February 18, 1940

The Man Who Wrote 'Ulysses'

By HORACE REYNOLDS

JAMES JOYCE By Herbert Gorman.

n the Middle Nineteen Twenties Herbert Gorman published a short exegis of James Joyce’s work, and the skill and clarity of its analysis helped many an American reader over the difficulties of the first reading of his bootlegged "Ulysses." Now Mr. Gorman has written a full and equally clear account of James Joyce’s first fifty-seven years. For the general reader it provides a most interesting introduction to the life of one of the symbolic personalities of our time. For the student of Joyce’s work its biographical matter complements the detailed criticism of Stuart Gilbert’s "James Joyce’s Ulysses."

Some of Joyce’s passion for documentary detail has animated Mr. Gorman in the making of this book. He has filled out all the backgrounds of time and place, defined the Parnellian Dublin of 1882, post-war Paris, and the Trieste and Zurich in between them. He describes the houses Joyce lived in, the cafes he frequented, the men he met, the books he read, the plays he saw, the music he heard. Mr. Gorman revives the personalities of Joyce’s Jesuit teachers, the history and curricula of his schools and the National University. He tells us that Joyce was the son of the son of a tenor; he gives us an admirable portrait of Joyce’s father, John Stanislaus Joyce, the Simon Dedalus of "Ulysses" whom Bloom heard singing the tenor air from "Martha" in the Ormond bar. The writer’s tenor voice never changed.

Joyce’s first printed work was an attack on the anti-Parnellite, Tim Healy, written at the age of 9, of which no copy is known to exist, a Joyce item now well worth the finding. Originally "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" bore the un-Joycean title of "Stephen Hero." Joyce’s daedal hand later turned Hero into Dedalus. (Incidentally, I have seen a holograph letter signed Stephen Daedalus (sic) dated as early as 1904.) For seventeen years before "Work in Progress" was finally published, Mr. Joyce had the ultimate title in mind and confided it to his wife. She kept the secret despite much pressure from the curious.

Only such a semi-official biography could have so benefited from things that only Joyce and Mrs. Joyce and James Joyce’s brother, Stanislaus, could have communicated to Mr. Gorman. Attacks of iritis tortured Joyce for eighteen years until Ezra Pound (Parisian shades of our excellent American dentistry!) made him have his abscessed teeth out; the poor man has had no less than ten operations on his eyes. The book is a veritable Who’s Who of Joyce’s four works of fiction. It brings out Yeats’s friendliness toward Joyce: it reveals that when Joyce left Dublin for Paris in 1902 Yeats kindly met the young exile early in the morning in Euston station and later gave him some help. Mr. Gorman prints many of Joyce’s letters; such items as the two rare satiric broadsides, "The Holy Office" and "Gas From a Burner," and a version of the old Irish ballad of "Finnegan’s Wake," after which Joyce named the work which came to the halt of publication last year after being so long in progress.

In a last glance at the brown apartment house where Joyce now lives in Paris, Mr. Gorman tells us that Joyce wears a dark colored house jacket and his grandfather’s embroidered waistcoat, that he eats abstemiously, drinks only white wine of Swiss vintage, and smokes Italian Virginia cigars. Next to writing he likes to sing and dance, "a dance that is full of quaint antics, high kicks and astounding figures." Indeed, in this brief glance at Joyce en famille Mr. Gorman almost turns Buck Mulligan’s Kinch into "the good family man."

The cooperation of the subject of a biography is a great asset to a biographer. Obviously Joyce has told Mr. Gorman many things that we are glad to know about him, and Mr. Gorman has passed them on to us. A most obviously autobiographical novelist, Mr. Joyce has not shared his fellow countrymen George Moore’s and Yeats’s fondness for writing about themselves in the first person. Possibly he means never to write his memoirs to compete with his autobiographical fiction. Asked why he did not do so, he might well reply that he has already told what is significant in a form much more to his taste and hand.

Be that as it may, the aid of the subject is not an unmixed blessing to the man who writes about him. It creates a sense of obligation, which may fetter the biographer, incline him to certain slants, cause him to hurry over certain episodes, yield to certain deferences and, in the final sense, prevent him from doing his subject ultimate justice. I remember once when I asked Mr. Yeats about his father, John Butler Yeats, he replied that because his father had been alive when he wrote of him he could not do his father justice by doing him injustice. "I could not tell little things about him that would have made him clearer," he added. Joyce, the novelist, has left the clearer portrait of his father.

I feel little of the workings of such embarrassing presence and help in Mr. Gorman’s book (in his acknowledgment he thanks Mr. Joyce for "his calm unconcern for my deductions and assumptions"). Perhaps Mr. Gorman gives to the young Dublin medicals with whom Joyce cavorted in his student days less room than they deserve. They certainly provided Joyce with gobs of material, as any one who knows Dublin and Joyce’s ability to remember can vouch. Perhaps his fondness for his subject, for whom he would account on the basis of Taine’s theory of race, moment, milieu--one of the best threads in the book--disinclines him to any open probing of questions whose attempted solution requires judgment.

All this is by way of saying that Mr. Gorman very properly chooses to tell about Mr. Joyce rather than fully to present and interpret him, to describe rather than to judge him. Doubtless he thinks that already too many men have attempted to do at least the Irish writer’s work ultimate justice. He eschews all formal criticism of the work.

Mr. Gorman devotes only a few pages to "Finnegan’s Wake," except in passing to note that a certain man or place or thing connected with Joyce’s life is adumbrated in its meanderings. Without his saying it, one gets the impression that he does not believe "Finnegan’s Wake" to be, like "Ulysses," an unquestionable masterpiece. Certainly the work affirms two of Joyce’s salient qualities as a writer: conception out of disgust; and love of the logos, worship of the word. Oliver Gogarty, Joyce’s Buck Mulligan, has a fantastic theory that Joyce, suffering, like Donne, from the verbal indiscretions of his youth, would destroy the integrity of the word and so absolve himself from the sins it has been the instrument of committing. That is worthy of the Schoolman in Joyce but not the artist who believes that in the beginning was the word and in the end it shall be everlasting. Amen. Surely the artist in Joyce is stronger than the Schoolman.

Indeed, Joyce has in full measure the ruthlessness, the overriding instinct for self- preservation and self-realization, the daimonic urge which secure genius to do its archetypal work. It is this which has impelled him to borrow, accept, starve, suffer and endure criticism with calm unconcern. The war hurried Joyce’s public toward him. But think of a man who labors in hunger and drudgery for eight years on a book that no one at the time but him can have dreamed ever had a chance of open publication. Now it is read in girls’ colleges.

For reasons inherent in its matter, the first half of Mr. Gorman’s book is the most interesting. Here he presents in detail, with imagination and power, the milieu and moment out of which Joyce rose in all the high tension of passion and irony which troubles the Irish mind. Once Joyce passes the annus mirabilis which contains the best documented day in all literature, Thursday, June 16, 1904, "Bloomsday"--once Joyce has left Ireland for hood to devour it abroad, his life, against backgrounds with which he has only an accidental relation becomes a less exciting thing to read and think about. In the early days of the struggle over the publication of "Dubliners," Joyce wrote to Grant Richards, "My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country." That chapter swelled into mighty volumes, and Mr. Gorman has admirably shown how and why.

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