Word: life
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...brood with eleven mortgages. There is Joyce's wife Nora, a Galway girl with a tart tongue and no head for "that chop suey he's writing," as she once said of Finnegans Wake. There is Brother Stanislaus, the plodding provident ant in Joyce's grasshopper life...
...Life with father was sometimes all beer and no victuals. The meticulous Stanislaus once calculated that John Joyce was roaring drunk 3.97 days a week. At such times, Papa would reel home in a vicious temper, flail away at any child within reach, and snarl, "I'll leave you all where Jesus left the Jews." An ardent Parnellite, the elder Joyce undoubtedly inspired the nine-year-old James to his first known literary effort, a poem to the fallen leader, in which Parnell was likened to an eagle, looking down from...
James Joyce harbored throughout his life a compulsive need to feel himself betrayed. Perhaps it helped him to maintain his chosen stance of lonely, lofty defiance of the "trolls," as he called the common...
Afraid of Thunder. Precocious as a writer, Joyce was also precocious sociologically. He had his first sexual experience at the age of 14 with a prostitute on a riverbank. Some small taint of degradation kept clinging to his idea of sex-one of the many dramatic paradoxes in his life. He was a near-alcoholic; yet he pursued his writing craft with monastic austerity. He had the courage to face approaching blindness, eleven eye operations, and his daughter Lucia's madness, but he ran from dogs and thunder. He renounced Roman Catholicism, but he could never rid his mind...
Joyce always liked to say that Nora Barnacle had come "sauntering" into his life out of the Dublin hotel where she worked as a waitress. The first day they went walking together was June 16, 1904, and Joyce always regarded it so romantically that he made it Bloomsday. the day everything happens in Ulysses. Nora had only a grammar school education, but when Joyce spouted his literary dreams to her and then declaimed: "Is there one who understands me?", Nora understood enough to say yes. She eloped with him to the Continent (they were not married till 27 years later...