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142 J A M E S[ 1903-1904 ]were a reserve upon which he could draw for proof, when he needed it,that he was the prey of fools, niggards, and circumstances. They encouragedhim in his feeling that socialism should come, for how else shouldhe be fed? He needed a redistribution of wealth if he was to be a spendthrift,and attended occasional meetings of a socialist group in HenryStreet, where prophets of the new day milder than Marx were discussed.55The anarchist theories of the American Benjamin Tucker alsoattracted him for a time.* Finally, he came to know the writings ofNietzsche, 'that strong enchanter' 56whom Yeats and other Dublinerswere also discovering, and it was probably upon Nietzsche that Joycedrew when he expounded to his friends a neo-paganism that glorifiedselfishness, licentiousness, and pitilessness, and denounced gratitude andother 'domestic virtues.' 57At heart Joyce can scarcely have been a Nietzscheanany more than he was a socialist; his interest was in the ordinaryeven more than in the extraordinary; but for the moment, in the year'sdoldrums, his expectations everywhere checked, it was emollient to thinkof himself as a superman, and he meditated a descent from the mountainto bring his gospel of churchless freedom to the unreceptive rabblement.To his Aunt Josephine Murray he confided, 'I want to be famous whileI am alive.' 58* In a note for Herbert Gorman's biography, Joyce wrote, 'Among the many whose workshe had read may be mentioned Most, Malatesta, Stirner, Bakunin, Kropotkin, EliseeReclus, Spencer, and Benjamin Tucker, whose Instead of a Book proclaimed the libertyof the non-invasive individual. He never read anything by Karl Marx except the firstsentence of Das Kapital and he found it so absurd that he immediately returned the bookto the lender.' (Gorman papers.)