2/26/2021 Paris hotel where Joyce plotted career in journalism

Paris hotel where Joyce plotted career in journalism

Around-the-world bikers Carl Clancy and Walter Storey enjoyed a steam-heated room in the Corneille

 Fri, Apr 5, 2013, 05:00

Peter Murtagh

Rue Corneille is a narrow street, perhaps 150m long, linking Place Paul Claudel and the Place de L’Odéon on Paris’s Left
Bank.

Today it is a bit of a one-way rat run for motorists zipping away from the Luxembourg Gardens and down towards the
Boulevard Saint Germain. But the area retains echoes of the avant garde heyday it enjoyed in the late 19th century and
into the 1920s – serious book shops mainly, and a few art studios.

 Rue Corneille itself is fairly dead. One whole side is taken up by the side of the Odéon theatre. On the other is a rather
chichi wine and cheese shop, a restaurant and a bookshop, the Librairie Honoré Champion, a publisher of French
academic books with snappy titles such as one currently in the window: From The ‘Trap’ of Rhetoric to The Critique of
Criticism - a study of western thinking on rhetoric from Frederick Nietzsche to Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Paul
de Man and Roland Barthes .

Next door, No 5, is where the Grand Hotel Corneille, the hotel stayed in by Carl Clancy and Walter Storey, used to be. An
this is where James Joyce parked himself from December 1902 until April 1903, one of his early stints in Paris where he
sought to forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race, as he had Stephen Dedalus put it in Portrai
of the Artist as a Young Man .

But before all that, young Joyce hoped for, among other things, some regular work with The Irish Times . In his initial
letters sent home from the Corneille in December, Joyce wrote about working for the Daily Express of Dublin (to which
he was introduced by Lady Gregory and for which he wrote reviews) and of William Butler Yeats putting in a word for
him at The Speaker and The Academy , two London publications in which Joyce was trying to get his poetry published.

In his December 6th letter from the hotel, addressed to “Dear Everyone”, Joyce mentions having dinner with Arthur
Symons, the Welsh poet and critic, Yeats’s friend and former room-mate.

Yeats had some rather faint praise for Joyce’s efforts at poetry – “charming rhythm in the second stanza”, he wrote on
December 18th, 1902, adding: “It is always a little troublesome getting one’s first start in literature, but after the first
start, one can make a pittance if one is industrious, without a great deal of trouble.”

Symons on the other hand, told him by letter dated May 4th, 1903, that he thought some of the poems were “remarkably
good”.

Towards the end of December 1902, Joyce’s funds were getting low. On the 21st, he wrote to his father,
SUGGESTED FORJohn Stanislaus
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Joyce, urging him to help him procure work with The Irish Ti mes through a reporter
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apparently a friend of Joyce snr. Woman who joined Islamic
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“Be sure to push on the ‘Irish Times’,” he urged his father, this time in a letter written from London.
ght for citizenship, court
rules
In a February 8th, 1903, letter to his mother, May, Joyce displays something of the flair necessary to be a successful
foreign correspondent for the Irish Times – he says he would fillet the local media for all they’reREAD
worth!
NOW

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2/26/2021 Paris hotel where Joyce plotted career in journalism

“It would be quite easy for me,” he assures her, “to send any kind of news to that intelligent organ – motor news, dead
men’s news, any news – for I have all the Paris papers at my disposal.”

But the intelligent organ wasn’t biting, at least not initially.

He wrote to his father on February 26th, 1903, again from the Hotel Corneille. “. . . I see that nothing has been done at
the Irish Times and if I am [a] good judge of heavy heads nothing will be done with its manager who is, I think, very
heavy in the head. I am seriously thinking of entering the church if I find editors and managers and ‘practical’ people so
very stubborn as they appear to be.”

But a month later, things fell into place, as he wrote to his father from the Corneille on March 26th. He told him that on
the following day, he was interviewing the celebrated French racing driver, Henri Fournier, who was expected to take par
the James Gordon Bennett Trophy race in Kildare and Carlow in July – an event, incidentally, that gave rise to the still
popular colour known as British racing green.

With help from O’Hara the reporter, Joyce did the interview, wrote it up and his career as a celebrated motoring
correspondent seemed assured. At least until a nice lady named Sylvia Beach and her Shakespeare and Company, just
around the corner from the Corneille at no 12 rue de L’Odéon, intervened in 1922 and published something else Joyce
knocked out.

Why Clancy and Storey chose the Corneille, with its exceptionally strong Irish connections, while staying in Paris is
unclear. Clancy gives no explanation in his reporting other than to write that he had “a comfortable, steam-heated,
electric-lighted room” there and a valet de chambre who polished his shoes.

And, no doubt, the motorcycle boots he wore around the world and which Geoff Hill is carrying with him, 100 years later

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