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James Joyce died on this day in 1941. His passing was noted in Ireland with a mixture of relief, indifference, and some regret. The Tuam Herald referred to him as ‘the ‘“stormy petrel” of twentieth century literature, by reason of the controversy centred in his writings’. Thread
The Belfast Telegraph described Joyce as ‘the author whom everybody talks about and nobody reads’. In the Irish Press, his sister Eva is quoted as saying: ‘He always expressed his love of Dublin and of the Dublin people, and often that he would love to live here again.'
Eileen attempted to underline his Catholic credentials: ‘They say he was anti-Catholic, but he never missed a service during all the Holy Weeks he spent with me in Trieste’. It was not easy to be related to Joyce in the Catholic Ireland of mid-century.
The Irish Rosary (published by the Dominicans): ‘We never found occasion to write about James Joyce when he was alive and we feel no inclination to write about him now that he is dead.’
It described Joyce’s evil influence, his bartering of an ‘intellectual pearl of great price for the husks of intellectual sin’, his having ‘fouled the nest which was his native city’, through blasphemy and obscenity, and his failure to be ‘reconciled to Christ’ on his death-bed.
The Irish Times claimed he 'was the most important English prose-writer of the present century. His place in the history of English prose will be greater than that of Yeats in the history of English poetry; for Joyce had an influence on world literature that Yeats never had ...'
The @IrishTimes editorial was probably written by the mischievous R.M. Smyllie, pictured above. These quotes are brief extracts from Consuming Joyce: One Hundred Years of Ulysses in Ireland which should be on the shelves this time next year! @BloomsburyAcad
