Stephen Joyce, the grandson of literary giant James Joyce, doesn't want you to know about the letters discussed herein. Stephen Joyce has refused copyright permission, sued Sotheby's auction house, and destroyed documents in order to keep people like you--and me--from reading his grandfather's correspondence and discovering this: that James Joyce, in addition to being one of the greatest writers in English, was a pervert.

I use "pervert" here with affection, not condemnation. Pretty much any person who is a pervert is fine by me. (N.B. I do mean to say consensual and safe perverts. As long as the executors of sexual preclusions toe the lines of both the safe and the consensual, I believe perverts everywhere should be free to let their freak flags fly.) And Joyce, the author behind such works of devastating brilliance and beauty as Ulysses, Dubliners, Finnegan's Wake and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, was pretty much a dyed in the wool--or, rather, skid-marked on cotton--pervert.