Distinguished Simplicity

LETTERS OF JAMES JOYCE, VOLUMES II AND III. Edited by Richard Ellmann. 1,056 pages. Viking. $25 for the pair.

It is doubtful that a man can be known from his letters alone, but in the case of James Joyce, the letters become stage lights that illuminate the variegated disguises, postures, attitudes and importunities that he showed to the world.

In his 58 years, Joyce lived at more than 200 residences scattered across the face of Europe--fleabags and fine hotels, hospitals and clinics, pensions and borrowed apartments, students' rooms and Martello towers. In these settings, Joyce wrote his books, from the epiphanies represented by Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to the full achievements of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. In addition, Joyce launched on the world a flood of letters. The first batch, edited by Stuart Gilbert, was published nearly a decade ago (TIME, June 3, 1957). Since then, many more have been found: these two volumes contain 1,136 letters written by Joyce and nearly 200 by other people--either to Joyce himself or concerning his tangled affairs.

Joyce refused to explain his literary efforts publicly, but argued his ideas fiercely in correspondence with Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats and James Stephens. Probably no writer was ever more single-minded than Joyce or more convinced of his own genius, even before he published a line. Yet his life was a continuous obstacle course. His eyes failed him, he had facial neuralgia, arthritis of the back, sciatica. "My mouth is full of decayed teeth," he wrote, "and my soul of decayed ambitions." He was to die in 1941 from the hemorrhaging of a duodenal ulcer--his stomach pains had been diagnosed in Paris as due to nerves.

His writing was as impeded as his health. Publishers recoiled from the ferocity and strangeness of his work. Printers refused to set his more gamy passages in type. The husband of one of Joyce's typists was so outraged by the manuscript of Ulysses that he set it on fire. Joyce, in turn, railed against the narrowness of the "chaste and castrated English-speaking world."

Dodder Bank. When Joyce's Paris patron, Sylvia Beach, wrote to George Bernard Shaw, offering to sell him an early copy of Ulysses, Shaw replied: "I am an elderly Irish gentleman and if you imagine that any Irishman, much less an elderly one, would pay 150 francs for a book, you little know my countrymen." Joyce won a box of cigars on that exchange: knowing his countrymen, he had bet that Shaw would decline. Yet Shaw in another letter refutes the canard that he was disgusted by Ulysses. Writing to London's Picture Post, Shaw explained: "I did not burn it; and I was not disgusted. If Mr. Joyce should ever desire a testimonial as the author of a literary masterpiece from me, it shall be given with all possible emphasis and with sincere enthusiasm."

What gives the letters an extra resonance is the frequency with which life prefigures art. Joyce's brief and platonic affair with a young Swiss woman, Martha Fleischmann, is replayed in some detail in the Bloom-Gerty McDowell episode in Ulysses. The few letters from Joyce's rakehell father have all the style and fresh idiom of Simon Dedalus in the book. And Molly Bloom's long, affirmative soliloquy comes to life in the letters of his wife, Nora--artless, rambling and totally innocent of punctuation, syntax or correct spelling.

From Nora, Joyce demanded continual proofs of love. The major one, right at the outset, was that she leave Ireland with him as his mistress in 1904. They were finally married in 1931, but only to make sure that Joyce's family could legally claim his estate. Nora gave in full measure the affection and companionship that Joyce so desperately needed, but she could make nothing of his work. The first copy of Ulysses was given Nora, but she never got around to reading the book.

Joyce was racked by jealousy. He wrote Nora: "At the time when I used to meet you at the corner of Merrion Square and walk with you and feel your hand touch me in the dark and hear your voice (O Nora! I will never hear that music again because I can never believe again) at the time I used to meet you, every second night you kept an appointment with a friend of mine outside the Museum, you went with him along the same streets, down by the canal . . . down to the bank of the Dodder. You stood with him: he put his arm round you and you lifted your face and kissed him. What else did you do together?" Joyce had no sooner mailed the letter than he discovered that he had been cruelly hoaxed by the other man: Nora had not been unfaithful.

Lapsed Daughter. As valuable as the letters themselves is the brief, brilliant introduction by Richard Ellmann, who has already written the best biography of Joyce. Though Joyce regarded himself as an exiled genius in revolt against the bourgeois world, Ellmann notes that he "could not live outside the environment of family affection, badly as he acts within it." He fought hard for the advancement of his son, Giorgio, who aspired to be a singer (he became a middling successful bass) and devoted years to tending his daughter, Lucia, when she lapsed into schizophrenia.

Though he fled Ireland--that "sow that eats its own litter"--Joyce was never far from home in thought. His loving hatred for it burned fiercely till he died. He was, as Ellmann puts it neatly and memorably, "a Parnell of art."

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