Across the pond, they are celebrating in Ireland the birthday of novelist James Joyce), born in a suburb of Dublin (1882). He was a cheerful boy called Sunny Jim by his family. He spent several years at an expensive Jesuit boarding school, but was forced to leave after his father spent the familys money on drinking and lost his job. For the remainder of Joyces childhood, the family was poor, moving to stay ahead of rent collectors. Joyce graduated from University College Dublin, then moved to Paris. He tutored students in English, but he wasnt saving anything — he asked his parents for money to come visit for Christmas, so his father remortgaged their house. Joyce returned to France, but a few months later, he received word that his mother was dying of cancer. He borrowed money from one of his students to afford the trip back home. After his mother died, he struggled to find work. He had been churning out book reviews for The Daily Express, but after a fight with the editor, he was forbidden from showing his face in the office. His submissions to The Irish Times were rejected. He was offered a job as the sub-editor of the Irish Bee-keeper, a position he kept, he said, for about 24 hours. He tried to start a daily newspaper with a friend, but that failed, as did his scheme to purchase books from pawnshops and resell them at a profit to rare book collectors. He borrowed his best friends .22 rifle and sold it at a pawnshop; Joyce felt bad so he rewrote the end of his friends poem, which then won a literary prize. He couldnt afford new clothes, so he wore hand-me-downs from friends — wrinkled flannels, tennis shoes, and a yacht cap. In the spring of 1904, he worked as a schoolteacher for a couple of months. He had an excellent tenor voice, and he earned a little money singing, too. That was the year he met his future wife, Nora Barnacle, a proud redheaded chambermaid from Galway. He was unhappy with life in Ireland, and he published a scathing satire of his contemporaries called The Holy Office (1904), declaring himself superior to them; he wrote: But all these men of whom I speak / Make me the sewer of their clique [...] And though they spurn me from their door / My soul shall spurn them evermore. After the publication of The Holy Office, it became more difficult to ask these same friends and peers for money. Poor and frustrated, with one suitcase between them, James and Nora left Ireland in October of 1904. They had enough money to get to Paris, where a doctor acquaintance lent them money to continue their journey. Joyce found work teaching in the city of Pola, in what was then Austria-Hungary. Joyce wasnt very good at managing money, and he made very little — the average salary in Pola ranged from 150 to 400 crowns, and he made 190. Neither of them liked Pola, but they expected that Joyce would publish a novel and strike it rich, and they could move to Paris — Nora took French lessons in preparation. Instead, Nora got pregnant, and officials in Pola ordered all foreigners to leave. Joyce got another teaching job in the city of Trieste on the Adriatic, which was also part of Austria-Hungary (but is now in Italy). They spent most of the next 10 years there. It was a culturally rich place, with interesting people, and Joyce particularly enjoyed drinking in taverns with sailors, but he spent more than he earned. He convinced his brother Stanislaus to move there, and that helped some — Stanislaus gave his brother money when he needed it and went out to haul him home when he passed out in the gutter. Stanislaus wrote: It seems to me little short of a miracle that anyone should have striven to cultivate poetry or cared to get in touch with the current of European thought while living in a household such as ours, typical as it was of the squalor of a drunken generation. Some inner purpose transfigured him. Joyce tried and failed at several business ventures, including opening movie theaters and importing Irish tweeds to Trieste. He was more successful with a series of lectures on Hamlet and tutoring private students, and Nora took in laundry. The family moved several more times — to Zurich, back to Trieste, and finally to Paris. There, for the first time, they had some level of security, mostly because the publisher Harriet Shaw Weaver was so impressed by Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) that she financially supported Joyce. Its been estimated that over the course of 20 years, Weaver gave Joyce about a million dollars in todays currency. Finally, in Paris, he could buy fancy wine and rich meals, taxis, Chanel dresses for Nora — plus he could afford to spend all of his time writing. Joyces works include Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922), and Finnegans Wake (1939).--thanks to The Writers Almanac
Posted on: Sun, 02 Feb 2014 16:06:42 +0000
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