Read The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses for Free Online Page A

continent’s manias. He planned a collection of short stories capturing the syphilitic paralysis at the core of Dublin’s moral life. He wrote about the city’s petty thieves and political hacks, its laundresses, abusive fathers and boardinghouses. He called the collection
Dubliners,
and he would write it in fits and starts over the next decade.
    One day he began composing elaborate sentences that barely settled into images and scenes. Rather than a story for
Dubliners
, he was writing an overwrought announcement unmoored from his careful epiphanies. The speaker prophesies the overthrow of old orders and aristocracies and proclaims the rise of a new conscience. Joyce wanted to reveal multiple eternities to unborn generations. He wrote the eight-page piece in one day and called it “A Portrait of the Artist.” When the editors of a Dublin magazine rejected it as incomprehensible, Joyce decided to turn his sketch into a novel—rejection inspired him even more than hardship. He wrote eleven chapters in two months.
    Since Paris, Joyce had been searching for an epiphany in a person. He thought the world’s radiance could emerge from an erotic connection with a woman who became in his mind an amalgam of women he had seen in Paris and in Nighttown, and the fact that she didn’t exist made it easy to sentimentalize her. “Thy love,” he wrote, “had made to arise in him the central torrents of life. Thou hadst put thine arms about him and, intimately prisoned as thou hadst been, in the soft stir of thy bosom, the raptures of silence, the murmured words, thy heart had spoken to his heart.” Contempt for the trolls was no longer enough. Joyce believed he would achieve true artistry only if he could find a companion.
    2.
    NORA BARNACLE
    Joyce moved out of the house in March 1904 and rented a room close to the Dublin docks. He declined the university’s offer to teach French (he suspected it was the priests’ way of controlling him) and cast about for other options. He wanted to start a newspaper called
The Goblin
with one of his friends—all they needed was £2,000. Joyce and Gogarty talked excitedly about compiling an anthology of poetry and witticisms gathered from public toilets. Joyce thought of turning himself into a joint-stock company and selling shares. He imagined that the prices would go up for his lucky investors as soon as his publications began to change Western civilization, and his lucky 1904 investors could get him at a bargain.
    One Friday in June, Joyce was walking down Nassau Street, where carriages and bicycles made way for double-decker trams rounding the corner of Grafton Street—people rode up top in the pleasant weather, their heads swaying above the railing advertisements. The drivers wound brass handles to speed the trams forward beneath cables that were spread out over the streets like broken spider webs. Amid the urban tableau, Joyce saw a tall woman he had never seen before striding up the street with her long auburn hair pinned down over her ears. She had heavy-lidded eyes, a mischievous smile and she moved with confidence. Joyce approached her, and she glanced at his dirty canvas shoes. He had smooth, flushed skin, a bold chin and clear blue eyes with an earnest look about them. She thought he looked severe, yet like a little boy.
    When he asked, she told him her name in her low, resonant voice. “Nora Barnacle,” she said. It was beautiful and absurd. “Nora” was right out of Ibsen, and she pronounced her surname “
Bear
nacle,” like someone from the west of Ireland. In fact, she was from Galway City, a town of less than fifteen thousand, and the Joyces originated in Galway, so he already had something to talk about. Nora mentioned that she was a chambermaid at Finn’s Hotel just up the street. She cleaned rooms, waited tables and probably helped tend bar in the meager redbrick establishment.
    Joyce asked her to meet him Tuesday evening in Merrion Square, just steps away from