THE ARTIST AS CRITIC

New Zealand Listener, Volume 41, Issue 1053, 30 October 1959, Page 15

THE ARTIST AS CRITIC

THE CRITICAL WRITINGS OF JAMES JOYCE, edited by Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellman; Faber and Faber, English price 25/-. HE indefatigable Americans have ‘" gathered together another monument to the unextinguishable Irishman who wrote his best prose in English larded with Norse and Latin from exile in France. Largely juvenilia, the articles have only academic interest. Joyce as an artist was a superb critic. But Joyce as a critic writes better about politics than plays or fiction, as he finally concedes by leaving the whole miserable reviewing business alone. In the last ~

twenty years of his life there are only as many pages, largely ribald. They add nothing to the extraordinary insights of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Hero or Ulysses; nor do they preview other than flippantly the serious eccentricities of Finnegan’s Wake. The earlier essays indicate his interests, including languages, aesthetics, and Ibsen’s new drama; but they are chiefly of interest to us as examples of a developing prose style, in a man who began with. scholastic rhetoric and finished up with a style of his own. With the rhetoric went his faith and his patriotism, Joyce learnt quite early to be frightened of the big words that make us so unhappy.

Anton

Vogt