James Joyce. By Edna O'Brien. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 182 pp. £12.99 in UK
As writers' lives go, that of James Joyce has everything: heroism, struggle, sex, fame, despair, tragedy, to name but a few. It is no surprise that a film is now being made, actually with Nora Barnacle as the main figure, featuring Susan Lynch and Ewan McGregor; the surprise is that it did not happen before. It is hard to fail in the telling of such a life, and Edna O'Brien certainly does not stint on the drama and excitement in this volume, one of a series in which contemporary writers consider some great figures of the past.
Joyce's life is dramatic not just in the obvious sense: it is also, almost literally, a drama, something staged and put on show. From a very early point, he himself endowed it with an emblematic quality: the figure of the artist-exile, defiant and unrepentant - "self-doomed", as he put it, and unafraid. And this stance was maintained with total consistency throughout: even the exigencies of two world wars and many other external traumas did not change it.
Having sketched the attractions this life presents to any biographer, it is time to mention the one serious drawback: it's all already very well known. Joyce's life has been told in a major biography - that of Richard Ellmann - which, while it is not "definitive" or the last word (can the last word be uttered on anyone's life?) does mark a level of knowledge and insight that has not been surpassed.
But in this instance, the drawback is not felt to be disabling: the purpose of this series, called "Lives", is to present succinct, engaged biographies for readers who understandably find the current trend for mammoth-sized, detailed recountings of a life rather more than they really want. So a comparison with Ellmann's work is not relevant: something quite different is being attempted, namely the encounter of one distinguished sensibility and consciousness with those of an even more distinguished other.
Nonetheless, this book does purport, in its relatively brief frame, to give an account of Joyce's life and work; it is fair, therefore, to expect that it would do so with reasonable accuracy and reliability.
Unfortunately, such an expectation is not fulfilled. In the first place, there is a dispiriting number of errors in the telling that render it quite unreliable as an account of its subject's years on earth. One does not want to labour the point - as the blurb puts it, Edna O'Brien "eschews the narrowly academic" - but it behoves any reviewer to murmur, for example, that the Trinity provost who compared Joyce to a corner boy was not called McPherson, that Thomas Davis is not the "national poet" referred to in A Portrait, that it's either C.P. Curran or J.F. Byrne but it's not C.P. Byrne, and that, contrary to the author's assertion, Samuel Beckett succeeded in failing to be born in Greystones - he had worse luck in Foxrock.
In addition to matters of this nature, there are major confusions in the chronology: Joyce's religious crisis is presented as predating his sexual awakening (in fact it occurred during it) and events that occurred during his time in Zurich are transposed to Trieste and vice versa. And there is plenty of misquotation: perhaps the best one is when the phrase: "Bridebed, childbed, bed of death" becomes "Ride bed" etc.
What, if anything, is there to compensate for these misfortunes? Well, there is a strong focus on the women in Joyce's life: his mother, Nora, his daughter, and to a lesser extent, Harriet Weaver and Sylvia Beach. It is difficult to feel that any great insight is gained. The position of the women in Joyce's family was very different from that of Joyce himself: they were not writers and most things about them have to be inferred. Nora, in particular, has proved very resistant to biographers' probings, a situation with which she might not have been unhappy. What emerges most clearly from O'Brien's account once again is her toughness - and how much she needed it.
As for Joyce himself, it is hard to avoid sensing an atmosphere of disapproval running through this account. Edna O'Brien is certainly not one to voice moral judgment, having been a victim of it herself, but there are aspects of Joyce's life - his drinking, his frequenting of brothels, his tendency to use people, his rather sovereign attitude to money - that she clearly finds hard to take. On this, a couple of modest points may be made. Firstly, very few lives would emerge untainted if subjected to the degree of scrutiny that Joyce's has received. Secondly, Joyce was, if nothing else, a writer, so it is perhaps inevitable that he committed to writing matters that many others might refrain from inscribing, thereby leaving some hostages to fortune: an occupational hazard.
Much is made, in this volume, of the 1909 letters to Nora, apparently on the basis that because these are "sexually explicit", they are therefore necessarily very revealing about the person who wrote them. It does not have to follow: it may be that in the throes of sexual passion people tend to mouth (allowing for variations in sexual preference) much the same material.
Edna O'Brien conveys well the experience, the labour, the obsessiveness of the writing of Ulysses (this is something which, as a writer, she is well qualified to understand). Her account of the book itself gives the basic information but does not go a great deal further. To say it is partial would be a truism - what account of Ulysses is not partial? - but it is rather disabled by the omission of the element of humour; one would never think, from this rendering, that Ulysses contained a single moment of levity, and yet humour is one of its basic ingredients.
Surprising, too, is the cursory treatment of Molly Bloom: considering how much Molly's monologue influenced O'Brien's fine novel, Night, one might have hoped for some insights from this author; they are not forthcoming, nor indeed do we get any sense of what Joyce as a writer might mean for O'Brien herself as a writer - an opportunity missed, perhaps.
She fares a good deal better in her treatment of Finnegans Wake, displaying a keen awareness of the book's linguistic richness and universality; her treatment of Anna Livia more than makes up for her comparative neglect of Molly. Indeed, her chapter on the book, with its creative use of quotation, might well encourage readers understandably dubious about its charms to have a go; any occasional incoherences are not necessarily of Edna O'Brien's making.
The book ends with a sympathetic account of the tragedy of Lucia Joyce and of the growing darkness, literal and metaphorical, of Joyce's final years. As these chapters go on, a quality that has been present in subdued form throughout begins to make itself more manifest: passion. Edna O'Brien actually thinks Joyce is a very great writer indeed, and she thinks this not because it is fashionable to do so, or because it is of any particular benefit to herself, or because she finds him very appealing as a person (though her feeling for him deepens with the later years), but because it is something she has experienced herself. And such a feeling is worth a thousand theses, accurate to the last detail. So while as a biography this book is deeply flawed (for those who find Ellmann a bit indigestible, a brief life by Morris Beja can be recommended), much, much can be forgiven for the sake of its true commitment to its subject.
Terence Killeen is a critic and an Irish Times journalist.