With the improvement of his lifestyle, Joyce lost much of his bitterness towards the Ireland which he had decided never to visit again after 1912. In addition, in Zurich, he stepped up his "attack" upon the English language, his restructuring of traditional means of expression. Two clouds, however, did partially mar the relatively secure Zurich days: at the end of 1918 and the start of 1919, he began a tepid affair with a Swiss woman named Martha Fleischmann (she was Joyce's prototype for Martha Clifford in Ulysses), which ended sadly; and in August, 1917, Joyce began undergoing the first of eleven eye operations that were to continue for fifteen years. He left Zurich for Trieste in October, 1919, and then, at Pound's urging, he decided in the late spring of 1920 to move to Paris, the city in which he was to spend the next 19 years.
Joyce was relatively happy during his first years in the cosmopolitan city. Pound had arranged to have Joyce's books translated into French, and he felt that Paris was the best place to launch Ulysses. One friend lent Joyce a free flat; others, clothing and furniture. The well-known critic Valery Larbaud gave a public lecture on Ulysses two months before its publication, and the novel was finally published on Joyce's 40th birthday, February 2, 1922, by Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company.
On March 10, 1923, Joyce began Finnegans Wake, the book that was to appear in parts in several magazines (most prominently in Eugene and Maria Jolas's transition from April, 1927, to April-May, 1938) until its publication as a whole on May 4, 1939. This enigmatic book cost Joyce most of his old literary associates, and its seemingly meaningless language alienated many of his friends. Pound complained that he could not understand what Joyce was doing in his new work; as a result, Pound's relationship with Joyce was strained after the late 1920s. Joyce's brother Stanislaus judged the book to be drivel. Joyce himself was so discouraged with the reception of his new work that in 1929 he proposed to the Irish writer James Stephens that he finish the book for him. The timing of the publication of Finnegans Wake as a whole, just months short of the declaration of World War II, was the final blow to a broken Joyce, who, shortly after, was once again forced to move because of international hostilities. In addition to all of his other disappointments, Joyce spent the 1930s in a desperate attempt to cure the schizophrenia of his daughter, Lucia. The task was a hopeless one, but Joyce persisted in trying to effect a restoration.
Joyce died on January 13, 1941, as the result of an undiagnosed duodenal ulcer. He is buried in the Fluntern Cemetery, which rises above Zurich.
