Fist of Five: James Joyce

February 2022 marks the centenary of James Joyce’s modernist masterpiece Ulysses, first published on February 2nd, 1922.

Today’s post, one of our occasional 'Fist of Five' series, recommends a selection of books on the theme of Joyce’s life and works.

Dubliners by James Joyce
If you haven’t read any Joyce before, Ulysses might not be the easiest place to start: Dubliners is definitely less daunting. Joyce’s early collection of short stories caused controversy (just like his later novel) because of their frankness about the realities of life, and their unflattering picture of the city’s inhabitants, the ‘gratefully oppressed’ as Joyce sardonically puts it. However, despite his determination to expose Dublin’s frailities in his ‘nicely polished looking glass’, there is also affection and understanding in these stories, and Joyce’s scorn is often tempered with gentleness and sympathy. 

The stories cover a multitude of different characters and experiences, of all ages, classes and situations. Two friends bunk off school in search of adventure, and get more than they bargained for; a young boy is smitten by the girl next door, and another falls under the spell of a deeply dubious priest. A timid civil servant dreams of becoming a poet; a wealthy young man is conned out of his cash. A landlady deftly manoeuvres one of her lodgers into a shotgun marriage; fastidious Mr Duffy’s self-image is shattered by an unexpected declaration of love. A drunken salesman is mugged in a pub and rescued by his friends; electioneers and political hustlers gather on a wet night and lament their country’s woes over bottles of warm stout. A middle-aged teacher blinks furiously through his spectacles as he navigates the minefield of his own sensitivities at a Christmas party; simple-minded, soft-hearted Maria is teased by her surrogate family; two ‘gallants’ prowl the Dublin streets, scheming to squeeze money out of a naive young housemaid … 

Edgar Allan Poe observed that in a short story, ‘every word tells’, and that is eminently true of the stories in Dubliners. Superficially plain, certainly in comparison to the stylistic flamboyance of Joyce’s subsequent novels, each word is nevertheless chosen with scrupulous care and precise attention to detail. It’s easy to miss their subtleties at first glance: re-read them and they’ll stay with you forever.

Nora by Brenda Maddox
One of the most powerful short stories in Dubliners, ‘Eveline’, focusses on a pivotal moment in the life of a young Irish girl on the verge of eloping to Argentina with her lover. Desperate to escape, but fearful of the unknown, Eveline is torn by indecision. Will marriage release her from the grinding domestic drudgery she endures, slaving for her drunken father? Is her lover, the disarmingly named Frank, as trustworthy as he seems, or is she simply stepping from one trap into another? 

The story parallels Joyce’s own experience: in the summer of 1904, when Joyce wrote ‘Eveline’, 18 year old hotel maid Nora Barnacle sauntered into his life and Joyce fell instantaneously in love. Like Frank, he begged Nora to run away with him: Nora - brave, reckless and adventurous (unlike Eveline) - immediately agreed. Brenda Maddox’s biography of this extraordinary woman is a fascinating and absorbing read. As Joyce’s partner (the couple didn’t actually marry until 1931), she put up with a lot, but her own strength of personality and defiance of convention made her a force to be reckoned with, and shaped many of the most intriguing women in Joyce’s fiction. As Joyce’s father reputedly said when he heard of their relationship, ‘Nora Barnacle? She’ll stick to him!’. And she did.

Endgame by Samuel Beckett
Nora apparently remained convinced all her life that Joyce would have had a better career as a singer than a writer: but by the time Samuel Beckett crossed paths with him, in Paris in 1928, Joyce’s reputation as one of the most innovative (and controversial) novelists of the era was thoroughly established. Beckett was then teaching at the Ecole Normale Supérieure: as Joyce’s eyesight deteriorated, he increasingly took on the role of Joyce’s research assistant and occasional scribe. His 1957 play Endgame draws upon this experience. 

Somewhere in a post-apocalyptic wasteland lives Hamm, a tyrannical, blind and semi-paralysed writer. He shares his home with his parents (whom he keeps in two dustbins), his lame, long-suffering servant, Clov, and a toy dog that can’t stand up (it only has three legs). He spends his days bullying, whining and running through recitations of the autobiographical novel he is writing and obsessively re-writing. How will his story end? 

Alan Cumming as Hamm and Daniel Radcliffe as Clov in the Old Vic's 2020 production of Endgame

Beckett’s dark, absurdist comedy has many sources. It’s partly a bleak re-working of the relationship between Shakespeare’s exiled magician, Prospero, and Ariel, the otherworldly spirit who executes his commands in The Tempest. It’s partly a recreation of the arduous months when Beckett returned to Ireland to nurse his invalid aunt, and, like Clov, felt his own light dying. And it’s partly an echo of Beckett’s time as Joyce’s amanuensis: ‘Joyce was an exploiter’, he later observed, and the play reflects this ambivalence, but also Beckett’s fascination with the (occasionally) monstrous genius.

Dotter of her Father’s Eyes by Bryan and Mary Talbot

While Beckett was fascinated by Joyce, Lucia - Joyce’s daughter - was fascinated by Beckett, and fell passionately, and unrequitedly, in love with him. Her tragic story - thwarted by mental illness and unrealised artistic ambitions - forms one thread of this graphic novel, which interweaves scenes from Lucia’s life with Mary Talbot’s memories of her own childhood, and her troubled relationship with her dictatorial academic father. 

The result is a complex, sad and unsettling work, with echoes of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. It shows how easily children can be crushed by their parents’ talents, and is particularly shrewd about the way in which women have often been conditioned to subordinate their own lives to those of their husbands and fathers. A melancholy read.

Travesties by Tom Stoppard

Much more fun (tho still tinged with melancholy) is Tom Stoppard’s 1974 comedy Travesties, in which Joyce appears in several guises - as himself, as a vaudeville song and dance man (Nora would have been delighted), as a limerick-spouting ‘Irish nonsense’ and as a magician.  

The play is based on a true story, and set in Zurich, in 1917, where Joyce was then living, as were two other significant historical figures: Tristan Tzara (founder of Dadaism) and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (father of the Russian Revolution). But its actual landscape is the wandering mind of Stoppard’s central character, Henry Carr - equally real, but far less famous: a minor civil servant invalided out of WWI with shellshock and seconded to Zurich’s British Consulate. Carr briefly crossed paths with Joyce, then business manager of an amateur theatrical company, when he took one of the main roles (‘not Ernest, the other one’) in their production of Oscar Wilde’s celebrated comedy of manners. The two men later fell out and sued each other in a petty squabble over minor expenses. Deep in old age, Carr contemplates his memoirs: ‘Memories of James Joyce. James Joyce as I Knew Him. The James Joyce I Knew. Through the Courts With James Joyce …’.. 

Peter McDonald as Joyce, Tom Hollander as Carr and Scarlet Strallen as Gwendolen in the Broadway transfer of the Menier Chocolate Factory's 2016 production of Travesties

The action of the play is filtered through Carr’s cracked and crumbling consciousness, as his faltering memory reshapes and reconfigures the past, merging art and real life, fact and fiction. There’s a serious debate at its heart about the nature and role of the artist, plus a moving exploration of the impact of war and the devastations of old age, but this is also one of Stoppard’s most wildly surreal and exuberant comedies, spectacularly revived six years ago with Tom Hollander as a memorably pompous Henry Carr. ’What’, scoffs Carr to Joyce, ‘did you do in the Great War?’ "I wrote Ulysses," he said. "What did you do?" Bloody nerve!’

You can find out more about the Ulysses centenary celebrations here, and if you'd like to catch up on some other 'Fist of Five' posts you can find them here: five books about islands, five novels with 'road' in the title, five books about apes, five sci-fi classics, five books about Englishness, five books about servants, five graphic novels, five stories by H P Lovecraft, five books about Frankenstein, five books about an animal's perspective ...