James Joyce: Unfacts, Fiction, and Facts

Abstract

In an undated and so far unedited letter, now in the Joyce Collection at Cornell University, James Joyce wrote from Trieste, then in Austria, to his brother Stanislaus sometime in the autumn of 1905: “When you remember that Dublin has been a capital for thousands of years, that it is the ‘second’ city of the British empire, that it is nearly three times as big as Venice it seems strange that no artist has given it to the world.” About the same time, 1 September 1905, Joyce asked Stanislaus by card: “Is it not possible for a few persons of character and culture to make Dublin a capital such as Christiania has become?” Sometime in the next year, 1906, Joyce wrote again to Stanislaus, this time from Rome: “The interest I took in socialism has left me. I have gradually slid down until I have ceased to take interest in any subject. I look at God and his theatre through the eyes of my fellow-clerks so that nothing surprises, moves, excites or disgusts me…. Yet I have certain ideas I would like to give form to : not as doctrine but as the continuation of the expression of myself which I now see I began in Chamber Music.”