Portrait of the artist in exile

'He liked to remember his happy days and spoke preferably of Trieste. His thoughts lingered on this topic with delight. There for a few short years he had enjoyed some moments of respite; fate had spared him some time.

"This pretty, good-natured Austrian city, half-Slavic and half-Italian (Edmund Gosse termed this 'life in Germany'), with the gaiety of the Midi, the medley of languages, the animation of a harbour, and an already exotic, oriental flavour (as Veronese's Venice), had given him an extreme pleasure: there were no classical monuments, no Roman mementos as in Split or Ancona. But there was the rock of Ithaca, and on the sea, the sail of Ulysses."

Thus wrote Joyce's Paris friend, Louis Gillet, providing an apt but often ignored view of the Irish writer's Triestine years. Often ignored because the vast body of Joyce criticism has still not fully come to appreciate the vital importance of his almost 11 years on the Adriatic and has preferred to concentrate on the problems that dogged him there: his family's poverty, the sometimes tormented atmosphere that prevailed between the writer, his brother Stanislaus and his partner Nora in their many apartments, his drinking, irregular lifestyle and, of course, his publishing frustrations.

While there was much that was negative about his Triestine sojourn, Joyce simply would not have stayed there for so many years nor voluntarily returned there after his seven-month spell in Rome, his three short visits to Dublin and after Zurich if the city had not been a place in which he could write, find company to sharpen his ideas, and glean material for his writing.

As he put it to his teaching companion of many years, Alessandro Francini Bruni, Trieste was his "second country", the place where "his personality had been formed". Thus, during one of his trips to Dublin - this time to set up the Volta cinema - Joyce would write lyrically to Nora of "La nostra bella Trieste! I have often said that angrily but tonight I feel it true. I long to see the lights twinkling along the riva as the train passes Miramar. After all, Nora, it is the city which has sheltered us. I came back to it jaded and moneyless after my folly in Rome and now again after this absence."

When Joyce first arrived in Austro-Hungary's chief commercial port in 1904 he found himself in a bustling city, distinctive for the mixture of races that had settled there and maintained their identities - Italians, Austrians, Slavs, Hungarians, Greeks, Jews enterprise, its financial clout, its cultural liveliness and its linguistic diversity. The writer was just 22 years old (like Stephen Dedalus), and, when he left, some 16 years later, he was, like Leopold Bloom, 38. In the intervening years, the author of Ulysses lived many of the experiences that would enable him to put flesh on his middle-European Dubliner, Leopold Bloom.

It was with good reason, then, that his Triestine friend Ettore Schmitz (better known as the writer Italo Svevo) could claim of Joyce "that we Triestines have a right to regard him with deep affection as if he belonged in a certain sense to us. And as if he were to a certain extent Italian. It is a great title of honor for my city that in Ulysses some of the streets of Dublin stretch on and on into the windings of our old Trieste. Trieste was for him a little Ireland which he was able to contemplate with more detachment than he could his own country."

To the Irish critic Boyd, who asserted that Ulysses was merely the product of pre-war thought in Ireland, Valery Larbaud replied, "Yes, in so far as it came to maturity in Trieste."

Trieste was the ideal location for Joyce to combine his enduring fascination with his local origins with an equally strong attachment to the diverse cultures of the Continent that were to be found in this middle-European melting pot of 250,000 inhabitants. It provided him with foreign echoes of Dublin while at the same time offering distinctive material of its own to be moulded to fit the world of his Hibernian metropolis. For much of the Oriental, Jewish and Greek elements of Ulysses, for much of the multilingual variety of Circe and Finnegans Wake, "that absendee tarry easty" (as he called it in the Wake) was his principal source, his "cittΘ immediata".

On a political front, the writer's ideas were challenged in the imperial Austrian city by the lively exchanges between the Italian irredentist and the socialist movements; his religious sensibilities were broadened by his encounter with a liberal environment which, in order to develop commercially, had become a refuge to people of differing religious persuasions from all over Europe, while, in a more strictly literary key, Joyce was challenged by the contrasting influences coming from Vienna and Florence, by the earnest endeavours of the Italian Futuristi and the Vociani, and the work of important local writers such as Italo Svevo and Silvio Benco (a Triestine D'Annunzio).

On a linguistic level, Giacometo (as he referred to himself in a letter to Svevo) revelled in the babble of languages to be heard on the city streets and came to master the local dialect of Triestino, which functioned as a glue to unite diverse elements within the city.

Joyce's view of women was also challenged in the Adriatic metropolis (as his Triestine novelette Giacomo Joyce shows): the city's young women forced him - because of their sophistication, education, beauty and sexual ease - to reconsider his reductive early visions of the feminine and replace them with the fuller versions we find in the later fiction.

The influence of Trieste as a crossroads of competing cultures can be seen in its most developed manifestation in the characters of Leopold and Molly Bloom, because while Stephen Dedalus was largely formed by the time Joyce left Ireland, Leopold and Molly are in great part products of his exile in Trieste: Bloom - a Jew, an Oriental, a European with Hungarian roots - does not fit into provincial Dublin, while Molly is as much a Mediterranean Jewess as she is Irish; and the elements that attract them to one another are the non-Irish ones, precisely those which Joyce found among what he called in Finnegans Wake "the cummulium of scents" of "an italian warehouse" - Trieste.

The Blooms, therefore, are the literary embodiment and proof of how much Joyce received (and was open to accept) from the divided city of Trieste, caught between its links with Mitteleuropa and its aspirations towards Italy. They are at once testimony of and a tribute to the forces of attraction that made him linger for 10 long years in the Adriatic city despite his many troubles there.

John McCourt is programme director of the Trieste Joyce School. His book, The Years of Bloom, Joyce in Trieste 1904-1920 is published in paperback by The Lilliput Press this week. He is also author of James Joyce: A Passionate Exile, published by Orion