Biographical Sketch
James Augustus Aloysius Joyce was born on February 2, 1882, in Rathgar,
a borough of Dublin, Ireland, the eldest of ten children who survived infancy.
In 1888 he was enrolled at Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit boarding school
near Dublin, where he stayed until 1891. Thereafter he attended Belvedere
College, and then University College, Dublin, where he graduated in 1902 with a
major in Italian. While at UCD Joyce wrote a paper in defense of Henrik Ibsen's
drama called
Drama and Life, which was suppressed by the
college president on moral grounds.
James Joyce's father, John Stanislaus Joyce, was a Cork man who had
inherited enough property to ensure a comfortable living from rents, but his
alcoholism led to a seemingly endless series of disasters which drove the
family to abject poverty by the time young Joyce was mature. His mother, Mary
Jane Murray, died of cancer soon after Joyce graduated from university; Joyce's
autobiographical counterpart
Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus, is haunted by her
memory. Young James was his father's favorite; he in turn seemed to forgive his
father's weaknesses. Many of James Joyce's fictional characters and stories are
indebted to his father's humorous stories of Dublin and its pubs.
After graduation Joyce went to Paris to study medicine, but he had
neither the funds to matriculate nor to pay for adequate food and lodging. He
made little progress in his medical studies because he used his time to read
widely in literature in preparation for his serious commitment to art. He
returned to Dublin to be with his dying mother, and for some time was at loose
ends. In 1904, perhaps on June 16, the day that
Ulysses takes place, Joyce eloped with a
chamber maid from Galway named Nora Barnacle, eventually accepting a position
as a teacher of English at the Berlitz School in Trieste. There two children
were born to the couple, Giorgio in 1906 and Lucia in 1907. (Joyce and Nora
were not to be formally wed until 1931.)
Joyce's published work began to appear in 1907 with his slim volume of
verse
Chamber Music. A number of his
Dubliners stories first appeared in the
Irish Homestead while George Russell (AE)
was editor. After considerable trouble with publishers fearing censorship,
Joyce finally saw
Dubliners appear as a collection of stories
in 1914. It was soon followed by
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in
1916, and his career as a writer was launched. He had captured the attention
and admiration of other writers, including the influential Ezra Pound.
In 1918 he published
Exiles. What secured for Joyce the attention
and respect of the literati was the appearance in periodical form of
Ulysses, for it was apparent that no
literary work remotely like it had ever been published. It is often said that
Joyce reinvented each genre as he wrote in it, but as yet there seemed to be no
genre into which
Ulysses could fit. In 1922
Ulysses was published by Sylvia Beach of the
Parisian bookstore Shakespeare & Co.
Ulysses, which reconstructs a day in the
life of a modern-day Jew in Dublin, patterned after the adventures of an epic
hero of Greece, was itself written by a wanderer; the book was begun in Zurich
and finished in Paris by an author who spoke to his family in Italian, who in
1941 would be laid to rest in a Swiss cemetery.
Joyce had a love-hate relationship with his native city, but in his
entire literary career he never really wrote about any other place. He often
said that if Dublin were destroyed he could recreate it from memory, street by
street and shop by shop. However, after his elopement in 1904 he never lived
there again, and visited infrequently. In 1915 he took his family from Trieste
to Zurich in anticipation of the outbreak of war, returning to live in Trieste
briefly at the end of World War I. In 1920, at the urging of Pound, he moved
with his family to Paris.
Soon after the publication of
Ulysses, Joyce began work on his final
literary work
Finnegans Wake, by far his most experimental
and perplexing. Though it was not published as a unified entity until 1939,
sections of it appeared in periodical form under its provisional title
Work in Progress. During these years Joyce
suffered from ocular problems and other medical difficulties. He underwent
surgery eleven times and was often quite blind. Shortly after the publication
of
Finnegans Wake, World War II broke out in
Europe and the Joyces left Paris for the south of France while awaiting
permission to again enter Switzerland. Three weeks after their arrival in
Zurich, Joyce underwent surgery for peritonitis, caused by a perforated
duodenal ulcer. He lapsed into a coma and died early on January 13, 1941. He is
buried in Fluntern Cemetery in Zurich beneath a statue of him by the American
sculptor Milton Hebald.
Scope and Contents
Manuscripts and correspondence make up the bulk of the James Joyce
Collection, 1899-1968. Part of the collection comprises original Joyce
material, but most of the collection is material about Joyce, including
research and criticism. The material, therefore, is organized into two series:
I. James Joyce Writings and Correspondence, 1899-1958 (4.8 boxes), and II.
Materials About Joyce and His Works, 1902-1968 (6.2 boxes). This collection was
previously accessible only through a card catalog, but has been re-cataloged as
part of a retrospective conversion project.
Series I is divided into three subseries. Subseries A, Works, consists
of holograph drafts, typescripts, page proofs, printed pages, notes, and
fragments of novels, poems, song lyrics, musical scores, limericks, and
translations by Joyce. The Center has the complete and final first edition page
proofs for
Ulysses (1922), with the author's
corrections and additions, as well as a typescript for the Ithaca episode, and
page proofs of a translation into French by Auguste Morel. In the collection
also are page proofs for
Finnegans Wake (1939), including
Continuation of a Work in Progress, and
Tales Told of Shem and Shaun, and holograph
drafts for
Pomes Penyeach (1927), as well as other
poems. Joyce provided the musical score for
Dark Rosaleen, and the text, from
Finnegans Wake, for the musicals
May Song It Flourish and
The Riverrun, and manuscripts for these
works are present. A holograph draft of his translation into Italian of
Riders to the Sea (1905) by J. M. Synge, is
included here as well.
Subseries B, Correspondence, consists principally of letters regarding
Joyce's literary work. Outgoing letters by Joyce were written to his London
publisher Elkin Mathews, and Swiss publisher Daniel Brody; to editor Padraic
Colum; to literary friends Richard Aldington, John Byrne, Edouard Dujardin, and
Livia Veneziani Schmitz; to Irish tenor John Sullivan; to his Zurich pupil,
Victor Sax; to his daughter Lucia Joyce, and to his aunt Josephine Murray.
Incoming correspondence to Joyce amounts to three letters, from Maria Jolas, Al
Laney, and G. Herbert Thring.
Subseries C, Personal Papers, consists of personal items relating to
Joyce such as items withdrawn from books in his Trieste library, a receipt to
him for the Swedish translation of
The Dubliners (1931), two memoranda of
agreement with Albatross Verlag and one with The Egoist, Ltd., and a report
regarding an operation on Joyce's left eye by Dr. Alfred Vogt.
Series II, Materials About Joyce and His Works, consists of
correspondence and manuscripts principally pertaining to Joyce. There are
holograph drafts, typescripts, and galley proofs of
James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses
(1960), by Frank Budgen, as well as drafts of
James Joyce's Work in Progress and Old Norse
Poetry,
Joyce's chapters of Going Forth by Day,
My Friend James Joyce, and
Further recollections of James Joyce.
John Francis Byrne is represented in this section with five holograph
notebooks and galley proofs for his memoir
Silent Years (1953), an address given at
Cornell University in 1959, as well as numerous articles and a review of
Richard Ellmann's
James Joyce. Included also are four reviews
of
Silent Years, by Herbert Cahoon, Kuna Dolch,
Richard Ellmann, and W. B. Ready. The extensive Byrne correspondence
principally concerns
Silent Years. Incoming letters to Byrne are
from Robert Adams (of Cornell University), Sylvia Beach, Isabel MacGarry Crotty
(an old friend), Richard Ellmann, Robert Giroux (of Harcourt, Brace and
Company, Inc.), John Stanislaus Joyce, Lucia Joyce, and from several friends.
There are also letters from Farrar, Straus & Young, Inc., and from authors
Vivian Mercier, Francis and Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, and Mabel Worthington,
among others.
A typescript of a speech by Richard Ellmann,
James Joyce, Irish European, is here, as
well as writings by Stuart Gilbert such as a biographical sketch on Joyce for
the
Dictionary of National Biography, page
proofs for his
James Joyce's Ulysses (1930), and a small
folder of Joyceana. There are galley proofs for a review copy of
My Brother's Keeper: James Joyce's Early Years
(1958) by Stanislaus Joyce; numerous articles about Joyce or his
writings by James Findlay Hendry, Helen Joyce, Lucie Leon, Josiah Mitchell
Morse, Joseph Prescott, and Derek S. Savage, among others; transcriptions of
radio broadcasts for the B.B.C. on Joyce by W. R. Rodgers and James Stephens;
and musical scores for
The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo and
May Song It Flourish by J. Willard
Roosevelt. In addition to these writings referring to Joyce are several
political articles by Francis and Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington.
In addition to the letters already mentioned in this Series are letters
from Byrne's wife, Gertrude, as well as letters from Sylvia Beach, Stuart
Gilbert, Harriet Weaver, Edward Titus, Herbert Thring, and others.
Elsewhere in the Center are nine Vertical File folders which contain
several maps of Ireland, postcards and articles about the Irish rebellion of
1916 and other related political matters, reviews and press notices of Joyce's
works, exhibition catalogs, publishers advertisements, a wood block with type
set for
Ulysses, and articles and obituaries
following Joyce's death. The Art Collection holds busts of Joyce by Sava
Botzaris and Jo Davidson, as well as sculptures, paintings, and drawings by
George Barker, Frank Budgen, Zdzislaw Czermanski, Desmond Harmsworth, Augustus
John, Harry Kernoff, Wyndham Lewis, Ivan Opffer, A. L. Price, Louis Sargent,
and Schoor. Several photos of Joyce can be found in the Photography Collection.
The Center is also home to the 564 volumes from Joyce's Trieste library, formed
between 1904 and 1920.
Other manuscripts and letters by Joyce can be found in the collections
of Edouard Dujardin, Morris Ernst, Stuart Gilbert, Oliver St. John Gogarty, the
James Joyce/Lake collection, Christopher Morley, PEN, John Rodker, Evelyn
Scott, Maurice Saillet, and Thornton Wilder.
For further information see
Joyce at Texas: Essays on the James Joyce Materials
at the Humanities Research Center by Dave Oliphant and Thomas Zigal,
Austin, 1983, a complete issue of
The Library Chronicle devoted to James
Joyce. For information on the Trieste library see
Catalogue of James Joyce's Trieste Library
by Michael Gillespie, Austin, 1986. A published facsimile of the page
proofs of
Ulysses is available for patron use.