35 Years Ago Today

My family and I moved from California to North Carolina

By Moristotle

June 16, 1983, was a Monday, I’m pretty sure, because I had worked my last day at IBM in San Jose, California the preceding Friday and I seem to recollect that we flew the day after that weekend. [Wrong! The calendar for June that year puts the 16th on a Thursday.] Raleigh-Durham Airport wasn’t international then, and my memory of it is similar to the image shown above, which was apparently made in the 1950s. I even think they rolled a stairway up to the airplane for us to disembark. Little of the fields of grass around it were covered with runways then.
    My family of four (not counting our Welsh Springer Spaniel, Dale) used five passenger seats for the flight, one for my son’s cello, because he would need it in a few days for the music camp in Interlochen, Michigan. (And cellos are a bit delicate for the cargo hold – unlike Dale, who made the trip to RDU fine.)
    The four of us (and the cello) stayed for a week in UNC-Chapel Hill’s Carolina Inn (Dale stayed in a kennel), because the rental house we would inhabit for the two months before our new house was finished wasn’t vacated yet by its owners, Howard & Jane Edell, who had recently moved down here from Connecticut, but Jane hated it and wanted to spend the summer in her beloved Connecticut. (Beloved by me too, given my fond undergraduate memories of Yale.)
    My wife and I walked two days ago in the Falconbridge community where the Edells’ house was located, and we don’t think we ever did see the house – we couldn’t remember the address and, indeed, the place seemed to have changed a great deal in so many years. We would both like to try again. Next time I’ll study a map of the area beforehand.
    I enjoyed the Edell’s house, and their library. I remember reading a Rabbit novel or two by John Updike. And the Japanese beetles feasting on Jane’s roses were amazing.

This could be the beginning of a memoir about the second forty years of my life (or at least about the first 35 years of them), but my purpose today is only to mark an anniversary (as Bloomsday commemorates the day in 1904 on which James Joyce set his novel Ulysses, the date chosen because it was when he had his first outing with his wife-to-be, Nora Barnacle.
    But although I was aware, in 1983, that we were flying on Bloomsday, I don’t deserve to make a big deal about that, since I still haven't finished reading the whole novel. And it’s unlikely I ever will, especially because I’m not quite a third of the way through an even longer novel, Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, whose title is perfect for this memorial, except that Proust’s memory was undoubtedly better than mine.
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Joyce & Proust met in May 1922, at a party for Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Diaghilev at the Majestic Hotel (in Paris). It was three months after Sylvia Beach published Ulysses (on Joyce’s 40th birthday) and six months before Proust died (at the age of 51). An August 2016 article in Open Culture (“When James Joyce & Marcel Proust Met in 1922, and Totally Bored Each Other”) cites a few accounts of their conversation. “Irish critic Arthur Power remarked, ‘Here are the two greatest literary figures of our time meeting and they ask each other if they like truffles’.” According to Joyce biographer Richard Ellmann, Joyce himself remembered that their “talk consisted solely of the word ‘No.’ Proust asked me if I knew the duc du so-and-so. I said, ‘No.’” Proust was asked if he’d read Ulysses, and likewise replied in the negative. “The situation,” Joyce remembered, “was impossible.”

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