POX: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis

Excerpt from Joyce chapter:

In James Joyce’s Ulysses, Leopold Bloom warns that the Nighttown area of Dublin was “a regular death-trap for young fellows of his age.” The author of Ulysses had his own experience with this death-trap. In 1904 James Joyce visited Nighttown and came home with a venereal disease. “Let me hear about your dingus,” Joyce’s friend Oliver St. John Gogarty wrote to his friend Jim on 13 February 1904, lecturing him at the same time about the necessity of chastity. A month later: “Congratulations that our holy mother has judged you worthy of the stigmata . . . .If I would venture an opinion—you have got a slight gleet from a recurrence of original sin. But you’ll be all right. When next mounting be careful not to wish eternal blasting as the process is intermittent.”
That same day he wrote to Dr. Mick Walsh on behalf of his friend, introducing him thus: “Mr. Joyce is the name of the tissues surrounding the infected part if you will damn him you will delight me. He may have waited too long and gotten gleet.” In May, Gogarty sympathized with the “so long neglected ladies,” continuing: “without faith we cannot be healed. Good luck old man: Give this ‘to Elwood Poxed,’” including with the letter this poem:

In the house where whores are dwelling
Unless it is wrapped in a glove
A little Hunterian swelling
Poxes the part that they love.

His postscript adds: “Thas a poem as yet in the head of the father, Chaos—to Elwood/ the end would be/scalded when he pissed/ And now he prays to Mercury/ Who was an atheist.” At about the same time, Gogarty noted that the canker [chancre?] had attacked Art.

Gogarty and Joyce were roommates briefly in 1904, the year after Joyce had dropped out of medical school. Gogarty lasted the course and became an otolaryngologist, as well as being a poet, novelist, and satirist. In a clever ballad, his syphilitic sailor Sindbad was so full of mercury that he was knocked unconscious when he stood near a heater. In 1906 Gogarty wrote an essay on venereal disease in which he called infection venereal bad luck.
Gleet is a chronic inflammation of the urethra due to gonorrhea. Some biographers have assumed that Joyce’s infection from Nighttown was nothing more than a minor case of the clap, but references to “Elwood Poxed” and mercury suggest syphilis, as does his noting that the condition was recurrent. Gogarty might be giving us the answer in the little Hunterian swelling: Joyce may have had both. Poor Dr. John Hunter was well-known in the literature then for a bungled self-inoculation experiment. Hypothesizing that two diseases could not exist simultaneously in the same organ, in 1767 Hunter used a lancet to inoculate himself with pus from the lesion of a prostitute. Unfortunately, she was doubly infected, as was he in short order. Some historians tell another story: that Hunter inoculated an experimental subject with the double misfortunate. Joyce may have been similarly unlucky.