No Modernism Without Lesbians, Diana Souhami [love books to read txt] 📗

America to the husband she feared and despised. As the years passed, Eleanor travelled with varying women friends and acquaintances to Paris, Rome, Florence, Algiers, Naples. She seemed lost.

In 1924, in Paris, she was charged with shoplifting jewellery from the Galeries Lafayette department store in boulevard Haussmann in the 9th arrondissement – trinket items of no particular value. Maybe from fear and confusion, or because she was at her wits’ end, she told no one of the charge or the ensuing court summonses. In June 1927, the police arrested her. Sylvia hired a lawyer, who elicited a character reference from the pastor of the American Church in Paris, got a doctor’s report testifying to Eleanor’s mental strain and confusion brought on by her medication, and secured her release without charge.

Eleanor, consumed with shame, wrote a long protestation of her innocence, drew up a will dividing her possessions among her three daughters and on 22 June, a Wednesday, overdosed on prescription drugs. An ambulance took her to the American Hospital at Neuilly-sur-Seine. She died at 5 p.m. She was sixty-three. Sylvia telegraphed her father and sisters, saying the death was from heart failure. She somehow averted an inquest, arranged her mother’s cremation and for her ashes to be buried at Père-Lachaise cemetery, settled her bills and, with her instinct to downplay drama, kept to herself the true circumstances of how her mother had died.

Joyce’s eyes and family

Joyce looked to Sylvia to sort out his unending problems of health, finances and family. He feared he was going blind. Sylvia found specialist help, but treatment for glaucoma was crude. Operations caused great pain and were of dubious success. Leeches were stuck round his eyes to drain them of blood.

Money and its lack was the never-ending vexation. Any amount Sylvia scavenged for him was gone the next day. She asked Harriet Weaver to help get Joyce’s son, Georgio, a job: ‘that would be a relief to Joyce’, she wrote. ‘George is a fine big fellow, but he has nothing to do all the time but loaf (He teaches Italian one hour a week).’

James Joyce, his partner and future wife, Nora Barnacle, and their children Lucia and Giorgio © Archive Photos / Stringer / Getty Images

Joyce’s family seemed dysfunctional. Whatever genetic vulnerability his two children, Georgio and Lucia, had was made worse by their rackety upbringing: constant shifts of language, insecure abode in different countries, an obsessive artist for a father, a dissatisfied mother. Both children had talent: Giorgio as a classical singer, Lucia as a dancer, but they were overshadowed by their father. Giorgio became alcoholic, as indeed was Joyce. He married an American heiress and divorcee ten years his senior – Helen Fleischmann, a friend of the art collector Peggy Guggenheim. They had a son, Stephen. She had a breakdown and went back to the States without Giorgio.

And as for Lucia… Joyce referred to her ‘King Lear scenes’: ‘Whatever spark or gift I possess has been transmitted to Lucia,’ he said, ‘and it has kindled a fire in her brain.’ This fire consumed her. Joyce’s gift with words and ideas expressed itself in Lucia as madness. In conversation they shared a make-believe language. Carl Jung diagnosed her as schizophrenic. He described them as ‘two people going to the bottom of the river, one diving and the other falling’.

Nora favoured Giorgio and disliked Lucia. Tension between her and her daughter was intense. Lucia’s earliest memories were of her mother’s scoldings. Her anxiety and insecurity was exacerbated by never staying anywhere long enough to forge other relationships. By the age of thirteen she had lived at numerous different addresses in Trieste, Zurich and Paris. More than once the family was evicted from apartments for not paying the rent. Lucia learned Italian, German, French, but no language allowed her to understand or control what was wrong with her. Home life made her anxious and she became violent towards her mother. Joyce loved Lucia and believed she had some special insight, but he was unable to help her. ‘She behaves like a fool very often but her mind is as clear and as unsparing as the lightning,’ he wrote to Harriet Weaver.

Lucia wanted her own identity and success. She went to nine dance schools in seven years, but left every group she joined. Among her teachers was Raymond Duncan, Isadora’s brother, at the Dalcroze Institute in Paris.

In 1927, when she was twenty-one, she became besotted with Samuel Beckett. He was twenty-three and had moved to Paris to work as Joyce’s secretary. Sylvia championed Beckett’s work and stocked his books. She particularly liked the title of ten interconnected stories set in Dublin, More Pricks Than Kicks.

‘My love was Samuel Beckett,’ Lucia wrote. ‘I wasn’t able to marry him.’ Other unsatisfactory affairs were with her drawing teacher, the sculptor Alexander Calder: ‘We were in love but I think he went away.’ Then there was the artist Albert Hubbell, who did cover illustrations for The New Yorker. Already married, he ended his involvement with Lucia by ‘just sliding out of her life’.

In 1929 she was a finalist in the first international festival of dance in Paris, held at the Bal Bullier, a dance hall on boulevard Saint-Michel.7 Mortified at not winning, Lucia gave up dancing, a decision, Joyce wrote to a friend, that caused her ‘a month of tears’. Her life disintegrated. She had an unsuccessful operation to try to correct the cast in her left eye. She picked up men, said she was lesbian. Joyce encouraged her to take up book illustration. She drew lettrines – ornamental capitals – and he paid various publishers to pay her for this work. He called Lucia ‘that poor proud soul, whom the storm has so harshly assailed but not conquered’.

carrying on for Joyce

Sylvia continued to serve Joyce. His hope was for her to publish all his work at prices readers could afford. She did her best, but she had had enough. She financed a recording of him reading