Significant Others - Bonus Episode: Dr. Mali Heled Kinberg on James Joyce and Nora Barnacle

Episode Date: July 27, 2023

On this month’s bonus episode, Liza is joined by Dr. Mali Heled Kinberg, UCLA faculty lecturer and holder of a doctorate in English Literature from Cambridge University, to discuss the fascinating and unique relationship between literary giant James Joyce and his partner, Nora Barnacle. Liza and Mali explore Nora’s profound influence on her husband and the scandalous letters the two exchanged throughout their relationship.We’re working hard on Season 2! Until then we will be releasing special bonus episodes from time to time. Want to support the show? Rate and review wherever you listen to your podcasts, and keep sending suggestions of Significant Others you’d like to hear about our way at [e-mail]!

Welcome to Significant Others. I'm Liza Powell O'Brien. Season two is coming soon, we promise. But in the meantime, we've got another conversation for you. This time about one of the more interesting couples, certainly in the history of literary couples, but also, I think, in the history of couples, James Joyce and his wife, Nora Barnacle. Here to share their

story with us is one of the significant people in my life, Dr. Molly Haled Kinberg, faculty lecturer at the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television, adjunct professor at the Anderson School of Management, and holder of a doctorate in English literature from Cambridge University. Molly, you and I met in a sandbox, literally. That is true. When our kids were very young and I expected to be consigned for the afternoon

to a mindless afternoon of watching kids play with dirt. And instead found myself listening to the phrase when I got my PhD in modernist literature at Cambridge, and I thought, wait, what? Who's this person? And, you know, friendship was born and here we are. And I'm so grateful that you are coming to talk to us about these fascinating people. Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here today. Thank you for having me. So for those of us who do not have a PhD in modernist literature from Cambridge or anywhere else, will you help orient us a little bit about why it is that we care generally about James Joyce. Thank you. Yes, of course. I think Joyce is arguably one of the most significant, radically inventive writers in the English language, certainly of the 20th century.

certainly of the 20th century. He took a lot of norms and turned them upside down on their head. He's very well known for creating stream of consciousness writing, which was the intention to write from the inside to express the way we think and to put that to paper. And it was very much shattered previous notions of literature representing sort of something more external. And I guess for the purposes of a lot of what we're going to be talking about today, part of why I love him so much is, and why I chose to spend five years studying him pretty much exclusively, if not more like nine years, studying him pretty much exclusively, if not more like nine years, it's that he not only brought in all the highfalutin, brilliant, modernist, intellectually mind-bending information into his work, but he was also really interested in the real and the bodily and keeping things true to life as it's lived.

And that is radical and inspiring about him. And you mentioned that that does have a lot to do with his eventual wife, Nora. For sure. So will you tell us how it is that they entered each other's lives? Will you tell us how it is that they entered each other's lives? So in 1904, Joyce, who just lost his mother the year before to a protracted and awful stomach cancer. And how old was he at the time? He was 21 when she passed away.

And were they tight? Were they close? He was very close to his mother. close. He was very close to his mother. His father was a drunken train wreck who had taken the family's stature and sort of pulled it down by pissing away all of their income to drink. And the mother was really sort of the fabric of the family, keeping barely everybody together. And so Joyce was plunged into grief, had begun his writing career. He had published in 1900 his first piece on Ibsen. And he was walking along Nassau Street and saw this tall woman. He would later describe it sauntering, but he liked the confidence of her strut. And he approached her.

This is now 1904, June 10th. And he approached her and started speaking to her. And they had a conversation. And Nora Barnacle had recently moved from Galway. She was two years younger than Joyce. And so she was 20 at the time. She was a wild spirit of sorts, apparently had been so uncontainable in the last few years. There was discussion of her cross-dressing to be able to go out of the house at hours when it wasn't allowed, that she had gotten a beating from her uncle and just left without a goodbye, Galway, and had moved herself just a few months before to Dublin,

where she had gotten a job as a laundress in Finn's Hotel. So probably, I'm not sure she was used to being picked up at all on the street by strange men, but I think she was probably lonely because she was in a new place and didn't know anybody other than the other women working at Finn's Hotel. So Joyce approaches her on June 10th. Her remembrance of it alternately describes him as a sailor in a Swede, but basically she says he's got these beautiful clear blue eyes, and he asks her if she'll meet him again.

And she says yes, And they agree to a date. And he shows up and she stands him up. Reasons unknown, maybe work didn't let her go that evening. And so he writes her quite a funny letter. It's his first letter to her that he sends to Finn's hotel. And he says, because he suffered, he had terrible glaucoma and was fraught with terrible eye problems throughout his life. So, and he was wearing glasses when she met him. And he said, well, I might be blind, but I went to the designated place. And I looked and I waited and I looked at a red brown haired woman, but I don't think it was yours. But would you please meet me again?

So, sure enough, they set another time to meet. And on the 16th of June, 1904, they have their first date, which is the day that everything takes place in Ulysses. So it becomes Bloom's Day, which is named after Leopold Bloom, who is Molly Bloom's husband. Joyce's literary avatar. Joyce's literary avatar. And they go on a date. They meet. Instead of sort of walking her into town towards cafes or whatever,

they walk out of town. And out of town, they, you know, have their first sexual encounter. Wow. First date. Yeah. And he later says that it, you know, it's her boldness that is she who unzips his pants and finishes him. And he says to her in his next letter, Nora, you made me a man. Wow. Wow. Wow. I think he's immediately attracted to her freeness, her boldness, her comfort in herself, and this voice of Galway, which is so, you know, was just sort of beginning to be fetishized a little bit in Irish, in Dublin literary circles as sort of an authentic aspect of Irish language and communication. Okay, so that's the start of their relationship. And they're together for a while before they're actually married, right? They're together for a very long while until they're

actually married because they don't actually marry until 1931. Oh, wow. Okay, so part of what is so fascinating and extraordinary about their union, one, it's they're sort of from different classes and circumstances, right? Joyce, even though the father's drink, like has drained away the money on drink, is from a highly educated part of society. All their friends are very sophisticated and at the best of schools. Joyce had distinguished himself at 15. He had written an essay that won a prize as the best in Ireland. So, you know. And he also, back to your Ibsen comment, he started corresponding with Ibsen, right? Or maybe he wrote one letter to Ibsen. So Ibsen was Joyce's literary hero. And he certainly, when he met Nora, certainly liked

that her name, she shared a name with Ibsen's Nora Helmer from A Doll's House. What Joyce loved about Ibsen was he felt that he had tapped into a true realism, specifically as it related to male and female relationships. Oh, interesting. And he did, he had written an article about a new work of Ibsen's, which caught the eye of his publisher, who wrote to Joyce, and then Joyce did correspond with Ibsen, thanking him for the tremendous inspiration and influence he had had on him as a young man of letters. Which takes a certain amount of confidence. Oh, yeah. As a young person.

I mean, but to your point about confidence, that's exactly like what we're talking about. So Joyce, and it's sort of like a wild, reckless commitment to his point of view about the world. He's dating Nora for a few months. They start going out together. He is seen, you know, start taking her out in public. His family members, his friends are disdainful of like, why is he with a laundress? They think it's a little bit beneath him. And yet one of them's trying to hit on her. But what he proposes to her in their departing, because they put themselves into self-exile from Dublin. They leave Ireland in 1904 together. But what's so radical is he asks her not only to come away with him, but to come away with him without marrying her and without...

And she's still 20. She's 20. And what he says to her is, you know, that he, my mind rejects the whole present social order and Christianity. Home, the recognized virtues, classes of life, religious doctrines. So he's not saying to her that he doesn't want to make her a partner for life, but that he cannot sanctify that partnership before a priest because he has rejected that. So he asks her to go on this journey. And at that age, at that stage, I mean, she would have been ruined, right? And in fact, even in Europe at that time, they had to feign being married. And so to your question about when did they get married,

they didn't actually get married until 1931, even though she wanted to. And that she would continually raise, well, she also was more religious, liked to go to mass. And she would raise this and was hoping that he would marry her. But it wasn't until 1931 when his son was marrying a 11-year-old divorcee Jewish woman, Helen Fleischman, from the States that she wanted to make sure that her husband, Giorgio, and should they have children, their child, who was then Stephen Joyce, would have a clean line to inheritance. So at that point, Nora had a civil service that was sort of the paparazzi were all over because they were like, at that point, now famous author Joyce was, and it was shocking to the children, never knew that their parents weren't married.

It reminds me of when Sting and Trudy Styler got married for the children. It's exactly the same thing. Exactly the same, which I always thought was a bit of a publicity stunt at that point in his career. Okay, so they're together for a few months. He says, let's leave Ireland together, but not married.

And where do they go? Okay, so first to that end. So they leave because this is quite scandalous. They don't even tell the family that they're leaving together. So they're going to meet at an appointed place on the boat. And she's standing in one place. Her family is not there. They're not even aware she's leaving the country. She doesn't communicate with her mother for years after her

departure. Joyce's father is there, some brothers and sisters, and then he comes to meet her up on the boat. And later it is said there's a great line from Joyce's father, John Joyce, who was a big lover of puns, which is where Joyce's, you know, literature is laden with doublon tendres and puns. And he got this love of punning from his father. So when he found out that he had run off with a woman named Nora Barnacle, he said, well, with that last name, she'll never leave him, which is true. And this name Barnacle, Joyce himself dives into all sorts of meaning with it. So the name Barnacle was and remains a popular last name in Ireland, particularly Western Ireland. I think now it's sort of pronounced more Barnacle, Biernacle, but it is from a barnacle goose, which was, there was this folkloric idea that the barnacle goose, sort of like we think of pregnancy and storks, that the barnacle goose was born in a shell on a tree and dropped into the sea.

And so Joyce picks up all these references. There's geese all over Ulysses, and he talks about her as his bird. There's a lot of reference to her as his— And there's a bit of a fertility connection there, it sounds like. Specifically, he refers to her as his brown-arsed fuckbird, but yes. I mean, who among us has not been called at some point her mother? It's not a good week if you haven't been. That's exactly right.

Okay, so how does she start influencing his work and how, at what point does his work become his livelihood in terms of his writing? I think there was never a moment since Joyce was a very young man that this wasn't who he was and what he was meant to be. And he had that like, you know, with creatives, he had that megalomaniacal belief in the need, the necessity of him creating his work and getting it out there.

And he also had with that, that modernist belief in, you know, toggled between two world wars that his work could save the world. I mean, and you see that in Pound and you see that in Eliot, but it's this huge belief in, and Joyce's work, you know, he would often say about Ulysses that it was written with such a level of detail that if Dublin should be obliterated, it could be rebuilt on that day of 1904, just based on his novel. So I think he is always about how to make that happen. It's about who you can get money out of to help that. He has a series of jobs. He's teaching at Berlitz. They move towns a lot as opportunities arise. Sometimes they want a warmer climate because he'll have an attack of his eyes.

Does she have to work also to support them? At one point when Georgia is a baby, she takes a job as a laundress. But mostly the bulk of her work is managing him because he's a lot of work. But people quickly believe in his brilliance. And he is able to, you know, through a series of favors, and he also always has these financial schemes. He's going to sell Irish tweed in Europe. He was the first, he built ever, the first ever movie theater in Dublin. Wow. Which was, I mean, he was an absolute disaster as a businessman, even though the ideas, of course, were brilliant. But yeah, so no, she wasn't working per se. And was she someone who cared about his art?

So it's interesting, like at the birthday party that was held when the first bound copy of Finnegan's Wake was ready, it wouldn't actually be published, but Joyce was very superstitious. And like, it was very important that Ulysses come out on his birthday and then Finnegan's Wake. So the rest of the publication wasn't ready for a couple of months,

but they gave him his first bound copy and were celebrating. And she made a toast and she said, well, I've never read a single one of your books, Jim, but I guess I should now since they make so much money. And apparently there was dead silence around the table. So not really.

She really liked Finnegan's Wake, which she would read to her, particularly the Anna Livia Pluribel section, which was very much an homage to her. It's a laundress washing the dirt of life in the river of life, the River Liffey. And Anna Livia is very much supposed to be her voice. So she loved that. Ulysses, the bits he read to her, she would say it was a lot of filth. And she would tell people it was a lot of filth.

So, you know, Joyce famously would say, well, he said famously to Mary Colum, I hate intellectual women. But I think that can be qualified because he liked the ones who he could utilize. So he had a phalanx of intellectual women who were helping him get published and fed while he wrote. So, for instance, Harriet Weaver was somebody who didn't believe in her inheritance. She must have given him 12,000 pounds of her, like, when she inherited money, she would just give it to him. And Sylvia Beach, who ran Shakespeare and Company with her lover, Adrienne Monnier, would also, you know, give him advances against things that were not, you know. So, there were intellectual women he certainly kept around, Maria Jolas, who, but his interest and his connection with Nora was something other than that. I mean, she's certainly very smart. I think that there was a lot of scholarship for a long time that sort of dismissed her as uneducated. And there's nothing unsophisticated about this woman. She was a force. She was apparently quite bossy with him.

She kept him in check. She kept him from drinking too much. He was a gentle soul in the house. His dad had beaten the kids and beaten his mother. And so they sort of showered them with love, perhaps too much love and too little structure, sort of compared to his rigorousness that never translated to either of the children. I mean, obviously, Lucia wouldn't have been capable, but Giorgio never really amounted to much. Georgiou never really amounted to much. And they had an incredibly rich and alive sex life, for lack of a better way of putting it. Absolutely. So there's a lot of heat around the discussion of these pornographic letters that they wrote each other. And so that's a fun place to start about this.

But yeah, from the get-go, I think, and Joyce was not, before meeting Nora, he wasn't particularly romantically experienced. He was frank about the fact that he had lost his virginity at a whorehouse at the age of 14. And he did frequent them in Dublin. And it was, you know, as you shared about Tolstoy, he did find it important to tell Nora before they left, like a confessional of all of his previous experiences, which I think she found rather shocking. But then he double, triple shocked her by saying, I also reject the church, and I've left the church six years ago. And again, as Tolstoy did, you know, but I want you to love me. It was his desire to be accepted and known in his own way. And I think... Did it feel redemptive for Joyce to be loved?

I mean, that's sort of what Tolstoy seemed to, in my reading of his diaries, seemed to be, you know, hoping for some sort of moral redemption. I don't know that Joyce was looking for the same thing. I think there's a little bit of a cat and mouse of like, I want to, you know, know that I've sinned and have been accepted in that. So I think there's part of that. And you see that in their letters, that there's some cat and mouse power play. But really, you know, he says to her at one point, no human being has ever stood so close to my soul as you now stand. And I think that's very true. I think he was so dependent upon her. And I think he is so, that necessity of honesty and realness, as sophomoric as it is in moments, this was part of that, right? He had to be able to be free with her and as hard as it

might be for her to hear some of these things. And I think she, so these letters, these famous letters. So Joyce goes to Dublin in 1909 to try and get the movie theater business going and also to check in on the publication of Dubliners. And he's leaving her and the kids for the first time in a long time. And, you know, he writes that he wants her to start sending some exciting letters. And I think, you know, part of it is she's aware of his history with, you know, prostitution, and she's trying to keep him satisfied while he's away. And they do have a very electric sex life. And so her letters, unfortunately, are lost for now. We don't know if they're yet to be discovered or he destroyed them, but his are available. And I have to say, like, even in our jaded times, they are freshly shocking.

And they are totally available to read online, basically. They are totally available to read online, basically. They are totally available to read online. You know, they're the Letters to Nora, December 1909. You can find them anywhere. They're full of, you know, I mean, they're talking about what they're, you know, what they want, what they desire. And he's desiring, I mean, a lot of it, it's, what's the term we said? what they want, what they desire. And he's desiring, I mean, a lot of it, it's, what's the term we said?

Corpophilia, which is a love of excrement as a fetish. But he wants to see her in the water closet, like, you know, like a hog. Picking up her clothes. Yeah, making her dung. And he talks about, you know, but, and as out, like outlandishly brave and bold and open as they are, I find them, you know, and this might just be my bizarre open mindedness to this, but I find them kind of romantic just because here they are. They're in the middle of Europe. They're exiled from what they know. And what they did know was this,

you know, oppressively strict Irish Catholic Ireland, you know, of 1904 was their last time there. And the fact that they could be so free and so honest with each other as parents and through life and through hardship and through hunger and through moves, to me is sweet that they had this strength of bond. Also, by the way, Nora's no dummy. So not only is she trying to keep him entertained and he's telling her, well, you know, in his letters, he's saying, well, I jerked off twice reading that last letter and write me another one. And I want to hear this and I want to think about that.

But then she starts to flip it to, okay, now I've got him like in a sexual fever and he's occupied, but I also now want to extract something. So she starts telling him I'm running around Trieste with no panties because I don't have any knickers. So he's suddenly sending her money for undergarments and then for, you know, nice nightwear to wear when he gets home. So she's like smart, really smart. Well, so she's, and she's, you know, to your point, she's able to harness, not only confront desire, but harness it and make use of it and kind of make the most of it. And the fact that Ulysses is a novel that is about a man who is tortured by his wife's infidelity to some extent, right? Where does that, how does that fit into the story of this otherwise, you know, incredibly well-matched couple?

Did he suffer? Did she cause him to suffer? Is this paranoid fantasy? Is this just him making use of an idea? him making use of an idea? Yeah. I mean, I think that, I think that while there's this concept of cuckolding that's central,

so it's interesting, you know, there's actually no act of sex that you witness over the course of Ulysses that's not onanistic, like it's misturbatory. And obviously it concludes famously with Molly Bloom satisfying herself in the final Penelope chapter of Ulysses, which is broken into eight long sentences, which he did write to his brother Stanislas early on in his courtship with Nora. Did you ever notice that women write without any stops or, you know, punctuation?

any stops or, you know, punctuation. And indeed, her letters and her mother's letters do read like these sort of like blocks of words. But I think that, you know, it's unclear, it's unknown if Joyce ever actually himself strayed from her. There are a couple of flirtations. He had a few flirtations with students of his. There was a woman, Amalia Popper, who was the daughter of sort of a wealthy merchant who, they say actually that Amalia is the basis of Molly Bloom's name. Then there was somebody else, Martha Fleischman, who he told his friend, Frank Budgen, after spending a day alone with her, I have explored the hottest and coldest parts

of a woman's body today. Wow. And never explained further what and how, but she then did have a bit of a nervous breakdown. So it's presumed that something might've happened, but really it's thought that they were devoted to each other over the course of the relationship. And I think that Joyce actually tried to encourage Nora at one point to stray so that he could experience it. And she got really mad at him. She was like, are you out of your mind? Find another way to get content for your book. I'm not. So I think that Molly's affair and the lust and the crumbs she's left in the bed that day is, it's more about, you know, Leopold Bloom comes home that night. He comes home back to her. They assume their position of

his feet on the pillow, you know, her head on the pillow and his feet on the pillow. He brushes aside the crumbs, aware of what's transpired. But I think it's more about an acceptance of love. You know, it's understood in the book that they haven't had sex since they lost their son who's lived only some days, Rudy. So in it, they only have a daughter, Millie. But I think Leopold desires her. He sort of is a little bit creepy in sharing images of her everywhere. He's showing everybody her picture. She's a small-time singer.

But I think that like Joyce and Nora, who Joyce would send her books by Masick, you know, pornographic, sadomasochistic novels, Leopold is always trying to get sexy novels for Molly. Like he's enthralled by Molly's sensuality, intersexuality. And I don't think there's so much begrudging or betrayal ultimately. It's about acceptance and of the complexity and messiness of life. So this is an absolutely impossible question to answer and i apologize in advance for it but

how do you imagine if you can imagine how his work would have been different were it not for her like do you think that he would have just found a an object you know she's an object in some way she worked on him in a certain way. And some of that is because of who she was, but some of it was because of who he was. And obviously he was meant to be a great writer. He was going to be a great writer, but he was in a sense defined by her. And so it's just, I always am curious about kind of probing that boundary a little bit. How do we think he might have expressed himself in a different way? Had he been with someone else?

Well, I think she was, you know, the perfect partner for him in this regard. And her strength, her freeness, her adventurousness. I think that very much takes, I mean, and he loved to listen to her. He would have her tell stories and stories. So there was her first crush at age 17 died of typhoid pneumonia. And she had this terrible guilt at the time that she had killed him because he'd come to see her and watched her through a snowfall from watch her in her window. And this becomes the character Michael Fury at the end of The Dead in Dubliners. And so I think he's always taking from her, her stories. And I think he sort of

imagined her as a representation for what he loved in Ireland and what he thought was a source of life in what is womanly. So I think certainly Molly Bloom is informed, and Olivia in Phoenix Wake, but is informed by this warm, you know, present body, fleshy, warm, you know, present, body, fleshy, you know, and she would get irritated because they would say, they would ask her, well, are you like Molly Bloom? And Nora would snap. She's, no, she's much heavier than I am. I think she's 163 pounds, however many, eight stone or whatever. No, I'm not as heavy, but Joyce was always giving her hot chocolate, always wanted, and she would say to people,

they were famously at a dinner with an actress, and she said to the actress, Joyce loves me to be fat. And the actress said, well, why ever so? She said, she just likes me that way. And so I think for sure, I mean, it would be impossible

to even start to imagine what his writing would be like without her. And how did they, who died first? He did in 1941. He died just short of his 59th birthday from a perforated ulcer. He died in Zurich. I mean, and just to put in context, right, how scandalous, right? So Ulysses gets published in 1922. It's banned in the US. It's not until 1931 that it can legally

be read. I mean, so there was so much and so much was happening in Ireland between civil war and the world wars that when Nora in the years after Joyce's death applied, not just to the Irish government, but through her like very influential circle of friends to have his remains brought to be laid to rest in Ireland. It was rejected. So Joyce and I've been to the grave. Joyce's grave alongside Nora's still is in Zurich. And she liked it alongside on the other side of a zoo. And she said, well, he'll love to hear the wild animals. A lot of fart smells and fecal matter in a zoo, as he preferred it. I mean, and they're all over Ulysses and all the different,

whether it's Leopold Bloom having oysters in a Guinness and flatulence. But in this, again, and a Guinness and flatulence. But in this, again, and you're looking at this period of time where you have so many uptight, hyper-intellectual modernist writers, and here's something profoundly humanist about his insistence on realism, that things should be not as they might be,

but as they are, which all goes back to, there's that great book by Fleming, The Rise of the Novel, that starts talking about, um, Moll Flanders, which was written by Defoe in 1705. And he's writing about a prostitute and it like shattered expectations because it was the first time you had written about somebody who was low and not high. And you weren't writing about a royal family. So Joyce is continuing a tradition of trying to keep it real. And real includes, you know, nose picking and flatulence. And, you know, when he talks about the Dublin Bay,

he talks about it as the snot green sea and the scrotum tightening sea. about it as the snot green sea and the scrotum tightening sea. So there's a novel that is a novelized version of Nora's life, essentially, that is now out called Nora. Yeah, which I think is actually a lovely read. I mean, to me, it felt like visiting old friends, but I think it's really, really well written. Her name's Nuala O'Connor. She's not an academician. She's a writer. And she imagines what it must have been like living through penury and crises and all the drama that surrounded getting, you know, Joyce's experimental works published and all the moves and all the, you know, retreats during world wars. And I mean, it was pretty crazy. Also, when they were in 19, when they, when the war was coming,

which is how they ended up in Zurich, they applied to leave. And I think the one day, I can't remember if they want to go back to Ireland or they wanted to go to Switzerland, and it was Nazis. The Nazis accused Joyce of being Jewish because of Leopold Bloom, I suppose. So it was, but yeah, I think this novel is a very nice representation that also marks part of a trajectory of giving Nora a greater break because, so famously, Richard Ellman, who is the quintessential biographer, not just of Joyce, but of all the Irish modernists. He wrote the biography on Oscar Wilde and the biography on Yeats and the biography on Joyce. And when Brenda Maddox, who wrote her biographies, wanted to write a biography on Nora in the 80s, came to Richard Ellman for some information and his point of view.

And she said, can I get anything? Do you have any materials for me? He said, oh, there's nothing to write about with her. And there was part of this like, you know, there's not much there. You're not going to find what to fill a novel with. And then apparently, and it's funny, and he said, but something that affected like, she can't even cook. And his wife, Mary Elman, who had written a book about female writers, perked up, she says, yes, she could, chicken. She made very good chicken. And she was funny. And he said, yeah, she was funny.

And by the time Brenda Maddox went back to visit him the year before Richard Elman died, he had changed his point of view and actually gave her materials and said, you know, maybe there is something there. intellectual, hyper-intellectual self, but as a real partner in strength. And somebody kept on pulling him back because he avoided alcohol for so long because of his father's alcoholism, but then would fall into bits of it. And it was, everybody understood that, but for her, he would have just gone off. How did she rein him in? Does she have strategy? She would say, yell at him, Jim, you know, Jim, no. That's what I need to, I she have strategy? She would say, yell at him. Jim? You know, Jim? That's what I need to tell you. And she would say, Jim's out trying to get the stories to write about.

Like, he would go. And actually, Hemingway has a funny account. Because you said, you know, the word is, the report is that the Joyce family are penniless. But the fact is, I see them every night out, the whole Celtic crew of them at me shows, eating and drinking till all hours. Them, the kids, he's like, and Binny, meaning his first wife Hadley, and I can only afford to go once a week. So it was like this, you know, profligate spending. And she was always trying to rein him in while, you know, not being especially disciplined herself. Uh-huh. Oh, my God. I could listen to you talk about this forever, but I suppose I should actually go read some more Joyce first. It's been a minute since I have. And Nora, I wish we had more to know her by, but this is a great start.

Thank you so much for having me. This was so fun. We'll be releasing bonus episodes right up until season two comes out. So do be sure to hit the subscribe button. And as always, we welcome any and all suggestions for upcoming episodes. You can email us at significantpod at gmail.com. Thanks so much for listening.