career

THE WRITING CAREER
By 1907 Joyce had added several stories to the Dubliners collection, including his masterpiece, "The Dead," and he had conceived the idea of a story involving a Dublin Jew which, some fifteen years later, was to become the monumental novel Ulysses. Chamber Music had been published. He was writing newspaper articles and delivering public lectures to the Trieste cultural community. Slowly he began to reshape the long, rambling, rather conventional autobiographical novel on which he had been working into a tight, elliptical, formally experimental work, although this process bore its greatest fruit only after 1913, when Ezra Pound began to encourage him. Meanwhile, the effort to publish Dubliners was a continual frustration. Grant Richards, who had originally accepted the collection in 1906, demanded more and more changes. Joyce agreed to a few, refused others, and Richards finally rejected the book. After four other publishers had rejected it, Maunsel and Company accepted it in 1909. Under British law a printer as well as a publisher could be sued if a book were found libellous or obscene, and Maunsel's printer was timid. Finally, the galley sheets for the book were destroyed in 1912. Enraged, Joyce wrote a scurrilous and funny broadside poem about the publisher and printer entitled "Gas from a Burner" and had it distributed in Dublin. After more rejections by other publishers, Grant Richards reconsidered Dubliners in 1913 and printed it in the following year. No one sued or even objected publicly. Meanwhile, in an unsuccessful and uncharacteristic foray into business, in 1909 Joyce had helped establish the first cinema in Ireland.

Ezra Pound was probably as responsible as anyone other than Joyce for the appearance of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The American poet was not only a significant Modernist writer in his own right, he was also an indefatigable discoverer and promoter of other artists. Yeats had sent him a lyric of Joyce's which he decided to include in his anthology Des Imagistes, and in response to his letter to Joyce, he received a revised first chapter of Portrait as well as a copy of Dubliners. Pound convinced a literary and philosophical journal called The Egoist, which was originally founded as a feminist organ, to serialize the novel. Meanwhile, war had broken out and Joyce had begun work on his only play, an Ibsenesque drama entitled Exiles. Generally considered his least interesting work, the play concerns an Irish writer who returns home after living in Europe with his commonlaw wife and son; he renews acquaintance with a popular journalist and sensualist who attempts to seduce his wife. The writer has insisted that his relationship with the woman should be free and open, and in a sort of experiment asks her to encourage the other man's advances. After considerable suffering all around, the play ends ambiguously, with the writer and audience unsure whether she has been faithful to him, or even what faithfulness might mean. Joyce, always tormented but fascinated by his jealousy of Nora, was to use marital fidelity as an important theme of his later works.

Installments of Portrait began to appear in The Egoist; perhaps more important, Harriet Shaw Weaver, the American who had taken over as editor, was moved to settle a trust on Joyce in 1919 that freed him from serious financial worries. Her personal as well as financial support was crucial during the remainder of his life. Meanwhile, after some unsuccessful attempts to publish the book in England, Portrait was published in America by B. W. Huebsch in 1916, and Weaver's Egoist Press used the same plates for a British edition the following year. Joyce had a serious attack of glaucoma, the beginning of the problems with his eyesight that were to grow increasingly acute until, in the last decade of his life, he was virtually blind. But his major interest during the war years was work on the book that was to become Ulysses, parts of which were serialized in the Little Review starting in 1918.