Everyone thought Lucia Joyce was mad - even her father, James. Playwright Michael Hastings has now written a play about her
Four years ago, I made up my mind to write a play about James Joyce's daughter, Lucia, and her strange love affair with her penniless Irish tutor, Sam Beckett. At the time I possessed few details of this little-known, little-understood relationship.
It was Paris, 1928. Lucia was 21; Sam, a year older. Even then, he was an almost unbearably raw but compassionate young man. Lucia made it very public she wanted Sam. She claimed she could see their future together. And Sam went along with this until he realised that if he consummated the affair, it might cause untold damage to her mental state. That is all I had to work on.
Shortly after making my list of research venues where papers were held, I learned that most of Lucia's hundreds of letters to and from James Joyce and Sam Beckett had been destroyed by the principal Joyce trustee, the author's grandson, Stephen Joyce. Almost everything else has vanished too, including diaries and a manuscript of an unpublished novel. Stephen Joyce announced he did not want any further investigation into Lucia's life and mental illness, and he didn't want more speculation about the father/daughter relationship.
Lucia was 15 when Ulysses was first published in 1922. After puberty, she was confined daily in rooms with her father to work together on the notoriously difficult follow-up, Finnegans Wake. The enormous book begins and ends with the same sentence. It is a cornucopia of lusty and comic new words and coined compounds. At its almost unreadable heart, there is a deep shame and guilt about a father who shows his genitalia to his daughter, and insists she does the same for him. There is a hint of intimacy between father and daughter here that borders on incest. Lucia once remarked to her father that no matter how many loves she had, she could never be unfaithful to him.
Even today among Joyceans this subject remains taboo. Regarding Lucia, academics have toed the Joyce party line - that she suffered fits, had uncontrollable sexual urges, and endlessly shouted forensic sexual details with involuntary abandon. For the sake of being allowed to quote from Joyce's papers, writers have repeatedly cast Lucia as the "problem", just as James and Nora always did. In effect, Lucia has been vaporised from history; memories of her obliterated. She is a "vanished woman".
I wanted to find out why.
I made plans to research in Dublin - the Beckett papers, the Joyce papers, the Thomas MacGreevy letters. And there were other locations: a wing of the British Library, and a store of research material in the New York Library, the James Joyce Collection at Buffalo and the University of Austin, Texas. There was even Joyce-related material scattered as far afield as the University of Tulsa, where a few papers belonging to a boyfriend of Lucia are stored.
In effect, I was involved in a paper chase where there were very few papers to uncover. Gradually, though, a picture began to emerge. And it was quite different from the "wild problem child" smear.
Lucia and her brother, Giorgio, moved home a hundred times between Trieste and Paris like impoverished Gypsies. They spoke four languages badly. She trained as a free-form dancer in the Loie Fuller mode. And she drew elegant lettrines to illustrate her father's limited editions. Giorgio showed promise as an opera singer. But there was a dark side. Her mother, Nora, saw Lucia as the dustbin of the family. The more extreme Lucia's behaviour, the easier it was for Nora to feel sane in a house of silent accusations.
I began to understand how Lucia lived in this unusual family. And certain parallel moments seemed to shed light on Lucia's behaviour. For example, all his life James Joyce suspected Nora had been a prostitute in Dublin before he met her. Now, research shows that Lucia often disappeared at night and roamed the Paris streets. She claimed men asked her to go only to the cinema. But it occurred to me that here was the daughter trying to reach out to a mother who would have nothing to do with her. As if Lucia wanted to say to Nora: "I understand the punishment you feel when Da accuses you of being a whore. I am reaching out to you here."
I became absorbed in Lucia's efforts to hold on to sanity. An expensive clinic advised the family never to let Lucia hold a box of matches because she was an "incendiarist". In reply, Lucia locked herself in a bedroom with a pile of newspapers and the family believed she would turn on the gas and destroy the whole apartment. But, as I discovered in New York, at least one incident did not involve a box of matches. Lucia was simply trying to fight back to the edge of sanity.
According to all the approved biographies, Lucia had fits of unrelenting obscenity. Did this make her an early victim of Tourette's syndrome? Or was there a simpler answer? Nora had written dozens of letters to James when he was away from her, letters - now mysteriously vanished - filled with the grossest descriptions of their organs at play. Joyce himself had insisted Nora write such things in order for him to masturbate over. Is it possible their child, Lucia, stumbled across these letters in her mother's bedroom, creating a sense of shame and shock? Were Lucia's obscene outbursts a means of fighting back inside the soul of this family? I can only surmise. I cannot prove it.
In modern terms I believe you can call Lucia's condition "lucid schizophrenia"; but James and Nora, in their ignorance, continued to fund exclusive doctors for the weirdest of treatments. I found papers from one doctor who cheerfully recommended he wrap her naked in a roll of linoleum all night. In Dublin, there were letters from friends that showed how Nora decided to tie Lucia up at night with a friend, Mary, who volunteered to sleep beside Lucia so she could not escape the apartment. James and Nora, I began to suspect, were determined to make Lucia the problem. And if she fought back, they would threaten her with even more rigorous mad medics.
One thin packet of papers in Texas revealed that at one point, James and Nora were sorely tempted to have their daughter lobotomised. Lobotomy was a newly fashionable craze in medical circles. After a quick operation on the frontal lobes of the brain, the victim would remain for ever at the age she received the operation. Fortunately, Joyce stepped back from this. To him it was as distasteful as having her pronounced insane.
I found a note from a particular doctor south of Paris. He had a salt-water tank. Lucia was obliged to float in the tank for 30 minutes at a time. Being Lucia, she allowed herself to sink to the bottom so many times, the clinic had to call out the local fire brigade. Yes, she fought back but often with a kind self-destructive anarchism.
Lucia's memory needs to be stripped of the "mad girl" epithet. She saw so clearly how little time she had left before someone led her away to an asylum. And yet most of her efforts to stay sane, as I uncovered the details, were appeals to be understood and not to be treated as a "recycle bin".
Yes, she claimed she could see the future. Yes, she was convinced Sam Beckett was the man for her. She invented a whole life for them both. And whenever Beckett, to his undying credit, went with her on this inner journey, Lucia became calm. He could see how the romance helped her. The few notes I had to go on suggest there was something non-judgmental and poignant about young Beckett's relationship with Lucia, not at all associated with the merchant of despair in the older playwright.
As the weeks of research passed, I had to accept the fact that under present copyright rules it is virtually impossible to quote directly from unpublished sources. So much about Sam and Lucia has been obliterated. It was up to me to draw a map of the emotions of this extraordinary family.
I felt I had to demonstrate how Lucia often acted out neuroses that were to be found in both her parents. She wanted to reach out to them. And yet something drove Nora and James Joyce to destroy their half-educated children. Giorgio's singing career was ruined by alcohol; his lungs collapsed. Lucia ended her days in an asylum in Northampton. - (Guardian Service)
• Calico, Michael Hastings' play about the passionate relationship between James Joyce's troubled daughter, Lucia, and playwright Samuel Beckett is on at the Duke of York's Theatre, London.