His city’s undercarriage

Eimear McBride, who ‘covers’ ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room,’ on the legacy of James Joyce’s Dubliners.

The publication history of Dubliners reeks of the familiar odour of editorial ineptitude: loss of the manuscript, moral outrage at the use of the word “bloody”, printers offering their own edits and ordering copies to be burned in protest at the stories’ unpatriotic bent. It was only Joyce’s tenacity and immodest adherence to the logic of his work that allowed him to prevail. By 1906 he was already replying to a potential publisher: “It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs around my stories. I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having a good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass.”

As the years passed, however, and his initial pique-ridden rejection of Ireland hardened into irrevocable, philosophically driven fact, Joyce’s bitterness and desperation increased. One attempt to bypass the byzantine legal requirements of a publisher led him to write directly to George V about “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” to enquire whether His Majesty may or may not find certain passages “offensive to the memory of his father”. A letter to Stanislaus in 1911, referring to yet another rejection, concluded: “I know the name and tradition of my country too well to be surprised at receiving three scrawled lines in return for five years of constant service to my art . . .”

When the book was eventually published, in June 1914, the fears of the liability-shy publishers proved unfounded. In the Egoist Ezra Pound, after several unsurprisingly snobbish remarks about Joyce’s Irishness, welcomed him to the fold, declaring, “Mr Joyce’s more rigorous selection of the presented detail marks him, I think, as belonging to my own generation . . .” And Gerald Gould’s review in the New Statesman (27 June 1914) opened: “It is easy to say of Gorky that he is a man of genius. To say the same of Mr James Joyce requires more courage, since his name is little known; but a man of genius is precisely what he is.” By this time Joyce was far into the serialisation of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but the seeds of his combatively physical style were sown and nothing after could be the same.