Portrait of a daughter as a lost cause

James JOYCE and Nora Barnacle had two children, Giorgio and Lucia. Giorgio was born on July 27, 1905, Lucia on July 26, 1907. All that most people have heard about Giorgio is that he inherited his father’s tenor voice and aspired to become a professional singer. All they know -- or think they know -- about Lucia is that for a while she was in love with Samuel Beckett and that, not necessarily as a consequence of her disappointment with his response, she went mad and died many years later in St. Andrew’s Hospital, Northhampton, England. She is also thought to have enjoyed the miserable privilege of being featured in Beckett’s novel “Dream of Fair to Middling Women” as Syra-Cusa, of whom the hero Belacqua reports that “she lives between a comb and a glass.”

Carol Loeb Shloss thinks that Lucia has been hard done by, and she has written a large-hearted biography to prove it. Lucia had some talent as a dancer, a writer and a book designer, but she could not turn these gifts into a life. She studied dance in Paris with Raymond Duncan -- Isadora’s brother -- and later with Margaret Morris and Jean Borlin. There were also lessons in eurhythmics at the Jaques-Dalcroze Institute. And a few lessons in singing.

Lucia was never short of teachers. Or of lovers. After Beckett, she was involved with Alexander Calder, Albert Hubbell and Alexander Ponisovsky. Sex was never a problem. But Lucia’s home life was arid. Nora, who doted on Giorgio, did not have much time for Lucia and by 1935 had largely given up on her. She was probably tiresome to deal with, emotionally demanding and sometimes impossible, but she did not deserve to be excluded from Nora’s affection and Giorgio’s. She started showing signs of mental illness in 1931 and was diagnosed as suffering from dementia praecox. But the diagnosis is still doubtful. Her friends disagreed about her condition: Some of them thought she was mad, others felt that she was just strange. Harriet Shaw Weaver did not think she was mad, but Maria Jolas thought she was. Stuart Gilbert concluded that her insanity was a pose, to begin with, but that with long practice she acted herself into the condition of madness. The doctors could do nothing for her. Even the great Dr. Carl Gustav Jung was helpless. Or maybe Lucia refused his help. “To think that such a big, fat materialistic Swiss man should try to get hold of my soul,” Shloss reports her as having said of Jung’s ministrations.

What was the matter with her? Shloss doesn’t claim to know, but she stops short of saying she was mad. “Joyce’s daughter may have had problems,” she says, “but she was no lunatic.” To have had problems doesn’t meet the case, though her not being a lunatic is what we would like to know. Joyce said, after years of consultations, conflicting diagnoses and psychiatric speculation, that his daughter had “one of the most elusive diseases known to men and unknown to medicine.” Shloss comes up with more questions than answers:

“Why was Joyce’s own sense of the beauty and talent of his child so at odds with the opinions of other people in his circle? Why should Joyce’s primary biographer [Richard Ellmann] have judged Joyce to be a man of extraordinary discernment in some matters but foolish in judging Lucia? Why was Joyce upbraided for trying to save Lucia instead of admired for the steadfastness of his love?”

Shloss has written this book on the conviction that Joyce knew Lucia “much better than anyone else, including well-meaning family friends.” Lucia, she claims, “was a person of great seriousness and intensity.” Many who “lived in her presence drew light from her being.”

If Joyce is the hero of Shloss’ book, he is surrounded by villains. Nora is first on that list, guilty of jealousy and incomprehension. In 1931, she bullied Lucia into giving up her dancing, the art in which she seems to have been most gifted. Giorgio is also presented as crass. He had no plan for Lucia except to have her placed in an institution and kept there. After Joyce’s death on Jan. 13, 1941, Giorgio wrote to Jolas: “I hope Dr. Delmas has not put Lucia in the street as needless to say I cannot pay him nor can I communicate with him.” Shloss comments on this sentence:

“Few words could have better displayed the alien nature of Giorgio’s birthright. Heir to neither his father’s passion nor his compassion, unable to imagine the magnitude of another human being’s fear or loneliness, unwilling to value the singular nature of his sister’s bright, misplaced, and mistimed originality, he abandoned Lucia. In one sentence he dismantled the fragile lines of communion that had bound her to life and to the hope of human understanding.”

“Abandoned” is rough. Even after his father’s death, Giorgio was not Lucia’s keeper. But he didn’t expend much imagination on trying to save her mind.

Shloss distributes further blame when the question of letters to and from Lucia arises. Her father evidently decided, in the chaos of the first weeks of World War II, that many letters should be destroyed, and he handed them over to Jolas with that in mind. Jolas appears to have gone through the letters and chosen some for the fire and some to be preserved. Harriet Weaver also exercised her judgment, retaining some letters and destroying others. Paul Leon did whatever he could to save boxes of letters.

There was still the question of releasing the correspondence to and from Lucia, and on this issue the most influential figure in the story is now Giorgio’s son, Stephen. He evidently decided, in Shloss’ version, that “his aunt’s story was a private one, of no interest to the reading public, “ and in that spirit he evidently managed to withdraw several items from the Leon archives now in the National Library of Ireland. Those archives of about a thousand items contain no letter from Lucia. In June 1988, Stephen Joyce announced that he had destroyed Lucia’s letters to him and had persuaded Beckett to do the same: “I didn’t want to have greedy little eyes and greedy little fingers going over them.... My aunt may have been many things, but to my knowledge she was not a writer,” he told the New York Times.

Shloss has written her biography of Lucia under these and other difficulties of censorship. She has also put forward a claim, as if by way of compensation, that Lucia became a figure of immense coded significance in her father’s “Finnegans Wake.” This is a stretch. Mothers are more liberally active than daughters in “Wake,” as in “Ulysses,” even though there are dancing girls in some of the most gorgeous passages of “Wake” that were probably inspired, however distantly, by Lucia. I wish I had space enough to quote the passage about Nuvoletta reflecting “for the last time in her little long life” and making up “all her myriads of drifting minds in one.” There is so much to be seen and heard in the book, it is all to the good to have such passages brought forward to the top of the banisters.

But Shloss now and again talks herself into excess and injustice. I am shocked to find Joyce presented as “the father/creator” who “became a voyeur whose appreciation of the spectacle presented by his child can in some way be considered a precipitating factor in the crises of the girl’s later life.” “Can in some way” are two weasel qualifications, but the tone of “appreciation” and “spectacle” is ugly, and there is no biographical justification for “precipitating.” Joyce had no part in Lucia’s illnesses, except that his love could not save her. *