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John Bayley

• John Stanislaus Joyce: The Voluminous Life and Genius of James Joyce’s Father by John Wyse Jackson and Peter Costello
  Fourth Estate, 493 pp, £20.00, October 1997, ISBN 1 85702 417 6

Joyce’s prose is ‘beautifully written’, as they used to say. Written, like his poems, in the old style of the Nineties. Paradoxically, it is not composed but spoken. The voice that echoes through it, the voices rather, and the tones, are those of the old artificer, the father of the tribe, Simon Dedalus, John Stanislaus Joyce. Like the violins of Cremona, Dubliners, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake are the products of a joint concern, a family undertaking. Joyce himself was frank about this. As long as he had escaped he could still be in the bosom of the family. As long as he remained in Trieste or Zurich or Paris he was able to take the part of maestro, conducting the chorus of voices in the parlour of the grandest house they had once lived in – 23 Castlewood Avenue, off Belgrave Square, Rathmines – or in the back kitchen of some much more modest establishment. As Richard Ellmann emphasised in his biography, Joyce employed his father till the very end, requiring the particulars of the ‘Star of the Sea’ church when Pappie was at death’s door. In his last remembered words the old man replied to another of his son’s queries: ‘Tell Jim he was born at six in the morning.’ Unknowing, John Stanislaus died the begetter of what was to become the greatest of all enterprises in modern Irish mythology.