A Friend of the Family

John Malcolm Brinnin writing on Dylan Thomas; Lytton Strachey on General Gordon or Florence Nightingale – there is something perverse in each of us which responds to the debunking of a public figure. This book debunks James Joyce very gently indeed. The authors, man and wife, might even claim that it is a tribute to a great man and a family friend. The picture they paint, however, from a number of scrappy, vivid reminiscences is by no means flattering – Joyce is shown first as a conceited young man and later as a paranoid Irishman in exile. One does not have to question the veracity of the Colums’ account, or their good intentions. But what precisely is the permanent value of this kind of anecdote?

One day Joyce came to me with a request for the loan of a half sovereign. A financial scheme was involved in its use. He had been given a pawn ticket as a contribution to a fund he was raising for himself. Now, to anyone else a pawn ticket would be a minus quantity . . .

Joyce’s poverty and ingenuity in raising money bear as little relation to his writing self as Dylan Thomas’s drinking habits bore to his function as a poet. It is the lack of profundity shown in a consideration of a profound-minded man which irritates most when one reads this amiable Irish gossip. The Colums give no real clue on the main issues – the origin of Joyce’s virulent anti-clericalism or how he came to disinter the body of Venus from a Dublin slum. For that we have to go back to the enigmatic works. The sketches of Joyce’s Bohemian youth, however, and his painful family life in Paris, seen as it were through bi-focal lenses (husband and wife taking turns at the washing up) will have no doubt for many readers their own kind of interest.

1959 (208)