59 Fun Facts About James Joyce

In which Dublin suburb was James Joyce born in 1882?

Rathgar's 41 Brighton Square was his first home, but by 1891 John Joyce's drinking and financial mismanagement had started the family's slide into poverty.

On what date is Bloomsday celebrated each year?

16 June is the day in 1904 on which Ulysses is set; the first organised pilgrimage, in 1954, set off in horse-drawn cabs but was abandoned halfway as its writers got too drunk.

Joyce's Ulysses was published on which day?

His birthday, his fortieth, was the day the book appeared in 1922, but readers in Britain had a long wait: Ulysses stayed banned there until 1936.

Ulysses parallels the episodes of which ancient epic poem?

The Odyssey gives the novel its frame, with ironic twists: Homer's hero takes ten years to get home to a faithful wife, while Joyce's is out for a single day as his wife takes a lover.

Joyce underwent more than a dozen operations on which part of his body?

His eyes plagued him for the rest of his life after an illness in 1907, and the surgery took him abroad again and again in his later years.

Which narrative technique is Joyce's Ulysses most closely associated with?

Stream of consciousness sets down a character's thoughts as they flow; Joyce said he owed the method to the French novelist Édouard Dujardin, whose novel he had picked up in 1903.

Which Dubliners story sends a lovesick boy to a bazaar?

Araby, third of the fifteen stories, leaves its narrator empty-handed among the darkening stalls; Joyce set it on North Richmond Street, where his own family lived when he was a schoolboy.

In which city was Ulysses first published as a complete book?

Paris was the place: no English or American printer would touch it, so a small Left Bank bookshop became the book's publisher for the occasion.

Which bookshop owner first published Ulysses as a complete book?

Sylvia Beach, the American owner of Shakespeare and Company, which had opened only in 1919, offered to publish the book after watching Joyce fail to find anyone else.

What is the title of Joyce's only surviving play, first staged in 1919?

Exiles was turned down for Dublin's Abbey Theatre by W. B. Yeats and found no stage in Britain or America, so it opened in Munich in August 1919, to poor reviews.

Which word opens Finnegans Wake, completing the sentence its last page leaves unfinished?

riverrun, in lower case, finishes the sentence that the book's final words leave hanging, so the Wake reads as an endless loop; Joyce kept its real title secret until it was published in 1939.

Which physicist borrowed the word 'quark' from Finnegans Wake?

Murray Gell-Mann lifted 'Three quarks for Muster Mark!' from Finnegans Wake in 1963; the line suited him because his quarks came in threes, and he chose to pronounce it 'kwork'.

Which Christian feast gave Joyce his name for the brief scenes he collected for his fiction?

Epiphany became Joyce's word for a moment when an ordinary scene suddenly shows its meaning; in Ulysses a young writer mocks his old plan to have copies of his own sent to all the great libraries of the world.

Which young Irishman helped Joyce research his last book before winning fame as a playwright?

Samuel Beckett, then a young lecturer at the École Normale Supérieure, also took down passages at Joyce's dictation; their friendship cooled after he rebuffed the affections of Joyce's daughter Lucia.

Which American poet became Joyce's champion, getting A Portrait of the Artist serialised in The Egoist?

Ezra Pound first wrote to Joyce in December 1913 on Yeats's advice, asking to reprint one of his poems in the anthology Des Imagistes, and then placed A Portrait in The Egoist in 1914.

In which Austro-Hungarian port city did Joyce live for most of the years 1905 to 1915?

Trieste was where Joyce taught English and finished Dubliners and A Portrait; he stayed until 1915, when Italy's entry into the First World War sent him, a British subject, to neutral Switzerland.

What is the title of the last and longest story in Dubliners?

The Dead, at nearly 16,000 words, is sometimes called a novella; it ends with Gabriel Conroy watching the snow fall on the living and the dead, and John Huston filmed it in 1987 as his final movie.

Which Jesuit boarding school did the six-year-old Joyce enter in 1888?

Clongowes Wood College, in County Kildare, took him in 1888 at six and a half; he left in 1891 when the family could no longer pay the fees, and the school opens A Portrait of the Artist.

Which American judge ruled in December 1933 that Ulysses was not obscene?

John M. Woolsey, of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, ruled on 6 December 1933; his opinion conceded the book was in places 'somewhat emetic' but nowhere an aphrodisiac.

Which US publisher deliberately had a copy of Ulysses seized by Customs to set up the 1933 test case?

Random House, under Bennett Cerf, imported a copy in 1932 so that lawyer Morris Ernst could force a test case; Customs waved the parcel through and had to be asked to seize it.

Joyce set Ulysses on the date of which event?

His first outing with Nora, a walk through the Dublin suburb of Ringsend, is traditionally dated to that day, six days after they met; admirers now mark the date every year as Bloomsday.

In which town or city was Joyce's wife Nora born?

Galway was Nora's birthplace in 1884; her memories of local boys who courted her and died young are thought to lie behind Michael Furey, the lost love in Joyce's most famous short story.

In which city's register office did Joyce and Nora finally marry in 1931, after 27 years together?

London was chosen largely because Joyce wanted his will and his children's inheritance to stand under English law; the couple wed at Kensington register office on 4 July 1931.

Which word ends Ulysses, closing Molly Bloom's soliloquy?

Yes, with a capital Y, ends the book as Molly recalls accepting her husband's proposal; Joyce called it 'the female word' and let her speak the last of his eighteen episodes alone.

In which French city was the first edition of Ulysses printed?

Dijon was home to Maurice Darantiere's press, where only one of the typesetters knew English, and the first edition came out peppered with misprints.

Which magazine serialised Ulysses in the US from 1918 to 1920, leading to an obscenity conviction?

The Little Review, edited by Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, ran Ulysses in instalments until the 'Nausicaa' episode brought a 1921 obscenity conviction; the Post Office had already seized several issues.

From which Dorset Street pork butcher does Bloom buy his breakfast kidney in 'Calypso'?

Dlugacz, the pork butcher, sells a pork kidney to the half-Jewish Bloom; the episode opens by noting that he ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.

At what Dublin address do Leopold and Molly Bloom live?

7 Eccles Street was a real house on Dublin's north side; it was later pulled down, but its front door was rescued and now stands in the James Joyce Centre's courtyard.

Where was Molly Bloom born?

Gibraltar: Molly was born there in 1870 to Major Tweedy and Lunita Laredo, and Ulysses closes on her memory of being kissed under its Moorish Wall.

What is unusual about the final 'Penelope' episode of Ulysses?

It has no punctuation apart from two full stops, across eight enormous 'sentences'; Nora's own letters ran on in much the same unpunctuated way.

Which episode of Ulysses is written as a play script, complete with stage directions?

Circe, set in Nighttown, Dublin's red-light district, unfolds as a hallucinatory play script; it became the 1958 off-Broadway show Ulysses in Nighttown with Zero Mostel as Bloom.

In which episode of Ulysses does the prose recapitulate the whole history of English style?

Oxen of the Sun is set in the Holles Street maternity hospital, and its prose moves from Anglo-Saxon to modern slang, the evolving language mirroring the nine months of a pregnancy.

How many nights did Joyce spend in the Martello tower at Sandycove that opens Ulysses?

Six nights in September 1904: he walked out in the small hours after a housemate, startled by a nightmare, fired a revolver in the room and the pans above Joyce's bed were shot down.

Which friend of Joyce leased the Sandycove tower and inspired 'stately, plump' Buck Mulligan?

Oliver St. John Gogarty, then a medical student, rented the tower from the War Office; later a senator, he escaped armed kidnappers by leaping into the Liffey and gave the river two swans in thanks.

In which cemetery was Joyce buried after his death in January 1941?

Fluntern cemetery, on Zurich's Zürichberg hill, holds Joyce; buried first in an ordinary plot, he was moved in 1966 to an honour grave, where Nora and their son now lie beside him.

Which country's government turned down Nora's request to rebury Joyce on its soil?

Ireland declined to bring him home, and no Irish official had attended the funeral; Nora herself refused a priest's offer of a funeral Mass, saying she could not do that to him.

Which future star tenor won gold at Dublin's Feis Ceoil in 1903 and urged Joyce to enter the next year?

John McCormack took the gold in 1903 and practised with Joyce before the 1904 contest; Joyce sang two songs well, refused to sight-read a third, and still went home with the bronze medal.

The Dublin picture house Joyce helped launch in 1909, the country's first dedicated cinema, was called what?

The Volta opened on Mary Street on 20 December 1909 with money from Italian backers Joyce had recruited; within months he had gone back abroad, and the cinema was sold.

In which language did the young Joyce write a fan letter to the playwright Henrik Ibsen?

Norwegian was Joyce's choice for the letter, sent after his admiring review of When We Dead Awaken ran in London's Fortnightly Review in 1900, while he was still a student.

Which poetry collection was Joyce's first published book, in 1907?

Chamber Music, thirty-six love lyrics, was brought out by Elkin Mathews, the publisher who refused the manuscript of Dubliners that same year.

Under what title was Finnegans Wake published in instalments for more than a decade?

Work in Progress was the label Ford Madox Ford attached in April 1924 when he printed the 'Mamalujo' fragment in The Transatlantic Review, and Joyce kept it until the book appeared in 1939.

Which wealthy English editor of The Egoist supported Joyce financially for life and paid for his funeral?

Harriet Shaw Weaver, who edited The Egoist and set up the Egoist Press to publish A Portrait in Britain in 1917, sent Joyce money for the rest of his life and paid for his funeral.

Joyce's daughter Lucia trained professionally in which art before her illness?

Dance was Lucia's calling: in 1929 she reached the final six of an international dance festival, and when she lost, the audience loudly protested the verdict; she gave up dancing soon after.

Which famous psychiatrist treated Lucia Joyce, and had earlier likened Ulysses to schizophrenic writing?

Carl Jung took Lucia as a patient in 1934; he said Joyce and his daughter were like two people going to the bottom of a river, one diving and the other falling.

What did Joyce do with a manuscript of A Portrait in a 1911 rage over Dubliners?

Threw it on the fire: a 'family fire brigade', his sister Eileen among them, pulled the pages out again, though accounts differ on who reached in first.

Which abandoned novel did Joyce rework into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man?

Stephen Hero ran to roughly 900 manuscript pages before Joyce cut the story down to five chapters; the 383 pages that survive were published in 1944, three years after his death.

Which bonus poem opens Pomes Penyeach, giving buyers thirteen poems for twelve pence?

Tilly is Irish English for the small extra a seller adds for free, so a shilling bought twelve poems at a penny each plus one over, like a baker's dozen.

Which member of Joyce's family died on Bloomsday in 1955?

His brother Stanislaus, the 'whetstone' who taught beside James at the Berlitz school and bailed him out for years, died on Bloomsday 1955; his memoir is My Brother's Keeper.

Which Tom Stoppard play brings Joyce, Lenin and the Dadaist Tristan Tzara together in wartime Zurich?

Travesties grew from Stoppard's discovery that all three men really were living in Zurich in 1917; he filters them through the muddled memory of an elderly British consular clerk.

Which Italian novelist took English lessons from Joyce and became a model for Leopold Bloom?

Italo Svevo, the pen name of businessman Ettore Schmitz, was little read until Joyce championed his novel Zeno's Conscience in France, where critics' praise finally won him readers at home.

In which Adriatic naval base did Joyce teach English to Austro-Hungarian officers in 1904 and 1905?

Pola, the Austro-Hungarian navy's main base at the tip of Istria, kept Joyce at its Berlitz school for one winter; he called it 'a naval Siberia' and left for a new post as soon as one came up.

In which city did Joyce work as a bank correspondence clerk in 1906 and 1907?

Rome, where he disliked almost everything he saw, still gave him the idea for Ulysses, first planned as one more short story for Dubliners.

Which fallen Irish leader do the adults quarrel over at the Christmas dinner in A Portrait?

Charles Parnell's fall splits the Dedalus family table at Christmas; Joyce was nine when Parnell died, and wrote verses on it that John Joyce had printed and handed round to friends.

What was the name of the theatre company Joyce co-founded and managed in wartime Zurich?

The English Players, started with the actor Claud Sykes, staged Wilde, Shaw and Synge; Nora acted in Riders to the Sea while Joyce sang offstage.

Which British consular official fought Joyce in court over The Importance of Being Earnest?

Henry Wilfred Carr, a consulate clerk who played Algernon, fell out with Joyce over money; the two sued each other, and Joyce took revenge by naming a foul-mouthed drunken soldier in Ulysses Private Carr.

In the ballad that gave Finnegans Wake its title, what brings Tim Finnegan back to life at his own wake?

Spilled whiskey revives the hod carrier, whose skull was broken in a fall from a ladder; Joyce turned his comic resurrection into the book's symbol of life's endless cycle.

Which singer was refused permission to set Molly Bloom's soliloquy to music for a 1989 song?

Kate Bush wrote her own words for The Sensual World after the Joyce estate said no; in 2011 it relented, and she re-recorded the song with Joyce's text as Flower of the Mountain.

Joyce's poem 'Ecce Puer' (1932) marked the birth of his grandson and the death of whom?

His father, John Joyce, died on 29 December 1931, seven weeks before grandson Stephen was born; James had not been back to Ireland since 1912.

Which US institution holds more than 10,000 pages of Joyce's working papers and his private library?

Buffalo: the university's collection began in 1950 when a donor bought a French bookshop's entire Joyce exhibition, including his library, still packed as it was when he fled the Nazi occupation.