Day 2: This Is Fun!

I’m not sure that “A Fire in the Brain,” the essay on Lucia Joyce, James’s daughter, was Acocella’s best choice to open the collection. In some ways it’s pretty representative of the rest of the book, but it’s not quite focused. (Speaking of which, Joyce appears to have had a pronounced case of strabismus, obvious even in the three-quarter-profile photo facing the essay.)

The occasion of the essay was evidently the publication of Carol Loeb Shloss’s biography Lucia  Joyce: To Dance in the Wake, which left Acocella unimpressed. In fact, although she mentions the book’s title early on, Acocella then studiously ignores the book for the first two-fifths of essay, heading instead straight for the biographical sketch. When she does finally take up Shloss’s book, it’s to administer a mighty smiting.

Her primary complaint against To Dance in the Wake is the liberties Shloss takes with documentation and fact. In the absence of almost all primary sources—none of Joyce’s letters remain, nor her diaries or poems, nor even a novel she was supposed to have been writing—Shloss, according to Acocella, tells the story the way she wants to. Joyce, perhaps dancing mutely in her father’s study while he works, communicates to him through her own art, wordlessly giving him the theme of flow for his Work in Progress. “This elevation of Lucia to the role of collaborator on Finnegans Wake,” writes Acocella, “is Shloss’s most spectacular act of inflation, but by no means the only one. The less she knows, the more she tells us.”

After this stinging rebuke, Acocella relents: “In some sections, however, Shloss forgets that she is writing a symbolist poem or a Laingian treatise and starts writing a biography. That, of course, is when she has some information to go on.” The bits Acocella seems to appreciate most involve empathetic recognition of the terrible circumstances of Joyce’s life, such as losing all her possessions when she was stuck in her first institution, or receiving awful experimental treatments for schizophrenia.

The last section of the essay places To Dance in the Wake into the tradition of the “biography-of-the-artist’s-woman” and characterizes that genre by means of examples. It then explains what might be gained from books in the genre: “All these biographical studies, subtle or not, are valuable, and not only for the sake of justice (when that is what they achieve) but because they tell an important truth about how artists get their work done.” This is where Acocella comes around to her book’s topic of ego strength, but it seems a little harsh to conclude that the schizophrenic Joyce “encountered obstacles and threw up her hands.” In fact, this whole coda feels irrelevant to the rest of the essay. With it in place, this one essay beats every drum in the book’s trap—biography, book reviewing, intellectual analysis, genre criticism, and ego strength—which makes it a decent opener, but it reads better without the final meditation on the artistic perseverance of a mentally ill woman.