James Joyce: Commentary (3)

G. B. Shaw: ‘In 1876 I had had enough of Dublin. James Joyce in his Ulysses has described, with a fidelity so ruthless that the book is hardly bearable, the life that Dublin offers her young men, or if you prefer it the other way, the life its young men offer to Dublin […] a certain futile derision and belittlement that confuses the noble and serious with the base and ludicrous seems peculiar to Dublin.’ (Preface to Immaturity, 1931; cited [in part] in Peter Costello, The Heart Grown Brutal, 1977, where it is called ‘a peculiarly wrongheaded judgement’, p.55.) Note: the same was previously in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (1965 Edn.), p.522, ftn.; with additional references in the text noting that Shaw refused to subscribe to the Egoist edition on the grounds that he found the novel a repulsive but accurate picture of Dublin and would like to force every male Irishman to read it, to see if any of them could bear looking at himself in this mirror, typifying the city as being full of ‘slackjawed blackguardism’.

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G. B. Shaw to Archibald Henderson, of Ulysses in The Little Review: ‘I was attracted to it by the fact that I was once a young man in Dublin, and also by Joyce’s literary power, which is of classic quality. I do not see why there should be any limit to the frankness of sex revelation; but Joyce does not raise that question. The question he does rais is whether there should be any limit to the use in literature of blackguardedly language […/] I could not write the words Mr Joyce uses: my prudish hand would refuse to form the letters; and I can find no intereset in his infantile clinical incontinences, or in the flatulations which he thinks worth mentioning […] Ulysses is a document, the outcome of a passion for documentation that is as fundamental as the artistic passion - more so, in fact; for the document is the root and stem of which the artistic fancyworks are the flowers. Joyce is driven by his documentary demon to place on record the working of a young man’s imagination for a single day in the environment of Dublin. The question is, the document authentic? […] I […] reply that I am afraid it is […/] The Dublin “Jackeens” of my day, the medical students, the young bloods about town, were very like that. Their conversation was dirt; and it defiled their sexuality, which might just as surely have been represented to them as poetic and vital. I should like to organise the young men of Dublin into clubs for the purposes of reading Ulysses; to that they should debate the question “Are We Like That?” […] You cannot carry out moral sanitation any more than physical sanitation without indecent exposures. […. &c.]’ (Quoted in Ellmann, op. cit., p.588, ftn.). Ellmann also cites a testimonial on Joyce from Shaw in response to a misreporting of his supposed burning of his copy of Ulysses made by Geoffrey Grigson in Picture Post in 1939 (idem.). See further on Ulysses under G. B. Shaw, infra.]

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W. B. Yeats (I): ‘“[…] Then, putting down his book, he began to explain all his objections to everything I had ever done./ Why had I concerned myself with politics, with folklore, with the historical setting of events and so on? Above all why had I written about ideas, why had I descended to making generalisation? These things fwere all the signs of the cooling iron […] I had been puzzled, but now I was confident again. He is from the Royal University, I thought, and he thinks that everything has been settled by Thomas Aquinas, so we need not trouble about it. I have met so many like him. […] But the next moment he spoke of a friend of mine [Oscar Wilde] who after a wild life had turned Catholic on his deathbed. he said that he hoped his conversion was not sincere. He did not like to thing that he had been untrue to himself at the end. No, I had not understood him.’ [Yeats here recounts his speech to Joyce about the merits of folk imagination.] ‘In the country, on the other hand, I mean in Ireland and in places where the towns have not been able to call the tune, you find people who are hardly individualised to any great extent […] Everything seems possible to them, and because they can never be surprised, they imagine the most surprising things. The folk life, the country life, is nature with her abundance, but the art life, the town life, is the spirit which is sterile if it is not married to nature. The whole ugliness of the modern world has come from the spread of the towns and their ways of thought, and to bring back beauty we must marry the spirit and nature again. When the idea which comes from individual life marries the image that is born of the people, one gets great art, the art of Homer, and of Shakespeare, and of Chartres Cathedral.” / I looked at my young man. I thought, “I have conquered him now,” but I was quite wrong. He merely said, “Generalizations aren’t made by poets; they are made by men of letters. They are no use.” / Presently he got up to go, and, as he was going out, he said, “I am twenty. How old are you?” I told him, but I am afraid I said I was a year younger than I am. He said with a sigh, “I thought as much. I have met you too late. You are too old.”’ (Quoted fully in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, OUP 1959, 1965, pp.107-08 and in part in [in part] Frank Tuohy, Yeats: An Illustrated Biography, Macmillan 1976, p.117.)

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W. B. Yeats (II): Note that Ellmann discusses fully the authenticity or otherwise of the received version - ‘You are too old for me to help you’ [actually circulated by Padraic Colum], supplying a) an account of Joyce’s response to it in conversation with Herbert Gorman in looking over the proofs of the biography [‘though he did say the words something to the effect attributed to him they were never said in the tone of contempt which is implied in the story’ - Gorman papers; Ellmann, ftn., p.105-06); b) a transcription of George Russell’s telling of the story in “Some Characters of the Irish Literary Movement” [typescript], ending ‘We have met too late. You are too old for me to have any effect on you.’ (Ellmann, idem.; see under Russell, infra); c) remarks from Yeats’s Autobiographies which speak of Joyce anonymously (‘a young poet, who wrote excellently but had the worst manners …’); d) remarks by L. A. G. Strong reflecting similar remarks by Yeats to him; and d) the sense of an interview with Stanislaus Joyce containing Joyce’s own account as retaled to him, which appears to provide the mainstay of Ellmann’s own narration. Ellmann notes that Yeats wrote an account of the interview - which he quotes fully and Tuohy has excerpted - at first intending to use it as a preface to Ideas of Good and Evil (here pp.106-08; citing Ellmann, Identity of Yeats, 1954, pp.86-89. (See further, under Commentary, Richard Ellmann, infra; and see also the account of the Yeats-Joyce meeting in R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats - A Life, Vol. I: “The Apprentice Mage”, OUP 1997, pp.275-78 - which sets the date in Nov. 1902 as distinct from Ellmann’s date (Oct. 1902) - given in Ricorso Library, “Criticism / Major Authors” - W. B. Yeats, infra.]

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W. B. Yeats (III) [Letter to Joyce]: ‘Remember what Dr Johnson said about somebody ‘let us wait until we find out whether he is a fountain or a cistern.’ The work which you have actually done is very remarkable for a man of your age who has lived away from the vital intellectual centres. Your technique in verse is very much better than the technique of anyyoung Dublin man I have met during my time. It might have been the work of a young man who had lived in an Oxford literary set. However men have started with as good promise as yours and have failed & men have started with less and have succeeded. The qualities that make a man succeed do not shew in his work, often for quite a long time They are much less qualities of talent than qualities of character - faith (of this you have probably enough), patience, adaptability, (without this one learns nothing), and a gift for growing by experience & this is perhaps rarest of all. / I will do anything for you I can but I am afraid that it will not be a great deal. The chief use I can be, though probably you will not believe this, will be by introducing you to some other writers who are starting like yourself, one always learns one’s business from one’s fellow-workers, especially from those who are near enough one’s own age to understand one’s own difficulties. (Collected Letters, Vol. III, pp.249-50; quoted in R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life, Vol. I: “The Apprentice Mage”, p.277.)

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W. B. Yeats (IV) - writing to Edmund Gosse regarding an application for Joyce’s inclusion in the Civil List): ‘It never occurred to me that it was necessary to express sympathy “frank” or otherwise with the “cause of the allies”. I should have thought myself wasting the time of the committee. I certainly wish them victory, & as I have never known Joyce to agree with his neighbours I feel that his residence in Austria has probably made his sympathy as frank as you could wish’. (James Longenbach, Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats and Modernism,OUP 1988, pp.182-83; cited in Roy Foster, ‘Hearts with one Purpose Alone: Yeats’s Poetic Strategy & Political Reconstruction, 1916-1918’, in Bruce Stewart, ed., Hearts and Minds: Culture and Society in Ireland Under the Act of Union, Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 2001, p.311.) Further, ‘We need not consider Mr. Padraic Colum’s Castle Conquer, nor Mr. James Joyce’s Ulysses, nor Mr. George Moore’s Conversations in Ebury Street, as, like Mr. Bernard Shaw, they have not been resident in Ireland. We feel, however, that it is our duty to say that Mr. James Joyce’s book, though as obscene as Rabelais, and therefore forbidden by law in England and the United States, is more indubitably a work of genius than any prose written by an Irishman since the death of Synge.’ (Quoted in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 1965 Edn., p.578, ftn.)

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W. B. Yeats (V) at first called Ulysses ‘A mad book!’, but later corrected himself in conversation with L. A. G. Strong: ‘I have made a terrible mistake. It is a work perhaps of genius. I now perceive its coherence.’ (Quoted in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 1965 Edn., p.545 [from interview]). He soon wrote: ‘It is an entirely new thing - neither what the eye sees nor the ear hears, but what the rambling mind thinks and imagines from moment to moment. He has certainly surpassed in intensity any novelist of our time.’ (Letter to John Quinn, 23 July 1918; Ellmann, idem.) When he had read the published book in hand, he wrote to Olivia Shakespear: ‘It has our Irish cruelty and also our kind of strength and the Martello Tower pages are full of beauty. A cruel playful mind like a great soft tiger cat.’ (8 March, 1922; quoted in Ellmann, idem.); finally, he confessed to Shakespear in June that he had given up reading it. (Ellmann, idem.).

W. B. Yeats (VI): ‘James Joyce differs from Arnold Bennett and Galsworthy, let us say, because he can isolate the human mind and its vices as if in eternity. So could Synge, so could O’Casey till he caught the London contagion in The Silver Tassie and changed his mountain into a mouse.’ (Pages from a Diary written in Nineteen Hundred and Thirty, 1944 [q.pp.]; rep. in Richard Finneran, ed., The Yeats Reader, NY: Scribner 1992, p.342.)

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W. B. Yeats (VII) - A Vision, 1925 [1926]: ‘There is hatred of the abstract […] The intellect turns upon itself […; they either eliminate from metaphor the poet’s phantasy and substitute a strangeness discovered by historical or contemporary research or […] break up the logical processes of thought by flooding them with associated ideas or words that seem to drift into the mind by chance; or […] set side by side as in Henry IV, The Waste Land, Ulysses […] a lunatic among his keepers, a man fishing behind the gas works, the vulgarity of a single Dublin day prolonged through 700 pages and […] delirium, the Fisher King, Ulysses’ wandering. It is as though myth and fact, united until the exhaustion of the Renaissance, have now fallen so far apart that man understand for the first time the rigidity of fact, and calls up, by that very recognition, myth.’ ([A Vision, 1925, pp.211-12]; quoted in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce [ 1959] 1965 Edn., p.608, ftn. [no ref.]; also in R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats - A Life, Vol. II: “The Arch-Poet”, OUP 2003, p.289 [as given in W. B. Yeats, Quotations, infra.]) Note: Foster adds in a note that James Joyce may lie behind a subsequent reflection: ‘the modern novel is created, but even before the gyre is drawn to its end, the happy ending, the admired hero, the preoccupation with desirable things, all that is undisguisedly Antithetical disappears.’ (Foster, op. cit., idem.)

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W. B. Yeats (VIII) - acc. Richard Ellmann, in James Joyce, 1959, &c.), 608, n.: ‘Joyce takes the occasion to refer to another attack upon him [Joyce], a more refined one, by Yeats in the first edition of A Vision, which (though dated 1925) appeared at the beginning of 1926. Yeats treated Joyce, along with Eliot, Pound, and Pirandello, as examples of the disintegration of the unified consciousness of earlier artists. In them, he said, “There is hatred of the abstract. […] The intellect turns upon itself.” He had in mind Joyce’s hatred of generalizations, as expressed to him in 1902. Then, he went on, they “either eliminate from metaphor the poet’s phantasy and substitute a strangeness discovered by historical or contemporary research or … break up the logical processes of thought by flooding them with associated ideas or words that seem to drift into the mind by chance; or … set side by side as in Henry IV, The Waste Land, Ulysses … a lunatic among his keepers, a man fishing behind the gas works, the vulgarity of a single Dublin day prolonged through 700 pages - and … delirium, the Fisher King, Ulysses’ wandering. It is as though myth and fact, united until the exhaustion of the Renaissance, have now fallen so far apart that man understands for the first time the rigidity of fact, and calls up, by that very recognition, Myth.”’ (A Vision, 1925, pp.211-12; quoted more fully in R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: The Apprentice Mage, OUP 1997; see also further under Yeats, Quotations, supra.) Ellmann continues: ‘It is curious that Joyce’s comment on A Vision, as recorded by Eugene Jolas, bears out part of Yeats’s picture of him and recalls their old argument. Jolas says, “He was deeply absorbed by the colossal conception”, only regretting that “Yeats did not put all this into a creative work.” To Joyce, Yeats was still a man of letters, theorising when he should have been creating. To Yeats, Joyce was too concerned with the commonplace, and unable to effect an adequate union between new material and a heroic, mythical background. / As John V. Kelleher points out, the diagram Shaun uses in Finnegans Wake (p.293) is one of the many places where Joyce is parodying Yeats’s A Vision. (ellmann, op. cit, p.608n.) [Note that the reference to Joyce, et al., as supra, do not appear in the account of Phase 23 in the revised edition, Vision B, 1937.)

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W. B. Yeats (IX), Introduction to The King of the Great Clock Tower (1934): ‘[…] Dublin had once been a well-mannered, smooth-spoken city. I know an old woman who had met Davis constantly and never knew he was in politics until she read his obituary in the newspaper. Then came agrarian passion; Unionists and nationalists ceased to meet, but each lived behind his party wall an amiable life. This new dispute [Parnell’s removal form leadership of the Irish Parliamentary Party] broke through all walls. There were old men and women I avoid because they have kept the day’s bitter tongue. Upon the other hand, we began to value truth. According to my memor and the memory of others, free discussion appeared among us for the first time, beinging the passion for reality, the satiric genius that informs Ulysses, The Playboy of the Western World, The Informer, The Puritan and other books, and plays; the accumulated hatred of years was suddenly transferred from England to Ireland. James Joyce has no doubt described something remembered from his youth in that dinner table scene in The [sic] Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, when after a violent quarrel about Parnell and the priests, the host sobs, his head upon the table; “My dead king”. [334] / We had passed through an initiation like that of the Tibetan ascetic, who staggers half dead from a trance, where he has seen himself eaten alive and has not yet learned that the eater was himself.’ (Intro., The King of the Great Clock Tower, 1934, q.p.; quoted in A. N. Jeffares, A New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats, London: Macmillan 1984, pp.334-35.)

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W. B. Yeats (X) - Intro. to J. M. Hone & M. M. Rossi, Bishop Berkeley: Life and Writings, 1931): ‘The romantic movement with its turbulent heroism, its self-assertion, is over, superseded by a new naturalism that leaves man helpless before the contents of his own mind. One thinks of Joyce’s Anna Livia Plurabelle, Pound’s Cantos, works of an heroic sincerity, the man, his active faculties in suspense, one finger beating time to a bell sounding and echoing in the depths of his own mind; of Proust who, still fascinated by Stendhal’s fixed framework, seems about to close his eyes and gaze upon the pattern under his lids. This new art which has arisen in different countries simultaneously seems related, as were the three telegrams to the three bodies, to that form of the new realist philosophy which thinks that the secondary and primary [405] qualities alike are independent of consciousness; that an object can at the same moment have contradictory qualities. This philsophy seems about to follow the analogy of an art that has more rapidly completed itself, and after deciding that a penny is bright and dark, oblong and round, hot and cold, dumb and ringing in its own right, to think of the calculationss it incites, our distaste or pleasure at its sight, the decision that made us pitch it, our preference to head or tail, as independent of a consciousness that has shrunk back, grown intermittent and accidental, into the looking-glass. Some Indian Buddhists would have thought so had they pitched pennies instead of dice. / If you ask me why I do not accept a doctrine so respectable and convenient, its cruder forms so obviously resurrected to get science down from Berkeley’s roasting-spit [406] I can but answer like Zarathustra, “Am I a barrel of memories that I should give you my reasons?” Somewhere among those memories something compels me to reject whatever - to borrow a metaphor of Coleridge’s - drives mind into the quicksilver. And why should I, whose ancestors never accepted the anarchic subjectivity of the nineteenth century, accept its recoil; why should men’s heads ache that never drank? I admit there are, especially in America, such signs of prophetic afflatus about this new movement in philosophy, so much consonant with the political and social movements of the time, or so readily transformable into a desire to fall back or sink in on some thing or being, that it may be the morning cock-crow of our Hellenistic Age.’ (pp.405-07.) [Cont.]

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W. B. Yeats (XI) - Intro. to Hone & Rossi, Bishop Berkeley (1931) - cont: ‘[Footnote:] This definition is taken from M. W. Catkin’s ‘Introduction’ to her selection from Berkeley. Moore in his Refutation of Idealism, the manifesto of modern realism, merely affirmed the objectivity of the sense-data, the raw material from which mind fabricates the objects of sense. Of recent years he has, however, suggested that judgment may be a form of perception, and McTaggart has incorporated the suggestion in his idealistic system. Future philosophy will have to consider visions and experiences such as those recorded in [J. W. Dunne’s] An Experiment with Time [vide p.402, supra], and in Osty’s Supernormal Faculties. Events may be present to certain faculties, distant in time to others. Certain investigators are convinced that they obtained through the mediumship of Mrs. Crandon the fingerprints of a man dead some twenty years; and the terms idealist and realist may be about to lose their meaning. If photographs that I saw handed round in Paris thirty years ago can be repeated and mental images photographed, the distinction that Berkeley drew between what man created and what God creates will have broken down.’ (“Bishop Berkeley” in Essays & Introductions, London: Macmillan 1961 [pp.396-411], pp.405-07.)

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W. B. Yeats (XII) - the Ballylee Tower: In Becoming George: The Life of Mrs W. B. Yeats (Oxford: OUP 2002), Ann Saddlemyer writes, ‘Encouraged by George, he [Yeats] was beginning to see the tower not as an adjunct but a complement to the work done in Coole by Lady Gregory: “I am making a setting for my old age, a place to influence lawless youth, with its severity & antiquity. If I had had this tower of mine when Joyce began to write I dare say I might have been of use to him, have got him to meet those who might have helped him.’ (WBY to John Quinn, 23 July 1918, NYPL; Saddlemyer, op. cit, p.171.) Saddlemyer also quotes Yeats to Olivia Shakespear: ‘George brings back much news of Dorothy and little of Ezra and under her incitement I have asked Joyce to come and stay [at 82 Merrion Sq.] for a few days. If he comes I shall have to use the utmost ingenuity to hide the fact that I have never finished Ulysses.’ (28 June 1923 [ftn. err. for 1924?]; Wade, Letters, London: 1954, p.698-99; Saddlemyer, op. cit., p.318.) And further: Yeats wrote to Pound on 17 June 1924, with an invitation to the Taillteann Games, indicating inter al. that he would ‘hear Joyce sufficiently commended, I hope, though certainly not crowned, for he is excluded by the terms of reference’ [not living in Ireland]. Saddlemyer adds, ‘Although the invitations were officially backed, neither Joyce nor Pound came.’ (Ibid., p.319.)

W. B. Yeats (XIII): Richard Ellmann quotes Yeats on Joyce in 1923 in a footnote of James Joyce [1959]: ‘James Joyce, the son of a small Parnellite organiser, had begun to write [in 1902] though not yet to publish; he was an exile, at first in Zurich, then in Paris, in flight from the objects of his hatred, bearing in mind always in minute detail, even to the names over shops, the Dublin that he hated but would never forget.’ (JJ, 1965, p.706, n.; no reference given.)

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George Yeats [Mrs. W. B. Yeats] to Lady Ottoline Morrell: ‘[…] I think Joyce lingers too much over all the indignities of the flesh; if he were a french [sic] writer he would linger with gaiety as in satire, but being an Irish Catholic he lingers with mingled fascination and disgust. The Irish Catholic is the very devil & Joyce having exploded out of it like a rocket cant forget the delighted surprise of freedom. Willie continues in admiration. I think a great deal is very fine but I want a large hot bath after each reading & that’s a bore.’ ([11 Mar. 1922]; Harry Ransom Hum. Research Centre, Texas; Saddlemyer, op. cit., p.294.) Saddlemyer notes that GY continued reading Ulysses smuggled a copy back to Ireland. Also quotes Mrs Yeats wrote to Allan Wade: ‘[…] About the Joyce letters. Would it be any use my offering the Joyce letters I have to Yale if they will send copies of WBY to Joyce? If you think it would, let me know.’ (Ibid., p.634.)

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Lily Yeats [on Dubliners]: ‘[A] never-to-be-forgotten book, a haunting book. At first I thought, how grey, how sordid, can such lives be lived even in the grey old houses about the north side of Dublin, built long ago for people who had leisure and money and talk, and now lived in by drab people. I saw the elderly women coming out and slipping into the city chapels for mouthfuls of prayer, seedy men coming out and slipping into greasy public houses for mouthfuls of porter. But of their lives I knew nothing, what went on behind the dirty windows, windows like those behind which James Stephens’s charwomen lived, which were so dirty anyone wishing to look out had to open them. Since I read Dubliners I feel I know something of their lives.’ (Letter to John Quinn, 1 June 1917).

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Lady Gregory (1) [Diary, 15 Nov. - having dined Joyce with W. B. Yeats & John B. Yeats on 4 Nov. 1902]: ‘I have seen Joyce who came up to see me last night. His mind is quite made up for Paris. I think from any ordinary standpoint his action is wild, but with boys like Joyce there is always the overshadowing powers to consider. i think he has genius of a kind and I like his pride and waywardness…. The more I know him the better I like him, and though I wish he could remain in Ireland still I would like to see him prosper somewhere. I am sure he will make a name somewhere.’ ( Seventy Years, Being the Autobiography of Lady Gregory , ed. Colin Smythe, Gerrards Cross, Colin Smythe, 1974, pp.425-26; quoted in Ann Saddlemyer, ‘James Joyce and the Irish Dramatic Movement’, in James Joyce: A Joyce International Perspective, ed. Suheil Bushrui & Benstock, Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1982, p.196.)

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Lady Gregory (2) [letter to W. B. Yeats, then in London]: ‘I wonder if Joyce has written to you? Poor boy, I am afraid he will knock his ribs against the earth, but he has grit and will succeed in the end. You should write and ask him to breakfast with you on the morning he arrives, if you can get up early enough, and feed him and take care of him and give him dinner at Victoria before he goes, and help him on his way. I am writing to various people who might possibly get him tuitions, and to Synge who could at least tell him of cheap lodgings.’ (Quoted in Elizabeth Coxhead, Lady Gregory, London, Secker & Warburg 1966, p.124; cited in Ann Saddlemyer, op. cit., 1982, p.209 [n. 27].)

Lady Gregory (3) [correspondence with J. M. Synge, then in Paris]: ‘Poor Joyce! The funny thing is that Longworth of the Express whom I had asked for work for Joyce has sent him my Poets & Dreamers to review, as a kindness to us both! I wonder what the review will be like!’ (Letter of 29 March; in Theatre Business, ed. Ann Saddlemyer, Gerrards Cross, Colin Smythe, 1982, p.38; quoted in Saddlemyer, op. cit. 1982, p.209 [n.31].)

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J. M. Synge [letter to Lady Gregory]: ‘He seems to be pretty badly off, and is wandering about Paris rather unbrushed and rather indolent, spending his studious moments in the National Library reading Ben Jonson. French literature I understand is beneath him! Still he interested me a good deal and as he is being gradually won over by the charm of French life his time in Paris is not wasted. He talks of coming back to Dublin in the summer to live there on journalism while he does his serious work at his leisure. I cannot think that he will ever be a poet of importance, but his intellect is extraordinarily keen and if he keeps fairly sane he ought to do excellent essay-writing.’ (Theatre Business, ed. Ann Saddlemyer, Gerrards Cross, Colin Smythe, 1982, p.36; quoted in Saddlemyer, op. cit. 1982, p.209 [n.33].) See also Saddlemyer’s account of Joyce’s reaction to the Dublin Playboy Riots of 1907: ‘Synge was the most difficult of the mummers to exorcise, despite his early death. From his remote perch on the continent, Joyce had anxiously observed the notoriety accompanying The Playboy of the Western World on its first production in January 1907. ‘This whole affair has upset me,’ he wrote to Stanislaus. ‘I feel like a man in a house who hears a row in the street and voices he knows shouting but can’t get up to see what the hell is going on. It has put me off the story I was going to write - to wit, “The Dead”. Could it be that “him who sober all the day / Mixes a naggin in his play” [?“Gas from a Burner”] had in truth turned to stronger stuff, unnoticed and unpresaged? Synge had publicly defied the trolls, asserting his right as an artist to write about anything he chose. Perhaps, too, it needled that Yeats’s critical judgment may have been more accurate than Joyce’s own, in which case rejection of his own translations rankled further.’ (Saddlemyer, op. cit., 1982, p.201.)

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George [“Æ”] Russell (1): “Some Characters of the Irish Literary Movement” [Russell’s tyescript with an account from memory of the meeting of Joyce and Yeats:] ‘[…] When Yeats returned to Dublin the famous poet and the unknown youth met. Yeats asked Joyce to read him some of his poems. “I do so since you ask me,” said Joyce, “but I attach no more importance to your opinion than to anybody one meets in the street.” Yeats made him some compliments on the verses, which were charming. But Joyce waived [sic] aside the praise. “It is likely both you and I will soon be forgotten.” He then questioned Yeats about some of his later poetry. Yeats began an elaborate and subtle explanation the essence of which was that in youth he thought everything should be perfectly beautiful but now he thought one might do many things by way of experiment. “Ah”, said the boy, “that shows how rapidly you are deteriorating.” He parted from Yeats with a last shaft, “We have met too late. You are too old for me to have any effect on you.”’ (Quoted in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, OUP 1959, 1965 Edn., p.105; on information of Alan Denson.] (See also Ellmann’s more extensive narrative, deriving from the same, in Ricorso Library, “Criticism / Major Authors” - James Joyce, infra.)

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George [“Æ”] Russell (7) - The Living Torch (1938): ‘He [Joyce] is creating a psychological following who are trying each to evolve a language of his own, as he is doing. I wonder do master and pupils ever meet? Do they ever speak to each other in the language they use when speaking to the public? How enchanting it would be to listen to such a conversation[!] I feel a little sadly about Joyce, who has an astonishing talent, which, in spite of my chastening recollection of unintelligibles of the past who became merely obvious to a generation who succeeded them, I feel he is burying in a jungle of words; and the burying is none the less effective because all the weeds in that jungle of words, which spread so prolifically over the grave, have been carefully selected. One suspects with Joyce some truly profound idea, some dark heroism of the imagination burrowing into the roots of consciousness, the protoplasmic material for literature, where there are strange blurrings and blendings of words, moods, passions, thoughts in a mysterious mush. Normally these are transfigured into the intelligible by their manifestations in speech or literature. But Joyce does not desire in his later work to allow that transfiguration to take place or allow the murky chaos to lose its formlessness. He desires to give us that murky chaos itself […] I wish he had tried to penetrate into the palace chambers rather than into the crypts and cellars and sewers of the soul, and written after Ulysses the effort of his hero to rise out of that Inferno through a Purgatorio to a Paradiso.’ (pp.139-40; rep. in Robert Deming, ed., James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1970 [Vol. 2], p.653.)

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George Moore (Letter to Edward Marsh [Asquith’s secretary], supposedly recommending Joyce for the Civil List): ‘The only book of Joyce’s that I have read is a collection of stories called Dubliners, some of them are trivial and disagreeable, but all are written by a clever man, and the book contains one story, the longest story in the book and the last story which seemed to me perfection whilst I read it I regretted that I was not the author of it [“The Dead”]. But this story, which I am sure you would appreciate as much as I did, does not prove that Joyce will go on writing and will end by writing something like a masterpiece. A talent, musical, literary or pictorial, is a pale fluttering thing that a breath will extinguish. I will get Dubliners from Heinemann to whom I lent the book and you will see for yourself. Of the novel I know nothing. Joyce left a disagreeable reputation behind him in Dublin, but he came back after some years a different man and everything I heard of him is to his credit. Of his political views I know nothing. He was not in Ireland during the sowing of the Sinn Féin seed and I hope he is not even a home ruler. […] The Irish like discipline, and if Mr. Asquith would treat the Irish as the Pope does he would be the most popular man in Ireland. / Yours .&c. GM. PS: I am sure that from the literary point of view Joyce is deserving of help.’ (Letter to Edward Marsh [Asquith’s secretary], 3 Aug. [1916]; quoted in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 1965 Edn., pp.418-19; see further under George Moore, Quotations,infra; and note that Ellmann erroneously dates the letter 1917 in his references, ibid., p.789.)

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George Moore (in conversation with Barret H. Clark at Restaurant Voltaire, 25 April, 1922): ‘Take this Irishman Joyce, a sort of Zola gone to seed. Some recenty sent me a copy of Ulysses. I was told I must read it, but how can onel plow [sic] through such stuff? I read a little here and there, but, oh my God, how bored I got! Probably Joyce things that because he prints all the dirty little words he is a great novelist. You know, of course, he got his ideas from Dujardin? What do you think of Ulysses [...] Joyce, Joyce, why he’s nobody - from the Dublin docks; no family, no breeding. Someone else once sent me his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a book entirely without style or distinction; why, I did the same thing, but much better, in The Confessions of a Young Man. Why at tempt the same thing unless you can turn out a better book? [He allowed there was merit in “The Dead”.] ‘But Ulysses is hopeless; it is absurd to imagine that any good end can be served by trying to record every single though and sensation of any human being. That’s not art, it’s like trying to copy the London Directory. Do you know Joyce? He lives here in Paris, I understand. How does he manage to make a living. His books don’t sell. Maybe he has money? You don’t know? I’m curious. As someone that question.’ (Clark, ‘George Moore’, in Intimate Portraits, 1951, p.110; quoted in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 1959, p.543-44 [and Do., new & rev. edn. 1982; 1983, p.529]; quoted [in part] by Michael Groden, in ‘The Complex Simplicity of Ulysses’, James Joyce, ed. Sean Latham, Dublin: IAP 2010, p. 106; also in Robert Deming, ed., James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1970, Vol. 1, p.80; and note similar reference to the London Directory in the notorious review of ‘The Scandal of Ulysses’ by “Aramis” [pseud.] in The Sporting Times, 1 April 1922 [as supra].)

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George Moore (Letter to Louis Gillet, 20 Aug. 1931): ‘[…] I am lost in admiration of the thought that you have put into this article and it required thought and consideration and reading and re-reading to disentangle Joyce’s metaphysics. I say metaphysics for Joyce’s book has nothing to do with art, nor yet science, so I suppose it must be metaphysics. Art is concerned with what the eye sees and not with the thinking mind. To the mind life is but the dreaming of a shade, but our actions arise from the belief that it is a great deal more than a shade and history will continue to be written notwithstanding Mr. Joyce’s protest. I am by temperament an artist, that is to say by temperament one who is interested on appearance; a metaphysician only in the belief that the appearance may be illuminated faintly by a moral conception, but oh so faintly! With Joyce it is just the opposite. There are no appearances in Joyce; it is all syllogism. I am not quite sure of the meaning of the word syllogism, but I hope it will serve my present purpose.’) [For a longer extract, see under Moore, Quotations, infra.]

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Oliver St John Gogarty: ‘This arch-mocker in his rage would extract the Logos, the Divine Word or reason from its tabernacle, and turn it muttering and maudlin into the street.’ (Review of Finnegans Wake, in Observer [London], 7 May 1939; rep. in James Joyce: Critical Heritage, ed. Robert Deming, 1970, Vol 2, p.675; see longer extract under Gogarty, infra.)

Oliver St. John Gogarty (‘The Joyce I Knew’, 1941): ‘[…] when all is said, the choice between the Logos, the Divine Word, “this godlike Reason”, and the large discourse and senseless mutterings of the subliminal mind’s low delirium, yet remains to be taken. / There is room in this world of ours for every form of literature. But those whose gaze is clear and undimmed and steadfastly fixed on the Vision Beautiful as Yeats’s was, must see what a waste of ingenuity and what nonsense this vast concordance [Finnegans Wake] represents. / To me it is like a shattered cathedral through the ruins of which, buried deep and muted under the debris, the organ still sounds with its stops pulled out at once. […]’ (in Saturday Review of Literature, XXIII (25 Jan. 1941), pp.3-4, 15-16; rep. in Robert Deming, ed., James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, London 1970 [Vol. 2], pp.673-75.) [For further extracts see under Gogarty, supra.]

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Oliver St. John Gogarty, ‘They Think They Know Joyce’, in The Saturday Review of Literature, XXXIII (18 March 1950): ‘[…] From Flushing I received a postcard with a photograph of Joyce dressed to resemble Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud’s revolution against established canons made him a god to Joyce. We must not leave Rimbaud out of the reckoning; if we do, we fail to understand the influence that fashioned Joyce. Rimbaud, disgusted with mankind, had withdrawn from the world. The logical end was for him to withdraw from all authorship because his kind of private writing would lead only to talking to himself. Joyce did not withdraw, so he ended by listening to himself talking in his sleep - “Finnegans Wake”.’ (p.9; quoted in Phillip Herring, ‘Joyce and Rimbaud: An Introductory Essay’, in James Joyce: An Joyce International Perspective, ed. Suheil Bushrui & Benstock, Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1982, p170.) Not that Ulick O’Connor reflects Gogarty’s view in writing: ‘When Joyce started to adopt Rimbaud’s custom of deliberately reviling those who helped him, Gogarty found himself unable any longer to stomach his friend’s Latin posturing.’ (The Times I’ve Seen: Oliver St. John Gogarty - A Biography, NY: Ivan Obolensky 1963, p.86; quoted in Herring, op. cit. 1982, p.171.) Note: Herring remarks: ‘For once Gogarty was right … [as infra.]’

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Dermot Freyer read and rejected Joyce’s Dubliners stories for Elkin Mathews with the remarks that the writing was ‘smooth flowing’, the narratives ‘often subtly and skillfully evolved’ and the dialogue ‘easy and natural’ but that the stories treated ‘very lower-middle class Dublin life’ and were ‘never enlivening, and often sordid and digusting’, with nearly all characters. ‘physically repulsive […] a dismal and depressing world, this’, and two stories - ‘Boarding House’ and ‘Gallants’ - ‘almost obscene’. (See Critical Heritage; also Florence L. Watzl, ‘Dubliners’, in Zack Bowen & James Carens, A Companion to Joyce Studies, 1984, pp.162-63).

D. H. Lawrence: ‘I am sorry, I am one of the people who cannot read Ulysses. Only bits, but I am gald I have seen the book, since in Europe they usually mention us together  - James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence, and I feel I ought to know in what company I creep to immortality.’ (Letters, IV.) ‘Ulysses wearied me: so like a schoolmaster with dirt and stuff in his head: sometimes good, though: but too mental.’ (Ibid.) The last part [of Uysse] is the most indecent, obscene thing ever written. Yes it is, Frieda. It is filthy . this Ulysses muck is more disgusting than Casanove and I must show it [must] be done without Muck.’ (Ibid.) Further: ‘Did I feel a twinge in my little toe, or didn’t I? Through thouands of thousands of pages [his characters] tears themselves to pieces, strip their smallest emotions to the finest threads, till you feel you are sewed inside a wool mattress that is being strongly shaken up, and oyu are turning to woll along with the rest of the wooliness.’ (Lawrence, Criticism, ed. Anthony Beale.)  Joyce spoke of Lady Chatterley’s Lover as ‘propaganda in favour of something which outside of D. H. Lawrence’s country at any rate, makes all the propaganda for itself. (Joyce, Selected Letters, 1975.) [The foregoing quoted in Paul Crawford, UG Essay, UU 2004.)

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Samuel Beckett - 1: ‘To Joyce reality was a paradigm, an illustration of a possibly unstatable rule.’ (Interview with Richard Ellmann, 1953; quoted [as paraphrase] by Ellmann in James Joyce, 1959, Edn. 1965, p.562). ‘I realised that Joyce had gone as far as he could in the direction of knowing more, [being] in control of one’s material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realised that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in substracting rather than adding.’ (Quoted in Knowlson, op. cit., 1996, p.352; cited in Pattie, op. cit.,2000, p.30.)

Samuel Beckett - 2: ‘[T]he difference is that Joyce was a superb manipulator of material - perhaps the greatest. […] the kind of work I do is one in which I’m not master of my material. The more Joyce know the more he could. He’s tending towards omniscience and omnipotence as an artist. I’m working with impotence, ignorance. I don’t think ignorance has been exploited in the past. There seems to be a kind of aesthetic axiom that expression is achievement - must be an achievement. My little exploration is that whole zone of being which has always been set aside by artists as something unusable - as something by definition incompatible with art.’ (Israel Shenker, ‘Moody Man of Letters’ [interview with Beckett], in New York Times (6 May 1956): Rep. in Lawrence Graver & Raymond Federman, eds., Critical Heritage,London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1974; quoted in Vivian Mercier, Beckett/Beckett, OUP 1977, p.8; also in Antony Roche, Contemporary Irish Drama, 1994, p.14, and Declan Kiberd, Irish Classics, London: Granta 2001, p.591.)

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Samuel Beckett - 3: ‘When I first met Joyce, I didn’t intend to be a writer. That only came later when I found out that I was no good at all at teaching. When I found I simply couldn’t teach. But I do remember speaking about Joyce’s heroic achievement. I had a great deal of admiration for him. That’s what it was; epic, heroic, what he achieved. But I realised that I couldn’t go down that road.’ (Quoted in James Knowlson, Damned to Fame,1996, p.105; cited in David Pattie, Samuel Beckett, 2000, p.12.)

Samuel Beckett - 4: ‘I welcome this occasion to bow once again, before I go, deep down, before his heroic work, heroic being. Samuel Beckett / Paris 29.9.80’ (MS repro. lines in James Joyce: An International Perspective, ed. Suheil Bushrui & Bernard Benstock, Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1982, p.vii.) [The collection was published on 16th June 1982.]

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Elizabeth Bowen, ‘In Praise of Shem the Penman’, March 1941; rep. in The Irish Times (12 Jan. 1991), Weekend/Books): ‘The death of James Joyce was felt by few in his own land as a personal tragedy […/] Yet he was before all an Irishman. All the cerebral complexity of his later art went to reproduce the physical impressions that he had received in Ireland, in youth. These obsessed him - and all the more, perhaps, becase he had withdrawn from them, as though in fear.’ Further, ‘It is not Joyce’s fundamental Irishness that has defeated, and in some cases antagonised, the critics forced into pronouncement by his death [sic] The English can never know us - and are we ready to know ourselves? To challenge our view of ourselves, I should say that it is more academic than we realise. Our talk and writing, and most of all when it is about ourselves, is full of conventions that we know. Joyce was unacademic, and by not a single convention did he save himself from his awareness of life. What he laid bare, or what he scorned to conceal, has been repugnant first of all to his countrymen. He was a great buffooner, a great scorner - in that, is he not like most of us. Only, his scorn and buffoonry admitted no stop. His early work is inundated with pity - and it is in our power to feel pity that wem as humans, are at our greatest. If there seems in the later work to be less pity, that came, I believe, in Joyce from a natural human refusal to suffer too much - to suffer, in fact, to that extent to which he was capable. (For the thing about pity is that it does make us suffer; it is much more than an imaginative act.) Pity for the frustrated dreams of the living, pity for the unfinished dreams of the dead.’ Here Bowen quotes at length the ending of “The Dead”. ‘This could not be gentler […] In the foreign countries he was to live in, his home life was dear to him. But as a writer he was, too, to develop that wayward and jeering cruelty that is either the inverse of pity or a reaction against it - cruelty that is a rigid abstention from feeling of any kind. It is never brutality: it is too full of nerves. I do not say we are often cruel, but when we are, is it not like this? Joyce’s portraits - some of the figures in A Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses - are drawn with a mercilessness more shocking to many people than any of his obscenities. At last he turned from character: in Finnegans Wake all human forms disappear.’ [Cont.]

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Elizabeth Bowen (‘In Praise of Shem the Penman’, March 1941) - cont.: ‘And Joyce had another gigantic faculty - laughter. His laughter, after some rumbles and false starts in Dubliners, after a check throughout the taut and burning Portrait, breaks out in the course of Ulysses into a sustained roar, and it sobs and wheezes and almost dies of itself behind the obscurities of Finnegans Wake. His laughter is disconcerting: people have edged away from it, as from a man laughing all by himself […] Joyce’s attempts to tell us what he was laughing at produced the more confused passages of Ulysses and the almost lunatic reaches of Finnegans Wake. he pounded language to a jelly in his attempts to make it tell us what he was laughing at. One may say that he ended by laughing so much that he could not speak. At the end of his solitary burning first phase, at the end of the racking ordeal of his long adolescence, the joke of the universe suddenly dawned on him and, adult, he broke out into laughter so adult that it has been too much for most of us. He was, most of all, solitary in his mirth. And yet, it is in Joyce’s own country that this cosmic devouring laughter is most heard. A door swings, and it hutrles out in a gust. Remember, in John Bull’s Other Island, how shocked the Englishman was when they all laughed when the poor pig died in the motor-crash. / In short, the contradictions of Joyce’s nature ought not to perplex his own countrypeople: we have tell all in ourselves. In the state of uneasy politeness caused by his death British critics, these last weeks, have been circling round him. Was the man kidding? Was was he getting at? Had he, for the last twenty years and more been leading young intellectuals up the garden path? […] Joyce has, by implication, been accused of having imposed himself craftily on the inter-war neurosis and disorientation of the young, of being a writer purely about the limbo for the too-willing and desperate dwellers in it. […] Wartime England is in a state of reation against what seems to her febrile and over-cerebral; she has only room, now for primary feelings, for plain speech and properly drilled thought. France is, at the moment, tragically silent, and slow mails hold up, for us, what America has to say. / An article in the Times Literary Supplement most fairly puts into words the general charge against Joyce. It speaks of him as “shirking his job of communication”. Did he? Or was it that, as his years went on, he increasingly overstrained language, himself and us in the very efforts he made to communicate?’ [Cont.]

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Elizabeth Bowen (‘In Praise of Shem the Penman’, March 1941) - cont.: Bowen makes a defence of “Work in Progress”: ‘Almost all of Finnegans Wake is, in the ordinary sense, unintelligible. It is unintelligible to the part of the mind that expects statement or narration. We are used to receive from a page of print, information, of one or another kind, information that we could, if necessary, pass on to a friend in our own words […] we do not on the other [hand], expect information from a symphony or the sound of a waterfall. Finnegans Wake, like music or a long natural sound, acts on us. We are affected, profoundly, instead of being informed. Sense has been sacrificed to sensation. Is this wrong? - To the greater number of people it offends every morality of the mind. There seems to be no doubt that Joyce, in writing Finnegans Wake, used the hole of his, by then, complete mastery not only of language but of its associations agains the defences of mere intelligence. The assocation that reinforce his language are super-intellectual and sub-infantile. The esoteric levity of the scholar fuses with the trance of the young child chanting non-words to itself in the half dark. The punning is packed with intellect; the schoolman swoops off into Jabberwocky tongue. […/] In fact what happens in Finnegans Wake is that Joyce does communicate, but does not inform. […].’ Bowen examines the mind of Stephen Dedalus and declares: ‘When Joyce perceived in himself and immortalised Stephen Dedalus, he defined not only the burning of one spirit, the desperate revolutions of one brain; he defined and seemed to create a type. He gave to male intellectual adolescence its lasting prototype in art.’ But she adds: ‘[T]o be truly Stephen one must be born Catholic, and Irish city-bred. / “Crying aloud in the rain on the top of the Howth tram” - Stephen is undetachable from his place.’ She concludes, ‘Europe and America have acclaimed Joyce. But it is in our power, as his people, to know him, as other countries do not. His death, since he went away so long ago, need not estrange him from us, but rather bring him back. We have given to Europe, and lost with Europe her greatest writer of prose … In Ireland we breed the finest of natures, then, by out ignorance, our prejudice and our cruelty drives those finest of natures from our shores. Let us strip from Joyce the exaggerations of foolish intellectual worship he got abroad and the notoreity he got at home, and take him back to ourselves as a writer out of the Irish people, who received much from our tradition and was to hand on more.’ (Rep. in The Irish Times, 12 Jan. 1991, Weekend/Books).

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News Review [unsigned], ‘Exiles: for the first time, the late James Joyce’s only play is produced in London’ [London] (20 Sept. 1945), p.21 [unsigned]: ‘Engrossed in his famed Ulysses, the late James Joyce hardly noticed that Europea was at war. In 1915 living modestly in Triest (then in Austria-Hungary) he was completely unaware that Italy and Austria would soon be fighint, woke up to the fact only when frontiers began to close. / A Greek friend (superstitiously Joyce believed that Greeks brought him good luck) wangled permission for him to leave for Switzerland though Italy. He caught the last train. Each time he passed a station on the frontier it was dynamited behind him. / At Zurich Joyce was happy. He taught at the Berlitzer school, drank white wine with English painter Frank Budgen, worked hard on Ulysses. Budgen asked how long he had been working on the novel. Said Joyce: “About five years. But in a sense all my life.” But at Zurich he took time off from his vast task. Concerned about his perpetual poverty, a group of admirers (including Edmund gosse and William Butler Yeats) got him £100 from the Privy Purse, hinted thta Joyce might do something to help the Allies. / Responding in the only way he could, Joyce formed an acting group, the English Players, wrote for them his only play Exiles. Last week, 27 yers after its publication, it was performed for the first time in England at London’s small dingy torch Theatre. / Concerned wit the intricate relations between an artist, his intelleutally inferior wife, a much-loved sympathetic woman, the piece has many typical Joyce ingredients, harks back to the situations mirrored in his sensitive A Portrait of the Artist as a Young man, foreshadows incidents in Ulysses. / Althought hampeed by a small stage and untiyde sets, the Torch cast did a difficult job well. Main acting honurs go unreservedly to Hermione Hannen as the artist’s wife. Subtley she allowed indications of her origins to seep through the part.’ [End; file photo of JAJ in profile and caption: ‘The late James Joyce wrote his only play to help the Allies in World War I; slipped into copy of Herman S. Gorman, James Joyce: His First Forty Years (London: Geoffrey Bles 1926).]

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Stanislaus Joyce, Dublin Diary, Sept. 1903: ‘Jim is a genius of character. When I say “genius” I say just the least little bit in the world more than I believe; yet remembering his youth and that I sleep with him, I say it […] Jim is perhaps a genius though his mind is minute analytic. He has, above all, a proud wiful vicious selfishness out of which by times now he writes a poem or an epiphany, now commits the meanness of whim and appetite, which was at first protestant egoism, and had perhaps, some desperateness in it, but which is now well-rooted - or developed? - in his nature, a very Yggdrasil. / He has extraordinary moral courage - courage so great that I have hoped that he will one day become the Rousseau of Ireland. […] His great passion is a fierce scorn of what he calls the “rabblement” - a tiger-like, insatiable hatred. He has a distinguished appearance and bearing and many graces; a musical singing and especially speaking voice (a tenor), a good undeveloped talent in music, and witty conversation. He has a distressing [142] habit of saying quietly to those with whom he is familiar the most shocking things about himself and others, and, moreover, of selecting the most shocking times for saying them, not beecause they are shocking merely, but because they are true. They are such things that, even knowing him as well as I do, I do not believe it is beyond his power to shock me or Gogarty with all his obscene rhymes. His manner however is generally very engaging and courteous with strangers, but, though he dislikes greatly to be rude, I think there is little courtesy in his nature. […]’ (quoted in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce [1959], 1965 Edn., pp.142-43; see further quotations, see in A. Walton Litz, James Joyce (Boston: Twayne Publ. 1966)[infra] and also under Authors AZ, Stanislaus Joyce [infra].)

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Stanislaus Joyce (Diary, 8 Sept. 1907): ‘He [James Joyce] told me he would omit all the first chapters and begin with Stephen, whom he will call Daly, going to school and that he would write the book in five chapters - long chapters.’ (Quoted in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 1965, p.274; and see further entries under Stanislaus Joyce, infra. Note that the sentences quoted here do not appear in the published Dublin Diary, and that Ellmann does not indicate the provenance.)

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Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper (London: Faber 1957) - on Epiphanies: ‘Another experimental form which his literary urge took while we were living at this address [Glengarriff Parade] consisted in the noting of what he called ‘epiphanies’ - manifestations or revelations. Jim always had a contempt for secrecy, and these notes were in the beginning ironical slips and little errors and gestures - mere straws in the wind - by which people betrayed the very things they were most careful to conceal. ‘Epiphanies’ were always brief sketches hardly ever more than some dozen lines in length, but always very accurately observed and noted, the matter being slight. The revelation and importance of the subconscious had caught his interest. The epiphanies became more frequently subjective and included dreams which he considered in some way revelatory.’ (p.134; cf. Richard Ellmann’s variant dating of epiphany in James Joyce [rev. edn.], p. 87). Note: acc. to Stanislaus, the “Vilanelle of the Temptress” was composed ‘a few years before the supposed date of the chapter [in A Portrait], Joyce’s first departure from Dublin, and belonged to one or other of the earlier collections.’ (Ibid., p.158). Also: ‘And I could see what he was driving at: the significance of unreflecting admissions and unregarded trifles, delicately weighed, in assaying states of mind for what is basic in them.’ (p.137; quoted [with the above in part] in C. H. Peake, James Joyce: The Citizen and the Artist London: Edward Arnold 1977, p.9.) [Cont.

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Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper (London: Faber 1957) - cont. [on Stephen Hero]: ‘This evening, sitting in the kitchen, Jim told me his idea for a novel. It is to be almost autobiographical, and naturally as it comes from Jim, satirical. He is putting a large number of his acquaintances into it, and those Jesuits whom he has known. I don’t think they will like themselves in it. He has [sic] not decided on a title, and again I made most of the suggestions. Finally a title of mine was accepted: Stephen Hero from Jim’s own name in the book, “Stephen Dedalus”.’ (My Brother’s Keeper, 1958; q.p.)

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Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper (London: Faber 1957) - on A Portrait: ‘In A Portrait of the Artist, Dedalus speaks of a certain disadvantage at which Irish writers find themselves in using the English language. The very slight differences in the shades of meaning which English words may have for Englishmen can give pause, I fancy, only to Irishmen like Yeats or my brother whose sensibility to words applies extreme tests […]. In Ireland, a country which has seen revolutions in every generation, there is properly speaking no national tradition. Nothing is stable in the country; nothing is stable in the minds of the people. When the Irish writer begins to write, he has to create his moral world from chaos by himself for himself. Yet, though this is an enormous disadvantage for a host of writers of average talent, it proves to be an enormous advantage for men of original genius, such as Shaw, Yeats or my brother.’ (p.88.)

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Stanislaus Joyce [on Finnegans Wake]: According to Stanislaus, Finnegans Wake was ‘the beginnings of softening of the brain’ (quoted in Ellmann, James Joyce, [rev. edn.] 1982, p.577; quoted in Margot Norris, ed., A Companion to James Joyce’s Ulysses, NY: Bedford Books 1998, [“Biographical and Historical Contexts”], p.16.) Also: ‘I confess I have no better explanation to offer of [his brother’s] triumphant struggle to preserve his rectitude as an artist in the midst of illness and disappointment, in abject poverty and disillusionment, than this, that he who has loved God intensely in his youth will never love anything less. The definition may change, the service abides.’ (Kevin Sullivan, op. cit., p.59; Litz, p.30; end Chap. 1; and Cf. My Brother’s Keeper, NY 1958: ‘the definition may change but the sense of service due to something outside himself sub specie aeternitatis abides’ [quoted in Litz, op. cit., in ftn., p.121.]

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Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper (London: Faber 1957): ‘My brother’s purpose was different and his angle of vision new. The revelation and importance of the subconscious had caught his interest. The epiphanies became more frequently subjective and included dreams which he considered in some way revelatory. some of these “epiphanies” he introduced here and there into A Portrait of the Artist where the occasion offered and some into the imaginary diary at the end.’ (p.135; quoted in Helene Cixous, The Exile of James Joyce, London: Calder 1976, p.617.) [See also further remarks under Stanislaus Joyce, infra.]

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Francis Stuart (in Black List, Section H [1971], 1975 London Edn.): ‘He started reading Ulysses. From the first page he felt the new impact, though it wasn’t till Bloom appeared at his moring chores that H experienced a similar shift in his angel of vision to that which had taken place when he’d filled the turn from the mountain stream and had a baptismal bath. / No write, as far as he knew, had ever before stooped low enough through the portal of sense in order to register the tangible feel of life. At the other end of the scale, Dostoevsky kept his characters at the highest levels of consciousness, constantly in a spiritual crisis, while existing in a a kind of vacuum, sketchily housed and inadequately fed and clothed, without earning a living, washing, shopping, or making love. / Not that H found in Ulysses what he was seeking. Joyce’s central nerve was a marvellous compound of the physical and intellectual, but in its pulsations H didn’t find what he was listening for. […] certain waves of disturbance traveling through outer space and echoing in the psyche, such as, at one point in history, the Gospels had seemed to record. / Joyce had a beautiful flexible style forged, in the first place no doubt, as his own interior communication system, with which to explore familiar but (till then) largely unrecorded [155] areas of consciousness. But, however much H admired him, they were not the areas to which H’s own inner nerve responded with the kind of excited beat that he craved to have set in motion.’ (pp.155-56). Further [in parenthesis]: ‘Joyce fascinated and repelled H. He felt that at the heart of Joyce was a pool of acidity in which certain fragile treasures, prized by H for their very insubstantiality, were completely destroyed.’ (p.156.)

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Francis Stuart: ‘A Portrait of the Artist created no such other world, was not visually evocative, but had a direct impact on my nerves, or so it seemed. It excited and made me feel uneasy as did some of my youthful sexuality I shared with one in particular of my girl cousins.’ (‘A Minority Report’, in Irish University Review, XII, Spring 1982, pp.17-22; quoted in S. J. Caterson, ‘Joyce, the Künstlerroman and Minor Literature: Francis Stuart’s Black List, Section H’, in Irish University Review, Spring/Summer 1997, p.89). Caterson adds a quotation from Black List, Section H: ‘It turned out that Aunt Jenny had bought it at the Amiens Street bookstall on Grimble’s [adive?] while they’d waited for the suburban train.’ (p.9.)

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William T. Noon: ‘The principle of Aquinian themes which make their presence felt in the writings of Joyce come to focus sooner or later, unless this study is very much mistaken, in the question of the meaning of language and the mystery of words.’ (Joyce and Aquinas, 1957, p. 29.)

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Mitchell Morse: ‘[The Portrait aesthetic] is internally consistent but does not conform with the facts, for even in his own case the enjoyment of beauty was no so limited. His theory of art, which was classic and ascetic, denied his own aesthetic experience which was largely romantic and integrated with his total enjoyment of life.’ (The Sympathetic Alien, 1959, p.125.)

Frank Kermode: ‘If you were ever flushed and excited by Ulysses you are probably now over forty; if you ever tried to live by it, over thirty. Under thirty, people seem to be a little bored by Joyce’s endless experimentation, and also by the setting up of a polarity between prose and poetry which is rendered in terms of straight talk about the genitals or swooning pre-Raphaelite rhythms.’ (Review of Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 1959; rep. in Kermode, Puzzles and Epiphanies, 1963, p.86; quoted in Robert Deming, ed., James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1970 [Vol. 1], Introduction, p.25.)

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Karl Radek, “James Joyce or Socialist Realism?” (1934): ‘We will not dwell on the extraneous matter that is woven into Joyce’s work, on how he encircles the actions and thoughts of his heroes with an intricate cobweb of allegories an dmythological allusions, on all these phatasmagoria of the madhouse. We will examine only the essence of the “new method” by which naturalism is reduced to clincial observation, and romanticism and symbolism to delirious ravings’. ‘But these Blooms and Daedaluses, whom the author relentlessly pursues into the lavatory, the brothel, the pothouse, did not cease to be petty bourgeois when they took part in the Irish insurrection of 1916. The petty bourgeois is a profoundly contradictory phenomenon, and in order to give a portrayal of the petty bourgeois, one must present him in all his relations of life. / Joyce, who is alleged to give an impartial presentation of the petty bourgeois, who is alleged to follow every movement of his hero, is not simply a register of life: he has selected a piece of life and depicted that. His choice is determined by the fact that for him the whole world lies between a cupboardful of mediaeval books, a brothel and a pothouse. For him, the national revolutionary movement of the Irish petty bourgeois does not exist; and consequently the picture which he presents, despite its ostensible impartiality, is untrue.’ (Contemporary World Literature and the Tasks of the Proletariat [Report delivered at the Congress of Soviet Writers, Aug. 1934], rep. in A. Zhdanov, et al., eds., Problems of Soviet Literature, 1935; rep. in Robert Deming, ed., James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, 1970, Vol. 2, pp.624, 625.) Further: ‘The “new method” by which naturalism is reduced to clinical observation, and romanticism and symbolism ot delirious ravings [has as its basic feature] the conviction that there is nothing big in life - no big events, no big people, no big ideas; and the writer can give a picture of life by just taking “any given hero on any given day”, and reproducing him with exactitude. A heap of dung, crawling with worms, photographed by a cinema apparatus through a microscope - such is Joyce’s work. (’Contemporary World Literature and the Task of Proletarian Art’, in Problems of Soviet Literature , ed. H. G. Scott, London 1935, p.153; quoted in Jeremy Hawthorn, ‘Ulysses, Modernism and the Marxist Criticism’, in James Joyce and Modern Literature, ed. W. J. McCormack & Alistair Stead, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1982, p.113.)

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John Cowper Powys, Obstinate Cyrmic ([1947] 1973), p.9: ‘[…] the mingling of that almost ecstatic sense of word-play - word-implications, word-conjuring, word-coining, word-marrying, word-murdering, word-melting, word-hypostasising - which takes up the basic facts of sex and perpetually ravels them and unravels them, with passages of almost Shakespearean imagination. The mischief is that the obscurity - for the average person - of the Work in Progress retards and perplexes us in our approach to this amazing tour de force , where a superhuman and inspired scholarship is so evidentally at work.’ (Quoted in Jerome McCann, review of Porius, in Times Literary Supplement,1 Jan. 1996, p.5.)

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James T. Farrell, ‘One of the ideological and social backgrounds of Joyce’s work is Irish nationalism, to which we find him antagonistic. His revulsion goes back to the Parnell episode, which shook Irish history and bitterly split the nation. Instead of condemning Joyce, however, it would be more fruitful for us to investigate this antagonism as it is refracted through his work,by making a genetic approach to its sources. Such an approach would provide us with an emotional awarenes of this feature of Irish life and it would furnish us with much illustrative information. / A second ideological sources in Joyce is Roman Catholicism, which connects closely with Irish nationalism. Ireland is a Church-ridden country, and the clergy played an important - and infamous - role in the Parnell case. Ireald si strongly Catholic, belligerently Catholic, furiously Catholic; and, wherther or not the reactionary elements of the [44] petty bourgeoisie appealed to Joyce, his attach on Catholicism in Ireland has banned his works fom his own country and made him a pariah. / Has a Marxist, then, any right to take a position like Karl Radek’s on Joyce? Is a Marxist warranted in judgging from so philistine a viewpoint while failing to consider the relation of Irish Catholicism and nationalism to Joyce’s work?’ (Extract from a Note on Literray Criticism, 1936, pp.83-85; rep. in Robert Deming, ed., James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, Vol. 2., 1928-1941, Routledge & Kegan Paul 1970, p.644-45.)

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Seán O’Faoláin, making a comparison between Joyce and Gogarty in the context of his account of the ethos of Presentation College, Cork: ‘How few escaped, could escape, or wished to escape that trap! If James Joyce had had half an ounce of social conscience, of Stendhal’s or Balzac’s awareness of the molding [sic] power of the cash-nexus, he would have made this clear in his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He had it most near to clear when he contrasted Daedalus, the poor rebel - but not against both the Empire and the Church - with Buck Mulligan, who set out to conform. My school produced some rebels but not many; it produced conformists by the ton.’ (Vive Moi, 1993 Edn., Sinclair-Stevenson, p.92.)

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