Sylvia Beach meets James Joyce in her Parisian English language bookshop, Shakespeare & Company in 1922 (the second poster in the background references a 1922 review of 'Ulysses'). She published Joyce's groundbreaking novel 'Ulysses.' on February 2, 1922 — Joyce's 40th birthday. It began to be serialised in the United States in 1918, resulting in a ban that was lifted in 1933.
The 100th anniversary of the publication of the novel 'Ulysses' (the Latinised name of Odysseus, the hero of Homer's epic poem the 'Odyssey') highlights the importance of James Joyce (1882-1941), who is renowned for his experimental use of language together with new literary methods, which he called "scrupulous meanness."
The book was also controversial in prudish times. Belfast-born James Douglas (1867–1940) — a critic, editor of the British Sunday Express, and author — called 'Ulysess':
“The most infamously obscene book in ancient or modern literature. All the secret sewers of vice are canalised in its flood of unimaginable thoughts, images, and pornographic words. And its unclean lunacies are larded with appalling and revolting blasphemies directed against the Christian religion and against the holy name of Christ — blasphemies hitherto associated with the most degraded orgies of Satanism and the Black Mass.”
A US attorney used the quote before the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in US v One Book Entitled Ulysses in 1934. A 1933 decision to lift a ban on the book was upheld. In the UK a 1922 censorship ban was lifted in 1936.
'Ulysses' was not banned in Ireland but it was never sold there until decades after its release.
The first publication, in Paris, came two weeks after the British government had ceded Dublin Castle, the bastion of 700 years of rule by Normans, English and British, to the new Provisional Government of the Irish Free State.
'Ulysses' is set on June 16, 1904, when the prospect of a self-governing Irish democracy was extremely remote.
Joyce had a love-hate relationship with Ireland and when he died in Zurich in 1941, he was a British citizen and a British diplomat spoke at the funeral while the Irish taoiseach (prime minister) queried if Joyce had been a Catholic. There was no Irish representation at the funeral.
Sylvia Beach, the American-born publisher of the book, had to support the Joyces through the 1920s but according to 'The New Yorker' "The peak of his prosperity came in 1932 with the news of his sale of the book to Random House in New York for a $45,000 ($916,000 today) advance, which, she (Sylvia Beach) confessed, he failed to announce to her and of which, as was later known, he never even offered her a penny. "I understood from the first that, working with or for Mr Joyce, the pleasure was mine — an infinite pleasure: the profits were for him."
James Joyce, Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier, at Shakespeare and Company, Paris 1938. Adrienne Monnier, Sylvia's lover, had a French-language bookshop across Rue de l'Odéon from Shakespeare and Company. The 1938 picture above was requested by the British publisher of 'Ulysses.'
Excerpts from Joyce’s 'Ulysses' were published in the pages of an American avant-garde magazine, 'The Little Review,' between 1918 and 1920. They were banned in 1920 and it was Sylvia Beach (1887-1962) who had come to the rescue by publishing 'Ulysses.'. Joyce gave Beach the world rights to 'Ulysses' and she graciously returned the rights in 1932 after producing about 4,000 printed books.
Maria Jolas (1893–1987) the American publisher, editor, translator, critic, and journalist who co-founded with her husband a Paris literary review, reported that she was at a dinner in Paris attended by Joyce in the late 1930s and when a person criticised Beach Joyce said: "All she ever did was to make me a present of the 10 best years of her life."
Joles in a 1986 book 'The Joyce I Knew and the Women around Him,' said that in the late 1950s she told Sylvia Beach about Joyce's compliment. "He said that?" she said as her eyes welled up with tears.
The post below was first published in 2018
Last year a friend invited me to a performance of a revival of Tom Stoppard’s (b. 1937) brilliant 1974 play, 'Travesties,' at the Appolo Theatre in London. The drama is set in Zurich in 1917, and it brings together James Joyce, Tristan Tzara, the poet and founder of Dada — the nihilistic, anti-art movement — and, Vladimir Lenin.
The play is narrated by an elderly Henry Carr, who had been a clerk at the British Consulate in Zurich during the First World War. His memory is a bit flaky and he believes that he had been the consul in 1917, and the real consul had been his butler. In real life, Carr had a legal dispute with James Joyce about the cost of a pair of trousers worn by Carr in Joyce's amateur production in the city of Oscar Wilde’s 'The Importance of Being Earnest.'
A week later I was in Zurich, having a pint of Guinness at the James Joyce Pub in the financial district — the pub’s interior came from the Jury's Hotel Antique Bar, dating from the early 1870s when the hotel had been rebuilt on Dublin's Dame Street. The fixtures and fittings had been auctioned after the demolition of the hotel in 1973, to make way for the Central Bank headquarters (1975-2017). Union Bank of Switzerland won the bid.
Excerpt from 'Ulysses':
“His eyes passed lightly over Mr Power’s goodlooking face. Greyish over the ears. Madame : smiling. I smiled back. A smile does a long way. Only politeness perhaps. Nice fellow. Who knows is that true about the woman he keeps? Not pleasant for the wife. Yet they say, who was it told me, there is no carnal. You would imagine that would get played out pretty quick. Yes, it was Crofton met him one evening bringing her a pound of rumpsteak.
What is this she was? Barmaid in Jury’s. Or the Moira, was it?
They passed under the huge cloaked Liberator’s form.”
James Joyce was the first Irish writer in English from the Gaelic tradition who won wide international renown for his work. Brian Merriman (1749-1805) the author of 'Cúirt an Mheán Oíche' (The Midnight Court), produced what was "undoubtedly one of the greatest comic works of literature and certainly the greatest comic poem ever written in Ireland," according to the late scholar of Irish literature, Prof Seán Ó Tuama. There was also the prolific writer George Moore (1852-1933) who was a native of Mayo and had lived in Ireland, France, and England.
Three of Joyce’s contemporaries from the Anglo-Irish tradition won Nobel Prizes: William Butler Yeats (1923); George Bernard Shaw (1925) and Samuel Beckett (1969). Joyce’s experimental writing was possibly too much for the conservative Swedish Academy.
How Joyce reinvented the novel in the 20th century with a focus on the everyday life of the common people
Why should you read James Joyce's 'Ulysses'? — Sam Slote, Trinity College, Dublin
James Joyce was born in February 1882 at 41 Brighton Square West, a red-brick middle-class Victorian house in the South Dublin suburb of Rathgar. He would become the eldest of 10 surviving children.
John Stanislaus Joyce (1849-1931), the father, was a native of Cork and his family were well-off merchants and property owners. However, despite a significant inheritance, he blew it on drink and overspending. He lost his last regular job, as a rates collecter in Dublin in 1893 at the age of 44.
James lived in 14 different houses until he visited Paris in late 1902. A friend later described 7 St Peter’s Terrace, Phibsborough (Cabra) in North Dublin: “The bannisters were broken, the grass in the backyard was all blackened out. There was laundry there and a few chickens, and it was a very very miserable home.”
Both Stanislaus and James had tenor voices and when the father sold the family piano, it was the last straw for James.
Joyce wanted to also escape the Victorian social conservatism, colonial and local politics, and the moralising of the powerful Catholic Church.
Joyce’s mother May died in 1903 at the age of 44 and he first met Nora Barnacle on June 16, 1904 — the date he later chose for the events in 'Ulysses.' The couple left Ireland later in 1904 and James would never return after 1912.
James and Nora were married in a civil ceremony in London in 1931 and six months later his alcoholic father died in Dublin. While James didn’t go to the funeral, he acknowledged that his father had been the source of much of his knowledge about Dublin.
The character Stephen Dedalus in 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' says:
“When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.”
James Joyce (second from left standing) graduated from University College Dublin in 1902 (originally known as the Catholic University of Ireland and subsequently as the Royal University, the university became known as UCD from 1908) with a pass degree in modern languages.
James Joyce and Nora Barnacle arrived in Trieste in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (united with Italy in 1918) on October 20, 1904; James got a language teaching job at the Austrian naval base of Pula (in modern Croatia, located south of Trieste on the east Adriatic coast); the Irish couple returned to Trieste in mid-1905 — in July 1905 Joyce’s son Giorgio was born; in October Joyce was joined by his brother Stanislaus, who also began teaching at the Berlitz language school. In June 1906 Joyce moved to Rome, where he worked as a clerk in the Nast-Kolb & Schumacher Bank until March of 1907 when he again returned to Trieste. In May 'Chamber Music' was published and he fell seriously ill with what was assumed to be ‘rheumatic fever,’ while in July 1907 Joyce's daughter Lucia was born.
Joyce had persistent problems with his left eye in particular and in the 1930s he was almost blind.
On a day in May 1922, in Paris, a well-known ophthalmologist sent his medical student to attend to Joyce who with his family was living in a 2-room apartment, in a residential hotel. The apartment looked as if a bomb had hit it, and James had to work amidst this chaos.
“A man of small virtue, inclined to extravagance and alcoholism” is how Joyce described himself to Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist, in 1932. Joyce asked Jung to examine Lucia. He also wrote a review of Ulysses.
"Dear Sir,
Your Ulysses has presented the world such an upsetting psychological problem that repeatedly I have been called in as a supposed authority on psychological matters.
Ulysses proved to be an exceedingly hard nut and it has forced my mind not only to most unusual efforts, but also to rather extravagant peregrinations (speaking from the standpoint of a scientist). Your book as a whole has given me no end of trouble and I was brooding over it for about three years until I succeeded to put myself into it. But I must tell you that I’m profoundly grateful to yourself as well as to your gigantic opus, because I learned a great deal from it. I shall probably never be quite sure whether I did enjoy it, because it meant too much grinding of nerves and of grey matter. I also don’t know whether you will enjoy what I have written about Ulysses because I couldn’t help telling the world how much I was bored, how I grumbled, how I cursed and how I admired. The 40 pages of non stop run at the end is a string of veritable psychological peaches. I suppose the devil’s grandmother knows so much about the real psychology of a woman, I didn’t.
Well, I just try to recommend my little essay to you, as an amusing attempt of a perfect stranger that went astray in the labyrinth of your Ulysses and happened to get out of it again by sheer good luck. At all events you may gather from my article what Ulysses has done to a supposedly balanced psychologist.
With the expression of my deepest appreciation, I remain, dear Sir,
Yours faithfully,
C. G. Jung"
Lucia died in 1982 and a New York Times review noted in 2003: "Occasionally, she would be visited by family friends, or by Joyce's biographer, and she would write down or say things about herself, sad messages like: 'My father was crying once with the pain he had in his eyes but I was awkward and could not console him or 'My love was Samuel Beckett. I wasn't able to marry him.''
Giorgio's only child, Stephen James Joyce, who was born in 1932, and had worked at the Paris-based OECD, a think-tank for mainly rich country governments, took over as the Joyce literary executor in the mid-1980s and until the 70-year copyright expired in 2011, battled with Joycean scholars on use of materials. Stephen has said that he had burnt some of Lucia's letters and he told The New Yorker magazine that the Joyces’ private life was “no one’s fucking business.” When the copyright expired, @ubuweb on Twitter rejoiced!
Rejoyce RT @ubuweb: Fuck you Stephen Joyce. EU copyright on James Joyce works ends at midnight: http://t.co/FO1KssdM
— Hari Kunzru (@harikunzru) December 31, 2011
On January 13, 1941, just a month after leaving France, James Joyce (1882-1941) died in Zurich due to a perforated duodenal ulcer. It was 3 weeks before his 59th birthday.
During their exile, the Joyces had occupied 10 different housing units in Trieste, 8 in Zurich and 19 or 20 in Paris.
Constantine Curran, who had been a lifelong friend of Joyce’s since university, wrote in an obituary in The Irish Times issue of January 14, 1941:
“I once asked Joyce when he was coming back to Dublin. ‘Why should I?’ he said. ‘Have I ever left it?’”…He shattered the categories of time and space and sought by the incantation of sound and otherwise, enormously to extend the sensitiveness of our apprehension….Joyce lived much of his life in desperate and tragic suffering. We have had in Ireland many generous artists who have not hesitated to mix in public affairs. To preserve his independence for the sake of his art, with him was a passion…He followed his inflexible purpose in poverty, in exile, in good and ill, and even in the manner of his literary expression with a heroism not easy to understand, and certainly not common. The integrity and independence of the artist may be vilified by a catchword. It was the essence of Joyce.”
Éamon de Valera, taoiseach/prime minister, asked the head of the Department of External Affairs to get information on Joyce from the embassy in Bern, the Swiss capital. “Please wire details about Joyce’s death. If possible find out if he died a Catholic?” was in the message sent from Dublin.
In 'Ulysses,' Mr. Deasy asks Stephen Dedalus if he knows why Ireland has “the honour of being the only country which never persecuted the Jews”? He then answers his own question: “Because she never let them in.” Likewise, Ireland never banned Joyce's books because most of them were intercepted by the customs.
There was no Irish diplomatic representation at the funeral on January 15, 1941. However, as the Joyces had British passports from pre-independence times, the British chief of mission in Bern, Lord Derwent, who was a published poet, was there and spoke at the funeral ceremony.
Harriet Weaver, the long-term editor of Joyce's output, wealthy English benefactor of Joyce and editor of the 'Egoist' literary magazine, wired money to Nora Joyce to pay for the funeral, despite the 1932 Random House advance.
The Joyce Martello Tower — the British began building these defensive towers on the Irish coast from 1804, to prepare for a possible invasion by Napoleon Bonaparte, the emperor of France. The city state of the Republic of Genoa began building these towers on its island of Corsica in the 16th century to protect against pirates. In 1794 at Cape Mortella in Corsica (mortella is the common myrtle plant, native to the Mediterranean region), the British were impressed that it took 2 warships two days of continuous cannon fire to capture one. The original name 'Mortella' changed to 'Martello' over time. On the Dublin coastline, 28 towers were built — 16 on the southside and 12 on the northside.
Chapter 1 of 'Ulysses' begins with the line "STATELY, PLUMP BUCK MULLIGAN CAME FROM THE STAIRHEAD, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed."
Buck Mulligan (a medical student), Stephen Dedalus (teacher) and Haines (an English Oxford graduate) are in the Martello Tower, in Sandycove, on the South Dublin coast.
Their real-life counterparts – Oliver St John Gogarty, James Joyce and Samuel Chenevix Trench, had stayed in the Tower for a week in September 1904. Joyce left early on the morning of September 15 following an overnight incident. He decided to end his friendship with Gogarty and leave for freedom in Europe.
According to the James Joyce Centre, "Samuel Chenevix Trench, whom Gogarty had known at Oxford and who was also staying in the Tower at the time, had a nightmare involving a black panther. Roused, he took his revolver and fired off a shot, much to Joyce’s discomfort. Trench went back to sleep, but the nightmare returned. This time, Gogarty took the gun and fired off shots into the pots and pans hanging over Joyce’s bed. Joyce dressed and quickly left the Tower."
Frank Budgen (1882-1971), the English painter and writer, who had become a friend of Joyce in Zurich in the First World War Years, wrote in his book 'James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses’
“Stephen [Dedalus] is entirely without means. He stands in boots and clothes that were given to him by Mulligan. He has a job as a teacher at Mr. Deasy’s school but his salary is barely sufficient for drinks. He owes bits of money all round the town. Let an individualist artist deny religion as vehemently as he will, economics is something he cannot deny. [. . .] Some misguided people have at times affirmed that the stimulus of poverty is useful to the artist and it may be darkly hinted that one day one of these misguided individuals will come to any untimely end. Poverty was never any good to anybody.”
The 85-year old Sylvia Beach, who claimed to have coined the term 'Bloomsday' for the anniversary of June 16, 1904, officially opened the Tower as a museum in honour of James Joyce, on June 16, 1962.
Sylvia Beach's Irish interview on James Joyce, the German occupation of Paris and Shakespeare & Company (1962)
Constantine Curran's gallant words in The Irish Times obituary on his friend's passion for the "independence and integrity of the artist" must be tempered by the history of Joyce cadging money from friends and benefactors. When Joyce had money to spare, he mainly spent it. He did have the costs for his daughter's medical treatment to cover in the 1930s.
By 1923 when William Butler Yeats received £7,500 with his Nobel Prize, Harriet Weaver had given Joyce £21,000 from an aunt's inheritance. It would be about £1,207,219 in 2017 pounds according to the Bank of England.
When Joyce went begging for money in 1927 to finance a trip to London, Sylvia Beach's frustrations boiled over in a letter:
"I'm afraid I and my little shop will not be able to stand the struggle to keep you and your family going from now until June, and to finance the trip of Mrs Joyce and yourself to London 'with money jingling in your pocket'...I have already many expenses for you that you do not dream of, and everything I have I give you freely...When you are absent, every word I receive from you is an order. The reward for my unceasing labour on your behalf is to see you tie yourself into a bowknot and hear you complain (I am poor and tired too)".
Beach never sent the letter.
In response to a prospectus on 'Ulysses' sent by Sylvia Beach to George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) in 1922, his response is in the British Library.
"It is a revolting record of a disgusting phase of civilisation; but it is a truthful one; and I should like to put a cordon-round Dublin; round up every male person in it between the ages of 15 and 30; force them to read it; and ask them whether on reflection they could see anything amusing in all that fouled mouthed, foul minded derision and obscenity. To you, possibly, it may appeal as art: you are probably (you see I don’t know you) a young barbarian – beglamoured by the-excitements and enthusiasms that art stirs up in passionate material; but to me it is all hideously real: I have walked those streets and know those shops and have heard-and taken part in those conversations..."
Shaw conceded that Joyce had ‘literary genius’, and later in 1939, the playwright defended 'Ulysses' as a masterpiece.
Shaw concludes: "that I am an elderly Irish gentleman and that you imagine that any Irishman, much less an elderly one, would pay 150 francs for a book, you little know my countrymen."
T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), the American-English poet, wrote that Joyce's use of classical myth as a method of ordering modern experience had "the importance of a scientific discovery."
Joyce had spent 8 years writing and editing 'Ulysses,' and 15 years on 'Finnegans Wake.'
Irish Times 1939 review of 'Finnegans Wake'
Read why there is no apostrophe in Finnegans Wake!
This from the Irish Times June 2000:
[On May 15th, Stephen Joyce, beneficiary of the James Joyce Estate, wrote to a 23-year-old Irish composer studying in Scotland named David Fennessy. Fennessy had asked Joyce for copyright permission to use 18 words from Finnegans Wake in a 3 1/2 -minute choral piece commissioned by Lyric FM for a Europewide broadcast: "As we there are where are we are we there from tomittot to teetootomtotalitarian. Tea tea too oo." Such are James Joyce's words.
His grandson refused. "You cannot even spell the title of my grandfather's last work correctly: its Finnegans Wake," Stephen Joyce wrote, correcting the apostrophe-free title, but forgetting to include an apostrophe in the "its" he wanted to stress. He added that he could not distinguish the words on the rough recording Fennessy had sent him. His final reason was a killer.
"To put it politely, mildly my wife and I don't like your music," Stephen Joyce concluded. Fennessy was shattered.]
The World of James Joyce: His Life & Work documentary (1986)
James Joyce's Dublin, 1904
Postscript
The following is a response to an October 28, 2019 Irish Times piece on the lobbying for moving James Joyce's remains from Zurich to Dublin.
["Exile was a key part of James Joyce’s strategy as a living writer. That it followed him into eternity was not part of the plan" - there is no evidence that Joyce wanted to be buried in Dublin.
After 1912, Joyce never returned to Ireland. In 1931 he had spent time in England including marrying at last Nora Barnacle, news which apparently caused consternation in Nora's native Galway while in London, a sister-in-law of the Joyces, refused to meet the couple. At Christmas that year James received news that his father John who was proud of his eldest son's achievements, was seriously ill, and he died on Dec 29. Even though James was distraught that he could not attend the funeral, he wrote to Ezra Pound, “In spite of my own deep feeling for him I never dared to trust myself into the power of my enemies.”
In a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, his nominated literary executor and supporter, Joyce wrote, “Why go on writing about a place I did not dare to go to at such a moment, where not three persons know me or understand me?” He added that he had heard that the editor of the Irish Independent had objected to an allusion to him in his father’s obituary.
When Joyce in almost 30 years of life could not face returning to his native city while escaping two world wars to find refuge in Zurich, a belated funeral in Dublin would be a travesty.]
Stephen Joyce (1932-2020) died on January 23, 2020. He was the last direct descendent of his grandfather James Joyce — Irish Times obituary Febuary 8, 2020.
