Mary Talbot's
father, James Atherton, was one of the world's leading Joyce
scholars, and when she was growing up his work took precedence over
most other activity in their home. Alternating charm and anger, he
drew out Mary's affection, then rejected it brutally. For the adult Mary,
a chance encounter with an old ID card of her father's brings back a
line from Finnegan's Wake, 'my cold mad feary father' and from
that line comes this book.
Dotter Of Her
Father's Eyes, another line from Joyce, has at its centre the
tragic life of Joyce's daughter Lucia, and the parallels with their
lives. There are the obvious ones: the father first struggling to
support his family, both men as teachers, while doing creative work
of great importance. The daughters relegated to the background,
especially in Lucia's case where her younger brother received most of
the encouragement. Both wanting some creative life of their own, and
finding huge barriers of missing expectation in their paths.
Lucia Joyce spent
years dancing, but at key moments of her possible career she would be
held back by both her parent's traditional view of a woman's
place—one strictly followed in the Joyce household, and a betrayal
by Samuel Beckett, her father's secretary, more in love, in the end,
with Joyce's work than his daughter. 
But the revelation at age 24, at
just the time her dance career had finally crashed, that her parents
were not married, that she and her brother were bastards, triggered
something within Lucia. As if the radical modernist who was an
upholder of prim bourgeois Irish Catholic propriety turned out to be
a hypocrite all the while, at his daughter's expense. Lucia's
behaviour became more erratic, suicidal, addicted to Veronal, and
eventually, after the occupation of Paris ended, she was committed to
institutions, where she died, on Mary's father's birthday.
But the revelation at age 24, at
just the time her dance career had finally crashed, that her parents
were not married, that she and her brother were bastards, triggered
something within Lucia. As if the radical modernist who was an
upholder of prim bourgeois Irish Catholic propriety turned out to be
a hypocrite all the while, at his daughter's expense. Lucia's
behaviour became more erratic, suicidal, addicted to Veronal, and
eventually, after the occupation of Paris ended, she was committed to
institutions, where she died, on Mary's father's birthday.
It's a very sad and
very dramatic story, and the parallels are never that strong or
complete—though Mary's first dream was also to be a dancer. The nuns at her school are a close enough
substitute for Nora Joyce, their strict disapproval aimed at filling her with low aspirations. The
crucial difference is that Mary manages to break away from her
father's hold, which Lucia was never able to do. She earns her PhD,
still trying at 30 to impress her father, and at least partially
succeeds. But she also, almost stumbling into the relationship, finds
a husband and family of her own, and her husband is the artist who
drew this book. And when her father dies, and she hears from students
and Joyce scholars about his brilliant teaching, and sees her
brothers carrying the coffin, laughing (which shocks her
mother-in-law even as we think of Finnegan one last time) it is as if
a circle has been broken. The ID card prompts memory, and the
academic teams up with her comic artist husband to produce a work of
great honesty, filled with pain and some hope. But at heart it is really, in the
dizzying world of Joyce's imagination and language, a memoir grounded
in dreams of dance and dancing reality, the legacy of our lives as we
all emerge from shadows.
Dotter Of Her Father's Eyes
by Mary M Talbot and Bryan Talbot
Jonathan Cape £14.99 ISBN 9780224096089
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