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3 The Biographical Crisis The genesis of Dubliners is familiar to every student of Joyce: in AE’s famous invitation (July 1904) to write a short story suitable for the Irish Homestead. Genial AE asked him if he could submit “anything simple, rural?, livemaking?, [pathetic?] which could be inserted so as not to shock the readers . . . playing to the common understanding and liking for once in a way” (Letters II: 43; JJII 163). This invitation must have reminded Joyce of a piece of advice he had received from Yeats some eighteen months before , during his Paris sojourn. Attempting to steer his young protégé away from verse, Yeats diplomatically offered an alternative course: “I would strongly recommend you to write some little essays. Impressions of books, or better still, of artistic events about you in Paris, bringing your point of view as much as possible, but taking your text from some existing interest or current event” (December 18, 1902, Yeats, Collected Letters 3: 281–82). It was not for twenty months (until mid-September 1904) that Joyce was to produce “After the Race”: an alloy of interests that were personal, Parisian, and current. Thus, while heeding the advice of his two eminent mentors, Joyce stumbled into the next stage of his development as a literary artist, the writing of the stories of Dubliners. Between early June 1904 and his departure with Nora Barnacle (October 7), Joyce’s life was marked by several axial developments in his creative development. The first of his responses to AE, “The Sisters,” appeared in the Irish Homestead on August 13 (JJII 164). On this, the anniversary of his mother’s death, he sent a copy of the story to the woman who replaced her in his life, Nora Barnacle (Letters II: 46). The third submission to the Irish Homestead, “After the Race,” he apparently wrote at the end of September or the first couple of days of October. The personal relationship he had entered into with Nora Barnacle was to replace his heterosexual adventures with prostitutes and displace his unstable friendships with several male The Biographical Crisis · 51 friends, J. F. Byrne, John Elwood, Vincent Cosgrave, George Clancy, and (principally) Oliver St. John Gogarty. In Nora’s love he had, apparently, found an alternative to both the cynical exploitation of poor women in which he, along with Gogarty, Cosgrave, and others including Elwood had indulged, and a substitute for the mother’s love that, with her death, he had lost. He met Nora ten months later and—whether fortuitously or not—in the midst of a search for personal and literary direction, and among various friends, and testing alternatives—music, medicine, journalism —he found a new self-confidence. This assurance appears in his letters to Nora, in the testimony of his brother’s diary, and in public documents such as “The Holy Office” (CW 149–52). The main emotional conflicts embroiling Joyce during his last Irish September were the severance of his friendship with Gogarty and the consolidation of his ties to his replacement, Nora Barnacle. While the second story to appear in the Irish Homestead (September 10), “Eveline,” is a meditation on trust between heterosexual would-be lovers on the brink of emigration, its successor, “After the Race,” is a subtle dramatization of the betrayal of homosocial relations and an exposé of the incompatibility of business and artistic personalities. In these (as well as many other) ways, “Eveline” and “After the Race” are companion pieces. As Eveline Hill is a remarkably empathetic portrait drawn on Nora Barnacle (and his sister, Margaret), so is the figure of Jimmy Doyle a caricature of Gogarty. Joyce limns each of these figures by contrast with two cunning self-portraits in the complementary half-named pair: the mysterious exile Frank, and the silent artist, Villona.1 During the three months before his departure, Nora Barnacle was supplanting every one of Joyce’s close acquaintances. Throughout that summer, between their regular meetings on sunny evenings, they were reading and rereading one another’s letters on the rainy ones. Before and during the summer of the Joyces’ “walking out,” other events were laying claim to public attention: King Edward VII’s return visit (April 26 to May 5), the public debate at the Metropole Hotel of Arthur Griffith’s Hungarian policy (August 3), the ongoing rivalry between the International and Irish Exhibitions of Industry, and the outbreak of Russo-Japanese hostilities in the Far East. He courted her as singer, writer...

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