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Joyce vs Joyce
Sunday, June 13, 2004

JamesJoyce1 By Niamh Connolly

Ireland cannot get it right with its greatest literary hero, James Joyce.

Or so it appears through the eyes of Stephen Joyce, Joyce's grandson and zealous protector of the writer's lucrative estate.

There are those who would agree. The more rarefied elements of the literary establishment view today's Denny Blooms day Centenary Breakfast on O'Connell Street in Dublin as little more than a crass display of marketing by the ReJoyce 2004 organisers.

Denny's makes a brief appearance in Joyce's novel Ulysses, which is set on June 16, 1904. Leopold Bloom watches a young girl in Dlugacz's butcher's shop buy a pound and a half of Denny's sausages, as he waits to buy a pork kidney for his and wife Molly's breakfast.

The mutterings of Joycean purists about the Bloomsday `circus' has made little impact on the organisers of the Re-Joyce 2004 festival, whose brief is to appeal to the widest possible audience.

Three separate breakfasts take place in Ulysses, and there is no shortage of punters - neophytes and scholars - willing to feast on O'Connell Street (albeit on a Denny rasher, sausage, and black and white pudding in a bread roll, instead of pork kidney).

"We have taken Joyce, one of the greatest writers in the 20th century, who had an enormous impact on our literature and culture, and given it tothepeoplein awaythat is accessible, fun and palatable,"says LauraWeldon, chief executive of the ReJoyce 2004 festival.

"Getting people to Joyce's texts is what it's all about, and we're doing that.There is an educational approach without the stern image - there's no quiz at the end."

But even if today's breakfast for 10,000 people manages to broaden the author's appeal beyond literary pundits who like to swap lines from Finnegans Wake, the copyright laws enforced by the Joyce Estate present further obstacles.

Hence, O'Connell Street will be awash with stripy blazers, straw boaters and canes, but conspicuously absent will be anyone reading publicly from Joyce's work . . . at least officially.

Warnings from the Joyce Estate on copyright means there will be no public readings from Joyce's works at the breakfast event.

The only official festival reading will be RTE's broadcast, Reading Ulysses. Separately, the James Joyce Centre had received legal advice that it is protected under the copyright rules for its Bloomsday readings.

Stephen Joyce, a wealthy septuagenarian residing in Paris, has copyright over his grandfather's writings. He and his wife Solange benefit from the royalties of the Joyce Estate. They declined to be interviewed.

It is a strange paradox that Irish Joyceans cite Joyce's grandson as their greatest adversary in their attempt to make his work accessible to a wider audience.

Stephen's assiduous protection of Joyce's legacy - and readiness to sue scholars and performers of his work - is seen as deeply ironic by Joyce devotees.

Those who celebrate the author on Dublin's streets each June 16 note caustically that their voluntary efforts further boosts the wealth of the estate.

Neither the festival organisers nor the government is taking legal responsibility for `unofficial readings' by any Joyce lover who might, for example, stand on O'Connell Street Bridge and read aloud from Joyce's works.

Legal advice for Bloomsday,under the rules of "fair use", is that unofficial readings should be limited to three sentences of Joyce's major works - Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake - or risk falling foul of the copyright rules.

However, the Irish side of the Joyce family are not impressed with their Parisbased relative, Stephen Joyce.

Helen Monaghan, a grand-niece of Joyce, is bemused. As director of the not-for-profit James Joyce Centre on North Great George's Street in Dublin, she says she "wondered about the bizarre position of having to stop people reading because they've gone beyond three lines".

"Last year, we added a new character to our ensemble, the Bloomsday Strolling Players - the copyright policeman who might interrupt readings to check editions and see how many lines had been read," Monaghan says.

Monaghan, whose grandmother May was James Joyce's sister, questions how the Joyce Estate will manage to guard against all public `unofficial' readings of the author's work.

"If someone stands up in O'Connell Street reading from a book, are they supposed to be arrested? It seems so bizarre, it's like we've come full circle," she says. "It's an act of rebellion to stand and read aloud from James Joyce, as if we're in the 1930s again."

Monaghan laments that the Bloomsday breakfast cannot include any element of Joyce's works.

"It would be the perfect opportunity to introduce a new audience to Joyce," she says. "So because of the restrictions placed on readings, the event risks becoming what it has been accused of: an event without reference to Joyce."

Senator David Norris, a Joycean scholar, put it more bluntly in the Seanad as emergency legislation was mooted to facilitate Bloomsday centenary celebrations. The legislation was passed to overcome copyright issues surrounding the display of 19 original Joycean manuscripts acquired by the National Library.

"It is an astonishing irony that a man such as James Joyce,who fought for freedom of expression, wanted to reach the widest possible audience, and committed himself so totally against censorship throughout his life, should now find his works . . . removed from public gaze by his own estate," he told the Seanad.

Stephen Joyce has legally challenged the legitimacy of the government's €12.6 million acquisition of the manuscripts from Alexis Leon, the son of Joyce's friend, Paul Leon.

Norris is unhappy with a previous government decision to hand over letters written by James Joyce to his grandson, which Stephen later claimed to have destroyed.

"It would make me think very carefully before bequeathing material to the National Library if I believed it would hand it over to the caprices and whims of somebody who is, after all, fairly distant in generational terms from the source of that material," he said.

But does the Joyce Estate believe the Irish government is not capable of treating the legacy of James Joyce in a dignified manner?

On the same day that the Minister for Arts, John O'Donoghue, launched Re- Joyce 2004 at the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin, Stephen Joyce gave a press conference at the James Joyce Pub in Zurich. He declared that Ireland did not deserve to host such an event.

Stephen Joyce has staunchly defended his grandfather's legacy. On one occasion, he wrote to the curator of the James Joyce Tower in Sandycove to prevent the museum selling a bar of Sweny's lemon soap, which Bloom carries in his pocket, as a souvenir.

Chief executive Weldon insists that ReJoyce 2004 is not using the event as a cash cow.

"If this festival was out to get every last cent from every last vendor, there would be tea-towels on the corners and there is none of that," she says. "The minister's primary concern is the calibre of the cultural contribution. If we have a follow-on benefit of tourism, then that's good too."

While the festival organisers cannot guarantee there will be no entrepreneurial spirits on O'Connell Bridge, Weldon says: "Our sole contribution to merchandising is the ReJoyce canvas bag - there were 500 of them - and they were given away free.We're not seeing ReJoyce logos slapped on mugs. It would undermine the integrity of what we're doing."

The government's late conversion to the works of Joyce is viewed with a jaundiced eye by his grandson. While Joyce was not banned in this country, in the eyes of the Catholic Church and the state, his works were sulphurous and were denounced as vulgar and immoral.

"I know Stephen," says Weldon. "This is a long-standing poor relationship with Ireland, and it goes back to the fact that in 1941, when his grandfather died, the state intentionally did not send a representative to the funeral. That was a mistake; it was a decision that may have been a function of the times.

"There was however, someone there from the British Consul, so Stephen understandably bears a grudge. Now we have a national celebration of someone who was previously shunned. I cannot begin to speak on behalf of Stephen, but that is one element of the dynamic."

Weldon, who is from Ohio in the US, and a graduate of New York's Columbia College and Harvard Business School, previously worked with the National Library on the state's acquisition of the Joyce manuscripts.

She describes Stephen as "historically prickly and difficult", but is more circumspect on his rights in relation to his grandfather's works.

"It is Stephen's legal right, as it is any copyright holder's, and I don't have to like it," she says. "It's not a choice, it is his right for seven more years and then it goes to the public domain and then it's over."

While a literary estate rightfully takes protective custody of a writer's works, Stephen Joyce's litigious approach bewilders his grand-niece, Helen Monaghan.

"I don't understand their motives,"she says."Everything wedo here[in the James Joyce Centre] only contributes to an appreciation of the texts - and if you want to be mercenary - to sales of the books which all go to the benefit of the The James Joyce Centre was donated a copy of Ulysses by the family of playwright John Boyd, who purchased it in Paris in the early 1930s. estate."

Monaghan recounts how Boyd put Ulysses, which was banned in Britain at the time, "into a cardboard box marked sanitary towels and smuggled it back into Belfast".

So fraught is the area of copyright of Joyce's works, the James Joyce Centre sought legal advice over the donation. With Joyce's works so protected,who exactly is making money from the `Joyce industry'?

"The only people I see making money out of the James Joyce industry is the James Joyce Estate," Monaghan says. "There certainly is a James Joyce industry, but it's not what people think; it's the academic world that has really made the Joyce industry.

"Scholars will make or break their reputation on Joyce, but it's not a moneymaking industry.

"It's not that people want to publish copies of the book and not pay the royalty or want to adapt it in some way that defames the text or is not in keeping with the work. But we think so many people want to celebrate the text, and that can only be a good thing."

But the divisions surrounding James Joyce run deep within his extended family. Monaghan recalls unhappily that her father, Ken Monaghan, son of Joyce's sister, May, was accused by Stephen of "jumping on the bandwagon".

"I found it fascinating because I thought jumping on the bandwagon meant we were making money from it," she says. "I don't think 15 years of voluntary service constitutes jumping on the bandwagon."

The James Joyce Centre is run by a voluntary board of directors chaired by David Norris. He fought a conservation battle with Dublin City Council for the retention of the James Joyce house at 35 North Great George's Street. His campaign saved the whole of North Great George's Street as a typical example of uninterrupted Georgian Dublin architecture.

"It has been a labour of love," Monaghan says. "You have these beautiful, furnished buildings and there was money from the EU Structural Fund in the 1980s to save the building. We received half a million punts in EU structural funding and we raised half a million over a period of 12 to 14 years through fund-raising initiatives and the support of people like [Desmond] Guinness."

Asked about the Irish government not sending a representative to Joyce's funeral, Monaghan responds: "It was in the middle of World War II. Okay, so Joyce was disapproved of . . . but in Ireland, think of all the writers that made it onto the banned list - it meant you were doing something right."

All of Joyce's works published in his lifetime went out of copyright in Ireland on December 31, 1991, 50 years after his death. However, copyright was revived from July 1,1995, due to the implementation of EU regulations which extended the lifetime of the copyright from 50 to 70 years. The works will revert to the public domain in 2011.

The James Joyce Centre believes it is legally protected for readings of Joyce's work as it availed of a legal window between 1992 and 1995 when Joyce was out of copyright. This ensured that Joyce-related projects already under way could continue.

"It's a tricky one," says Robert Nicholson, author of The Ulysses Guide,which gives tours through Joyce's Dublin. Nicholson's book was first published in 1988 and reprinted in 2002. The James Joyce Estate was paid "as required", though Nicholson will not be drawn on exact figures.

Nicholson is the curator of the Dublin Writers Museum and the James Joyce Tower in Sandycove. He is a Bloomsday devotee and somewhat sympathetic to Stephen's position.

"I suppose he had a particular relationship with his grandfather," Nicholson says. "He has felt that other people are taking over his grandfather and rummaging around in family cupboards. I wouldn't like that to be done to me.

"But I can understand both sides; other people feel James Joyce should be celebrated in whatever way we can."

Norris's critically acclaimed book, Joyce for Beginners, was published in 1994 during the copyright window. However, he says the quotations the estate allowed him to use were limited.

Like Monaghan, he believes public readings during the festival will be impossible to police by the estate. "Somebody should test it," he says.

Sean Walsh's film Bloom, which is based on Ulysses, is also exempt from copyright restrictions. Work on the project,which features Stephen Rea as Leopold Bloom and Angeline Ball as Molly Bloom, began before the law was changed.

The ever-vigilant Stephen Joyce recently moved toblock the sale of a `James Joyce' wine produced by a Swiss winemaker, Provins Valais. He secured an injunction in the Swiss courts to prevent further shipments of the wine to Ireland.

Bacchus Wines, the Irish distributors of the Cuvee James Joyce, had already imported more than 1,000 cases of the wine for the Bloomsday centenary celebrations.

But while Stephen Joyce works to preserve the memory of his grandfather, not everyone shares the same fervour about Joyce's legacy. Irish author Roddy Doyle told a group celebrating James Joyce's birthday in NewYork that Ulysses could have done with a good editor.

"People are always putting Ulysses in the top ten books, but I doubt any of those people were really moved by it," Doyle is reported to have said.

Referring to the Joyce industry, Doyle said: "They'll be serving Joyce Happy Meals next."