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the Left Bank, and he ambled through the streets of Dublin with a thin ashplant cane, but neither his attire nor his obvious literary talent could eclipse his circumstances. Joyce never drank during his university days, but after his mother’s death the floodgates opened. First it was sack, then Guinness and then whatever was at hand. He usually drank with Vincent Cosgrave, one of his more listless former classmates, and Oliver St. John Gogarty, who belonged to one of Dublin’s esteemed families. Three generations of Gogartys were physicians, and Oliver would be the fourth in a country where Catholic doctors were rare. The family had two Dublin homes, and Oliver wasn’t bashful about his circumstances—he regularly sported a yellow vest with gold buttons. Gogarty and Joyce bridged their social differences with poetry, alcohol and irreverence. They spent long nights reciting Blake and Dante, holding forth on Ibsen and the Irish Theatre and singing French songs through the streets while most Dubliners tried to sleep.
    Once, Joyce’s drinking got him into a one-sided fight in St. Stephen’s Green. He approached a woman who he did not realize was accompanied, and Cosgrave simply walked away while the man beat the would-be writer senseless. As Joyce lay bleeding in the dirt, a stranger, a reputedly Jewish Dubliner named Alfred H. Hunter, lifted him up and brushed him off. He steadied Joyce by the shoulders, asked the young man if he was all right and proceeded to walk him home just as a father would have done. Joyce never forgot it.
    Joyce and his friends often ventured into Dublin’s redlight district. Nighttown was a collection of shabby eighteenth-century houses crumbling into tenements near the Great Northern Railway terminus and the fetid horse stables on Dublin’s north side. Painted facades with motley lamps in the windows were scattered among the tenements. There were dozens of brothels in Nighttown—more here than in Paris, actually. It was one of the worst slums of Europe, and the police had given up trying to enforce the law. Gogarty and Joyce would drink until they were “arse over tip,” as Gogarty put it, and proceed to the more economical houses on the far end of Tyrone Street.
    The walls of the brothels displayed pictures of the saints and the Blessed Virgin. In secret alcoves behind the sacred images the prostitutes hid hefty pieces of lead pipe in case someone started trouble, but Joyce was not a troublemaker. He paid with the money he earned writing book reviews, and his good humor made him popular in Nighttown. One of the women, Nellie, quite liked him. “He has the fuckin’est best voice I ever heard,” she said. She even offered to loan him money—his poverty made him all the more endearing.
    Nighttown was an escape from the miserable Joyce household on St. Peter’s Terrace, where the family managed to stay for more than a year. Their father’s gravelly voice bullied the children relentlessly. “Ye dirty pissabed, ye bloody-looking crooked-eyed son of a bitch. Ye ugly bloody corner-boy . . .” John Joyce would reach for the nearest threatening object—a tin cup if they were lucky, a pot stick if they were not—and launch it blindly at whoever happened to be nearest. After their mother died, Joyce, Stannie and Charlie took turns guarding their sisters. “I’ll break your heart! I’ll break your bloody heart!” John Joyce recycled the threats he used to issue to his wife.
    Hardship inspired Joyce. His first fiction publication, in 1904, was “The Sisters,” a story about the death of a syphilitic priest as seen through the eyes of a boy. Father Flynn dies after erratic behavior and paralysis, though no one will name the cause, and the boy is left to guess at the truth beyond the halo of silence. Joyce thought of Dublin as a massive den of syphilis, metaphorically and literally. Europe as a whole was a “syphilisation,” he would later joke, and the disease accounted for the