Personal Pangs

COLLECTED POEMS—James Joyce—Viking ($2).

Last week U. S. booksellers might well have lined their window-displays with a border of shamrocks. Novelist-of-the-week was Liam O'Flaherty (see col. 3); and for the first time since the U. S. publication of Ulysses (1934), famed James Joyce had brought out a book.

When, in Ulysses, James Joyce succeeded in crowding pre-War Dublin piecemeal through the eye of a verbal needle, he was hailed as the largest literary giant Ireland had ever produced. Seeing a giant, however, is not necessarily believing in him: and Ulysses' gigantic size seemed, to some critics and many lay readers, to conceal a wizened point of view. Readers who are cajoled into the belief that all is big in Brobdignag will find Giant Joyce's Collected Poems an eye opener. For not only are his poems measly in number (50), they seem small potatoes—and with few eyes in them at that.

The largest parcel of the collection consists of the 36 pieces of Chamber Music, first published in 1907. In this sequence of lyrics 25-year-old Joyce gave his version of love's old sweet song. Among apple trees and amid green woods, far removed from the bleeding tarts and coal-quay whores of Ulysses' Dublin, the young lover sings the praises of his "dove," his "beautiful one"—half angel, half virgin; he finally persuades her to undo the snood ''that is the sign of maidenhood"; and ends up in the classic predicament of all lyric lovers: starkly sitting on his bottom, all alone. A genius at mimicry. Joyce succeeds in imparting a flavor of old-fashioned purity to his verses; but behind this not entirely insincere façade the reader can sense, and sometimes see, his peculiarly Irish irreverence;

What counsel has the hooded moon Put in thy heart, my shyly sweet, Of love in ancient plenilune, Glory and stars beneath his feet— A sage that is but kith and kin With the comedian Capuchin?

Joyce's post-Ulyssean prose style is composed almost entirely of dream-scrambled verbalisms (Anna Livid Plurabelle, Work in Progress) which by some are highly touted as a significant experiment, seem to others merely words in a helter-skelter retreat from significance. Joyce himself used them sparingly in Pomes Penyeach (1927), eschews them entirely in Ecce Puer (1936), his single four-quatrain poem written during the last decade. His later poems, which in general hew to the line of modern Irish minor verse, in their essential scope are no advance over his earlier pseudo-madrigals. All arise from and express similar, unimportant sensations: casual pangs felt by a sensitive nature in the clutch of existence.

All day I hear the noise of waters Making moan. Sad as the seabird is, when going Forth alone He hears the winds cry to the waters' Monotone.

Of those non-casual, nonpersonal pangs, familiar to all true poets, there is in these poems just enough of a trace to reassure readers that this giant is a human giant after all.