The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (42 page)

24.

Joyce spent the years after
Ulysses
tunneling into a denser, more obscure novel.
Finnegans Wake
is written in the weltering language of dreams. Words spill out of definitions and syntax like a river breaking the banks, and puns are as destructive as they are playful. Joyce felt as if he had arrived at the end of the English language.

All the world’s in want

and is writing a letters. A letters from a person to a place about a thing. And all the world’s on wish to be carrying a letters. A letters to a king about a treasure from a cat. When men want to write a letters. Ten men, ton men, pen men, pun men, wont to rise a ladder. And den men, dun men, fen men, fun men, hen men, hun men wend to raze a leader.

This is one of the more lucid passages.
Finnegans Wake
kept Nora up at night. “Jim is writing at his book,” she told a friend. “I go to bed and then that man sits in the next room and continues laughing about his own writing.” She would get out of bed and pound on the door, “Now, Jim, stop writing or stop laughing.”

Almost no one liked
Finnegans Wake
. When Ezra Pound first read a portion in 1926, he replied, “I make nothing of it whatever. Nothing so far as I make out, nothing short of divine vision or a new cure for the clapp can possibly be worth all the circumambient peripherization.” The letter’s deepest insult was Pound’s salutation (“Dear Jim”). Even Miss Weaver disapproved. “I do not care much for the output from your Wholesale Safety Pun Factory,” she confided, “nor for the darkness and the unintelligibilities of your deliberately-entangled language system. It seems to me you are wasting your genius.” By the time Miss Weaver confessed her disapproval, Joyce had been wasting his genius for five years. “It is possible Pound is right,” Joyce wrote in February 1927, “but I cannot go back.” He would continue writing
Finnegans Wake
for twelve more years.

Joyce was being undone by his virtues. His concentration and single-mindedness deepened his isolation. His defiant egoism became self-absorption, and his writing lost the balance of concealment and revelation. For seventeen years, he kept the title of
Finnegans Wake
a secret, and his favorite game was having people try to guess what it was—writing became camouflage. His devotion to his work meant that everyone in his life became instruments for his literary purposes, and the instruments, in the end, became demoralizing crutches. Joyce was fully dependent upon Miss Weaver’s patronage after
Ulysses
, and the censorship bans didn’t help. In 1923, following Joyce’s surgery, she gave him another capital gift of £12,000, bringing her total endowment to £20,500 (equivalent to more than £1 million today). The interest gave Joyce £850 per year after taxes (more than £40,000 today). But it was never enough. In 1927, Joyce began to divest small amounts from the principal, reducing his earnings each time. When the Depression hit, he began withdrawing more.

The qualities that made Joyce an excellent writer made him a ruthless human being, and Sylvia Beach may have suffered the most. There were letters to write, bills to pay, books to retrieve, requests for medications, advances needed on printings of
Ulysses
that were still months away. When the Roth piracy began, it wasn’t enough that she organized an unprecedented global protest on his behalf. He wanted her to go to the United States to stop it herself. Beach endured his requests gracefully, but in the midst of the
Two Worlds
piracy, she got an unexpected bill for £200, and the dam finally broke. “The truth is that as my affection and admiration for you are unlimited,” she wrote to Joyce, “so is the work you pile on my shoulders. When you are absent, every word I receive from you is an order. The reward for my unceasing labour on your behalf is to see you tie yourself into a bowknot and hear you complain.” He gave her work mercilessly, as if he were testing how much she could handle. “Is it human?”

A few months later, in June 1927, Beach’s mother was arrested in Paris for ignoring a petty shoplifting charge, and when she was released on bail, she overdosed on digitalis. For the rest of her life, Sylvia Beach concealed the suicide from her father and sisters. She withdrew herself from the suit against Roth, and she began to pull away from Joyce’s affairs.

—

JOYCE’S LIFE WAS FALLING APART. One of the reasons why
Finnegans Wake
was taking so long was that he was consumed by his daughter’s increasingly troubled life. In 1932, on Joyce’s fiftieth birthday, Lucia threw a chair at Nora. A few months later, after a party celebrating her engagement to a man she didn’t love (she was in love with Samuel Beckett, who began visiting Joyce in 1929), Lucia became catatonic. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and it was the beginning of a life of mental institutions. Joyce long insisted there was nothing wrong with her, that her mysterious pronouncements were clairvoyant, and that she was the greater genius of the family. “Whatever spark or gift I possess has been transmitted to Lucia, and it has kindled a fire in her brain.” She was creating her own language, he said, and he understood most of it. Joyce’s idea of therapy was to buy her a fur coat, which was as ineffectual as her doctors’ therapies (one suggested she drink seawater). During her second stay at an institution in 1932, Joyce smuggled her out. When he didn’t visit her, she sent him messages: “Tell him I am a crossword puzzle, and if he does not mind seeing a crossword puzzle, he is to come out [to see me].” When the truth was unavoidable, he blamed himself.

Lucia’s illness strained Joyce’s relationship with Nora. His excesses and spendthrift ways had become more difficult for her to handle over the years, and their quarrels became so serious that she would threaten to leave him. One friend remembers helping Nora pack up her belongings while Joyce implored her not to go, claiming he simply couldn’t manage without her, and his dependence upon her deepened as the prospect of life without her became more real. In 1928, when Nora was hospitalized for a two-week radiation treatment for uterine cancer, Joyce insisted on staying in the adjoining room. When she had a hysterectomy a few months later, he set up a bed next to hers so that he could be by her side through her recovery. She bore the illness better than he did. Joyce wrote to Miss Weaver during Nora’s treatments to tell her that listening to the nurses shouting in the emergency room and the storms howling outside kept him up at night and irritated his already fraying nerves.

By the time he reached his late forties, Joyce was already an old man. The ashplant cane that he had used for swagger as a young bachelor in Dublin became a blind man’s cane in Paris. Strangers helped him cross the street, and he bumped into furniture as he navigated through his own apartment. Nora had to put the milk and sugar in his tea for him, and he held on to her arm when they walked through the streets. He wouldn’t visit Miss Weaver in 1931 because he thought the tinted glasses he was wearing made him look like he was disguising himself for committing some monstrous crime. “I deserve all this,” he wrote to Miss Weaver, “on account of my many iniquities.”

Joyce was not being histrionic. He was trying to confess. One had to peer closely to see the nature of his iniquities, but it was visible. Nestled in the folds of Joyce’s irises were soft granulomatous lesions less than a millimeter wide, and inside those lesions were colonies of pale bacteria shaped like corkscrews that were coiling and lurching into his iris’s muscles and fibers. The bacterium that invaded Joyce’s eyes was called
Treponema pallidum
. James Joyce was going blind because he had syphilis.

—

THE BACTERIUM that causes syphilis wreaks havoc wherever it goes. The first lesion appears on the skin and heals after a few weeks, but
Treponema pallidum
searches for homes as it circulates through the bloodstream. The bacteria can inhabit blood vessels and bones, muscles and nerves. They can overrun the heart, the liver, the spinal cord or the brain. The versatility of the
Treponema
means that syphilis can cause an array of medical problems depending upon which organs it infests. Unlike other venereal diseases, syphilis can induce anything from arthritis and jaundice to aneurysms and epilepsy. But what struck a special fear in anyone who visited a prostitute and later discovered an unsightly lesion was the prospect of contracting “General Paralysis of the Insane.” If syphilitic bacteria invaded the central nervous system, the result was potentially a syndrome of psychoses, delusions and erratic mood swings combined with either full or partial paralysis. Joyce grew up terrified of what syphilis could do to a person. He whispered the word
paralysis
to himself at night as if the sound itself evoked the shiver of a ghost story.

Syphilis has a particular affinity for the eyes. Joyce suffered from many infections associated with syphilis—conjunctivitis, episcleritis, blepharitis—but the most common and devastating ocular manifestation of syphilis is iritis. His eye attacks were recurrent because syphilis advances in waves of bacterial growth and dormancy. A sudden eye attack would abate in a merciful period of health only to yield to another attack. The symptoms, duration and severity of the disease vary dramatically from one individual to another—Nora almost certainly contracted it from Joyce, but her case may have been negligibly mild. Only a third of syphilitics endure all three stages of the disease. Joyce, unfortunately, was one of them. He suffered his first recorded attack of iritis in 1907, when he was only twenty-five years old, and he endured twelve more attacks over the next fourteen years. By the late 1920s, his eyes had been ravaged by a twenty-year infection.

Today, syphilis is cured by a shot of penicillin, which became available as a medication in 1942, the year after Joyce died. Before penicillin, there were few good options for an advanced case of syphilis, and it didn’t help that Joyce was a difficult patient. He didn’t follow orders, he skipped appointments, and he searched for the doctors who gave him the answers he wanted. Dr. Borsch did his best to appease Joyce when he began seeing him in 1922. To gain his consent for a sphincterectomy in 1923, Borsch told him it was just a minor procedure, though it was essentially the same as an iridectomy.

The larger problem was that Joyce refused to take a drug called salvarsan, the only available medication that could attack syphilis effectively. He had good reasons not to take it. Salvarsan was the trade name for a modified form of arsenic called arsphenamine, which was essentially a low dose of poison. Some patients died from it, and others fell deaf or lapsed into comas. For Joyce, salvarsan’s gravest threat was something else. As a writer who refused to dictate his prose, he was desperate to keep what little he had of his eyesight to continue working, and Dr. Borsch was obliged to tell his patient that one of salvarsan’s side effects could leave him blind: the drug damages the optic nerve in about one in forty patients. After Joyce refused salvarsan, Dr. Borsch had to resort to treatments that attacked symptoms rather than their underlying cause, and Joyce’s eyes became steadily worse.

By 1928, Dr. Borsch must have been at his wits’ end. Joyce walked into his clinic perilously underweight: at five foot ten he weighed less than 125 pounds. Seeing Joyce’s weight loss, his bevy of eye infections, his uncommon fatigue and the “large boil,” as he described it, on his right shoulder, Dr. Borsch desperately needed an alternative to salvarsan, an antisyphilitic treatment that would curtail the
Treponema
infestation destroying his patient’s body without endangering his eyes.

He happened to know of one: an obscure French drug called galyl. Borsch probably remembered using galyl when he was a French military doctor during the war—the French army administered thousands of galyl shots to syphilitic soldiers because it was a patriotic substitute for the German-made salvarsan. Galyl was another modified form of arsenic—not arsphenamine but phospharsenamine, a chemical combination of arsenic and phosphorus. Separately, each element is highly poisonous. Together, they’re less toxic than salvarsan. The more Dr. Borsch thought about it, the more he must have realized that galyl was Joyce’s best option. There were no indications that the drug would harm his optic nerve, and one of galyl’s side effects was fortunate: it improved a patient’s appetite. It would help Joyce put on much-needed weight.

Because it was weaker than salvarsan, doctors recommended several injections of galyl. So in September and October 1928, Joyce walked up the miserable back stairwell of Dr. Borsch’s eye clinic and rolled up his sleeve. The doctor unsealed a glass ampule containing a greenish-gray powder, mixed less than a half-gram of galyl with sodium carbonate and water and injected it into Joyce’s bloodstream every other day for three weeks. It didn’t help. Doctors rarely used galyl after World War I because the drug simply wasn’t effective. The only benefit was that Joyce became ravenous after the injections—he began eating toffee, cream sweets and Turkish delight. His decade-long case of syphilis, unfortunately, continued.

Some people must have guessed the reason for Joyce’s eye problems. Before penicillin, syphilis was the most common cause of recurrent iritis. John Quinn and Ezra Pound suspected it, but they said nothing. Dr. Borsch, however, didn’t suspect. He knew. What were the chances that a man
without
syphilis would develop iritis at repeated intervals for decades? Slim. What were the chances that Dr. Borsch would misidentify syphilis—that he would, after peering into James Joyce’s eyes with his ophthalmoscope, not know a syphilitic lesion when he saw one? Virtually none. Nearly everything about syphilitic lesions is distinctive—the way they look, the substances they contain, the high amount of exudate they produce and their location on the iris. Dr. Borsch knew exactly what to look for.

By 1928, when he treated Joyce for syphilis, Dr. Borsch had been a clinician for twenty years in Paris, where the disease was widespread (a single Parisian hospital treated ten thousand cases in 1920 alone, and the numbers only increased through the decade). Beyond that, diagnosing syphilis simply wasn’t difficult, especially for someone like him. Dr. Borsch had received two medical degrees—the second from Paris’s Faculté de Médecine, which was regarded as providing the best ophthalmological training in the world. If, in the end, he was at all uncertain, Dr. Borsch could have administered a serology test, though the results of any tests Joyce may have taken are gone. In fact, nearly all of Joyce’s medical records have been either lost or destroyed.