THIS book contains the fullest account so far available of Joyce's years in Trieste. This now Italian city on the Adriatic, about a hundred miles east of Venice, was Joyce's first refuge in exile and he stayed there from 1904 to 1915, with a seven-month sojourn in Rome, and again from 1919 to 1920. As the title indicates, it is in part a guide book, containing maps, photographs and detailed itineraries of areas of the city connected with Joyce. But it also contains a number of prefatory chapters giving a narrative history of the writer's time in Trieste which contains much new information.
In many respects the account of those years given in Ellmann's classic biography is sketchy; they are far less well documented than his later time in Paris. This book, with Italian and English texts (translated by John McCourt, who is doing further study in this area) facing each other, helps to fill out the picture, using many hitherto unrecorded reminiscences, and gives it great closeness and intimacy - one gets the sense of daily life as it was lived in that turbulent, permanently penurious household. At one stage five adults - James, Nora, Stanislaus and Eileen Joyce, and Eileen's husband Frantisek Schaurek - along with four children, were living together in one flat.
The value of this book is not just biographical: Joyce did write about places other than Dublin and in particular he wrote about places in Trieste. Particularly welcome in this connection are the many photographs of old Trieste in this volume, photographs which bring into sharp focus the context in which the artist continued to develop and Ulysses was begun. (The house in which this happened, via Donato Bramante 4; is marked with a plaque.) One of the most valuable images is a photograph of, the old Fontana baths, the setting of one of Joyce's most moving poems, On the Beach at Fontana.
IT would have been nice to have had also a picture of the nearby San Sabba, setting of another fine poem, but it is of course outside Trieste. However, there is much other information here, from Triestine high life to Triestine low life, including accounts of the brothels which Joyce probably frequented.
Joyce's residence in Trieste was fortuitous, like almost everything that happened to him, except his writing. But its importance to him cannot be gainsaid. And it is worth suggesting, in a Bloomian spirit of civic improvement, that some formal link between Trieste and Dublin should commemorate, this unexpected but important connection.