I.
An Irish bishop and I are looking semireverently at a plaque affixed to a building in Rome.
The bishop is Paul Tighe of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education. The building is one in a row in the Via Frattina, a street full of smart shops: polo shirts, neckties, eyeglasses. The plaque is engraved in Italian, in serif capitals with V’s for the U’s.
IN THIS ROMAN HOVSE FROM AVGVST TO DECEMBER 1906 LIVED JAMES JOYCE, VOLVNTARY EXILE, WHO EVOKED THE HISTORY OF VLYSSES, MAKING HIS DVBLIN OVR VNIVERSE
—I was here as a young priest on the day that was unveiled. February the second nineteen-eighty-two.
—The centenary, I say. In my teens writers replaced ballplayers as the figures whose capsule biographies I made my own, and Joyce became the model of the literary modernist — a writer whose credo of “silence, exile and cunning” echoed those of the Church he spurned.
But my thoughts have turned to a different Joyce; as I stand with Bishop Tighe I have another bishop in mind.
This is Robert F. Joyce, my father’s uncle, who was the bishop of Burlington, Vermont. During my childhood, Bishop Joyce, already emeritus, would celebrate Mass in our upstate New York parish every year and come to our house for lunch in a black suit, rimless glasses and plus-size pectoral cross, a figure as solid and permanent as Vermont marble. We children were made to know that he had taken part in Vatican II and that “The Council” was historic. After the meal, he would set us the challenge of remaining silent at the table for 10 minutes, and when our sister Janet burst out laughing after a minute and a half, he’d laugh along with her.
James Joyce lived in Rome in 1906 and 1907. Bishop Joyce spent autumns in Rome from 1962 to 1965. I myself have become semiregular in Rome, here for a week once or twice a year. As I consider these two ancestors — artist and cleric, skeptic and believer — I feel them as kin, to me and to each other, made so by the shared experience of Rome.
—You know Joyce came up with Ulysses in Rome.
—I didn’t. I think of him writing it in Paris.
And I feel our overlappings as Joycean. Ulysses has structural motifs in superabundance, but the human pattern of the novel is simple: a young man and an older man go about a city on a single day, encountering each other here and there.
Here in the Via Frattina, I begin to see a pattern in the ways we three have intersected across a century in Rome. The postfamine diaspora, the eminence of Ulysses, the rise of American Catholicism, Vatican II, my own Roman sojourns: each looks different in the light of this great city scarcely altered by modernity. But the difference I feel is more personal. Because my surname is French Canadian, I’ve never felt Irish Catholic — until now, in Rome, awakened to the movements of a people in whom Rome, Ireland, America and Catholicism have each played a part.
II.
—A Bloomsday reading! he said, as if it was understood by all what that meant.
Where, I can’t remember: some windowless upstairs place, incandescently lit, wood-paneled, uproarious — a place where it was possible to feel yourself away from suburban Albany circa June 1982 and connected to the Dublin of June 16, 1904.
Tom Murray was the instigator. He was the prince of the punks: a hundred pounds, pallid, his pants pegged, his oversize dress shirt stuck with safety pins. By night he was the bassist in The Verge. By day he was a classmate in Intermediate French.
—Everybody raise a glass to James Augustine Aloysius Joyce! Here comes everybody!
Soon the six-packs of Guinness were depleted, and the cigarette smoke was thick.
—And now let’s read Ulysses.
He flitted through the crowd, brandishing a battered paperback. From it he tore a page and then another and another, giving one to each of us. When the pages had been distributed he turned the book in hand to a random page.
—On the count of three. One, two, three—
And then we read our pages aloud in Babel-ish cacophony. Our voices rose to the eaves. It was surreal and liturgical at once, and for me it was a first taste of literature as experience. I still have the pages I read from, 579 and 580, quartered into a secondhand paperback of A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man I got not long after.
As I became a young man, I devoted myself to Joyce. In Dublin during a college summer abroad I made a pilgrimage to the coastal stone tower where Ulysses begins; for a senior thesis I tried to read the novel without commentaries; in graduate school, I read Richard Ellmann’s biography, the cover featuring a photograph of Joyce pre-blindness: hat, mustache, bow tie and rimless glasses framing intent, all-seeing eyes.
The James Joyce we had celebrated in Albany that night was an eminence: Dubliner, expatriate, rebellious ex-Catholic, but first and last a modernist, seeing life slant even before his powers of sight declined. When Stephen Dedalus declares, “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race” — the conclusion of the Portrait — the “race” he evokes isn’t white or Irish so much as modern. And that was the attraction. To devote oneself to Joyce in the 1980s was to place oneself outside Ronald Reagan’s America and in the continental avant-garde.
The James Joyce who arrived in Rome from Trieste in late July 1906 was far from eminent. He wasn’t known as a modernist writer or as a writer at all. He was 24, Irish, an alcoholic’s half-orphaned eldest son, the partner of Nora and the father of Giorgio, born a year earlier —a young man thrust into adulthood by parenthood.
He was revising a book of poems and seeking a publisher for his stories. That the stories were among the great prose works of the age was evident to him but not to anybody in Rome. There his only distinction was that he was fluent in Italian.
The stories were a suite called Dubliners. Just then it couldn’t be known that he would devote three more books to a microscopic evocation-excoriation of the city and its people. Dublin was the city where he had grown up; that was all.
One surprise of the Ellmann biography is that the Joyces weren’t native Dubliners at the time of James’ birth but recent arrivals. James’ father, John, was from Cork, the only child of a civil servant who had died during John’s teens. John was a gifted athlete, actor and singer who claimed there wasn’t a field in County Cork he didn’t know. But he couldn’t earn a living. When he was 25, his mother insisted they move to Dublin, where job prospects were better. There he married Mary Jane Murray, who had come from County Leitrim to study music and met him in a church choir.
James Joyce’s dramatic self-exile from Dublin to Paris at age 20 was an echo of his father’s move from Cork to Dublin. And it was a late expression of the great migration of Irish people in the second half of the 19th century, impelled by the Great Famine of 1845-52 and the “potato blight” of 1879. Some Irish went from country to city or from small city to larger one. Some went east, to Manchester or Liverpool or Europe, and some went west — to New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago, to the river city of Albany and to the green mountains of Vermont.
III.
Proctor, Vermont, has “more hills than Rome” — or so it was said when Proctor was young and growing. It was and is a town in the middle west of the state. Settled in the 19th century, it came to be known far and wide for its white marble, which was quarried and used to build banks and churches and city halls all over the eastern United States — and was used to form the foundation of St. Dominic, the Roman Catholic church in Proctor, dedicated in 1882.
Robert F. Joyce was born in Proctor in 1896 and his sister Eleanor (my grandmother) three years later. The town had just been wired for electricity. The marble mills were on the outskirts. Covered bridges crossed the Otter Creek. There were five churches, several cemeteries, a hospital, a poorhouse and a high school, where Robert — nicknamed “Pat” — became a student. Houses were scattered in the hills and spaced geometrically on both banks of the creek. “Everybody in town kept a flock of hens, and many who could afford to kept pigs and a cow,” a local historian recalled.
Proctor, then, was a lot like the towns and villages of Ireland, except more prosperous because of marble. The Green Mountain State was akin to the Emerald Isle in its scale and hilly topography. And the Joyces of Proctor were joined to the Joyces of Dublin by Roman Catholicism. Grace before meals, prayers at bedtime, a nightly examination of conscience; school bells and Latin declensions and floggings to keep idlers in line; the “silent gloom” of the confessional, the rosary in a pants pocket, the sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary gathering to say the office on Saturday morning: all these were known to Pat Joyce as they had been known to James Joyce a generation before.
The Joyces here and there also had an idea of America in common. We picture the Irish in the U.S. dreaming of the old country. Less often do we picture the Irish in Ireland dreaming of America. But America was in their mind’s eye, as prospect or fallback or last resort, and as a dynamic society unto itself.
It was in James Joyce’s mind, for it is there in his fiction. Early in the Portrait Stephen Dedalus “opened the geography to study the lesson; but he could not learn the names of places in America.” In Dubliners, “An Encounter” begins with a scene of some Dublin boys acting out Wild West “Indian battles,” the ringleader dancing round the back garden with “an old tea-cosy on his head, beating a tin on his fist and yelling: —Ya! yaka, yaka, yaka!” The action of “After the Race” — drinking, a card game — takes place aboard a yacht berthed on the River Liffey and owned by Farley, a rich American. Waltzing and square-dancing are followed by toasts: “They drank Ireland, England, France, Hungary, the United States of America. . . .”
What if John Joyce, seeking a setting for his exploits, had gone to America instead of Dublin, and had wound up in New England, raising a family here, not there?
In Libra, Don DeLillo’s novel about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Warren Report is likened to “the megaton novel James Joyce would have written had he moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred.” That is a first-class counterfactual: To situate James Joyce at the Writers’ Workshop pondering “the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century” seems fantastical. But to place him in New England early in the century is practically plausible. More than 400,000 Irish emigrated to the U.S. in the 1870s. It’s no stretch to imagine John Joyce and Mary Jane Murray as two of them, settling in Vermont and raising an unruly brood in Proctor.
There, as the all-seeing eldest child James became a young man and an artist, he might have made fiction from the lives of the people of Proctor: two boys playing on the Otter Creek and encountering a predatory man there; quarrymen quarreling in the tavern on payday; the pious youth at St. Dominic who everybody said would be a bishop someday, so devout was he. Or his life there might have taken a different course. In Vermont, going to public school and weekly catechism instead of Jesuit boarding school and daily chapel, James might have been spared the Good Friday hellfire sermon that in the Portrait is the beginning of the end of the artist-hero’s Catholic faith, as the Jesuit retreat master evokes the pains of the damned: “Just as in dead bodies worms are engendered by putrefaction, so in the souls of the lost there arises a perpetual remorse from the putrefaction of sin, the sting of conscience. . . .” In Vermont, where Catholics were a minority and not a “priestridden” monoculture, he might not have turned away from Catholicism emphatically, or at all.
It is even less of a stretch to imagine James Joyce migrating from Dublin to America as a young man: We have a factual parallel. Four years after he left Dublin at age 22 with Nora, his brother Charlie left Dublin at age 22 “with a woman he’d made pregnant” — left it for Boston, Massachusetts.
IV.
James Joyce didn’t wind up in America. He wound up in Austria-Hungary, in the seaport of Trieste, teaching English at Berlitz, and when the school did away with his position, he was drawn to Rome by a want ad seeking a bank clerk to conduct correspondence.
James, Nora and Giorgio arrived by ship and train from the north and found a flat at 52 Via Frattina, part of the “strangers’ quarter.” The bank was in the Corso nearby. The workday was 12 hours, including lunch. Joyce wrote 250 letters some days, the long hours at a desk wearing out the seat of his pants. The bank paid his wages monthly in a lump sum. A spendthrift like his father, he exhausted them quickly — on food, drink, a new scarf and cap — and then patched together a living for the rest of the month. Weary, short of money, he could not write fiction. So, he revised Dubliners and corresponded with publishers in London, hoping one would take the book.
Out of the office, he saw historic Rome: the Colosseum, St. Peter’s Basilica, the grave of Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose young artist’s rebellion was a precursor to his own. He went about 20th-century Rome: to the Caffè Greco to read the English-language papers; to a bookshop where he found Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray in Italian translation. He took walks “through the ways of the city” such as he would describe in the unfinished autobiographical novel Stephen Hero: the “treasure house” of his mind full of words he saw and heard “in the shops, on advertisements, in the mouths of the plodding public. He kept repeating them to himself until they lost all instantaneous meaning for him and became wonderful vocables.”
And he obsessed about Dublin. This trait of Joyce’s — the unrelenting imaginative attention he gave to a city he had literally left behind — is invariably seen as his modus operandi, proof of his commitment to his art. And yet to consider Joyce obsessing on Dublin while in Rome — young, brilliant, fluent in Italian, still impressionable, ripe with artistic possibility — is to realize just how odd his obsession with Dublin was. How can it be that Dublin’s hold on him was so strong that even Rome couldn’t break through?
The common answer is a literary one: As a modernist, Joyce was averse to the past and considered everyday 20th-century city life as authentic and dramatic as anything that had gone before. The past for him was deathly, even the past grandeur of historic Rome. To a friend he characterized the city as a cemetery where “flowers of death, ruins, piles of bones, and skeletons” were arrayed in an “exquisite panorama.” As he wrote to his brother Stanislaus after taking a guided tour of the Forum: “Rome reminds me of a man who lives by exhibiting to travellers his grandmother’s corpse.”
There’s some truth to that. But the intensity of Joyce’s distaste for Rome indicates something more was going on. That remark about a death in the family made into a spectacle suggests what it was.
It is this: Joyce’s boyhood in Dublin was traumatic. His father’s profligacy grew perilous as the family swelled to 10 children. His father’s drinking put them all at risk — a risk that James, as the eldest, felt especially sharply. Then, after the youngest Joyce, Freddie, died in infancy, his father throttled his mother in a drunken, despairing rage, and threatened to kill her. “Now, by God, is the time to finish it,” John Joyce brayed, his hands around her throat. James hurled himself at the two of them and forced them apart and then watched his mother flee to a neighbor’s, taking the youngest children. He was 12.
“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” Stephen Dedalus remarks in Ulysses. The “history” in this aphorism is generally taken to refer to the history of Ireland, oppressed by England and, in Joyce’s view, by the Church. But it applies to Joyce’s personal history as a pointed self-diagnosis. And it helps to explain why Joyce was repelled by Rome: His Dublin childhood was so nightmarish that the epic history and architectural splendor of Rome couldn’t awaken him from it.
When we see Joyce’s childhood as traumatic, the notion that he might have come to America becomes a tantalizing counterfactual. Imagine him in New York or New England — forward-facing places where thousands of immigrants and the children of immigrants were vigorously awakening from the privations of the British colonial past! Imagine this young writer of genius facing forward into the American century rather than backward to an Ireland flash-frozen on June 16, 1904! To imagine this is to imagine a Joyce untraumatized, his creativity encouraged rather than thwarted.
Of course, Joyce didn’t come to America. He went to Europe. And when in Rome he did as he’d done in Dublin. He obsessively reenacted scenes from his native city and his personal history — as he would in fiction for two decades.
Sigmund Freud in Vienna a few years later devised a term for this practice, so common among the traumatized: “repetition compulsion.” But the insight of an American writer living in London in that moment — T.S. Eliot — illuminates the specific way that Joyce’s repetitions were shaped by Rome. Eliot sought to explain the way an artist expresses emotion in a work of art. The artist finds “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion.” Eliot, drawing on the work of the American poet and painter Washington Allston, called this image or situation an “objective correlative.”
For Joyce the situation of Rome — a city that couldn’t awake from its history — was an objective correlative for his personal situation. Rome was haunted by the past. So was he. No wonder he disliked it: Rome was “too close to home,” as we’d say today. And yet in Rome he would find a way to make art out of the situation whereby the everyday life of a modern Dubliner was set against epic history.
V.
For Robert F. Joyce and American Catholics of the next generation, Rome was a place of promise and a source of loyalty. Then more than now, Catholics in the U.S. were known as Roman Catholics, adherents of the Roman church, a term that at once distinguished it from the Methodist, Lutheran and Presbyterian churches and marked it as a church of immigrants, regardless of their country of origin. Derided as Romish, Catholics claimed the appellation with pride. They wound up in “a strange stance,” the Notre Dame historian Jay P. Dolan explained. “They were both 100 percent American, loyal patriots to the core, and 100 percent Roman, loyal Catholics to the core.”
It was in this doubly oriented Church that Rev. Joyce emerged as a leader. He was educated at the University of Vermont and at Catholic seminaries in Montreal, becoming fluent in French. Ordained in 1923, he served as a priest in several Vermont parishes, as principal of Cathedral High School in Burlington and as an Army chaplain during World War II. As pastor of St. Peter’s Church in Rutland after the war he initiated a renovation of the 19th-century building, commissioning new marble altars and a carved wooden baldacchino along with modern heating and lighting systems. He served as a mediator between a railroad company and striking workers, helping to bring about a settlement in 1953. He was named an auxiliary bishop the next year, and in 1956 the bishop of Burlington — a diocese that encompassed the state. He began writing a column for the diocesan newspaper and joined a bishops’ committee on Catholic education, a role which involved assessing new Catholic books for doctrinal soundness before publication.
American Catholics had a voice in Rome in Cardinal Francis Spellman, a confidant of Pope Pius XII — and a second-generation Irish American, born south of Boston in 1889. And they had a new clerical headquarters there. American bishops had sent seminarians to the North American College, near the Trevi Fountain, for nearly a century; in 1953 — as the U.S. Church was swelling with priestly vocations — a vast campus was dedicated on the Janiculum Hill, a few minutes’ walk from St. Peter’s Basilica.
Pius died in 1958, and the conclave elected Angelo Roncalli, the patriarch of Venice, who took the name John XXIII. Soon afterward John called an ecumenical council, not to define a dogma or confront an evil but for the “enlightenment, education, and joy of the entire Christian people,” as Notre Dame provost John McGreevy ’86 observes in his recent history of global Catholicism. The Vatican established commissions to address specific topics, and the U.S. bishops formed their own, too.
The most distinctive American preparation for the council was not that of a bishop, however. It was that of John Courtney Murray, S.J. Murray’s scholarship focused on two themes, each related to the nature of conscience and “freedom of religion”: the role of Catholics in public life in democratic societies, and the interactions of Catholics with people of other Christian bodies. Prior to the council, the Vatican still held that there was “no salvation outside the Church” and that the ideal government was one constituted along Catholic lines. Murray held differently in a series of essays. In 1954 his Jesuit superiors, under pressure from the Holy Office in Rome, told him to cease publishing on the topic of religious freedom. This he did, craftily — by developing his insights in the text of a book that would be brought out when circumstances were propitious. With the council imminent, circumstances were propitious. We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition was published in December 1960, with some Latin on the copyright page indicating that it was doctrinally sound:
Imprimatur: +Robert F. Joyce
Bishop of Burlington
Burlington, June 18, 1960
VI.
One night in early December 1906 the Joyces were evicted from Via Frattina. They hadn’t paid the rent but had hoped the landlady wouldn’t force out a young couple with a child. They left the strangers’ quarter after dark and in the rain, a carriage loaded with their possessions conveying them through what Joyce called the “nighttown” of Rome.
They found another flat in Via Monte Brianzo, 51, across the Tiber from the medieval Borgo and St. Peter’s. Today the area is at once gritty and plush, but it is not hard to imagine it 120 years ago as a definite step down — the narrow streets below the waterline of the dank Tiber nearby, the brick embankment that keeps the river on course making the place feel like an enclosure, the Eternal City’s dead end.
Joyce was faltering in his expatriation, but he was advancing in his art. One day he sketched the interior of the flat like a post-Impressionist painter working in words.
Scene: draughty little stone-flagged room, chest of drawers to left, on which are the remains of lunch, in the centre, a small table on which are writing materials . . . and a saltcellar: in the background, a small-sized bed. A young man with a snivelling nose sits at the little table: on the bed sits a madonna and plaintive infant. It is a January day.
That is a portrait of the artist, age 25.
At that table, struggling to concentrate — Nora and Giorgio were an arm’s length away — Joyce plotted the next phase of his art. He conceived “The Dead,” a long story of loss, set at Dublin at Christmas, that would evoke the “hospitality” celebrated in the story as the virtue of Ireland and the Irish and express the loss of it that he felt in Rome, the eviction still fresh in his mind. He made notes for two other stories: “The Last Supper,” about a Dubliner named McKenna, and “Ulysses,” about Alfred H. Hunter, a Jewish Dubliner. And he came up with a plan for a novel. He would complicate the novel fantastically in the years to come, but it would follow the plan he framed at the table in the draughty room. The novel would be a “mock epic,” in which a 20th-century man would go about everyday city life against a classical backdrop. It would take its title — Ulysses — from the short story (which, he later noted, “never got any forrador [farther] than the title”). And it would take its inner dynamism from his experience as a 20th-century man going about daily life in historic Rome.
VII.
The world’s Catholic bishops gathered at the Vatican in October 1962 to ponder “the Church in the modern world” against the backdrop of historic Rome.
Bishop Joyce likely traveled via Boston in a delegation headed by Richard Cushing, archbishop of Boston. Cushing was a son of Irish immigrants: His father had left County Cork for the U.S. in 1880 — not long after John Joyce left County Cork for Dublin. A generation removed from Ireland, Cushing had given the invocation at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy as president of the United States.
The council fathers met daily in St. Peter’s. In the iconic photograph they are shown from the rear of the basilica, seated in rows facing the center aisle, 2,500 men in white robes. Seeing that photo over the years I’ve always relished the knowledge that one of those robed figures was my granduncle. I never expected to see him there specifically. But as I scrolled through a Vatican II anniversary piece on the National Catholic Reporter website one day, there he was.
He’s standing in the “observers’ gallery,” an area set off by red velvet and damask fringed with gold. He appears as he would appear in our dining room 10 years later, pale and substantial as marble. He wears a scarlet robe over a cassock edged in lace. On his head are rimless glasses and a zucchetto. A leather portfolio is under his left arm. There are several nuns in the front row, each severe in habit and wimple, but he is talking to two lay women — a modern bishop attuned to the laity.
The council fathers would meet at St. Peter’s several hundred times over the next four years. The U.S. bishops stayed at the North American College. In the off hours they went about Rome, which was itself opening fitfully to modernity. They took taxis, rode buses, made phone calls with the clunky coins called gettone, and sent letters and missives home. They went to receptions at the Gregorian University and the Collegio Romano, suppered in trattorias and osterias, and visited churches — contemporary Catholic pilgrims in historic Rome.
Down the Janiculum from the North American College was the Hotel Michelangelo, with a view of St. Peter’s from the sheltered entrance and a bus stop on the corner. The name aside, the Michelangelo was a modern hotel, designed in the sleek Italian style then known worldwide through the movies. Bishop Joyce was familiar with the place. The rooftop, with Michelangelo’s dome looming a seeming arm’s length away, was a site for receptions. And he would meet parishioners from Vermont who stayed at the hotel while on pilgrimage.
This I know through a letter he sent to the States. In September 1965 my parents, at whose marriage he had presided in 1963, welcomed their second child. He sent congratulations on the hotel’s stationery, filling the page to the margins in his loping script. “I pray that he will fulfill all your hopes and plans, and always be a source of joy to you, and that St. Paul would watch over him always, along with St. Robert,” he said, and went on: “The life in Rome is getting organized and the Council is operating every day. I am enjoying it as much as ever, having time to just read, and walk, and having had several pleasant social evenings with old friends. It is a great pleasure every day to meet Bishops from all over the world whom I have known from previous years.” He closed ceremonially: “Enclosed is a small gift to help start Paul Robert Elie on his earthly career. God bless all of you. Love, +RFJ.”
The letter is in a family scrapbook. The letterhead bears the hotel’s address, phone and telex numbers, and the words “Air Conditioned.” In the top left corner, a printed line drawing points up the contrast between the lean profile of the hotel and the baroque curves of the nearby dome. The letter is a reminder that the marbled man out of time who came to our house for lunch was a 20th-century man after all, one who went to Vatican II deeply familiar with the outlook of the modern world that was the council’s subject.
A photograph shows the council fathers in a grand exeunt omnes from St. Peter’s on the council’s final day: December 9, 1965. It is in black and white, like a last vestige of the Old World. The bishops in white robes and miters are processing in a giant L through a crowd of thousands of men and women, a vast, dark-clad congregation.
I imagine James Joyce there among them. Born in 1882, he would have been 83. Plenty of his peers were alive and at work in those years: Marianne Moore, for instance, wrote liner notes for a 1963 LP of Muhammad Ali’s verses. I picture Joyce in the piazza: hatted, stooped, leaning on his ashplant, squinting through rimless glasses.
What would he have made of Vatican II? He might have said of the council’s shift away from Scholastic philosophy what Stephen Dedalus says when a friend suggests that he should leave the Roman church and become a Protestant: “What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?” Or he might have applied to the Church’s openings to the Jewish people, the “separated brethren” of other churches and people of other faiths the maxim — from his last book, Finnegans Wake — that has become his most notorious expression. He might have said, “Here comes everybody.”
VIII.
“I am passing out. O bitter ending! I’ll slip away before they’re up. They’ll never see. Nor know. Nor miss me. . . .” James Joyce died in 1941, shortly before he would have turned 59. He had ended Finnegans Wake with the death of its archetypal female figure, Anna Livia Plurabelle.
Already a bishop at age 59, Robert F. Joyce was defined by the role ever after. He retired at 75 as was mandatory, but remained active for two decades, driving to parishes all over Vermont. The Daughters of St. Paul published a book, Thoughts to Ponder, drawn from his columns. They’re the thoughts of a man who was modern as the Church reckoned such things but quite traditional on the whole. One from Good Friday suggests how — suggests the fresh view of conscience that the council had called forth.
Our consciences have a way of stirring uneasily within us when we face spiritual realities, and when we allow ourselves to draw close to God. It is hard to go through Passion Week and Holy Week, to meditate on Christ and the cross, to recall that we are daily nearing our own Good Friday, without making a more searching, honest, and sincere examination of conscience. We might find ourselves, like Peter and the repentant thief, blessed with the gift of tears and repentance, that we might have life.
Fifty-nine is the age I am now, at large in Rome on a spring day not long after the death of Pope Francis and the election of Pope Leo XIV.
I’m a guest at the Albergo Santa Chiara, which was an albergo, or hotel, in James Joyce’s time. Nearby the Pantheon, long open to everybody, is now a ticketed attraction. The bank where Joyce worked faces an Apple Store across the Corso.
I go first to St. Peter’s for a Jubilee Mass celebrated by Pope Leo. I’m seated among a group of motorcyclists who have ridden, pilgrim style, from Poland to Rome. Seen firsthand and up close, the new pope is smaller than they’d thought.
Then to the Hotel Michelangelo, in the neighborhood to the left behind St. Peter’s. The entrance has been updated, but the lobby, the concierge tells me, looks much as it looked in the 1960s: marble walls, cut-glass chandeliers. I picture a bishop in a black suit and rimless glasses seated at a wingback chair, facing a sheet of hotel stationery propped on a leather portfolio — a bishop and also a writer. I realize more strongly than before that my Catholic faith must owe a good deal to his example and intercession — and so must my inclination to ponder matters of faith in writing.
Via Monte Brianzo is a half-hour stroll away, across the Ponte Sant’Angelo. The embankment that may have given the area a dead-end quality in 1906 has kept the flow of tourists at bay in 2025. Number 51 is characteristically Roman: ocher with brown shutters. The wall bears no plaque or marker, and there’s no statue of James Joyce out front like the one I saw in Trieste a few years ago. But there’s no need. As I cock my head up to the top floor, I can see in my mind’s eye the room and the table where Joyce made a self-portrait in prose — a memorial as vivid as any in bronze or stone. I’m struck by the fact that in this city of monuments, he has made himself present across space and time through a few words. I’m moved by the writer’s calling that I have sought in a modest way to follow; and I’m struck by the insight, obvious but no less true for being so, that the arts, religion and city life have a common objective of binding together people of different eras through shared experience. And I grasp that the charism of the Roman Catholic Church is that it enshrines a great city as the expression of this process — as the objective correlative, one might say. These are insights that Rome, where art, religion, and city life come together as nowhere else, has called forth.
I spend the rest of the day walking through the centro storico, my senses awakened to establishments that were open for business in James Joyce’s time and Bishop Joyce’s time and now in our own. The Antica Cappelleria Troncarelli near the Piazza Navona has sold hats since 1857, and the floppy, small-brimmed cap such as James Joyce wore is there in a stack of caps for sale. The Antica Birreria Peroni has been serving draft beer since 1906. The Libreria Cesaretti, near the Collegio Romano for a century, sells books older than that. I go in. Ulisse is on offer, but no, grazie — imagine reading that polyglot, pun-filled novel in translation.
After a brief exchange the proprietor finds the book I have asked for in my still-poor Italian. The jacket calls it “un libro che da solo basterebbe a formare la gloria del grande scrittore” — a book that in itself would be enough to present the glory of the great writer. I buy it, an intercontinental, cross-generational souvenir.
An hour later I am reading Gente di Dublino at a battered table in an enoteca straight out of a post-Impressionist sketch. Here in Rome are Joyce’s Dubliners, in a new language but recognizably themselves, one raising a glass in a toast: “Bevvero però: era vino di Boemia. Brindarono all’Irlanda, all’Inghilterra, alla Francia, all’Ungheria, agli Stati Uniti d’America. . . .”
Paul Elie is a senior fellow in Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs and a regular contributor to The New Yorker. He is the author of The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s.