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

his poems, the younger man replied, “I do so since you ask me, but I attach no more importance to your opinion than to anybody one meets in the street.”
    Yeats listened to Joyce’s lyrics and prose sketches and decided he had “a very delicate talent,” though he wasn’t quite sure what the talent was for. Yeats explained that he himself was shifting from poems of beauty to experiments in Irish folklore. “That,” the younger writer said, “shows how rapidly you are deteriorating.” When Yeats protested that he had written his plays rather easily, Joyce said that made his deterioration quite certain. He stood up to leave, but turned back to Yeats. “I am twenty. How old are you?” Yeats said he was thirty-six, one year younger than the truth.
    “We have met too late. You are too old for me to have any effect on you.”
    —
    JOYCE LEFT DUBLIN for Paris a month after his graduation ceremony. He planned to enroll in the Ecole de Médecine, support himself by giving English lessons to Left Bank professionals and earn the medical degree his grandfather once held but his father failed to complete. He would be both a doctor and an artist, and with his first paycheck he would buy his mother a new set of teeth. A medical career was the least he could do for the family. The meager income his father earned when he had a job was siphoned away from the younger children and given to his promising eldest son for his education.
    But Joyce was unprepared for Paris. The medical school demanded his enrollment fees up front and rejected his university degree before granting him, reluctantly, a provisional pass to attend chemistry lectures. He went for one day and quit. Living in Paris without friends, a career or a decent coat, Joyce fell into a rhythm of reading, writing and walking. He barely sustained himself by the fees he earned teaching English to his two students, desperate money orders from home and small payments for writing the occasional book review for London or Dublin papers.
    Joyce measured the winter of 1903 by the hours he spent without food. Twenty hours today. Forty-two hours last week. Once, when the food finally came, he vomited. He developed a cruel toothache that made chewing painful. He would pass by the cafés near l’Odéon before giving his three
sous
to one of the women in wooden clogs selling steaming bowls of chocolate on the sidewalks. He used his tie to conceal the stains on the shirt he couldn’t afford to launder. His mother sent nine shillings when she wrote to him in March. “How are yr clothes and boots wearing? and does the food you eat nourish you?”
    It was in Paris that Joyce’s life as an artist began in earnest. He threw himself into Aristotle, Aquinas and Ben Jonson at the Bibliothèque Nationale. When the library closed, he worked in his room at the Hotel Corneille by the flickering light of candles burned down to nubs. Joyce was working out the fundamentals of his craft. He wrote sweeping definitions of comedy and tragedy next to budgets and calendars in his penny notebooks.
    The notebooks were also filled with small scenes he called “epiphanies,” flashes of intensity that focused on a moment or an object. They were his first tentative steps from poetry to prose. One of his epiphanies was about the prostitutes of Paris walking along the boulevards. He described them as “chattering, crushing little fabrics of pastry, or seated silently at tables by the cafe door, or descending from carriages with a busy stir of garments, soft as the voice of the adulterer.” An epiphany was not a miraculous dispensation from above but, as Joyce defined it, an insight into “the soul of the commonest object.” Epiphanies were everywhere. Illuminations came out of small things, like God from an atom.
    The challenge Joyce confronted was combining the ever-diminishing scope of his prose with his ever-increasing artistic ambition. Joyce wanted to distill an order out of history’s chaos. He