It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Dubliners - The Dead

But there was no play on the football grounds for cricket was coming: and some said that Barnes would be prof and some said it would be Flowers. And all over the playgrounds they were playing rounders and bowling twisters and lobs. And from here and from there came the sounds of the cricketbats through the soft grey air. They said: pick, pack, pock, puck: like drops of water in a fountain slowly falling in the brimming pool.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Joyce wondering if he could borrow money off the photographer

 

James Augustine Joyce was born in Dublin on 2 February 1882 into a relatively prosperous middle class family. The family's fortunes however, rapidly sank as his father's drinking rose, and Joyce's childhood was spent flitting from house to house, dropping into ever poorer districts with each move.

His was educated at Clongowes Wood school by the Jesuits, an experience that had a great affect on him (see a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) and his early life was much influenced by the Catholic church. His father was a somewhat critical, sceptical catholic, but Joyce's mother was devout, and passed on her strength of faith to her eldest son.

Joyce then moved on to University College Dublin where, despite not being one of the keener students, he graduated in 1902. Then, in a move presaging much of his later nomadic life, he moved to Paris in a vain attempt to attend medical school. His impecunious foreign sojourn was cut short however, by his father's curt - come home, mother dying - telegram in 1903.

While back in Dublin, Joyce met the woman who was to be his life partner and arguably, after the city of Dublin, the biggest influence on his career as a writer.

Nora Barnacle would seem to most people to be a strange choice of partner for the slightly eccentric, wild, cosmopolitan Joyce, desperate to break the shackles of the - as he saw it - backward, priest-ridden society of Edwardian Ireland.

She was born in Galway in relatively humble circumstances, and, although not uneducated, her's did not match up to Joyce's. She has been much derided by critics over the years as being Joyce's intellectual inferior. Yet despite these differences in background and upbringing, they stuck together through poverty, upheaval and the many crises associated with their hand-to-mouth nomadic existence. Indeed, one of Joyce's blackest times was when one of Joyce's friends claimed, falsely, that she had been unfaithful to him.

Nora may not have shown much interest in Joyce's books, but much of her appears in his writing. Gretta Conroy, in the story The Dead from Dubliners is clearly based on Nora. Even Gretta's story of Michael Furey, the boy who died for love of her, is based on a real character from Nora's past.

Nora was found also, in Joyce's greatest work, Ulysses. Not only is she found in Molly Bloom - whose monologue at the end of the book owes much, apparently, to Nora's punctuation starved letter writing style - but also in the character of Martha Clifford, with whom Leopold Bloom carries on a pre-cyberspace, virtual affair via snail-mail.

 

Yes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs since the City Arms hotel when he used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice doing his highness to make himself interesting to that old faggot Mrs Riorden that he thought he had a great leg of and she never left us a farthing all for masses for herself and her soul greatest miser ever was actually afraid to lay out 4d for her methylated spirit telling me all her ailments she had too much old chat in her about politics and earthquakes and the end of the world let us have a bit of fun first God help the world if all the women were her sort down on bathingsuits and lownecks of course nobody wanted her to wear...

Ulysses - Penelope

Joyce aged 6.5

- Mary? Here, Stephen, here's something to make your hair curl. He poured sauce freely over Stephen's plate and set the boat again on the table. Then he asked uncle Charles was it tender. Uncle Charles could not speak because his mouth was full but he nodded that it was.

- That was a good answer our friend made to the canon. What? said Mr Dedalus.

- I didn't think he had that much in him, said Mr Casey. - I'll pay you your dues, father, when you cease turning the house of God into a pollingbooth.

- A nice answer, said Dante, for any man calling himself a catholic to give to his priest.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo …

His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face. He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt.

O, the wild rose blossoms On the little green place.

He sang that song. That was his song.

O, the green wothe botheth.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man