by Anna Vaught
I couldn’t speak of him—to others I mean—of Daddy yet, so I listened, but give it time. Then I was bolder, came down my extraordinary father’s cold red road and I read to them, at the bookshop, from his Pomes Penyeach. I rehearsed so hard A Flower Given to My Daughter—Too much, too much, but you can do it Lucia! consoled Violet, in my head, in my heart, willing me on—so I managed. I said Love, hear thou from his work and I was mouthing only of Daddy when I said... when I said (of course I am crying, I am crying)... I was a wonder wild.
And the audience said Was that you, in the poem? and I said, was proud, Why yes I believe it was.
To still me, after I had listened and read to these reverent guests who so valued my father, I wrote poems of my own: Pomes Dolereach. Do you like it, the title? I know it to be a little silly, but you, Violet, loved jokes and never gave them up, even on your deathbed. One day my poems might be read by anyone, but as they are now, they are only for him and for my latter-day friend. I enjoy playing now, again, with lettrines and illuminations, but also I know the harm a book can do, after all. So I’m cautious. Mostly.
Oh and this is how I saw Daddy again. I read him aloud, let him inspire me and so called him into being. Don’t say that’s madness.
No.
It’s imagination and love.
Here’s a thought for you all, too. Jung was an interesting fellow. In a way, I wish we’d kept up. I knew he was on a quest for self-exploration; he was uneasy and searching. And he had much to say about madness. So here: Madness, said he, is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical. Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law. What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life. You see, I learned to abide by the rules of the mental hospital in order to be quiet and to be able to leave. But beyond that, who are you kidding? None of us knows what we are up to! I see as clearly as I am able and I enjoy the mystery of it all, just as Violet encouraged me to do.
Oh yes and Sam Beckett. Well I really saw him. Actually, we could lose the adverb because really is subjective, isn’t it? You know, it’s all mystery and unknown law! But yes, Sam came to me in Paris, where I went next. No, not another affair; he was betrothed then to Susanne. But he listened to my work and encouraged me and was cordial. I was proud.
And my novel. My Work in Progress. I had almost completed it before but it had been wrested from my head and hand and I do not know by whom. Psychotropics? Phenothiazines? Hypnotics? Sedatives? Mother or Giorgio? That cross boy my nephew. Does it matter? I will finish that one day; it’s well on the way in its draft form. I started all over again. About flight; freedom. Of course.
I am thinking aplenty, but now thinking is not always frightening. Life is not easy, but I am free: not Poor Isa, not poor Dilly, sister of my father’s Stephen Dedalus. I can travel, not be a sacrifice to someone or some thing. I am educated, a polyglot and I have the words and the dance. But yet, oh yet. But still voyaging to work out who or what I am, in a mad swerve that belongs to me and only to me. You remember what you said now Violet, I hope?
That those who are confined have the best imaginations.
His work sold. Daddy’s. Of course. As we knew, he was a genius. But I was not, was I? Though as Violet knew, my imagination was rich. Yours is too. Test it.
Could we be geniuses together? Try? You’d better be a testy virago, though I am open to offers.
As I was saying, his work sold. It sold. Some days so well that I raged because barnacle and Daddy birthed me in penury, immured me, and I think, I can’t go on, I will go on. And so on and on. They let me have a little money from the estate; the stuff that, I suppose, would have been spent by mother and Giorgio on keeping me inside. And I earn some, too. I can travel, times away from my work in Paris, helping the children and the new mothers to heal and dance and feel joy and strength, as Margaret Morris would, so she had trained me, have me do. I wanted, I needed to go back to Paris, so I spent days, too, at Shakespeare and Company Bookshop. Gradually, I would write more, in my Work In Progress, my novel, or another book, if need be, my own Wake, of the Paris of my girlhood. But as I was saying, Shakespeare and Co. It used to be called Le Mistral and that’s a word I have always loved. Mistral. So. I have had time to spend with Sylvia Beach, founder of the original bookshop of this name, at 12, Rue de l’Odéon and the one person brave enough to take on my father’s Ulysses. Wait: there is a plaque for her. Good. Dance. Lucia. Dance for your daddy.
EN 1922 DANS CETTE MAISON
M’ELLE SYLVIA BEACH PUBLIA
‘ULYSSES’
DE JAMES JOYCE.
J.J.S.S.F.
Do you know that in 1941—and my father had died eleven months before, yes, and I only heard it on my radio in hospital (can you imagine? Giorgio, barnacle did not tell me)—a Nazi officer went into her shop and insisted that she sell him the last copy of Finnegans Wake? She would not sell it.
It is not for sale.
Yes it is for sale it is in your shop.
No, still it is not for sale.
I am getting angry SELL IT TO ME THIS INSTANT.
No it is not for sale.
And he, brute, told her that he would confiscate everything in her shop and close it down. She was majestic. I heard that she took everything upstairs to an apartment. Do you know that Sylvia Beach spent six months in an internment camp at Vittel? She hid the book. Left it on the roof, in a nest box, brown waxed paper, a sturdy bag on top and safe, so a little bird told me, and I have it now. My dear copy of Finnegans Wake. It says Lucy Light at its beginning. Came Sylvia home, to this lovely place. She told me she hadn’t written the inscription so... who did? Well now I think that, somehow, it was you, Violet. But how on earth? That secret went with you. Like I said before, there’s a multitude of mysteries.
Sometimes I stay at Shakespeare and Company, a tumbleweed: that’s what they are called. Tumbleweeds. Anyone can tumble in for a while and home up. You browse, read, work among the books and rest there, like one of us and one of them, a sleeping giant, yourself. I do it too. Why don’t you come on, too? I sleep there, work in the bookshop for a few hours and if you look at all the one-page autobiographies there—thousands; it is part of being a tumbleweed—you will see mine. It says Lucia Anna Joyce. Roamer. Daughter of James Joyce. Rager. Artist of sorts, dancer and teacher. Friend. Mistral!
I was happy with that description and to include the gorgeous blustery word that Blanche had so loved. Mistral. Make it apply to me, with all my spirits and the energy that had been bundled under. And Violet, I will make a page for you, too; invite others to comment. I shall keep an eye on that!
And I remember. I shivered when we ran through the streets of Paris, to the feast at the house of Monsieur Charcot and I didn’t know why, then. It was because, one day, the bookshop, a home of sorts, would be there, nearby.
These days, I am relaxed about what I believe in, because of everything I learned and which happened, so I’ll give prescience a go. Why not?
Before I left the hospital in Northampton, I changed my will because I was free and I had to be sure of what came next. You don’t need to be completely better to go out into the world, so I was wary. Dr Griffith helped me. You, Violet had a hunch, didn’t you? Give your wills, your thoughts, to your women. But for now, I am out and here. I won’t be silenced. Now you can know me and always, if that is what you would like. Harriet Weaver, lately Daddy’s patron, and her fine, fine goddaughter Jane Lidderdale, made me free. Like I said, friends of our family whom I thought were gone. And I was wrong. And oh, my Violet: while it was too late to save everything, more of my letters are there, so others can see me, or at least more of me, in time to come. We got there before they were immolated.
> And there’s Blanche; Bertha inhabiting the draft of my novel. Violet, you made me your scribe. God love you.
And if you still want to know what my book is about? The novel I mentioned? You are reading it. Well I am sure you grasped that. You’re clever. And I am a clever girl. And I don’t want Violet to be forgotten. In my head it is called Work in Progress, because I am, because he was, dying too soon, because of The Wake. But out loud I call it Saving Lucia because of Violet, who started the whole shooting match off, extending her hands like Giotto’s St Francis with the birds, then making us fly. The book’s still drafting; a juddery old thing, but I’m proud of it. Do feel free to write in the margins though. Cross things out if you’re just too disbelieving!
Such episodes in our story! Can you believe we did it, that we shot Mussolini? Had it been sooner, then there was more that we could all have done. Saved Matteotti, leader of the Socialist party, whom he had butchered, two years before our Lebels were raised. No-one should fail to come to their family. Be found in a ditch. The many unspoken, but known and loved. It is too big to grasp, what things in time to come may not be. Abyssinia I know of. And his Augustan Empire: the glittering things he held proud; times in other countries. Different, yes? Originally, thus: Il Duce’s wife arrested and, like us, committed to a mental hospital. The rest of her life was a nightmare of escapes, re-arrests and attempts to trace her son. He, emperor, had made sure she had enough pain to break her. This boy: adopted by the former Fascist police chief of Sopramonte. Ida Dalser died, they said, of a brain haemorrhage in 1937 at a Venetian institution. I think they took her off, but only after she’d died of the crying. Her son went five years later, also in an institution, near Milan. They injected and injected and kept him in a coma. His heart gave way, they said. You heard all this earlier. Now I want to say, Not in our story, oh no. How should a soul be capable of such cruelty?
At Coppet I had warned her. She was vile to me, if you remember, but as Violet would have stated, ‘It is not fair, what they have done.’ I suppose you could have said that, when he took off her husband in 1926, we’d made her safe, but you couldn’t be sure. He was already plotting and planning, cronies all about; she already chirping. So I was glad to warn; to note that she’d listened.
But I cry at night. We couldn’t save everyone.
But we’d done for himself, for bad bird Benito, hadn’t we?
Bang. This time, four Lebel revolvers. Square on Campidoglio. Then we were gone, on the wing. Who killed Cock Robin? He who thought he was cock of the wark? We did.
So.
Oh enormous things happened because of what we did. It all starts with the freedom, in mind, of the individual and no son should be motherless, just as—and I am sorry, Daddy, for saying this—no mother should be without her son, as Helen Kastor Joyce your daughter in law was when you took the little child from her, my brother, my Giorgio, my one time adventurer, my captain fey on Galway Bay. My. Stop. You are already gone. You all did wrong. I do have some tenderness, but on my raging Dilly Days, then I might come out and eat Mother and son and sometimes Daddy with bacon and spice, like the tripe so loved by Rabelais, and I would eat all three, a Pantagruelian dish, until I had bad indigestion. Blanche: she said something like this about her spectators at the Salpêtrière. Such gargantuan intrigues. Get your napkin! What a feast we had, at the house of Charcot. But I am sorry. It is only in words that I make my violence and calm my appetites now; it was really all I wanted.
That—and love. And I came to love you Violet. You were not, could not be, my friend so long and I could not change your time to go because you were tired and frail and off, helter skelter, so you said, to see your Maker and roast the bad priests and a few others. You told all this, in the last days. They never understood how funny you were, God love you.
Oh! you said: Do it right, miss. You might be St Lucy but you’re also Anna the putative Mother of The Virgin Mary, so what would be your excuse now? Oh dear girl, silly girl.
I answered you back, though you were dying. Oh! I mocked a little, because I said Shh now, old girl! but I loved you. Then, I told you there was a painting I had been thinking about. I said: And do you know that, in a painting by Jacobello del Fiore that I once saw in Fermo, Italy, St Lucy is kneeling before the shrine of St Agatha. I’m going in hard now Violet, but that’s alright. St Agatha had her breasts removed; you, too, suffered such levelling, such scars. And you told me that you shot yourself there, too. The things you have suffered, in illness, in violence and in such deep sadness. I thought about that painting, then about you and, in my dreams some nights ago, St Peter the Apostle came to you in prison and healed you. Now... well my friend, it is as if much of life, the paintings I saw, words I swallowed, were like a prefiguration of times to come; time with you. Is it like you and me, in a way, that painting? And were you, in a prison, healed?
I was crying, obviously. You were leaving, but you, old bird, looked at me and I heard a throaty little giggle and you trilled: Well now Lucia, you decide. Go inland dear girl. What does your imagination tell you? Then you pulled me close and said: Promise you will remember?
It was only I that heard this one. I, said the song thrush.
Outside flew the lark, the goldfinch, nuthatch and the modest little sparrow.
I.
Elsewhere, saved, robin, nightingale.
And then Violet was at peace. You were, my Lady.
You got Mass. I made sure of that. I am Lucy Light and know a thing or two about persuasion.
The priests were there, just as you’d wanted. The censer clicked and I thought I heard you cackle. The lover and the damask rose and the scent of jasmine; I sensed you swooning with these memories. I’d listened so carefully to you and you were not what they thought you were. I imagined more things for you.
I thought, I’d done it again just before we lost you.
Tried to make moments for you. You had said that you’d like a few little things before you left us, so it went: your fiancé back, one time. Brothers: Victor, Willie, Harry, the champion tobogganer; a new painting by De Maistre took place at brother Willie’s place in France and this time you were looking up and sister Constance, who was dutiful, holding your hand. In all the photographs taken at St Andrew’s, as the birds came to you, not once did you or could you face the camera. This was different, as you posed for De Maistre’s initial sketch: you faced the artist head on and without shame. I wondered if Blanche had whispered to you about that! Show yourself for who you are, she might have said. Or show yourself for how you wish or need to be seen! Yes, I am glad that, as you died, I could tell all these stories to you. Create these moments, when you were supine and comfortable.
You had said to me: We fly, Passerines. Lucia, dear girl, I imagine we will be buried in different places, but please make them give us our Mass, and listen to what we both want. Have yourself buried by your daddy, in Zurich, if you want. Put our graves with the proper inscriptions: take yours from your daddy, if you will, but make mine from the nightingale, the lark or the goldfinch. I do not mind. Don’t let mine be plain, sweet mad girl! But not overwrought, either. After the comma there must be text; I think that they, whoever attends to my grave, may leave it unfinished, but after mad I shall need something new.
And the birds came, as we sang into the dust. Passerines. I was better, gradually, then. I thought that Dr Griffith might listen to me. As you saw, he did. Got others to, like I said. Official folk, you know. Poor old Dr Griffith must have been in such an imbroglio that night at St Andrew’s when we caused chaos just before our flight. That night, when down the corridors of the asylum echoed a turbulent commotion and alarms flew. This was the bit the staff heard, but they’d missed the whispers, glissando of the winged helpers no louder than a heartbeat through a greatcoat; rustles of paper and scratches of soft pencil. A tremendous thing. Nothing could have stopped it then. Poor man. We must have given him a fright!
/> And Dr Griffith kindly spoke to those who remained, to your executor, Violet, about the headstone. More words were allowed, so on the stone it went, it fluted, I fly to thee.
I wanted to add all kinds of this and that, but I told myself no. But still, it seemed a bit melancholy, so on I went, and now it said,
THE HONOURABLE VIOLET ALBINA GIBSON,
1876-1956.
Even the sparrow finds a home and the swallow a nest.
I fly to thee.
In my head, it also said I shot Mussolini which was better than the drear record of your failed attempt in Burke’s Peerage—Went to Rome in 1926 and tried to assassinate Mussolini by shooting—but so.
Violet, I will not have you forgotten.
That day you died, Dr Griffith confided in me; he said: I was a scripture champion you know. In Carmarthenshire, turn of the century. He was tired and wizened, but I thought that he had learned from you, Violet. And when you were slipping away and I was allowed to see you, hold your hand, he stood near me. I had said I promise to remember, Honourable lady. And I saw Griffith and his eyes were moist. He stood on his own, turning round to look at the wide sweep of lawns and that little spot where the birds flew to you, Violet. Could he see all assembled company in the room? He’d missed some prime case studies there!
Love always, Blanche; Bertha. I’ll not forget.
