James Joyce: Commentary (1)

London Illustrated News (1, Aug. 1914): ‘[..] ‘Larry’s most damaging charge against the Irish in John Bull’s Other Island is that they were a mean-spirited nation. He rent asunder the veil from their dreaming, and pointed out that it was a pernicious, drugging thing, far removed from the lofty vision of the idealist. Dubliners (Grant Richards) could give him powder and shot. Mr. James Joyce’s studies are not, strictly speaking, fiction. They are facts shifted [sic] and sorted in the kaleidoscopic of a novelist’s brain - not at all the same thing. The impression they leave is sordid, unilluminated, circumscribed. He draws a sharp picture of narrow and ignoble lives. The sentimental Irishman of the English fancy is, of course, absent: by this time he should be dead as a dodo. Mr. Joyce’s Dubliners are drab, rather dirty-minded, rather suspicious, and superstitious materialists. They are, in fact, a people who have lost the self-respect of freemen - a people, to put it clearly, ripe for Tammany. They furnish a very strong reason for the Celtic revival, for if they are as they are drawn here their case is desperate and only the prophet or the seer can hope to mend them. Handled by politicians for their own ends, they do not bear thinking about. The bright spot in the book is “Maria” - and a nation is not saved by the virtues of its aged virgins. We should prefer not to believe in Mr. Joyce’s dreary realism: but, unfortunately, he has the touch of genius. Dubliners, whether you like it or not, is a book to be reckoned with’ (Quoted John McCourt, James Joyce: A Passionate Exile, London: Orion 2000, p.50; note also ill. p.29 shows James Joyce and the green-house with caption; ‘every inch the young man about town’; front. Louis le Brocquy, ‘James Joyce’, 1983; note author remarks in adjoining caption that Dubliners is reviewed ‘glowingly’ in LIN, as supra.)

Irish Book Lover [review of Dubliners], Vol. VI, No. 4 (Nov. 1914), pp.60-61: ‘Dublin, like other large cities, shelters many peculiar types of men and women, good, had and indifferent; in fact some, whose knowledge of it is extensive and peculiar, would say more than its fair share. Of some of these Mr. Joyce here gives us pen portraits of great power, and although one naturally shrinks from such characters as are depicted in “An Encounter” or “Two Gallants”, and finds their descriptions not quite suited virginibus puerisque, one cannot deny the existence of their prototypes, while wishing that the author had directed his undoubted talents in other and pleasanter directions.’ (Quoted in Chris Hopkins, ‘“James Joyce is an Irish Edition of Mr. Caradoc Evans”: Two Celtic Naturalists’, in Irish Studies Review, Autumn 1995, pp.23-26, note 7.) Further, the review notices ‘language unprinted in literature since the days of Swift and Sterne’ and adds, ‘no clean-minded person could possibly allow it to remain within reach of his wife, his sons or daughters.’ (Robert Deming, ed., James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1970 [Vol. 1], pp.68-69; quoted in Maurice Beja, ed., James Joyce: A Casebook, Macmillan 1973, pp.79-80; also in Joe McMinn, ‘A Likely Pair: Joyce and Swift’, in Irish Studies Review, Spring 1997, p.33.) See further reviews of Joyce in the Irish Book Lover, Vols. 6, 8, 11, 13, 27, incl. James Stephens’s contemporary opinion on the appearance of the Dubliners stories that Joyce was a poet not a prose writer.

The Irish Book Lover, review of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (April-May 1917): ‘In spite of the serious drawbacks to be mentioned later, truth compels one to admit that this pseudo-autobiography of Stephen Dedalus, a weakling and a dreamer, makes fascinating reading. We read it at a single sitting. The hero’s schooldays at Clongowes Wood, and later at Belvedere, are graphically and doubtless, faithfully portrayed, as is the visit to Cork in company with his father, a clever ne’er-do-well, gradually sinking in the social scale. One of the strongest scenes in the book is the description of the Christmas-dinner party during the black year of 1891, when Nationalist Ireland was, riven to the centre over the Parnell “split”. Mr. Joyce is unsparing in his realism, and his violent contrasts - the brothel, the confessional - jar on one’s finer feelings. So do the quips and jeers of the students, in language unprinted in literature since the days of Swift and Sterne, following on some eloquent and orthodox sermons. That Mr. Joyce is a master of a brilliant descriptive style and handles dialogue as ably as any living writer is conceded on all hands, and, oh! the pity of it. In writing thus, is he just to his fine gifts? Is it even wise, from a worldly point of view - mercenary, if you will - to dissipate one’s talents on a book which can only attain a limited circulation? - for no clean-minded person could possibly allow it to remain within the reach of his wife, his sons or daughters. Above all, is it Art? We doubt it.’ (Anon.; IBL, April-May 1917, viii, Nos. 9-10, p.113; rep. in Robert Deming, ed., James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1970 [Vol. 1], p.102; quoted in Clare Hutton, ‘The Dubliners Fiasco Revisited’ [lecture], “The Irish Book Lover”, symposium at Princess Grace Irish Library, Monaco, Oct. 2002.)

Irish Book Lover (q. iss.; 1940), reviewing Finnegans Wake (1939), finds that it contains ‘a world of language which seems to have the strange minuteness, the cloying consistency and the rapacious spread of duckweed’. Further: ‘Stephen Dedalus has kept his word and his silence, exile and cunning has, in Finnegan’s Wake, produced what must be regarded as one of the most extraordinary books ever produced in any language […] for the moment we wonder why so great a talent, gifted with prodigious memory, a mastery of English and of other languages, a poet’s ear for the beauty of vowel, and an artist’s fastidiousness in form, should bend itself to a task in which no mind save its own can enjoy or appreciate the grotesque output of its labour?’ (Quoted in Nicholas Allen, ‘The Irish Book Lover’ [keynote lecture], symposium at Princess Grace Irish Library, Monaco, Oct. 2002.)

Freeman’s Journal, ‘A Dyspeptic Portrait’ (review of A Portrait of the Artist, 1916), ‘[…] Had it been a description of the desolation of No Man’s Land on the Somme or the Yser, the horror could hardly have been laid on more thickly, and all through the book food is scarcely mentioned without the same shudder of disgust, which is more reminiscent of the pangs of dyspepsia than of the joy of art. Had the author confined himself to this particular form of ugliness it would not have been so bad, but, as Whistler said of Oscar Wilde, that he could not keep out of the area, so Mr. Joyce plunges and drags his readers after him into the slime of foul sewers. He is not, indeed, like Mr. George Moore, who points to the iridiscence as a proof of the beauty of corruption. Mr. Joyce knows better, but despite his repulsion his pen, instead of pointing to the stars overhead, is degraded into a muck-rake. This is due in a measure to a false theory of aesthetics, but it springs even more from temperamental defects […] The great masters have not been blind to the aspects of life that Mr. Joyce exploits, but they see them in their true perspective and do not dwell on them to the exclusion of everything else. They know the value of proportion and the importance of sanity and clear judgment and realise that to see life steadily one must see it whole. It is an accident that Mr. Joyce’s book should have Dublin as its background. A youth of the temperamental quality of his Stephen Dedalus was [98] bound to react as sharply against any other environment; had he been brought up in an English cathedral town or an American industrial centre he wouldhave pillioried [sic] them in just as repellant a fashion. Yet English critics, with a complacency that makes one despair of their intelligence, are already hailing the author as a typical Irishman, and his book as a faithful picture of Irish life. It would be just as accurate to declare that De Quincey’s Opium Eater embodied the experience of the average English youth […].’ (FJ, 7 April 1917; rep. in Robert Deming, ed., James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1970 [Vol. 1], pp.98-99.)

Freeman’s Journal (J.W.G., ‘Ibsen in Ireland’, review of Exiles, 1918): ‘Ibsen’s genius that shows the most signs of wear and tear. His greatness did not he in the fact that his characters were adepts in the analysis of their emotions, but that this analysis was so presented as to strengthen the impression of dramatic personality. This is exactly what Mr. Joyce fails to do, and his failure is the more curious because it is due to no lack of power. The appalling discussion at the dinner party, in the opening chapters of Portrait of the Artist as Young Man, crams into a single page more dramatic reality than is to be found in the three acts of Exiles. In his play, where one looks for men and women one finds instead states of mind loosely personified. Vital energy seems to have been drained out of the characters, and they impress one less as individuals than as Aolian harps vibrating to the waves of emotions they are powerless to direct or control. Subtlety is possible in the theatre, but to be effective it must be expressed in terms of the theatre. Mr. Joyce scarcely makes a pretence of attempting to hold the interest of his audience, and though he introduces, as Ibsen certainly would not have done, a suburban sitting-room equipped with no less than four doors, he disdains to conjure up a single dramatic situation in the real sense of the word. The plot of Exiles is not unlike that of [Shaw’s] Candida, with the humour left out. Betha [sic] Rowan is in much the same plight as Mr. Shaw’s heroine was between Marchbanks and Morell, only in Mr. Joyce’s play all the three principals see themselves and are presented by their author from the Marchbanks’ point of view. Dramatically it is a case of great cry and little wool; and while Exiles contains, as one expects from Mr. Joyce, some dialogue that is wonderfully subtle and effective, good dialogue is the beginning, and not the end, of play-making.’ (FJ, 15 June 1918; rep. in Robert Deming, ed., James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1970 [Vol. 1], pp.135-36.)

Sunday Chronicle (1922): ‘The foulest book that has ever found its way into print […] What concerns us all and most earnestly demands consideration is the appalling fact that our Metropolitan criticism should have been treating such works as those of Mr. Joyce seriously as works of genius.’ (Alfred Noyes, reviewing Ulysses; quoted in Patricia Hutchins, James Joyce’s World, Methuen 1957, p.176, n.1.)

Sunday Express (Dublin 1922): ‘I say deliberately that it is the most infamously obscene book in ancient or modern literature. The obscenity of Rabelais is innocent compared with its leprous and scabrous horrors. All the secret sewers of vice are canalised in its flood of unimaginable thoughts, images and pornographic words. And its unclean lunacies are larded with appalling and revolting blasphemies directed against the Christian religion and against the name of Christ. […] The book is alread the bible of beings who are exiles and outcasts in this and every civilised country. It is also adopted by the Freudians as the supreme glory of their dirty and degraded cult.’ (James Douglas, reviewing Ulysses; quoted in Stan Gébler Davies, James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist, Davis-Poynter 1975, p.247; n.d.; earlier quoted in James Liddy, ‘The Reputation of James Joyce: From Notoriety to Fame’, in University Review, 3, 2, Summer 1963, p.16). Note: Joyce insisted that the review be included in publicity material.

Guardian [Manchester], review of Finnegans Wake (1939): ‘[…] The work is not written in English, or in any other language, as language is commonly know. I can detect words made up out of some eight or nine languages, but this must be only a part of the equipment employed. This polyglot element is only a minor difficulty, for Mr. Joyce is using language in a new way. […] the easiest way to deal with the book would be to become “clever” and satrical or to write off Mr. Joyce’s latest volume as the work of a charlatan. But the author is obviously not a charlatan, but an artist of very considerable proportions. I prefer to suspend judgement […] What Mr. Joyce is attempting, I imagine, is to employ language as a new medium, breaking down all grammatical usages, all time space values, all ordinary conceptions of context. Compared with this, Ulysses is a first-form primer. In this volume the theme is the language and the language is the theme, and a language where every association of sound and free association is exploited. […] The clearest object in time in the book is the Liffey, Anna Livia, Dublin’s legendary stream, and the most continuous character is H. C. Earwicker, “Here Comes Everybody”: the Liffey as the moment in time and place, and everything, everybody, all time as th terms of reference, back to Adam or Humpty Dumpty, but never away from Dublin. […] Who, it may be asked, was Finnegan? Again, I should have been unable to tell, unaided, from Mr. Joyce’s book. But I gather there is an Irish story of a contractor who fell and was stretched out for dead. When his friends toasted him he rose at the word “whiskey” and drank with them. In a book where all is considered, this legend, too, has its relevance.’ The reviewer adds some remarks on the role of Jung and Freud (‘Tung-Toyd’) in Finnegans Wake and concludes: ‘One might imagine that Mr. Joyce had used his great powers deliberately to show the language of a schizophrenic mind. He alone could explain his book and, I suppose, he alone could review it.’ (Contemp. review of Finnegans Wake, 1939; rep. [anon.] in Guardian Review; accessed online, 16 Aug. 2002.)

Thomas Kettle, review of Chamber Music (Freeman’s Journal, 1 June 1907): ‘Those who remember University College life of five years back will have many memories of Mr. Joyce. Wilful, fastidious, a lover of elfin paradoxes, he was for the men of his time the very embodiment of the literary spirit. […] The title of the book evokes that atmosphere of remotesness, restraint, accomplished execution chraracteristic of its whole contents. There is but one them behind the music, a love, gracious, and, in its way, strangely intense, but fashioned by temperamental and literary moulds, too strict to permit it to pass over into the great tumult of passion. The inspiration of the book is almost entirely literary. There is no trace of the folklore, folk dialect, or even the national feeling that have coloured the work of practically every writer in contemporary Ireland. Neither is there any sense of that modern point of view which consumes all life in the language of problems. It is clear, delicate, distinguished playing, of the same kindred with harps, with wood birds, with Paul Verlaine. […] Mr. Joyce’s book is one that all his old friends will, with that a curious pleasure, add to their shelves, and that will earn him many new friends.’ (Quoted [in part and from the original] in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce [1959] 1965, p.271; rep. more fully in Robert Deming, ed., James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1970, Vol. 1., p.37.)

H. G. Wells (reviewing A Portrait in Nation, 24 Feb. 1917): ‘Like Swift and another living Irish writer, Mr. Joyce has a cloacal obsession. He would bring back into the general picture of life aspects of modern drainage and modern decorum have taken out of ordinary discourse and conversation. [...] if the reader is squeamish upon these matters, then there is nothing for it but to shun this book.’ (Rep. in Deming, ed., Critical Heritage, 1970 [Vol. 1], p.86; also quoted in Jeri Johnson, Introduction to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, OUP [World Classics] 2000, p.vii.) Note: Johnson also quotes his calling A Portrait: ‘a mosaic of jagged fragments’ (Wells, in Deming, op. cit., p.87; Johnson, op. cit., p.xvi.) Further: ‘Sterne could not have done the Christmas dinner scene better. I recommend this most memorable novel for its quintessential and unfailing reality.’ (Quoted in Donagh MacDonagh, ‘The Reputation of James Joyce: From Notoriety to Fame’, in University Review, Summer 1963, pp.12-20; p.13.)

H. G. Wells, letter of 23 Nov. 1928 to Joyce on “Work in Progress”: ‘I have enormous respect for your genius dating from your earliest books and I feel now a great personal liking for you but you and I are set upon absolutely different courses. Your training has been Catholic, Irish, insurrectionary; mine, such as it was, was scientific, constructive and, I suppose, English. The frame of my mind is a world wherein a big unifying and concentrating process is possible (increase of power and range by economy and concentration of effort), a progress not inevitable but interesting and possible. The game attracts me and holds me. For it, I want language and statement as simple and clear as possible. You began Catholic, that is to say you began with a system of values in stark opposition to reality. Your mental existence is obsessed by a monstrous system of contradicitons. You may believe in chastity, purity and the personal God and that is why you are always breaking out into cries of cunt, shit and hell. As I don’t believe in these things except as quite personal values my mind has never been shocked to outcries by the existence of waterclosets and menstrual bandages - and undeserved misfortunes. And while you were brought up under the delusion of political suppression I was brought up under the delusion of political responsibility.’ […; cont.]

H. G. Wells (letter to Joyce, 23 Nov. 1928) - cont.: ‘Now with regard to this literary experiment of yours. It’s a considerable thing because you are a very considerable man and you have in your crowded composition a might genius for expression which has escaped discipline. But I don’t think it gets anywhere. You have turned your back on common men, on their elementary needs and their restricted time and intelligence […] What is the result? Vast riddles. Your last two works have been more amusing an exciting to write than they will every be to read. […] Do I get much pleasure from this work? No. Do I feel I am getting something new and illuminating as I do when I read Anrep’s dreadful translation of Pavlov’s badly written book on Conditioned Reflexes? No. So I ask: Who the hell is this Joyce who demands so many waking hours of the few thousand I have still to live for a proper appreciation of his quirks and fancies and flashes of rendering? …/] Your work is an extraordinary experiment and I would go out of my way to save it from destructive or restrictive interruption. […] I can’t follow your banner any more than you can follow mine. But the world is wide and there is room for both of us to be wrong.’ (Letters of James Joyce [Vol. I], pp.274-75; quoted in Ellmann, James Joyce, 1965 Edn., pp.620-21; also [in part] in Stan Gébler Davies, James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist, Poynter-Davis 1975, pp.270-71.)

Francis Hackett, ‘Green Sickness’, review of A Portrait, in New Republic (3 March 1917): ‘[…] It is quite true that the Irish literary revival was beginning to be recognised at precisely the period of Mr. Joyce’s novel, and it is also true that his protagonist is a student in Dublin at the hour of the so-called renaissance, a writer and poet and dreamer of dreams. So perverse is life, however, there is scarcely one glimmer in this landscape of the flame which is supposed to have illuminated Dublin between 1890 and 1900. If Stephen Dedalus, the young man portrayed in this novel, had belonged to the Irish revival, it would be much easier for outsiders to “place” him. The essential fact is, he belonged to a more characteristic group which this novel alone has incarnated. One almost despairs of conveying it to the person who has conventionalised his idea of Ireland and modern Irish literature, yet there is a poignant Irish reality to be found in few existing plays and no pre-existent novel, presented here with extraordinary candour and beauty and power […] It is only when a person with the invincible honesty of James Joyce comes to write of Dubliners as they are, a person who is said to be mordant largely because he isn’t mushy, that the discrepancy between the people and the myth [that the southern Irish are a ‘bright and witty people’] is apparent.’ [Cont.]

Francis Hackett (‘Green Sickness’ in New Republic, 3 March 1917) - cont.: [Calls George Birmingham an ‘an amiable fabulist’.] ‘But there is the whole of the exquisite Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to substantiate the assertion that a proud, cold, critical, suspicious, meticulous human being is [94] infinitely more to be expected among educated Catholic Irishmen than the sort of squireen whom Lever once glorified. If this is a new type in Ireland, come into existence with the recent higher education of Catholics, one can only say that it is now by far the most important type to recognise. […] Mr. Joyce’s power is not show in any special inventiveness […] The thing he writes about is the thing he knows best […] He has sought above everything to reveal those circumstances of his life which had poignancy, and the firmest claim on him to being written was not that a thing should be amenable to his intentions as a sophisticated novelists, but that a thing should have complete personal validity. […] To have the truth one must have a man’s revelation of that which was really significant to himself. […]’. (Cont.)

Francis Hackett (‘Green Sickness’ in New Republic, 3 March 1917) - cont.: Hackett gives some thought to the effect of ‘mortal sin of masturbation that preys most terribly on this youth’ and to his subsequent transition from ‘a private specialising in mortification to the acceptance of nature and the earth.’ (Deming, p.94; as in ref., infra). ‘The last chapter […] gives one the esprit of the Catholic nationalist students in University College. It is a marvelous version of scurrilous, supercilious, callow youth. Mr. Joyce’s subject is not in sympathy with the buzzing internationalist any more than the arcane Irishman whom he compares to Ireland [sic], “a batlike soul waking to the consciousness of itself in darkness and secrecy and loneliness.” Stephen walks by himself, disdainful and bitter, in love and not in love, a poet at dawn and a sneerer at sunset, cold exile of “this stinking dunghill of a world”. / A novel in which a sensitive, critical young man is completely expressed as he is can scarcely be expected to be pleasant. […] But no one can miss […] the tenacity fidelity of James Joyce he has made a rare effort to transcend every literary convention as to his race and creed, and he has had high success. Many people will furiously resent his candour, whether about religion or nationalism or sex. But candour is a nobility in this instance.’ [End] (Rep. in Robert Deming, ed., James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, Routledge & Kegan Paul 1970 [Vol. 1], pp.94-97.) Note that Jane Heap later questions Hackett’s remark that A Portrait ‘reveals the inevitable malaise of serious youth’ (‘James Joyce’, Little Review, April 1917, pp.8-9; see also under Hackett, supra.)

Padraic Colum, ‘James Joyce’, in Pearson’s Magazine (May 1918), pp.38-42: ‘[…] Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a biography in [164] which all inessentials are suppressed and people and incidents only stand out as a background for the emergence of a soul. It is a confession in which there are things as ignominious as the things in Rousseau’s Confessions. But there is heroism in the book, and in spite of corruption and precocity there is youth in it also. Halfway in the life that is shown to us Stephen Dedalus comes to a spiritual morass. He wins through it by virtue of a power of spiritual vision backed by the discipline of the Catholic Church. Later he loses his faith in the sanctions of that Church and at the end of the story he is leaving his country. He is going to discover a mode of life or art whereby his spirit may express itself in unfettered freedom. / What really makes Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man strange to English and American people is that it gives a glimpse into a new life - into the life that has been shaped by Catholic culture and Catholic tradition. James Joyce’s book is profoundly Catholic. I do not mean that it carries any doctrine or thesis: I mean that, more than any other modern book written in English, it comes out of Catholic culture and tradition - even that culture and tradition that may turn against itself. Even in the way the book is written there is something that makes us think of the Church - a sense of secrecy, of words being said in a mysterious language, of solidity breaking into vision. Stephen Dedalus is unable to analyse his ideas or to shape his life except in terms of the philosophy that the Catholic Church has evolved or adopted. His ideal of beauty is the ideal that has been attained to in the masterpieces of Catholic art. It is the speech of the Church that fills his soul with apprehension because of his secret sins, and it is the absolution of the Church that gives him peace and the way to a new life. […] / And this city, so thwarted on the side of culture, is low in material circumstances. The misery that comes from low wages and few opportunities pervades the Portrait of the Artist as it pervades Dubliners. Stephen’s bread-and-butter life is not merely sordid, it is on the verge of being squalid. […/] Against this background of economic decay and incomplete culture and of shut-in sin Stephen Dedalus makes his spiritual assertion. He will win towards freedom and the power to create. He will strive, too, to give a soul to this people [… &c.]’ (rep. in Robert Deming, ed., James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul [Vol. 1], 1970, pp.163-66; p.165.)

Padraic Colum (‘James Joyce’, 1918) [cont.]: ‘Stories were told about his arrogance. Did not this youth say to Yeats, “We have met too late: you are too old for me to be influenced by me”? And did he not laugh in derision when a celebrated critic spoke of Balzac as a great writer? […] he gave me his poems to read - they were in a beautiful manuscript. he used to speak very arrogantly about these poems of his, but i remember his saying something that made me know how precious these beautifully wrought lyrics were to him - he talked about walking the streets of Paris, poor and tormented, and about what peace the repetition of his poems had brought him. / His poems wer perfect in their form But could one who expressed himself so perfectly at twenty really go far? Yeats had said of him, I do not know whether you are a fountain or a cistern.’, and A.E [George “Æ” Russell] had remarked, “I do not see in your beginnings the chaos out of which a world is created …”. It was then that he told me the name of the book he was writing [ see note infra] - the book that was being referred to in Dublin as “Joyce’s Meredithian novel” - it was Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It was not Meredithian at all.’ (Ibid.; rep. in Deming, op. cit., p.1970, p.166.) Note: Colum begins this section, ‘Joyce was ten years writing the book. I saw him in Dublin when he was mid-way in it and he told me there were pars that gave him physicial nausea to write. &c.’

Padraic Colum, Preface to Anna Livia Plurabelle (1928): ‘Much should be said, and some time much will have to be said, about the de-formations and re-formations of the words in James Joyce’s later work [..] There are other innovations in the langauge that are really difficult to explain. Or, rather, that would require the exposition of a theory to be properly explanatory. Let us say that words are always taking on new meanings, that they take on new meanings more quickly than we realise, and that, in the case of English, as the language becomes more and more wide-spread, the change is being accelerated […]’ (pp.vii-xix; prev. printed as ‘River Episode from James Joyce’s Uncompleted Work’, in The Dial, April 1928, pp.318-22; rep. in Our Friend James Joyce (1958, pp.139-43; extract in Robert Deming, ed., James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1970 [Vol. 2], pp.388.)

Padraic Colum, ‘From a Work in Progress’, in New Republic (17 Sept. 1930): ‘In his late thirties James Joyce recast the most used of literary mediums, the novel; he recast it with Ulysses. He is now recasting the novel more radically, and he is recasting language as the medium of wrtiters wh know that what they write should tend towards poetry.’ [542] ‘But why, it will be asked, has James Joyce found it necessary to use this arcane language? Briefly, because “Work in Progress” deals with the night life of humanity, that dream life which is the one-third of our mortal career. The language of the day cannot be the language of the night; another language has to be found to render this state. […] Joyce finds his language in words in which a number of meanings are telescoped […’; 543] The effect that James Joyce is working for can only be realised in a complete work; he cannot achieve it by introducing such passages of poetry or humour into writing that close to our norm. It is heroic of him and it is right on his part to make a complete departure and to put all his discoveries in one integral work.’ Colum goes on to counsel ‘prudence’ in the light of Joyce’s inclusion of so much information that only Dubliners could know, such as the phrase ‘tellforth’s glory’ [FW, 522.26] in Here Comes Everybody, which contains the name of Telfords, the builders of the Dublin organ-builders. (pp.131-32; rep. in Robert Deming, ed., James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1970 [Vol. 2], pp.pp.542-44.)

Padraic Colum, introduction to Exiles (London: Jonathan Cape 1952): ‘Among Joyce’s works his single play has never been given a fair show. Exiles comes after A Portrait of the Artist and before Ulysses, and critics have recorded their feeling that it has not the enchantment of the first nor the richness of the second, and they have neglected to assess what quality it actually has.’ (p.7; quoted in Miranda Hickman, ‘“Not . love verses at all, I perceive”: Joyce’s Minor Works’, in James Joyce, ed. Sean Latham, Dublin: IAP 2010, pp.83-104; p.88.)

Ezra Pound (1) - letter [Between 6 & 12] September 1915 / ‘5, Holland Place Chambers, Kensington. W. Dear Joyce: I have just read the splendid end of The Portrait of the Artist, and if I try to tell you how fine it is, I shall only break out into inane hyperbole. / I think the Chapter V. went straight to the Egoist, or came when I was away and had to be forwarded at once ... anyhow I have been reading it in the paper. / I have been doing nothing but write 15 page letters to New York about the new magazine and my head is a squeezed rag, so don’t expect le mot juste in this letter. / However I read your final instalment last night when I was calm enough to know what I was doing, and I might have written then with more lucidity. / Anyhow I think the book hard, perfect stuff. I doubt if you could have done it in “the lap of luxury” or in the whirl of a metropolis with the attrition of endless small amusements and endless calls on one’s time, and endless trivialities of enjoyment (or the reverse). / I think the book is permanent like Flaubert and Stendhal. Not so squarish as Stendhal, certainly not so varnished as Flaubert. In English I think you join on to Hardy and Henry James (I don’t mean a resemblance, I mean that there’s has been nothing of permanent value in prose in between. And I think you must soon, or at least sooner or later get your recognition. / Hang it all, we dont get prose books that a man can reread. We don’t get prose that gives us pleasure paragraph by paragraph. I know one man who occasionally buries a charming short chapter in a long ineffective novel ... but that’s another story. / It is the ten years spent on the book, the Dublin 1904, Trieste 1904, [44] that counts. No man can dictate a novel, though there are a lot who try to. / And for the other school. I am so damn sick of energetic stupidity. The “strong” work .... balls! And it is such a comfort to find an author who has read something and knows something. This deluge of work by suburban counter-jumpers on one hand and gut-less Oxford graduates or flunktuates on the other bah! And never any intensity, not in any of it. / The play [Exiles] has come, and I shall read it as soon as I can be sure of being uninterrupted.’ (Rep. in Forrest Read, Pound/Joyce, NY: New Directions 1967, pp.44-45.) [Ensuing remarks at the second date of writing are on Exiles.]

Ezra Pound (2): ‘Joyce has fled to Trieste and into the modern world […] He writes as a European, not as a provincial [32; …] Let us presume that Ireland is ignorant of Mr. Joyce’s existence and that if any copy of his work reaches that country it will be reviled and put on the index. For ourselves, we can be thankful for clear, hard surraces, for an escape from the softness and mushiness of the neo-symbolist movement, and from the fruitier school of neo-realists, and in no less a degree for the phantasists who are the most trivial and most wearying of the lot. All of which attests the existence of Mr. Joyce, but by no means the continued existence of Ireland.’ (‘The Non-Existence of Ireland’, in The New Age, XVI, 17, 25 Feb. 1915, p.452; rep. in Forrest Read, ed., Pound/Joyce, New Directions 1970, p.32-33; quoted with sundry other excerpts [in part], in Emer Nolan, James Joyce and Irish Nationalism, Routledge 1995, p.3ff.; also quoting Pound on Joyce: ‘the one man calling himself Irish who is in any sense part of the decade’ (q.p.).]

Ezra Pound (3): ‘[…] James Joyce produces the nearest thing to Flaubertian prose that we have now in English, just as Wyndham Lewis has written a novel which is more like, and more fitly compared with, Dostoievsky than is the work of any of his contemporaries. In like manner Mr. T. S. Eliot comes nearer to filling the place of Jules La Forgue in our generation. (Doing the “nearest thing” need not imply an approach to a standard, from a position inferior.’ (‘At last the Novel Appears’, in The Egoist, IV, 2, Feb. 1917, pp.21-22; rep. in Forrest Read, ed., Pound/Joyce, New Directions 1970; pp.88-91; p.89.)

Ezra Pound (4): ‘The Portrait is very different from L’Education Sentimentale, but it would be easier to compare it with that novel of Flaubert’s than with anything else. Flaubert pointed out that if France had studied his work they might have been saved a good deal in 1870. If more people had read The Portrait and certain stories in Mr. Joyce’s Dubliners there might have been less recent trouble in Ireland. A clear diagnosis is never without its value. […] The hell of contemporary Europe is caused by the lack of representative government in Germany and by the non-existence of decent prose in the German language. […] A nation that cannot write clearly cannot be trusted to govern, nor yet to think.’ (Ibid., p.90.)

Ezra Pound (5): ‘I have yet to find in Joyce’s published works a violent or malodorous phrase which does not justify itself not only by its verity, but by its heightening of some [a]pposite effect, by the poignancy which it imparts to some emotion or to some thwarted desire for beauty. Disgust with the sordid is but another expression of a sensitiveness to the finer thing. There is no perception of beauty withoout a corresponding disgust. It is the price for such artists as James Joyce is exceeding heavy, it is the artist himself who pays. / If Armageddon has taught us anything it should have taught us to abominate the half-truth, and the tellers of the half-truth, in literature.’ (‘Joyce’, in The Future, II, 6, May 1918, pp.161-63; rev. & rep. in Instigations, 1920, and later in Literary Essays, 1954; rep. in Forrest Read, ed., Pound/Joyce, New Directions 1970, pp.133ff.)

Ezra Pound (6): ‘[Joyce] has done what Flaubert set out to do in Bouvard et Pecuchet, done it better, more succinct. An epitome.’ (Idem; under heading “Ulysses”). Note that Pound earlier writes of H. G. Wells as one whose ‘style is always a bit greasy in comparison with the metallic cleanness of Joyce’s phrasing’, but adds that Wells ‘came out with a fine burst of admiration for a younger and half-known writer.’ (Ibid., p.134.)

Ezra Pound (7): ‘It is surprising that Mr. Joyce is Irish. One is so tired of the Irish or “Celtic” imagination (or “phantasy” as I think they call it) flopping about. Mr. Joyce does not flop about. He defines. He is not [28] an institution for the promotion of Irish peasant industries. He accepts an international standard of prose writing and lives up to it. / He gives Dublin as it presumably is. […] Erase the local names and a few specifically local allusions, and a few historic events of the past, and substitute a few different local names, allusions and events, and these stories could be retold in any town. […] He does not bank on “Irish character”. Roughly speaking, Irish literature has gone through three phases in our time, the shamrock period, the dove-grey period, and the Kiltartan period. I think there is a new phase in the works of Mr. Joyce. He writes as a contemporary of continental writers. […] He is not ploughing the underworld for horror. He is not presenting a macabre subjectivity. He is classic in that he deals with normal things and with normal people. A committee room, Little Chandler, a nonentity, a boarding house full of clerks - these are his subjects and he treats them all in such a manner that they are worthy subjects of art.’ (‘Dubliners and Mr. James Joyce’, in The Egoist, I, 14 (July 15, 1914), p.267; Literary Essays, pp.399-402; rep. in Forrest Read, ed., Pound/Joyce, New Directions 1970, p.27-30; pp.28-29.)

Ezra Pound (8): ‘These correspondences are part of Joyce’s mediaevalism and are chiefly his own affair, a scaffold, a means of construction, justified by the result, and justifiably by it only. The result is a triumph of form, in balance, a main schema, with continuous inweaving and arabesque.’ (“Paris Letter”, 1922, in Forrest Read, ed., Pound/Joyce, New Directions 1970, p.197; quoted in Stephen Heath, ‘Ambiviolences: Notes for reading Joyce’, in Attridge & Ferrer, eds., Post-structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French, Cambridge UP 1984, p.47.)

Ezra Pound (7) - to Joyce: ‘Bloom is a great man, and you have almightily answered the critics who asked me whether having made Stephen, more or less autobiography, you could ever go on to create a second character.’ (Letter, 22 Nov., 1918; quoted in Ellmann, James Joyce, [1965 Edn.] p.457.)

Ezra Pound (10) - to Joyce: ‘Also even the assing girouette of a postfuturo Gertrudo Steino protetopublic dont demand a new style per chapter. If a classic author “shows steady & uniform progress” and from one oeuvre to ensanguined next, may be considered ample proof of non-stagnation of cerebral Rodano - flaming Farinatas included -.’ (Letter, 10 June 1919, in Pound/Joyce, ed. Forrest Read, London: Faber & Faber 1968, p.157; quoted in Stephen Heath, ‘Ambiviolences’, in Derek Attridge & Daniel Ferrer, Poststructuralist Joyce: Essays from the French, Cambridge UP 1984, p.33.)

Ezra Pound (11) - “Paris Letter”, in The Dial [72, 6] (June 1922): ‘all men should “Unite to give praise to Joyce”; those who do not may content themselves with a place in the lower intellectual orders. I do not mean that they should all praise it from the same viewpoint; but all serious men of letters, whether they write a critique or not, will certainly have to make one for their own use.’ (Pound/Joyce, ed. Forrest Read, p.194; quoted [in part] in Margot Norris, A Companion to James Joyce’s Ulysses, Bedford Books 1988, p.28; also quoted in See Sam Slote, Catalogue Notes, Buffalo Univ. Library “Bloomsday” Centennial Exhibit, 2004 [online; 31.12.2008].) Further: ‘Joyce has taken up the art of writing where Flaubert left it …. Ulysses has more form than any novel of Flaubert’s’ (Read, idem; quoted in Norris, idem.) Also: ‘And the book is banned in America, where every child of seven has ample opportunity to drink in the detals of the [Fatty] Arbuckle case.’ (Read, p.200; Norris, idem.)

Ezra Pound (12) - in reponse to the “Shaun” typescript, sent by Joyce to Rapello: ‘I will have another look at it, but up to the present I make nothing of it whatever. Nothing so far as I make out, nothing short of divine vision or a new cure for the clapp can possibly be worth all that circumambient peripherisation / Doubtless there are patient souls who will wade through anything for the sake of the possible joke … but … having no inkling whether the purpose of the author is to amuse or to instruct … in somma …’ (Letter, 15 Nov. 1926; rep. in Forrest Read, ed., & intro., Pound/Joyce, NY: New Directions 1970, p.228; also quoted in Ellmann, James Joyce [rev. edn.] 1982, p.584.)

Ezra Pound (13): ‘I respect Mr. Joyce’s integrity as an author in that he has not taken the easy part. I never had any respect for his commonsense or for his intelligence, apart from his gifts as a writer.’ (New Review, 1931, quoted in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 1965 Edn. p.495.)

Valery Larbaud, ‘James Joyce’ [1922], in Robert Deming, ed. James Joyce: The Critical Heritage (Routledge Kegan Paul 1970), 252-62 [prev. printed in Nouvelle Revue Française, XVII (April 1922), pp.385-405; trans. & rep. in Criterion, 1, 1, Oct. 1922, pp.94-103, and as preface to Gens de Dublin [i.e., Dubliners], Paris 1926); also in Ce vice impuni, la lecture [writings]: ‘[…] In sum, he does not please them [i.e. those who want him be nationalist]. One must note, however, that in writing Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses, he did as much as did all the heroes of Irish nationalism to attract the respect of intellectuals of every other country toward Ireland. His work restored Ireland, or rather gave to young Ireland, an artistic countenance, an intellectual identity; it did for Ireland what Ibsen’s work did in his time for Norway, what Strindberg did for Sweden, what Nietzsche did for Germany at the end of the nineteenth century, and what the books of Gabriel Miró and Ramón Gomez have just done for contemporary Spain. The fact that Joyce’s work is written in English should not trouble us: English is the language of modern Ireland […] which shows how little nationalistic a literary language can be […] In short, one might say that with the work of James Joyce and in particular with this Ulysses which is soon going to appear in Paris, Ireland is making a sensational re-entrance into high European literature. […; /] I would like to speak to you now about Ulysses, but I believe that it would be better to follow a chronological order. Furthermore, Ulysses, which is by itself a difficult book, would be almost inexplicable without the knowledge of the earlier works of Joyce […]’ (p.255). ‘The world of Dubliners is already the world of Portrait of the Artist and of Ulysses. It is Dublin and the men and women of Dublin […] Never has the atmosphere been better rendered […; 255] But it is not the city which is the principal character, and the book does not have any unity: each story is a separate unit, it is a portrait, or a group, and there are some well-marked individualities which Joyce makes live. […]’ (p.256.) [See further remarks of Larbaud in Ellmann, James Joyce (1959), under Notes, infra.]

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Valery Larbaud (‘James Joyce’ [1922], in Deming, ed. James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, 1970) - on A Portrait: ‘The hero - the artist - is called Stephen Dedalus. And here we approach one of the difficulties of Joyce’s work: his symbolism, which we will encounter again in Ulysses and which will actually be the plot of that extraordinary book. / First of all, the name of Stephen Dedalus is symbolic […] But, according to the author, he also has two other names; he is the symbol of two other persons. One of these is James Joyce […] But he is also - we shall see it again in Ulysses - Telemachus […] the artist who remains apart from the mêlée of interests and desires which motivate men of action; he is the man of science and the man of dreams who remains on the defensive, all his forces absorbed by the task of knowing, of understanding, of expressing. / Thus the hero of the novel is both a symbolic character and a real one, as will be all the characters of Ulysses. […] From the Portrait of the Artist forward, Joyce is himself and nothing but himself. […] The style of the Portrait is a great advance over that of Dubliners; the interior monologue and dialogue are substituted more and more for narration. We are more frequently carried to the essence of the thought of the characters: we see these thoughts forming, we follow them, we assist at their arrival at the level of conscience and it is through what the character thinks that we learn who he is, what he does, or where he is and what happens to him.’ (p.257.)

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Valery Larbaud (‘James Joyce’ [1922], in Deming, ed. James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, 1970) - on Ulysses: ‘The reader who approaches this book without the Odyssey clearly in mind will be thrown into dismay […] for he is plunged into the middle of a conversation which will seem to himincoherent, between people whom he cannot distinguish, in a place which is neither named nor described; and form this conversation he is to learn little by little where he is and who the interlocut[o]rs are. Furthermore, here is a book which is entitled Ulysses, and no character in it bears this name; the name of Ulysses only appears four times. But gradually the reader begins to find his way […; 258] all the elements are constantly melting into each other, and the illusion of life, of the thing in the act, is complete: the whole is movement. […] It must be acknowledged that, although each of these eighteen parts differs from all of the others in form and language, the whole forms none the less an organism, a book. / As we arrive at this conclusion, all sorts of coincidences, analogies, and correspondences between different parts come to light; […; 259] We begin to discover and to anticipate symbols, a design, a plan, in what appeard to us at first a brilliant but confused mass of notations, phrases, data, profound thoughts, fantasticalities, splendid images, absurdities, comic or dramatic situations […] But where is the key? I venture to say, in the door, or rather on the cover. It is the title: Ulysses. […] Joyce extricated Ulysses from the text [i.e., the Odyssey], and still more from the mighty fortifications which criticism and learning have erected about the text,and instead of trying to return to Ulysses in time, to re-ascend the stream of history, he made Ulysses his own contemporary, his ideal companion, his spiritual father.’ [Cont.]

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Valery Larbaud (‘James Joyce’ [1922], in Deming, ed. James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, 1970) [cont.] ‘What, then in the Odyssey, is the moral figure of Ulysses? […] He is a man, the most completely human of all the heroes of the epic cycle: it is this characteristic which first endeared him to the schoolboy. [260] Then, little by little, always bringing Ulysses nearer to himself, the young poet recreated this humanity, this human, comic, and pathetic characer of his hero. […] There is no explanatory heading, or sub-heading. It is for us to decipher [the Homeric parallel], if we care to take the trouble. […] This plan, which cannot be detached from the book, because it is the very web of it, constitutes one of its most curious and fascinating features. […] one asks oneself how it can be that out of such a formidable labour of manipulation so living and moving a work could issue. / The manifest reason is that the author has never lost sight of the humanity of his characters, of their whole composition of virtues and faults, turpitude, and greatness; man, the creature of flesh, living out his day. And this is what one finds in rading Ulysses. […] In Ulysses Joyce wanted to dispaly moral, intellectual, and physical man enire, and in order to do so he was forced to find a place, in the moral sphere, for the sexual [261] instinct in its various manfiestions and peversions; and, in the psychological sphere, for the reproductive organs and their functions. He does not hesitate to handle this subject any more than the great casuists do, and he handles it in English in the same way that they have handled it in Latin, without respect for the conventions and scruples of the laity. His intention is neither lascivious nor lewd; he simply describes and represents. […] The other point is this: why is Bloom a Jew? […] All that I can say is that if Joyce has made his chosen hero, the spiritual father of this Stephen Dedalus who is his second self, a Jew - it is not because of anti-Semitism.’ (p.262; end.) Note that Larbaud’s first name is sometimes erroneously given as Valéry.

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T. S. Eliot (1) - speaking of A Portrait: ‘Mr Joyce’s mind is subtle, erudite, even massive; but it is not like Stendhal’s, an instrument continually tempering and purifying emotion; it operates within the medium[,] the superb current, of his feeling. The basis is pure feelings, and if the feelings of Mr. Yeats’s were equally powerful, it would also justify his thought.’ (Review of W. B. Yeats, The Cutting of an Agate, in Athenæum, 4 July 1919; rep. in Robert Deming, ed., James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1970 [Vol. 1], p.17 [Introduction].) Further, the ‘crudity and egoism’ characteristic of Yeats was ‘justified by exploitation to the point of greatness, in the later work of Mr. James Joyce.’ (Idem; and see further under W. B. Yeats, Commentary > T. S. Eliot, infra.)

T. S. Eliot (2) - ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’, in The Dial (Nov. 1923): ‘Among all the criticisms I have seen of the books I have seen nothing - unless we except M. Valery Larbaud’s valuable paper [Nouvelle revue] which is rather an Introduction than a criticism - which seemed to me to appreciate the significance of the method employed - the parallel to the Odyssey, and the use of appropriate styles and symbols to each division. Yet one might expect this to be the first peculiarity to attract attention; but it has been treated as an amusing dodge, or scaffolding erected by the author for the purpose of disposing his realistic tale, of no interest in the complete structure.’ (Rep. in Robert Deming, ed., James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1970, Vol. 1, pp.268-71; p.268.) Eliot then cites Richard Aldington’s account of Joyce novel as ‘a prophet of chaos’, bewailing ‘the flood of Dadaism which his [Aldington’s] prescient eye saw bursting forth at the tap of a magician’s wand’. (Ibid., p.269.) Further: ‘[…] One can be “classical” in a sense, by turning away from nine-tenths of the material which lies at hand, and selecting only mummified stuff from the museum […] Or one can be classical in tendency by doing the best one can with the material at hand. The confusion springs from the fact that the term is [269] applied to literature and to the whole complex of interests and modes of behaviour and society of which literature is a part; and it has not the same bearing in both applications. It is much easier to be classicist in literary criticism than in creative art - because in criticism you are responsible only for what you want, and in creation you are responsible only for what you can do with material which you must simply accept - not virtues to be enlarged or vices to be diminished. The question, then, about Mr Joyce, is: how much living material does he deal with, and how does he deal with it: deal with, not as a legislator or exhorter, but as an artist? / It is here that Mr Joyce’s parallel use of the Odyssey has a great importance. It has the importance of a scientific discovery. No one else has built a novel upon such a foundation before: it has never been necessary. I am not begging the question in calling Ulysses a novel; and if you call it an epic it will not matter. If it is not a “novel”, that is simply because the novel is a form which will no longer serve; it is because the novel, instead of being a form, was simply the expression of an age which had not sufficiently lost all form to feel the need of something stricter. [...] Mr. Joyce has written one novel - the Portrait; Mr Wyndham Lewis has written one novel - Tarr. I do not suppose that eithter of them will ever write another “novel”’. The novel ended with Flaubert and James. It is, I think, because Mr Joyce and Mr Lewis, being “in advance” of their time, felt a conscious or probably unconscious dissatisfaction with the form, that their novels are more formless than those of a dozen clever writers who are unaware of its obsolescence.’ (Ibid., pp.269-70.) [Cont.]

T. S. Eliot (‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’, 1923; cont.]): ‘In using the myth, manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. They will not be imitators, any more than the scientists who use the discoveries of Einstein in pursuing their own, independent, further investigations. It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. It is a method already adumbrated by Mr. Yeats and of the need for which I believe Mr. Yeats to have been the first contemporary to be conscious. It is a method for which the horoscope is auspicious. Psychology (such as it is, and whether our reaction to it be comic or serious), ethnology, and The Golden Bough have concurred to make possible what was impossible [270] even a few years ago. Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art, toward that order and form which Mr Aldington so earnestly desires. And only those who have won their own discipline in secret and without aid, in a world which offers very little assistance to that end, can be of any use in furthering this advance. [End]’ (Deming, 1970, Vol. 1, pp.270-71; quoted [in part] in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, Oxford; Clarendon Press [1957] 1965 Edn., p.541; also in Ronald Schleifer, ‘Yeats’s Postmodern Rhetoric’, in Yeats and Modernism, ed. Leonard Orr, Syracuse UP 1991, p.16.) The whole is reprinted in Richard Ellmann & Charles Feidelson, eds., The Modern Tradition (NY: OUP 1965), [cp.681]; also in Frank Kermode, ed., Selected Essays of T. S. Eliot (NY: Harcourt 1975), pp.177-78. Note: For a modern reaction to ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’, see Lidia Vianu, ‘Eliot’s Hidden Agenda: Joyce?’, in The European English Messenger, 19.1 (2010), pp.43-46 [as infra].

T. S. Eliot (3): Eliot interpreted the manner of “Oxen of the Sun” as a revelation of the ‘futility of all styles’ - as reported by Woolf [diary entry for 26 Sept. 1922], in A Writer’s Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf, London 1954, p.50; quoted in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, p.490.) Further: Eliot wrote to Joyce of Ulysses: ‘I wish for my own sake, that I had not read it’ (letter of 21 May 1921) - and asked Virginia Woolf, ‘How could anyone write against after achieving the immense prodigy of the last chapter?’ (Woolf, op. cit., p.363; quoted in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 1965 Edn., p.542). Ellmann adds that Eliot ‘thought Joyce had killed the nineteenth century, exposed the futility of all styles, and destroyed his own future [since t]here was nothing left for him to write another book about’ (Op. cit., p.542.) [Note, pag. 363 and 50 in Woolf recte as given in Ellmann.]

T. S. Eliot (4) - Preface to My Brother’s Keeper (1957): ‘In the case of James Joyce we have a series of books, two of which at least as so autobiographical in appearance that further study of the man and his background seems not only suggested by our own inquisitiveness, but almost expected by the author himself. / We want to know who are the originals of his characters, and what were the origins of his episodes, so that we may unravel the web of memory and invention and discover how far and in what ways the crude material has been transformed. / Our interest extends, therefore, inevitably and justifiably, to Joyce’s family, to his friends, to every detail of the topography and life of Dublin, the Dublin of his childhood, adolescence and young manhood.’ (Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, London: Faber & Faber 1957, pp.11-12; given as epigraph to Peter Costello, James Joyce: The Years of Growth 1882-1915, London: Kyle Cathie 1992 [no ref.]). [Cont.]

T. S. Eliot (Preface to My Brother’s Keeper [1957], NY 1958) - cont.: ‘It is difficult to believe that greater knowledge about the private life of Shakespeare could much modify our judgment or enhance our enjoyment of his plays; no theory about the origin or mode of composition of the Homeric poems could alter our appreciation of them as poetry. With a writer like Goethe, on the other hand, our interest in the man is inseparable from our interest in the work; and we are impelled to supplement and correct what he tells us in various ways about himself, with information from outside sources; the more we know about the man, the better, we think, we may come to understand his poetry and his prose.’ (pp.vii; quoted in A. Walton Litz, James Joyce, Boston: Twayne 1966, p.15; see Litz’s remarks, infra.)

Alessandro Francini-Bruni, ‘Joyce Stripped Naked in the Piazza’ (Trieste 1922): ‘At that time Joyce talked a strange species of Italian. It is better to say archaic than strange, a crippled Italian full of ulcers. It was, if you can imagine such a thing, like an only-child language, and that child the deformed daughter of a buxom wet nurse and a diseased old dwarf. At any rate, it was a dead language, which joined the babble of living languages coming out of that pit of poor devils at the school. / Joyce was not aware of the ulcerations but, on the contrary, spoke them with great naturalness. The beautiful thing was the confidence with which he uttered those heresies. He came out with certain abortions that, as God is true, could not be allowed either in heaven or on earth. In heaven God in all his mercy could not have accepted them. On earth they existed only because Joyce did and because he kept them alive. He spoke them with brazen indifference to people’s opinions. This virtue was not lacking in that spirited man. It is true that five years later the Italian language - the real language& - was much more familiar to him than to me. He was a valuable and powerful contributor to our newspapers. And even though Benco,8 with false humility, exaggerated in saying that Joyce had taught him Italian, it is certain that many of us would have been happy to write Italian as skillfully as that Irishman did. But at first, I assure you, it was another story.’ [See longer extract in RICORSO Library, Criticism > “Major Authors”, via index or direct.]

Eugene Jolas, ‘The Revolution of Language and James Joyce’, in Our Exagmination Round His Factification fir Incamination of Work in Progress: A Symposium, ed. Samuel Beckett [1929] (NY: New Directions 1972: ‘The Real metaphysical problem today is the word. The epoch when the writer photographed the life about him the mechanics of words redolent of the daguerreotype, is happily drawing to its close. The new artist of the word has recognized the autonomy of language and, aware of the twentieth century current towards universality, attempts to hammer out a verbal vision that destroys time and space.’ (p.79; quoted in Christine van Boheemen-Saaf, ‘Joyce in Theory/Theory in Joyce’, in James Joyce, ed. Sean Latham [Visions & Revisions Ser., gen. ed. Stan Smith], Dublin: IAP 2010, p.155.) [Cont.]

Eugene Jolas (‘The Revolution of Language and James Joyce’, in Our Exagmination [... &c., 1929], 1972 edn.): ‘Modern life, with its changed mythos and transmuted concepts of beauty makes it imperative that words be given new compositions and relationships. / James Joyce, in his new work published serially in transition, has given a body blow to the traditionalists. As he subversts the orthodox meaning of words, the upholders of the norm are seized with panic, and all those who regard the English language as a static thing, sacrosanct in its position, and dogmatically defended by a crumbling hierarchy of philologists and pedagogues, are afraid. Epithets such as “the book is a nightmare,” “disgusting, distorted rubbish,” “utterly bad,”, &c., have been poured on the author and his work.’ (Ibid., p.80; for Jolas’s extensive response to Sean O’Faolain’s Criteria review-critique of ALP in this article, see under O’Faolain, infra.) [Cont.]

Eugene Jolas (‘The Revolution of Language and James Joyce’, in Our Exagmination [... &c., 1929], 1972 edn.): ‘We are not interested in romantic “passé-ism,” nor in infantile parallelisms. / The most cursory glance at the evolution of English, or other languages, shows that speech is not static. It is in a constant state of becoming. Whether the organic evolution of speech is due to external. conditions the people themselves bring about, or whether it is due to the forward-straining vision of a single mind, will always remain a moot question. I imagine there is an element of both working simultaneously at this process. Renan once accused Saint-Paul of “audaciously violating, if not the genius of the Greek language, at least the logic of human language.” The reason for Saint-Paul’s heresy lies in the fact, - as pointed out by the Rev. Marcel Jousse - that he tried to follow the laws of spoken human language. There is no logical reason why the transmutation of language in our day should not be as legitimate as it was throughout the ages. While painting, for instance, has proceeded to rid itself of the descriptive, has done away with the classical perspective, has tried more and more to attain the purity of abstract idealism, and thus led us to a world of wondrous new spaces, should the art of the word remain static? Is it not true that words have undergone radical changes throughout the centuries? Should James Joyce, whose love of words and whose mastery of them has been demonstrated in huge creations, be denied the right (which the people themselves hold) to create a vocabulary which is not only a deformation, but an amalgamation of all the languages in the so-called English-speaking world? The English language, after all, has been an amalgamation from [82] the very beginning of its existence. Why should the unilingual Englishman feel worried, when in the British Isles alone, there are five languages still in common use: Manx, English, Irish, Gaelic and Welsh! With what right can the “unilingual” Englishman demand that the well of the English language remain undefiled ? It is a very muddy well, at best.’ (pp.82-83.) [For longer extracts, see RICORSO Library, “Major Authors > James Joyce”, infra.)

Eugene Jolas, The Man from Babel [1998]: ‘[Joyce] seemed to be constantly on the look-out, listening rather than talking. ‘Really, it is not I who am writing this crazy book’, he said in a whimsical way. ‘It is you and you and that girl over there and that man in the corner.’ One day I found him in a Zurich tea-shop laughing quietly to himself “Have you won the gros lot?” I asked. He explained that he had asked the waitress for a glass of lemon squash. The somewhat obtuse Swiss girl looked puzzled. Then she had an inspiration: “Oh, you mean Lebensquatsch?” she stammered. (Her German neologism might be translated as “life’s piffle”.)’ (The Man from Babel, ed. Andreas Kramer & Rainer Rumbold, Yale UP 1998, p.166; quoted by Tim Conley, ‘Finnegans Wake: Some Assembly Required’, in James Joyce, ed. Sean Latham, Dublin: IAP 2010, p.141.) Note: Conley remarks: ‘Sure enough, the waitress’s lovely invention appears in the Wake: “I’ll go for that small polly if you’ll such up to your lebbensquatch”’ - adding ‘It’s worth noting that the judgement “obtuse” is Jolas’s and not necessarily Joyce’s.’

Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Study [1930] (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1963): ‘At a first reading of Ulysses the average reader is impressed most of all by the striking psychological realism of the narrative […] But the realism of Ulysses strikes far deeper than the mere exercise of verbal frankness; apart from the author’s extreme, almost scientific, precision in his handling of words, there are two factors which place Joyce’s work in a class apart from all its predecessors, even the most meticulously realistic: firstly, the creator’s standpoint to his theme, the unusual angle from which he views his creatures, and, secondly, his use of the ‘silent monologue’ as the exponent not only of their inner and hardly conscious psychological reactions but also of the narrative self.’ (p.19.)

Stuart Gilbert (James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Study, 1930 Edn.) - cont.: ‘There is, in Ulysses, a background of political preoccupations, which is frequently visible behind the texture of the narrative or soliloquies. The betrayal of Parnell is, in fact, one of the themes of the work and there are many allusions to such national leaders as O’Connell, Emmet, Wolfe Tone. But the author of Ulysses, in this as in other matters, shows no bias; he introduces political themes because they are inherent in the Dublin scene, and also because they illustrate one of the motifs of Ulysses, the betrayal or defeat of the man of mettle by the treachery of the hydra-headed rabble. As far as his own outlook on these matters can be appraised, it is that of weariness and disgust. “Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.” “No honourable and sincere man has given up to you his life and his youth and his affections from the days of Tone to those of Parnell but you sold him to the enemy or failed him in need or reviled him and left him for another.” / It would, however, be unsafe to draw from the embittered aphorisms of young Stephen Dedalus any absolute inference regarding his creator’s subsequent attitude to politics. The title of the work whence these quotations are made is A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; in Ulysses, young Dedalus is but a year older and has not yet outgrown his rancour and disillusionment. In 1904 he is only twenty-two years of age; Ulysses was written in Trieste-Zurich-Paris between the years 1914 and 1921, when its author was remote both in time and place from the experiences of his adolescence and could exercise the detachment which remoteness gives. This ironical indifference is well illustrated by the Cyclops episode where, by a technique of exaggeration, chauvinism of all kinds is distended to bursting-point and beyond, till, exploding, it betrays the void within. Moreover, by way of counterpoise to the fanaticism of most of the Dubliners and the bitterness of young Stephen, who cannot forgive his church or country for his loss of faith in them, we have the placid commentary of sensible Mr Bloom, whose considered opinion seems to be that one government is, in general, as good or bad as another.’ (p.30.)

Stuart Gilbert (James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Study, 1930 Edn.) - cont: ‘It is, of course, no defence of obscenity to say that nature is obscene […] But obscenity has its place in the scheme of things and a picture of life in which this element was ignored or suppresed would be incomplete, like the home without Plumtree’s Potted Meat. / “What is home without / Plumtree’s Potted Meat? / Incomplete.” [U72] / In practice we find that nearly all great works, from the Bible onwards, which treat of the universe as a whole and discover a coherence in all God’s works, include some obscenity in their presentatioin of the phenomena of life. / It cannot be too strongly emphasized that the object of the author of Ulysses was to present an aesthetic image of the world, a sublimation of that cri de coeur in which the act of creation begins. [32; quotes “The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence … refined out of existence, indifferent, paring its fingernails”: AP252] / Aesthetic emotion is static. [Quotes “The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing … The feeling excited by improper art are kinetic, desire and loathing. Desire urges us to abandon, to go from something. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts.”] Such a conception of the function of artist presided over the creation of Ulysses. The instant when the supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the aesthetic image, “is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous stasis of aesthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley’s, called the enchantment of the heart.’ [A Portrait.] / The artist’s aim, then, is to ban kinetic feelings from his reader’s minds, and in Ulysses we find the ideal “silent stasis of the artist” nearly realized, his personality almost impersonalized. Nearly - but not entirely. The feeling of desire, which urges us to possess, is absent; there is not the least pornographical appeal; but the loathing, which urges us to abandon - that aversion from the sordid which made of Stephen Dedalus an exile in his own country - is, one cannot but feel, latent in certain passages. One of the influences which may be discerned in Ulysses is that of Swift, “the great hater of mankind”, to whom there are many allusions. In those pasages where certain physical processes or sensual appetites are minutely described a rapprochement with the Swiftian attitude may probably me made, that point of disgust which has been admirably depicted by a French biographer of the Dean of St. Patrick’s.’ [Quotes Émil Pons; see Swift, supra] (p.33.)

Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Study [1930]: ‘A Neapolitan critic has said of Ulysses that its true protagonist is neither Mr Bloom nor Stephen but the language’ (Ibid. p.76.) [On “Oxen of the Sun”:] ‘The technique and the subject of this episode are both “embryonic development” and the styles of prose employed follow an exact historical order.’ (1963 Edn., p.140; quoted in Laurie Magowan, UG Dissertation, UUC 2006.) On “Penelope”: ‘[Molly is] not a degenerate modern playing at a “return to nature”, phallus-worship, the simple life and what not: she is the voice of Nature herself, and judges as the Great Mother, whose function is fertility […] whose pleasure is creation […]’ (Vintage Edn., 1955; p.400; quoted in Daryl Clarke, UG Diss., UU 2006). [On the technique of “Circe”:] ‘All these hallucinations, however, are amplifications of some real circumstances, they have a logic of their own and are not mere empty visions descending from a cuckoocloudland of befuddlement and exhaustion.’ (Ibid., p.319.)

Stuart Gilbert, in Reflections on James Joyce: Stuart Gilbert’s Paris Journal, ed. Thomas Staley & Randolph Lewis (Texas UP 1993): Gilbert calls the punning method of Finnegans Wake - which he witnessed in action - ‘easy to do and hard to understand’ (p.21; quoted in Eric Bulson, Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, Cambridge UP 2006, [q.p.]).

The Times - Obituary of James Joyce (14 Jan. 1941): ‘James Augustine Joyce was born in Dublin on February 1882, one of a large and poor family. He went to the National University of Ireland and graduated in 1902. Joyce had strong literary tendencies in adolescence. For Ibsen he had such a passion that he learnt Norwegian so as to read the original. In his student days he was so self-opinionated and vain that he said to W. B. Yeats: ‘We have met too late; you are too old to be influenced by me’, to which the poet made answer: ‘Never have I seen so much pretension with so little to show for it.’ There was, indeed, not much to show for 12 or 14 years. Joyce was in Paris during 1903-04, engaged first in medical studies and later in having his voice trained for the concert platform, and in 1904 he returned to Dublin He published a few stories, but could not make a living, so he and his wife went off to Trieste, where he taught English. He had a great talent in that he was able to contribute for languages and learnt Italian so well articles on Irish politics to the Piccolo della Sera. In 1912 he went back to Dublin to start the Volta cinema theatre, but on its failure he resumed his teaching in Trieste. Thus far his only book had been one of lyrics called Chamber Music. In 1914 appeared Dubliners, delayed nine years by haggling with publishers owing to their demand that he should make certain excisions.’ (See ensuing sentences: ‘Joyce’s next task ... &c.’, as infra.) [Cont.]

The Times - Obituary (1941) - cont.: ‘Joyce’s book Ulysses purports to relate the whole mental and physical life of Leopold Bloom, Jewish advertisement canvasser, and Stephen Dedalus, during one single day in Dublin. Its settled principle is to omit nothing, however trifling or scabrous and it makes extensive use what has been called the ‘interior monologue’, a literary device which Joyce claimed to have discovered in Edouard Dujardin’s forgotten novel, Les Lauriers sont coupés (1888): Proust, of course, used it, as did Miss Dorothy Richardson and others in this country, and it has had a far-reaching influence on the technique of many modern writers. Ulysses has many repellent or boring passages. It is steeped and soaked in the rough life of Dublin city. It is, however, intensely alive, fundamentally Irish, full of Rabelaisian ‘humour’, with a highly developed sense of time and a fantastic imaginative faculty.’ Further: ‘Joyce’s next task was a large work, which he entitled “Work in Progress”, which began to appear in 1927, in sections under various titles. In it the word-coinages that were a feature of Ulysses were multiplied to the point of unintelligibility.’ [see full-text version in RICORSO Library, “Criticism / Major Authors” - James Joyce, via index or direct.)