flight

FLIGHT TO EUROPE
In 1902 Joyce graduated from University College with a rather undistinguished B.A., briefly enrolled as a medical student, and in December left Dublin for Paris, armed with introductions from Yeats and others and the possibility of supporting himself meagerly by writing book reviews for newspapers. He had left with George Russell a group of his unpublished verses. He also left with Russell a group of what he called "epiphanies" or "epicleti," short prose sketches that vary in character from lyrical, dream-like effusions to literal reportage of overheard vulgar conversations. Joyce struggled in Paris, returned home for money, then returned to Paris, where he stopped attending medical lectures and began studying in the National Library. He met Yeats's protege, the playwright John M. Synge, whom he accused of being insufficiently Aristotelian. Then in April, 1903, he was recalled home by a telegram announcing his mother's fatal illness. Her request that he pray with her brought on another religious crisis, and during this time and following her death he drank heavily, especially with Gogarty. This disgusted Stanislaus, his highly intelligent, more conventional younger brother, whom he bullied, confided in, and depended upon for much of his life. At the beginning of 1904 he taught briefly in a school in a Dublin suburb. Then, sometime around June 16, he met and, in the Irish phrase, "walked out with" Nora Barnacle, a country girl from Galway working as a hotel chambermaid. She was to be in many ways the central figure during the remainder of his life.

Joyce began writing in earnest now. He began with a lyrical, revolutionary, and rather obscure essay that Stanislaus entitled "A Portrait of the Artist", which was to be the earliest version of the autobiographical novel his friends had feared he was writing. He published a story entitled "The Sisters" that Russell had commissioned for his magazine The Irish Homestead, under the pseudonym "Stephen Daedalus." Russell took two more stories and several of his poems. Joyce sent a collection of his poems entitled Chamber Music to the English publisher Grant Richards. Then, in November, he left Dublin with Nora, without benefit of marriage, planning to teach English in a Berlitz school in Zurich. Except for brief visits, he would never return to Ireland. Joyce wound up teaching in Trieste and in 1905 completed nine more of the short stories that were to form the book Dubliners; he sent the whole collection to Richards, thus beginning a painful eight-year effort to publish the volume. His brother Stanislaus joined him in Trieste, and a son, George, or "Giorgio," was born to him and Nora. Two years later, his daughter Lucia Anna was born. During this period Joyce was under considerable strain: although he had avoided the legal title of husband, he soon discovered that in practical terms he was both husband and father. Like his father he was generally improvident and given to bouts of drinking which his constitution was never really strong enough to recover from easily. At times, he doubted whether he should be with Nora. The responsibility of a family weighed upon him, especially as he never doubted that his primary responsibility should be to his art. Stanislaus often rescued the Joyces and tried to play the role of his brother's good conscience, a kindness that Joyce of course resented. After Joyce's death, Stanislaus wrote a book on James entitled My Brother's Keeper.