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Here is a review of Edna O'Brien's book on Joyce, I think from today's Sunday Times of London: JAMES JOYCE By Edna O’Brien Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £12.99 ISBN 0 297 84243 9
“Anyone who touched Joyce,” Edna O’Brien tells us, “seemed to get a bit carried away.” It is too true. Her biography is certainly a work of devotion, and there are moments of insight: “eerie tenderness”, for instance, perfectly sums up the underlying tone of Dubliners. But such shafts are too often overwhelmed by a style that opens in parodic sub-Joycean excess (“Once upon a time there was a man coming down a road in Dublin and he gave himself the name of Dedalus the sorcerer, constructor of labyrinths and maker of wings for Icarus who flew so close to the sun that he fell”), lurches into banality (“parents are parents, and Irish parents the most solicitous of all”) and ends in obscurity (“his glands were in a pandemonium”). “Edna O’Brien eschews the narrowly academic and has no truck with the superficial,” the dust-jacket announces: empathy is all. There are a number of matey reflections of the “we writers” variety which would have made Disraeli blush. O’Brien eschews dates except to get them wrong (Joyce did not meet Yeats on his 40th birthday), lurches around the chronology (Parnell’s death, 1891, occurs several pages after Joyce’s first flight to Paris, 1902) and issues several hilariously off-beam statements (the notoriously laconic Parnell makes speeches lasting “several days” in the House of Commons). She is also apparently incapable of quoting correctly: canonical phrases of Yeats’s and Synge’s come out garbled, as does - unforgiveably - the opening of Finnegan’s Wake. She has not been helped by the incapacity of Weidenfeld’s copy-editors, who cannot see a proper name without mis-spelling it, an addiction extending even to their own authors. Joyce’s life, pared to its essentials, is now as familiar as that of a much-loved native saint in the Middle Ages. The shabby-genteel family background, the daredevilry of the student years, the flight to the Continent with Nora Barnacle, the poverty and passion of the Trieste period, the struggles with publishers, the growth of a his reputation, the reliance on patrons, the decline into an old age at once insecure and strangely dignified: it has all been told before. The point of doing it here is apparently to tell the world how much O’Brien admires Joyce, and to allow her to defend him against those who - she believes - “still hate” him. She is determined to rescue Joyce from Marilyn French’s claim that “it seems certain he had a contempt for women”, a judgment so self-evidently barmy that it hardly needs noticing. On the other hand, O’Brien is certainly not going to have any “truck” with the controversy swirling around the variant texts of Ulysses, or clarify the contested date at which the young Joyce first ventured into Nighttown. The problem is that O’Brien leaves us with nothing that is new, and little that is novel. It is possible, even after Ellmann’s masterwork, to find out more about this heroic artist’s life - as Peter Costello showed in James Joyce: the years of growth 1882-1915. It is also possible to produce a short biography that adds valuable commentary to the huge canon of Joyceana - as David Pierce showed in James Joyce’s Ireland. Neither appears in a bizarre “bibliography” of 24 titles “in order of author preference”. Ezra Pound once said that the only real artistic sin was to do, less well, something that somebody else had done before. Writers in this series of short Lives - indeed, biographers of any kind at all - would do well to nail that motto to their masthead. ROY FOSTER I have now read the Review of Edna O'Briens book on Joyce that I posted!. I feel like apologizing. The Review has that terribly anglo-superior tone I have come to dislike so much. Virginia Woolf had that same tone when she showed her ambivalence towards Joyce in remarks about his lower-class breeding. "horn of a bull, hoof of a horse, smile of a Saxon" ( Stephen, Page 27, Ulysses, Penguin) "Never did I read such tosh. As for the first two chapters we will let them pass, but the 3rd 4th 5th 6th -- merely the scratching of pimples on the body of the bootboy at Claridges." Virginia Woolf on Ulysses Letter, 24 April 1922, to Lytton Strachey. (published in The Question of Things Happening: Letters, Vol. 2, ed. by Nigel Nicolson, 1976), commenting on Ulysses. Now, I am sure to buy Edna O'brien's book and enjoy it! In fact, I recently read an excerpt of that book in the New Yorker. It was excellent reading. Would very much like to hear from all of you what your reaction to that review is, while I put together something on A Mother Rasik |
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