GRAPHIC NOVEL: Dotter of Her Father's Eyes By Mary M Talbot and Bryan Talbot Jonathan Cape, 89pp. £14.99
LUCIA JOYCE, daughter of arguably the greatest writer of the 20th century, is a controversial figure: was her descent into schizophrenia a tragic illness or did her family drive her crazy? It is an argument unlikely to be settled, seeing as virtually everyone involved destroyed Lucia’s letters. She is a ghostly figure, seen only in others’ stories and as the model for Issy in Finnegans Wake, where she flits like the strange child she was, dancing silently as her father composes.
In their new graphic novel, Dotter of Her Father's Eyes, Mary M Talbot and her artist husband, Bryan Talbot (creator of the cult comic book The Adventures of Luther Arkwright), follow Lucia through her tragic life, interleaved with episodes from Mary Talbot's youth with her own "cold mad feary father", the respected Joycean scholar JS Atherton.
Bryan Talbot draws his wife’s childhood with her parents (remarkably, they were called James and Nora, like Lucia’s) in a grim pastel; her student days and adulthood are in colour. The Joyce family are drawn in blue-black, the contrast making Lucia’s childhood all the more poignant.
Lucia was born in 1907 in a pauper’s ward in Trieste. “The Joyces lived like displaced persons,” writes Talbot. “They moved from one furnished flat to another, and they often went hungry.” Joyce, whose family were practised at the moonlight flit back in Dublin, was replicating his chaotic childhood. The Talbots show Lucia’s mother, Nora Barnacle, ruling the family with an iron hand. She had fled Galway for Dublin “after a savage beating. Her sin? Going out with a Protestant.”
Joyce worked as an English teacher, and one of Bryan Talbot’s panels shows Joyce and two of his pupils sliding down a banister, as described in Richard Ellmann’s biography.
At the outbreak of the first World War, the family moved to Zurich. Aged seven, Lucia learned her third language. At war’s end, when she was 11, they went to Paris. Now she spoke French, English, German and, at home, always Triestine Italian.
Meanwhile, back in 1950s Wigan, Mary Talbot’s ego-crushing father was, according to the book, smacking her, shouting at her to get out of his workroom and sniggering that “of all creatures women be best, Cuius contrarium verum est.” When Mary says she doesn’t know what this means, he says, grinning, “ You’re not meant to . . . It means ‘of which the contrary is true’.”
In Paris, the Joyces lived at the centre of the bohemian 1920s city. Joyce acquired patrons in Harriet Weaver and Sylvia Beach, but he became strange and stressed. Riven by superstitious terrors, he once exclaimed, as the family passed a stranger, “That man, whom I have never seen before, said to me as he passed, in Latin, ‘You are an abominable writer.’ ”
Bryan Talbot's joyous illustrations show Joyce appearing as an extra in Marcel L'Herbier's surrealist film L'Inhumaine(along with Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Erik Satie and Picasso) and enjoying another of L'Herbier's films, Ballet Mécanique.In his pictures, Lucia's eyes glow at the dancing of Margaret Morris, Josephine Baker and Raymond Duncan (Isadora's brother, who dressed in Greek robes). She took dance classes, joined a professional troupe, toured Italy, trained with Duncan and with the Ballets Suédois founder Jean Borlin, and performed in a Jean Renoir short. When she was 21, a reviewer wrote, "James Joyce may yet be known as his daughter's father."
But all was not well. Joyce, however experimental he may have been as a writer, was not adventurous as a father. “It’s enough if a woman can write a letter and carry an umbrella gracefully,” he asserts in one Talbot drawing. Nora mutters, “Just likes drawing attention to herself. Little trollop.”
The book shows Samuel Beckett, Joyce’s secretary, as Lucia’s lover, but as they break up she snarls that she is “nothing but an hors d’oeuvre” to him (there’s a pun for you), and she feels bitterly rejected.
The cinematic graphics vividly sketch Giorgio and Lucia's horror as their parents announce that they are going to marry, thereby revealing that the siblings are illegitimate. Gradually, Lucia disintegrates, screaming at Joyce and, finally, in a rage over Beckett being asked to her father's 50th birthday, throwing a chair at her mother. Giorgio had her committed to an institution. "For four years, she alternated between clinic and house arrest, restraint and sedation," writes Talbot. "Her last days at large were spent wandering the Dublin streets she knew through Ulysses. Her displacement was complete. Eventually she was installed in a sanatorium in Paris."
Lucia survived the Nazis’ euthanasia programme and was transferred to a sanatorium in England. She stayed there for the rest of her life.
Graphic novels, more familiar in the guise of superhero hagiography, are making surprising inroads into real life, starting with Art Spiegelman's harrowing Maus, in which he subverted the customs of the genre to imagine his parents' memories of Auschwitz. Here, Lucia Joyce's tragic descent from creativity into fragmentation is brilliantly brought home by the writing and art of the Talbot team.
Lucille Redmond is a journalist and critic. She will publish a collection of short stories,
Love
, as an ebook next month
