Product details
- ISBN 9781628972719
- Format: Paperback
- Publication Date: 30 Jul 2020
- Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
- Publication City/Country: Normal, US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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“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.
Arthur Power (1891–1984) was raised in Waterford, Ireland, and served in the First World War before moving to Paris, where he socialized with the sculptor Jo Davidson, interviewed Amadeo Modigliani, and became a regular visitor to the Joyce home. After ten years in France, Power moved back home to Ireland to try to manage the family estate and was for a long time an art critic for The Irish Times. He is also the author of From the Old Waterford House (1940).
