60 Fun Facts About James Joyce

In which Dublin suburb was James Joyce born in 1882?

Rathgar, then a prosperous south Dublin suburb, is where Joyce was born at 41 Brighton Square on 2 February 1882, the eldest of ten surviving children of John and May Joyce.

On what date is Bloomsday celebrated each year?

It is the day on which the whole of Ulysses takes place, and fans in Edwardian dress retrace Bloom's route around Dublin.

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

The book follows three Dubliners through a single day in 1904, and its fans now celebrate that date every year.

Ulysses parallels the episodes of which ancient epic poem?

The Odyssey supplies the scaffold: the novel's canvasser hero stands in for the wandering Odysseus, Stephen Dedalus for his son Telemachus, and Molly for the waiting Penelope.

What was the name of Joyce's lifelong partner, later his wife?

She was a chambermaid from Galway working at Finn's Hotel when they met in June 1904, and the relationship lasted 37 years.

Who is the advertisement canvasser at the centre of Ulysses?

Leopold Bloom is the son of Rudolf Virág, a Hungarian Jew who anglicised the surname; virág means 'flower' in Hungarian, hence Bloom.

How many short stories make up Dubliners?

Fifteen stories, written between 1904 and 1907 and published in 1914 after years of disputes with printers, move from childhood through adolescence to maturity and public life.

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 published Ulysses in 1922?

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, Joyce's only surviving play, was published in 1918 and first staged in Munich in August 1919; its theme of a husband testing his wife's fidelity drew on Joyce's own jealousy.

How many years did Joyce spend composing Finnegans Wake?

17 years: Joyce began the book in 1923, the year after Ulysses, and it was published on 4 May 1939, less than two years before his death.

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'.

In which city did Joyce die in January 1941?

He had fled occupied France only weeks earlier and died two days after surgery for a perforated duodenal ulcer, aged 58.

What is the name of the young playwright Joyce hired as an assistant, who later wrote Waiting for Godot?

Samuel Beckett, then a young lecteur at the École Normale Supérieure, helped Joyce with research for his last book; the friendship cooled for a time after Beckett 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 a Chamber Music poem in 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?

He called it a second Dublin, taught English at the Berlitz school there, and worked out Leopold and Molly Bloom in the city.

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.

In which Dublin suburb did Joyce and Nora take their first walk together on 16 June 1904?

Ringsend, by the docks on the south side of the Liffey, was where they first walked out together; they had met only six days earlier, on 10 June 1904, when she was working as a chambermaid.

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

Galway: Nora was born there in 1884 and grew up in a small house on Bowling Green, which later opened as a museum dedicated to her.

In what year did Joyce and Nora finally marry, in a London register office?

1931: they married at Kensington register office on 4 July, after 27 years together, chiefly to secure the children's inheritance under English law.

How many episodes make up Ulysses?

Eighteen episodes, split into three parts of 3, 12 and 3; the Homeric titles such as 'Hades' and 'Ithaca' come from Joyce's schemata and never appear in the text itself.

How many numbered copies made up the first edition of Ulysses?

1,000 numbered copies: 100 signed on Dutch handmade paper at 350 francs, 150 on vergé d'Arches at 250 and 750 on ordinary paper at 150; the text was riddled with printer's errors.

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

Dijon was where Maurice Darantiere's press set and printed the book; Darantiere later reused the plates for the Egoist Press edition sold in England later that year.

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 burned several issues.

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

Dlugacz, the pork butcher, sells Bloom a pork kidney for breakfast, an irony Joyce planted for his Jewish hero; the episode opens by noting he ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.

At what Dublin address do Leopold and Molly Bloom live?

7 Eccles Street, a real north-side address that stood empty in 1904; the house was demolished in 1967 and its front door was rescued for display at the James Joyce Centre.

Where was Molly Bloom born?

Gibraltar: Molly was born there in 1870 to Major Brian Tweedy and Lunita Laredo, and her closing monologue returns to its memories; a bronze of her stands in the Alameda Gardens.

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

It has no punctuation, apart from two full stops, across eight long paragraphs; Molly's monologue begins and ends with the word 'yes', and Nora's own letters were similarly unpunctuated.

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 actually spend in the Martello tower at Sandycove that opens Ulysses?

Six nights, from 9 to 15 September 1904: he left after a night in which a fellow lodger fired a revolver at a nightmare panther and his host then shot down the pans above Joyce's bed.

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

Oliver St. John Gogarty, a medical student and later a Free State senator, rented the tower in 1904 and said he wanted it for the purpose of Hellenising the island; Joyce's portrait of him was unflattering.

In which cemetery, in the city where he died, is Joyce buried?

Fluntern cemetery, on the Zürichberg beside the city zoo, holds Joyce; in 1966 he was moved to an honour grave there, and Nora was reburied beside him.

Which country's government refused Nora's request to repatriate Joyce's remains after his death?

Ireland's government turned Nora down; it had also kept its diplomats in Switzerland away from the 1941 funeral, at which the British minister, Lord Derwent, gave an address.

In which Irish music competition did Joyce win a medal as a tenor in May 1904?

Feis Ceoil, Dublin's annual music festival, gave him a bronze medal in May 1904; he refused the sight-reading test, costing him the gold, and the medal was bought at auction by dancer Michael Flatley.

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

The Volta, on Mary Street, opened on 20 December 1909 with Triestine businessmen as backers; Joyce managed its launch but pulled out within months, and the venture was sold at a loss in 1910.

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

Norwegian, which Joyce taught himself to read Ibsen in the original, was the language of his 1901 birthday letter to the playwright; his first publication, in 1900, was a review of When We Dead Awaken.

How many poems are in Chamber Music, Joyce's first published book (1907)?

Thirty-six short lyrics make up Chamber Music; the sequence originally ran to thirty-four, and two late additions close it, the last being 'I hear an army charging upon the land'.

Under what working 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 her training: born in 1907, Lucia studied at the Dalcroze Institute and with Raymond Duncan, and performed with the six-woman troupe Les Six de rythme et couleur.

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

Carl Jung treated Lucia briefly in 1934 at Küsnacht; he said father and daughter were like two people going to the bottom of a river, one diving and the other falling.

Who rescued the manuscript of A Portrait after Joyce threw it into a fire in 1911?

His sister Eileen pulled the pages from the fire; the rage was over yet another publisher rejecting Dubliners, and the novel finally appeared in New York in December 1916.

How many chapters did Joyce plan for Stephen Hero, the abandoned first draft of A Portrait?

63 chapters were planned; Joyce wrote about 25, some 900 pages, before abandoning it in 1907 and compressing the material into the five chapters of the finished novel.

How many poems make up Pomes Penyeach, sold for a shilling in 1927?

Thirteen poems: a shilling was twelve pence, and the extra one, 'Tilly', is the baker's-dozen bonus that the title jokingly promises.

Which of Joyce's family members died on Bloomsday, 16 June 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.

Who sculpted Dublin's 1990 James Joyce statue, nicknamed 'the Prick with the Stick'?

Marjorie Fitzgibbon's statue, unveiled on Bloomsday 1990, shows Joyce leaning on a cane on North Earl Street, a few steps from O'Connell Street.

Which novelist, pen name Italo Svevo, was one of Joyce's English pupils and a model for Bloom?

Ettore Schmitz, who wrote as Italo Svevo, was a paint manufacturer who took English lessons from Joyce from 1907; his Jewish background fed into Bloom, and Joyce later championed his novel Zeno's Conscience.

In which Adriatic naval base did Joyce teach English to officers before settling in Trieste?

Pola, the Austro-Hungarian navy's main base at the tip of Istria, was where Joyce taught at the Berlitz school from October 1904 to March 1905; he called it 'a naval Siberia'.

In which city did Joyce work as a bank correspondence clerk for seven months in 1906-07?

Rome, where he clerked at the Nast-Kolb and Schumacher bank from July 1906 to March 1907, bored him, but the stay seeded the idea of Ulysses, first conceived as a short story for Dubliners.

Which socialist historian's anti-heroic view of history fed into the character of Leopold Bloom?

Guglielmo Ferrero's L'Europa giovane, which Joyce read in 1906, offered an anti-heroic view of history and a sympathetic discussion of European Jews that biographers link to the making of Bloom.

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

The English Players, founded in 1918 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 clerk at the British consulate who played Algernon, demanded money for his costume; Joyce sued him for ticket money and libel, winning the first but losing the libel case in 1919.

Which Monteverdi aria was sung by tenor Max Meili at Joyce's burial in Zurich?

Addio terra, addio cielo, from Monteverdi's Orfeo, was sung by the Swiss tenor Max Meili at the graveside on 15 January 1941; Dublin's Department of External Affairs asked only whether Joyce had died a Catholic.

Which American sculptor made the seated statue beside Joyce's honour grave in Zurich?

Milton Hebald's bronze shows Joyce seated, legs crossed, with a book and cigarette; it was placed at the honour grave in 1966, where Nora and Giorgio were later laid beside him.

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, seven weeks before his grandson Stephen was born on 15 February 1932; the poem ends 'O, father forsaken, / Forgive your son!' and appeared in the 1936 Collected Poems.

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

Buffalo: the University at Buffalo's Poetry Collection holds the largest Joyce archive, including notebooks for Finnegans Wake, manuscripts of Ulysses episodes and the books from his own library.