This Day in Literary History (Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ and the Irish Literary Revival)

February 2, 1922—On the morning of his 40^th birthday, James Joyce was presented with the first copy of his novel Ulysses, by his friend Sylvia Beach, owner of the Parisian bookstore Shakespeare and Co. As my college friend Steve was good enough to remind me recently, the great event occurred on Groundhog’s Day.

Only 1,000 copies of the book were printed in that initial run, but news about its extraordinary nature soon spread. Not everyone was pleased. At least a few Irish citizens, for instance, were so annoyed by Joyce’s modernist masterpiece that they probably wished that he, like the groundhog, had instead chosen to hibernate a while longer. One of those was Lady Augusta Gregory, one of the artistic directors of Ireland’s Abbey Theatre and a longtime patron of writers.

In one chapter of Joyce’s novel, for instance, he had referred to her as an “old hake”--an Irish term for a gossipy woman. She would also have read (or, at least, heard) a line about “our peasant plays,” an unmistakable reference to the type of material that she, William Butler Yeats, and John Millington Synge had staged at the Abbey. Synge himself, dead 13 years, came in for a jab. Shakespeare, one of Joyce’s characters notes, was the “chap that writes like Synge.”

It’s been months since I saw Woody Allen’s very fine Midnight in Paris, but now I’m a little chagrined that he didn’t get around to depicting Joyce among the 1920s notables that Owen Wilson encounters on his nocturnal excursions. With his deteriorating eyesight, his drinking and his fine tenor voice (so fine that many, including wife Nora, felt he should have been a singer rather than a writer), Joyce would have made as distinct an impression as any of the culturati in the final cut of the movie, even Ernest Hemingway.

“Jim” Joyce (as the young American called him) and Hemingway had something else in common besides their Paris days: they frequently bit the hand of anyone kind enough to help them when they were starting out. Hemingway’s works are littered with the victims of his numerous literary assassinations: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Harold Loeb, Sinclair Lewis, and John Dos Passos, to name just a few.

At least let’s give Joyce credit for this much: those whom he attacked had plenty of opportunity to prepare themselves for what he might say.

Take Yeats, for instance. The great poet and friend of Lady Gregory is believed to have met Joyce only twice. The first and more memorable of the two encounters occurred in October 1902. The conversation might have taken an inexorable turn for the worst when Yeats, slightly annoyed by Joyce’s suggestion that the folklore-derived plots of Yeats’ plays evidenced the poet’s deterioration, pointed to a page in one of Joyce’s short stories and countered that he had “got that from somebody else who got it from the folk.” Joyce, already certain that he was sui generis, insisted that it came from his own mind.

As Joyce got up to go, he turned to Yeats and asked how old he was. On being told 36 (one year younger than he actually was), the 20-year-old Joyce responded: “I thought as much. I have met you too late. You are too old.”

Joyce, in other words, was already demonstrating a youthful arrogance perhaps only exceeded by Orson Welles at the time of Citizen Kane: the kind that led Herman Mankiewicz, the filmmaker's collaborator on that classic, to crack, "There but for the grace of God, goes God."

One month after Yeats had his encounter with Joyce, the poet arranged for the young man to meet Lady Gregory. You have to ask yourself why Yeats did something so preposterous -- and to someone who was his friend, for heaven's sake--when his own encounter with this young welp turned out to be so unsatisfactory. The only explanation I have is that misery loves company.


Early in 1903, Lady Gregory arranged for the Daily Express to send Joyce books to be reviewed. This would help alleviate his money problems while getting his name before the public. One of the books the editor of this publication mailed Joyce was Lady Gregory’s own Poets and Dreamers. I'm sure there was an expectation that Joyce would go easy on it.

You get an idea of the tone of the subsequent review in this phrase: “in the fullness of its sterility.”

Oh, did I forget to mention that Lady Gregory was not happy one bit about this?

Perhaps Joyce felt the aid he received was not commensurate with his genius. Perhaps he hated the feeling of being beholden to anyone. At the end of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce’s alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, vows to “forge, in the smithy of my soul, the uncreated conscience of my race.” That’s a grandiose ambition, but, because it acknowledges no influences or creative forbears, it’s also filled with isolation and alienation.


So, as novelist-critic Thomas Flanagan wrote in his essay collection There You Are, Joyce managed, in Ulysses, to accomplish "an Irish rebellion of the deepest and the subtlest kind, a rebellion within the word, within language itself." It was an act of separation not merely from the "acquired speech" of Stephen's English dean of studies, nor even from the Roman Catholic Church from which Joyce famously fell away, but also from Gregory, Yeats, and the other Protestant lights of the Irish Literary Revival.

Ironically, for all of Joyce’s attempts to pick a fight with Lady Gregory, he  shared with her a highly developed ural sensibility--or, if you will, an ear for dialogue. It would serve both exceedingly well throughout the rest of their careers.

Lady Gregory's attempt to capture the spoken cadences of Irish peasants represented an important advance in a country where previous writers had settled for thick and awkward dialect that turned people into caricatures. And in Ulysses, almost by way of compensating for what he could no longer see, the visually impaired Joyce created dialogue and interior monologues ("stream of consciousness") that caught ordinary Dubliners on a seemingly ordinary day that his prose made extraordinary.