Conversations with James Joyce

“In the ordinary sense Joyce was not a conversationalist,” writes Arthur Power, the author of Conversations with James Joyce. An aspiring painter and art critic, Power (of the famous whiskey family) struck up a strained, somewhat prickly friendship with the master of exile, silence, and cunning at the Bal Bullier in Paris, in the year of 1921. This volume, now appearing in print for the first time in North America, is Power’s record of the two men’s encounters and conversations, whose subjects ranged from Irish literature to American politics, and from Assyrian monuments to the individual “odor of a country,” which, Joyce assured his wide-eyed interlocutor, was “the gauge of its civilization.” Here is a rare glimpse of the private Joyce—to Power’s great surprise, not a brash bohemian, but a steadily working, sharp-tongued, elusive man.