An end to bad heir days: The posthumous power of the literary estate

Gordon Bowker - Friday 06 January 2012 - The Independent

On the last day of 2011, the 70th anniversary year of his death, James Joyce's work finally passed out of copyright. It was the dawn of a new age for Joyce scholars, publishers and biographers who are now free to quote or publish him without the permission of the ferociously prohibitive Joyce estate.

Over the past 20 years the right to quote from or publish Joyce's work has been a matter of increasingly heated debate. The estate's most vocal trustee, Stephen Joyce, the author's grandson, earned himself the reputation as the most intractable defender of any copyright in modern times. His truculence (often verbal and colourful) towards those wishing to quote or publish his grandfather's words dated from the mid-1970s, when biographer Richard Ellmann published some of Joyce's "pornographic" letters to his wife Nora and some suggestive ones to a clandestine lover in Zurich. On becoming a trustee, Stephen was determined to prevent any further such revelations.

He outraged a meeting of Joyce scholars in Venice in 1988 by announcing that he had destroyed around a thousand letters to Joyce from his troubled daughter Lucia, as well as some to her from Samuel Beckett, the love of her young life. The following year he forced Brenda Maddox to delete a postscript concerning  Lucia from her biography Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom. However, in 1991, the 50th anniversary of his death, Joyce's copyright lapsed and for a time he could be quoted freely without permission. But in 1995 copyright in Europe was extended to 70 years, so the rights reverted to the estate.

From that moment, Stephen became increasingly forceful in policing it. He announced that for the foreseeable future no permissions would be granted to quote from his grandfather's work. Court actions were threatened and prosecutions launched. Libraries holding Joyce's letters were forbidden from showing them without written permission; revised editions, anthologies, re-enactments, and plans to run passages from his work on the net were vetoed.

Stephen Joyce's hostility largely accounted for the long absence of a comprehensive life of the author following Ellmann's long-admired biography of 1982. He claimed that he was protecting the reputation of his grandfather and the privacy of his family. Perhaps this was why the permission fees demanded were often extortionate.

There's nothing new in a writer's work being restricted by some determined keeper of the flame. Shelley's work was bowdlerised by his wife, most of Jane Austen's letters were burned by her sister, pages were torn from Lewis Carroll's diaries, probably by family members, and Ted Hughes destroyed one of Sylvia Plath's journals. The literary executors of TS Eliot, George Orwell, Vladimir Nabokov and Lawrence Durrell have at various times denied access to letters and diaries to would-be biographers. Mary Shelley, Franz Kafka and Philip Larkin asked for letters and manuscripts to be burned after their deaths; JD Salinger took Ian Hamilton to court to prevent him quoting from his letters in a proposed biography, and in an attempt to defeat the iconoclasts, Thomas Hardy secretly composed his own biography to be published posthumously as if written by his widow.

The intention of the literary guardian is often not just to protect the reputation and prestige of an individual or family but also to safeguard the integrity of a work against experimentation, revision or trivialisation. Samuel Beckett, for example, refused to allow women to take the leading roles in Waiting for Godot, an indignant Orwell stopped his publisher publicising Nineteen Eighty-Four as a romantic thriller and the Joyce estate refused Kate Bush permission to include the final, seductive words of Molly Bloom from Ulysses in a song.

Full piece at The Independent.