Footnotes

AN IMPORTANT ASSOCIATION COPY OF JOYCE'S SCARCE FIRST PUBLISHED VOLUME OF POETRY, presented to his student Vela Bliznakoff (1895-1967). Vela was the niece of the Italian novelist and playwright Ettore Schmitz (better known as Italo Svevo) who was the inspiration for Leopold Bloom in Ulysses: "But Bloom is more (and less) than Joyce ... This prototype was almost certainly Ettore Schmitz, whose grandfather came from Hungary, and who wore the mustache that Joyce gave to Bloom.... Schmitz was in many ways different to Bloom; but he had married a Gentile, he had changed his name (though only for literary purposes), he knew something of Jewish customs, and he shared Bloom's amiably ironic view of life" (Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, p.374).

While her uncle provided the bedrock of Bloom's character, it was a particularly foolhardy antic of Vela's father Marco, that would be immortalised in Ulysses. During a trip to the country, Marco Bliznakoff had taken his ten-year-old son Boris out drinking, encouraging him to drink until he was horrendously sick. On returning home Marco had proudly boasted that the child had been resolutely saved from ever becoming a drunkard - a tale later attributed to Bloom: "he bought him home as drunk as a boiled owl and he said he did it to teach him the evils of alcohol and by herrings if the three women didn't near roast him" (Joyce, Ulysses, Chapter 12).

Living in Zurich at the time that Joyce was writing Ulysses, Vela and her sister Olga were granted some of the earliest glimpses of Joyce's working drafts of the novel. "Sometimes he brought along the manuscript of Ulysses and read them a few pages from it, but he omitted sentences or whole paragraphs, on the grounds that these were not for girls" (Ellmann, p.397). During this period "Nora Joyce found it impossible to persuade him [Joyce] to wash and shave, so one day when Vela Bliznakoff came to call on them, Nora asked her to speak to him about it, thinking her pretty face might have an influence. She did so, Joyce humorously gave her his word to shave and wash as early as the very next day; and afterwards she fancied she detected some improvement" (Ellmann, p.397).

Provenance: Vela Bliznakoff, gift inscription from the author; "GDF", ink stamp on front free endpaper.