A nice American talking

Terence de Vere White

James Joyce Richard Ellmann (New and revised edition O.U.P. £25) ichard Ellmann's biography of Joyce was universally praised when it was published in 1959; the new revised edition gives an opportunity for reassessment. Whether the additions demanded a new edi- tion is irrelevant; Joyce's centenary justified the celebration. All the cir- cumstances combine to persuade us to look again at Dublin's divine comedian. By some process akin to osmosis, Joyce and his biographer have become so closely iden- tified that a criticism of one looks like a slight to the other, and it would be in- teresting to know how many who have read their Ellmann (and Molly Bloom's night thoughts) feel they have mastered the sub- ject.

Ellmann has written Joyce's epitaph: 'In whatever he did, his two profound interests — his family and his writings — kept their Place. These passions never dwindled. The Intensity of the first gave his work its sym- pathy and humanity; the intensity of the se- cond raised his life to dignity and high dedication.' A nice American talking. In Dublin it might be put this way: 'His work and his family apart, Joyce didn't give a damn for anything or anyone.' Fear that no one would read Finnegans Wake was his first thought when war broke out in 1939; half-hearted sympathy with that difficult Work was enough to end a friendship. The new matter in the biography, largely in the form of foot-notes, provides nuts and bolts, often interesting, but the solid struc- ture of the whole required no securing at this stage. The prurient may want to know Whether the obscene letters Joyce wrote his wife for their mutual excitement are includ- ed. I did not find them, but some of the frantic letters written in Dublin in 1909, truncated in the first edition, are now given In full. The decision to leave out what Joyce can have hardly wished the world to read Will please some, irritate others. Why, when they were edited and published in 1973, dodge the issue now? What if it were Shakespeare? Would one hesitate? There are many questions, but this is Ellmann's book.

He has added a communication which ar-

rived too late for inclusion in the first edi- tion.

Gertrude Kaempffer, a 2S-year-old

German doctor, was introduced to Joyce in a Locarno pension in 1917. Hearing that Mrs Joyce was jealous she refused to let him see her home, but he 'succeeded in meeting UP with her' later, lent her two of his books, and made overtures she refused to en- enurage ; but she agreed to a poste restante correspondence. His first two letters to her

described his first sexual experience — 'he was walking with the family nanny through fields on the edge of a wood when she sud- denly apologised and asked him to look the other way'. Urinary details followed. Ger- trude tore up and did not answer the letters. Ellmann suggests that she suggested Gerty McDowell, the lame girl on Sandy Mount strand who showed too much leg to the susceptible Mr Bloom. Is it blasphemous to suggest that sexually Joyce was a queer fish? His own claim was that if he 'put down a bucket into my own soul well sexual department', he would draw up the same water as Ibsen, Father Bernard Vaughan and everyone else's. He was 'nauseated by their lying drivel about pure men and pure women and spiritual love, and love for ever; blatant lying in the face of truth'. He was young when he said that he would put that into a novel one day; as an older man he told an Irish friend that when he heard the word 'love' he felt like 'puking'.

Ellmann's evocation of the man and his world is absorbing, but I suggest as further reading William M. Murphy's Prodigal Father, the life of J.B. Yeats, father of the poet, to show the difference between a pro- testant and catholic Irish family at the time, both hard up, even desperately poor. Their idiom is not the same, and why did the catholics drink so much more than the Pro- testants? Drink ruined Joyce's father. Shaw recognised Joyce's Dublin; it was what he fled from. But Shaw and Joyce were very different sorts of animal. To Shaw Joyce portrayed a 'slack-jawed blackguardism'. What Shaw saw as a national characteristic was 'a certain humorous blackguardism', exemplified by Gogarty, pilloried by Joyce as Buck Mulligan. Ellmann should have done more to emphasise that his hero's

hatred of his friend and youthful patron was largely paranoia. Gogarty was the darl- ing of the classical dons of Trinity College,

and 35 years on Yeats would still be lauding him and overloading the Oxford Book of Modern Verse with his poems. Yeats lost his

head, but Gogarty was worth more than Ellmann lets his readers know. Is it in-

evitable when a biographer comes from abroad? There is throughout the book no attempt to catch a likeness of the suppor- ting players. We are told that Gabriel Con- roy in The Dead is modelled on C.P. Cur- ran. That Dublin worthy is taken off to the life in his after-dinner speech, but not elsewhere in the story. We are told it was extraordinary that Joyce should have even considered James Stephens as his deputy if he broke down on Finnegans Wake, but not that Stephens charmed every man, woman, child and dog that ever met him (with the sharp exception of Virginia Woolf, but then Bloomsbury, sniggering over 'semen', found Joyce too much of a good thing). Wells and Ford were in the small company of English admirers. Wells may have been encouraged by Rebecca West. Fifty years ago Compton Mackenzie observed that he had never met a woman who was shocked by Joyce. From women he drew all his sub- sidies — Harriet Weaver's flow of gold even after she lost faith in Finnegans Wake, a 16-year stint, and was disapproving of his drinking habits, is sublime in its disinterestedness.

If conflict is essential to drama, Joyce was one of the most dramatic men in history. No matter how deep he lowered that bucket of his into the prose well, his lyrics remained delicate and clear as spring water. Looked at from one angle, his life was tragic: humiliating poverty in youth, years of neglect from publishers, eye- operations too numerous to count, a mad child, endless fittings, in permanent exile from a country which reviled him.

Seen another way, he received a far better education from the Jesuits than came the way of Shaw or Yeats; unlike them he went to university; he never did a thing he didn't want to do; his genius was recognised from the start; established writers, including Ibsen, were encouraging; his wife was long- suffering and faithful; from quite early on there was always some admiring woman to Spay his way; he knew he was world-famous before he died. Compared with Lawrence's his life was a bed of roses. What makes most impression in this long story is his hor- ror at the inescapable truth that his daughter was mad — his scream into the night. 'A man of small virtue, inclined to extravagance and alcoholism' — that was his description of himself.

Where is he in English literature? With that other Dubliner Swift, I suggest; likely to be read in shortened versions, thought of eventually as a comic writer, perhaps.

In the third edition, Professor Ellmann must change Pierce O'Reilly, polo cham- pion, a character in Finnegans Wake, to Percy. Percy Philip were that sportsman's names.