Bloomsday is tomorrow, and I suppose UD‘s little contribution to it would go like this:
Leader’s bio of Ellmann, who himself wrote the great bio of James Joyce, is currently much talked about. Ellmann was a friend/colleague of my then-boyfriend (and I mean then! we’re talking about what? the early ‘seventies?) at Northwestern University.
One afternoon Ellmann came over to our place to ask him a favor.
Ellmann had written a long angry defense of himself against some hostile reviewer – my memory is that the review appeared in the NY Review of Books, and Ellmann intended the defense to appear there? – and he wanted my bf to submit it under his name. As if he had written it!
Wee UD sat on a couch by the fireplace, listening to my bf, a professor much-junior to Ellmann, agree — uncomfortably — to do this. I recall the two of them reading over the letter together, my bf making occasional edits, and then the official handing off of the thing from Ellmann to my bf.
I was shocked! Tried talking to the bf about it and he shrugged. Let’s not talk about it.
It was a strange early lesson for UD (must have barely been in my twenties) in the ways of the world. The ways of some worlds.