Was he an anti-Semitic shade? Or a stand-in for the man who put the manic in talismanic? The most significant connection from my point of view is with the Macintosh I’ve been writing on for the past 20 years. In the Cyclops episode the man in the macintosh “loves a lady who is dead.” In the dream world of Nighttown, he “springs up through a trap door,” pointing accusingly at Bloom. When I got home I expanded the encounter for the amusement of English major friends who, like me, were at play in the fields and on the streets of Ulysses. Later that day I took imaginative advantage of my mysterious guide, merging him with the “man in the macintosh” who is seen by Leopold Bloom at Paddy Dignam’s funeral. For now, the father of Ulysses was on his own. No flowers (they’d have been drowned), no sign of wife Nora and son Giorgio, who in time would be buried nearby. Complaining in heavily accented English about the “foul weather,” he showed me the way to number 1449 and vanished, leaving me to stare at a flat black tombstone, engraved James Joyce, 1882-1941. I was drenched and about to give up when a man in a macintosh appeared out of the dense mist. I found the graveyard but couldn’t find the grave.
One person said, “You mean the English writer?” Finally, a girl in a bookshop told me to take the tram to Fluntern Kirche and look for the zoo. Ellman’s transformative biography had only just been published and nobody knew where he was buried. Several decades after Joyce’s death on January 13, 1941, I spent the better part of a rainy summer afternoon in Zurich searching for his grave. On February 1, Darantière said that the package would “surely arrive by noon of the next day.” Pressed by Joyce, who claimed to be in “a state of energetic prostration,” Miss Beach told the printer that this method “was too uncertain,” and so Darantière made heroic haste, personally bringing the precious package to the conductor on the Dijon-Paris express, who delivered it into the midwife’s hands early on the talismanic morning, whereupon she rushed the newborn by cab to its proud parent. As the day approached, he fired off letters and telegrams and made frantic phone calls to Sylvia Beach, his publisher (formerly of Library Place in Princeton), and to Maurice Darantière, the printer, who was based some 300 kilometers from Paris in Dijon. D ocumenting the birth of Ulysses in James Joyce (1959), Richard Ellman suggests that the day of publication “was becoming, in Joyce’s superstitious mind, talismanic.” If anything, there was more of the manic than talismanic in Joyce’s insistence that his 40th birthday, February 2, 1922, absolutely had to coincide with the birth of his creation.
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