No She Said No
By Hermione Lee
Published: December 28, 2003
LUCIA JOYCE
ON 28 SEPTEMBER 1934 LUCIA JOYCE ENTERED THE SANATORIUM AT KÜSNACHT.
To Dance in the Wake. By Carol Loeb Shloss.
Dotter of her Father's Eyes by Mary M Talbot & Bryan Talbot
Illustrated. 560 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $30.
James Joyce said, in 1934: ''People talk of my influence on my daughter, but what about her influence on me?'' Or so the Joyce biographer Richard Ellmann was told, 20 years afterward, by Joyce's close friend Maria Jolas. At around the same time, Ellmann also interviewed Carl Jung, who in 1934 had ''treated'' Joyce's daughter. Lucia Joyce and her father, Jung told Ellmann, were ''like two people going to the bottom of a river, one falling and the other diving.'' In the matter of his daughter, Ellmann commented, Joyce was ''foolish fond like Lear.''
Lear, Jung and Joyce: what hope could there be of rescuing the drowned voice of the mad daughter from such powerful father figures? Carol Loeb Shloss's strenuous, emotional attempt to fish Lucia up from the depths of incarceration and obliteration has to do battle with very weighty pressures, giving her book a strained, excitable, defiant air. For its project of resuscitation to succeed, it must claim that Lucia's ''influence on'' Joyce was indeed paramount: that they were creative collaborators, like-minded modernists, ''dancing partners.'' ''Joyce's art surrounded'' Lucia, Shloss says, ''haunted her from birth; and she in turn was part of the life that surrounded the maker of that art. She gave him the means to fling it amid planetary music.'' ''The place where she meets her father is not in consciousness but in some more primitive place before consciousness. They understand each other, for they speak the same language, a language not yet arrived into words and concepts but a language nonetheless. . . . In the room are flows, intensities, unexpressed longings.''
I quote so much because this sort of fervid glop is served up on many pages. It is a rhetoric that damages the book's credibility, making it read more like an exercise in wish fulfillment than a biography. I lost count of the incidences of ''We can imagine'' or ''It is safe to imagine'' or ''We can speculate'' or ''We can picture her'' or -- most revealingly -- ''I like to imagine'': ''Among all the letters that were destroyed, there was one, I like to imagine, that expressed Lucia's gratitude to her father for persisting in his belief in her.'' And then again, perhaps there wasn't.
Lucia, the second child of James Joyce and Nora Barnacle, was born in 1907 in the pauper's ward of a hospital in Trieste. Her parents were extremely poor, and her childhood was spent moving from one flat or hotel room -- or country -- to another. Meanwhile her father tried out numerous money-making schemes (importing Donegal tweeds to Europe was one that didn't come off), taught, drank and wrote: first ''Portrait'' and ''Exiles,'' then ''Ulysses'' (which ''grew up'' alongside Lucia), and then, for 17 years, ''Finnegans Wake.'' By the time she was seven, in 1914, Lucia had lived at five addresses, always cooped up with her brother, Giorgio: ''You are locking us up like pigs in a sty,'' they were said to have shouted once to their departing parents. (An incest plot is hinted at but not spelled out.) During World War I, the Joyces moved from Trieste to Zurich to Paris. Lucia, passing rapidly from school to school, knew some French, Italian and German, showed musical talent and, in her teens, began to study dance. Starting with a course of eurhythmics at the Jaques-Dalcroze Institute in Paris, she worked, in the 1920's, with a succession of radically innovative dance teachers.
There was, first, Isadora Duncan's peculiar brother, Raymond, who went in for Greek tunics and sandals, pacifism and vegetarianism, and flowing Dionysian rhythms. Then, Margaret Morris (William Morris's granddaughter), advocate of expressive open-air dance as a recipe for health, and her talented colleague Lois Hutton, who formed a group of bohemian, experimental women dancers in the South of France called Les Danseuses de Saint-Paul, one of whom, for a time, was Lucia. Other mentors were the brilliant Jean Borlin, whose primitivist and surreal collaborations with Paul Claudel, Darius Milhaud and George Antheil rivaled the Ballets Russes in notoriety and influence; Elizabeth Duncan (Isadora's sister) and the German pianist Max Merz, whose Salzburg school promoted Aryan body-worship; and Lubov Egorova, Diaghilev's colleague and a ferocious teacher. The best feature of Shloss's book is its vivid, informed description of these experimental dance groups in 1920's Europe, and her account of how Lucia came into contact with modernism and surrealism while her father was writing the ''Wake.'' But, as relentless as Egorova, Shloss has to push this parallel to its farthest possible point -- and make Lucia into a collaborator on the ''Wake''; as it were, its co-author.
What Shloss can prove is that Lucia had talent. An interviewer in The Paris Times in 1928 praised her skills as choreographer, linguist and performer, and predicted that when she reached her ''full capacity for rhythmic dancing,'' James Joyce ''may yet be known as his daughter's father.'' But it was just then that things began to go wrong. In 1929, Lucia's plans to teach dance fell through; she either gave up or (Shloss's theory) was forced by family opposition to discontinue her career. There was a series of disturbing events: her father's eye operation, her mother's illness, her brother's affair with the older, married Helen Fleischman, the Joyces' civil marriage, 26 years after they started living together, and the shock of discovering she was illegitimate. ''If I am a bastard,'' Lucia was said to have screamed at Nora in one of their rows, ''who made me one?''
Lucia embarked on her own sexual adventures, which Nora Joyce's biographer Brenda Maddox summed up dismissively as promiscuity, but which Shloss prefers to link to her brother's affair and to the free-living artistic world she moved in. She fell in love with her father's literary disciple, Samuel Beckett, who told her that he was more interested in Joyce than in her. (This led to a breach between Joyce and Beckett). In his ''Dream of Fair to Middling Women,'' the ''jewelly,'' ''wanton,'' ''hollow'' Syra-Cusa, whom Shloss reads as Lucia, is ''impotently besotted'' with Belacqua, who thinks of her as ''hors d'oeuvre'' -- and ''a cursed nuisance.'' She had short-lived affairs with the artist Alexander Calder and with an American art student. In 1932 there was a brief, hopeless engagement to a young Russian Jew, Alec Ponisovsky. Instead of dancing, she was doing some graphic work for Joyce -- illustrations for ''Pomes Penyeach,'' illuminated letters (which were unfortunately lost by the publishers) for a children's book. ''Casting his daughter as his own collaborator,'' Shloss says, ''he formalized and made visible the collusion in place between them.''
But from the early 1930's onward, Lucia's behavior became increasingly erratic -- or, in Shloss's view, angry and frustrated. Her ''scenes'' were all intensely dramatic. She vomited up her food at table; she threw a chair at Nora on Joyce's 50th birthday; she staged a tremendous tantrum at the Gare du Nord, preventing the family from leaving Paris for London; she went into a ''catatonic'' trance for several days after her engagement party; she cut the telephone wires on the congratulatory calls that friends were making about the imminent publication of ''Ulysses'' in America; she set fire to things; she hit her mother; she wrote urgent telegrams and many, many letters.
Desperately, various attempts were made to treat, diagnose or ''cure'' Lucia Joyce. During her first, unwilling incarceration (engineered by Giorgio) in a French sanitarium in 1932, she was said to be suffering from ''hebephrenic psychosis'' (the young person's version of what Kraepelin had defined as dementia praecox). Then she was placed under a disciple of Bleuler at the Burghölz psychiatric clinic in Zurich, where schizophrenia was diagnosed. She was treated by a Dr. Forel, who recommended ''persuasion'' and surveillance. She was analyzed by Jung, who thought her so bound up with her father's psychic system that analysis could not be successful. His colleague Cary Baynes diagnosed repression. Friends of the Joyces -- Maria Jolas, Mary Colum, the heroically well-behaved Harriet Weaver, Joyce's married sister Eileen -- all tried to look after Lucia, in London or Paris or Ireland, more or less disastrously. Her treatments included injections with sea water and animal serum, barbiturates and solitary confinement.
Shloss maintains that Lucia's aberrant behavior was linked to her dancing and to her father's experiments in language: all three forms of ''Wakean dance'' are seen as modernist projects. When she was prevented from dancing, and when her Dionysian expressiveness was controlled by rationalist, Apollonian doctors, Lucia continued, in her gestures, to act out ''the more sinister choreography of the unconscious.'' Her treatments -- drugs, incarceration -- made her worse. Her actions -- incendiarism, singing all night, throwing books out of the window -- were ''her repertoire of coping behaviors.''
When World War II broke out, Lucia was in a clinic in Ivry. Joyce, who never abandoned her, and never believed that she was ''mad,'' moved heaven and earth to get her out of occupied France. But he died, suddenly, of peritonitis, in January 1941, at the age of 59. Lucia was abandoned. In 1951, Harriet Weaver had her moved to a mental hospital in Northampton, England, and there she remained until her death in 1982. Occasionally, she would be visited by family friends, or by Joyce's biographer, and she would write down or say things about herself, sad messages like: ''My father was crying once with the pain he had in his eyes but I was awkward and could not console him''; or ''My love was Samuel Beckett. I wasn't able to marry him.''
That anything at all survives of her letters and sayings seems remarkable, given the ''expunging'' of Lucia that Shloss claims was going on even during Joyce's lifetime. She calls her biography ''a story that was not supposed to be told.'' All such recuperative biographies of ''silenced'' figures attached to great male writers -- whether it's Zelda Fitzgerald, or Vivienne Eliot, or Ellen Ternan -- require someone to be blamed and shamed. Here, almost everyone is to blame: Richard Ellmann for too readily accepting Maria Jolas's version of Lucia; Joyce's friends -- Jolas herself, Stuart Gilbert, Harriet Weaver -- for treating Lucia as a madwoman and for ''deciding that a book was more important than a girl's life'' ; Giorgio Joyce for having his sister incarcerated (''her own brother!''), for abandoning her after their father's death and for making off with Jolas's trunk full of family papers, which were never seen again; Brenda Maddox (whose book is praised but contradicted) for making Nora the heroine; Nora for her jealousy of her daughter; Stephen Joyce, Lucia's nephew, for continuing in his attempts to protect his family's long-violated privacy.
The only characters who escape without blame are Lucia, who is completely romanticized (we don't hear much about her squint and her hairy chin), and -- on the whole -- Joyce. This is not a child-abuse story but a story of love and creative intimacy. And even if, like me, you are skeptical of Shloss's devout belief in Lucia as her father's second self, this biography will certainly alert you to her presence, should you ever be reading ''Finnegans Wake'' -- a pathetic, vanishing figure, flitting through her father's book:
''Then Nuvoletta reflected for the last time in her little long life and she made up all her myriads of drifting minds in one. She cancelled all her engauzements. She climbed over the bannistars; she gave a childy cloudy cry: Nuée! Nuée! A lightdress fluttered. She was gone. And into the river that had been a stream . . . there fell a tear, a singult tear, the loveliest of all tears . . . for it was a leaptear. But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh! I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!''
Photo: Lucia Joyce, photographed in Paris by Berenice Abbott, 1926. (Photograph courtesy Commerce Graphics Ltd./from ''Lucia Joyce'')