The Most Dangerous Book

The most basic summary of James Joyce's life would cover his eye problems, his poverty, probably his devotion to his work being equalled only by his devotion to drinking and the censorship of Ulysses. Yes, yes, yes, one thinks but one needs a fuller account like that by Kevin Birmingham to appreciate the extremities of each element and how they came together to make for such an extraordinary life. To compare the biography of Ulysses to that of The Waste Land is to put a campaign of monumental heroism in the name of art and literature up against a bout of hypochondria.

It's hard to say which feature of the story is the most astonishing. The efforts of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice were determined. Certainly Ulysses pushed at boundaries far beyond those that had made Tess of the d'Ubervilles and Jude the Obscure seem shocking only a couple of decades earlier but if they thought it was filth it was a good thing they didn't read the letters between Joyce and Nora. They might have been well-intentioned but their case was flawed in as far as not being clear how anybody could be corrupted by a book they couldn't understand.

Joyce's devotion to booze makes his achievement in writing such a book all the more staggering as he was delivered home regularly barely able to stagger himself. And, the 'Oxen of the Sun' episode cost him 'a thousand hours of work' which compares with the couple of hours each Sunday afternoon one winter in which I dutifully churned out a first draft of Time After Time - 50 thousand words - in order to be able to say I'd written such a thing. That calculates to, say, 24 x 2 = 48 plus a bit of thinking and planning such as it was but it was more than enough for me to realize what hard work writing a novel is, even a very poor one.

Joyce,

was so cold in their last residential hotel that he wrote with blankets over his shoulders and a shawl wrapped around his head. He wrote whenever he wasn't bedridden with fits of pain, and he thought about writing whenever he was.

And his eysight was failing, too.

In due course there was financial and practical support from the small, committed band of sponsors and believers but his itinerant life with his family was a further burden on the creative process. It is they that are the heroes of the story as much as Joyce in a way because without them it wouldn't have happened and for once Ezra Pound is one of the good guys which is unusual for him. That is a measure of what an unlikely story it is.

After the fact, Modernism looks like an inevitable done deal but it looks like no such thing in this account of what it was like at the time. Like any revolution it came from the underground and took a lot of organizing against the odds and the combined powers of the authorities in place. Like a lot of revolutions it looks in retrospect as if it had to happen but maybe there are even more revolutions thyat need to happen but don't.

The two major revolutions in Western art, literature and music, for me at least, were Romanticism and Modernism. I wouldn't be a complete devotee of either but recognize the benefits they brought with them alongside the collateral damage. Romanticism made us all self-indulgent and Modernism required us to be highbrow. It is necessary to give some credit where it's due to Pound who was otherwise not a good man but one wonders if the Moderrnist achievement would look quite so extraordinary without Joyce who, like Picasso, showed that he could do it properly before taking it several stages beyond. Ulysses was at the giddy limit and then the Wake went where nothing has ever been since. Literature has been 'after the fact' ever since.

It is a story of heroism, if in artistic terms only. Ulysses makes no difference to the vast majority of people's lives. It's not even one of my favourite books and I'm some sort of low-level literatus, I'd like to think. Whether it was worth it depends on one's point of view but it must have been essential for Joyce or else he wouldn't have given himself to it so completely and then extended the project infinitely beyond itself. Perhaps it is through such involvement that one can find fulfilment or perhaps he was uncompromisingly selfish and the fallout from his life and work contiunes to wreck those of others. Not least the professors who devote theirs to deciphering what might otherwise be regarded as madness.