They are, without doubt, an odd couple: Anthony Trollope and James Joyce. Their paths meet in 1882, the year of Trollope’s death and Joyce’s birth.
If the scale of literary production matters, Trollope wins hands down with his overflowing output of 47 novels and more than 50 short stories, some great, some good, some poor, almost all of them linked by common themes, common characters, and a fairly consistent narrative method. Trollope was a man of extraordinary industry, but, as he noted in his autobiography with typical self-deprecation, “the idea that I was the unfortunate owner of unappreciated genius never troubled me”.
Joyce, on the other hand, although equally industrious, condensed his energies into a single volume of 15 short stories, Dubliners, a problematic play, Exiles, two volumes of poetry, and his three indisputably great novels, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake, each one as different from the next as could be imagined but each of which puts a fictional version of Joyce himself at the centre.
And yet, as his brother Stanislaus recalled, Joyce had his doubts about the idea of genius: “As for Jim, he did not believe in genius. He said it was a fake of vanity. He believed in talent, work, and what he called ‘throwing himself into what he tried to do’”. On another occasion Joyce told Stannie in a letter: “I may not be the Jesus Christ I once fondly imagined myself, but I think I must have a talent for journalism”. Trollope, who had faith “in the cobbler’s wax much more than the inspiration”, would have approved.
Both authors lived significant portions of their lives in exile and turned that experience, however painful it might at times have been, to their advantage. Both left their respective countries to set up home in unexpected, unlikely territories – Joyce in far-off Trieste, port of the empire Joyce calls “Old Auster and Hungrig” in Finnegans Wake, Trollope in remote Banagher, Co Offaly.
As I argued in The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste, 1904-1920 (Lilliput Press, 2000), Joyce, especially the Joyce of Ulysses, was creatively caught between two contested national cultures, between Ireland and that corner of north-eastern Italy that was still nestled within the grip of the Austro-Hungarian empire at Trieste, between English and Italian, between the national and the cosmopolitan.
Trieste – which provided much of the flesh for the character of Leopold Bloom – was the first, and probably the most important step towards Joyce's becoming intricately trans-national and trans-cultural but long remained, in Joyce criticism, a lost domain of his mental landscape, an unrecognised influence. Today the role of Trieste is more fully acknowledged with Ulysses being seen by many as a tale of two cities (Dublin, in primis, and Trieste) and the Adriatic city remains at the forefront of Joyce criticism and scholarship thanks to its annual Joyce School, the 19th edition of which kicks off on Sunday, June 28th. For more click here.
Equally, as I argue in Writing the Frontier: Anthony Trollope between Britain and Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2015), the undoubtedly very English Trollope in a very real sense became the successful Post Office administrator and fiction writer we know today thanks to his long sojourn in Ireland, which began in 1841 when he was 26 and finally concluded in 1859, and saw him living in places like Clonmel, Mallow and Dublin (Donnybrook).
Because of these Irish experiences, Trollope found a space in which to write and a literary territory that was almost all his own (mid-nineteenth century Ireland). Thus, his first two published novels were Irish: The Macdermots of Ballycloran (1847) and The Kellys and The O'Kellys (1848) but he would also come to incorporate an Irish strain in the greater body of his writings – a concern with the community as well as with the individual, a connectedness with place as a source of inspiration, a life-long concern with matters of justice and conscience, an understanding of the centrality of story-telling at the heart of his novel-making – (elements, these, which would also be central to Joyce's enterprise). Which is not to claim that these are purely Irish features but that they are elements that Trollope came to understand in a singularly Irish context just as Joyce came to understand them in Trieste where, as Italo Svevo commented, "a piece of Ireland was ripening under our sun".
While neither writer (Trollope almost surreptitiously nudging the content and form of the Victorian novel towards modernity, Joyce taking that modernity to its extreme), seems to me prone to nostalgia, both would come to look back with almost elegiac affection at their adopted homes. Trollope wrote of how it was his “fate to have so close an intimacy with Ireland, that when I meet an Irishman abroad I always recognise in him more of a kinsman than I do in your Englishman. I never ask an Englishman from what county he comes, or what was his town. To Irishmen I usually put such a question, and I am generally familiar with the old haunts which they name” (North America). Joyce, for his part, wrote of “the old Austrian Empire” as “a ramshackle affair but it was charming, gay, and I experienced more kindnesses in Trieste than ever before or since in my life.”
Back in 2000 Roy Foster commented that “Irish writers may discover their voice in exile, but critical attention concentrates on the vision of Ireland thus achieved, rather than the way it may have been conditioned by their foreign surroundings”. The same is probably true for English writers living abroad. Thus it is opportune to focus not simply on the “Irish” Joyce or the “English” Trollope but to acknowledge that both writers would always remain “betwixt and between”, always partial outsiders difficult to confine within their respective literary traditions, oscillating between their identities of birth and their identities of adoption. Thus their writings could reach more broadly and deeply – albeit in hugely contrasting ways – precisely as a result of their both having been so open to enriching forms of cultural crossing and contamination.
Roy Foster’s review of Writing the Frontier: Anthony Trollope between Britain and Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2015) by John McCourt will be published on July 25th in The Irish Times
