Rave for Edna O'B
Jorn Barger
June 20 1999 BOOKS: BIOGRAPHY
HUMPHREY CARPENTER had his doubts, but happily reports that Edna
O'Brien has produced a refreshingly unreverential biography of her
compatriot, James Joyce, that is a delight from start to finish
Portrait of the artist as a funny man
'What on earth is Lady Longford doing with Byron?" asked Geoffrey
Grigson at the beginning of a 1975 review of Elizabeth Longford's book
Byron's Greece. A similar question springs to mind on first hearing that
Edna O'Brien has written a biography of James Joyce. True, James Joyce
(Weidenfeld Stg8.99) is part of the publisher's new series of
pocket-sized lives, which will be attempting some enterprising
match-making of subject and author (Edmund White on Proust has already
appeared). True, too, that O'Brien has claimed that Joyce hugely
influenced her development as a writer; and that her books, like his
Ulysses, have been censored and banned in Ireland. But the notion of
such a lushly romantic novelist tackling the flint-hard master-pioneer
of uncompromising modernism still induces queasiness - until one begins
to read her book, which is a delight from start to finish, and achieves
the near-impossibility of giving a thoroughly fresh view of Joyce.
Richard Ellmann's celebrated 1959 life of Joyce (a giant step forward
for the genre of literary biography with its combination of meticulous
research and finely written criticism) drew a portrait that has remained
virtually unquestioned ever since. Ellmann's Joyce is the classic
writer-as-hero, labouring to produce his masterpiece, Ulysses, in almost
impossible conditions - near-penury, the discomforts of wartime exile,
and weakening eyesight - and enduring martyrdom when the book is banned.
Yet it is arguable that Joyce himself would not altogether have
recognised the portrait. "I do not want to be a literary Jesus Christ,"
he once said, and Ellmann's narrative, superb as it is, does tend to
downplay one massively important side of Joyce, his sense of humour.
Everything he wrote, from the Chekhovian sketches in Dubliners to that
literary Goon Show, Finnegans Wake, displays his total conviction that
even the most painful human experiences (such as Molly Bloom cuckolding
her husband in Ulysses) can be legitimately rendered as comedy.
Joyce is one of the funniest writers in history, and his life was comic,
too, although you would not generally know that from the Ellmann book.
But then Ellmann was not Irish, and O'Brien is. In a book that is a
fraction the length of Ellmann's, she brings Joyce to life with wit and
verbal deftness. She laughs at other writers on him, for slipping into
Joyce-pastiche in their own prose: "Anyone who touched Joyce seemed to
get a bit carried away." Occasionally, she makes this error herself: "So
limp with leching, they betook themselves to the pelvic basin of the
icky licky micky red light district," she writes of Joyce and his Dublin
medical student friends on the razzle. But, mostly, her prose is
confidently unJoycean, as she sketches his upbringing in "near slums
with cracked fanlights in the doorways and women in the nearby streets
behind the barrows selling cabbages and potatoes . . . gaunt spectral
mansions in which children sat like mice in the gaping doorways".
At odds with the Catholic church herself, ever since priests burnt her
first novel The Country Girls, she writes tellingly of Joyce's teenage
determination to break with religion: "Escape it he did but leaving the
Church is not the same as leaving God." Ellmann handled Joyce's steamily
sexual letters to his wife Nora Barnacle with fastidiousness and
scarcely hidden embarrassment, but O'Brien wallows in them with Molly
Bloom-like enjoyment, and wisely says of them: "The letters were for
Nora, of course, but they were also for Joyce, to convince himself that
he was free of every vestige of Roman Catholic guilt. But was he?" She
admires his handling of women ("Joyce empathised with women far more
than with men") and dismisses Kate Millett's feminist assertion that his
view of them as sexually primitive is absurdly naive: "There is nothing
naive in Joyce and if he depicted women as sexually primitive he was far
more prescient than anyone before or since." Her frequently used
metaphor for Joyce's exploration of the sexual and lavatorial murk in
human nature is that of someone trawling in deep mud: "He had put the
buckets down, man's and woman's."
She admits to being puzzled by Joyce's choice of a near-peasant woman
for his wife, but is amused rather than shocked (as Ellmann was) by
Nora's lack of interest in Ulysses: "She read 27 pages and that, as
Joyce pointedly said, included the title page." O'Brien herself has read
it all extremely carefully, and she retells the story of Bloomsday with
a light touch, so that her book is an excellent appetiser for the reader
who has not yet tackled Joyce.
She is rightly harsh about his abominable treatment of his patron,
Harriet Shaw Weaver. Ellmann skates over this, but O'Brien bluntly shows
how, over the years, Joyce relieved Weaver of sums that today would be
worth about Stg1m, living it up in posh Paris restaurants while she had
to go short. "In the canons of literature," O'Brien writes of Weaver,
"she is rife for beatitude."
Occasionally, O'Brien even questions Joyce's apparently unassailable
literary reputation, reporting that T S Eliot complained privately that
Ulysses "gave no insight into human nature, was a dazzlement of style
and not a sea of consciousness", and mentioning the charge from some
quarters that Weaver's lavish patronage "had given him the freedom to
write an unintelligible book".
More disturbingly, O'Brien mentions the "ugly rumour" that his daughter
Lucia's descent into madness might have been caused by a sexual
relationship with her father. O'Brien first dismisses this ("Joyce loved
her too much for that") then admits, "His letters to her are indeed the
letters of a lover." Since O'Brien's most recent novel, Down by the
River, is about father-daughter incest, one suspects that her mind
remains open about the possibility, as it does about most aspects of
this genius-monster whom Ellmann sometimes tended to portray as a saint.
--
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