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.
On a day in May, 1922, in Paris, a medical student named Pierre Mérigot de Treigny was asked by his teacher, Dr. Victor Morax, a well-known ophthalmologist, to attend to a patient who had telephoned complaining about pain from iritis, an inflammation of the eye. The student went to the patient’s apartment, in a residential hotel on the Rue de l’Université. Inside, he found a scene of disarray.
Joyce left Ireland a year later, when he was twenty-two, but he never really left the manner of life he had known. Like his father, he was a raconteur and a barfly. He had a good tenor voice , and he loved to sing and to dance. When he had no money, he borrowed it; when he had it, he picked up the tab for whatever company he was in, booked himself and his family into fancy hotels, and bought fur coats for Nora and Lucia.
After the Second World War broke out and the Germans occupied Paris, Joyce managed to get to Switzerland. He died there, in Zurich, of a perforated ulcer, on January 13, 1941. He was fifty-eight, and a very old man. He had burned the candle all the way down. He had spent eight years on “Ulysses,” and fifteen years on “Finnegans Wake,” which was published in 1939. “My eyes are tired,” he wrote in a letter to Giorgio, in 1935.
Ellmann’s “James Joyce” came out in 1959. The English novelist Anthony Burgess, another dedicated Joycean, judged it “the greatest literary biography of the century,” and many people have filed concurrences. Ellmann didn’t start working on the book steadily until 1952. Considering the quantity of information it holds, he wrote it in an amazingly short amount of time, and a reader can feel how fully he was possessed by his project, and how much fun he found the job to be.
Bowker’s notion of how life relates to art is more mechanical. He thinks, for example, that “John’s habit of regular long walks around Dublin and environs . . . foreshadows the wandering narrative line which snakes through most of his son’s fiction”—an observation that does not do a lot of interpretive work.
In 1932, two young Americans, Dwight Macdonald and George Morris, recent Yale graduates with an interest in modern literature and art, were in Paris, where they bought a copy of “Ulysses,” still outlawed in the United States, at the English-language bookstore Shakespeare and Company. They got into a conversation with the owner, Sylvia Beach, the woman who had published “Ulysses,” and she arranged for them to meet Joyce.
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