Much has been written about the impropriety of publishing the infamous letters and Richard Ellmann, who selected them, was castigated. Years earlier far less incriminating ones were published with the permission of Nora and George, and Samuel Beckett fumed against literary widows, saying that they should be “burned on a pyre along with the writer himself.” But do they make us think any less of Joyce or of Nora? Do they demean the marriage? Hardly. True, they are as outright in their earthiness as the mystics are in their ecstasies, yet they share the mystic’s longing for a coupel to dissolve into one. Joyce’s chaos is our chaos, his barbaric desires are ours too, and his genius is that he made such breathless transcendations out of torrid stuff, that from the mire he managed to “bestir the hearts of men and angels.” Moreover he was a young man filled with a scalding passion and at that very same time attending a hospital in Dublin to be treated for a “damned dirty complaint,” an infection which he had picked up from a prostitute.
These letters are about more than smut. First and foremost they are a measure of the inordinate trust that he had in Nora to allow him to be all things, the child-man, the man-child, the peeping Tom, and the grand seducer. But there is also her own sexual prowess, no small thing for a convent girl from Galway and a radical thing in defiance of that male collusion whereby women are expected to maintain a mystique and conceal their deepest sexual impluses. Sexuality and maternity being thought to be contrary.
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