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It was not until the next morning, July 3, that the final placings were officially announced (London Times, July 4, 8). In declaring the results—that the winning car was German and the French were second and third, Joyce’s narrator is both inaccurate and premature. 10) because their three cars finished second, third, and fourth, which earned them the team prize, the Montagu Trophy. 13–14, 8) is not of congratulation for their success in the race, as the narrator implies, but from political sympathies originating in French support for the United Irishmen, a theme of the previous five years’ centennial commemorations.

By 1916, as an established ear, nose, and throat surgeon, Gogarty was able to demand a hundred guineas for an operation, whereas Joyce, with Dubliners and A Portrait in print, was still scrabbling for students in Trieste. This historicization shows, further, that Joyce seemed to realize, but disdain, the capitalist wisdom in the investment in the automobile industry: there was, indeed, serious money to be made from cars in Ireland, as elsewhere in Europe and America at the time. Arthur Griffith’s and Joyce’s articulation of an anticolonial political critique of the Gordon Bennett Cup Race was, nonetheless, an early step in that direction.

It is within these contexts that we move to look at Joyce’s interview with the French racing driver and his consequent story. Fournier Interview The first Irish publication to promote the Gordon Bennett Cup Race was the Irish Times. The semiofficial organ of the Anglo-Irish establishment, its readership would have included almost every motorcar owner of the time. Thanks to the good offices of one Matthew O’Hara, a friend of John Stanislaus on the newspaper staff (JJII 119, 127), the editors contacted James Joyce in Paris about a New York Herald–style interview with Henri Fournier, one of the prospective French drivers.