Ulysses Diary - Final Edition

 I finished Ulysses yesterday. It took three weeks in tandem with the commentary by Harry Blamires which is confirmation enough that one can give up the day job and spend time rewardingly.Like so many colossal masterpieces, it is mainly funny but a lot of other things besides. One note I made in Molly's soliloquy at the end was of,

I hate that confession when I used to go to Father Corrigan he touched me father and what harm if he did where and I said on the canal bank like a fool

It's an old joke, considering he's already done where was Moses when the lights went out by then but he does it so well. In The Times on Saturdays they get some well-known person to say that they wished they'd learnt the piano and that Fritz Lang is their favourite film-maker and they are also asked who they'd invite to dinner and they say Ghandi, David Attenborough, Dorothy Parker and Frida Kahlo but apart from not wanting anybody to dinner, I wouldn't want Joyce because I'd be so hugely out of my depth.

I was glad to see,

the infantile discharge of decomposed vegetable missiles, worth little or nothing or less than nothing

because someone once questioned whether there could be 'less than nothing' in a poem of mine (how dare they), Walking on Water,

And underneath, the grizzly, staring fish, 

suspended rigid in the glassy dark,

dreamed of nothing or even less than that. 

 

Well, if it's good enough for Joyce, it's good enough for me.

But above all else, the last section, which must be its best-known part, raised the whole thing to something better. To think there was still a fuss about D.H. Lawrence in 1963 when this had, eventually, been published in 1922 makes one wonder but it makes me wonder more about endings and how Joyce takes all he had before and goes beyond it. 

In Dubliners, he has built from slight beginnings to The Dead and then in its last pages provides the most sublime prose ever to be put on paper and, then, as Dubliners moves into the Portrait, to Ulysses and then Finnegans Wake, he keeps raising it to something more adventurous as if they were all part of an overall design. His grandstand endings only give him the starting place for what he does next.

But not everyone does that with endings. Beethoven signposts the endings of his symphonies from some way off and makes big performances out of them. Shakespeare's endings, in the plays, sometimes clear up quietly after the climax and we will see in Larkin Diary here soon, maybe tomorrow, how Larkin is adept at diminuendo finishes, having broadened out his theme not long before.

 

I can't nominate Ulysses as the greatest novel ever because I've only recently don't that for Proust and it's not even the best thing he wrote, which is The Dead, but three weeks of Ulysses did nothing to make me ever think about removing Joyce from the position of undisputed champion of prose fiction. And, much as I always feel bad about reading the letters of Larkin, Elizabeth Bishop, Mozart, Ted Hughes and I think that's all I have to confess to (and you can see how all that Catholicism can drag you down), I think if there's no other Joyce to be had than his, then we'll have them.

I found the fragment, Giacomo Joyce, upstairs. I think another look at that will provide the necessary excuse to delay the Wake and one doesn't live by Joyce alone so Balzac might be next anyway.

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Much of today was spent reading Larkin, the Collected, and I dare say this evening I'll read the uncollected that were belatedly collected in the Collected, and in between I continued to find my slow way back from a minus position towards equity on the racehorsing enterprise. I missed Vocalised winning at Bangor because I was making notes on High Windows. Although I much prefer winning by 6 lengths like With Thanks did at Catterick to the short head that Vocalised won by, it still pays out and retrieving a large deficit a little bit at a time is a long job but we may get there yet. Racetrack Wiseguy is your man in form but there's nothing doing tomorrow.

 

Come back soon for some thoughts on Larkin. I hoped there would be days like this and there are.