The most overwhelming of the great books that appeared in 1922 was Ulysses, by James Joyce. On the surface, the form of Joyce’s Ulysses could not be more different from The Waste Land or Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, which will be considered later. But there are similarities, and the authors were aware of them. Ulysses was also in part a response to the war – the last line reads: ‘Trieste-Zurich-Paris, 1914–1921.’ As Eliot does in The Waste Land, Joyce, as Eliot himself commented in a review, uses an ancient myth (in this case Homer) as ‘a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.’27
Born in Dublin in 1882, Joyce was the oldest child in a family of ten. The family struggled financially but still managed to give James a good education at Jesuit schools and University College, Dublin. He then moved to Paris, where at first he thought he might be a doctor. Soon, though, he started to write. From 1905 he lived in Trieste with Nora Barnacle, a young woman from Galway who he had met on Nassau Street, Dublin, in 1904. Chamber Music was published in 1907, and Dubliners, a series of short stories, in 1914. On the outbreak of war, Joyce was obliged to move to neutral Zurich (Ireland was then ruled by Great Britain), though he considered Prague as an alternative.28 During hostilities, he published A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but it was Ulysses that brought him international fame. Some chapters appeared first in 1919 in a London magazine, the Egoist. However, the printers and some subscribers took objection, and publication of subsequent chapters was discontinued. Joyce next turned to an avant-garde American magazine, the Little Review, which published other chapters of the book, but in February 1921 that magazine was found guilty of obscenity, and the editors were fined.29 Finally Joyce approached a young bookseller in Paris, another American named Sylvia Beach, and her shop, Shakespeare & Co., published the book in its entirety on 2 February 1922. For the first edition, one thousand copies were printed.
There are two principal characters in Ulysses, though many of the countless minor ones are memorable too. Stephen Dedalus is a young artist going through a personal crisis (like Western civdisation he has dried up, lost his large ambitions and the will to create). Leopold Bloom – ‘Poldy’ to his wife, and modelled partly on Joyce’s father and brother – is a much more down-to-earth character. Joyce (influenced by the theories of Otto Weininger) makes him Jewish and slightly effeminate, but it is his unpretentious yet wonderfully rich life, inner and outer, that makes him Ulysses.30 For it is Joyce’s point that the age of heroes is over.* He loathed the ‘heroic abstractions’ for which so many soldiers were sacrificed, ‘the big words which make us so unhappy.’31 The odyssey of his characters is not to negotiate the fearsome mythical world of the Greeks – instead, he gives us Bloom’s entire day in Dublin on 16 June 1904.32 We follow Bloom from the early preparation of his wife’s breakfast, his presence at the funeral of a friend, encounters with newspaper acquaintances, racing aficionados, his shopping exploits, buying meat and soap, his drinking, a wonderfully erotic scene where he is on the beach near three young women and they are watching some fireworks, and a final encounter with the police on his way home late at night. We leave him gently climbing into bed next to his wife and trying not to wake her, when the book shifts perspective and gives us his wife Molly’s completely unpunctuated view of Bloom.
It is one of the book’s attractions that it changes style several times, from stream of consciousness, to question-and-answer, to a play that is also a dream, to more straightforward exchanges. There are some lovely jokes (Shakespeare is ‘the chap that writes like Synge’, ‘My kingdom for a drink’) and some hopelessly childish puns (‘I beg your parsnips’); incredibly inventive language, teeming with allusions; endless lists of people and things and references to the latest developments in science. One point of the very great length of the book (933 pages) is to recreate a world in which the author slows life down for the reader, enabling him or her to relish the language, a language that never sleeps. In this way, Joyce draws attention to the richness of Dublin in 1904, where poetry, opera, Latin and liturgy are as much a part of everyday lower-middle-class life as are gambling, racing, minor cheating and the lacklustre lust of a middle-aged man for virtually every woman he meets.33 ‘If Ulysses isn’t fit to read’, said Joyce to his cousin, responding to criticism, ‘life isn’t fit to live.’ Descriptions of food are never far away, each and every one mouthwatering (‘Buck Mulligan slit a steaming scone in two and plastered butter over its smoking pith.’). Place names are left to hang, so we realise how improbable but very beautiful even proper names are: Malahide, Clonghowes, Castleconnel. Joyce revisits words, rearranges spelling and punctuation so that we see these words, and what they represent, anew: ‘Whether these be sins or virtues old Nobodaddy will tell us at doomsday …’, ‘He smellsipped the cordial …’, ‘Her ample bedwarmed flesh …’, ‘Dynamitard’.34
In following Bloom the reader – like Dedalus – is exhilarated and liberated.35 Bloom has no wish to be anything other than who he is, ‘neither Faust nor Jesus’. Bloom inhabits an amazingly generous world, where people allow each other to be as they are, celebrating everyday life and giving a glimpse of what civilisation can evolve into: food, poetry, ritual, love, sex, drink, language. They can be found anywhere, Joyce is saying. They are what peace – inner and out – is.
T. S. Eliot wrote an essay about Ulysses in the Dial magazine in 1923, in which he confessed that the book for him had ‘the importance of a scientific discovery,’ and indeed part of Joyce’s aim was to advance language, feeling it had dropped behind as science had expanded. He also liked the fact that Joyce had used what he called ‘the mythical method.’37 This, he believed, might be a way forward for literature, replacing the narrative method. But the most revealing difference between Ulysses, on the one hand, and The Waste Land, Jacob’s Room, and Henry IV on the other, is that in the end Stephen Dedalus is redeemed. At the beginning of the book, he is in an intellectual and moral wasteland, bereft of ideas and hope. Bloom, however, shows himself throughout the book as capable of seeing the world through others’ eyes, be it his wife Molly, who he knows intimately, or Dedalus, a relative stranger. This not only makes Bloom profoundly unprejudiced – in an anti-Semitic world – but it is, on Joyce’s part, a wonderfully optimistic message, that connections are possible, that solitude and atomisation, alienation and ennui are not inevitable.
In 1922 Joyce’s Irish colleague W. B. Yeats was named a senator in Ireland. Two years later he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Yeats’s fifty-seven-year career as a poet spanned many different periods, but his political engagement was of a piece with his artistic vision. An 1899 police report described him as ‘more or less of a revolutionary,’ and in 1916 he had published ‘Easter 1916,’ about the botched Irish nationalist uprising. This contained lines that, though they refer to the executed leaders of the uprising, could also serve, in the ending, as an epitaph for the entire century: