Ann Gilligan, Deirdre Collins, Anita Hayes and Pamela
Barry
St. Marys HFC, Glasnevin
On the 2nd of December, we went to the James Joyce Centre in North Great
George's Street as part of our activity week.
We were given a talk by James Joyce's nephew. He told us what it was
like to be related to a man who was considered a 'dirty' writer and a
disgrace to society. He told us about Joyce's life and the consequences
of his reputation on the rest of his family.
The centre is a restored Georgian building. Before renovation began,
the building had no roof, the floors were rotten, and the ceilings and
the plasterwork were destroyed. The people who restored the beautiful
Georgian building to its former glory, paid painful attention to detail.
In the room now used as a cafe, the paintings on the wall were copied
from photographs of the originals.
James was married to a woman who he knew for many years and loved. They
moved to Paris and they had two children, a boy and a girl. His daughter
became ill with schizophrenia and soon died. James was heartbroken. His
son got married and had children also. Joyce came back to Ireland for
his last time in 1916 before his father died.
We were brought into the library where most of Joyce's books are kept.
There was a huge book of 'Finnegan's Wake' on the table. People are allowed
to go into the library any time they want. There were also two rooms on
show, which had photographs of Joyce in different countries. It also has
his famous book 'Ulysses'. We were told about his children. There are
a lot of reports of his daughter Lucia.
We were brought out into a conservatory where illustrations of the eighteen
chapters of 'Ulysses' are on the wall. They are very colourful. We were
allowed to sit in the James Joyce chair which was brought to that house.
The tour was very good and we learnt a lot about the life and family of
James Joyce. We started at 2.00 and finished at 3.20.
We were shown a short film about Dublin when Joyce was alive. We were
also told about his life, how his father did not have much respect for
his mother and Joyce followed in his footsteps by doing the same. When
he left home his mother had a lot of children and had very little money,
but still Joyce wrote home telling his mother about his shortage of money.
She would then pawn something and send it to him. Joyce then felt guilty
and realised how he mistreated his mother when she died.
Outside, there were illustrated pictures from 'Ulysses'. In the small
cafe, the wall is decorated with pictures representing each of the chapters
from 'Ulysses'.
The Joyce Centre is in a house, which, Joyce himself did not actually
live in. The Centre is housed in a beautifully restored 18th Century Georgian
Townhouse. The aim of this centre is to promote an interest in the life
and works of James Joyce.
About James Joyce
James Joyce was born on 2nd February 1882 on Brighton Square,
Rathgar in the affluent southside of Dublin. He was the eldest surviving
son of a family which was initially very wealthy and James enjoyed the
advantages of an upper middle-class upbringing for his first ten years.
He attended the exclusive and expensive Jesuit school, Clongowes Wood
College in Kildare and lived in many fashionable addresses around Dublin
including Rathmines, Bray and Blackrock.
His father, Jack Joyce (whom Richard Ellmann, Joyce's distinguished biographer,
described as the 'most gifted reprobate in Ireland') managed, however,
to squander most of his wealth by the time James was ten and the family's
fortunes began to decline. James was withdrawn from Clongowes and there
was less and less money for the family which would eventually include
four sons and six daughters.
In 1893 the family was forced to leave the southside of Dublin and travel
to the poorer north inner city. For a time, James did not go to school
and he spent much of his time exploring the city (which would help later
when he used his almost encyclopedic knowledge of Dublin when writing).
From this point on, the family moved regularly both because of eviction
and to avoid payment of rent.
Fortunately for James, a chance encounter between Jack Joyce and Fr Conmee
SJ, headmaster of Belvedere College and former rector of Clongowes, on
Mountjoy Square resulted in James and his brothers, Stanislaus and Charles,
being admitted to the school for free. That school still functions and
can be seen from the Joyce Centre at the bottom of the street. Joyce remained
there until 1898 when he would attend another Jesuit institution, the
Catholic University (now University College, Dublin) on Stephens Green
which had been established by Cardinal Newman and where Gerald Manley
Hopkins had taught. Although he would repudiate Catholicism, Joyce remained
grateful to his Jesuit teachers: 'From them I have learnt to arrange things
in such a way that they become easy to survey and judge.'
Unsure of what to do after graduating with an indifferent degree, Joyce
left for Paris late in 1902 ostensibly to study medicine. To have his
voice trained and to become a professional singer was also a possibility.
He succeeded at neither and returned home in the spring of 1903 when he
heard that his mother was dying.
May Joyce eventually died on 13th August 1903 at the early age of forty-four.
Joyce started writing more seriously at this point and what he called
'epicleti' (what would become the 'Epiphanies') was the first result.
He had already written a play 'A Brilliant Career' (1900) and collection
of poems (1901) which do not survive. In early 1904 he wrote 'A Portrait
of the Artist' for the new Dana magazine which was rejected. Soon
afterwards, he started expanding that piece into Stephen Hero.
In 1904, the first stories of Dubliners were written and published
in the Irish Homestead and the Speaker published some poems. The summer
of 1904 was also significant because he met Nora Barnacle, the woman who
would be a life-long partner and mother of two children, Giorgio and Lucia.
Joyce and Barnacle left Dublin for mainland Europe in October 1904. Joyce
would return to Ireland only on three occasions. He had the promise of
a teaching post in Zurich. In fact, he did not get a post until he had
travelled first to Trieste (then in the Austrian Empire) and then to Pola.
In 1907, Joyce published his first book, a collection of poems called
Chamber Music. Although Dubliners was complete in 1907,
it was not published until 1914.
Stephen Hero had been greatly changed and rewritten in the intervening
years and in 1916, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was
published. A play called Exiles, influenced by Joyce's hero Henrik
Ibsen was published in 1918 but has rarely been successful.
Joyce was already working on his masterpiece, Ulysses. He had
moved to neutral Switzerland in 1915 to avoid the war and was writing
a book which concentrated on one day in the life of Dublin, 16th June
1904 (probably the day he and Nora first went out together). The book
is loosely structured on Homer's Odyssey and uses free association of
impression or stream of consciousness ('style indirect libre') extensively.
It was finished and finally published (on Joyce's 40th birthday in 1922)
in Paris. The book was banned in the USA and in England but Joyce was
already living largely at this stage on the patronage of Harriet Shaw
Weaver.
The next thirteen years Joyce spent writing Work in Progress,
what would eventually become Finnegans Wake, a book sometimes termed
his revenge on the English language. Although his eyesight was deteriorating
steadily Joyce managed to write a book dreamt by a man in one night in
a Chapelizod public house. It uses multiple puns in about forty languages
and is loosely structured on the Italian philosopher Vico's cyclical history
of time. Joyce was again frustrated by war and his book did not get much
attention on publication (although sections had been published serially
since the 1920s and had been the subject of positive criticism by many
including Samuel Beckett). He went again to Zurich to avoid the madness
and died there in the morning of 13th January 1941.
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