Spouse odyssey
Edna O’Brien’s examination of James Joyce’s marriage is an understanding tribute to his very unliterary wife.
If she didn’t read his books and indeed resented the hours he spent writing them, Nora did read the letters he wrote to her and replied to his eager, indeed passionate, questions about the state of her knickers and her habits when he was away from her. He was certainly inquisitive. The Spanish novelist Javier Marías thought that
Joyce’s epistolary “interrogation” of Nora “resembles more than anything that of a Catholic priest in the confessional,” though it is clear that Joyce framed questions in the hope that Nora’s replies would be sexually arousing.
Nora had a hard time until, when at work on Ulysses (published in 1922 when he was 40) Joyce finally found patrons willing to support him in the style he demanded and, arguably, deserved. The couple were poor in their early years together and when he was working in a bank in Rome she often had to spend the day in a café or cinema with their young child until he had given a pupil a private lesson and collected the fee which would enable them to put up in a cheap hotel.
In any case, as O’Brien says, “writers are a scourge to those they cohabit with. They are present and at the same time absent”. They have “a longing to see into another person, but the longing is discharged into their work”. Nora was re-created as Molly Bloom and one suspects that Molly became more real to him than the woman he married after they had lived together for 24 years. Joyce had thought marriage “a monstrous institution” but “shelved his distaste so that his children could inherit his estate”.
By this time what O’Brien recognises as his “intense, obsessive, solicitous overlove had transferred itself to his children, particularly to his daughter, Lucia, who resented her mother.” Sadly Lucia became mad and had to be confined in a sanatorium, to Joyce’s distress.
Was it all worth it? Or was Joyce a writer who began brilliantly with Dubliners and Portrait and the first half of Ulysses and then ran out of material just about the time when, in his other life away from the desk, he and Nora are said to have stopped having sex? Later still, according to O’Brien, he said that “when he heard the word love he felt like puking”.
The last third of his life was devoted to the elaboration of Finnegans Wake which I have always found unreadable, though
many years ago some passages read aloud when you were on the second bottle of wine made a splendid sound. Others think it a masterpiece, and almost 40 years ago Anthony Burgess managed to expound its plot, or said he did.
O’Brien does James and Nora justice, and quoting lines from the end of Finnegans Wake asserts that “no man composed and decanted words that so utterly depict the true and desperate heart of a true and desperate woman”.
Her essay is a tribute and an understanding one – to Nora as well as James. is just random. Chaos is what is wanted. And, on the basis of this excellent book, there are fissures for chaos to seethe in everywhere. Nobody with an IQ of over 35 can think that Trump is a deep political thinker. The fact that he was played so brilliantly by Putin is terrifying.
We are now in the realm, as Harding puts it, of a world where you are “treason-like, or treasony, or treason-ish, or a treason-weasel”. The barbarians, as Cavafy elegiacally said, “were a kind of a solution”.