The Joyce Girl

by Annabel Abbs

  He felt a sudden spike of anger. Why did Doctor Jung talk of nothing but his, Jim’s, effect on Lucia? At times he imagined putting his hands round the ignorant Doctor Jung’s fat neck and throttling him. Why did no one understand about her effect on him? Finnegans Wake – this tightly woven tapestry of words, this spangled net of language – was her book. He couldn’t have written it without her. Why did everyone talk of his genius, but never of hers? He looked up at the window, noticed the fresh snow drifting against the glass. The brightness hurt his eyes. He adjusted his spectacles, peered so hard he felt pain slice through his cornea. But something in the way the snow moved stopped him drawing the curtains. The way it floated, wafted, and then the sudden scampering as a few flakes caught the wind and seemed to tap, like the toenails of small children, upon the glass. As if the snow wanted to come in …

  He opened the window a fraction. A clutch of snowflakes gusted straight into his face. He felt them hit his forehead, soften and melt, roll down the lenses of his spectacles. He closed the window and returned his gaze to the scene outside. It seemed to him the flakes were dancing, spinning and turning in a wild frenzy of abandonment. Lucia! She had come to him. And in that moment, words streamed into his head. He picked up his crayon and began writing.

  “So and so, toe by toe, to and fro they go round, for they are the ingelles, scattering nods as girls who may … And they look so lovely, loovelit, noosed in a nuptious night.”

  For a second he saw himself not writing but dancing with words. He paused, looked back at the window. The snow swirled and sang. He felt it close around him. He shut his eyes. And there she was again. She was everywhere, in every snowflake, in every filament of his memory, in every fibre of his body, in every word of his execrable book. He started writing and the words seemed to fly from his crayon, from his fingers.

  “For the last time in her little long life she made up all her myriads of drifting minds in one … A lightdress fluttered. She was gone. And into the river that had been a stream, there fell a tear, a singult tear, the loveliest of all tears …”

  Such a rush of thoughts and words – like striking a vein of gold, he thought. Striking it so hard shards of golden ore, bright ingots, flew into the air. And how adroitly, how nimbly, he had caught them. He put down his crayon and counted the words. But he couldn’t concentrate. He kept miscounting, muddling words and sentences, confusing single and double digits. He felt his blood slow and his heart tighten and shrink. He stopped counting. Another thought was swimming just below the surface of his mind. Rising now. Assertive. Strident. He felt the thought still and coagulate, like the hardening of clay.

  He sat very still. He could feel the words nudging and creeping from his mouth. They wanted to be said aloud. “She will not be well until I finish this book.” He removed his glasses, pushed the heels of his hands into his eyes. These perpetual tears … Would they never end? He put his glasses back on and sniffed. “When I leave this dark night, she too will be cured.”

  The air buckled around him. The snow beat against the window. He laid his hand carefully on the manuscript in front of him. He could cure her! He would cure her! But only by finishing this cursed book. He picked up his crayon again.

  “I am passing out. O bitter ending! I’ll slip away before they’re up. They’ll never see. Nor know. Nor miss me. And it’s old and old it’s sad and old it’s sad and weary I go back to you my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father … My leaves have drifted from me. All. But one clings still. I’ll bear it on me. To remind me of. Lff! So soft this morning ours. Yes. Carry me along taddy, like you done through the toy fair …”

  Historical Note

  After four months in the sanatorium at Küsnacht, C.G. Jung refused to continue his treatment of Lucia, saying that continued psychoanalysis was possible but the outcome was uncertain and could even cause a deterioration. Joyce, who had always harboured misgivings about both psychoanalysis and Jung, removed Lucia from Küsnacht and installed her in his Zurich hotel with a nurse. Throughout Jung’s analysis, he and his assistants probed for a ‘sexual secret’ in her past, but she consistently clammed up at such questions. He later burned all his notes and files on Lucia but maintained his opinion of Joyce as the cause of her troubles. Later, Jung said of them, “Both were going to the bottom of the ocean, he was diving and she was falling.”

  At the beginning of 1935, Joyce’s patron, Harriet Weaver, and supporters were despairing of him ever completing Finnegans Wake. They regarded Lucia as a major obstacle to his work. Harriet Weaver and Joyce’s assistant, Paul Leon, conspired to have her sent to London so that Joyce could continue writing. Lucia didn’t protest – she was desperate to see Beckett again. She made her way, under supervision, to London where Beckett was living and undergoing his own course of psychoanalysis following the death of his father. There is no record of what happened between them, except for a comment in one of Beckett’s letters: “The Lucia ember flared up and fizzled out.”

  From this time on, Nora Joyce refused to have Lucia in the house. After her stay in London with Harriet Weaver, Lucia made her way to Ireland where she lived with her cousins for a few months. Here, according to her biographer, she became addicted to the barbiturate Veronal, which her father posted to her in large quantities, believing it would help her sleep. She also attempted suicide after reading an interview with Giorgio in the New Yorker.

  Lucia ran away from her cousin’s house and was eventually found living rough in Dublin, sleeping on those very streets her father had written and talked of throughout her life. In her pockets were dog-eared pages of Finnegans Wake, sent to her by Joyce. She told her cousins that she was the subject matter and muse for all the sections of Finnegans Wake that dealt with love, dancing and madness. Rescued by a friend of Joyce’s, she was returned to England where she began another course of treatment with a doctor who prescribed seven weeks of solitary confinement. As before, the more Lucia was restrained, the more she struggled.

  From then on, Lucia spent the rest of her life incarcerated in institutions, latterly in Northampton, England. After numerous, differing diagnoses, she was eventually labelled as schizophrenic. Joyce spent much of his remaining life searching for possible cures, new doctors, better nurses and sanatoriums for her. He wrote to her constantly, talked about her continuously and regularly sent her gifts. He never balked at the fees required, despite them taking him to the verge of financial ruin. Meanwhile, Giorgio and Nora were united in their view that Lucia should be ‘shut in and left there to sink or swim’ (noted in a letter from Paul Leon to Harriet Weaver, quoted in Carol Loeb Schloss, Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake). Nora never visited Lucia.

  Joyce always maintained that Lucia was clairvoyant, claiming that he and Nora had ‘seen hundreds of examples of her clairvoyance’ and that her ‘intuitions’ were ‘amazing’.

  Although Lucia didn’t dance publicly again, her illuminated letters (‘lettrines’) were published as Pomes Penyeach in 1932, as The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies in 1934 and as A Chaucer ABC on her birthday in 1936. Positive reviews appeared in a range of newspapers including the Daily Telegraph, the New York Herald, Paris-Midi and Mercure de France.

  Lucia was last visited by her father in 1939. By 1940, Nazi Germany had annexed Austria, invaded Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg – and France. In June 1940, the German army arrived in Paris where Lucia was interred in a mental asylum. While many of the mentally ill and handicapped were killed by the Nazis as part of their euthanasia programme, Lucia was lucky enough to escape these and survive. She saw out the war from an asylum in northern France.

  Joyce’s letters demonstrate how, throughout this period, he worked tirelessly (but futilely) for her to be moved to Switzerland, where he, Nora and Giorgio were now living in safety. When he died, all communication to Lucia ceased. It was Harriet Weaver who finally stepped in and arranged for Lucia to be relocated to England so that she could keep an e
ye on her.

  From 1951 until she died in 1982 Lucia lived calmly (thanks to the availability of Phenothiazine) at St Andrew’s Hospital in Northampton. Here, she continued to think constantly about marriage, going over and over her roster of former lovers, pondering whom she should have married. She also continued her crusade for freedom (even writing to General Charles de Gaulle at one stage) and maintained her loathing of imprisonment. Her only regular visitors were Joyce’s patron, Harriet Weaver, and then Weaver’s god-daughter, Jane Lidderdale, with the odd visit from a Joycean scholar interested in her father. But Samuel Beckett never forgot Lucia. He always sent her birthday presents and wrote to her regularly until she died. After his death, a picture of Lucia dressed as a mermaid at the International Dance Competition at the Bal Bullier was found amongst his personal belongings.

  Lucia died on 12 December (the eve of St Lucia’s day), 1982. Despite there being a place for her in the Joyce family grave in the Fluntern cemetery, Zurich, she finally demonstrated her independence and chose her own burial place in Kingsthorpe Cemetery, Northampton.

  In 1938, after seventeen years, Joyce penned the final lines of Finnegans Wake. He later said he saw a profound connection between the writing of it and Lucia’s suffering. According to Lucia’s biographer, “Lucia’s influence upon the life of her father and upon both the form and the substance of Finnegans Wake was profound.” Joyce died two years later in Zurich, having not seen Lucia for well over a year and devastated by what had happened to her. Nora died in Zurich, with Giorgio at her side, in 1951. The infamous ‘dirty letters’ she wrote to James Joyce were destroyed but his were eventually made public. It has been speculated that Nora’s participation in this infamous exchange of letters was her attempt to keep Joyce from revisiting the syphilis-ridden brothels of Dublin while he was attending to business in Ireland and she remained in Trieste.

  Giorgio left his wife, Helen (Mrs Fleischman), in 1939. She had been diagnosed as ‘markedly neurotic’ after showing signs of early depression. Later, the diagnosis was changed to schizophrenia. He visited Lucia in England only once, in 1967.

  The bulk of Lucia’s letters were destroyed by her nephew, the last remaining descendent of James Joyce. These included letters to and from Samuel Beckett, allegedly destroyed at Beckett’s request. Harriet Weaver had already destroyed all her letters from Lucia. An account of the destruction of Lucia’s letters can be found in Lucia’s biography (see Acknowledgements).

  Afterword

  Samuel Beckett became one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, receiving the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature. He also received the French Croix de Guerre and Médaille de la Reconnaissance for his bravery as part of the French Resistance during the Second World War. One of the characters in his early novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women is thought to be based on Lucia.

  Alexander Calder became one of the twentieth century’s great sculptors and the originator of the mobile. His work can be seen at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, amongst other places.

  Zelda Fitzgerald was diagnosed with chronic schizophrenia and from 1930 spent most of her remaining years in mental institutions initially in France (including the same sanatorium supervised by the same doctor as Lucia), then in the United States. She died in a fire while at Highland Hospital, Asheville.

  Stella Steyn left Paris to study at the Bauhaus in Germany. With the rise of fascism, she left Germany and spent the rest of her life living quietly in London. She painted, sporadically, for the rest of her life and her paintings are now in many British and Irish collections, including that at No. 10 Downing Street.

  Alex Ponisovksy narrowly missed being sued by the Joyce family for breaking his engagement contract to Lucia. He later helped extricate Peggy Guggenheim’s art collection from Paris in 1940 but was picked up by the Nazis in Monte Carlo in 1942 and was never seen again.

  Paul Leon was shot by the Nazis in 1942, having rescued Joyce’s papers and belongings after the Joyce family fled their Paris apartment in 1939.

  Emile Fernandez married, but after the collapse of his marriage he fathered a child with a fifteen-year-old from the Ivory Coast. His musical career never reached the heights of his cousin, Darius Milhaud.

  Margaret Morris’s pioneering dance movement is still practised across the world today.

  For more background on all of the above, please visit www.annabelabbs.com.

  Acknowledgements

  I am heavily indebted to the outstanding, seminal work done by Carol Loeb Schloss in her biography Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake. Schloss spent sixteen years not only meticulously researching and writing her extraordinary biography of Lucia but fighting the Joyce Estate in a groundbreaking court case for the right to access Joyce family papers.

  I am also indebted to the superb work of many other scholars and biographers too numerous to list here. But the following were the works I relied on most heavily: Gordon Bowker’s James Joyce; Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce; Brenda Maddox’s Nora (including the censored final chapter, for which I thank the Joyce Centre in Zurich); Deirdre Bair’s Samuel Beckett; James Knowlson’s Damned to Fame: A Biography of Samuel Beckett; Gerry Dukes’ Beckett; Nancy Milford’s Zelda; Conor Fennell’s A Little Circle of Kindred Minds: Joyce in Paris and Jane Lidderdale and Mary Nicholson’s Dear Miss Weaver.

  Alexander Calder’s autobiography My Life in Pictures was helpful and his sculpture, drawings and jewellery can all be seen online as well as in many museums and galleries, including the Whitney Museum in New York. His circus can be watched on YouTube.

  The works of Joyce and Beckett were essential reading, in particular Ulysses, Finnegans Wake and Beckett’s early prose (The Complete Short Prose, ed. S. Gontarski).

  For background information on Joyce, 1920s Paris and dance, I am indebted to: Janet Flanner’s Paris Was Yesterday; Robert McAlmon and Kay Boyle’s Being Geniuses Together; Noel Riley Fitch’s Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties; Peggy Guggenheim’s autobiography, Out of This Century; Ernest Hemingway’s On Paris and A Moveable Feast; William Wiser’s The Crazy Years; Kevin Birmingham’s The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses; Judith Mackrell’s Flappers; Margaret Morris’s My Life in Movement; Bev Trewhitt and Jim Hastie’s Margaret Morris: Modern Dance Pioneer; Kevin Jackson’s Constellation of Genius; Vincent Bouvet and Gerard Durozoi’s Paris Between the Wars: Art, Style and Glamour in the Crazy Years; Arlen Hansen’s Expatriate Paris; Zelda Fitzgerald’s Save Me the Waltz and Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

  For background information on Jung, I recommend John Kerr’s A Dangerous Method; Vincent Brome’s Jung: Man and Myth and Jung’s Dreams, Memories, Reflections.

  On a lighter note, I must mention two graphic novels, the prize-winning Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes by Mary and Bryan Talbot (without which I may never have come across Lucia) and James Joyce: Portrait of a Dubliner by Alfonso Zapico.

  Because so much evidence (including letters to, from and about Lucia; her medical notes; her novel and poems) has been destroyed or lost, I have imagined Lucia’s thoughts and feelings throughout. Hence this is a novel of the imagination not a work of fact. However, where factual information was available I adhered to it as closely as possible within the confines of the narrative.

  Included in the text are unacknowledged quotes and words from Joyce’s letters and works (Selected Letters of James Joyce, ed. Richard Ellmann, Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake).

  Finally, I would like to thank all those that have supported me so generously with their time and expertise: Barbara Abbs, Pam Royds, Doctor Lisa Dart, Sarah Williams, Emma Darwin, Clare Stevenson-Hamilton, Annie Harris, Claire Baldwin, Stephanie Cabot, Douglas Matthews and Thomasin Chinnery. I am particularly grateful to Sharon Galant at Zeitge
ist Literary Agency, who believed in this novel from the beginning, and to David Lancett and Rachel Singleton at Impress Books, who gave me their prize and proved to be excellent editors too. Thank you also to Natalie Clark and everyone else at Impress Books.

  Thank you to everyone who answered my questions on subjects as diverse as Dublin dialects, Irish phraseology, ballerinas’ feet, modern dance and obscure Paris locations: Ali Mun-Gavin, Ann Marshall, Sandrine Marinho, Anna Carlisle and Bernie Flynn. Thank you to the Margaret Morris dancers who bore with me as I learned to dance.

  And thank you to my reading friends with whom I first discovered Lucia: Amy, Alison, Catherine, Isis, Nina, Rachel and Susan.

  The biggest thank you, of course, goes to my husband, Matthew, and our children, Imogen, Bryony, Saskia and Hugo.

  In memory of Lucia Joyce, all the author’s profits from royalties earned during the first year of sales will be donated to the charity, YoungMinds. YoungMinds campaigns for the improved mental health and wellbeing of children and young adults in the UK.

  Lastly, any mistakes made are mine – and mine alone!

  Book Club Questions

  1. To what extent does Lucia define herself through her relationships with men?

  2. Do you think that Beckett was in love with Lucia?

  3. How effective is the characterisation of Lucia’s madness as a beast?

  4. How significant are the encounters with Zelda Fitzgerald?

  5. How effective are the scenes between Lucia and Jung? Do you think Lucia is telling the truth in her memoir and in what she says to Doctor Jung?