The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (128 page)

P
ROUST
went far to make the remembered self a resource for re-creating the world. The refluent self became his “inner book of unknown symbols.” But the self had other outreaching possibilities, which James Joyce (1882–1941) explored with surprising consequences. For Joyce, encompassed time was no mere private garden of involuntary memory but a microcosm of all human history. This he chronicled in no heroic figure on a grand stage but in “the dailiest day possible,” not in a history-making capital but in a provincial metropolis on the periphery. He folded time in by making his work, like Proust’s, the story of its own making and of the making of himself. But he would also prove that Homer had never died.

Joyce and Proust, to be coupled forever as pioneer explorers of the self, were near-contemporaries. Proust was only ten years older than Joyce, and they appealed to the same select audience. They did meet once, at a Paris supper party for Stravinsky and Diaghilev in May 1921. Proust, on a rare excursion from 102 Boulevard Haussmann, arrived late in a fur coat and was seated beside Joyce. The best account of this legendary meeting came from the American poet William Carlos Williams, who was there. “I’ve headaches every day,” complained Joyce. “My eyes are terrible.” To which Proust replied, “My poor stomach. What am I going to do? It’s killing me. In fact, I must leave at once.” As they left each expressed regret at not having read the work of the other. But Proust tried to enliven the conversation by asking Joyce if he liked truffles. To which Joyce replied, “Yes, I do.”

Joyce’s failing eyesight and the twenty-five eye operations that left him blind for periods had a self-confining effect like Proust’s asthma. Proust’s divided Franco-Jewish self had its counterpart in the self-exile of Joyce, whose life was a web of paradox. Never living in Ireland after his twenty-second year, Joyce remained passionately Irish. He explained to his publisher that his purpose in
The Dubliners
was “to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city
seemed to me the centre of paralysis.” The city became his Mediterranean. From his birth he was entangled with the issue of Irish independence. His father, John, a passionate follower of the firebrand Charles Stewart Parnell (1846–1891), had made a living as one of Parnell’s election agents, then enjoyed his reward as a well-paid collector of taxes for Dublin, where Joyce was born in 1882.

Joyce’s first known writing was a poem at the age of nine attacking Parnell’s opponents. And his family’s fortunes fell with those of Parnell, in melodramatic decline when he was accused of terrorist murders in Phoenix Park (which Parnell’s men had not committed) and when Parnell was named corespondent in the divorce suit of a fellow Home Rule politician. John Joyce’s heavy drinking, neglect of his office, and habit of dipping into money from the taxpayers’ till were enough reason for his dismissal from his remunerative post. The family naturally charged up their misfortunes to the enemies of Irish Home Rule. In 1891 John Joyce’s family of ten children who survived infancy tumbled from prosperity to poverty. “For the second half of his long life,” James’s brother Stanislaus observed, “my father belonged to the class of the deserving poor, that is to say, to the class of people who richly deserve to be poor.” The insecurity of the rest of James’s young life left unforgettable memories of household furniture in and out of pawn, and moving about to stay one jump ahead of the bill collector.

Somehow James Joyce still had the benefit of the best Irish schools. At six he briefly attended an elite Jesuit boarding school until his family could no longer pay the fees. For two years after 1891 he stayed home under his mother’s tutelage, then in 1893 both brothers were admitted tuition-free to a Jesuit grammar school in Dublin. Then on to another Jesuit institution, University College, Dublin, where Joyce pursued languages and made his first literary sallies. Admiring the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906), at the age of eighteen he published (1900) a review of
When We Dead Awaken
(1899), where he contrasted “literature” that dealt with the temporary and the unique with “drama” that posed the laws of human nature. “The great human comedy in which each has share, gives limitless scope to the true artist, today as yesterday and as in years gone.”
Lohengrin
“is not an Antwerp legend but a world drama.
Ghosts
, the action of which passes in a common parlour, is of universal import.” To read Ibsen in the original, he studied Dano-Norwegian.

A message from Ibsen himself thanking him for his “benevolent” review made him ecstatic. In a letter congratulating Ibsen on his seventy-third birthday in 1901, Joyce confessed:

The catalytic role that Ruskin, fixing the universal past in stone, played for Proust, Ibsen played for Joyce, helping him find the universal in the everyday. University College mates were more impressed by the twelve guineas that the
Fortnightly Review
(April 1, 1900) paid Joyce for his piece.

On receiving his B.A. degree with second class honors in Latin from University College, Dublin, he went to Paris, where he toyed with the idea of studying medicine. Lacking both the academic qualifications and the tuition fees, he quickly returned to literature, supported by small sums from his mother. Coming back to his dying mother in Dublin in 1904, he sold to a farmers’ magazine (for one pound each) three of the stories that would later go into
The Dubliners
. On June 16, 1904 (destined to be known in literary history as Bloomsday) he fell in love with Nora Barnacle, whom he had met only four days before. Though Joyce refused to go through a marriage ceremony, they left together for the Continent in October. He would never again live in Ireland. First he tried teaching in the Berlitz School in Pola, near Venice, before he and Nora moved to Trieste, where their two children were born. They were joined by his brother Stanislaus. There Joyce taught English to businessmen. Then on to a brief distasteful stint in a bank in Rome. He visited Ireland briefly in 1909, to try to publish
The Dubliners
, and to start a chain of Irish movie theaters, and again for the last time in 1912.

When Italy declared war in 1915, Joyce moved from Trieste to Zurich. There he remained for the duration, piecing out a living by teaching English, selling short pieces, and enjoying patronage—from the Royal Literary Fund (seventy-five pounds), from Edith Rockefeller McCormick, and from the bountiful Harriet Weaver (eventually some twenty-three thousand pounds). In 1920 Ezra Pound induced him to move to Paris, where he remained until his death in 1941. He and Nora finally went to London in 1931 to be married to satisfy his daughter. Though he made a career of writing, he never really made a good living from it, only surviving on meager fees from short pieces supplemented by patrons.

Joyce, most modern of novelists, encompassed time in autobiography, creating new ways to make the self universal. Despite his migratory life of self-exile, his writing remained rooted in Ireland. His first published work was a volume of verse,
Chamber Music
(1907), which already revealed his witty mastery of the beauty in words. And his writing had an unfolding
logic, astonishing from so vagrant an imagination. His collection of stories,
The Dubliners
(1914), offered the background for
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
(1916), which was his autobiography, and
Exiles
(1918), an Ibsenesque play of emigrants returning to Dublin, which dramatized Joyce’s own marriage problems. His masterpiece,
Ulysses
(1922), was a personal epic, and finally came
Finnegans Wake
(1939), intended to be an epic of all humankind. Except for short experimental pieces and brief volumes of poetry, this was his whole lifework. He showed wonderful progress from the most objective and external ever inward and toward the self, finally penetrating to a new language of consciousness. Yet as his subject matter became more self-bound and his purpose and meaning ever broader, his style grew more arcane, his language more cryptic. His way of conquering time revealed the limits of the self, the need to reach out through community. But he was finally tempted to make language into a self-regarding ornament.

He brought together the two modern literary forms, the novel and biography, as none had done before. And incidentally, in the progress of his writing he provided a summary history of modern literature—from narrative in the human comedy of
The Dubliners
, to biography-autobiography-confession in
The Portrait of the Artist
, to ruthless exploration of the self in
Ulysses
. Unsatisfied by the unique self and its experience, he found refuge in the ancient community of myth. But his self-preoccupation did not leave him alone. Finally in
Finnegans Wake
he made his very language a toy, an embellishment and labyrinth, of the self. As his works became more self-absorbed they became harder to understand and less accessible until finally they reached the outer limits of intelligibility.

The Dubliners
, a collection of stories about the daily life of his city, was mostly written in Trieste in 1905. And it shows what Joyce meant when he called Dublin the center of Ireland’s paralysis. Without melodrama or suspense, they reveal the everyday frustrations and disappointments of a disgraced priest, of an unconsummated love, of a compromised girl, of the electioneers for Parnell and Home Rule. This was Joyce’s album of the “moral history” of his country, of the faiths of ordinary people. The final haunting story, “The Dead,” he added, after his brief unhappy interlude in Rome, to fill out his portrait of Dublin. “I have not reproduced its ingenuous insularity and its hospitality, the latter ‘virtue’ so far as I can see does not exist elsewhere in Europe.” He made the simple story of a Dublin Christmas party a parable of the rivalry between the living and the dead. His efforts to have
The Dubliners
published were a foretaste of his lifelong publishing tribulations. Publishers objected to his use of the word “bloody,” his disrespectful reference to King Edward VII, and his naming of actual streets and people. First refused by a London publisher, it was taken on by
Maunsel in Dublin, who printed a whole edition. But then Maunsel decided to play safe, broke their contract, and had all (except one copy) burned.

Joyce had gone to Dublin in 1912 to hasten publication, but when Maunsel destroyed his books he resolved never to return to Ireland. And he never did. He had a Dutch printer set up a broadside that he wrote especially for this occasion to be circulated in Dublin:

The Dubliners
was published after all in 1914 by Grant Richards of London, who had reneged eight years before. The reviews were not unfavorable, but in the first year after publication, only 379 copies were sold (120 to Joyce himself). The publisher reassured Joyce that no books were selling well in wartime.

“Why did you leave your father’s house?” Leopold Bloom would ask Stephen Dedalus in
Ulysses
. To which Stephen replied, “To seek misfortune.” “The Dead,” as his biographer Richard Ellmann notes, was Joyce’s first song of the exile that proved to be his proper element. On leaving Ireland with Nora in 1904, he had promised a great book within ten years. The year 1914 was indeed his
annus mirabilis
, on which his lifework converged—when
The Dubliners
was published,
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
was substantially finished,
Exiles
was written, and
Ulysses
was begun. All were products of his residence in Trieste.

With the outbreak of the war in 1914, instead of being interned by the Austrian government Joyce was allowed to go to Zurich, which became his headquarters for the next five years.
A Portrait of the Artist
which bore at its conclusion “Dublin 1904/Trieste, 1914” was Joyce’s first plunge into himself, an autobiography in the character of Stephen Dedalus of the first twenty years of his life. He recounted his infancy, his childhood, Clongowes School and the university with unprecedented fluency and candor.

The line between Stephen Dedalus’s consciousness and his external experience is dissolved. After this immersion Joyce could not withdraw. His friend Herbert Gorman, who knew him when he was writing
Ulysses
, saw
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
as “the coffin-lid for the emaciated corpse of the old genre of the English novel. It was a signpost pointing along
that road which led to
Ulysses
and which still stretches wide and inviting albeit stony and difficult for other novelists who would be among the outriders of our intellectual progress.”

Just as Boswell opened the gates of biography by recounting the trivial idiosyncrasies of an unheroic figure, so Joyce first dramatized the fantastic resources in the consciousness of a boy. So he made a narrative art of the flow of consciousness. Its grandeur came not from significant external events nor potent antagonists, but from the inner mystery. Proust, too, had found the well of involuntary memory rich and deep in childhood. Joyce finds drama and suspense in the inner struggles of young Stephen Dedalus’s discomfitures on the playground, his bewilderment before arcane Jesuit propositions, his pain at unjust punishment for his broken eyeglasses, his malaise of disbelief and of insecure belief, haunted by the terrors of hell. And his unease at hearing the priest tell him that he might have been destined for the Church. Dedalus’s conversations cover death, love, art, salvation—all the topics that figure in Joyce’s later works. Foreshadowing
Ulysses
, the style varies and progresses, from the familiar opening, “Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road, and this moocow … met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.…” gradually toward the mature finale: