All his life he was a voracious reader. He read books, pamphlets, manuals, street directories, everything and anything to feed his eclectic tastes and his lust for knowledge. In his library after his death there were almost a thousand volumes, books as diverse as A Clue to the Creed of Early Egypt, Apuleius, Aeschylus, Psyche and Cupid, Thomas Aquinas, Plato, Nietzsche, Irish melodies, Historic Graves of Glasnevin Cemetery, Cowper’s translation of the Odyseey, a pocket missal that had belonged to his cousin, Fanny Hill’s unexpurgated memoirs, a book on uric acid, another on masturbation, a little handbook on fortune-telling by cards, and the catalogues from the modish shops in Lond and Dublin.
Without knowing it he had conceived of his novel Ulysses—“It is an epic of two races (Israelite-Irish) …” --and he had given voice to his daring manifesto. To Stanislaus he wrote that if he were to put a bucket down into his own soul’s sexual department, he would also draw up the muddied waters of Arthur Griffith (leader of Sinn Féin), Ibsen, Saint Aloysius (his own saint name), Shelley and Renan, in short, cerebral sexuality and rank bodily fervor run amok. Not since the Jacobeans would sex be so openly and so rawly portrayed. Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontë sisters, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Proust, all had dwelt achingly on love, unrequited love, and by implication on sex, but Joyce was determined to break the taboos—to depict copulation, transvestism, onanism, coprophilia and all else that was repellent to Victorian England, puritanical America and sanctimonious Ireland. If people did not like it he couldn’t help that either. On the “saince” of a certain subject, he said that very few mortals did not wake up each morning in dread of finding themselves syphilitic. “Talk about pure men, pure women and spiritual love” was all bunkum. There was no such thing. Sexuality was central to human impulse. More importantly sexuality was a universal trait and not just an Irish one—he would Hellenize, Hebrewize, demonize and immortalize his native city and for his crimes he would be punished and long after his death he would be rewarded by having snatches of his Ulysses transcribed on small bronze plaques and beveled into the pavements which Leopold Bloom and others had trodden.
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