Shaun the Penman
POLSKY, NED
Shaun the Penman Revieived by Ned Polsky Contributor, "Chicago Review," "Explicator,'' "Dissent'' My Brother's Keeper. By Stanislaus Joyce. Viking. 266 pp. $5.00. This biography does full...
...I have a recollection, definite enough though vague in detail, of a dramatic performance of the story of Adam and Eve, organized for the benefit of his parents and nursemaid...
...Richard Ellmann, an unobtrusive editor, has footnoted some of these minutiae and left others to be annotated by the toilers for the academic journals...
...What gives the book its special authority, though, is that Stanislaus knew not merely his brother...
...That Stanislaus Joyce was an intelligent defender of his brother's work from the beginning almost to the end of the journey (like another long-time Joycean, Ezra Pound, he objected to Finnegans Wake) testifies not only to brotherly devotion but to an unusual critical faculty...
...My Brother's Keeper, in consequence, gives us much more than the full recital of facts about James Joyce's early years which we might reasonably demand from one having special knowledge born of intimate acquaintance...
...Ellmann fails to provide a bibliography of Stanislaus Joyce's other writings...
...It appears from this record that Stanislaus managed to maintain a psychologically intimate relationship with his brother and a critical detachment that enabled him to see that relationship in its complexity and prevented him from unconsciously falsifying the account...
...But let us be grateful for what we have—almost the sole work in the postwar flood of Joyceana that can truly be called indispensable...
...Let us see wherein the greatness of the artist and the biography resides...
...The only serious editorial defect of this volume, by the way, is that Mr...
...Now, such a Tadical formal innovator is, from first to last, an artist very difficult to "get with" and stay with...
...Such development refers not to the introduction of ever-new subject matter and message, but to the expansion of the artistic medium itself...
...namely, each artist displays, in addition to the usual attributes of genius, that extraordinarily rare capacity for continual artistic development...
...From time to time scholars will doubtless unearth a few useful details unknown to Stanislaus or left unrecorded by him...
...The view now fashionable among those who would save James Joyce for the Church, which claims that Joyce attacked Catholicism solely as a secular institution while continuing to believe in a personal god, is here denied...
...Joyce in each of his prose works, like Picasso in each of his periods, explores new formal problems or provides new answers to old ones...
...Joyce and Picasso are the supreme artists of this century for the same reason that Beethoven's nine symphonies are a greater achievement than Haydn's 104...
...And there is fuel for other critical fires...
...For example, it provides further evidence—if such be needed—that Joyce rejected religious belief itself, albeit he was, as Stanislaus says, "like Renan an unwilling unbeliever...
...I was Adam and a sister . was Eve...
...An additional and fascinating source of this biography's strength lies in Stanislaus's obvious awareness of brotherly hate as well as love, of the things that some of us would nowadays place under the rubric "sibling rivalry...
...Of the items not glossed by Stanislaus or Mr...
...he knew what his brother was about...
...Even those with little or no interest in James Joyce will find it a major addition to biographical literature...
...The result is a double biography, as it were, and one that leaves the impression of absolute honesty...
...Think here of Beethoven's contemporaries, for example, who complained about each symphony that it wasn't like the last one...
...More unfortunately, he did not live to write, even in rough draft, a full account of the later years of brotherly intimacy...
...Ellmann that bear on larger themes, my own favorite, because of the importance that I attach to Joyce's cryptic and usually overlooked self-identification as Satan in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, is the opening statement of the book: "My recollections of my brother go back to nursery days...
...we know from fragmentary material in his pamphlet and periodical essays how important such an account would have been...
...My brother was the devil...
...Stanislaus Joyce did not live to revise the manuscript of this book, and its style, though always clear and graceful, is rarely moving...
...but the essence is forever here...
...Occasionally, Stanislaus records a minor biographical detail without bothering to mention its later appearance in James's work...
...It relates those facts to Joyce's art in an extremely perceptive way, and many of the literary judgments and analyses in this book rank with the best of Joyce criticism...
...Of course, purely on the factual level this book will correct various distortions, willful and otherwise, that have been made about James Joyce's life and work...
...This biography does full justice to a great artist, and on that account may itself be judged great...
...This product of Stanislaus's knowledge, literary intelligence and emotional awareness is, surely, the best book that will ever be written on Joyce's formative years...
Vol. 41 • May 1958 • No. 20
