CROSSWORD EDITOR RICHARD NORRIS SKIN
There was Buck Whaley the 18th century rake who walked to Jerusalem and played handball on its walls for a bet, and Skin the Goat, accomplice in a sensational political assassination, and Francy Higgins the sham squire… These colourful eccentrics were later to flit though the pages of Joyce’s works.Įven as a child, Joyce had a prodigiously retentive memory and an enquiring mind, as his father remarked. Joyce absorbed much anecdotal information on walks round Dublin with his father John Stanislaus Joyce. One of the great 18th century landowners, Henry Moore, Earl of Drogheda, literally built his name across the centre of Dublin. Some idea of the grandiose notions of these past grandees (or so-called Ascendancy) can be seen on the city map. They stood or ran in the roadway or crawled up the steps before the gaping doors, or squatted like mice upon the threshold… He picked his way deftly through all that minute vermin-like life and under the shadow of the gaunt spectral mansions in which the old nobility of Dublin had roistered.ĭublin’s old nobility was the arrogant and unrepresentative Protestant élite, far removed from the Gaelic and Catholic Ireland from which James Joyce sprang. … a horde of grimy children populated the street. This is Joyce’s description of Henrietta Street, which had once been Dublin’s finest Georgian street. The great town houses of the aristocracy were abandoned, first to the rising Catholic bourgeoisie, and then to tenement occupation. Splendidly brilliant in the 18th century, when for a brief period an independent parliament was established in the capital, Dublin’s glory did not long survive the extinction of that parliament by the Act of Union in 1800." I’M LUCKY TO HAVE BEEN BORN IN A CITY LARGE ENOUGH TO RANK AS A EUROPEAN CAPITAL, YET SMALL ENOUGH TO BE COMPREHENDED AS A WHOLE.ĭublin was founded by the Vikings over 1,000 years ago (although a settlement of some sort is indicated on Ptolemy’s map many centuries earlier). The Irish name for Dublin is Baile Atha Cliath or the town of the ford of the Hurdles, indicating a convenient place for crossing the river. With the Dublin Mountains as a backdrop, the sweep of the bay half circles the metropolis like a sleeper’s arms, and the River Liffey – Joyce’s Anna Livia – rises in the foothills and meanders in a wide arc before flowing through the city to the sea. It became for him a city frozen in time – the Edwardian Dublin of 1904 with its horse-drawn cabs, gas lamps and British soldiers, a city of some 500,000 souls where respectability and the subversive went hand in hand. Yet, for the remaining 28 years of his life in exile, he wrote about nothing else but Dublin. He first left Dublin in 1904 and did not visit again after 1912. Joyce, above all else, is the quintessential modernist recorder of city life. In so doing, he heroically expanded the frontiers of human spiritual development. In particular, he blew away the cobwebs surrounding the Victorian treatment of sexuality and presented it in an honest manner that was revolutionary. He displayed the same standards of integrity in dealing with his subject matter, an uncompromising realist writing of areas of human experience previously regarded as too mean, too personal, too intimate or too risque to be made the subject of art. Language was his raw material, and he applied to it the kind of extreme tests and standards more usually expected of poetry. Undeterred by poverty, illness, family problems or world wars, he never wavered in the service of his often misunderstood genius. James Joyce was possessed by an unswerving devotion to his art throughout his life. There are plenty of good old-fashioned belly laughs, but also some sly oblique smiles that reward only the careful reader. There is also in Joyce a rich vein of humour, even at the blackest moments. A golden rule for the reader is when in doubt, read aloud. Joyce had a musical ear and the sound of prose was always extremely important to him. WHAT I AM SEEKING IS THE PERFECT ORDER OF WORDS IN THE SENTENCE. GAWD! TWO SENTENCES? YOU WERE SEEKING THE RIGHT WORDS? NO, I HAVE THE WORDS ALREADY. HOW’S ULYSSES PROGRESSING? I’VE BEEN WORKING HARD AT IT ALL DAY.ĭOES THAT MEAN YOU’VE WRITTEN A GREAT DEAL? TWO SENTENCES. Joyce looked unusually pleased with himself. One day in Zurich, while writing Ulysses, Joyce encountered his friend Frank Budgen.
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