Anjelica Huston on James Joyce: A Shout in the Street

This programme contains very strong language

And after I was only a week in the comfort, he died.

He was buried where his people came from.

Oh, the day I heard that.

That he was dead.

The film of James Joyce's story

The Dead has a special meaning for me.

The role of Gretta Conroy was a wonderful part to play.

The screenplay was written by my brother, Tony,

and the movie was directed by my father, John Huston.

It was his cherished ambition to

film an adaptation of Joyce's story for many years,

and this was the last of the many

classic movies that he made during his lifetime.

I'd heard of the book Ulysses, and I read it, and it was just

an enormous influence it played on my life.

Having read Ulysses, I proceeded to read everything else that

he'd written. And among that material was The Dead,

and of course, it's one of the most extraordinary

short stories

in the English language.

One, two, three.

My father was far from alone in his admiration of James Joyce

and his belief in Joyce's greatness as a writer.

Joyce questions everything.

He wants to know more about everything.

And in that respect, I think he is the poet of revelation.

I think in Ireland he's viewed as an heroic figure.

And I don't think anybody now in

Ireland would take offence at anything he said.

It all turned out to be true.

You probably get to know Joyce most...

You know, you see his image in pubs.

This is one of the complications of Ireland's projection on the world

is it's synonymous with good times and booze,

and I suppose Joyce has been

subsumed into that in quite a big way,

which is probably quite appropriate.

Growing up in Ireland, you just

can't not be aware of Joyce as a figure, as a spectre.

He's everywhere, right?

I think he was cold

in the way that many great artists are cold.

I think he was entirely self absorbed.

If you're too celebrated or celebrated early in Ireland,

clearly you're doing something wrong and you're going nowhere.

It's like you should be annoying Ireland in some way.

He asked himself the question once - does a writer have to be ruthless?

The answer is yes.

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born in 1882 in Rathgar,

a suburb on the south side of Dublin.

He was the oldest of ten surviving

children born to John Stanislaus Joyce and May Murray.

His mother seems to have been a

submissive and deeply religious woman.

She must also have been very tolerant,

since her husband was an alcoholic and a spendthrift.

He managed to run through a large inheritance and did not hold down a

regular job for the last 40 years of his life.

As John Joyce's income fell,

his family changed houses often to escape their creditors.

In theory, this was a kind of

Catholic middle class family who desperately wanted to

be respectable, but they couldn't keep up that sort of pretence.

You know, the tradesmen were always coming, looking to be paid,

and were not being paid. They were hiding from the rent collectors.

But John was determined that his son would be educated at Ireland's elite

schools. Those run by Jesuits and not by the Christian Brothers.

The Jesuits, in terms of Catholic education,

were for the Catholic elite,

and the Christian Brothers were for the lower middle classes,

and the difference between one and the other was enormous.

James first attended Clongowes Wood College,

but had to leave when his father couldn't pay the school fees.

However, he was soon offered free tuition at Belvedere College in the

heart of Dublin.

I think the Jesuit education gave him a sense of himself as different.

Joyce grew up during a period of

political uncertainty in Ireland that had

developed in the decades that

followed the fall and death of Charles Stewart Parnell,

the uncrowned king of Ireland,

who had brought the country to the verge of independence.

But Parnell had been named as an adulterer

in a sensational divorce case,

and the political party he led had split in two.

Joyce's own home was split by this division,

which he wrote about in his first novel.

Joyce's novel was dramatized by Hugh Leonard in his play, Stephen D.

In one of its scenes, Stephen Dedalus is seven years old,

and has been allowed to join the adults for Christmas dinner.

Parnell's the only figure that Joyce doesn't mock.

This sense of him as a martyr.

The sense of him as a sexual martyr.

The sense of him as someone who had suffered deeply at the hands of the

worst elements in both Irish and English society.

An argument breaks out about the

role of the Catholic Church in the fall of Parnell.

And were we to desert Parnell at the bidding of the English people?

He was no longer worthy to lead.

He was a public sinner.

-Yeah.

-We are all sinners, Mrs Reardon, and black sinners.

The row plants the first doubts in his mind

about the authority of the Catholic Church.

Joyce was a brilliant student

who won awards and scholarships from an early age,

and whose writing was first published

when he was just nine years old.

His family is living in abject poverty, but when he's 12,

Joyce wins a top prize in Ireland's national exams,

a windfall for the family,

and his father says Joyce can spend it as he chooses.

He thinks it will teach his son the value of money.

But Joyce uses it to visit expensive restaurants and pay for trips to the

theatre. Within a few weeks,

the money is gone and the family is poverty stricken once again.

Like his father, Joyce loved telling stories, singing and drinking.

When he had money, he spent it with abandon.

When he had none, he borrowed shamelessly from his friends.

Joyce was not only precocious in his academic achievements,

he also became sexually active while he was still very young.

Respectability is such a powerful force in Victorian society that if

you're going to follow your sexual desires,

it means that you're going to place

yourself outside of that society very,

very fast and Joyce seems,

from what we can tell from his own versions of himself,

to be actually pretty comfortable

early on with making that breach between

himself and the society around him.

He frequented the prostitutes who

operated in the Monto district of Dublin,

on the north side of the River Liffey, close to his school.

Everything would begin to change for Joyce on the day he came across a

young woman recently arrived in Dublin from Galway.

Her name was Nora Barnacle.

Nora caught Joyce's eye as he was walking in the centre of Dublin.

Nora claimed she mistook him for a Swedish sailor,

with his electric blue eyes, yachting cap, and plimsolls.

But when he began to speak, she realised her mistake.

"I knew him at once for just another

"Dublin jackeen chatting up a country girl."

She represented a part of Ireland that he, the Dubliner, did not know,

and in fact feared.

They met again six days later, on June 16, 1904.

Nora and Joyce walked along the

River Liffey until they reached a secluded

spot, where they became intimate.

Some years later, he recalled that day.

"It was you who slid your hand down inside my trousers and frigged me

"slowly until I came off through your fingers,

"all the time bending over me and gazing at me out of your quiet,

"saint-like eyes."

She literally took him in hand and literally made a man of him.

In many ways, this was most important day of his life,

and it would become known as Bloomsday,

the day on which he set all the

action of his most famous novel, Ulysses.

Nora might have seemed an unlikely match for Joyce.

She'd been born in a Galway workhouse to illiterate parents.

Her father was a drunkard.

Her upbringing was chaotic, and her education was rudimentary.

She'd run away from home after a severe beating,

and was working as a chambermaid when she met Joyce.

He sees a woman who is not a prostitute,

but who has sexual desires,

and sexual desires that are probably as strong as his own.

From the beginning, they trusted one another.

Within a few weeks,

they'd agreed to leave Ireland together and seek a new life abroad.

They eventually settled in Trieste,

at that time part of Austria-Hungary,

where Joyce obtained a post teaching English,

and where he believed he would become not just an Irish writer,

but a world-famous writer.

For the trams of Trieste,

even they can only add to the appeal of a city caught in the varying

fashions of various occupiers.

Of course, the Romans were here, but later,

Austrian rule must surely have given Trieste this taste of Vienna.

Trieste at that time was the most

important port in the Habsburg Empire.

It was a cosmopolitan city, and had

become a hub of languages, music, art, and literature.

"They call it a ramshackle empire.

"I wish to God there were more such empires."

It's not Dublin.

It's completely unlike Dublin,

and yet there's something about it that immediately was Dublinesque.

I can see why Joyce loved it.

He would have loved it for the

mixture of types and of races and of languages.

Things really do change once he leaves Ireland.

To get away from that world of craw thumping, of petty jealousy,

into a world where he could begin to miss Dublin.

That instead of resenting it, wanting to leave it,

he could think about it in a way which was more sonorous and kinder.

Almost exactly a year after they first met, Nora gave birth to a son,

Giorgio. Two years later, she gave birth to a daughter, Lucia.

It is clear from the erotic letters they exchanged

that they enjoyed an intense physical relationship at that time.

"My love for you allows me to pray to the spirit of eternal beauty and

"tenderness mirrored in your eyes.

"Or to fling you down on that soft

"belly of yours and fuck you up behind

"like a hog riding a sow,

"glorying in the open shame of your upturned dress and white girlish

"drawers and the confusion of your flushed cheeks and tangled hair."

Nora seldom read Joyce's work and claimed she would rather he'd been a

professional singer than a writer.

But she gave him the support that he needed, and Joyce, in turn,

remained committed to Nora for the rest of his life.

You would never think seeing her separately, and seeing James Joyce,

that these two would be a marriage, but they were.

And a great one.

Nora had much to endure during their years in Trieste.

They were often penniless and had to move from one miserable apartment to

another. Joyce was also subject to great physical pain,

due to recurring eye and stomach problems.

But this was a period of exceptional creativity for him.

During these years, he completed his first collection of poems,

his first novel, and his first and only play.

He also published his first

collection of short stories, Dubliners.

You don't get Joyce's great work

without the formation of a consciousness

that is utterly free of two things.

One is shame, and the other is snobbery.

And Nora liberates him, finally, from both of those things.

Dubliners, his collection of 15 stories,

each of which represents a different aspect of Dublin life in the opening

years of the 20th century.

By the time we get to the end of that collection of short stories,

you've been taught something about a place that is so visceral.

You know, he caught it, you know.

I never... When I read it, I'd never been to Dublin,

and I certainly hadn't been to Dublin in that time, and never will,

but I feel like I knew it.

According to Joyce,

Dubliners is written in a style of scrupulous meanness,

to convey a sense of material hardship and emotional repression.

When people in Dublin go on about our Jimmy Joyce,

I never know the Jimmy Joyce they're talking about,

because if you look at the work,

he may have loved Dublin, but he disliked it intensely,

and you can certainly see that in Dubliners, for instance.

I mean, the portrait of Dublin in Dubliners is bleak,

cold, grey, and grimy.

The 15 stories are built around a

series of what Joyce termed epiphanies,

moments of profound insight and revelation.

Well, it is the one I can understand.

Just the stories are extraordinary.

The Dead is the final and most accomplished story in Dubliners,

and it takes place on the feast of the Epiphany.

I don't think art is a competitive field,

but there is a case to be put for

The Dead as possibly the greatest short

story ever written.

Its inspiration came from Nora Barnacle.

She told Joyce that as a girl in Galway,

she'd fallen in love with a boy who died while still very young.

I don't know why The Dead is so good.

Everything about it is good.

I thought it was the most devastatingly beautiful

short story I'd ever read.

The language is so poetic and at the same time so grounded.

It just spoke to my soul.

The Dead has been adapted as a one-act play, as an opera,

as a Broadway musical, and of course,

as the movie directed by my father,

-John Huston.

-The movie of The Dead was so close to the original,

it was so faithful, it is one of the few true kind of

proper acts of homage that you see to Joyce.

The lead character in Joyce's story is Gabriel Conroy,

who leads a carefully measured life.

Oops, you'll never guess what he has me wearing now.

Galoshes. That's the latest.

He and his wife Gretta attend a

Christmas party given by two elderly aunts

who are music teachers in Dublin.

The next thing he'll buy me will be a diving suit.

In the story, we realise, of course, he's falling apart.

He doesn't know who he is as a person,

he doesn't know who he is as an Irish person.

To tell you the truth, I'm sick of my own country.

-I'm sick of it.

-Why?

Superb.

Why?

Of course you've no answer.

He's challenged at every point and then as his...

The only thing he really knows is

his relationship with Gretta, his wife.

What row had you with Molly Ivers?

No, no row. Why, did she say we had?

No, I noticed you carrying on, that's all.

I'm trying to get that Mr Darcy to sing.

He's full of conceit, isn't he?

There was no row. She wanted me to

go on a trip to the west of Ireland and I said I wouldn't.

Oh, Gabriel, do go.

I'd love to see Galway again.

Well, you can go if you like.

I think there our great things in John Houston's film.

I think that the central performances of Donald McCann and

Anjelica Huston are glorious.

# Oh don't you remember. #

At the end of the evening,

Gabriel watches Gretta as she stands at the top of the stairs and listens

to a haunting ballad,

The Lass of Aughrim.

It's remarkable how then it becomes

a story about her, because you thought it was a story about him.

And he's able to do that with great economy,

but also with great sympathy.

# When we both met together. #

The real revolutionary in the story is Gretta.

She has come from the working class, come from the peasant class.

She has infiltrated the Dublin bourgeoisie

at its deepest, at its hardest.

# My babe lies cold within my arms. #

And by the end of the movie, she's done a complete flip.

He can't show vulnerability, and the moment that she shows vulnerability,

she's the conqueror.

Later, in their hotel,

Gretta becomes upset and tells Gabriel

that the ballad was one a young boy

called Michael Furey used to sing to her.

I used to go out walking with him when I was in Galway.

And perhaps that was why you wanted

-to go with Galway with that Ivers woman.

-What for?

How do I know? To see him, perhaps.

He's dead.

All of his expectations of her have somehow reversed,

and she's become like a wild creature.

She's become a wild swan again.

I suppose you were in love with this Michael Furey, Gretta.

I was great with him at the time.

What was it he died of so young?

Consumption, was it?

I think he died from me.

She then articulates the truth about her life in the most

perceptive and courageous way.

Did you not tell him to go back?

I implored of him to go home at once

and told him he'd get his death in the rain.

But he said did not want to live.

He realises that he can't... He can't control her.

He can only observe her as the free creature that she is.

So it's like he has to release her.

Then, of course, it ends with the most astonishing prose that I don't

think an Irish writer has ever come out with,

in those concluding paragraphs,

with this vision of Ireland as a

place snowbound and possibly paralysed,

but also with this potential for life,

stirring brilliantly underneath this gorgeous,

teeming imagery that he presents to you at the end.

Snow is falling.

Falling in that lonely churchyard where Michael Furey lies buried.

Falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling

like the descent of their last end

upon all the living and the dead.

The story is about a man's being revealed to himself.

While we're watching that happen, I think, we're revealed to ourselves.

What we think we are and what we are, really, is...

Are two different things.

A total labour of love.

It was... There was nothing but love involved.

Love for Ireland, love for the life we'd led there,

love of Irish character.

Oof.

And then deep understanding of...

..the kind of humanity that Joyce writes about in The Dead.

And the best thing you can say about The Dead is that it is as great a

film as Joyce's story is a story.

Dubliners was accepted for publication in 1905.

However, the printer refused to set all of the stories.

Three years later, the book was

again due to be published, but once again,

the printers refused to set the type.

But you can't really find anything in the stories to say

"Well, that's actually not publishable,"

you know, because they're not filthy,

but there's a general sense that this way of writing about Ireland,

this way of writing about Dublin, is somehow offensive.

When Dubliners finally appeared, it received critical praise,

but failed to sell.

A pathetic number of Dubliners were sold.

After all the trouble of trying to get it done, then not a penny.

It did not make him the fortune he'd hoped, but by then,

Joyce had already completed his first novel.

He had written the first version of

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

as a short essay for a literary journal in Dublin.

When it was rejected, he decided to develop the essay into a novel.

He began his final attempt at

writing this novel in September 1907,

but after the first three chapters, he found it impossible to continue.

He did not resume work on his book for the next six years.

At that point, he received an

unexpected letter from a total stranger.

It came from the American Ezra Pound,

who'd been told about Joyce by the poet WB Yeats.

It was Pound's enthusiasm that

convinced Joyce to complete his novel.

The complete novel was finally published in New York in 1916.

The Irish reviews were scathing.

One claimed that Joyce,

"Drags his readers after him into the slime of foul sewers."

"Out here, Dedalus.

"You are a lazy little schemer."

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

charts the development of Stephen Dedalus

from a child into a gifted but self-absorbed young man,

who is about to leave Ireland.

It seems his character has much in common with Joyce.

In the course of the novel,

we witness the loss of Stephen's

religious faith as he comes to define God as,

"A shout in the street."

The portrait is built around a number of set pieces.

In one of these, Stephen takes part in a religious retreat.

When I was, say, seven or eight,

you would start going to the boys' confraternity,

and they would lower the lights in

the big cathedral and the booming voice

of the priest would say,

"Death comes soon and judgment will follow,

"so now, dear boys, examine your conscience and find out your sins."

And there would be silence.

In hell, all laws are overturned.

There is no thought of family, country, its ties or relationships.

On the third day of the retreat,

the priest's sermon focuses on the horrors of hell and describes its

torments in such relentless and visceral detail

that he terrifies Stephen into submission.

Why did you sin?

Why did you lend an ear to the temptings of friends?

Why did you not shun the occasion of sin?

Why did you not give up that lured habit,

that impure habit?

Stephen stops frequenting prostitutes,

makes a full confession,

and is granted absolution.

It seems that he has been reconciled with mother church.

And you will promise God now

that you will never offend him again by that wicked sin.

-Yes, Father.

-That wretched, wretched sin.

But the priest's sermon also focused on the rebellion of the

intellect, which Lucifer raised against God,

and the fallen angel's call of defiance

is the same as the young artist.

Non serviam.

I will not serve.

"Six years ago, I left the Catholic Church.

"By doing this, I made myself a beggar, but I retained my pride.

"Now I make open war upon the Church

"by what I write and say and do."

Despite that, Catholicism seeps into every aspect of Stephen's life.

Above all, it shapes his perception of himself as an artist.

"A priest of the eternal imagination,

"transmuting the daily bread of experience

"into the radiant body of ever living life."

I thought this is the way to lead one's life,

or in particular, my life.

I want to be... I want to be an artist like this.

The idea of the priestly idea of the modernist writer appealed to me.

By the end of the novel,

Stephen is ready to leave Ireland,

and embrace a life of silence, exile, and cunning.

He wants to spread his creative

wings and fly past the nets of family,

church, and nationality that hold back his soul.

Joyce completed the first draft of

the first episode of his new novel on

the same day that the school where he'd been teaching closed.

Trieste was part of the Habsburg Empire.

However, most of the inhabitants were Italian,

and Italy had just declared war on Austria-Hungary.

Ireland was still part of the British state,

and therefore was also at war.

Joyce was classified as an enemy alien,

but he managed to escape from Trieste

with the help of some well-connected friends.

He and his family arrived in Zurich at the end of June, 1915.

Zurich was kind of a non-place.

It was also safe.

Like all artists, you know, he spent his time fleeing danger.

He'd intended that Ulysses would be another short story,

but it grew in his imagination.

He mapped out a structure that would correspond to Homer's epic poem,

the Odyssey, and found parallels

between modern Dublin and ancient Greece.

I often wonder if you came into a publishing house to pitch Ulysses,

and say, "Well, it's going

"to be Homer, but it's going to be, you know, Dublin in a single day."

If people would have just said,

"Get him out of here. We're not publishing that."

You know, you have to... You sort of have to execute it

for anyone to believe in it.

The rest of Europe may have seemed hell-bent on

destruction, but Switzerland was not at war.

Joyce and his family lived in many different addresses in Zurich,

as was their habit.

But thanks to the influence of the WB Yeats,

Joyce now received a stipend from the British Council.

He also caught the attention of Harriet Shaw Weaver,

a wealthy English woman.

Over the next 25 years,

she would provide him with enough money to ensure that he could devote

himself to writing.

On the 10th of October, 1916,

Joyce wrote to Harriet Weaver to say he was busy writing a new book.

"I am working at it as well as I can.

"It is called Ulysses and the action takes place in Dublin in 1904.

"I've almost finished the first part,

"and have written out part of the middle and end.

"I hope to finish it in 1918."

Joyce fell far short of that deadline,

but he began to publish episodes from the book

before it had been completed.

It soon became clear that Joyce's ambitions and skills as a writer had

gone far beyond his previous work.

He invented a form of English for himself.

No sentence in Ulysses is straightforward unless he means it

to be, unless he means it to be cliche.

That was his great revolution.

In July of 1920, Joyce and his family moved to Paris.

It was meant to be a brief visit,

but he stayed there for the next 20 years.

It was in Paris that he completed Ulysses,

and it was there that his book was published by Sylvia Beach,

another of his female benefactors.

Some people asked me,

"Were you disappointed when you met James Joyce?"

And I always say, "Never at all, for he was anything but disappointing."

There were attempts to censor Joyce's book even before it had been

published. In 1920, The Little Review

had featured the Nausicaa episode,

which includes references to masturbation

and the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice

took legal action to keep the book out of the USA.

At a trial in 1921, the magazine was declared obscene,

and Ulysses was banned.

He used to tell me about what was going on in New York,

and he was following this case where Ulysses was being suppressed,

and finally he came one day, to show me this Little Review, and he said,

"You see, this is now being completely suppressed,

"and my boo-ook,"

as he pronounced it, "will never come out."

So he sat there with his head in his hands, and

I said to him, "Would you like me to publish Ulysses?"

And he said, "I would."

In the final months before publication,

Joyce exhausted himself by rewriting numerous passages in the book.

He was determined that every detail should be authentic.

In November, 1921, he writes to his aunt Josephine.

He wants to know if it's possible

for an ordinary person to climb over the

area railings of number seven Eccles Street,

whether from the path or steps,

lower himself from the lowest part of the railings,

till his feet are within two or three inches of the ground and drop

unhurt. He needs to know because he

is revising one of the episodes in his

novel, in which someone enters his

house in Eccles Street by this method,

and Joyce wants to make quite sure it is possible.

Finally, on the 2nd of February, 1922,

two copies of Ulysses were sent by

train from printers in Dijon to Paris.

Joyce received the books on the morning of his 40th birthday.

Those that could obtain a copy soon found that the novel posed something

of an existential challenge.

Ulysses is a difficult book,

and it's a challenge for many readers.

I think we don't usually get too far in a conversation before I say,

"I've read Ulysses," because I'm still quite proud of it.

Of having actually got through it.

I think reading Ulysses is a bit like, you know,

being punched in the head, repeatedly,

and then finding after a time that you quite enjoy that.

The novel begins at eight in the morning of June the 16th, 1904,

with three young men who are living in a Martello tower in Sandy Cove,

a small coastal village south of Dublin.

There's no plot.

Days don't have plots.

Life doesn't have a plot.

And all the better for it.

At the end of Joyce's first novel,

Stephen Dedalus was about to leave for Paris.

In this one, he's returned to Ireland.

The novel also follows the path of an older man, Leopold Bloom,

as he goes about his business on that June day.

Bloom is the son of a Hungarian Jew, and an Irish Protestant.

He converted to Catholicism to marry his wife, Molly.

In this TV production,

Milo O'Shea gave what some

consider to be a definitive reading of the character.

I think the fact that Bloom is Jewish

is at the very heart of Ulysses.

I think it's so important.

I think it was a very deliberate, very careful,

very clever choice on Joyce's part.

I belong to a race too that's hated and persecuted.

At this moment, this instant.

Robbed, plundered, insulted, persecuted.

Taking what belongs to us by right, at this moment.

Are you talking about the new Jerusalem?

I'm talking about injustice.

Stand up to it, then, with force, like men.

But that's no good.

Force, hatred.

History and all that.

No, that's not the life of men and women.

Hatred, insult.

Everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that's really life.

-What is?

-Love.

Having this complex identity for Bloom

allows Joyce to really wrangle with

all the themes of nationalism and identity and belonging.

And the saviour was a Jew and his father was a Jew, your God.

-That'll do now.

-Whose God?

..was a Jew and

your God was a Jew. And Christ was a Jew, like me.

I'll brain that bloody Jew man for using the holy name.

Bejesus, I'll crucify him!

I think he's saying just because we

don't have a big Jewish community does

not mean that we are not anti-Semitic

or have not been in the past.

And also, that moment is kind of chilling as well,

when you read it in the light of everything that followed.

See now.

There all the time without you.

Ulysses may be based on a classical text,

but everything that happens to

Stephen and Bloom is rooted in the everyday

experiences that make up the lives of ordinary people.

And through his use of a stream of consciousness technique,

Joyce is not only able to tell us what the characters are doing,

but what they are thinking.

Funny, my watch stopped at half past four.

What's happened?

Such a bad headache now.

Oh, exhausted, that female has me.

But will she come here tomorrow?

Murderers do. Write a message for her?

For Joyce, language was a lens.

It distorted, it clarified, and it was very highly polished.

What emerges as a portrayal of

Dublin that is both comprehensive and

precise. Joyce claimed that

if Dublin one day suddenly disappeared from the Earth,

"It could be reconstructed out of my book."

Joyce had originally intended that there would be 17 episodes in his

novel, all of them devoted to Bloom and Stephen.

But he added an 18th and final episode,

in which the only voice we hear is that of Bloom's wife, Molly.

She's waited for her husband's return

like Penelope in the Odyssey.

But unlike Homer's faithful wife,

she has committed adultery that afternoon.

Breakfast in bed.

He has an idea about me and Boylan.

Molly's final speech is written in eight paragraphs,

without any dialogue, and without any punctuation.

Men. I'd rather die 20 time over than marry another of their sex.

As we follow her speeding train of thought, sometimes bawdy,

sometimes fastidious,

we gather that she's both a sensuous and an intelligent woman.

Joyce had no problem getting into the minds of whoever,

because the book was the world and the world was his mind,

that he could do whatever he wanted,

including getting into the mind of Molly.

The day I got him to propose to me.

Yes, I said, I was a flower of the mountain, yes.

Every writer

needs one governing thing, one

governing emotion in their sensibility,

that no matter what, you can see it

appearing in their work, and for Joyce, that idea

of adultery, of unfaithfulness, of being a man,

and being weakened by the fact that

the woman who you desire, who you want,

is actually with somebody else, really animates him,

really gets him going.

Much of Molly's thoughts are related to her personal sexual history,

impulses and fantasies.

The explicit detail of her words

greatly contributed to the novel's shock

impact when it was first published.

"It begins and ends with the female word yes.

"It turns like the huge Earth ball, slowly, surely, and evenly,

"round and round, spinning,

"its four cardinal points being the

"female breasts, arse, womb, and cunt."

To say yes, my mountain flower.

First I put my hands around him. Yes.

I find the language itself tremendously sensual.

I drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts so perfumed, yes.

And physical and funny and overwhelming.

His heart was going like mad.

And yes, I said, yes, I will. Yes!

TS Eliot described the publication of Joyce's book as having the

importance of a scientific discovery.

It's incredible. You would look at the whole and think the certitude,

that he absolutely knew where he was going, which is hard, you know.

It's hard to see the end before you begin.

It may be the hardest thing for a writer,

and I don't think anyone did it better.

But not everyone has appreciated Joyce's novel.

By 1922, Ireland had achieved political independence,

but the new Irish state was imbued with a deeply conservative Catholic

ethos. Ulysses was never banned in Ireland,

but Joyce was often portrayed as a pornographer.

His aunt Josephine in Dublin steadfastly

refused to read Ulysses because

she believed it to be a dirty book.

"If Ulysses isn't fit to read," Joyce said,

"then life isn't fit to live."

In 1931, Joyce's father died.

"No man could be worthy of such

"intense love as my father had for me."

Soon afterwards, his first and only grandchild was born.

Joyce wrote a poem to mark the occasion of Stephen Joyce's birth.

A child is sleeping.

An old man gone.

Oh, father forsaken.

Forgive your son.

Joyce's reputation as a banned writer

made him a literary celebrity.

He became a leader of the avant-garde,

and he enjoyed to the full the cafe society of Paris.

There were few royalties from Ulysses,

because it was banned for many years.

But Joyce continued to enjoy the patronage of Harriet Weaver.

He has enormously powerful, wealthy, and patient allies.

I mean, this was a golden time in the life of Paris,

and he was at the very centre of this and, I mean,

I think this gave him great pleasure.

Within a few years,

Joyce had gone from being an impoverished language teacher in a

backwater of Europe to becoming a

respected writer with an international reputation.

When Joyce goes to the restaurant, it's, you know, the full canonicals.

He lives a sort of,

you know, grand bourgeois life for a lot of the time,

and when he's not doing that, it's because he's spent all the money.

He has his father's improvidence.

The young Irishman Samuel Beckett will wait another 30 years for fame

as author of the controversial drama Waiting for Godot.

At the moment, he is serving as secretary to his renowned and still

more controversial compatriot, James Joyce.

Joyce's novel Ulysses is damned by

censors on both sides of the Atlantic,

but finds an enthusiastic publisher and public in Paris.

In 1933,

Random House arranged for a copy of

the book they'd imported to be seized by customs.

The publisher then contested the seizure.

The US court of appeals ruled that the book was not pornographic.

It was a landmark decision that

would help to change attitudes on the

censorship of art throughout the world.

Joyce's celebrity could not protect him from his worsening health.

He suffered from a constant stream of eye problems,

went through a number of complex surgeries,

and spent long stretches when he was virtually blind.

At times, he had to write with large

red crayons so that he could read his own words.

There was something else that weighed on his mind during these

years. And that was the mental health of his daughter, Lucia.

Lucia had been a sickly child,

and her earliest memories were of domestic chaos.

Her relationship with her father was intense, and sometimes tortured.

Do you know an author who isn't manipulative?

That's what we do. We sit in our rooms and we manipulate language,

we manipulate character, we manipulate the material we're given,

we manipulate our families and friends.

We're cannibals, essentially.

Lucia had a strained relationship with Nora,

and on Joyce's 50th birthday,

she attacked her mother.

Lucia was admitted to a clinic and for the next few years,

moved between hospitals and home.

Carl Jung diagnosed schizophrenia,

but Joyce did not want to accept this verdict.

"I am in a minority of one, in my opinion,

"as everybody else apparently thinks Lucia is crazy.

"But her mind is as clear and as unsparing as lightning.

"She is a fantastic being, speaking a curious language of her own.

"I understand it.

"Or most of it."

He came to love Lucia, probably more than anyone.

And he felt

that his madness,

that he had somehow escaped the worst of,

and in some etheric way,

he had transmitted it to his daughter.

When she was 28, Lucia entered an asylum in France.

She would never live outside an institution again.

Joyce was so exhausted by the time he finished Ulysses

that he was unable to write prose for over a year.

However, in March, 1923,

he wrote to Harriet Weaver that he'd just completed two pages of a new

book. This would eventually become Finnigan's Wake.

Joyce, after Ulysses,

has gone into a certain zone where

he does what a shaman does in society,

which is sort of a shaman makes himself crazy.

He goes out onto the extreme, has visions and talks in tongues,

and deranges himself.

The Wake was his final book,

and it took Joyce 17 years to complete.

The novel is often considered to be one of the most difficult books to

read in any language.

Like a lot of people, I got a

hundred pages into Finnegan's Wake and

couldn't find my way out.

The opening line of the book is a

fragment of the sentence which is left

unfinished in the book's closing line,

making the work a never ending cycle.

You can't really read it.

It has to be spoken and has to be spoken by someone Irish and someone

probably a Dubliner.

The book concerns the Earwicker family,

but there is no conventional plot.

Joyce builds layer upon layer of multilingual puns, wordplays,

and literary allusions upon a

foundation of standard or Hiberno English.

I still don't know how to read it.

The critical reaction, when the book appeared, was largely negative.

Ulysses may have been a demanding read, but for many,

Finnigan's Wake was a step too far.

I consider Finnigan's Wake to be a great disaster,

with equal emphasis on both words.

It is great but it's also disastrous.

As TS Eliot in his gnomic way said,

"One book like this is enough."

"I might easily have written the story in the traditional manner.

"Every novelist knows the recipe.

"It's not very difficult to follow a

"simple chronological scheme which the critics will understand.

"But I, after all, am trying to tell a story in a new way."

Perhaps Finnigan's Wake disappointed some readers

because they felt it was not the book Joyce should have written.

People are slightly moral about what writers should or shouldn't do,

and you can see the progression in Joyce

so simply from Dubliners through to Finnigan's Wake.

You say, "Oh, should he have done that now?"

So, should he have done Finnigan's Wake?

It's really, really hard to read and you say,

"Well the connection with the readership is obviously broken there

"or he didn't need to sell a book."

He had plenty of money. But I think that he was going so far out on the

limb that was nowhere else for him to go.

But the reason that he's so good was that he was following his

own preoccupation with such integrity.

The Wake maybe more often written about than read,

but it has come to assume an iconic role in English literature.

The book has bequeathed new words to the English language,

and nuclear physicists have even found that its linguistic patterning

corresponds to complex fractals,

the geometric figures that that

feature in the structures of everything

from snowflakes to the galaxies of stars.

I love that it exists, you know. It had to exist.

It's incredibly important that it exists.

Someone had to do it and there's no-one else except for Joyce who

could have pulled it off and had the, you know,

persistence and the intelligence and the vision to do it.

Some things need to be done just because they need to be done.

By the time he finished the Wake, Joyce had,

in the words of one friend,

"Consumed almost all of his substance, physical and spiritual,

"moral and material."

Perhaps the years of illness coupled with excessive drinking and

creative struggle had taken their toll,

and there were other urgent issues to be addressed.

Germany's wild attack becomes more savage every hour.

Down swoop their bombers on undefended towns,

down upon women and children.

On May the 10th, 1940,

the German Wehrmacht launched a blitzkrieg across a wide front.

The armies of France, Belgium, and the Netherlands were soon defeated,

and German forces were able to enter Paris.

Joyce was still a British citizen,

and Great Britain was at war with Nazi Germany.

He also represented everything in art that the Nazis despised.

Beyond that, his daughter Lucia was in a psychiatric hospital,

while his grandson Stephen was half Jewish,

and Joyce knew how the Nazis dealt with mental patients and with Jews.

Joyce decided to seek refuge once again in Switzerland.

But crossing the Swiss border this time proved more difficult.

By the end of his life, Joyce was once again short of money.

Eventually, he managed to cross the Swiss border with Nora,

Giorgio and Stephen.

Joyce arrived in Geneva in December 1940,

travelling on to Zurich a few days later.

He arrived there broken and sick,

and wrote with relief to thank the mayor of Zurich for his help in

facilitating his family's entry.

Less than a month after he arrived in Switzerland,

Joyce was overcome with stomach pains.

He was admitted to hospital, and an X-ray revealed a perforated ulcer.

At first, it seemed that an operation had been successful,

and he worried who would pay for it.

The next day, he lapsed into a coma.

At one o'clock in the morning of January the 13th, 1941, he woke,

and asked a nurse to call Nora at once.

But before she could arrive at the hospital, Joyce was dead.

Joyce was the great escapologist.

In the Portrait of the Artist,

he said, "I've got to fly the nets

"of nationality, religion, of family."

He gets away.

He gets away from Ireland, he gets away from Dublin,

he gets away from his family, he gets away from Catholicism,

he gets away from the First World War,

but he doesn't really get away from the second.

In the end, history catches up with him.

I mean, it's a very sad idea that

this great man who was taken from us so

young had achieved so much.

I mean, it is really, really almost

sickening to think that he published Ulysses when he was 40.

Joyce was still regarded by many in Ireland as a pornographer

and religious apostate.

Nora's request to repatriate the

body to Ireland was refused by the Irish government.

When Joyce was buried in Zurich,

the Irish Consul was instructed not to attend the funeral.

A Catholic priest had approached Nora,

offering to provide a religious service, but she refused.

"I couldn't do that to Jim," she said.

When his daughter Lucia heard of his death, she said,

"What's he doing under the ground, that idiot?

"When will he decide to come out?

"He's watching us all the time."

Perhaps Lucia's instincts were right, because since his death,

Joyce's presence has continued to be felt.

Not just in works of literature, but

also in art, in music, and in cinema.

When I think of his reputation in the 1970s in Dublin,

and how his own family were ashamed that they were related to him,

you cannot imagine what it would have been like 50, 70,

80 years ago previously to that.

I mean, it was just impossible for

someone to have lived in that Dublin.

What amazed me about Joyce is how much he changed over the

span of his career.

To me, it's like the Beatles going from their first album through the

White album. Like a relatively short span of time where every possibility

is used, exhausted,

and then chucked away, and something else has taken its place.

He was someone who could look deep into the human mind,

into all our nasty little secrets, and still find us wonderful.

Bloomsday, the day on which he first walked out with Norma Barnacle and

the day on which he set Ulysses,

is celebrated wherever Joyce's work is read,

which means all over the world.

In Ireland, the country that once abhorred Joyce and his works,

the day has become something of a national festival.

With an Irish writer, if she or he is any good,

make no mistake, he's also a European writer.

There is an opinion that the

presence of Joyce especially cast a dark

shadow on all other fiction that

came after him in Ireland, but you know,

my response is, you know, look what happens in the shadows.

Badness.

Wonderful, wicked badness.

Without Joyce's work, no modern literary canon can be complete.

He's read everywhere, taught everywhere,

and his influence is felt everywhere,

even by those who've never read his books.

The Irish provenance of his work is indisputable,

but its compass is the world.