In Praise of Messy Lives (10 page)

The premise of
Lucia Joyce
, like the rest of these biographies, is that the woman is an artist herself. The Great Man is not creating by himself, but somehow channeling the energies of the women around him. James Joyce’s daughter, Lucia, was a dancer. “She too had been an artist,” Shloss informs us, “who worked with a fervor and vision comparable to Joyce’s own.” Her accomplishments, in addition to dancing, were apparently a novel that’s been lost and a few illustrations. But Shloss’s evidence of
her genius seems to be gleaned from her imitations of Charlie Chaplin at parties, a photograph of a dance performance in which she wore a sensational, mirrored, fish costume, and “excellent report cards” from her childhood.

Lucia herself felt quite rivalrous with her father. When friends called Joyce to congratulate him on winning his obscenity trial in the United States, enabling the publication of
Ulysses
, Lucia cut the phone wire, saying, “I am the artist!” It’s unclear whether this episode comes out of craziness or theater. Later, she behaves in ways that seem more clearly mad: she sets fires, throws a chair at her mother, unzips the pants of male visitors, sleeps with the gas on, sends telegrams to dead people, and wanders through Dublin for days, sleeping on the street.

Inevitably, these progressive new biographies conflate brattiness, mental imbalance, and brilliance into a miasma of thwarted ability. One of the hallmarks of the woman-attached-to-great-men genre is that the Great Man has somehow prevented the female family member from achieving her potential. In this case, Joyce spirited his gifted daughter to London away from Paris, where, after years of dilettantish wandering, joining and quitting dance groups that sound suspiciously like cults, she somehow miraculously had been about to find her calling. He wouldn’t let her dance, and thus crushed her spirit. You may not be altogether surprised to hear that other male villains lurk in the margins: there are male artists like Samuel Beckett and Alexander Calder who sleep with Lucia and abandon her. There is also a brother who Shloss suggests—with astonishingly little evidence—may have sexually abused her, and seems ferociously bent on keeping her in an institution, so that she won’t tell the story of this abuse.

No matter how sensationalized the life, our appetite for these biographies is enormous. And there is no denying that the book is monumentally engaging, but why? We find something reassuring about the stories of the almost-artist, the brilliant “fantastic being,” who could have written
Ulysses
but somehow never got around to it. The ordinary woman, the daughter, wife, mother, who people remember sparkling in conversation or wearing a particularly beautiful dress, is elevated to the status of artist. In a way, Lucia Joyce is the ultimate heroine of this genre—a dancer who doesn’t dance, a painter who doesn’t paint,
and
a writer who doesn’t write. Shloss writes, “Lucia spoke in a kind of body language that expressed pain and suffering and unspoken desires. She expressed life as a dance of false starts and small triumphs, of emotions lifted, of hopes deflated.”

Women readers, in particular, are endlessly drawn to these stories of doom and raw talent. It confirms some view we have of the world that is not nurturing our talent; it shifts the responsibility from us onto the shadowy male world. It taps into the secret biography of our innermost aspirations, the half-written screenplays in our computers, the proverbial novels in drawers. But why have we been thwarted? Has someone physically prevented us from writing
Ulysses
, or are we just not talented or driven enough? The comforting, democratic message of these books is that you don’t have to write or paint or act to be “an artist.” It is enough to
be
. To Shloss, “Lucia didn’t need books like
Ulysses
to become modern.”

Of course, the biographies of great men’s women lend themselves to all kinds of romanticizing. It is, in these hefty, attractive books, with their dramatic sepia covers, enormously glamorous
to be mad. Had Lucia Joyce simply married, and stayed in Paris and taught dance to eager young protégées, and pursued her art in a modest way, and grown fat and happy and had a couple of children in a little apartment with a view of the river, there would be no
Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake
.

In spite of its romantic frisson, the position of muse is very vague and largely thankless for the muse herself. It would be nice to think that
Ulysses
or
Finnegans Wake
could not have been written without Lucia; but of course, one suspects that they could have been. In this case, Lucia’s role as muse seems to consist of a single afternoon where she was dancing in a room where Joyce happened to be writing
Finnegans Wake:
“There are two artists in his room, and both of them are working. Joyce is watching and learning … the place where she meets her father is not in consciousness but in some more primitive place before consciousness.” This is a pretty image, and Shloss embellishes it even further: “They understand each other, for they speak the same language, a language not yet arrived into words and concepts, but a language nonetheless, founded on the communicative body.”

And what about Lucia herself, petulant, mesmerizing, fragile, bratty Lucia? She liked to sleep outside under the stars, and walk around without underwear, and swim in the middle of the night. Instead she spent fifty-odd years in an institution. There is no poetry, no glory, in this story, no secret communion, no mystical collaboration, no intangible collusion, between father and daughter, only pointless, run-of-the-mill human suffering. Instead of the subtle literary pas de deux between Joyce and his daughter, the truth is more painful and nonsensical: a woman’s life was wasted. Books like this give a dishonest, literary gloss to what is
a form of illicit voyeurism; they free us from the difficulty of literature into the easy glamour of being vaguely associated with it, and deploy the language and cachet of feminism to celebrate those moments when women are not writing or painting or otherwise creating.

Few endeavors would appear as arduous and maddening to a responsible scholar as a biography of Shakespeare’s wife, Ann Hathaway. We have almost no solid facts about Mrs. Shakespeare’s life, and we know almost nothing about the Shakespeares’ marriage. We know that the playwright could have brought his wife to live with him in London and did not, though we don’t know how often he made the three-day trip back to Stratford. We know that in his will, he left his wife only his “second-best bed.”

From this slender evidence, along with liberal and dubious readings of the plays and sonnets, scholars have created a robust portrait of the Shakespeares’ unhappy domestic life—a “marriage of evil auspices,” as one scholar put it. Rather than inhibiting biographers, the lack of information seems to have freed many of them to project their own blooming fantasies onto the relationship. The prevailing image of Ann Hathaway is that of an illiterate seductress who beguiled the young Shakespeare, conceived a child, and ensnared him in a loveless union. Germaine Greer’s task in her ingenious new book,
Shakespeare’s Wife
, is to
expose the construction of this fantasy, tracing its evolution from early biographers like Thomas de Quincey through the work of respected modern scholars like Stephen Greenblatt. “The Shakespeare wallahs,” she writes, “have succeeded in creating a Bard in their own likeness, that is to say, incapable of relating to women.”

After sifting through records of lives that ran parallel to the young Shakespeares’, Greer contends that in their time and place there was nothing unusual in a baby’s being born six months after a marriage. She also demonstrates that an unmarried woman in her mid-twenties would not have been considered exceptional or desperate. Ann Hathaway, Greer argues, was likely to be literate, and given the relative standing of their families in Warwickshire, she may very well have been considered a more desirable match than her husband.

Though generally appreciative, several Shakespeare scholars have found Greer’s approach “stridently … combative” and full of “scattergun assaults.” But for those accustomed to Greer’s feminist provocations,
Shakespeare’s Wife
will seem extremely sober and restrained. Rarely have the possibilities of the conditional tense been so fully exploited: the entire book is written in elaborately tentative lines like “she may have permitted herself the odd grim little smile” and “he might have read them out to her.” Greer has a doctorate in Elizabethan drama from Newnham College, Cambridge, and she is almost showy in her research into parish registers, in her dry apprehension of fact. Germaine Greer, it turns out, is an unusual type, with both a polemicist’s vision and a scholar’s patience. In spite of her flamboyant reputation, she has never resorted to the easy or the doctrinaire.
The Female Eunuch
(1971), her brilliant analysis of women’s oppression, was mischievous, restless, wide-ranging, unpredictable. Of
the nonfiction classics of 1970s feminism, hers alone eluded the imaginative limits and rigidity of good politics.
Shakespeare’s Wife
similarly transcends the drab conventions of much academic excavation of lost female figures.

Even within the context of Shakespeare studies, however, Greer’s speculations are, for the most part, surprisingly responsible. Many of her more fanciful theories, like the possibility that Shakespeare died of syphilis, are shared by more mainstream scholars. Because so little about the playwright’s life is known, prejudice and desire assume a greater role than in most biography. The biographer is forced to create his or her own version of Shakespeare, and Greer is no exception.

Inevitably, in imagining the Shakespeares’ marriage, Greer draws heavily on archetypes from her own work. Her Ann Hathaway is unusually independent and hardworking. She is almost too good to be true, and she is certainly too good to be interesting. “Though Ann Hathaway had been living manless for nearly 30 years,” Greer writes in a chapter on Shakespeare’s return from London around 1611, “no breath of scandal ever attached to her name, which, given the evidence of the surviving records of the Vicar’s Court, is itself remarkable.” In Greer’s view, Shakespeare did not support his wife financially, and during his long absences she devoted herself to running a malt business or otherwise taking care of her children.

If Greer consistently romanticizes anything, it is female independence. While acknowledging the complexity and drama of sex, Greer has long celebrated the woman who lives apart, who somehow evades the ordinary encumbrances of a man in her daily life. She devotes an entire section of
The Female Eunuch
to alternatives to the oppressions of the nuclear family and quotes a
sociologist from the 1930s: “For a male and female to live continuously together is … biologically speaking, an extremely unnatural condition.” One can hear Greer’s feminist interpretations beneath her descriptions of Hathaway’s life. Ann “could have been confident of her ability to support herself and her children, but not if she had also to deal with a layabout husband good for nothing but spinning verses,” she writes in a chapter suggesting that Ann may well have encouraged Shakespeare to go to London. Her observation that “when her husband died Ann was 60, and free for the first time in a third of a century” evokes another line from an earlier book,
The Change:
“To be unwanted is also to be free.” At times, one suspects that Greer is writing more about an idea of freedom than about any historical woman.

Toward the end of
Shakespeare’s Wife
, Greer makes the implausible case that Ann was responsible for the publication of the First Folio in 1623. Here one may recall Tom Wolfe’s account of a younger Greer at a dinner party, getting bored and setting fire to her hair. And yet it often seems that Greer is slyly drawing attention to the novelist’s endeavor, that she is self-consciously pointing out the element of fiction writing inherent in any effort to understand Shakespeare’s life. She playfully begins each chapter with summaries reminiscent of nineteenth-century novels. And she writes that the book is “heresy, and probably neither truer nor less true than the accepted prejudice.” Does it matter if Greer’s theories are true? In spinning her version, she has opened up the story; she has laid bare the fantasies, uprooted the assumptions. It’s unlikely that hereafter the shadowy figure in the corner of the great house in Stratford will be treated with the same easy contempt.

One might wonder why this book, filled with mundane accounts
of business deals, wills, and birth records, is so riveting. It may be that one senses the passion in the archives, in the artifacts of daily life that Greer meticulously uncovers. In her research into the life of another widow in Stratford, Greer finds: “In all, her possessions were worth £17 10s 2d, of which £4 was in wheat and barley. She too owned her own pewter and brass, and five flitches of bacon, probably of her own curing, for in her barn there were two ‘store pigs,’ as well as a cow and a heifer, two geese and a gander, 12 hens and a cock. It seems that right up to her last days Elizabeth supported herself by selling her butter and eggs and bacon.” The details—so rare, so tangible—have the bareness of poetry. The world of Elizabethan England is so completely lost to us that these hard facts glow a little in the darkness.

In
A Room of One’s Own
, with its famous riff on Shakespeare’s sister, Virginia Woolf wrote that when one tries to picture the life of an Elizabethan woman, “one is held up by the scarcity of facts. One knows nothing detailed, nothing perfectly true and substantial about her. History scarcely mentions her.… What one wants, I thought—and why does not some brilliant student at Newnham or Girton supply it?—is a mass of information; at what age did she marry; how many children had she as a rule; … did she do the cooking; would she be likely to have a servant? All these facts lie somewhere, presumably, in parish registers and account books; the life of the average Elizabethan woman must be scattered about somewhere, could one collect and make a book of it. It would be ambitious beyond my daring.” And now the book written by a brilliant student from Newnham, dreamed of by Virginia Woolf in the last century, exists: lively, rigorous, fiercely imagined.