FEELING the cutting edge of this January weather? Well, if you take a tip from James Joyce, the remedy is literally at hand. Jacques Mercanton, a French journalist, became friendly with Joyce during the writer's later years, and among his many recollections is of a request from Joyce to get him a copy of The Irish Times.
"Very doubtful that I should find that paper in Lausanne, where there could not have been many Irish readers, I started to suggest - other newspapers. But Joyce would not hear of them. Finally, after a good deal of searching, I managed to uncover a copy of The Irish Times. Rather proud of myself, I took it to him at once. His face lit up.
"You will see how indispensable that paper is to me." And half unfolding it in one supple gesture, he slid it under his coat, against his back. "Nothing will keep you warmer than that. Provided it's a good newspaper." Then he reassured me: "It doesn't hurt the paper. When you are ready to read it, you will find that no harm has been done.
Everyone has long been aware, of course, that The Irish Times is a paper of considerable substance - but it's nice to have confirmation of the fact from one of the century's greatest writers. You will find this intriguing anecdote in a book called Portraits of the Artist in Exile, subtitled Recollections of James Joyce by Europeans, and published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. It's not new, so you may have to seek it out, but the search will be worth it, as it's full of fascinating stories and insights.
AS that anecdote shows Joyce was, in many ways, a very practical man - and a few of the most arresting quotes of the past year show writers similarly mindful of their bodily needs and responses. Vanessa Feltz, for instance, extended the boundaries of literary criticism when, in the Mail on Sunday, she reviewed Kate White's Why Good Girls Don't Get Ahead and declared: "Tina Brown knows a piece of writing works if it makes her nipples go hard. Mine are like bullets." Gosh, and I thought she was just pleased to see me.
ON much the same subject, Elizabeth Wurtzel, best selling Author of Prozac Nation, told The Independent why she posed semi naked for GQ magazine: "The book is so naked that me going naked makes it all go together more. I think people should look at these pictures with the attitude: you get the book and the big tits, too.
IT's almost with relief that one turns to the spiritual angst of Irish writer Philip McCann, as quoted by The Guardian: "Like someone with an addiction, I was turning this despair at the futility of writing, this anti art stance, precisely into art. My despair was becoming an aesthetic of despair. I couldn't stop. I can't stop." Oh, I don't know, I'm sure he could if he tried.
Paula Yates, though, is unstoppable, as is obvious from the opening line of her autobiography: "My father had a very big organ, which may explain a lot of what follows." Taste, wit, subtlety, sensitivity, and Michael Hutchence, too - Paula's got it all.
IF you're having trouble keeping that New Year resolution giving up the booze, may I recommend two books to you? One of them, which was first published a few years back but which I've just been rereading in an Abacus paperback, is Tom Dardis's The Thirsty Muse. This truly sobering study recounts the alcoholic careers of Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway and O'Neill and explodes as nonsense Hemingway's boast that "good writers are drinking writers." After reading Dardis's account of the amount of alcohol these people drank on a daily basis, you'll feel appalled and probably somewhat ill, too.
Just as sobering in its own way is Pete Hamill's A Drinking Life, published last year in the US by Little, Brown and now on this side of the Atlantic under the Back Bay imprint.
Hamill, an Irish American whose parents emigrated from Belfast, has been a journalist, a novelist, a liner note writer (for the original pressing of Dylan's Blood on the Tracks, before Dylan substituted a painting instead), an intimate of the likes of Shirley MacLaine and Norman Mailer, and a drinker of some considerable renown in The Lion's Head, The White Horse and sundry other Manhattan hostelries.
A Drinking Life chronicles this crowded career, and chronicles, too, his final abandonment of alcohol. His reason for giving up the booze was simple: "I don't have a talent for it". Neither did Fitzgerald, but sadly that didn't stop him and he died at the age of 44.