Preface to the New and Revised Edition
The pleasure afforded by James
Joyce's works shows no sign of
diminution
as we reach the centenary of his birth. He exhibits the
staying power
associated with the greatest writers.
Vestigial perplexities, as critics labor
to allay them, tend if anything to swell his reputation. In
offering a new
edition of this biography, I have incorporated
the considerable amount
of new information that has come in during the
twenty-two years since it
was published. The additions may help to assuage
some of the curiosity
that still persists about this bizarre and
wonderful creature who turned
literature and language on end.
I n what follows readers of the first
edition wil l discover that more pages have
been altered than not, by insertions ranging from a
line to a page or more. The fresh material deals
with most aspects of Joyce's
life: his
writings and his attitude towards them, his
experiences of love and desire,
his domestic travails, his political views. Many
corrections (besides those
entered on two occasions in earlier
printings) have also been made. Since
this biography has to some degree the character
of the year, 1959, when
it first appeared, I have kept
references to 'now' though they must be
understood as referring to 'then.'
In the second edition, as in the
first, I have followed Joyce's
own
prescription of total candor,
with the knowledge that his life, like
Rous
seau's, can bear others' scrutiny as it bore his
own. In working over these
pages, I have felt all my affection for him
renewed.
New College, Oxford
March 15, 1982
Preface and Acknowledgments 1959 Edition
Twelve years ago in D u b l i n Mrs . W .
B. Yeats showed me an unpub
lished preface in which Yeats
described his first meeting with James
Joyce.
M y book had its origin at that
time, although I did not work on it
steadily
unt i l 1952. W h e n i
n that year I talked with James
F. Spoerri in Evanston
and went through his Joyce collection, I
felt a new biography could be
written. W i t h the encouragement
of Frank O'Co nnor and of Carroll
G.
Bowen, I went to Europe in 1953
(and then again in 1954 and 1956) to
see Joyce's relatives and friends, and
to gather records.
Harriet Shaw Weaver, Joyce's
literary executor, was
constantly gener
ous to me; otherwise I could
not have proceeded with the book.
I have
made use of her published
and unpublished correspondence with
Joyce
and have also benefited from
her reading of the manuscript.
Mrs. Maria
Jolas was one of the first to aid me,
and without her help many of
Joyce's
later experiences would have eluded
me. I am grateful to her also for
reading the chapters on Joyce i
n Paris and suggesting improvements.
John J. Slocum, Joyce's
bibliographer, at once put his
collection and knowl
edge generously at my disposal;
and Herbert Cahoon, his fellow-bibliog
rapher, gave me unstinting help from
beginning to end, and read the
manuscript. Harry Levin, who himsel f laid
the foundation of Joyce
scholarship, and John V. Kelleher, who
is perhaps the most knowledge
able American on Irish subjects,
have gone out of their way
to help me
throughout my work and, by
reading the book before
publication, en
abled me to make necessary
changes. For valuable suggestions I am
in
debted as i n all my work to
my brother Er wi n B. Ellmann.
Ellsworth G.
Mason, Librarian of Colorado College,
helped to shape my view
of Ulys
ses and prompted me to reconsider
many aspects of Joyce's life. I
have
profited, too, from our collaboration
in editing The Critical Writings of
James Joyce.
I had important assistance in Zur ich
from Dr. Alfred D u t l i , and in
Dubl in from Patrick Henchy, Keeper
of Printed Books in the
National
Library, who gave a good deal
of time during seven years
to tracing rec
x Preface and Acknowledgments
l i n background I had the help of T . W
. Pugh, with his extraordinary
recollection of the details
of life sixty years ago, and
his minute knowl edge of Ulysses.
For Joyce's residence in Zur ich I had
the expert help of Ottocaro Weiss,
of Riverdale, New York; for
Trieste also, his knowledge proved indispensable.
He suggested many possibilities, successfully solved
many problems of identification,
and aided me as well by
benevolently reading several chapters more than
once and so preserving me from i n
accuracies.
Among others to whom I feel
special gratitude are Sean and Eileen
O'Faol ain , Stuart Gi lbert (who very
kindly gave me much information
i n the later chapters and then read
and made corrections i n them), Frank
Budgen, the only witness of many
important moments in Joyce's life,
Samuel Beckett, Myron C. Nutting, M m
e Lucie Leon, Alessandro Fran-
cini Bruni, J. F. Byrne, Niall
Sheridan, and Robert N . Kastor.
Mrs.
Claire Gorman allowed me to make use
of Herbert Gorman's important
notes and papers for his biography, now
in the Croessmann Coll ection
at Southern Illinois University. Professor
Heinrich Straumann of the
University of Zurich made
it possible for me to meet many friends
of
Joyce i n Zur ich , and also
generously showed me the important letters
from Joyce to Mar the Fleischmann w hi ch he
had saved from loss. Pro
fessor Carlyle King of the
University of Saskatchewan was
good enough
to trace, with immense difficulty,
Eileen Vance, Joyce's childhood friend,
and to interview her for me.
Several collectors have put important
material at my disposal; among them I
must mention particularly Dr. H. K.
Croessmann, who repeat edly went
to trouble and expense to obtain
documents that might be of
use to me; and Charles E. Feinberg, T.
E. Hanley, John H . Thomp son, and Edward
Naumburg, Jr.
I am greatly indebted to the relatives
of James Joyce, who have helped
me at every turn: to
the late Professor Stanislaus Joyce,
who kindly talked
with me in 1953 a r >d *954> a
r *d to his widow, Mrs. Nelly
Joyce, who
gave me information I could
not have obtained from anyone
else about
Joyce's life in Dubl in and
Trieste; to Joyce's sisters, Mrs. Eileen Schaurek
(and her daughter, Mrs. Boezema
Delimata), the late Evd Joyce, and
Mrs. May Monaghan, who observed
James Joyce shrewdly as well as
affectionately, and enabled me to see h i
m as a son and brother. Joyce's
sister Margaret, now a nun in a Convent
of Mercy i n New Zealand,
also kindly wrote me about her
family. I am happy to thank
George Joyce,
with his wife Asta, for much
information about his father's later years;
and Stephen James Joyce, James Joyce's grandson.
Mrs. Hele n Fleisch-
man Joyce and her son David Fleischman have
aided me. Among the
relatives of Mrs. James Joyce,
I have had great help from Mrs.
Kathleen
Barnacle Griffin, and have also been
assisted by Mrs. Mary Barnacle
Blackmore.
Preface and Acknowledgments xi
wife, Mary E ll mann, wh o has impro ved it everywhere,
both i n concep tion and expression.
The names of the many other persons
who have helped me are given
in the Further Acknowledgments on pp. 813-15 of
this book.
I have had a good deal of assistance
from libraries. At Yale I must
thank particularly Marjorie Wynne for her kindness, and
also Donald
Gallup; at Cornell I am greatly indebted to Dr. Stephen
A. McC arth y,
Director of the Library, and to George
Harris Healey, Curator of Special
Collections, who treated me with the utmost
generosity. Professor Arthur
Mizener of Cornell has also given me important
assistance. At the
University of Buffalo Charles D. Abbott, Director of
University Libraries,
greatly facilitated my work, and I am indebted also
to Gene Magner. In
the National Library of Ireland, Dr. R. J. Hayes and
his staff put me
under great obligation. I am indebted to the Houghton
Library' at Har
vard, to the Stanford Univers ity Library, the Univers ity
of Illinois L i
brary, the Pierpont Morgan Library, the Princeton University
Library, the
New York Public Library, and the British Museum. Jens
Nyholm, L i
brarian of Northwestern University, assisted
me with his knowledge of
Danish, and his staff has given me continual help.
It is pleasant to acknowledge the very
substantial assistance I have re
ceived from Northwestern University; I much appreciate the
support Uni
versity officials gave my work from the start. I
wish to thank John Crowe
Ransom and the Kenyon Review for the award
of a Kenyon Review Fel
lowship, and to thank Henry Allen Moe and the John
Simon Guggen heim Foundat ion for the award of a Gug
gen heim Fellowship. I am grate
ful to the American Philosophical Society
and to the Modern Language Association for
grants-in-aid.
Parts of this book have appeared in
different form in the Kenyon Re view, Sewanee
Review, Reporter, Yale Review, and Commonweal, i
n my
introduction to Stanislaus Joyce, My
Brother's Keeper, and i n The Critical Writings
of James Joyce. One section was published
as a pamphlet by the
Cornell University Library.
For permission to quote material here I am indebted
first to Harriet
Weaver and Lionel Monro, as administrators of the
Estate of James Joyce, and to the
Society of Authors. I am also indebted to
the following: in the
United States, The Viking Press, Inc., for
quotations from The Portable
James Joyce, ed. Harry Lev in , in clu din
g Dubliners, A Portrait of the Art
ist as a Young Man, Exiles, and Collected
Poems, and for quotations from
Finnegans Wake, The Letters of James Joyce,
ed. Stuart Gi lber t, Stanis
laus Joyce's M y Brother's Keeper,
and The Critical Writings of James
Joyce;
Random House, Inc., for quotations from Ulysses; Ne w
Direc tions for
quotations from Stephen Hero; Holt , Rinehart
& W in st on , In c. , for quo
tations from Herbert Gorman's James Joyce.
I n England I must thank
Jonathan Cape, Ltd., for permission to quote
from The Essential James
from Stephen Hero; to Faber &
Faber for quotations from Finnegans
Wake, The Critical Writings of James Joyce,
and Stanislaus Joyce's M y
Brother's Keeper; to John Lane
The Bodley Head for quotations from
Ulysses. For permission to quote other materi al, I must
thank the Mac-
mil lan Co. (New York) and Rupert Hart-Davis, Ltd.
(quotations from
The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Al la n Wade),
Ernest Hemingway (an
unpublished letter), Oliver D. Gogarty
(unpublished letters of his father),
Diarmuid Russell (unpublished letters of his
father George Russell), Sig-
nora Letizia Fonda Savio (quotations from
published and unpublished
writings of her father [Italo Svevoj),
Samuel Beckett (an acrostic), Mr s .
Maria Jolas (unpublished letters by her and her
husband Eugene Jolas), Mrs. Cynthia
Stephens (quotations from James Stephens),
Mrs. Nelly
Joyce (quotations from Stanislaus
Joyce), Mrs. Anne Wyndham Lewis
(quotations from Wyndham Lewis), Frank Archer and the British
Drama
League (letters from Wil l i am Archer), Mrs.
Marjorie Wells (a letter from
H . G. Wells), Dr. C. G. Jung (an unpublished
letter), Stuart Gilbert (an
unpublished letter), M m e Lucie Leo n (correspondence
fr om her husband
Paul Leon), T. S. Eliot (excerpts from unpubl
ished letters), C. D. Me d
ley (unpublished letters of George Moore), Mrs.
W. B. Yeats (unpub
lished letters of W . B. Yeats), J. F.
Byrne (an unpublished letter), and
Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. and
Ezra Pound (quotations from The
Letters of Ezra Pound, ed. by D. D . Paige,
copyright 1950 by Harcourt,
Brace & World, Inc.).
Acknowledgments 1982 Edition
Quotations from Joyce's works in this new edition are
cited with page numbers from the following: for all of
his books up to Ulysses and
Fin-
negans Wake, The Portable James Joyce, ed.
Harry Levin (The Vi ki ng
Press, 1949), and The Essential James
Joyce (Jonathan Cape, 1948); for
Ulysses, Random House and Mo de rn Library, 1961,
and John Lane The
Bodley Head, 1969; for Finnegans Wake, The
Vik ing Press and Faber &
Faber, 1939; for Stephen Hero, New Dir ect ions,
1955, and Jonathan
Cape, 1956; for The Critical Writings of
James Joyce, eds. Ellsworth Ma
son and Richard Ellmann, The Viking Press and
Faber & Faber, 1959;
for Giacomo Joyce, ed. Richard El lm ann , Th e Vi ki
ng Press and Faber &
Faber, 1968; for Letters of James
Joyce: vol. I , ed. Stuart Gi lber t 1957,
new ed. 1966, vols. I I and H I , ed. Richard E l lm an n 1966, Th
e V ik in g
Press and Faber & Faber; Selected
Letters, ed. Richard El lm an n, The
Viking Press and Faber &
Faber, 1975. W hen Ame ric an and English
editions are not identical, page references are
given first to the American
edition and then following to the English edition.
The principal new materials in this edition come from
the following
collections:
The Sylvia Beach papers, in the
Poetry-Rare Books Collection, State
University of Ne w York at Buffalo
The C. P. Curran papers, in the Library of
University College, Dublin
The Stuart Gilbert papers, in private hands
The Stanislaus Joyce papers, in
private hands
The Adrienne Monnier papers, in the Berg
Collection, New York
Public Library
The Ezra Pound papers, in the
Beinecke Library, Yale University
The Francis Sheehy Skeffington
papers, in the National Library of
Ireland, Dublin, and in private hands
The Harriet Shaw Weaver collection in the British
Library
xiv Acknowledgments, 1982 Edition
I am grateful to the curators of
the above collections, and record
with
gratitude others who have
assisted me with this edition:
T he Reverend Godfrey Ainsworth, O . F . M . ,
for recollections of Joyce's
sister Margaret (later Sister Mary Gertrude); Dr.
Melissa Banta, for access
to some valuable Joyce letters;
Samuel Beckett, for Joyce's l
imerick on
Murphy, and for help with the
cryptic 'H om e Olga'; Professor Zack
Bowen, for identification of a popular song;
Andre du Bouchet, for help
in retranslating into English his Fren
ch translation of a lost Joyce man
uscript; the Reverend Bruce Bradley,
S.J., for information about the
Punishment Book and related matters at
Clongowes; the late Fra nk
Budgen, for ampler accounts of Joyce's
relationship with Marthe Fleisch-
mann and of his own quarrel with
Joyce; Ralph C. Busser, for Joyce's
dealings with his father, then American Consul in
Trieste; Mrs. Noel Carr,
for reminiscences of Joyce's dispute
with Henry Carr in Zur ich ; W . P.
D'Arcy, for reminiscences and surmises
about Joyce in 1904; M m e Marie
Dujardin, for details of her husband's
friendship with Joyce; David
DuVivier , for help on two
points of French philology; Mr s. Valerie El iot
,
for permission to quote from a
letter of T . S. Eliot to
Joyce; Mrs. Vincent
Farrington, for quotations from
her brother Thomas McGreevy's papers; Dr.
Gisele Freund, for recollections of
her photographic sessions with
Joyce; Oliver D. Gogarty, for
letters of his father and other
documents
pertaining to the Martello Tower at
Sandycove; Albert Hubbell , for an
account of his friendship with Lucia
Joyce; Louis Hyman, for details
about Joyce's Jewish connections;
Mrs. Nelly Joyce and her son James
Joyce, for permission to quote
from Stanislaus Joyce's journals
and letters
from Joyce; Dr. Gertrude Kaempffer,
for reminiscences of Joyce in Lo
carno; Jane Lidderdale, for info rmat ion
about Harriet Shaw Weaver and
Nora Joyce; Dr. J. B. Lyons, for the autopsy
report on Joyce; William
M c G u i r e , for valuable suggestions
about Dr. C. G. Jung's treatment of
Lucia Joyce; Professor Giorgio Melchiori ,
for an important new letter
from Joyce about Irish
politics; the late Professor M i j o
Mirkovic , for guid
ance on Joyce's life in Pola
(Pulj); Professor Takao Nakabayashi,
for i n
formation about early friends of Nora
Joyce; M y r o n Nutting, for an in
terview recorded i n the Or al History project
of the University of Californ
ia
at Los Angeles; Liam O'Flaherty, for
reminiscences of Joyce; Sean O
Mordha, for discovering some
new leads i n Dubl in
and elsewhere; Mary
de Rachewiltz, for access to her father Ezra
Pound's correspondence with
Joyce; Ximena de Angulo Roell i ,
for transcribing her mother' s recollec
tions of Joyce and Lucia in association
with Dr . C. G. Jung; Mrs. Vera
Russell, for her recollection of Joyce's
attitude towards childbirth; Maur
ice Saillet, for m u c h new infor
matio n about Valery Larbaud , Sylvia
Beach, and Adrienne Mo nni er i n their
relations with Joyce; Peter du
Sautoy, for a multitude of favors; Fr
itz Senn, for some useful corrections;
Mrs. Andree Sheehy Skeffington,
for quotation from her father-in-law
\
Acknowledgments, 1982 Edition xv
of the Bernard Shaw Estate, for a
letter from Shaw to Sylvia Beach;
Professor Thomas Staley, for interviewing Mrs.
Maria Eccel, once the
Joyces' maid in Trieste; Mrs. Phyllis Moss
Stein, for memories of Patrick
Tuohy and Joyce; Mrs. Lola Szladits,
curator of the Berg Collection, for
permitting me to quote a letter; Tom Stoppard, for a
photograph of Henry
Carr, and highspirited general enlightenment;
Mrs. Mabel Walls, for
memories of her mother Mrs . Josephine Murray;
Dr. Piero Weiss, for
his knowledge of Trieste and his help with
translations; Mrs. Roma
Woodnutt of the Society of Authors,
for generous assistance.
In addition I wish to thank Professor
Robert Martin Adams, Dr. Ruth
Bauerle, Dr. Paul Cohen, Marc Dachy,
Dr. Hans Walter Gabler, Bren
dan G i l l , Michael G i l l ,
Professor J. Paul Hunter, Quentin
Keynes, W i l -
helm Krull , and Edward Malins. I am greatly indebted
to Catharine
Carver for her astute and dexterous
editing.
During the twenty-three years since this
book was written my efforts to
collect further material have been
fortified by financial assistance from
Northwestern University, Yale University, Oxford
University, and Emory
University.
Mary Reynolds, who has given me many
valuable suggestions, has
increased my debt to her by compiling a new and much
more elaborate
index for this edition.
m 1882-1894 23
iv 1894-1898 42
v 1898-1900 57
vi 1900-1902 75
VII 1902 98
VIII 1902-1903 111
ix 1903-1904 129
x 1904 143
XI 1904-1905 183
X I I 1905 '95 X I I I 1905-1906 212
XIV 1906-1907 224
XV The Backgrounds, of 'The Dead'
243 XV I 1907-1909 2 54
XVI I 1909 276
XIX 1909-1911 300
XX 1912 318
XXIII 1914-1915 380
XXVIII 1919-1920 470
Part Four PARIS
xxxn 1923-1926 553
xxx iv 1929-1932 610
Notes 745
Plates XXXIII through L I V follow p.
482.
J A M E S J O Y C E
Introduction
As often as I think of that
unbloody housewarmer, Shem
Skrivenitch, al
ways cutting my brhose
to please his phrase, bogorror,
I declare I get the
jawache! Be me punting his reflection
he'd begin his beogrefright in mud-
dyass ribalds.
—Finnegans Wake (432)
We are still learning to be James
Joyce's contemporaries, to understand
our interpreter. This book enters Joyce's
life to reflect his complex, i
n
cessant joining of event
and composition. The life of an
artist, but par
ticularly that of Joyce, differs from
the lives of other persons
in that its
events are becoming artistic sources
even as they command his present
attention. Instead of allowing
each day, pushed back by the next,
to lapse
i n k ^ j n i p x e d s e l l j ^ again the
experiences,_which have
shaped h i m . He is at once the
captive"and"t fie liberator. In turn the
process ot reshaping experience
becomes a part of his li fe,
another of its
recurrent events like rising
or sleeping. The biographer must
measure in
each moment this participation of the
artist in two simultaneous pro
cesses.
Individual moments are often
undistinguished. But their evidence ac
cumulates along with the evidence
of distinguished moment s; small par
ticulars begin to define when they
had appeared only to multiply,
traits
become reiterative, a central
energy seems to evoke rather than
to com
pile them, and within that
energy artist and man rule each
other. Re
spect, which Joyce elicits
at once, coiivergeXWith growTTTg~affection.
He was fond of disparaging himself ,
and those may be pardoned wh o,
missing his irony, have sometimes
followed suit. Few writers have
achieved acknowledgment as geniuses and
yet aroused so mu ch discon
tent and reproach as Joyce. To his Irish
countrymen he is still obscene
and very likely
mad; they were the last
of nations to lift .the ban
on
Ulysses, To the
EnglisnTie"ls"e^centrlc~ahd"Trish,' an epithet
which,
considering the variety of the
literature produced by Irishmen
during the
3
4 / A M E S
last seventy years, sounds
dangerously ' En gl ish .' T o the American s, who
have received him most kindly (although he
could not bear their coun
try), he is a great experimentalist, a great city man, but
possibly too hard of heart; while to the French, among
whom Joyce lived for twenty years, he
lacks the refined rationalism which would prove him
incontestably a man of letters. As a result of
these reservations, Joyce holds his
place of eminence under fire; he is much
more assailed than writers who are
evidently his inferiors. Though the name of Joyce
is as inextricably as sociated with modern
prose as is the name of Eliot with modern
verse, or that of Picasso with modern art,
it is possible that the current of opin
ion wi l l swerve, and
not-to-like Joyce wi l l become as
fashionable tomor row as not-to-like Picasso is
becoming today.
The future of man may appear less sinister
to those who hope Ulysses
and Finnegans Wake wi l l be ignored, but they
should be cautioned against
optimism. In spite of Joyce's reputation of
having skirted his age, he is
unexpectedly at its center. In his isolation he comments on
everything
from Adam and Eve to Daddy and Peaches Browning.
War and society
were not his theme, but they found h i m out an d forced h i
m into attitudes
towards them. His work began in the merest lyric and
ended in the vastest encyclopedia. He surveys the
human landscape from infancy to senility,
from birth to death, from the young men
knocking at the door to the old
men struggling to keep i t shut. He is by turns gay,
morose, tru st ing,
suspicious, uxorious, and misogynous. Joyce is so
various, in fact, that
he has been compared promiscuously with great
writers of the past. These comparisons are inevitably
as unjust as they are just. Joyce is not much
like Homer, either in his subject matter or in his
preoccupation with
autobiography; yet the Homeric myth hovers behind Bloom
in Ulysses,
insistently altering the context of that book. At
moments Joyce is as ro
bust as Rabelais, but robustness is not his dis tin
guish ing qu al ity, and the
more fundamental likeness, as J. M*-Cohen-suggests,1 is
that he seems to come..to. thin gs th ro ug h words,
instead o f to words th ro ug h things .
Dante was perhaps Joyce's favorite author,
and Joyce was as local and as
scrupulous in vision; but he put aside Dante's
heaven an d hell, sin and
punishment, preferring like Balzac to
keep his comedy human, and he
relished secular, disorderly lives which Dante
would have punished or
ignored.
W h e n Joyce's adherents anx iously compare h i
m with the great, his
detractors are apt to call up against him the
formidable figure of Tolstoy.
A famous critic has remarked
that Joyce, unlike Tolstoy, tells us noth
i n g . 2 Certainly in Joyce there is non e of
the active, ex terna l, conclusive
life that Tolstoy portrays. O ut o f al l the characters i
n War and Peace only
Pierre, and Pierre only so long as he does no th in g
and remains ineffec
tual and observant, could have been a
Joyce character. Yet i f Pierre tells
/ O Y C E 5
novelist he liked best, and has conceded to Flaubert
that the novelist
must not judge, we must listen to what, in spite of his
cardplayer's face and the ostentatious shuffling of the
deck, Joyce is saying to us.
Whether we know it or not, Joyce's court is, like
Dante's or Tolstoy's,
always in session. The initial and
determining act of judgment in his
work is the justifi cation of the com monpla ce. Other
writers had labored
tediously to portray i t , bu t no one knew what the commonplace
really
was unti l Joyce had written.
There is no th in g like Joyce's commonplace
in Tolstoy, where the characters, however humble, live
dramatically and
- inst i l l wisdom or tragedy in each
other. Joyce was the first to endow
an
urban man of no importance with heroic
consequence. For a long time
his intention was misunderstood: it was
assumed he must be writing
satire. How else justify so passionate an
interest in the lower middle class?
Marxist critics leaped to attack him, and Joyce said
gently to his friend
Eugene Jolas, ' I don't know why they attack me. Nob
ody in any jsf-rny
books is worth more than a thousand pounds.' 3 To
look into th e(notsam «fc
of a city was common enough after Zola, but to
fmd_UJ^ssesJtjigre was
reckless and imjjnident. I t was an idea quite
ali en, t oo , to Irish writers of
tKe time. Yeats was aristocratic and demanded
distinc tions between me n;
Joyce was all for removing them. Shaw
was willing to accept any man so
long as he was eloquent, but Joyce took for his
central hero a man not
outwardly eloquent, thinking in fits and
starts, without Shaw's desire to
be emphatic or convincing. Joyce deals in his
books with the theme of
Tristram and Iseult that his fellow-Dubliners were freshening
up, para
doxically, with the more ancient Irish
names of Naisi and Deird re, but '
the love story interests h i m hardly at a ll , his interest" is in
the c ommon-
place husband. Unimpressive as Bloom may
seem in so many ways, u n
worthy to catch marlin
or countesses with Hemingw ay's characters, or
to
sop up guilt with Faulkner's, or to sit on
committees with C. P. Snow's, Bloom is a
humble vessel elected to bear and transmit
unimpeached the
best qualities of the mind.
Joyce's discovery, so humanistic that he wo ul d
have been embarrassed to disclose it
out of context, was that the ordinary
isjhe extraordinary.
To" come" to this conclusion Joyce had to see joined
what others had
held separate: the point of view that life is
unspeakable and to be exposed,
and the po int of view that it is ineffable and to be
distilled. Nature may
be a horrible document, or a secret revelation; all may
be resolvable into
brute body, or into mind and mental
components. Joyce lived between
the antipodes and above them: his brutes show a
marvelous capacity for
brooding, his pure minds find bodies
remorselessly stuck to them. To
read Joyce is to see reality rendered
without the simplifications of con
ventional divisions.
One of his unexpected fusings takes place between
beauty and its op
posite. When Livia Svevo heard that Joyce
in Finnegans Wake was using
6 J A M E S
but when she heard that in the river
were two washerwomen scrubbing
dirty l inen, she was disgusted.4 T o
Joyce the juxtaposition was easy and
natural. The river is lovely
and filthy; Dubl in
is dear and dirty; so are the
mind and body. In theory we
grant these combinations, but in
practice
seem to hold the units apart.
Joyce never does. What other hero in
the
novel has, like Stephen Dedalus, lice?
Yet the lice are Baudelairean lice,
clinging to the soul's as well as
the body's integument. W hat other hero
defecates or masturbates like Bloom
before our eyes? Joyce wi l l not make
it easy for us either to contemn
or adore. I f we go to h i m thinking
he
may be the apostle
of brotherhood, he shows
us brothers in violent quar
rel. I f we go to hi m to find a
defender of the family, he presents
his
central hero—the cuckold. I f we ask h i m to be
the celebrant of the iso
lated individual, Joyce shows isolation
making him morose and defense
less. I f we look for the spokesman
of life, he introduces us to the
dead.
The reconciling factor is the imagination,
which, working through wit,
brings opposite ends of the mind
together, and makes
our seeming un-
likenesses suddenly gregarious.
Joyce is the porcupine
of authors. His heroes are grudged
heroes—the
impossible young man, the passive adult,
the whiskey-drink ing graybeard.
It is hard to like them, harder
to admire them. Joyce prefers it so.
Une
quivocal sympathy would be romancing.
He denudes man of what we
are accustomed to respect, then summons us
to sympathize. For Joyce,
as for Socrates, undejstand^gjs._a.jtm We
can move closer to h i
m by climbing oveTthe obstacIeToFour
pretensions,
but as we do so he tasks our prowess
again by his difficult language. He
requires that we adapt ourselves
in form as well as in content to
his new
point of view. His heroes are
not easy liking, his books are not
easy
reading. He does not wish
to conquer us, but to have us conquer
him.
There are, in other words, no invitations,
but the door is ajar.
It is not easy, either, to enter
into his life with the abandon
of com
radeship. 'A man of small virtue,
inclined to extravagance and alcohol
i s m , ' 5 he described himself to C.
G. Jung, and to Louis Gil let
, the French
Academician who wished to exalt h i m
, he said, 'Don't make a
hero out
of me. I 'm only a simple
middle-class man.' He surrounded himself
with
people who were mostly
not known: some were waiters, tailors,
fruitsell-
ers, hote l porters, concierges, bank clerks, and
this assemblage was as
inevitable for Joyce's temperament as
marquises and marchionesses were
for Proust's. To those who
admonished him for wasting his time,
he
replied, ' I never met a bore , ' 6
a remark that from most writers would
sound merely sentimental. That he meant it
is demonstrated by the thou
sands of phrases garnered mostly
from undistinguished friends with which
he filled his books. 'Th is book,' he
said to Eugene Jolas of
Finnegans
Wake, 'is being written by
the people I have met or k n o w n . '
7 His con
temporary John
Synge listened to people thr ough a
knothole in the floor;
J O Y C E 7
uncompromising in his aims. People lion ized hi m but
he wou ld not roar.
If we ask Joyce to bestride
literature like a colossus, he wi l
l disappoint
us. No generals paid h i m visits of homage, no one
called h i m the sage
of Dublin. As he makes clear enough himself, in
the world's eyes he
began as a bad boy and ended as an old codger. There is much to
rebuke
him for, his disregard of money, his regard for alcohol, and
other con
duct lacking in majesty or decorum. Yet we have
to ask with Parsifal the
question that Joyce also asked, 'Who
isgeTToY 8 "Though Joyce,
prophet
ically enough, called the biographer af'biografiend,/'
he also supplied the
precedent for seeing his subject in all postutes-irrorder to know
him. His
passion for truth, however unpalatable, is a contagion
which he would
have his readers and his admirers
share.
Yet as the nobility of his
heroes gradually overcomes their inglorious-
ness, so the tenacious craftsman, ho ldi ng to his idea,
gradually sur
mounts that roving, debt-ridden scene through
which Joyce kept his ele
gant way. Implicit in his work there is a new
notion of greatness, greatness not as
an effulgence but as a burrowin g that occasionally
reaches the
surface of speech or action. This
kind of greatness can be perceived in
his life, too , though camouflaged by frailties. To be
narrow, peculiar,
and irresponsible, and at the same ti me
all-encompassing, relentless, and
grand, is Joyce's style of
greatness, a style as difficult, but ultimately
as
rewarding, as that of Finnegans Wake.
The Family Before Joyce
Wharnow are alle her childer, say? In
kingdome gone or power to come
or gloria be to them farther? Allalivial,
allalluvial! Some here, more no
more, more again lost alia stranger.
—Finnegans Wake (213)
Stephen Dedalus said the family was a net which he would fly past,
but
James Joyce chose rather to entangle
himself and his works in it. His
relations appear in his books under thin
disguises. In general , those who
bear the Joyce name appear to
better advantage than those who bear
the
name of Murray, his mother's family. In this
treatment Joyce follows the
prejudices of his father, 1 who complained that the name of
Mu rr ay stank
in his nostrils at the same time that he breathed
a tipsy perfume from
that of Joyce. His immediate
ancestors scarcely justified this preference,
but, like all Irish Joyces, the family
claims descent from the distinguished
clan o f Galway wh ich has given its name to the
Joyce country there. It
is impossible to verify this claim—the earliest records show them
already
in Cork ci ty— but there seems to be no reason
to refuse to allow them
this innocent distinction.
Joyce's father, John Stanislaus
Joyce, owned a framed engraving of the
coat of arms of the Galway Joyces, and he used to
carry it along, grandly
and quixotically, on his frequent enforced
dernjgnagements, atoning for
squandering his family's fortune by parading its putative
escutcheon. Joyce v
represents him in Ulysses as crying out, 'Head up l' Ke
ep our flag flying!
An eagle gules volant in a
field argent displayed,' 2 and i n A
Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man Stephen offers to show
a do ub ti ng classmate the family crest at the Ulster
king-at-arms' office in Dubl in Castle. 3
The
best dreams of noble_ancestors occur onjst ra wb ed s. ,To
the remark , 'W e
are all kings' sons,' Stephen says, 'Alas ,
' 4 but James Joyce, like his
father
or , for that matter, like Shakespeare,
took excellent care of the coat of
12 / A M E S
family portraits by W i l l i a m
Roe, s which he in turn carried about from
flat to flat in later life.*
The name of Joyce is derived by
genealogists from the French joyeux and
Latin jocax, and James Joyce, who
held that literature should express the 'holy
spirit of joy , ' 6 accepted his
name as an omen. In later life he carried a seventeenth-century
picture of a Du e de Joyeux in his wallet, and
asked friends i f they could not detect a strong resemblance.
O n the other hand, he enjoyed referring to himself as
'James Joyless,' 'a Joyce in
the wilderness,' 'a Joyce of evil,' and
considered Freud a namesake, though an undesired
one.
The given name James was not new in the family. At the
beginning
of the nineteenth century George
Joyce, a man of property in Cork,
named his son James. This James, who was
the great-grandfather of the
writer, named his only child
James Augustine Joyce, and this son in
turn
intended, according to a boisterous but unreliable family
recollection, to
name his only child James, but was thwarted
by a drunken parish clerk,
who wrote down John instead and so broke
the line.
The great-grandfather bequeathed a zeal for nationalism, a dislike
for
the clergy, and an ineptitude for business which
survived in the next two
generations and are apparent, with due modifications,
in the life of the
writer. As a young man this Ur-James
Joyce joined the "Whiteboys," or
Catholic agitators against landlords, and was condemned
to death, though
the sentence was not carried out. Of his
anti-clericalism the only remem
bered example was his remark, T i l never let one of
them put his two feet
under my mahogany.' A little of his history as a
businessman may be
traced in old deeds. One of 1842 records that he and
a Jeremiah Joseph O'Connor obtained a lease
of salt and lime works on the lands of Carri-
geeny near Cork in 1835; they sold the m in 1842
for five hundred pounds.
His son, James Augustine, who was born at
Rose Cottage, Fer moy , in
1827, became his business partner, but
neither seems to have had much
skill, for by 1852 there is record that James
Joice [sic] and James Joice the younger, who
traded under the name of 'James Joice &
Son, salt and
lime manufacturers and chapmen,' were bankrupt.
James Joyce the younger, grandfather of the writer
, had however made
an advantageous marriage with a member of a
prosperous family of
O'Connells. This family came, like Daniel
O'Connell the Liberator's,
from the Iveragh Peninsula , and clai med to be related to
his. Th e Lib
erator was glad to concede the connection, and when
he came to Cork
twice a year for the Assizes would
always pay a visit to his 'cousin' John
O'Connell, an alderman, who kept a prosperous draper's and tailor's
shop
on St. George's Street between St.
Augustine's Church and the corner of
J O Y C E 13
South Main Street. The tenuous relationship is now
impossible to verify,
although genealogists have tried to do so.
John O'Connell and his wife,
born Ellen McCann and from Ulster, had a large
family. One son,
Charles, became curate of Carrignavar in Cork Harbour
and , having pri
vate means, declined to accept offerings
from his parishioners. He was
advised by his bishop that this conduct was unfair to the other
clergy,
and on his conti nui ng to refuse offerings he was
silenced. Another son,
Wi l l i am, became a prosperous businessman, but
according to A Portrait
of the Artist, he squandered his fo rt un
e; 7 one report says he also
attained
bankruptcy. 8 He then went to live with
John Joyce's family in Dublin,
returning to Cork just two days before his death.
His grandnephew de
scribed W i l l i a m as 'a hale old man
with a well tanned skin, rugged fea
tures, and white side whiskers,' who was still good for
a ten or twelve-
mile constitutional, and smoked a pipeful of vil e-smel ling
tobacco every
morning in a backyard shack, with his hair
carefully greased and his tall
hat perched on his head. 9
Two other children of John O'Connell, Alicia and Ellen, entered
the
Presentation Convent at Cork as postulants about 1847. Alicia' s
religious
career was unusual. One night she dreamed that
she was standing on a
hi l l overlooking the sea, succouring ch ildr en , and on
waking she thought
that the place meant was the little village
of Crosshaven in Cork Har
bour, where her brother Wil l iam had
a seaside house. She collected seven thousand
pounds, chiefly from her own family, and planned
the Present tation Convent and Boarding School at
Crosshaven which flourishes still.\
Under her convent name of Mother Xavier, she prepared John
Joyce for •
his first communion. In later years John,
the father of James Joyce, tried
unsuccessfully to persuade her able
successor, Mother Teresa, to admit
two of his children to the school on reduced
fees. Mother Teresa did not
like h i m . 1 0
Alic ia's sister Ellen was not intended for such piety and
enterprise; she
was a postulant for about eight months when she decided
to leave on the
grounds~ot i l l hea lth. Her father was eager to
find her a husband, and a
priest suggested a match with James
Augustine Joyce, then only twenty-
one, m uc h younger than El le n. A n older, strong-minded wife wo
ul d
quiet him down, it was thought; he was too dashing for his
own good—
'the handsomest m an in C o r k , ' 1 1 his son John
called h im—and a great
hunter. Th e marriage took place on February 28, 1848, and
brought
James many advantages,
including a portion of a thousand pounds 1
2 and
close connections with men of prominence such as
Ellen's first cousins
John Daly, later Lord Mayor of Cork, and Peter
Paul McSwine y, later
Lord Mayor of Dublin.
Their only child, John
Stanislaus Joyce, was born July 4,
1849. He
was probably named after John O'Connel l ; his middle name,
Stanislaus,
came from Saint Stanislaus Kostka
(1550-68), one of the three patrons
Poland, Stanislaus of Cracow (1030-70), and
reflected his parents' sym
pathy for the struggle of Catholic Poland for liberation. (As
Joyce re
marked, The tenor air in The Bohemian Girl, " W h e n
the fair land of
Poland," always brought down the house.') 1 3
Neither marriage nor the
birth of a son did in fact settle James
Augustine Joyce, for after the bank
ruptcy of 1852 he was soon bankrupt again. But he was,
according to
Stanislaus Joyce, 'a man of angelic temper'; 1 4
both families helped him,
and he was able to maintain his wife and
child in the fashionable Cork
suburb, Sunday's Wel l . No doubt through
influence he held down the
consequential, and not very demanding, position of Inspector of
Hackney
Coaches . 1 5
W i t h his son John, the only child
of an only child, he got on well,
treating him as indulgently as he had himself been treated,
and training
hi m up to hounds, where John also
excelled. When the boy was ten he
was sent to St. Colman's College in Fermoy, then
only in its second
year, perhaps because the
Joyces had Fermoy connections. He was the
youngest boy in the school, and the favorite of Dr. Croke the
rector, later
to be Archbishop of Cashel, who
always put John Joyce next to him at
dinner in the refectory. 1 6 John did not
stay at the school long: he entered
on March 17, 1859, and left on February 19, i860. The college
records
indicate he had special inst ruct ion in piano and in s in g in g ,
1 7 and prob
ably he already showed signs of
possessing the tenor voice of which he
was later justly proud. But his health was bad: he
suffered from rheumatic
fever, and then from typhoid fever,
and his father decided to withdraw
him. The college records disclose that
seven pounds of his tuition were
never p a i d , 1 8 a remissness
which John Joyce was to emulate
thirty years later when he withdrew his son
James from Clongowes.
To build up the boy's health, his father
sent John out with the pilot
boats to meet the transatlantic ships that stopped at Que
enstown, and this
therapy worked surprisingly well.
It also furnished him, his son Stanislaus
suggested, with his remarkable vocabulary of oaths and
obscenities. D ur
ing these years he distinguished himself as a
hunter and as a bon vivant
at the 'joll ific ations ' that followed the hunt s. His quick ,
retentive mind
formed the habit of mastering all the local details; he
prided himself on
knowing the history of every house and
householder and, as he boasted
later, 'There is not a field in County Cork that I
don't know.' 1 9 His
encyclopedia of local trivia was to be transmitted
to James Joyce.
John Joyce's life was sobered by the
early death of his father, at the
age of thirty-nine, on October 28, 1866. Th e
night he lay dying, accord
ing to Stanislaus Joyce, he
tried to persuade his son to go and
hear Mario,
who was singing i n an opera that night in C o r k , 2
0 and in Exiles it is
suggested that John actually went and returned
to find his father dead. 2 1
The son entered Queen's College, Cork , the fol low ing
au tu mn , and be
gan his studies seriously e nough, win ning , by his ow n
account, several
J O Y C E 15
icates in a story circumstantial enough to make their
existence almost
credible: ' I put my portmanteau i n pawn one t ime for ten
shillings with
a pawnbroker named Cunningham in Marlborough Street,' said
John
Joyce; 'He was a very decent fellow. There was a set
of false teeth in the
bag too, but he sold bag, teeth, and certificates which were in
i t . ' 2 2
Whether he won the exhibitions or not, he
successfully passed the first
year of the medica l course.
The next two years went less well, if
more spectacularly. John Joyce
became a star performer i n sports and i n college
theatricals . His son Stan
islaus records that his father rowed in the college fours,
ran cross-country,
put the shot, and held the record for the hop, step, and j u
m p . 2 3 He
suffered, in fact, from too much talent. An excellent
mimic and singer,
he eventually gave al l his ti me to dramatic
performances; by Ma rc h of
1869 he was the leading actor in al l the shows. O n Mar ch
11 he was
described by the newspapers as 'exceedingly funny ' in
singing 'The Groves of Blackpool' and
'Paddy M ' F a d d e n ' ; 2 4 on
April 16 he took the role of a
stage Irishman in a play called The Mummy, and in
Ma y he had the
principal part in another play, The Irish
Emigrant. I n June he failed the
second year's work and had to take it over
again in 1 8 6 9 - 7 0 . 2 5
His third year also ended in academic
failure but it is unlikely that
John Joyce cared particularly about that. His
father's death had left him
heir, on his twenty-first birthday, to properties in Cork
that brought him
about £315 a year, and on July 4,
1870, his grandfather John O'Connell
gave hi m a thousand pounds on the occasion of his comin g
of age . 2 6
Th e outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in the same
month inspired
him to a madcap adventure; he and three friends went off
to join the
French army. He got as far as London before his indignant mother
caught
up with h i m and brought h i m back. No t at all
dashed, he pro mptly
involved himself in some Fenian troubles in Cork.
His mother decided
that they would go to Dublin in the hope
of finding some pacific and
lawful outlet for his abilities. She relied upon her family
connections to
help him find work or something resembling it.
The change from Cork to Dublin, which
took place probably in 1874
or 1875, presented no diffi culties for John
Joyce. He found new friends,
and delighted in the character of a Cork man
away from home. He did
not have to work, and spent a good deal of time sailing
around Dalkey,
where his mother had taken a house. He had his own boat and a
boy to
take care of it. Not long after his arrival in
Dublin he went to a music
teacher who, after listening to him sing for a few minutes,
called in her
son and said, ' I have found the successor o
f C a m p a n i n i . ' 2 7 Probably at
the age of twenty-seven, i n 1875, he sang in a
concert at the Antient
Concert Rooms, and Barton McGuckin, the leading tenor
of the Carl
Rosa Opera Co mp any, happened to be i n the audience.
As John Joyce
told and retold the story later, 'After this concert when
McGuckin used
i 6 J A M E S
why he looked so hard at
me and by God I never could make out what
it was all about; and it was only after
he was dead for some years
that I
heard the story. John Phelan said to me, "You had
the best tenor in
Ireland." "Yerra, my God, what put
that into your head?" says I , and he
said, " I heard it from
the very best authority . " " Wh o
was that?" says I .
" W e l l , " says he, " di d you ever hear
of a gentleman named Barton
McGuckin?" " I d id indeed," said I ,
and John said, " Th at is my author
i ty . " And that accounted for the way he
used to look so hard at m e . '
2 8
James Joyce, who knew this story
well, remembered it in writing 'The
Dead.'
About the year 1877 John
Joyce entered into negotiations with
Henry
Alleyn, a Cork ma n and a
friend of his father's, who
was organizing the
Dublin and Chapelizod Distilling
Company. The company needed money
and Joyce offered to buy £50 0
of shares on condition that he
be appointed
secretary at £300 a year.
The directors agreed, and he was soon
working
every day in the old building on
the Liffey at Chapelizod which,
having
served as a convent, a soldiers'
barracks, and a flax factory owned by
Wi l l i am Dargan, was now a distillery.*
Although Alleyn was a marti net,
John Joyce got on with hi m well en
oug h, 2 9 and liked Chapelizod. His
stories about Broadbent, who had the Mull ingar
Hotel (now Mullingar
House) there, helped his son James to construct
Finnegans Wake around
a hero who is a Chapelizod innkeeper. One
day John Joyce discovered
that Alleyn was milking the
firm, and called a meeting
of the stockhold
ers. Al le yn departed, t and the stockholders voted
their gratitude to Joyce
for saving them from a worse
loss. He was elected trustee of
nothing—
the money, including
his own, was gone. He liked
later to mai nta in that
some of it was still on deposit in
his name at the Bank of
Ireland, too
bound about with legal complications for hi
m to touch. But the Bank,
in the cold way of such
institutions, reports it has no money
in the name
of John Joyce.
He drifted next into politics, perhaps
through the influence of his
rel
ative Peter Paul McSwiney, wh o was Lord
Mayor of Dubl in in 1875.
The occasion was the general election on
April 5, 1880, called by Dis
raeli's government, which had been in power
since 1874. John Joyce was
a Home Ruler, but there were no Dubl
in candidates precisely of his
persuasion. He took, nevertheless,
the position of secretary
of the Un ite d
Liberal Club i n Dubl in . The club's
sentiment was favorable to Home
Rule, but it was co-operating ambiguously
with the whole Liberal Party,
which, while eager to please Home
Rulers and Unionists alike at election
time, later tried to suppress
the nationalistic Land League. John
Joyce
does not seem to have investigated
deeply the politics of the
Liberal Party;
* Joyce calls it in Finnegans Wake
'the still that was mill ' (265).
It was later known as the Phoenix Park Distil lery.
t 'Mr. Alleyne' is the name of
the unpleasant employer in the story
'Counterparts'; James
Joyce liked paying off his
father's scores.
J O Y C E 17
he saw an occasion to unseat the last two conservative
members for Dub
l in city, Sir Arthur E. Guinness—a
more successful brewer than he him
self had been—and James Stirling. The Liberal
candidates opposing them
were Maurice Brooks and Dr . Robert Dyer Lyons, the latter a
Cork man,
a point in his favor. Joyce worked indefatigably for
Brooks and Lyons
during March and unt i l the election
of April 5. He later described with
gusto the counting of the ballots: 'The count of the
votes took place in
the Exhibition Palace in a very big room. All the
tables were there and I
had four men on each table. I didn't at
all expect that we would get the
two members i n — I would have been
satisfied i f I got Brooks in bu t I
didn't at all expect that Lyons would get in.
Towards the end of the count
I got the rough figures and I totted them up two
or three times and by
God what was it bu t I knew the two were returned.* This was
the hell of
a thing for me.
' W h o should be sitting next to me but
Sir Arthur Guinness and his
cousin the Hon. David Plunkett, and the two were in evening
dress. He
lived at the time in Stephen's Green; at
the north side of it he had a
house, his brother Lord Iveagh has it now. Sir Arthur
asked me, "Have
you got the figures?" " I have, Sir
Arthur , " I replied, and he asked me,
" H o w did it go?" I then had the pleasure
of telling Sir Arthur Guinness
that he was no longer a member.
'W e went out soon after and had a thanksgiving meet ing i n the
Ro
tunda Bar. I was the cock of the walk that day and I w
i l l never forget it;
I was com pl imented by everybody. I got one hundred
guineas from each of the members. M y God
it was three o'clock i n the morni ng and the
excitement was great and I was the hero of it al l
because they said that it
was I that won the election. By God Almighty, such
drinking of cham
pagne I never saw in my life!
We could not wait to draw the corks, we
slapped them against the marble-topped counter. The
result was we were
there drinking for about three hours and when we
came out the question
was what were we to do with ourselves at
that ungodly hour of the morn
ing. The Turkish Baths came into
my mind and there I went after having
any God's quant ity of champagne. O h dear,
dear, God, those were great
t i m e s . ' 3 1
The Joyce family continued the celebration
into Finnegans Wake,
where John Joyce's victory is made that of
the outs over the ins, of the
moneyless over the moneyed: 'since then
sterlings and guineas have been
replaced by brooks and lions and some progress has been
made on stilts
. . , ' t A leading article i n the Freeman's
Journal of April 7 compli
mented the United Liberal Club on having exerted a great influence
on
i 8 J A M E S
the results, and a grateful government
was asked to reward John Joyce's
zeal. The new Lo rd Lieutenant who
succeeded to office on May 5 oblig
ingly assigned h i m to one
of the easy, well-paid positions in
the office of
the Collector of Rates for Dubl in , at that
time under the Lord Lieut en
ant's jurisdiction. The appointment was
for life, and carried a
salary of
£500 a year.
This position enabled John Joyce to
get married, as for some time he
had intended. A few months before, he had
met a young woman, not
yet twenty-one , named Mary Jane
Murray, who sang on Sundays as he
did in the choir of the Church
of the Three Patrons in
Rathgar. 3 2 She
was the daughter of John
Murray, an agent for wines and
spirits from
Longford, who had made purchases at
the distillery. She was good-
looking, with fair hair, and had great
resources of patience and
loyalty,
which John Joyce, try as he might,
would not exhaust. I f he was the
principle of chaos, she was the
principle of order to which
he might
cling. He found in her, as his father
had found in Ellen O 'Connell , a
woman who wou ld indulge his
boisterousness without sharing it, who
could live evenly while he
frolicked or raged. Neither John
Joyce's mother
nor Mary Jane Murray's father favored
the marriage. John Murray did
everything possible to discourage i t
, rightly foreseeing that John
Joyce,
already a heavy drinker
and known to have broken
off two previous en
gagements in fits of jealousy,
would not make his daughter a
good hus
band. One day Murray found
his daughter with Joyce on Grafton
Street,
scolded her and called a cab to take
her home. A crowd gathered and a
man asked John Joyce what the
trouble was. 'Oh, nothing serious,' he
replied breezily, 'just the usual story
of the beautiful daughter and the
irascible parent.' 3 3 But Mary Jane
liked his dash and wit, her
mother
encouraged the match, and John
Joyce apparently precipitated the deci
sion by moving to 15
Clanbrassil Street, 3 4 only a
few doors from the
Murrays at No. 7.* At last Murray
consented to the marriage, but John
Joyce's mother Ellen remained adamantly
opposed to it, regarding the
Murrays as beneath her. About
the time of the marriage, wh ic h took
place at the Roman Catholic Chu rch
in Rathmines on May 5, 1880 ,3 5
she returned to Cork and died
not long after wi th ou t sending for
her only
child or forgiving him. Her pride
and stubbornness are acknowledged by
her grandson in 'The Dea d,' where
Gabriel's mother stands in 'sullen
opposition' to his marriage, and
in Exiles, where
the hard-heartedness of
Richard Rowan's mother also never
lessens. On the other han d, the mon th
of May, when his parents were
married, always seemed a lucky month
to James Joyce.
Mary Jane ('May') Murray, born May 15,
1859, was ten years younger
than her husband. She came on her
mother's side from a family
with
* In Ulysses Bloom's father
is said to have
lived on Clanbrassil Street, which was
a Jewish
neighborhood.
J O Y C E 19
keen musical interests; her grandfather Flynn, who had the
starch mill
in Back Lane mentioned in 'The Dead,' arranged
for all his daughters to
be trained in music. From the age of five to nineteen May Murray
had
lessons in piano and voice, as well as in dancing and
politeness, at the
'Misses Flynn school' at 15 Usher's Island, a
street which runs beside the
Liffey. The school was operated by two of her mother's
sisters, Mrs. Cal-
lanan and Mrs. Lyons, with the aid later on of
Mrs. Callanan's daughter,
Mary E ll en .* It may have
been from them that she learned the slightly
old-fashioned courtliness of manner which she was to teach to her
oldest j
son. '
John Joyce complained a little about
the Flynns, but he drew the line
at the Murrays. His finest epithets were reserved for
the members of this
family who had disapproved of him, and the
vitriol of Thersites in the
Cyclops episode of Ulysses is modeled
in part on his eloquent abuse. 'O
weeping God, the things I married i n t o . ' t 3
6 His father-in-law, who had
delayed the match, was the 'old fornicator' because he
had married a
second t i m e . 3 8 Mary Jane
Murray's two brothers, W i l l i a m and John,
were 'highly respectable gondoliers. ' 3
9 Wil l iam Murray was a cost-drawer,
or billing clerk, for the well-known firm
of solicitors, Collis and Ward.
He hated John Joyce and once said so
to James, who left the house with
filial primness. 4 0 John, known as 'Red' Murray and so
described in Ulys
ses, worked in the accounts department of the Freeman's
Journal. John
Murray, whose marriage was somewhat unhappy (his
nephew James is
said to have once derisively deposited a bag
of oysters on his doorstep),
and whose temperament was surly and inflexible,
provided a good deal
of literary material for Dubliners,
concealed there under other names.
John Joyce's favorite story about this
brother-in-law told how, as they
were walking through an open space in the Phoenix
Park, they suddenly
saw a company of cavalry galloping towards them. John
Murray was about
to turn tail and run for the trees, which he could
not have made, but
John Joyce grabbed him and forced him to
stand still while the riders
divided into two groups, so as to pass on
either side of them. At an order
from the officer in charge the soldiers raised
their sabers and saluted
Joyce. 4 1 Understandably the inciden t did not make Mu
rr ay grateful.
Wil l i am Murray appears
transparently in Ulysses under the name of
Richie Goulding. He required his children to call him 'sir,' and
when
he was drunk treated them savagely enough. But he
was a fair singer of
* That the school was in good repute is suggested by
the fact that Katharine Tynan, the poet and novelist,
whose family was comfortably situated, was a fellow-pupil of
Mary Jane Murray.
