Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man (Paperback)

During James Joyce's growing-up years in Dublin, his family progressed from middle-class gentility to shabbiness as Joyce's profligate father failed at a series of jobs and business ventures and his mother underwent 16 pregnancies, producing a brood of 10 surviving children. His parents were both talented musicians, and Joyce, himself a gifted singer, remained deeply involved with music all his life. While acknowledging that he received a solid classical education at Jesuit schools, Joyce called the Jesuits "a heartless order," and by age 16 he was beginning to question the narrowness of Catholicism and to see himself as a writer who would need to transcend his repressive heritage. In 1902 he received a B.A. from University College in Dublin, in modern languages. At that point, he left for Paris, knowing instinctively that Ireland would be his subject matter but that, in order to write objectively about his homeland, he would have to live in exile. After a few brief visits to Ireland, he returned permanently to the continent in 1904 with Nora Barnacle, an uneducated Dublin girl he called his "portable Ireland." (Nora used to ask him, "Why don't you write books people can read?") The couple lived in Trieste, where Joyce taught English and wrote many of his major works, from 1904 until 1915. Eventually, they settled in Paris, remaining until 1940 (finally marrying in 1931 and producing two children), when they were forced by wartime necessity to evacuate to Switzerland. Joyce died there soon after, after an operation for a perforated ulcer. He was not quite 50 years old. Joyce was never financially solvent and relied on the assistance of patrons who believed in his genius. He was an expatriate most of his life, but as a writer he remained obsessed with Dublin, making the city a microcosm of all human experience. In the year 2000, Joyce's handwritten draft of the "Circe" chapter from ULYSSES sold at auction for $1.54 million--an ironic coda to the life of a writer who was perennially short of cash.