He went on to say: ‘In my opinion, the most recent work of Joyce had nothing at all to do with such a programme.’
In these years, however, what Joyce was doing continued to fascinate him; he was nourished by his association and friendship with Joyce and his reading of Joyce’s work. Despite his admiration for Shem, as he often calls him in his letters, and indeed his affection for him, the relationship was not simple, not least perhaps because of the class difference between them as Irishmen. Just before Christmas 1937 he wrote to MacGreevy about working on the proofs of
Beckett was invited to dine with the Joyces on Christmas night 1937. Joyce wanted a collection of critical essays on his work in progress to appear in the
I have done nothing more with the NRF article and feel like dropping it. Certainly there will be no question of prolegomena or epilegomena when the work [
Soon, however, he was writing in a different mood about Joyce. On 5 January 1938: ‘He was sublime last night, deprecating with the utmost conviction his lack of talent. I don’t feel the danger of the association any more. He is just a very lovable human being.’ After the stabbing, he wrote to MacGreevy from hospital: ‘The Joyces have been extraordinarily kind, bringing me round everything from a heating lamp to a custard pudding.’ When he arrived home, he found ‘an immense bunch of Parma violets from Joyces’.
There is very little about Beckett’s relationship with Lucia Joyce, James Joyce’s daughter, in his letters, although the short biography of Lucia at the back of the book is helpful. (‘Lucia Joyce, who is widely considered to be the model for the Syra-Cusa in SB’s
In early 1938 Beckett reported that Joyce was very worried about Lucia; the footnote informs us that she was ‘in treatment for mental illness’. In April 1939 he wrote: ‘I see the Joyces now & then. I go every week to Ivry to visit Lucia, who I think gets slowly worse. She sees nobody but her father & myself.’
The edition of the first volume of Beckett’s letters has been annotated with knowledge and care, using vast research. It will, for the most part, please admirers of Beckett’s art and satisfy those who respect his wishes that only letters that have bearing on his work should appear. There is no spilling the beans, or mad gossip; it was not his style. There is no detailed account of what it was like to be a witness in the Gogarty libel action. Nor is there much fanfare when Beckett meets Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, with whom he was to live for almost half a century and with whom he would spend the war years in France, the years immediately after this first volume of letters. In April 1939 Beckett wrote to MacGreevy with his typical dry, stoical wisdom: ‘There is a French girl also whom I am fond of, dispassionately, and who is very good to me. The hand will not be overbid. As we both know that it will come to an end there is no knowing how long it may last.’
Brian Moore: Out of Ireland Have I Come, Great Hatred, Little Room
In the second chapter of Brian Moore’s early novel
Brian Moore began to think about Judith Hearne when he was twenty-seven, in exile from Belfast, and trying to write short stories in a remote part of Ontario: ‘I thought of this old lady who used to come to our house. She was a spinster who had some Civil Service job to do with sanitation and she lived most of her life with her “dear aunt”. They’d not been “grand” but they had pretensions, and she had very genteel manners.’ The novel is full of Joycean moments. It is set in a Catholic Ireland that is half-genteel and oddly insecure; it allows Judith Hearne’s vulnerable consciousness great dramatic power; it uses different tones and cadences and voices; and it takes from ‘Clay’, the most mysterious story in
Yet none of this explains the intensity of the novel, the versions of spiritual suffering and abject despair set beside tiny instants of pure social embarrassment and nuanced social observation. The novel manages to make the large moments in the book — Judith running at the tabernacle in a Catholic church in a fit of drunken despair, for example — as credible and powerful as the smaller pieces of self-delusion and social comedy. ‘It is also a book about a woman,’ Moore wrote to his publisher, ‘presenting certain problems of living peculiar to women. I wrote it with all the sympathy and understanding that I am capable of.’
Moore knew that you could achieve certain effects by writing about a woman in the Ireland of his time that you could not achieve in writing about a man. A man can swagger with drink, his drunkenness, even in a genteel context, will not bring disgrace, but pity maybe, or tolerance, or a sort of liberation. A middle-aged woman, however, who gets drunk alone in her room in a genteel boarding house and does not remember that she sang all night and has to face her landlady and her fellow boarders the next day is a piece of dynamite. In a society where, as Miss Hearne says, men are gods, how do you go about dramatizing them? In a society where female vulnerability is open and public, where women are alert to their shifting position, watchful, under the bony thumb of the Church, in charge of intimate domestic details but nothing else, women are a godsend to a novelist, living, as Moore told an interviewer:
in a personal world, a very, very personal world. Men, I find, are always, as they say in America, ‘rolling their credits’ at each other. They come on telling you what they’ve done, and who they are, and all the rest of it. Quite often, women don’t do that, because life hasn’t worked out that way for some of them. But when a woman tells me a story about something that happens to her, [I] often get a sudden flash of frankness which is really novelistic. It is as if a woman knows when she tells a story that it must be personal, that it must be interesting.
It is no coincidence, then, that the three finest novels to appear in Ireland between the mid-1950s and mid- 1960s were about middle-aged women suffering. They were Moore’s
