James Joyce, who was born on this day in 1882, didn’t believe in miracles. He believed in coincidences. 'My foot strikes something, I look down, and there is exactly what I’m in need of,' he wrote to a friend.
The woman was Nora Barnacle. She and Joyce were unmarried, and had two teen-age children, Giorgio and Lucia, who were living with them in the two-room apartment. The conditions in which the student discovered them were not typical—Joyce lived in luxury whenever he could afford it, and often when he couldn’t—but the scene was emblematic. Joyce was a nomad. He was born in 1882, in Rathgar, a suburb of Dublin, and grew up the oldest of ten surviving children.
For many years after he moved to the Continent, he scraped a living as a language teacher in Berlitz schools, a job he disliked. He started out in Pula, moved to Trieste, to Rome, then back to Trieste, and, finally, to Zurich. He changed residences regularly wherever he was, sometimes under a landlord’s gun.
Joyce had a lot of bad luck in the literary marketplace. Four publishers turned down his first book, a volume of poems called “Chamber Music.” He spent nine years getting his story collection, “Dubliners,” into print. It was rejected by eight publishers. At least thirteen printers refused to set his first novel, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” in full.
So the first question that a writer contemplating a biography of Joyce has to ask is whether we really need another one. It’s true that more is known about Joyce and his world. Since 1982, biographies of John Joyce , of Nora , and of Lucia have come out, and there has been fresh biographical work on Joyce himself. Gordon Bowker’s “James Joyce: A New Biography” is a kind of synthesis of this research—along with some material, now in Ellmann’s papers, that Ellmann elected not to use.
Joyce didn’t use actual people and places because he was settling scores, or because he was writing disguised autobiography, or because he lacked invention. The relation between his world and his fiction is much stranger than that.
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