I have been pressed to write for the English public something about the immense book of Mr Joyce. I do not wish to do so; I do not wish to do so at all for four or five – or twenty – years, since a work of such importance cannot properly be approached without several readings and without a great deal of thought. To write, therefore, of all aspects of Ulysses, rushing into print and jotting down ideas before a hostile audience is a course of action to which I do not choose to commit myself. The same imperious correspondents as force me to write at all forward me a set of press-cuttings, the tributes of my distinguished brothers of the pen to this huge statue in the mists.
One may make a few notes, nevertheless, in token of good will and as a witness of admiration that is almost reverence for the incredible labours of this incredible genius. For indeed, holding Ulysses in one’s hand, the last thing one can do about it is to believe in it.
Let us, if you will, postulate that it is a failure – just to placate anybody that wants placating in that special way. For it does not in the least matter whether Ulysses is a success or a failure. We shall never know and the verdict will be out of our hands: it is no question of flying from London to Manchester under the hour. That we could judge. It fails then.
Other things remain. It is, for instance, obvious that the public – the lay, non-writing public of today – will not read Ulysses even in the meagre measure with which it reads anything at all, the best or the worst that is put before it. Perhaps no lay, non-writing public will ever read it even in the measure with which it reads Rabelais, Montaigne, or the Imaginary Conversations of Walter Savage Landor. (I am not comparing Mr Joyce with these writers.) That perhaps would be failure.
Or perhaps it would not. For myself, I care nothing about readers for writers. It is sufficient that the book should be there on the shelf, or the manuscript, down the years, slowly gathering the infiltrated dust of the bottom of a chest; indeed, it is enough that the words making it up should have ever been gathered together beneath a pen. Force once created is indestructible; we may let it go at that.
And yet, even though the great uninstructed public should never read Ulysses, we need not call it a failure. There are other worlds. It is, for instance, perfectly safe to say that no writer after today will be able to neglect Ulysses. Writers may dislike the book, or may be for it as enthusiastic as you will; ignore it they cannot, any more than passengers after the forties of last century could ignore the railway as a means of transit.
I have called attention in another place to the writers’ technical revolution that in Ulysses Mr Joyce initiates. The literary interest of this work, then, arises from the fact that, for the first time in literature on an extended scale, a writer has attempted to treat man as the complex creature that man – every man! – is. The novelist, poet, and playwright hitherto, and upon the whole, have contented themselves with rendering their characters on single planes. A man making a career is rendered simply in terms of that career, a woman in love as simply a woman in love, and so on. But it does not take a novelist to see that renderings of such unilateral beings are not renderings of life as we live it. Of that every human being is aware! You conduct a momentous business interview that will influence your whole future; all the while you are aware that your interlocutor has a bulbous, veined nose; that someone in the street has a drink-roughened voice and is proclaiming that someone has murdered someone; that your physical processes are continuing; that you have a headache; you have, even as a major motive, the worry that your wife is waiting for you at the railway terminus and that you may miss your train to your country home. Your mind makes a psychological analysis of the mind of your wife as she looks at the great clock in the station; you see that great clock; superimposed over the almanack behind the head of the bulbous-nosed man, you see the enormous hands jumping the minutes.
And that is a rendering of a very uncomplex moment in the life of the most commonplace of men; for many, such a scene will be further complicated by associations from melodies humming in the ear; by associations sweeping across them with scents or conveyed through the eye by the colours and forms of wainscotings…. Or merely by pictures of estates that you may buy or lands that you may travel in if the deal on which you are engaged goes through.
Of this complexity man has for long been aware, nevertheless in Anglo-Saxondom until quite lately no attempt has been made by writers to approach this problem. For that reason in Anglo-Saxondom the written arts are taken with no seriousness as guides to life. In Dago-lands it is different. There for the hundred years that have succeeded the birth of Flaubert huge, earnest works distinguished by at least mixed motives in psychological passages or consisting almost solely of psychological passages that shiver with tenuously mixed motives – such works have been the main feature of European literature, from Education sentimentale to the Frères Karamazoff.
To this literature Anglo-Saxondom, or at any rate England, has contributed nothing at all, or nothing of any importance,1 and because of that Anglo-Saxondom remains outside the comity of civilized nations. So the publication of Ulysses, success or failure, is an event singularly important. It gives us at least our chance to rank as Europeans.
No doubt we shall take it – for I do not believe that it is the Anglo-Saxon publics that are at fault in the matter of civilization. Ulysses will go on being miscalled or ignored by our official critics and will go on being officially disliked by our writers with livings to get. But the latter will have to take peeps at it so as not to let the always threatening ‘other fellow’ get ahead; and gradually across our literature there will steal the Ulyssean complexion. That, I think, will be so obvious to any student of past literature that it hardly needs elaborating. Then our publics, learning to find their ways amongst complexities, will approach at least nearer to the fountain-head. This sounds improbable. But it should be remembered that there was once a time when the works of Alfred Tennyson were hailed as incomprehensible and when Charles Dickens clamoured for the imprisonment of Holman Hunt, painter of The Light of the World, as a portrayer of the obscene!2Such strange revolutions have taken place; but they are conveniently ignored, as a rule.
I know that a thousand readers of The English Review – or is it twenty thousand? – are waiting to tell me that Mr Joyce is not Tennyson. But indeed I am aware of the fact and glad of it, since one more figure such as that must push English literature a thousand – or is it twenty thousand? – years back. And this is not to attack Tennyson!
It is to say that in matters of literature at least we have an ineffable complacency to which another such a Figure as that of the Bard of Haslemere could only immeasurably add: on the principle that ‘it is certain that my conviction gains immensely as soon as another soul can be found to’ … put it into rhyme.3 Let that be how it may, it is certain that in Mr Joyce we have at last, after one hundred and fifty-one years – I leave the date 1771 for the unriddlement of the literary learned – a writer who forms not only a bridge between the Anglo-Saxon writers and grown men,4 but a bridge between Anglo-Saxondom and the Continent of Europe.
Ulysses, then, is an ‘adult’, a European, work. That is why we fittingly call it incredible. For who, a year or so ago, would have believed it possible that any work having either characteristic would have been printed in the English language?
The question of the expression of what are called indecencies in the arts is one that sadly needs approaching with composure. I will claim to approach it with more composure than can most people. On the whole I dislike pornographic or even merely ‘frank’ writing in English – not on moral, but on purely artistic grounds, since so rare are franknesses in this language that frank words swear out of a page and frankly depicted incidents of a sexual nature destroy the proportions of a book. The reader is apt to read the book for nothing else.
On the question of whether the Young Person5 should be ‘told’ truths about sexual matters I keep a quite open mind. If she should, well and good – as long as subtle souled psychologists6 can be found at first to know and then to reveal that truth! If she shouldn’t, there are locked bookcases and Acts of Parliament such as prevent the supply of cigarettes and racing circulars to the adolescent. But it is probably impossible to keep sexual knowledge from the Young Person who is determined to obtain it. Personally, I never had a bookcase locked against me in my childhood; my father expressed to one of my school masters the mild wish that I should not be encouraged to read ‘Byron’, and naturally, as soon as I heard that I read three or four lines of Manfred. But I cannot remember a single indecent passage in any literature that I read before I was twenty, unless four lines of Milton that used to make one of my classes at school shiver with delight can be called indecent. My schoolfellows – at a great public school! – used to approach me, sometimes in bodies, I being reputed bookish, with requests that I would point out to them the ‘smutty’ passages in the Bible and Tom Jones. But I did not know these, and I remember being severely manhandled on at least one occasion by ten or a dozen older boys, because I refused. I formed even then the opinion that the appetite in humanity for sexually exciting written details was an instinct of great strength, and nothing that I have since experienced has caused me to change that opinion.
My own ‘suppressions’ – three in number – have been merely funny, and yet, reflectively considered, they are nearly as revelatory as any others.
Thus: A great many years ago an American publisher who afterwards became United States Ambassador to Great Britain,7 proposed to publish one of my works in his country. It was a novel, Tudor in tone. He sent for me one day and protested: ‘You know, we could not print this speech in the United States!’ … To indicate something of great rarity one of my characters said: ‘You will find a chaste whore as soon as that!’ I suggested mildly that he should print it: ‘You will find a chaste — as soon as that!’ But, ‘Oh!’ exclaimed that publisher diplomat, ‘we could never print the word “chaste”; it is so suggestive!’ And my book was never published in the United States.
Again: One of my colonels, formally using his powers under King’s Regs, prohibited the publication of one of my books. He was of opinion that it was obscene; besides, he thought that ‘all this printing of books’ ought to be stopped. He was a good fellow: he is dead now. My book he had not read. It was published by H.M. Ministry of Information over that officer’s head – as British Governmental propaganda, for recitation to French Tommies!
Again: Years ago I had a contract with a very respectable Liberal journal to supply once a week a critical article. Being in those days a ‘stylist’, I had inserted in my contract a clause to the effect that the paper must publish what I wrote and must publish it without the alteration of a word. I had occasion then to write of two of the characters of some novel: ‘The young man could have seduced her for the price of a box of chocolates.’
Late, late one night the editor of that journal rang me up on the telephone to beg me not to insist on his publishing those words; his readers, he said, were not so much strait-laced as particular. After I had gloated over his predicament a little I told him that he might alter the words to suit his readers.
He altered them to: ‘The young man could have taken advantage of her at small cost’!
Now I hope I may be acquitted of personal resentment if I say that that publisher-ambassador and that editor – we may leave the colonel out of it, since he was purely irresponsible, desiring to suppress all books and authors on principle – that publisher and that editor credited their respective readers with minds extremely objectionable. For the person who prefers the phrase ‘take advantage of’ to the word ‘seduce’, like the person who cannot read the word ‘chaste’ without experiencing indecent suggestions, must have the mind of a satyr. It would be better not to write, to publish, or to edit for him at all.
It is, of course, a fact that the serious artist is invariably persecuted when he trenches on matters that are open to the public handling of any pimp as long as he grins. It seems impossible to change that amiable trait in Anglo Saxon officialdom. But that is not the same thing as saying that a change would not be a good thing. Before the war, when I was less of a hermit but much more ingenuous, I used to be shocked by the fact that a great many ladies whom I respected and liked possessed copies of, and gloated as it appeared over, a volume of dream-interpretations by a writer called Freud – a volume that seemed to me to be infinitely more objectionable, in the fullest sense of the term, than Ulysses at its coarsest now seems to me. For I can hardly picture to myself the woman who will be ‘taught to be immodest’ by the novel; I could hardly in those days imagine anyone who could escape that fate when reading that – real or pseudo! – work of science. Yet I find today that the very persons who then schwaermed over Freud now advocate the harshest of martyrdoms for Mr Joyce.
That is obviously because Mr Joyce is composed, whilst Mr Freud has all the want of balance of a scientist on the track of a new theory.
Composure, in fact, is the last thing that our ruling classes will stand in anything but games; that is to say that it is permitted to you to be earnest in frivolities, whereas to be in earnest about serious matters is a sort of sin against the Holy Ghost and the Common Law. That will have to be changed – or we as a race shall have to go under. And we shall have to go under because of the quality of our minds; and the quality of our minds is what it is – because we cannot stand the composure of Mr Joyce!
I cannot help these things; but I expect to be severely censured for making the constatation. As Matthew Arnold pointed out, we were in his day the laughing-stock of the world; today we are the laughing-stock and the great danger to civilization. That is largely due to the nature of our present rulers – but only partly! Other nations have bad Governments and are yet not so universally distrusted. We are distrusted, lock, stock, and barrel, and every man jack of us because we are regarded not merely as a nation of shopkeepers, but as personally and every one of us hypocrites to boot.
Here is a passage which, I suppose, Mr Joyce risks – possibly quite justifiably, who knows? – a long sentence for writing. It comes from the very height of his Walpurgisnacht:
PRIVATE COMPTON (waves the crowd back). Fair play here. Make a b……g butcher’s shop of the……
(Massed bands blare ‘Garryowen’ and ‘God Save the King.’)
CISSY CAFFREY. They’re going to fight. For me!…
STEPHEN. The Harlot’s cry from street to street
Shall weave old Ireland’s winding-sheet
PRIVATE CARR (loosening his belt, shouts). I’ll wring the neck of any …. b……d says a word against my… … King.
BLOOM (shakes CISSY CAFFREY’s shoulders). Speak, you! Are you struck dumb? You are the link between nations and generations. Speak, woman, sacred life-giver!
CISSY CAFFREY (alarmed, seizes PRIVATE CARR’s sleeve). Amn’t I with you? Amn’t I your girl? Cissy’s your girl. (She cries) Police!.…
VOICES. Police!
DISTANT VOICES. Dublin’s burning! Dublin’s burning! On fire! On fire!
(Brimstone fires spring up. Dense clouds roll past. Heavy Gatling guns boom. Troops deploy. Gallops of hoofs. Artillery. Hoarse commands. Bells clang. Backers shout. Drunkards bawl. W……s screech. Foghorns hoot…. In strident discord peasants and townsmen of Orange and Green factions sing ‘Kick the Pope’ and ‘Daily, Daily, Sing to Mary’.)
PRIVATE CARR (with ferocious articulation). I’ll do him in, so help me…. Christ! I’ll wring the b……d ……’s ……d……g windpipe!
OLD GUMMY GRANNY (thrusts a dagger towards STEPHEN’s hand). Remove him, acushla. At 8.35 a.m. you will be in heaven and Ireland will be free. (She prays.) O good God! Take him!
BLOOM. Can’t you get him away?.…
STEPHEN. Exit Judas! Et laqueo se suspendit!
BLOOM (runs to STEPHEN). Come along with me now before worse happens. Here’s your stick….
CISSY CAFFREY (pulling PRIVATE CARR). Come on. You’re boosed. He insulted me, but I forgive him (Shouting in his ear). I forgive him for insulting me…
PRIVATE CARR (breaks loose). I’ll insult him!
(He rushes towards STEPHEN, fists outstretched, and strikes him in the face. STEPHEN totters, collapses, falls stunned. He lies prone, his face to the sky, his hat rolling to the wall. BLOOM follows and picks it up.)
That appears to have been an ordinary Dublin Night’s Entertainment; the English reader may find it disagreeable to peruse. But I do not see that the adoption of a suppressive policy towards such matters does anyone much good. I ought to say that in Mr Joyce’s pages the epithets that my more coy pen has indicated with dots are written out in full. I don’t see why they should not be: that is the English language as we have made it and as we use it – all except a very thin fringe of our More Select Classes. And that, in effect, is our civilization of today – after a hundred years of efforts at repression on the part of those with Refined Poetic Imaginations.
For that, looking at the matter with the complete impartiality, and indeed the supreme indifference, of one who breeds animals, seems to me to be the main point about the whole matter. We have for just about a hundred years had, in Anglo-Saxondom, firstly repressive tendencies in the literary pundit, and then repressive legislation; at the present moment we are a race hysterical to the point of degeneracy in the pursuit of the salacious; our theatres cannot pay their way without bedrooms on the stage; our newspapers cannot exist without divorce-court and prostitute-murder cases, and the lubricities of the Freudian idées fixes creep subterraneous – ‘creeping-rootstocks’, to use a botanical term – in the under-minds of our More Select.
The language of our whole nation, except for a tiny and disappearing class, is of an aching filthiness that would add to the agonies of the damned in hell! Those are the facts: no one who has lived with men during the last eight years will deny them.
Then, a hundred years of repression having brought us to that pass, it would seem to be better to drop repressions! The promotion of them is an excellent way of making a career – as the late Mr Comstock found it; an excellent way of extorting boodle; inflicting pain on the defenceless; of attaining to haloes whilst perusing scabrous matter. All these ambitions, God knows, are human. Whether they are commendable would seem to be a matter of doubt. That they are extremely bad for a people is obvious to the composed in spirit. For if you expel Nature with handcuffs and the Tombs, it will burst forth on Broadway in pandemonium. Mr Mencken in a Book of Prefaces presents us with evidence enough of that.
There is not very much about Mr Joyce in all this – et pour cause! Mr Joyce stands apart from this particular world of ambassador-publishers, lay and ecclesiastical editors, intelligentsia, and Comstockian orgies. To call a work that deals with city life in all its aspects ‘serene’ would probably be to use the wrong word. And yet a great deal of Ulysses is serene, and possibly, except to our Anglo-Saxon minds, even the ‘disgusting passages’ would not really prove disgusting. That is what one means when one calls Ulysses at last a European work written in English.
For indeed a book purporting to investigate and to render the whole of a human life cannot but contain ‘disgusting’ passages; we come, every one of us, into a world as the result of an action that the Church – and no doubt very properly! – declares to be mortal sin; the great proportion of the food we eat and of the food eaten by the beasts that we eat is dung; we are resolved eventually into festering masses of pollution for the delectation of worms.
And it is probably better that from time to time we should contemplate these facts, hidden though they be from the usual contemplation of urban peoples. Otherwise, when, as inevitably we must, we come up against them we are apt to become overwhelmed to an unmanly degree. As against this weakness it would probably be good to read Ulysses. But I am not prescribing the reading of Ulysses as a remedy to a sick commonwealth.
Nor indeed do I recommend Ulysses to any human being. In the matter of readers my indifference is of the deepest. It is sufficient that Ulysses, a book of profound knowledges and of profound renderings of humanity, should exist – in the most locked of bookcases. Only… my respect that goes out to the human being that will read this book without much noticing its obscenities will be absolute; and I do not know that I can much respect any human being that cannot do as much as that. But I daresay no human being desires my respect!
Let us copy out a random page from this book: this is Mr Bloom, the advertisement canvasser of a Dublin paper, coming out from Mass and, on his way to a funeral, entering a chemist’s to get a lotion made up for Mrs Bloom:
He passed, discreetly buttoning, down the aisle and out through the main door into the light. He stood a moment, unseeing, by the cold black marble bowl, while before him and behind two worshippers dipped furtive hands in the low tide of the holy water. Trams; a car of Prescott’s dyeworks; a widow in her weeds. Notice because I’m in mourning myself. He covered himself. How goes the time? Quarter past. Time enough yet. Better get that lotion made up. Where is this? Ah, yes, the last time Sweny’s in Lincoln Place. Chemists rarely move. Their green and gold beaconjars too heavy to stir. Hamilton Long’s founded in the year of the flood. Huguenot church near there. Visit some day.
He walked southwards along Westland Row. But the recipe is in the other trousers. O, and I forgot the latchkey too. Bore this funeral affair. O well poor fellow it’s not his fault. When was it I got it made up last? Wait. I changed a sovereign, I remember. First of the month it must have been or second. O he can look it up in the prescription book.
The chemist turned back page after page. Sandy shrivelled smell he seems to have. Shrunken skull. And old. Quest for the philosopher’s stone. The alchemists. Drugs age you after mental excitement. Lethargy then. Why? Reaction. A lifetime in a night. Gradually changes your character. Living all the day among herbs, ointments, disinfectants. All his alabaster lily-pots. Mortar and pestle. Aq. Dist. Fol. Laur. Te Virid. Smell almost cure you like a dentist’s door bell. Doctor whack. He ought to physic himself a bit. Electuary or emulsion. The first fellow that picked an herb to cure himself had a bit of pluck. Simples. Want to be careful. Enough stuff here to chloroform you. Test: turns blue litmus paper red. Chloroform. Overdose of laudanum. Sleeping draughts. Love philtres. Paregoric poppysup bad for cough. Clogs the pores or the phlegm. Poisons the only cure. Remedy where you least expect it. Clever of nature.
– About a fortnight ago, sir?
– Yes, Mr Bloom said.
He waited by the counter, inhaling the keen reek of drugs, the dusty dry smell of sponges and loofahs. Lot of time taken up telling your aches and pains.
– Sweet almond oil and tincture of benzoin, Mr Bloom said, and then orangeflower water….
It certainly made her skin so delicate white like wax.
– And white wax also, he said
Brings out the darkness of her eyes. Looking at me, the sheet up to her eyes, smelling herself, Spanish, when I was fixing the links in my cuffs. Those homely remedies are often the best: strawberries for the teeth: nettles and rainwater: oatmeal they say steeped in buttermilk….
That is a page of Ulysses, selected at random and exactly measured. There are in this book 732 such pages; they were written in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris during the years 1914 to 1921. The reader will say they are not exhilarating: they are not meant to be. And yet … how exhilarating they are!
English Review, 35 (December 1922), 538–48.
1 I may as well say that I am not unaware of the Tarr of Mr Wyndham Lewis; of the works of Miss Dorothy Richardson; Nocturne of Mr Swinnerton, or even of Legend by Miss Clemence Dane, each of which three last attacks one or other corner of Mr Joyce’s problem, whilst Tarr makes a shot, unrealistically, at the whole of it. I am, however, writing notes on Ulysses, not a history of a whole movement.
2 [Actually Rossetti’s Christ at the Home of his Parents; not as obscene but as blasphemous.]
3 [The quotation, a favourite of Ford’s, is a variation of Novalis’ epigram used as Conrad’s epigraph for Lord Jim: ‘It is certain my Conviction gains infinitely, the moment another soul will believe in it.’]
4 ‘I should be said to insist absurdly on the power of my own confraternity’ (that of the novelists) ‘if I were to declare that the bulk of the young people in the upper and middle classes receive their moral teaching chiefly from the novels that they read. Mothers would no doubt think of their own sweet teaching; fathers of the examples which they set; and schoolmasters of the excellence of their instructions. Happy is the country that has such mothers, fathers, and schoolmasters! But the novelist creeps in closer than the father, closer than the schoolmaster, closer almost than the mother. He is the chosen guide, the tutor whom the young pupil chooses for herself. She retires with him, suspecting no lesson… and there she is taught how she shall learn to love; how she shall receive the lover when he comes; how far she should advance to meet the joy; why she should be reticent and not throw herself at once into this new delight….’
I leave it to the reader to guess what – very great – novelist wrote that in the year 1880.
5 [Mr Podsnap in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend worries over what might bring a blush to the cheek of the ‘Young Person’.]
6 [Shelley’s phrase about Coleridge in ‘Peter Bell the Third’.]
7 [In Return to Yesterday (London, 1931), pp. 320–1, Ford retold this story, identifying the publisher as Walter H. Page.]