Dear Mr Joyce: an essay by Edna O’Brien

As Ulysses turns 100, O'Brien tries to pin down what its extraordinary author was really like

Was he garrulous? Did he wear a topcoat? Did he hanker after renown? Such questions we ask ourselves about the deceased great, trying in our forlorn way to identify with them, some point of contact, some malady, some caprice that brings us and them closer. Such questions are not satisfactorily answered in works of fiction, writers being by necessity conjurors, ex-lovers are unreliable, friends overreaching, enemies bilious, so the closest we can get to a legendary figure is from letters. Letters are like the lines on a face, testimonial. In this case they are the access to the man that encased the mind, which housed the genius of James Joyce.

In his youth he was suspicious, contemptuous, unaccommodating. He saw his countrymen as being made up of yahoos, adulterous priests and sly deceitful women. He classed it as the venereal condition of the Irish". Like the wild geese he had a mind to go elsewhere. He wanted to be continentalised. He liked the vineyards. He had a dream of Paris, and a craze for languages. In literature his heroes were Cardinal Newman and Henrik Ibsen. To Ibsen he wrote, Your work on Earth draws to a close and you are near the silence. It is growing dark for you." He was 19 at that time. Young men do not usually know such things unless there is already on them the shadow of their future. There was on him. He descended into blindness. He was beset by glaucoma, cataract, iris complaint, dissolution of the retina. He is said to have had 25 eye operations. His nerves were like the twitterings of wrens. His brain pandemoniacal as he resorted to aspirin, iodine, scopolamine.