Joyce: ‘Not a drop has passed our lips.’
Nora: ‘Then it is your eyes again.’
Magnifying glass over etymological dictionary: blood-globe, headache. More wrappings around Joyce's head than a mummy. Bandages under grey Homburg, smoked glasses. Stub of period moustache, just like my father.
‘Did you ever see my eyes?’
‘No.’
‘Did you never have the curiosity, while I was sleeping, to take off my glasses and look at my eyes?’
‘Pulling back the lids? No.’
‘One of these days I'll show them to you. It seems they've gone all white.’
I refilmed, on outdated 8mm stock, garden footage my father shot of his father, shortly before he died. Wartime in Wales. My grandfather slipped away, forgotten face over the rim of the cot, while I was a baby. He is trapped in a home movie: convalescent, dapper but unwell. Bones push against flesh as he holds up seedcake for his dog, a Scottie, to jump. Tilted hat, good tailoring; thin legs crossed. The dog jumps and jumps. My mother is there, by his side, in a summer dress. This man, a doctor, is very tired. He performs a reflex ritual, perhaps for the last time: remembering how to lift an arm. A moment that parallels Gisele Freund's 1938 photograph of Joyce in a deckchair. More dead than alive. Moving image slowing to a still: bleaching to nothing.
When this clip, recycled as a memory induced by motorway travel, was logged for the script of the film of London Orbital, the young woman doing the job wrote: ‘James Joyce in garden.’ Thereby confirming my fantasy of a physical resemblance between two dandified grandfathers: Henry Sinclair and James Joyce.
Joyce died in Zurich, 13 January 1941, of peritonitis from a duodenal ulcer; leaving Lucia, dependent on distracted relatives, in occupied France. A clinic in Pornichet. Lucia saw her father's obituary in a newspaper, an accidental reference that preceded the letter from her brother, Giorgio. She wanted to get away from hospitals: to Paris, Zurich, Galway. Harriet Weaver, her father's patron, agreed to try her in London.
When she was in Weaver's care, before the war, Joyce sent a camera. Something to replace the stress of drawing: the lettrines supposed to decorate private editions of his work. Photographs reveal Lucia's strabismus, the turn in her eye that failed to evade the Kodak's inquisition. The flaw that emphasises her dark-browed beauty: the height, the dancer's athleticism. Dead photographs speak of the aborted beginnings of things: careers, night walks, lovers, cities.
‘When Lucia forwarded snapshots to him in mid-October,’ wrote Carol Loeb Shloss (in her biography of this troubled daughter), ‘Joyce saw a sullen, immobile young woman lying in a hammock with a book.’ A lost girl swinging in a net, enjoying the warmth, the pointless eros of an English garden. Practice for the asylum years. The nunnery of mental hygiene. Lucia, who would soon be threatened by Nazi eugenicists, culling difference, is captured at Loveland's Cottage, where Miss Weaver brought her, along with Mrs Middlemost, a Scottish nurse chosen for ‘her splendid physique’. The snapshot Joyce received was taken as evidence of Lucia's deteriorating condition: an upraised hand, palm open. Her belt tight, a restraint. Long, loose cardigan. Overhanging leaves: coarse and spiky as the girl's hair.
Joyce wrote to Weaver: ‘My daughter is in a madhouse where I hear she fell off a tree.’ Once more he echoes Clare: the fall associated with epileptic fits. Doctors soothing hot bruises with cold baths, lukewarm mutton.
Dr Macdonald, Lucia's London psychiatrist, was a needle man; an associate of Naum Ischlondsky. They worked on a supposed connection between the endocrine glands and the nervous system: blood affecting mood. Serums were made, as Carol Shloss explains, ‘from the tissues of embryonic animals’. Lucia could be injected only after a ‘violent struggle’. Macdonald laid out a grim regime: confinement to bed for seven weeks, no visitors, no other medication. Clammy London summer. Lucia ‘sang incessantly in four languages’. She threw books from windows.
The story moves towards an inevitable destination. Macdonald arranged for Lucia to be returned to St Andrew's Hospital, which she had visited, briefly, in 1935 and 1936. A three-time loser, lifer. Maria Jolas escorted her from Paris to London. Dr Macdonald was waiting at Ruislip airfield with a car. He drove Lucia to Northampton. In her luggage she had: an identity card, a little money, a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes bought by Jolas. The cigarettes, prison currency, were used. The other items, after Lucia's death, were gifted to the library of the University of London. More boxes, more forensic bags, more permission slips.
Outlasting Clare, in silence and stamina, Lucia Anna Joyce remained in Northampton from 15 March 1951 until her death on 12 December 1982. She had already been living at St Andrew's for two years when Alan Moore was born.
In mid-England, mid-journey, flying and drowning become confused. Drowning and writing. Dreaming and walking. Finnegans Wake: Lucia searching out words for her father, the book for which she is the inspiration. The problem. The role of secretary (sub-author) taken away from her by Samuel Beckett. Until he is banished, for the crime – as Nora Barnacle sees it – of trifling with her daughter's affections.
She is drowning. Agenbite. Save her. Agenbite. All against us. She will drown me with her, eyes and hair. Lank coils of seaweed hair around me, my heart, my soul. Salt green death.
Joyce asks Lucia to look at the song ‘Dublin Bay’, to change it: the young couple must not be drowned. The man will bide his time at the bottom of the sea, then rise to the surface. Joyce, fond father, continued to believe that Lucia, dosed on sea-water, would swim back to him, to health. Hospitals taught her to breathe underwater.
She visited Jung. He couldn't help. There was an unresolved argument with the author of Ulysses: a book that dared to trespass on his territory. Beckett, marooned in London (in the Thirties), went with his therapist, W. R. Bion, to hear Jung lecture. He picked up on the notion of patients having their horoscopes cast. He used it in his first published novel, Murphy. ‘If Joyce was diving into a river,’ Jung said, ‘Lucia was falling.’ Voluntary or involuntary immersion: it depends on who is telling the tale.
Hypnotised sleepwalkers dance, movements choreographed by alienists. Beckett retained the photograph of Lucia in performance; barefoot in a scaly, shimmering, mermaid-skin. Carol Shloss sees Lucia falling like Icarus into the sea: flying and drowning. ‘O cripes, I'm drowned!’
Stopped Lucia, kept back from the excitement of theatres and dance halls, was put to making designs for her father. Joyce persuaded his daughter to draw complex initial letters: turning his 1927 collection, Pomes Penyeach, into an illuminated gospel (for private subscribers). The experience proved both stressful and unfulfilling: like the capitalised correspondence of Clare's madness. Those High Beach poems: ‘The Rose Of The World Was Dear Mary To Me’. Lucia was permitted to express her pain, one letter at a time. A saline drip. An agony compounded by work on another alphabet project, the Chaucer ABC. Brenda Maddox (in her biography of Nora Barnacle) says that ‘Joyce tried frantically to breathe life into Lucia's career as a designer of lettrines. He pretended that she was, as he saw himself, an unappreciated artist whose brain was on fire.’
In his confinement, John Clare lost language: word by word, syllable by syllable, letter by letter. Too much kindness. Too much interest. Too many helpers eager to take away his agonised fumblings, his failures. ‘They have cut off my head and picked out all the letters of the alphabet,’ he told Agnes Strickland. ‘All the vowels and consonants – and brought them out through my ears; and then they want me to write poetry!’
He leaked blood and pus. Lucia, when she was visited in St Andrew's, had nothing to say. She had been dosed into sexless neutrality. She told Nino Frank, and repeated it several times, that her father was under the earth: ‘watching us all the time’. A double surveillance. By nurses and attendants. And by the concerned dead. While we think of them, they watch. Open eyes. All white. Sight recovered, postmortem. Skull emptied of letters.
‘Eyes,’ as the great European poet Paul Celan wrote,
‘talked into blindness… Visits of drowned joiners to these submerging words.’
An exile in Paris, Celan died at the age of fifty: suicide in the Seine.
Walking through twilight Northampton, I have to force myself to let go of the back story. Through accidents of literary history, we know something about John Clare and Lucia Joyce, and something about the celebrity aspect of St Andrew's – but the anonymous patients and sufferers have gone: recorded, unremarked. Moving through the darkness, you are at liberty to choose your own relatives, revise your autobiography.
I had been searching – library records, photo albums, birth and wedding certificates – for a direct connection between the Clares and the Hadmans. There wasn't one: if you discount Clare's spirit children, by Mary Joyce, the ones who haunted Helpston and Glinton. The ones who were not buried with Patty Clare, against the church wall in Northborough. The relationship I had missed (or suppressed), until I started on this genealogical truffling, was between myself and Samuel Beckett. Cousin Sam.
The link is as tenuous as Geoffrey Hadman's wished-for association with Clare. I enjoyed finding out about Anna's antecedents, I prefer to leave my own in obscurity. Let them out of the box and they'll have you. A life dedicated to cramming oversize feet into delicate footprints.
Dublin, 1962. I met Anna in Sandymount. A student house on the sea. I saw her at the turn of the stairs, coming up, brown jersey with silver-coin clip; tall, dark, hesitant. Should she wait or climb further? There was a discussion, subdued, about her appearance in a play. And, shortly after that, my parents in town, I went with my father to visit relatives, cousins, aunts, in polite Ballsbridge. I have done my best, of course, to expunge the memory. The last thing I wanted, back then, was a conduit that might filter news
home to Wales: no tea parties, no written reports on academic lethargy.
The Ballsbridge aunt, I recall (or re-invent), was gracious and interesting. She had a connection with Sam Beckett and attended his lectures in Trinity. She kept, and now produced, detailed notes. There was the lecture on the imaginary poet Jean du Chas. There were recollections of Beckett's appearance in a play put on by the Modern Languages staff, cut-up Pierre Corneille. There was talk about the agonised delivery of material to dull-witted and rowdy students. This woman, who was related to Beckett, was also related to my father. Let that suffice: I handled the notes, I wiped the tape.
When Beckett arrived in Paris, he carried a letter of introduction to Joyce, written by Harry Sinclair. His Aunt Cissie (mother's sister) married William ‘Boss’ Sinclair. Harry and William were twins. They have the standard issue Sinclair names: my father and grandfather were both called Henry, my son is William. The Dublin Sinclairs were Jewish or half-Jewish (and were famously libelled by Oliver St John Gogarty). Beckett's first real affair was with his cousin, Peggy Sinclair, daughter of Cissie and Boss.
The Sinclairs, removed to Germany, were a refuge for Sam; an escape from the cramp of the Beckett villa in Foxrock. From his fearsome mother. From nightsweats and a racing heart. Bohemian, after their fashion, dealers in paintings and antiques, the family were travelling fast towards poverty. They were established in the wrong place, at the worst time.
Peggy died young, of tuberculosis, drowning in air. Boss Sinclair had a house on Howth Head; where I lived in a caravan that threatened to take off during winter storms. In summer, I rowed Anna out to Ireland's Eye (a rock in the bay). We disturbed colonies of roosting birds. Returned to Howth for the first night of our marriage, in 1967, we met a girl I knew, former runaway, involuntary patient, earning a few pounds by escorting an overweight lady in black velvet on an excursion from the asylum. She suffered with radio voices in the head, inconvenient broadcasts. Dublin was full of such marginal figures, hovering somewhere between the status of cancelled artists and inspirers of fiction. One character, who lived for years by positioning himself with forensic precision at the edge of drinking groups, talking Yeats and Joyce, William Faulkner and Douglas Sirk, followed us from Dublin to London. You never knew when you'd wake in the night to find him sitting on your bed, shaking coins from your pocket. Visiting the mother, a widow, he dropped into a Baggot Street bar and saw, on a newly installed television, the image that had him hospitalised (or sheltered) for the rest of his life. James Joyce stepping out of a plane at Dublin Airport. Peace made with the Pope. Come home to kiss the tarmac. Nobody could tell him that it was Giorgio, the son, looking after family business. Taking care of a valuable and litigious estate.
If there is common blood with Beckett, however diluted, so much the better. I won't investigate it. I salute him as a great walker, out alone in all weathers, or with his father, tramping the Wicklow Hills. (William Beckett, a quantity surveyor, kept an office in town, which Sam frequently visited. It was in Clare Street.)
Elective affinities: I acknowledge Beckett, from the period of Murphy, as a notable London psychogeographer. James Knowlson tells us how the frustrated novelist trudged for hours through streets and parks, making a narrative of the city. ‘The regularity of his movement acted as a kind of anaesthetic, easing his troubles.’ Beckett noted, for future use, street names, pub signs, bread companies, manufacturers of bath mats. ‘He could cover as much as twenty miles in a day.’
Reading the Beckett biography, I came to understand how relationships are based on shared topography, not mere accidents of blood. Beckett had preceded us to the asylums of London's orbital fringe. Through his friendship with Geoffrey Thompson, he arranged to visit the Bethlem Royal Hospital at Beckenham (where Thompson worked as a Senior House Physician). This was old Bedlam, twice removed; first from Bishopsgate, then from Lambeth. He penetrated secure wards, viewed ‘melancholics, motionless and brooding, holding their heads or bellies according to type’. Years later, I walked through those gates with Renchi. The expedition was part of our tour around the M25; a direct line from the Millennium Dome to Clacket Lane Services. Samuel Beckett was ahead of us, every step of the way: his silence, his eagle stare (the poster portrait, in the alcove outside the bathroom, that terrified my children).
Before we left town, we made an attempt on St Peter's Church. Once again, Beckett beat us to it. James Knowlson reports that, after the cricket match against Northampton, Sam took to the streets. ‘Instead of going off whoring or drinking in the local pubs with the others, he went on his own around local churches.’
A key is obtained, without difficulty, through the window of the pub. It's that kind of morning: bright sun, beds of lavender scenting soft air. Malfate in remission. The church, under threat of restoration, is balanced between shafts of light, shadowy recesses: past worshippers, present silence. Romanesque arches. Celtic beasts. This is somewhere in which to sit, while the mind is cleared of its froth and babble.
A memorial bust, all knobble and lump, takes me by surprise. Renchi, in his epic walks across England, gathers up chips of chalk, slate, flint. They are incorporated into his paintings as part of the meaning, the weight of the journey. The presiding spirit, on these jaunts, is visionary engineer and duff poet William Smith. Who was responsible, as Simon Winchester would have it, for the ‘map that changed the world’. The colours of this 1815 chart are those of a living body, after the skin has been stripped to expose rivers of pulsing nerves and fibres.
TO HONOUR THE NAME OF WILLIAM SMITH, L.L.D. THIS MONUMENT IS ERECTED BY HIS FRIENDS AND FELLOW LABOURERS IN THE FIELD OF BRITISH GEOLOGY
William Smith, stalker of the limestone causeway, Bath to Lincoln, died in Northampton. And was memorialised in a locked church, across the road from the hotel ibis. An obituary is carved, in capitals, on a marble tablet. Born: 23 March 1769 (at Churchill in Oxfordshire). Works on collieries, canals. In 1815, he publishes his geological map. The artfully delineated strata come at the period of enclosures. Pinks, greys, greens: England divided like the villages of Helpston and Glinton.
The Jurassic Highway drew Smith, as we had been drawn to investigate the mysteries of the M25. His nephew reported: ‘In
the winter of 1819 Mr Smith, having perhaps more than usual leisure, undertook the walk from Lincolnshire into Oxfordshire.’ He intended ‘to pass along a particular line through the counties of Rutland, Northampton, Bedford and Oxford’. He listened to ‘odd stories of supernatural beings and incredible frights which were narrated by the villagers’. And as he walked, like Renchi, he picked up stones at the roadside; even the ‘dull red sandstone found in unexceptional middle-English cities like Northampton’. Pedestrian excursions of ‘fifty miles or so’ were ‘a casual stroll’ for this driven man.
It was the Scottish poet Allan Ramsay who provided a verse tribute at the geologist's anniversary dinner in 1854. ‘To Father Smith we owe our thanks/For the history of a few stones.’
Travelling home from Oxfordshire, Smith's coach stopped in Northampton – where he chose to lodge for a few days with his old friend George Baker. A cold ‘settled on his lungs’. He died, 28 August 1839, and was buried, with due ceremony, in St Peter's Church.
We packed up to move out: a last Clare walk, before Renchi returned to Somerset. We would make a circuit, Glinton to Crow-land Abbey, to Market Deeping, to Northborough, back to Glinton. Alan Moore, reflecting on the evening's talk, rang the ibis, telling us to go to the crossroads of Marefair, Gold Street and Horse Market, and to look downhill. We would see the place where St Gregory located the centre of England. Gregory, it seems, made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The Northampton Chronicle fleshes out the story: ‘Visiting the supposed spot where Christ was crucified he noticed an unusual shaped stone projecting from the ground. Scraping it out he discovered an ancient stone cross just 10 inches long.’ An angel ordered him to plant the cross in Northampton: on the spot where he was subsequently buried. The notion of ‘centre’ is a spiritual conceit, significant for local mystics. The ‘true’ centre of the English landmass, according to geographers, is a little closer to the territory from which Anna's ancestors emerged.
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