James Joyce. A portrait of the artist as a schizoid.

Abstract

Today customs officials watch bearded college students return from Europe carrying copies of Naked Lunch or the Works of Chairman Mao, and check pockets or luggage for marihuana or heroin. In the nostalgically distant days of forty years ago, Hemingway and Joyce were the culture heroes of the clean-shaven avant-garde. The hottest contraband for import was Joyce's Ulysses , banned for obscenity in the United States but available for smuggling at Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Co. bookstore in Paris. Now the heroes of that generation are dead—Joyce by a gastrointestinal hemorrhage, Hemingway through suicide, Dylan Thomas from the ravages of alcohol. Of the Joyce coterie, most are also dead, though the once young Samuel Beckett, whom Joyce's daughter Lucia for a time admired, has lived on to win the Nobel prize for literature that his master never attained. And Lucia Joyce lives on too, a permanent resident of St. Andrew's Psychiatric