Status Updates From James Joyce

'A man of small virtue, inclined to alcoholism,' he described himself to a doctor; to Louis Gillet, the French Academician who wished to exalt him, he said, 'Don't make a hero out of me, I'm only a simple middle-class man.' He surrounded himself with mostly unknowns: waiters, tailors, fruitsellers, concierges. This assemblage was as inevitable for Joyce's temperament as marquises and marchionesses were for Proust's.'

most of the book so far is joyce asking his younger brother for money

p480(footnote):"[Ezra] Pound said however in the first number of New Review, 1931, 'I respect Mr. Joyce's integrity as an author in that he has not taken the easy part. I never had any respect for his common sense or his intelligence, apart from his gifts as a writer.'"

p445"Nora Joyce suffered under this ambiguity [whether she had cuckolded James]. She was in tears one day because, as she confided to Frank Budgen, 'Jim wants me to go with other men so that he will have something to write about.' She seemed to have failed him in this wifely duty."