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

wanted to write a book that would usher in a new era. He wanted, as he later put it, “to pierce to the significant heart of everything.”
    On Good Friday, Joyce received a disturbing letter about his mother’s health. In the early evening he crossed the Seine, stood in the back of Notre Dame Cathedral and observed his favorite mass of the calendar. The priest snuffed out the candles one by one, a shiver of awe swept across the darkening nave, and in complete darkness, the priest slammed his Bible shut to symbolize the Lord’s death. When the evening service was over, Joyce walked for hours along the vacant boulevards before returning to his room on rue Corneille, where he found a telegram slipped under his door. He tore the seal open and folded back the sides.
    MOTHER DYING COME HOME FATHER
    —
    JOYCE BORROWED MONEY from one of his students and returned to Dublin to be at his mother’s deathbed. Mary Joyce lay in the front room of a two-story brick rowhouse on the north side of Dublin. A doctor diagnosed her with cirrhosis, though it was probably liver cancer—she was vomiting green bile. For Easter, she asked her oldest son to go to confession and take communion in her final attempt to coax him back to his faith. Joyce’s objections to the Church had multiplied over the years, and her impending death did not dissolve them. Joyce stood next to his Aunt Josephine in the darkened room, with the acrid smell of his mother’s sickness around them, and refused her request.
    His mother’s death throes went on for months, and her mind deteriorated through the summer of 1903. His father, John Joyce, hadn’t held a steady job in years, and he returned drunk at unpredictable hours to a home of ten children. Four had already died. Nevertheless, Joyce’s return from Paris provided comfort. Every now and then the children were cleared out of the front room so he could read sketches of his writing to their mother. Once while he was reading to her, he found his sister May, the quiet one, hiding under the sofa so that she could listen to the stories. Joyce told her she could stay.
    The Joyces were a family in decline. John Joyce squandered a respectable inheritance by the time Joyce finished primary school, but they had reason to be hopeful that their oldest son was destined for success. Joyce devoured books and won school prizes. It was his honor to carry the family portraits under his arms from one house to the next whenever they were evicted. Their father would agree to move when the current landlord gave him a false receipt for rent paid in order to satisfy the next landlord. The family would pile their dwindling belongings onto a cart pulled up the street by a sullen horse, and Pappie, as his children called him, would sing defiantly cheerful songs while the neighbors and their children gathered to look at the Joyces outside. They migrated to eleven addresses in ten years. That was how Joyce learned about Dublin.
    On a Tuesday in August 1903, Mary Joyce fell into a coma. The family gathered at the house and knelt down at her bedside. At some point, their uncle John turned around, saw Joyce standing in the middle of the room and gruffly gestured to his nephew to kneel. Joyce remained standing. While the other children prayed aloud, their mother’s eyes suddenly opened, darted about and briefly made contact with her intractable son. Then it was over.
    Her body was washed and clothed in a brown habit, and the mirror was draped with a sheet to keep her spirit from being trapped inside its reflection. Just before midnight, Joyce woke up his sister Margaret to see if they could catch a glimpse of their mother’s departing ghost. They couldn’t. He waited until everyone in the house was asleep, and then James Joyce, motherless, cried alone.
    Mary Joyce’s death stripped away the last vestiges of the family’s middleclass stability, and Joyce sensed that doors were being closed on him. He wore his debonair tie and felt hat from