The Blossoming of Molly Bloom

NEW YORK —  “People say I have helped him to be a genius. What they’ll be saying next is that if it hadn’t been for that ignoramus of a woman what a man he would have been! But never you mind. I could tell them a thing or two about him after 20 years.”

Nora Joyce was speaking about her husband, James Joyce. With characteristic frankness, she acknowledged what she knew to be true: that Joyce’s admirers found her an unsuitable companion for her brilliant husband.

But, with equally characteristic self-confidence, Nora Joyce knew the power she wielded over him. She knew his dependency, his most intimate fears and insecurities. She knew she was his haven. She probably also knew she provided the inspiration and voice for the female characters in his books.

“Very early on, I realized it was her tremendous assurance and confidence that attracted Joyce,” said Brenda Maddox, author of “Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom,” published this month by Houghton Mifflin. “When someone is analyzing himself to the extent Joyce did and scarcely dares move, the attraction of someone who just does it is devastatingly attractive.”

Maddox’s biography does much to dispel the myth that Nora Joyce was a slovenly, illiterate, uncultured chambermaid from western Ireland who had neither the affinity for nor the interest in Joyce’s literary masterpieces, and could not even cook. Such was said by the literary crowd, critics, some members of Joyce’s family and even by some friends.

Maddox’s biography documents Nora Joyce’s culinary skill but, more to the point, it also depicts a woman of formidable strength, courage and wit who withstood 37 years with a hard-drinking, profligate, self-involved writer, and did so with her senses of humor and self intact.

She bore two children during the early stages of Joyce’s career, when recognition of his books and, consequently, money were scarce. She raised them in makeshift homes in five different countries, moving whenever Joyce needed a change of scenery, or when they were evicted for failing to pay their rent. She learned three European languages. She remained a pillar of strength as her daughter went mad and her son became an alcoholic, always tending to her husband’s all-consuming needs.

Maddox’s interest in Joyce’s wife was kindled when she read the late Richard Ellmann’s revised biography, “James Joyce,” in 1982. She put down the book wondering how, in the early 1900s, this convent-educated girl could have run away with a man who would not marry her. She wondered why they bothered with a civil marriage ceremony, two children and 27 years after their flight. She wanted to know how Nora survived living with Joyce, especially if it were true that she cared little, if at all, for his writing.

In addition to these questions, there were parallels between Maddox’s family and the Joyces. Maddox’s maternal grandparents had also fled their families to live together for many years before finally marrying.

Painful Bond

Maddox shared another, more painful bond with the Joyces. Her stepdaughter is a schizophrenic, as was the Joyces’ second child, Lucia, who spent most of her adult life in an asylum.

Maddox is quick to point out that she would hate to be “so selfish that the only things you can have sympathy for are the things that have happened to you. (But) I certainly understood from my stepdaughter’s breakdown how a family could live with schizophrenia without recognizing it and hoping it isn’t so. Many times they are reasonable, charming people.”

Maddox has written extensively on women and marriage as a journalist for the Economist and as an author of five books, including one on gay marriages and another on stepparenting.

“I’m interested in marriage,” Maddox explained. “What is the unspoken bargain? What do you get out of it? What do you think you are expected to give for what you get?”

While intrigued by the Joyces’ seeming incompatibility, Maddox also had a sense when she read Joyce “that there had to be a fabulous female personality there, which was certainly underreported. In Ellmann, she appears in the footnotes. If a joke of hers is reported, it’s as if she knew not what she said, (that) she doesn’t even know she’s funny. She did. Joyce did. I don’t think Joyce ever underestimated Nora.”

Tracing Nora Joyce’s life from her early days in Galway to her final days in a clinic in Zurich, where she died afflicted with acute arthritis, Maddox examines Joyce’s emotional and physical dependence on Nora, particularly as his eyes failed him.

“She was his eyes and ears,” said Maddox. “She went to the parties and she could tell him who the phonies were. He relied on her increasingly to tell him about the real world and about the total world of women.”

Born Nora Barnacle on March 21 or 22, 1884, in Galway, the second daughter in a family of six girls and a son, she was “irretrievably urban--not a barefoot peasant from the moorland . . . but a city girl, street-smart, with a ribbon in her hair, a sharp tongue in her head,” Maddox wrote.

Her father was a baker, who, like Nora Joyce’s husband and son, had a fondness for liquor. Her mother was a seamstress and dressmaker. Shipped off to her grandmother and to the convent at an early age, she went to school until she was 12, the “maximum schooling that was available without fees to girls of that day. Many of both sexes had less,” Maddox notes in her book.

Celebrating Bloomsday

Nora Barnacle’s bearing and stride first attracted her nearsighted lover. Joyce accosted the arm-swinging redhead on Nassau Street in Dublin on June 10, 1904, and made a date to meet four days later. Joyce’s letters show that she stood him up, so their actual first date is presumed to be June 16, the day during which the episodes of “Ulysses” occur. Today, Joyceans throughout the world are celebrating Bloomsday in tribute to their literary hero.

Ellmann wrote in his Joyce biography that, “(to) set ‘Ulysses’ on this date was Joyce’s most eloquent if indirect tribute to Nora. It was the day upon which he entered into relation with the world around him.”

Their stroll to a deserted part of Dublin near the harbor was hardly your typical first date. Maddox reports that, wasting no time on formalities, Nora, according to Joyce’s later account, “made me a man.”

“Nothing in his experience from his pious mother to the Jesuits, had prepared him for the frankness and directness of Nora’s sexual approach,” Maddox wrote. “Instead of losing respect for her, he fell in love with her.”

Four months later, Nora and Joyce set off, 20 and 22 years of age respectively, unmarried, unemployed and bound for Switzerland. They would spend the next 37 years together.

Both Were Rebels

Far from being ill-suited, “they might have been matched by computer,” Maddox said. She points out that both grew up with alcoholic fathers who had a penchant for moving households on a regular basis. Both were raised in a highly religious atmosphere. Both were cast from home at an early age and both were sexual rebels.

“The Joyces’ devoted and enduring marriage will always remain a mystery to those who insist upon looking at it as a match of intellectual incompatibles,” Maddox wrote.

From the night they left Dublin until Joyce’s death in 1941, the couple were rarely apart. It was during two major separations in 1909, when Joyce traveled to Ireland and Nora Joyce remained in Trieste, that the couple composed their so-called “dirty letters.” Maddox says that her primary purpose in writing the erotic letters was to keep Joyce from seeking satisfaction from prostitutes.

Joyce slept with prostitutes as early as 14 years old and he had a venereal disease when Nora met him. Fearing he might contract the disease again (and also that the flow of rent money from Ireland might stop) Nora obliged her husband’s request to write letters “for my eyes only.”

“For Nora the dirty letters were an exercise in fluency and in control,” Maddox wrote. “She proved to Jim that she could match him on paper, and she proved to herself that she had her curious man firmly under her thumb.”

During their first separation in 1909, Joyce learned that Nora had been involved with his close friend, Vincent Cosgrave, at the same time that Joyce was courting her. Joyce wrote her passionate, heart-wrenching letters describing his devastation with discovering her betrayal.

No one knows for sure whether Nora Joyce did have other lovers, but Joyce’s friends eventually convinced him that she had been true to him. Maddox notes, however, that his sense of betrayal and uncertainty were critical to his art, for without them he could not have explored the themes of deception and cuckoldry as he did in “Ulysses.”

Another important aspect of Nora Joyce’s letter writing is the similarity her letters bore to the character Molly Bloom’s stream-of-consciousness way of thinking and speaking. Lacking punctuation or capitalization, “words rushing off the page,” Nora’s letters were written as she spoke “spontaneous, direct, humorous, and, when she chose, vulgar.” Maddox excerpts Nora Joyce’s prose in her book, concluding that her words demonstrate why, as other Joyce scholars have argued, “Nora is considered the main stylistic influence on the long interior monologue of Molly Bloom with which Joyce ended ‘Ulysses.’ ”

Lack of Interest

The origin of the myth that Nora Joyce did not read anything Joyce wrote may lie in the fact that she often expressed her lack of interest in his writing. When “Ulysses” was published she weighed it in her hand and sarcastically asked a friend, “How much will you give me for this?” She referred to his prose as “chop suey” and complained that he did not write humorous books that people might understand.

“Nora’s indifference to his work saddened and tantalized him. It was part of her desirability and unattainability that his genius was of no interest to her. She loved him for his ordinariness,” Maddox said.

However, Nora Joyce did memorize all of Joyce’s poems and found passages of his works that he read aloud to her “remarkable.” She also took dictation from Joyce, when his failing eyesight prevented him from writing, and conducted correspondence with publishers for him.

Perhaps the two people in Joyce’s inner circle who suffered most from his monomania and peripatetic life style were his children.

“The Joyces loved their children--but loved them rather than reared them,” Maddox stated in her book. “They gave no thought to preparing them for careers or marriage and never hesitated to pull them out of school when they felt the need of a change of air or when Joyce sought a different atmosphere in which to work.”

Her Family’s Mainstay

It was because of their children that the Joyces ultimately consented to legalize their union on July 4, 1931. Their son, Giorgio, was set to marry a woman who wanted her children to have a legitimate claim to the Joyce name. Lucia’s devastation at learning that her parents’ grandly celebrated “anniversary” marked their departure from Ireland, not their nuptials, further spurred the couple to marry.

Throughout her life, Nora Joyce was her family’s mainstay. Quick-witted, a bit daring and unflappable, she held her family together as best she could. But when she died 10 years after Joyce, her contribution to her famous husband’s work and well-being was denigrated, if not ignored, and she appeared doomed to ignominy. “The woman who had given her loyalty, her strength and her wit to Joyce went down in literary history not only as a burden who contributed nothing to his work, but also as a belatedly married mistress,” Maddox wrote.

A truer picture would appear to be what Joyce wrote to Nora in a letter: “Everything that is noble and exalted and deep and true and moving in what I write comes, I believe, from you.”

The Joyces’ grandson, Stephen Joyce, went even further, remarking “I venture to say that he could have done none of it, written not one of the books, without her.”