The James Joyce Centre is delighted to announce that we are now taking bookings for our Bloomsday Festival 2013 programme.

We’ve scheduled a week of of engaging and inspiring events, from staples like the traditional Bloomsday Breakfast and walking tours, to brand new theatre, live music, talks and other special events.

CLICK HERE to view all of our events. And CLICK HERE to book you tickets! You can also book tickets over the phone by calling us at +353-18788547 or by dropping into the Centre at 35 North Great George’s Street, Dublin 1.

We’ve also expanded our programme to include a comprehensive listing of many other Bloomsday events taking place across the city throughout June. You can view them on our website HERE.

We look forward to welcoming you at the James Joyce Centre this June!

The post Announcing Our Bloomsday Festival 2013 Programme! appeared first on James Joyce Centre.

Partly because of the poor reception of his new work, Joyce proposed to Harriet Weaver that James Stephens might take over and finish work on the book. He didn’t mention this to Stephens until much later and, in the end, the proposal came to nothing.

Joyce had already written to Harriet Weaver on 12 May suggesting that he might hand over work on Part II of his book to someone else, but he concluded that letter by saying that there was no ‘waster’ wasteful enough to take on such a project. On 20 May, however, he wrote that he was considering James Stephens for the role.

Up to this point, there had been little contact between Joyce and James Stephens. At least as early as 1909, Joyce had read works by Stephens in the Sinn Féin newspaper, to which Stephens was a regular contributor. Apparently they met and went drinking together in Dublin in 1912, when Stephens told Joyce he hadn’t read a word of his. Though Stephens thought Chamber Music was pleasant, he called Dubliners ‘unpleasant,’ and after Ulysses was published he claimed that Joyce had written the same book three times and hadn’t developed at all as a writer.

Apart from what he had read in Sinn Féin, Joyce does not seem to have been familiar with Stephens’ writing. In his letter of 20 May 1927, he mentioned that he had started reading Stephens’ Deirdre the day before, but this seems to be all he has read. It is hard to say what Joyce saw in Stephens’ work that made him think Stephens would be able to do anything with Work in Progress. Joyce claimed that Stephens would not give the book the same time or effort that Joyce was giving it, but he adds that this might not be a bad thing for the book, or for him.

Joyce’s hope was that if Stephens agreed to maintain certain essential points, he would show him the basic strands so the pattern could be completed. Perhaps most of all, Joyce liked the idea of the initials ‘JJ&S’ (standing for James Joyce & Stephens, but also John Jameson & Sons, the Dublin whiskey makers) appearing under the title of the book.

At the end of May 1927 Joyce remarked on coincidences between him and Stephens, including that Stephens was born on the exact same day as him, and that Stephens’ name was made up of Joyce’s first name and the first name of Stephen Dedalus. Even so, it was some time before Joyce broached the subject with Stephens, and Stephens thought the whole thing had more to do with the coincidence of birthdays than anything else.

After discussing the idea with Stephens in July 1929, Joyce was reassured that Stephens would do everything he could. But Stephens also told Joyce that Anna Livia Plurabelle was the ‘greatest prose ever written by a man,’ and insisted that Joyce would finish the book himself. In November 1929 Joyce spent most of a week with Stephens explaining Finnegans Wake to him, after which Stephens promised to continue the work if Joyce himself could not.

Joyce sent Stephens telegrams in 1935 and 1936 wishing him many happy returns for ‘our’ birthday, but nothing more came of the idea of him completing Finnegans Wake. And it now seems that Stephens wasn’t born on 2 February 1882 after all.

Sources & Further Reading:

Ellmann, Richard: James Joyce – New and Revised edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Finneran, Richard J: ‘James Joyce and James Stephens: The Record of a Friendship with Unpublished Letters from Joyce to Stephens,’ in James Joyce Quarterly, vol. 11, no. 3, Spring 1974, 279-292.

Joyce, James: Letters of James Joyce, vol. I, edited by Stuart Gilbert, London: Faber & Faber, 1957; vol. III, edited by Richard Ellmann, London: Faber & Faber, 1966.

The post On this day…20 May appeared first on James Joyce Centre.

The article, ‘Home Rule Comes of Age,’ was written in Italian and published in Il Piccolo della Sera. It was the second of nine articles on Irish affairs that Joyce wrote for the Piccolo, starting from March 1907. The irredentist readership of Il Piccolo della Sera, the audience Joyce was aiming his article at, was familiar with Irish relations with Britain.

In this article, Joyce sarcastically greeted the coming of age of attempts to achieve Home Rule for Ireland. The first Home Rule Bill (the Government of Ireland Bill 1886) had been introduced by Gladstone’s government on 8 April 1886. Joyce’s article starts with a dramatic account of how Gladstone’s four-hour speech proposing the Bill was received on the streets of Dublin. Joyce himself was only four years old at the time, but doubtless his father witnessed the scenes and told Joyce about them.

After two months of debate the Bill was defeated in June by 341 votes to 311, and Gladstone’s government collapsed. Gladstone’s second attempt came in 1893 and this time the Bill was passed by the House of Commons but defeated in the Lords.

Now, twenty-one years after the first Home Rule Bill, the Chief Secretary for Ireland, Augustine Birrell, had proposed the Irish Council Bill on 7 May 1907. The Bill would have given Ireland a very limited version of Home Rule, in spite of which it was initially supported by the Irish Parliamentary Party.

Looking at the history of Home Rule from this perspective, Joyce drew two conclusions. First, that it was no longer the forces of British Conservatism that were the greatest threat to Ireland. That threat Joyce saw as coming from the combined forces of Liberalism and the Catholic Church. Second, Joyce claimed that the Irish Parliamentary Party, which had supposedly pursued Ireland’s interests in Westminster for nearly thirty years, was now effectively morally bankrupt. During those thirty years, Irish taxes had increased by 88 million, and 1 million people had left the country. In the meantime, the Party’s deputies had enriched themselves.

In preparing and writing this article, Joyce made use of his reading of the Sinn Féin newspaper, edited by Arthur Griffith. Griffith, incidentally, held anti-Semitic views and published several anti-Semitic articles in Sinn Féin. He also supported the anti-Semitic campaign against Jewish businesses in Limerick in 1904.  It is interesting to note that anti-Semitic campaigns in Ireland coincided with the Home Rule Bills of 1886 and 1893.

Birrell’s Irish Council Bill, which prompted Joyce’s article, was abandoned by the Government in June 1907 after Nationalists withdrew their support for it. A third Home Rule Bill, introduced in April 1912, was passed in May 1914 but was suspended for the duration of the First World War. After the war, the situation in Ireland had changed dramatically and had gone well beyond the terms of the Home Rule Act of 1914.

Sources & Further Reading:

Ellmann, Richard: James Joyce – New and Revised edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Joyce, James: Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, edited with an Introduction and Notes by Kevin Barry, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

The post On this day…19 May appeared first on James Joyce Centre.

Though Joyce had started writing Ulysses in 1914, by May 1918 he had only just completed a final draft of the ‘Hades’ episode, and the ‘Proteus’ episode had only just appeared in print in the Little Review. On 18 May, he wrote to Harriet Weaver setting out where he was with Ulysses and his plans for its publication.

The serialisation of Ulysses had been announced in the Little Review in January 1918, and ‘Telemachus’ appeared there in March. It was followed by ‘Nestor’ in April, and ‘Proteus’ in May. These episodes were also supposed to appear in Harriet Weaver’s Egoist magazine, but Weaver was having difficulty with her printers who were refusing to print Joyce’s text. Joyce suggested she could get her magazine printed in Paris by George Crès but Weaver rejected the idea.

In his letter of 18 May 1918 Joyce told Weaver that he regretted that she could not accept Crès’ offer. He said he feared that she has lost money on his book. To try to compensate for that, he offered to consider the money she had already paid for the serial rights in Ulysses as advances on royalties for the book, and offered her the book rights.

Now that three episodes had been published in America, Joyce was considering offering Ben Huebsch the possibility of publishing the ‘Telemachia’ in a cheap paperback edition under the title Ulysses I. Joyce thought this might be a way of keeping people who were interested in his writing from forgetting that he existed.

He went on to tell Weaver that the second part of the book, the ‘Odyssey,’ would have eleven episodes (in the final version there are twelve episodes), and that the final part, the ‘Nostos,’ would have three episodes. Of these seventeen episodes, Joyce had finished six, but was unable to say how much of the book was really written. He claimed that some of the other episodes were already in their second draft, but that this meant little since he had spent about 200 hours revising the second draft of ‘Proteus’ before he was satisfied with it.

Nonetheless, Joyce told Weaver that he hoped the book would be completed by the summer of 1919. In fact, it would take him two and a half years longer than that to finish the book, and much of what he had already written and published in the Little Review would be subject to a great deal of revision before it appeared in its final form in 1922.

Sources & Further Reading:

Ellmann, Richard: James Joyce – New and Revised edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Joyce, James: Letters of James Joyce, vol. I, London: Faber & Faber, 1957.

Norburn, Roger: A James Joyce Chronology, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

The post On this day…18 May appeared first on James Joyce Centre.

The reason for this was that the husband of one of Joyce’s typists was so disgusted by what he read that he burnt the manuscript his wife was typing. Joyce had already sent the original of the manuscript to Quinn and had no other manuscript of his own from which to reconstruct the burnt parts, so he had to ask Quinn to send him the missing pages.

Joyce felt that Circe herself was punishing him for what he had written, and he called it the ‘cursed’ Circe chapter. Most of the typists Joyce was using were helpful amateurs, but the results were not always helpful. In one case, the typist couldn’t bring herself to type in certain words, and so she left gaps where the words had to be filled in afterwards. Another could only type an hour or so each evening after getting a full-time job. In fact, Joyce claimed that ‘Circe’ had been typed on so many different kinds and colours of paper, and on so many different typewriters that it was a horrible thing to behold!

One typist had to give up typing the episode when her father, Dr Livisier, a famous Paris doctor, had a heart attack, and after this incident the manuscript was given to Mrs Harrison to type. At six o’clock on 8 April 1921 Mrs Harrison arrived at Joyce’s apartment in an agitated state to inform him that her husband, who worked at the British Embassy, had burnt part of the manuscript.

Apparently, she had left some pages on a table where her husband found them. After reading them, he tore them up and burnt them. Joyce told Quinn that this was followed by hysterical scenes in the house and on the street. From what she was able to tell him, Joyce couldn’t make out how much had been destroyed. Mrs Harrison told him she had hidden the rest, and she left, promising to return in an hour with everything.

As it happened, she didn’t return until the next day, leaving Joyce in suspense overnight. When she arrived with the package containing the remainder of the manuscript, Joyce realised that luckily only about six or seven pages had been destroyed. They covered the later part of the episode, from the time Bloom leaves Bella Cohen’s brothel to the beginning of the quarrel with the soldiers.

In addition to the ‘Circe’ manuscript, Joyce had also given Mrs Harrison copies of the Little Review and of the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ typescript to help her in preparing the typescript of ‘Circe.’ Despite writing to her, Joyce still hadn’t got these back three weeks later, and he was trying to track her down where she worked in the hope that her husband hadn’t burnt these things too.

Since Joyce had already sent the manuscript to John Quinn in New York, he had only his notes to work from to try and reconstruct the missing pages, and so he wrote to Quinn asking him to send the relevant pages back. Perhaps fearing the curse of Circe, Quinn instead had photostats made of the pages and sent them to Joyce on 17 May.

Sources & Further Reading:

Ellmann, Richard: James Joyce – New and Revised edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Joyce, James: Letters of James Joyce, vol. I, edited by Stuart Gilbert, London: Faber & Faber, 1957; vol. III, edited by Richard Ellmann, London: Faber & Faber, 1966.

Norburn, Roger: A James Joyce Chronology, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

The post On this day…17 May appeared first on James Joyce Centre.

What happens to the alternate possibilities of history once they have been superseded by events?  What would have happened if the famous “pisspot” never fell on Pyrrhus’ head, or if Julius Caesar was never killed?  And what difference does it make to this classroom of boys, who just want to hear a good ghost story or go outside to play.

Stephen doesn’t try to bring his students along for his meditiations on history, and instead pushes forward into the next lesson, which is a recitation of Milton’s “Lycidas.”  “Lycidas” was written as a memorial to a fellow student of Milton’s at Cambridge, one  Edward King, who drowned when the ship he was traveling in sank in the Irish Sea.  Edward King was born in Ireland, and was traveling back to Ireland to visit his home when he died. He was a rival of Milton’s, though they were also friends – and another candidate for Stephen’s list of disappointed possibilities.

Back in the first episode we heard about another drowned man – the one whose body Mulligan expects will appear in the harbor today .  Mulligan himself  has saved a drowning man, which Stephen sees as one of the differences between them – for all of Mulligan’s bluster and lack of loyalty, he is brave.  But without getting into an elaborate game of chase-the-symbol (just google “drowning man in Ulysses” if you do”), let’s just say that the connection between these drowned men seems to speak to how death forecloses possibilities – which is a grim thought when standing in front of a room of schoolchildren.

Note that the boys are supposed to be reciting this poem from memory – Stephen observes that the boy he calls on is cheating by looking at his book, which is hidden (poorly) behind the “breastwork” of his satchel.

The post Reader’s Guide: Nestor 011 appeared first on James Joyce Centre.

The Feis Ceoil is an annual celebration of Irish musical talent with competitions in various categories including singing. In 1903, the Feis Ceoil tenor singing competition was won by John McCormack. The prize was a year-long scholarship to study in Italy. Shortly after his return to Ireland in 1904, McCormack persuaded his friend Joyce to enter the Feis Ceoil.

In preparation, Joyce started taking lessons from Benedetto Palmieri, the best singing teacher in Dublin, but he soon switched to Vincent O’Brien who was less expensive than Palmieri. Joyce had moved into rooms at 60 Shelbourne Road where he hired a piano to rehearse for the competition. Joyce sang in a concert given by the St Brigid’s Panoramic Choir on Saturday 14 May 1904, and two days later he sang at the Feis Ceoil.

The set pieces for the singing competition in 1904 were ‘No Chastening’ by Arthur Sullivan (of Gilbert and Sullivan fame), and ‘A Long Farewell,’ a traditional song arranged by Moffat. According to the review of the competition in the Irish Daily Independent on 17 May, “Mr. Joyce showed himself possessed of the finest quality voice of any of those competing…”

Part of the competition was to sing at sight from a previously unseen music score, and at that point Joyce simply walked off the stage. It seems that the judge, Professor Luigi Denza, had intended to give Joyce the gold medal but, when Joyce refused the sight-reading test, Denza could not place him among the medal-winners. However, at the end of the competition, the second-placed singer was disqualified and Denza awarded the third-place medal to Joyce. Joyce gave the medal to his Aunt Josephine and today it is owned by the dancer Michael Flatley.

In 1909 while Joyce was visiting Dublin he paid a visit to Charles Wilson, secretary of the Feis Ceoil, to try and promote Geoffrey Molyneux Palmer’s settings of Joyce’s poems by having singers at the Feis Ceoil sing them, but nothing seems to have come of it.

Sources & Further Reading:

Ellmann, Richard: James Joyce – New and Revised edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.

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HCE

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Joyce’s mother, Mary Jane Murray, known as May, was born in the Eagle House tavern in Terenure on 15 May 1859. Her father, John Murray, came from Longford and was an agent for wine and spirits, while her mother came from a long line of Dublin businessmen.

May Murray’s brothers William and John were well known to Joyce who based characters in his fiction on them. William Murray, on whom Joyce based the character Richie Goulding, married Josephine Giltrap who became an important figure in Joyce’s life. May Murray’s aunts (Mrs Lyons and Mrs Ellen Callanan) ran the Misses Flynn’s school at 15 Usher’s Island where May received lessons in piano, voice and dancing. Joyce based the characters of the Morkan sisters on his great aunts and used the house at Usher’s Island as the location for the party in the story ‘The Dead.’

May Murray’s father’s business brought him into contact with the Dublin and Chapelizod Distillery Company, the Secretary of which was John Joyce who took to visiting Murray at his home at 7 Clanbrassil Street. May Murray and John Joyce also sang together in the choir at the Church of the Three Patrons in Rathmines. Despite being ten years older and having two broken engagements behind him, John Joyce was smitten.

However, both May Murray’s father and John Joyce’s mother objected to the match. John Murray may well have recognised the budding drinker in John Joyce and refused to give his consent. On one occasion he caused a fuss when he discovered his daughter with John Joyce on Grafton Street, and he sent her home in a cab. Mrs Murray approved of the match and when John Joyce moved into a house at 15 Clanbrassil Street, a short distance from the Murrays’ home, John Murray capitulated and gave his consent. Mrs Joyce, however, continued to object and around the time John Joyce married May Murray, Mrs Joyce went back to Cork where she died without being reconciled with her son.

May Murray was ten days short of her twenty-first birthday when she and John Joyce were married in the Church of Mary Immaculate, Refuge of Sinners, in Rathmines on 5 May 1880. Fr Patrick Gorman officiated and the wedding was witnessed by Margaretta Lyons (May Murray’s first cousin) and John George Lee. The newlyweds honeymooned in London, and after their return to Dublin they lived briefly at Ontario Terrace and Emorville Avenue before moving to Northumberland Avenue, Dun Laoghaire.

A first child, christened John, died in infancy, and John Joyce had already started mortgaging his property by the time James Joyce was born on 2 February 1882. Another three boys followed along with six girls until a last boy, Freddie, died in infancy in 1894. Shortly after, May Joyce was attacked by her husband and fled the house with the younger children. The incident seems to have been serious enough for the police to become involved, and it marked another stage in the slow decline of the family.

Given her husband’s drinking and lack of employment, May Joyce seems to have had great patience and staying power, but his behaviour seems to have gradually worn her down. Her decline wasn’t helped by Joyce’s rejection of his Catholic religion, and an even greater blow came with the death of George Joyce in May 1902. George had been suffering from typhoid and died of peritonitis after she had started feeding him again.

Despite the fact that Joyce thought she had never looked so well as she looked when he was home from Paris in winter 1902-03, his mother’s decline was well underway. She blamed it at first on her teeth and on her eyesight, but by April 1903 she was already confined to bed. From the extant letters, she seems to have given Joyce no hint of her illness except towards the middle of April. On Good Friday morning, Joyce sent her a postcard asking her to tell him what was wrong, but when he returned to his hotel that evening he found his father’s telegram informing him that his mother was dying.

May Joyce had been diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver, though it seems she actually had cancer of the liver. John Joyce took out yet another mortgage on 24 April to cover his wife’s medical expenses, and May Joyce lingered in increasing sickness and pain until her death on 13 August. She lapsed into a coma in her final hours with her family about her. Joyce and his brother Stanislaus refused to kneel and pray at the bedside of their dying mother, despite being ordered to do so by John Murray. Mrs Joyce was laid out in a brown habit at the house at St Peter’s Terrace before being buried in the plot in Glasnevin Cemetery. The death certificate said she died of cirrhosis.

After her death, Joyce found among her paltry possessions a bundle of love letters written to her by John Joyce. He read them and told his brother Stanislaus there was nothing in them. Stanislaus burned them without reading them.

A year later, Joyce’s first story, ‘The Sisters,’ was published in the Irish Homestead magazine on the first anniversary of May Joyce’s death. A couple of weeks later, Joyce wrote to Nora Barnacle to say that he believed his mother was killed by his father’s behaviour and by his own frank and cynical conduct. But he added that when he looked upon her grey and wasted face as she lay in her coffin, he knew that he was looking on the face of a victim, and he cursed the system that had made her a victim.

Sources & Further Reading:

Ellmann, Richard: James Joyce – New and Revised edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Joyce, James: Letters of James Joyce, vol. II, edited by Richard Ellmann, London: Faber & Faber, 1966.

The post On this day…15 May appeared first on James Joyce Centre.

The bazaar opened on Monday 14 May (though the official opening by the Lord Lieutenant, Lord Houghton, only took place on Tuesday 15 May) and ran until Saturday 19 May 1894. It was held in aid of Jervis Street Hospital, an institution run by the Catholic Sisters of Mercy. Joyce used the name ‘Araby’ for one of the stories in Dubliners, the action of which centres on a boy’s visit to the Araby bazaar.

The bazaar was held in the Royal Dublin Society’s grounds in Ballsbridge. Though a proper platform was not built there until 1902, the RDS had paid for a siding to be constructed to allow easy access by train for visitors and the delivery of goods to the show grounds.

The programme for the Araby bazaar promised a ‘Grand Oriental Fete’ and was illustrated with images of an Arab mounted on a camel and oriental-looking buildings with onion domes and minarets. Admission to the bazaar was one shilling. The bazaar had its own theme song, with words by WG Wills and music by Frederick Clay, the first verse of which went

I’ll sing to thee of Araby,
And tales of fair Cashmere,
Wild tales to cheat thee of a sigh,
Or charm thee to a tear.

To add to the oriental atmosphere the catalogue promised a ‘magnificent representation of an oriental city,’ complete with Cairo donkeys and donkey boys, and an Arab encampment. Entertainment would include an international tug-of-war, dances by 250 trained children, eastern magic from the Egyptian Hall in London, ‘skirt dancing up to date,’ a grand theatre of varieties, tableaux, theatricals, and Christy Minstrels.

Other diversions included switchback railways and roundabouts, ‘Menotti, the King of the air,’ the great Stockholm wonder, bicycle polo, rifle and clay pigeon shooting, and magnificent displays of fireworks by Brock, of the Crystal Palace, London.

Further musical entertainment would include ‘The Alhambra,’ an orchestra of 50 performers, the Euterpean Ladies’ Orchestra, and eight military bands, as well as a Café Chantant ‘with all the latest Parisian successes,’ under the management of Mr Houston. The Café promised French, German, Italian, Spanish, English and Irish songs, as well as piano and violin solos and ‘Orpheus Glees.’

Apparently there were numerous bazaars held in Dublin around this time, though often in aid of Protestant or Masonic charities. In 1893, the Archbishop of Dublin William Walsh warned that any Catholic who attended a Masonic bazaar would be liable for excommunication, such was the Catholic fear of the influence of the Masons. Perhaps it is with this in mind that the boy’s aunt in ‘Araby’ expresses her hope that the Araby bazaar is not some Freemason affair.

Sources & Further Reading:

Ellmann, Richard: James Joyce – New and Revised edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Gifford, Don: Joyce Annotated – Notes for Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, second edition, Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982.

Joyce, James: Dubliners – An Illustrated Edition, with annotations, eds. John Wyse Jackson & Bernard McGinley, London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1993.

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