Dublin's Prodigal Son

JAMES JOYCE (842 pp.)--Richard Ellmann--Oxford ($12.50).

During World War I, James Joyce mailed his manuscript of Ulysses, bit by bit, from Zurich to London, and for a time British censors suspected the book of being an enemy code. It was a prophetic incident; for decades Joyce would inspire battles between the code sniffers and the cult worshipers. Once when asked why he put so many puzzlers into his works, Joyce replied: "To occupy my critics for 300 years." Richard Ellmann, professor of English at Northwestern University, worked a mere seven years on this huge biography, but its great and fascinating merit is that it demystifies Joyce without debunking him. It will be read as long as James Joyce is read.

Out of minute factual detail, Ellmann fashions a Ulyssean portrait that has the lived-with, lived-through intensity of a major novel. Never before have people so painfully close to Joyce stepped so personably out of the shadow of his reputation. There is his father John, a barroom wit and tosspot, would-be singer and doctor, who sired ten children and saddled his brood with eleven mortgages. There is Joyce's wife Nora, a Galway girl with a tart tongue and no head for "that chop suey he's writing," as she once said of Finnegans Wake. There is Brother Stanislaus, the plodding provident ant in Joyce's grasshopper life.

Above the Trolls. Joyce's magnificent obsessions with the wit and wiles of the English language began at his father's breakfast table. Of a morning, John Joyce might read an obituary. "Oh! Don't tell me that Mrs. Cassidy is dead," protested James's mother on one occasion. "Well, I don't quite know about that," said Papa Joyce with a quizzical glint in his monocled eye, "but someone has taken the liberty of burying her."

Life with father was sometimes all beer and no victuals. The meticulous Stanislaus once calculated that John Joyce was roaring drunk 3.97 days a week. At such times, Papa would reel home in a vicious temper, flail away at any child within reach, and snarl, "I'll leave you all where Jesus left the Jews." An ardent Parnellite, the elder Joyce undoubtedly inspired the nine-year-old James to his first known literary effort, a poem to the fallen leader, in which Parnell was likened to an eagle, looking down from

His quaint-perched aerie on the crags

of Time

Where the rude din of this . . . century Can trouble him no more.

James Joyce harbored throughout his life a compulsive need to feel himself betrayed. Perhaps it helped him to maintain his chosen stance of lonely, lofty defiance of the "trolls," as he called the common run of men.

Afraid of Thunder. Precocious as a writer, Joyce was also precocious sociologically. He had his first sexual experience at the age of 14 with a prostitute on a riverbank. Some small taint of degradation kept clinging to his idea of sex--one of the many dramatic paradoxes in his life. He was a near-alcoholic; yet he pursued his writing craft with monastic austerity. He had the courage to face approaching blindness, eleven eye operations, and his daughter Lucia's madness, but he ran from dogs and thunder. He renounced Roman Catholicism, but he could never rid his mind of the systems of Aquinas and Aristotle. He loathed and left his native land, yet his bitterness was inverted longing. Small wonder that Nora once told a friend: "You can't imagine what it was like for me to be thrown into the life of this man."

Joyce always liked to say that Nora Barnacle had come "sauntering" into his life out of the Dublin hotel where she worked as a waitress. The first day they went walking together was June 16, 1904, and Joyce always regarded it so romantically that he made it Bloomsday. the day everything happens in Ulysses. Nora had only a grammar school education, but when Joyce spouted his literary dreams to her and then declaimed: "Is there one who understands me?", Nora understood enough to say yes. She eloped with him to the Continent (they were not married till 27 years later) and he swore to "try myself against the powers of the world."

During the next dark decade, Joyce badgered publishers in vain, cadged meals, cheated landlords, begged, scrounged and borrowed, taught English at Berlitz and clerked in a bank, suffered his first eye attacks, trundled his family from city to city, and drank steadily. During visits home, he would stumble to meet Stanislaus, and that sturdy keeper of his brother's conscience would shout: "Do you want to go blind? Do you want to go about with a little dog?"

Joyless Omens. As the biographer describes Joyce's literary struggles, the book's only drawback appears: Ellmann is so busy correlating Joyce's life and work that he attempts no critical revaluation. He does not ask if Finnegans Wake is a masterpiece, or a monstrous jungle of word play. Nor does he ask whether Joyce's famed "interior monologue" really reveals anything, or whether T. S. Eliot was correct when he suggested that "it doesn't tell as much as some casual glance from outside often tells."

When Ulysses was published in 1922, it showed Joyce's matchless command of the English language and his finger on the tragicomic pulse of human life. If that life sometimes seemed tinged with an indefinable futility, it was because Joyce tried to construct a universe without God. In such a universe, superstition cast a spell. He saw coincidences as magic omens and tried to have all his books published on his birthday (Feb. 2). He wore a special ring to ward off blindness. He carried a picture of the 17th century Due de Joyeux (no kin) in his wallet and told people that Joyce, i.e., joy, meant the same as Freud (joy in German).

Before long, the omens turned joyless. He had to face his daughter's incurable schizophrenia, and he guiltily ascribed it to the countless uprootings he had imposed on his family. When the critics were baffled by Finnegans Wake, Joyce sank into gloom. World War II and the bureaucratic ordeal of moving from Paris to Zurich sapped the last of his energy. In 1941, he underwent surgery for a perforated ulcer. When a blood transfusion was needed, two Swiss soldiers from Neuchatel offered themselves. "A good omen," said Joyce, "I've always liked Neuchatel wine." But early next morning he was dead.

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