Giacomo Joyce - James Joyce

Edited with an introduction and notes by Richard Ellmann

The existence of a short work by James Joyce entitled Giacomo Joyce has been known for some time; it is referred to, and extracts from it are given, in Professor Richard Ellmann’s biography of Joyce. But not until now has the owner of the manuscript released it for reproduction. It appears here with an introduction and notes by Richard Ellmann, who regards it as an important work and dates it to 1914, Joyce’s ‘great year’, when he began Exiles and Ulysses, wrote the last two chapters of A Portrait of the Artist and completed some poems for Pomes Penyeach. Although Joyce never published this work, he used a great deal of it in his published books, as Professor Ellmann shows.

It is a short piece, concerned with Joyce’s attraction to a young Jewish girl who was among his pupils in Trieste. (A ‘Giacomo’, after Giacomo Casanova, is a ‘great lover’.) Joyce was facing the end of his youth, and was at the same time concerned with adultery both as a subject to write about and as a fact of life. He was also experimenting with the techniques he would require for writing Ulysses. So the work has biographical and literary interest of a high order.