Published in 1999, this is by Edna O'Brien (1930-2024). And, obviously, it's about James Joyce (1882-1941), last visited on this blog here. It's part of the Penguin Lives series, which invites well-known novelists to make sense of other authors' biographies.

I really enjoyed it. It's concise; it flows well; and it gives you a good idea of the turbulent life of its subject. What more could you want from a biographer?

Bits I already knew, from researching the two works I've read so far (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners), or from reading Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company, or from our explorations in Trieste. But lots was new to me.

-- He was a difficult -- no, impossible -- character... I suppose no great artist can create anything without something of a sense of entitlement: I'm the genius; it's up to you to feed me. Certainly, Joyce bums money off all and sundry, never seems particularly grateful, and never curbs his tendency to extravagance. Poor, put-upon Stanislaus, his brother, seems to cop the flak most of the time. When Stanislaus comes to live with his brother in Trieste, James drinks his salary, too... At one point, James runs off to Rome, leaving behind his brother, pregnant wife (Nora, actually not his wife then), and their small child (Giorgio). The family are so short of money they rent rooms by the night, so she has to vacate the premises each day, and wait for the next let. With a child. Can you imagine...? Another time, Joyce pays one of his rare visits to Dublin, and becomes the victim of a strange plot to prove Nora had betrayed him. It's nonsense, but he's wounded. O'Brien deadpans: "He would leave for Trieste immediately, once Stanislaus had procured the fare money..."



-- He's a mass of contradictions. Growing up in Dublin, he longed to escape his family (who were spiralling downwards financially), and yet saw that the material for his work was right there. He was distant towards his family, yet also sensitive, says O'Brien, and capable of "eerie tenderness". He appears uncaring, and yet is fiercely proud. "The equivocation, the sarcasm, the hauteur," O'Brien tells us, "was merely a mask." Actually, he was "emotionally bereft". It couldn't have been easy, that's for sure: "The rows, the deaths, the hunger, a constant scraping for money had been his bitter schooling and led to disdain for family and for country." He's furious with Ireland, and yet wants to be "the poet of his race". He doesn't want to return to Dublin, and yet he writes "luminous images of the city he professed to hate". Indeed, "no other writer," O'Brien argues, "so effulgently and so ravenously recreated a city." Ulysses, he said, would serve as a blueprint should Dublin ever be destroyed... "It must have been an agony for Joyce to be separated from the city he loved so... And he never forgot it, never really left it, regardless of exile."

-- I already knew about Joyce's father, a violent, unpredictable man who terrorized and alienated his children (it's actually more complicated than that, but I'll talk about him when I post on Colm Toibin's book). But the way Joyce shut out his mother I found bizarre. In his childhood, the mother-son bond was strong. But by the time he had spent a while at school, he was already distancing himself from her. His confirmation name was Aloysius, the short-lived saint, says O'Brien, who feared contact with women so much he wouldn't let his mother embrace him... Eventually Joyce broke with all three mothers -- his actual one, Mother Church, and Mother Ireland. By the time he sets off for Paris (to get away from Ireland and study medicine), he is no longer under May Joyce's influence. Which doesn't stop his stuffing his letters (which "veer from arrogance to self-pity") with requests for things she can ill afford to supply. He seems ungrateful, cavalier. Nevertheless, he's haunted by her memory, and "bore her a grudge that persisted to her deathbed and even after". He never spoke of her after her death. There is no mention of her in any letter, even after his father's death: "It is a fierce and determined repudiation." But she keeps returning in his fiction. He was afraid of her, says O'Brien, and tried to repress that fear. Constantly battling for his soul, she says, were sex, religion, and mother. He broke with the Church, too, of course, and yet never really left it, religious motifs continuing to permeate his work.


Trieste, 2023

-- Nora... They're chalk and cheese. He's insanely literate; she's "fairly illiterate", and ultimately doesn't fit in with most of his circle. But she exercises a curious power over him. "In her company he put aside his jeering contemptuous nature," says O'Brien. What Joyce saw and noted as they walked together all over Dublin would eventually find its way into his fiction, and she it is whom he chooses to elope with. She's also the enthusiastic partner in the famous exchange of "dirty letters". But she certainly gets fed up. Ulysses was a severe trial. The book "ist ein Schwein," she says. (And when it was finished, she read only 27 pages...)

-- Joyce has been accused of generally being contemptuous of women. But it's O'Brien's view that his thought was "both complex and paradoxical". In Dubliners, for example, "the women, despite being victims, attain a moral superiority". After meeting Nora, "his women were to embody the ethereal and the sexual". And Joyce, she says, trusted women more than men. But he walked all over Miss Beach, as we saw in the post cited above, until eventually a distinct coolness arose. After that, Miss Weaver takes over, supporting Joyce through thick and thin. She lived frugally herself to channel money to him, undeterred by his spendthrift ways. In today's terms, she gave him about GBP 1 million... His letters to her, while expressing gratitude, always turn to requests for her to send things, do things. "Joyce's cruelty never left him," O'Brien comments, "and no one bore the brunt of it more than Miss Weaver." While still subject to requests, she is effectively cut off from his life. But she always paid up. Paid for Joyce's funeral, continued to support Nora and Georgio. "In the canons of literature, she is rife for beatitude."



-- Lucia, Joyce's mentally troubled daughter, was new to me too. She's stroppy, outspoken, incredibly highly strung, obsessed with Samuel Beckett, sometimes violent, and very hard on her mother while doting on her father. "The degree to which Joyce indulged her temper is outstanding," O'Brien comments. He sent her to see Carl Jung, despite his somewhat scathing attitude to the famous psychiatrist. Jung has to give up. She goes to clinic after clinic, undertakes cure after cure. And poor Miss Weaver has to step up there too, hosting Lucia, and going through all sorts of mayhem as a result.

***

O'Brien quotes Joyce's famous biographer, Richard Ellmann: "Our experiences seek us out because we want them to..." Is that true? Did Joyce enjoy living in this vortex of ambition, frustration, chaos, penury, and extravagance? He once said that "the measure of a work of art is from how deep a life does it spring". Well, there's no denying he had depth. Depth and depths.

Of course, he does become famous in his own lifetime, in a highly controversial sort of way. Legends spring up around him, says O'Brien, but nobody remembers the 20,000 hours of effort, the terrible eye strain, the arthritis...



***

All things considered, I enjoyed O'Brien's interpretation immensely. But because I'm not familiar with Joyce's longer works (Ulysses and Finnegans Wake), I'm not picking up the nuances others notice. Magdalena Ball, for example, comments: "The writing is playful and referential, inspired by a close reading of both Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake. This book contains some of the most succinct and well managed summaries of both books I’ve come across anywhere... Above all, is the pleasure that O’Brien takes in the words that Joyce has left behind him -- words that have become centre-stage in this succinct but powerful biography."

O'Brien seems to have copped some fairly misogynistic-sounding flak for this book (see the quotes here and here).

Harold Pinter, however, applauds it: "Her Joyce book was in fact a very singular achievement. She really got under the skin of Joyce. It was as if she was sitting in a cafe with him, but that is the nature of her. She has a very keen sensibility and a very acute perception into other people's lives'."

For me, it ticks all the boxes: It's interesting in itself, and it inspires me to want to find out more.