Yesterday, in the city of Zurich, Switzerland, an auspicious birthday was celebrated - and it merits some notice in Ireland too. Fritz Senn, the most eminent living James Joyce scholar, has reached the age of 80. His is a most unusual eminence: he has never held a "proper" academic position, he has never published a "proper" book on Joyce, just some collections of essays, and his approach is entirely devoid of any of the fashionable theories and methodologies that so enliven (not) the efforts of so many aspiring practitioners in the academic world.
Splendid though his essays are, there is a personal aspect to his Joycean qualities which, in a sense, the written word cannot convey. To some, all this may seem a scandal; to others, it is a justifiable cause to celebrate this birthday, at least as much as the hailing of the New Year itself.
Fritz Senn is director of the James Joyce Foundation in Zurich, the city where Joyce first went when he left Ireland with Nora Barnacle in 1904; the city to which he returned for refuge during the first World War, to which he returned again for the same purpose during the second World War and where he died on January 13th, 1941. He is buried in the Fluntern cemetery above the city.
A tentative Senn biography can be pieced together from his most recent book, Joycean Murmoirs (soon to be reviewed in these pages). He was born in Basle on, obviously, January 1st, 1928; the family moved to Zurich when he was five. From the start, his interest in Joyce was extra-academic, if only because Joyce was not taught in the University of Zurich, where he studied, or indeed anywhere much else in the late 1940s.
Having left university without, it seems, taking a degree of any kind - as Senn characteristically puts it in Joycean Murmoirs, "Life struck. A child was on the way" - he worked from 1952 to around 1985 in the printing and publishing industry, first as a proof-reader at a small printer's firm, later at a publisher's, where he graduated to copy editor. Throughout this very long period, he developed and pursued an intense interest in Joyce, corresponding with like-minded people around the world, helping to set up the first James Joyce Symposium (in Dublin, in 1967) and contributing a stream of brilliant articles on Joyce to various journals, mainly the James Joyce Quarterly. So while remaining, as he says, a "poorly paid proof-reader" at home, he became a figure of deserved international repute in the Joyce world.
In 1985, at a time when his economic circumstances were difficult (he had been made redundant by the publisher's firm following a change of ownership), and when there was a danger that his marvellous Joyce collection would be dispersed, a group of associates and supporters came together. With the backing of a Swiss bank (they have their uses, after all) they set up the Zurich James Joyce Foundation, with Senn, naturally, as director. The foundation has become a leading centre of Joyce studies, with a library, annual workshops, reading groups and many other events, as well as being open to visits from all and sundry who find their way to Zurich. (Irish visitors are particularly welcome: one Irish-Swiss marriage has resulted from the establishment of the foundation - an event of which Senn feels himself to be very much the godfather.) Recently, the standing of the foundation has been enhanced through the donation of an important archive of manuscripts and documents by the son of Giorgio Joyce's second wife.
So in many ways his is an inspiring story of someone who, despite a difficult background (his personal life was not very happy and he has always been subject to crippling depressions), succeeded in fulfilling his true vocation and becoming the distinguished Joyce authority he was always meant to be.
Now that "Joyce" has become a global brand, it is hard to believe the difficulties that originally beset the modest efforts of those, such as Senn, who sought to promote the study and appreciation of this writer. The first International Joyce Symposium in Dublin in 1967 was not an entirely happy experience for the largely non-Irish participants. Though it received enthusiastic support from a small handful of Dublin Joyce devotees, the local and media reaction was sceptical, to say the least. The participants received something less than a céad míle fáilte. Strangely, a former occupant of this column, Seamus Kelly (Quidnunc), took a scornful attitude to the proceedings: one "Irishman's Diary" memorably began: "The Joyce posers (or symposers) were at it again hot and heavy on Thursday night. . ." Kelly was himself a Joyce enthusiast, with considerable knowledge: he seems, in a characteristic Irish quirk, to have resented these foreign parvenus who claimed to know so much - ironically, Fritz Senn's main theme is how little we know.
All that is a long time ago: in 2004, UCD conferred an honorary doctorate on this honorary son of Erin, a son by adoption and temperament, if not by birth (his reluctance, for instance, to publish a "proper" book, with chapters, a structure, and an argument, is classically Irish and probably entitles him to honorary citizenship on its own). These days, he is a frequent visitor to Dyoublong. He is the regular patron of the James Joyce Summer School; he has broadcast a running (or at least walking) commentary on Ulysses on RTÉ radio and was also featured in an RTÉ television programme, with his long-time friend Gerry O'Flaherty, on reciprocal visits to Dublin and Zurich.
The word "homecoming" is a dangerous one in Joyce studies, given Joyce's own relations with his native land and the ambiguous nature of Bloom's homecoming in Ulysses; but if affection and welcome count for anything, then Senn's visits to Dublin are indeed a form of coming home.