Read The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses for Free Online Page B

Finn’s Hotel. He arrived on time, but she never came. The following night, he wrote Miss Barnacle a letter.
    I may be blind
    . I looked for a long time at a head of reddish-brown hair and decided it was not yours. I went home quite dejected. I would like to make an appointment but it might not suit you. I hope you will be kind enough to make one with me—if you have not forgotten me!
    James A Joyce
    —
    NORA BARNACLE CAME to Dublin to escape what little semblance of a family she had. When she was five years old, Nora’s mother sent her to live with her grandmother. The Barnacles had been barely able to keep their house together, and they had to send Nora to her grandmother when twins arrived and Nora’s father lost his bakery because of his drinking. Nora was thirteen when her grandmother died. After her grandmother, it was the convent, and after the convent, Uncle Tommy.
    Nora’s uncle was a disciplinarian who warned his niece to be home on time lest she get a beating. In the evenings, he went looking for her through the streets of Galway while swinging a blackthorn stick. Nora was usually with her friend Mary O’Holleran when Uncle Tommy couldn’t find her, and the young women were more brazen together. They dared each other to use foul language, and Nora wasn’t afraid to say “bloody” or “God” or “damn” the way men did. They sneaked into their neighbors’ gardens and stole vegetables, because if they’d eat a head of cabbage while looking into the mirror they would see the face of their future husbands. They would stick nine pins into an apple, throw the tenth away, stuff the apple into their left stockings and tie it with their right garters—
not
the left. When they put the apple under their pillow, they would dream of the man they’d marry. But it only worked on Halloween.
    Nora had gotten more than her share of attention from men. A young schoolteacher named Michael Feeney sang songs to her, but he succumbed to typhoid in the winter of 1897, the same winter her grandmother died. Sonny Bodkin gave Nora a bracelet when she was sixteen, but tuberculosis ended that courtship. At the convent, they called her the “man killer.” A young priest once invited her to tea at the presbytery and then pulled her onto his lap. The priest’s hand was already under her dress before she could push him away, and he told her that
she
was the one who sinned by tempting him.
    Sometimes Nora and Mary would put on trousers, neckties and heavy boots. They would tuck their hair under their caps and roam around Galway’s Eyre Square disguised as men. Mary remembered hearing Uncle Tommy whistling his favorite tune as he walked toward them one night. “My love, my pearl, my own dear girl.” As they passed within the length of his blackthorn, Mary muttered in a husky voice, “Good night,” as if the three of them had just finished a pint together. Uncle Tommy paused for a perplexed moment as the two figures walked quickly away, and when they turned the corner they broke into fits of laughter over their triumph.
    —
    NORA CHANGED her mind after receiving Joyce’s letter. On June 16, 1904, she met him in Dublin’s Merrion Square and walked with him to Ringsend, an empty field by the docks on the eastern edge of the city where the River Liffey opens into the bay. There were no streetlamps, and they were alone. As she drew closer he could smell the balsam and rose from the scented handkerchief she pinned into her clothes, and he blushed when he felt the gentle tugging at his buttons. She pulled his shirttails up, nimbly reached her fingers inside and began. When he moaned, she looked at Joyce and smirked, “What is it, dear?” It was an important moment in literary history.
    Joyce, eager to remain aloof, kept up his carousing, but every now and then he strolled into Finn’s to see Nora, and the sight of his clothes and shoes embarrassed her. Considering his appearance, his letters to her were oddly formal. He