Die, Stephen, Die!: or, A Modest Proposal

In 1906, Mark Twain gave a rousing speech on the extension of copyright. At least, I assume it was rousing. This is Mark Twain we're talking about, and from everything I've read and heard, I gather he was as brilliant a speaker as he was a writer. Just reading the text of the speech one hundred years later is pretty stirring stuff, especially if one is at all connected to the subject matter -- and who isn't? If one isn't an artist or writer or musician oneself, one is surely a viewer of art, a reader of books, an enjoyer of music. If one isn't any or all of those things, one is (or might as well be) legally dead and therefore of no importance so far as this discussion goes.

Twain was speaking in support of a new Copyright Bill, which proposed that an author's copyright should hold good for as long as he lived, plus fifty years. Actually, Twain wasn't supporting it, exactly. Of course he wanted it, but he thought it didn't go nearly far enough. He argued that copyright ought to be eternal and everlasting.

His argument is quite compelling, at least while one is reading it. Well, Mark Twain is always compelling when he's arguing, and if he was awake and writing, he was arguing with or about something. His two main points in this particular debate seem, on the face of it, irrefutable. First, he fails to see any fairness in the idea that the offspring of artists can't cleanly and completely inherit an estate in the same way that those lucky enough to be the offspring of, say, owners of real estate or coal mines can. Second, he points out that there are so few writers whose work will still be turning any profit at all after their deaths that we might just as well let those few worthy souls support their offspring indefinitely. To fight against perpetual copyright is, for Twain, comparable to creating a bill limiting families to twenty-two children by one mother. It will happen so rarely that any couple will have so many children that one might as well leave them to it. "Let them have all the liberty they want," Twain contemplates answering anyone proposing such a foolish notion. "In restricting that family to twenty-two children you are merely conferring discomfort and unhappiness on one family per year in a nation of 88,000,000, which is not worth while."

It is a particularly persuasive argument when one notices that, of the six authors he mentions as producing works that outlived the proposed fifty years after death, only four of them are names that any number of people would now recognize; and of the four remaining -- James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Edgar Allan Poe -- the middle two have now only, of the many works they produced in their lifetimes, about a title apiece that sells any number of copies worth worrying about.

Presenting this novel idea to my husband, who is always the one who suffers when I read anything more potent than a cereal box, I demanded that he find something wrong with it. (Finding things wrong with other people's arguments is my husband's hobby; had he spent a little more time at the wrong kind of school or been possessed of just a shade less integrity, he would have made a fine and prosperous lawyer. Yes, that was an anti-attorney-type jab. So sue me.) He immediately pointed out what is probably glaringly obvious to pretty much anyone who's read this far, which is that those few writers who are worth bothering with after even ten years are exactly the ones the world can't do without. If their work isn't guaranteed to enter the public domain eventually, readers must live in constant worry about what exactly kind of hands the writing is going to fall into. What if you get someone who won't loosen their clutches on the work and refuses to let it be published for love or money?

Point well taken. I shivered at the thought of some of the writers I might currently be doing without in that nightmare universe, and turned my thoughts to other matters until a recent New Yorker article by D. T. Max, "The Injustice Collector," brought it to mind again.

The article concerns James Joyce's grandson, Stephen James Joyce, current guardian of the Joyce literary estate. Full disclosure: I have read Dubliners and part of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and have serious plans to buy a severely annotated copy of Ulysses and read it right after I finish reading Fagles' translation of The Odyssey, which will probably happen just after I get that smashing haircut I know is waiting for me somewhere and sell the novel that will win me that 17-member cult following I've been dreaming of. I have specific plans not to read Finnegans Wake until and unless my child is kidnapped and that's one of the ransom demands. So the quality of the hands that hold Joyce's work (and the turn of the mind behind those hands) isn't anything that's been weighing on me too urgently. Probably that's why I was able to read Max's article with as much enjoyment as I did. If it had been about a writer in whom I've invested a great deal of emotional capital -- Austen, any of the Brontes, Woolf, Shirley Jackson, Twain of course -- I would have found it too wrenching to finish.

Because Stephen James Joyce hasn't exactly set out to make himself popular. That's no slander. He'd probably say so himself, and with pride.

Well, there's nothing wrong with that. After all, who springs to mind when we think of people who wake up every morning with the express goal of making themselves popular? Exactly. Teenagers. And the ones who succeed at it are generally unbearable. So, with of course the given that a certain level of worldwide basic politeness is a desirable thing, I'm content to let grownups be as prickly as they please.

And of course the relatives of the truly great deserve a certain amount of sympathy. Not only are they doomed to spend their lives defined first and foremost as relations of so-and-so, but there's an unfair pressure on them, if only because the eyes of the world are upon them, to make something capital-G great out of their own lives. Which is ridiculous, by the way. How many greats are themselves descended from greatness? Twain might as well have had no parents at all, for all his brilliance relied upon any of theirs. Austen's parents were intelligent and resourceful, as were (by and large) her siblings; but a kindly, hard-working rector for a father, and a mother able to turn the occasional amusing poem when she wasn't absorbed in caring for a large family, vegetable garden, and boarding scholars are hardly whom one would triumphantly point to as guaranteed breeders of one of the greatest voices in English literature. Woolf's father was an important writer in his time, but where is his work now? The mother and father of the Brontes produced some small, heartfelt works; but their literary talent hardly seems to have been enough, mixed together or stretched out however one could manage it, to have created even one great writer, let alone three. Wells, the James brothers, Cather, Dickens, Dickinson, Eliot (George or T.S.) -- all could have hatched from eggs or fallen from the sky, for all we would know or care about their parents had not the famous offspring made them at all significant to the universe.

I can think of one exception to this general rule. William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, fine writers in their own right, produced Mary Shelley, for which readers and old movie lovers may be properly grateful. She in turn married Percy Bysshe Shelley and produced one memorable book and one entirely forgettable son. Pity him.

Pity, too, Pen Browning, child of two great poets who looked expectantly at him to carry on their name in every way. Greatness rarely begets greatness. Genius springs more often than not from no one in particular, a notion the Shakespeare conspiracists steadfastly refuse to entertain.

So when we notice, as we are bound to do, that Stephen James Joyce is no one and nothing in particular -- or would be, if he weren't the literary executor of a master -- our only surprise should be at the fact that we're surprised at his being no one we know. And our sympathy should lie, as mine certainly did, with someone unfortunate enough to be in the spotlight through no fault or deed of his own. His ferocious efforts to preserve the family's privacy are equally understandable, at least at first blush. Surely the urge to know every sordid detail about the writers we love is low and shameful. Near relations of great writers will naturally feel differently about biographies, and biographers, of their great-aunts or grandparents than we will, and that ought to be respected.

Even Stephen James Joyce's antipathy toward scholars isn't unsympathetic. Depending on what you mean by scholars, anyway. I know Virginia Woolf said that the best way to learn about Shakespeare is to go and get a nice inexpensive edition of his plays and read the danged things, rather than sitting and listening to some teacher droning on about what Hamlet was really about, and I think she has a point. On the other hand, I'm everlastingly grateful to all those scholars who put all those footnotes in the books I love. Common reader that I am, I wouldn't stand much of a chance on my own without them when it comes to Shakespeare, or even Austen.

But I do see SJ's point when he claims that academics may have scared ordinary book-loving types away from his grandfather's works. I think it's a stretch to say (as he did) that literally millions of people who, left to their own devices, would have eagerly jumped into Ulysses have been frightened away by academics cautioning that Joyce is too difficult for plebes. On the other hand, I do know several people, one of whom is in possession of a Ph.D. (and not an honorary one), who were told by their professors that reading and understanding Shakespeare was beyond their capabilities. And I was once paid a heartfelt compliment by a real live scholar, Joan Wylie Hall, who has written actual scholarly works on our mutual favorite writer, Shirley Jackson. She was impressed, she said, by a piece I'd written about Jackson; she'd like to think that I taught at a university, but I sounded too sensible for that -- "too unimpeded by obnoxious theorizing, I mean." That was when I knew I'd always be a civilian, no matter how many hours I spent reading and ranting about literature. As Catherine Morland says in Northanger Abbey, I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible. And apparently that impression the civilian world has that scholarly writing can only be understood by other scholars isn't completely unwarranted (though Hall's own work on Jackson is a happy exception).

Even when I heard that SJJ had destroyed all the letters that his aunt Lucia (James Joyce's daughter) had written to him, he hadn't lost me. I winced, but I couldn't take it as evidence of evil, or even malice. Cassandra Austen destroyed a great many letters written by her dear sister Jane exactly because she knew they would someday be of great interest to readers outside the family. We grieve, but we can't really blame her for feeling a certain protectiveness toward her sister, her family, and the picture the world might someday make of them based purely on Austen's ungaurded, often mischievous letter-writing. One can only be grateful that so many of Austen's letters survive. And of course one wonders avidly what on earth Cassandra's criteria were when the burning time came. If she allowed this, from a 1798 letter, to carry on:

Mrs. Hall of Sherbourn was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, oweing [sic] to a fright.--I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband.

-- what, then, had been judged too sharp, too cutting, too personal or too revealing to furnish amusement or edification for future generations?

Stephen James Joyce says in so many words that the private life of his famous grandfather is no one's effing business. D. T. Max argues that this "clashes with his notion that Joyce's work is essentially autobiographical," but I'd have to disagree. There's autobiographical, and then there's autobiography. One is art, the other a series of facts. There's a difference between acknowledging that your grandfather drew on personal experience for his writing, and saying that therefore everyone in the world has the right to know exactly what those personal experiences were. The artist has given enough to the world when he gives his work, his writing. Anyone who has witnessed any of the ferocious struggles for and against the writing of the "real" life of Sylvia Plath, by all accounts a very autobiographical writer, soon comes to the dizzied conclusion that the books Plath wrote stand quite well alone.

Nevertheless, writers don't write in or from a vacuum, and the curiosity aroused by a great writer as to who exactly he or she was is both natural and deserving of some answer. Writers write because they must, but they publish that writing because they wish to make a name for themselves. Such a longing is both sympathetic and ancient. It hardly seems fair, then, to take readers to task as being childish, petty, or shallow for their eager questions, while indulgently allowing writers their craving for fame. Shirley Jackson wrote a children's book that ought to be better known than it is about a little girl who was unhappy because no one in the world had ever heard of her. "I wish everyone knew my name," the eponymous heroine of Famous Sally mourns. "I wish I could hear everyone saying Sally Sally Sally." We smile at her because we understand completely. We all wish we could hear the world saying our name. When we speak of fame and fortune, notice which one comes first.

Sally is lucky. The world's inhabitants do end up speaking her name, and they are content to leave it at that -- the name itself. They ask no troubling questions as to the character of its bearer. Real fame is never so tidy. On being presented with a great public figure, our first simple admiration is followed by a cooler echo of Lewis Carroll's caterpillar on first seeing Alice: "Who are you?"

SJJ would have been on firmer ground had he expressed a wish to guard his own privacy. Those who seek the world's acknowledgment of their own greatness have tacitly admitted that they wish no such protection. If one believes with Emily Dickinson that it really would be "dreary -- to be -- Somebody!" it's usually quite simple to remain a Nobody. Most of us do it without any effort at all. Dickinson herself remained true to both her work and her deep desire for a quiet private life. Those who don't emulate her example have announced that they don't wish to. Never mind any nonsense about being young and needing the money. Day jobs are still plentiful, and if art really is one's only marketable skill, privacy is only a nom de plume away.

SJJ isn't buying it. His grandfather wanted both fame and privacy and fought for both, and his literary heir might argue that he is simply continuing the battle where Joyce left off.

This is questionable for two reasons. We have the Kafka conundrum, for one. Kafka begged Max Brod, his best friend, to destroy all Kafka's writing after his death. Brod didn't do so, and for a little while I went to all the trouble of feeling slightly guilty every time I read The Metamorphosis or The Trial. Then I realized how ridiculous I was being. Kafka had it in his power to destroy his own writing whenever he chose to (and in fact he did destroy some of it, as Brod was grieved to discover). He could have done away with it himself, or he could have left that writing to someone other than the man who was an unswerving admirer of Kafka's writing long before such a stance was popular. Brod had told Kafka many times that he believed his writing to be revolutionary, world-changing, truly Great. This was rather generous, since Brod was himself a best-selling writer who cheerfully accepted the idea that his own work and fame would die with him. But his dearest Kafka -- ah, Kafka was the next new voice, and someday the world would be singing his praises. This is the person Kafka had placed in charge of taking the torch to his writing -- the man who once said to him in regard to such a conflagration, "If you seriously think me capable of such a thing, let me tell you here and now that I shall not carry out your wishes." Artists may not always be the most practical people, but surely even a writer would have recognized that this wasn't the man who would light the match Kafka claimed to desire.

Getting back to Joyce. D.T. Max mentions that Joyce was snarlingly hostile to biographers -- "biografiends," as he refers to them in Finnegans Wake. While Kafka claimed that his work ought to be burned because it was inherently worthless, Joyce seems to have suffered from no such painful self-doubt. He wished to have certain erotic letters destroyed because of what they revealed about him (but again, why didn't he do the job himself? The letters were to his wife, after all). He hated the idea of the world knowing just how late in their child-producing career he and Nora had married. He even tried suing a man who said that Joyce owed him money. This doesn't sound like a man who wants to be left to live his life in a quiet Dickinsonian grace. This is someone who wants all the world to know his name but is blusteringly indignant that anyone might pronounce that syllable in a tone of anything but reverence.

More importantly so far as the issues at hand are concerned, Joyce actively refused to grant to others the privacy his grandson is trying to claim for him. Almost in passing, Max mentions in his New Yorker article that "the publication of Dubliners...required seven solicitors, in part because [Joyce] refused to remove pointed references to actual people and places."

Now, look. Some actor should be sued because he said that Joyce owed him a hundred and fifty francs; but Joyce can commit to the permanence of the printed page references -- pointed references -- to people who wished not to be referred to? If that doesn't strike anyone else as horribly inconsistent, I must be reading it wrong.

Still. Greatness has a price, but it seems damnably hard that that price should be visited unto the third and fourth generation. The painter Sophie Matisse didn't know for a very long time that she was related to that Matisse, and it's possible that spending her formative years being first and foremost herself, rather than being followed always by that nasty comma and "great-granddaughter off...", was what made it possible for her to fulfill her own considerable gifts without feeling intimidated by those of her ancestor. Such freedom may be difficult for the immediate relations to acquire, though. Sophie Matisse was born long after Henri had died. It would have been hard to lie to Stephen James Joyce about who his grandfather was or wasn't when the guy was right there.

And so, having read and pondered Max's article so far as I had, I still harbored sympathy and even a sneaking liking for SJJ himself. I even rather enjoyed his disdain when requests from scholars contain typographical errors. That's the kind of thing I can imagine refusing permission to quote over. "You can be remotely associated with my grandfather's writing when you learn what the hell a comma is for, pal!" I might mutter vindictively in such a situation. I have a thing about commas. And don't get me started on semicolons.

But then as I continued my reading, Stephen James Joyce, not to put too fine a point on it, started to look like a jerk. He didn't just refuse permission to quote. He refused permission for someone to pursue her idea of what a novel within a novel of Joyce's might have been. Eloise Knowlton wanted to write her own version of Sweets of Sin, a naughty book the main character of Ulysses buys for his wife. SJJ fired back an absolute denial.

That one touched a nerve. One of my favorite books in the world is Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, which might loosely be described as a prequel to and expansion of Jane Eyre as told from the point of view of the madwoman in the attic. It's stark and brilliant and forces even the most idolatrous admirer of Rochester into troubled reconsideration of Bronte's Byronic hero. In the universe as it would be if copyrights were eternal and all literary estates were run by Stephen James Joyce or someone very like him, this coldly luminous masterpiece wouldn't exist.

Granted, the odds are very much against Knowlton's book being nearly so worth reading. Most sequels, prequels, and other fan-fiction expansions of great works are so little worth reading that one wishes to erect a loving, regretful monument to the trees that died putting them into print. But there are always exceptions. Look at what Tennyson did with Homer's lotus eaters. Heck, look what Milton did with a man, a woman, and a snake. There is a beautiful baby now and then among all that stinking bathwater.

And SJJ didn't just refuse permission. He went out of his way to be nasty about it. "Neither I nor the others who manage this Estate will touch your hare-brained scheme with a barge pole in any manner, shape or form," he snapped back at Knowlton. He told another scholar who incurred his displeasure that he'd better think about a job as a trash collector, since he'd never be allowed to quote another Joyce text.

We've moved past Cassandra Austen territory here. I'm not feeling the love. What I'm reminded of, vividly, is my days behind the counter at an independent bookstore. Often we would host visits by writers -- some famous, some not-so. One night, we were to have two book signings, one following the other in rapid succession. The second writer to grace that evening was Gloria Steinem -- not a name exactly associated with immortal prose, but a very well-known and influential person, especially at a bookstore that specialized in women's writing. The first visiting author that evening was someone who had just written a book about Sofonisba Anguissola, a painter in the sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century. It was a godsend to this woman that she got to share billing with Steinem. This bookstore was in a big city. People weren't hurting for entertainment. If the evening had been all about her, she'd have been lucky to sell five copies of her expensive art book. As it was, thanks to the captive audience of dozens of people who'd come early in order to get a decent place in line to get books signed by Steinem, she sold a box of them.

One of the writers that night was gracious, kind, even self-deprecatory -- speaking to everyone quite naturally, seeming genuinely happy to make their acquaintance. One of them was snappish, self-important, and demanding. The nice one was Steinem; the diva was the one whom no one but scholars in her field had heard of before or since.

I had already noticed that it was, almost without exception, the really famous writers who treated us lowly clerks with kindness and consideration, while the first-timers or the ones who weren't ever going to make it big were far more likely to be condescending and rude. That evening I realized that being associated with great fame without going to all the trouble of earning it can have a poisonous effect on the personality.

Who exactly would SJJ be if he didn't happen, by accident of birth, to be heir to the Joyce estate? Who would ever have heard of him? What would he have given the world? His day job, when he had one, was a position as a mid-level manager. He took eight years to graduate from Harvard, and I wonder if he ever would have been admitted at all if not for the famous family name. Hardly someone to be dissing garbage collectors.

SJJ says he's protecting the Joyce family's privacy. Where, exactly, do continual attempts to block public readings of Joyce's published works fit into that category? He even told an actor who'd memorized some of Finnegans Wake in anticipation of a monologue he expected to deliver that he'd probably already violated copyright laws. That's not a loving grandson being protective; that's a power-hungry little Nobody having a snit-fit.

He is, nevertheless, a nobody related to a Somebody. There is a certain justice in Twain's idea that writers ought to be able to support their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren with the continued revenue generated by their work just as real estate magnates and oil-barons can. As Twain pointed out, if a man's lucky enough to discover a coal mine, it isn't as if the government steps in after a few decades and says that he and his family have made enough money off that particular lode, and now it ought to be given over to the public.

On the other hand, it isn't right that SJJ's personal decision to be as much of a jerk as he feels like on any given day should have the tragic impact it currently does on readers, scholars, and other admirers of James Joyce's writing. The man once refused permission to publish because he didn't like the name of the scholar's university publisher's sports team, for God's sake. This must be stopped.

So here's my modest proposal. Let the law be changed so that a certain amount of the royalties earned by a writer's work will be paid to the descendants of the writer for as long as there are royalties to speak of. (SJJ should love that; he's been known to lobby staggering permissions fees.) But let control of the work pass into the public domain, and that right soon. Sooner than it is now.

As I said before, Joyce isn't a writer vital to my existence. But I can still despise his grandson's behavior. He reminds me of Mr. Frankland, a minor character in The Hound of the Baskervilles. Frankland is a man who has ought to be quite wealthy, but he has squandered most of his inheritance on constant, costly, meaningless lawsuits. Thanks to his detailed knowledge of obscure British law, he legally establishes a right of way through the center of a wealthy neighbor's park -- "We'll teach these magnates that they cannot ride rough-shod over the rights of the commoners, confound them!" -- on the same day that he has the woods where the village folk used to picnic closed off -- "These infernal people seem to think that there are no laws of property." Watson goes on to say that "apart from the law he seems a kindly, good-natured person," but the reader is hard-pressed to believe any such thing, especially when we learn of Frankland's behavior toward his own daughter. She lives in hiding from her abusive husband, fearing every day that he will force her to live again with him (the law being on his side in this matter), and must earn a scanty living "in a typewriting business." Her father refuses to help her in any way, because she married without his permission. Legally, he isn't required to render her any assistance, and apparently legal compulsion is the only kind he understands. Watson, a visitor to the area, only sees Frankland's lawsuits as "a little comic relief where it is badly needed," but the residents live for the day when his money runs out and he finally stops making their lives miserable simply because he can.

And so must Joyce scholars and lovers of literature in general feel about Stephen James Joyce. I'm not saying the man should be eaten by a luminescent dog. I'm just not sure how many people would go into deep mourning, or half-mourning, or even an unbecoming olive drab, if he did meet his maker in such a fashion. Preferably before 2012, when the Joyce work goes into the public domain.

Then again, having him alive and forced to buy industrial-strength earplugs to shut out the noise of the countless block-parties scholars all over the world will throw when that blessed year finally comes would have a certain cosmic justice to it. I can think of a certain scholar in particular who'll probably buy advertising time during the Super Bowl just to say, "So, I should be a garbage collector, huh? Yo, Stephen J. -- collect this!" You know he's going to say it. He has to. I hope I get to watch.

Got a question or comment?
Write to the Book Lady.

If you found this essay helpful,
please visit the Filthy Lucre page