James in Nighttown

By Paul Gray

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!"

The publication of this material would doubtless have pained Joyce deeply. Despite his reputation as a writer of dirty books, he was remarkably prim in his speech and other correspondence. "Keep my letters to yourself, dear," he admonished Nora. "They were written for you." Yet because everything Joyce experienced found its way some how into his fiction, the exposure of his raw sexual fantasies is not the simple invasion of privacy it might seem. Joyce's life was a tug of war between schizoid contradictions. He fled Dublin but never wrote about anything else. He renounced Catholicism, then cast himself as a higher priest who would transform the bread of common life into art. As these newly released letters show, the aloof classicist also struggled with the dark sensualist. "It is strange," Joyce wrote Nora in 1904, "from what muddy pools the angels call forth a spirit of beauty." Ulysses and Finnegans Wake were to prove him prophetic.

Paul Gray

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