February 2
James Joyce (1882)
It was on this date, February 2, 1882, that Irish author James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born in Dublin, the son of a Roman Catholic mother and an underachieving father. James Joyce's early education was from Irish Jesuits, who (he said) taught him to think straight — but he rejected their religion while very young, considering it "black magic." "I confess that I do not see what good it does to fulminate against the English tyranny while the Roman tyranny occupies the palace of the soul," said Joyce. "For me there is only one alternative to scholasticism, scepticism."
In his autobiographical novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), the Joyce character, Stephen Dedalus, like Joyce, begins as a devout Catholic and slowly loses his religion. In Chapter 5, the Joyce character (Stephen) says to another character,
Look here, Cranly, he said. ... I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using my defence the only arms I allow myself to use - silence, exile, and cunning."*Joyce went on to distinguish himself with his novel Ulysses** (1922). Later still, Finnegan's Wake (1939), Joyce's most revolutionary work, was a critical and popular disappointment. Joyce died on 13 January 1941, — never witnessing the subsequent popularity of Finnegan's Wake, which was received by some as a masterpiece, by others as incomprehensible. In the "first draft" of his novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, called Stephen Hero, Joyce has Stephen muse, "He comes into the world God knows how, walks on the water, gets out of his grave and goes up off the Hill of Howth. What drivel is this?"
* James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1916, chapter 5. The full text of this work can be found at this link.
** The full text of Ulysses can be found at this link.
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Havelock Ellis (1859)
It was also on this date, January 2, 1859, that English psychologist and sexologist Henry Havelock Ellis was born in Croydon, Surrey. In his youth, he traveled around the world with his father, a sea captain, stopping in Australia, where he worked as a teacher in New South Wales. There he read Life in Nature by philosopher and sex reformer James Hinton and saw his own life's work. Hinton's book caused Ellis to abandon the Christianity of his youth for a variety of Vitalism. "There is," he observed, "a very intimate connection between hypnotic phenomenon and religion."*
Back in London, Ellis trained in St. Thomas's Hospital, and concentrated on the scientific and psychological study of sex. His studies yielded his six-volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex, appearing from 1897 to 1910. But it was his Sexual Inversion, published first in Germany in 1896 (Das konträre Geschechtsfühl) that got his bookseller prosecuted, and a British judge declare it obscene. It had been only recently that Oscar Wilde was condemned for homosexuality, so when Ellis's work concluded that homosexual behavior was not a disease or a crime, Victorian society was appalled.
In fact, his liberal views on sexuality outraged the English clergy, and based on the private knowledge of one writer,** they attempted "to trap and prosecute him." That he was a Freethinker is shown in his Affirmations (1897) and My Life (1940). Ellis died on 8 July 1939 at the age of 80. It was Havelock Ellis who wrote, "The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence from Jerusalem of a lunatic asylum."†
* Quoted in Rufus K. Noyes, Views of Religion, 1906.
** Joseph McCabe, A Biographical Dictionary of Ancient, Medieval, and Modern Freethinkers, 1945.
† Havelock Ellis, Impressions and Comments, 1914.
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