James Joyce had syphilis, new study claims

James Joyce, who wrote of his worsening vision in 1931 that "I deserve all this on account of my many iniquities", was trying to confess that he was suffering from syphilis, according to new evidence uncovered by a Harvard scholar, which could upset current perspectives on the author's life and fiction.

Kevin Birmingham, a lecturer in history and literature at Harvard University, claims in his forthcoming history of Joyce's Ulysses, The Most Dangerous Book, that Joyce was going blind because he was suffering from syphilis – "his eye attacks were recurrent because syphilis advances in waves of bacterial growth and dormancy". The array of symptoms Joyce described in detail to his correspondents, "the abscesses that ravaged his mouth and the large 'boil' on his shoulder", were probably syphilitic, writes Birmingham. "Syphilis 'disabled' his right arm in 1907", and the psychological toll of the disease "likely caused Joyce's periodic fainting spells, his insomnia and his 'nervous collapses'", according to the scholar.

Rumours that Joyce had syphilis were circulating during the author's lifetime, but first hit print in 1975, when a biography of Joyce claimed he had congenital, rather than acquired, syphilis. In 1995, Kathleen Ferris's James Joyce and the Burden of Disease also made the claim – but she "makes a lot of assumptions and counts literary evidence as biographical evidence: if one of Joyce's character's had syphilis, that meant Joyce had syphilis", said Birmingham. Her work was "openly ridiculed" by the medical doctor JB Lyons (who knew Joyce), and the issue "faded away", according to Birmingham, who added that "to this day there are prominent Joyceans who haven't even heard of the debate".