Ghostwriting for Stephen James Joyce
Also: George Orwell’s Burmese days, Southern California’s oldest bookstore, Kafka’s diaries, Hans Holbein and the Tudor court, and more.
In Granta, James Scudamore writes about the time Stephen James Joyce—James Joyce’s grandson and former litigious executor of his grandfather’s estate—asked him to ghostwrite his memoir:
The client’s reputation didn’t so much precede him as ride out like a pillaging army. Stephen James Joyce (you had to use the full name): the executor of his grandfather’s literary estate, who had become infamous for his ferocious sense of ownership. Who was said to be so litigious that he had stifled Joyce scholarship for two decades. Who had systematically withheld permission to quote from the work, or else demanded impossibly exorbitant fees, until most of it went out of copyright in 2012, when an article headlined ‘Fuck You, Stephen Joyce’ had been widely circulated online. Who according to D.T. Max in a 2006 New Yorker profile had said that academics should be exterminated ‘like rats and lice’ and had once warned a performance artist that he had probably ‘already infringed’ on the estate’s copyright simply by memorising a portion of Finnegans Wake – surely a unique instance of someone threatening legal action for an unlicensed copy of a literary work in someone’s head. When I asked around, two responses stood out. A novelist who’d lived in Dublin told me he was rumoured to skim cash from the Joyce-linked bars there like a protection racketeer. And a venerable French editor said, ‘He threatened to kill me! And several of my friends. You must have nothing to do with him.’
Scudamore speaks with Joyce on the phone, and it looks like a book contract might be signed, but he finds out from Joyce the next day that the deal is most likely off:
When I called him the next day, he started ranting before I’d had a chance to speak. ‘I have two things to say to you, and I warn you that they are not pleasant.’ The first was that he had severed all contact with my friend’s firm following an unexpected bill and was further incensed that the firm had brought up the issue of my non-refundable flights. The second, almost an afterthought, was that he now had someone else in mind to ghostwrite his memoir. I told him that I didn’t need reimbursing for the flights, since I now planned to come to the island anyway to do some work of my own.
‘That sounds very nice,’ he said. ‘And obviously we would be delighted to take you for lunch.’
The island is the Île de Ré, and Joyce and his wife, Solange, do take Scudamore to lunch and end up spending nearly every day with him. Do read the rest. Stephen Joyce died in 2020.
In other news, Kwame Kwei-Armah resigns as artistic director of the Young Vic: “Kwei-Armah, who started out as an actor and has been greatly acclaimed as a playwright and director, ran Baltimore’s Center Stage theatre from 2011 to 2017 before returning to Britain. He kicked off his Young Vic tenure in 2018 with a soulful musical version of Twelfth Night, which he co-directed. Subsequent productions included the hotly debated Fairview, a Pulitzer prize-winning play about racial bias by Jackie Sibblies Drury; a Covid-delayed Hamlet, starring Cush Jumbo; and Beneatha’s Place, Kwei-Armah’s play picking up the story of a character from Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun.”
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