Discovering Ibsen ranks for Joyce as definitive as Saint Paul’s conversion on the way to Damascus. Ibsen he placed above Shakespeare as a dramatist, Ibsen he revered because of his contempt for falsity and hypocrisy. A letter written to Ibsen’s translator reveals Joyce the intending warrior identifying with Ibsen’s battles, those as he said “fought and won behind your forehead.” Ibsen had set an example to him to walk in the light of his inner heroism. “But we always keep the dearest things to ourselves,” he wrote, a telling confidence sent to a famous man who was unable to read English and a poignant admission of how emotionally bereft Joyce really was. The equivocation, the sarcasm, the hauteur was merely a mask. At the end of the letter he wrote, “Your work on earth draws to a close and you are near the silence. It is growing dark for you.” He was nineteen at the time. Young men do not usually know such things unless there is already on them a premonition of their own darkness. The rows, the deaths, the hunger, a constant scraping for money had been his bitter schooling and led to disdain for family and for country. Coming away from a play by Sudermann in which a family were pitilessly dissected, he told his parents that they need not have gone, the genius that they had seen on stage was breaking out in the house and against the home. He warned that it would happen in their own life.
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