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Joyce to the Life

I have the clearest recollection of my first reading of Richard Ellmann’s life of James Joyce. I have just reread it, from cover to cover and from footnote to footnote, for the second time. And, at the end, I have found myself, as I did thirty-five years before, with tears in my eyes.

I first read it in Venice, in the summer of 1980. I was there for a month, with a friend and various visitors coming and going: we had arranged a house swap, exchanging my London home for a family flat in Dorso Douro with a partial view of the dome of the Salute. Ellmann was my August reading. I can’t remember exactly why, but I think my choice must have been connected with the growing influence of the biographer Michael Holroyd. (We married in 1982.) Also, Venice was not so very far from Trieste, where the Joyces spent so many years, so I knew I was in the right climate. During the day, my friend and I would wander our separate ways, she with the book she was translating, I with my companion Ellmann, whom I would read in cafés and on creaking landing stages and occasionally in the Biblioteca Marciana. One evening, when we met for dinner, I reported that I was drawing to the close of Joyce’s life. She told me that she could see that I was affected. And, more than I knew, I was.

I was surprised by my response. I was not, and am not, a Joyce scholar, and had never encountered his work at university. I had read Ulysses, at first surreptitiously and selectively in the copy my father had brought home from the war and concealed in a bottom drawer, and then, more comprehensively but far too speedily, when challenged by a clever American student in a London-based class that I was teaching in the 1970s. I knew I wasn’t grasping the work as a whole, and needed to give the volume more time. I think the thought of reading the biography suggested itself as a way of making my way into the book. And so it was, but it was also a magnificent achievement
in its own right,

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I have the clearest recollection of my first reading of Richard Ellmann’s life of James Joyce. I have just reread it, from cover to cover and from footnote to footnote, for the second time. And, at the end, I have found myself, as I did thirty-five years before, with tears in my eyes.

I first read it in Venice, in the summer of 1980. I was there for a month, with a friend and various visitors coming and going: we had arranged a house swap, exchanging my London home for a family flat in Dorso Douro with a partial view of the dome of the Salute. Ellmann was my August reading. I can’t remember exactly why, but I think my choice must have been connected with the growing influence of the biographer Michael Holroyd. (We married in 1982.) Also, Venice was not so very far from Trieste, where the Joyces spent so many years, so I knew I was in the right climate. During the day, my friend and I would wander our separate ways, she with the book she was translating, I with my companion Ellmann, whom I would read in cafés and on creaking landing stages and occasionally in the Biblioteca Marciana. One evening, when we met for dinner, I reported that I was drawing to the close of Joyce’s life. She told me that she could see that I was affected. And, more than I knew, I was. I was surprised by my response. I was not, and am not, a Joyce scholar, and had never encountered his work at university. I had read Ulysses, at first surreptitiously and selectively in the copy my father had brought home from the war and concealed in a bottom drawer, and then, more comprehensively but far too speedily, when challenged by a clever American student in a London-based class that I was teaching in the 1970s. I knew I wasn’t grasping the work as a whole, and needed to give the volume more time. I think the thought of reading the biography suggested itself as a way of making my way into the book. And so it was, but it was also a magnificent achievement in its own right, a magnum opus. The biography is nothing less than the resurrection and evocation of a living man, in all his persistence and inconsistency and prejudice and genius: it is Joyce as Ulysses is Leopold Bloom, and as Joyce’s wife Nora is embodied as the (not very grateful) force behind Molly Bloom. Ellmann follows his subject from Dublin to Europe, from Trieste to Zurich and Paris and Rome and Belgium and London, sketching each city, each landscape, each temporary residence with colour and skill and wit. At first, young James as schoolboy and student provokes the reader, with his cocksure intransigence and arrogance, and when he goes into voluntary exile in Trieste he causes further outrage by his appalling treatment of his loyal younger brother Stanislaus, whom he abused and exploited over many years. James, like his father, was a reckless spender and scrounger and a serious drinker (of white wine, never of red). He evaded paying his taxes, was always in debt, and was merciless to his creditors, whose claims he despised: behaviour not likely to appeal to this Quaker-educated reader. I was, and remain, on Stanislaus’s side. The brothers worked as teachers of English at the Berlitz School and other establishments, and James also gave private lessons, conducted in a highly eccentric and flamboyant manner. But it would seem they were greatly appreciated by his various students (who included the writer Italo Svevo and various titled gentlemen), and this time round I have come to understand that in his own way he did work hard – not as hard as Stanislaus, but hard. Here was his regime, ‘Aetat.27–29’, in Trieste:

He woke about 10 o’clock, an hour or more after Stanislaus had breakfasted and left the house. Nora gave him coffee and rolls in bed, and he lay there . . . ‘smothered in his own thoughts’, until about 11 o’clock. Sometimes his Polish tailor called, and would sit discoursing on the edge of the bed while Joyce listened and nodded. About eleven he rose, shaved and sat down at the piano (which he was buying slowly and perilously on the instalment plan). As often as not his singing and playing were interrupted by a bill collector . . . There was lunch at 1 o’clock, cooked by Nora with some skill now.

In the afternoon, he gave lessons ‘fairly regularly from 2 to 7, 8 or 9 in the evening’. Usually he taught at home, but visiting some of his pupils involved him in long and elaborate journeys, some undertaken for ‘payment amounting to thirty pence’. And, of course, he was simultaneously pursuing his hitherto financially unrewarding literary career, having been unable to prosper through his dream of opening Italian cinema houses in Ireland or importing Irish tweeds to Trieste. The long story of his battles to get Dubliners past the censors and into print (which included a direct appeal by letter to ‘top dog’ King George V) is a tribute to his pertinacity, if not to his tact. And he was writing, all the time: Portrait of the Artist, his play Exiles, poetry, lectures on Defoe and Blake, reviews, journalism, drafts for Ulysses. His supreme confidence in his own genius, confirmed at the age of 17 by having precociously managed to have published in 1900 an essay on his hero Ibsen in the Fortnightly Review (fee twelve guineas), paid off handsomely. But how he would have fared without the devoted support, first of Stanislaus, and then of various admirers (including Ezra Pound) and benefactors, of whom the principal was the ever loyal Harriet Shaw Weaver, can never be known. I hadn’t fully appreciated, back in 1980, that Miss Weaver (as Joyce invariably addressed her) had been alive when Ellmann was doing his research, and had spent much time talking to him and sharing her papers and correspondence. Her relationship with her protégé is one of the strangest stories of literary history. This wealthy, proper, old-fashioned, Quaker-reared avant-garde feminist and editor came into his life in 1913, when she was 37, and she remained his ally to the end. The causes of her sense of affinity with and profound admiration for his work seemed mysterious even to Joyce: when he asked hopefully if she had a little Irish blood, she replied, ‘I am afraid I am hopelessly English.’ She supported him with money, advice, publication, advocacy: she even took charge for a while of his seriously afflicted and dangerously disturbed daughter Lucia. Weaver and Joyce corresponded voluminously but did not meet until he came to London in 1922 to consult ophthalmologists about his rapidly deteriorating eyesight. They got on well in person, but, Ellmann notes, ‘when the choice lay between a taxi and a bus, Joyce unhesitatingly sprang for the taxi and tipped the driver lavishly with Miss Weaver’s former money. Miss Weaver realized that the inner promptings of his nature were as extravagant as hers were frugal [but] never thought of admonishing him.’ She did, however, express a less than wholehearted enthusiasm for the ‘Work in Progress’ that became Finnegans Wake and, as he respected her judgement, he seems to have been at least temporarily cast down by this. Joyce, like his father, was a natural spendthrift, and had inherited, in his own words, ‘an extravagant licentious disposition’, as well as a good tenor voice. As his means increased and his patrons grew in number with his fame, his expenditure became more ostentatious. He continued to look rather shabby in person, as most witnesses record, but he believed the gift of a fur coat could remedy all female ills: Nora and Lucia were both presented with furs at strategic moments, although in one instance Nora’s promised mink dwindled into squirrel. (‘Venus in Fur’, presumably courtesy of Sacher-Masoch, appears in the ‘Circe’ section of Ulysses.) Even in hard times, when James was pathetically begging crusts of bread for his wife and children from Stanislaus, the Joyce tribe seemed regularly to eat out, drink out, consume much champagne, and attend the theatre and the opera: nobody actually starved. Nora unsuccessfully tried to outwit his tendency to excess drinking, though, interestingly, he said he never embarked on alcohol until eight o’clock in the evening. But he loved late nights, and was never short of drinking companions. Irresponsible as he was in so many ways, he was also, like Bloom, a loyal husband and a devoted father, and became an attentive grandfather. Generous and thoughtful when his friends were in trouble, and at times an ardent pursuer of their interests, he was also capable of the pettiest vanity and rivalry: Ellmann’s reports of his interchanges with and attitudes towards his contemporaries – Proust, T. S. Eliot, Yeats, Shaw, D. H. Lawrence and others – are highly entertaining. He attempted to manipulate the review coverage and the prices of limited editions of his work to such a degree that his admirer Sylvia Beach at the Shakespeare and Company Bookshop was driven to protest about his ‘hustling’. He sent a wreath to George Moore’s funeral, and was highly indignant, insisting on apologies, when the press did not mention this tribute. He was cantankerous about small things, big-hearted about large. In sum, he was a mass of contradictions, and Ellmann brings them all to life, persuading us of the reality and humanity of this extraordinary figure. This volume, in all its well-documented yet living detail, has been rightly acclaimed as the dawn of a golden age of biography, and also includes a good deal of easily assimilated and perceptive literary commentary and criticism which do indeed, as I had hoped, make Joyce’s own masterpieces more approachable. I think I found it deeply moving as well as informative because Joyce’s life seems to map, with a sense of impending and inevitable tragedy, the major conflicts of the twentieth century: the Great War, the Irish Troubles, the Second World War. Joyce always, often vehemently, denied any interest in politics (it was Stanislaus who in 1914 was interned behind barbed wire for four years for his Irridentist views), but nevertheless he mirrored the history of his times. Ellmann, American-born of Romanian and Russian Jewish ancestry, had a profound sympathy both with Bloom’s Jewishness and with Joyce’s Irishness. He explores the meaning of Joyce’s exile from his homeland with great insight, and Joyce’s death and burial in Zurich on a cold snowy January day, in the dark days of the war in 1941, provide a sombre finale. Prematurely aged and almost blind, he was only 58 when he died, and his last two years had been full of anguish. But he of all writers knew he had left his legacy, a legacy that would rejoice and perplex readers for centuries to come.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 49 © Margaret Drabble 2016


About the contributor

Margaret Drabble is a novelist and critic. She completed her nineteenth novel in 2016. It deals, pertinently, with questions of ageing. She will now have to embark on her twentieth, which may turn out to be about childhood.

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