To Henrik Ibsen
March 19018 Royal Terrace, Fairfield, Dublin
Honoured Sir:
I write to you to give you greeting on your seventy-third birthday and to join my voice to those of your well-wishers in all lands. You may remember that shortly after the publication of your latest play When We Dead Awaken, an appreciation of it appeared in one of the English reviews—The Fortnightly Review—over my name. I know that you have seen it because some short time afterwards Mr. William Archer wrote to me and told me that in a letter he had from you some days before, you had written, ‘I have read or rather spelled out a review in TheFortnightly 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.’ (My own knowledge of your language is not, as you see, great but I trust you will be able to decipher my meaning.) I can hardly tell you how moved I was by your message. I am a young, a very young man, and perhaps the telling of such tricks of the nerves will make you smile. But I am sure if you go back along your own life to the time when you were an undergraduate at the University as I am, and if you think what it would have meant to you to have earned a word from one who held so high a place in your esteem as you hold in mine, you will understand my feeling. One thing only I regret, namely, that an immature and hasty article should have met your eye, rather than something better and worthier of your praise. There may not have been any wilful stupidity in it, but truly I can say no more. It may annoy you to have your work at the mercy of striplings but I am sure you would prefer even hotheadedness to nerveless and ‘cultured’ paradoxes.
What shall I say more? I have sounded your name defiantly through a college where it was either unknown or known faintly and darkly. I have claimed for you your rightful place in the history of the drama. I have shown what, as it seemed to me, was your highest excellence—your lofty impersonal power. Your minor claims—your satire, your technique and orchestral harmony—these, too, I advanced. Do not think me a hero-worshipper. I am not so. And when I spoke of you, in debating-societies, and so forth, I enforced attention by no futile ranting.
But we always keep the dearest things to ourselves. I did not tell them what bound me closest to you. I did not say how what I could discern dimly of your life was my pride to see, how your battles inspired me — not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead—how your willful resolution to wrest the secret from life gave me heart, and how in your absolute indifference to public canons of art, friends and shibboleths you walked in the light of inward heroism. And this is what I write to you of now. Your work on earth draws to a close and you are near the silence. It is growing dark for you. Many write of such things, but they do not know. You have only opened the way—though you have gone as far as you could upon it—to the end of ‘John Gabriel Borkman’ and its spiritual truth — for your last play stands, I take it, apart. But I am sure that higher and holier enlightenment lies—onward.
As one of the young generation for whom you have spoken I give you greeting—not humbly, because I am obscure and you in the glare, not sadly because you are an old man and I a young man, not presumptuously, nor sentimentally—but joyfully, with hope and with love, I give you greeting.
Faithfully yours,
James A. JoyceFrom Letters of James Joyce. Joyce, James, Richard Ellmann, and Stuart Gilbert. New York: Viking Press, 1957; 1966.
You want to know what real courage looks like? Forget the battlefield bullshit, the physical confrontations, all that macho posturing. I’m talking about an 18-year-old kid from Dublin, 18 years old, sitting down in 1901 and writing a fan letter to Henrik Ibsen that’s so nakedly honest, so electrically charged with ambition and recognition and need that it makes most contemporary attempts at artistic discourse look like Hallmark cards written by committee.
This wasn’t some fawning, ass-kissing exercise. Joyce had already published an essay defending Ibsen in the Fortnightly Review, and the old Norwegian, 73 years old and approaching “the silence,” as Joyce put it, had read it and called it “benevolent.” That word did something to young Jimmy. Moved him. Shook him. Because here’s the thing about real artists: they understand, viscerally, what it means when someone they revere actually sees them back.
But Joyce doesn’t just thank Ibsen. Oh no. He apologizes that only his “immature and hasty article” reached the playwright instead of “something better and worthier.” The kid is already thinking about his legacy while he’s still an undergraduate. He’s got the audacity to write: “I have sounded your name defiantly through a college where it was either unknown or known faintly and darkly. I have claimed for you your rightful place in the history of the drama.”
Claimed. Like he’s got the authority. Like he knows. And you know what? He did. He does. This is where it gets beautiful and terrifying. Because Joyce drops the academic posturing and goes straight for the jugular: “But we always keep the dearest things to ourselves. I did not tell them what bound me closest to you. I did not say how what I could discern dimly of your life was my pride to see, how your battles inspired me, not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead.”
Behind. Your. Forehead.
That’s the whole war right there. Not about technique or structure or any of that craft bullshit we love to obsess over. It’s about the internal demolition and reconstruction that happens when you’re trying to make something true, something that matters, something that justifies taking up space on this planet. Joyce recognized in Ibsen what every real artist recognizes in their heroes: the willingness to endure the isolation, the doubt, the absolute indifference to “public canons of art, friends and shibboleths” in order to “walk in the light of inward heroism.”
That phrase deserves to be carved into every art school wall, tattooed on every wannabe’s chest: inward heroism. Because that’s what it takes. Not the visible bravery, not the theatrical suffering-for-your-art performance piece, but the daily choice to keep wrestling with the work even when no one’s watching, even when you suspect you might be deluding yourself, even when you’re young and unknown and the odds of anyone giving a damn are approximately zero.
And Joyce knew he was one of them. You can feel it in every line. He’s not humble, he explicitly says so, because humility would be a lie. He knows what he’s capable of. But he’s also not presumptuous or sentimental. He’s greeting Ibsen “joyfully, with hope and with love” as “one of the young generation for whom you have spoken.”
That’s the real gift of the letter: this moment of pure artistic recognition across the generational divide. Ibsen, dying, has opened a door. Joyce, barely beginning, walks through it with his eyes wide open. No false modesty. No cynicism. Just the raw acknowledgment that art, real art, is a conversation that transcends mortality, geography, all the petty barriers we erect.
The letter is a promise and a prophecy. Within two decades, Joyce would deliver Ulysses and blow up the entire concept of the novel. But in 1901, he’s just a kid who understands, with frightening clarity, what the fight actually is. And he’s telling his hero: I see you. I see what you did. I see what it cost. And I’m going to do it too.
That’s the kind of artistic lineage that matters. Not influence in the academic sense, not imitation or homage, but this raw transmission of courage from one generation to the next. Ibsen fought his battles. Joyce fought his. And somewhere, right now, some 18-year-old nobody is looking at Joyce, or Ibsen, or whoever speaks to them, and feeling that same electric charge of recognition.
The letter isn’t just beautiful. It’s a blueprint for how to honor your heroes without diminishing yourself. How to be ambitious without being insufferable. How to see the greatness in others while simultaneously insisting on your own potential for greatness.
Joyce wasn’t asking for permission. He was announcing his arrival.