WHATCHA READIN'?

Stanislaus Joyce’s My Brother’s Keeper. James Joyce’s Early Years (1957) Picked up a nice used copy by chance in Gray Matters mid-August. I don’t believe I’ve read it cover to cover, more like skimmed it in a library. It was a big revelation for Joyceans in the late '50s/early '60s, but by the time I got into JJ studies, mid-80s, it had been thoroughly picked clean in other studies, notably Ellmann’s biography which I first read in 1981 or 82. And anyway, MBK mainly seemed of use for the old “spot the reference to JJ’s own experience” approach, which I was frankly dismissive of, as a scholarly bent. Stanislaus is all about their shared experiences. In a represented discussion with JJ, Stanislaus dismisses the ending of a juvenile play JJ wrote because the ending has no basis in Joyce’s own experience (i.e., JJ had no lady love in his life at the time) so SJ is criticizing his brother for inventing a woman wholesale. It’s pretty feeble as criticism but, as no one but SJ and William Archer read the play, maybe it was a feeble scene (though Archer, a publisher, found that scene to be best). It’s not to besmirch SJ that I note this but mainly to say that his rendering of JJ is steeped in “what I know about him”—which is always going to miss the big picture. But here is what SJ says much to the point: “He [JJ] maintained that art had no purpose; that all fixed purposes falsify it, but that it had a cause, namely, necessity, the imperative inward necessity for the imagination to recreate from life its own ordered synthesis. He spoke of the importance of the artist in the community, and insisted on his right to develop his personality freely in accordance with his own artistic conscience, and without being drawn into movements or making himself the mouthpiece of others. The artist inherits difficulties enough to struggle with in his own soul” (p. 129).

Reading this, I can say that that attitude is one I had in youth, that was much like my driving ideal. Since I knew little of Joyce until the end of high school, the common ground for that view might well have been Ibsen. I had an Ibsen phase around 15—though nothing like JJ’s infatuation with Ibsen as a living artist he actually corresponded with! Probably the main source is Nietzsche which SJ doesn’t speak of much except to note the part he played in creating, in Duffy of “A Painful Case,” a character somewhat based on SJ. In any case, that sense of the artist as his own criteria was clear to me and was my “test” in evaluating artworks: was the creator his own person, working from that sense of “necessity”? It’s what I embraced in Dylan whenever he turned away from what was expected of him in search of whatever he felt most compelled to do. It’s what, eventually, made me a defender/explicator of Finnegans Wake. For I believed fully in JJ’s reasons for writing it, though I never insisted that a “general reader” had any reason to read it. And that’s my view of art anyway: when it comes to “community” I don’t recognize one. Though I suppose that it is how one gets from the inward imaginative necessity to a commodity for sale in a marketplace. It must pass through “a community,” the “win friends and influence his uncle” phase. I still see writing the way I see art works: unique. Certainly, as with prints and other mechanically arrived at works you can make as many copies as you like but the notion of “supplying a market” only makes sense if there is a market—and is a market ever “a community”?  This is shown in JJ’s own career. I always loved the story of how Ulysses was published: it was done by a community; only when it went forth into the international marketplace did it have to deal with being suppressed and pirated and all that mess. Certainly I’m glad there were commercial versions of it available by my lifetime, as I am that Dylan got a contract with a major label, after winning over the “folk city community” of NYC, but how those things came about is always murky to me. In other words, how the artist gets the interest of the money-men, out to make money off his “inner necessity” by means of consumers rather than a community.

I have to say it’s a shame Stanislaus didn’t get to the Trieste years. His pointing out sources for the Dubliners stories (often from something SJ witnessed) makes me want to read them again (it’s been ages).