James Joyce: Commentary (6)

Stephen Spender, ‘Books and the War - II: Time, Violence and Macbeth’, in The Penguin New Writing, ed. John Lehmann (Feb. 1941), p.114. ‘The two most ambitious novels of the century (and, incidentally, the two most opinionated) are I suppose, Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu and James Joyce’s Ulysses. Both these novels express a theory about time, and all the much discussed features of pattern and plot are subsidiary to this. The theory is that the past, which lives in the present, has as active a significance as the present; in fact, in so far as it still lives in memory and influences our actions, it is the present. In order to express this, Joyce and Proust both telescope the past into into the present and treat all events as though they were happening at the same time. The fact that they adopt entirely opposite means of presentation does not contradict this. The action of Ulysses takes place in one day, but it consists largely of memories which cover a large number of years. The action of Proust’s vast work extends over a lifetime, but is the re-living of past memories within the narrow space and unvaried time of the life of an invalid. He might well live through all these memories, lying on his bed, in one day, indeed, in a day dream, containing volumes, of ten minutes. Yet in his memory of the past, one never loses the present; one sees his characters not as they are at one given moment but as they are all ages and at all the moments of thier lives. / The titles of these two books are revealing. Ulysses is [115] the voyage of a lifetime over a wide space contained withi the limitations of one day the confined. space of Dublin. Remembrance of Things Past (even more the French title of the book) expresses a mental voyage over a wide area within a very narrow contemporary setting. / Joyce and Proust are by no means the only modern writers who have devoted enormous skill to breaking down the barrier between past and present.’ (pp.115-16.) [Cont.]

Stephen Spender (‘Books and the War - II: Time, Violence and Macbeth’, 1941): ‘Obviously the lack of a sense ofthe continuity of past, present and future has a more than superficial significance. In Joyce’s most recent work, and in Eliot’s The Waste Land, contemporary life resembles seething cauldron from the bottom of which float up hard fragments of the past which have not yet been melted down. Much of the obscurity of modern poetry is due to a lack of continuity. For once relations in [118] time have been destroyed, relations in space collapse very rapidly also. The sense of time gives us the sense of place, because at a given time we are at a given place. If we make no distinction between past and present, we also make no distinction between ‘here’ and ‘now’ and ‘there’ and ‘then,’ the places at which we are, will be, and were. / All the same, if there is a collapse of standards of measurement in some directions, there are signs of a search for new standards in others. There are signs, for example, that the time obsession in modern literature develops parallel to a change in our conception of time which may prove as revolutionary as other great scientific discoveries.’ (p.119.)

J. I. M. Stewart, ‘Dubliners’ [1963], on Joyce term ‘scrupulous meanness’: ‘The meanness of language has an air of accepting and taking for granted the meanness of what is being described. It is contrived to expose what it affects to endorse.’ (Essay rep. in Morris Beja, ed., James Joyce: Dubliners [Macmillan Casebook Ser.], London: Macmillan 1988, p.204; quoted in V. H. Logue, UG Essay, UU 2004.)

A. Walton Litz, The Art of James Joyce: Method and Design in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake(London/NY: OUP [Galaxy] 1964): ‘In writing Ulysses Joyce retained on one level the chronological order of conventional fiction: the immediate experiences of the characters are described in the order of their occurrence. But only the events of 16 June 1904 are given this chronological order. All the elements provided by memory or association come to the reader piecemeal, and cannot be fully understood until the novel has been read many times. In a sense, as Joseph Frank says, “Joyce cannot be read-he can only be re-read.” Quotes Frank at greater length: “[...] unless one is a Dubliner, such knowledge can be obtained only after the book has been read and all the references fitted into their proper place and grasped as a unity [...] Joyce, in his unbelievably laborious fragmentation of narrative structure, proceeded on the assumption that a unified spatial apprehension of his world would ultimately be possible.” (‘Spatial Form in Modern Literature’, in Critiques and Essays in Criticism, ed. R. W. Stallmann, NY 1949, p.345; here pp.56-57.) [Cont.]

A. Walton Litz (The Art of James Joyce, 1964) - [cont.]: ‘Unlike Ulysses, Finnegans Wake is based upon a stylised “dream-logic”, and there is no obvious narrative level to draw the reader’s interest and establish a fundamental line of development. There is really no development at all, in the conventional sense, for the book’s cyclic structure eliminates “beginning, middle and end”. Edmund Wilson has mentioned as a “serious defect” the fact “that we do not really understand what is happening till we have almost finished the book” (The Wound and the Bow, rev. edn., 1952, p.236.) I would emend this to read “till we have finished the book several times”. One cannot fully comprehend the basic themes of the opening episodes until after an exhaustive study of the entire work; each passage depends as much upon what follows as upon what precedes it. At first one reads the Wake for its humour and Joyce’s linguistic virtuosity, for the frequently moving passages and sudden illuminations; systematic understanding comes later and with much re-reading.’ (p.57.) [Cont.]

A. Walton Litz (The Art of James Joyce, 1964) - cont.], Chap. III, ‘Work in Progress’ [dealing with so-called first fragments of Finnegans Wake]: ‘Too often the process of deformation diffuses the basic effect instead of intensifying it; in many cases the earlier versions of a passages contain essential elements which are blurred in the final text. This is an inherent defect of Joyce’s method.’ (p.92.) Further, ‘Joyce seems to have thought of his original units [in Finnegans Wake] as fundamental designs which could be expanded indefinitely through his techniques of amplication. It should be noted that the original units are almost always “narratives” in the conventional sense, whereas the revisions introduce analogies and connections which are essentially “static”. (p.101.) Note: for an account of the so-called first fragments, see Chap. III, ‘Work in Progress 1923-1926’, 76ff.

A. Walton Litz, James Joyce (Boston: Twayne Publ. 1966), quotes T. S. Eliot [as supra], and remarks: ‘It is difficult to believe that greater knowledge about the private life of Shakespeare could much modify our judgment [...]’, and goes on to remark: ‘Joyce obviously belongs with Goethe in this grouping of writers, but we will do well to remember that, even in the most [16] straightforward autobiography, personal experience has been transformed by conventions and circumstance: the act of writing itself is an experience that changes the author’s personality. And if this is true of the simplest attempts at self-examination, how much more relevant it is to Joyce’s complex works, in which we are confronted with infinitely more subtle transformations. The autobiographical figures in Joyce’s fiction - from the Stephen of Stephen Hero to Shem the Penman in Finnegans Wake - must be taken as personae: as masks through which the author speaks, masks which often conceal more than they reveal. Even in the early Stephen Hero the conventions of the novel have worked changes on Joyce’s personality, and by the time we reach Finnegans Wake we are faced with a grotesque autobiographical figure who can best be viewed as an embodiment of the sterile qualities in Joyce’s life; Shem is really a burlesque of the earlier personae. / As if the theoretical problems raised by Joyce’s use of biographical materials were not enough, the facts of his life have long been obscured by the “unfacts” of rumor, legend, and deliberate distortion. Joyce’s authorized biographer of the 1930’s, Herbert Gorman, actually wrote a biography of Stephen Dedalus; Gorman mingled biographical facts with fictional attitudes, and Joyce - who carefully aided and hindered Gorman - was an active party to this distortion [James Joyce, 1939]. At one point in Finnegans Wake the medieval Irish Martyrology of O’Gorman is rendered as “the Martyrology of Gorman” (349.24), and this is a fair description of Gorman’s study. Joyce seems to have deliberately made the “authorized” biography a part of the artistic process which simultaneously revealed and concealed his inner life.’ (p.16-17.) Further: ‘[I]t would be a mistake to take Joyce’s fiction as a guide and to think of him as a sullen rebel against parental authority. Although he was often embarrassed by his father, whose main interest lay in “jollification”, Joyce was genuinely fond of him and shared his interest in the complex public life of Dublin.’ (p.19.)

A. Walton Litz (James Joyce, 1966) - cont. [Chap. 7, on Finnegans Wake ]: ‘The story of the last twenty years of Joyce’s life is in large measure the story of his work on Finnegans Wake, which was intended to be a self-sufficient cosmos creating its own laws of existence; and there is no doubt that Joyce gradually became a prisoner of that cosmos. I have spoken earlier of the triumphs and limitations of Finnegans Wake, which force me to conclude that it is a partial failure. Any set of standards that will account for the essential greatness of Ulysses must, I feel, find a certain sterility in Finnegans Wake. Even the comic spirit which, much more than the elaborate structural patterns, gives the Wake its unity, seems to me ultimately self-defeating. In Ulysses, parody and satire have direction because they serve a moral vision; but in Finnegans Wake they turn in upon themselves and destroy their own foundations. / It is easy to relate Finnegans Wake to a number of literary traditions - symboliste experiment, the Irish comic heritage, hermetic writing - but these relationships rarely seem vital. The Wake illustrates the extreme tendencies of many traditions without enlarging them. Unlike Joyce’s other major works, it does not affect our view of the whole literary tradition; it stands outside the mainstream, asking to be judged in terms of itself. One of the Wake’s most intelligent readers, James S. Atherton, has claimed that “strong as are the arguments for the solipsistic nature of Finnegans Wake they fall to nothing before the liveliness of the book itself.” (See Books at the Wake, NY 1960, p.13.) This is a statement of personal taste, and must be respected as such. But to many readers the “liveliness” of the Wake does not touch on life with sufficient frequency to compensate for the work’s extraordinary demands. / The one tradition which does stand in vital relationship to Finnegans Wake is that of Joyce’s own art. At the beginning of his work on the Wake Joyce kept a notebook (finally published under the title of Scribbledehobble) which contained headings for each of his works up to and including the chapters of Ulysses. Under these headings Joyce entered fragments left over from these earlier works, verbal parodies, comments on leading themes: the obvious aim was to make one level of Finnegans Wake a summing-up of his artistic career. However, as Clive Hart has pointed out (Structure and Motif, London: Faber 1962, pp.42-43), Joyce partially abandoned this aim in favor of [118] “narcissistic self-parody within Finnegans Wake itself” - satiric comment on his own “Work in Progress.” / But, whatever Joyce’s final attitude may have been, the Scribbledehobble notebook does emphasize the unity in Joyce’s achievement. [...] For this reason anyone who wishes to comprehend Joyce’s full achievement must devote his critical attention, if not his unqualified admiration, to Finnegans Wake.’ [pp.118-19; end.] (For longer quotations, see under RICORSO Library, “On Major Authors” > James Joyce, infra.)

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Walter Allen, Tradition and Dream (London 1964; Penguin 1965): ‘It is only in work written in times of extreme national peril that one finds anything in the English novel comparable to this: Joyce Cary’s To Be a Pilgrim comes to mind as an instance. Generally Englishness, what it means to be an Englishman, is not a subject of the English novel. No Englishman could have written, or made his hero say, as Joyce does Dedalus in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, “Welcome, O Life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” The conscience of the English was created not by one man but by multitude living in many centuries. But historically it has been the great task of the American poets and novelists to do exactly what Stephen Dedalus boasted he would do. [...]’ (Quoted in Patrick Sheeran, “The Novels of Liam O’Flaherty: A Study in Romantic Realism”, Ph.D., UCG 1972, p.124; also issued as book [title do.], Dublin: Wolfhound Press 1976.)

Note -Sheeran remarks: ‘The uncertainty which the passage betrays derives from the displacement of the novelist from his natural position in a tradition which begins with Maria Edgeworth, continues with Lady Morgan, Banim, Griffin, Carleton, Maturin, is resumed in the late nineteenth century by the novels of Somerville and Ross and George Moore. A central concern of all [these] writers [...] is the effort to forge the uncreated conscience of their race [...] concerns and [which] were different from those of the English novelists’ - but not so from American. (pp.124-25.) See further: ‘The great theme of the European novel and perhaps especially the English novel has been man’s life in society: more precisely, the education of men and women, in the sense of their learning to distinguish, through their inescapable involvement in society, the true from the false both in themselves and in the world about them.’ (Ibid., p.14; Sheeran, op. cit., p.156.)

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Richard Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats (Faber 1954, 1964) [an account of Joyce’s first meeting with Yeats]: ‘Joyce, only twenty years old but already formidable, was almost ready to burst out of Dublin and make his name on the continent. He was paradoxically bent on conquering Yeats in argument and on winning his respect. Yeats [...] was particularly sensitive about his work at the moment because he was busy changing it. With Lady Gregory’s help he was embarked on a series of short plays about peasant life, but he did not intend to write peasant plays exclusively, and was less certain of the value of his attempts in this genre than he allowed others to know. Joyce’s outspoken and powerful attack [in “Day of the Rabblement”] was therefore a little nettling to him, and he retained from it a permanent impression of a brilliant but cruel mind. He was not, of course, overwhelmed, and his remarkably honest story of the interview is humorous and detached.’ (p.86.) [There follows a full quotation follows Yeats’s lengthy record of the same, intended as a preface for Ideas of Good and Evil (1903) - see extract, infra.] (Cont.)

Richard Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats ([1954] 1964) - cont.: ‘Joyce’s position in this peculiar interview is less immediately comprehensible that Yeats’s. Although he said little, he evidently took Yeats’s interest in folklore as a narrow ideology, and therefore a denial of the personal immediacy and concreteness, and of the haughty autocracy of great art. Yeats, on the other hand, hoped to capture from the peasantry first, an insouciant spontaneity, and second, a multitude of images sanctioned by tradition. His pastoral impulse was not naive; he did not think of folk art [88] as the talented creation of an untalented group of country bumpkins, but regarded it as mainly the work of individual artists who had escaped the infection of current intellectual and literary movements and of an excessive self-consciousness like his own. Not that the images were to he adopted without thought: his goal was to bring his schematic insights into experience - his themes, correspondences, and oppositions - which he called ideas in talking with Joyce, together with fresh images of the folk. The artist’s individualized consciousness must be married to ancient, anonymous, popular, unconsidered images. Joyce saw nothing beneath the ingratiating metaphor of marriage except abstraction and theory, not knowing that his own work would one day follow a similar pattern.’(Cont.)

Richard Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats ([1954] 1964) - cont.: ‘As for Yeats, who with some reason thought himself a pioneer both in the symbolist movement and in a new Irish dramatic movement, to be treated as an elderly decadent by this brilliant young man was discomfiting. Besides, Joyce had pricked an old wound. For men like Johnson and Dowson in the Rhymers’ Club had been equally contemptuous of Yeats’s theorizing. In his Autobiographies he admitted, “A young Irish poet [Joyce], who wrote excellently but had the worst manners, was to say a few years later, ‘You do not talk like a poet, you talk like a man of letters’, and if all the Rhymers had not been polite, if most of them had not been to Oxford or Cambridge, the greater number would have said the same thing. I was full of thought, often very abstract thought, longing all the while to he full of images.’ (Autobiographies, 1955, p.205.) / The special character of Yeats’s verse made the danger of generalization particularly alarming. Wishing to create moods, and unable to work without an impressive organization of themes and symbolic ramifications, he ran the risk of creating schematizations instead.’ (pp.88-89.)

Richard Ellmann [with Ellsworth Mason, eds.,] intro. to “The Day of the Rabblement”, in The Critical Writings of James Joyce (NY: Viking 1966): ‘The Irish Literary Theatre, which was to become the Abbey Theatre, began its performances in May 1899, with Yeats’s play, The Countess Cathleen. Joyce was in the audience and applauded it vigorously; he refused to join his fellow-students in protesting its heresy. He also liked the company’s second play, Edward Martyn’s The Heather Field [note]. He attended, in February 1900, a performance of the new play by George Moore and Edward Martyn, The Bending of the Bough, and liked it well enough to write a play of his own, A Brilliant Career, probably with the intention of submitting it to the Irish Literary Theatre. But William Archer, who read the play in manuscript, pointed out serious flaws in it, and Joyce went no further. / Meanwhile the theatre has become definitely, and to his mind, obnoxiously Irish. He was dismayed to learn in October 1901, that the next play would be Douglas Hyde’s Casadh an Súgán, written in Irish, and an unrealistic play, Diarmuid and Grania, which Yeats and Moore had taken from Irish heroic legend. On the morning of October 15 1901, Joyce quickly wrote an indignant article condemning the theatre for its parochialism. / He submitted the article to the editor of St Stephen’s, a new magazine which some students at University College had just begun to publish. The article was rejected [...]’ (p.68; see also Ellmann’s more extensive remarks on“The Day of the Rabblement” under Joyce in Notes > Giordano Bruno [infra])

See Joyce’s programme notice for The Heather Field, written for the English Players’ production in Zurich, March 1919: ‘[...] he [Martyn] follows the school of Ibsen and therefore occupies a unique position in Ireland, as the dramatists writing for the National Theatre have chiefly devoted their energies to peasant drama.’ (Critical Writings, p.251.) [There follos a summary of the plot of The Heather Field, concerning Carden Tyrell and his wife, who are now living ‘on bad terms’ with each other.]

Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (OUP 1959; 1965 Edn.), Introduction: ‘[...] We are still learning to be Joyce’s contemporaries.’ (p.1). ‘Unimpressive as Bloom may seem in so many ways, unworthy to catch marlin or countesses with Hemingway’s characters, or to sup up guilt with Faulkner’s, or to sit on committees with C. P. Snow’s, Bloom is a humble vessel elected to bear and transmit unimpeached the best qualities of the mind. Joyce’s discovery, so humanistic that he would have been embarrassed to disclose it out of context, was that the ordinary is extraordinary. / To come to this conclusin Joyce had to see joined what others had held separate: the point of view that life is unspeakable and to be [3] exposed, and the point of view that is ineffable and to be distilled. [...] To read Joyce is to see reality rendered without the simplifications of conventional divisions.’ (p.3.) [Cont.]

Richard Ellmann, (James Joyce [[1959]; 1965) - cont.: What other hero in the novel has, like Stephen Dedalus, lice? Yet the lice are Baudelairean lice, clinging to the soul’s as well as the body’s integument. What other hero defecates and masturbates like Bloom before our eyes? Joyce will not make it easy for us either to condemn or adore. If we go on thinking he may be the apostle of brotherhood, he shows us brothers in violent quarrel. If we go tofind him a defender of the family, he presents his central hero as a cuckold. [...] Joyce is the porcupine of authors [...] He requires that we adapt ourselves in form as well as in content to his point of view (p.4.) [Cont.]

Richard Ellmann, (James Joyce [[1959]; 1965) - cont.: ‘Though Joyce, prophetically enough, called the biographer a “biografiend”, he also supplied the precedent for seeing his subject in all postures in order to know him. His passion for truth, however unpalatable, is a contagion which he would have his readers and his admirers share. (p.5.)

Further [James Joyce, 1959, 1965 Edn.]: ‘[Joyce’s] greatness not as an effulgence but as a burrowing that occasionally reaches the surface of speech or action. [...] To be narrowing, peculiar, and irresponsible, and at the same time all-encompassing, relentless, and grand, is Joyce’s style of greatness, a style as difficult, but ultimately as rewarding, as that of Finnegans Wake.’ (p.5.)

Richard Ellmann (James Joyce, OUP [1959] 1982 rev. edn.) [cont. - Meeting the revival:] ‘It was midnight, but, unwiling to give up his idea, Joyce knocked at the doorway and asked if it was too late to [98] speak to him [Russell]. “It’s never too late,” Russell courageously replied and brought him in. They sat down and Russell looked at Joyce inquiringly. Since Joyce seemed to experience some difficulty in explaining why he had come, Russell talked for a bit and then asked, “Has it emerged yet?” It had not. Russell’s life was divided, like Gaul, he told Joyce, into the three parts: economics, literature, and mysticism. Was it the economics that interested Joyce? No, it was not that. Joyce finally said shyly what he had prepared in advance as part of his bold offensive, that he thought it possible an avatar might be born in Ireland. [Ftn. Earwicker is “the vilest bogeyer but the most attractionable avatar the world has ever had to explain for.” He may have been referring to himself, but his implication, as Russell understood it, was that the sight of his host, cross-legged in an armchair, comfortably smoking his pipe, had made Joyce think that the avatar was not in front of him. He remained nevertheless for hours, talking. He allowed that Russell had written a lyric or two, but complained that Yeats had gone over to the rabblement. He spoke slightingly of everyone else, too. When pressed by Russell, he read his own poems, but not without first making clear that he didn’t care what Russell’s opinion of them might be. Russell thought they had merit but urged him to get away from traditional and classical forms, concluding (as he afterwards remembered with great amusement), “You have not enough chaos in you to make a world.” [Interview with Monk Gibbon.] / They took up Theosophical subjects as well, although Joyce was skeptical of Theosophy as being a recourse for disaffected Protestants. He had remarked to his brother that the Dublin mystics had left the churches only to become latter-day saints. “As such they do not compare either for consistence, holiness, or charity with a fifth-rate saint of the Catholic Church.” [The Dublin Diary, p.108.] Nevertheless he was genuinely interested in such Theosophical themes as cycles, reincarnation, the succession of gods, and the eternal mother-faith that underlies all transitory religions. Finnegans Wake gathers all these up into a half-“secret doctrine”. Russell conceived what Joyce called “the quaint misconception” that he had a new recruit for the Hermetic Society, and afterwards, if the evidence of Ulysses can be trusted, told “some Yankee interviewer” that Joyce “came to him in the small hours of the morning to ask him about planes of consciousness.” [U1845/237] But if Russell misconceived the motive of Joyce’s visit, so did Joyce’s friends, who thought the young man was merely pulling the older man’s leg. Russell, on several planes of consciousness, was integral in Joyce’s plans. He was full of useful information about Eastern philosophy, and he was a means of access to other writers. [...]’ (Ellmann, James Joyce, revised edn. 1982, p.99.)

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Richard Ellmann (James Joyce, OUP 1959, 1965 [cont.]) - Joyce meets Yeats: ‘In early October 1902, Yeats came to Dublin, and Russell, who had told him a year before that a new generation would arise to find them both obvious, announced, “The spectre of the new generation has appeared. His name is Joyce. I have suffered form him and I would like you to suffer.” Yeats submitted, and Russell wrote to Joyce to go to see the poet at that Ancient Concert Rooms where he was helping rehearse Cathleen ni Houlihan and some other plays [letter to Joyce in Slocum Collection, Yale UL]. But Joyce preferred to meet Yeats more privately and haphazardly on the street, near the National Library. They went from there to a café. / Their meeting has a symbolic significance in modern literature. Yeats, fresh from London, made one in a cluster of writers whom Joyce would never know, while Joyce knew the limbs and bowels of a city of which Yeats knew only the head. The world of the petty bourgeois, which is the world of Ulysses and the world in which Joyce grew up, was for Yeats something to be abjured. Joyce had the same contempt for both the ignorant peasantry and the snobbish aristocracy that Yeats idealised. The two were divided by upbringing and predilection.’ (Ibid., p.104; quoted [in part] in Matthew Hodgart, A Student’s Guide to James Joyce, Routledge Kegan & Paul 1978, p.13.) [Cont.]

‘At the age of thirty-seven, Yeats had not yet begun to display the deliberate savagery or the worldly beauty of his later poetry, but he [104] had reached a point in his early work from which he knew he must veer sharply. The Wind among the Reeds (1899) and The Shadowy Waters (1900) had been too concerned with beauty, and Yeats needed to find roughness and spontaneity. For this purpose he had violently turned to writing peasant plays in peasant dialect. To Joyce this interest in the Irish folk on the part of an Anglo-Irishman was patronising, and on the part of an elaborate artist was self-defeating. Not understanding the complicated dialectic by which Yeats flung himself from unpopular to popular are, he saw only volatility: he had spoken in “The Day of the Rabblement” of Yeats’s “floating will” and in Finnegans Wake he would call him “Will-of-the-wisp” [FW211; not supported in Roland McHugh, Annotations to FW, 1991]. He did not conceal his uncomplimentary, and misguided, views now, but spoke to Yeats “with a gentle and engaging smile and presently apologised by saying, “I am not, as you see, treating you with any deference, for after all both you and I will be forgotten.”’ Modest as Yeats was, such an apology could only ruffle him. He is said to have remarked to his friends, “I have never seen so much pretension with so little to show for it.” Probably he did make th remark in momentary pique - Dubliners usually make the remarks that are attributed to them - but he was nonetheless impressed by Joyce [...].’(Ibid., p.104-05.) (For longer extracts, see RICORSO Library, “Criticism / Major Authors” - James Joyce, infra.)

[For Yeats’s account of the Yeats/Joyce meeting, see under Joyce Notes, infra, and Joyce Commentary - W. B. Yeats, supra.]

Note: R. F. Foster (W. B. Yeats - Life, Vol. I: The Apprentice Mage, 1997), sets the date of the meeting in November 1902 and the location a café in O’Connell St., as specified in Yeats’s own memoir. (Foster, op. cit., 276.)

Note: In Margaret Mills Harper, The Wisdom of Two, OUP 2004: ‘[the] much-debated conversation that took place the first time he [WBY] and Joyce met’ is referenced to Ellmann, James Joyce, 1982, pp.101-03, n.35. Harper wryly refers to the ‘famous and fabulous remark that WBY was too old’ and notes that its author was ten years older than ‘the ancient one’s wife’; ibid., p.115.

Richard Ellmann (James Joyce, OUP 1959, 1965 Edn. [cont.]) - Joyce & Ireland: ‘The demands of his country for national feeling he was prepared to meet, but in his own way. Following Ibsen’s example, he detested the grosser forms of nationalism. Yet it would be a mistake to see Joyce as already buying a ticket for Paris; he probably still expected he could live in Ireland. His later depiction of himself makes him more à cheval on his principles than he had yet become. For the moment his most basic decision was in favour of art’s precedence over every other human activity. The nation might profit or not from his experiment, as it chose. In the creedless church he had found for himself, older than St. Peter’s and more immortal, he would be stubborn and daring. It was not long before he found a splendid quarrel in which to display both traits at their best [i.e., Countess Cathleen controversy].’ (p.67.)

Further [James Joyce, 1959, 1965 Edn.]: ‘Whenever his relations with his native land were in danger of improving, he was to find a new incident to solidify his intransigence and to reaffirm the rightness of his voluntary absence. In later life he even showed some grand resentment at the possibility of Irish independence on the grounds that it would change the relationship he had so carefully established between [113] himself and his country.’ (1965, p.114.)

Ellmann on the composition of A Portrait: “To write A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Joyce plunged back into his own past, mainly to justify, but also to expose it. The book’s pattern, as he explained to Stanislaus, is that we are what we were; our maturity is an extension of our childhood [...] But in searching for a way to convert [295] the episodic Stephen Hero into A Portrait of the Artist, Joyce hit upon a principle of structure which reflected his habits of mind as extremely as he could wish. The work of art, like a mother’s love, must be achieved over the greatest obstacles, and Joyce, who had been dissatisfied with the earlier work as too easily done, now found obstacles in the form of the most complicated pattern. / This is hinted at in his image of the creative process. [...; here quotes ‘the life tht surrounds it ... interplanetary music’ (SH); ‘the phenomenon of artistic conception [... &c.]; and, the progression from lyrical to epical and to dramatic art, as well as Flaubert’s idea of the artist as a “god” in his creation.] This creator is not only male but female; [...] Within his womb creatures come to life. Gabriel the seraph comes to the Virgin’s chamber and, as Stephen says, “In the virgin womb of the imagination the word is made flesh.”’

In a footnote, Ellmann here paraphrases Joyce’s version of the theory as it is given in “Scylla and Charybdis”: ‘the artist’s brain-womb is violated by experience, a violation which in some sense it seeks. Outer and inner combine, like spermatazoon and ovum, to form a new creation, independent of its parents.

Joyce did not take such metaphors lightly. [... he] thought of a man’s character developing “from an embryo” with constant traits [... and] his subsequent interest in the process of gestation, as conveyed by Stanislaus during Nora’s first pregnancy, expressed a concern that was literary as well as anatomical. His decision to rewrite Stephen Hero as A Portrait in five chapters occurred appropriately just after Lucia’s birth. For A Portrait of the Artist is in fact the gestation of a soul [...] From the start the soul is surrounded by liquids, urine, slime, seawater, amniotic tides, “drops of water” (as Joyce says at the end of the first chapter) “falling softly in the brimming bowl.” The atmosphere of biological struggle is necessarily dark and melancholy until the light of life is glimpsed. [...] In the last few pages of the book, Stephen’s diary, the soul is released from its confinement, its individuality is complete, and the style shifts with savage abruptness. / The sense of the soul’s development as like that of an embryo not only helped Joyce to the book’s imagery, but also encouraged him to rework and rework the original elements of the process of gestation. [...] In this process other human beings are not allowed much existence except as influences upon the soul’s development or features of it. [...]’ (pp.296-97.) Further: “Joyce was obviously well-pleased with the paradox into which his method had put him, that he was, was the artist framing his own development in a constructed matrix, his own mother. [...] In ”

‘Thus encouraged [by Pound’s letter of 15 Dec. 1913], Joyce made final revisions on the first chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, “my novel with the concertina title”, and sent it, along with Dubliners, to Pound in mid-January.’ (Ellmann, James Joyce, 1982 Edn., p.350.)

‘The necessity of meeting deadlines for the Egoist installments of A Portrait spurred Joyce to try to finish that book. He sent the manuscript along chapter by chapter to Ezra Pound, who transmitted it to the Egoist; it was published there in installments of about fifteen pages each. [...] After the publication of chapter three a hiatus occurred because of the outbreak of war and the necessity of finding a postal address intermediary in Italy. Joyce was determined, however, to keep his old promise of writing a novel in ten years, so that he might put at the end, “Dublin 1904 / Trieste 1914”. / Four pages of the manuscript have survived which indicate that Joyce at one time considered concluding the book just prior to his elopement with Nora Barnacle on October 7, 1904. One of these pages foreshadows a quarrel between two young men in a tower. But eventually Joyce decided to end A Portrait with his earlier, uncompanioned departure for Paris in December 1902. At once extraordinarily self-absorbed and professionally detached, he thereby reserved for future use his Paris sojourn, ending in April 1903, and the month before and after his mother’s death in August, when he mooned about Dublin feeling talented and trammeled. This grumpiness thickens the consciousness of Stephen Dedalus at the beginning of Ulysses. / In bringing the book together Joyce found unexpected help in Balzac, who took for his own device and gave his hero in Le médicin de campagne the Carthusian motto “Fuge .. Late .. Tace”. These Stephen translated as his own watchwords, “Silence, exile, and cunning.”’ (p.354; ... &c.)

[ Note: Ellmann elsewhere indicates that the Carthusian motto is from Balzac’s Splendeurs et misères des courtisane (1847) - as quoted under Textual Notes, infra.]

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Richard Ellmann (James Joyce, OUP 1959, 1965 [cont.]) - Ulysses: ‘The theme of Ulysses, Joyce intimates, is reconciliation with the father. Of course, the father, whom Joyce depicts in Bloom is in almost every way the opposite of his own father, and is much closer to himself. Insofar as the movement of the book is to bring Stephen, the young Joyce, into rapport with Bloom, the mature Joyce, the author becomes, it may be said, his own father. Stephen is aware enough of the potential ironies of this process to ponder all the parodies of the father as his own son in the Trinity, and of Shakespeare as both King Hamlet and prince Hamlet. Yet the book is not without its strong woman; Bloom is appropriately under the influence of his wife, whom he dissatisfies (to some extent intentionally), and wishes to bring Stephen under her influence too.’ (James Joyce, [1959], 1965 Edn. p.309.)

Ellmann on Joyce in Zurich - quotes JAJ to Frank Budgen: You know, you can see I am some sort of personality. I have an effect on some kind of people who come near me and know me and are my friends. But my wife’s personality is absolutely proof against any influence of mine.” Perhaps for this very reason Nora suited Joyce ... moderate his frailties.’ (James Joyce, 1982 [rev. edn.], p.434.)

‘Walter Ackerman, who later became a flier and wrote an autobiography in German, records that Giorgio invited school-mates to the home of his father the writer in 1918 [Zurich] where, on leaving, they saw a man entirely in black in the hall. This was Joyce coming home. Ellmann writes: ‘The impression must have been accurate enough for a landlady of the Joyce’s referred to him as “Herr Satan”. (James Joyce, 1982 Edn., p.435.)

‘He took special interest in Synge’s play [Riders to the Sea] because he persuaded Nora to play a minor role. She had never acted before and was timid at first but her rich contralto voice, with its strong Galway accent, gradually acquired confidence. Joyce trained the other actors to imitate her speech and the Aran speech rhythms.’ (1982, p.440.)

Richard Ellmann (James Joyce, OUP 1959, 1965 [cont.]) - Finnegans Wake: ‘In retrospect, it seems clear that the “monster”, as Joyce several times called Finnegans Wake in these days, had to be written, and that he had to write it. Readers may still sigh because he did not approach them more directly, but it does appear that this alternative was not open to him. In Dubliners he had explored the waking consciousness from outside, in A Portrait and Ulysses from inside. he had begun to impinge, but gingerly, upon the mind asleep. There lay before him, as in 1922 he knew well, this almost totally unexplored expanse. That the great psychological discovery of his century was the night world he was, of course, aware, but he frowned on using that world as a means of therapy. Joyce’s purpose was not so didactic; he wished, unassumingly enough, to amuse men with it. / The night attracted him for another reason. [...] Sleep is the great democratiser: in their dreams people become one, and everything about them becomes one. Nationalities lose their borders, levels of discourse and society are no longer separable, time and space surrender their demarcations. All human activities fuse into other human activities [...] By day we attempt originality; by night plagiarism is forced upon us. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Joyce had demonstrated the repetitions of traits in the first twenty years of one person’s life; in Ulysses he had displayed this repetition in the day of two persons; in Finnegans Wake he displayed it in the lives of everyone.’ (James Joyce, 1959, 1965 Edn., p.729.)

Richard Ellmann (James Joyce, OUP 1959, 1965) - on Joyce as reviewer for the Daily Express, 1903: ‘Two books seem to have affected him more deeply than the others. One was J. Lewis McIntyre’s Giordano Bruno, which revived his old admiration for the philosopher who, disregarding tradition, marched heretically “from heroic enthusiasm to enthusiasm” towards God. The other was Marcelle Tinayre’s The House of Sin, the story of a young man named Augustine who, after a strict Jansenist upbringing, is swayed slowly away from the spirit to the flesh. He has by inheritance what Joyce calls a “double temperament. “Little by little,” Joyce writes, “the defences of the spiritual life are weakened, and he is made aware of human love as a subtle, insinuating fire.” Though Augustine comes at last to a tragic end, the author’s sympathies are not with “the horrible image of the Jansenist Christ” that looms over him, but with “the fair [144] shows of the world.” Joyce must have seen the parallel to his own rearing by the “mirthless” Jesuits, and his escape from them to “life.” He admired also the way Tinayre’s prose seemed to fall in with the pathology of the hero: a lessening of the young man’s vitality was subtly suggested by pauses, and in the end the prose seemed to expire along with Augustine’s soul. The House of Sin was one of the many odd spots where Joyce found a useful idea.’

Richard Ellmann (James Joyce, OUP 1959, 1965): ‘In “A Portrait of the Artist [1904],” for the first time since writing A Brilliant Career, Joyce was willing to attempt an extended work, to give up the purity of lyrics and epiphanies. He was resolved to gather the stages of his spiritual experience together in a connected pattern. It is difficult to say whether what he wrote was essay or story, for it has elements of both, the essay strained by apostrophe and dramatic exhortation, the narrative presented for the most part discursively. At the age of twenty-one Joyce had found he could become an artist by writing about the process of becoming an artist, his life legitimizing his portrait by supplying the sitter, while the portrait vindicated the sitter by its evident admiration for him. That admiration was already a little complicated by the attitude which, in the later book A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, has led some readers to suppose that Joyce could not bear [149] his own hero. But in both portraits, as well as in the intermediate Stephen Hero, there is no lack of sympathy on the author’s part; he recognizes, however, that earlier stages of the hero’s life were necessarily callow, and makes the callowness clear in order to establish the progression towards the mature man.’ (pp.149-50; 1982 rev. edn., pp.144-45; for longer extract, see RICORSO, Library, “Criticism > Major Authors > James Joyce”, infra.)

Richard Ellmann, (James Joyce [[1959]; 1965) - cont.: ‘Joyce seems to have thought with equal affection of the roles of mother and child. He said once to Stanislaus about the bond between the two, “There are only two forms of love in the world, the love of a mother for her child and the love of a man for lies.” In later life, Maria Jolas remarked, “Joyce talked of fatherhood as though it were motherhood.” He seems to have longed to establish in himself all aspects of the bond between mother and child. He was attracted, particularly, by the image of himself as a weak child cherished by a strong woman, which seems closely connected with the images of himself as victim, whether as a deer pursued by hunters, as a passive man surrounded byburly extroverts, as a Parnell or a Jesus among traitors. His favourite charactres are those who in one way or another retreat before masculinity, yet are loved regardless by a motherly woman’ (p.303; rev. edn. 1982, p.293.)

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Richard Ellmann - Introduction to Letters of James Joyce, Vol. II (NY: Viking 1966) on Joyce’s youthful disposition: ‘He demands patronage rather than charity. Joyce’s conviction of merit was justified in the event, yet he was imbued with it long before there were publications or even manuscripts to confirm it; confidence in his powers may be said to have antedated their manifestation. / Because of this confidence, he has little patience with those who fail to pay tribute to his talent, and is likely to shift suddenly from suppliant to renunciant. He is regularly on the verge of scorning the help he requires.’ [xxvi]

‘Though his gestures of renunciation, and threats of gestures, might argue that Joyce was, as he called Ibsen, an “egoarch”, they must somehow be reconciled with his other qualities. Joyce was gregarious, filial, fraternal, uxorious, paternal, in varying degrees, and surrounded himself with relatives and friends.’ (xxxvii.)

‘In early youth Joyce began to formulate the relation of art and the spiritual self into an aesthetic, as these letters testify; this aesthetic would vindicate him by establishing the primacy of the poet over the priest through system rival to theology’s. The artist was to be shown to be integrating on a higher level than the priest’s, and without external or supernatural authority to make his work easier. This conscious definition of the principles of his art finds an accompaniment in these letters in Joyce’s reiterated insistence that his own behaviour has been defensible and even praiseworthy.’ (xxxviii.)

[Further on egoism:] ‘Joyce did regard himself as a hero, but thought it advisable not to say so explicitly [in A Portrait]; he thought of himself also as in some way a martyr, but as usual his way of saying so is by seeming to repudiate the idea.’ (xliv.)

[On his letter to his mother of 21 Feb. 1903]: ‘This letter does not inspire an instant sympathy or a desire to join in singing “Upa-Upa” [the song he quotes]. Its young writer is not self-sacrificing, not virtuous, not sensible, although he waves his hand distantly at these attributes. At first we see only self-pity and heartlessness in this assertion of his own needs as paramount. He takes unfair advantage of the fact that his mother’s love is large enough to accept even the abuse of it. Yet there are twinges of conscience, sudden moments of concern for here, and there is evidence that he depends upon her for more than money, as if he could not live outside the environment of family affection, badly has he acts within it. The postscript about “Upa-Upa” is a kind of humorous palinode; it seems to say, “Never mind. We can still sing.” / Throughout the letter the emphasis is on his lenten fasts for his art. In other correspondence with her too, Joyce asks his mother to approve his artistic plans while he is fully aware that they are beyond her grasp, last as later he makes the same demands of his less educated wife.’ (xl-xli.)

‘These letters of 1909 and 1912 present Joyce with more intensity than any others. [...] He reminds her [Nora] constantly of his art, often combining it with love tokens. [...] His art is the lofty counterpart of that deeper nature which he will divulge otherwise only to her. And he mixes his pleas with tender rebuke, scolding her for scolding him. She is too rude for him, ruder than he deserves. To vary the note, he sometimes delights in acknowledging his faults, including his infidelities with prostitutes, in imagining her as even more merciless to him, as whipping him like the ladies in Sacher-Masoch, and with furs on to complete the picture. [...] Then, to renew his innocence and hers, he leans upon her as if she were a mother, and he longs to be her child or even or unborn infant: ‘Take me into the dark sanctuary of your womb. Shelter me, dear, from harm!’ / Yet one route of distrust remains: he can never understand her implacable unlikeness to him. He finds himself suspicious again: ‘Are you with me, Nora, or are you secretly against me?’ (xlviii.)

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Richard Ellmann, Ulysses on the Liffey (Oxford: OUP 1972; rep. 1974)

Richard Ellmann, The Consciousness of Joyce(London: Faber & Faber 1977): ‘The central action of Ulysses is to bring together Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom by displaying their underlying agreement on political views which the author thereby underwrites.’ (Quoted in Vincent Cheng, Joyce, Race and Empire, Cambridge UP 1995.)

Richard Ellmann, ‘Even in adolescence Joyce recognized that Yeats was the writer with whom he must finally compete.’ (“Yeats and Joyce”, in Dolmen Yeats Centenary Papers (Dublin: Dolmen Press 1965), pp.447-79; p.447; quoted in Frank Shovlin, Journey Westward: Joyce, “Dubliners” and the Literary Revival, Cambridge UP 2012, p.131.)

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William G. Fallon, in The Joyce We Knew, ed. Ulick O’Connor (Cork: Mercier Press 1967; Brandon 2004), pp.39-59: ‘[...] I think it appropriate to mention here a few observations or what I knew of Joyce’s religious attitude as a schoolboy and a student. Stanislaus Joyce has recorded in his Dublin Diaryof August 1904 that ‘Jim had ceased to believe in Catholicism for many years’. This to my mind is an unjustifiable conclusion. It shows an inability to distinguish between commonplace irreverence or negligence and dogmatic disbelief. / I remember very well at University College that Jim continued to attend to his religious duties. He was a member of the College Sodality. This included going to Confession and Communion. He was also a member of St. Thomas Aquinas Academy. His sister, Sister Gertrude, who had become a nun in New Zealand, corresponded with me until her death in March 1964. She had exchanged letters with her brother, Jim, until his death in 1941. She prayed constantly for him during his lifetime and after his death. / I often think that Joyce would have been attracted to Teilhard de Chardin’s interpretation of Catholicism, Joyce with his H.C.E. (Here Comes Everybody) who revolves in four cycles of human evolution. Perhaps Joyce got only halfway there. Teilhard’s notion that man is progressing, that science and astronomy all converge on the infinite, would, I believe, have greatly appealed to that side of Joyce’s character which I feel was spiritual.’ (p.49.)

William G. Fallon (in The Joyce We Knew) - cont. [On not going to Trinity College:] ‘At University College, at least, he would realise how native traditions and culture, held in common, were the bonds that linked his Dublin with the provinces. That revelation was Joyce’s simple conception of Irish nationalism, but in the awakening political enthusiasm of those years he was wholly disinterested.’ (Fallon, p.50; Editor’s note [i.e., Ulick O’Connor]: ‘But Joyce took a keen interest in Arthur Griffith’s Sinn Féin and thought it the only political group likely to succeed.’) Further, Fallon cites Rory O’Connor (of ‘the Civil War’) as one of the talents of the L & H. (p.51.) Note: Fallon’s contribution was written specially for the book.

Curtis Bradford, Yeats at Work (Illinois UP 1965), pp.ix-x: ‘The recently published first-draft version of the Shem the Penman section of Finnegans Wake (David Hayman, A First-Draft Version of Finnegans Wake, pp.108-12) is a very poor thing indeed. This comes as a surprise, for Shem is clearly an extension of the Stephen myth and Joyce had been working on the Stephen myth during most of his creative life. So the reader begins to ask why Joyce has so much trouble getting the episode underway. I think he gets an answer very early when Joyce writes “Cain - Ham (Shem) - Esau - Jim the Penman.” Translated out of Joyce’s shorthand this must mean “I, the writer James Joyce, am Cain-Ham-Esau: I want to kill my insufferably righteous brother ‘in the Meddle of [my] might ... to find out how his innards [work], I have seen’ the nakedness of my father - that is of my fatherland, and I have sold my birthright for a mess of pottage though I have also been done out of it.” This points to many themes of the finished episode, but it also points to the fact that Joyce is having trouble controlling his accidence, trouble creating a myth out of a man. And in fact he never did quite manage to control his accidence here and elsewhere in Finnegans Wake.’ [Cont.]

Curtis Bradford, Yeats at Work (Illinois UP 1965) - cont. [same para.]: ‘In the Shem the Penman episode Joyce’s paranoid feelings toward Ireland are apparent in spite of the pyrotechnics of his style, as are also such naked biographical facts as his eschewing his native victuals by preferring canned salmon to Liffey trout and white wine to Guinness, and his irritation [ix] over the pirated editions of Ulysses printed in the United States. In the great moments of Shem the Penman Joyce becomes if not everyman at least every artist, When he works “kuskykorked ... up tight in his inkbattle house”, when he refuses his “birthwrong ... to fall in with Plan”, when he as every great writer must becomes a “Europaisianised Afferyank”. But elsewhere, though it is simplistic to separate what is being said from how it is being said, only his “quashed quotatoes” and “his cantraps of fermented words” save Joyce from sounding maudlin, if indeed they do save him. Which may in part explain the quashed quotatoes and fermented words.’ [Cont.]

Curtis Bradford, Yeats at Work (Illinois UP 1965) - cont. [new para.]: ‘Perhaps I, who am not a Joyce critic but only one of his common readers, can go further from this instance and hazard some generalizations which a Joyce critic might properly hesitate to make. The exegesis of Finnegans Wake has made it clear that in the Wake Joyce sooner or later worked off every irritation he had accumulated during his literary life - and he had accumulated a great many. In one aspect it is his Dunciad. Now the Dunciad, excepting the fourth book, hardly seems to me to belong with the best of Pope [...] partly because Pope’s pain shows through in spite of the technical brilliance of the poem. Finnegans Wake is not the best of Joyce and for the same reason. In Dubliners, Portrait, Ulysses, Gabriel and Gretta are not James and Nora Joyce, Cranley is not J. F. Byrne, and, especially, Stephen and Buck Mulligan are not Joyce and Gogarty. In this last instance mythical figures of great dimension stalk the streets of Dublin; the accidence in which they began has been wholly transcended. Too often in Finnegans Wake once we have penetrated the verbal texture we find James Joyce in all his accidence. I’ve had lots of fun at Finnegan’s Wake, but reading the first-draft version has made me aware of one reason why I do not think it as great as Joyce’s other fictions.’ (p.x.)

Austin Clarke, Penny in the Clouds (1968): ‘ Some weeks later as we were sitting in a cheap café in a side street under the shadow of St Sulpice, drinking Pernod Fils, Joyce afer long silence, mentioned Yeats again. His remark was so surprising that I keep it in Italian: “La poesia de Mangan e de Yeats è quella segatora di chi sela da fa solo”. He emphasised their obsession with hands, quoting Mangan and pointing to the frequency with which Yeats refers to pearl-pale hands. I realised that he was only acquainted with the early twilight poems. As I glanced at the drooping figure, I wondered if he had been addicted in youth to our national vice.’ (p.96; quoted in Peter Costello, James Joyce: The Years of Growth, 1992, p.16.)

Austin Clarke called the language of Finnegans Wake ‘as monstrous and ugly as the latter-day Abbey brogue.’ (Quoted in Bernard O’Donoghue, review of sundry works, Times Literary Supplement [Irish issue], 29 June 2001, p.9-10.)

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Forrest Read, ed., Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, with Pound’s critical essays and articles about Joyce (NY: New Directions 1965) - Introducton: ‘When Pound discovered him Joyce was at the end of his tether. Before he left Ireland for good in 1904 he had published in Dublin and London only some essays and book reviews and a few poems and stories. Since then he had lived in Pola, Rome, and Trieste, whorking as a language teacher and a bank clerk. in 1907 Chamber Music, brought out by Elkin Mathews, who was soon to become Pound’s publisher, received some slight notice. Some 1905 he had been trying to get Dubliners publiched but an exasperating series of efforts had resulted only in unfulfilled contracts, broken plates, and a burned edition. He had also been turning a false start, Stephen Hero, begun in 1904, into a new kind of novel. But the frustration of trying to publish his book of stories unexpurgated continued to rankle; he was writing desultorily, his time eaten into by English [2] language lessons, by the added responsibility oftwo children, and by periods of discouragement. [...]’ (pp.2-3.)

Forrest Read, ed., Pound/Joyce (NY: New Directions 1965) - cont.: ‘[Pound] was almost wholly in the dark about Joyce’s course of life. Joyce lived a quite unspartan life in Trieste and Zurich. His penury was largely selfinflicted; he was always willing, even eager, to be dependent, and despite his success at finding windfalls he always considered his plight deplorable. During one financial crisis Pound actually suggested that the great metropolitan might construct his own furniture or move to a village in the country, reminding him that “Various young writers have done so”. Pound might have been aghast or even indignant had he known the luxuries Joyce allowed himself.’ (p.6.)

Forrest Read, ed., Pound/Joyce (NY: New Directions 1965) - cont.: ‘Joyce appeared to Pound as the great new urban writer, a great synthetic expresser of the modern consciousness. In many ways 1914-1924 was for Pound, indeed for modern writing itself, the Joyce decade.’ (p.8.) Further: ‘Joyce was both perfecting nineteenth-century realism and realising in literature the motives of Pound’s avant-garde experiments. He had a sharp eye for seeing life as it is and presenting the urban surface intensely, yet he also presented “a sense of abundant beauty”, combining the objective fact and the sensitive response. Dubliners made the city a formal principle for the first time in modern English literarature; the lives of the Dubliners were not subdued to the conventional form of the story, but were presented according to the pressure of the city and the form of an emotion. In A Portrait, Joyce transformed his own personal experience to explore the artist’s expanding inner life, contrasting it to Dublin’s urban surfaces and its stultifying moral and intellectual milieu. He was achieving a full stylistic and formal expression in the settings, events, rhythms, conciousness, emotions, and historical perspectives of Ulysses. [...] Joyce ws the most consistently absorbing cuase of Pound’s London years, not only a focus for his versatile activities but also a touchstone of literary innovation.’ (p.9.)

Forrest Read, ed., Pound/Joyce (NY: New Directions 1965) - cont.: ‘The war years were the years not only of the gradual growth and appearance of Joyce’s mock-epic in prose but also of Pound’s counterpart in poetry, The Cantos. Nor is it a coincidence that their work continued to run parallel as Joyce embarked on Finnegans Wake and Pound unfolded his “long endless poem”. Of all modern writers, Pound and Joyce are the two who decided at an early age to follow the classic vocation of preparing themselves to write epic: as moderns, to use their personal lives “to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race”; as classicists, to adapt the motives, methods, and forms of the epic tradition to modern use. Both developed a single idea towards an ever larger, more inclusive synthetic form. The similarity of their motives and methods is reflected in Pound’s essays. As a group, these essays show how Joyce’s work served as a kind of goad or catalyst while Pound was absorbed in his own public and artistic struggle. [...] his association with Joyce enriched and expanded his thinking about literary methods and form along lines that Joyce was exploring.’ (p.10.)

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V. S. Pritchett, ‘The Comedian of Orgy’, Reassessment 4: James Joyce’, in New Statesman (15 Aug. 1969), pp.205-06: ‘The early, petty-bourgeois Joyce is emancipated by what, on the face of it is the traditional Irish drug of talk, the talk of rhetoricians, pedants and grammarians. Joyce has forebears here not only in Sterne but in Carlyle and Browning, where the pedantry and the uncommon syntax and grotesque image are intended to convey action and the unrest of wit. (The flesh become word.) By language that paralysed others, he makes his escape. It is the trick of Rabelais. The mean people are stuffed, enlarged to giant size by every kind of grammatical peculiarity - Stuart Gilbert found 95 examples - as well as by the trivia of their environment and every historical association grand or parochial, that came into his endlessly associating and polyglot mind. [...] the Joycean paradox is that he is the learned, literary archivist collecting the elements of a popular oral culture. The young poet and brilliant scholar of The Portrait of the Artist [sic] will turn into the first McLuhanite hope. But oral writing [...] as difficult [... &c.] (p.205.)

Note: Harry Levin quotes Pritchett on Ulysses and contests his view: ‘Undertaking recently to speak for the generation that grew up with the book, V. S. Pritchett announced that it has shrunk from comic epic to crossword puzzle - “and, as such, a major, unrequited European export to the scholar-technicians of the American universities’. Since Mr. Pritchett’s “reassessment” was written for The New Statesman, his transatlantic sneer is a standard ploy, best explained by his economic metaphor, English critics, though very free with their personal impressions and moral evaluations, have always tended to shy away from technical analysis; and Mr. Pritchett is true to himself [195] in his distrust of scholarship. I am reluctant to pres what is so clearly a sore point with him and thoroughly disinclined to engage in international trade wars. Indeed, I should welcome his consignment of Joyce’s work to this side of the Atlantic, if British letters could afford to lose it.’ (pp.195-96.)

Maurice Harmon, ed., The Celtic Master (Dolmen Press 1969), Introduction: ‘The charge is sometimes made that for the Irish James Joyce is a local joke that outsiders take seriously. While there is some truth in that assertion and some evidence of native impatience with Joycean scholarship, it must also be observed that Joyce is seriously regarded as the originator of the Irish prose tradition. Writers like Sean O’Faolain, Frank O’Connor, Flann O’Brien and Samuel Beckett have demonstrable affinities with his work and recently Thomas Kinsella has argued, on lines similar to those expressed in these pages by Niall Montgomery, that Joyce is central to modern Irish life because, accepting the here and the now, he immersed himself in the filthy modern tide that Yeats had turned away from. Significantly, Kinsella’s “Nightwalker” is a fluid narrative in the manner of parts of Ulysses, and has an imaginal design of violence which is composed mainly from explicit allusions to recent events in Irish political, economic and social life. / It is significant also that the two Irish contributors to this collection of essays take Joyce seriously, concerned as scholars everywhere are with the literary achievement, its modes, relationships and sources. [...]’ (p.[7].)

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S. L. Goldberg, The Classical Temper (NY: Barnes & Noble 1961): ‘Joyce learned his artistic discipline from a variety of masters; Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Ibsen and, in the novel, Flaubert. That discipline is a large aprt of what he called the classical temper. The meaning he gave to the phrase has nothing to do with academisim or plaster models from the Greek, nor is it to be [31] confused with what T. E. Hulme and T. S. Eliot have meant by “Classicism”. It is elss definite and more complex than that, and to define its genuine presence in Ulysses is the main object of this study. / In very broad terms, we may say that, as Joyce understood the term, the classical temper is essentially dramatic. It accepts the ordinary world of humanity as the primary object of its attention, and endeavours to see it and present it steadily and whole. In order to do so, it seeks patiently for maturity, detachment, impersonality of judgment and an artistic method, that, hile it begins with the local and the concrete as its foundation, enables it to penetrate beyond them. The classical temper thus involves a moral as well as an artistic ideal, an ideal of spiritual completeness and impersonal order. No one knew better than Joyce that to record life truly engaged the artist’s whole sensibility in most complex, delicate moral perceptions and judgments. If he avoided dogmas and “beliefs” - all explicit systems of values - this does not mean he rejected all values whatever; it only means that he trusted to his dramatic imagination to discern and express them in life as he knew it. If in some ways he started his career from Aestheticism, “the romantic temper”, he rejected it both in life and in art for exactly the same reasons. The classical temper displays itself as a responsive openness to life, a firm grasp on the centrally human, a respect for the present reality we all share, an allegiance to the objective, and a mistrust of metaphysical or naturalistic “realities” abstracted from the total complexity of human experience. This attitude is the ground of his finest inspiration.(p.32.) [Cont.]

S. L. Goldberg, The Classical Temper (1961) - cont.: ‘[...]it is true, as any examination of the theories quickly reveals, that the notion of what Joyce called “epiphanies”, which is touched on in Stephen Hero (but nowhere else, and never explicitly developed), is essential to any aesthetic attributable to Joyce himself. It is also true that the theory in the Portrait is crippled by the omission of the concept (or something like it), while the more satisfactory theory in Ulysses depends upon it. But the concept as it is assumed in Ulysses is rather different from the form in which it is mentioned in Stephen Hero, and if we wish to understand Joyce’s own views we ought to take that difference into account. We may, for whatever reasons, prefer the early formulation with its vaguely metaphysical flavour (although personally I do not), but we cannot reasonably presume that it represents Joyce’s own, real and always consistent view. But the real importance of this is its bearing on the second assumption. Although the notion of “epiphanies” is of central importance, some critics have tried to add it to Joyce’s other aesthetic theories by supplying him with a gratuitous metaphysical system, and interpreting “epiphanies”, as well as the terms Stephen explicitly borrows from Aquinas, in a fully Scholastic sense. Despite his Scholastic terminology, Joyce’s aesthetic is not strictly Theorist at all. Nor is there any real evidence whatever that he gave any of his aesthetic terms a theological meaning, or that he intended at any stage to reveal through art the ordered spiritual vision of Christianity. He may never have cast off the effect of his religion even though he rejected it, or escaped the influence of his Jesuit teachers; on the other hand, his reading in Aquinas seems to have been private and idiosyncratic, and certainly not undertaken in pursuit of a Catholic philosophy. Joyce was never a philosopher of any kind, and we must not read too much into what he actually wrote for the sake of making it consonant with what we perhaps feel he ought to have written. Joyce was never a philosopher of any sort, and we must not read too much into what he actually wrote for the sake of making it consonant with what we perhaps feel he ought to have written.’ (p.44.) [Cont.]

S. L. Goldberg, The Classical Temper (1961) - cont.: ‘From his early romantic egoism he came eventually to discover the meaning of “life” in the creative understanding wherein he defined himself as a creative artist, and then in the more complex act wherein he defined the social and moral nature of the world and himself. The critical exploration of the self led, with an exemplary logic, to the critical exploration of society. / This progression took him to Ulysses. But that book involved the recognition that the individual realises himself only in the meaning he creates and not in the form of society around him. Hence Joyce next advanced beyond the “now and here” into the trans-spatial, transtemporal dimension. / In what reality does mankind find the source and the pattern of its life? The answer could only be in the meaning of human history itself. So Joyce [...] would confront Life directly, beyond he provisional forms of fiction, and write a comprehensive epic of Humanity, a “monomyth” of all the myths, the “Words” by which Man has ordered his experience and therein “understood” reality and realised himself as Man.’ (pp.104-05; for longer extracts, see RICORSO Library, “Major Authors”, James Joyce, infra.)

SeeMargot Norris, ed., A Companion to James Joyce’s Ulysses (NY: Bedford Books 1998), “A Critical History”: ‘S. L. Goldberg’s 1961 The Classical Temper [...; &c.] answered [F. R.] Leavis most directly by elevating the novel to a high moral plane on the basis of the “classical temper” of its humanistic objectivity. [q.p.]

S. L. Goldberg, The Classical Temper (1961) - cont.: ‘And despite the enthusiastic assertions of its admirers, the questions it prompts the ordinary reader to ask remain, I believe, still the most important – questions concerned less with its verbal “meaning” or its machinery than with its value; why Joyce ever undertook it, why it seems so laborious and, more particularly, so unrewarding to read through.’ (p.103.

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Alice Curtayne, The Irish Story: A Survey of Irish History and Culture (Dublin: Clonmore & Reynolds 1962) [following a brief review of the revival]: ‘Even this faint adumbration conveys some idea of the lively intellectual atmosphere of the Irish capital in the first quarter of the twentieth century. It emphasises the strangeness of James Joyce’s uncompromising aloofness. Of all our literary geniuses who, in one sense, escape integration with the country of their origin, Joyce is unique. His coldly critical attitude to the very atmosphere that produced him is told in his own words: “This race and this country and this life produced me. I shall express myself as I am.... My ancestors threw off their language and took another. They allowed a handful of foreigners to subject them. Do you fancy I am going to pay in my own life and person debts they made? I’d see you damned first. ... When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.” / But it was a flight that only anchored him more securely to the place he had forsaken. He lived all his effective writing years in Paris, Trieste and Zurich, but nothing of them appears in his books. His background remained forever Dublin. His first and last love was Anna Livia, or “the city founded by the Vikings at the mouth of a river.” ... There is a story of someone meeting him abroad, saying to him: “Jim, when are you coming back to us?” to whom he gave the entirely truthful answer, “I have never left you.”’

Alice Curtayne, The Irish Story: A Survey of Irish History and Culture (1962) - cont. [new para]: ‘His flight from the spirit of his country had an even stranger sequence. Since his only theme was himself and his only formation the Irish Catholic one, the Faith is in every line of his writing. He could no more shed that conditioning than he could shed his own skin. One of his sisters said, “Poor Jim was obsessed with religion. He could never get away from it.” Even when presented in his writing under the disguise of blasphemy and obscenity, it is still there. The unforeseen [158] result is that for a growing number of intellectuals, their first glimpse of the Faith is in Joyce. Thomas Merton is a typical example. On his way into the Church, he read Ulysses four times, fascinated by what he found in that overwhelmingly successful book.’ [ Cont.]

Alice Curtayne, The Irish Story: A Survey of Irish History and Culture (1962) - cont. [same para]: ‘Joyce was the originator of a new vehicle of expression, a new school of letters that took the literary world by storm. He turned prose inside out and took the stuffing out of the King’s English with all the audacity of an Irish rebel. Ulysses is, too, a valuable period piece. The seedy Dublin of Joyce’s youth before the 1916Rising lives forever in its pages: life at the Viceregal Lodge; the Lord Lieutenant proceeding through the city in ceremonial state; the red-coated soldiers with their canes, strolling the streets; the shocking slums that form a sort of vision of hell in the centre of the book; the masses of the underprivileged and underpaid, dividing their scant earnings between the pawnshop and the pub; the streets of brothels. It cannot be claimed even today that the slums have been completely eradicated; to get rid of the legacy was a big job. The housing schemes undertaken by the native Government have to date almost jeopardized the national economy. But it is true to say that Joyce’s Dublin is now largely a vanished world.’ (pp.158-59.)

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Niall Montgomery, ‘Proust and Joyce’ (The Dubliner, July-Aug. 1962, pp.11-22): “Joyce, Proust and ‘Social Problems’” [Sub-heading]: ‘There are also certain formal comparisons to be made between the two people; there are certain negative comparisons to be made, for instance, people think of them, even as great a man as Mr. Edmund Wilson, whom I must mention again, talks about Joyce as though he were indignant about the social order and were anxious to reform it and anxious to unveil the injustices behind the social structure. I don’t think any of that applies to either of them. Joyce, on one occasion, swore to somebody that there was no vestige of morality in any of his books. There’s an odd contrast there too, the very moral bourgeois Joyce and his books, and, possibly, the immoral Proust and the highly sanctified and holy books that he wrote, but another comparison that can be made between the two, on the negative side, is that they have been accused of being pornographic writers. Of course that is quite ridiculous, and, although I say quite ridiculous, I myself [20] must say that I find both of them very shocking. I find Night-town shocking each time I read it. I find the meditations of Molly Bloom quite horrifying. When I first heard the grunting of the Baron de Charlus in Proust I had to close the book. But then this business of shocking has nothing to do with pornography. When I open my post in the morning and I find my bank manager openly using the word overdraft, I find that horrifying too. In making comparisons, formal comparisons between Proust and Joyee, one is tempted to say, that each depicted the civilisation of which he was a product. Such a statement would, I’m sure, cause their ghosts to shriek with rage; and yet there’s an amusing way in which it’s true - Joyce as a representative of the narrow puritan civilisation of Ireland and Proust representative say of the full flowering of French civilisation.’ (pp.20-21.) [See further under Montgomery,Quotations, infra].

Niall Montgomery, ‘A Context for Mr. Joyce’s Work’, in The Celtic Master, ed. Maurice Harmon, Dolmen Press 1969, pp.9-15: ‘In 1922 we had reached a nadir in our cultural life. Mr. Yeats had not yet discovered the godlike persona of the great W. B. Yeats. Our typical cultural expression would have been the Celtic Twilight, that Irish Revival which was, in effect, an overseas affiliation of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood - with slightly funnier hats. In that context and in those circumstances, the publication in Paris of Ulysses seemed to be everything that was most exotic, most unrelated to our lower middle-class life in Ireland, and it has to be said that, since that date, we Irish, on the one hand, and the more intellectual followers of Mr. Joyce on the other, have been at pains to stress not the resemblances but the differences. [...] for a person of my generation and class, it is difficult to read the speech of the old men in Ulysses, to appreciate the verisimilitude of those speech rhythms and sentiments without emotion. So then, Ulysses, is illuminated my Ireland and the corollary is magnificently true. / [...] he expressed our lives, he expressed the culture of Ireland, he made the Irish Literary Revival look like a lot of old rope. His was the exposition, the true expression of the life of the Irish in the early twentieth century and his work is very much part of our cultural heritage, very much part of our richness and our treasures.’ [...; 11] (Cont.)

Niall Montgomery, ‘A Context for Mr. Joyce’s Work’, in The Celtic Master, ed. Harmon (1969) - cont.: ‘For a reader over the age of seven, the Joycean obsession with form and symbol is distressing, but there is nothing one can do about it, and one of the fine things about the artist is that, alone in this world, he is not amenable to the feedback from market research.’ [Speaks of Budgen’s assurance that Joyce’s art shares formal preoccupations with The Book of Kells.] ‘Typically, Mr. Joyce, in his works reverses these proceses. In his early books he appears to be concerned with humanity ... When we get to Finnegans Wake, of course, we are back into the world of magic, the world of abstractions, the world of geometry. [...; 12]’. ‘It is simply that he has decided to change the form of the novel: the fabulous artificer and his fabulous artifice had now become more important to humanity [...] The great continental writers had been concerned with mature civilisations, in which the human spirit had been liberated for centuries. Joyce was writing about lower middle-class people in the Dubln of the early twentieth century. This is not a political meeting, and I shall end my talk by simply saying that the great achievement of England in Ireland was to abstract, to extract, rom the Celt his fiery spirit and to substitute therefor [sic] the low Gothic, nonconformist conscience, so that when we emerged into partial liberty in 1922, what emerged was nation of zombies, predominantly male, with some few males arbitrarily labelled female. [13; see further under Montgomery, infra, and longer extracts in RICORSO Library, “Criticism”, Major Authors, Joyce, infra.]

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James Liddy, Esau, My Kingdom for a Drink: Homage to James Joyce on his LXXX Birthday (Dolmen 1962): “You, James Augustine Joyce, of great and immeasurable constancy of soul, sailing between the Scylla of musty Protestant Ireland, Lyster, Best, Eglington, and the Charybdis of the neighbourly jealousy of your compatriot, Buck Mulligan, how much you speak for us. You, the greatest son of Catholic Ireland in seven hundred years, how many things you were to us, how near from our bogland you flew to the sun of truth of life, how like all of us you were searching for the father, Bloom-Shakespeare, hidden in the deep bones to which we long to return. [speaks of Joyce in ‘the decaying streets of [his] childhood’; ...] Then the going to college and the finding the world you were brought up for is a farce, that the professors you hear discussed are crooks or at best [7] nonentities, that the priests surrounding you do not love their neighbour neither do they meditate but they worry about what effect they are having and what the Archbishop is thinking of their activities and how secure is the job and how long to go to a Parish. Where your mind awakens to reality, to the reality of your life now, and to the love which demands at the same time both angelic sublimation and the human tenderness of lusting.[...]’ (Cont.)

James Liddy, Esau, My Kingdom for a Drink (1962) - cont.: ‘You, Stephen-Daedalus, preparing in those streets to be an artist of all kinds and f or all times, from the cry of your youth against the mob of College gombeens and censors to your end as the apotheosis of the artist as divine figure, the ultimate artificer of the deepest strands of holy life: myth and the dream. The Wake Man of civilization worshipped now where two or three are gathered in your name whether in New York or in the mid-West or at Santa Barbara, California. You are not a sick cult, as is still whispered in your town, but the cultus of the divine figure of the artist-doctor, the doctor who is his own guinea pig, observing his own symptoms with the trained patience of a lifetime, and not only his life but everyone talking, laughing, suffering around him: society his national health list out of which he can only save a few, those who listen to his rhythms, look at his pictures, moralise his messages and endure the parable [8] of his famine, the eaten-out heart of one man in one place. [...](Cont.)

James Liddy, Esau, My Kingdom for a Drink (1962) - cont.: ‘You saw the water from the shore, greenbedabbled, and went on cleaning your weapons to scatter for ever the parishes of fat boozey men and crumbling anæmic women, your enemies. You made them all begin to die with Blazes Boylan, Mr. Deasy, Buck Mulligan, Fr. Conmee, the Citizen and all the shadows of the devil-soul of Ireland: you put them into your book and they became satirical caricatures and witches of hate. So you, James Joyce, loving us seriously all the time behind our backs like a father, caring for us as unmarried virgins who might die without kissing life, still walking our pavements from your books and showing us our hypocrisy and timeserving, you, comradeless, hoping as you wrote but telling none that we, in our green isle of only human snakes, should read your armoury of words and begin to live. In the library you, Stephen-Joyce, talk about the stupid soul of the nation, of the bum scholarship and bogus renaissance of your fledging time. With the dead musty Protestant soul of - Ireland, Lyster and Eglington [sic for Eglinton], behind the counter whispering in the scared tones of Saintsbury and Dowden and beside you the shifty soul of townland Catholic Ireland, Buck Mulligan, with its student blasphemies and its pretence of classical education: that wild Ireland [9] which settles down into the professions and makes money and gets bitter when it thinks of its youth and drinks and drinks. (For full text version, see RICORSO Library, “Authors”, via index, or direct.)

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Clive Hart, Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake (London: Faber & Faber 1962): ‘Joyce’s development as a writer was characterised by a rapid and continuous movement away from the technique that he called epiphany towards the all-inclusive art of Finnegans Wake where, instead of choosing the most typical and illuminating example of a theme, Joyce attempted to present every conceivable trope.’ (p.24.) Further: ‘There is no reason to believe that Joyce gave any credence to the ideas ascribed to Stephen Dedalus, even whilst writing A Portrait, and still less to suppose that he considered his subsequent works as answering to their sense, whilst there is ample reason to show that he was never much interested in anything but the book that he was working on at any time.’ (Ibid., p.25.)

Clive Hart (Structure and Motif, 1962) - cont. [on Finnegans Wake]: ‘Around a central section, Book II, Joyce builds two opposing cycles consisting of Books I and III. In these books there is established a pattern of correspondences of the major events of each, those in Book II occurring in reverse order and having inverse characteristics. Whereas Book I begins with a rather obvious birth (28-29) and ends with a symbolic death (215-6), Book III begins with death (403) and ends with birth (590); ‘roads’ and the meeting with the King (12.2) reappear in 111.4, the trial of 1.3-4 in 111.3, the Letter of 1.5 in 111.1, the fables of 1.6 earlier in 111.1. In his correspondence Joyce implicitly referred to this pattern.’ (pp.66-67; see also brief quotation under A. Walton Litz, supra.)

[See Hart’s discussion of the use of Edgar Quinet’s sentence from Introduction à la philosophie de l’humanité [Oeuvres Complètes, II, 1857] which Joyce quotes and several times parodies in Finnegans Wake, in Structure and Motif, 1962, p.183ff. - as cited under Notes > Edgar Quinet - infra.]

Clive Hart (Structure and Motif, 1962) - cont.: ‘Joyce was essentially an indoor man, a city dweller. All his books before Finnegan Wake are urban. Nature in the Wordsworthian sense seems to have meant little to him, and although in Finnegans Wake river and mountain, flower and tree are for the first time used as major recurrent symbols, they are little more than stylised icons which rarely develop into sensuous, living images. In A Portrait the rural setting of Clongowes Wood [185] College is barely mentioned and fulfills no important function as it might have done in, say, a Lawrence, while the more recently published pages from Stephen Hero [Marvin Malaganer, ed., A James Joyce Miscellany: Second Series (Carbondale, Ill. 1959, pp.3-8.), dealing with rural Mullingar, show how out of touch Joyce felt when he attempted to write naturalistically about events in settings outside his native city. The biographies have little to say about holidays spent away from city life, and the Letters contain very little mention of the natural world (except, of course, for the frequent allusions to the Liffey, which formed an essential part of Joyce’s urban Dublin). Mr. Frank Budgen insists that Joyce detested flowers, and indeed even the graceful periwinkle, hyacinth and and daisy of Quint’s sentence are prized more for the abstractions they embody than for their sensuous qualities. Soon after Joyce begins to rework the sentence, he transforms the flowers into a giggling group of lewd schoolgirls, and then into a variety of other rapidly mutating symbols. This is not to say that the book would be better otherwise. In too many places it is already dangerously near to a sentimentality which any softening of Joyce’s hard, stylised approach to natural objects could only tend to exaggerate.’ (p.186.)

Arthur Power, ‘Conversations with Joyce’, in James Joyce Quarterly, III, No. I (Fall 1965), pp.41-6, incls. remarks: ‘While living in Dublin I had read Dubliners, and later A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and I was intrigued to meet one of our most important authors. [...; quotes Joyce, speaking of his earlier works:] “That is the emotional aspect. There is also the intellectual attitude which dissects life instead of puffing it up with romanticism, which is a fundamental false attitude. In Ulysses I have tried to write literature out of my own experience and not out of emotion, for you cannot write well if you allow yourself to be blown around by your passions.” “I think you wrote better when you were blown around by your passions as you express it”, I said, “as for example, in the Portrait.” / “That was the book of my youth”, said Joyce, “but Ulysses is the book of my maturity. Youth is a time of torment in which we can see nothing clearly, but in Ulysses I have seen life clearly, I think, and as a whole. It has taken me half a lifetime to reach the necessary equilibrium to express it, for my youth was exceptionally painful and violent [...] “In my Mabbot Street scene I have, in my opinion, approached reality closer than anywhere else in the book (except perhaps for the last chapter) since sensation is the object heightened even to the pomit of the hallucination which is the exalted vision of the mystics [...]”.’

Richard Ellmann recounts: ‘A young Irishman named Arthur Power was brought to his table [at Bal Bullier on the night that the details and royalties of Ulysses were agreed on March 25 1921], and Joyce asked if he were [504] “a man of letters”. Power, embarrassed by the label, said he was interested. “What do you want to write?” Joyce asked. “Something on the model of the French satirists.” “You will never do it,” Joyce said decisively, “you are an Irishman and you must write in your own tradition. Borrowed styles are no good. You must write what is in your blood and not what is in your brain.” Power objected, as Joyce himself might once have done, that he was tired of nationality and wanted to be international, like all the great writers. “They were national first,” Joyce contended, “and it was the intensity of their own nationalism which made them international in the end, as in the case of Turgenev. You remember his Sportsman’s Notebook, how local it was - and yet out of that germ he became a great international writer. For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.” “But how do you feel about being Irish?”, asked Power. Joyce responded, “I regret it for the temperament it has given me.”” (Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, [rev. edn.] Oxford 1982, pp.504-05; citing Power, From an Old Waterford House, London n.d., pp.63-64, and “James Joyce - The Man” [interview with Power], in The Irish Times (30 Dec. 1944) and his own interview with Power in 1953.)

Arthur Power, Conversations with James Joyce (London: Millington 1974; NY: Harper & Row 1974): ‘One of the most interesting things about Ireland is that we are still fundamentally a medieval people.’ (p.92; for longer extracts, see under Power, infra.)

Joyce to Power: ‘In realism you are down to facts on which the world is based: that sudden reality which smashes romanticism into a pulp. What makes most people’s lives unhappy is some disappointed romanticism, some unrealizable or misconceived ideal. In fact you may say that idealism is the ruin of man, and if we lived down to fact, as primitive man had to do, we would be better off. That is what we were made for. Nature is quite unromantic. It is we who put romance into her, which is false attitude, an egotism, absurd like all egotisms. In Ulysses I tried to keep close to fact.’ (Q.p.; given on Peter Chrisp Blogspot - online; accessed 06.04.2015.)

Joyce to Power: ‘You are an Irishman and you must write in your owntradition. Borrowed styles are no good. You must write what is in your blood,and not what is in your brain. [...] For myself, I always write about Dublinbecause if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all thecities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.’ (Power, From an Old Waterford House,London n.d., p.63-64; see further citations under Joyce > Quotations - as supra.)

Arthur Power (‘James Joyce: Internationalist’, in John Ryan, ed., A Bash in the Tunnel, Clifton Books 1970): ‘Even as late as 1930 in Paris I would try to interest him in the new Free State which was in being. But no, he would obstinately cut across my conversation to ask details about some old building or shop he knew in his day . Indeed, I remember when once I was extolling the beauty of the West to him, he cut me short by repeating the supercilious, and in my opinion stupid, remark an American woman had recently made to him at a dinner. “Have you got a West?” / All this was to show his hate of provincialism, for he was determined to be the universal or, to put it more accurately, the Continental man. / It was the reason why he had originally left Ireland. For he revelled in Continental life, in the flowing in of so many diverse rivers, and in the scintillating beauty of the Paris of his time. New art, new ideas, new forms were appearing everywhere of which he, strangely enough, was a leader. Also, as a foreigner, he had no local or nationalistic attachments, and so he was freer than any. In fact, no one but himself could call him to account, so he courld follow to the full her own bent in creating the avant-garde and prophetic literature of our time, in which he used [182] words as the advanced painters used paint [...] to become in the end, as Wilde himself had said of himself, “a lord of language”.’ (p.182.) ‘Also, more practically, he was nervous as to what might happen to him or his family if he returned. [...]’ (p.185.)

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Bernard Share, ‘Downes’s cakeshop and Williams’s Jam’, in A Bash in the Tunnel: James Joyce by the Irish, ed. John Ryan (Brighton: Clifton Books 1970), pp.190-91: ‘[...] One contributor to the [1967 James Joyce International] Symposium, who confessed he was going to miss out on the conducted tour of the shrines, even went as far as to hint that he, as a scholar, would be happier when all physical vestiges of the Dublin of 16th June 1904 had been swept away. Exegesists [sic] like himself would then be left with a tabula rasa upon which to build, using cut-outs from the canon like the back panels of cereal boxes, their own Joycean Dublin. Brute facts can sometimes be a damned nuisance. / Every Summerhill boy knows that having shaken the sphagnum of the “inhospitable bog” off his feet for good and all, he never tired of wanting, in theory at least, to get stuck back into it; and that his “wild goup’s chase across the Kathartic Ocean” never really took him further than a twopenny tram-ride from the Pillar. He put into his early books, in the words of his city’s present Commissioner and Joyce scholar, Andrew Cass [John Garvin], “a motiveless malignancy against various Dubliners” as well as every other tiny detail he could beg or remember of this physical shape and feel of the place. [...]’ (Cont.)

Bernard Share, ‘Downes’s cakeshop and Williams’s Jam’, in A Bash in the Tunnel, ed. Ryan (1970) - cont.: ‘When we come to consider Joyce’s Dublin from this point of view we discover that art has taken a stranglehold on life and that nothing [190] short of the most violent academic blasphemy is likely to dislodge it. It is useless for the tourist boys to hope to interest the visiting Joyceman in the current beauties of the capital, the concrete boxes, the O’Connell Street ice-cream parlours, the parking meters. They have no need to look at Dublin: They know it from Dubliners and Ulysses, and they know that nothing can possibly change it. This is not mere fantasy, based, like bad market research, or a knock upon one academic door. Never mind what is said in the hot airlessness of a Joyce Symposium.’ (Cont.)

Bernard Share, ‘Downes’s cakeshop and Williams’s Jam’, in A Bash in the Tunnel, ed. Ryan (1970) - cont.: ‘ Share quotes William Schutte and a certain John William Corrington on the ‘the major causes of enervation in Dublin’ and the ‘corruption or frustration’ evinced by Dubliners and protests: ‘Of course it was corrupt and frustrating; of course it was suffering from “spiritual [191] paralysis”, as Robert Scholes had it in a reading of “Counterparts”, because Joyce says so. I have seen no research - though of course I am nowhere near up to date in latest developments within the industry - which has tabulated the happy, cheerful things that happened in Edwardian Dublin to happy cheerful people, nothing which really exposes Joyce’s city for the sophistic vision that it is.’ (Cont.)

Bernard Share, ‘Downes’s cakeshop and Williams’s Jam’, in A Bash in the Tunnel, ed. Ryan (1970) - cont.: ‘Andrew Cass has clearly pointed out that the reasons for Joyce’s leaving Ireland had as much to do with Joyce as with Ireland, and that when he had purged his spleen in Dubliners and Ulysses he made a belated attempt to set the record straight in Finnegan, which is more or less clearly dedicated to Ireland, con amore rather than con furore. Critics and public alike, however, have preferred to disregard this late abberation; they continue to a man to take Joyce’s earlier, bitter picture of his city as the factual and atmospheric truth, and, to judge from implicit attitudes at the Symposium, nothing has changed. [...]’ (p.199-92.) Quotes “Gas from a Burner” [‘Shite and onions ...’] and concludes: ‘Sad and ironic, but for anyone tainted with iconoclasm, great gas.’ (p.192; end.)

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Monk Gibbon, ‘The Unraised Hat’ in John Ryan, ed., A Bash in the Tunnel, Clifton Books 1970): ‘As for Joyce’s own occasional claims to strike useless fetters from the human soul, they do not ring very true. There was only one thing to which he was steadfastly and consistently loyal, and that was his own genius.’ (p.210). ‘[A] writer whose metier it became to share with us every scabrous recollection and aberration of youth’s angry consciousness.’ (Idem.) Further: ‘Joyce became the arch-enemy of all forms of genuine human aspiration, [210] reserving a little tenderness for Bloom, provided it never runs too much counter to our contempt for mankind. The effect of Ulysses on a mind like E. M. Foster’s was cataclysmic enough. One wonders what someone like Carlyle would have had to say to it. / It helped the trend of denigrating human personality and revealing the depths; and, so far from frightening our western civilisation away from those depths, there has appeared a school of writers who, it would almost seem, would like us to thing those depths typical.’ [Cont.]

Monk Gibbon, ‘The Unraised Hat’ (1970) - cont.: ‘I do not think that it would have surprised Joyce if he had been told that professor would one day dance round his work and slash themselves with knives or with their thesis.’ (p.211.) Takes issue with Joyce’s defence of Ulysses on the grounds that if the book is not fit to be read, life is not fit to live (Idem.) ‘[H]e excites in some of us a fundamental antipathy, like that of a man who cannot stop telling us about the dog-dirt on his boots. / There was more to the Irish people than that. Just as there was something irrationa in Joyce’s trivial personal superstitions so there is something in his work, disproportionate, distorted, almost a disease. Preoccupied almost exclusively with certain obsessions on which he can exercise his verbal activity and despite his brilliant intelligence, he has no ultimate comment to pass upon life [...] places beside the humanity, the universality and the sanity of Tchekov he becomes almost fin-de-siècle.’ (End; p.212.)