Stephen Joyce guarded grandfather’s literary legacy
Stephen Joyce, a grandson and last surviving direct descendant of James Joyce and the formidably rigid gatekeeper of that Irish author’s coveted literary estate, died Jan. 23 on Île de Ré, an island resort on the west coast of France, where he lived. He was 87.
President Michael Higgins of Ireland, confirming the death in a statement, said Joyce had been “deeply committed to what he saw was the special duty to defend the legacy of the Joyce family in literary and personal terms,” although Higgins allowed that it was “not a task carried out in harmonious circumstances at all times.”
Stephen Joyce gleefully maintained an iron grip on his grandfather’s printed works, unpublished manuscripts, letters and other material, although his hold loosened somewhat on the 70th anniversary of James Joyce’s death, when most copyrights on his masterpieces like “Ulysses” and “Finnegans Wake” expired. He said he was safeguarding the materials’ literary integrity and defending them from critics and biographers, whom he likened to “rats and lice” that “should be exterminated.”
“I am not only protecting and preserving the purity of my grandfather’s work but also what remains of the much-abused privacy of the Joyce family,” he told The New Yorker in 2006.
With most legal constraints lifted and the material controlled by Stephen Joyce now part of his estate, its fate uncertain, the most likely immediate impact of his grandson’s death will be the freeing of aggrieved scholars to ventilate, without fear of retribution, about how Stephen Joyce had thwarted their research for decades.
“I think now there will be more open reflection on the role Stephen Joyce played in impeding so many projects,” Anne Fogarty, director of the James Joyce Research Centre at University College Dublin, wrote in an email. “He saw himself as gatekeeper but was very often quite obstructive.”
Hans Walter Gabler, a German Joycean who edited a critical edition of “Ulysses” in 1984, began that reflection bluntly. In an email, he accused Stephen Joyce of having exercised his vigilance over the Joyce archive “with a vengeance,” and that “with refusals of permission and/or exorbitant fee requests, he terrorized scholars and critics as well as publishers into passivity and nonaction in an attitude of ‘anticipatory obedience.’”
Stephen Joyce’s penchant for privacy was inherited. James Joyce had meticulously vetted his own official biographer and dismissed prospective profilers as “biografiends.”
His litigious grandson went well beyond that, though, suppressing publication and performances of copyrighted material, barring access to many private papers and even expunging others.
In 1988, he stunned James Joyce scholars who had convened in Vienna by revealing that he had destroyed about 1,000 letters he had received from his Aunt Lucia, James Joyce’s daughter, who spent decades in mental institutions; even more, he said, he had discarded correspondence that she had received from Irish expatriate playwright Samuel Beckett, James Joyce’s onetime secretary, with whom Lucia had fallen in love.
“No one was going to set their eyes on them and repsychoanalyze my poor aunt,” Stephen Joyce told The New York Times that year. “She went through enough of that when she was alive.”
He added: “I didn’t want to have greedy little eyes and greedy little fingers going over them. My aunt may have been many things, but to my knowledge she was not a writer.”
Stephen Joyce was raised in France, New York and Switzerland, where, as their only grandchild, he lived with James and Nora Joyce. (James Joyce died when Stephen was almost 9.)
Stephen Joyce spent his high school years at Phillips Academy Andover in Massachusetts, where he wrote an essay in 1948 about his grandfather, titled “The Man Whom I Loved and Respected Most in This World.” Admitted to Harvard in 1950, he took eight years to graduate.
He married Solange Raythchine in 1955; she died in 2016. The couple lived on Île de Ré, off the Atlantic coast near La Rochelle, and had no children.
For more than three decades, Stephen Joyce was a midlevel, self-described “international civil servant” for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a global research and advocacy organization based in Paris. He focused on sub-Saharan Africa. He retired in 1991 to become the full-time Joyce executor and literary executor.
English had been his worst subject in school, he said, and at first he was intimidated by his grandfather’s novels, which have often confounded even committed Joyceans for nearly a century since “Ulysses” was published. James Joyce and “Ulysses” are commemorated annually on Bloomsday, June 16 — both the anniversary of his first outing with his future wife, Nora Barnacle, and the date on which the novel takes place in 1904 as it follows, and delves inside, the protagonist, Leopold Bloom, as he goes about his day.
When Stephen Joyce finally got around to reading his grandfather’s books (“I am a Joyce, not a Joycean,” he liked to say), he was surprised, he said, that the denser ones, like “Ulysses” and “Finnegans Wake,” were not so baffling after all.
To be sure, James Joyce himself had fervently guarded the integrity of his work, and his vigilant grandson looked to him for guidance. Helen Joyce wrote that when Stephen Joyce had to make vital decisions about the estate, he would go to James Joyce’s gravesite in Zurich, Switzerland, to consult him.
Still, it could be said that the struggle between the estate and Joyceans was generated by the author himself. After all, it was his modernist, thorny, often opaque writing that propelled critics and scholars to scour his private papers looking for clues in the first place. “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant,” James Joyce once said.