The Dubliner

James Joyce liberated the literary language of the English-speaking nations, including, among others, his own. Now Edna O’Brien, a distinguished novelist of one of those generations which stand in his debt, has written not his biography (a task splendidly performed years ago by Richard Ellmann, an American) but rather his “Life,” in Plutarch’s meaning of the word, setting forth his accomplishments and eccentricities, the shape of his existence, the fallibilities of his character and the infallibility of his art and suggesting persuasively the ways the world of our language has been touched by that art.

She has done this by turning her back on today’s fashions in literary criticism, relying instead upon her native good sense, her alert sensibility and her own subtle and seductive language. She has deliberately exposed her language to the power of Joyce’s, without bending the rhythms of her own prose too closely to his. There is a good instance early on--too tightly woven to excerpt--in which she follows the young Joyce, intellectual, passionate, inflamed, as he first lusts for, then quickly comes to love, a graceful but ignorant Galway girl, Nora Barnacle, who has come down to Dublin to scrub floors and empty chamber pots in Finn’s Hotel.

She has Joyce’s letters to work from, but the author of “A Fanatic Heart” can bring her own authority to such matters. In these days, when discussions of Joyce resemble a Postmodern epistemological disquisition, she reminds us of Joyce’s fierce eroticism and how close its roots lay to the roots of his art.

June 16, 1904, the day on which something physical transpired between Joyce and Nora, is the date in Edwardian Dublin to which Joyce would later assign the complicated multitudinous world of “Ulysses.” One of the most prodigious novels of the century, the only one to stand beside Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past,” took full seed from the touch by Nora which, as Joyce told her, “made a man of me.” But then, Proust’s immense novel grew from a biscuit soaked in lime tea, from a water-soaked Japanese paper flower. It is curious that both of these masters of modernism were obsessed by the propinquity of the minute and the magnificent. In Joyce’s case, it is an obsession of which O’Brien keeps us aware.

Joyce and Nora left Dublin together and forever, into the exile which he had chosen for them both, unmarried, living in what was in those days called sin. Their shared decision against marriage had complex roots. In Nora’s case, it was shaped by a furious, unverbalized detestation of the Catholic Church throughout her childhood in the Galway slum. But Joyce and the Joyces suffered in a Dublin slum to which they had tumbled down from near-gentility, thanks to the father’s drunkenness and profligacy. A baleful inheritance, that drunkenness, so James came to feel. The curse of the Irish, as many an Irishman had phrased it, before him and after. But Joyce’s father, before he hit the skids, had contrived to purchase for James the best and most expensive of Jesuit educations, at Clongowes Wood and Belvedere. When Joyce attacks God and the church, it is with the keenest and most glittering of intellectual steel.

Almost the most puzzling aspect of this most puzzling of men is the union between a complicated, ferociously sardonic man, building books designed to challenge the universe, and an ignorant, illiterate and on the whole lazy peasant girl. But they knew what they were about, in the secrecies of bedsheets and daydreams. “Her powers over him were undoubted and her sexual powers were consummate,” as O’Brien well says.

The aspects of Joyce’s work upon which O’Brien writes splendidly are the linguistic and the erotic, the domestic and the familial. She creates with both compassion and restraint, for example, the heart-wrenching sorrow of Joyce’s attempts to avoid knowledge of the developing mental chaos within his much-loved daughter Lucia, while his eyes were slipping into a black, hopeless chasm and with “Finnegans Wake” yet to finish. But there is another, and perhaps the ultimate, aspect of his work which she scants and, perhaps, disrespects.

Joyce was an intellectual, perhaps the most finely honed of all the creative writers of his time, more so, it could be argued, than even T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. He left the Jesuits, but he never left their training, and theirs was a training in the specific and the particular. Everything he wrote, from “Dubliners” through “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” to “Ulysses” and “Finnegans Wake” has a firm--firmly ambivalent, that is--intellectual structure. Indeed, it might be argued that if there is a theme, it is the confrontation of reason, passion and imagination. It is an aspect of his work that we ignore at our peril.

And that is precisely what O’Brien has done. From time to time we are shown Stephen Dedalus “ruminating” in a pub or debating while perched on a bar stool, but we are rarely told what he is ruminating about--such matters as the nature of art, as it happens, the immortality of the soul, the inordinate demands placed upon him by the Catholic Church, the British Empire and Ireland itself, “the old sow that eats her farrow.” Stephen has a brain as well as feelings and passions.

In one respect, at least, O’Brien is temperamentally as far from Joyce as it is possible to be. It is notorious that Joyce, writing about Dublin in far-off Paris and Zurich, was forever sending home to friends and aunts to get the particulars exactly right of Dublin’s streets, specific houses, the dimensions of a bar. O’Brien describes the process. How many steps up to the front door of 7 Eccles St.? What shops do you see when you look along Wicklow Street from Grafton Street corner? These particulars are the building blocks of his aesthetics. Not hers, though.

For a book of modest length (one of its virtues), she has assembled an impressive number of inaccuracies of a factual nature. The “national poet” of Victorian Ireland was not Thomas Davis but Thomas Moore; there was no statue of Thomas Davis in Joyce’s day, although there is now. The first encounter of the young Joyce and the middle-aged William Butler Yeats is variously described by various interested parties, but it was left to O’Brien to compress matters into a single sentence in which every word is inaccurate. In a second sentence, she has Joyce telling Yeats that he intended to “burn with a hard and gem-like ecstasy.” If Joyce wished to quote from Walter Pater, he would have done so with accuracy. For all that, Joyce would have been dismayed by this, as am I, an ex-professor of literature, but I much admire this book: It is swift, moving and brimming with the author’s enthusiasms and her well-earned affection for a difficult colleague. If you are about to set out upon Joyce’s deep seductive seas, you will need only “Ulysses,” O’Brien’s study and Richard Ellmann’s splendid biography.