

Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Middle-Aged Man

by Massimo Soranzio

The pity is,

the public will demand

and find

a moral—

or worse.

On the honour of a gentleman,

I will not serve that

which I no longer believe:

not one single

serious line.

I have recorded,

simultaneously,

what a man says, sees, thinks—

studied through a microscope in the morning,

repeated through a telescope in the evening.

I will express myself

as wholly as I can,

using for my defense

silence, exile

and cunning.

Neither more,

nor less alone,

not only separate from all

others, but to have

not even one friend.

No drama

behind the historical raving:

they are all there,

all the great talkers,

for the first hunt of the season.

Freudians

and all the things they forgot,

bringing on the rain—

and we

wanting to go for a stroll.

SOURCE: “James Joyce — A Portrait of the Man Who is, at Present, One of the More Significant Figures in Literature” by Djuna Barnes, Vanity Fair (April 1922).

IMAGE: Novelist James Joyce (1882-1941), drawing by Djuna Barnes, Vanity Fair (April 1922).

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I found this interview to a celebrity from the past, James Joyce, by mere chance. Though not one of my favourite authors, Joyce has played an important role in my life, accompanying and inspiring me on several occasions. His answers in this interview, published around the publication, on his 40th birthday, of his masterpiece Ulysses, were poetic per se, so I just selected and reordered his words to produce this sketchy self-portrait of the writer.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Massimo Soranzio writes on the northern Adriatic coast of Italy, about 20 miles from Trieste. He teaches English as a foreign language and English literature in a high school, and has been a journalist, a translator, and a freelance lecturer on Modernist literature and literary translation. He posts some of his found and constraint-based poetry on his blog, massimosoranzio.tumblr.com.