Sunday Morning! Lucia by Alex Pheby

Why did Lucia Joyce throw a chair at her mother?

The mother was jealous of the daughter, which we know. The father doted on the daughter and the mother doted on the father; and the daughter threw a chair at the mother during the father’s fiftieth birthday party. So, the daughter was eventually committed to an asylum and spent the rest of her life in one institution or another, diagnosed schizophrenic. And that explains why she threw a chair at her mother.

However, we know so little about the girl and the scant details we have are so fascinating: daughter of James Joyce, rejected admirer of Samuel Beckett, danced with Raymond Duncan (himself the brother of someone more famous), filmed by Jean Renoir (but cut from his film), lover to two artists, Alexander Calder and Hubbel (both of whom left her for their regular partners) and of Myrsine Moschos, the shopgirl who delivered papers between Joyce and Sylvia Beach; she was a writer whose works and letters were destroyed, and an artist whose strange drawings survive in small numbers. She is remembered today only through the accounts of those who were around her.

She was also a woman under an older sort of Irish patriarchy, inherited from her parents; but living in a Paris that was a kind of laboratory of freedom- at least, until the Occupation, until her own incarceration. Living as a young woman under patriarchy is a bit like being French under German occupation- the public persona does not match the inner self, and we accept that. So, of course, it has been tempting to ascribe more to this cipher than the record allows: that she was a genius (her father thought so) who helped write Finnegans Wake; that she was the great suppressed artist of Modernism; that she was an early feminist whose free nature was too much for those around her to take; that she was really more bipolar, or even just moody, than schizophrenic. And there is something true about all of these interpretations.

But, then, there are the fires. She had a tendency to set fires to things and cut telephone wires and communicate with dead people. The mother eventually got even for the chair-throwing; she left Lucia in the asylum and didn’t visit her for the last 12 years of her life. And then there are a startling number of fires to the historical record: Lucia’s poems and a novel-in-progress were destroyed; she was treated briefly by Jung, who destroyed his notes; many of Joyce’s friends destroyed letters from or about Lucia; in 1988, the grandson Stephen Joyce announced that he had destroyed all of the letters from his Aunt and those to her from Beckett, to much gnashing of teeth. Like one of Stalin’s functionaries, Lucia was erased.

Stephen Joyce, who died last year, was not a popular person in Joyce studies, to say the least, and largely because he seemed to make it his life’s mission to resist those studies as much as possible. He appears right at the beginning of Alex Pheby’s novel Lucia, recently published in North Armorica by Biblioasis, depicted as a “silly old cunt” instructing a young man from town to burn the trunk full of letters, which the boy finally accomplishes in a semi-comic scene that ends chillingly:

“Now each image was invisible behind her face, her eyes, her pyre. Who would look past it? Shoes and teeth and parcels wrapped in string, certificates of birth and death, all personal effects the property of the state, stateless, piled and shorn, seat stuffing.

Shovel it on, shovel it off.”

It’s a slightly disturbing and delicately written scene in a book that reads more like a collection of vingettes than a novel. We have already read about Lucia’s embalming and will soon read about how little girls were disciplined during her childhood. Later, we will read about a match girl dying in the freezing Paris winter, how asylum workers submitted patients to submersion in hot water and injected them with serums made from cow placentae, the instruments used to perform abortions, how mental asylum dentists removed a patient’s teeth. All of this is rendered in matter-of-fact, artful prose. And there are even some blackly comedic bits, like a chapter which speculates on the role of tapeworms in literary history. One would not want to deny that a great deal of research went into the book- it is very much a “show your work” kind of novel.

On one hand, this detached approach seems particularly honest: instead of rendering Lucia Joyce as a triumphant free-spirit, why not depict her from a clinical distance, the length by which she was held in real life? Why should a writer attempt to speak in her voice, which has been so utterly silenced? Who do biographers think they are? In regular intervals throughout the book, Pheby writes about early 20th century archaeology and a fictional account of an Egyptian dig, drawing clear parallels between grave robbers and imaginative biographers like himself. We hear the voices of so many men, and a sort of authoritative misogynist voice, throughout the book; but we never hear Lucia’s voice, and this is clearly intentional. It would be perhaps dishonest for yet another man to attempt to speak for this poor woman. Pheby is clearly trying to avoid writing a hagiography of someone who was not treated like a saint in life.

One can respect that.

On the other hand, it also reminded me a bit of a Lars Von Trier film- aesthetically accomplished and extremely erudite art in the service of depicting a woman’s torture. I don’t want to suggest either man is a sadist. It’s just easy to get a reaction from an audience with torture. It has the proper effect: we’re meant to sympathize with Lucia and angered at the way she was mistreated throughout her life. And I don’t want to say it’s illegitimate to depict violence or abuse, because the obvious response is that this is all drawn from the reality for women and asylum patients. This was what these people went through. If we hate the depictions, we should hate the reality. And we do feel the sympathy that her handlers denied Lucia. After a while, though, I think we also get a bit numb like they did.

And then, we also get to hear about how her brother Giorgio, Stephen’s father, tortured her pet rabbit in order to prevent Lucia from telling others about his molesting her. Did this happen? It has been speculated that something might have happened between them because they were isolated together throughout childhood and both had unstable personalities later in life… But, no, I don’t think there is a record of this happening. Yet, there’s almost no record of Lucia to speak of! In a passage that has been much-quoted, Pheby writes: “All things that are possible are, in the absence of facts that have been destroyed that might have proved them incorrect, equally correct.” Take that, Stephen Joyce!

Elsewhere, he imagines Lucia being molested by James Joyce and her uncle Stanislaus. Again, Joyce doted on his daughter and nearly went broke trying to cure her, and others have speculated that maybe there was an erotic component of his love… But, no, we can’t prove it did, or didn’t, happen. Meanwhile, the mother Nora, who is often treated as a heartless bitch by Lucia’s biographers, is a battered wife here. Or, possibly a battered wife… It was not outside the realm of possibility. After a certain point, though, Lucia feels like “When did you stop beating your wife? The Novel.”

If this was a straight biography, Pheby might be criticized for this type of speculation, if that’s the word for it, but as an imaginative work of fiction, we can call it an investigation of misogyny and female agency and a blow against the Joyce estate for going after writers who have dealt with these figures in a more respectful way in the past through lawyers.

But is it a work of biography? Or one of vengeance? It has been described as a “veritable Molotov cocktail of prose at the hallowed preoccupations of the Joyce Estate and the censorship concerning Lucia administered by her nephew Stephen Joyce in particular.” And few would argue that Stephen Joyce didn’t make himself a fair target for this sort of response. But it gets trickier when we ask if James Joyce or Giorgio deserved this; or, indeed, if Lucia Joyce deserved this type of memorialization.

I can’t say; I’m no Joyce scholar. And I’m not sure I would want to be.

So, what are YOU reading, writing, watching, pondering, playing, or memorializing this weekend?