Books: Kaleidoscopic Recamera

(3 of 3)

Rheumatism combined with overwork have reduced Author Joyce to near-blindness : he wears thick spectacles, sometimes a black patch over his left eye. He cannot read without a magnifying glass. When he writes, he wears a white jacket with the arms of the City of Dublin embroidered on the breast pocket; uses a large red pencil. Friends reread his manuscript to him, which he corrects many times. His proofs, too, surfer, even to the fifth or sixth revision. Domestic, shy, Joyce rarely leaves home except for the opera or to dine at the famed Trianon Restaurant. Poor most of his life, he is now subsidized by an anonymous Englishwoman. He dresses neatly, always wears green ties, sports heavy rings on his fingers, carries an ash-plant cane which he twirls and twirls. Timid, he fears dogs and thunderstorms, likes cats; a short "beard covers the scar where a dog bit him 43 years ago. He has very small feet, of which he is proud. Well-known to newspapermen, Author Joyce has never been interviewed. (Author Djuna Barnes "interviewed" him, unbeknownst to himself, published the piece in a recent Vanity Fair.)

With his famed countryman, Poet William Butler Yeats, Joyce does not get along. When as a young man he first met Yeats, then already a famed poet, he spoke arrogantly. Said he: "We have met too late: you are too old to be influenced by me." Poet Yeats afterwards remarked: "I doubt whether that young man has enough chaos in him to create a world."

Work in Progress has been appearing serially in transition for the last two years. Author Joyce, no smoother of the path for his public, gave the transition editors only the first and third sections, one instalment of the second, supplied no key to the whole. The prevailing explanation: to out-smart literary pirates.

Other Joyce books: Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Chamber Music, Exiles (a play).

Critics. The reaction to Ulysses was immediate, decided. Said Critic (onetime U. S. now British) T. S. Eliot: "I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted and from which none of us can escape." Said Critic-Author Virginia Woolf: "Ulysses was a memorable catastrophe—immense in daring, terrific in disaster." Said U. S. Critic Henry Louis Mencken to Author Francis Scott Fitzgerald: "Why, that book is full of smut!" Says Critic Henry Seidel Canby: "Joyce is a pioneer in the technique of the stream-of-consciousness novel, and very influential. His books, however, lack the control of a great artist." Says Editor Ellery Sedgwick (Atlantic Monthly)'. "In Ulysses Joyce made an original contribution to tragic literature, highly stimulating to conscious writers of subconscious fiction." Controversy still rages about whether or not Ulysses is really obscene. Joyce himself does not like dirty stories. A U. S. admirer chucklingly told Editor Jane Heap (of the late great Little Review) he was sending Joyce a choice collection; was advised not to send them, as Joyce would be greatly offended.