Sex and Lucia

Sometimes the answer to a woman’s problems is right there between her legs and there is no need to get more profound than that.” I know, this sounds like a line from About Adam or even Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. Or maybe a paper by Freud. In fact, it’s a line from A Is For Everything, a play by Caitlin Murphy which focuses on the relationship between James Joyce’s daughter, Lucia and Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesil, the wife of Samuel Beckett.

That said, although the play deals with a series of “volatile meetings” between both women, they never actually met, as far as is known. Yet Lucia definitely did meet Beckett before he married Suzanne and fell deeply in love with the man, which sets up the dramatic premise for the play. But who says that pretty pointed line I quote at the start of the article?

“Lucia says it to Suzanne,” responds Tony McCleane-Fay, the play’s director. “She’s talking about marriage and time and about how she was never really fulfilled in a lot of areas in her life, sex being one of them.”

And sex with Beckett obviously was something Lucia Joyce craved. In the context of the love she felt for him which was never reciprocated, it seems.

“Beckett was within Joyce’s circle of friends in Paris and it was at that point Lucia fell in love with Beckett,” Tony explains. “And he wasn’t really that interested. He suspected that she was not quite right, psychologically. So what Lucia felt was a totally frustrated love. And eventually Beckett left the Joyce household saying that he just couldn’t live there anymore because of that pressure from Lucia. And her condition.”

Which was later diagnosed as schizophrenia. But was that condition, one wonders, aggravated by the rejection by Beckett and the fact that he subsequently married Suzanne?

“I’m not too sure about that,” counters Tony. ”But Anthony Cronin, in his biography of Beckett, suggests that Beckett was, in a way, to be lauded for leaving because he didn’t take advantage of Lucia. But a year after he left, Joyce phoned Beckett and invited him over and at that point Lucia had been diagnosed as schizophrenic, and Beckett said ‘no’. And later Lucia was committed to an asylum in Northhampton for 40 years. We use that as the jumping off point for the play, the meetings that occurred after that.”

As for Lucia Joyce’s feelings about her daddy, well, Tony says she was “fixated” on Joyce. So might her love and longing for Beckett have been transference, to a degree? Might she secretly have longed for daddy to solve that problem between her legs? And in her soul?

“Well, actually, the more you research this you find that there is an awful lot in Finnegans Wake about Lucia and about incest as well,” Tony responds. “So maybe she did transfer to Beckett the feelings she had for her father. But A Is For Everything does have all these resonances and suggestions bubbling under the surface, that’s what makes the whole project fascinating to me.”

And Tony McCleane-Fay suggests that this production – “which features black comedy, dance, live music and songs” – isn’t just for Joyce and Beckett fans.

“One of my main aims, as a director, when I read the script, was to make this a story that is accessible to anyone,” he says. ”So I really do believe the play will be enlightening and entertaining for the public in general.”