Biography: This is quite an affecting book. Whatever one may think of the particular positions Carol Loeb Shloss espouses, it is hard not to be moved by the story of Lucia Joyce, and, I should add, it is hard not to be touched by the author's own commitment to her difficult subject.
Advance rumours (always to be treated warily) had indicated that scandalous disclosures were in the offing: in fact, there are no disclosures, scandalous or otherwise. To most people who are reasonably familiar with James Joyce and his world, this book merely fleshes out an already well-known tale: the story of Lucia, James Joyce's artistically gifted but mentally troubled daughter, who spent most of her life from 1936 onwards in mental institutions and who died in St Andrew's Hospital, Northampton, in 1982. That Lucia Joyce had a few sexual relationships is not news: more detail is provided on these, and on some other matters, but there is precious little in the way of genuinely new information.
Naturally, the dearth of new material can be put down to censorship; as is well known, systematic efforts have been made by the James Joyce Estate to suppress as much material by and about Lucia as possible. Shloss gives a detailed account of these efforts at the very start of her book. But while this is frustrating and regrettable, it should not be imagined that anything necessarily very sensational, or anything that would radically alter what we know of Lucia, has been suppressed; this particular horse has bolted a long time ago.
One thing the book does accomplish is to emphasise the extent of Lucia's artistic achievements; this is very welcome. She was very talented, especially as dancer and designer. This does make her subsequent descent into mental illness all the more tragic, but Shloss is right to focus attention on how much was actually accomplished.
She provides a vivid context for Lucia in the artistic movements and libertarian tendencies of the Paris of her day: this is probably the best part of the book. She is also right, if I understand her argument correctly, to underline the tensions caused in Lucia by the avant-garde nature of the artistic circles in which she moved as compared to her relatively bourgeois home life. There is of course an irony here, since Lucia's home life included the greatest experimental writer of the century, but as Shloss rightly says, Joyce wrote experiment, he didn't live it. Joyce's way of being wild was the deeply respectable Irish one of getting drunk; this was not an option that was either available or attractive to his daughter. It is also very much to the author's credit that she firmly dismisses the old theories of incestuous links between father and daughter; her clarity on this point is commendable.
It would be idle to imagine, though, that the strains of her situation alone could have precipitated Lucia's breakdown; contrary to what I take Shloss to be saying, nothing in Lucia's position, I believe, had to lead to the sad outcome that did ensue. Yes, it contained stresses and strains and contradictions; so do many other situations.
Essentially, Shloss wants to see Lucia's life as a unity: in her later travails she is still expressing herself artistically, in opposition to a predictably demonised medical establishment that wants to impose its Apollonian order on Lucia's Dionysiac energies. Her wildness, her impulsiveness are all of a piece with this. This is a very touching but not really convincing scenario. All artistic expression involves control; Joyce's own work illustrates this perfectly.
Shloss has a slightly new take on the well-known tale of Lucia's relationship with Samuel Beckett. She offers a fine analysis of the figure of the Syra-Cusa in Beckett's Dream of Fair to Middling Women, now definitively identified as Lucia. (In this connection, I may say that if Shloss chooses to rehash an over-hasty identification I once made, and which has already been comprehensively dealt with by James Knowlson, she might at least spell my name correctly.)
The last 31 years of Lucia's life are dealt with in eight pages; Shloss does not seem to be in a position even to indicate the cause of her death. I do not believe that she was just allowed to vegetate at St Andrew's Hospital, Northampton.
In short, and counter to the rather vague thesis that underlies this book, I think she probably was schizophrenic and in that situation, those concerned about her did their best. It is true that her brother, in particular, seems callous towards her, but, to put it mildly, he had his own problems.
Lucia seems to have been a genuinely friendly person when not in the grip of her condition, with a warm and engaging smile: a nice Joyce. On the occasion of the first James Joyce Symposium in Dublin in 1967, she sent a friendly message to the organisers, wishing it every success (a very different message from the kind now addressed to symposiums by the heirs of Joyce); it is a pity Shloss does not allude to this.
All in all, this book is a disappointment; it has a good heart, but the claims made for Lucia (such as that she was Joyce's "creative partner") are too large, and people are divided too rigidly into good and evil. As a biography, there are large gaps: the Trieste years are particularly poorly covered, not a surprise considering that the most important recent work on that period, John McCourt's The Years of Bloom, is not even listed in the bibliography. Nor am I convinced by the reading of the end of Finnegans Wake, which identifies the speaker as the daughter; the speaker is the mother, Anna Livia. Shloss ignores a line such as "The childher are still fast". The work is also marred by a number of errors: as indicated already, names are not the author's strong point: thus we have Tom Devlin for Joyce's friend, Tom Devin, and Kathleen Griffen for Nora's sister, Kathleen Griffin. Best of all is the information that Giorgio and Lucia stayed in Galway in 1922 "on Nun's Island off the coast". The geography of Galway has clearly shifted in the meantime.
• Terence Killeen is an Irish Times journalist and critic. His book, Ulysses Unbound, will be published in May