And A Very Good Time It Was: A Short Life of ... - The Modern Word

January, 1915. Joyce and his family remained in Trieste, but when his students and fellow
teachers entered the army and the school closed, he said, “Now that everyone in Trieste knows
English, I will have to move on.” 134
Leaving their furniture and books behind, the Joyce clan left Trieste in June, 1915, and ended
up in Zurich, where Joyce was to write the majority of Ulysses. His family was not happy with
the move—Nora had to learn a new language, and the children were again set back in school.
Thankfully, with the help of Pound, Yeats, and others, Joyce was granted seventy-five pounds
from the Royal Literary Fund. His Zurich friends also helped him out with money; many paid for
English lessons they never received, and one friend remembers, “Joyce was sometimes
humorously indignant if a pupil insisted upon having a lesson he had paid for.” 135
With sales of Dubliners tapering off, he now sought to publish Portrait in book-form, but
already he was running into the same problems that had plagued his previous books. Squeamish
printers had deleted whole sentences from its serialized parts in The Egoist. Duckworth’s, in their
rejection of it, said,
James Joyce’s ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ wants going through
carefully from start to finish.... It is too discursive, formless, unrestrained, and
ugly things, ugly words, are too prominent; indeed at times they seem to be
shoved in one’s face, on purpose, unnecessarily....Unless the author will use
restraint and proportion he will not gain readers. His pen and his thoughts seem
to have run away with him sometimes. 136
With the help of H. G. Wells (who admired Portrait), Joyce was able to secure an agent,
whose efforts landed the American publication of Dubliners and Portrait, by B. W. Huebsch, by
the end of 1916. No publisher in England would yet touch Portrait, and finally Miss Weaver
offered to have the Egoist Press print it, and it finally appeared on February 12, 1917. Soon
afterwards his play Exiles was published by Grant Richards, though it remained unperformed for
the time being.
As a result of his patrons’ help, Joyce could now live as he wished, waking late and staying
out in the cafes. Zurich at the time was a strange crossroads of artists and intellectuals, and in
1915 the original Surrealists began meeting at the Café Voltaire before moving to Paris after the
war. Also, in the Café Odéon, Joyce and Lenin were both frequent customers, and it is said that
on one occasion they actually met. 137
He continued with Ulysses as always, and began to bring his acquaintances more and more
into the process of its composition. He talked for a long time to a student and friend, Georges
Borach, and Borach noted much of what Joyce said in his notebook:
The most beautiful, most human traits are contained in the Odyssey....I find the
subject of Ulysses the most human in world literature. Ulysses didn’t want to go
off to Troy ... [and when] the recruiting officers arrived, he happened to be
plowing. He pretended to be mad....Then the motif of wandering. Scylla and
Charybdis—what a splendid parable. Ulysses is also a great musician; he wishes
to and must listen [to the Sirens]; he has himself tied to the mast. The motif of the
artist, who will lay down his life rather than renounce his interest.... On Naxos,
the oldster of fifty, perhaps bald-headed, with Nausicaa, a girl who is barely
seventeen. What a fine theme! And the return, how profoundly human! Don’t
forget the trait of generosity at the interview with Ajax in the nether world, and
many other beautiful touches. I am almost afraid to treat such a theme; it’s
overwhelming. 138
Ellmann points out, “It is not surprising that Joyce’s description of Ulysses as pacifist, father,
wanderer, musician, and artist, ties the hero’s life closely to his own.” 139