Who was the real Almidano Artifoni?

This post is a part of an occasional series on the real people behind the characters in Ulysses.

In the sixth vignette of Ulysses’ tenth episode, “Wandering Rocks,” we see Stephen Dedalus chatting with Almidano Artifoni, a music maestro with comically starchy trousers. Their conversation is written entirely in untranslated Italian, so if, like me, you don’t speak any Italian, the dialogue between the two is entirely opaque. Luckily, you can find a detailed translation here.

James Joyce was a great lover of the Italian language. Richard Ellmann’s biography of Joyce tells how, around age 12, he needed to choose a third language to study at Belvedere College on top of French and Latin and decided Italian was the one. In a 1921 letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, Joyce wrote, “My father wanted me to take Greek, my mother German, and my friends Irish. Result I took Italian.” James Joyce: a dedicated contrarian from his earliest years. Learning Italian was so unusual at that time that there was only one other boy in Belvedere interested, the fabulously named Albrecht Connolly. Young James and Albrecht formed a class of two. I don’t know what became of Albrecht, but Joyce maintained his keen study of Italian throughout his years of study at University College Dublin, earning the nickname “Dublin’s Dante.” In his early twenties, Joyce and his partner Nora Barnacle moved to the Italian city of Trieste where they would give their two children Italian names: Giorgio and Lucia. Joyce spoke Italian with his children even after they left Trieste.

Naturally, Stephen Dedalus also speaks Italian. We’ve already seen him contemplating Dante’s Divine Comedy in the original Italian back in “Aeolus.” Of course, an advanced knowledge of Italian makes Stephen the answer to Bloom’s problem of finding an Italian teacher for Molly, foreshadowing their eventual hypostasis as found father and son. These matters are far from Stephen’s mind when he is talking with Artifoni in “Wandering Rocks,” though. Artifoni suggests that he teach singing lessons to make ends meet, while Stephen responds with a noncommittal “I’ll think about it.”

Almidano Artifoni was the director of the Berlitz Language School in Trieste where Joyce worked as an English teacher. The real Artifoni was a socialist and Ellmann writes that he hired Joyce in part because he liked the young man’s politics. During the years that Joyce worked for Berlitz, he frustrated Artifoni with his eccentric habits of dress and his unmarried co-habitation with Nora. However, Joyce was popular with the school’s wealthiest clients, and this particular charisma allowed him to get away with his “ungentlemanly” manner to a certain degree. Joyce incurred a lot of debts during this era, and borrowed money from Artifoni regularly, which implies to me that they had at least a friendly rapport.

Joyce initially used the name “Artifoni” for a priest in his novel Stephen Hero. Fr. Artifoni was modeled on Fr. Charles Ghezzi, who taught Joyce Italian at UCD. When Joyce refined Stephen Hero into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Fr. Artifoni was renamed Fr. Ghezzi, which the real Fr. Ghezzi didn’t exactly appreciate. He appears in a paragraph discussing Italian philosopher and mystic Giordano Bruno:

“Then went to college. Other wrangle with little round head rogue’s eye Ghezzi. This time about Bruno the Nolan. Began in Italian and ended in pidgin English. He said Bruno was a terrible heretic. I said he was terribly burned. He agreed to this with some sorrow. “

It’s not known why Joyce made these particular tweaks to his novel. Scholar Corinna del Greco Lobner thinks the change may have been in service of word play. “Ghezzi” sounds like the word “ghezzo,” which was defined in a contemporary dictionary as “quasi-black in color.” “Bruno” means “brown” in Italian, and del Greco Lobner suggests that Bruno would have turned quasi-black as he was burned at the stake by the Catholic Church. She thinks this kind of twisted pun would appeal to Joyce, and I have to agree.

In the context of Ulysses, Artifoni takes on the role of Benedetto Palmieri, Joyce’s voice teacher in 1904. In the final moments of “Wandering Rocks,” Artifoni alights the tram near Lansdowne Rd, where the real Palmieri lived. Joyce haphazardly pursued a singing career as a young man, for which knowledge of Italian was certainly a boon. Though his earnest pursuit of music occupied quite a bit of his time in 1904, Stephen’s talent for music is only a minor detail in the novel.

Artifoni acts as a fatherly presence for Stephen, a Dublin Virgil to Stephen’s Dante, perhaps. He is (rightly) concerned about Stephen’s finances and is trying to give some advice that will help the clearly brilliant and talented Stephen get on his feet. It has been pointed out in multiple texts that the name Artifoni could be punned as “Arty Phony.” Stuart Gilbert wrote that Artifoni’s oddly sturdy trousers are meant to evoke the episode’s Art of Mechanics, likening them to H.G. Wells’ Martians in War of the Worlds. Artifoni is a little too rigid and uptight to adequately advise wannabe bohemian Stephen, making him unfit to be a proper Virgilian figure.

Artifoni’s practical advice isn’t too far from that given by Mr. Deasy and Bloom. Scholar Mark Osteen wrote that this unholy trinity of concerned adults represents the three masters that Stephen describes to Haines in “Telemachus”:

“—I am a servant of two masters, Stephen said, an English and an Italian.
—Italian? Haines said….
—And a third, Stephen said, there is who wants me for odd jobs.”

While I think Stephen really chafes under the strict, conservative pseudo-fathering of Mr. Deasy, he accepts Artifoni’s advice while also feeling comfortable enough to tell him directly it’s not for him. Scholar Daniel Schwarz writes that Artifoni is “speaking… in the debased commercial spirit of the world.” The singing teacher only has practical advice for this young brilliant creative, encouraging him to pursue teaching to keep the bills paid rather than starve while pursuing artistic ecstasy. Of course, we know that Joyce did both, as the choice between a practical career or becoming a starving artist is a false dichotomy. I think there’s a personal joke built into Artifoni pushing Stephen to teach, as I get the impression that Joyce exasperated the real Artifoni who employed him as a teacher while also caring for him like a bemused father figure in Trieste.

We know from “Nestor” that Stephen has no passion for teaching and fancies himself as a learner rather than a teacher. Of course, Bloom, who is positioned as Stephen's true father figure, does indeed want him for odd jobs, like teaching Molly how to properly pronounce “voglio.” Bloom is also warm and protective of the wayward Stephen, but the young artist leaves the Blooms’ house as well because, in the end, he wants more than even the nicest parts of Dublin can offer.

I want to tell the story of Joyce’s fleeting music career before we finish. In the early months of 1904, Joyce quite seriously pursued a music career before deciding that writing was a more fitting form of expression. There’s some alternate timeline where James Joyce is remembered as one of Ireland’s great tenors, alongside the likes of John McCormack, who of course is most famous nowadays for singing the Blooms & Barnacles theme music.

Joyce was in dire financial straits in 1904, as we’ve explored in the past on this blog, and music seemed like an obvious career path. McCormack and Richard Best took great interest in refining his talent and training his voice. They encouraged him to enter that year’s Feis Ceoil, a singing competition in Dublin that was founded in part by Best’s wife Edith. Joyce decided to hire Dublin’s best voice teacher, Benedetto Palmieri, with money borrowed from his friends J.F. Byrne and Oliver St. John Gogarty. Compounding his terrible financial choices, he rented a large room and a grand piano with more borrowed money. He had options that he could have used for free, but there is no arguing with Joyce. He carried on these arrangements until he could no longer afford Palmieri and was evicted from his rented space.

Joyce took home the bronze medal in the 1904 Feis Ceoil on a technicality. He was strongly favored by the judges for gold, but balked at taking part in a sightreading challenge as part of the competition. He felt that a singer shouldn’t be asked to perform a piece they hadn’t prepared, but the judges felt otherwise, eventually awarding him the bronze after another competitor was disqualified. Joyce left the competition frustrated and disillusioned, even more so when he found he couldn’t pawn the medal. Gogarty claims he ultimately threw the medal into the Liffey in a final dramatic gesture. Of course, competitions like the Feis Ceoil are not just about medals. After watching Joyce’s performance, Palmieri offered to train Joyce for three years free of charge in exchange for a share of Joyce’s concert earnings. Joyce turned him down, much like Stephen turned down Artifoni’s suggestion. So ends James Joyce’s music career. Ellmann concluded, “... Joyce’s ardor for a singing career had already begun to lapse; the tedious discipline did not suit him, and to be a second McCormack was not so attractive as to be a first Joyce.”

Who was the real Almidano Artifoni?

Further Reading:

The Superior, The Very Reverend John Conmee S. J.