Man goes for a walk in Dublin. That’s the plot of Ulysses. It’s not exactly John le Carré, but then James Joyce doesn’t tell you a story. He takes you on a journey. You smell Dublin, you taste the stout in the Ship, you hear the tap, tap of the stick of the blind stripling and you savour the eroticism within Gerty MacDowell. You relish the fine taste of faintly scented urine within the inner organs of beasts and fowls. Reading Joyce is a skill you have to learn. That other great Modernist writer, Marcel Proust – snob goes for a walk in Paris – said reading was as creative as writing because we all invent our own books as we read. With Joyce, you have to throw yourself in as you would into Ireland’s snot green sea from a Booterstown beach on a summer day. You perceive gradually, as in life. Pictures that last are painted over time.
Joyce met Proust once and nearly killed him. A rich American called Sydney Schiff invited a cube of Modernists – Joyce, Proust, Diaghilev, Picasso – to a reception at the Majestic in Paris. Joyce partook liberally of drink and, as the asthmatic French luminary departed, Joyce hopped into his cab, cigar alight. This apart, neither made an impression on the other. Joyce saw “no special talent” in Proust and the Frenchman never mentioned the Irishman. Later Joyce was to say, in one of several contrasting accounts of the story, that Proust would only talk about duchesses while he was more concerned with their chambermaids.
Nora Barnacle, Joyce’s long-suffering companion and eventually wife, was a chambermaid in Dublin when they met on the hallowed June 16 1904. At times, she must have wished she’d remained in the hotel business. She had a vision of life with a successful novelist and instead she sat on her own as Jim lay on his stomach “scribbling” his “silly writing”, as she saw it. You have to be sympathetic. She was waiting to live off a bestseller and he came up with “For a nod to the nabir is better than wink to the wabsanti. Otherways wesways like that provost scoffing bedoueen the jebel and the jpysian sea.” A muse she may have been but, as this book points out, Joyce gave her little to be amused about. Nora was by no means the only person to be sacrificed at the altar of Joyce’s artistic ambitions and obsessive ego. The list came to include most of his friends, his children’s welfare, his family and, especially, his desperately unappreciated younger brother Stanislaus. At times, even his high spirits resembled a wake. I have begun his account of Finnegan’s interment more often than I have commenced periods of abstinence and healthy living – and usually persevered little more with the former than the latter. Reading the Wake is like doing a crossword in a language you don’t know. Mind you, one morning, when my daughter Jess was six, I discovered her at the breakfast table, flicking through the volume I had left there in bitter frustration the previous night. I watched dumbstruck as she chuckled to herself while skimming pages. Finally she shut the book with a chortle that conveyed a sense of benevolent tolerance for adult tomfoolery. It was, I like to think, the sound of Joyce. To be honest, biographies aren’t especially to my taste, either. Partly this is paranoia inflicted upon me by my literary chum Di, who once told me that there is a link between reading biographies and declining faculties – and, ever since, I have associated them with decay and prostates. And then Proust in Against Saint Beuve says it is nonsense to want to know about the author of a book. Read the book and just that instead of seeking “to surround oneself with all the possible facts about a writer, to collate his correspondence to question people who knew him”. Which is exactly what Gordon Bowker’s book does. It begs the question of why you would want to spend your spare time with a self-absorbed, insecure, obsessive, distant, over-sensitive, demanding, selfish, dogmatic, carping old exile. Wouldn’t you sooner be with naughty Dubliner Polly Mooney, take a glass with the shadowy Earwicker or thrill to a sadistic hellfire sermon aflame with sulphurous brimstone, all the offal and scum of the worlds, brains boiling in the skull and the company of the damned?
Ordinarily, yes. But this is a wonderfully lively and meticulously researched account of the life and work of a fascinatingly inexplicable paradox. A man who went abroad to write detailed descriptions of the place he had left. Who yearned for respectability while writing literature for which he knew he would be hounded and reviled. Who was a deep cultural snob with a deep affection for the labouring classes. Who rejected religion while being addicted to its rituals. Whose companion Nora was his pure angel and his “dirty little fuckbird”. Who understood humanity deeply and of his own wife and daughter very little. Bowker’s book is a wonderfully detailed and gripping study of the life of a madman or genius depending whether you lived with him or pottered round the fringes of literature. It is different from most literary biographies because Joyce’s life and work are so tightly bound. Bowker sets it down: there would have been no Stephen Dedalus without James’ father, no Molly Bloom without Nora, no Leopold Bloom without Alfred Hugh Hunter, a Jewish friend of his father who rescued Joyce when he was attacked by a soldier, no Buck Mulligan without Gogarty. Here we meet the models for everybody. And the final success of this book is that when you snap shut the final page there is nothing your hand wants to reach for except a volume of Joyce. Bowker’s success is to lead you back to the texts, perhaps understanding them better for this rich account of the maddening insane genius who wrote them
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