Susan Sontag / The Hunger Artist

Sontag says of her fiction, “I discovered that I liked to tell stories and make people cry.”Photograph By Richard Avedon

The Hunger Artist

Is there anything Susan Sontag doesn’t want to know?

By Joan Acocella
February 28, 2000

Susan Sontag did two big things last year. She finished a novel, “In America,” which is being published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux this week, and she underwent treatment for cancer. On a recent evening I said to her, “This is now your second novel in eight years, but it wasn’t novels you were known for—it was essays. Don’t you miss the essay form?” She answered something like “Essays! Pooh! Forget essays! That was the past. From now on, I’m writing fiction. I have a whole new life. It’s going to be terrific.” And she began charting for me her happy future. This was a person who that same morning, as she told me, had been scanned in every inch of her body for cancer. (Her recent episode was not the first. She had breast cancer in the late seventies.) Furthermore, as a result of chemotherapy—specifically, a drug called cisplatin, with a platinum base—she has heavy-metal poisoning. For months last year, she was in terrible pain—she lived on morphine derivatives, meanwhile trying to finish the book—and couldn’t walk without help. Now she can walk, but her balance is still uncertain. “I don’t know where my feet are unless I look at them,” she told me. She has physical therapy for three hours every day.

Crime pays / The dilemma of Georges Simenon

CRIME PAYS

The dilemma of Georges Simenon

BIOGRAPHY

By Joan Acocella
OCTOBER 10, 2011 ISSUE

Those who know anything about Georges Simenon usually know at least three things. The first is that he divided his energies between detective novels and “straight” novels. The former made him one of the highest-earning writers in the world in the mid-twentieth century, and barred him from achieving the top-rung literary status that he longed for. The second thing is that he generally devoted only about a week and a half to writing a novel, a practice that, again, was good for his bank account and bad for his reputation. Finally—and this is a matter that Simenon discussed enthusiastically with journalists—he spent a great deal of his life having sex. Once, in an interview with his friend Federico Fellini, he claimed that he had been to bed with ten thousand women.

Simenon was born in 1903 in Liège, the main economic and cultural center of French-speaking Belgium. In his highly autobiographical coming-of-age novel “Pedigree” (1948), he described his home town as a place where there was almost nothing to do except go to school and to church. After Sunday dinner, Uncle Charles would show the photographs that he had recently taken of clouds over the general post office. Eventually, Simenon discovered books: Balzac, Dumas, Dickens, the usual list for boys of his period. He also found another interest: girls. His description of his deflowering takes your breath away. He and Renée—he was twelve, she fifteen—were in the woods. He climbed a holly tree, to pick berries for her, and descended bleeding, from the thorns. She told him to lie down, and she licked the blood off. Then she pulled down his shorts and climbed onto him. “It hurt like mad,” he recalled. “She practically circumcised me.” Soon, however, he tried again and became a fan for life.

Simenon adored his father, Désiré. In “Pedigree,” too, the father is called Désiré, and, like the real one, is a minor agent in an insurance company. A sweet-natured, unambitious, and dignified man, he stands in his church pew “as calm as a saint in a stained-glass window.” He loves his lunch, his newspaper, his chair in the kitchen, and, undemonstratively, his son, Roger (the Simenon character). By contrast, the mother, Élise, has screaming quarrels with the boy. Élise is as unhappy as Désiré is happy. She weeps and throws fits daily. Her greatest concern is money. The family is petit-bourgeois, but only barely. Against Désiré’s wishes, Élise takes lodgers into their small apartment. Soon, when Désiré comes home from work, someone is sitting in his chair, reading his newspaper.

Simenon was a disobliging child, and once he reached adolescence all he wanted was to get out of Liège. He quit school at fifteen, and he went to work writing for a local newspaper. Soon, he began writing novels as well. The first was published when he was eighteen. That year, Désiré died, of angina pectoris, at forty-four. A year later, Simenon left town. He came back home for two days to marry his fiancée—Tigy (Régine) Renchon, a painter, and apparently more a friend than a lover. The two of them settled in Paris, and Simenon didn’t cross his mother’s doorstep again for almost thirty years.

This productive man now became more so. In the next seven years, he brought out more than a hundred and fifty novels and novellas. All were unabashed pulp—Westerns (e.g., “The Eye of Utah”), adventure tales (“The White Monster of Tierra del Fuego”), and what he called “spicy” stories (“A Girl Who Learned a Thing or Two”)—published under pseudonyms. Tigy quit painting in order to help him. They hired a housekeeper, Henriette Liberge, nineteen years old, whom Simenon nicknamed Boule, or “ball” (she was plump), and he made her his mistress in short order. Other lovers came later, and he visited brothels frequently. Every morning, he sat down and completed his self-assigned daily quota of eighty typewritten pages. Then he would vomit, from the tension, and spend the rest of the afternoon relaxing. Thus, by the age of twenty-seven, he had established the pattern of his life: lots of books, lots of women. In the words of his excellent biographer, Pierre Assouline, “the train was on its way.”

But Simenon was discontented with being a writer of potboilers. In 1931, he produced the first novels that he was willing to sign his name to. They were detective stories, about a police superintendent named Jules Maigret.

At the opening of a Maigret novel, as of any detective novel, a body drops, and at the end of the book we find out who did it. But the point of the Maigret stories is by no means the plot. The dénouement, which, in classic detective stories, is usually the crucial matter, often makes only a slight impression in the Maigret novels. In many cases, the culprit turns out to be the person we suspected all along, or the opposite— someone out of left field, a person we’ve never met before. Julian Symons, an expert on the detective novel, claimed that the Maigret novels were not really part of that genre, because, he said, Simenon was not interested in detection.

What interested him was his characters and the world they moved through. The central matter in the Maigret novels is Maigret. We see him more clearly than we do any other character in Simenon’s fiction. In most of the books he is middle-aged, and a famous man. Because he is the head of the homicide police, his picture is frequently in the papers. When he gets into a taxi, the driver often says, “Where to, Inspector?” He is tall (five feet eleven) and broad-shouldered. He smokes a pipe almost continuously, as did Simenon. He likes to drink. Not rarely, he will stop in a bar by 10 a.m. He also loves to eat, and he is no longer thin.

Which brings us to his wife. As one critic said, Mme. Maigret looks after her husband as if he were a toddler. She makes splendid meals for him, not just at dinnertime but also for lunch. Often, he does not arrive to eat them, because he is out solving crimes, but if Maigret misses the foie de veau en papillote at lunch he still gets the chicken with tarragon for dinner.

Appropriately, Maigret’s first encounter with this woman has to do with food. In what is probably Simenon’s most poignant book, “Maigret’s Memoirs” (1951), our hero remembers a time when he was an apprentice policeman, on a bike. A friend invites him to a party given by some government people. He goes, but he feels awkward and ill-dressed. At one point, he is standing next to a full plate of petits fours. He reaches out for one, then, without thinking, another and another. Eventually, he looks down and sees, to his mortification, that he has eaten every last one of the little cakes. Furthermore, other guests have noticed and are staring at him in disbelief. At that moment, a girl in a blue dress comes up to him with another plate of petits fours. Would he like one? she asks, and advises him that the ones with the candied fruit on top are the best. This is the niece of the hosts, and what she is saying is that Maigret should have all the cake he wants. Her name is Louise, but she is almost never called that again, because she is soon Mme. Maigret.

This episode made me recall the chapter in “David Copperfield” where David, penniless and alone in the world—his mother has died in childbirth—walks all the way from London to Dover, to the home of his great-aunt, Betsey Trotwood. Miss Trotwood brusquely tells the maid to give him a bath and put him to bed. Then comes a paragraph famous in Western literature. David sits in darkness, gazing out the window, over the Channel,

looking at the moonlight on the water, as if I could hope to read my fortune in it, as in a bright book; or to see my mother with her child, coming from Heaven along that shining path, to look upon me as she had looked when I last saw her sweet face. . . . I remember how I thought of all the solitary places under the night sky where I had slept, and how I prayed that I never might be houseless any more.

Maigret’s mother, too, died in childbirth, when he was a boy. His father rarely spoke again. Maigret wanted to be a doctor and went to medical school for two years, but then the money ran out. He went to Paris and became a beat cop. Like David, he had no money, no protectors, no proper shoes. Much of the time, he was hungry. (Hence the petits-fours episode.) Unlike Dickens, Simenon is abstemious. In his account, there is no moonbeam, no mother. But when the girl in the blue dress appears, to save his honor, you feel, as with Copperfield, that an act of grace has occurred.

Simenon treats the Maigrets’ marriage in the same fashion: great emotion, greatly muted. On Sundays, they usually walk, arm in arm, to the movies. Every year, Mme. Maigret goes to visit her sister in Alsace for a month, and Maigret moves into a hotel, because he can’t bear to be at home when she’s not there. Physical exchanges between the two are seldom described. I know of only a few exceptions. In “Maigret and the Dead Girl” (1954), the superintendent turns around and kisses Mme. Maigret—in bed! I was very embarrassed.

The Maigret books are full of moral teachings. One is about the ordinariness of crime. In “The Bar on the Seine” (1931), a guest at a country weekend party is killed, and the police put up a roadblock. The neighbors find this a great nuisance, “especially for a small scale crime that had very little coverage in the newspapers.” In “Maigret and the Killer” (1969), a young man is stabbed to death on the sidewalk in front of a café. Four men playing cards in the café hear the commotion and go to the door, but they don’t venture out. It’s raining.

Correspondingly, in these books Simenon tends not to give us the violence straight on. In my experience, we never see the murder happen. Maigret’s initial reaction to a crime is an itch to solve it, but by the end his emotion is usually sorrow. Once, he watches some men playing boules, and he envies them, he says, because when they win they are entitled to feel joy. When he wins, someone loses his liberty, or his life.

Probably the most admired quality of Simenon’s books is his scene-setting, his power to describe and to make the description call up emotion. “The Bar on the Seine” opens on a glorious day:

The sunshine almost as thick as syrup in the quiet streets of the Left Bank. And everything—the people’s faces, the countless familiar sounds of the street—exuded a joy to be alive. . . . When Maigret arrived at the gate of the Santé [prison] he found the guard gazing soppily at a little white cat that was playing with the dog from the dairy.

In the clear air, Maigret’s footsteps ring on the pavement. “Does he know?” Maigret asks a warder. “Not yet,” the warder answers. “He” is the prisoner. What he doesn’t know is that his appeal has failed, and that he is going to die. By juxtaposing this with the lovely day, and the dog playing with the little cat, and the guard looking at them tenderly, Simenon is telling us that though life is beautiful, it is also appalling.

In many of Simenon’s other novels, life is more appalling. Just as he decided, after ten years of producing potboilers, to get serious, and started writing the Maigret novels, so, two years after that, he came to feel that the Maigret books were not serious enough, and he began writing “straight” novels, which he sometimes characterized as romans durs, or “hard novels,” meaning hard on us.

The greatest of these is “Dirty Snow” (1948), in which Frank, the nineteen-year-old son of a brothel owner (he lives in the brothel, spying on the whores at their work by standing on a table and peering through the transom), makes his way in an unnamed city under military occupation. In the first chapter, we see Frank with his friend Kromer. Kromer has murdered people. For example, he was once having sex with a girl in a barn loft, and she became sentimental. She said that she hoped he was impregnating her. “The idea of having a child with that stupid, dirty girl he was kneading like a piece of dough had seemed grotesque” to him, so he strangled her. That was the first time he killed someone. “And let me tell you,” he says to Frank, “it’s very easy.” Frank is overcome with admiration. Kromer shows Frank a knife that he has just acquired. Frank asks to borrow it. Soon afterward, he is lurking in a snowbank when an officer comes by. He kills him. He doesn’t know the man. He just wants to try out Kromer’s knife, “to feel what it was like when it . . . slipped between bones.”

Not “Dirty Snow” but many other romans durs follow a single plotline: a man walks out on his life—his job, his family, often the town, too—and gives himself up to a kind of obsession. As Simenon put it, his characters “go to their limit.” Often, this involves their committing a crime, which is all the more shocking in that it receives no authorial comment. Simenon’s novels are almost always strict point-of-view narratives. We see things only as the main character sees them. Sometimes this is half comical. In “The Man Who Watched Trains Go By” (1938), a prototypical roman dur, the first action that the hero, Kees Popinga, takes upon leaving home is to try to seduce his boss’s mistress. When she casually refuses him, he kills her. “I just can’t understand why Pamela laughed at me,” he writes in the diary he is keeping of his adventures. She’ll think twice about doing that again, he figures. But what if she goes to the police? That might be nice, though. His name will be in the papers. He has forgotten that he killed Pamela.

Such anomie sounds very much of Simenon’s time: the Fascist-breeding thirties, the war, the postwar despair. It seems to echo the work of the existentialists Sartre and Camus, and Camus acknowledged that he had learned from Simenon. But the most influential of Simenon’s colleagues, and the most admiring, was much older—André Gide, who called him “perhaps the greatest and the most truly a novelist in contemporary French letters.” Other respectable artists also spoke of Simenon as a serious writer. At the same time, many of his top-drawer literary fans, clearly meaning well, praised him as a supplier of page-turners. The Chilean writer Luis Sepúlveda said, “There is nothing like winter in the company of a keg of brandy and the complete works of Simenon.”

Sad to say, Simenon endorsed this snobbish position. He called his Maigret novels quasi-literary. Like Conan Doyle with Sherlock Holmes, he tried to ditch his famous detective. From 1935 to 1941, he wrote no Maigret novels. Then, he said, he yielded to popular demand, which is another way of saying that he yielded to financial considerations. Very early on, Simenon learned to spend what he earned. He had fabulous houses—he once rented a sixteenth-century château—and fancy cars to park in front of them. At one point, when he was living in the country, he had a menagerie, including a white stallion that he liked to ride to the market, and two wolves. (The latter, unfortunately, ate the family cat and had to be given to a zoo.)

Living in such a manner, Simenon could not ignore his sales. In his mature period, he wrote almost twice as many straight novels as Maigret novels—a hundred and thirty-four versus seventy-six—but it was the Maigrets that made the real money. Simenon was legendary in the publishing world for driving a hard bargain. Eventually, he obtained full subsidiary rights to his books. This meant that he received the money from all translations, which have appeared in some fifty-five languages. But far more important—a gold mine—were movie rights. Fifty-three films were made of Simenon’s work during his lifetime, and that’s not counting the television adaptations. Of course, it was the Maigrets that were most often adapted for film and TV. (The ITV series, of the nineteen-nineties, with Michael Gambon as Maigret, is the best.)

Nevertheless, the widely held view that he wrote primarily for money infuriated Simenon. He thought that he deserved the Nobel Prize in Literature, and, in interviews, where he was always incautious, he predicted that he would. On the day when it was announced that Camus had won the prize, Simenon got drunk and hit his wife. In 1933, as part of his campaign for acceptance in the high-art league, he had changed publishers, signing on with Gallimard, France’s most prestigious house, whose list included Gide, Proust, and Valéry. Gallimard unquestionably took him on so that he could make some money for them. He obliged, but that did not prevent some of the Gallimard editors from treating him like a gate-crasher. He responded with defiance. When he went to Gallimard’s offices, he would sing (not hum) as he walked down the hushed hallways where editors were curating the modernist money-losers they considered superior to his work.

So there were, fundamentally, two competing views of Simenon. He was a hack or he was an artist. Both are half right. The finest things Simenon ever wrote—“Dirty Snow,” “The Man Who Watched Trains Go By,” “Pedigree”—are non-Maigrets. These few books are not just his best novels; they are among the best novels of the twentieth century. But many of the durs have serious weaknesses, the worst being that the hardness often comes off as luridness. This month, a 1947 novel, “Act of Passion,” is being reissued by New York Review Books, which has a long and distinguished line of Simenons. This is a classic dur, in which a man, Charles Alavoine, escapes from what he feels is a mediocre existence in favor of a sort of self-immolation. Near the end, he has just made love with the woman, Martine, for whom he gave up everything. He is holding her in his arms and stroking the place on her thigh that he likes best. “And to think that I shall have to kill her one day,” he says to himself. Then he goes on caressing her thigh. You’re surprised, but are you impressed? Or does it just seem an effect, as if the book were an existential comic?

Martine’s case brings up another matter. Simenon was repeatedly accused of misogyny. He indignantly replied that he had great female characters and that when the women weren’t strong, and got kicked around by the men, that was the way of the world. But the strong women of the durs are, for the most part, frightening bitches. The nicer women are generally weak, even masochistic. Many, like Martine, are killed by their men, and the man likes it better if she doesn’t resist. “I felt that she was encouraging me,” Martine’s lover recalls. (Of course, he says that it hurts him more than it hurts her.) Others are not killed but just shamed. The early “Tropic Moon” (1933) takes place in Gabon. (Simenon, who loved trips as much as paychecks, wrote many travel articles, and thereby spent some time in Africa.) In it, a group of white men get drunk one night and drive out to a village, where they herd three women into the back of their truck and continue on to a clearing, where they have a little orgy. Then they pile back into the truck. The women try to get in, too. “Hey, baby, just a second!” one of the men says. “Whites first!” The women obediently stand back and wait their turn, whereupon the men drive off without them. The women, shrieking, run after the truck, but it is soon gone. They are left naked, fifteen miles from home, in the middle of the night.

In “Dirty Snow,” the officer whom Frank will eventually kill is a regular at the local bar. He usually has two women with him. While drinking at his banquette, he fingers them under their skirts and then raises his wet hands to the light, laughing. Simenon may have called this the way of the world. I call it pornography, of a familiar sort. I dislike the scenes of humiliation more than the murder scenes, because they are more realistic, more possible. But it’s all pretty bad, not just politically but also artistically: because it involves the abuse of a mere woman, not a man, it can just be thrown off, as a kind of flourish. This encouraged Simenon to rely on such gestures, as in Alavoine’s decision to murder Martine in “Act of Passion.” It gave him access to cheap effects.

Underlining this easy evil is Simenon’s fondness for a sort of pat irony, like something out of Maupassant. In a 1956 book, a man who tells his wife that he will take her to Cannes for Christmas—he is lying; he intends to go skiing with his mistress—is seen, in the last chapter, in Cannes with his wife. His mistress has come to a bad end. At the conclusion of another novel, a man who has labored for months devising a way to poison his wife and run off with his mistress looks on in horror as his mistress eats the arsenic-laced meal he had cooked for his wife.

Such things don’t happen often in the Maigret books. You could say that, being police novels, they are conservative, bent on making people behave. But when you read them and see the sorrows and the bad boyfriends and the too many drinks that they, too, describe, you realize that this is not really the case, any more than, say, with Raymond Chandler’s books. Simenon respected his Maigrets less, and as a result they are, on average, more relaxed, more witty, even more poetic.

Nevertheless, they share one serious fault with the durs: they are often sloppy, and that, unquestionably, was owing to Simenon’s writing method, his habit of completing a novel in ten to eleven days. Usually, he took seven to eight days to write a novel, and then two or three days to revise. Furthermore, when he started a book, he had no outline of the plot, only a sketch of the characters. He said that, upon beginning, he entered into a trance, in which, chapter by chapter, the plot came to him. This was obviously a high-pressure business, but he seems to have taken pleasure in it. When he felt a novel coming on, he cancelled all appointments and had a checkup with his doctor to make sure he could endure the stress. Four dozen freshly sharpened pencils were lined up on his desk, and a “Do Not Disturb” sign, stolen from the Plaza Hotel in New York, was hung on his study door. He wrote one chapter per morning, but even in the afternoon his family and staff were ill-advised to speak to him. For each book, he had a “lucky shirt.” It had to be washed every night.

This method damaged his work terribly. Halfway through some books, subplots get dropped, characters change weirdly. If Simenon had cared about revising, he would have seen the problems and either fixed the book or given up on it. Surely he noticed that the few novels for which he violated the schedule and took more time—notably “Pedigree,” which contains the most beautiful writing he ever did—were among his finest. But, again, this wasn’t just a case of not knowing. He didn’t want to bother. Once more, we should not forget about the money. In the words of Luc Sante, Simenon had a working-class view of his profession. The more product he turned out, the more he expected to earn. Commentators exclaim over his sales, but his publisher Gaston Gallimard pointed out that his books, on average, sold only about eight thousand copies. The reason people bought so many of his novels per year is that he produced so many novels per year—an average of five after his potboiler period. Stanley Eskin, whose “Simenon” (1987) is the best critical study of the author, says that, at heart, Simenon had little respect for intelligence. Fine, but then you have to ask: why did this man expect to win the Nobel Prize?

Despite the vomiting, Simenon appears to have enjoyed himself for many years. He didn’t do much besides writing. He apparently didn’t waste a lot of time reading his contemporaries’ novels, including those of his useful friend Gide or his other fervent literary fan Henry Miller. It seems that when Simenon and Miller got together they talked mainly about girls. Miller told Simenon that he had “a six-inch bone in his cock.”

After Tigy and Boule—or together with them—Simenon had two more wives, or “wives.” In 1945, in New York, he hired a beautiful, nervous French-Canadian woman, Denyse Ouiment, seventeen years younger than he, as his secretary. She later said that they met at one-forty-five and were in bed by seven. After Denyse had a child in 1949, Simenon divorced Tigy, but in time his harem was augmented by Teresa Sburelin, a Venetian woman who joined the household, in 1961, as Denyse’s maid. Other servants, too, had a dual function. “If one has a place in the country and if one has servants, what can one expect?” Simenon told Brendan Gill, of The New Yorker. “One must take care of their needs.” Still, Simenon said he liked prostitutes best. Denyse, when told about his claim of having had ten thousand sex partners, said, pooh, it was probably only about twelve hundred.

We shouldn’t be too impressed by this. In 1968, Simenon, with his usual indiscretion, allowed himself to be interviewed by a panel of five doctors. One of them later said that the group was struck by his unromantic approach to sex. He told them that he limited the contact to two minutes. Reportedly, he also kept his clothes on (he just unzipped). One day, when Denyse was in her study conferring with one of her assistants, Joyce Aitken, Simenon entered the room, wanting to have sex. “You don’t have to leave, Aitken,” Denyse said, and she and Simenon got down, briefly, on the rug. If you followed such procedures, you, too, could have twelve hundred sexual partners.

In 1940, after the Second World War got under way, Simenon moved his family to a village in the Vendée, in west-central France. Because of travel restrictions, he got stuck there. In the morning he wrote; in the afternoon he played cards with the locals in a café. His war record was mixed. He ran a refugee center, very energetically, people say. On the other hand, four of the nine movies made of his books during the Occupation were produced by what he knew was a Nazi-run company. For that organization, he also signed a statement that he was an Aryan. Pierre Assouline says that Simenon was neither a collaborator nor a resister but just an opportunist. Alan Riding, in his recent, evenhanded book on the Occupation, “And the Show Went On,” also brushes Simenon’s case aside. But most people suffered severe privations during the war. Meanwhile, Simenon got richer (primarily from those movies). And so, once the Occupation ended, the purge committee of the French writers’ union began looking into his case. Simenon became truly frightened—some writers, on the committee’s recommendation, were barred from publishing—and in 1945, as soon as he could get out, he sailed with his family to North America. They eventually settled in the genteel town of Lakeville, Connecticut, where Simenon was restless but productive. (Many of his best books were published in his middle years, from about 1938 to 1951.) After a ten-year exile, the family returned to Europe, settling near Lausanne, Switzerland, which for Simenon, as for others, was a tax haven.

Something that had sustained Simenon in the United States—his passionate relationship with Denyse—now collapsed beneath him. She became increasingly nervous and obsessive. (Once, when they checked into a hotel, she changed the paper linings in the drawers and disinfected the telephone.) Such problems were exacerbated by the fact that she had become an alcoholic. She had several stays in detox centers, as well as in psychiatric clinics. Simenon was not in good shape, either. The two had screaming fights; they hit each other. Finally, in 1964, he banished her from the house. He gave her a generous allowance, but he would not agree to a divorce, he said, because she was asking for too much money. They remained legally married until his death.

One day in 1973, when Simenon was having trouble with a novel, he declared that he was through writing fiction. If you read his novels of the two or three years preceding this, you may decide that he was right to stop when he did. For his seventieth birthday, however, he went out and bought a tape recorder, into which, over the next six years, he dictated twenty-one volumes’ worth of memoirs. They are widely considered formless, trivial, and boring. Simenon later agreed: “At bottom I have nothing to say.”

Simenon had four children, one boy by Tigy and two boys and a girl by Denyse. He was a doting father, and all his boys did well. But the daughter, Marie-Georges, always known as Marie-Jo, had a hard time, especially once she reached adolescence: drug problems, love problems, dissipations, depressions. Like her mother, she had frequent stays in psychiatric clinics. A special difficulty was her fervid attachment to her father. Whatever she thought of her parents’ relationship, she seems to have believed that, once they separated, she should have been given a more central place in her father’s life. But, after Denyse left, Teresa Sburelin took on the role of wife, blocking Marie-Jo’s path, as she saw it. Once, in the bedroom Simenon shared with Teresa, Marie-Jo pointed to their bed and asked him, “Why not me?” In 1978, when she was twenty-five, she locked herself in her apartment and shot herself in the heart with a .22. Assouline says that Simenon felt not just sorrow and guilt but relief. He loved her, but she had tormented him with her problems all her life. He had foreseen her suicide.

Around the time of his retirement from novel-writing, Simenon put his enormous house in Lausanne on the market, sold his five cars, placed his furniture in storage, and moved, with Teresa and his youngest son, into a small eighteenth-century house. From then on, he saw almost no one. In an office across town, Joyce Aitken (of “You don’t have to leave, Aitken”) managed his business affairs and also his fortune, which, in 1987-88, the Swiss tax authorities estimated at three and a half million Swiss francs (the equivalent of about four and a half million dollars today), not counting property. He expressed utter indifference to the books he had written: “So many hours, so many pages. Why?” Teresa looked after him tenderly, and he spoke of her with love. Nevertheless, he said that one of the reasons he was attached to her was that she had not asked to be in his will. In 1989, at the age of eighty-six, he died, of natural causes. Assouline writes of his subject—so avid for work, fame, money, women—that he died “as he had dreamed of dying: old.”

JOAN ACOCELLA

Joan Acocella has written for The New Yorker, mostly on books and dance, since 1992, and became the magazine’s dance critic in 1998. Her article “Cather and the Academy” was included in “The Best American Essays 1996”; she later expanded the essay into the book “Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism.” She is the author of “Mark Morris,” a biographical/critical study of the choreographer, and of “Creating Hysteria: Women and Multiple Personality Disorder.” She co-edited “André Levinson on Dance: Writings from Paris in the Twenties” and edited “The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky,” the first unexpurgated version in English. Her most recent book is “Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints,” a collection of essays. She is now working on a biography of Mikhail Baryshnikov. She has written on dance, literature, and other arts for The New York Review of Books, the Times Book Review, Art in America, and the Times Literary Supplement. She has been a Guggenheim fellow and a fellow of the American Academy in Berlin, and is currently a fellow of the New York Institute of Humanities. She has received awards from the National Book Critics Circle, the Congress on Research in Dance, the American Psychoanalytic Association, and the Newswomen’s Club of New York.

THE NEW YORKER

ELENA FERRANTE’S NEW BOOK: ART WINS

By Joan Acocella

 , SEPTEMBER 1, 2015

A few paragraphs into Elena Ferrante’s new novel, “The Story of the Lost Child,” the final volume of the writer’s so-called Neapolitan tetralogy—the first three volumes are “My Brilliant Friend,” “The Story of a New Name,” and “Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay”—Lena, the narrator, says that now we’re coming to “the most painful part of the story.” Really? It’s going to get worse? When we last saw Lena, she was walking out on a decent husband and two daughters to run off with a man who we know is going to betray her. The little girls scream and weep and hang onto her skirt, begging her not to go. “I couldn’t bear it,” she writes. “I knelt down, I held them around the waist, I said: All right, I won’t go, you are my children, I’ll stay with you.” This calms them down. Then she goes to her bedroom and packs the suitcase she will take when, a few days later, she drops the girls off with a neighbor, says she’ll be back shortly, and leaves for the train station.

Ferrante’s Neapolitan series, unlike other long historical novels we might compare it with (“Buddenbrooks,” “Remembrance of Things Past”), does not go to a lot of trouble to span generations or social classes. Most of its characters come from a single cluster of working-poor families living in a noisy, hot slum on the outskirts of Naples between 1950 and 2010. Ferrante supplies a dramatis personae at the beginning of the first volume—the shoemaker’s family, the Cerullos, Fernando, Nunzia, Lila, and Rino; the mad widow’s family, the Cappuccios, Melina (the widow), Ada, and Antonio; the grocer’s family, the Carraccis, Don Achille, Maria, Stefano, Pinuccia, and Alfonso; the train conductor’s family, the Sarratores, Donato, Lidia, Nino, Marisa, et al.—and, apart from births and deaths, the cast hasn’t changed much by the fourth volume. All these people are fantastically enmeshed. They practically can’t walk to the corner without running into someone they’ve slept with or beaten up.

But no two characters are more bound together than Lila, the shoemaker’s daughter, and Lena, the porter’s daughter. Both were born in 1944; they meet at the age of six, when they are entering first grade. Lena is blond and plump and inclined to do as she’s told. Lila is dark and skinny and ferocious. “Her quickness of mind was like a hiss, a dart, a lethal bite.” Everyone’s afraid of Lila, and most of them are in love with her, too, but none more than Lena, and Lila loves Lena back, though “love” is too narrow a word for it. The two envy each other, compete with each other. They help and gravely harm each other. In “The Story of the Lost Child,” they get pregnant at the same time; they go to their doctor’s appointments together, and each holds the other’s hand during her pelvic examination. For much of that book, Lena’s family lives upstairs from Lila’s, and their children eat and sleep now at one apartment, now at the other. You could say (as Rachel Cusk more or less does, in her Times Book Review essay this week) that they are two halves of one complete woman, but actually each is complete in herself. And it is through their interaction that Ferrante says what she has to say about the world.

She has two subjects, basically. The first is women. This is the most thoroughgoing feminist novel I have ever read. (I will call the four books one novel. They are, though the first volume, at least, could be read without the others.) In the person of Lila, we have an embodiment of female beauty like something out of Titian. At the end of “My Brilliant Friend,” this girl, sixteen years old and due to get married, to Stefano, that afternoon, asks Lena to give her a bath. Lena speaks of her inner turmoil at being asked to rest her gaze

on the childish shoulders, on the breasts and stiffly cold nipples, on the narrow hips and the tense buttocks, on the black sex, on the long legs, and on the tender knees, on the curved ankles, on the elegant feet; and to act as if it’s nothing, when instead everything is there, present, in the poor dim room, amid the worn furniture, on the uneven, water-stained floor. … I washed her with slow, careful gestures, first letting her squat in the tub, then asking her to stand up: I still have in my ears the sound of the dripping water, and the impression that the copper of the tub had a consistency not different from Lila’s flesh, which was smooth, solid, calm. I had a confusion of feelings and thoughts: embrace her, weep with her, kiss her, pull her hair, laugh, pretend to sexual experience and instruct her in a learned voice, distancing her with words just at the moment of greatest closeness. But in the end there was only the hostile thought that I was washing her, from her hair to the soles of her feet, early in the morning, just so that Stefano could sully her in the course of the night. I imagined her naked as she was at that moment, entwined with her husband, in the bed in the new house, while the train clattered under their windows and his violent flesh entered her with a sharp blow, like the cork pushed by the palm into the neck of a wine bottle.

As Ferrante makes clear here, a woman’s sexual allure will not get her much. Lila never liked sex. (Her wedding night is a violent rape scene.) As for Lena, she does like sex, and, in a touching passage, she says to her old boyfriend Antonio—whose heart she broke for the sake of the no-good Nino she’s running away with at the end of “Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay”—that it was he who awakened her to it: “He was the discovery of excitement, he was the pit of the stomach that grew warm, that opened up, that turned liquid, releasing a burning indolence.” But, as she goes on to tell him, nothing ever fulfilled that expectation. At the end of the book, Lena is alone, and Lila, no doubt, is, too.

Yet there is no repudiation of the trappings of femininity: the dolls, the bracelets, the buttons and bows. The book fairly teems with women’s things, women’s bodies, which, furthermore, are imagined as being in a state of constant flow, as if they were part of some piece of French écriture féminine. Lena again and again has visions that her mother, whom she mostly hates, has crawled inside her body and is kicking around inside there. Lila has something worse, a condition she calls “dissolving boundaries”: it seems to her that edges of things melt, and their innards squirt and slosh into each other. Do you remember, Lila asks Lena, that night on Ischia, when you all said how beautiful the sky was? To her, it wasn’t beautiful: “I smelled an odor of rotten eggs, eggs with a greenish-yellow yolk inside the white and inside the shell, a hard-boiled egg cracked open. I had in my mouth poisoned egg stars, their light had a white, gummy consistency, it stuck to your teeth, along with the gelatinous black of the sky, I crushed it with disgust, I tasted a crackling of grit. Am I clear? Am I making myself clear?”

As plenty of readers will have heard by now, “Elena Ferrante” is a pen name. Apart from the information in the jacket bio—that she is a woman and was born in Naples—we know nothing about the author. (There is an interview with her by Sandro and Sandra Ferri in the Spring, 2015, issue of The Paris Review, but it gives no further biographical details.) It seems to me unquestionable, though, that these books were written not just by a female but by one who has been pregnant. Lila says that, if she didn’t stay alert, the world would undergo a huge inundation: “The waters would break through, a flood would rise, carrying everything off in clots of menstrual blood, in cancerous polyps, in bits of yellowish fiber.” In fact, at this point in the novel waters might indeed be breaking. Lila and Lena are both heavily pregnant, and they are sitting in a rocking car in the middle of Naples, where they have taken refuge from an earthquake, the Irpinia earthquake of 1980. (The book tracks world events closely. We hear about the Red Brigades, Chernobyl, the World Trade Center.) All around them, gas mains are exploding, buildings are collapsing; a cemetery is breaking off the mainland and falling into the sea.

Here, Ferrante has used a catastrophic real-life event to exemplify—indeed, culminate—her sense of women’s undefended boundaries, but the matter comes up again and again, even in modest circumstances. At one point, Lena’s daughter Dede, now a young woman, who for years has avoided any physical contact with her—she’s another one who fears being invaded—breaks her rule and goes and sits in her mother’s lap. Lena describes the feeling of her daughter’s warm bottom, the “wide hips,” against her thighs. To me, that was almost as unsettling as the earthquake.

Much of the thrill of the four books lies just in this elastic back and forth between realism and hallucination. No one is a more careful realist than Ferrante. When Lena’s husband, in their kitchen, gets ready to punch her in the face, Ferrante takes time to tell us about the hum of the refrigerator and the drip of the faucet in the background. And her general faithfulness to reality encourages us to stay with her as she veers off into hallucination. Some scenes, just by their tone and pacing, and by what they omit as much as by what they include, seem to take place in slow motion or under water or on another planet. It’s not that things are askew. The very air is different. This, Ferrante seems to say, is what happens in the world of women, and though much of the book is devoted to women’s more frequently discussed problems—such as how they are supposed to go out to work and raise the kids at the same time, and, if they do have work, work they care about, how come this still seems to them secondary to their relationship with a man?—it is the exploration of the women’s mental underworld that makes the book so singular an achievement in feminist literature; indeed, in all literature.

Ferrante’s other subject is language. Insofar as the book is realist, the critical thing in it is the neighborhood: the poverty, the ignorance, the unremitting violence. The only way to gain any power or happiness is to get out, and the only way to do that is via schooling, the learning of words, and not the words your parents speak—that’s dialect—but standard Italian. Apart from femaleness, there is nothing in the book more important than this. From page to page, in passages of dialogue, Ferrante tells us (and then so does the excellent translator, Ann Goldstein, who is also the head of the copy department at The New Yorker) if someone is speaking standard Italian and the other is speaking dialect, so that we can understand what is going on between them, and then, if anyone switches, as they may do, what that means.

Basically, what the linguistic difference means is whether the person is going to remain in the neighborhood and—to put it in female terms, Ferrante’s terms—get pregnant every two years, and get beaten up by her husband if dinner is late, or whether she’s going to escape this. Both Lila and Lena understand the situation early on. When they are twelve and have the chance to go to middle school—where you can perfect your Italian and even learn Latin, and also write essays and read books—both of them are desperate to go. But first you must pass an exam, and taking the exam costs money, and Lila’s family is marginally poorer than Lena’s. Also, Lila’s father fails to see why a girl needs an education, as Lena’s father, for some reason, does not. So Lila is told that she can’t continue her schooling. This is the fork in the road for the two girls, and it is marked by the book’s first serious moral crime. Lila, with all her powers of seduction, suggests to Lena that they play hooky one morning and walk across the city to the harbor, to the sea, which they have never seen. Lena agrees, as she always does to Lila’s mad plans. But on the appointed morning, when they set out, Lila begins acting strange. She slows down; she keeps looking behind her, as if she’s afraid they’re being followed. Her hand starts to sweat. Suddenly, a storm breaks, and Lila insists that they go back. This baffles Lena—Lila is never afraid of anything—but they run back home, and Lena gets a beating. The next day, Lila inspects Lena’s bruises:

“All they did was beat you?”

“What should they have done?”

“They’re still sending you to study Latin?”

I looked at her in bewilderment.

Was it possible? She had taken me with her hoping that as a punishment my parents would not send me to middle school?

Yes, presumably, and then she repented. For the rest of the novel, that ambivalence never lets up. From middle school, Lena keeps on going, through university. She becomes a writer—of feminist novels! Along the way, Lila helps her. She encourages her, praises her. Once she gets married and has some money, she buys Lena’s schoolbooks, and not used ones but new ones. “My brilliant friend,” she calls her. She also mocks her and, for long periods, stops speaking to her. She knows that the more learning Lena has, the more this will separate them. But her feelings are also in accord with the old, primitivist formula whereby the less refined something is, the truer it is.

Lena works ceaselessly, in school and later. Her books make her famous. And sadly, in the dark of night, she too trusts the old formula. She feels she can never truly write well because she lacks Lila’s wild, prodigal spirit. Lila, she thinks, “possessed intelligence and didn’t put it to use but, rather, wasted it, like a great lady for whom all the riches in the world are merely a sign of vulgarity.” If, on occasion, Lena thinks she has written well, that’s because she has somehow captured Lila’s spirit, made “space for her in me.” (This is why, in “The Story of the Lost Child,” Lena has moved back into her natal slum. She feels that she needs to be near Lila in order to do her work.) When she’s not worried about whether she’s been able to absorb Lila into her books, she worries that Lila will turn out books of her own.

Of course, Lila can’t produce a book, but she does write little things now and then. In the second volume of the series, when she gets married, she gives Lena a tin box tied with a piece of string—her writings, she says. She doesn’t want her husband to find them. Neither must Lena ever read them. Lila is, of course, no sooner out of sight than Lena opens the box and begins poring over the eight notebooks it contains. They are poignant: Lila practicing Italian, penning descriptions of things (a leaf, a pot), recording what she thought of a movie she saw in the church hall. But halfway down a page, she will lose patience and fill the rest of the space with drawings: “twisted trees, humped, smoking mountains, grim faces.” For weeks, Lena studies the notebooks, “learning by heart the passages I liked, the ones that thrilled me, … the ones that humiliated me.” Finally, one night, she leaves the house with the box under her arm:

I stopped on the Solferino bridge to look at the lights filtered through a cold mist. I placed the box on the parapet, and pushed it slowly, a little at a time, until it fell into the river, as if it were her, Lila in person, plummeting, with her thoughts, words, the malice with which she struck back at anyone, the way she appropriated me, as she did every person or thing or event or thought that touched her.

This person that Lena loves more than anything in the world: she is trying to kill her. And in keeping with the book’s logic, she is doing it by killing her words.

In “The Story of the Lost Child,” something very terrible happens to Lila (see the book’s title), and one day, after laboring for years under her sorrow, she simply disappears. Her son, Rino, calls Lena, now living in Turin. Everything Lila owns, he says, is gone from the apartment. As Lena understands, this is not because Lila needed those things but because she wanted to erase herself. She even scissored herself out of the photos of herself with Rino. Lena, who had been stalled in her work, now starts to write again, to prevent Lila’s self-annihilation. To Lila’s oppressive disorder—the menstrual clots, the yellow gobbets, the things flying apart—she will oppose her own, once-despised instinct for order. Dispersal will meet containment; dialect, Italian. This is an old literary trick, or at least as old as Proust: to tell a story of pain and defeat and then, at the end, say that it will all be redeemed by art, by a book—indeed, the book you are reading. Lena will write for months and months, for as long as it takes, she says, to give Lila “a form whose boundaries won’t dissolve.” She will thus calm her friend, and herself—and, to reach beneath the metaphor, rescue life from grief, clarity from chaos, without denying the existence of grief and chaos. She pulls her chair up to her desk. “We’ll see who wins this time,” she says. Art wins. We win.

Joan Acocella has written for The New Yorker, reviewing dance and books, since 1992, and became the magazine’s dance critic in 1998.

THE NEW YORKER

A Fire in the Brain / The difficulties of being James Joyce’s daughter

BOOKS

A FIRE IN THE BRAIN

The difficulties of being James Joyce’s daughter.

BY JOAN ACOCELLADECEMBER 8, 2003

William Butler Yeats, when he was riding the bus, would occasionally go into a compositional trance. He would stare straight ahead and utter a low hum and beat time with his hands. People would come up to him and ask him if he was all right. Once, his young daughter, Anne, boarded a bus and found him in that condition among the passengers. She knew better than to disturb him. But when the bus stopped at their gate, she got off with him. He turned to her vaguely and said, “Oh, who is it you wish to see?”

When I think of what it means to be an artist’s child, I remember that story. There are worse fates. But in the artist’s household the shifts that the children must endure—they can’t make noise (he’s working), they can’t leave on vacation (he hasn’t finished the chapter)—are combined with a mystique that this is all for some exalted cause, which they must honor even though they are too young to understand it. Furthermore, if the artist is someone of Yeats’s calibre, the children, as they develop, will measure themselves against him and come up short. In fact, many artists’ children turn out just fine, and grow up to edit their parents’ work and live off the royalties. But some do not—for example, James Joyce’s two children. His son became an alcoholic; his daughter went mad. Carol Loeb Shloss, a Joyce scholar who teaches at Stanford, has just written a book about the latter: “Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $30).

Lucia grew up in a disorderly household. Joyce had turned his back on Ireland in 1904, when he was twenty-two. Convinced that he was a genius but that his countrymen would never recognize this, he persuaded Nora Barnacle, his wife-to-be, to sail with him to the Continent. They eventually landed in Trieste, and there, for the next decade or so, he worked as a language teacher and completed “Dubliners” and “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” With the publication of “Portrait,” in 1916, he acquired rich patrons, but until then—that is, throughout his children’s early years—the Joyces were very poor. Some days they went without dinner. Their first child, Giorgio, was born in 1905, a bonny, easy baby, and, furthermore, a boy. Nora adored him till the day she died. Two years after Giorgio came Lucia, a sickly, difficult child, and a girl, with strabismus. (That is, she was cross-eyed. Nora, too, had strabismus, but hers was far less noticeable.) Lucia’s earliest memories of her mother were of scoldings. Joyce, on the other hand, loved Lucia, spoiled her, sang to her, but only when he had time. He worked all day and then, on many nights, he went out and got blind drunk. The family was evicted from apartment after apartment. By the age of seven, Lucia had lived at five different addresses. By thirteen, she had lived in three different countries. The First World War forced the Joyces to move to Zurich; after the war, they settled in Paris. As a result, Lucia received a spotty education, during which she was repeatedly left back by reason of having to learn a new language.

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Was she strange from childhood? With people who become mentally ill as adults, this question is always hard to answer, because most witnesses, knowing what happened later, read it back into the early years, and are sure that the signs were already there. Richard Ellmann, the author of the standard biography of Joyce, and Brenda Maddox, in her “Nora: A Biography of Nora Joyce,” both note that the young Lucia seemed to stare off into space, but the strabismus might account for this. It is also said that she was reticent socially. Although she was talkative at home—a “saucebox,” her father called her—she apparently went through periods when she spoke to few people outside her family. But the language-switching could explain this. A friend of the family described her, in her twenties, as “illiterate in three languages.” It was four, actually: German, French, English, and Triestine Italian. The last was her native tongue, the language that her family used at home, not just in Trieste but forever after (because Joyce found it easier on the voice). It was not, however, what people spoke in most of the places where she lived.

When Lucia was fifteen, she began taking dance lessons, mostly of the new, anti-balletic, “aesthetic” variety, and this became her main interest during her teens and early twenties. She started at the Dalcroze Institute in Paris, then moved on to study with the toga-clad Raymond Duncan, Isadora’s older brother. Eventually, she hooked up with a commune of young women who performed now and then, in Paris and elsewhere, as Les Six de Rythme et Couleur. However briefly, Lucia was a professional dancer. She is said to have excelled in sauvage roles. But eventually she left this group, as she left every group. (I count nine dance schools in seven years.) In part, that may have been due to lack of encouragement from her family. Nora reportedly nagged Lucia to give up dancing. According to members of the family, she was jealous of the attention the girl received. As for Joyce, Brenda Maddox says he felt “it was unseemly for women to get on the stage and wave their arms about.”

Finally, after seven years’ training in the left wing of dance, Lucia bolted to the right wing, and embarked on a backbreaking course of ballet instruction with Lubov Egorova, formerly of the Maryinsky Theatre, in St. Petersburg. This was a terrible idea. Professional ballet dancers begin their training at around the age of eight. Lucia was twenty-two. She worked six hours a day, but of course she couldn’t catch up, and, in her discouragement, she concluded that she was not physically strong enough to be a dancer of any kind—a decision, Joyce wrote to a friend, that cost her “a month’s tears.”

The loss of her dance career was not the only grief that Lucia suffered in her early twenties. The publication of “Ulysses,” in 1922, made Joyce a star, and there were plenty of young artistic types in Paris who thought it would be nice to be attached to his family. When Giorgio was in his late teens, an American heiress, Helen Fleischman, laid claim to him; eventually he moved in with her. Lucia, who had been very close to Giorgio, felt abandoned. She was also scandalized. (Fleischman was eleven years older than Giorgio, and married.) Finally, she wondered what she was missing. She decided to find out, and in the space of about two years she was rejected by three men: her father’s assistant, Samuel Beckett, who told her he wasn’t interested in her in that way; her drawing teacher, Alexander Calder, who bedded her but soon went back to his fiancée; and another artist, Albert Hubbell, who had an affair with her and then went back to his wife. Lucia became more experimental. She took to meeting a sailor at the Eiffel Tower. She announced that she was a lesbian. During these romantic travails, she became more distressed over her strabismus. She had the eye operated on, but it didn’t change. Soon afterward, her pride received another blow: her parents told her that they were going to get married. (Giorgio’s marriage to the newly divorced Fleischman got them thinking about legality and inheritance.) This is how she discovered that they never had been married and that she was a bastard.

The following year, on Joyce’s fiftieth birthday, Lucia picked up a chair and threw it at her mother, whereupon Giorgio took her to a medical clinic and checked her in. “He thereby changed her fate,” Shloss writes. That is a strong judgment, but it is true in part, because the minute an emotionally disturbed person is placed in an institution the story enters a new phase, in which we see not just the original problem but its alterations under institutionalization: the effects of drugs, the humiliation of being locked up and supervised, the consequent change in the person’s self-image and in other people’s image of him or her. For the next three years, Lucia went back and forth between home and hospital. One night in 1933, she was at home when the news came that a United States District Court had declared “Ulysses” not obscene (which meant that it could be published in the States). The Joyces’ phone rang and rang with congratulatory calls. Lucia cut the phone wires—“I’m the artist,” she said—and when they were repaired she cut them again. As her behavior grew worse, her hospitalizations became longer. She went from French clinics to Swiss sanitariums. She was analyzed by Jung. (Briefly—she wanted no part of him.) One doctor said she was “hebephrenic,” which at that time was a subtype of schizophrenia, describing patients who showed antic, “naughty” behavior. Another diagnostician said she was “not lunatic but markedly neurotic.” A third thought the problem was “cyclothymia,” akin to manic-depressive illness. At one point in 1935, when she seemed stabler, her parents let her go visit some cousins in Bray, a seaside town near Dublin. There she set a peat fire in the living room, and when her cousins’ boyfriends came to call she tried to unbutton their trousers. She also, night after night, turned on the gas tap, in a sort of suicidal game. Then she disappeared to Dublin, where she tramped the streets for six days, sleeping in doorways, or worse. When she was found, she herself asked to be taken to a nursing home.

Soon afterward, the Joyces put her in an asylum in Ivry, outside Paris. She was twenty-eight, and she never lived on the outside again. She changed hospitals a few times, but her condition remained the same. She was quiet for the most part, though periodically she would go into a tearing rage—breaking windows, attacking people—and then she would be put in a straitjacket until she calmed down. This went on for forty-seven years, until her death, in 1982, at the age of seventy-five.

Carol Shloss believes that Lucia’s case was cruelly mishandled. When Lucia fell ill, she at last captured her father’s sustained attention. He grieved over her incessantly. At the same time, he was in the middle of writing “Finnegans Wake,” and there were people around him—friends, patrons, assistants, on whom, since he was going blind, he was very dependent—who believed that the future of Western literature depended on his ability to finish this book. But he was not finishing it, because he was too busy worrying about Lucia. He was desperate to keep her at home. His friends—and also Nora, who bore the burden of caring for Lucia when she was at home, and who was the primary target of her fury—insisted that she be institutionalized. The entourage finally prevailed, and Joyce completed “Finnegans Wake.” In Shloss’s view, Lucia was the price paid for a book.

But, as Shloss tells it, the silencing of Lucia went further than that. Her story was erased. After Joyce’s death, many of his friends and relatives, in order to cover over this sad (and reputation-beclouding) episode, destroyed Lucia’s letters, together with Joyce’s letters to and about her. Shloss says that Giorgio’s son, Stephen Joyce, actually removed letters from a public collection in the National Library of Ireland. When Brenda Maddox’s biography of Nora was in galleys, Maddox was required to delete her epilogue on Lucia in return for permission to quote various Joyce materials. Shloss doesn’t waste any tears over Maddox, however. In her opinion, Maddox and Ellmann are among the sinners, because they assumed, and thereby persuaded the public, that Lucia was insane. (Whenever Shloss catches Ellmann or Maddox in what seems to her a factual error, she records it snappishly—a tone inadvisable for a writer who, forced to swot up three decades of dance history, made some errors herself.) But the biographers are a side issue. None of Lucia’s letters survive as original documents. Nor is there any trace of her diaries or poems, or of a novel that she is said to have been writing. In other words, most of the primary sources for an account of Lucia Joyce’s life are missing. “This is a story that was not supposed to be told,” Shloss writes. Therefore she tells it with a vengeance.

Shloss says that Lucia was a pioneering artist: “Through her we watch the birth of modernism.” She compares her to Prometheus, “privately engaged in stealing fire.” She compares her to Icarus, who flew too close to the sun. Insofar as these statements have to do with Lucia’s dance career, Shloss is as hard up for evidence as all other people writing about dance that predated the widespread use of film and video recording. What those writers do is quote reviewers and witnesses. But Lucia’s stage career was very short; Shloss is able to document maybe ten or twenty professional performances, and Lucia’s contributions to them were apparently not reviewed. Once, in 1929, when she competed in a dance contest in Paris, a critic singled her out as “subtle and barbaric.” Apropos of that performance, Shloss also quotes the diary of Joyce’s friend Stuart Gilbert: “Ballet yesterday; fils prodigue is a compromise between pas d’acier (steps of steel) and neo-Stravinsky.” This would be an interesting compliment if the prodigal son in question were Lucia, but what Gilbert is clearly describing is George Balanchine’s ballet “Le Fils Prodigue,” which had its première in Paris, with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, three days before Lucia’s dance contest.

Shloss’s evaluation of Lucia as an artist is not limited to her dance career, however. Lucia, she tells us, collaborated with Joyce on “Finnegans Wake.” One of Lucia’s cousins, Bozena Berta Schaurek, visited the Joyces briefly in 1928, and in an interview fifty years later she recalled something from that visit: while Joyce worked, “Lucia danced silently in the background.” Joyce prided himself on his ability to write under almost any conditions, so if his niece saw him, once or twice, working in the same room where Lucia was practicing, this would not be surprising. But in Shloss’s mind Schaurek’s report prompts a vision:

There are two artists in this room, and both of them are working. Joyce is watching and learning. The two communicate with a secret, unarticulated voice. The writing of the pen, the writing of the body become a dialogue of artists, performing and counterperforming, the pen, the limbs writing away. The father notices the dance’s autonomous eloquence. He understands the body to be the hieroglyphic of a mysterious writing, the dancer’s steps to be an alphabet of the inexpressible. . . . The place where she meets her father is not in consciousness but in some more primitive place before consciousness. They understand each other, for they speak the same language, a language not yet arrived into words and concepts but a language nevertheless, founded on the communicative body. In the room are flows, intensities. 

Shloss thinks that this artistic symbiosis went on for years and that out of it came the theme of “Finnegans Wake” (flow), its linguistic experiments, much of its imagery, and also, because dance is abstract, its quasi-abstract quality. In return for these artistic gains, Shloss says, Lucia’s life was forfeited. Transfixed by Joyce’s gaze, she became too self-aware. And magicked by her relationship with him—“one of the great love stories of the twentieth century,” Shloss calls it—she could never form an attachment to another man. Even years later, when Lucia is in the sanitarium and doing bizarre things—painting her face black, sending telegrams to dead people—Shloss believes that this was Lucia’s way of giving her father material. She wasn’t schizophrenic; she was working on “Finnegans Wake.”

This elevation of Lucia to the role of collaborator on “Finnegans Wake” is the book’s most spectacular act of inflation, but by no means the only one. The less Shloss knows, the more she tells us. On Lucia’s studies with Raymond Duncan, for example, she seems to have almost no information. But here, among many other things, is what she says on the subject:

Lucia’s mind was filled with the grammar of vitality, prizing the dynamic over the static order. She imagined herself in terms of tension and its release; she felt the anxieties of opposing muscle to muscle and the heady mastery of resistances, knew the peace of working with gravity and not against it. To drop, to rebound, to lift, to suspend oneself. To fall and recover, to know the experience of grounding oneself and then arising to circle to the edge of ecstasy. Priests danced, children danced, philosophers’ thoughts rose and fell in rhythmic sequence; lovers danced, and so did Lucia. 

This is what you get when you tear up letters on a biographer. Underlying that passage—indeed, the whole book—are many of the irrationalist formulas associated in the public mind with dance. Painting is an art, writing is an art, but dance is a religion, an immolation. It is primitive, it is sexual, it is Dionysiac. (Shloss gives us a talk on Nietzsche.) It is an ecstasy, an obsession—the Red Shoes. Therefore it is cousin to insanity. Shloss points us to Zelda Fitzgerald, who also threw herself into ballet in her twenties, also studied with Egorova, and also went mad. (The two women even ended up in the same Swiss hospital, though Zelda was gone before Lucia checked in.) Nijinsky, too, is invoked. And Lucia’s symptoms are repeatedly described as her way of dancing.

In some sections, however, Shloss forgets that she is writing a symbolist poem or a Laingian treatise and starts writing a biography. That, of course, is when she has some information to go on. At one juncture, she quotes from a history of Lucia that Joyce and his friend Paul Léon wrote for one of the hospitals that she was sent to: “The patient insists that despite her diligence, her talent and all her exertions, the results of her work have come to nothing. The brother, her contemporary, whom she previously idolized, has never worked at anything, is well known, has married wealth, has a beautiful apartment, a car with a chauffeur and, on top of it all, a beautiful wife.” Lucia herself said to a companion that her situation was “just as if you had been very rich, and collected many valuable things, and then they were taken away from you.” These are modest statements, about cars and money, not Dionysus, but they are the ones that make you want to cry.

Another poignant section of the book has to do with Joyce’s efforts on Lucia’s behalf. Joyce believed that Lucia’s problems were somehow inherited from him: “Whatever spark or gift I possess has been transmitted to Lucia and it has kindled a fire in her brain.” (In fact, the fire may have been transmitted by Nora, whose sister Dilly spent a year and a half in a lunatic asylum.) He tried to find ways to heal her, please her. He bought her a fur coat (“My wish for you is warmth and beauty”), and when she lost it he bought her another one. To replace dancing, he persuaded her to take up book illustration—she drew lettrines, ornamental capitals—and he secretly gave publishers the money to pay her for her work. He didn’t think she was crazy; he thought she was special—“a fantastic being,” with her own private language. “I understand it,” he said, “or most of it.” If there was something wrong with her, maybe it was an infection, or a hormone imbalance. (She was given hormones, and also injections of seawater. The treatment of schizophrenia in those days was basically stabs in the dark, as it is still.) He spared no expense. In 1935, Léon reported that three-quarters of Joyce’s income was going to Lucia’s care. When the Germans invaded France, in 1940, and the family had to flee to Switzerland, Joyce practically killed himself in the vain effort to arrange for Lucia to go with them. Indeed, he may have killed himself. A month after the family arrived in Zurich, he died of a perforated ulcer.

Shloss loves Joyce for the pains he took over Lucia. The enemies in her book, apart from the letter-destroyers, are Nora and Giorgio—especially Giorgio, who, though by this time he spent his days in an alcoholic haze, was always forgiven everything by his family, and who, time and again, was the first person to say that his sister should be put away. Shloss repeatedly suggests—again, without evidence—that there may have been some sexual contact between Lucia and Giorgio when they were in their teens or earlier, and that Giorgio, in his rush to institutionalize her, may have been trying to silence her on this subject.

Shloss’s book is part of a tradition, the biography-of-the-artist’s-woman—a genre that is now about thirty years old, as old as its source, modern feminism. Its goal is to show that many great works of art by men were fed on the blood of women, who were then, at best, forgotten by history or, at worst, maddened by their exploitation and then clapped in an institution. In the latter cases—Shloss’s “Lucia,” Carole Seymour-Jones’s “Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot, First Wife of T. S. Eliot, and the Long-Suppressed Truth About Her Influence on His Genius”—these books can be very indignant. (Not always. Nancy Milford’s biography of Zelda Fitzgerald basically comes down on Scott’s side.) When the woman is merely unacknowledged, the tone tends to be milder, as in Brenda Maddox’s “Nora”—which,pace Shloss, says that Nora was the primary inspiration for Joyce’s work—or Ann Saddlemyer’s “Becoming George: The Life of Mrs. W. B. Yeats,” which tells the weird story of how Yeats’s wife, Georgie, was the medium (literally) through which he reached the spirit world and thus found the subject of his late work. In recent years, possibly because most of the really shocking cases have been used up, the arguments seem to be getting subtler. In Stacy Schiff’s “Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)” we are shown a woman whose contribution to her husband’s work was to meld with him in the creation of a single, shared personality, which then wrote the books and lived the life—a curious phenomenon.

All these biographies, subtle or not, are valuable, and not only for the sake of justice (when that is what they achieve) but because they tell an important truth about how artists get their work done. Many people are brilliant, and from that you may get one novel, as Zelda Fitzgerald did. But to write five novels (Scott) or seventeen (Nabokov)—to make a career—you must have, with brilliance, a number of less glamorous virtues, for example, patience, resilience, and courage. Lucia Joyce encountered obstacles and threw up her hands; James Joyce faced worse obstacles—for most of his writing life, publishers ran from him in droves—but he persisted. When the critics made fun of Zelda’s novel, she stopped publishing; when Scott had setbacks—indeed, when he was a falling-down drunk—he went on hoping, and working. Lucia and Zelda may have been less gifted than the men in question. But there is something else going on here, too, which the biographies-of-the-artists’-women record: that while nature seems to award brilliance equally to men and women, society does not nurture it equally in the two sexes, and thus leaves the women more discourageable. Nor, in females, does the world reward selfishness, which, sad to say, artists seem to need, or so one gathers from the portraits of the men in these books. One can also gather it from biographies of the women who did not lose heart—for example, George Eliot, whose books were the product of a life custom-padded by her mate, George Lewes. (Phyllis Rose, in her “Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages,” reports that for twenty-four years Lewes screened Eliot’s incoming letters, together with all reviews of her books, and threw away anything that might distress her.) Then there is Virginia Woolf, whose novels would never have been written had she not had non-stop nursing care from Leonard Woolf. Virginia knew this, and seems to have decided she deserved it, or so she suggests in “A Room of One’s Own.” But, male or female, once the artist walks into that private room and closes the door, a lot of people are going to feel shut out—are going to be shut out—and they may suffer. ♦

THE NEW YORKER