ABSTRACT
Nevertheless, transition had its place. Bright people learned what some had thought years back, that Joyce, great genius that he was, was the end of a method and of an epoch rather than the beginning. He had carried words as words to a literary end as far as they could be carried; and younger writers were released to explore new materials and newer phases of social and psychological and circumstantial quantities and qualities. So far from having said all about life, Joyce’s genius was a provincial and limited one intellectually and as regards types and phases of life. Because of this it had tremendous intensity, often too mainly introspective. His father, Dedalus, Buck Mulligan, Molly Bloom, and the newspaper and library scenes in Ulysses, saved that book from excessive-introversion in these passages, but his later Work in Progress went beyond the beyond. It was nice to hear him read it in that soothing ‘Irish-tenor,’ but to read pages of that punning, sentimental-remembering, meandering-wondering about life-death-birth, naughty jokings and flippant obscenities, was quite beyond my capacity and that of most people who knew Joyce and who ‘understood’ him. Bill Bird, I, and others would glance at any new extract and chuckle at an allusion
or a pun or a witticism here and there, but it would not carry the interest on through several pages of a book…. [pp. 247-8]
Unlike as Stein and Joyce are as regards personality, mind, outlook, and writing methods, people will group them. They are as unlike as the north pole is from the equator. Joyce knows words, their rhythms, colour, assonances, capacity to evoke, their histories, and their emotional significations. Stein fumbles and mauls them and gradually something emerges as so much mud emerges into some sort of form in the hands of a maladroit child. Stein’s wit is sluggish; Joyce’s is almost too quick, constant, and around a limited range of experience, variable. They have in common only a tendency to withdraw themselves from the horde, to make themselves precious, but that tendency is light indeed with Joyce, and would not be in him at all if it were not that his eyes do not allow him to be as gregariously free and easy as he would like to be. He is not afraid of being unmasked for he is sure of himself, and I have never known him to boast without immediately withdrawing the boast in a ‘what do we all know about it’ manner. That cannot be said of poor Gertrude. She boasts and is hurt if her listener does not boost her boast…. [p. 250]
Joyce on the other hand quite healthily admits doubts. ‘Do you think I may be on the wrong track with my Work in Progress? Miss Weaver says she finds me a mad man. Tell me frankly, McAlmon. No man can say for himself.’ That day, one of my more earnest and kindly days, I assured the gentleman that of course he was not mad, as yet, just touched enough for genius in the James Jesus Joyce manner….
