Ulysses and the Moral Right to Pleasure

[Mark Thibodeau]

Ew.

On Sat, Jun 21, 2014 at 1:59 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> There is an article about Joyce in the latest( July) issue of Harper's  called Portrait of the Artist as a Syphylitic. It lays out a fairly persuasive case that Joyce suffered from Syphilis and passed it to his Wife and Daughter. He was certainly as acquainted with pain as pleasure.
> On Jun 20, 2014, at 2:48 AM, Dave Monroe wrote:
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>> http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2014/06/ulysses-joyce-moral-right-to-pleasure.html
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> A Portrait of the Artist as a Syphilitic
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> Revisiting James Joyce’s medical record
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> By Kevin Birmingham
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> One summer evening in 1917, James Joyce was walking down a street in Zurich when he developed a pain in his right eye so severe he couldn’t move. A bystander helped him to a nearby bench, where he gazed at halos around the streetlights. After twenty minutes, he was able to pull himself onto a tram and make his way home. Joyce was suffering from glaucoma brought on by acute anterior uveitis, an inflammation of the iris, which had eroded his optic nerves. He’d had two previous “eye attacks,” as he called them—the first in 1907—and now allowed a surgeon to cut away a small piece of his iris. Nora Barnacle, Joyce’s partner, wrote to Ezra Pound that Joyce’s eye was still bleeding painfully ten days on. Joyce’s attacks recurred intermittently for the next twenty years, and in that time he had about a dozen eye surgeries. By the age of forty-eight, he was essentially blind. The origin of Joyce’s decades-long battle with uveitis has never been definitively named. Before penicillin’s introduction, in the 1940s, the most common cause was syphilis (uveitis is now most often associated with autoimmune disorders), and Joyce began visiting prostitutes at age fourteen. Was his affliction sexually transmitted?
> In the absence of distinct evidence, very few scholars have been eager to raise the possibility that Joyce was syphilitic. Joyce’s grandson Stephen, his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver, and Nora Barnacle all destroyed letters from him that they deemed too personal. Richard Ellmann, Joyce’s preeminent biographer, examined extensive medical documents but never addressed syphilis, and the documents have since gone missing. It wasn’t until 1975 that a biographer speculatively attributed Joyce’s chronic uveitis to the disease. Five years later, Vernon Hall, a Ph.D. in comparative literature, and Burton Waisbren, a medical doctor, reread Ulysses and found syphilis everywhere—in Stephen Dedalus’s “somewhat troubled” sight, in Leopold Bloom’s verbal lapses, even in the “repetitive use of the letter s.” In 1995, a Joyce scholar named Kathleen Ferris published a book arguing that Nora Barnacle had serious syphilitic complications, that Lucia, her daughter with Joyce, was suffering from neurosyphilitic insanity, and that Joyce himself eventually developed a form of advanced neurosyphilis called tabes dorsalis. Hall and Waisbren had tabes in mind when they noted the staggering Stephen and the stiff-legged Leopold. Ferris used it to explain Joyce’s habit of walking around with an ashplant cane and suggested that the disease left him impotent and incontinent before giving him the intestinal ulcer that killed him, in 1941, at the age of fifty-eight.
> Though Ferris was the first scholar to make a systematic case for syphilis, her diagnoses were overzealous (Joyce’s cane, for instance, was merely an affectation), and her book garnered a largely negative reaction from the few Joyceans who took note of it. Primary among them was an Irish doctor named J. B. Lyons, who concluded, in an article for a neuroscience journal in 2000, that her argument was “preposterous.” Yet Joyce’s medical history, which I have pieced together from letters (many of them unpublished) and other documents, seemingly describes all the stages of syphilis. The disease begins with infection by a corkscrew-shaped bacterium called Treponema pallidum that gathers in lesions on the skin. Joyce may have contracted syphilis during one of his many visits to Dublin’s red-light district in 1904. That same year he sought treatment for a persistent urethral discharge caused by gonorrhea. In 1907, Stanislaus Joyce wrote of rubbing his brother’s body with a concoction of grappa and salt, possibly to disinfect lesions. Joyce was teaching English in Trieste, and he had come down with what he called “rheumatic fever,” a popular diagnosis used at the time to describe a collection of ailments including ocular inflammation and stomach problems. These could also have been attributable to syphilis, which can resemble multiple nonvenereal conditions. One common symptom, periodontal disease, got so bad for Joyce that in 1923 he had seventeen teeth extracted. Once in the bloodstream, Treponema can infest virtually every tissue it encounters.
>   In Trieste, Joyce was bedridden for weeks, and his right arm became, according to his brother’s diary, “disabled” for more than a month. What exactly Stanislaus meant remains a vexing question. If the joints in Joyce’s right arm were merely stiff and inflamed, he may have had some innocuous form of arthritis, which is what Lyons argued in 2000. But if his arm was partially paralyzed, it’s possible the Treponema spirochete was attacking Joyce’s peripheral nervous system. Years later, Joyce complained of pain in his right shoulder, where the deltoid muscle was also badly atrophied. In 1928, this shoulder had what he called a “large boil,” which in the advanced stages of syphilis can form as lesions cluster and merge. Lyons proposed that Joyce had an auto­ immune affliction called Reiter syndrome, a form of reactive arthritis typically triggered by a gastrointestinal infection. But whereas Joyce’s eye problems recurred over two decades, consistent with syphilis, a Reiter flare­up typically lasts only a few weeks, and its three chief symptoms are arthritis, urethritis, and conjunctivitis—not uveitis. One of the largest­ever Reiter studies, of an outbreak among Finnish soldiers at an army hospital on the Russian front in 1943, found that more than two thirds of the 344 patients suffered from conjunctivitis. Only eleven had uveitis. Reiter syndrome, moreover, nearly always affects the lower limbs, and even then it is unlikely to “disable” anything. If Joyce had Reiter syndrome, he had a particularly rare form of an illness that in his day afflicted perhaps three in 100,000 people. Syphilis struck one in ten.
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> The key to Joyce’s medical mystery is not his symptoms, however. It’s his treatment. A syphilis diagnosis prior to World War II meant taking tolerable doses of poison. Mercury pills and ointments, which had been popular for centuries, weakened patients until their teeth, fingernails, and hair began falling out. By the early 1900s, doctors had started experimenting with arsenic compounds, which were harsh and only partially effective. The most popular of these, Salvarsan, killed hundreds of patients before the introduction of a less potent version. In October 1928, distraught and nearly blind, Joyce wrote in two letters that he was on a three­week regimen of “injections of arsenic and phosphorus.” He was surely describing a compound—doctors would not have injected either substance alone. What decades of Joyce biographers have overlooked is that the chemical compound of arsenic and phosphorus is a little­known syphilis medication called galyl (phospharsenamine). While less commonly prescribed than Salvarsan, galyl had one important advantage: unlike the earlier drug, there was no risk that it would harm Joyce’s already damaged optic nerve. Crucially, galyl was the only injectable compound of arsenic and phosphorus, and the only reason a doctor would have injected a patient with it was if that patient had syphilis.
> The advanced stages of syphilis sometimes lead to a syndrome of abrupt psychoses, erratic personality transformations, memory loss, and delusions of grandeur—in Joyce’s time it was called “general paralysis of the insane.” While syphilis probably contributed to Joyce’s “nervous collapses” and crying fits, he was spared the disease’s most debilitating neurological problems. He did experience delirium and hallucinations— in 1924 he wrote to Harriet Shaw Weaver that his room in Paris was haunted by the sounds of tumbling books—but these were likely caused by medications he took for his many other ailments. The bookseller Sylvia Beach remembered visiting Joyce in an eye clinic after surgery and watching helplessly as he raved for hours. By the 1930s, he was taking six sleeping pills a night. Decades after his death, scholars often remember Joyce as a hypersensitive artist, a grousing hypochondriac with easily frayed nerves, but his pain went much deeper than we have realized. To the mountains of data scholars have gathered about his life—down to the songs he sang and the marginalia scrawled in his books—we can now add the revelation that Joyce suffered intensely and for most of his life from syphilis, even as he was writing some of the twentieth century’s most brilliant prose.   Kevin Birmingham’s The Most Danger­ ous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s “Ulysses” was published last month by Penguin Press.
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