He lives in a large apartment in a neighborhood on the left bank of the Seine. Tales of his dire poverty have traveled over the United States. Like most such gossip about literary men, they are groundless. The home of James Joyce is comfortably and sensibly furnished.

A life-size portrait of the novelist's father dominates the living room. Well-executed, deep blue-eyed, heavy-jawed, intelligent and intensely Irish, it catches a strong personality.

The elder Joyce more closely resembles a belligerent Irish squire than the father of one of the most sensitive and introspective of men. There are other paintings of Joyce’s relatives in the large living room.

A reception room, severe and monasterial, is to the left of the living room. Over a small fireplace in this room is a picture of the Seine at twilight. The picture and the sentimental inscription written under it are in direct contrast to other objects about.

A reproduction of the arms of Ireland hangs elsewhere.

Joyce resembles some portraits of Christ. His head is well shaped. His hair is fading yellow from auburn. A van dyke beard lengthens a face already long.

His eyes are gentle, placid, devoid of expression, being half-blind. They have been to him, he spoke slowly, "a long martyrdom." During the past twenty-two years many operations have been per- formed upon them.

He reads with heavy, thick glasses which magnify the print enormously. One of the most deeply learned and well-read of men in his generation, he garnered his knowledge with handicapped vision. He has the firm chin of his father. His carriage is graceful and slow. His step is light.

His extreme sensitivity is instantly noticed. His fingers are tapered, slender. He touched objects delicately, as though his hands were antennae.

That he is austere, ascetic, proud, sensitive, and melancholy can be seen in his face. This man, whom many consider more gifted than any of his contemporaries, talks but little, and then in a voice so crooning that one must listen closely for every word. With a strong Catholic background, which dominates all his work, no matter how revolutionary, Joyce settled in Paris after the war. Joyce has a liquid melody of speech similar to that of George Bernard Shaw. It is shot through with the poetry of the Celt. The early troubles of James Joyce as a writer were many and varied. He made a contract with Grant Richards of London, to publish his book, Dubliners. Nearly a year passed, and Richards asked Joyce to delete one story entirely, and alter passages in others, giving as an excuse the fact that the printer refused to set them up. Joyce refused to make any of the suggested alterations, and several months were wasted in correspondence. Joyce consulted a lawyer in Rome, who advised him to comply with the publisher's requests. Joyce once more refused, and Richards returned the manuscript to him, refusing to print it without changes, although Joyce held a contract for its publication. Some months later Joyce sent the manuscript to Messrs. Maunsel, Dublin publishers. A contract was signed with them in July of 1909. They agreed to publish the book on or prior to September 1, 1910. The following December, they asked Joyce to change one of the stories. Certain passages in the tale referred to Edward VII in a manner to which they objected. Joyce made one or two minor changes and the book was once more accepted. Publication was delayed again. Joyce was requested to delete the passage entirely.

He stated that he would not do so, but finally agreed to its deletion if he might be allowed a prefatory note to explain it. This suggestion was not accepted by the publishers. Joyce took the matter up with a lawyer in Dublin, who advised him to accept the publishers' demands.

In desperation, Joyce sent the story, with the offending passage marked, to George V, asking his opinion.

It was later returned by the King's secretary, stating that "it was inconsistent with rule for his Majesty to express his opinion in such cases." The manuscript was returned at the same time. The book had been written for seven years.

Another year passed. Joyce went to Ireland and took the matter up once more with Messrs. Maunsel. He was now requested to omit an entire story, and to remove other certain passages.

He was also told to omit or change all names of places of business mentioned in the book.

For nearly two months he fought this alteration. He saw two lawyers, who refused to take the case. However, they told him that there had been a clear breach of contract. At last, in desperation, Joyce agreed to everything requested, providing that there would be no further delay in publishing the book and that future editions might be brought out in the original text. The publishers requested him to place one thousand pounds in their bank, or to secure two sureties of five hundred pounds. Joyce refused to do this. Once more the publishers declined to publish the book. Also, unless he made them an offer to cover the expense of printing the book, be would be sued for the amount. Joyce finally agreed to furnish 60 per cent. of the first edition of one thousand copies, providing it were turned over to him. He began plans for his brother to publish the book and sell it in Dublin. At the last moment the printer refused to give Joyce the copies, and making no claim to the money due him, broke the type and burned the edition. Joyce had only one printed copy of Dubliners when he left Ireland. After two years, Grant Richards, who was to have been the original publisher, brought out the book in London.

At one period of his life Joyce opened a motion- picture theater in Dublin. His interest in films is still very great.

He studied medicine for a short time at the University of Paris. A student of languages, he has taught them on the Continent.

His life has been quite meager in actuality. As a student of scholastic philosophy he has lived a great deal in the minds and imaginations of other men. Hip is deeply interested in all men of action.

As a young man, Joyce ridiculed the idea of an Irish national theater. He wanted, however, the money collected for that purpose to be used for European masterpieces. This can perhaps be traced to bitter days in Ireland.

Antagonisms were created in those days. Even the gentle A. E. said to Joyce, "I am afraid that you have, not enough chaos in you to make a world."

Mrs. Joyce is kindly, placid, the antithesis of her world-famed husband. Courteous, amiable, the remnant of a once beautiful Irish girl, there is in the tired expression in her eyes that which indicates that living with genius exacts a price.

No contemporary writer has been more discussed than Joyce. His theory that words are stale and that the English language needs revitalizing is accepted by many. Others are of the opinion that such a practice is unnecessary -- that words are continually being borrowed from other languages and used as the need arises. Joyce has without doubt written some of the greatest prose in our period. His refusal to conform to standardized writing when superficial observations and sophisticated banter drop from every pen is at least admirable.

Joyce has a morbid fear of thunder and lightning. He was informed that in a certain portion of Holland the heavens were peaceful. Mrs. Joyce made everything ready for the journey. Joyce travels slowly, taking three days to make a journey that would require a half day for a less temperamental man, but Mrs. Joyce succeeded at last in getting him to his desired location.

On the night of his arrival the lightning struck a church close to his hotel. It crashed the belfry to the ground. Joyce walked the floor until time for the first train in the morning and rushed back to Paris. He could not be induced to leave the city again. The fact that the Eiffel Tower is so near his home on the Rue Grenelle reassures him considerably, since it would prevent lightning striking anything else in the neighborhood.

He is pleased with the way Ulysses has been received in France. He approves of the translation, upon which Auguste Morel, Stuart Gilbert, and Valery Larbaud have been working five years. The German translation was published last year and was also praised very highly. Joyce seldom speaks of Ulysses. For him it has been long done and forgotten.

His new book, Work in Progress, absorbs all his thought.

Instead of writing a book from beginning to end, he carries the whole thing in his head, that is, the general lines, and writes it almost as a painter proceeds, putting down essential sentences here and there and then expanding them to the exact degree of detail necessary. His phrases grow almost the way a rose blooms. He does a prodigious amount of work on each page, but never discards anything, because he feels that the first draft is the skeleton upon which the whole body of his work is developed. The process fascinates him; however hard he works he feels that he is always catching subtle associations between the sounds or meanings of words. His idea, in Work in Progress is to use all the languages familiar to English-speaking people or those which have been used previously to form the English speech of today. To read the new book, a good ear and a quick wit are more essential than academic knowledge. There are those who claim that Joyce knows American slang as well as any of her writers. Reading newspapers has become rather difficult for him, but he keeps in touch with everything.

He never forgets anything completely. One afternoon long ago, Elliot Paul casually told him how thunderstorms follow the rivers in the west of America. Joyce later worked the idea into a chapter of a book. Most people fail to realize the humorous intent of Joyce's work, especially Work in Progress. The Bible and other legends he has used and combined are all considered from a comical angle, and in the passages which are most lyrical and musical there is always an undercurrent of fun. In one part, for instance, the words flow along with the feeling of all the rivers in the world; they issue from the mouth of a washerwoman kneeling on the bank, washing out the bishop's underclothing. For an Irishman, the story of Finnegan's wake, near the beginning of the book, is highly humorous. Joyce rings in Humpty Dumpty, Steve Brody, and the fall of Satan in the same phrases which describe Finnegan falling from a staging into a wheelbarrow full of plaster.

Joyce's favorite music is the old English, even before Purcell. He is a fine singer. He plays his accompaniments on the piano. He is a magnificent reader, too. He can put all the nuances into pronunciation which the spelling indicates. That is why he takes such liberties with spelling, as all the old English writers did, for the sake of sound and emphasis. The word "their" sounds differently from "there" when he pronounces it carefully.

Mrs. Joyce is kind to her distinguished husband. His excruciating nerves never get the best of her. She does not understand him.

"James Joyce, the writer," she once said, with a woeful expression. "And to think that once he sang on the same stage with John McCormack."

She asked him once where she could get some "good old Irish humor" to read, not counting him among the Irish humorists at all. He tells the story with a wistful, good-natured smile.

Joyce is a lonely man. He loves companionship, but he is so sensitive, and reacts so vividly to everything that is said to him, that a nervous person in his presence suffers because it seems that his mind is too delicate an instrument to play upon unskillfully.

No subject, with the exception of politics, is uninteresting to him.

Not a dozen men in the world have given him encouragement since the writing of Ulysses. He is not at all bitter.

In this book he wrote: "The supreme question of a work of art is: out of how deep a life does it spring?"

If he is wasting his time, he intends to do it on a colossal scale, as he has done everything else. It is possible that he may be more appreciated a few hundred years from now.

He has the patience of eternity.

The names of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein have been linked together. Their work is entirely dissimilar. It is granted by some critics that Three Lives, written twenty-five years ago, is an excellent realistic novel. The Making of Americans has some enthusiasts.

It has not been printed in America.

In this book she took one of each kind of people she knew and by means of repeating what they said and did, day in and day out, made in the opinion of her admirers a most remarkable book which can be picked up anywhere and found to be extraordinarily true to life without being in any sense photographic. "By repeating you can actually change the meaning," she writes.

After The Making of Americans she wrote a series of short sketches in which she depicts the complete lives of a group of people by repeating and inverting a few phrases which in themselves mean almost nothing.

Her work is becoming more and more abstract, according to her followers.

Her disciples say there is no trick about it. They claim that it means just what it says and must be followed in that way. As a Wife has a Cow, A Love Story has all the feeling and form of a story without any tangible narrative at all.

She believes that narrative, in the ordinary sense, is played out. Her theory is similar to Joyce's. I do not agree with them in this -- but who cares? They are both of the opinion that writing may be different from speaking, that it can be a much more complicated, interesting, and varied process than merely setting down words which might form the pattern of an oral story.

Gertrude Stein insists that description by means of comparison is weak, that simile and metaphor are confessions of an inability to state a thing directly. She may be correct that As a Wife has a Cow, A Love Story is direct writing.

Gertrude Stein is gracious and hospitable. She believes life is richer today than ever before.

During the war, she drove an ambulance in the French and later in the American army. Her home in Paris is on the Rue des Fleurs. She entertains a stream of people each afternoon. Her mornings are reserved for writing. Her favorite reading is early American history or biography.

She received a degree in brain surgery at Johns Hopkins after being graduated with the highest honors. She acted as an assistant to William James teaching philosophy.

With a scientific education and background, she prefers experimental writing. It is possible that she could become a popular writer. She does not need money, and her mentality is above such solace.

Her hobby is modern painting. She was the discoverer and encourager of many artists -- since world famous. Many of the paintings on her studio walls, done by unknown people at the time, have since become valuable.

She was the early admirer and friend of Picasso and Cézanne.

A picturesque figure, she arouses the antagonism of those who dislike what they consider useless things.

Miss Stein drives a Ford. She pulls weeds in her garden if she feels the need of more exercise.