FROM THE ARCHIVES:Columnist Kees Van Hoek interviewed writer James Stephens at his London home some six months before his death at 68. -
JOE JOYCE
‘PLEASE DON’T tire him, he has been very ill,” so Mrs. James Stephens earnestly admonished me before I was to have tea with her husband “and half an hour’s chat”. When I left fully three hours later, it was I who felt to have been in need of a protecting spouse.
From the moment James Stephens had shuffled into the cosy sitting-room, he took complete control of the conversation, which sparkled in utter oblivion of time or space.
I mentioned that a year or two ago I had heard him read for the B.B.C. passages from “Finnegans Wake,” and that only then had they made sense to me.
“Ah, Joyce,” he pounded, “when he described girls dancing round a Maypole, the very words went a-dancing. What that man could not do with words. How he made them serve him. Mind you, a bit too much! Finnegans Wake is overwritten by hundreds of pages. But where he did succeed, he achieved incomparable beauty.”
And slowly, his hands first fan against his face as if to force his concentration, James Stephens begins to recite a passage from “Anna Livia Plurabelle”. His sonorously articulating, beautifully cadenced voice rises and falls, his hands and arms, shoulders, soon all his body models the imaginary of the flawless sentences.
At one point he had to jump out of his chair (he is so small that his shoulders barely reach the low back) to give the sentence all the physical height he could muster.
Right at that moment, Mrs. Stephens came in with the tea tray, and I wondered what she thought of my promise not to excite her husband. “You knew Gertrude Stein?” he asked abruptly. “Wasn’t she a big, fat ’un, but God forgive that I should be unkind to her spirit. Now, she just played at words without Joyce’s creative genius.”
And before we knew where we were, Stephens, looking fixedly at the empty grate, started a Steinesque solloquy [sic], a parody without capitals, commas or full stops, reducing its effects, chasing empty repetitiveness to absurdity. [...]
As a young man, James’s ambition was far off writing.
“I wanted to become an athlete, like Dan Lowry’s acrobats on the Olympia stage, you know, light, swift and strong. That was the time I was arrested in Dublin for speeding, doing more than eight miles an hour on my bike, and such a contraption that was.
“One day, rich with a few tanners in my pocket, I bought two books on the quays, Blake and Browning. I started reading in bed and my mind suddenly said to me: ‘You can do that,’ and that night I wrote 25 poems. From nowhere!
“I never knew what a poem was going to be about, I always knew I had a poem the way a hen knows for sure she has an egg. Only when she has laid it can she see whether it is large or small, white or brown or speckled.”
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