A note about CALICO

Samuel Beckett arrived impoverished in Paris in 1928 to be a junior lecturer at the Ecole Normale. Tall, with weak lungs and increasingly poor eye-sight, he looked like a bag of bones. However, he was an excellent cricketer: he had played for Trinity College against Northamptonshire as a medium-pace bowler. And he continued to play scrum half for a local French rugby team. But the rugby had to stop for his own safety. When playing he was virtually blind without his glasses, and his cadaverous shape found him almost crushed lifeless in various rucks. He’d published a few poems while at Trinity College, and his first days in Paris were filled with Dante and Proust, cricket results and the discovery of Fernet-Branca. A passionate love affair with a young cousin, Peggy, was already doomed. At this time, his fellow tutor, Thomas MacGreevy, introduced Sam to the Joyce household. Sam was 22. James Joyce and Nora Barnacle had two children, Lucia, 21, and Giorgio, 23. James and Nora originally had met on June 16, 1904, and soon after the young lovers exiled themselves from Ireland and moved to Trieste. Between Trieste and Paris in 1928, the whole family moved over 120 times. In Paris alone, the Joyces moved 20 times in seven years. When Joyce met Beckett, he almost immediately offered Sam a job as an unpaid assistant on an enormous fiction – ‘work in progress’ which was to be the successor of Ulysses. Beckett jumped at the chance to work with the most notorious writer in Paris. But this was no ordinary family he had entered. It was be-devilled with health. Nora had recently undergone an operation for cancer of the womb. James suffered continuously from glaucoma of the eyes. And their daughter Lucia showed unnerving fits and uncontrollable behaviour. Giorgio alone was the sane and calm member of the family.

Worse still for the young Beckett was the gradual realisation of the deep tensions within the family. For when Joyce first met Nora, she was a chamber maid at Finn’s Hotel close by the Liffey River. For certain reasons he feared her past and he was aware of the stories of hotel maids taking clients down to the river at night. In his heart Joyce always suspected Nora was one of those chamber maids by the river. Before Ulysses was published in 1922 in Paris, James Joyce was the author of a play Exiles; a book of short stories, Dubliners; a book of poems, Chamber Music, and a revised early work, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The fame of Ulysses quickly spread in Paris, and several editions were issued; meanwhile legal barriers in the name of ‘public decency’ kept the book from release in the UK, or the States, and it was automatically banned in Ireland. Joyce’s personality was indelibly attached to the book: the epic novel about a day in Dublin was set on June 16, ‘Bloomsday’, that very day James first walked out with Nora.

For young Sam Beckett this was quite a learning curve. What he least expected was the shock of meeting Lucia Joyce. Lucia was a keen but awkward free-form dancer. She designed elegant lettrines for limited imprints of her father’s books. Above all, she spent long hours beside her father helping him assemble the epic ‘work in progress’. Lucia believed she could read the future, and she announced to Sam in no uncertain terms he was the chosen man for her. For a while, the bemused Sam accepted the imaginary game of ‘Mr and Mrs Beckett’. Lucia became a wonderful companion, and they seemed on the surface inseparable. But there was a darker side to all this. She arrived unannounced in his tutor rooms. She hid herself in the room. She became demanding, it was a form of flirtatious suffocation. Gradually, Sam was confronted by her strange involuntary shrieking fits. These fits appeared to have no time pattern, and occurred in any kind of public or private place. They most often consisted of a barrage of virtual forensic sexual detail. When the barrage stopped, it was as if some kind of cathartic act had spent itself. Sam Beckett’s response to this wasn’t immediate. He noticed how little Nora seemed to care about these outbursts. He realised with some dismay how Joyce was unable to respond properly to his daughter. Yes, Joyce swore that his daughter was not insane and must never be sectioned off to any asylum. But no, he often behaved like an animal caught by car headlamps – frozen and speechless. What was happening here to Lucia? Why did Sam feel so responsible for her condition?

In the days that followed Sam was made aware of how he could help Lucia. If he occasionally fell in with her fantasias about their ‘married life’ together, Lucia would thank him and calm herself. Then, after moments, she’d rally and return to normal everyday matters.

This ‘work in progress’ by Joyce was a mammoth, barely readable tale, filled to the brim of every page with new coinages and often comic sulphurous compounds of words. It begins and ends with the same sentence. It tests the reader’s concentration to the utmost. And this book remains now either the bible of Modernism or the tombstone of Modernism. It has the appearance of a book partly written in a language seemingly foreign to the reading mind. Eventually, it was published in 1939 under the title Finnegans Wake.

At times you might want to step back, and ask yourself what were these two grown intelligent men doing? Constructing new words with comic compounds. And yet the incoherence was ameliorated by a tactile lyricism. It was a new language of polished constructs. So vivid beside the prosaic tongue. Yes, of course there were others in Germany – Schwitters’ Sneeze Poem etc. But was it all merely just an aesthetic preoccupation beside the world emergence of fascism and the British betrayal of the Irish people? Take that small step back, and one can see the young 20th century yearning for more immediate communication. The Mann brothers, Thomas Hardy, Emily Dickinson, Mayakovski, Seferis, Garcia Lorca, even the misbegotten Horst Wessel. Writers all, achieving some kind of spirit of the age. The yearning for immediacy – the advent of movies, the telegram, short-hand, Reuters, and the clarity of new journalism. They were an enormous influence. And then here find James Joyce and Samuel Beckett coining compounds for hours like a pair of word scoundrels playing a paranoid game of Scrabble, without observable rules.

Sometimes it is necessary to look back at these artists of Modernism, take note of their mandarin literature, their determination to make literature ‘difficult’, and ask yourself – yes, geniuses each one, but have their works been kidnapped for an elitist agenda in the academic groves? Because so much of Modernism now appears to look incongruous beside the 20th century’s new age of mass communication. Meanwhile, a number of illustrious doctors hired by Joyce could not identify Lucia’s sickness. And this is where one can only make a passing reference to a ‘forbidden’ area in the Joyce family saga. An area which is usually glossed over with no uncertain timidity, and it still cannot be too glibly mouthed today in the teeth of the shocked animosity from the James Joyce camp. Almost any reference to this ‘forbidden’ area seems scarcely possible, what with the autocracy of the family estate, the punishing approval most Joyce scholars have to adhere to, and it has never been an easy matter to translate the clues.

In brief, Finnegans Wake describes the Fall. Earwicker (or HCE) has committed a foul act. In the mildest of forms it suggests Earwicker has taken his own daughter aside and both of them have revealed their genitalia to each other. Earwicker’s loyal wife stands by him. But his sons, Shem and Shaun, take different sides in the dispute. The enormous book proceeds through Dante-like circles of Hell. History and mythology interweave the chapters and direct us to a reincarnation we must awaken to. Then Shem finds a letter that appears to prove his father’s guilt. Deep shame and the plunging knife of guilt consume the story. Nobody will now deny this book is about incest with a daughter. Curiously, Sam’s friend, Thomas MacGreevy, always referred to Joyce as ‘Shem’. More curiously, academic studies of Joyce – in fear they will be denied any quotation rights – have daringly included Lucia’s few known words to her father – ‘I will never be unfaithful to you’, but so often without further comment.

No matter how much Joyce loved Lucia as a father, if the true root of her damaged life lies not with him, why this thunderous silence which surrounds her? Why the ‘lost’ diaries? Why the ‘lost’ novel manuscript? Why the destruction of all her letters to her father? Why has she been vapourised? In the absence of history, imagination may be the only resort.

It makes a lot of sense to realise that Joyce could not eke out a proper living from a few limited editions of Ulysses. And the peripatetic days of chaotic moves must come to an end. It says a lot for the plight of his genius when we discover the Joyce family after 1928 had the benefit of three patrons, and money arrived from London and Paris, Dublin and New York. There was one instance when a patron arrived to present Joyce with a cheque for £ 12,000. A sum of money not unadjacent to a million dollars today. The Joyces loved fur coats and fine hats, the occasional hired car, and they dressed regularly for Sunday lunches at chosen restaurants. The brunt of the money was spent on Joyce’s glaucoma, bills for Lucia’s irregular stays at clinics, Nora’s ill health, or to pay for Giorgio’s voice lessons. The new apartment had a certain style about it. Those years of grinding poverty in Trieste and Zurich were over.

For the young Sam Beckett it was an extraordinary experience to be welcomed into the Joyce tribe and virtually treated as a new son. It was even stranger for him to find himself bewitched and repulsed by Lucia in equal measure. Weeks passed by, Sam was in the apartment on a daily basis, and Lucia’s demands on him were increasingly obsessive. It is claimed she once murmured to him ‘What a day, life is’. And Sam slowly grasped what was happening. Her fantasias about their future ‘life’ together were so vivid, it actually helped Lucia gain a grip of sanity on the real world at home. And as he entered further into her imagined world, she could turn to him and explain to him these dreamings were the only measure of normal life she will ever have. She knew her days of sanity were numbered. Samuel Beckett showed unique patience and compassion for all this. Although he could not be expected to know the roots of her illness. At the last minute, he pulled back from her. It was at one a cruel and yet compassionate act. If they had gone on to a proper relationship impossible damage would destroy her life with the ultimate reality of sex. And there would be the inevitable split from James Joyce, the man he most admired in Paris. For a 22 year old junior teacher in Paris it was a sensitive decision out of numbed compassion.

Calico tries to come to terms with the idea of schizophrenia in an ignorant age. But schizophrenia is too general a name for a wide group of incapacitating mental ills. The term was introduced in 1911 by E Bleuler, after Kahlbaum and Hecker’s more reductionist labels of ‘catatonia’ and ‘hebephrenia’. The modern treatment of schizophrenia concentrates now on drugs like Chlorpromazine. However, there is no quantifiable data on this illness, because no single general cause is known. This writer has been struck by the similarity of Lucia Joyce’s condition to the Tourette Syndrome. Georges Tourette (1857-1904) made a few selective studies of patients who suffered with sudden involuntary bursts of abusive/obscene shouting (coprolalia), and exaggerated copy of seemingly ordinary actions and conversations (echopraxia). Tourette’s is treated with certain drugs like Haldol. Modern medicine is inclined to believe that excessive doses of Dopamine, one of the body’s neurorochemicals, is the main cause. Be that as it may, but no specific diagnosis exactly fits Lucia’s intense prophecies and her virtual forensic preoccupation with sexual detail. Above all, there is little credit given to her for her daily struggle to stay self-aware and human in the midst of an extraordinary family itself under some public scrutiny.

It is I suggest a serious mistake to palm Lucia off with such a specific neurological label as Tourette’s. Too easily it lets the entire family off the hook. And these days psychiatrists appear to have a sea-change of doubt in their behavioural therapy. Their diagnoses can often lack reliability. We could be stuck with focussing on problems and doling out labels like Tourette’s, but should we be looking at the past like that? Recently, Richard Bentall, Professor of Clinical Psychology at Manchester University, has strongly advised us ‘to abandon psychiatric diagnoses altogether and instead try to explain and understand the actual experiences and behaviours of psychotic people’. Calico, with the humility of hind-sight, tries to reveal psychotic behaviour out of family events. It is ‘Critical Fiction’. Thus the play must not aggrandise itself with even more diagnostics. Lucia’s memory doesn’t need ‘tablets’. It needs to be stripped of the ‘mad girl’ epithet. And show how she acted out neuroses to be found in James and Nora. Neuroses her parents were none too keen on examining. She let herself to be ‘seen’ as a whore, a street walker. Just as Joyce himself stained Nora with the hotel chamber maid legend. Lucia had read her mother’s letters to James Joyce, letters filled with as much Obscene’ material as Joyce required to masturbate over. Letters that Joyce demanded. And later Lucia would burst out in the middle of a meal with a torrent of identical foul language. Calico suggests the entire family needed her as the ‘emotional dustbin’ in the family. So that they could appear to function properly, with their ultra-dressed appearance and conservative mien. And yet this play proceeds out of character, not out of plot. It can only provide a map of their emotional lives. CalicoWaiting for GodotWaiting for GodotGodotMolloy