Portrait of the Daughter; Two works seek to reclaim the legacy of Lucia Joyce.(Book Review)

Byline: Tara Pepper

When Samuel Beckett died in 1989, a striking snapshot of a feral woman dancing, clad from head to toe in silver fish scales, was found among his papers. Beckett had kept this memento of his affair with James Joyce's turbulent daughter, Lucia, for more than 60 years. To her father, Lucia was the "wonder wild," his dark muse, who spent much of her adolescence locked with him in a room while he wrote "Finnegans Wake," his final novel. "Whatever spark or gift I possess," Joyce wrote in 1934, "it has been transmitted to Lucia and kindled a fire in her brain." But the rest of the world saw her differently; in the history of 20th-century literature, Lucia is portrayed as a troublesome blight on the Joyce family, an eccentric, mentally unstable woman in the mold of Vivienne Eliot, Zelda Fitzgerald and Sylvia Plath.

Two recent works seek to reclaim Lucia from these misconceptions. Michael Hastings's new West End play, "Calico" (through March 29), echoes Carol Shloss's recent reassessment of Lucia's life in "Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake" (576 pages. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux ). Both emphasize that Lucia was a powerful creative force in her own right: a poet, illustrator and pioneer of modern dance. Hastings's portrayal of the destructive interaction among family members as Lucia clings to the edges of sanity is poignant and convincing. Lucia's symptoms--promiscuity, outbursts of violence and foul language--inspired a series of diagnoses ranging from "schizophrenic" to "nothing much wrong." But in Hastings's play, they seem the natural result of her isolation and neglect, and the sexually charged atmosphere in the household. Previous biographers of the Joyce family--like Richard Ellman, in his definitive work on James, and Brenda Maddox, who wrote a pioneering study of James's wife, Nora--failed to explore the exact nature of her illness or the reasons for Lucia's confinement in a series of clinics and asylums, where she spent much of her adult life.

Shloss also blames Lucia's upbringing for her mental instability. James Joyce sought to make visible that murky realm of human consciousness that, he wrote, "cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cut and dry grammar and goahead plot." Subjected to the incessant, intense scrutiny of her father, who regarded her as raw material for his work, Lucia's disturbing, unfettered language and behavior were increasingly interpreted as signs of madness, writes Shloss. Left barely educated by the family's peripatetic lifestyle, moving from Trieste to Zurich, Paris, Dublin and London, she had few resources of her own. Shloss notes that Carl Jung, who treated Lucia briefly in 1934, said she ...