JAMES JOYCE DEAD

Evening Post, Volume CXXXI, Issue 11, 14 January 1941, Page 5

JAMES JOYCE DEAD

AUTHOR OF "ULYSSES"

INDIVIDUALISTIC WRITER

ZURICH, January 12. Mr. James Joyce, the Irish author, is dead.

James Joyce, the Irish author, was born in Dublin on February 2, 1882, and graduated at the Dublin University College. He went to Paris to study medicine, but gave this up in favour of a career as a tenor. However, in 1904 he definitely adopted a literary career. His first published work was a small volume of lyrics, "Chamber Music," which appeared in 1907. "Dubliners," a set of tales and studies of Dublin personalities, followed in 1914; a novel, "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," in 1916; and "Exiles," a play, in 1918. Meanwhile Joyce had left Ireland, had married, and was living abroad. Rome, Zurich, Trieste, and Pai'is claimed him in turn, and in Trieste he supplemented his earnings as an author by teaching English.

Until 1922 James Joyce's light in the literary world did not shine with very conspicuous brilliance, although his work was recognised as highly individualistic. But in 1922 appeared "Ulysses," the fruit of seven years' work, and as "Ulysses" was banned in most English-speaking countries,. it was only natural that James Joyce's fame became wide. "Ulysses" was hailed in some quarters as the work of a literary genius: in other quarters it

was and still is roundly condemned as "the drunken dribbling- of a lunatic," or something worse. "Ulysses" is the life history of a Dublin Jew, "a mental dustbin," as one eminent critic put it, "into which the author has tossed scrap ends of language, literature, philosophy, psychology, religion, magic, Irish history, and numerous other odds and ends which drift into a disorganised mind." In it a spade is most emphatically called a spade. On the other hand, "constructed on the ground plan of Homer's 'Odyssey,' 'Ulysses' is a great book, destined to. take a permanent place in the world's literature." Time will tell which school of thought is right.

James Joyce, meantime, suffered

much trouble with his eyesight and underwent several operations. At one time he resorted to writing with a charcoal pencil on large slips of paper. But he continued with his literary work, and among his more recent publications has been "Anna Livia Plurabelle," a fragment of the more monumental "Work in Progress." In this James Joyce uses his customary new language, revolutionary and puzzling in its implications,, "his constructive metabolism of th primary matter of language." The following quotation from "Anna Livia Plurabelle" is typical:—"Well, arundgirond in waveney lyne aringarounma, she pattered and swung and sidled, dribbling her boulder

through narrowa mosses, the dilisdydrear on our drier side and the vilde vetch vine agin us, curara here careero there, not knowing which medway or weser to strike it, edereider making chattahoochee all to her am chichin, like Santa Claus at the cree of the pale and puny, nistlingto hear for their tiny hearties, her arms encircling Isolabella, then running with reconciled Romas and Reims, then bathing Dirty Hans' spatters with spittle, with a Christmas box apiece for aisch and iveryone of her childer, the birthday gifts they dreamt they gabe her, the spoiled she fleetly laid at our door!" '