Writing Amid Chaos

Stanislaus Joyce wrote in his diary in 1903 that his brother James lived “on the excitement of events.” Until he began to find steady support for his work at the end of 1913, when Ezra Pound discovered him, James Joyce and his family lived in a moderate uproar. Like his father before him, Joyce found himself in poverty exacerbated by heavy drinking and free spending, with frequent changes of address as landlords or creditors caught up with him. In addition to the challenges of living abroad, he also had to endure the effects of World War I and unreliable publishers. His long and ultimately fruitless negotiations with Maunsel & Co. concerning Dubliners amounted to a particularly galling ordeal. But living on the edge stimulated Joyce’s creativity, and in the years from 1904–1913 he finished Chamber Music and Dubliners and wrote most of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

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