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Early Life

At a Glance

One of the greatest writers of the early twentieth century, James Joyce suffered from an incurable case of wanderlust. During his 58 years, he lived in many different parts of the world. He began his life in Dublin, Ireland, which was the setting for most of his great fiction. In 1903, he moved to Paris, but returned to Dublin a year later when his mother was dying. He remained in Dublin long enough to marry Nora Barnacle, a maid at a Dublin hotel. Shortly thereafter, Joyce moved to Zurich and then on to Trieste where he stayed for a decade teaching English and writing. Joyce’s life was a troubled one with bouts of alcoholism, depression, and poverty. Despite his problems, he managed to write many influential pieces of literature: Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, the short story collection Dubliners, and a somewhat autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Facts and Trivia

· Joyce was attacked by a dog as a young boy and ended up with a severe canine phobia that persisted throughout his life. He was also afraid of thunderstorms because his grandmother once told him storms were a sign of God’s wrath.

· Dedham, Massachusetts, hosts an annual James Joyce Ramble, which is a 10K race. Each mile is dedicated to one of Joyce’s works, and actors in period costumes line the streets and read from his novels as the runners pass.

· The last story in Joyce’s Dubliners collection, “The Dead,” was made into a film in 1987 by director John Huston. It was Huston’s last major film before he died.

· Joyce’s grandson, Stephen, has supposedly destroyed many letters written by his grandfather. He has also blocked what he considers “inappropriate” adaptations of his grandfather’s work.

· The library at the University College in Dublin is named after James Joyce.

· Joyce underwent over 25 eye surgeries in his lifetime.

Early Life

Although James Joyce spent his adult life in self-imposed exile, his sensibility and writing remained firmly grounded in Ireland. Born in Dublin on February 2, 1882, Joyce experienced the tensions of Irish culture and politics in his immediate family. In addition to a politically motivated distrust of the clergy, John Joyce imparted to his son a gift for storytelling, a tendency toward excessive drinking, and an inability to cope with financial matters. In contrast, Mary Murray Joyce, a devout Catholic, provided the oldest of her ten children with a consistent source of love which was particularly important given the decline in family finances, accompanied by frequent changes of residence, which was to continue throughout his childhood. The tensions within the Joyce family came to a head over the Home Rule movement headed by Charles Stewart Parnell, who was denounced from the pulpit after being accused of adultery. What both father and son saw as Parnell’s betrayal—Joyce was to identify strongly with the fallen leader throughout his life—inspired Joyce’s first literary production, a political satire which his father distributed to friends.

With the exception of a brief stay at the Christian Brothers’ School, Joyce was educated almost entirely by Jesuits, at Clongowes Wood College, at Belvedere College, and finally at University College, Dublin, from which he was graduated in 1902. Although he was to reject most of the specific teachings of his Jesuit masters, Joyce maintained a respect for their intellectual rigor. The broad-based knowledge of classical authors—particularly the aesthetic speculations of Saint Thomas Aquinas—and the knowledge of languages which Joyce first developed under the Jesuits were to prove essential to his literary development. Of equal importance were the long walks which provided the encyclopedic knowledge of Dublin geography, and social life, so important to his later works.

During Joyce’s youth, Dublin had developed an important literary community revolving around slightly older writers including William Butler Yeats, George Moore, Æ (George Russell), and Lady Augusta Gregory. Joyce was both interested in and aloof from what came to be known as the Irish Literary Renaissance. Following the riots over Yeats’s play The Countess Cathleen (1892) in 1899, Joyce defended Yeats against the widespread Catholic and nationalist outrage. Nevertheless, distancing himself from what he saw as the mysticism and the provincialism of the Irish Literary Renaissance, Joyce chose to model his own early work after the example of Continental realism, particularly the work of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. Although the dialogue may be apocryphal, Joyce was widely believed to have told Yeats on their first meeting (which Joyce instigated) in 1904, “You are too old for me to help you.” A similar confidence emerges in a letter to Ibsen on his seventy-third birthday in which Joyce cryptically announces himself as a new presence waiting to assume the master’s role in European letters.

Beginning in 1902, Joyce began to prepare for the physical exile he found essential to a clear vision of his native country. Both photographs and descriptions dating from this period portray a tall, thin young man who maintains a somewhat distant and aloof expression. His first trip to Paris, where he was ostensibly studying medicine, was brought to an end by his mother’s terminal illness. Asserting his artistic independence from strictures of religion, nation, and family, Joyce refused to honor his mother’s deathbed wish that he take communion. Remaining in Dublin through most of 1904, Joyce began work on his first published literary works. The year was marked by several personal events of immense importance to his later development. A brief residence at the Martello Tower with his friend and rival Oliver St. John Gogarty—the Buck Mulligan of Joyce’s fiction—provided a substantial amount of the material incorporated into Ulysses (1922). The story of a single day, Ulysses takes place on June 16, 1904, the day of Joyce’s first extended meeting with Nora Barnacle, who was to be his lifelong companion and the mother of his two children. Armed with his chosen weapons of “silence, exile, and cunning” and accompanied by Nora (whom he was not to marry legally until 1931), Joyce set off in late 1904 to pursue his literary destiny on the Continent.

Life’s Work. Two interrelated themes—one aesthetic, the other financial—dominate Joyce’s career. Even as he wrote the books that established him as a major modernist author, he struggled with only intermittent success to provide a comfortable level of support for his family. With the exception of brief stays in Pola (1904-1905) and Rome (1906-1907), Joyce spent the first decade of his exile in Trieste, an Austrian port city with Italian traditions and sympathies. There, Joyce taught English both privately and in association with the Berlitz School. With the aid of his brother Stanislaus, Joyce managed to maintain his growing family; a son Giorgio was born in 1905, a daughter Lucia in 1907. Stanislaus also served as an underappreciated, but invaluable, intellectual foil and critic for the drafts of Dubliners (1914) and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), which were written primarily in Trieste. An essentially realistic portrayal of Dublin life, Dubliners was accepted for publication in 1906, but objections from editors and printers delayed publication until 1914. Although there is little in any of Joyce’s books likely to outrage late twentieth century taste, Joyce expended a large amount of energy throughout his life resisting attempts to censor his writing. Dubliners is a collection of 15 short stories by James Joyce, first published in 1914. They were meant to be a naturalistic depiction of Irish middle class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the 20th century.

The stories were written when Irish nationalism was at its peak, and a search for a national identity and purpose was raging; at a crossroads of history and culture, Ireland was jolted by various converging ideas and influences. They centre on Joyce's idea of an epiphany: a moment where a character experiences self-understanding or illumination. Many of the characters in Dubliners later appear in minor roles in Joyce's novel Ulysses. The initial stories in the collection are narrated by child protagonists, and as the stories continue, they deal with the lives and concerns of progressively older people. This is in line with Joyce's tripartite division of the collection into childhood, adolescence, and maturity.