SELECTED LETTERS OF JAMES JOYCE
Edited by RICHARD ELLMANN 440 pages. Viking. $18.95. $5.95 paperback.
JAMES JOYCE: A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST
by STAN GEBLER DAVIES 328 pages. Stein & Day. $10.
Like the ever recycling figures who fall and rise through Finnegans Wake, James Joyce refuses to stay buried. A character bearing his name is currently cutting linguistic capers in the Broadway hit Travesties. The discovery of some exam papers Joyce wrote while seeking a teaching certificate in 1912 was recently headlined in the New York Times. Going on sale next week is a facsimile of the Ulysses manuscript (three volumes; Octagon Books). Price: $150. For a writer who labored half his life in seething obscurity, Joyce has achieved a renown that might sate even his massive Irish appetite for irony.
Not all of this attention is of a kind that Joyce would welcome. Irish Journalist Stan Gebler Davies has taken the measure of the two previous Joyce biographies (by Herbert Gorman and Richard Ellmann) and found them too hagiographic for his taste. By contrast, Davies' Joyce seems to spend most of his youth consorting with Dublin prostitutes and most of his maturity lying drunk in a succession of Continental gutters. Clearly the man liked wine and women; it is his song that Davies manages to ignore. He dismisses, for instance, the difficult but hardly inaccessible Finnegans Wake as a "monument to perversity." So much for 18 years of his subject's life—and for a palimpsest dream-epic of surpassing erudition and beauty. Davies' stumblebum Joyce is thus every bit as one-dimensional as the St. James who has been propped up by generations of acolytes.
Virgin or Madonna. A more complex portrait of the artist emerges from the Selected Letters of James Joyce. Biographer Ellmann has trimmed three volumes of Joyce's correspondence into a crisp, compelling narrative—and added previously suppressed letters from Joyce to his wife Nora. Visiting Dublin on business in 1909, Joyce was unhinged by the rumor (false) that Nora had been unfaithful to him during their courtship five years earlier. Back in Trieste, Nora was bewildered and shocked by Joyce's anguished accusations. When this crisis passed, the couple tried to bridge their physical and emotional separation with a series of starkly erotic letters. Nora's have not survived, but Joyce's reveal that both partners used these letters as aids to masturbation — thus deflecting their sexual desires for others. "One moment," Joyce writes, "I see you like a virgin or madonna; the next moment I see you shameless, insolent, half naked and obscene!"