Putting a small James Joyce wrong right
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Author James Woodall (‘Borges: A Life’) writes about a troubled Joycean encounter for the website of the British magazine ‘Intelligent Life.’
The conflict was not with James Joyce but his grandson -- and executor -- Stephen, and it happened 20 years ago. At issue was the manuscript of Brenda Maddox’s biography of Joyce’s wife, ‘Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom’ (which would go on to win the LA Times Book Award for biography). Woodall was its editor.
Maddox had to get permission from Stephen for some of the contents of her book. Stephen has tremendous power when it comes to his grandfather’s work and papers. In 2006, D.T. Max wrote about him in the New Yorker:
Stephen is Joyce’s only living descendant, and since the mid-nineteen-eighties he has effectively controlled the Joyce estate. Scholars must ask his permission to quote sizable passages or to reproduce manuscript pages from those works of Joyce’s that remain under copyright -- including ‘Ulysses’ and ‘Finnegans Wake’ -- as well as from more than three thousand letters and several dozen unpublished manuscript fragments.
Permission was granted, but under one condition: that Maddox remove an epilogue focusing on the years Joyce’s daughter Lucia spent in a psychiatric hospital. Maddox agreed that she -- and her heirs -- would not discuss or disseminate the epilogue. Woodall didn’t talk about it, either. But now he has:
Lucia Joyce had first shown symptoms of mental instability in the late 1920s, and did eventually go mad. To the Joyce saga of nomadism, drunkenness, improvidence and mythical fame -- and also of tragedy and dysfunction -- Maddox’s gentle account, which concentrated mainly on Lucia’s treatment and uncontroversially on her fads and phobias, was in my view an elegiacally perfect coda. Stephen was having none of it.
By the time the details of the agreement reached Woodall, bound proofs of the book had already arrived at the publisher. ‘On the fourth-floor of our offices in Kensington, every single proof had the epilogue sliced out with scalpels,’ Woodall writes.
But the excision didn’t sit well with Woodall, and it seems to have been bothering him for two decades. This summer he visited the Zurich James Joyce Foundation established by Fritz Senn, ‘a Joyce expert and collector,’ Woodall writes, with ‘no special claim on the writer.’ Woodall admired the collection, where scholars can handle copies of postcards and letters written in Joyce’s hand. Then, he made a contribution:
I handed him a photocopy of the story of Lucia, the quashed epilogue of ‘Nora,’ with Brenda Maddox’s blessing. In Zurich it can now be read. This was neither a vast gesture nor a hugely significant contribution to Joyce studies. But 20 years later, it felt satisfying to put a small wrong right.
-- Carolyn Kellogg
