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| James Joyce |
Dear Mr Joyce: an essay by Edna O’Brien
As Ulysses turns 100, O’Brien tries to pin down what its extraordinary author was really like
Edna O'Brien
Wednesday 2 February 2022
Was he garrulous? Did he wear a topcoat? Did he hanker after renown? Such questions we ask ourselves about the deceased great, trying in our forlorn way to identify with them, some point of contact, some malady, some caprice that brings us and them closer. Such questions are not satisfactorily answered in works of fiction, writers being by necessity conjurors, ex-lovers are unreliable, friends overreaching, enemies bilious, so the closest we can get to a legendary figure is from letters. Letters are like the lines on a face, testimonial. In this case they are the access to the man that encased the mind, which housed the genius of James Joyce.
In his youth he was suspicious, contemptuous, unaccommodating. He saw his countrymen as being made up of yahoos, adulterous priests and sly deceitful women. He classed it as “the venereal condition of the Irish”. Like the wild geese he had a mind to go elsewhere. He wanted to be continentalised. He liked the vineyards. He had a dream of Paris, and a craze for languages. In literature his heroes were Cardinal Newman and Henrik Ibsen. To Ibsen he wrote, “Your work on Earth draws to a close and you are near the silence. It is growing dark for you.” He was 19 at that time. Young men do not usually know such things unless there is already on them the shadow of their future. There was on him. He descended into blindness. He was beset by glaucoma, cataract, iris complaint, dissolution of the retina. He is said to have had 25 eye operations. His nerves were like the twitterings of wrens. His brain pandemoniacal as he resorted to aspirin, iodine, scopolamine.
Religious motifs may have dogged him and Latin words and hades and Potsdam and melancolores and Atrahora and the Portuguese for devil but he remained a plain-spoken man. In a tart and almost vulnerable rejoinder he was driven to point out to his aunt that receiving a copy of Ulysses was not like receiving a pound of chops and he urged her to seize it back from whatever hooligan had swizzled her out of it, under the name of borrowing. His mind was forever computing. In the next letter, or the letter following, he plied her with questions. Had such and such a house ivy on its seafront wall, how many steps were there down to the sea, could a man climb over a certain railing into Eccles Street without injuring himself. To him words were not only literature but numerals, digits, things that when he strung them together in his wild, prodigious way, took on another light, another lustre, and were the litany of his lapsed Catholic soul. He liked hymnbooks and tittle-tattle and all tongues to be welded in together. The English he strove for was pidgin, cockney, Irish, Bowery, mythological and biblical. To avoid being cloying, or run the risk of being literary he always prefaced his incandescent phrases with a joke. When asking Italo Svevo to collect a briefcase, he first described it with surgical accuracy, its oilskin cloth, the approximate weight, the approximate measurement and the protrusion which struck him as having a likeness to a nun’s belly. Then he added, “In this briefcase I placed the written symbols of the languid lights which occasionally flashed across my soul.” Only by giving a pedestrian complexion to the whole thing could he communicate his real feeling, his depth.
Love! Love makes dotards of us all. It is a solace to know that he sublimely fell into those traps. No detachment, no grand phrases but raging boiling lust and suspiciousness and doubt. His love object, and a lasting one, Nora Barnacle, was from Galway, the city of his tribal name. They left “Stepmother Eireann” in October 1904 to embark on a life of penury, obstacle and adventure. Their first stop was the naval city of Pola, where Joyce taught in a Berlitz school, revelled in the milieu of several languages, and regularly held court in the taverns. Meanwhile, in some rented room, sick for home, Nora moped, was ridiculed by his co-professors, often threatening to leave him, yet never did.
On a brief visit to Dublin, with the ludicrous intention of opening a cinema, Joyce’s passion for Nora was reignited and set down in a torrent of intemperate letters. Could he be smacked by her, or better still flogged? Could he be her child? Could she be his mother? Desire and shame, shame and desire. His own words for his own feelings were that they were mad and dirty.
He attended to his own talent, not in the interest of bombast or self-aggrandisement, but rather like a faithful watchman. He had the fixity of the great and therefore no need of vanity. He estimated that three shillings would be a reasonable price for Ulysses. A tiresome book, he admitted. At the same time he was dogged by fear that the printing house would be burnt down or that some untoward catastrophe would happen. He assisted Miss Beach in wrapping the copies, he autographed the deluxe editions, he wrote to influential people, he hawked packages to the post office. He knew that the illustrati would change their minds many a time before settling down to a final opinion and that many another would know as much about it as the parliamentary side of his arse.
It was for the safety and wellbeing of his family that his profound heart was laid bare. He had two children, Giorgio and Lucia, and believed that some mysterious malady had befallen them when they were small. Lucia wanted to be a dancer and then an illustrator, but did not succeed at either. Fathers and daughters. That clandestine clench. In her 20s, she felt a failure. First apathy, then slithering into speech that echoed the “baulkspeech” of Finnegans Wake, so that he named her his “Inspiratrice”. She became violent, especially towards her mother. Finally the specialists and doctors persuaded him that she had passed the line of demarcation and would have to be put in some institution. She hated her incarcerations, said Jung was a fat man, trying to steal her soul, set fire to several of these premises, whereupon Joyce and Nora had to find another sanatorium in Austria or Germany or Switzerland. Joyce, who built constellations through language, was helpless to cure her.
Towards the end of his life there came a thaw, a melting. He was bowed to, at the opera. But it was not fame that caused him to mellow so, surely it was growth. He called on people, sent greetings, telegrams, entertained guests with his clear tenor tones. He sent Yeats an autographed copy of Work in Progress and said that if Mrs Yeats cared to unsew the first pages of Ulysses he would happily sign it for them. He sent Pomes Penyeach to the library at Galway University. They had a special reading desk made and he was delighted that his book, with Lucia’s letterings, was on display for all the ex-hooligans to see. He had come to a height.
When war broke out, Joyce and Nora had to leave Paris for neutral Switzerland. The undertaking had in it all the bungle and grinding perversity of a Kafka fable. Worse, he could not, though he tried indefatigably, secure a permit for Lucia’s release from a Maison de Santé in Brittany.
A lonely figure with an eye patch in a long overcoat, he was to be seen walking around sidestreets in Zurich with a stick, stones in his pocket to drive off marauding dogs. Finiche. No more. A fadograph of yesteryear.
In January, he was struck down with pains that could only be relieved by morphine and next day, writhing like a fish, he was carried to the Red Cross hospital. There he was diagnosed with a perforated duodenal ulcer that had been his undiagnosed companion for years and was operated upon immediately. Later, transfusions of blood were supplied by two soldiers from Neuchâtel, a region known for the wine he had so frequently relished. Nora was advised to go back to their lodgings, believing the worst was over. He was just bordering on 60. After some few hours, he fell into a coma and died. It was 13 January 1941 – 13 being a number that he had always regarded as unsuitable for travel.
It is hard not to believe in immortality, considering the untimely death of dear Mr Joyce.
This essay was first published in the 1970 collection A Bash in the Tunnel: James Joyce by the Irish
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