Joyce: Second Edition

by Ian Pindar, Terry Eagleton (Introduction)

A timeless study of a man who revolutionized the literary landscape.

James Joyce (1882–1941) is hailed as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. Rejecting his homeland and its religion as a young man, Joyce went on to reinvent the Dublin of his youth in his fiction. His masterpiece, Ulysses—once banned in Britain and the United States—redefined the modern novel and has become a canonical classic. Finnegans Wake, written as Joyce’s eyesight deteriorated, cemented his legacy as one of the founding figures of modernist literature.

In a revised edition of this lucid and compelling biography, containing a new foreword from the author, crucial events in Joyce’s life, from his self-imposed exile to his creative triumphs, are explored vividly. Ian Pindar reveals how Joyce’s work carefully blends the abstract and the mundane, capturing the great human comedy of which we are all part.

176 pages, Paperback

Published September 12, 2025

Reviews

[Matthew Ted · Rating 4 out of 5]

Can any biographer write something as voluminous as Ellmann's biography on Joyce? Possibly not, but Pindar's biography is charmingly short (200 pages, compared to Ellmann's 900) and still manages to strike enough points in Jim's life to make it worthy reading. It felt like a nice refresher, post-Ellmann. This was originally published in 2002, but has been republished. Since then, Stephen Joyce (Jim's grandson, 'a Joyce, not a Joycean'!) has died (in 2020). Stephen's hold over anyone trying to write about Jim was not to be taken lightly. Pindar talks about this in his new 2025 preface. For one, Stephen, in 1988, declared to a Joyce symposium in Venice that he had destroyed all of Joyce's daughter Lucia's letters, including several written to her by Samuel Beckett (''I didn't want to have greedy little eyes and greedy little fingers going over them''); when a composer wanted to use some words from Finnegans Wake in a piece, Stephen responded, ''To put it politely and mildly, my wife and I don't like your music'; and when a professor wanted to make use of some newly discovered research material on Joyce, Stephen replied, 'You should consider a new career as a garbage collector in New York, because you'll never quote a Joyce text again'. The list goes on. He was also particularly against the infamous sexual letters his grandfather wrote his grandmother (which, thinking about it, is valid).

Either way: if you haven't read Ellmann, this is a great place to start. It strikes on the major moments throughout Joyce's life and gives a few clues about his work, but the focus is the biographical material. Pindar is a very sympathetic biographer here and is happy to say in one breath that Joyce could be difficult and arrogant, etc., but he deserved to be, being who he ended up being. Well, if only we could all act as we pleased, if we knew how/where we'd end up!

As for the infamous letters... Pindar does share one long one, which I won't transcribe in full but for a taster:

Punish me as much as you like [...] I wish you would smack me or flog me even [...] call me into your room and then to find you sitting in an armchair with your fat thighs far apart and your face deep red with anger and a cane in your hand [...] throw me face downwards across your lap [...] to be struggling in your strong arms and in your lap, to feel you bending down (like an angry nurse whipping a child's bottom) until your big full bubbies almost touched me and to feel you flog, flog, flog me viciously on my naked quivering flesh!

Sorry, Stephen.