From "Stephen Joyce Dies at 87; Guarded Grandfather’s Literary Legacy/The last direct descendant of the author of 'Ulysses' and 'Finnegans Wake' was a fierce protector of James Joyce’s estate, to the frustration of scholars" (NYT).
February 8, 2020
"In 1988, he stunned Joyce scholars... by revealing that he had destroyed about a thousand letters he had received from his Aunt Lucia, James Joyce’s daughter..."
"... who spent decades in mental institutions; even more, he said, he had discarded correspondence that she had received from the Irish expatriate playwright Samuel Beckett, Joyce’s onetime secretary, with whom Lucia had fallen in love. 'No one was going to set their eyes on them and re-psychoanalyze my poor aunt,” [Stephen] Joyce told The New York Times that year. 'She went through enough of that when she was alive.... I didn’t want to have greedy little eyes and greedy little fingers going over them. My aunt may have been many things, but to my knowledge she was not a writer.... Where do you draw the line? Do you have any right to privacy?... What are people going to do to stop me?'... His refusals to grant access to the Joyce archive could seem arbitrary. He rejected the request of one author whose work was being published by Purdue University because he deemed the nickname of Purdue’s sports teams, the Boilermakers, to be vulgar."
From "Stephen Joyce Dies at 87; Guarded Grandfather’s Literary Legacy/The last direct descendant of the author of 'Ulysses' and 'Finnegans Wake' was a fierce protector of James Joyce’s estate, to the frustration of scholars" (NYT).
From "Stephen Joyce Dies at 87; Guarded Grandfather’s Literary Legacy/The last direct descendant of the author of 'Ulysses' and 'Finnegans Wake' was a fierce protector of James Joyce’s estate, to the frustration of scholars" (NYT).
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32 comments:
What Irishman would turn down a boiler maker. I know of none.
That looks like a picture from a slasher movie.
Rick Mount was unavailable for comment.
It's like the old debate about whether one can 'own' art. Yes, I say, one can. And if one buys a prized Van Gogh, one has the legal right to slash it into confetti should one wish.
Is that Mayor Pete's wife?
"Is that Mayor Pete's wife?"
LOL. Good one.
My initial reaction was outrage, what a bastard (yes, mockturtle, he has right to do it, that’s not in question). But the more I think about it, the more doubtful I am that there was anything important in those letters. Enjoy the books or don’t. Private correspondence is not public fodder just because something else about the writer was public.
Joyce shunned Beckett after Beckett refused to return Lucia's affections.
Beckett on his writing: "I could not have gone through the awful wretched mess of life without having left a stain upon the silence."
There is a great In Our Time broadcast/podcast on their relationship.
Greedy eyes and greedy fingers indeed. He didn't want his family to be a pawn for some striving academic's reach for tenure.
And sheesh, we all know now it's what the reader brings to the text that matters. Why would anyone care about an author's family.
From this blurb, I love him.
If there's one thing the world has more than enough of, it's "Joyce scholarship." Yet his work still remains impenetrable to most, in part because Joyce scholars would rather focus on the minutiae of his life rather than the details of his work.
I wouldn't have released my aunt's letters either unless she specifically requested I do so, and if I felt they would be published after my death against her wishes, I would burned them all, too.
No true Irishman ...
Good for him.
The High-Brow Paparazzi
Vulgar is an unacceptable reason for rejecting someone! Except Trump!
“Blogger Psota said...
If there's one thing the world has more than enough of, it's ‘Joyce scholarship.’ Yet his work still remains impenetrable to most, in part because Joyce scholars would rather focus on the minutiae of his life rather than the details of his work.”
James Joyce is the most over-rated “author” in the English speaking world.
My uncle and a cousin were boiler makers (welders) for Standard Oil/Chevron. But, what is a Purdue boiler maker? Never understood the nickname.
As a famous Irish writer remarked, "Ireland sober is Ireland stiff."
G.M. Trevelyan was an esteemed British historian of the early twentieth century. He was Macaulay's great-nephew and the son of a Whig aristocrat. He was given access to the letters and diaries of all Whig notables. Thanks to Trevelyan's rigorous standards, we will never know very much about their love affairs or gambling debts. He burned or excised such comments. He felt love affairs and gambling debts were not the proper subject of history. Well, not if you wish to write a best seller.....I recently read William Manchester's "Goodbye Darkness". It is a memoir of Manchester's service in the Pacific during WWII. In the book, Manchester reveals that he was bounced out of Officer Training School because of excessive masturbation during nighttime hours.. An interesting historical footnote but perhaps TMI....Some generations take the lace doilies off. Other generations put them on or use them to cover different parts....Most modern recording artists will gladly reveal how they lost their virginity but will be quite discreet about how much they made on their last contract.
Boilermakers.
I always thought it was because it's known as an engineering school. (and not because engineers drink a lot).
The Dubliners was the only Joyce book that I liked and reread. His genius is accessible in those stories. I always felt that the harder stuff reflected my lack erudition rather than Joyce's lack of genius. Some writers are not for everyone. As unread writers go he is far superior to Pynchon.
Good for him.
Joyce's wife, Nora, and their two children had unusual lives that were more difficult than they would have been with a more conventional husband and father. Giorgio, the son, spent years shepherding his father's work and attending to its releases. He would have approved of what his son did.
For what little it is worth, Stephen Joyce was said to bear a strong physical resemblance to his grandfather.
It perhaps is no longer true in our age of self-absorbed millennial memoir, but artists traditionally have preferred to let their works speak for themselves.
Contra RobinGoodfellow, I would nominate T.S. Eliot for that dishonor. Dubliners is brilliant throughout, I have reread and enjoyed most of Ulysses (I remain defeated by the Nighttown section), and forgive him for Finnegan's (which I have not attempted, being a mere mortal with the clock running). I consider the latter the literary equivalent of the ill-conceived 12-tone music fad of the last century.
Like others, I have little sympathy for the whining of the "Joyce scholars". Believe it or not, there was a time when I considered becoming an English Lit guy. After a couple of courses I decided that I didn't want to waste my life bullshitting about other people's books. It was the right decision.
I started up on my first Roger Scruton last night! You have to bring your best attention but the man could write (and think).
Finnegans Wake gets really good in the last third.
It is about the way we finally accept what is real, not only in our own lives but in the lives of those we care about. While not exactly Christian, it is Christian-themed, as one would expect from an old suffering man, most of whose friends were Christians.
Don't bother reading the whole book, just start where he says "Sandyhas, Sandyhas" ...
You don't really need all that much annotation to read the last third of the book - which constitutes something like 90 percent of the best writing Joyce ever wrote, in my humble opinion - you could probably profit from maybe a hundred, or two hundred at most, footnotes to let you know what Irish word he is referencing (if you have never studied old Irish), and about fifty asterisks to explain the other references to other languages, and maybe 20 or 30 footnotes per 100 pages to explain where Joyce was referencing the New Testament or the Old Testament.
It's a tough one. I respect the desire to keep a family's secrets secret. OTOH if Max Brod had honored Kafka's wishes and burned his unpublished manuscripts upon his death, the world would have been deprived of "The Trial", "The Castle" and "Amerika".
I applaud him. James Joyce is interesting because he was a great author. What bears directly on his writing is fair game. His family is not particularly interesting and is irrelevant.
Joyce was a great writer. Too bad he had nothing to say. But he was a great stylist. I think he was better suited to short stories and "Dubliners" is his best book.
Manchester also exaggerated and lied about his combat service as a Marine. He did more than 90% of serviceman in WW II, and was WIA, but he still had to embellish.
Jefferson burned the letters between he and his wife.
stephen cooper: Thank you for that information. In truth, I shied away from the book because of its reputation (and also because the clock is running...).
Generally speaking, I believe in reading or listening to a whole book or piece of music, respectively. I hate the practice of "excerpting", aka, picking out the "good parts" of pieces of music to play on the radio (I'm looking at you, wrti.org.) But if the last part is as good as you say, it might be worth trying it again from page one.
Regarding music, certain pieces that some say are "abstract", or difficult to relate to, I have found transparently expressive and moving on first listening. Certain late Beethoven sonatas, Shostakovitch's 24 Preludes and Fugues, much of Brahms, for instance.
I guess that's just the way it is with art. It either speaks to you, or it does not.
It was my lot to be involved with archiving and in some cases collecting the personal papers of local notables, some of whom are pretty well known (and who I got to know better than I might have preferred). The biggest points in any negotiation with potential donors were access (by whom, when?) and publication rights. Our standard deed of gift form was an all-encompassing "you give Us everything, and thanks!" but it was rarely so simple.
I'm not enough of a Joycean to have much opinion on these particulars, but I usually consider it a shame for private letters to end up in the dumpster.
Narr
Historians are professional readers of other people's mail, and proud of it
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