Bloomsday's Child

MY BROTHER'S KEEPER: JAMES JOYCE'S EARLY YEARS (266 pp.)--Stanislaus Joyce --Viking ($5).

"Lives of great men all remind us friends .will make them less sublime." Thus most literary memoirs might be described, but James Joyce was lucky in his friends: at worst, they merely carved their initials on the giant oak of his literary reputation. He was even luckier in his late brother, Stanislaus. With candor, insight and a remarkable lack of rancor toward the man who arrogantly dubbed him "my whetstone," Stanislaus was content to draw what is easily the best portrait of his legendary brother as a young man.

Though he followed James Joyce to Trieste in 1905 and remained there for nearly a half-century as an English professor, Stanislaus was the invisible man in Joyce's life. In this book, he emerges as the perfect foil. Joyce was mercurial, Stanislaus was phlegmatic. Joyce drank, Stanislaus was abstemious. Joyce was referred to as "Sunny Jim," Stanislaus as "Bile Beans." In the Dublin days with which this memoir begins and ends, one belief surmounted all brotherly differences --the belief that Jim had genius.

Even as a baby, Jim did the star turns at their home in Bray, a seaside village near Dublin. In a morality play staged in the nursery, little Jim wriggled across the floor as the devil, with a rolled-up sheet for a tail, and easily stole the show from Stanislaus' staid Adam and a sister's Eve. It was a pleasant middle-class childhood until Papa Joyce began dragging his brood on an alcoholic long day's journey into night.

Enemies of Life. John Joyce was not born a failure; he achieved it. Competent connoisseurs compared his tenor voice to the best in Europe, yet he never bothered to train it properly. He failed in politics as well as in business. In his early 405, John Joyce was left with nothing but a pension of -L-11 a month. He was the father of a dozen children, but he rarely worked again--though he lived to be 83. Drunk or sober, he affected a monocle, but slipped easily into the language of a stevedore. In one drunken fury, John Joyce almost strangled his long-suffering wife. As Mary Joyce lay dying in her 44th year, he besottedly entered her room and blurted: "If you can't get well, die. Die and be damned to you!" Stanislaus lunged at his father but Jim got the old man safely out of the room.

Jim's outward calm during such incidents always puzzled Stanislaus, though he later realized one of its causes: their mother had become a symbol to the great symbol-maker of "the Irishwoman, the accomplice of the Irish Catholic Church, which [James] called the scullery-maid of Christendom." Stanislaus laces his book with anticlerical gibes; the brothers' joint rejection of the Catholic faith culminated in a scene at their dying mother's bedside in which Jim and Stanislaus refused to kneel and pray for her--an episode that Joyce later used in Ulysses as the source of Stephen Dedalus' "agenbite of inwit," i.e., remorse.

The Artist as Priest. Schooled by Jesuits from the age of six, Jim was "God-intoxicated," and Stanislaus was keen enough to recognize that Joyce remained God-intoxicated though he changed gods. The work of art became his religious passion. It was this, says Stanislaus, that prompted Jim as a stripling to say to the mature Yeats: "I regret that you are too old to be influenced by me." Argues Stanislaus: "What my brother said, or meant to say . . . was in plain words that Yeats did not hold his head high enough for a poet of his stature, that he made himself too cheap with people who were not worthy to dust his boots."

Stanislaus became indignant when Jim took to boozing and wenching with Oliver St. John Gogarty, the "stately plump Buck Mulligan" of Ulysses. Recalls Stanislaus of his brother: "I hated to see him glossy-eyed and slobbery-mouthed." Gogarty confessed to another friend that he wanted "to make Joyce drink in order to break his spirit," and celebrated the occasions of sin with a limerick:

There is a young fellow named Joyce,

Who possesses a sweet tenor voice.

He goes down to the kips*

With a psalm on his lips,

And biddeth the harlots rejoice.

As for himself, says Stanislaus, "I determined to give continence a fair trial." He also generalizes that "women do not interest Irishmen except as streetwalkers or housekeepers."

Ulysses or Madness? Joyce's junior by nearly three years, Stanislaus 'makes no unseemly claims for his own influence on his brother during these apprentice years. He does report having arranged the order of the poems in Chamber Music and suggested the title. This gives the lie to Gogarty, who claimed that Joyce was inspired by the tinkle of a night pot in a brothel. For Joyce, the incomparable word-distiller, the charm doubtless rested in the title's double meaning.

Had Stanislaus lived to complete his memoir, Editor Richard Ellmann is certain that he would have pressed the claim that he saved his brother from the triple threat of dissipation, dubious friends and inertia. Joyce never admitted the need to be saved from anything, but Jung himself is reported to have said after reading Ulysses that Joyce would have gone mad had he not written the book.

Just as Joyce was obsessed by Dublin and needed to get it out of his system, so Stanislaus was obsessed by James Joyce, and this book was his exorcism. With the true Joycean alchemy, he took truths that were ugly, sordid and violent and composed a memoir that is grave and serene. Yet he did not wholly escape his brother. He died in 1955, on June 16--Bloomsday, i.e., the day in the life of Leopold Bloom chronicled in Ulysses. It was a day Stanislaus himself annually celebrated with a party.

* Brothels.

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