By BUDD PARR [Age of Sand] – James Joyce wrote to Henrik Ibsen when Joyce was nineteen years old and Ibsen in his seventies and at the end of his career. Joyce had managed to publish a review —his very first formal publication — of Ibsen’s play When We Dead Awaken a year earlier and, to his great surprise, Ibsen responded: “I have read or rather spelled out a review in The Fortnightly Review by Mr James Joyce which is very benevolent and for which I should greatly like to thank the author if only I had sufficient knowledge of the language.” This began a three year correspondence between the two.
According to Joyce’s biographer Richard Ellmann, Ibsen’s response “fell upon him like a benison at the beginning of his career. He had entered the world of literature under the best auspices in that world…Before Ibsen’s letter Joyce was an Irishman; after it he was a European.”
At this time Joyce had been writing, but it was well before he published any of his own work of fiction, poetry or drama.
Continued at Age of Sand | More Chronicle & Notices.
