Hayden Murphy recalls a poignant encounter with the offspring of a
literary legend
IN March 1975, letters of introduction in my pocket, I headed for an
asylum. My destination was St Andrew's Hospital, Northampton. The
letters were addressed to a resident psychiatrist and his long-term
patient Miss Lucia Joyce. The introductions were written by a portly
Queen's Counsel called Eoin O'Mahony, who had died in 1970.
At the time of his death Hubert Butler, a great annotator of Irish
eccentrics, wrote in The Irish Times ''Eoin never had any triumphs, or
disasters, and yet he liked pomp and ceremony and relished life's
vicissitudes.''
Eoin O'Mahony was known the length and breadth of Ireland as The Pope.
Mainly thanks to his modest self-belief in his own infallibility. Also
because of the air of benign sanctity surrounding him. I was his
presidential election agent when he stood as ''Non-party-political
Pacificist-Independent'' in the Presidential election of 1966. At 19 I
was chosen because of a maternal link with the Parnellite and Home Rule
MPs John and Luke Hayden.
We failed, fortunately for my sanity, by a handful of votes to get
nominated to the election proper. De Valera won that. The Pope's payment
for my efforts were letters of introduction to the great, famous, and
peculiar he numbered among his friends. Beckett, the Italian poet
Montale, Pablo Neruda and spy-jumping Sean Burke were among those
randomly selected from his files.
We had a love of Joyce's writing in common. In 1967, he and I had
shared, at their expense, a memorable Bloomsday with a busload of
Japanese Joyceans. Eoin had visited Lucia several times in the late
fifties. He wanted me to ''drop in, cheer her up, give her some youth''.
So, as The Pope's emissary I arrived at the hospital where she had
been a patient since 1951. The doctor was kind but firm. He would see
how she was ''today''. A nurse pointed out a dark-coated figure in a
wheelchair animatedly waving her arms.
The intrusive awfulness of my unannounced arrival hit me. I wrote a
line of explanatory greeting and left. Not before I felt I had been
sighted by the mild squint, hereditary companion to her mother's sleepy
left eye. And imagined the troublesome scar on her chin jut in my
direction with a stubborn curiosity reminiscent of her father. Her
father, James Joyce, ''international eyesore of all the crowning words
of Europe''.
Lucia Anna Joyce was born July 26, 1907, in the pauper ward of
Ospedale Civico de Trieste. Her father was in the fever ward with
rheumatics. Her Galway-born mother, Nora Barnacle, picked up 20 crowns
on her successful birth, ''a standard payment to the indigent.'' Her
only brother, Jeorgio, was born two years earlier on July 27. Birthdays
were co-celebrated collisions.
After years of ''domestic distributions'' (Trieste, Zurich, Rome) the
Joyces settled in Paris. In the early thirties Samuel Beckett, who took
dictation from Joyce for passages of what became Finnegans Wake, became
a regular house-guest. He took Lucia -- ''the tortured and blocked
replica of genius'' -- to the theatre and restaurants. She fell in love
with him. He fled. For some time he was unpopular in the household. But
Joyce relented and wrote of the tall French scholar: ''Sam knows miles
better me how to work the miracle. He'll prisckly soon hand tune your
Erin's ear for you.''
Meanwhile Lucia was turning the books upside down on the shelves,
cutting telephone wires, and throwing chairs at Nora. ''Needs a nice
young husband'' said her still unwed mother. ''I'm sex starved''
responded Lucia and set about a disturbing promiscuous remedy.
Hospitals, followed by sanitoriums, led to asylums. Even Carl Jung
despaired. In March 1951, a month before her mother's death (her father
died in 1941), she was committed to the English hospital for the rest of
her life. She died there in 1982.
These details, these Patrick Day memories, came crowding back when
watching Rosaleen Pelan's effervescent performance as Lucia in Robert
Forrest's moving play of that title in Fifth Estate's production at the
Netherbow Theatre, Edinburgh. John Linklater (March 9) has justly
praised script, production, and cast. It merely remains for me to
half-close my eyes, see the ''pretty, little American flapper'' that
novelist Thomas Wolfe saw in 1928. Recall again the assessing squint.
The vulnerable jut of the jaw and at curtain call cry ''Clapause'' and
hope I brought ''some youth'' to it.
This lovely understated play is never a triumph but is full of
creative pomp and theatrical ceremony. The Pope would have relished its
vicissitudes.
* Lucia is at the Netherbow Theatre, Edinburgh, (not Sundays) until
March 26.
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