A Portrait of the Artist's Wife

Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom

By Brenda Maddox

381 pp.

Houghton Mifflin, $24.95

FOR many students of literature, Molly Bloom, the heroine of James Joyce's Ulysses, is the greatest character in what may be the greatest novel of the English language. Wife, mother, performer, realist, Earth figure, whore, Molly was to Joyce what the Greek Penelope was to Homer--all that was embodied in the female gender.

But while Molly Bloom has been examined, analyzed, dissected and deconstructed from the time that Ulysses faced its first obscenity charges in the early 1920s, her model--Joyce's common-law wife Nora Barnacle--has gone largely unnoticed. Inaccurately dismissed as unintelligent and certainly unintellectual by posterity, Nora and her contribution to Joyce the artist and Joyce the man have been largely ignored by many scholars.

But in Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom, Brenda Maddox has finally given to Barnacle what she truly deserves--her own identity and life, free from the many characters that Joyce created out of her experiences.

Joyce once said, "Imagination is memory," and he drew greatly on his personal experiences for his works--so greatly that his first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is considered nearly biographical. For many of his female characters, who seem even more real and human than the male characters which Joyce based on himself and his experiences, he drew on Nora. Molly, Gretta Conroy in The Dead, Anna Livia Plurabelle in Finnegans Wake all bear striking resemblences to Nora.

BUT Nora was her own person, and from the very beginning Maddox lets the reader know that it is her biography, not Joyce's, by dispelling many of the myths about her. She could cook, although legend had it that she couldn't, but the Joyces ate in restaurants because Joyce liked to go out a lot. She was not illiterate; although she never could get all the way through Ulysses (neither could W.B. Yeats), Nora read and memorized many of his poems.

The book begins with her decision to depart with Joyce for England at the age of 20 even though he would not marry her, and reflects back on her early life in the city of Galway in the West of Ireland. Maddox touches upon her early romantic relationships, including two of her early loves who died while she was just a teenager, and her family.

Her departure from Ireland was just the first of the many uprootings she faced in her life, as the Joyces moved from Trieste to Rome to Zurich to Paris, facing eviction everywhere they stayed in their early lives together. Money was a continual problem. Although they did not have much money, they used up whatever credit they had and were continually forced to borrow money from Joyce's brother Stanislaus and other friends.

But a lack of money did not seem to keep Nora and James from trying to produce a family. Nora conceived a son, Giorgio, and a daughter, Lucia, before she had a miscarriage which kept her from having other children. But that did not keep the couple from having an active sex life. Joyce's wildest sexual fantasies, which readers of Ulysses will recall from the text, were earnestly fulfilled by Nora, and their erotic letters, written during the few times in their lives that they were apart, are filled with the couple's rather eccentric sexual fantasies.

Joyce, despite his incessant jealousy, also nearly pushed Nora into an affair to garner new material for him to write about. Nora refused to succumb and teased him about his wishes, addressing letters to him, "Dear Cuckold." That spirit helped her to deal with her son's affair with one of her friends, her daughter's nervous breakdown and Joyce's death. It also helped her finally convince Joyce to agree to marry her, 27 years after they first ran away together.

ALTHOUGH Barnacle is an intriguing person on her own, she is most fascinating in the way she affects Joyce and his art. His dependence on her--to take care of him, to keep him sexually satisfied and, most importantly, to keep him anchored firmly in reality--comes out clearly in the biography.

Nora was Joyce's "portable Ireland," and he frequently read into her experiences, songs and tales for his inspiration. Nora's unpunctuated letters to Joyce were the basis of Molly's monologue at the end of his masterpiece. All of his major female characters share her wit, personality and touching humanity, and it is because of the impact she made on him that he was able to give the world all the great literature that he did.

The fact that he set Bloomsday, the day on which the action of Ulysses takes place, on June 16, 1904, speaks volumes of his need for her. That was the day he first fell in love with her. But while Joyce and his art was changed dramatically by her, she still remained the same humble person she had always been:

Ireland must be important," says Stephen Dedalus to Bloom, "because it belongs to me." Nora is important because she belongs to Joyce and because she never did. She was the stronger of the two, an independent spirit who had far more influence on him than he on her.

Is Nora's biography essential for Joycean scholars to understand what was going on inside Joyce's mind when he was writing his masterpiece? Will it inspire in Joyce's admirers a desire to go back and re-read all of his works and give them new meaning? In the words of Nora and Molly: Yes.