Scandal Work: James Joyce, the New Journalism, and the Home Rule Newspaper Wars

Chapter 3: James Joyce’s Early Scandal Work

87 C h a p t e r 3 James Joyce’s Early Scandal Work “Never Write about the Extraordinary” The pink edition extra sporting of the Telegraph tell a graphic lie lay, as luck would have it, beside his elbow and just as he was puzzling again, far from satisfied, over a country belonging to him . . . his eyes went aimlessly over the respective captions which came under his special province the allembracing give us this day our daily press. —Joyce, Ulysses Let us pry. —Joyce, Finnegans Wake In both his personal correspondence and his published writing, James Joyce, like many high modernists, deplored the artistically standardizing effects imposed by Britain’s commercialized print culture . Owing at least in part to his position as a déclassé, urban, Irish-­ Catholic outsider, Joyce found the political and aesthetic constraints embedded in print capitalism’s prime directive—to “give the public 88  s c a n d a l w o r k what it wants”—artistically deadening and ethically abhorrent.1 Indeed , Joyce’s hostility toward the press, popular audiences, and commercial writing runs through all of his early writing and thinking.2 In his earliest published essay, “Ibsen’s New Drama” (1900), and in a subsequent private letter, Joyce lauded Henrik Ibsen’s magisterial detachment from commercial considerations, while his self-­published essay, “The Day of the Rabblement” (1901), castigates W. B. Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory, and J. M. Synge for placating the conservative Catholic masses. Though George Russell, editor of the Irish Homestead, had offered Joyce in 1904 the chance to gain “easily earned money” for something rural and sentimental, cautioning him only to “not shock his readers,” Joyce gave him “The Sisters,” “After the Race,” and “Eveline ,” stories that provoked a flurry of complaints from shocked readers and lost Joyce the Homestead as a venue and income source.3 For Joyce, the years following this episode were distinguished by simmering resentments against unresponsive editors and debates and rows with those editors who did take an interest. Throughout his career, Joyce’s “mild proud sovereignty” repeatedly offended editors, reviewers, readers, and sometimes even friends and benefactors.4 He terminated his run as a book reviewer for the Daily Express when, having earlier pushed his luck by “slating” Lady Gregory’s “drivel to Jaysus” (as Stephen is accused of doing in Ulysses), he insulted the newspaper’s publisher in a subsequent review. Characteristic of the wrath that Joyce could stir up, his editor not only sacked him but reput­ edly threatened to assault him.5 Following his 1904 removal to the continent, the venue with which Joyce maintained the longest association was the Triestene daily newspaper Il Piccolo della Sera, a leftist organ that routinely covered the period’s nationalist movements and gladly published Joyce’s reflections on Irish culture and the Irish independence struggle.6 Joyce produced his most explicit reflections on the effects of newspaper and commercial writing in and on Irish society in a series of editorials written for this politically broad-­ minded and geographically and linguistically detached venue. During these years, Joyce was also completing work on Dubliners (1904–1907), fighting to get the collection into print (1905–1914), and revising Stephen Hero into Portrait of James Joyce’s Early Scandal Work  89 the Artist as a Young Man (1907–1914).7 Although his early collection of poetry, Chamber Music, appeared in print with comparative ease in 1907, the period from 1907 to 1914 was, for Joyce, a difficult one, as the dire implications of his refusal to make terms with the literary marketplace became increasingly clear. Throughout this period, Joyce was incessantly, painfully aware of the ease with which print capitalism ’s representatives could and routinely did ridicule, scandalize, lock out, and starve artists who lacked what they considered to be the right priorities. As he increasingly recognized the New Journalism’s use of scandalous words as weapons and as a means to control artistic output, Joyce started developing a literary praxis capable of wielding those same words as a means of self-­ defense.8 In an exchange with Djuna Barnes, another extravagantly self-­ libeling modernist, Joyce summarized the counterintuitive strategy he was developing for countering the sensationalizing pressures of print capitalism: “A writer,” he asserted, “should never write about the extraordinary. That is for the journalist.”9 If the New Journalist labored to sensationalize the quotidian, Joyce claimed for himself and other...