James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born on the 2nd of February 1882 at 41 Brighton Square, Rathgar, Dublin, and died 58 years later in Zurich after surgery for a perforated ulcer. Between those two dates he produced a body of work so strange and so rigorous that scholars have generated over 15,000 articles, monographs, theses, translations, and editions trying to explain it. His novel Ulysses, published in Paris in 1922, was banned in both the United Kingdom and the United States for obscenity. Copies were smuggled across borders. Pirate publishers reprinted it without his permission. And yet today it regularly tops lists of the greatest novels ever written.
Joyce spent most of his adult life outside Ireland, moving through Trieste, Rome, Zurich, and Paris. He was nearly blind by his final years, having undergone more than a dozen eye operations. His daughter Lucia was permanently institutionalised with schizophrenia. His finances were perpetually chaotic. Yet he kept writing, producing work of astonishing complexity and precision. How did a middle-class Dublin Catholic become the writer who most changed the novel as a form? What drove him out of Ireland and what kept pulling Dublin back into his imagination? And what exactly is in Ulysses that made governments want to ban it and readers want to smuggle it?
At nine years old, Joyce wrote a poem called "Et Tu, Healy" mourning the death of the Irish political leader Charles Stewart Parnell. His father printed it on broadsides and distributed copies to friends. The poem attacked what the elder Joyce saw as a betrayal of Parnell by the Irish Catholic Church and the Irish Parliamentary Party. That sense of betrayal by the Church left a mark on James Joyce that ran through his entire career.
The Joyce family had come down in the world. John Joyce held a rate-collector position with Dublin Corporation from 1887, and the family lived in the fashionable small town of Bray. But drinking and financial mismanagement eroded everything. John Joyce's name appeared in Stubbs' Gazette, a blacklist of debtors and bankrupts, in November 1891. He was dismissed with a reduced pension in January 1893. Joyce had begun his schooling in 1888 at Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit boarding school near Clane in County Kildare, and had to leave when the fees could no longer be paid.
A chance meeting saved his education. John Joyce encountered the Jesuit priest John Conmee, who arranged for both James and his brother Stanislaus to attend Belvedere College without fees from 1893. At 13, Joyce was elected by his peers to join the Sodality of Our Lady. He won first place for English composition in his final two years before graduating in 1898. The Jesuit formation he received there, rooted in the Ratio Studiorum, shaped his intellectual approach for the rest of his life, even as he eventually rejected the faith itself.
On the 10th of June 1904, Joyce met Nora Barnacle, a 20-year-old woman from Galway city who was working in Dublin as a chambermaid. Six days later they walked together through the Dublin suburb of Ringsend. That date, the 16th of June 1904, became the date of all the action in Ulysses, known in popular culture as Bloomsday in honour of the novel's main character, Leopold Bloom.
By October 1904, Joyce and Nora had left Ireland together. They had intended to find work through a Berlitz Language School, but when they arrived in Zurich there was no vacancy. The school's director sent Joyce on to Trieste, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and when there was no position there either, Joyce was placed in Pola, Austria-Hungary's major naval base, teaching English mainly to naval officers. He called Pola a "back-of-God-speed place, a naval Siberia". Less than a month after leaving Ireland, Nora was pregnant.
Joyce moved to Trieste proper in March 1905, aged 23. He convinced his brother Stanislaus to join him that October, and Stanislaus's salary went largely to supporting Joyce's household. The London publisher Grant Richards had a contract with Joyce for Dubliners, but printers refused passages they found indecent. Eight and a half years of negotiation and rejection followed before the book finally appeared on the 15th of June 1914. During those years Joyce also reworked his abandoned novel Stephen Hero into the more compressed A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, wrote his only published play Exiles, and began drafting Ulysses. Trieste, he later said, had become a second Dublin for him.
Margaret Caroline Anderson, owner and editor of the New York-based literary magazine The Little Review, began publishing Ulysses serially in March 1918 after Ezra Pound secured her commitment. Two instalments were suppressed as obscene in January and May 1919. In September 1920, an unsolicited copy of the "Nausicaa" episode reached the daughter of a New York attorney associated with the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. An official complaint followed. In February 1921, Anderson and her co-editor Jane Heap, defended by the lawyer John Quinn, were each fined $50 for publishing obscenity and ordered to stop.
Sylvia Beach, who ran the Rive Gauche bookshop Shakespeare and Company in Paris, agreed almost immediately afterwards to publish the novel through her shop. She mailed copies to subscribers in Paris and the United States; Harriet Shaw Weaver sent copies to subscribers in England from Beach's printing plates. Postal officials in both countries began confiscating the shipments. Copies then moved by smuggling. Because the work had no American copyright at this time, pirate versions appeared, including editions from publisher Samuel Roth, who only ceased after a court order in 1928. The novel was not legally published in the United States until 1934, when Judge John M. Woolsey ruled in United States v. One Book Called Ulysses that the book was not obscene. In the United Kingdom it remained blacklisted until 1936.
Joyce had finished writing Ulysses near the end of 1921. Its 18 episodes each cover roughly one hour of a single day, rendered in a distinct literary style. Each chapter refers to an episode in Homer's Odyssey, as well as a specific colour, a particular art or science, and a bodily organ. Joyce used the 1904 edition of Thom's Directory, which listed the owners and tenants of every residential and commercial property in Dublin, to ensure his descriptions were accurate. He claimed that if Dublin were destroyed in some catastrophe, it could be rebuilt from his novel.
Ezra Pound wrote to Joyce in 1913 asking to include a poem from Chamber Music, "I Hear an Army Charging upon the Land", in the journal Des Imagistes. He had written at W. B. Yeats's suggestion. A correspondence began that lasted until the late 1930s. Pound became Joyce's most energetic promoter, placing his work with editors and helping to secure publication for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the London literary magazine The Egoist after persuading its editor Dora Marsden.
In Zurich during World War I, Harriet Shaw Weaver, who operated The Egoist, began providing Joyce with large regular sums of money. The psychotherapist Edith Rockefeller McCormick, who was living in Zurich and studying under Carl Jung, also paid him a stipend. Between 1917 and the start of 1919, Joyce was financially secure for perhaps the only sustained period of his adult life. McCormick stopped the stipend partly because Joyce refused to be psychoanalysed by Jung. Weaver continued her support for the rest of his life and paid for his funeral.
In Trieste, the writer Ettore Schmitz, better known by the pen name Italo Svevo, was one of Joyce's private language students. Svevo, a Catholic of Jewish origin, became one of the models for Leopold Bloom. Joyce learned much of what he knew about Judaism from him. Svevo also helped Joyce work through his writer's block on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Their friendship was one of mutual criticism and lasting loyalty. Roberto Prezioso, editor of the Italian newspaper Piccolo della Sera, was another student; he commissioned Joyce to write three newspaper articles aimed at the Triestine irredentists, drawing a parallel between their desire for independence from Austria-Hungary and Ireland's struggle against British rule.
Joyce began his next work in 1923 and called it Work in Progress. Ford Madox Ford first published it under that name in April 1924 in his magazine The Transatlantic Review, printing its "Mamalujo" episode. Eugene and Maria Jolas continued serialising it in their magazine transition from 1926. When the first excerpts appeared, even some of Joyce's closest supporters turned against it. Stanislaus, Pound, and Weaver all wrote unfavourably. Writers including Seán O Faoláin, Wyndham Lewis, and Rebecca West criticised it publicly.
Joyce and the Jolases responded by organising a collection of favourable essays titled Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, to which Samuel Beckett and William Carlos Williams contributed. Joyce publicly revealed the novel's actual title, Finnegans Wake, only in 1939, the year he completed it. Faber and Faber published it in London with the assistance of T. S. Eliot. The novel took 16 years to complete.
Through those years his eyes were failing. By 1930 he was practically blind in the left eye, and his right eye functioned poorly. He had all his teeth removed because of infection. He asked the Irish author James Stephens to complete Finnegans Wake if he became unable to finish it himself. Joyce and Nora, who had lived together for 27 years, married at the Register Office in Kensington on the 4th of July 1931, primarily to secure Giorgio's inheritance rights under British law. Joyce also published Pomes Penyeach in 1927, a collection of 13 poems written across Trieste, Zurich, and Paris.
In 1938, Joyce helped Jews escape Nazi persecution. After Germany occupied France in 1940, he returned to Zurich for the last time. On the 11th of January 1941 he underwent surgery for a perforated duodenal ulcer, fell into a coma the next day, and died on the 13th of January 1941 at age 58. Swiss tenor Max Meili sang "Addio terra, addio cielo" from Monteverdi's L'Orfeo at his burial in Zurich's Fluntern Cemetery. Though two senior Irish diplomats were in Switzerland at the time, only the British consul attended the funeral. In October 2019, a motion was put to Dublin City Council to plan and budget for the repatriation of Joyce's remains, a proposal that immediately became controversial.
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Common questions
When was James Joyce born and where did he grow up?
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born on the 2nd of February 1882 at 41 Brighton Square in Rathgar, Dublin. He grew up in Dublin before his family moved to Bray shortly after he turned nine years old.
Why did James Joyce leave Ireland and where did he live during World War I?
Joyce and Nora Barnacle left Ireland in October 1904 for self-imposed exile and eventually settled in Trieste by March 1905. During World War I he remained in neutral Switzerland after May 1915 while his family stayed in Locarno during their time in Zurich.
How many episodes does Ulysses contain and what date do they cover?
The novel contains eighteen episodes covering roughly one hour each day on the 16th of June 1904. Each chapter refers to an episode in Homer's Odyssey along with specific colors art science and bodily organs.
What caused James Joyce's death and when did it occur?
He died fifteen minutes after waking briefly at two am on the 13th of January 1941 following surgery for a perforated duodenal ulcer on the 11th of January 1941. He had fled Nazi occupation of France and returned to Zurich for safety in 1940 before undergoing the operation.
Did James Joyce ever become Catholic again after leaving the Church?
He lapsed from the Church early in life but never considered himself Catholic according to firsthand statements. When living in Trieste he attended Mass on Holy Thursday and Good Friday occasionally and sometimes went to Eastern Orthodox services saying he liked the ceremonies better.