The Details of Genius | profile

There are books that one does not read: one looks at them as if time had stopped so that the gaze can move forward with the archaeological secrecy that the discovery of an intimate ruin requires. Three Days with Joyce by Gisèle Freund is one of them. It is a short, almost accidental book, the result of a visit that could have gone unnoticed in anyone’s biography, except that the host was James Joyce and the visitor was none other than the photographer who knew how to transform observation into a form of politeness. Philippe Sollers affirms in the prologue – which has the sufficiency of a person who feels himself to be the legitimate heir to an invisible line – that friend Joyce not only portrayed him, but also lived him. And perhaps he is right: Rarely does such a succinct book succeed in conveying the atmospheric density of a character.

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about this encounter is the way Freund moves with almost no narrative intent, letting the photography speak for itself. He doesn’t describe Joyce with the methodology of someone recording data; Rather, he retouches it, revealing it in a mental darkroom where the light comes not from documentary truth but from patience and waiting. Friend looks as if he’s always about to press the shutter, and yet he doesn’t shoot: he collects. This quiet collection makes these pages more than just a testimony; It is the suggestion of a portrait that emerges when one looks further, as if the Joyce we see is still settling on the delicate paper.

But what’s truly unusual is that, between devotion and trembling, Freund turns his attention to what anyone else would have missed: the texture of everyday life, the touch of time on a body he no longer sees. In the Paris house where Joyce lived at the time, Freund observes a scene without meaning: the discreet furniture, the lamps that offer an unstable clarity, the silence broken only by the walk of someone who knows he is being watched and at the same time indifferent. There, Joyce appears less the titan of modern literature than a man tired of his own invention. You can hear him talking, rambling, getting up unhurriedly, reading with a magnifying glass, as if he had never fully settled into the world.

And here’s what, when read today, has the same effect as a secret wink: Joyce never changed her stockings in those three days. Freund records it without fanfare, perhaps ignoring it, almost with documentary innocence. He talks about his proper suit, his handkerchief arranged with practiced clumsiness, but the stockings—those stockings that obey the dampness of a foot that has walked more than is humanly advisable—remain unchanged. Sollers mentions the detail in passing, although he cannot help turning it into a metaphor: only a writer who has changed the structure of his language can afford not to change that of his costume.

But perhaps the revelation is different. In the persistence of these stockings lies the Joyce who does not appear in the biographies: the Joyce who ages, who does not see, who clings to what he knows more through touch than form (a Borgesian Joyce, bah). Almost domestic, on the verge of a personal tragedy, completely unaware of the monumentality that posterity imposed on him. Photography, as Freund reminds us, has no obligation to embellish: it should only get close enough to allow the subject to breathe. And Joyce breathes there, in these three days that seem like one, in these clothes that do not change, in this time that stretches and contracts like a tightrope, and in this Paris that is not a postcard but a refuge.

Perhaps the book is effective precisely because it shows us a possible Joyce, more human than literary, more tranquil than monumental. Friend looks at him. Photography captures it. And we, the late readers, discover that sometimes a detail is enough – a pair of stockings worn without modesty and modesty – to understand that genius also has its little things and that eternity always begins with the ridiculous.