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The publication of this material would doubtless have pained Joyce deeply. Despite his reputation as a writer of dirty books, he was remarkably prim in his speech and other correspondence. "Keep my letters to yourself, dear," he admonished Nora. "They were written for you." Yet because everything Joyce experienced found its way some how into his fiction, the exposure of his raw sexual fantasies is not the simple invasion of privacy it might seem. Joyce's life was a tug of war between schizoid contradictions. He fled Dublin but never wrote about anything else. He renounced Catholicism, then cast himself as a higher priest who would transform the bread of common life into art. As these newly released letters show, the aloof classicist also struggled with the dark sensualist. "It is strange," Joyce wrote Nora in 1904, "from what muddy pools the angels call forth a spirit of beauty." Ulysses and Finnegans Wake were to prove him prophetic.
Paul Gray