She left James Joyce hanging

Cal Revely-Calder enjoys Edna O’Brien’s idiosyncratic 1981 study of Joyce’s 37-year romance with Nora Barnacle

JJAMES AND NORA by Edna O’Brien 62pp, W&N, £6.99, ebook £3.99

ames Joyce was a frustrating man. He enjoined his friends to promote his novels, but refused to talk to journalists. He badgered people for cash, then skipped the rent and bought the drinks. (Over three decades, his patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver, gave him what amounts to more than £1 million in today’s money.) He could spend all day polishing two sentences; that, to him, was progress made. It took him seven years to write Ulysses, then 16 for Finnegans Wake.

It’s therefore pleasing to know that Nora Barnacle began their 37-year love affair – it became a marriage late, and for legal ends – by leaving Joyce to hang. The couple met on June 10 1904, on Nassau Street in Dublin. After some chatter and flirty looks, they made a date for the following day. Joyce arrived, and looked, and waited. “We all,” writes the novelist Edna O’Brien,

“know the trepidation, the ingrained desperation of those waits.” But Nora didn’t show. A flicker of lust, and gone: to the smitten 22-year-old Dubliner, she was the exemplary Galway girl.

Luckily for him, a few days later Joyce got the girl anyway. Their day out involved a walk beyond the city docks, and a furtive bout of manual sex at the end. This promising start was likely on

June 16, now known to fans as “Bloomsday”, the date on which Ulysses would be set. And this year, just in time for Bloomsday, James and Nora: A Portrait of a Marriage, O’Brien’s 1981 study of the Joyces’ relationship, is being reissued.

At 62 pages, James and Nora is slim, especially if you shelve it next to James Joyce (1959) by Richard Ellmann, which is so thorough that it is now the standard example of a “standard biography”. I doubt that O’Brien hoped to rival, rather than complement, Ellmann’s book; the two were friends, and when she wrote James and Nora, Ellmann was still alive. In 1999, O’Brien would repurpose some of that book for a James Joyce of her own, a short volume for Penguin’s series “Lives”, taking a nicely cavalier, rather Joycean, approach to facts.

She’s running on home turf. Jimmy Joyce, being a shambles of a man who dragged a Catholic girl into sex, isn’t so far from the men in O’Brien’s novels (19 of them to date). TS Eliot’s Introducing James Joyce was the first book that young Edna bought, and spending a lifetime with her compatriot’s writing has sharpened her judgments a treat. What are the links between Joyce’s life and those of his characters? – one of those tedious questions on which scholars can drone at will. In her meticulous way – “Stephen Dedalus… was the impersonation of Joyce” – O’Brien can frame it in a single, perfect word. She can, as in her novels, be tartly funny too. Just before Jim meets Nora, he’s weighing his options up:

Whores were bad conductors of emotion and he longed to copulate with a soul. His brother Stanislaus, who had a somewhat disgruntled view of the human race, thought that if James longed to copulate with a soul he ought to get himself born anywhere other than Ireland.

Later, the Joyces would skip around Europe – Trieste, Paris, Rome – in fruitless attempts to make more money than the novelist could lose behind the bar. The worst excursion saw Joyce alone in Dublin, hoping to open a cinema; during this trip, he and Nora exchanged those notorious letters – “frank, rabid and founded on lust”, O’Brien says – about wet farts and flogging and sperm everywhere.

“His body would soon penetrate into hers, and O that his soul could too and O that he could nestle in her womb”: this is taken from one of those letters, but O’Brien cuts it sharply and omits quotation marks. Throughout James and Nora, she harvests these Joycean phrases and laces them into hers. In the main, her project works, since both Joyce and O’Brien have a gift for beauty distilled. James and Nora ends, for instance, with a yearning line that she nicks from Finnegans Wake: “Only a fadograph of a yestern scene.” (Joyce mixes

Their notorious letters were ‘frank, rabid and founded on lust,’ says O’Brien

and hope for more. A British Muslim lives with his abusive father, and has a job at a bookies to avoid working with him, too. There’s a postman, a bouncer with a secret, an impotent alcoholic. (This is the best story in the collection, a grippingly horrendous evocation of the worst addiction out there.)

Halls’ portrayals are unerringly wintry. His characters’ lives have been shrunk, and so too have their dreams: one wants a girlfriend, one to go to Spain. The Quarry has two pubs, a club, a Paddy Power, a Cash Converters and at least one bus route. Their lives are thin, and

Halls accurately and touchingly evokes this quality.

Most of the issues we read of men facing in 2020 are covered. But while the concerns are contemporary, the characters are Cretaceous: we’ve seen them all before. Here, however, they don’t have the demotic dazzle cast by, say, Martin Amis in Money – or the moments of deeply articulated beauty and magic found by Colin Barrett. Instead Halls’ characters are blunt, impressively unvarnished, and the stories that stay with you do so – pace, NFL – by whacking you around the head until you submit.

It is important, then, to distinguish good stories – which these are – from underwhelming writing. Some of the conversations are tone-deaf, which is a shame, as surely the best way to give a platform to under-represented voices is to give them – well, a voice. Some of the characters clarify how they’re feeling. They might say, “My life is f------ s---”, or reflect that, “I’ll be left a sad old man. A failure”, or even claim that, “First thing I’m doing is asking how he can be so happy while we’re so f-----’ miserable.” Yet there is little gradation or variance between them. Often, each seems to represent an aspect of masculinity, rather than a life.

There are also moments when the dialogue simply rings hollow. One character says of a route through the estate: “Been a walk I’ve done a bare amount, and I got the timing down.” “Bare”, in this context, doesn’t mean nude but lots, and it doesn’t go with a quantitative noun. Halls should have written “been a walk I’ve done bare”, or “done that walk bare”.

The word also originates in multicultural London English, probably from a Jamaican root.

All bar one of these characters are white British. Wouldn’t the book present a truer image of the rich constellation of London’s melting pot if Halls included a black Caribbean or African voice? Halls has remarked that he enjoys sitting in a pub with his headphones on, making notes. Perhaps if he took them off, and listened to what the people around him were saying, these stories would sound a little more like real life.

We’ve seen characters like this before, but with more demotic dazzle, in Martin Amis

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