelity in 1909. Initially filled with penitence and remorse, they shift towards expressions of lust and passion. He adopts a childlike attitude towards Barnacle, comparing their relationship to that of a mother and her child. In one letter, he tells Barnacle that he wishes he could "nestle in your womb like a child born of your flesh and blood" and "sleep in the warm secret gloom of your body". Joyce also expresses sadomasochistic inclinations; in his letter on 2 September, he writes that he has an "idea madder than usual" and requests that Barnacle try flogging him.

A group of nine of Joyce's letters to Barnacle were especially sexual and obscene in tone. These, written on December 2nd, 3rd, 6th, 8th, 9th, 13th, 15th, 16th, and 20th, 1909, were the set not initially included in compilations of Joyce's letters until biographer Richard Ellmann's Selected Letters of James Joyce in 1975. Barnacle's replies to Joyce, possibly destroyed or lost during a move, were never published. Joyce occasionally praises sections or phrases within the unrecorded letters; on 8 December, he writes that he "did as you told me" and masturbated twice to one of her letters. Barnacle probably encouraged Joyce to write increasingly obscene content, seemingly spurred on by his request to her from his previous trip to Dublin, where he asked her to write a letter which he "[dared] not be the first to write". Joyce interspersed his romantic and erotic prose with regular news about family matters and finances. Despite the highly obscene language in the letters, Joyce was known to be reserved and avoidant of sexual topics in person, avoiding the use of "obscene phrases" and disliking ribaldry.

Analysis

Throughout his love letters, Joyce frequently contrasts the spiritual qualities of Barnacle and his love with those of lust and deviance. He uses long sequences of contradictory adjectives in the letters, calling Barnacle "my little bad-tempered bad-mannered splendid little girl" and a "proud little ignorant saucy dear warm-hearted girl". Recounting his initial sexual experience with her, he describes how she "frigged me slowly until I came off through your fingers, all the time bending over me and gazing at me out of your quiet saintlike eyes". Even his most purely obscene letters often use romantic epithets for her, such as one which opens by addressing her as "my dark-blue, rain-drenched flower". The motif of a blue flower is used to represent Barnacle throughout the letters, often in the closing statements. Literary scholar Wendy Faris attributed this to a desire to compensate for the intense expressions of lust and violence preceding it. Joyce describes his lust and attraction to Barnacle as brutal and bestial, but contrasts this with his concurrent "spiritual love" for her.

Joyce frequently makes erotic references to defecation and flatulence, calling Barnacle his "darling brown-arsed fuckbird". He also frequently assumes a sexually submissive posture (calling himself "so small and soft") and outlines his fantasies on how he wishes Barnacle to engage with him sexually, calling on her to "ride me like a man". The Joyce scholar Christine Van Boheemen-Saaf wrote in 2008 that he "relishes the vilest imagery he can conjure" to reinforce the persistent dialectic between degrading and idealizing language.

In a 2000 analysis, the French semiologist notes the contrast between the letters' erotic and domestic registers. Joyce frequently implies that the letters should be read by night, writing that "in the cold light of day, they must seem horrible". The couple's physical separation probably contributed to the intense eroticism. Joyce appears to have masturbated during the composition of some of the letters, especially the ones on the 16th and 20th of December. In these, he abruptly shifts tone away from the erotica towards other subjects, implying that he had reached orgasm: in one, he cuts off mid-sentence, announcing "no need to continue!", while in the other, he writes the Italian phrase ('enough for God's sake!') and announces that the "tomfoolery" is over.

Writing in a 2013 study, the writer David Cotter theorised that Joyce's fears of cuckoldry sparked greater romantic and sexual appreciation for Barnacle, so that he "was able to feel that she was a prize, and not a burden of sympathy". Van Boheemen-Saaf writes that the letters "mark a rupture and a redoubling not only in Joyce’s relationship to Nora but also in his style of writing", with the temporary break in trust leading him to "sanctify" Barnacle and view her in a more maternal light, with himself in the relatively submissive role.

Release and controversy After his death in 1941, large numbers of Joyce's papers were held by his brother Stanislaus Joyce in Trieste, unknown to Joyce scholars. Stanislaus had given out only a few papers, probably keeping his collection secret in order to work on a biography of his brother (portions of which were posthumously published as My Brother's Keeper). Richard Ellmann visited their home after Stanislaus's death in 1955, and discovered the extent of his collections. In aid of Stanislaus's widow Nelly Joyce, who was struck with severe financial difficulties after his death, Ellmann arranged a sale of the papers to Cornell University; Nelly and her son were given the funds to buy a house in London, while Ellmann was able to negotiate exclusive publishing rights for the letters.

Included within the papers from Stanislaus were the erotic letters between James Joyce and Nora. Ellmann was eager to publish these within his compilations of Joyce's letters, citing the often explicit nature of Joyce's work and the potential for scandal if the letters were published out of context. The Joyce etate was strongly opposed to this proposal, as was Ellmann's publisher Faber & Faber, which feared a legal challenge for obscenity. Writing that he wished to respect the feelings of Joyce's family, Ellmann omitted two of the letters and redacted portions of some others from his two 1966 volumes of Letters of James Joyce, a continuation of Stuart Gilbert's 1957 volume.