from
James Joyce (Penguin Lives) by Edna O'Brien:
“I can do anything I like with words,” he once said and yet he was helpless to do that one thing he so desperately wished for: to make Lucia of sound mind. Hearing that a nearby hotel would soon be requisitioned as a
maison de santé he went and saw the doctor to secure a place for her. He can hardly have been assured by the doctor at Ivry who had come to believe that the night alerts of the air raids could prove beneficial to highly strung patients. In her violent moments she broke windows, assaulted nurses or other patients but her father still believed that if she were near him there would be deliverance. Without her and without writing he was stranded. A writer, and especially a great writer, feels both more and less about human grief, beign at once celebrant, witness and victim. If the writing ceases, or seems to cease, the mind so occupied with the stringing together of words is fallow. There was nothing he admitted but rage and despair in his heart, the rage of a child and the despair of a broken man. It is not singular to Joyce. Tolstoy in his later years renounced his works and peopled his estate with Rasputin-like zealots who split the family. When Tolstoy left his house and walked through the snow, Sonya, who had borne many children and copied
War and Peace by hand three times, followed but was refused admission to the waiting room where he lay dying. Eugene O’Neill came to see his wife Carlotta as his enemy and moreover his mad enemy. Virginia Woolf put stones in her pocket and one morning drowned herself in the River Ouse in Sussex. Charles Dickens became lonely and morose, marshaling his children against his estranged wife Kate.
Joyce did not leave Nora and in fact became more dependent on her as time went on. Stuart Gilbert describes a scene a year or so earlier, Mrs. Joyce packing in order to go to a hotel, Joyce curled up in a chair, dejected, saying that he could not look after himself, that he must have her, and Nora suggesting that he drown himself. Then the old arguments about drink and money, the money spent on the Irish tenor John Sullivan when his son Giorgio could have done with such patronage. In order to let them thrash things out, Gilbert left the apartment but at Joyce’s request phone at six o’clock to be answered by Nora who said, “I’ve given in again.” Joyce loved his family and insisted that they were all that mattered to him but as he got older he became less attached to the things of this world; they were, as with Anna Livia, “becoming loathed to him.” Words had been his mainspring. He told Ole Vinding that while
Finnegans Wake had been insuperably difficult it had given him immense pleasure and it had for him a “greater reality than any other.” The fulfillment which the work brought was countered with a devouring emptiness. Camus has written of the actor’s tenor and even more so of the actor’s impotence but the barren writer is even more enfeebled. Because of being able to conjure up worlds, to depict emotions so passionately, to make characters as animate as Anna Karenina or Leopold Bloom, the writer seems invincible but is in fact potentially the most stranded of all. The cliff face is the daily port of call. It is ironic that the righteous André Gide who returned his copy of
Ulysses said after Joyce’s death that what he most admired in him, as in Mallarmé and Beethoven and the very rarest of artists, was that the work completes itself with a cliff, the steep face of its genius an enigma to the end.
