What do you think?
Rate this book
The Selected Letters of James Joyce by James Joyce
This correspondence provides a balance between the letters of Joyce as a man, and as a writer.
Paperback
First published January 1, 1957
23 people are currently reading
820 people want to read
About the author
James Joyce
1,914 books9,312 followersA profound influence of literary innovations of Irish writer James Augustine Aloysius Joyce on modern fiction includes his works,
Ulysses
(1922) and
Finnegans Wake
(1939).
Sylvia Beach published the first edition of Ulysses of James Augustine Aloysius Joyce in 1922.
John Stanislaus Joyce, an impoverished gentleman and father of James Joyce, nine younger surviving siblings, and two other siblings who died of typhoid, failed in a distillery business and tried all kinds of other professions, including politics and tax collecting. The Roman Catholic Church dominated life of Mary Jane Murray, an accomplished pianist and his mother. In spite of poverty, the family struggled to maintain a solid middle-class façade.
Jesuits at Clongowes Wood college, Clane, and then Belvedere college in Dublin educated Joyce from the age of six years; he graduated in 1897. In 1898, he entered the University College, Dublin. Joyce published first an essay on When We Dead Awaken , play of Heinrich Ibsen, in the Fortnightly Review in 1900. At this time, he also began writing lyric poems.
After graduation in 1902, the twenty-year-old Joyce went to Paris, where he worked as a journalist, as a teacher, and in other occupations under difficult financial conditions. He spent a year in France, and when a telegram about his dying mother arrived, he returned. Not long after her death, Joyce traveled again. He left Dublin in 1904 with Nora Barnacle, a chambermaid, whom he married in 1931.
Joyce published Dubliners in 1914, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1916, a play Exiles in 1918 and Ulysses in 1922. In 1907, Joyce published a collection of poems, Chamber Music .
At the outset of the Great War, Joyce moved with his family to Zürich. In Zürich, Joyce started to develop the early chapters of Ulysses, first published in France because of censorship troubles in the Great Britain and the United States, where the book became legally available only in 1933.
In March 1923, Joyce in Paris started Finnegans Wake, his second major work; glaucoma caused chronic eye troubles that he suffered at the same time. Transatlantic review of Ford Madox Ford in April 1924 carried the first segment of the novel, called part of Work in Progress. He published the final version in 1939.
Some critics considered the work a masterpiece, though many readers found it incomprehensible. After the fall of France in World War II, Joyce returned to Zürich, where he died, still disappointed with the reception of Finnegans Wake.
Sylvia Beach published the first edition of Ulysses of James Augustine Aloysius Joyce in 1922.
John Stanislaus Joyce, an impoverished gentleman and father of James Joyce, nine younger surviving siblings, and two other siblings who died of typhoid, failed in a distillery business and tried all kinds of other professions, including politics and tax collecting. The Roman Catholic Church dominated life of Mary Jane Murray, an accomplished pianist and his mother. In spite of poverty, the family struggled to maintain a solid middle-class façade.
Jesuits at Clongowes Wood college, Clane, and then Belvedere college in Dublin educated Joyce from the age of six years; he graduated in 1897. In 1898, he entered the University College, Dublin. Joyce published first an essay on When We Dead Awaken , play of Heinrich Ibsen, in the Fortnightly Review in 1900. At this time, he also began writing lyric poems.
After graduation in 1902, the twenty-year-old Joyce went to Paris, where he worked as a journalist, as a teacher, and in other occupations under difficult financial conditions. He spent a year in France, and when a telegram about his dying mother arrived, he returned. Not long after her death, Joyce traveled again. He left Dublin in 1904 with Nora Barnacle, a chambermaid, whom he married in 1931.
Joyce published Dubliners in 1914, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1916, a play Exiles in 1918 and Ulysses in 1922. In 1907, Joyce published a collection of poems, Chamber Music .
At the outset of the Great War, Joyce moved with his family to Zürich. In Zürich, Joyce started to develop the early chapters of Ulysses, first published in France because of censorship troubles in the Great Britain and the United States, where the book became legally available only in 1933.
In March 1923, Joyce in Paris started Finnegans Wake, his second major work; glaucoma caused chronic eye troubles that he suffered at the same time. Transatlantic review of Ford Madox Ford in April 1924 carried the first segment of the novel, called part of Work in Progress. He published the final version in 1939.
Some critics considered the work a masterpiece, though many readers found it incomprehensible. After the fall of France in World War II, Joyce returned to Zürich, where he died, still disappointed with the reception of Finnegans Wake.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
July 19, 2018
That antique procedure whereby you sit at your desk, fish out some writing paper, unscrew your bestest fountain pen, find a piece of blotting paper, then a bottle of ink (blue, black or green?), then composing your short or long, serious or ludicrous, huffy or languorous message to your sweetheart/your landlord/your grandmama/the man who found your dog, then folding the letter, opening three drawers until you find an envelope, then cadging a stamp from your sister, writing the address – make sure your 3 does not look like an 8 - stuffing the envelope, licking the strip of glue on the triangular flap, bashing the flap down to ensure postal security, licking the stamp – euch, why don’t they make better tasting glue, affix the stamp, ensuring the King or Queen’s head is not upside down (a punishable offense), then find your hat and coat, swap your slippers for your smart hightop boots and trip down the road to the postbox and pop this careful creation into the comforting red cylinder with the black top hat, to join the millions of other letters flowing around the whole world like corpuscles in a bloodstream, in the absolute confidence that in sometimes four, sometimes eight but certainly in 24 hours this letter of yours will find its way into the hand of your MP/your bank manager/your dangerously ill beloved aunt/ your old school pal.
All of that labour intensive malarkey was terminated by the internet, first by email, then by texting. Maybe there are still some old ones now in their 70s and 80s who write letters. Time was that everyone used to do it. It was the telephone before the telephone.
The funny thing, and I have never seen any explanation for this anywhere, is that some people kept other people’s letters. Not just for a week or so and then chucked them, but for ever, so that I guess boxes and bags of them were found after their demise; and the discoverers also kept them; and if they were written by somebody famous, often they found themselves being printed in big important books. Even if they said something like
Arrived safely in Ancona. Filthy hole : like rotten cabbage. Thrice swindled. All night on deck. G very good. More from Rome. Jim.
(postcard dated 31 July 1906)
Was it that the friends and relatives of anyone who was suspected of greatness eagerly collected their letters? Or are their sacks and hampers and bales of letters from total nobodies cramming the attics of the western world and gradually finding their ways to the nearest landfill?
In this large volume of selected letters of James Joyce we find a whole string of letters he sent to Nora Barnacle when he was on a trip to Ireland in 1909 and she stayed in Trieste. Very remarkable they are too. Even better would it have been to have had Nora’s letters to Jim in this sequence. But well, of course, they aren’t here, I suppose because maybe Jim The Joyce did not keep hers as she kept his; because she was just a mere appendage to the great man (he was 27 at the time); or Richard Ellman the editor did have Nora’s letters but of course excluded them as plainly Nora is not Jim.
Jim and Nora met in 1904; their son Giorgio was born the following year and daughter Lucia in 1907. So here is a young father writing to his young wife in 1909. My, I wonder if all husbands are quite so… torrential… towards their wives. Great cataracts of gushing sluicing words rain down upon Nora’s uneducated head in these letters.
At the time when I used to meet you at the corner of Merrion Square and walk out with you and feel your hand touch me in the dark and hear your voice (O Nora! I will never hear that music again because I can never believe again!) at the time I used to meet you, every second night you kept an appointment with a friend of mine outside the Museum, you went with him along the same streets. Down by the canal… I have heard this only an hour ago from his lips…. O Nora, is all to be over between us? (6 August)
It is half past six in the morning and I am writing in the cold. I have hardly slept all night, Is Georgie my son? (7 August)
My darling I am terribly upset that you haven’t written. Are you ill? I have spoken of this affair to an old friend of mine, Byrne, and he took your part splendidly, and says it is all a “blasted lie”. What a worthless fellow I am! But after this I will be worthy of your love, dearest. (19 August)
Do you know what a pearl is and what an opal is? My soul when you came sauntering to me first through those sweet summer evenings was beautiful but with the pale passionless beauty of a pearl. Your love has passed through me and now I feel my mind something like an opal, that is full of strange uncertain hues and colours, of warm lights and quick shadows and of broken music.
(21 August)
Nora, my true love, you must really take me in hand. Why have you allowed me to get into this state? Will, you, dearest, take me as I am with my sins and follies and shelter me from misery. If you do not I feel my life will go to pieces. … One moment I see you like a virgin or Madonna the next moment I see you shameless, insolent, half naked and obscene! (2 September)
Guide me, my saint, my angel. Lead me forward. Everything that is noble and exalted and deep and true and moving in what I write comes, I believe, from you. O take me into your soul of souls (5 September)
I hope you take that cocoa every day and I hope that little body of yours (or rather certain parts of it) are getting a little fuller. I am laughing at this moment as I think of those little girl’s breasts of yours. You are a ridiculous person, Nora! (7 September)
Well, I was going to quote from the following letter of 2 December but really, it’s quite obscene, and you might be reading this over breakfast with your family, and that would never do. But suffice to say, he imagines various acts and positions and goes on and on about wild beastlike cravings, odours, glorifying in the stink, white girlish drawers – you get the drift.
Eight letters were written with porny passages in them and until 1975 they were censored. But Richard Ellman finally got permission to print the whole of them. The effect they have is not pleasant, I do admit, but in some ways all the mooning about souls and pearls and opals is just as unpleasant to me. Really and truly, reading Joyce’s letters is not that great an experience. You are tipped into the ordinary meanspirited filth of life; you drag along with Jim, cadging some few pounds here, moaning about his boring job there – apart from being an undisputed genius he was a pain in the neck and often a dreary woebegone creep. His better qualities don’t really shine out that much.
Still, this is as close as you can get to the fine detail of the life of Jim. In the future we will know a whole lot less about our great writers because no one will be publishing their Collected Texts and Emails Vols 1-7. That may be a good thing, of course.
All of that labour intensive malarkey was terminated by the internet, first by email, then by texting. Maybe there are still some old ones now in their 70s and 80s who write letters. Time was that everyone used to do it. It was the telephone before the telephone.
The funny thing, and I have never seen any explanation for this anywhere, is that some people kept other people’s letters. Not just for a week or so and then chucked them, but for ever, so that I guess boxes and bags of them were found after their demise; and the discoverers also kept them; and if they were written by somebody famous, often they found themselves being printed in big important books. Even if they said something like
Arrived safely in Ancona. Filthy hole : like rotten cabbage. Thrice swindled. All night on deck. G very good. More from Rome. Jim.
(postcard dated 31 July 1906)
Was it that the friends and relatives of anyone who was suspected of greatness eagerly collected their letters? Or are their sacks and hampers and bales of letters from total nobodies cramming the attics of the western world and gradually finding their ways to the nearest landfill?
In this large volume of selected letters of James Joyce we find a whole string of letters he sent to Nora Barnacle when he was on a trip to Ireland in 1909 and she stayed in Trieste. Very remarkable they are too. Even better would it have been to have had Nora’s letters to Jim in this sequence. But well, of course, they aren’t here, I suppose because maybe Jim The Joyce did not keep hers as she kept his; because she was just a mere appendage to the great man (he was 27 at the time); or Richard Ellman the editor did have Nora’s letters but of course excluded them as plainly Nora is not Jim.
Jim and Nora met in 1904; their son Giorgio was born the following year and daughter Lucia in 1907. So here is a young father writing to his young wife in 1909. My, I wonder if all husbands are quite so… torrential… towards their wives. Great cataracts of gushing sluicing words rain down upon Nora’s uneducated head in these letters.
At the time when I used to meet you at the corner of Merrion Square and walk out with you and feel your hand touch me in the dark and hear your voice (O Nora! I will never hear that music again because I can never believe again!) at the time I used to meet you, every second night you kept an appointment with a friend of mine outside the Museum, you went with him along the same streets. Down by the canal… I have heard this only an hour ago from his lips…. O Nora, is all to be over between us? (6 August)
It is half past six in the morning and I am writing in the cold. I have hardly slept all night, Is Georgie my son? (7 August)
My darling I am terribly upset that you haven’t written. Are you ill? I have spoken of this affair to an old friend of mine, Byrne, and he took your part splendidly, and says it is all a “blasted lie”. What a worthless fellow I am! But after this I will be worthy of your love, dearest. (19 August)
Do you know what a pearl is and what an opal is? My soul when you came sauntering to me first through those sweet summer evenings was beautiful but with the pale passionless beauty of a pearl. Your love has passed through me and now I feel my mind something like an opal, that is full of strange uncertain hues and colours, of warm lights and quick shadows and of broken music.
(21 August)
Nora, my true love, you must really take me in hand. Why have you allowed me to get into this state? Will, you, dearest, take me as I am with my sins and follies and shelter me from misery. If you do not I feel my life will go to pieces. … One moment I see you like a virgin or Madonna the next moment I see you shameless, insolent, half naked and obscene! (2 September)
Guide me, my saint, my angel. Lead me forward. Everything that is noble and exalted and deep and true and moving in what I write comes, I believe, from you. O take me into your soul of souls (5 September)
I hope you take that cocoa every day and I hope that little body of yours (or rather certain parts of it) are getting a little fuller. I am laughing at this moment as I think of those little girl’s breasts of yours. You are a ridiculous person, Nora! (7 September)
Well, I was going to quote from the following letter of 2 December but really, it’s quite obscene, and you might be reading this over breakfast with your family, and that would never do. But suffice to say, he imagines various acts and positions and goes on and on about wild beastlike cravings, odours, glorifying in the stink, white girlish drawers – you get the drift.
Eight letters were written with porny passages in them and until 1975 they were censored. But Richard Ellman finally got permission to print the whole of them. The effect they have is not pleasant, I do admit, but in some ways all the mooning about souls and pearls and opals is just as unpleasant to me. Really and truly, reading Joyce’s letters is not that great an experience. You are tipped into the ordinary meanspirited filth of life; you drag along with Jim, cadging some few pounds here, moaning about his boring job there – apart from being an undisputed genius he was a pain in the neck and often a dreary woebegone creep. His better qualities don’t really shine out that much.
Still, this is as close as you can get to the fine detail of the life of Jim. In the future we will know a whole lot less about our great writers because no one will be publishing their Collected Texts and Emails Vols 1-7. That may be a good thing, of course.
May 15, 2013
The 1975 edition includes all the 'dirty' letters to Nora from 1909. Farts and all. A must read. Such an articulate and lyrical man, with such dirty thoughts
December 9, 2015
Read and re-read many times over the years, these are essential reading (and joyous, delightful reading) for any and all lovers of old Jamesy (which should really be all of you). There is so much wonderful stuff here but, to pick on just one, I genuinely believe his dear dirty letters to Nora enrich one's understanding of both Ulysses and FW. The body is beautiful and worthy of Art in all its messy, stinky, putrid glory.
March 20, 2014
Some of the most brilliant, hilarious, whacky, bawdy letters I have ever read in the English language.
Where to begin? This volume is full of more juicy Joycebits than you could shake a bandy stick at!
Not only are we offered a wonderful opportunity to delve into one of the greatest minds of the 20th Century, but we can also see who Joyce was getting along with, who he was not, and even find some clues to FW! Yes, there is a plethora of explanations for all Wake scholars, probably listed elsewhere in Joycean studies.
The main people Joyce corresponded with in his younger life were...
1) Stanislaus Joyce or 'Stanny' (his brother who ran to his aid, or to be more specific, to Nora's aid)
2) Nora Barnacle Joyce (his wife)
and various other Italian intellectuals and writers he met while in Trieste.
In the middle and second-half of his life, Joyce writes often to...
1) Ezra Pound (someone who both championed Joyce's work and helped introduced him to other illustrious figures which helped boost Joyce's career immensely)
2) Harriet Shaw Weaver - a true steadfast benefactress and friend who offers not only much-needed financial support for Joyce but also much emotional support. I came out of this thinking she was truly one of his best friends upon whom he relied.
And finally, fellow poet/writers....
3) T. S. Elliot
4) Yeats
If I was not already bowled over by Joyce's incredible erudition, wit and humour, what amazed me even more was how well he could write in Italian, French, German and even once in Danish!
I knew that he majored in Italian at university but his command of the language in these letters, even though I am no expert in Italian but can read French pretty well, is truly spell-binding. He even manages to somehow make his very tongue-in-cheek style very translatable and readable to the Italian reader.
The last 50 pages were very hard to read with the sharp decline in his physical health, the evident torpor of his mind which started to set in, the institutionalization of his schizophrenic daughter in an asylum, the break-up of his son's marriage and then finally the confusion and chaos at the outbreak of WWII where his family has to flee France for Switzerland.
For someone either highly revered or slandered by the Irish, this man spent very little time inside of Ireland after 1904. No wonder he wrote a play called The Exiles. He spent the majority of his last 40 years moving back and forth from Trieste, Zurich and Paris among other cities in Europe. He ended up dying in Zurich and I heard there is a beautiful statue of him there which I would love to see one day.
I don't think I am quite ready for the three-volume complete letters of JJ yet but this volume is like being served a main course when you are expecting an appetizer. A titillating and hilarious book (I did not books of letters could be so entertaining!) which also contains some of the filthiest letters I have ever read - his letters to Nora Joyce about their sex life. In short, a little bit of everything in here for everyone. Cannot recommend this highly enough. Absolutely sensational.
Where to begin? This volume is full of more juicy Joycebits than you could shake a bandy stick at!
Not only are we offered a wonderful opportunity to delve into one of the greatest minds of the 20th Century, but we can also see who Joyce was getting along with, who he was not, and even find some clues to FW! Yes, there is a plethora of explanations for all Wake scholars, probably listed elsewhere in Joycean studies.
The main people Joyce corresponded with in his younger life were...
1) Stanislaus Joyce or 'Stanny' (his brother who ran to his aid, or to be more specific, to Nora's aid)
2) Nora Barnacle Joyce (his wife)
and various other Italian intellectuals and writers he met while in Trieste.
In the middle and second-half of his life, Joyce writes often to...
1) Ezra Pound (someone who both championed Joyce's work and helped introduced him to other illustrious figures which helped boost Joyce's career immensely)
2) Harriet Shaw Weaver - a true steadfast benefactress and friend who offers not only much-needed financial support for Joyce but also much emotional support. I came out of this thinking she was truly one of his best friends upon whom he relied.
And finally, fellow poet/writers....
3) T. S. Elliot
4) Yeats
If I was not already bowled over by Joyce's incredible erudition, wit and humour, what amazed me even more was how well he could write in Italian, French, German and even once in Danish!
I knew that he majored in Italian at university but his command of the language in these letters, even though I am no expert in Italian but can read French pretty well, is truly spell-binding. He even manages to somehow make his very tongue-in-cheek style very translatable and readable to the Italian reader.
The last 50 pages were very hard to read with the sharp decline in his physical health, the evident torpor of his mind which started to set in, the institutionalization of his schizophrenic daughter in an asylum, the break-up of his son's marriage and then finally the confusion and chaos at the outbreak of WWII where his family has to flee France for Switzerland.
For someone either highly revered or slandered by the Irish, this man spent very little time inside of Ireland after 1904. No wonder he wrote a play called The Exiles. He spent the majority of his last 40 years moving back and forth from Trieste, Zurich and Paris among other cities in Europe. He ended up dying in Zurich and I heard there is a beautiful statue of him there which I would love to see one day.
I don't think I am quite ready for the three-volume complete letters of JJ yet but this volume is like being served a main course when you are expecting an appetizer. A titillating and hilarious book (I did not books of letters could be so entertaining!) which also contains some of the filthiest letters I have ever read - his letters to Nora Joyce about their sex life. In short, a little bit of everything in here for everyone. Cannot recommend this highly enough. Absolutely sensational.
February 5, 2017
James Joyce is one of the most singularly fascinating people to have ever existed and his letters, selected judiciously for this volume by Richard Ellmann, paint a compelling portrait of a man whose very life was his art.
March 2, 2019
Him and Nora! So SEXED up!!!
September 25, 2022
Anxious, lonely, horny. What a man! I don't know how I will interpret his fiction after having read this.
July 4, 2007
Fucking amazing find... I like to just pick it up and turn to a page at random and marvel. His letters to Nora are by far the best... the passion! It's fantastic. I love letters.
Currently reading
May 2, 2008Dear Stannie,
Send money.
yours everlastingly,
Jim
Send money.
yours everlastingly,
Jim
September 16, 2017
I finished reading James Joyce’s letters last night. The emotional impact they carried is still with me, so I had to write this post now.
They are emotional because I have just finished reading the last thing James Joyce ever wrote. And no, it wasn’t Finnegans Wake, it was a postcard to his brother, offering advice about how to keep him safe during the war, which was two years old. At the end of his life Joyce’s protective instincts for his family were embedded in his last literary gesture.
The letters are a rollercoaster. Whereas Ellmann’s celebrated biography provides structure and rumination at the different stages of Joyce’s life, here the passage of time is unadorned and unadulterated. They offer first-hand access to the life of a literary genius. From his early ego-filled literary pronouncements, his burning jealousies of his wife’s lovers and ex-lovers, his immense frustration at trying to get published whilst preserving his literary focus and not compromising his intent; to the raw affection he held for the small coterie of people around him – his wife, his son and daughter, his brother and sisters, and his father. Family has always featured strongly in all of Joyce’s work and while the letters show him to be at times obstinate, pedantic, arrogant, penny-pinching, and inconsiderate, they also show him to be loving, tender, caring, incisive and generous.
The collection contains the grouping of naughty letters to Nora that have gained notoriety for their explicit nature. Reading these again, after the humour and shock have died away, it is clear they represent both a fascination for the human body immortalised in Ulysses, and also the tender nature of desire he feels for his wife – the proximity of spirit and soul he wishes to attain with her by physical means. They are not merely salacious or scandalous; they also express a new language of love Joyce wanted to propound, a way of inserting intensity in words to represent the feelings Joyce bore.
The letters also express the deep struggle Joyce had throughout his life with literature, both in writing and publishing it. This is most frustratingly felt with the interminable to and fro with printers for the publication of Dubliners. Their refusal to accept responsibility for any likely lawsuits prompted several changes to his stories, changes Joyce did not want to make, or saw why he should. His frustration comes across time and time again, as does his intellectual superiority and resolute belief in himself. If Joyce were alive today would he go through a traditional publisher or would he take up the mantle of indie publishing to get the blasted thing done himself? The answer in these letters is abundantly clear: his literary independence screams from the pages from beginning to last.
It is an exciting time to be a Joycean, and to read his letters. His work having recently come out of copyright means there is more than ever to read and review; his early struggles to become published provide an interesting context in which to view the state of global publishing today, and its various power shifts. The letters offer direct and straightforward access to a man who so often in his works has been maligned as deliberately intending to confuse or be ambiguous; they reveal a startlingly human and vulnerable man, prone to outbursts of temper, but also to sublime melancholy and, to those loyal to him, unlimited kindness.
Follow me on Twitter @JerichoDominic
They are emotional because I have just finished reading the last thing James Joyce ever wrote. And no, it wasn’t Finnegans Wake, it was a postcard to his brother, offering advice about how to keep him safe during the war, which was two years old. At the end of his life Joyce’s protective instincts for his family were embedded in his last literary gesture.
The letters are a rollercoaster. Whereas Ellmann’s celebrated biography provides structure and rumination at the different stages of Joyce’s life, here the passage of time is unadorned and unadulterated. They offer first-hand access to the life of a literary genius. From his early ego-filled literary pronouncements, his burning jealousies of his wife’s lovers and ex-lovers, his immense frustration at trying to get published whilst preserving his literary focus and not compromising his intent; to the raw affection he held for the small coterie of people around him – his wife, his son and daughter, his brother and sisters, and his father. Family has always featured strongly in all of Joyce’s work and while the letters show him to be at times obstinate, pedantic, arrogant, penny-pinching, and inconsiderate, they also show him to be loving, tender, caring, incisive and generous.
The collection contains the grouping of naughty letters to Nora that have gained notoriety for their explicit nature. Reading these again, after the humour and shock have died away, it is clear they represent both a fascination for the human body immortalised in Ulysses, and also the tender nature of desire he feels for his wife – the proximity of spirit and soul he wishes to attain with her by physical means. They are not merely salacious or scandalous; they also express a new language of love Joyce wanted to propound, a way of inserting intensity in words to represent the feelings Joyce bore.
The letters also express the deep struggle Joyce had throughout his life with literature, both in writing and publishing it. This is most frustratingly felt with the interminable to and fro with printers for the publication of Dubliners. Their refusal to accept responsibility for any likely lawsuits prompted several changes to his stories, changes Joyce did not want to make, or saw why he should. His frustration comes across time and time again, as does his intellectual superiority and resolute belief in himself. If Joyce were alive today would he go through a traditional publisher or would he take up the mantle of indie publishing to get the blasted thing done himself? The answer in these letters is abundantly clear: his literary independence screams from the pages from beginning to last.
It is an exciting time to be a Joycean, and to read his letters. His work having recently come out of copyright means there is more than ever to read and review; his early struggles to become published provide an interesting context in which to view the state of global publishing today, and its various power shifts. The letters offer direct and straightforward access to a man who so often in his works has been maligned as deliberately intending to confuse or be ambiguous; they reveal a startlingly human and vulnerable man, prone to outbursts of temper, but also to sublime melancholy and, to those loyal to him, unlimited kindness.
Follow me on Twitter @JerichoDominic
March 14, 2024
The edition I read is the paperback version of the 1975 edition (yes, the one with the "dirty bits"). I am grateful to Mr. Ellison et al for the labor of scholarship that put this edition together. Joyce was a polyglot of sorts and while the bulk of the correspondence is in English, there are missives in French, German, Italian, Danish, and vernacular peculiar to Trieste, Zurich, and other locales where the Joyces made their abode. There are extensive notations to help the reader with the "who's who" of Joyce's extensive social and professional acquaintances and friendships, and there are introductory essays prefacing each of the "chapters" of Joyce's life. The early letters are dominated by Joyce's monetary woes, painstakingly detailed to his brother most especially. When Nora and James are separated by the latter's return to Ireland on a business venture, the most intimate of the letters transpire, and one wishes in this case at least that Nora's contributions had been present along with her husband's. Suffice it to say that for James, the human body is the body glorious, in all its manifestations. The middle sections cover a variety of subjects, but Joyce's solicitude over the publication and reception of Ulysses tends to dominate, and the latter years alternate between concern for his daughter's mental deterioration and his work on the "Work In Progress" (aka Finnegans Wake) and the inexorable drumbeat of impending war...again. All in all, the volume is cause for...re-joyce-ing.
March 28, 2021
By reading Joyce's letters we get to know not only James Joyce the genius, but also James Joyce the human: funny, eloquent, confident, caring, angry, jealous, poor, proud and, most notably to many, perverse. Highlights include a hilarious parody of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, a suggestion on how to tackle Finnegans Wake using three colour pencils to categorize words based on how understandable they are—I might try this myself when I finally decide to take on that beast—and many clever little formulations and verbal plays, my favourites being "Ibsen ibself" and "Bloomitis" (I think I've suffered from the latter after my first attempt at reading Ulysses). With regards to his dirty love letters to his muse Nora—dirty not only by the standards of early 20th century media but by more or less any standard—Joyce puts it well himself: “Some of it is ugly, obscene and bestial, some of it is pure and holy and spiritual: all of it myself.”
August 25, 2021
A great collection of letters. Joyce was a funny, prickly, condescending, emotionally immature man and one of the greatest writers in the English or any language. The filthy letters to Nora are a hoot as well.
October 13, 2017
This gentle selection of James Joyce's letters is the answer to the question "how could anyone write a book as complex as Ulysses?" These are dispatches from a man on the margins of society, begging for scraps and moving every couple of months to avoid creditors. More so than the stellar biography by Richard Ellmann, these letters paint a detailed portrait of an artist who sacrificed all modern comforts and any semblance of stability to give himself the space to transcribe his vision to paper. The fact that Joyce fought for nine years to get his first book Dubliners published is well known. But reading letter after letter, argument after argument as the years pass, all laid out over hundreds of pages, it is hammered home that this is a man, like Anthony in the desert, that has no choice but a total dedication to the crucible of his art.
Inspiring and ultimately tragic, the Selected Letters of James Joyce is the best glimpse for those interested in the process Joyce himself described as "When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets".
Also you get a real understanding of just how much money James Joyce borrowed from his brother, Stanislaus.
Inspiring and ultimately tragic, the Selected Letters of James Joyce is the best glimpse for those interested in the process Joyce himself described as "When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets".
Also you get a real understanding of just how much money James Joyce borrowed from his brother, Stanislaus.
September 8, 2021
Great letters usually have one of three things:
1) They are full of great prose, wit, or humor.
2) They describe interesting events, travels, or actions
3) They give us insight into the mind of a great personage, artist, author, or stateman.
Joyce's letters are none of these. They're well written of course. But they're mostly letters to his family or Benefactors. Lots of the letters describe his current situation or ask for money. The only excitement comes from some spicy love letters to his wife. So, unless you have a deep interest in the details of Joyce's life, I'd skip the book, and content yourself with reading Joyce's biography.
Postscript: These letters do emphasize more than his biography, Joyce's constant struggle after 1917 with his bad eyes. Endless operations. Endless recoveries. Endless attacks of pain. Its a miracle the man finished Ulysses and wrote Finnegan's wake.
1) They are full of great prose, wit, or humor.
2) They describe interesting events, travels, or actions
3) They give us insight into the mind of a great personage, artist, author, or stateman.
Joyce's letters are none of these. They're well written of course. But they're mostly letters to his family or Benefactors. Lots of the letters describe his current situation or ask for money. The only excitement comes from some spicy love letters to his wife. So, unless you have a deep interest in the details of Joyce's life, I'd skip the book, and content yourself with reading Joyce's biography.
Postscript: These letters do emphasize more than his biography, Joyce's constant struggle after 1917 with his bad eyes. Endless operations. Endless recoveries. Endless attacks of pain. Its a miracle the man finished Ulysses and wrote Finnegan's wake.
February 5, 2014
My fat young brother Leo I've already vetted the plan, so we can start right away Smith, the idler, was incredulous when told that he had an odd nickname.
"No odder than Benjamin Subject (a person or animal) to physical examination Johnson or even Shelly I am writing a persuasive speech with the proposition that social stigma surrounding mental illness is damaging to the ill Smith," he countered.
We all agreed. Still though, my brother is an idler. Trust me.
"No odder than Benjamin Subject (a person or animal) to physical examination Johnson or even Shelly I am writing a persuasive speech with the proposition that social stigma surrounding mental illness is damaging to the ill Smith," he countered.
We all agreed. Still though, my brother is an idler. Trust me.
November 26, 2015
Beckett thought Ellmann should not have published the smutty letters Joyce wrote to Nora but Beckett was wrong. Those letters help us understand the artist who wrote the Molly chapter of Ulysses. These letters give a peek into the incredibly stressful life this great artist lived while creating one of the greatest novels ever written.
July 11, 2011
mostly boring snarls from a crank.
April 8, 2014
Joyce's letters to his wife- a real trip.
February 9, 2017
I read some excerpts and my god, they were amazing. I want this book. Flatulence.
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews