The Books: Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom, by Brenda Maddox

Daily Book Excerpt: Biography

Next biography on the biography shelf is Nora: A Biography of Nora Joyce, by Brenda Maddo

I may be blind. I looked for a long time at a head of reddish-brown hair and decided it was not yours. I went home quite dejected. I would like to make an appointment but it might not suit you. I hope you will be kind enough to make one with me — if you have not forgotten me!

James A. Joyce 15 June 1904
— note from James Joyce to Nora Barnacle the day before their first date, June 16, 1904, known now the world over as “Bloomsday”

Well, Jim I haven’t read any of your books but I’ll have to someday because they must be good considering how well they sell.
— Nora Joyce to her husband Jim Joyce

I’ve said before that I’m not big on “women behind the man” biographies. Most wives of great men can be sufficiently covered in the biography of the man himself, her contributions, her character, how the relationship helped the man, etc. I know this may be an unpopular opinion, but I’ve rarely read a “woman behind the man” biography that is worth a damn. (A.S. Byatt is very funny and biting in Possession in her characterization of Beatrice, the scholar working on a biography of Ellen Ash, the wife of great Victorian poet Randolph Ash. Poor Beatrice had visions of literary grandeur, and instead is buried in index cards noting Ellen Ash’s recipe for blackberry jam, and her boring diary entries mainly having to do with dealing with querulous servants. But it was the only realm where Beatrice could assert her scholarship, since Randolph Ash had been studied to death. Of course, Ellen Ash, the wife in question, was far more interesting than her diary ever told – because the most interesting part of her she never ever told – only Byatt tells it to us – and therefore the facts of her life are lost to time. Byatt is so brilliant in her assertion that the most important parts of our lives – men’s and women’s, but perhaps mostly women’s, are lived between the lines.) Not to discount the contributions of the women in great men’s lives – but I find that in general it’s not all that interesting. If the man had an important relationship with a woman, then usually it is sufficiently covered in any in-depth biography of the man himself. Now if the man was dating, say, Isadora Duncan or Marlene Dietrich, now that’s another story. Many wives are only interesting because of the great or famous man they married. Or at least not interesting enough to warrant an entire book. There are, of course, many exceptions to this rule. Abigail Adams, for example.

And Nora Joyce is another exception, mainly because of what an inspiration she was to Joyce (he said that he only knew one woman, he couldn’t create others out of his imagination – all women were Nora to him), and it’s interesting to see what this lady was all about, outside of her husband’s books. Brenda Maddox’s Nora was made into a movie, with Ewan McGregor as James Joyce and the wonderful Susan Lynch as Nora, and I highly recommend it. It covers their early years, their romance, their exile, their time in Trieste. It’s a great story. And Maddox’s book, by focusing on Nora and not James (who can take up an entire landscape just by standing in it) is a good addition to any Joycean library. You still get to know her extremely well in Richard Ellmann’s masterpiece, and Maddox herself references Ellmann in almost every other footnote, so that just goes to show you that her biography of Nora may very well be superfluous. There is nothing new here. No revelations, no secret life revealed, no new material.

The Joyces were not secretive people. They were monogamous, they were committed to one another, and with only a couple of sequences of separation (he went back to Ireland for a couple of months, etc.) – they were together every single day and every single night of their lives. They were not bohemians, they did not approve of free love, they were quite conservative and conventional in their relationship. Yes, there are the famous “dirty letters”, but those are really the early 20th century equivalent of phone sex, a way to keep their energetic sex life alive while separated, and while the letters were shocking when they were first revealed, there really isn’t anything shocking about them at all. They weren’t writing “dirty letters” to anyone other than each other. They were almost boring in the way they ran their personal lives. They did not approve of people who resisted commitment, they did not like casual relationships, they kept to themselves. They were rather relaxed about homosexuals, there were many in their circle, but even there, they approved of those who settled down with one person (like Sylvia Beach). Nora and Jim and their two children were always together. They kept bizarre hours, they lived in squalor much of the time, they ate out for every meal, and their apartments were apparently a mess … but they were happy and content. James and Nora had run away together to escape the judgment of Catholic Ireland, but in the end they lived lives as respectable as any of those back home.

As a matter of fact, James Joyce’s life was rather boring. Except for, you know, remaking 20th century literature. But he didn’t fight in any wars, he didn’t have affairs, he didn’t run wild … what is exciting about him is his literary sweep, his philosophical and theological questioning, the books he read, his thoughts on language, and how he did what he did. But the surface events are quite tame (at least compared to his contemporaries). Nora and Jim had two children, and while they ran away together in 1904 and lived as man and wife for many years, they didn’t make it official until 1930. So this, yes, was an enormous scandal at the time. James Joyce felt he couldn’t live in Ireland. He couldn’t be free and open with Nora in such a rigid society. He wanted to shed himself of those imposed structures: nation, church, family. It was impossible to be free of all of that while in Ireland.

Nora Barnacle hailed from Galway. She got a bit of an education (the myth that she was illiterate or totally uneducated is completely untrue – Joyce’s letters are part of why that myth got around, he was fascinated by her lack of polish, and played it up in letters). She went to a convent school and graduated. She came from strictly working class. In 1896 when she was just a kid she fell in love with a boy named Michael Feeney. He came down with typhoid and pneumonia and was put into a workhouse hospital (the conditions had to have been horrifying). He died a week later. A couple of years later, when she was 15, Nora (who was very attractive, and already a bit of a troublemaker) fell in love again, with a boy named Michael Bodkin – who came down with tuberculosis and also died. This gave Nora a bad reputation in town (undeserved – it was not her fault they died), but years later when she told Jim these stories, he would eventually weave them into the masterpiece that was “The Dead”, turning Michael Feeney and Michael Bodkin into the “Michael Furey” in the story who “died for love” of Gretta. A couple years later, in 1903, Nora began a romance with a Protestant, a big no-no, and her uncle was so angry and frightened for her future that he apparently beat her mercilessly with a stick. Nora then ran away to Dublin and got a job as a maid in Finn’s Hotel. She met James Joyce on the street, and thought he was Swedish because of his blue eyes. She told him her name was Nora, and he made a cryptic comment about Ibsen. They made a date to go out walking on June 15, 1904. Nora blew Jim off, and Jim, distraught, sent her the note at the top of this post. Nora must have replied, because they did go out walking the next day. Something sexual most probably occurred on that walk, although they didn’t actually have sex until they were in Europe (we know all of this because of the “dirty letters” where they reminisced about their first time, whipping each other into an epistolary masturbatory frenzy – talking about how they loved it when they “did it backwards”, and etc., and so forth – we know a LOT about how these two liked to have sex). A mere 3 or 4 months after they met, the two fled Ireland forever.

The rest is history.

His friends (and many Joycean scholars) think Nora was not right for their beloved Joyce. She was too earthy, not intellectual enough, not smart enough. His friends assumed that Joyce was just having a bit of fun, albeit in his own way (running away with her? was he nuts??) and would soon throw her over. That would be worse than running away with her. The “you need to make an honest woman out of her” conversation was loud and shrill, and continued on for some years until everyone pretty much forgot about it and just treated James and Nora like husband and wife. Theirs was not an easy placid union. They drove each other crazy. They made fun of each other (they were Irish, after all). They picked on each other. They were very very big on “taking the piss” out of each other. If he was in any danger of getting too big for his britches, a tart comment from Nora would bring him back to earth. They had many financial worries, and worries about their daughter Lucia (who was quite ill, and eventually was diagnosed with schizophrenia), and Joyce’s eyesight and his problems with his eyes were a constant worry. But they stuck by each other. They made it through. She may have thrown pots and pans at him, but she never left. And vice versa. And if either of them had an affair, it would certainly have come out by now. There were flirtations, and some moments of concern – but no real breaches of the commitment. Rather an extraordinary partnership. Methinks Jimmy Joyce would not have fared well at all with a hothouse flower lady, well-raised and well-trained. He also wouldn’t have done well at all with one of the raging cigarette-smoking Bohemians hanging out in his crowd in Paris. No, no, those “modern” ladies wouldn’t have suited him at all.

Nora Barnacle (what a name, perfect for someone like Joyce who was so sensitive to language and metaphor: “Barnacle” – a clinging crustacean, and “Nora”, the star of Doll’s House, by the playwright who had completely changed Joyce’s life) had a scandalous past and nowhere to return to. Who knows what would have become of her if she hadn’t have run into the short-sighted intellectual who picked her out in the middle of a street as someone he wanted to know. Years and years later, Nora Joyce said, “You can’t imagine what it was like for me to be thrown into the life of this man.”

And, conversely, who knows what would have happened to James Joyce’s latent genius if he hadn’t met Nora Barnacle. She obviously did not create him. But without her, his work may have stayed at a certain level. He may not have had the perspective on women that would allow him to create someone like Molly Bloom or Anna Livia. Intimacy with one woman was the event, the defining event, that set the aimless and tortured James Joyce free. He could have been just another coffee shop fop, blathering on about the Gaelic language and Irish nationalism, the trends of the day. His relationship to Nora helped him get out, for real. It was not an abstract escape, it was not an intellectual escape: Joyce’s escape was actual.

I am categorically opposed to assigning too much responsibility to these helpmates of great men, especially the artists. Many wives, by providing stability and a safe haven, helped the men have the space they needed in order to create. Wives can provide order, good meals, clean clothes, bills paid. That’s certainly important for a certain kind of artist. But to say that these wives were somehow responsible for the actual words on the page written by their husbands … Bah. Get out of here with that bullshit.

But Nora is a bit of a different story. As is Zelda Fitzgerald. In both cases, their husbands used their wives’ actual words, in some cases, as well as their personalities, phraseology, turns of phrase, idioms … Yes, it took the writer to get it all down. That is their accomplishment and theirs alone. But one wonders who Fitzgerald would have been without the guiding focus and obsession he had with Zelda (so many of his female characters ARE Zelda) and the same is true for Joyce.

James Joyce is flat out unimaginable without Nora.

She’s that big a part of his work.

So while I still think if you’re interested in Nora Joyce, you might as well just read the Ellmann biography. She’s a huge character, and he certainly gives her his due. But Brenda Maddox’s book is interesting, with its slightly tilted slant on this famous woman we have come to know through her husband’s words.

Oh, and see Nora with Ewan McGregor and Susan Lynch. It’s quite good.

Here’s an excerpt about the start of their lives together, after fleeing Ireland.

Excerpt from Nora: A Biography of Nora Joyce

Nora tried to adjust herself to the fact that she had chosen (she considered herself “married”) a man who earned his living by putting ink onto paper. It was not easy. He showed her a magazine from London (The Speaker) that had published one of his poems and scolded her when she managed to lose it.

She tried to follow what he was reading and to give him her own opinion. She read George Moore’s short story, “Mildred Lawson” and she put down the book in disgust. “That man doesn’t know how to finish a story,” she said. She read the Dublin paper T.P.’s Weekly and the name of Ibsen caught her eye. “Is that the Ibsen you know?” she asked Jim. She interested herself for the first time in questions of theology. “Is Jesus and God the same?” she asked him. She tolerated his writing because she expected that it would allow them eventually to live a rich life in Paris. (She was quite right, but neither of them would have believed how long they would have to wait.)

In his letters to Stanislaus, Joyce portrayed Nora as a naive little primitive. ” ‘Tell Stannie I am axing at him!’ ” he quoted her as saying. He patronizingly described how Nora delighted in the cinema (a technical marvel in which that part of the world was very advanced) and could not contain herself when a cruel Lothario threw his betrayed girlfriend into a river. “Oh, policeman, catch him!” she cried aloud. And she expressed herself in that Irish inverted form of speech that Joyce was to use repeatedly in Ulysses: “Divil up I’ll get till you come back!” When he had stomach cramps, she prayed to God “to take away Jim’s pain.” (She did not risk his anger, however, by praying in church or by consoling herself with the one custom common to Galway and Pola, going to Mass.)

Nora’s lack of sophistication was not the whole truth. Joyce was so frightened of so many things – fights, being alone, dogs, as well as thunder – that Nora thought he was childish. She called him “simple-minded Jim”. She quickly learned how to manipulate his dependence. One night she decided to punish him, apparently for staying out all night without telling her. When they went to the Caffe Miramar, she avoided his gaze and sat staring stonily ahead. Joyce scribbled her a desperate letter:

Dear Nora For God’s sake do not let us be any way unhappy tonight. If there is anything wrong please tell me. I am beginning to tremble already and if you do not soon look at me as you used I shall have to run up and down the cafe . . . When we go home I will kiss you a hundred times. Has this fellow annoyed you or did I annoy you by stopping away? Jim

“This fellow” may have been Eyers, the other English teacher at the school. He had said that Nora was not worthy of Joyce, and once he had made Nora cry. Joyce had thrown him out. In that foreign environment, it took a fellow Briton to discern the incongruity between Joyce and Nora. To the rest, Nora and Joyce were a matched pair, “the Irish couple”.

They lived on their charms. Their sense of fun and occasion attracted many friends, they gave good parties, usually with music. Even for their first Christmas in a cold, small room they rented a piano so that they could have singing. (From Dublin Stanislaus contributed a plum pudding.)

Their charm drew the Francinis, who, early in 1905, invited them to share a house. Nora and Joyce were glad to move into a sunny apartment with shuttered windows, a warm stove, and a writing desk. Even so, they ate out every night, and the Francinis, living on the same income, felt they could not afford to join them.

Then, as later, the Joyces were poor with style. One of the many reasons that Nora never left Joyce, although she frequently threatened to do so, was that she enjoyed the life he gave her. In their attitude toward domestic economy, Nora and Joyce were as one in believing that money is for spending and that living well is the best revenge on the past.

Their constant dining out all their lives gave rise to the story that Nora could not cook. She could. She cooked the plain Irish food they both preferred, especially sweets, puddings, and cakes, but she gladly accompanied Joyce out in the evening because it meant less work for her and because Joyce, after a day’s solitary writing, liked to get out, to see and be seen.

Joyce complained to Stanislaus that Nora had no friends, but she soon was on close terms with Clotilde Francini. Clotilde, who was housebound with a young child, welcomed Nora’s company and found her full of fun. Clotilde, who was Florentine and spoke a pure Italian, began tutoring Nora, who ambitiously dreamed of learning to speak the language as well as her husband did. Clotilde also undertook Nora’s education in Italian cooking and in fashion. Nora, newly conscious of her educational inferiority, asked Joyce to teach her the geography she had failed to learn at the convent and to give her lessons in French as well, in preparation for the day when they could return to Paris.

But in one area of their lives she needed no tutoring. Nora took to sexual intercourse with enthusiasm and imagination. Often she took the lead, as she had in their courtship. even on that first night in Pola, when to their official greeter earlier that day she had looked bedraggled and withdrawn, she was wildly passionate in bed. Joyce was delighted but slightly overwhelmed. One night, naked, she straddled him like a horse, urging, “Fuck up, love! fuck up, love!” Her behavior fulfilled all his dreams of domination by a fierce woman, and that Nora could release such fervor only three weeks after initiation left him with a lasting sense of awe at the banked fires of female desire.

The true curse of Edwardian women, menstrual rags, which needed to be washed and boiled and dried, did not plague her. Nora became pregnant at the first opportunity – the end of October 1904. Joyce craved a family, or at least to be a family man. There is no record that he and Nora ever discussed it. In their experience, the equation of man plus woman equals baby was incontrovertible. It was then that they began to feel their isolation. Nora was still out of touch with her mother. The only way she had let Annie Barnacle know that she had left Ireland to make a new life with a man was to drop her a postcard from Paris. “Delightfully vague,” Joyce wrote Stanislaus. Isolated with Nora and cut off from his friends, he poured all that he could not share with Nora into private letters to his brother. Stanislaus read them carefully and added them to his collection.

Nora, Joyce told Stanislaus, was “adorably ignorant” about the facts of childbirth, but so was he. He asked Stanislaus to sit down with Cosgrave and study some books on midwifery, and he requested his Aunt Josephine to write Nora a letter of instruction. He went on to confide touchingly in Mrs. Murray that, easily disillusioned as he was, he had been “unable to discover any falsehood in this nature which had the courage to trust me”. He had not left Nora, he reminded his aunt, as his cynical friends had predicted he would do.

On the second of February Nora celebrated Joyce’s birthday (his twenty-third) for the first time. With the Englishman Eyers and Fraulein Globocnik, the Berlitz School secretary, they took a steamer excursion to the island of Brioni. It was Nora’s introduction to the solemnity with which Joyce regarded any birthday. He had learned from the Jesuits the habit of ritual. To him sacred days required appropriate ceremony, and his own anniversary was the supreme holiday in his personal liturgical calendar.

After this outing Joyce remarked to Stanislaus that Fraulein Globocnik had taken a fancy to him. Flattered, he decided that there might be something in him that was attractive to women. Yet he noticed more than he knew, for in describing the Berlitz secretary to his brother, he called her a “melancholy little Androgyne”, discerning the type of woman to whom he was particularly attractive. Nora, with her strong stride, mannish eyebrows, and big-knuckled hands, had many androgynous qualities herself.

Joyce liked to think of Nora as uneducated: it made her seem all the more his creation, and it was not until his long years of near-blindness began a decade later that he openly acknowledged his dependence on her. In the early months of their life together he apologized for her seeming inadequacies. He told Stanislaus that he admired her character, which was in many ways more admirable than his own. He told Stanislaus of Cosgrave’s jibe that he would never make anything of her but declared that “in many ways in which Cosgrave and I are deficient she requires no making at all.”

This entry was posted in Books, James Joyce and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink.

20 Responses to The Books: Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom, by Brenda Maddox

  1. george says:

    Sheila,

    “His friends (and many Joycean scholars) think Nora was not right for their beloved Joyce”

    I like it when ‘not right right for each other’ explodes in other people’s faces. So many of those not right for each other couples make for incredibly interesting pairings and the more they defy conventions the more intriguing they are. So good for Jim and Nora, and Nora again, for, if not being the woman behind the man, for being the woman long with the man. I can’t help believe that a bio of Joyce neck deep in his brilliance and flecked with scholars, intellectuals, and the Paris crowd could be as interesting without, measure for measure, Nora.

    Just last week I came across this: Bloomsbury Ballerina: Lydia Lopokova, Imperial Dancer and Mrs John Maynard Keynes by Judith Mackrell. I haven’t any notion of how well done the biography is (I aim to find out – I knew nothing of this side of Keynes – NOTHING – and was shocked by the pairing, as apparently were Keynes’ fellow Bloomsburians(?)) but here may be the ultimate woman behind the man behind the woman bio.

  2. sheila says:

    Well that book sounds absolutely fascinating, George.

    There’s got to be SOMEthing interesting about the “woman behind the man” besides how much she supported him. Otherwise, who cares.

    And I agree: I love that James and Nora were seemingly mismatched but it ended up working out great. She was a bit baffled by him (she looked at a proof sheet of Finnegans Wake, saw the incomprehensible language – he had already been working on the damn thing for 15 years at that point and she said, “Why can’t you write a book that people want to read, Jim?”) – but her bafflement was almost good for him. It left him alone. She wasn’t trying to compete with him, first of all – that would have been disastrous – and she also wasn’t interested in trying to make him something he wasn’t. She wasn’t looking for him to be a banker or a teacher. She hitched her star to his. Without even really understanding much of it. But she believed in him. She knew he was a genius. She left him alone with it. She did her thing and let him be. It worked out great.

  3. Bob says:

    I’m still a bit confused by the wife of T.S Eliot. She certainly added much to his writing, but how much is left to speculation. There is an old Irish tradition that seems to push young women in the support role of their husbands. Fame and popularity were not to be sought by men and especially not by wives. Still we know what a tremendous role they played in some of societies best writing.
    I used to have a very feminist teacher who was angry at the lack of recognition, in history books and elsewhere, of the wives and lovers of “great” men. I always remembered them all the more for taking the time to see who they really were. What they did, and who they are will always be there for those who take the time to look. The response to the question “Who contributed more to civilization, men or women”, has always been a simple answer to me. If one says men then keep looking. There is always more going on behind the “accepted storyline”.

  4. PaulH says:

    Bob, I think that view is a little simplistic. I can’t accept that every great man was only great (or to be more accurate, performed great acts) because of the woman in his life, or because the woman in his life contributed to those great acts in such a way that they wouldn’t have happened without her. As Sheila points out, this is certainly true of some women – what would Joyce have written without Nora – but I don’t think that the blanket approach of your teacher is sustainable – that to say, for instance, that the achievements of  Charlemagne were due to his wife or mother, but the achievements of Elizabeth I were down to her alone.

    That said, it is intriguing that there are no notable ‘man behind the woman’ biographies. Is there a male equivalent of Nora Joyce, or Constanze Mozart, or Frieda Lawrence?

  5. sheila says:

    Bob – As I said, it’s not to discount their contribution. But more often than not it’s certainly not interesting enough to make up an entire book. We live in a patriarchal society – even more so in the past – so many women’s lives were invisible or lost to history, due to lack of information. The lack of opportunity made it so that women did disappear into the mists of time … and I can understand the need to rectify that situation – although I completely disagree with trying to do so by over-stating someone’s contribution, or trying to make something out of nothing in an attempt to redress the past. Of course, entire humanities departments in America disagree with me, but I’m fine with that. Humanities departments, in discounting “dead white male” contributions and over-hyping female/minority contributions, have much to answer for in terms of the sorry state of education in this country at present. The past will not be redressed. Life is unfair. history is unfair.

    Having babies and keeping house is very important – as I said – and often male artists have that supportive partner that keeps the home fires burning while he goes off and does his thing. Marriage is a stabilizer. But still: as I said: the women’s contributions can easily be covered in any big biography of the man in question.

    Because the reality of so many women’s lives in the past was invisible (or at least invisible to us now – they left no record of it) – then unless new information is uncovered that had been either suppressed or lost – then I don’t see any use in biographies that go on and on about child-rearing and doily-matching – hoping we’ll find it interesting just because she was married to some great man. The past cannot be corrected (much to the sorrow of many feminist writers).

    And my point remains: unless the woman behind the man did something really interesting in her own right, you’ll never catch me buying one of those books! Life’s too short.

  6. sheila says:

    And yes, the wife of TS Eliot is a fascinating character in her own right. That relationship was very interesting.

  7. sheila says:

    Paul H – Hmm, the details are lost to me now but I know that Edna St. Vincent Millay was married to a kind of regular guy – and she was a hell-raising sociopath if you ask me (hahaha) – and he put up with her nonsense and created a safe space for her to keep writing – and took on the role of suffering wife, basically.

    But I don’t need to read an entire biography of his life – it would be the most boring thing imaginable. He is sufficiently covered in the biography of the one who is really interesting: Edna.

  8. sheila says:

    In general, I make an exception for men who were great/notorious politicians or world leaders. I’d read a book about Stalin’s housemaid if the researcher could come up with some information not already included in any biography of the man.

  9. sheila says:

    And then there was Leonard Woolf – but he obviously is interesting in his own right, not only because of his marriage to Virginia. Because we live in a patriarchy, I am far more interested in men who take on that stereotypical female role, especially before it was accepted.

  10. PaulH says:

    Ha ha – there is no part of Stalin’s life that is safe from you!

    Woolf is indeed interesting in his own right, but without Virginia he would be a very minor figure in history. George Henry Lewes may be another example. I admit that the first name that sprang to mind when I thought about this was Denis Thatcher. Hmmmm.

  11. sheila says:

    Paul – Hmmm indeed. Yes, Leonard Woolf is interesting because of his intersection with his famous wife. It’s a different situation than, say, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes – who are both giant talents separately (although how they influenced one another’s work is very very interesting). With those two (and others like it) there is the opposite problem – sometimes it is difficult to “see” Ted Hughes without Sylvia in the way – even though he wrote brilliantly for decades after she killed herself. It’s important sometimes to “get people out of the way” in order to see the subject properly. He was with Sylvia Plath for, what, 8 years? The man lived a long long life and his marriage to Sylvia Plath was a blip on the radar screen, at least in terms of the time spent. But I think that’s just the way it goes. She had a huge influence on him, they had two kids, she killed herself and left behind a raging volume of poems blaming him, in many ways, for leaving her. Of course his name would forever be wrapped up with hers.

    There are probably many more examples.

    I think men who are the supportive force behind a powerful women are more interesting, maybe because it’s outside the norm.

  12. sheila says:

    Speaking of Denis Thatcher, I am so excited for IRON LADY that I can barely focus on anything else.

  13. PaulH says:

    I’m looking forward to it too, and not just because of Meryl Streep, but also for the inevitable punch up that the film will provoke in the UK press. As far as I can see Thatcher now holds a very strange place in the public consciousness here. But that is a discussion for another comment thread.

  14. sheila says:

    I can’t wait to see the reaction. And the tiny clip we’ve so far seen of Streep in the role gives me goosebumps. That woman is totally uncanny.

  15. Catherine says:

    Denis Thatcher definitely fits the bill. Such a mild, benign presence; he seemed to keep Maggie calm and down to earth. Apparently he would be the only one who would coax her to take a few hours sleep each night, or to end late-night meetings at a reasonable hour.

    Also, Bob Treuhaft, Jessica Mitford’s husband. He was a civil rights lawyer and one of his cases was her inspiration for The American Way of Death.

  16. Bob says:

    I guess I was trying to get people interested in the whole story of how great works get published. I want neither the true artist nor those who help them to be lost to history. It is a difficult subject to say the least. I’ m still not sure how Proust wrote the way he did. A strange genius at work.

    • sheila says:

      I think we’re all interested in that already, Bob.

      I agree that there is a great mystery at the heart of great works, and also the geniuses who walk the planet. My beef with “women behind the man” bios is that these authors often have a beef with the great man himself, and that I cannot abide. Boooooring. So she spent her prime years changing dirty nappies and putting the kettle on. Oh, well. There weren’t as many opportunities for women back then and therefore – their lives weren’t as interesting. At least not to posterity, and at least not when compared to the men they hitched up with.

  17. sheila says:

    Catherine – Ah, Decca Mitford. I haven’t read her collected letters yet – have you?

    I haven’t even checked to see who plays Denis in the movie.

  18. sheila says:

    Ah yes, Jim Broadbent, which is perfect.

  19. Pingback: Stop the Ride « Limited Supervision

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.