Part 1 –
Born in Dublin on the second of February to a lower- middle class family, this cosmopolitan and well-travelled Irishman found employment as an English teacher till he achieved fame with his unique writings, blending naturalist descriptions of journeys, local characters, taverns and carousing, underpinned by his cavalier approach to the fundamentals of punctuation . Mostly unheralded in his youth, he was a cult figure whose genius was acknowledged by a select few.

But enough about me. What about this James Joyce fella?

What I find most interesting about Joyce is that although his writings are geographically hyper-specific, focusing exclusively on the milieu of Dublin life , for the most part, he lived in self imposed exile in continental Europe, finding work as an English tutor to help fund his writings in the pre-and inter-war salons of Paris , Rome & Zurich, where he would die in 1941. Wrote Joyce ; “For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.”

But the main place Joyce called home on the continent was of course the city of Trieste – Vienna by the Sea – a Habsburgian free port, kind of like a Mittleleuropa Mos Eisley Spaceport. At the time of Joyce’s arrival in 1905 , Trieste was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and was their main outlet to the sea, conferring a huge sense of importance on this crossing point of the  Germanic,  Italian and Slavic worlds. While in its  current version it’s notably Italianate, back then, its free port status meant it became a hive of cosmopolitan commerce, attracting Serbian, Greek and Jewish merchants alongside dockers, chancers, the Habsburgs, the Habs-not- burgs and ultimately Joyce.  

Modern Trieste is the Joyciest Place on Earth. My trusted attorney and man not without culture Mr Tom Mayer joins me as we stay in the James Joyce Hostel, see the James Joyce statue on James Joyce Walk , peruse the James Joyce Merch in the Cafe Pirona he frequented, admire the James Joyce Theatre and enjoy the fried kidneys n’ onion street food from the Joycean-themed stall JJ’s . All of those are real except the last one. There are walking tours highlighting Joyce’s many many abodes in the city , having moved around about 15 times, absconding each time because he couldn’t pay his rent. While working  as an English Teacher ( a noble profession reserved for the cream of society),  he met Italo Svevo, (real name Ettore Schmitz) , the noted Italian writer whom Joyce probed for his Jewish perspective , helping form the outline of Ulysses’s protagonist Leopold Bloom.

Joyce had chosen no finer city for the sophisticate flanneur. Famed coffee brand ‘Illy’ is from Trieste , and with the Viennese influence, the Triestini must be the most coffee loving of all the Italians, which means they do loooooove their coffee. You can visit these cafes where Joyce would lounge about and sample the tarts, as well as the brothels where he may have …. also sampled the tarts*. (*NB There is no evidence for this, but a gag’s a gag)

The local cuisine is ham heavy,  with an österreichischian kraut n’ bier emphasis. Many of the trad restaurants here are buffets, a kind of canteen for dockers with mounds of boiled ham, ham, sausage, ham-hocks, ham chunks , boiled ham,  ham ham eggs and ham, kraut, horseradish,mustard and an aul bit of bread. I sample this local specialty, the Piatto di caldaia (from the cauldron) on the first night here, my night’s slumber crudely ravaged by ham-fever dreams of Joycean lust too warped and lascivious to record here. Just as the Mesoamerican shamans of the Zapotec and Olmecs would take mind altering psychotropic substances to produce visions for their sacred texts, perhaps Joyce developed his signature stream of consciousness from a similar night on the ham and its accompanying nocturnal porcine digestive visions. It’s a theory, people!! 

Of course, the British were here, and the city was administered as a UK/US Zone in the  post war 1940s as a separate country of The Free Territory of Trieste, only becoming part of Italy in 1954, joining the province of Friuli Venezia Giulia. It is, to date, the only place where you’ll see pleas to the Anglo-Saxon colonisers to come back. Madness.
Strolling its backstreets, it has a certain faded seaside glamour, its heyday long past as the port fell into  decline. Fortunately, it’s on a bit of comeback , a beautiful coastal town with the largest harbour-facing Piazza in Europe. Think of a larger harbour-facing Piazza. That’s right- you can’t ! It’s even a stop-off on the cruise ship scene, just across the Adriatic from Venice. It is also the kind of town where stuff is closed on a Sunday, including our target Irish Pub, which is a bit un-Irish but each to their own.

At the turn of the 20th Century, the concept of the Irish Pub abroad would have been seen as sheer folly, particularly as the nation of Ireland didn’t even exist, Joyce famously being a citizen of the British Empire . But who knows, had it been there, perhaps Joyce would have frequented Trieste’s one and only Irish Pub- Murphys Meeting Point !  Located in a half-covered shopping centre, across from a stuffed bear shop, lies our spot. Trieste on a Monday night is calm, and we are able to plant ourselves at the bar, gazing at the fine range of ales and spirits impressively assembled before us . As the name suggests, there’s no Guinness on show here, so we settle on their lovingly poured Murphys. The pub has classic vintage pub frontage, wooden and pillared, with a range of faux metal bar plates with the usual inanities. Notably , they have a bottle of Poitin behind the bar- so bonus points. One wonders what Joyce would make of the modern Irish pub phenomenon. We do know he was of course fond of the light music of whiskey falling into the glass, and of the ‘Wine of the Country”. There is even a whole school of conjecture as to whether Joyce wrote an alternative slogan for Guinness- ‘The free, the Froh, the Frothty Fresher’

Would he have savoured that link to home, the sup of porter unattainable since his departure? Or would he have been baffled by the artifice and concept of Irish-ness as a commodity, an attractive desirable element ? One thing we can say , knowing his fiduciary impropriety, he probably wouldn’t have got a round in. I would have sorted him though.  A part of me empathises with Joyce. When asked why I choose to visit every pub in the world, I recognise this dichotomy between the wanting to live a life of the continental sophisticate while simultaneously forever maintaining and tending to the link to home, however tenuous. Sharper readers may note the constant parallels between your narrator and Joyce himself , but it is not for me to to make such comparisons. You can though, that’s fine – its only normal. Don’t worry. As the man himself so truthfully stated:

‘I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad’