James Joyce: A Life by Gabrielle Carey, Australian Scholarly Publishing, was launched by Russell Smith at the Gaelic Club, Sydney, on 3 February 2024

Hi everyone. My name’s Russell Smith and I’m a lecturer in Modern Literature at ANU. I got to know Gabrielle in 2019 when she came to ANU as a recipient of a six-month H.C. Coombs Creative Fellowship. I remember quite clearly the first time I met her. My colleague Lucy Neave would normally be the person who welcomes and hosts Creative Fellows, but she was away on leave and asked me if I would step in. I must admit I was a bit apprehensive because, without knowing much about Gabrielle—and with all due respect to the writers (like myself) present in the room—I was a bit worried she might be ‘high maintenance’. I needn’t have worried, of course: we hit it off immediately. I had arranged to meet her in Mocan and Green Grout, a quirky little café tucked away in a hard-to-find nook at the edge of the University precinct; it’s a bit of a well-kept Canberra secret, or so I thought. When I arrived Gabrielle was already there, set up with her notebook and a coffee and immediately said ‘Great choice! This is one of my favourite places in Canberra!’

It was a good sign: I soon found out that Gabrielle knew more about the good places to go in Canberra than I did. This established a kind of pattern in our relationship, familiar I think to many people here: we would share our discoveries of good places to go, good books to read, good movies and TV shows to watch, good music to listen to. Gabrielle was always honest and uncomplicated and sometimes quite forthright about what she did and didn’t like, so when we shared a discoveries that really hit a chord with the other—I put her onto Theodore Fontane’s novel Effi Briest; she put me onto the TV series The End of the Fucking World—these were real bonding moments.

On that day in 2019, we began by discussing the project that brought her to Canberra, which was her research on Elizabeth von Arnim, which she published as the book Only Happiness Here in 2020. She asked me about my research, which at the time was something on Samuel Beckett. And this brought us to the subject of James Joyce. At this point, it seemed, the rapport we were striking up threatened to falter. I told her how much I loved Dubliners and Ulysses, but didn’t care so much for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; she agreed—so far so good. But then Gabrielle’s eyes lit up and she said, ‘But Finnegans Wake is his real masterpiece!’ At this point I’m sure I gulped, and my face scrunched up painfully; I’d owned a copy of Finnegans Wake since I was sixteen, but I’d never really made a serious attempt to read it; I’d always thought of it as a gigantic mistake on Joyce’s part, a book that nobody in their right mind would ever read. Awkwardly I confessed my ignorance.

And it was then that Gabrielle began to teach me how to read Finnegans Wake: in a group, reading aloud, going very slowly, line by line, everyone pitching in suggestions and ideas, without too much concern for what might be right or wrong, sense or nonsense, just taking pleasure in the beauty and the strangeness and the glorious and often hilarious inventiveness of the language.

Over the next six months, as well as finishing her book on Elizabeth von Arnim, Gabrielle set up a Canberra Finnegans Wake Reading Group, similar to the one she had set up in Sydney; there were usually about 6 to 8 of us, we met roughly fortnightly, usually in cafés and pubs, and we kept going even after Gabrielle finished her fellowship and moved back to Sydney; needless to say, whenever Gabrielle was in town, we’d schedule a special session. So, I have to say, of all the discoveries and recommendations Gabrielle and I shared, this was the deepest and most lasting. I’m currently working on a book on Finnegans Wake, and I can say quite categorically that this would never have happened without Gabrielle.

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So, we’re here today to launch Gabrielle’s last book, James Joyce: A Life.

Those of you who’ve had a chance to read it will know that is a surprisingly brisk read. With her characteristic lightness of touch, Gabrielle constructs the book as a kind of mosaic, a collection of small but vividly coloured fragments set into interesting patterns. This in itself is a rather remarkable achievement: to construct a book about James Joyce—a writer whose greatest books are both long and incredibly dense, and about whom there is enough critical commentary to fill a medium-sized warehouse—and to keep it short and entertainingly readable and still get at the essence of the man and his work.

I’m not going to try and sum up Gabrielle’s book; I want you to read it for yourself; but I do want to comment on a few of the things that, among all the books on Joyce, and indeed all the biographies of Joyce, make this book distinctive.

First, I mentioned it’s like a mosaic. In fact, Gabrielle accomplishes very clever things by her use of the modernist technique of montage, or if you want to be really fancy, parataxis, which consists in putting statements side by side without any syntactical link explaining the relation between them, instead leaving it up to the reader to make whatever connection they will. Here’s an example from page 3:

Sin was one of Joyce’s earliest and most enduring obsessions. As a small child, he re-enacted the Adam and Eve story with his younger brother as Adam, and his sister as Eve. Joyce played the devil, wriggling around on the floor with a long tail made of a rolled-up towel.

‘He had an instinctive realization of the fact that the most important part, dramatically, was that of the Tempter,’ remarked his brother Stanislaus.

At home his nickname was Sunny Jim because of his happy, easy-going disposition. 

 Here’s another example. Gabrielle notes how the Rector of Clongowes College, where Joyce boarded as a schoolboy, observed that his letters home were like grocer’s lists. She writes:

Corresponding with a friend many years later, Joyce remembered the priest’s comment about his letter-writing and conceded that not much had changed. ‘I have a grocer’s assistant’s mind,’ he said.

Joyce was twelve when the students of Clongowes were asked to write an essay on their favourite hero. He chose Odysseus [Ulysses in the Roman version]. He liked the fact that the ancient warrior triumphed through cunning and intelligence rather than violence. 

A Greek hero renowned for his cunning; and a grocer’s assistant: by putting them side by side, Gabrielle suggests that both are important for understanding Joyce.

Elsewhere Gabrielle quotes Joyce’s own apparently self-deprecating description of himself as a ‘scissors and paste’ man. Here Gabrielle outlines a profound insight into Joyce’s writing and philosophy: he took life as he found it; his books included, without prejudice, all aspects of everyday reality and of ordinary people’s minds, from the elevated to the depraved; and he used textual materials in a similar way, drawing on both theological treatises and advertisements for cocoa; Dante’s Inferno and vaudeville comic skits.

Gabrielle’s book, fittingly, also has something of this bowerbird quality, with gems like the following sample sentences that Joyce gave to his students at the Berlitz School in Trieste as translation exercises:

That lady has nice small breasts.

The tax collector’s an imbecile who’s always bothering me.

Ireland is a great country. They call it the Emerald Isle. It is now an untilled field. The government sowed it with famine, syphilis, superstition, and alcoholism. Puritans, Jesuits, and bigots have sprung up.

Proverbially and by nature our peasants walk in their sleep, closely resembling fakirs in their froglike and renunciatory sterility. 

 Elsewhere you can sense the mischievous relish with which Gabrielle quotes Joyce’s various critics and detractors, like the following report in Perth’s Daily News:

The well-known poet Mr Alfred Noyes opined that Ulysses was “simply the foulest book that has ever made its way into print – there is not foulness conceivable to the mind of madman or ape that has not been poured into its imbecile pages … a corrupt mass of indescribable degradation”. (79)

This brings me to another distinctive thing about Gabrielle’s book: its Australian perspective. She notes how Finnegans Wake contains references to the famous Aboriginal cricketer Bullocky, who toured England with the all-indigenous team in 1868; as well as various references to Australian birds, including the now-extinct White Swamp Hen, Porphyrio Albus, whose Latin name Joyce transforms, quite justly, to sound like Perfidious Albion; and she takes delight in tracing the reception of Joyce’s work in Australia, from the predictable detractors who fulminated about the vulgarity of Ulysses and the incomprehensibility of Finnegans Wake, to readers such as Alexander King, who wrote a brilliantly perceptive appreciation in the West Australian. Indeed, the last words of Gabrielle’s book note that in 1941 Ulysses was banned in Australia for a second time, a ban that would not be lifted until 1954.

Behind all these details is, of course, a vast amount of research and scholarship. However, another thing you will note as soon as you pick it up is that Gabrielle’s book contains not a single footnote or academic reference. I must admit, as an academic, I was initially somewhat scandalized by this, and occasionally frustrated, wondering ‘Where the hell did she get that from?’ But it is, of course, a very deliberate decision on Gabrielle’s part: to present Joyce’s writing, and Finnegans Wake especially, in a way that allows the reader to experience it as directly as possible, without the intimidating ramparts and battlements of scholarship about its difficulty and the need to dedicate a lifetime to understanding it (which, of course, is something that, just quietly, Gabrielle has done).

Another thing that is distinctive, although not unique, about Gabrielle’s life of Joyce is the attention she gives to the network of supporters that Joyce surrounded himself with, and especially the women who in various ways encouraged and enabled him. With great economy, Gabrielle details the rather sad story of Joyce’s long-suffering mother; she pays tribute to the literary women who published and promoted Joyce’s writing, from Sylvia Beach, of Shakespeare and Co. bookshop, to Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, who were financially ruined after being prosecuted for publishing extracts of Ulysses in the Little Review; and of course Harriet Shaw Weaver, heiress from a wealthy Protestant background, feminist and freethinker, whose astonishingly large handouts to Joyce over several decades can rightly be said to have enabled the writing of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Gabrielle suggests, too, that Weaver’s disapproval, not only of Joyce’s drinking and his spendthrift habits, but of his wilder experiments in Finnegans Wake, may have played an important role in motivating Joyce to complete the damned thing and prove the method in his madness. And of course, above all, there is Nora, whom Gabrielle depicts, not sentimentally, as an unthinkingly loyal companion, but as a strong and proud woman who put up with just about as much as she could take, and whose constancy to Joyce consisted, in part, in her constantly threatening to leave him.

The exception to these women in supporting roles is, of course, Joyce’s daughter Lucia, who was possessed of powerful creative energies of her own and showed enormous promise as a dancer in the modern style, until, for reasons that remain unclear, she abandoned her pursuit of a professional dancing career. As is well known, her behaviour became increasingly more erratic, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and despite Joyce at one point spending three quarters of his income on attempts to treat her, she was institutionalised and separated from the family by the war. With great care and delicacy Gabrielle gives considerable space to Lucia Joyce and her father’s complex feelings about her, which seemed to have ranged from admiration and even envy, to fear and fascination, to a despairing fatherly protectiveness and concern.

Indeed, as it goes on, Gabrielle’s book paints an increasingly tragic picture of the later years of Joyce’s life. Alongside the heart-wrenching concern over Lucia’s condition were, of course, the long-standing eye troubles that became increasingly severe in the last decade of his life, so that he could only read with one eye and the help of two magnifying glasses (the other eye he referred to as ‘the broken window of my soul’). And to top it all off, not only was the public reception of Finnegans Wake on its publication in 1939 less rapturous than Joyce would have wanted, but, as he saw it, the outbreak of the Second World War quite unreasonably diverted many people’s attention from the most significant event of the decade.

Gabrielle quotes a letter from Joyce’s loyal friend Paul Léon to his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver:

Mrs Joyce told me he was in a state of exhaustion over the closing pages of the book which he had written in a state of extreme tension … It is impossible to deny that he has acted according to his conscience and that he has actually consumed almost all of his substance, physical and spiritual, moral and material, in the writing of a book likely to be received with derision by his ill-wishers and with pained displeasure by his friends.

And then, as a counterpoint to this solemn note, Gabrielle continues in the next section:

When asked whether his Work in Progress was a blending of literature and music, Joyce replied:
………………..No, it’s pure music.
But are there not levels of meaning to be explored? the questioner pressed.
………………..No, no, said Joyce, it’s meant to make you laugh. 

With this juxtaposition, Gabrielle restates her contention that, for all the tragedy of Joyce’s life, his literary vision is ultimately a comic one, and that for him comedy, rather than tragedy, is the supreme artistic form. While Joyce’s work up until Finnegans Wake is suffused with melancholy—and she quotes at length the famous ending of the short story ‘The Dead’, recognised as one of the most beautifully melancholic passages in all literature—the Wake itself is a book of joy, like its character the Gracehoper, who is, as Gabrielle quotes, ‘always jigging ajog, hoppy on akkant of his joyicity’.

While it unflinchingly depicts his many faults, Gabrielle’s life of Joyce pays deeply respectful homage to the tenacity and singlemindedness of his artistic vision. It is ultimately a writer’s book about the life of a writer, a writer who clearly served for Gabrielle as a source of joy, inspiration, admiration, frustration, and that kind of creative antagonism that brings out the best in people.

*

When another friend of mine died a few years ago, I kept imagining I saw him everywhere in the streets; he was obviously somebody who looked a lot like other people, and so every couple of weeks, it seemed, I’d see someone in the distance and think, for a moment, there he is. But Gabrielle was not someone who looked like other people. She had a very distinctive appearance: small stature, quite an upright, energetic bearing, and always impeccably turned out. Nevertheless, a few weeks ago, for the first time, I caught sight of someone in the distance who looked like Gabrielle, and before my rational brain could take over, I experienced that surge of gladness that her presence always brought.

I experience that pleasure again with this book. As Gabrielle once did to me with Finnegans Wake, I recommend it to you.

 – Russell Smith

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Dr Russell Smith is a lecturer in Modern Literature and Literary Theory at the Australian National University. He has published widely on the work of Samuel Beckett, as well as on various topics in modernist literature, contemporary literature and art, and literary theory. His current project examines the impact of James Joyce’s 1930s radio listening on the composition of Finnegans Wake and its treatment of the emerging global wireless communications network.

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James Joyce: A Life by Gabrielle Carey is available from https://scholarly.info/book/james-joyce-a-life/
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