The 90-year-old restaurant menu that paints portrait of James Joyce as a patriotic man

James Joyce once branded his homeland an “old sow that eats her own farrow” and deliberately lived in exile. However, new evidence of a raucous night out may paint a new portrait of the artist as an Irish man.

A 90-year-old restaurant menu has revealed that the Irish writer celebrated St Patrick’s Day, despite his conflicted relationship with Ireland – suggesting that he may have had more patriotic affection for his mother country than previously thought.

The wine-heavy menu newly unearthed by British experts came from a restaurant in Paris, where Joyce lived for 20 years, and bears the date “St Patrick’s Day 1931” along with the signature of the author and his guests at what appears to have been a celebratory dinner that evening.

Samuel Beckett, the playwright and fellow Irish exile, joined in the celebrations with his literary friend then pocketed – and therefore saved – the autographed menu, which was suitably replete with wine options for St Patrick’s Day revelry, and for Joyce’s famous taste for alcohol.

The relic from the modernist author’s daily life found its way into an archive of material amassed by his grandson Stephen, who kept secret the contents of the collection until his death in 2020, when he left it to the University of Reading. The Telegraph was given an exclusive look at its treasures.

“It seems like he was out celebrating St Patrick’s Day,” said Guy Baxter, the university’s head of archive services. “There he is with Beckett, his family, his friends. There’s plenty of ‘vins’ on the menu, which is no surprise.

“But it is a surprise to see him celebrating St Patrick’s Day, when you think of his views, his life in Europe, and even his tone in some of the letters that we have when it comes to Ireland.”

Although he wrote about it from successive bases in Trieste, Paris and Zurich, Dublin-born Joyce never returned to Ireland after 1912, and at the time of his newly discovered St Patrick’s Day meal was a 49-year-old exile living with his family in France.

While there is no surviving bill for the meal, the signed menu bears the name of Silvia Beech, a bookshop owner who published Joyce’s groundbreaking novel Ulysses at her own expense, and the presence of his loyal patron at the dinner suggests that the often penniless author may have dined for free.

The venue was the Restaurant Les Trianons on Paris’ Left Bank, where duck, turbot and even booze-filled souffles were served to at least 11 guests, including Joyce’s wife Nora (possibly singing the menu with a joke name) and daughter Lucia.

Steven Matthews, a professor of English literature at the University of Reading, said: “When examining great literary figures like Joyce, we often do so in quite detached ways, speaking in abstractions.

“But this really brings us closer to the man, and gives us a sense of intimacy, and an insight into the everyday.”

Other insights from the archive so far include a telegram sent by Joyce to his secretary from Llandudno in July 1930, indicating that the famously Continental author chose Wales for a summer holiday that year.

Also included is a letter from HG Wells to Joyce declining his pleas to promote the notoriously impenetrable novel Finnegans Wake – archivists have found that it has been intentionally or unintentionally torn in half.