A Little Circle of Kindred Minds - Joyce in Paris by Conor Fennell: book review

A Little Circle of Kindred Minds: Joyce in Paris (2014) is the biography of Irish author James Joyce living in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s.

Fennell focuses on Joyce’s friendships – his kindred minds - and of gaining and losing friendships, primarily based on issues with money.

Joyce had many friends, such as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Heminway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert McAlmon, Thomas MacGreevy, Samuel Becket, Sylvia Beach, and Harriett Stow Weaver. His friends were predominantly from America, the United Kingdom, and Ireland, but also from around the world. Many of his friends remained throughout his life, while few were short-lived.

Fennell’s book describes the friends that were supportive of Joyce and his writing ‘genius’ and those who became friends of his whole family – his wife Nora, and his two children Giorgio and Lucia. And those whom fancied Lucia and whom Lucia fancied.

It describes how Joyce managed to obtain many friends to help with his work – transcribing, translating, publishing, promoting, and even smuggling his banned books into countries, particularly into America (the American publication of his major work, Ulysses, was 12 years after the initial publication by Sylvia Beach in France in 1922).

This is interesting because few of James Joyce’s friends expected anything in return, except to be close to greatness. But Joyce surely gained much from them for they all inspired him in some way – and many appear disguised, or not, in his great books.

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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