John Stanislaus Joyce, by John Wyse Jackson, with Peter Costello, Fourth Estate 494pp, £20 in UK
James Joyce was obsessed with his family's past, and his principal source of information was the stream of stories and reminiscences supplied by his loquacious father, John Stanislaus. As he acknowledged after his father's death, Joyce owed "Pappie" a great deal, not least his intimate knowledge of Dublin: "hundreds of pages and scores of characters in my books came from him", and "the humour of Ulysses is his; its people are his friends. The book is his spittin' image."
This biography, the fruit of twenty-five years of research, sets out to examine the life of John Stanislaus on its own terms, not as mediated through his son's work. The sub-title - The Voluminous Life and Genius of James Joyce's Father - sets the tone; not surprisingly, over the years the authors have become rather fond of their colourful subject, and occasionally indulge him with mockheroic treatment: "As Aeneas bore his aged and infirm sire Anchises from the ruins of Troy at the end of the war, so James Joyce took the memory of his Virgil-quoting father out of the decay and oblivion that was turn-of-the-century Dublin and gave him a home in his work." They are also determined not to let any of their meticulous research go to waste. The result is a densely packed, often rather dry chronicle of the minutiae of the social and political world of Victorian Ireland, first in Cork, where John Stanislaus was born and brought up in the 1850s and '60s, and then in Dublin. Some of it tends to the banal, for example, speculation about John Stanis laus's childhood excursions in County Cork: "Though James Joyce, the writer, for all his words, never kissed the Blarney stone there, it is highly probable that his father did."
These were exciting times in Ireland, of course, and through his youthful brush with Fenianism, a failed attempt to stand for Westminster and his fervent, life-long devotion to his great hero, Parnell, John Stanislaus was a participant as well as a passionate observer. His gregarious disposition ensured that he knew many of the key figures in local as well as national politics. In Portrait, Stephen Dedalus gives a description of his father, Simon, which could stand as a summary of John Stanislaus's life: "a medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a storyteller, somebody's secretary, something in a distillery, a taxgatherer, a bankrupt, and at present a praiser of his own past. " The authors of this volume remind us that the word "failed" could easily be appended to most elements of this list. As their biography clearly demonstrates, for a more complete picture, some additional epithets would also include: self-deluding fraud, cheat and abusive alcoholic. It was his wife May and their nine children who bore the brunt of John Stanislaus's fecklessness, his inability to hold down a job, his spiralling debts, and his spending of borrowed money on his own drinking. Exhausted by anxiety and an unrelenting spate of pregnancies - with numerous miscarriages between the many births - May died at the age of 44. Her one appeal for help, to a priest in the confessional, had been met with an exhortation to go home to her husband. Jackson and Costello's jocular, euphemistic remarks about May's succession of pregnancies jar somewhat: references to the Joyce seed, John Stanislaus's unfailing fertility, etc, seem to be attempts to adopt their subject's bullish, patriarchal tone, but are inappropriate. The comment that "May made John a father again" has overtones of some kind of miraculous immaculate conception. It is hardly surprising that Stanislaus Joyce, James's younger brother, judged his father extremely harshly in his memoir, My Brother's Keeper, based on the diary he kept in his youth. In comparison, James was a lot more forgiving, which is hardly surprising, since, from the moment of his birth, John Stanislaus's loving attention had been focused on him, the eldest son. An only son of an only son, John Stanislaus, obsessed with patrilineage, treated James as if he too were an only son. In addition, James shared many of his father's shortcomings, in diluted form, which tempered his criticism. Inevitably, his view of his father softened over the years, helped, no doubt, by his physical distance from him. His sisters were not so lucky. Yet even this most mutually admiring of father-son relationships had its limits and its silent recesses. "Until the end of John Stanislaus's life, James Joyce hoped that he would receive a sign of his father's approval for the extraordinary screed that was Work in Progress, or for his work in general . . . he longed for a gesture of some understanding from him . . . for the strange struggles and achievements of his life as a writer. That never came." For all the painstaking efforts of the authors of this biography, and their enthusiastic assertions ("in his prodigality was his genius, too"), their subject comes across as an objectionable, selfaggrandising, sentimental bore, far more readily appreciated through an encounter in the pages of his son's books than in person.
Helen Meany is an arts journalist and critic