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James Augustine Aloysius Joyce remains one of the most controversial authors of the 20th Century. The novel that took him seven years to write, Ulysses, was met with such outrage it was banned from 1920 to 1933. Today it's compulsory reading (and fairly difficult reading for many) in colleges and universities worldwide.
Joyce was the eldest of ten children. He was a precocious lad and attended the prestigious Clongowes Wood College which was considered the 'Eton of Ireland'. When his father lost his well-paid position as a tax collector and took heavily to the drink he had to pull James out of school. He returned to the college two years later when the board decided they would waive the fees to nurture young James's potential.
From there he went on to Dublin University where he studied language and literature, along with alcohol, women and wasting time, pretty much like many other students. With considerable luck and some skilled writing he passed his exams in 1902 (a BA with second-class honours). In a flight of fancy Joyce then decided he wanted to be a doctor and took off to Paris to study medicine. Unfortunately (or fortunately for the literary world) he underestimated both his own ability and his funds. In 1903 he packed it in and returned to Dublin after receiving news of his mother's impending death.
Back in Dublin he embarked upon a monumental novel called Stephen Hero.
Largely autobiographical, it later became the stories that make up The
Dubliners. In 1904 Joyce fell in love with a young, uneducated chambermaid
with the wonderful name of Nora Barnacle and he persuaded her to run away
and live with him outside wedlock, having turned his back on Catholicism.
They went to Trieste (then part of Austria-Hungary) but he had trouble
supporting Nora and two children. In Trieste he went back to work on Stephen
Hero under the new title, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
After outbreak of World War One Joyce fled the country to much safer Zurich
where he began work on Ulysses. His fine and coercive use of language
attracted enough people to support his writing process for the next seven
years. It was only because of one of the more generous benefactors that
Joyce was ever published. Harriet Shaw Weaver took it upon herself to
publish A Portrait of the Artist.
Joyce's eyesight was appalling. He wore thick glasses from the age of six and underwent 11 operations for myopia, glaucoma and cataracts. In one operation they removed the lens from his left eye. At times he was completely blind, at others he could just make out newspaper headlines, but still he kept writing. It took him seventeen years to complete the sequel to Ulysses, Finnegan's Wake.
Joyce's overall health wasn't good either - mental or physical. He suffered great personal anguish when his daughter was hospitalised with schizophrenia and a terrible obsession over the fact that her parents had never married. In an attempt to help her Joyce and Nora finally exchanged vows in 1931.
Good health was never a priority with Joyce. As a young, unpublished
writer he somehow survived on a diet of cocoa which caused extreme toothache.
He couldn't afford a dentist and the teeth went from bad to much worse,
causing iritis in both eyes. In 1907 he suffered a bout of rheumatic fever.
His iritis attacks over the next decade left him recovering for weeks
at a time. He finally got some relief from the attacks in 1923 when he
had all his abscessed teeth removed. On January 10th 1941 he suffered
acute stomach pains and was rushed to hospital, "writhing like a
fish". He feared cancer but it was far worse. X-rays found a perforated
duodenal ulcer. Surgeons operated but Joyce fell into a coma, only waking
once before he died to utter the words, "Does nobody understand?"
The ex-Catholic was buried with a brief ceremony in Fluntern Ceremony,
Zurich. A priest offered his services but Nora declined saying, "I
couldn't do that to him".
Joyce would not have died thinking he had been a failure. The ego and confidence that made him focus on his writing was such that he would have believed it was only a matter of time until he would be praised as the greatest master of English since Milton.
Joyce's artistic ambition was "to forge within the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race". And, of course, it was Woody Allen who, some years later expanded on the vision with admirable observance of his own surroundings saying he wished to "to forge within the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. And then see if I can get it mass-produced in plastic."
If you want a definition of poetry, say "Poetry is what makes me laugh or cry or yawn, what makes my toenails twinkle, what makes me do this or that or nothing!"
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