The marriage of James Joyce and Nora Barnacle, more than 25 years after they first met, caused a sensation in the press and scandal in Ireland. But when Joyce's father fell gravely ill, the writer's dread of returning to his home country would lead to terrible regrets, as GORDON BOWKERrecounts in a new biography
ON JUNE 29TH, 1931, James Joyce was handed the lease on 28b Campden Grove, in Kensington in London, thus becoming a UK resident, a voter and a potential juror. The following day, on the advice of Fred Monro, his solicitor, he applied for a special licence to marry Nora Barnacle, his partner of more than 25 years, arranging the ceremony for July 4th (also his father’s and brother George’s birthdays). To shield his identity he wrote down all his Christian names – James Augustine Aloysius – and omitted his place of birth. He was also keen to keep the truth behind the wedding secret, telling Helen, his daughter-in-law, and Giorgio, his son, not to betray the fact that they were just about to be “made honest”. To confuse the newshounds, he joked, the bride would be dressed as a lifeguard while the groom would wear green satin and a white veil and carry an orange umbrella. But, a few hours after registering his intention to marry, Joyce was buttonholed on Campden Grove by an Associated Press reporter, whom he shook off finally only by referring him for answers to Monro, who happened to be out of town. But the Joyces’ doorbell rang all that day, and at midnight, when they returned from dining out, a reporter was camped on the front steps.
The day before the wedding, Joyce was at Monro’s home by 8.30am. When the lawyer suggested he confess all, Joyce said he had nothing to confess. The line they finally agreed was that he and Nora underwent a form of marriage in Austria in 1904 that was invalid because Nora had given a false name – Gretta Green – and it was not registered with the British consulate. They were marrying now “for testamentary reasons”.
The wedding was scheduled for 11.15am at Kensington register office, on Marloes Road, a short walk from Campden Grove. That morning, London was greeted with the headlines Joyce had been so anxious to avoid. The Daily Expresscarried news of the notice to marry, complete with photograph of Joyce in hat and bow tie, and informed its readers that he lived on Campden Grove, had a flat in Paris, had undergone several operations for failing eyesight and had refused to comment on the story. But the Daily Mirrorwas quick to sniff a scandal, saying "the bride's name is given as Nora Joseph Barnacle, aged 47, of the same address. Mr Joyce is the author of Ulysses.According to Who's Whohe was married in 1904 to Miss Nora Barnacle of Galway."
The Telegraphhad a longer piece, tucked away on page 12, that mentioned the couple's having lived for many years in Trieste and having two children. It would need more than an orange umbrella or fake uniform to prevent them from being waylaid by prowling hacks on the way to the altar.
Not only was Campden Grove swarming with journalists, Joyce told Harriet Shaw Weaver, his patron and supporter, but the street outside the register office was occupied by a squad of cameramen. Having run the press gauntlet, they were delayed inside the office when the registrar’s clerk argued that the couple should be divorced from an irregular marriage before they could marry in accordance with regular English law. Monro convinced the clerk otherwise, and the ceremony proceeded, witnessed by Monro and a Mr Clark borrowed from the registry. On the marriage certificate Joyce was entered as a 49-year-old bachelor of independent means and Nora as a spinster aged 47. An official cloak was thereby drawn over 27 years of “sinful living”. Joyce found a reason to joke about it. With the British monarch, George V, then signing into law a Bill extending the right to marry within the family, nicknamed the Marry-Your-Aunt Bill, now, he said, he should sign a Marry-Your-Wife Bill.
On the way back from the registry along Marloes Road, a photographer snapped the newly-weds, Nora wearing a smart coat with a high fur collar, despite the summer heat, and hiding her face coyly beneath the brim of a fashionable cloche hat. Beside her, Monro conceals his lower face with his left hand; close behind, ashplant in hand, is Joyce, sporting that bow tie and staring grumpily ahead from under a broad-brimmed hat tilted back above a furrowed brow. This picture appeared on page 3 of the Evening Standard, together with the story of Joyce's 1904 "marriage" to Barnacle.
Later Joyce was doorstepped by a Sunday Expressreporter who wanted to know the story behind "Nora Barnacle, Spinster". He was handed a letter from the Expresseditor offering him half the middle page for an article, with the implied threat of a hostile story if he refused. Joyce declined the offer, saying that he neither read newspapers nor wrote for them. But of course he read newspapers avidly, and next day he made sure that he bought the Sunday Express, to see if the editor's threat had been carried out. It had not.
A WEEK AFTER THE wedding, the writers Robert and Sylvia Lynd threw a great literary party at their Hampstead home, on Keats Grove, where the garden was festooned with fairy lights and night lights in coloured jars. Just after midnight everyone moved indoors, to the drawing room, where Joyce went to the piano and sang Phil the Fluther's Balland the sadly poignant Siúil a Rúin. For the first time Joyce found himself among leading lights of English letters, including Goronwy Rees, JB Priestley, Victor Gollancz, Norman Collins, Max Beerbohm, Arthur Ransome, Humbert Wolfe and Isaiah Berlin, some of whom performed their own party pieces. But Joyce stole the show, as the Lynds' daughter recalled. "Against his own low accompaniment he recited . . . Anna Livia Plurabelle.He neither spoke it nor sang it: he used something like the [S]prechstimme, or pitch-controlled speech, familiar from Moses [u]nd Aaron, and other works by Schoenberg. And the sound of it was lovely beyond description." Priestley also recalled the evening, comparing Joyce's easy presence in Hampstead with the "heroic" Joyce he had found among his American idolaters in Paris. "He was all amiability, and sang, in a pleasant light tenor, many comic songs. Probably it is too difficult to sing comic songs to pilgrims from American Eng Lit departments."
The story in the London papers had filtered through to Joyce's relatives. There was a violent reaction from Nora's family in Galway, and, in London, the zealously Catholic wife of Joyce's brother Charlie forbade him from her house and forbade her son any further contact with his immoral uncle. She threw Charlie's copy of An Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress,a book of essays on Finnegans Wake, on to the fire and later destroyed all his brother's letters and signed copies of his various books. Dublin, Joyce predicted, would soon follow suit, with Irish associates like Thomas McGreevy not far behind. In Paris, according to Giorgio, the rumour was that the London marriage was just another publicity stunt.
Joyce had hoped finally to travel to Cornwall in search of legends but got no farther than Stonehenge, in Wiltshire. Nora refused to go, but her sister Kathleen, who was visiting them, did, and later recalled what happened. “It was a very dreary day, and we could see nothing to amuse us but the wide open space of grass, and once in a while a soldier would come along on a motorcycle. I said, ‘Where are we going? This is a terrible place!’ And he said, ‘Kathleen, I am fourteen years trying to get here.’ ”
To his friend Frank Budgen he referred to John Sullivan, the Irish tenor whom Joyce supported, as the “voice of Stonehenge”, implying an awesome inexplicable mystery. He noticed that Kathleen was not wearing the watch he had given her in Bognor and asked about it. Much embarrassed, she admitted that she had pawned it, at which Joyce let out his famous guffaw and said, “That’s just what I’d do.”
On August 5th Joyce made out a new will, naming Nora Joseph Joyce his sole executor and trustee, and giving Weaver responsibility for his literary work. His portraits were willed to Giorgio. The only family name omitted was that of his daughter, Lucia. She, who had been in a highly nervous state throughout their time in London, had decided to return to France to stay with Helen and Giorgio at Montigny-sur-Loing, near Fontainebleau.
NEWS CAME ON December 23rd, 1931, from his father’s landlord, that John Joyce was seriously ill in Drumcondra Hospital, and unlikely to last long. He urged Joyce to write to his father before it was too late. Joyce immediately cancelled his usual Christmas celebrations, but any thought of hurrying to his father’s bedside was countered by a powerful instinct against ever returning to Ireland. It was a mixture of fear, distrust and dread of bursting the bubble of illusion that enabled him to continue living in the now mythical Dublin of his youth. He cabled the doctor brother of an old Dublin friend, Kenneth Reddin, asking him to ensure that his father received the best attention available and to send all bills to him. He later told Harriet, “I spent the four days after Xmas sending messages to my father by wire and letter and by telephone to the hospital every evening.” John died on December 29th, surrounded by mementos of his favourite son: photographs, press cuttings and signed copies of his books. The cause of his death was given as “Senile decay and Endocarditis”.
Joyce was consumed with remorse at not visiting his dying father, but, as he told Ezra Pound, "In spite of my own deep feeling for him I never dared to trust myself into the power of my enemies." Only the son of John Stanislaus Joyce could have written Finnegans Wakein collaboration with the husband of Nora, the father of Lucia and Giorgio and the brother of Stanislaus. Only through his father's presence and significance in his life was Joyce able to conceive and deliver Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, Anna Livia, Issy, Shem and Shaun. But John's presence and significance were crucial. Louis Gillet, the French critic and friend, thought that the "peculiar rapport" between this father and son was "the central factor in Joyce's life, the basis, the axis of his work".
STILL CONSCIENCE STRICKEN at not having visited his father for some 20 years, on New Year’s Day 1932, the day of his funeral, Joyce unburdened himself to TS Eliot and Pound. “A poor heart”, always loyal to him, was gone, he wrote, and he was broken by it. His guilt was only intensified by the knowledge that he had deliberately fostered the illusion that he would visit the old man.
When he asked Con Curran, a Dublin friend, and Michael Healy, Nora’s uncle, whether his father had said anything about him towards the end, they both reported the same words: “Jim never forgets me.” It hardly eased the pain. To Harriet, he wrote saying that his father “had an extraordinary affection for me” but was “the silliest man I ever knew”, albeit cruelly ruthless and cunning. Even on his deathbed John was thinking and speaking of his favourite son; as a fellow sinner, Joyce said, he still liked the old man despite his faults. From him he had inherited not just the family portraits, his colourful waistcoat and “a good tenor voice” but also “an extravagant licentious disposition” from which what talents he had probably sprang.
Unable to afford a proper suit of mourning, he told Harriet, he was reduced to wearing a dyed green jacket, striped trousers and tan shoes. His feelings of remorse did not move him to attend his father's funeral, however, and he had to depend on accounts of the occasion from Curran and Michael Healy, who followed the cortege to Glasnevin Cemetery. He sent a wreath – inscribed "With Sorrow and Love" – asking Harriet to sell £100 of his stock to cover all of the funeral costs. Afterwards Niall Sheridan, the young Irish poet and literary commentator, told him that his father was buried by none other than Corny Kelleher, the undertaker who had "buried" Dignam in Ulysses. John received obituaries in the Irish Pressand the Chicago Premier, which pronounced him a master of vernacular and a fine storyteller. "His versatility enabled him to adapt his style to all surroundings, whether that of a drawing room or a saloon. He was full of reminiscences of Irish life of the last half century, and his stories were usually embellished with rare artistry."
ALTHOUGH STUART GILBERT reported that Work in Progress – Finnegans Wake– was "advancing rapidly", its grieving author told Weaver that he was somehow paralysed and felt like abandoning it. "Why go on writing about a place I did not dare to go to at such a moment, where not three persons know me or understand me?" he asked, adding that he had heard that the editor of the Dublin Independenthad objected to an allusion to him in his father's obituary.
The mental image of a hostile Dublin was being continually reinforced.
To escape this confusion of fear and wretchedness he began taking pills in search of the healing oblivion of a decent night’s sleep.
By January 5th Joyce had emerged from his state of mourning sufficiently to begin wondering what had happened to books and letters he had sent his father, and asked John’s old friend Alf Bergan, the executor of his will, to find out. Bergan reported that Joyce’s sister Eileen had taken away a valise containing letters, documents and signed copies of his books. She handed back the valise but kept the books inscribed to his father, except for an unsigned copy of Exiles. When John’s will was granted probate his estate was valued at £665 0s 9d, a goodly sum for 1931, but when all debts were paid, James, his sole legatee, received £36 12s 1d: about €1,300 today.
© Gordon Bowker 2011
This is an edited extract from James Joyce: A Biography, by Gordon Bowker, to be published by Weidenfeld Nicolson on Thursday, £30
