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Mary Agnes O’Loughlin (Lucia Joyce), Tref Gare (James Joyce) and Jeremy Harland (Samuel Beckett). Photography: Jody Jane Stitt.

Bloomsday in Melbourne’s new play for 2024 is Samuel Beckett and the Rainbow Girl. Its playwright, Steve Carey, recounts the background

In 1929 Constantin Brancusi was commissioned by American expatriates Harry and Caresse Crosby to create a portrait of James Joyce for a limited edition of extracts from Work in Progress,  eventually published in 1939 as Finnegans Wake. The best known of the resulting images is a clockwise spiral, suggesting an ever-expanding sweep entirely appropriate for Joyce’s voraciously encyclopedic method. (The image, meant as a symbol, was misidentified in the book as a ‘Portrait’ of Joyce, leading his father to observe, wryly, that ‘Jim has changed more than I’d thought.’)

Joyce was living in Paris with his partner Nora and their two children, Lucia and Giorgio. Joyce found himself in a peculiar situation as an internationally famous or infamous filthy author – yet Ulysses, the book on which this reputation was founded, was at this time still banned throughout the English-speaking world. It would not be published in English until its US appearance, after a court case, in 1934. Joyce owed its French publication in 1922 to an American, Sylvia Beach, who had founded Shakespeare and Company in Paris, a bookshop that became a mecca in the 1920s onwards for poor authors, particularly Americans, who found the exchange rate favourable, the lack of censorship congenial and the lack of prohibition to their taste.

In late 1928 a man half Joyce’s age, a 25-year-old Dubliner, arrived looking for teaching work and fell under his spell. The young man, unknown, unpublished and as yet without literary aspiration, was Samuel Beckett, and so taken was he with the older man that he nearly crippled himself wearing the very same shoes in Joyce’s much smaller size. As Waiting for Godot puts it, it’s a case of a man blaming on his boots the faults of his feet, or I suppose their owner. 

It is said that Joyce, troubled as so often with eye problems, was dictating to Beckett when someone knocked at the door. When his amanuensis read the passage back, complete with a ‘Come in,’ Joyce shrugged and said, ‘Let it stand.’

But there was a complication in the relationship between the master and his apprentice, in the form of Joyce’s daughter Lucia, who fell hard for an unresponsive Beckett. Lucia was crushed and Joyce the offended paterfamilias banished Beckett from the family home. Sadly Lucia, a highly promising dancer, developed very serious mental problems, such that eventually she was institutionalised, living out her final decades in Northampton, in England, of all places. She died in 1982 and, curiously, is buried next to Violet Gibson, the Irishwoman who had attempted to assassinate Mussolini in 1926.

This strange love triangle – Beckett worships Joyce who worships Lucia who worships Beckett – is the rich territory that forms the basis for my new play for Bloomsday in Melbourne, Samuel Beckett and the Rainbow Girl.

All three stories – Beckett’s boots, the ‘Come in’ and Lucia’s disappointment at being rebuffed by Beckett – find their way into the script. Beckett crippling himself wearing the shoes of his idol is too much, too hammy a metaphor, for this playwright to dare put onto the stage. Instead the symbolic shoes become Lucia’s, her oddity expressed in unmatching ballet shoes, which she hands over to her parents when she gives up dancing.

The difficulty with that ‘Come in’ story is that truth gets in the way: no-one’s ever found those words in Finnegans Wake – but they’re there now, in this play, slyly inserted into the text and true to the spirit of their relationship. (Mind you, if you’ve tried tackling Finnegans Wake it’s entirely possible to believe the words really are there, somewhere in the undergrowth, oddly mutated.) 

There’s a different kind of problem with Lucia and Beckett’s relationship, which is that we really don’t know what happened. Did Beckett seduce Lucia? Did she seduce him? Was the relationship all in her head? Was it consummated? And history’s difficulty is my opportunity, freeing me to suggest what happened without obligation to present a single, unambiguous version. Was Lucia’s mental decline the result of her failed relationship with Beckett, or the cause of it? Was her abandonment of dance the result of her mental decline, or at least in part the cause of it? Was being the daughter of a famous artist what prevented her from becoming one, or was it the genetic inheritance and parental influence that made it a possibility – or perhaps a delusion? In each case the truth is more complex than a simple cause and effect. Narratives are imposed on facts afterwards, and any set of facts can be presented in different ways. A new biography doesn’t need new facts: just a new reading of them.

The story, however, does not end with Beckett’s banishment. In 1938 he was stabbed in the street by a pimp, improbably named Prudent, who, when challenged for an explanation, simply said, ‘Je ne sais, m’sieur’ – as Beckettian a line as Beckett himself ever wrote. Remarkably, first to the hospital to visit was James Joyce, perhaps the only known example of his solicitude for anyone outside of his own family. 

But though the friendship was thus restored, the hero worship was over and Beckett was gradually coming to realise that there was no future in trying to out-Joyce Joyce. Brancusi could not have known it, but his concentric circle not only captured Joyce’s expanding vision but Beckett’s contrary one, counterclockwise, towards the centre: inward, towards the self, towards silence, towards the expression of the inexpressibility of expression and the obligation nonetheless to make the attempt. As he later explained to his biographer, James Knowlson: 

I realized that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, in control of one’s material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realised that my own way was impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, subtracting rather than adding… I had a great admiration for him. That’s what it was: epic, heroic, what he achieved. I realized that I couldn’t go down that same road.

I thought I’d written a play about Samuel Beckett, about hero worship and about finding your own voice through realising you can’t express yourself by copying. It turned out that the shadow of Joyce was not only obscuring Beckett, but his daughter: when our Director Carl Whiteside and his cast took delivery of the script, the voice that came through loudest for them is, ironically, the one voice silenced. Poor Lucia Joyce, growing up in the shadow of a self-obsessed giant whose dedication to his own work came ahead of everything else, was never able to flourish. After her death Joyce’s grandson Stephen turned up and made a bonfire of her letters and a novel. He was, he said, protecting her and the family, but it’s also another silencing, Lucia shushed even in death.

We can never know, of course, what might have been had she remained well enough to explore her own language of dance. There’s a letter of Joyce’s in which he talks of Lucia ‘crying for a month’ when she stopped dancing, Once again struck down with eye problems, he’s dictating it. 

Only this time, poignantly, it’s not Beckett who’s acting as amanuensis… but Lucia.

Samuel Beckett and the Rainbow Girl, directed by Carl Whiteside, is on at St Martins Theatre, Irene Mitchell Studio, 44 St Martins Lane, South Yarra, Thursday 13th-Sunday 23rd June. More information and tickets at www.bloomsdayinmelbourne.org.au. Playwright Steve Carey will be talking about the play at the Bloomsday 2024 Seminar and lunch on Sunday 16th June – more details at the same website.