The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses Read Online Free PDF Page A

industries—shipbuilding, ironworks and textiles—were channeled northward to Anglo-Irish Belfast while Catholic Dublin remained stagnant longer than anyone could remember. By 1901, as Europe crossed the threshold of the twentieth century, Dublin stood as the overflowing wreckage of a bygone era.
    In 1901, James Joyce was nineteen years old and ready to declare his antipathy toward his country. He wrote an essay for the Royal University’s literary magazine attacking the Irish Literary Theatre for refusing to stage the best European drama. The Theatre was the primary institution of the Irish Renaissance, which had emerged in the 1880s as an expression of nostalgia for the days before the famine, when agrarian life dominated Irish culture. After the famine, one in four people were either dead or gone, and for Ireland’s reeling survivors, the revival of Celtic folklore, countryside life and the Irish language became a form of nationalism without bloodshed. And yet Joyce considered Irish nationalism a provincial fantasy. The writers of the Irish Renaissance themselves (Lady Gregory, William Butler Yeats, John Synge, Sean O’Casey, George Russell, George Moore) were all wealthy Anglo-Irish Protestants mining Irish peasant themes.
    Joyce’s essay “The Day of the Rabblement” insisted that a century of decline made Ireland hostile to artists, so instead of Tolstoy and Strindberg, the Theatre produced mediocre plays that flattered the Irish public—it was, as Joyce put it, a “surrender to the trolls.” For Joyce, being an artist meant storming the barricades of an entire society built on lies—no one had the courage to write what life in Dublin was actually like—but attacking the Irish Literary Theatre was possibly the most ill-advised thing an aspiring Dublin writer could do. The Theatre dominated Ireland’s small literary ecosystem, and alienating it meant alienating the people who could help him the most.
    The university banned Joyce’s essay, which should not have been surprising. In the place of Irish writers, Joyce celebrated apostates, including a heretic burned at the stake for insisting that God could be found in an atom. Joyce gravitated toward writers who turned art into an embattled faith, writers like Henrik Ibsen, the provocative Norwegian playwright who thrived on contempt. “To live,” Ibsen said, “is to war with trolls.” Joyce’s essay was, in fact, partly inspired by Ibsen—he learned Dano-Norwegian to read the playwright in his native tongue and to write to him as he was dying. To carry Ibsen’s spirit onward, Joyce and a friend printed eighty-five copies of the censored essay (the most they could afford) and distributed them around Dublin themselves.
    Joyce’s contempt for the trolls was a nineteen-year-old’s preemptive defense against literary society’s rejection: instead of evading that rejection, he courted it. One night in 1902, Joyce knocked on the poet George Russell’s door uninvited. They began talking about literature, and Joyce expounded on the shortcomings of the Irish Renaissance into the early morning hours. William Butler Yeats, Joyce insisted, was pandering to the Irish, and Russell himself was not a very good poet at all. Joyce read some of his own verse and recited Ibsen in Dano-Norwegian. Russell was impressed, and he wanted Joyce to meet Yeats, Ireland’s most important writer. “He is an extremely clever boy,” Russell wrote to Yeats, “who belongs to your clan more than to mine and still more to himself.”
    Like most of Ireland’s writers, Yeats was living elsewhere, but he returned to Ireland to stage a play just as Joyce was graduating from the Royal University in 1902. After Russell arranged a meeting, the two writers sat in the smoking room of a restaurant on O’Connell Street, Dublin’s main thoroughfare. Yeats thought the young man had a disarming vitality. He was intense and soft-spoken, almost timid. But when Yeats asked Joyce to read some of