Menu
Ireland's political and cultural magazine
50 July 2022
By Kevin Kiely
O
N WHAT grounds is Joyce owed an
apology? Is he not lauded as a literary
genius? Are there not international
celebrations, monuments, and
institutions founded in his name?
Has he not respect and honour enough? The
answer is no – and after a hundred years of
pretending otherwise, it’s time to finally face the
facts.
There are many reasons why Joyce is owed an
apology: his isolation and exile, his abject
poverty, his ultimate prostitution to the
publishing and tourist sectors ironically backed
by his vilification and lack of recognition in Irish
media during his actual lifetime. The most
extreme example of this last is the burning of a
thousand copies of Dubliners at the behest of a
publisher and printer in Jervis Street, Dublin.
Despite later denials by Maunsel & Co., Joyce
insisted on the reality that the book had been
burnt and left Dublin that same day with Nora
Barnacle and their two children, never to return.
The burning of ‘Dubliners’ signified for Joyce
his rejection by Ireland, and the lack of coverage
for this abhorrent auto-da-fé is only one of the
many glaring biographical inaccuracies (and
omissions in feelgood biographies) in accounts
of Joyce’s life.
Joyce left Ireland but he remained Irish. He
was a Parnellite, an admirer of Grith and his
Sinn Féin. His manifesto was stated by Stephen
Dedalus in ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man’: “I will tell you what I will do and what I will
not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer
believe, whether it calls itself my home, my
fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express
myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I
can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence
the only arms I allow myself to use — silence,
exile, and cunning”.
Dedalus will not serve but he does not
foreswear — and of course, he is a young man,
and not Joyce. It is complicated though: on the
verge of the German entry to Paris in 1941, an
ocial at the Irish legation repeatedly oered
Joyce and his son Georgio Irish passports, which
would have allowed them to leave occupied
France when they wished. The oers were
declined, and Joyce “clung doggedly to his
British passport”. — all of which led inevitably
to Bruce Arnold in ‘The Scandal of Ulysses’,
claiming that “Joyce was neither British nor Irish,
practically and emotionally”.
Arnold, an Englishman in exile in Ireland, may
not be well-attuned to the national question. To
his credit, however, more generally Arnold
challenges the so-called definitive Joyce
biography by Richard Ellmann for its weaving of
fiction (namely ‘Ulysses’) with facts. Ellmann’s
is “a biography that will tell us what can and
what cannot be determined as actually having
existed outside Joyce’s works”. Ellmann falls
short, losing himself in exegesis to the detriment
of his biography. An under-recognised disservice
to the great man.
Of course, Joyce grew up with an alcoholic
widower father who was on the way down, and
who moved house eighteen times in Joyce’s
childhood, was in perpetual debt and ill-
equipped to rear his ten children, five of whom
died in infancy. Joyce, a socialist, took on the
tradition with no relish and famously remained
in debt his entire life, and particularly to his
family.
Our greatest writer, the toast of our oleaginous
tourist industry, was so marginalised that he
wrote his masterpiece in dire poverty. Joyce
refers to life in Trieste in his personal letters:
“Clothes: I have none and can’t buy any…I wear
my son’s boots (which are two sizes too large)
and his casto suit which is too narrow in the
should.” Wyndham Lewis and T. S. Eliot brought
a parcel from Ezra Pound in London to Joyce. In
Lewis’s ‘Blasting and Bombardiering’ we are
told of how Joyce opens the parcel to find
secondhand boots.
Joyce’s real worry wasn’t footwear, however,
but sucient patronage to live on. Pound
begged John Quinn, the New York lawyer to give
Joyce support after Edith Rockefeller McCormack
had endowed his rent for a year in Zurich during
the writing of ‘Ulysses’. At Rue de l’Université in
Paris, the twentieth address at which part of the
book was written by this atavistic peripatetic,
he completed the greatest novel of the twentieth
century while sitting on the side of his bed
“without a desk, without books”. After years of
poverty, stress and strain, Nora Barnacle left
him and took her two children to her family in
Galway — for a while.
Another dishonour done to Joyce, which his
biographers are all too happy to gloss over, and
which I believe I am publishing for the first time,
is the fact that the predecessor to University
College Dublin, humiliatingly failed him in his
final examinations in…English.
As a graduating student “he had done well
enough to pass,” according to Ellmann.
However, his marks in English were 344 out of
800, where the passing mark was 400. This
would be like Einstein failing physics (which,
despite persistent urban legends, he never did).
Joyce obtained his degree only by a narrow
complimentary pass, due to his score of 465 in
French and 417 in Italian. UCD’s examination-
correcting system must have grossly
misinterpreted his final year paper in English for
the BA.
Joyce was clearly academically capable, as
demonstrated by the lectures he gave to the
Former Royal University of Ireland, Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin (left of photo): UCD owes apology
for failing Joyce in English in his final exams.
One word is due to our
greatest master of prose
July 2022 51
Literary and Historical Society, titled ‘Drama and Life’ in January 1900,
and ‘The Poetry of James Clarence Mangan’, in February 1902.
His Mangan paper was highly praised by the Freeman’s Journal the
following day: “It was deservedly applauded at the conclusion for what
was generally agreed to have been the best paper ever read to the
Society”.
Joyce was on top of his studies to the extent that he was in
correspondence with Henrik Ibsen of whose work he wrote erudite
reviews.
It is embarrassing, for UCD, the onetime situs of a café called ‘Finnegans
Break’, that someone whose genius would become indisputable through
his literary legacy could be given such a low mark. UCD owe Joyce not
only an apology, but a posthumous doctorate – to at last grant him the
recognition he deserves. To say he would not have appreciated the
accolade is belied by his energetic intellectual engagement during his
time in UCD, as well as his sultry exiled and cunning silence about his
final marks.
And even when the work was completed, it was mostly tossed aside.
Mainstream publishers had rejected ‘Ulysses’ unanimously, and no Irish
publisher in the 1920s would have accepted the scandalous book. The
first printing was a subscribers’ edition of 1,000 copies by Joyce’s patron
Sylvia Beach the bookshop proprietor of Shakespeare and Company in
Paris.
When the work did finally get around, the reviews were highly negative
– especially in London from Edmund Gosse, Arnold Bennett and Virginia
Woolf. Joyce had demolished the traditional English novel and satirised
There are many reasons why Joyce is
owed an apology: his isolation and exile,
his abject poverty, his ultimate prostitution
to the publishing and tourist sectors,
ironically backed by his vilification and
lack of recognition in Irish media during his
actual lifetime
its form and content – but “what else would you expect from an Irish
writer?” was their general sniy summation.
Joyce’s brother Stanislaus on reading ‘Ulysses’ remarked: “I wish you
would write verse again…after this last inspection of the stinkpots.
Everything dirty seems to have the same irresistible attraction for you
that cow dung has for flies”.
Joseph Collins in the New York Times called ‘Ulysses’ an artistic failure
because of its “unreadability”.
‘Ulysses’ in its first year of underground publication was depicted as
immoral, obscene, depraved, and disgusting, and was banned in England
and the US.
builds something
Former Royal University of Ireland, Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin (left of photo): UCD owes apology
for failing Joyce in English in his final exams.
52 July 2022
Of course, there were some exceptions. Pound exploded in
the Mercure de France: “Unite to give praise to ‘Ulysses’, those
who do not, may content themselves with a place in the lower
intellectual orders”.
Joyce’s exile required patrons; mainstream publishing failed
him, hence the underground publishing of his books at first
through excerpts in literary magazines, as with both ‘Ulysses’
and ‘Finnegans Wake’. ‘Finnegans Wake’ took more years than
‘Ulysses’ to write, and with it Joyce reached his apogee,
abandoning fiction for linguistics where characters, dialogue
and events are subordinate.
‘Ulysses’ permutates words obsessively within its sentences,
whereas ‘Finnegans Wake’ permutates consonants and vowels
within the words themselves.
Joyce subverts the traditional sentence, delving into the sub-
atomic particles to create a new language.
And yet, Irish Booker Prize fiction winners and runner-ups,
such as Edna O’Brien, Emma Donoghue, John Banville, or Roddy
Doyle have never engaged with Joyce’s innovations, techniques,
and originality within either ‘Ulysses’ or Finnegans Wake, and
our most internationally known fiction writer, Maeve Binchy,
always extolled William Somerset Maugham as her master. On
Joyce, Sally Rooney, a fellow socialist, remains silent though to
be fair, she oers an apparent homage to Joyce’s short story
‘The Dead’ in the form of the unpleasant Felix singing ‘The Lass
of Aughrim’.
Joyce’s legion of critics might well have joined in the apology
during the mammoth smugfest seminar taking place in Dublin
this June. Their books about ‘Ulysses’ over the years have
generally been more concerned with critical analysis than
biographical veracity. Joyce is mulled and mused over as a
literary mystery, with little consideration for his life.
The creation of ‘Ulysses’ presents a totally achieved work of
art amongst its other myriad beneficent results: enlargement
of Dublin’s provenance globally, the generation of cultural
wealth, the Joyce Industry, Joyce in University Curricula with
prose fiction, innovative techniques, and not least the largesse
of comedy conferred on the reader.
When Bruce Arnold, Sylvia Beach, Maria Jolas, Flann O’Brien,
and Patrick Kavanagh (among others) launched the Joyce Tower,
Sandycove in 1962 Bloomsday in Ireland came into existence.
It imported an industry. And yet the wrongs done to Joyce
throughout his life have hardly been recognised, let alone
atoned for.
Presidential pardons are granted. Government apologies are
part of the historic continuum. The posthumous apology, from
our President, Politicians, Burghers and the well upholstered
literary industry and academic oligarchs, to the supreme
modernist is overdue. Joyce’s reaction, we can be sure would be
superhumanly wry.
Kevin Kiely is author of ‘Arts Council Immortals’ and other books,
available on Amazon.
Another hidden dishonour
done to Joyce which I
believe I am publishing for
the first time, is the fact
that UCD humiliatingly
failed him in his final
examinations in…English.
JOYCE TIMELINE
1882
1889
1918
1900
1920
1904
1922
1905
1921
1909
1931
1912
1933
1914
1939
1915
1941
1954
JOYCE IS BORN
in Rathgar, Dublin
on February 2nd
BEGINS COLLEGE
at University
College Dublin
THE
SERIALISATION
OF ‘ULYSSES’
in ‘The Little
Review’ begins
ELOPES
with Nora Barnacle;
begins writing
‘A Portrait’
FINED
Editors of ‘The
Little Review’ fined
for obscenity
THE VOLTA
Back in Dublin, Joyce
manages Ireland’s
first cinema
MARRIAGE
James and Nora
Marry
‘A PORTRAIT OF
THE ARTIST AS A
YOUNG MAN’
is serialized in ‘The
Egoist’
‘FINNEGANS WAKE’
is published
BLOOMSDAY
Patrick Kavanagh and Flann
O’Brien visit the Martello
Tower in Sandycove,
beginning the tradition of
Bloomsday in Ireland
‘IBSEN’S NEW
DRAMA’
is published
PARIS
The Joyces move
to France, James
meets Ezra Pound
GIORGIO
James and Nora’s
first child is born:
they move to Trieste
‘ULYSSES’
Is published in Paris
by Shakespeare
& Co.
BURNING
of 1,000 copies of
‘Dubliners’ by printer
John Falconer
THE TRIAL
‘United States V. One
Book Called Ulysses’
trial begins
ZURICH
The family move to
Switzerland; Joyce
works on ‘Ulysses’
JOYCE DIES
in Zürich at the
age of 58
