Edna O'Brien On James Joyce. - Review - book review

James Joyce. Edna O'Brien. Weidenfeld & Nicholson. [pound]12.99. 182 pages. ISBN 0-297-84243-9.

In this brief biography a distinguished novelist romps through the hectic life of James Joyce (1882-1941). Any biography of him could be extended indefinitely because almost all in the life appears in the writings: his art and his life become synonymous, but did he have to experience everything to write about it? Surely not. Few modem writers have had such a powerful, all conquering memory, imagination and linguistic talent.

Edna O'Brien selects twenty-two allusive themes -- she could have chosen hundreds -- for her framework: she avoids the academic biography which has been definitively penned by Richard Ellman. Neither is her book a critique of Joyce, which is 'work in progress' among workers in the Joycean industry.

Nevertheless Edna O'Brien's Joyce would be hard-going for the uninitiated as they would find it difficult to discern the signposts of the life. And yet, readers of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Dubliners (1914) Ulysses (1922) but not of Finnigan's Wake (1939) -- a labour of immense difficulty -- will be pleasantly surprised by provocative insights. It is however predictable that she is particularly good at elucidating the influences on Joyce of all the female members of his family and those of his patrons and benefactors.

Do we get to know James Joyce from this biography? Hardly, for O'Brien claims: 'No one knew Joyce, only himself, no one could'. What others saw was only a fraction of the man; the glimpses we get of this complex and infuriating character are fascinating in their ambiguities and contradictions. Here we can see Joyce's love/hate relationship with Dublin and Ireland, with the 'Rock of Rome', the English Crown, the legal profession: and between home and exile, then his other innermost conflicts between lust and love; order and chaos; family restrictions and the free-booting spirit at odds with the tenacity with which he pursued his life as a writer 'more than half in love with persecution'.

Joyce used his own life and the social milieu of Dublin through which he took an imaginary walk every day of his exiled life. Ulysses was written in Trieste, Zurich and Paris between 1914 and 1921 when he was on the rocks and Edna O'Brien's chapters dealing with the writing and publication of Ulysses are among the finest. However students will not find herein any easy analysis of the styles and structures of Joyce's masterpiece. They will discover much of what contemporaries and critics said in her chapter 'Himself and others' and of Joyce as his own keenest critic.

Critics agree with Joyce's use of Homer but not with his relevant use of the Bible to the life and work of the modern artist. His debts to Wagner, the great mythologist (and to opera in general) and his radical re-interpretations of the Bible, are, perhaps, under-played in Edna O'Brien's otherwise excellent biography. Joyce will continue to be read for his humour, humanity and virtuosity. Let's leave the lady novelist the last word: 'Joyce's future is assured. His shade haunts every great writer who has followed him'.

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