Joyce set Ulysses on the day he first walked out with Nora
On 16 June 1904 James Joyce and Galway chambermaid Nora Barnacle walked through Dublin's Ringsend—their first outing together. He later fixed that calendar day as the single span of Ulysses, now celebrated as Bloomsday for Leopold Bloom.
Born 2 February 1882 at 41 Brighton Square, Rathgar, eldest of ten surviving children of John and May Joyce, he was baptised three days later at St Joseph's, Terenure. Jesuit schooling at Clongowes ended in 1891 when fees failed; Belvedere followed without charge after priest John Conmee intervened, and he took first place in English composition his last two years before 1898 graduation. University College Dublin study of English, French, and Italian steeped him in Aquinas; a 1900 Fortnightly Review piece on Ibsen was his first publication. Family finances crashed—John Joyce hit Stubbs' Gazette in November 1891 and lost his rate-collector post in January 1893—yet Dublin remained the map of Joyce's fiction even after decades abroad.
Medicine lectures in Dublin and a brief Paris certificate course gave way after May Joyce's 13 August 1903 death. With Nora he left for Europe in 1904, teaching English in Pola and Trieste, with a short Rome clerkship and Zurich wartime years spent drafting Ulysses. Paris became home from 1920; Ulysses appeared there in 1922 while British and American bans on its "obscenity" drove smuggling and piracy until the mid-1930s. He began Finnegans Wake in 1923 (published 1939), married Nora civilly in London in 1931, and chased eye treatment and help for daughter Lucia. He told interviewers that capturing Dublin's heart would unlock every city: "In the particular is contained the universal."
Minor episodes seeded major art. Alfred H. Hunter, who tended Joyce after a St Stephen's Green beating and was rumoured a Jew with an unfaithful wife, helped shape Bloom. Friend Oliver St. John Gogarty became Buck Mulligan. A talented tenor, Joyce took third at the 8 May 1904 Feis Ceoil after refusing to sight-read, yet judge Luigi Denza praised the voice. German occupation pushed him from France to Zurich in 1940; he died there in 1941 at fifty-eight after surgery for a perforated ulcer—modernism's cartographer of one Irish capital.
Source: James Joyce
