Germ's Choice, Shame's Voice
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS & WRITING Germ's Choice, Shame's Voice By Stanley Edgar Hyman "The only arms I allow myself to use-silence, exile, and cunning," Stephen Dedalus proclaims proudly near the end of A...
...We see him, as sponge and toady, begging support from Lady Gregory while despising her, or allowing Harriet Shaw Weaver to commission an episode in Finnegans Wake, or but-tering-up any reviewer who mentions his name...
...He explains to Ezra Pound that he did not go back to Ireland to see his father before his death because "I never dared to trust myself into the power of my enemies...
...I hope and hope you too will write me letters even madder and dirtier than mine to you...
...One thinks of Homer.'" The unloving brother creates the Stephen in Ulysses who sees his sister Dilly buying a French primer for a penny, realizes that she shares his aspirations, and understands tragically that he dare not help her: "She is drowning...
...Sean O'Casey writes to him, calling Ulysses "that great and amazing work...
...Joyce's letters relentlessly promoting and publicizing his work are the most repulsive of all in their cold and mechanical conniving ("It would be very useful to me if your correspondence with the writer did not cease...
...I wish you would smack me or flog me even...
...I began this letter so quietly and yet I must end it in my own mad fashion...
...A series of intimate letters to Nora in 1909 (the only sensational material in the new volumes) is disconcerting less for its revelation of Joyce's broad streak of the perverse than for the infantile nature of his thought and language...
...Here is a swatch of deathless prose (the dots mark a censorship by Ellmann): "I am your child as I told you and you must be severe with me, my little mother...
...She will drown me with her, eyes and hair...
...his reward is transformation into "ben Bloom Elijah" and immediate ascent to heaven "like a shot off a shovel...
...Yeats writes, when the Irish Academy is being founded, "Of course the first name that seemed essential both to Shaw and myself was your own...
...Agenbite...
...Sometimes he postures as King Lear: "Perhaps in years to come, long after my release from this world, you may learn to feel some of the pangs I have endured, and then you will appreciate the feelings of a Father who loved his children and had high ambitions for them, and spared no money when he could afford it, to educate them and make them what they should be, but who when adversity came and he could no longer gratify all those wants, was despised disrespected, jeered at, scoffed at and set at defiance...
...some of Joyce's acquaintances were so fleeting that he never learned the man's name, but Ellmann knows it and tells it...
...Not in play, dear, in earnest and on my naked flesh...
...We see him writing to Stanislaus that he is registering his entry to a newspaper puzzle contest so that he cannot be cheated out of the prize, or writing to Nora, "Are you with me, Nora, or are you secretly against me...
...I suppose you think me a filthy wretch...
...The large volume of his letters edited by Stuart Gilbert in 1957 has now been reissued with corrections, and supplemented with two additional volumes edited by Richard Ellmann to make a boxed set (Letters of James Joyce, Viking, 437, 472, 584 pp., $35.00...
...I expect some of the filthy things I wrote made you blush...
...Joyce was, as we all are, a flawed human being, but his marks of weakness, marks of woe, stand out quite vividly...
...a postcard to two of the English Players from Elsinore, reading "Greetings to the English Players from here in Elsinore...
...The most beautiful book that has come out of our country in my time...
...The hater of Dublin and Ireland becomes the author of Finnegans Wake, that Joyous love letter to "Dear Dirty Dumpling" and "the matther of Erryn...
...It is true that John himself is no prize...
...Or Joyce writes, with horrid coyness, "There is a place I would like to kiss you now, a strange place, Nora...
...WRITERS & WRITING Germ's Choice, Shame's Voice By Stanley Edgar Hyman "The only arms I allow myself to use-silence, exile, and cunning," Stephen Dedalus proclaims proudly near the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man...
...The repulsive self-publicist with streaks of paranoia becomes Bloom the lion-hearted, standing up to the Cyclops on behalf of justice, love, and the truth that "Christ was a few like me...
...As unsympathetic son, Joyce wrote so offensively to his father that John Joyce broke off the correspondence for several years...
...The ungrateful supplicant to Lady Gregory becomes the parodist author of Ulysses who has Buck Mulligan reprove Stephen for his treatment of "that old hake Gregory': "She gets you a job on the paper and then you go and slate her drivel to Jaysus...
...My task is similar in regard to Joyce...
...I would be delighted to feel my flesh tingling under your hand...
...Yeats said, in another connection, that we must choose perfection of the life or of the work...
...Save her...
...Are you offended by my horrible shameless writing, dear...
...instead of cunning, all too often, Joyce making a fool of himself...
...We can forget those deformations, Germ's Choice and Shame's Voice...
...The embarrassing language of the letters to Nora is broadened comically into the style of the "Nausicaa" chapter, accurately characterized by Joyce in a letter to Budgen as "a namby-pamby jammy marmalady, drawersy (alto l? !) style with effects of incense, mariolatry, masturbation, stewed cockles,' and so forth...
...Of most value to the reader, perhaps, are the letters that furnish sources or offer clues to the books...
...Early in his courtship, he writes to Nora, "My brothers and sisters are nothing to me.' When Herbert Gorman was writing Joyce's biography, Joyce told him that he didn't know where his sisters lived...
...Are you offended because I said I loved to look at the brown stain that comes behind on your girlish white drawers...
...Georgie's cold seems to be better...
...He can walk across the room by himself now and he has two new teeth...
...Other letters will be boring to everyone but card-carrying Joyceans (Father Conmee said that Joyce's letters home from Clongowes were "like grocer's lists"): "Today for dejeuner I had some cold ham, bread and butter, Swiss cream with sugar...
...Punish me as you like...
...The letters are primarily important as a portrait of a man, and it is an unlovely portrait...
...Do you know what I mean, Nora dear...
...I would love to be whipped by you, Nora love...
...As a hater of Ireland, Joyce writes Miss Weaver that his father cursed "his native country and all in it," as does his father's son...
...I propose to mark firmly what is ridiculous and odious in the Shelley brought to our knowledge by the new materials,' Matthew Arnold writes in a review of Dowden's Life of Shelley, "and then to show that our former beautiful and lovable Shelley nevertheless survives...
...The unsympathetic son turns into the author of the Cork episode in Portrait, that moving and perfect dramatization of the inability of like father and like son to break down the barriers of misunderstanding between them, then into the author of Finnegans Wake, that 628-page anecdote about an encounter John Joyce once had with a tramp in Phoenix Park...
...Pardon me, dear, if this is silly...
...Not on the lips, Nora...
...a card to Ettore Schmitz ("Italo Svevo") and his family, wishing them "Buon Natale" a postcard to Joyce's son George and his wife, reading, in its entirety, "Here's my hotel and my news is coming...
...The new biographical facts that emerge are of interest only to specialists, since, for the common reader, Ellmann's James Joyce (1959) is quite enough biography...
...How will you answer these letters...
...Much of the material in these volumes, however, is of little or no interest on any basis...
...A letter accusing Nora of adultery and questioning his paternity of George asks melodramatically, "How am I to drive away the face which will come now between our lips...
...Do you know where...
...Couldn't you do the Yeats touch...
...His creator and prototype, James Joyce, used a lifetime of exile, certainly, but not much silence or cunning...
...These letters show Joyce as, among other things, a sponge and toady to the rich, an unloving brother, an unsympathetic son, a perverse husband, a hater of his native land, and a repulsive self-publicist...
...James Joyce chose perfection of the work, and it is the glory of our century...
...Agenbite...
...Worse, we see him at the age of 82, posturing as the first page of Portrait: he reminds his 49-year-old son that James used to be "Babie Tuckoo" and that John used to tell him "all about the moo-cow...
...I am too...
...Ellmann has performed another of his prodigies of scholarship: footnotes translate all the letters not in English, identifying every indelicate pun in, say, an imitation of a Slovene speaking Triestine Italian...
...As unloving brother Joyce writes incessant begging letters to Stanislaus, and eventually observes, "I daresay you are tired of these letters...
...In these 1,600-odd letters we have, instead of silence, endless whining and recrimination...
...Ellmann says in his preface that about 100 "trivial communications" have been omitted, but they could not have been more trivial than some of what is gravely printed: a postcard from Nora Joyce to Frank Budgen saying "Sorry you cant come for Jim's birthday...
...Our beautiful and lovable Joyce survives in his books, where all that is ridiculous and odious is transmuted into magnificent comic and tragic art...
...The infantile perverse husband is transformed into Leopold Bloom, the magnificent comic hero of our time, and all his infantile perversities are apotheosized into the "Circe" chapter of Ulysses, one of the peaks of the world's literature...
...I wish you were strong, strong, dear, and had a big full proud bosom and big fat thighs...
...Joyce's correspondence with other writers is of more general interest, and is a remarkable record (writers being what they are) of the esteem for him among his compatriots: William Butler Yeats writes to him, of Portrait, "I think it is a very great book-I am absorbed in it...
...All against us...
...In other moods, it must be said, he thought Dublin beautiful and hospitable, and wished there were an Irish Club in Rome...
...Agenbite of inwit," a motif in the book, is "remorse of conscience...
...Joyce had more than a touch of paranoia...
...for dinner I had two poached eggs and Vienna bread, macaroni and milk, a cup of cocoa and a few figs...
...Home on a visit in 1909, Joyce writes to Nora, "I loathe Ireland and the Irish...
Vol. 49 • December 1966 • No. 24
