‘The stern task of living’: Dubliners,Clerks, Money and Modernism

Abstract

In the Dubliners story `Two Gallants’, Lenehan presents an enigma: `No one knew how he achieved the stern task of living.’⁴ James Joyce himself knew enough, it seems, about the ‘stern’ or ‘delicate’ task of keeping body and soul together. By 1904, the year Joyce met Nora Barnacle, the rapid financial decline of John Joyce’s family had led them from independent propertied income to the virtual poverty of 7 St Peter’s Terrace, Dublin, where the cramped space was occupied by the recently-widowed father and his nine children. When Oliver Gogarty inquired about the illness which had caused his friend’s disappearance for two days, Joyce cited ’inanition’.⁵ The procurement of money through ingenuity and stealth, coupled with ’a remarkable capacity to fall from every slight foothold, to teeter over every available precipice’,⁶ becomes the keynote of Joyce’s early adulthood and beyond. He writes, in his first letter to Nora, of his home as ‘simply a middle-class affair ruined by spendthrift habits which I have inherited’.

It is hard enough by giving lessons all day to keep body and soul together in Paris; and how you can expect to do that, and at the same time qualify as a doctor, passes my comprehension.

William Archer, letter to James Joyce, 25 November 1902¹

I am an English teacher here in a Berlitz School. I have been here for sixteen months during which I have achieved the delicate task of living and supporting two other trusting souls on a salary of £80 a year.

James Joyce, letter (from Trieste) to Grant Richards

28 February 1906²

My home was simply a middle-class affair ruined by spendthrift habits which I have inherited. My mother was slowly killed, I think, by my father’s ill-treatment, by years of trouble, and by my cynical frankness of conduct. When I looked on her face as she lay in the coffin — a face grey and wasted with cancer — I understood that I was looking on the face of a victim, and I cursed the system which had made her a victim.

James Joyce, letter to Nora Barnacle, 29 August 1904³