The Dedicated Artist

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 947, 4 October 1957, Page 15

The Dedicated Artist

LETTERS OF JAMES JOYCE, edited: by Stuart Gilbert; Faber and Faber, price 42/-.

(Reviewed by

James

Bertram

HAT manner of man was the author of Ulysses? Let him deal with some of the legends himself: "My family in Dublin believe that I enriched myself in Switzerland during the wap’ by espionage work for one or both combatants. Triestines . . . circulated the rumour, now firmly believed, that I am a cocaine victim. . . In America . . » I was an austere mixture of the Dalai Lama and Sir Rabindranath Tagore. Mr Pound described me as a dour Aberdeen. minister. . . One woman here originated the rumour that I am extremely lazy and will never do or finish anything. (I calculate that I must have spent nearly 20;000 hours in writing Ulysses.) . . . There is a further opinion that I am a crafty simulating and dissimulating Ulysses-like type, a ‘jejune jesuit,’ selfish and cynical. . . The truth probably is that I am a quite commonplace person undeserving. of so much imaginative painting." In this magnificent collection of let-ters-surely the most important publication of its kind since the Notebooks of Henry James and the Journals of Gide-we have for the first time an authentic Portrait of the Artist, at work and at home. Joyce’s position in world literature is now secure. But few can have expected to discover, behind those labyrinths of words that still astonish by their complexity and their elaborate coherence, such a simple, fallible. and immensely likeable human being. For whatever the prejudices with which we approach Joyce, these letters are completely disarming. He is far and away the best commentator on himself: and unlike his expositors, he is never pretentious. He knew from the start that he had extraordinary gifts, and was determined to make the fullest and most original use of them, despite poverty, illness and the entrenched opposi-

tion of Church, State and public morality. About his art he was not humble, but he was never arrogant, and he never ceased to try to make his intentions clear. In these letters, for example, the whole scheme of Ulysses is unfolded, to different correspondents, at almost every level of intelligence. It is clear that his greatest concern was to be understood, and the frankness and lucidity with which he supplies interpretations on request is in striking contrast to (say) the mystifications of Yeats, the academic coyness of Mr Eliot, the hieratic shrillness of Ezra Pound. And if the. artist at work is here most agreeably clarified, so too is the family man. This volume has as _ its frontispiece that incredible period photograph taken in Paris in 1924-it shows us a cocky little 20th century D’Artagnan; Mrs Joyce is drawn up like a high priestess of suburbia; a pretty daughter looks sulkily temperamental; the handsome son, wasp-waisted and killing in spats, is a Frenchified dummy. How different all these people appear when we have read these affectionate family letters: the devoted, longsuffering wife of genius; the daughter, tragically slipping into a dementia where only her father’s voice can reach her: the son, struggling to build his career as a singer, sustained by the unfailing encouragement of a true connoisseur ("I know little about literature, less about music, nothing about painting and less than nothing about sculpture; but I do know something about singing, I think"). The picture that emerges is one of a completely united family, and it is Joyce-the heretic, the enemy of society-who holds it together. Few men have suffered more for their art than Joyce: in the end he had recognition everywhere, except in his own country. His most constant patron was Harriet Shaw Weaver, and it is his regular letters to her which establish the framework of this collection. But to an extraordinary range of occasional correspondents he has, as might be expected, an inimitably lively range of tone and style. The family language > «

was Italian, and it dances along; the letters to his daughter, at the end, are the gayest and most moving of all. I shall be very surprised if the publication of this volume does not win Joyce a whole host of new readers. A great artist, it is mow clear, was also a great and lovable man. And it will no longer be possible, even for the Irish, to throw dirt on the finest national and international writer their country has produced.