Zealous gatekeeper of James Joyce’s literary estate battled with biographers
Stephen Joyce, who has died aged 87, was the grandchild and only surviving descendant of James Joyce and, as principal trustee of his grandfather’s estate, was zealous in defending his copyright, becoming a bete noire of biographers and others foolish enough to take Joyce’s name in vain or to reproduce his words without consent.
After James Joyce’s death in 1941, control of his literary estate passed to his wife, Nora Barnacle. It transferred through the family and then fell to Stephen, the son of Giorgio Joyce, the author’s son, in 1982 – ‘‘The year when the sky darkened and we all heard the thunder’’, as one
Joycean put it.
From then until Joyce’s copyright expired in most places at the end of 2011, Stephen Joyce asserted his claims, not only as the writer’s legal and literary representative, but as his moral and cultural custodian, too.
Targets of his wrath, writs and often exorbitant financial demands included publishing houses, public readings, scholars wanting to quote from Joyce’s writings (academics, he told the New Yorker in 2006, were like ‘‘rats and lice – they should be exterminated!’’) and museums and libraries planning exhibitions or selling Joycean merchandise. Few were spared, and Stephen Joyce never minced his words.
In 1988 scholars who assembled in Venice to hear him address an international symposium were stunned when he announced that he had destroyed all his letters from his Aunt Lucia, the writer’s daughter, who had spent most of her life in mental institutions, along with correspondence to Lucia from Samuel Beckett, Joyce’s one-time secretary.
‘‘I didn’t want to have greedy little eyes and greedy little fingers going over them,’’ Joyce said. ‘‘My aunt may have been many things, but to my knowledge she was not a writer.’’
Destroying the letters, he explained, was a direct response to Brenda Maddox’s Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom (1988), a critically acclaimed biography of his grandmother, which had been published after a long wrangle over copyrighted material ended in the deletion of an epilogue about Lucia weeks before publication.
In 2000, when Stephen Joyce discovered that a musical interpretation of Molly Bloom’s fruity soliloquy from Ulysses was planned for the Edinburgh Fringe festival, he denounced it as ‘‘a circus act’’ and had it pulled.
Similar action was taken over a special children’s reading of The Cat and the Devil ,a story that Joyce had written for Stephen as a child, while a reading from Beckett and Joyce to celebrate Bloomsday 2000, for which the Beckett estate asked for a nominal £20, foundered upon Joyce’s demand for £27,000. Some anthologies facing hefty charges to use extracts from the writer’s works chose to appear with blank pages rather than pay up.
When David Fennessy, a young Irish composer, asked permission to use 18 words from what he called Finnegan’s Wake ina choral piece he had been commissioned to write, Joyce turned him down with brutal finality. ‘‘You cannot even spell the title of my grandfather’s last work correctly: its [sic] Finnegans Wake,’’ Joyce wrote, adding: ‘‘To put it politely and mildly, my wife and I don’t like your music.’’
In 2004, as plans were laid for celebrations to mark the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday, June 16, 1904, the date on which Ulysses takes place, Irish MPs rushed through emergency legislation to prevent the estate from suing the government and the National Library over an exhibition of Joyce manuscripts.
The reasons for Stephen Joyce’s rigour were unclear, though few believed that his motivation was financial, since many of the projects he turned down would have yielded substantial rewards. But the famous last words of Ulysses – ‘‘… And yes I said yes I will
Yes’’ were not, on the whole, words that anyone associated with him.
Stephen James Joyce was born in Paris, the only child of Giorgio and his wife Helen, a wealthy American divorcee 10 years her husband’s senior.
His grandfather marked Stephen’s birth with the poem Ecce Puer, which also mourned the death of Joyce’s father: ‘‘Of the dark past/ A child is born;/ With joy and grief/ My heart is torn . . ./ A child is sleeping:/ An old man gone./ O, father forsaken,/ Forgive your son!’’
Stephen spent much of his early life in France before the family moved in late 1940 to Switzerland, where he was brought up by his father and grandmother Nora.
After World War II, he studied at Harvard and then joined the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris, working mainly in the area of African development.
He became the principal trustee of the James Joyce estate in 1982 after the death of his aunt Lucia, and retired from the OECD in 1991. Thereafter he lived near La Rochelle.
He was predeceased by his wife, Solange. They had no children. –