It is 70 years since Lucia Joyce had her last and longest stay in Ireland - six months in 1935. The visit was meant to be recuperative for James Joyce's 28-year-old daughter, but proved otherwise because of her unique and troubled mind, and her history of mental imbalance. She was born in 1907 in the Civic Hospital, Trieste - in the pauper's ward since the Joyces were close to destitution at the time.
The eminent psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung attempted to help Lucia when she was in her mid-twenties but after many sessions believed that she was her father's femme inspiratrice (Joyce's "inspiration"). Jung told Joyce that she was "an exceptional case and certainly not one for psychoanalytic treatment that might provoke a catastrophe from which she might never recover". Joyce, who was definitely inspired by Lucia and their private father-daughter conversations in English, Italian, French and German, used her as the source for feminine aspects, elements and various characters in Finnegans Wake. He also believed she was clairvoyant, that her essential qualities were "gaiety and gentleness" and that "whatever spark or gift I possess has been transmitted to Lucia and it has kindled a fire in her brain".
Carol Loeb Shloss of Stanford University claims that the closing chapter of Finnegans Wake addresses Lucia in coded language; and by implication Joyce's daughter is Anna Livia Plurabelle, a river of unconscious speech rather than the more obvious reference to the Liffey in Joyce's mammoth novel.
Lucia had, before her Irish visit, seen other doctors besides Jung, and been in clinics and hospitals. Added to this was the nomadic and irregular home life of the Joyces - eating badly, drinking heavily and living in cramped conditions.
Galway was the home place of her mother Nora, but because the family there were elderly, Lucia's parents decided that she would stay with her Aunt Eileen and cousins in Bray. When Lucia considered going to the College of Art, Aunt Eileen, using Joyce's money, booked her into the Gresham Hotel and later, Buswells, nearer to the college on Molesworth Street. She also wanted to attend the Academy of Music and learn to play the harp. Nothing came of either plan. Lucia was a trained professional dancer and had performed in Paris in the 1920s but her instability ended such a career. She had done book illustration but left this aside.
In Ireland, Lucia grew irksome and demonstrative when asked about her father. She liked to stay up all night and go skinny-dipping off Bray Head at dawn. Bray Head resembled her father, whom she imagined as a giant, she told her cousins or people on the promenade. She sang songs indoors and in the streets, including her favourite, You're the Cream in My Coffee.
Lucia told her cousins about her unhappy love affairs with Emile Fernandez, Samuel Beckett, Sandy Calder and someone she was particularly heartbroken over, Alec Ponisovsky, a Russian émigré living in Paris, to whom she had been engaged. The Irish artist Patrick Collins befriended Lucia and was fascinated by her.
She drank and took barbiturates instead of her prescribed medicine. Aunt Eileen knew nothing of this and fussed over her niece, preparing continental foods for her: ragout, goulash, gnocchi and kipfels with sauerkraut. Lucia sent flowers to Maud Gonne McBride, and many letters to her father, who joked and chided her in their special language, somewhat like passages from Finnegans Wake. He did not mention the cost of her trip and daily expenses, including packets of Lucky Strikes. Lucia went to see Chaplin films, and spent a week wandering like a vagrant, according to the police who brought her back to Aunt Eileen in Bray. Just before leaving Ireland, Lucia posted her father the lyrics of Dublin Bay, with the refrain "O why did we leave sweet Dublin Bay?"
After her Irish visit, Lucia lived in a cottage in Surrey with Harriet Shaw Weaver, who would become Joyce's literary executor. The following year, she was relocated to Neuilly in France, into the care of Maria Jolas, another close friend of the Joyces. Months later, her condition was stable at a clinic in Ivry. She was not present at the party in February 1939 to celebrate the publication of Finnegans Wake.
With the outbreak of war and the occupation of France, it became impossible for the Joyce family, who had moved to Switzerland, to negotiate her relocation to Zurich. Within weeks of Joyce's death in 1941, the attempts to arrange Lucia's release from Nazi-occupied France ceased altogether. She might easily have become a victim of the Nazi Holocaust, but survived in a clinic at Pornichet under the care of a humane physician, Dr Delmas. In 1951, Harriet Shaw Weaver had her moved to St Andrew's Hospital, Northampton.
Weaver's goddaughter, Jane Lidderdale, became her friend but Lucia's life in Northampton was often lonely and troubled. She occasionally spoke with the nurses about returning to Dublin. The few visitors she had were concerned with Joyce and his writings.
Lucia died in 1982 (the centenary of her father's birth) and is buried in Northampton, far away from Joyce, Nora and her brother Giorgio, ( who are interred in Zurich. There is no evidence that she ever read the published version of Finnegans Wake. She had been a central inspiration for the novel and knew some passages from it by heart.