READINGS OF THE WORK BY PHILIP HARVEY

In 1996 David Denby, the New Yorker writer, published an account of his return to university, after thirty some years, to sit in on Literature seminars at Columbia University. This sit-in was not a protest against the canon and all it stood for, rather an older man’s attempt to observe, and maybe learn from, what students in the early 1990s made of major writers found in said canon. Reviewers at the time were divided over the worth of such a venture ( Great Books : My Adventure with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World. Simon & Schuster, 1996) and we read the book now as a snapshot of the American zeitgeist at the end of the Cold War. Chapter 16 is where Denby and his fellow literature students tackle the first book of the Dante’s Comedy. That the course doesn’t have time for the other two books proves in itself to be a fault in what follows, as the students judge the Florentine solely on what he creates in Inferno, without chancing...

Osip Mandelstam Tristia No. 92  Sometimes titled ‘Taurida’ What is the stream of golden liquid that pours from the bottle? It is the given, the proportion of riches that time has brought us, now being poured forth just when the world is in upheaval. Madame Vera Sudeikina, for whom the poem was composed, said the liquid was honey, but translators have theories, one calling it ‘cordial’, another ‘mead’. Honey and mead are the same word in Russian. Everything is slowed down and summery, so that her words, when they come, may be timed by the flow of the honey. She who has invited us into this special world uses words of misfortune – sad, bored or dull – to warn us that she and her friends have known better times. Their expectations are high, but their lives have been reduced by circumstances she cares not to describe. We will not be bored, and feel not the least bit dull, as though that were a rule of life. Who is she talking to but we, her guests in the future, reading the ...

  The Blooms at Eccles Street and Howth Head.  Two stills from Joseph Strick’s film Ulysses, made in 1967 The general conclusion of both theatre and seminar this year was that a film of Ulysses is unrealisable. But that doesn’t mean we cannot realise theatre pieces about the novel and film. The ruse was that James Joyce and Charlie Chaplin planned to make a movie together, but ambitions, or egos, or artistic integrity, or time, or other projects, or love interests even, got in the way. Out of this unexpected, but not entirely unlikely, meeting of creative minds came a Bloomsday theatre piece of considerable insight. The new timber of the Docklands’ Library sent the aromatic fragrance of a recent work site. This is the most fully realised portrait of the artist as a middle-aged man that the script committee has yet created. The reason is obvious: the Joyce character has a natural opposite, a larger-than-life contrasting counterpart up against whom he ha...

A paper written by Philip Harvey for the Bloomsday in Melbourne seminar held on the feast day, 16 th June 2015. Read at Library at the Dock, Docklands, Melbourne with Philip reading the Harvey bits and Liam Gillespie reading the Joyce bits (marked thus >>). The Optic Nerve 1: 1914-1922 (Ulysses) James Joyce was near-sighted. He suffered eye problems from early childhood. Most photographs and portraits of Joyce have him wearing glasses. Richard Ellmann says that nearsightedness became part of his personality, for rather than staring or putting on glasses, he assumed a look of indifference. James Joyce had strong prescription glasses all his life. >> Had he performed any special corporal work of mercy for her? He had sometimes propelled her on warm summer evenings, an infirm widow of independent, if limited means, in her convalescent bathchair with slow revolutions of its wheels as far as the corner of the North Circular road opposite Mr Gavin Low’s pl...

A few thoughts after attending last Friday night’s performance of ‘Macbeth’ by the students of Ivanhoe Girls’ Grammar School in Melbourne.   The local girls’ school is currently performing an all-female ‘Macbeth’. Returning to the Scottish Play after many years is salutary and astonishing. One forgets yet how tight the drama is, how many memorable lines operate inside a “brief hour” on stage, how intensely everything spoken devolves to the psychodrama in Macbeth’s own mind. There are two openings, each setting the pace and direction for all that follows: the witches’ first scene and then, quite separately, Duncan’s arrival. “What bloody man is that?” is the opening line of the action really, and it surprises and shocks still, not least when coming from the mouth of a Year Ten schoolgirl. As if the witches did not instantly catch our attention, Shakespeare then uses a swearword in the mouth of a king. The Jacobean audience, highbrow and lowbrow, would have been cau...

I agree with you about every work of art being too long, even those of Stendahl, which I adore. Lawrence’s are certainly all too long, except perhaps some of his short stories … Ulysses is certainly far too long, I think, even admitting that its bulk in itself has a sort of aesthetic value. Joyce, it seems to me – my opinion of him is always changing – is au fond a very meretricious artist, a getter of effects, and quite incapable of attaining the simplicity which is the condition of the most real and great art. (I don’t mean simplicity of mind, but of spirit, singleness, rareness.) I think I have made quite a valuable discovery regarding him – that he is primarily an artist in words, that he is more interested in language than in his subject matter, and that his interest in the one gets between us and the other – a very fundamental sin against art, it seems to me. I hope by the time I come to write at length about him I shall cease to be astonished by him, for at the other side o...