Samhain, Issue No. 2

Samhain, Issue No. 2

Dublin

Sealy, Bryers, and Walker

1902

With pencil sketches by John Butler Yeats of James Joyce while at Irish Literary Theatre, signed in his early hand, “Jas. A Joyce.”

In October 1902, George Russell (“AE”) wrote to Yeats, “The spectre of the new generation has appeared. His name is Joyce. I have suffered from him and I would like you to suffer.” Yeats agreed to meet Joyce, and AE’s warning proved accurate. As he left, Joyce, aged twenty-two, imperiously declared that Yeats, aged thirty-seven, was “too old” to be helped. Joyce firmly rejected any invitations to become part of the literary movement. Yet he attended the opening of Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen and memorized some passages, which he later threaded into his novels. In 1912, on a rare visit to Dublin, Joyce wrote to Nora, his wife: “The Abbey Theater will be open and they will give plays of Yeats and Synge. … I am one of the writers of this generation who are perhaps creating at last a conscience in the soul of this wretched race.”

Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations