Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (65 page)

Joyce finished his primary education at another Jesuit institution, Belvedere College. It was a local day school and did not charge. The teachers liked him and he was seriously inclined towards the priesthood. He responded sensitively to the beauty of ritual and – as
Chapter 3
of
A Portrait
records – hypersensitively to the terrors of damnation. Hell, for him, was a gigantic Clongowes cesspit: ‘Consider then what must be the foulness of the air of hell. Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jelly-like mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse a prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes of nauseous loathsome decomposition.’ Terror acted as a moral discipline on Joyce until 1898, when he met a ‘gay girl’ and ventured to have sex. Thereafter ‘He would never swing the thurible before the tabernacle as priest.’ When his mother died, he refused her dying wish to kneel by her bed. Where religion was concerned he would be, in his word, ‘elusive’. Uncaught. However, the indoctrination of his early years could not be entirely rinsed out. In his last year of life he was asked why he carried stones in his pocket to pelt at local dogs. ‘Because they have no souls’, he replied. What, very soon, would happen to his?

Joyce went on to university and graduated in 1902 with a lowly pass degree. He was much better educated than that measly award suggests. He left University College Dublin fearsomely well read, a skilled dialectician and intellectually ‘solitary’ – his own man.
Non serviam
was his motto. The principal influence on him in these formative years was Henrik Ibsen, whose spirit, he recorded, blew through him ‘like a keen wind’. In his tract,
The Quintessence of Ibsenism
, George Bernard Shaw conceived the Norwegian’s principal instruction to be ‘repudiation of duty’. James Joyce repudiated church, nationalism and the infatuations of the Irish literary renaissance (‘Ancient Ireland is dead just as ancient Egypt is dead’). His first significant publication was an essay on Ibsen for the
Fortnightly Review
(April 1900). It drew praise from William Archer, Ibsen’s English disciple and a commendatory
letter from the playwright himself. Archer shrewdly nudged the young Irishman away from drama to what he could do best – prose narrative and lyric poetry. It was at this period that Joyce began recording what he called ‘epiphanies’: moments laden with meaning, crystallised in language.

There were a number of false starts. In 1902 he went to Paris to study medicine. He lacked the necessary qualifications, but the city’s bohemian culture captivated him. He returned to less captivating Dublin after a year, to teach. This is the rootless interim commemorated in
Ulysses
– specifically a week or so that he lodged in a Martello tower, in summer 1904. He developed what would be a lifelong addiction to drink, along with his current, even more bibulous, bosom friend, Oliver St John Gogarty (‘Buck Mulligan’). He toyed with the idea of a singing career. Meanwhile he was struggling with a long
Bildungsroman
, initially called ‘Stephen Hero’, eventually to be given the Rembrandtian title,
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
. He would be a middle-aged man before it was published. He was also working on a set of poems called ‘chamber music’ – chamber as in chamber-pot, music as in the tinkle of a whore’s urine. Joyce’s scatological sexual tastes have provided mixed distaste and fascination for the Joyce industry. Cesspits always had their strange fascination for him.

In 1904 he managed to smuggle some of the stories later to be published in
Dubliners
into print, under the loaded
nom de plume
‘Stephen Dedalus’. Another turning point came on 10 June 1904, when he first encountered Nora Barnacle, a hotel chambermaid. She was, to his gratified astonishment, easy-going sexually. He came to regard her as his ‘soul’ and his ‘Ireland’. At exactly the same period he met the man who would inspire Leopold Bloom. In the autumn of this eventful year he resolved to leave Ireland with Nora, soon to be pregnant with their first child, Giorgio. He had jumped the gun but he would not make his father’s philoprogenitive error. The method of contraception the couple favoured, initially, was that described in
Ulysses
between Molly and Leopold – sleeping head to toe. They would not marry until 1931.

Why Joyce should have gone into exile remains slightly obscure – although he wore the condition as a badge of integrity, along with ‘cunning’ and ‘silence’. He may have wanted a place more tolerant of a man and a woman ‘living in sin’. Self-preservation as an artist may have come into it. Ireland, as Stephen puts it, was the sow that eats her farrow.

A series of mishaps with teaching posts across Europe led to them finally taking up residence in the tiny nowhere state, Trieste, where he found secure employment in the Berlitz school. The Berlitz method was to teach a language by conversation – dialogue – which suited Joyce, as did the morally relaxed atmosphere of the coastal
state. Joyce by now had several literary projects on the go – most hopefully his Dublin short stories which the English publisher, Grant Richards, had agreed to take before getting cold feet. It was a bumpy road to eventual publication in 1914. Censorship problems were invariably the problem. The delayed publication of these naturalistic stories skews one’s sense of Joyce’s extraordinary evolution stylistically and, in a decade, their social relevance had aged. The most important of them is ‘The Dead’, which he finished in 1907. In the spiritually inert character of the ‘West Briton’ journalist, Gabriel Conroy, he left a sly self-portrait of himself in his twenties:

He was a stout tallish young man. The high colour of his cheeks pushed upwards even to his forehead, where it scattered itself in a few formless patches of pale red; and on his hairless face there scintillated restlessly the polished lenses and the bright gilt rims of the glasses which screened his delicate and restless eyes. His glossy black hair was parted in the middle and brushed in a long curve behind his ears where it curled slightly beneath the groove left by his hat.

‘The Dead’ centres on Conroy’s discovery that his wife had had, before he knew her, a young lover who ‘died for love of her.’ His obsessive investigation into his wife’s inner mind, fuelled by his jealousy, led to the finest achievement of
Ulysses
, ‘Penelope’. In this final section, as she falls asleep, all of Molly Bloom’s life comes crowding in, culminating in a re-enactment of the orgasm that Leopold could never give her:

I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Nora claimed to have read none of her husband’s books – even those that wrote about her. In 1906 Nora was pregnant again with a daughter, Lucia, born to be doomed. As he approached thirty, Joyce published his first book, a volume of poetry,
Chamber Music
(1907). The poems are charming but – for this writer – strangely antique. For example xxxii, which opens:

Rain has fallen all the day.

O come among the laden trees:

The leaves lie thick upon the way

Of memories.

There was no money in poetry. Joyce then ventured on a madcap scheme to
open a cinema in Dublin, managed from Trieste. It came to nothing, as did the most recent attempt to publish
Dubliners
, which ended with a thousand copies destroyed before sale. It was Ezra Pound who at this point took charge of Joyce’s career, arranging for the serial publications of
Portrait
(it came out whole in London in 1917) and, later,
Ulysses
. It was Pound, too, who agitated to get Joyce handouts from the Civil List and the Society of Authors. Most importantly, Pound put him in touch with the woman who would be his principal patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver, who took the Irish author (whom she had never met) as her pensioner.
Ulysses
is routinely acclaimed as the greatest novel of the century. It is as much the product of cultural philanthropy (Weaver) and literary agency (Pound) as modernism.

It was at this relatively stable point in his writing career that Joyce began serious work on
Ulysses
. As with everything in his life, it did not go smoothly. World war meant the family moving to Zurich in 1915. What would be chronic, and eventually blinding, eye problems had set in. Joyce’s drinking was periodically pathological; he smoked heavily and he was sedentary by nature. Every room, he believed, should have a bed in it. The furore over Lawrence’s
The Rainbow
meant that no British publisher would take an unexpurgated text which contained the word ‘fuck’. And Joyce would never expurgate. The novel – if one calls it that – was marginally less objectionable in the US and most acceptable in Paris, after the war, where it was put out, in full, by the expatriate American bookseller, Sylvia Beach.

Ulysses
, once published, was universally notorious but rarely read throughout, even by its most ferocious opponents and warmest advocates. It was the more difficult for the average reader by virtue of each section of narrative inventing a separate technique. It was an ‘encyclopaedia’, as Joyce called it, which changed its form as its content changed. The public was not used to such things. Nor were the authorities indulgent. The first volume edition of
Ulysses
published in London was widely confiscated and banned, despite a dauntingly impressive subscription list. It would not be until 1934 that an enlightened court case in the US acquitted
Ulysses
. The Bodley Head edition came out two years later in the UK – but not in Ireland.

By now, the family of four had moved to Paris – the only place for a modernist to live, Pound urged – but Joyce’s health was precarious. All his teeth had been extracted, he was virtually blind in one eye, and prone to crippling depression. But he forged ahead with his most ambitious work
Finnegans Wake
. This, and the dire condition of his daughter Lucia, would be his main preoccupations over the years that remained to him. A gifted artist, Lucia conceived a hopeless, and utterly rejected, infatuation for Samuel Beckett – whose only interest was her father. She sank into a state diagnosed as schizophrenic – although the diagnosis has been much debated, as is the possibility of incest within the family. She was eventually institutionalised.

Joyce finished
Finnegans Wake
in 1939 as war, once again, consumed Europe and enforced flight. Once again Switzerland was their refuge. In this last work, in his last years, Joyce had brought fiction ‘to the end of English’. The title alludes to a folk ballad about a drunken bricklayer, thought dead, who is resurrected (he wakes at his wake) when whisky is accidentally sprinkled in his coffin. The first line is one of the most famous in literature:

riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

Very few readers make it to the last line:

A way a lone a last a loved a long the
PARIS, 1922–1939.

Joyce died in Switzerland of complications arising from stomach ulcers.

Virginia Woolf was a sane woman who had an illness.
Hermione Lee

Hermione Lee’s life of the novelist opens with a shriek of scholarly pain: ‘My God how
does
one write a biography?’ A principal embarrassment is Woolf’s own fragmentary attempts at autobiography. They have had as disturbing an effect for the would-be life writer as the clandestine ‘fragment’ Dickens slipped into Forster’s hand, divulging his hitherto suppressed childhood experiences in the blacking factory. The poison pill in Woolf’s life also involves childhood trauma. At the ‘Memoir Club’ (a Bloomsbury outfit, as self-regardingly exclusive as the Cambridge Apostles), the forty-something Woolf delivered a couple of papers recalling her troubled adolescence. The first, entitled ‘22 Hyde Park Gate’ (the family address in her teens), was given in November 1920. Both of Virginia’s parents had passed through earlier marriages. Her mother Julia brought to her second union with Leslie Stephen two sons (he brought a mentally disabled daughter, Laura), George and Gerald, both much older than Virginia, the second youngest of eight children in the house, and her slightly older sister Vanessa.

George Duckworth (‘my incestuous brother’), Virginia told the Memoir Club, had molested her, around the time of her puberty. The molestation was related in a mock-gothic style, verging on pastiche of the kind of fiction Woolf habitually mocked: ‘Sleep had almost come to me. The room was dark. The house silent. Then, creaking stealthily, the door opened; treading gingerly, someone entered. “Who?” I cried. “Don’t be frightened”, George whispered. “And don’t turn on the light, oh beloved. Beloved –” and he flung himself on my bed, and took me in his arms.’ The ‘old ladies of Kensington and Belgravia’, she added, never knew that George Duckworth was the lover, as well as the brother, to ‘those poor Stephen girls’. She repeated a version of the story in a second address to the club, in which George again appears as the ravishing Tarquin.