Lucia North North West

Whether it's letters or unauthorized biography, I'm never entirely convinced we have the right to access all areas of anybody else's inner life. Is it really any of our business. I can't help myself, though, so I'm on the lookout for an excuse. Well, I don't eat meat and I didn't vote Leave so I'm not as bad as some people.

Carol Loeb Schloss's account of Lucia Joyce has been a riveting read, though, and Lucia is by now long out of harm's way. I was hoping Lucia was 'misunderstood' rather than 'mad' but from the first hints of her difficulties, which seem to emerge from her giving up on her career in dance, she does deteriorate. I'm not going to be the judge of what 'mad' is and I have as little faith in psychiatry as I have in Economics or History which is not a great deal more than I have in Astrology or Voodoo.

One has to have sympathy for Lucia, the daughter of James whose mind was on other things and Nora whose,

erratic domesticity...thought cleaning the food cupboard with water from a chamberpot was hilarious.

Her childhood was itinerant so she spoke at least four languages, her mother was apparently jealous of her father's affection for her, her brother, Giorgio is 'futile' and unsympathetic and almost inevitably there is a lurking question of whether she suffered abuse. Joyce himself is ultimately the only one who tries to save her, not helped by his difficult relationship with Carl Jung who didn't rate his work, wanted to psychoanalyze him and, like many of his sort, saw fit to impose his ready-made theories onto his patients for his own benefit more than theirs. It would have been a more miraculous story if Lucia could have come through it all okay but she sets fire to things, attacks people, is by turns catatonic and wanting to express herself through movement.

Out of 465 pages of her story here, she is still only 31 by page 355 but 1951-1982, her time in the sanatorium in Northampton, is covered in 10 pages. In 1935, of a photograph of  Lucia in a hammock, Carol Loeb Schloss writes,

it..lets us see a poignant moment in modern history, a moment when modernism could not live with the consequences of its own creation

so perhaps it is fitting that Lucia was the muse that was behind Finnegans Wake, the book that led so many to think that Joyce had lost his mind. 

The latest Joyce reading spell is going to have to take a break after this. A week that included both Rosemary Tonks and Lucia Joyce is making me have my own doubts. Whatever 'sanity' is - and it might just be the ability to put on a brave face- it is a fragile thing and we need to try to hold on to as much of it as we can.

Recent arrivals include a very good copy of Richard Ellman's big account of Joyce and an odd copy of Beckett's Dream of Fair to Middling Women in very reasonable condition but covered in annotations. At school I thought such notes in books might be useful and a previous owner had done the homework for me by highlighting the important bits and adding salient comments but it was never so. I prefer to add in a slip of paper with pages numbers on rather than deface the text. The previous owner of this Beckett found it necessary to highlight the significance of one of the editors, Eoin O'Brien, having a name like 'Owen' and the same as the England One-Day International Cricket captain. The text is then littered with underlinings and inane comments as far as page 91 when they peter out. It doesn't look like he finished it. And I'm confident that he was a 'he'.

It seems very unfair to put Lucia away when there's prats like that about.