Readers of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are encouraged to see the essay as the composition of a Stephen Dedalus walking through the streets of Dublin.

In this notebook, Joyce wrote an essay on aesthetics that declares that “proper” art excludes desire and loathing. The notebook shows that these concerns were intimately related for Joyce: his accounting and his research were allied attempts to master the overwhelming demands of the city around him. It allows a glimpse into the mind of the young Joyce, as he records the dates he studied at the library and lists his expenses and borrowings side by side with quotations from Aristotle and questions on aesthetics. The notebook, which the National Library of Ireland made available online in 2002 as part of the James Joyce Papers, is strikingly modest: a French schoolboy’s cahier with graphed pages. This question emerges in the notebook Joyce kept in Paris in 1903 (and took with him when he eloped with Nora in 1904). The French metropole posed a question that motivated his work for the rest of his life: what, given the force of modern capitalism, is art? But Joyce was profoundly shaped by his early encounter with Parisian life and Parisian literature.

He was too late, the poets had passed on, and after a few months in the city, at the news of his mother’s fatal illness, he returned to Dublin.

Twenty years old, Joyce had moved to the City of Light in an attempt to join the poètes maudits, “accursed poets” like Paul Verlaine and Charles Baudelaire. This image is the starting point for the new account my book offers of this most canonical of Irish modernists. In 1902, in Paris, a thin, uncertain James Joyce posed for a photograph in borrowed Left Bank clothes.

James joyce shakespeare and company