***
There used to cover the United States when I was last there a cunning advertisement that read: ‘Drink Moxie! You will not like it at first!’ It is a good advertisement to remember when it is a matter of considering the works of young men who are abused by the middle-aged and the established. And indeed I will concede that the works of wild young men are wild – and bad. But as I said last week there are badnesses that, to those who study these things, are worth a whole wilderness of virtues. Let the reader remember the worldly fates of those who – like myself, alas! – were the really model boys at school.
I may have seemed to wander a long way from the Vill Loomyare – but I have not got very far from Paris, the sober, quiet and incredibly industrious city. For I have been driven to these speculations by happening to look down the publishing list of the Three Mountains Press which consists of six works selected by my friend Mr Pound as marking the high-water mark of English literary psychology and execution of the present day – these works all having been published in Paris and being all by writers who have been profoundly influenced by the curious, indefinable, unmistakeable spirit of workmanliness that breathes in the Paris air – though not in the air of the Vill Loomyare. Mr Pound has selected three English and three American writers for publication under his aegis. I will leave out of account the three English writers: any English Critic – I mean Reviewer – would tell you that he had never heard of one of them.1 I will also leave out the Indiscretions of Mr Pound himself. Dealing as they do with family history in an American society of two decades or so ago they may, for all I know, occasion personal discomfort to the actual present reader, and if he dislikes that at first he may, and with some reason, go on disliking it. The Great American Novel of Dr William Carlos Williams – unless the reader happen to be a Great American Novelist – and the In Our Time of Mr Ernest Hemingway do not, I imagine, start with any such handicaps. Each of these works is distinguished by a singular, an almost unsurpassed, care of handling, Dr Williams in a mood of fantasia presenting you with a sort of madly whirling film in which Greater America flies over, round and through your head whilst Mr Hemingway gives you minute but hugely suggestive pictures of a great number of things he has seen whether in the days when the late war was a war of movement, or in the gardens and presence of the King of Greece, or again in the corridas of Southern Europe. Mr Hemingway stays in Paris and his work is in the hardest and tightest tradition of the French, inspired with a nervous assiduity that is the American contribution to the literary forms of today. Dr Carlos Williams is a practising physician in the United States who dashes now and again through Paris on his way somewhere. So, if the American reader will pardon the gaucheness of a phrase that I cannot think how otherwise to put, his work is more European. For whereas French work on the whole retains the aspect of hard chiselling that distinguished even their most impressionist writers, Europe around Paris has developed Impressionism almost to its logical ends, so that to read Dr Williams is to be overwhelmed by the bewildering remembrances that, with their blurred edges, are all that remain to us of life today. To read Mr Hemingway is to be presented with a series of – often enough very cruel – experiences of your own that will in turn be dissolved into your own filmy remembrances. Dr Williams, in short, presents you with a pre-digested pabulum of life, Mr Hemingway with the raw material. These are the two main literary trends of today and each of these writers in these several ways is singularly skilful. I daresay both of them might distress a quite lay reader, for that is a branch of diagnosis in which I am singularly inexpert.
***
Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine, 24 February 1924, 3.
***
And masterpiece or no masterpiece the French literary stream pursues its way, engrossed and uninterrupted. The masterpieces may be there or they may not; if they are they are as like as not ignored. But the general level is amazing. I have lately had the luck to have to pass some days in quinined retirement and so to do some reading! And during those three days I have read three French books of varying literary calibre, but coming my way almost by hazard and not one of them ignoble. You would have to find a month of Sundays before you could find a chance three of our books of which the same could be said. The French are said to be insular, to ignore the outside world. One of these books – Oxford et Margaret by Jean Fayard – which I take to be the work of a very young man concerns itself solely with Great Britain; another, A la Dérive, by Philippe Soupault, very largely with Australia; the third, Lewis et Irene, by Paul Morand, flits around the world from the Levant to the Strand as deviously as it flits around its cosmopolitan characters. From the literary point of view M. Fayard’s book is the least satisfactory of the three; it is relatively formless and abounds in the author’s comments which we were taught to regard as taking away from the vividness of the depiction. Nevertheless its insight into the life of the devious, divagating thing that is the British young soul of today is amazing. To read it is like listening, as from time to time one is privileged to do, to the long, long talks of the Young Things of a Britain profoundly under the influence of Dostoevsky; so under the influence of Dostoevsky that the adolescent British mind seems to drift without any tangible aim, conception of a Cosmos or guiding spirit. So, at last you see us as we are, almost as talkative today as were the Russians before the war – and almost as fusionless!
Thus M. Fayard’s work has a real sociological value. From it the seer into international futurities might learn a great deal as to the future. For young Oxford, aimless and drifting as it is, will give us the men and women that tomorrow will mould our Imperial destinies. And so nicely balanced and tight a place is the world of today that the moulding of our Imperial destinies must enormously influence the destiny of every soul in the world.
M. Morand, on the other hand, views the world from the more unconcerned – and more indulgent – armchair of the diplomatist who has travelled, who knows where and seen who knows what. He concerns himself very little with ethics, with frames of crowd minds and the last thing that can have influenced his world must have been any book of Dostoevsky’s. The aimlessness of his cosmopolitans is the aimlessness of the entirely disillusioned and his handling of his immense problem – which is actually: What will happen when Woman, as she now does, enters the Temple and takes her place among the moneychangers – this immense problem is handled with such disillusioned aloofness that the Problem becomes merely an individual falling out of a Prince and Princess in a Parisian Night’s Entertainment. That in itself is an achievement and the work is in a genre almost unknown amongst Anglo-Saxon publications. If you compare it with, say, Antic Hay, of Mr Aldous Huxley, a young English writer who, is apparently coming to occupy, mutatis mutandis, something of the position occupied by M. Morand in France – and for the matter of that in Anglo-Saxondom – if you make that almost impossible comparison you will see how infinitely more consummate in this literature of cynicism is the French method of which M. Morand is so admirable an exponent. It is Stendhal against Sir James Matthew Barrie, that terrible influence which together, again, with Dostoevsky, has so taken the quality of blind potency out of our British life of today. So that in M. Morand you have international passion against a tapestry of the isles of Greece and the rue St Honoré; in a working almost too slight; whereas in Mr Huxley’s book you have a drawing by a hypercultured, rather heavy-handed Englishman of good traditions, almost without atmosphere, rendering a sort of pawkily promiscuous life that is without passion or background. Both are fairy tales, at the end of the story – and the fairy tale is a species perfectly legitimate amongst the fauna of the Arts! – but M. Morand’s work is consummate, the other merely tentative.
M. Soupault, on the other hand, is a poet – and if any Frenchman’s work of today can shew influence of any English writer, M. Soupault’s A la Dérive shews the influence of the author of Lord Jim. His book on account of its sheer writing – lucid, cadenced, and tranquil – is singularly beautiful. It is indeed, on that account so beautiful that, lulled by the cadence of the words the reader rather forgets the energetic, the harsh and the sometimes even very cruel nature of the story. That is an achievement in art, since usually the writer of the ‘strong’ book seeks only to make his incidents harrowing and so fails to be an artist. The story of A la Dérive is the story of a Hamlet amongst tramps, pursuing his unknown aims from Paris to Australia and its great desert, to Singapore, all the world over to end in the Ile St Louis.
So if last week has not brought us three masterpieces of the scale of Salammbô it has at least brought us three books that one can read without feeling oneself mentally lowered by one’s company.
Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine, 2 March 1924, 3, 11.
I am frequently asked – I am indeed almost too frequently asked: ‘Do you really take pleasure in the works of all these so-called advanced writers and artists. Or…’ But at that point the interlocutor boggles, the only implication remaining open to him being: ‘Do you only do it because of a pose? Or because you are paid by a publisher? Or by Bolsheviks?’ However even the Anglo-Saxonly boorish do not get as far as that to one’s face.
The other day, however, a critic, a Frenchman and therefore a man of some intelligence and politeness, varied the form of the enquiry and asked: ‘How is it possible that you take pleasure in the work of Mr Joyce? You, a Classic?’ He did not mean that I was yet of that band of half-calf bound importances the thought of whose works casts glooms over festive occasions, but merely that he acknowledged that I endeavour to express myself with limpidity. It was nicely done! And you observe that he conceded without question the fact of my pleasure in the Advanced.
And indeed I do take that pleasure. And I am not paid to do it and to do so does not pay. Indeed I imagine that my diet of a little thin oatmeal would speedily become turtle and old port if only I would consent to deny I took that pleasure. For another question that reaches me almost every day is: ‘How is it that your books with their… and their… and their… do not sell by the tens of hundreds of thousands in the United States?’ And not infrequently the questioner will supply the answer: ‘It’s because we Americans can never really tell whether you are in earnest, and no American can stand that.’
If in turn I question the questioner it does not take long to discover that I am suspected of a want of earnestness and of the quality of uplift – if uplift be a quality! – just because I, a Classic, do profess to take pleasure in the works, say, of Mr Joyce… Now I am for the moment very much in earnest and I am about to try to explain to the Indulgent Reader why it is that I take the pleasures that I take. This would be a task of no value or importance were it not for the fact that no man, however much he may be a Classic, is very far in the end from being an homme moyen sensuel – so, if I can explain myself, it may explain to a number of my fellow-beings how they, in turn, may take that pleasure for themselves. That is the function – the sole function of a critic!
The Lay Reader – and I imagine myself to be addressing almost solely the reader who has neither practised nor made any very deep study of Literature – the Lay Reader, then, must start by remembering that, in Literature as in every other department of life, the point of view of the professional differs inevitably in certain departments from that of the layman. A charming lady, leaning delicately over the wall of a pig-sty will exclaim: ‘Oh what a darling little thing that pink lop-eared one is,’ and well it may be. But the expert pig-rearer beside her knows that that little pig is too narrow through the heart to be up to its meals, too spindly in the quarters to run to good hams, too short in the snout to grub well for its victuals – and that the lop-ears will ruin him for the show-bench. It is much the same with books.
We professionals with a passion for our art are not looking out for, we have no use at all for, the pink-piggy Peter-Pannishnesses that, charmingly bound and colouredly illustrated, shall decorate a lovely lady’s drawing-room table – any more than the professional pig-rearer attempts to produce a breed of piglings fitted, with pink bows on tail and ears, to trot after a dimity flowered skirt. We are out, really, to discover what grim uglinesses of today shall make the poetically admirable flakes of ham of next year’s breakfast table.
The parallel is almost exact. For the Lay Reader should remember that, inevitably and unchangeably, today finds horrible in literature what tomorrow finds adorable – or even merely insipid. There was for instance in my youth a writer called Rhoda Broughton who used to be considered the last outrageous thing in advanced opinions. Her heroines had latch-keys, rode in omnibuses or walked the city streets unchaperoned – I forget the other horrors.
Well, that is merely a matter of manners, not of writing but it is emblematic enough – for it is not merely the literary methods of advanced books that are always shuddered at by the conservative of any given day, it is also the depiction of manners. In their day Keats and Shelley were howled at by the Quarterlies not alone because they invented between them the poetic jargon that became the stock in trade of all Victorian poets, they were also pilloried as Atheists, Revolutionists, advocates of Adultery … as every imaginable type of suborner of the established; and as writing, for the sake of a pose of exclusiveness, incomprehensible and wicked mystifications. Exactly the same epithets were hurled a little later at Tennyson. But exactly the same. Exactly the same at Browning, Exactly the same, odd as it may seem, saluted the early works of Dickens – and to make the circle come truer, a very little later, in the Daily Telegraph, Dickens himself was clamouring for the imprisonment of the Pre-Raphaelites – and for exactly the same reasons. D.G. Rossetti, who is now considered a very mild writer for very young men, was accused of writing in an incomprehensible jargon, atheisms, obscenities, lustfulnesses, and all the rest of it. A little later the same charges of incomprehensibility and looseness of morals were made against Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure and the poetry of Mr Hardy.
When then the Reader finds today exactly – but exactly, exactly! – the same charges being made against the most prominent of the younger writers of today, what, even if he do find those younger writers a tough proposition, must he conclude? I leave the answer to the Reader. The moral however will bear a moment’s adumbration. It is, that is to say, disagreeable to adopt a position of humility towards that which one finds at first reading, incomprehensible and strange, or shocking because of its too great definiteness of outline. I am quite acquainted with the feeling. But it is worth while, the most enduring of pleasures being those that one acquires at the expense of trouble, to make several essays of the works of one or other of one’s younger contemporaries. The probability is that they will be the adored poets of tomorrow; for history whether of men or of literatures is one long tale of repetitions. Then, if one can get from their work, before tomorrow, some of the pleasure that tomorrow will almost inevitably feel, one’s gain will be great indeed.
It may, that is to say, be disagreeable to read and re-read – though I find it pleasurable enough!
And there they were too listening in as hard as they could to the solans and the sycamores and the wild geese and gannets and the auspices and all the birds of the sea, all four of them, all sighing and sobbing, and listening. They were the big four, the four master waves of Erin, all listening, four. There was old Matt Gregory and then besides old Matt there was old Marcus Lyons, the four waves, and oftentimes they used to be saying grace together right enough…
It is a lovely, sleepy cadence, if there is nothing else to it and, if you permit yourself to be choked off the enjoyment of it by the fact that you do not quite understand it or by the suspicion that there are no such birds as sycamores and auspices, you will just lose that enjoyment and gain nothing in particular.
I am driven into these speculations by being asked by my editor to explain to his readers, precisely the pleasure that I take in the work of Mr Joyce…
For myself then, the pleasure, the very great pleasure that I get from going through the sentences of Mr Joyce is that given me simply by the cadence of his prose, and I fancy that the greatest and highest enjoyment that can be got from any writing is simply that given by the cadence of the prose. This may seem a hard saying to the Reader, but if he will consider the pleasure – the definite pleasure apart from any other consideration – that he will get from the more glowing passages of, say, the English Bible, what I mean will begin to suggest itself.
In the days when the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong men shall bow themselves, and the grinders cease because they are so few, and those that look out of the windows be darkened. And the doors shall be shut in the streets when the sound of the grinding is low, and he shall rise up at the voice of the bird and all the daughters of music be brought low…
I do not know the precise significance of the passages I have underlined but I do get extreme pleasure from reading them, and so I imagine does the reader.
Or let us take again a passage in which the ‘sense’ might be almost unpleasant, since we may care nothing at all about the interior of ships and, having a great deal to do, dislike burdening our minds with matters that are of no use to me:
It was stayed like the gallery of a mine, with a row of stanchions in the middle, and cross-beams overhead, penetrating into the gloom ahead – indefinitely. And to port there loomed like the caving in of the sides, a bulky mass with a slanting outline. The whole place, with the shadows and shapes, moved all the time. The boatswain glared: the ship lurched to starboard and a great howl came from that mass that had the slant of fallen earth.
That seems to me to be supremely beautiful writing – and merely because of the cadence.
Now I must not be taken as saying that there is any kinship or resemblance between the writings of Mr Joyce, the Scriptures or the prose of Mr Conrad. All that I am saying is that immense pleasure can be obtained from letting the cadences of Mr Joyce pass through the mind.
There comes in then another factor. There is hardly any writer caring about his art who has not longed at one time or another to compose mere fantasias in words, just for the sound of them. And this is no exclusive desire of the writer, for almost all adults at one time or another and all the children that ever were born indulge in bursts of pure nonsense-speech, just to create rhythms for themselves and to have an outlet for high-spirits. And, if every one has had the desire to utter such verbal sounds most unspoiled human beings like to have communicated to them such rhythms with little, or with quite grotesque, meanings.
The liking for these qualities of pure sound through which penetrate glimmers of incongruous or grotesquely contrasted half-ideas is merely the liking for the quality of surprise and the dislike for the obvious that is at the basis of all art. It is shared by all human beings but it is perhaps more relished by us Anglo-Saxons than by other races. This you may learn from the fact of the immense popularity of purely ‘nonsense’ writers like Edward Lear of the Limericks. And how many generations since the death of Miss Edgeworth – if the writer was indeed Miss Edgeworth – have not been ravished at the sound of:
So she went into the garden to cut a cabbage leaf to make an apple-pie. And the Great She Bear put his head in at the window. ‘What, no soap?’ So he died and she very imprudently married the barber. And there were the Picaninnies and the Glubyillies and the Great Panjandrum with the little button at the top and all. And they all fell to playing the game of catch as catch can and they danced till the gunpowder ran out of the heels of their boots?
‘But,’ the Reader will exclaim, ‘surely there is no relation between the delicate foolery of Miss Edgeworth and the blasphemous pages of Ulysses.’
Nevertheless consider the cadence of: ‘And there they were too listening in as hard as they could to the solans and the sycamores and the wild geese and gannets and the auspices and all the birds of the sea,’ and you will find that your [ear?] is being pleased by a cadence that is [one?] of the universal old cadences of all, [Miss] Edgeworth having struck on the same [caden]ce decades ago.
Or for sheer incongruousness consider:
Malachias, overcome by emotion, ceased. The mystery was unveiled. Haines was the third brother. His real name was Childs. The black panther was himself the ghost of his own father. He drank drugs to obliterate. For this relief much thanks. The lonely house by the graveyard is uninhabited. No soul will live there. The spider pitches her web in the solitude. The nocturnal rat peers from his hole. A curse is on it. It is haunted. Murderer’s ground.
What is the age of the soul of man? As she hath the virtue of the chameleon to change her hue at every new approach, to be gay with the merry and mournful with the downcast, so too is her age changeable as her mood. No longer is Leopold, as he sits there, ruminating, chewing the cud of reminiscence, that staid agent of publicity and holder of a modest substance in the funds. He is young Leopold, as in a retrospective arrangement, a mirror within a mirror (hey presto!) he beholds himself.
That passage, chosen really and truly at random as Ulysses opened itself, is surely genuine and high-spirited fantasia and I take a good deal of pleasure in reading it. It is not one of the finest passages or I should take more, but its essential quality is typical enough and it very well supports my thesis.
The reader will by now be saying: ‘Well, but this fellow says nothing about what we want to hear of. There is not a single word about the obscenities, the blasphemies, the Bolshevism of which we have heard so much.’ And there is not, simply because I have been asked to explain what makes me take pleasure in the work of Mr Joyce, and I take no pleasure in obscenities, blasphemies or the propaganda of the Soviets. And indeed, of this last there is not a word in the works of Mr Joyce. There are obviously passages that, in the ordinary vernacular, would pass for obscenities and blasphemies and, if they were not necessary for the texture and construction of Ulysses I should prefer to be without them as also I should prefer to inhabit a world that had no sewers, no refuse pits, no avarice, greed, slander, hate, detritus or indigestion. And the reader who prefers to ignore the existence of these things in the world has one very simple remedy, as far as Ulysses is concerned. He can refrain from reading the book. I am not asking him to do otherwise.
Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine, 6 April 1924, 3, 11.
1 [One of them was Ford himself, whose pamphlet Women & Men appeared in the series.]