A Brief Life of James Joyce

41 Brighton Square, Rathgar, Dublin: Birthplace of James Joyce

the bold bad bleak boy of the storybooks

James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882. His parents were affluent middle-class Catholics. John Stanislaus Joyce, a Corkman, was socially ambitious, but he had neither the talent nor the perserverence to realize his dreams. An increasing dependence on alcohol, which he bequeathed to his eldest son, was probably a response to his many failings as a husband and a father rather than their cause. Mary Jane (“May”) Murray was born in Dublin but her father hailed from County Longford. In many respects she was a typical Irish Catholic mother: deeply religious, and highly protective of her eldest son, whom she loved unconditionally but did not understand. She bore John Stanislaus twelve children, two of whom died in infancy—one of those two was her first-born son John Augustine. It was probably to her that Joyce owed the superstitious side of his nature, which was at odds with his Aristotelian outlook on life.

In 1882 the Joyces were still sufficiently well-off to retain house servants, but by the time their eldest surviving child was ten years old, the family had begun its relentless slide into poverty. The arc of Joyce’s life was in marked contrast to that of his most famous literary precursor: Shakespeare’s writings retrieved his family’s fallen fortunes (or so Joyce, a Stratfordian, believed) : Joyce’s writings did not.

Clongowes Wood College

Joyce was educated for the most part by Jesuits: first at Clongowes Wood College in County Kildare, and later at Belvedere College in Dublin. At an early age he developed a life-long interest in the rituals and theology of the Catholic Church, and immersed himself in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. A career in the Church was suggested to him when he was sixteen, but any vocation he may have had evaporated before his growing disenchantment with the Christian faith.

Competing with these early religious studies were his leanings towards language, literature and Irish politics—three interests he was never to lose. When he was just nine years old he penned a political diatribe denouncing the Irish MP Timothy Michael Healy. Healy was the leader of the faction that had forced the resignation of Charles Stewart Parnell following the scandalous revelations concerning Parnell’s private life in 1890. Parnell—_the uncrowned king of Ireland_—was the leader of the country’s principal political party, and was widely regarded as Ireland’s best hope for achieving independence from Great Britain since the days of Daniel O’Connell. Joyce never forgave Healy or the Catholic prelates for the active part they played in Parnell’s downfall. John Stanislaus Joyce had his son’s verses, Et Tu, Healy, published privately as a broadside in 1891, but no copies are known to have survived. Curiously, the opening lines of the work, greatly distorted, found their way into Finnegans Wake some thirty-nine years later:

My Cod, alas, that dear old tumtum home

Whereof in youthfood’s port I preyed

Amonk thy verdigrassy convinct wallsall dazed

And cloitered for amourmeant in thy boosome shede!

(RFW 182.20-23, which was first drafted in late 1930. See Slocum 3 and Ellmann 33 for the attribution to Et Tu, Healy. See Gekoski 63 for a divergent opinion.)

At Belvedere College Joyce wrote some of his earliest surviving works, both prose and verse, and a number pieces that have not survived or of which only fragments have been preserved. Among these juvenilia the following may be noted:

An essay of 1894 on the topic My Favourite Hero. The subject chosen by Joyce was the mythical Greek hero Ulysses, of whom he had read in Charles Lamb’s The Adventures of Ulysses.
A number of essays in English composition. In 1897 and 1898 Joyce was awarded first place for English composition in the National Intermediate Examinations.
A short story intended for the magazine Titbits, but which was not published. It features prominently in Ulysses, where it is called Matcham’s Masterstroke and is attributed to Mr Philip Beaufoy. The story itself has not survived.
Silhouettes, a series of prose sketches in which the narrator witnesses scenes of domesticity silhouetted against window-blinds. The collection has not survived, but thirty years later Joyce used the same idea in III.4 of Finnegans Wake [RFW 454.13-23], which was probably first drafted in early 1925. Here the love-making of Mr and Mrs Porter is silhouetted on the blind of their bedroom-window for the benefit of the man in the street.
Moods, Joyce’s first collection of poems. None is known to have survived.
O fons Bandusiae, a translation of an ode by Horace (Odes 3.13), which is probably the earliest surviving work by Joyce. Curiously, it too is alluded to in Finnegans Wake (RFW 218.02-03).

In 1898 Joyce entered the Catholic University of Ireland on St Stephen’s Green, where he studied literature and modern languages. He read extensively during these years, quickly developing a keen interest in the European avant garde (Ibsen, Maeterlinck and Hauptmann, among others) while at the same time retaining his fascination for the old masters (Dante, Shakespeare and the Scholastics). He was also writing. Some of his college essays have survived, and poems from his second collection, Shine and Dark. A review of Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken appeared in the Fortnightly Review and was complimented by the author himself. An attack on the Irish Literary Theatre, The Day of the Rabblement, was published privately in a pamphlet when the editor of the college magazine St Stephen’s rejected it. He also began to compile a collection of Epiphanies, prose sketches in which things profound and spiritual are revealed through banal events.

In 1900 Joyce paid a brief visit to London with his father. They spent much of their time in the city’s theatres and music halls, where Joyce learned the value of the popular arts as vehicles of serious social criticism.

Newman House, Catholic University of Ireland

After graduating in 1902 with a BA in modern languages, Joyce enrolled in the Royal University Medical School, and introduced himself to some of the leading lights of Dublin’s literary circles. But he was growing weary of life in Dublin and did not value his chances of carving out a name for himself among so many established luminaries. Before the end of the year he had left his native city for Paris, ostensibly to continue his medical studies. He spent only three weeks in the huge metropolis, before giving up all thought of a medical career and returning home for Christmas.

In January 1903 Joyce became acquainted with Oliver St John Gogarty, a young medical student with similar interests in the arts, but he soon returned to Paris in pursuit of his literary ambitions. The following eleven weeks were devoted mainly to the study of aesthetics, the days being spent in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Rue de Richelieu) and the nights in the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève (Place du Panthéon). He read widely and compiled the Paris Notebook, which has survived. This period of penury, hunger and intense study came to an abrupt end in April, when he received a telegram from Dublin informing him that his mother was dying.

He returned home, renewed his acquaintanceship with Gogarty and played the rôle of the impoverished Parisian student, while waiting for his mother to die. May Joyce died of cancer on 13 August 1903, after which her son resumed his literary efforts. Before the end of the year, more than a dozen of his literary reviews had been published by the Daily Express. He also contributed some short pieces to The Irish Times and The Speaker.

James Joyce in 1904

1904 was a critical year in the life of James Joyce. He abandoned the rôle of the literary critic and began to write short stories of his own, stories which would one day be published in the collection Dubliners. He penned an extraordinary essay, A Portrait of the Artist, which was rejected by the journal Dana. He began an ambitious autobiographical novel entitled Stephen Hero, which he would later reforge as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He wrote and published a number of lyrical poems, which eventually became the cycle Chamber Music. He moved out of his father’s house and lived at a variety of different addresses (most famously the Martello Tower in Sandycove, where he spent six days with Gogarty and Samuel Chenevix Trench, whom Gogarty had met at Oxford). He taught briefly at Clifton School in Dalkey. And he met his future partner Nora Barnacle.

In October 1904 James Joyce and Nora Barnacle eloped to the continent: Joyce would spend the remaining thirty-six years of his life in exile. After brief sojourns in Zürich and Pola (now Pulj in Croatia), they settled in Trieste, where their two children, Giorgio and Lucia, were born. While continuing to pursue his literary ambitions, Joyce was willing to try his hand at anything that might bring in some money: he taught English at the Berlitz School in Trieste : he gave a series of lectures on Hamlet at Trieste’s Università Popolare : he worked briefly in a bank in Rome, disliking the city as much as the job : he opened Dublin’s first cinema, the Volta in Mary Street, during a visit to his native land in 1909 (it failed the following year) : he wrote a number of articles for the local newspaper Piccola della Sera : he even attempted to export Irish tweed and linen to the continent. In 1912 he made his last visit to Ireland, while trying to arrange the publication of Dubliners.

James Joyce in Zürich in 1915

In late 1914 Joyce began to write his most famous work, Ulysses. The following summer the Joyces left Austrian Trieste and settled in Zürich. There, for the most part, they spent the remainder of World War I. Joyce was beginning to suffer from the chronic eye problems that would blight his literary efforts for the rest of his life and require numerous operations. It was largely for reasons of health that he spent the winter of 1917 in Locarno, on Lake Maggiore. Meanwhile, both Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man were finally published.

In 1920 the Joyce family moved to Paris, which was to be their home for the following two decades. There Joyce finished Ulysses, which was published to great acclaim by Shakespeare & Company on his fortieth birthday, 2 February 1922. By the autumn of that year he had begun to put Ulysses behind him and to give thought to his next work. The following sixteen years or so—three lustra, in Joyce’s own words (letter to Livia Svevo, January 1939)—would be devoted to Finnegans Wake.

And that’s as good a place as any to beach the bark of our tale.

References

Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, Oxford University Press, Oxford (1982)
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, Faber & Faber Limited, London (1939, 1949)
James Joyce, James Joyce: The Complete Works, Pynch (editor), Online (2013)
James Joyce (Stuart Gilbert & Richard Ellmann, Editors), _The Letters of James Joyce_, Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3, Viking Press, New York
Charles Lamb, The Adventures of Ulysses, Chapman and Hall, London (1808)
Danis Rose, John O’Hanlon, The Restored Finnegans Wake, Penguin Classics, London (2012)
John J Slocum, Herbert Cahoon, A Bibliography of James Joyce, Yale University Press, New Haven (1953)
Rick Gekoski, Lost, Stolen or Shredded: Stories of Missing Works of Art and Literature, Profile Books Ltd, London (2013)

Image Credits

Clongowes Wood College: National Library of Ireland, The Lawrence Photograph Collection, LROY 03995, Public Domain
James Joyce in 1904: Constantine Peter Curran (photographer), UCD Special Collections, Curran Collection, CUR P1, Public Domain
James Joyce in Zürich, 1915: Ottocaro Weiss (photographer), University of Buffalo, Public Domain

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