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by: John Wyse Jackson, Peter Costello
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 941.7081092
EAN: 9781857026924
ISBN: 1857026926
Label: Fourth Estate Ltd
Manufacturer: Fourth Estate Ltd
Number Of Pages: 512
Publication Date: August 20, 1998
Publisher: Fourth Estate Ltd
Sales Rank: 3338034
Studio: Fourth Estate Ltd
Editorial Review:
Product Description:
Obsessed with the burden of being an only son of an only son, John Joyce himself fathered 17 children with his long-suffering wife (despite many affairs and many engagements, he only married once), but was concerned only with his eldest surviving son, James. This was through no intrinsic merit on James's part but because of John Joyce's excessive belief in the rights of primogeniture. This was to such an extent that all his other children were excluded from his will, and those who predeceased him were not even named on the family gravestone. John, as James liked to claim, gave to his son all of his wit: most of the characters in 'Ulysses' are barely disguised friends of his and the incidents from his life pepper James's fiction. John Joyce was also the most important person in James's life.
Amazon.com Review:
It is ironic that a man who scarcely wrote a word in his life, failing even to write letters to friends, fathered one of the 20th century's greatest master of words. John Stanislaus Joyce--father of novelist James--had much to say, for sure, but his media were the witty turn of phrase and off-the-cuff song, his stage, the pub. John Stanislaus was raised in Cork then educated in Dublin. Here he quickly rose to prominence in the local pubs where he shared his passionate Irish nationalism and fervor for sports with bar mates. Though he received a comfortable inheritance in early adulthood, Joyce the elder was, by all accounts, a terrible money manager. In fact the few letters he ever wrote were loan requests; thus the Joyce home was loving but often impermanent, shifting with the tides of fortune. Joyce's most important gift to his son James was his contribution to his fiction. John Stanislaus is the model for the hero of Finnegan's Wake and his 'memories and extravagant idioms' are the foundation of Ulysses's Leopold Bloom. Writers John Wyse Jackson and Peter Costello include in this biography some of James's character sketches of his father--a real treat for Joyce fans and scholars.
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