As a descendent of Irish ancestors, and a retired altar boy to boot, it was perhaps inevitable I would launch my college career with a seminar devoted to a single author, the Irish literary icon James Joyce.
Taught by a fallen Catholic priest, my introduction to Joyce began easily enough with “Dubliners” and “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” the Joycean equivalent of hitting a bucket of golf balls before actually playing a round.
“Ulysses” would be the main event.
Already hopelessly lost by page three, I raised a hand to ask a long-forgotten question. What I will never forget was Professor Phelan slowly closing his eyes as if struck by a migraine. Then, softly, more to himself than to me, muttering, “Oh, you just don’t want to go there.” That’s the moment I realized, more than any other author, Joyce has the power to break men.
I know not if it was “Ulysses” or “Finnegans Wake” or some other crisis of faith that drove Francis Phelan from the priesthood, but I suspect somewhere James Joyce is smiling.
Of course it wasn’t easy for Joyce, either.
Gordon Bowker’s “James Joyce: A New Biography” is a fascinating and insightful portrait of the artist as a young, then middle-aged, and then old man, and goes a long way to explaining the Western world’s most enigmatic literary giant.
Joyce’s genius was recognized early, starting with his long-suffering brother, Stanislaus, as well as by the friends and enemies he made in abundance. Less clear is the “why” of Joyce.
Bowker’s narrative concentrates on the existential struggle of Joyce’s life, going beyond the complex relationship he had with his wife, Nora Barnacle, his muse and template for Molly Bloom. Bowker reveals the yin of this fundamentally bourgeois family man with the yang of his hyper-bohemian and rebellious soul.
All of Joyce’s literary antecedents are here as well as the instrumental relationships that helped shape his life, career and world view, beginning with his ne’er-do-well father, John Joyce, and deeply religious mother, May, whose best efforts to redeem her blasphemous son went unrequited as she took her last breath.
James Joyce was born with the music of language in his blood. He spoke and thought and lived the higher rhythms of the human tongue, first expressed in childish doggerel, then poetry and song. Joyce could have earned his keep as a singer had he so chosen, but his destiny took a different turn.
The fateful day was June 16, 1904, immortalized as “Bloomsday,” when young James met Miss Barnacle. From that day forward, the man recedes as the legend rises.
But even legends need to eat. And ultimately, Joyce was the father of two — a son, Giorgio, and a gifted but emotionally damaged daughter, Lucia.
“James Joyce: A New Biography” traces the convoluted and peripatetic course of Joyce’s 59 years of life. Joyce and Nora wander from Dublin to Paris to Trieste to Zurich with so many zigzagging stopovers, this reader lost count.
Along with the relentless packing and unpacking, Joyce’s eyes failed him, prompting a series of gruesome and ineffective surgeries that would have silenced the pen of a less determined artist.
Bowker vividly sets the turbulent life of James Joyce in the context of his time and place, dominated as it was by the über-provincialism of his native Ireland, the land that he loved and scorned, immortalized and repudiated. Joyce’s bones still rest in Switzerland, unwanted by his own people. The animosity Joyce felt toward Ireland was reciprocal.
From mentor William Butler Yeats to disciples Samuel Beckett and Ezra Pound, the major figures of Joyce’s life populate this biography but Joyce and Nora dominate the narrative as the Artist’s journey ends abruptly not long after completing “Finnegans Wake.” His long anticipated “work in progress” remains a nearly impenetrable literary mystery, either an otherworldly masterwork or a final yank of the chain from a man who reveled in chain yanking.
Doug McIntyre is a columnist for the Los Angeles Daily News and can be heard 5-9 a.m. weekdays on KABC 790 AM.
