Joyce believed that his genius had cast its shadow on Lucia’s psyche and perhaps it had. But his guilt reeks of something darker and more incriminating, and as if her malady was not the consequence of his genius but his early youthful dissipation. The sins of the fathers. Samuel Beckett when he met her saw the father’s mind running rampant in the daughter. He thought she was like a charmed snake, cut off from those around her and with a longing to create. She resented her mother, would shout at her and say she was sex-starved, in short, Joyce-starved. A slender, dark-haired girl will brilliant blue eyes, she was so highly strung that her conversations would skid from one topic to another. Beckett was first drawn to her because of this acceleration but soon began to feel alarmed over her growing attachment to him. He saw that she was going insane but said that no one else saw it, especially her besotted father. Beckett had sat with Joyce at the Bal Bullien watching Lucia dance in a shimmering silver fish costume, Joyce chafing when she was not awarded first place and putting it down to a vogue for Negroid dancing. Not having succeeded at that she decided to quit dancing, took to her bed for days, then poured all her energies into the conquest of Beckett. She would wait for him inside the door, arrange lunches in restaurants, while he resorted to the male strategy of evading her affections by bringing a friend along. At one of these lunches her disappointment was so great that she stared into space, ate nothing, cried, then ran out leaving two penniless would-be poets confronted with the bill. For Beckett her feeling were not only too overt, they were, as he put it, “like incest.” When he told her frankly that it was her father whom he came to see, she lapsed into one of her catatonic states, adding this failure to so many others. She had studied singing, drawing, and seventeen different kinds of dancing but was a helpless, floundering girl with no man to pay court to her, only her father. Nora blamed Beckett for his advances and he was barred from visiting the family.
At Joyce’s fifty-third birthday party she threw a chair at her mother and George had to hold her down as two orderlies strapped her into a straitjacket. Her father, helpless to do anything, watched her being carried out to an ambulance. Within days she discharged herself but Nora was in dread of being alone with her ever again. Her father refused to concede that she might be mad and said she was just a young girl who was “prey to sudden impulses.” Joyce was not afraid of madness. It was a word he often used, just as his father used it when asked what he thought of Jim’s work. But madness on the page is one thing, madness in the other room is quite another. There was Lucia either sitting listlessly by a window, or throwing furniture at her mother and hurling abuse, saying her mother had made her a bastard by not having been married when she was born. Her father was absolved from any wrongdoing.
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