Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake
by Carol Loeb Schloss
Bloomsbury £20, pp528
'Whatever spark or gift I possess has been transmitted to Lucia,' James Joyce once said of his troubled daughter, 'and it has kindled a fire in her brain.' CJ Jung, who treated Lucia for supposed schizophrenia, seemed to agree, describing father and daughter as 'two people going to the bottom of a river, one falling and the other diving'.
It was perhaps inevitable, then, that, at a time when the damaged life is accorded as much attention as the gifted one, Lucia Joyce would be reclaimed from the margins of literary history. Already this year, her dalliance with Samuel Beckett has been turned into a confused drama called Calico, which ran briefly in the West End. Now comes this ambitious and at times extravagantly overreaching biogra phy by Carol Loeb Schloss, an American academic determined to counter the received wisdom about Lucia's blighted life.
That received wisdom runs broadly as follows. Lucia was a sickly second child, whose nomadic, unconventional upbringing seems to have exacerbated the usual confusions of adolescence. In her teens, she pursued a career as a modern dancer and was an accomplished illustrator. At 20, having abandoned both, she fell hopelessly in love with Beckett, a 21-year-old acolyte of her father's.
When Beckett belatedly made it clear that his affection was not romantic, Lucia's life began to unravel. She seems to have blamed her mother, Nora, for the break-up of the relationship, and on Joyce's 50th birthday in 1932, flung a chair at her in a rage. Her older brother, Giorgio, had Lucia committed to hospital. She was 25, and, other than a brief exile in Ireland, it marked the beginning of a confinement in institutions that would last until her death 50 years later.
'This is a story that was not supposed to be told,' Schloss tells us, referring to the destruction of the hundreds of letters that passed between Joyce and his absent daughter. Maria Jolas, one of several strong-willed women with whom Joyce surrounded himself in Paris, destroyed the entire correspondence after Lucia's death. Later, Samuel Beckett burnt his letters from Lucia, having been pressed to do so by Joyce's nephew, Stephen, a man unstinting in his opposition to the Joycean industry in academia and publishing.
As Schloss points out in her lengthy introduction, both Joyce's biographer, the late Richard Ellman, and Nora's biographer, Brenda Maddox, also seem to have cut deals with Stephen Joyce whereby they excised material about Lucia in return for his co-operation. In death, as in life, it seems, Lucia was an embarrassment to her family.
With so much evidence gone and so many of the primary sources dead, Schloss has her work cut out in attempting her painstaking reconstruction of the poignant complexities of Lucia's life. Had she concentrated solely on the known complexities of that life, this book might have been a small masterpiece of reclamation. Instead, it often reads as an uneasy alliance of scholarship and conjecture. Early on, for instance, Schloss sheds much light on Lucia's short career as a dancer, but also gives it a cultural import that seems wholly unjustified. 'Through her,' she writes, with typical extravagance, 'we watch the birth of modernism.' Yet Lucia featured in maybe 20 performances at most.
Schloss is strong, though, on Lucia's struggles to define herself through the brief embrace of a bohemian lifestyle for which she was spectacularly ill-suited. The writing catches fire when she details Lucia's long descent, particularly the poignant description of her brief exile in Ireland and her nocturnal wanderings though Dublin, 'whose every door she had heard named since earliest youth'.
While Joyce's attempts at helping his beloved daughter were often inadequate and ill-judged, they betokened a deeply felt, but seldom focused, belief that incarceration was not the answer to Lucia's problems. In this, he was alone, and overruled by the indomitable Nora.
Schloss is damning, too, of those who, like Joyce's publisher, Sylvia Beach, insisted on the primacy of his work above all else. Ironically, Lucia lives on as an abiding presence in Finnegans Wake, for which she was a muse, and, according to Schloss, maybe even a creative collaborator. The latter claim seems to be based on an ambitious reading of the text, and on one piece of anecdotal evidence, recounted by Lucia's cousin, Bozena Berta Schaurek, some 50 years after a brief visit to the Joyces' Paris apartment.
Bozena remembers being struck by her uncle's ability to write while: 'Lucia danced silently in the background.' From this fragment, Schloss creates a scenario that has precious little to do with biography and borders on wishful thinking. 'There are two artists in the room,' she writes, 'and both of them are working. Joyce is watching and learning. The two communicate with a secret, unarticulated voice. The writing of the pen, the writing of the body become a dialogue of artists...'
Were this a work of fiction in the vein of, say, Colm Tóibín's The Master, which attempts to get inside the head of Henry James, this kind of imaginative leap might make metaphorical or symbolic sense. In a work of scholarship, it is distracting at best, compromising at worst. Besides, her subject's story is extravagant enough without this kind of embellishment.
The possibility that there was a genetic link between his genius and his daughter's illness haunted Joyce until his death in 1941. By then, Lucia, at 33, was again confined in a sanatorium in France, having tried to set fire to her aunt's house in Bray, Co Wicklow.
Ten years later, she was moved to St Andrew's Hospital in Northampton where she died in 1982. She is buried alone in Northampton, far from the family grave in Zurich.
She was someone who, said one of her admirers in Ireland, 'had a great scope to her', but seems to have lost her way in early adulthood, and, lacking the guidance she needed from those she loved, never found it again. This book rescues her from the margins, but in doing so, bestows on her a cultural importance unwarranted by her ill-fated life. Even in death, Lucia Joyce seems fated to be a much misunderstood individual, more sinned against than sinning.
