Bookplanet: did you know James Joyce wrote a play?

The ogre of betrayal
James Joyce wrote only one play, Exiles. It was rejected by theatres and scorned by critics, but it gives us a valuable insight into his turbulent marriage
By Edna O'Brien (from the god old Guardian)

"I expound Shakespeare to docile Trieste" was Joyce's opening remark when in 1913, at the age of 31, he delivered the first of three lectures on Hamlet at the University del Popolo in Trieste. He had a lifelong obsession with Hamlet: his fictional alter-ego Stephen Dedalus espouses Hamlet's embittered idealism, and Leopold Bloom is a cuckold as King Hamlet was and as Joyce claimed Shakespeare was, having been betrayed by Anne Hathaway with Shakespeare's brother. Yet the dramatist Joyce most admired was Ibsen. He did not admire the plays WB Yeats and Lady Gregory were fostering at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin at that time, deeming them "peasant dramas", omitting to note that the peasants booed them. For a time Joyce even disregarded the wild genius of The Playboy of the Western World, but later conceded that Synge possibly had a purer artistic spirit than he himself. He read Ibsen's plays in translation and had his ever-dutiful mother also read them, his father, having scanned the works, pronounced them "safely boring". At the Literary Debating Society of University College Dublin, he spoke defiantly of Ibsen's greatness and scorn for convention. An article of his, which appeared in the Fortnightly Review, brought a warm letter from Ibsen, to William Archer, the editor, and for Joyce this commendation was a transfiguration, the moment when he ceased to be an Irishman and became a European. To read Ibsen in the original he began to study Dano-Norwegian and in a letter to the master he praised the lofty and impersonal powers, citing the battles fought and won behind the forehead, recognising in his hero his own spiritual and aesthetic travails.

His play Exiles, completed in 1915, certainly bears the influence of Ibsen in theme and structure. Joyce said that it was not a play about adultery, but a play about exile, yet when two men, Richard and Robert, who were boyhood friends, meet after an interval of nine years and are still feuding for the affections of the same woman, it is difficult for even the most vacant sensibility not to see it as a work freighted with jealousy and the ogre of betrayal. Bertha is Richard's enigmatic wife and the woman whom Robert still desires, finding her nine times more beautiful in the intervening nine years since she and Richard went to Italy. The drama unfolds in a matter of days, Bertha in her lavender dress, with a sweet reasonableness is mediator, caught up in the broil of these two highly articulate and jousting combatants. In his ignoble heart, Richard wishes to be betrayed by her, "secretly, meanly and craftily", even encouraging her to keep the assignation which Robert has proposed, willing his own dishonour so as to know the deep shaft of doubt. Meanwhile, Robert is assuring her that her husband wishes her betrayal, wanting as he does to be delivered from all the laws and chains of convention.

"Three cat and mouse acts" was how Joyce described it and we presume that Bertha is the cat, yet she refutes our feline expectations; she is no Hedda Gabler, no schemer, she does not pitch one man against the other, credulous to the idea that she can bring them closer together, her mind, as the author tells us, "like a sea mist", a woman stripped naked by the machinations of both men. In his notes for the play, Joyce wishes for her eventual independence, that being the singular route to her "own soul's solitude". Perhaps she senses that she is powerless to assuage them or even uncover their knotted relationship. While their battle may be centred on her, it is rooted in something deeper, the hidden nugget that by possessing the same woman, they will somehow arrive at carnal knowledge of one another.

Joyce described the creation of a work of art as evolving in three stages: artistic conception, artistic gestation and artistic representation. Accidents, as he said, "never happen to men of genius". He who had such a burning need to be betrayed was to get his fill of it, on his home ground. In 1909 he arrived in Dublin with his young son Georgio, in the hope of a reconciliation with his family, who had not forgiven him for eloping with Nora Barnacle, a Galway girl, who had been a chambermaid in Finn's Hotel in Dublin. He had many enemies, but chief among them were his former drinking cronies, Oliver St John Gogarty and Vincent Cosgrave. Both bore him malice because he had left Ireland; imprudently he had had chapters of his novel Stephen D distributed in Dublin, in which they appear in a villainous light, and though they mocked it as "scholastic stink" they also feared that he might indeed, as he had vowed, "become the Homer of his race". When he got off the boat in Kingstown, the first omen was not propitious, sighting as he did, "Gogarty's fat back". For several days he avoided them, until Gogarty and Cosgrave, "the hooded reptile", searched him out. He determined to be aloof, refusing grog, wine, coffee and tea, inducing Gogarty to say "Christ man, you're in phthisis". Then Cosgrave, "the rum rooster", struck. He claimed that when Joyce was courting Nora and had met her on certain nights each week, he, Cosgrave, met her on the other nights and had dallied with her out in Ringsend and along the banks of the Dodder. In short, Joyce had been deceived. A cuckold. Accusations shot across the Irish Sea to reach Nora in Trieste, his heart full of bitterness, wounded, dishonoured and destroyed for all time. His faith in her was broken. He would leave for Trieste immediately once his beleaguered brother Stanislaus, who was in the lodgings with Nora in Trieste, had wired the fare money. Driven to the edge of delirium and having traipsed around Dublin all day, he headed for his last remaining friend, John F Byrne, who lived at number 7 Eccles Street - an address that was to become famous in Ulysses - where he wept, groaned and gesticulated in futile and wretched impotence. Byrne assured him that it was a "blasted plot" to break him, because Cosgrave had always wanted to get "inside" Joyce with Nora. A letter from his brother Stanislaus confirmed Cosgrave's treachery and so came the flood of recantation. By the fact of her neither confirming nor denying the trysts with Cosgrave, his desire for her was inflamed as he tasted in his imagination the nectar of the voyeur. Whether it was true or not, it would become true for literature. He had found the first incentive for Exiles. The second occurred in Trieste, some three years later.

He once remarked that when things get boring onstage, it is advisable to bring on a woman; he might just as easily have said when a marriage becomes prosaic, bring on the suave seducer. Roberto Preziosa, a Venetian and noted dandy, had been a pupil of his and later, as editor of Il Piccolo de la Sera, had commissioned several articles from him. Preziosa became increasingly susceptible to Nora's allurements, calling on her in the afternoons, showering her with compliments, all of which Joyce encouraged so that he could learn more about human deviance for his art. However, when Preziosa made a proposition, claiming that the sun shone for her, Joyce was outraged. The bitter contretemps occurred on Piazza Dante in Trieste, Joyce fuming and shouting, the culprit weeping copiously and the irate scene witnessed by the painter Silvestri, who was one of Joyce's drinking companions.

The flirtation was quashed and Joyce commenced on the reams of notes for his play. They are fascinating and far-reaching, ranging from Nora's amber hair, the roses of her body, garters, Preziosa, cream sweets, a convent garden, the lost pages of Madame Bovary, Schopenhauer's repugnance for women and Othello which, bafflingly, he found "incomplete". No sooner was Exiles published than it was deemed "filth", but then whenever Joyce put pen to paper, it was stamped with the odium of filth.

His efforts to have it produced were Herculean and sometimes ludicrous. He enlisted the services of a chancer, Jules Martin, whose theatrical taste was for music hall and between them they conceived the rash idea of asking Mrs Edith Rockefeller McCormick, a capricious heiress who lived in the Hotel Baur au Lac, to play the part of Bertha, her accomplishments being nothing more than her furs, her clothes and her diamonds. The play was rejected by managements in England, Ireland and America. George Bernard Shaw, a decisive voice for the English Stage Company, found it obscene, but then Joyce had regarded Shaw as "a born preacher". Rejecting it on behalf of the Abbey Theatre, W B Yeats wrote a polite but tepid letter, adding how very great Portrait of the Artist was. Coinciding with these setbacks and disappointments, Joyce was giving English tuition for five or six hours each day, steering a perilous course between landlords and bill collectors, having his furniture repossessed, consuming flagons of white wine, his mind all fluxion and discordance, yet his ideas and narrative were being crystallised into the prodigious and beautiful sequences of Ulysses, which would become the dominant fiction of the 20th century.

The play was given its first production in 1919 in Munich, on the commendation of the author Stefan Zweig. Joyce was by then living in Zurich, because Trieste was an occupied zone since 1915 and had he stayed there he risked internment by the Austrian authorities. Mrs McCormick was inveigled to pay his train fare to Munich, but in keeping with the bungling that dogged his entire life, Joyce failed to secure the necessary visa.

The tension surrounding the first night had something of the mystique of a séance. Six people, including Joyce and Nora, foregathered in the apartment of an actor, Arnold Korff, in evident suspense, waiting for the congratulatory telephone call. It did not come. Instead there came the telegram that presaged the bilious review that was to appear in the following morning's newspaper, a critic asking "Why all that noise for an Irish stew." The play was immediately withdrawn. Smarting from the rejection, Joyce scathingly asked his friend, the author Italo Svevo - "Did they want a steeplechase?" It was Svevo who was entrusted with the intrepid task of reporting to Joyce on the first night of the English production at the Regent Theatre in London in 1926, Joyce having recently undergone two eye operations and already embroiled in the "bauchspeech" and night-labyrinth of Finnegans Wake. The audience were appreciative, yet two days later George Bernard Shaw, who had many reservations about his fellow Dubliner's linguistic incontinences, was obliged to defend the work at a public debate in answer to some of the more extreme fulminations.

(Exiles is at the National Theatre, London, SE1. Box office: 020-7454 3000)