Silence, Friendship, and Cunning

This essay aims to complicate and question the pervasive image of James Joyce, and his own self-image, as "[u]nfellowed, friendless and alone," by looking at the role of friends and friendship in Joyce's life and in the lives of his major self-portraits, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom. I examine Joyce's relationship with his most important friends, such as Vincent Cosgrave, J. F. Byrne, Oliver St. John Gogarty, Frank Budgen, Samuel Beckett, Paul Léon, and others—notably a number of women, including Sylvia Beach, Maria Jolas, and Harriet Shaw Weaver. Those relationships were complex, as are the friendships in Joyce's fiction. In A Portrait, Davin, for example, says that Stephen is "[a]lways alone," yet in Lynch and Cranly he has close friends. In Ulysses, the friendships with Mulligan and Lynch are notably strained. But while Stephen is cynical about friends and, by extension, friendship, it is Bloom who is, in fact, apparently without any close friends: he seems to have only acquaintances (like Molly as well, for that matter). Yet Bloom and Stephen form a bond that, although it is hard to define and almost certainly temporary, seems to bring a measure of comfort to both of them.