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Edited by RICHARD ELLMANN 440 pages. Viking. $18.95. $5.95 paperback...
...this attention is of a kind that Joyce would welcome. Irish Journalist Stan Gebler Davies has taken the measure of the two previous Joyce biographies (by Herbert Gorman and Richard Ellmann) and found them too hagiographic for his taste. By contrast, Davies' Joyce seems to spend most of his youth consorting with Dublin prostitutes and most of his maturity lying drunk in a succession of Continental gutters. Clearly the man liked wine and women; it is his song that Davies manages to ignore. He dismisses, for instance, the difficult but hardly inaccessible Finnegans Wake as a "monument to perversity...
...Ellmann adequately explained the circumstances surrounding Jim Joyce's letters to Nora in his biography, but he was muzzled by the Joyce estate when it came to actually divulging their content. All he could say then was that they "veered between blunt sexual excitation and extreme spirituality." Only now can we see the complete picture of the heaven and hell of Joyce's passions...
...small failures of Ellmann's new collection that Nora's reply to Joyce's paranoid accusation is never mentioned. Ellmann called it "a pathetic yet strangely dignified letter" in his biography. It was lost but can be partly reconstructed from a letter Joyce sent to Nora dated August 31, 1909: a condescending missive saying "you are not, as you say, a poor uneducated girl...
...just maybe it can all be reduced in the same way that Bloom's world was reduced to Molly's backside, to one image: discharges Joyce like to call "quick little merry cracks." But those old farts are for the scholars to decipher; in the meantime, Richard Ellmann should be thanked for giving us more pages with margins to be heavily soiled...