Image by DreamStudio James Joyce in Dublin Father a tenor, raconteur man about the pubs losing jobs, money hence the inevitable slide from a comfortable home with maids and a piano cut glass, white tablecloths to slobland, offal, trash inkpots by seaspawn cocklepickers subsisting on tea, bread-'n'-drippin' the ten Joyce children living by the slums and "Sunny Jim" nearsighted, singer, smart voracious reader at school the Jesuits and their strictures appealed before he rebelled with trips to Nighttown to visit the whores to drink to excess to exult in sin in his frayed clothing torn shoes, sailor cap singing for refills so full of himself unlike most Irish boys believed in his future in Paris drinking, writing in bars, cafés, cheap rooms hungering to be published for another ten years. James Joyce in Love with Nora Barnacle jaunty auburn-haired maid from Galway country girl, peasant not interested in books spoke in riddles, prickly stories of Catholic girls he found enchanting on June the sixteenth on their first walking out they strolled by the river to the green gray bay behind the granite rocks and he wanted more for the next 35 years from crisis to crisis illness and madness poverty, fame and fortune. Unmarried, scandalous they ran off together Zürich, Trieste, Rome teaching English all day tavernas, caffés all night in hotel rooms waiting Nora and the baby Nora and two babies taking in laundry ironing, burning mad at her mate drinking his pay. She was his Ireland limestone and grass harp and shamrock his rock, his muse caretaker, queen crowned heart turf and bog his barnacle goose. James Joyce's Ulysses He wrote he said to tell the truth about Ireland but the publishers feared libel, obscenity laws but he had fans he had supporters he had benefactors Pound, Yeats, women with money paid the way for his eye surgeries and his books he kept on writing half blind in dark rooms on a voyage to the new he pushed further out for Ulysses, further still for Finnegans Wake. Some called his novels the scribblings of a madman while others named him the greatest writer of his time on the cover of Time in exile in Zürich an eye patch, an ulcer perforated, dead. Ireland refused his body as he had rejected them when he made poetry his country, his sacrament his truth, his life purpose to reinvent his Dublin in the poignant details of everyday life.
Image by DreamStudio Hemingway's Feast Orphan Hadley met Ernest with her family money in a trust he liked her red-gold hair in Paris low rent, cheap food, cafés a beautiful romantic city for a foreign correspondent training ground with Gertrude Stein, Pound, Picasso, wine drinking with James Joyce traveling with Fitzgerald to bullfights, fist fights he wrote it all down war time vignettes his first novel a hit he became the voice of the Lost Generation unpublished work lost with Hadley's luggage. Decades later, a fourth wife told to repossess two old steamer trunks stored at the Paris Ritz full of his notebooks a young man's struggle to write one true sentence his life spread out then before him a veritable feast. Hemingway's Key West The famous author wanted a chic wife underestimated the power of black remorse trading in the old for the writer for Vogue. She called him Papa gave him two sons a home in Key West with a carriage house for his studio a stand-up desk a salt-water pool a fishing boat a lot of booze. Key West had charm frame houses, dirt alleys Conch town characters grits and boiled grunts azure skies, sparkling high seas and quiet and he felt the death loneliness at the end of every day wasted not writing at Sloppy Joe's bar his fans found him and Martha Gellhorn hot war correspondent the red-gold hair he thought he loved only later knew if you lie with one against another you'll do it again as he left Key West far behind. The Old Man Deep in the bush two plane crashes in two days, the first hit a flock of ibis, the second exploding on the runway skull fractured, dislocated shoulder, crushed discs ruptured liver and kidney lost sight, hearing on one side lost lucidity, memory laughing while reading his own obit in the national news. Fragile, frail, aged too soon he wrote The Old Man and the Sea in eight weeks for Life winning the Pulitzer the Nobel Prize while his mania slid into years of depression. When his father shot himself many years before Hemingway said I'll probably go the same way. And he did. ~Mickey Corrigan Poems from a collection of literary/poetry biographies of two major mid-20th century writers. Bio: Originally from Boston, Mickey J. Corrigan hides out in the lush ruins of South Florida. She writes pulp fiction, literary crime, and psychological thrillers. Salt Publishing in the UK released Project XX, a satirical novel about a school shooting. Bloodhound Books UK published What I Did For Love, a spoof of the classic Lolita. Corrigan has published poems in literary journals, chapbooks, and collections.
A fabulous read! Thank you!