Word: nora
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What's really lewd, obscene, perverse and generally captivating about these new letters is a series from Joyce to his wife Nora in the latter half of 1909. These letters will immediately become a part of that strange sub-genre of literature characterized mainly by soiled finger-marks on the margines of pages: the Dirty Parts. It's doubtful that these letters will mean anything to Joyce scholarship. They mostly suggest what Joyce-the-Man was like, clarify some affinities between Joyce and the characters of his novels, and map out the origins of his works, if not the works...
Ellmann adequately explained the circumstances surrounding Jim Joyce's letters to Nora in his biography, but he was muzzled by the Joyce estate when it came to actually divulging their content. All he could say then was that they "veered between blunt sexual excitation and extreme spirituality." Only now can we see the complete picture of the heaven and hell of Joyce's passions...
...EARLY in his career, Joyce returned to Ireland after five years of self-imposed exile, leaving his wife behind in Trieste. Joyce looked up an old comrade, a friend who years before had also wanted Nora. The friend told him that Nora had been seeing them both during the dearest moments of Joyce's courtship and that she had deceived him. Joyce took this all too seriously, writing his wife hours later that it might possibly be all over. Joyce's jealous friend had in fact fabricated the betrayal, but for the next few weeks Joyce sent out letter after...
...small failures of Ellmann's new collection that Nora's reply to Joyce's paranoid accusation is never mentioned. Ellmann called it "a pathetic yet strangely dignified letter" in his biography. It was lost but can be partly reconstructed from a letter Joyce sent to Nora dated August 31, 1909: a condescending missive saying "you are not, as you say, a poor uneducated girl...
Joyce's first reply to his wife's response, that August 31st letter, is a key that unlocks one of the most lyrical moments of filth in the canon of Dirty Parts. It is a strange moment for Joyce, an attempt to become closer to Nora through a type of innocent lechery: There is a place I would like to kiss you now, a strange place, Nora. Not on the lips, Nora. Do you know where? The letters continue in this vein, rising sometimes to quite literal climaxes; and Joyce intended this masturbatory spontaneous writing for himself and his wife...