Shem the Penman
By ANTHONY BURGESS
Nora Joyce died sixty-five years after she was born. Otherwise, Stephen's statement about Anne will serve prophetically, since Stephen is James Joyce, for his own widow. We ourselves observe the parallel, and it is no blasphemy. Shakespeare and Joyce, in all world literature, come closest In aim, technique and achievement. And what, for lack of matter, we cannot do for the one we are implicitly enjoined to do for the other. Hence the piety of collecting Joyce's letters, the detailed unveiling not only of drinks and debts but of marital intimacy. Stuart Gilbert's selec- tion showed mostly Mr Joyce, a public man in tennis shoes carrying a walking-stick. In one phase of the correspondence collected by Richard Ellmann,* Joyce is totally undressed; indeed, the nakedness is almost an excoriation. Stephen might approve for Shakespeare; would he approve for himself? Some of us will take on the burden of vicarious disapproval—perhaps solely out of outmoded pudeur that Joyce, in the shades, might laugh at.
After all, he went further than any writer in depicting boldly what the world has preferred to regard as secret and shameful—Bloom's Masturbation, Earwicker's incestuous fantasies and voyeurism, the menses of Nausicaa and Penelope. But, after the image of grave formality that emerges from the Gilbert letters, an image corroborated in Ellmann's biography, we are not prepared for the satyr that leaps out in the newly published letters to Nora Barnacle. The God of creation has ceased to stand in- different above his work, paring his finger- nails; he has entered the flesh of Leopold Bloom.
Yet if we want to relate man and creator, which is the true purpose of reading an artist's letters, we ought to wade in shamelessly and take all the intimacy we can get. The bulk of the 'public' letters in these two big volumes is far from riveting. Joyce asserts his rights as man and artist to publishers, Pinker, Sir Horace Rumbold (for whom the hangman in Ulysses is named), the world at large, even His Majesty the King. He nags his brother Stanislaus for money, enabling Stanislaus to strengthen his claim to be one of the great saints of the age. He is courteous to Harriet Shaw Weaver, his quixotic benefactress. He is generous to Shaw, * LETTERS OF JAMES JOYCE. Volumes 2 and 3. Edited by Richard .ElLtnann. (Faber,. 12 gns.) friendly to Budgen, a thaumaturgic granter of new life to Svevo and Dujardin. In other words, we are given more of what, in Gilbert's volume and Ellmann's biography, we already have in plenty. We range from blunt (though never rude) unliterary language to cunning jesuitical courtli- ness, not only in English but in French, German, and two kinds of Italian. Undoubtedly, more of such letters will be unearthed in time (there is already a sizeable appendix of late deliveries in Volume 3): we have not yet heard the last of Joyce the beggar, pleader of rights, propagandist. These, though, have little to do with the portrayal of the artist.
Take Joyce away from men and put him among women, and we catch a glimpse of the provenance of the art. The letters in these volumes are not all Joyce's, but it is perhaps the biggest tribute to Joyce that we are happier to read what mother and wife write to him than what he writes to them: it is as though his own creations step out of books into life. 'What useful discovery did Socrates learn from Xanthippe?' asks Eglinton, sneering. Stephen replies: 'Dialectic, and from his mother how to bring thoughts into the world.' Ask what Joyce learned from Nora, and here is one answer : Well I feel very knocked up to day you don't know what a thunderstorm is but if you went through one here you would not be worth much it was something dreadful it began last night about half past nine we were in the dining room with a few people and as it had been raining all day the people did not expect it and all of a sudden it came on lightening thunderbolts I thought it was our last I was almost stiff with fright for about twenty minutes then it poured and we went to bed about half past ten but I did not sleep then a hurricane began and lightening which lasted till halfpast five this morning . . .
And so on, a couple of pages of authentic Molly Bloom. As for the sweet doomed mother of Stephen Dedalus, we hear what Ellmann calls her 'faultless simplicity' in a reply to her arro- gant son, self-pityingly starving in Paris: My dear Jim if you are disappointed in my letter and if as usual I fail to understand what you would wish to explain, believe me it is not from any want of a longing desire to do so and speak the words you want but as you often said I am stupid and cannot grasp the great thoughts much as I desire to do so. Do not wear your soul out with tears but be as usually brave and look hopefully to the future.
Joyce doesn't attempt to make the Stephen of Ulysses very likeable, but at least that swollen- headed young poetaster is visited by attacks of `agenbite of inwit' and wonders if amor matris may not be the most important thing in the world. The Catholic Church and the farrow- eating sow that is Ireland are incarnated in a patient, sorrowing, ignorant mother, and we have to accept the exorcising of her wraith with a cry of `Shite' and an ashplant-striking of the gas-lamp. But in the letters everything is different. The young Joyce is a monster of a son; the mother is a heroine.
Joyce was not, apparently, looking for a mother-substitute in Nora Barnacle, chamber. maid at Finn's Hotel. But the sexual yearnin2., expressed in some of his letters to her are very curious: he wants to creep into her womb and become a foetus again; he wishes to be whipped and humiliated by her. These letters were all written in 1909, when Nora was in Trieste and Joyce back in Ireland. Their function was patently to induce teleorgasms in both, and I leave it to sexologists to relate the anal fixations, the masochism and fetichism to filial guilt. But we are confirmed in our suspicion that a great deal of the Bloom in the Nigh ttown scene is pure Joyce.
And there is another petal of Bloom in that strange affair (really an unaffair) with Martha Fleischmann. Professor Straumann of Zurich University takes over from Ellmann to annotate this chapter of the Joyce odyssey. In the autumn of 1918 Joyce saw Martha, stared, started, apolo- gised. She reminded him, he said, of a girl he had once seen on the beach in Ireland. We think less of the Nausicaa episode in Ulysses than of the moment of wonder at the end of Chapter IV in A Portrait. Somewhat adolescent letters followed (Joyce was then thirty-six, though he pretended to her to be nel, mezzo del caninzin, like Dante), and Joyce made an attempt at dis- guising his handwriting by using the 'Greek e.' Well, the residue of that queer Schwarnterei is to be found in Ulysses. Bloom corresponds with a Martha (using the 'Greek e'), and the operatic Martha (`Come, thou lost one, come, thou dear one') provides a recurring motif. Everything that happened to Joyce was for artistic use.
Mr Ellmann is not merely an admirable edi- tor. He continues to be an admirable biographer, prefacing each group of letters with a succinct account of what was happening to Joyce while they were being written, and showing that same affectionate irreverence which marks every page of the biography. Thus: 'His letters to his son Giorgio and his daughter Lucia demonstrate his talent, when they were in the dumps, for find- ing miseries of his own equivalent to theirs, with which he proposed to cheer them up.' And again : live in Pola had been embarrassing for Joyce, to live in Rome irritating, to live in Trieste quaint but inconvenient. After those cities Zurich had been at least safe and un- avoidable. To live in Paris came for a time sus- piciously close to being pleasant.' And Ellmann's summaries of what Joyce was attempting in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake strike with an icy freshness: it is as though our youth is restored, and we are about-to meet those great works for the first time.
But the letters themselves, called together from the academic corners of the free world, tell their own story. It is not a story which could be repeated in our own age. Though, as Ellmann says in his biography, we are slowly learning to become Joyce's contemporaries, that is only in respect of his books. This tale of exile is 3 tale that had to end in 1941. Exiled from hit homeland, the last of the fanatic artists, Joyce was buffeted over Europe by two wars, knew private patronage (perhaps its last great bone' ficiary) and—rare today—the generous conm• munity of fellow-artists. Today an American academic community would cosset him, look forward to his death, and indulge in no carping at even his most fantastic experiments. Ireland, old faithful, would still reject him. England would be, as before, indifferent. And yet he Is one of the glories of our language.
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