James Joyce, the exile who rebuilt Dublin from memory, one street at a time

James Joyce

Photo: Rajeshkumar durka / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 2, 1882 Rathgar
Died	January 13, 1941 (58)
Occupation	Poet

Every June, Dublin dresses up as a book. Men in straw boaters and women in Edwardian skirts eat kidneys for breakfast, walk from a Martello tower down to the strand, read aloud in a cemetery and end the night in pubs where the barmen know the passages by heart. The city stages the novel with the pride of a town celebrating its patron saint. The man who wrote that novel left Dublin as a young man, came back only a handful of times, and spent the rest of his life abroad. When he died in Switzerland, no one from the Irish diplomatic service came to his funeral, and the government later declined his widow’s request to bring his body home. He still lies in a cemetery on a hill above Zurich.

That is the contradiction at the centre of James Joyce. He wrote about almost nothing except Dublin, and he could not bear to live in it. He treated the Catholic Ireland of his childhood as a trap to escape and then reconstructed it, street by street and shop sign by shop sign, with the accuracy of a surveyor. He once told the painter Frank Budgen that he wanted to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day disappeared from the earth it could be rebuilt out of his book. In the process he changed what the novel was allowed to do, and he asked more of his readers than any major writer before him. A century later, the book that was banned, burned and mocked sits at the top of lists of the greatest novels in English, and it is still one of the most bought and least finished books in any language.

A family sliding downhill

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce came into the world on February 2, 1882, at 41 Brighton Square in Rathgar, a comfortable suburb on the south side of Dublin. He was the eldest of ten surviving children of John Stanislaus Joyce and Mary Jane Murray, known as May. His father was charming, musical, a gifted talker and a disastrous manager of money. Over the following two decades the family moved from one address to another, each smaller and cheaper than the last, as debts piled up and the house contents went to the pawnbroker. The boy watched a respectable household come apart in slow motion, and he stored every detail. John Joyce, with his songs, his grudges and his endless stories in the pubs, would reappear in fiction as Simon Dedalus.

The Jesuits gave him his education and, in a sense, his method. He was sent at six to Clongowes Wood College, a boarding school in County Kildare, and had to leave in 1891 when his father could no longer pay the fees. After a short spell with the Christian Brothers he entered Belvedere College in Dublin in 1893, where he won prizes for his essays and rose to prefect of a Marian sodality before losing his faith in adolescence. The rigor of the Jesuit classroom, with its Latin, its Aquinas and its taste for fine distinctions, stayed with him long after the belief was gone. At University College Dublin, from 1898 to 1902, he studied modern languages, taught himself enough Norwegian to write a fan letter to Henrik Ibsen, and cultivated a reputation as the most arrogant young man in the building. He published an essay on Ibsen in the Fortnightly Review at eighteen and was paid for it, which impressed his classmates more than any argument.

After graduating he left for Paris, nominally to study medicine. He barely attended the lectures, lived on almost nothing, and was already giving up the plan by the start of 1903. In April a telegram called him home: his mother was dying of cancer. She died in August 1903. Joyce had refused her wish that he make his confession and take communion, and at her bedside he would not kneel to pray. The refusal haunted him, and he handed it to Stephen Dedalus, who is reproached for it on the first page of Ulysses.

Nora, and the decision to leave

On a summer afternoon in 1904, walking down Nassau Street, Joyce noticed a tall young woman with reddish-brown hair. Her name was Nora Barnacle, she came from Galway, and she worked as a chambermaid at Finn’s Hotel. They met on June 10. Their first proper evening together, a walk out to Ringsend, took place on June 16. Joyce never forgot the date. Eighteen years later he set the whole of his great novel on that single day.

Nora was not literary and never pretended to be. She was funny, blunt and unimpressed by his reputation, and he trusted her more than anyone he ever met. That September he spent a few nights at the Martello tower in Sandycove with the medical student Oliver St John Gogarty, an episode that ended badly and became the opening scene of Ulysses, with Gogarty transformed into the mocking Buck Mulligan. In October 1904 Joyce and Nora left Ireland together, unmarried, a scandalous move for a Catholic woman of her class. He had decided that the only way to write about his country was to stand outside it. His alter ego would later name the weapons he allowed himself: silence, exile and cunning.

An English teacher in Trieste

The couple drifted to the Adriatic. Joyce taught English at the Berlitz school in Pola, then moved in March 1905 to Trieste, a busy port of the Austro-Hungarian empire where Italian, German, Slovene and Greek were all heard in the same street. Their son Giorgio was born there in July 1905 and their daughter Lucia in July 1907. Apart from an unhappy spell of about seven months as a clerk in a bank in Rome, Trieste was their home for more than a decade. Joyce gave private lessons, borrowed money from everyone, drank more than he could afford and wrote at night.

One of his private pupils was a middle-aged businessman named Ettore Schmitz, who had published two novels under the name Italo Svevo and had given up after nobody read them. Joyce read them, praised them, and helped revive a career that would produce La coscienza di Zeno. Schmitz, a Jewish Triestine with an ironic view of his own weaknesses, gave Joyce some of the raw material for Leopold Bloom. Trieste also gave him his ear for a city of mixed languages, which would matter enormously when he came to write Finnegans Wake.

The man who opened Ireland’s first cinema

There is a chapter in Joyce’s life that film lovers tend to forget. In 1909, noticing how many cinemas had opened in Trieste, he persuaded a group of Italian businessmen that Dublin, a city with no dedicated cinema at all, was an untapped market. He travelled back to Ireland to set it up, found premises at 45 Mary Street, and on December 20, 1909, the Volta Electric Theatre opened its doors. It was the first dedicated cinema in the country. The opening programme mixed a comedy, a mystery and a historical tragedy, mostly European productions.

The audience did not come in the numbers the backers had hoped. Dubliners preferred British and American films to Italian costume dramas, and Joyce, who had returned to Trieste, lost interest. After about seven months his partners sold the business at a loss to a British company. The venue later became the Lyceum, closed in 1948 and was demolished in the 1960s. The episode is a footnote to his career, but a telling one. Joyce was fascinated by new technologies of seeing and hearing, and critics have long argued that the cutting, montage and simultaneous action of Ulysses, above all in the Wandering Rocks episode, owe something to the cinema he tried to sell to his hometown.

Dubliners, the book nobody would print

Joyce began his career as a poet, and his first book was a slim collection of lyrics called Chamber Music, published in 1907. The poems are delicate, musical and conventional, and he seemed to know they were not where his real gift lay. By then he had already finished the collection of short stories that would become Dubliners. He sent the manuscript to the London publisher Grant Richards in 1905. What followed was nearly a decade of haggling. Printers objected to the word bloody, to references to Edward VII, to a story about a sexual predator. Publishers asked for cuts, Joyce made some and refused others. In 1912 a Dublin firm, Maunsel and Company, went as far as printing the sheets, and then the printer destroyed them rather than risk a libel case. Joyce left Dublin that year in a rage. It was the last time he set foot in the city.

Dubliners finally appeared in June 1914. Its fifteen stories describe what Joyce called the paralysis of the city: clerks, children, landladies, failed politicians and drinkers who glimpse a way out and do not take it. Many of them end on what he called an epiphany, a sudden moment in which a trivial gesture or phrase reveals the whole shape of a life. The final story, The Dead, set at a Christmas party, is often called the finest short story in English. It closes with snow falling over all of Ireland, on the living and the dead. John Huston, himself a naturalized Irish citizen, chose it for his last film in 1987, with his daughter Anjelica Huston as Gretta Conroy.

Portrait of the young man as a problem

The next book was the one in which Joyce turned his own life into a laboratory. He had spent years on a sprawling autobiographical novel called Stephen Hero, then threw most of it out and rewrote it as something far more compressed. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man follows Stephen Dedalus from infancy to the moment he decides to leave Ireland, and the prose grows up with him. The first page is written in the language of a small child. The last pages are a young man’s diary, arrogant, self-absorbed and alive.

The novel reached print thanks to Ezra Pound, the American poet who had become the self-appointed talent scout of modernism. Pound read Joyce’s work in 1913, recognized it immediately, and arranged for A Portrait to be serialized in the London magazine The Egoist between 1914 and 1915. The magazine’s editor, Harriet Shaw Weaver, a quiet Englishwoman of radical convictions, became Joyce’s most important patron. Over the following decades she gave him money on a scale that allowed him to write full time, and she was still supporting the family when he died. She even paid for his funeral. The book came out in 1916 in New York. The same period produced his only play, Exiles, published in 1918, an Ibsen-like study of jealousy and freedom inside a marriage that never found the same audience as his fiction.

Eyes, war and Zurich

When Italy entered the First World War in 1915, Joyce, a British subject living in Austria-Hungary, had to leave Trieste. The family moved to neutral Zurich, where he spent the war years in cafés with exiled artists, spies, Dadaists and émigrés. It was there that he began to lose his sight in earnest. Joyce had suffered his first attack of iritis around 1908, and in Zurich in 1917 it was complicated by acute glaucoma, a condition so painful that he once collapsed in the street. Over the following years he underwent around a dozen eye operations, many of them in Paris, often without effective anaesthetic. He joked that he was the holder of the world amateur record. The famous photographs with the eyepatch are not an affectation. Much of Ulysses and almost all of Finnegans Wake were written by a man who could barely see the page, using thick crayons and a magnifying glass.

Ulysses, one day and eighteen episodes

Ulysses takes place in Dublin on a single day, June 16, 1904, and loosely follows the plan of Homer’s Odyssey. Its hero is Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertising canvasser who wanders the city while trying not to think about the fact that his wife, Molly, is going to receive her lover that afternoon. Stephen Dedalus, back from Paris and grieving his mother, plays a sort of Telemachus. The two men cross paths through the day and finally meet late at night. The book ends with Molly lying in bed, thinking, in one of the most famous unpunctuated passages in literature.

What made the novel revolutionary was less the story than the method. Each of the eighteen episodes is written in a different style. One follows the stream of Bloom’s thought, with its half-finished sentences and stray memories. One is built like a newspaper, with headlines. One moves through the history of English prose, from Anglo-Saxon alliteration to modern slang, as a child is born in a maternity hospital. One is a hallucinatory play set in the red-light district. One is written as a catechism of questions and answers. Joyce had turned the novel into a set of experiments on how language reaches the mind, and he did it without leaving the streets of an ordinary city on an ordinary day.

The book’s path to readers was a battle. Serialized in the New York magazine The Little Review from 1918, it ran into the censors when the episode in which Bloom watches a young woman on the beach appeared in 1920. In February 1921 a New York court convicted the editors, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, of publishing obscenity, fined them 50 dollars each and ended the serialization. No commercial publisher in Britain or the United States would touch the complete book. It was Sylvia Beach, an American who ran the Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company, who offered to publish it. Ulysses appeared on February 2, 1922, Joyce’s fortieth birthday, in an edition of 1,000 copies. Copies smuggled into the United States and Britain were seized and burned by customs officials. It was only in December 1933 that Judge John M. Woolsey, in a New York federal court, ruled that the book was not obscene, allowing Random House to publish it legally in America the following year.

Paris and the nightmare of language

Joyce had moved to Paris in 1920, at Pound’s urging, and it would be his home for twenty years. After Ulysses he was a celebrity, the man every young writer in the city wanted to meet. He was also a difficult one: formal, superstitious, terrified of thunderstorms and dogs, courteous and cold in company. He lived beyond his means, moved flat constantly and depended on Weaver’s money. In 1931, mostly to protect his children’s inheritance, he married Nora at a registry office in London, twenty-seven years after they had left Dublin together.

In 1923 he began a new book that he called only Work in Progress. Fragments appeared in magazines over the next fifteen years, and they baffled even his admirers. The finished work, published in 1939 as Finnegans Wake, takes the form of a dream, or of a whole night of dreams, centred on a Dublin publican and his family. It is written in a language of Joyce’s own invention, built from English but saturated with puns, portmanteau words and fragments of dozens of other languages. The river Liffey flows through the book as the voice of a woman, Anna Livia Plurabelle, and the first sentence completes the last. A young Irishman named Samuel Beckett was among those who helped Joyce with research and dictation, and wrote one of the first essays defending the project. Joyce is often quoted as boasting that he had put enough enigmas into his work to keep the professors busy for centuries. The Wake has kept them busy for eighty-seven years so far.

Lucia, and the price of genius

The years in which Joyce was writing his most ambitious book were also the years in which his family came apart. His daughter Lucia, a gifted dancer who had trained in Paris, began to show signs of serious mental illness in the early 1930s. Joyce refused for a long time to accept the diagnosis, insisting that she was only unusually sensitive, and spent enormous sums on doctors, clinics and schemes to help her. In 1934 she was seen by Carl Jung in Switzerland. Jung, who had written a famously irritated essay about Ulysses, told Joyce that father and daughter were like two people going to the bottom of a river, one falling and the other diving. Lucia was diagnosed with schizophrenia and spent most of the rest of her life in institutions, from 1951 at St Andrew’s Hospital in Northampton, England, where she died in 1982.

This is where the heroic version of Joyce needs correcting. The story usually told is that of the lonely genius who sacrificed everything for his art. The people around him paid a good part of that price. Nora followed him across Europe with small children, little money and no language in common with her neighbours. Giorgio’s singing career never took off. Joyce’s brother Stanislaus, who shared the Trieste years and supported him financially, received very little gratitude. And the book itself was not universally admired even by the people who should have been its natural allies. Virginia Woolf, who read Ulysses in 1922 at T. S. Eliot’s recommendation, wrote in her diary that she had been amused and stimulated by the first chapters and then bored and irritated by what she called a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples. She called it an illiterate, underbred book. Many readers since have quietly agreed and put the novel back on the shelf after the first hundred pages. Joyce’s reputation for difficulty is not a myth, and the reverence around him sometimes hides how demanding, and at times how self-indulgent, his late work really is.

A death in Zurich

When the Second World War began and German troops entered France in 1940, the Joyces fled Paris, leaving Lucia in a clinic in occupied territory. After weeks of negotiations with Swiss authorities, who initially suspected Joyce of being Jewish, they reached Zurich in December 1940. A few weeks later he was taken to hospital with a perforated duodenal ulcer. He came through the operation but did not recover, and died on January 13, 1941, a few weeks short of his fifty-ninth birthday. He was buried in the Fluntern cemetery. The Irish government, which had two senior diplomats in Switzerland at the time, sent no one to the funeral, and a message from Dublin reportedly asked whether he had died a Catholic. Nora later tried to have his body repatriated and was refused. She died in Zurich in 1951 and was buried nearby. Their remains now share a grave marked by a bronze statue of the writer seated with a book.

How Ireland learned to love him

For decades after his death, Joyce was an embarrassment to official Ireland, a blasphemer and pornographer whose books were talked about more than read. The change began informally. On June 16, 1954, the fiftieth anniversary of the day in Ulysses, a group of Dublin writers including Flann O’Brien, Patrick Kavanagh and Anthony Cronin, together with the publisher John Ryan and a dentist cousin of Joyce’s, set out in two horse-drawn cabs to retrace the novel’s route. They began at the Martello tower in Sandycove, got as far as Sandymount Strand and gave up for the pubs. It was the first Bloomsday. It is now a festival that runs for most of a week, with more than a hundred events across Dublin in 2026 alone and readings in cities from Philadelphia to San Francisco. Joyce’s face appeared on the Irish ten-pound note, and the Martello tower is now a museum dedicated to him.

The guardianship of his legacy had its own drama. For decades his grandson Stephen James Joyce, the last direct descendant and executor of the estate, threatened or sued scholars, biographers, theatre companies and festival organizers who wanted to quote from the work or the family letters. Much of that control ended when the copyright on Joyce’s published writing expired in most of Europe in 2012. Stephen Joyce died in France in January 2020, and with him ended the last family line leading back to the Rathgar house.

What the work still argues

It is hard to name a major novelist of the past century who did not have to reckon with Joyce. The interior monologue passed through William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf herself. Latin American writers such as Julio Cortázar and Guillermo Cabrera Infante took from him the freedom to play with the structure of the book. Beckett spent his career moving in the opposite direction, toward silence, precisely because Joyce had taken expansion as far as it could go. In 1998 the Modern Library placed Ulysses first on its list of the best novels in English of the twentieth century, and it still leads most such rankings.

What the books argue, though, is simpler than their reputation suggests. Dubliners says that ordinary lives deserve the most exact attention a writer can give them. Ulysses says that a single unremarkable day, lived by an unheroic advertising salesman, contains as much as the Odyssey. Finnegans Wake says that language itself is a history of everyone who ever spoke. Joyce left Ireland because he felt it would not let him say those things. He spent the rest of his life saying them about Ireland anyway. The city that once shredded his first book now reads the last one aloud every June, and it has never quite stopped arguing with him.

Tags: writers, James Joyce, Irish literature, Bloomsday, Dubliners, Finnegans Wake