Nora’s life through a different type of lens
In this lively imagining of James Joyce’s muse, Mary Carr finds Nora Barnacle to be a woman of indomitable spirit
We were like one person with many sides and now, my best part is gone’, says Nora Barnacle upon the death of James Joyce . Although Nora had no literary bent, these words which author Nuala O’Connor puts in her mouth are a perfect description of one of the most celebrated literary couples of modern times.
Their intensely symbiotic bond that lasted 37 years saw Nora, a working-class girl with scant education become the muse of one of our most brilliant writers, his nursemaid during his grave illnesses, his restrainer during his mammoth drinking bouts, his right arm and his rock.
Nora Barnacle was only 20 years old when her life was changed by a coup de foudre and there is little to say of the handsome chambermaid from Galway’s childhood, beyond that she felt unloved by her mother after she sent her to live with her granny as she had too many mouths to feed, and had a few juvenile skirmishes with the opposite sex.
In that sense, the Nora that emerges in this lively and affectionate imagining by Nuala O’Connor is typical of her time in that her existence is defined by her man and the arc of her life dictated by his scorching ambition.
Nora’s strong emotional pull to the faith of her childhood, despite Joyce’s rigid anticlericism; her affection for home, despite his scorn for the Irish and their nationalist shibboleths and priest-ridden ways is also fairly standard
SHE DIVED HEADLONG INTO THE ROMANCE AND HER DEVOTION NEVER FALTERED
stuff for an Irishwoman back then.
Yet luckily for the reader, for Nora, and indeed for the writer who brings her to life, the man she hitched her star to was not a boring bank manager but a literary genius who, in the process of forging, as he put it ‘the uncreated conscience of his race’, brought her on a fascinating odyssey through European cities, from eking out a living in the most squalid of apartments to rubbing shoulders with high society and literary figures in the most fashionable salons.
That Nora agreed with such alacrity to leave Ireland, unwed and so down-at-heel that she had to borrow a coat, is the most compelling aspect of her character, marking her out as more free-spirited than Joyce whose bohemian background, less hung up by ideas of respectability than her’s, gave him a license to break convention.
Smart rather than intellectual – Joyce used to laugh at her only reading 11 pages of Ulysses – Nora was acutely aware of the risk she took when she absconded with her penniless lover in 1904.
She knew that as a man with a rackety reputation, Joyce’s credibility would hardly be dented by the scandal of their domestic set-up whereas she would be cast as a scarlet woman.
In weaker moments, particularly when she fell pregnant with their first-born Giorgio, she feared that he might abandon her and she would have to return home in disgrace.
Yet she dived headlong into the romance and her devotion never faltered, despite times of great poverty and stress, when Joyce’s poor eyesight seemed about to cripple his career and he squandered what little they had in the
watering holes of Paris, Trieste or Rome.
Their dividing one Christmas Eve Giorgio’s present of a sugary mouse in two and sharing it between them speaks volumes of their pitiful poverty, while Nora’s rhapsodising about the puddings, hams and mouthwatering treats her folks would enjoy the following day in Galway was scribbled down by Joyce, inspiring the scenes of bountiful hospitality in The Dead. Nora’s account of a local boy who lost his heart to her also informs that short story.
In hard times the young couple quarrelled daily about Jim’s carousing, Nora was forced to take in washing to make ends meet, and they were evicted from yet another apartment, with Joyce throwing himself at the mercy of outsiders to provide another roof over their head.
The glue that kept them together was their complete sexual compatibility. Nora was uninhibited and adventurous, while even the most cursory reader of James Joyce knows about his fetishes.
O’Connor supplies the star-crossed lovers with a lively erotic correspondence that does justice to the obscene and often icky letters that Joyce wrote to his ‘dirty little fuckbird’ from 1909 onwards.
Indeed the opening chapter of Nora leaves the reader in no doubt but that the couple’s earthy sensuality is about to be laid bare, if you pardon the pun, in explicit bedroom scenes and the steamy outdoor vignettes that marked their early courtship.
The instant attraction that exploded into a frenzy of bodice and trouser ripping fondling on Howth Head or in Ringsend has echoes of Brenda Maddox’s excellent biography of Nora Barnacle, also entitled Nora. Other motifs like Nora’s spendthrift nature and her good-looking and stately bearing which meant that she could never be dismissed as living in a great man’s shadow also cross-overed from Maddox’s book.
For while Nora might have been more sensible than Joyce when it came to spending money, they both shared an incorrigible hankering for the finer things in life. She would ruefully admit that the fancy furniture or dinner plates she couldn’t say no to were beyond her means and she was naturally delighted when, as Joyce’s obscurity melted away, and they enjoyed the patronage of wealthy figures like Edith Rockefeller McCormick and Harriet Shaw Weaver, there was no reason not to splurge.
Sadly Joyce’s emergence as the toast of the literary world was overshadowed by their daughter Lucia’s deteriorating mental health and her parents’ agony and guilt about her condition. O’Connor hints at the questions that some critics have asked about Nora’s relationship with her only daughter and claims that Joyce said his wife was jealous of the girl’s youth and promise.
But maternal resentment seems out of character for the easygoing protagonist of this novel. Nora was the target of Lucia’s rages which descended into violence and caused her to be moved between asylums and a variety of psychiatrists.
Ultimately responsibility for her welfare was handed to Joyce’s patron Harriet Shaw Weaver, with Nora, haunted by how their peripatetic family life could have caused Lucia to become unstable, not seeing her at all in the last years of her life.
Joyce often said that he and Lucia, a talented dancer, shared an artistic temperament. Her life might have been happier had she inherited more of her mother’s indomitable spirit. n Nora: A Love Story Of Nora and James Joyce by Nuala O’Connor (New Island), is out now and costs €16.95.
THE GLUE THAT HELD THEM TOGETHER WAS THEIR SEXUAL COMPATIBILITY