Penguin-Holt-Penguin

[Tim Strzechowski]

Also:

from John Bishop, _Joyce's Book of the Dark: Finnegans Wake_.  U of 
Wisconsin Press: Madison, 1986:

"The intensity with which Joyce studied dreams, read about dreams, and 
discussed dreams with family members and friends has been broadly 
documented.  Jacques Mercanton, who is supposed to have become the occicial 
expositor of _Finnegans Wake_ had Joyce lived, makes it seem in his 
recollection of Joyce that the going over of dreams may have been the first 
order of business of every day.  But it clearly went further than this: 
stray remarks in his letters show Joyce waking up at night, scribbling on 
paper in the dark, and falling back asleep:  'I composed some wondrous 
devices for ^d during the night,' he informed Harriet Shaw Weaver, 'and 
wrote them out in the dark very carefully only to discover I had made a 
mosaic on top of other notes so I am now going to have to bring my 
astronomical telescope into play.'  Already he was teaching her, everywhere 
in the letters, how to read _Finnegans Wake_ [...] (p. 21).

Also cf. note 95 on p. 413:

"Between October 1921 and August 1922, the Joyces lived at 9 rue de 
l'universite in Paris: 'there they slept three in one room, one in the 
other.  In the larger room Joyce kept a series of potted Phoenix palms: as 
one died, it was replaced by another.  He said the plant reminded him of the 
Phoenix Park, as he attached great importance to it.

"The period of time in which Joyce carried out this impractically expensive 
little ritual was the same as that in which he finished proofreading and saw 
the publication of _Ulysses_ (in February 1922).  Although it may have 
seemed to others that Joyce was moodily unproductive between February and 
August 1922, the 'great importance' he attached to this ritual suggests that 
he was actually beginning to compose the _Wake_, although not in words, the 
first of which were drafted in March 1923.  Instead, he seems to have mulled 
over the story of HCE's rise and fall by contriving the resurrections of 
potted phoenix palms -- and, undoubtedly, by observing the enspathed 
perianths of their blossoms.  This may be the only instance in literary 
history in which the genesis of a book has been recorded in the quotidian 
ritual by which an author maintained his house plants." [...]

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