It was in Rome, in 1906, that he first conceived of “Ulysses”-“that little epic of the Irish and Hebrew races.” From there, he voiced his literary manifesto in a postcard to his brother, Stanislaus. In truth, anger over his financial straits and frustration at not having his short stories published was hotting up in him as he searched for that “fermented ink” to stir his bile, the way shots of absinthe sizzled his brain. He found a job in a bank writing letters to foreign customers for nine hours a day. Rome, the Eternal City, suited his destiny, and, moreover, his hero Ibsen had wintered there. Being of a restless disposition, he soon tired of Trieste, with its drab provincials and a bora wind that turned men with ruddy complexions, like his, into butter. Joyce left Ireland-that “scullery maid of Christendom”-in 1904, to escape its confiningness, and went with his sweetheart, Nora Barnacle, to teach in a Berlitz school on the Adriatic coast, first in Pola, and then in Trieste. If the seven stages of man, as defined by Shakespeare’s melancholy Jaques, pertain, then Joyce is the author to conduct each one of us through our successive reading lives. The Joyce I loved and learned from formerly has metamorphosed into an even more radical, more elusive, more labyrinthine writer than when I first read him or later read Richard Ellmann’s great biography of him. More than other Irish literary icons, Joyce continues to command such revels because his work-particularly “Ulysses”-is a minefield of new riches, new explosives, each time we return to it. What would Joyce, the prevaricator, make of the revels that are held each year on June 16th, in commemoration of his miscreant hero Leopold Bloom? On Bloomsday in Dublin, men and women in Edwardian dress recite snatches of “Ulysses.” Bloom’s favorite foods-kidneys and other innards of beasts-are served at several rival breakfasts with, of course, Guinness, the national drink. The doings, the sayings, the veniality, the music, the cadences of his Dubliners are all there, as is the city itself, but his real crime in that strife of tongues was to break the sexual taboos of holy Ireland, Victorian England, and puritanical America. It was seen as technically monstrous, antihumanist, unclean, and excrementous. Joyce’s journey as a writer was one of martyrdom: the odium meted out to each of his works was strenuous, but it was “Ulysses” that met with the most vituperative attacks. The Dublin poet Austin Clarke said that Joyce was afflicted “with a particular kind of Irish pornography.” Illustration by Tullio PericoliĪt the age of twenty, as the impecunious James Joyce prepared to leave Dublin in order “to forge the conscience of his race,” he wrote blisteringly to Lady Gregory, the doyenne of Irish literary society, “I have found no man yet with a faith like mine.” That faith has since been vindicated, but his insistence that he did not want to be a “literary Jesus Christ” was sorely tried.
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