On a day in May, 1922, in Paris, a medical student named Pierre Mérigot de Treigny was asked by his teacher, Dr. Victor Morax, a well-known ophthalmologist, to attend to a patient who had telephoned complaining about pain from iritis, an inflammation of the eye. The student went to the patient’s apartment, in a residential hotel on the Rue de l’Université. Inside, he found a scene of disarray. Clothes were hanging everywhere; toilet articles were scattered around on chairs and the mantelpiece. A man wearing dark glasses and wrapped in a blanket was squatting in front of a pan that contained the remains of a chicken. A woman was sitting across from him. There was a half-empty bottle of wine next to them on the floor. The man was James Joyce. A few months before, on February 2nd, he had published what some people regarded then, and many people regard now, as the greatest work of prose fiction ever written in the English language.

The detritus of reality is the material of Joyce’s fiction. “If ‘Ulysses’ isn’t fit to read,” he once said, “life isn’t fit to live.” Illustration by Delphine Lebourgeois

The woman was Nora Barnacle. She and Joyce were unmarried, and had two teen-age children, Giorgio and Lucia, who were living with them in the two-room apartment. The conditions in which the student discovered them were not typical—Joyce lived in luxury whenever he could afford it, and often when he couldn’t—but the scene was emblematic. Joyce was a nomad. He was born in 1882, in Rathgar, a suburb of Dublin, and grew up the oldest of ten surviving children. After he started school, his family changed houses nine times in eleven years, an itinerancy not always undertaken by choice. They sometimes moved, with their shrinking stock of possessions, at night, in order to escape the attention of creditors. They did not leave a forwarding address.

James was the favorite of his charming, cantankerous, and dissolute father, John Stanislaus Joyce, and was adored by his brothers and sisters. They called him Sunny Jim, because he laughed at everything. He was a brilliant student when he chose to excel, a prodigy; and, despite the family’s relentless downward spiral—John Joyce wasted a considerable inheritance—he received a serious education at Jesuit schools. By the time he got his degree, from University College, Dublin, in 1902, the family was living in the northern suburb of Cabra. A friend later described the house: “The banisters were broken, the grass in the back-yard was all blackened out. There was laundry there and a few chickens, and it was a very very miserable home.” Joyce’s mother, Mary, died there, of liver cancer, in 1903.

Joyce left Ireland a year later, when he was twenty-two, but he never really left the manner of life he had known. Like his father, he was a raconteur and a barfly. He had a good tenor voice (as did John Joyce), and he loved to sing and to dance. When he had no money, he borrowed it; when he had it, he picked up the tab for whatever company he was in, booked himself and his family into fancy hotels, and bought fur coats for Nora and Lucia. He was generous in the free-spirited way that only the inveterately insolvent can be.

For many years after he moved to the Continent, he scraped a living as a language teacher in Berlitz schools, a job he disliked. He started out in Pula, moved to Trieste, to Rome, then back to Trieste, and, finally, to Zurich. He changed residences regularly wherever he was, sometimes under a landlord’s gun. In 1920, he moved to Paris, where he was supported by patrons and—though only toward the end of his life, since “Ulysses” was banned for twelve years in the United States and for fourteen in Britain—by royalties. During the twenty years he lived in Paris, he had eighteen different addresses.

“A man of small virtue, inclined to extravagance and alcoholism” is how Joyce described himself to Carl Jung. He was frail—he avoided contact sports like rugby as a child and barroom pugilism as a grownup—and he was frequently laid low by nervous attacks and illnesses. His eye troubles forced him to submit to a series of tricky and painful operations. At times, he was virtually blind. When he wrote, which he did usually stretched out across a bed, he wore a white jacket, so that light was reflected onto the paper; as he got older, he used a magnifying glass, in addition to his eyeglasses, to read.

After the Second World War broke out and the Germans occupied Paris, Joyce managed to get to Switzerland. He died there, in Zurich, of a perforated ulcer, on January 13, 1941. He was fifty-eight, and a very old man. He had burned the candle all the way down. He had spent eight years on “Ulysses,” and fifteen years on “Finnegans Wake,” which was published in 1939. “My eyes are tired,” he wrote in a letter to Giorgio, in 1935. “For over half a century, they have gazed into nullity where they have found a lovely nothing.”

Joyce had a lot of bad luck in the literary marketplace. Four publishers turned down his first book, a volume of poems called “Chamber Music.” He spent nine years getting his story collection, “Dubliners,” into print. It was rejected by eight publishers. At least thirteen printers refused to set his first novel, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” in full. His play, “Exiles,” after being turned down by theatre companies in Ireland and En-gland, opened in Munich, was poorly received, and closed almost immediately. It took Joyce two years to obtain an injunction against a pirated American version of “Ulysses.” And, throughout his career, he had chronic censorship afflictions, even with “Finnegans Wake,” a book that people said was unreadable—which ought to have made the question of obscenity moot. But he was lucky in his biographer.

Richard Ellmann started his biography of Joyce in 1947. He was therefore able to interview people who had known his subject. The medical student who reported on Joyce’s ménage on the Rue de l’Université, for example, was a discovery of Ellmann’s. Ellmann was an energetic researcher, an eloquent writer, and a scholar whose specialty was Irish literature. (His first book was a critical biography of William Butler Yeats.) He understood the man—“this bizarre and wonderful creature who turned literature and language on end,” he called him—and he understood the work. Not every literary biography has all those things going for it.

Ellmann’s “James Joyce” came out in 1959. The English novelist Anthony Burgess, another dedicated Joycean, judged it “the greatest literary biography of the century,” and many people have filed concurrences. Ellmann didn’t start working on the book steadily until 1952. Considering the quantity of information it holds, he wrote it in an amazingly short amount of time, and a reader can feel how fully he was possessed by his project, and how much fun he found the job to be. That, too, is not an impression left by most eight-hundred-page biographies. The book was reprinted twice, with corrections and additions, and a revised edition was published in 1982. (Ellmann suffered from A.L.S.—Lou Gehrig’s disease—but he was able to finish a second major biography, of Oscar Wilde, which appeared in 1987, the year of his death.)

So the first question that a writer contemplating a biography of Joyce has to ask is whether we really need another one. It’s true that more is known about Joyce and his world. Since 1982, biographies of John Joyce (by John Wyse Jackson and Peter Costello), of Nora (by Brenda Maddox), and of Lucia (by Carol Loeb Shloss) have come out, and there has been fresh biographical work on Joyce himself. Gordon Bowker’s “James Joyce: A New Biography” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) is a kind of synthesis of this research—along with some material, now in Ellmann’s papers, that Ellmann elected not to use. Bowker is a clear and prudent writer, and his labors count as a service to scholarship. But he never indicates where he thinks earlier accounts got things wrong; his biography is an update, not a revision. It doesn’t affect our understanding of Joyce or of what Joyce wrote.

“It is enlightening to view the work of a highly autobiographical writer like Joyce in the context of his life,” Bowker says. Well, yes—that’s exactly what Ellmann demonstrated more than fifty years ago. And Joyce himself could hardly have been more explicit. The invitation to understand his fiction as fashioned from the facts of his own experience is one of the few things in Joyce’s work not to be taken ironically. “As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image,” Stephen Dedalus explains (a little grandly, but Stephen is a little grand) to the Dublin literati, in “Ulysses.” “So in the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be.” Stephen is imagining himself, many years later, as Joyce, writing “Ulysses” and imagining himself, many years earlier, as Stephen.

Bowker’s notion of how life relates to art is more mechanical. He thinks, for example, that “John’s habit of regular long walks around Dublin and environs . . . foreshadows the wandering narrative line which snakes through most of his son’s fiction”—an observation that does not do a lot of interpretive work. As many previous commentators have, he matches up names and events in Joyce’s books with their likely real-life counterparts, which is an entertaining game but not a challenging one, since Joyce usually did little or nothing to disguise the originals of his characters. He often gave them their real names. Joyce’s dramatis personae include a lot of “as himself” parts. It’s one of the reasons he never returned to Ireland after “Ulysses” came out: many people in Dublin were prepared to sue him for libel.

Joyce didn’t use actual people and places because he was settling scores, or because he was writing disguised autobiography, or because he lacked invention. The relation between his world and his fiction is much stranger than that. In November, 1921, he wrote to his aunt Josephine, in Dublin, to ask if she could tell him whether it was possible “for an ordinary person to climb over the area railings of no 7 Eccles street, either from the path or the steps, lower himself from the lowest part of the railings till his feet are within 2 feet or 3 of the ground and drop unhurt.” He had seen it done, he told her, but by someone with an athletic build; he wanted to make sure that an ordinary man could do it. He needed the information because he was editing the “Ithaca” chapter of “Ulysses,” in which Leopold Bloom, who has forgotten his latchkey, enters his house, at 7 Eccles Street, by this method. He had made up Bloom. Why couldn’t he just make up the height of the railings?

Bowker has relatively little critical interest in what Joyce was up to as a writer. And, if you’re not interested in that, you’re not going to produce a very satisfying biography. The writing is where the action is. Joyce lived in eventful times, but he did not lead an eventful life. After he moved to Paris, he socialized mostly with his family and, since he was a suspicious man who suffered from a mild but persistent persecution complex, with a small circle of trusted associates. He did not reveal himself to strangers. He knew his famous contemporaries—Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway—but his attitude toward them was fairly aloof. He could be self-absorbed far beyond the point of mere incivility. The only things that really mattered to him were his family and his art.

In 1932, two young Americans, Dwight Macdonald and George Morris, recent Yale graduates with an interest in modern literature and art, were in Paris, where they bought a copy of “Ulysses,” still outlawed in the United States, at the English-language bookstore Shakespeare and Company. They got into a conversation with the owner, Sylvia Beach, the woman who had published “Ulysses,” and she arranged for them to meet Joyce. They showed up at Joyce’s apartment and plied him eagerly with questions about his work. He was unresponsive. “It was like trying to open a safe without the combination,” Macdonald later said. Finally, one of them made a remark about people not knowing what to do with their lives. Joyce suddenly perked up. He gestured toward the window. “There are people who go walkin’ up and down the street,” he said, “and they don’t know what they want.”

He knew what he wanted. Bowker reports someone’s remembrance of Joyce as a little boy at parties with neighborhood children: “Sometimes, donning a red cap, he played the Devil, condemning some of them to hell, which he decided was under a wheelbarrow.” The artist was already at work. “Joyce’s court,” as Ellmann put it, “is always in session.” Joyce’s favorite writer was Dante, another exile, who created a verbal universe that he populated with old Florentine comrades and enemies, each caricatured with exquisite precision for all time, and who placed at the center of his imaginary cosmos a woman he had fallen in love with after seeing her on the street, Beatrice Portinari.

Joyce’s Beatrice, of course, was Nora. She came from Galway, and was working as a chambermaid at Finn’s Hotel, in Dublin, when he saw her walking along Nassau Street in a manner suggesting that she was approachable. “Sauntering” is how Joyce later described it. He duly approached, and asked her for a date. She agreed, but stood him up. He sent her a note. “I went home quite dejected,” it said. “I would like to make an appointment but it might not suit you. I hope you will be kind enough to make one with me—if you have not forgotten me!” This time, they did meet. They walked to Ringsend, on the south bank of the Liffey, where (and here we can drop the Dante analogy) she put her hand inside his trousers and masturbated him. It was June 16, 1904, the day on which Joyce set “Ulysses.” When people celebrate Bloomsday, that is what they are celebrating.

Ellmann chose to omit the sexual details in his account of the first date with Nora, although there are several references to the incident in Joyce’s letters. After a date, Joyce took one of Nora’s gloves home with him, and he writes to her to say that he has slept with it: “Your glove lay beside me all night—unbuttoned—but otherwise conducted itself very properly—like Nora.” In August, he tells her that what happened was “a kind of sacrament, and the recollection of it fills me with amazed joy.” Five years later, on a trip to Dublin, he writes to her in Trieste: “It was not I who first touched you long ago down at Ringsend. It was you who slid your hand down down inside my trousers . . . and frigged me slowly until I came off through your fingers, all the time bending over me and gazing at me out of your quiet saintlike eyes.” On that night, he tells her in another letter, she “made me a man.”

“Oh, I see what happened. Autocorrect changed ‘southpaw’ to ‘sauerkraut.’” Facebook

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Joyce had known only prostitutes and proper middle-class girls. Nora was something new, an ordinary woman who treated him as an ordinary man. The moral simplicity of what happened between them seems to have stunned him. It was elemental, a gratuitous act of loving that had not involved flattery or deceit, and that was unaccompanied by shame or guilt. That simplicity became the basis of their relationship.