Chamber Music and Other Poems by James Joyce

Author:James Joyce
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Alma Books
Published: 2018-02-16T10:27:50+00:00

Extra Material on James Joyce’s

Chamber Music

and Other Poems

James Joyce’s Life

James Joyce was born on 2nd February 1882 in Rathgar, a suburb of Dublin, and was the eldest surviving child of what became a large family. His childhood saw the decline of both Ireland’s fortunes and his family’s. The Act of Union, imposed in 1800, had wrested economic and political control away from Ireland towards England, leaving behind an impoverished and destitute land. The dominant socio-political event of Joyce’s childhood was the political demise of Charles Stewart Parnell, the foremost figure of the Irish Home Rule movement. Parnell had been successful in advancing the cause of Irish independence from British rule until 1889, when he was accused of having an adulterous affair with the wife of one of his political associates. The ensuing scandal diminished him politically, and he died in 1891. Joyce’s father, John Stanislaus, was an ardent Parnellite and benefited from his party’s patronage. On the occasion of Parnell’s death, Joyce, then just nine years old, wrote a poem entitled ‘Et tu, Healy’, which condemned Parnell’s foes from within his own party. John Stanislaus was so proud of his son for this that he had copies privately printed, although none of these broadsides are known to survive. John Joyce blamed his own declining fortunes on anti-Parnellite forces, although his propensity to drink was the more likely cause. At the time of his first son’s birth, in addition to having inherited significant property in Cork, John Joyce was a prosperous collector of rates, but by the 1890s his wealth was so diminished that he often moved his family to new houses surreptitiously to avoid rapacious debt collectors. His son would inherit this peripatetic lifestyle.

Joyce was educated first at the Clongowes Wood Jesuit school in County Kildare from the age of six and a half to nine, when he had to leave, because his father could no longer afford the fees. John Stanislaus was then able to secure a place for his son at another Jesuit school, free of charge: Belvedere College in Dublin. Joyce’s university years were at the Royal University (now University College Dublin), yet another Jesuit institution. At college he was regarded as one of the most brilliant students of his generation, and Joyce later credited the Jesuits for imparting to him his critical and intellectual skills.

Upon his graduation from college, Joyce moved to Paris, ostensibly with the aim of studying medicine, but with the secret ambition of becoming a writer. By early 1904 he had written a brief philosophical and autobiographical sketch entitled ‘A Portrait of the Artist’, which, like many of his subsequent works, was rejected for publication.

In April 1903, while he was still in Paris, his mother became seriously ill and he was called back to Dublin. She died on 13th August 1903. The following June, while walking on Nassau Street, by Trinity College, he met a young woman from Galway named Nora Barnacle, who was working as a maid in a nearby hotel. Their first date was on 16th June.

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