Stephen Joyce talks to his grandfather, James, regularly, and assiduously guards his copyright. But Frank McNally saw his lighter side.
One day last year, the office phone rang and a voice with an American accent asked for me by name. The caller solemnly identified himself as "Stephen Joyce" and, after a pause, added: "Grandson of James Joyce." My blood froze.
As I urgently recalled, I had some time before written a column that featured a short spoof on the closing passage of Joyce's 'The Dead'. The column was about drink and, specifically, about the remorseless spread of chilled Guinness in pubs - even in the west, where you used to be able to get a room-temperature pint. Based on the evidence of recent travels, I had lamented: "Cold Guinness was general all over Ireland. Its temperature was falling on every part of the dark, central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling." etc, etc.
Stephen Joyce was going to set his lawyers on me, I thought. But he was just ringing to say he enjoyed the piece. It was a bit cheeky, but he thought his grandfather would have approved. "I visit his grave often and I talk to him, you know," he said.
Now in his 70s and living in France, Stephen Joyce is notoriously protective of his famous ancestor's work, and the eagle eye he keeps on it has clearly been helped by the development of Internet search engines. His reputation for protecting copyright strikes fear in Joycean scholars and promoters. And this week it forced the passage of emergency legislation through the Seanad, to remove a threat hanging over the James Joyce and 'Ulysses' at the National Library of Ireland exhibition, the centrepiece of the Bloomsday centenary.
Although the new Bill has much wider applications, and junior minister Michael Ahern made no mention of Joyce in introducing it, Senator David Norris did not mask its immediate intent. "It is an astonishing irony," he told the Seanad, "that a man such as James Joyce, who fought for freedom of expression, wanted to reach the widest possible audience, and committed himself so totally against censorship throughout his life, should now find his works being . . . removed from public gaze by his own estate."
Stories about Stephen Joyce's attempts to police his grandfather's reputation are numerous, and occasionally funny. In 1992, for example, a group of enthusiasts gathered in London to unveil a plaque where the writer lived briefly. Edna O'Brien was giving the oration, during which she welcomed the arrival of Joyce's "living ghost in Kensington". At which point, according to a report from the Sydney Morning Herald, a man emerged from the crowd, grabbed the microphone and, after identifying himself as Joyce's grandson, delivered an angry speech. "No one saw fit to invite me and my wife here today," he told the startled crowd. "Yesterday in Zurich I stood beside my grandfather's grave and told him I was coming. 'Good,' he said, 'you do that'."
His distaste for modern musical interpretations of Joyce's work is well known. Kate Bush was one victim, when she sought permission to use part of Molly Bloom's soliloquy in her song The Sensual World. "The song was saying: 'Yes, Yes'," she told an amused audience in 1989, "and when I asked for permission, they said 'No! No!'" In the end she had to rewrite the words.
But most of the stories are not funny at all. Many relate to the large and very specific financial demands made in return for rights. RTÉ radio producer Seamus Hosey recalls a special deal for extracts from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man on Bloomsday 1999. The fee had to be paid in sterling and delivered to a Dublin hotel at a certain time.
But in the Seanad on Thursday, Norris talked also of the restrictive effect of the Joyce estate's approach. "I have encountered this kind of inhibition in respect of a little puppet show for inner city kids, which was free of charge. It was closed down by the operation of the estate. This is like taking lollipops from blind kids; it is disgusting." The National Library's exhibition centres on an archive bought by the State in 2001, and originally collected by Paul Léon.
Unhappy with the way the manuscripts - including draft episodes of Ulysses - were acquired, Stephen Joyce warned that the exhibition could breach copyright. The new Bill represents what Norris called "a certain stiffening of attitude" towards him .
The senator contrasted the new attitude with the "pusillanimity" over an earlier collection of documents. "Despite protesters such as myself," he told the Seanad, "[the library] handed over to Stephen Joyce some letters which he took with him and later claimed he destroyed. It would make me think very carefully before bequeathing material to the National Library if I believed it would hand it over to the caprices and whims of somebody who is, after all, fairly distant in generational terms from the source of that material."
It should be said that the organisers of the year-long Rejoyce Dublin 2004, while welcoming the legislation for its general implications, say they have had "no problems whatsoever" with the Joyce estate. "There was a glitch in the copyright law and, frankly, it needed to be fixed," says Laura Weldon, the festival's national co-ordinator. "But none of our events had to be altered."
Stephen Joyce protects the rights "ferociously", Weldon agrees, adding that the individual venues involved handled their own negotiations over rights.
"Can he be incredibly difficult and demanding? Yes. But as the legitimate copyright holder he has certain rights, we're aware of what they are, and we respect them. We didn't create events that would send us down the path of conflict. But having said that, nothing we're doing has been in any way diminished."