James augustine joyce

JAMES AUGUSTINE JOYCE

JAMES AUGUSTINE JOYCE (1882 - 1941), one of the most radical innovators of twentieth-century writing, who dedicated himself to exuberant exploration of the total resources of language. He was born at Rathgar, a suburb of Dublin, on Feb. 2, 1882. His father, who took pride in coming of an old and substantial Cork family, had some talent as a musician and much more as a genial lounger, and was little troubled by the economic straits into which is household was drifting during his son's boyhood. Joyce was sent at first to the expensive Jesuit boarding school described in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. But by the time he entered the Faculty of Arts in University College, Dublin, he was already involved in that struggle with dire poverty which was to continue into his middle years. He seems to have inherited something of his father's improvidence; and when benefactions from admirers began to reach him, a good deal of the money was spent in the best restaurants of Paris. But with the son, as not with the father, these indulgences went along with a life of unremitting labor. Joyce was a dedicated artist of the first order.

He grew up a rebel among rebels. Those movements, whether political or literary, which had as their objective the freeing of Ireland from English dominance, held very little attraction for him. His instinct was for a broader European culture, and to this an exceptional faculty for linguistic study gave him precocious access. Among companions who were picking up a little Gaelic and were enthusiastic for the theater of Yeats, Synge, and Lady Gregory, Joyce stdied Dano-Norwegian and opposed to the Celtic twilight the hard, clear illumination of Ibsen in his realistic phase.

In a city much given to artistic coteries he remained aloof and even arrogant. For a time he led, or claimed to lead, a life of more than common adolescent irregularity; his early fugitive productions were often improper or scandalous. A powerful and original intellect made him quickly intolerant of the narrow curriculum of his college and of the strict Roman Catholic orthodoxy by which it was controlled.

In 1902 he broke away from his family and his studies and went to Paris on a tenous proposal to read medicine. After a year of near starvation he was recalled to Dublin to the deathbed of his mother. His refusal to kneel in prayer beside the dying woman, whether it be matter of fact or the artistic transmutation of fact, certainly marks that turning point in his life at which he formally renounced the Christian faith and thereby thought to free himself from influences by which (as we can now see) his mind had been irrevocably coloured.

In 1904 Joyce again departed for the Continent, this time taking with him a girl called Nora Barnacle, who became the mother of his son and daughter, and whom he married in 1931.

Miss Barnacle, who is said to have worked in a Dublin hotel [as a chambermaid], had little education and no understanding of Joyce's work; to the end she seems to have felt merely that

he made things very difficult for himself by writing in so strange a fashion. But she shared the fondness for music and was vivacious and humorous. Joyce's domestic life was a happy one - although indeed checkered by a morbid jealousy correlative with his sense of persecution as a writer and in its last years darkened by his daughter's decline into insanity.

He worked for many years as a teacher of English in Trieste and Zurich, in an exile which was to grow legendary with his tardily achieved fame. The course of his career, like that of so many artists of his time, was much influenced by the American poet Ezra Pound, whome he was on one occasion to describe as having taken him "out of the gutter". Pound indeed was to disapprove of Work in Progress, but before this he had been largely instrumental in sponsoring Joyce and in introducing him into circles which made easier his eventual setting in paris. There the writer who had in youth stood out against coteries became himself the center of a coterie.
His eyesight deteriorated progressively. This, plus the great difficulties of printing and proofreading his often strange and fantastic writings, made him peculiarly dependent on the assistance of devoted friends. This he abundantly received, and although his circle tended to surround his labours with pretentious and absurd exegesis, it was composed in the main of persons of generous and amiable disposition. Joyce lived largely on the gifts of patrons - notably of Harriet Weaver, and no Medici could have been more munificent. For long the judgments and prejudices of society had impeded his efforts to support himself and his family as a man of letters. He rightly considered his reliance upon patronage as entirely honorable. Joyce had weathered World War I in Zurich; and he and his wife, with their son and grandson, managed to make their way to Zurich in the second year of World War II. His last published letter, dated Dec 20, 1940, thanks the mayor for the asylumn granted him and exhibits the simplicity and dignity of one who knows his place in the literary history of his time. He died in Zurich on Jan 13, 1941.