Desert Island Books

 For a long time now I've had in mind a feature for here called The Best Book in the House. It would have been one of those 'World Cup' sort of games in which titles would qualify for the later stages from groups like Poetry, Fiction, Biography, Music, Sport, Painting, Philosophy and even Science.

There might, very approximately, be 2000 books in the house. That's not loads but, along with the CD's, space for them is becoming an issue but I like them and rarely part with any of them. But it is assumed I have all the best books I want because if I knew about any others, I'd buy them. Signed editions by Larkin, Auden, Eliot, Rosemary Tonks and Elizabeth Bishop being beyond sensible at the prices they are.

So, to cut the game short, I stood in front of the shelves one at a time and noted down likely contenders. It's a brutal way of doing it but I can't sit down and re-read them all like a Booker Prize judge. It's a competitive game and if something isn't conspicuous enough then it probably isn't a potential winner.

What came of that was a list of 20 that didn't even have Elizabeth Bishop on it. That's how cruel the process was. But the answer hasn't been arrived at yet and there is still time for decisions and revisions that a minute will reverse. In fact, there might not be an answer as such. The closest I might get is a list of Desert Island Books. From the 20, I've put stars against 7 and been left in that awful position of having too many to fit into the standard 8 so the list could well be extended to 10. I lined up the 7 that seemed to have become the essential elements. But I'm not sure.

Not on the team photo are Proust, Camus, Hardy, Hamlet, Rosemary and the copy of Touch signed by Thom Gunn in Cambridge in 1979 because it is the artefact and its significance that matters, too. As yet there are no music books but music is at its best as music and I don't listen to books, I read them, so we will see about that.

But the 7, here lined up in all their glory, are at least among the best books I've ever read.

Dubliners didn't take much thinking about. Of all prose fiction, the outrageously both most artful and most natural. Not just The Dead but the way the other stories expand towards it. James Joyce would have been as much of a hero if that was all he had written. Possibly even more so given my preference for not over-producing.

Religion doesn't feature much in my life. One has to respect that of others while finding it absurd. Jesus Christ had more impact on the world than anybody since, though, and the CofE Conservative, A.N. Wilson, is the ultimate scholar in explaining who he was, in Jesus.

Another life I've taken some interest in is Shakespeare's and it makes one wonder quite high-powered married life can be when Andrew and Katherine Duncan-Jones were husband and wife for many years. Her Ungentle Shakespeare is readily the choice on Shakespeare biography in a wide but often dubious field.

Naturally, the Collected Larkin, I don't mind which. Poetry made sensible, perhaps more than it ever had been before, and the better for it.

Dr. Johnson's Selected Essays. Why. To tell you that, sir, would be no more necessary than to tell you why you breathe. It brings life to you and sustains it.

Not Donne's poems, spectacular though they are but a choice of books about him and them in which John Carey and others are deeply impressive but I enjoyed John Stubbs the most, as I remember.

That's a similar sort of tight choice as when there can't be room for more than one book about C17th Dutch painting but one is overrun with options. So, it isn't Andrew Graham-Dixon's Vermeer or Laura Cumming's Thunderclap. It's not the Vermeer because there's more to it than that and it's not quite Laura because, like Benjamin Moser, she brings herself, and her father into the story. I was enchanted by all three books, almost as much as by the art they take as their premise but Benjamin nicked it by making me wish I lived in Utrecht and so The Upside-Down World it is.

 

It might be best to leave it at this 7 that have seemingly selected themselves rather than not be able to decide on one more and so extend it to 10, then why not 20, 50 or 100. The carnage of any selection process is horrific. What I'd like as the next choice, as ever, is a remedy for the compulsion to want to make lists.

The Portrait Gallery

 Two separate deliveries this afternoon brought firstly the Charles King Every Valley book on Messiah and the frames for the new portrait gallery.

It went well to begin with, the pictures are great and fit the A3 frames perfectly as A3 pictures should. Oh, yes, here I was expertly curating the library I live in to further effect, I thought. I had thought it all out, too, to ensure a disaster-free installation. In particular, having found a serviceable frame for the Hammershøi print in the front room several years ago, the ensuing battle to fix it intact onto the wall provided a sequence that made Eric Sykes and Tommy Cooper in The Plank look like consummate professionals.

The first great length I went to to ensure the highest exhibition standards applied to my gallery, I measured the distance to the floor from the nail on which Shostakovich now hangs so that Joyce would be level with him. It's hard to believe I took such a precaution but once I've reverted to haplessness I see it through determinedly. I had soon bent three pins knocking them into the wall having sought out the proper pin for the job well in advance when things had been going well.

Being a mindful curator, Joyce is directly above the shelf of his books. Shostakovich was selected to go next to him on account of being C20th. On the other side it hardly seemed to matter anymore that the pictures should be level. In fact it's probably best that they aren't - to make it look like asymmetry was the idea. So Handel takes the place of a small picture from Szentendre, just up the Rhine from Budapest, while Shostakovich replaces a Gwen John print. Mercifully the other wall is softer and the pin went in easily and Josquin des Prez goes where had been a picture of Glasgow by Avril Paton. If the British Museum has 99% of its artefacts in storage I won't feel so bad that those items that have been up for a long time are given a rest.

It might be that this haphazard picture hanging becomes the way they are, like lines left in a poem pro tem before going back to them gradually solidify into the finished version. At first they are a tribute to my practical hopelessness and a reminder why Mr. Next Door does any such job that needs doing properly but I could hardly ask him to do anything as straightforward as that. Such a reminder seen every day might get on my nerves, though. I'll have to see how it goes. They are such great pictures it's hard to spoil them but if anybody can, I can.

Top 6 - Fiction Writers

 The Hardy Project proceeds at some pace. He is such a pleasure to read. A Pair of Blue Eyes is so far at least as much as any other but both that and the Thomas Hardy Novels Ranked, which thus involves a TOP 6, will come later. I don't think I've done Novelists as a category before and although this is prompted by reading the remainder of him it is not so that he can be included because he always would have been since circa 1975.

While I'm very clear about my Top 6 Poets, I'm much less so about prose fiction which is what we must call it here because the paragon example's best work is not a novel. 

It's been proclaimed more than once in this place that Dubliners is the finest prose fiction in the language - for its idiom, for its themes and tones and understatement. James Joyce must be first on the teamsheet on account of that, and the Portrait, his devotion to his art and for being so impossibly himself rather than on account of where his outlandish invention took him later. I wish it hadn't, in one way, but he put the novel out of reach once and for all with the Wake and maybe allowed others to grope their way back from it to sanity. I've been informed in recent years that Dubliners, or maybe just The Dead, is 'sentimental'. Well, if so, so be it.

Thomas Hardy is being discussed in ongoing fashion here for the time being but I have recently credited my full conversion to literature as a way of life to being introduced to his work at school which only goes to show that education serves some purpose and isn't only something that one has to spend the rest of one's life recovering from. The stories are rich in detail and 'poetry', conceived on an immense scale and usually but not always doomed to tragedy which is what life is like and literature is worth so much less if it doesn't reflect back on life.

After which two incontrovertible selections, the six begins to become more of a scramble for places.

Albert Camus didn't apparently consider novelist as his primary activity given his politics, philosophy and role as Humphrey Bogart look-a-like but, heaven knows, L'Etranger, La Peste and La Chute are almost brutally brilliant examples of spare, uncompromised writing. At the time it might have seemed as if it was Camus who broke ranks with the Existentialist doctrine and somehow gave way but it was Sartre, wasn't it, who failed to denounce the Soviet Union and so, even if he was the more complete philosopher, he was not the better man and certainly not the better novelist. If sainthoods were awarded by an institution that was not the Catholic church, he'd be a candidate.

A work like Middlemarch was essential to the Victorian Literature course at university but probably wasted on 19 year olds which is a good reason for anybody who has a good reason to do an Eng Lit degree to get a job first and appreciate the B.A. (Hons) work later when they have more capacity to do so. My year of George Eliot was some years ago now, although belated, but I was profoundly impressed. If Dickens is more readily adapted to film, in writing he is in comparison a cartoonist. The theme in Eliot, it always seemed to me, was great potential having to compromise with what the world is like and ain't that the truth.

There are a few things that France has generally done better than England. Revolution maybe, football sometimes, philosophy one might think, wine definitely and films. Perhaps not usually poetry but probably the novel. Zola, Balzac, Flaubert, Gide, maybe Stendhal, Maupassant. I've abandoned the rule in TOP 6's that one can't mention anything outside the six. It's Proust I'm putting in, though, after being so thoroughly impressed with him as the lockdown project - all-encompassing and such a compellingly complete picture of social and emotional interaction and shortcomings. It seemed to me at the time that nobody else did it quite like him.

But there remains America, Russia, Germany, Japan and the Rest of the World, not to mention contemporary Brits. Julian Barnes is the business ahead of Graham Swift and Ian MacEwan. Katherine Mansfield, dear Virginia, George Moore, Salinger, Turgenev, Chekhov, Murakami, The Glass Bead Game and Narziss and Goldmund by Hesse, Donna Tartt, I'd better say Tolstoy. Fitzgerald, Daphne du Maurier.

On another day it might different but today it's Virginia Woolf.

New Acquisitions - the Portrait Gallery

It can be a risky business ordering prints from the internet. I've never been entirely happy with my Vermeer which is too dark and I'm not sure if the tones on my Walter Sickert are exactly right but today's delivery of my new portrait gallery are excellent, from a supplier called Nice Captain on Amazon.

The selection process is first of all dependent on who is available but the range is imaginative enough. Next, I thought Shakespeare, Bach and Mozart were a bit obvious and Larkin's not photogenic by any standards. Some of us prefer to be viewed through our work rather than what we actually look like ourselves. Quite amazingly, I have the one and only credited picture of Buxtehude on a t-shirt that is too rare and precious to ever wear so,

the elegantly disreputable James Joyce; the imperious GF Handel; the understandably worried - but heroic- Dmitri Shostakovich and somebody's drawing of Josquin's exotic headgear with him beneath it.

I'll wait until after Christmas to order frames and instal them at the other end of this room. I'd had my doubts if these were a wise purchase but I'm very pleased with them. 

 

John Burnside, and other stories.

It's not always good news one finds on the poetry-related internet. The death of John Burnside was marked by Martyn Crucefix or else it could have been a long time before I knew. He was one of the few remaining poets whose new titles were essential, one of those rare writers who could be called a 'poet' because he did more with the language than accumulate some of its constituent parts. And he was rewarded with a fair share of the major poetry prizes as well as this website's Best Poem of 2017 when I read enough new poems to have some good ones to compare.

Mistaken for a Unicorn seemed like a very special poem until I realized John Burnside conjured the same sort of semi-mystical magic on a regular basis the like of which I haven't found in any other writer. It becomes simply what he did but remains virtuoso, in a class of its own and not to be replaced.

--

At the end of Ellman's James Joyce I feel I've done as much as I can but, as in the Wake, having done it all find myself only really at the beginning of Joyce Studies. 

I was much taken by his diatribe against summer and anticipation of October although I'm happy with September. Also, of local interest, was him spending the summer of 1923 in Bognor and doing early work on the Wake there. He was visited by Eliot but, checking on when Eliot was in Bosham, maybe that was in 1917 but it adds significantly to nearby sites of literary interest. Bognor awarded the place a blue plaque.

Portsmouth is where  Dickens was born but he didn't do much else here and Conan Doyle is claimed with more justification. Not too far up country, near Petersfield, is Steep - which it is - and some very recognizable Edward Thomas country. Not far East is Warblington where the grave of Rosemary Tonks was eventually to be found and then Bosham where not only Eliot stayed for some recuperation but Dylan Thomas was there, too.

On his voyage to Italy, Keats stopped off to visit a friend at Bedhampton and a plaque in Chichester records where he began The Eve of St. Agnes. Chichester Cathedral has a book signed by John Donne and a tomb written about by Philip Larkin. I'm sure there's more than those things to know about.

--

Hindemith has proved quite a success on my turntable with the three volumes of viola music preferred in their number order if only on the basis of less being more, the solo viola being vol. 1, with piano 2 and with orchestra 3, which is not to say there isn't plenty to like about all of them. As with Shostakovich, its the right amount of dissonance not going overboard into modernist mannerism.

--

And, as an idea for a project, why not my own anthology of English poetry all gathered into a pdf. By no means any sort of educational tool or canon, just an extended favourite poems with personal notes by way of commentary. The equivalent effort at pop music stalled midway eventually but neither job needs finishing.

'The greatest literary biography of the century'

The top line on the back cover of my paperback James Joyce by Richard Ellman cites Anthony Burgess proclaiming it 'the greatest literary biography of the century'. Perhaps he thinks Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson is better for being first-hand. Paperback is not the ideal format for something as heavy, as it isn't for the three volumes of Proust, but it piles enormous amounts in. One might think it exhaustive if one wasn't aware of more detail in the letters, the biographies of Nora and Lucia but a monumental writer can only be accounted for in such a monument. It might not be essential to know that in Zurich he made the acquaintance of the great musician, Busoni, and met Lenin in a cafe they both frequented but it makes one the more aware of the six degrees of separation. And then there is a huge cast of people only now known to history for their tiny cameo parts in this story.

Never deviating far from his method of tracing the life into the books, Ellman's main theme is to show how all of Joyce's writing was one big autobiography but he provides authoritative commentary on the books as art, too. Of Dubliners, it says,

The reviews were good enough; most of them found the stories cynical or pointless or both,

which would make for a good starting point to discuss for an essay. To be able to appear so but not be makes for 'art' and 'art' was what Joyce devoted himself to, possibly to the detriment of all else in his life.

The much less-known Giacomo Joyce is revealed to be a footnote prompted by a mutual infatuation with an English language pupil, Amalia Popper - no relation to Karl, apparently, that went no further but was important enough to be considered worthy of the effort. And anybody who wonders at the archaic nature of the Joyce poems might be interested in how Joyce,

could still succumb in verse to the Swinburnian allurements of sere, pale souls and the wan waves of time

with only traces of liniguistic invention to make them Joycean.

It has always been disappointing, since finding out, that The Dead is quite so derivative - from previous literary sources, not from Nora's past. That is what Modernism did, though, and being entirely original is not a pre-requisite of art. It is The Dead and Dubliners in general that make me admire Joyce's writing to the extent that I do. To what extent one admires Joyce as a person beyond being the author of his work is another question entirely.

A Portrait of the Artist in His Own Work

In what is scheduled to be the big climax of the recent excursions into Joyce, Richard Ellman's biography is a fittingly monumental way to end. The detail, the grasp and the depth of scholarship is, well, awesome as long as the word is not reduced to that mild term of approval it has become among those who don't necessarily know what awe is.

It is 'literary biography' in the purest sense, making every available connection between the life and the work and in Joyce there's more of that than there is in most writers. Like Falstaff being Sir John Oldcastle or Margaret Peel in Lucky Jim being Monica Jones, there would appear to be few characters anywhere in Joyce that aren't made from real people, and people he knew in real life. Up to a point, I dare say that most literary fiction has an element of encoded autobiography but Joyce's work and his autobiography merge into this one thing.

There is as much to admire in Joyce, in his ideas, as there is to have reservations about in his personality but, try as I might, it's not easy to think of a major writer who seems unconditionally likeable. Maybe it is finding that balance between admiration for the work and doubts about the authors in real life that make for much of the fascination of literary biography. Joyce is quoted, at the age of about 16 or 17, as saying,

How could I write the most perfect love songs of our time if I were in love? A poet must always write about a past or future emotion, never a present one....Poetry must have a safety valve properly adjusted. A poet's job is to write tragedies, not be an actor in one.

And that is as good a guide to 'ironic distance' as one is likely to get, especially from one so young. Many writers never go beyond the 'I' of their poems, are never anything but the protagonist in their own work, never see themselves from any other perspective and are always involved in their own tragedies so that they never achieve any more than that one dimension.

At college, Joyce admired John Byrne, who became Cranly in the fiction, 

in a world of foppishness, Byrne had the courage to be plain. But it was his mnner that attracted: he moved about with the air of a man who knows all the secrets but disinclines to exercise the power he threby possesses.

I'm sure we have all seen qualities in others that we would aspire to emulate but don't achieve. If Joyce tried to be like Byrne it came across as more aloof or even disdainful, as one of his outrageous talent almost has a right to do, but it can't be expected to make one eminently likeable. Genius is only compatible with sociability if it is a genius for sociability. Those Shakespeare biographers who imagine the sympathy and humanity of the writing to have also been a feature of his character are assuming more than they should because the writer and the person-in-the-world, to manufacture a Sartrean construction, can't be so easily conflated.

The amount of work that Ellman's 744 pages of text in his 887 page book, by the end of the index, took is unthinkable and he couldn't have done it without such a compelling subject but I'm sure it's heading towards the highest echelons of great books somehow indistinguishable as 'secondary' to the life and work it describes by being as impressive as its primary sources. In some ways perhaps I wish it didn't insist on cataloguing the correspondances between the life and the work to such an extent but with Joyce that is almost the whole point, that they were inseparable. The art and the artist are two different things usually but in Joyce to isolate one from the other is like someone said taking the UK out of the European Union was, like trying to return a cake back into its original ingredients.

It will be a good couple of weeks, in both senses of the phrase, before Ellman's Joyce is finished and there are ever likely to be further thoughts about it here but it should be in its rightful place at the end of the Joyce shelf ahead of the book I've been waiting for for longer than I waited for any other - the biography of Thom Gunn. I've waited so long for that that I'm only at about 80% of the anticipation I once had for it but not having it would make all that waiting a waste of shame. There was a time when it was an ambition to live long enough to read it, if there were ever to be such a thing and so, fingers crossed, it looks like we're almost there.

He's another who had good ideas about taking the artist out of the art but then somehow found that his work was all about him. Maybe that's a trap that it's not possible to avoid. It's a paradox that Schrödinger himself might have enjoyed.   

Rosemary Tonks and James Joyce

There was another gentle prod towards linking together Rosemary Tonks and James Joyce while having another look at
The Halt During the Chase. Sophie says of Guy,

'...And the books he reads ! I wanted to understand him, so I went to the library and got hold of one of them, Ulysses by James Joyce. And I took the trouble to read it through, right down to the glug-glug-glug gog-gog-gog bits.'

So Joyce, for Rosemary, represents something - the sort of writer her protagonist's would-be boyfriend would read, something a bit out of the ordinary- and something she can reduce to absurdity in her ironic way.

Sophie, like Min in Way Out of Berkeley Square, is 30-ish and in a similar way behindhand in establishing herself, trapped to some degree at home, most tellingly,

I was really terrified of the women in Philip's set...Name any subject, and they had a brand-new set of opinions on it. Another thing: I hadn't had a miscarriage or an abortion, and that marked me down straight away...No left wing and no miscarriage? You cannot hope to become a fertility tyrant of the middle classes, and earn the right to exclude, snub and humble others, without a story about babies...

 

There is a huge difference between Rosemary's head-on satire and Joyce as a comic writer. I'm not sure how much my enjoyment, and admiration, of Joyce depends on him making me laugh but Rosemary's novels do so on a regular basis.

Neither am I convinced that there's enough to link them together to make for a proper 'compare and contrast' or where such an essay would find an audience. How tangential can a premise be and still mean anything of significance. On the other hand, if the main benefit of writing is that one enjoys doing it, nothing else matters. So we will see. It might be like the essay a friend of mine did for Prof. Norman Sherry, Graham Greene's official biographer, who told me, I could have given it 0 or I could have given it 80, so I gave it 80. I don't know if universities still work like that any more.

Rosemary's Way Out

It wasn't quite as apparent as I'd hoped that a re-read of The Way Out of Berkeley Square by Rosemary Tonks would provide enough about 'being stuck' to base a whole essay on the theme of it. There's some and it might be enough but I don't know if it will seem like too much of a contrivance. It can be very hurtful when someone as eminent as Prof. Sir Stanley Wells along with all the other accoutrements that apply to his name, and his coterie of faithful followers, pile in to discredit one's work. Stan didn't make much of a case beyond his blustering outrage eight years ago but it would be worse if somebody were to find a fault that I suspected might have actually been there.

The first move would be to compare Arabella's situation in Berkeley Square with those of the Dubliners and Stephen Dedalus in Portrait.

When father overwhelms me with domestic tasks I've often wondered whether it's because he wants me to leave home and is driving me out, or whether he wants at all costs to keep me there by giving me so much to do that I can't roam abroad.

It's there alright and much else besides and both Rosemary and Joyce are heavily reliant on autobiographical material even if Rosemary transfers her illness to Arabella's brother, Michael, who has the same name as her real life husband and is in Karachi writing poems.

Some who believe themselves to be poets can't help but reflect on the situation and Rosemary, through Michael, like Joyce through Stephen, has a very familiar dissatisfaction with it,

Until a year or two ago I loved bookshops; but as I grew up, I grew level mentally with some of the books inside them and the disappointment was very great. No philosopher, when read, seemed truly to philosophise, no erotica was really erotic; no poetry was ever poetry. 

(and there's more worth having before...)

The fact that he [Michael] can't manage without books and never stops reading doesn't alter his contemptuous attitude towards them. 'I don't like the air around here, Pigeon, but I have to breathe it because there's nothing else.' That's Michael.

And it sounds like Rosemary, too. Sometimes you find a few lines in which an already favourite writer excels even themselves and it's not quite clear whether one falls in love all over again or if it only serves to confirm what you knew already. Going even further, in the last few pages, Michael says,

that from now on he's separated forever from the English poets by his sufferings and his experience, whereas before he was separated only by his contempt.

Rosemary can try to hide behind Michael but I can see her there, not least joining those bits up with the comments in her interview in which she despaired of 'English' poets in the 1960's 'not writing passions' which one could easily think refers to Philip Larkin as per the essay due any time soon in the Larkin Society journal.

I'm not taking sides because they are both at the very top end of my list of favourite poets and Larkin could be just as disparaging about other poets and often was.

The new essay, should it ever get done, would compare and contrast the 'ways out' of the various paralyses that Rosemary, Joyce, Larkin, Hardy and others either find or fail to. It might work. I might get away with it. And if I don't, as long as I've enjoyed it it won't matter.

We might like to glorify such things as 'work' but they're not. They are pleasure.

The Most Dangerous Book

The most basic summary of James Joyce's life would cover his eye problems, his poverty, probably his devotion to his work being equalled only by his devotion to drinking and the censorship of Ulysses. Yes, yes, yes, one thinks but one needs a fuller account like that by Kevin Birmingham to appreciate the extremities of each element and how they came together to make for such an extraordinary life. To compare the biography of Ulysses to that of The Waste Land is to put a campaign of monumental heroism in the name of art and literature up against a bout of hypochondria.

It's hard to say which feature of the story is the most astonishing. The efforts of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice were determined. Certainly Ulysses pushed at boundaries far beyond those that had made Tess of the d'Ubervilles and Jude the Obscure seem shocking only a couple of decades earlier but if they thought it was filth it was a good thing they didn't read the letters between Joyce and Nora. They might have been well-intentioned but their case was flawed in as far as not being clear how anybody could be corrupted by a book they couldn't understand.

Joyce's devotion to booze makes his achievement in writing such a book all the more staggering as he was delivered home regularly barely able to stagger himself. And, the 'Oxen of the Sun' episode cost him 'a thousand hours of work' which compares with the couple of hours each Sunday afternoon one winter in which I dutifully churned out a first draft of Time After Time - 50 thousand words - in order to be able to say I'd written such a thing. That calculates to, say, 24 x 2 = 48 plus a bit of thinking and planning such as it was but it was more than enough for me to realize what hard work writing a novel is, even a very poor one.

Joyce,

was so cold in their last residential hotel that he wrote with blankets over his shoulders and a shawl wrapped around his head. He wrote whenever he wasn't bedridden with fits of pain, and he thought about writing whenever he was.

And his eysight was failing, too.

In due course there was financial and practical support from the small, committed band of sponsors and believers but his itinerant life with his family was a further burden on the creative process. It is they that are the heroes of the story as much as Joyce in a way because without them it wouldn't have happened and for once Ezra Pound is one of the good guys which is unusual for him. That is a measure of what an unlikely story it is.

After the fact, Modernism looks like an inevitable done deal but it looks like no such thing in this account of what it was like at the time. Like any revolution it came from the underground and took a lot of organizing against the odds and the combined powers of the authorities in place. Like a lot of revolutions it looks in retrospect as if it had to happen but maybe there are even more revolutions thyat need to happen but don't.

The two major revolutions in Western art, literature and music, for me at least, were Romanticism and Modernism. I wouldn't be a complete devotee of either but recognize the benefits they brought with them alongside the collateral damage. Romanticism made us all self-indulgent and Modernism required us to be highbrow. It is necessary to give some credit where it's due to Pound who was otherwise not a good man but one wonders if the Moderrnist achievement would look quite so extraordinary without Joyce who, like Picasso, showed that he could do it properly before taking it several stages beyond. Ulysses was at the giddy limit and then the Wake went where nothing has ever been since. Literature has been 'after the fact' ever since.

It is a story of heroism, if in artistic terms only. Ulysses makes no difference to the vast majority of people's lives. It's not even one of my favourite books and I'm some sort of low-level literatus, I'd like to think. Whether it was worth it depends on one's point of view but it must have been essential for Joyce or else he wouldn't have given himself to it so completely and then extended the project infinitely beyond itself. Perhaps it is through such involvement that one can find fulfilment or perhaps he was uncompromisingly selfish and the fallout from his life and work contiunes to wreck those of others. Not least the professors who devote theirs to deciphering what might otherwise be regarded as madness.

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

Firstly, absolutely hats off to Tony Blackburn for this morning's Sounds of the 60's.

Cliff, Cilla, Dusty, Petula, Miss Ross, Auntie Dionne, the Walker Brothers, Glen Campbell sings Jimmy Webb and some upstarts with one of my first ever favourite records called Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, but that came after my very first which was Doris Day and Move Over Darling. And that is what pop radio can be like when it's not made dreary by Dire Straits, Coldplay, Radiohead. It was a masterpiece of broadcasting by the very doyen of the art.

-- 

While there is nearly always something missing these days, looking for those things can result in finding other things. Like looking for the print out list with my lost, last ISBN number resulted in me finding some old cassettes and, in turn, that reminded me that quite some time ago I did buy a machine that could play such things with such things in mind. So, a 1992 R3 programme with Thom Gunn interviewed and reading poems from The Man with Night Sweats had me bathed both in nostalgia and bathwater but while that was a fine thing, it's the August Kleinzahler programmes I almost want more so the dialectic between things lost and found continues like a Trotskyite manifesto.

--

Radio 3's change of schedule throws one's sedate life into turmoil like never before.

The final, once-and-for-all sacking of Danny Baker from Radio 5 changed Saturday mornings forever. Five lost its flagship and I've not been back there much since. 

Radio 3 won't lose me by moving Composer of the Week to 4pm but I won't hear Donald MacLeod's gentle tones as often as I have been doing, especially when he's doing Buxtehude, Pergolesi or Josquin des Prez rather than Bruckner, Wagner or Korngold. For a week or two I'll think it's 9am when it's actually 9.30 and Petroc hands over to Georgia but after that it will be the new normal.

--

29 runners in six races at Fontwell on Thursday was indicative of both heavy ground and a gaff track in decline but that doesn't make it a waste of time.

I was out with my mate, who went, the night before and advised that Mr. D. Maxwell was worth avoiding on a short-priced favourite whereas Gavin Sheehan in the bumper was worth a look if he was backed so that's a 4/7 chance shot down, a 100/30 winner tipped up and a self-proclaimed Wiseguy reputation intact.

--

The Joyceana project continues most satisfyingly with Kevin Birmingham's biography of Ulysses, The World's Most Dangerous Book (Head of Zeus). 

Made so much weightier by putting the difficult birth of the seminal book, the Moderrnist revolution is shown to be much more of a plot by dissident factions than the inevitable shift in sensibility or consciousness that hindsight has since seen it as.

Ezra and his committed sponsors worked long and hard under what look now such antiquated laws and attitudes and it didn't come quite as naturally as those Blair and Boris landslides seemed to.

Joyce's life was a nightmare of impecunious itinerancy and irresponsibility but he lived for his art, he

believed that marriage was the first step toward foisting upon their children the same nightmares of history and belief that they had traveled so far to escape. It was a coercive institution of property and power, and Nora's pregnancy made that coercion clear - the couple was forced to leave three different flats.

But rolling home drunk from bars having spent money he didn't have doesn't make him seem feckless in the light of the 'Oxen of the Sun' chapter costing him a thousand hours of work. Being a writer can't always be equated with being a layabout.

--

It can be for such a small-scale writer as me but not one in pursuit of such epic achievements as Ulysses.

I had more telling revelations, though, when happening across Dawn French in her one-person show entitled Dawn French is a T***, in which the forbidden word is a bit like, but isn't, 'twit'. I didn't watch it all. I didn't need to. I'd had enough of my own 'Me, Too' epiphany after half a dozen of her shudderingly cringe-making anecdotes.

Yes, Dawn, I know. I have maybe nearly sixty years of similar, if not worse, stories stored up and they take turns in their multitude to ambush me either when triggered by something or when brooding unhealthily on bygone days.

For some reason- necessity more than anything else I dare say- I spent most of my time thinking I was okay, mostly reasonably liked well enough, getting by as best I could within a vague agenda and while clearly out of my depth in some circles, cool enough to do okay in favourable conditions.

It comes as some small compensation to know that much-loved Dawn had her share of gauche moments, too, and that she can even monetize them. It's not Impostor Syndrome. I have that by the gallon as well whereas she shouldn't have. It's being found out as being utterly dreadful.

It is further, and almost as small, compensation to be sure that others were more conspicuously dreadful much more of the time and that we are betting without Boris and his like. But, but, but Anne Stevenson's biography of Sylvia had a chapter entitled 'The Stigma of Selfhood' and that, even thirty years or so ago, made a lot of sense.

How much does one sometimes wish not to have to be oneself. It is the ultimate prison. I might have once thought I'd rather have been George Best or Alex Higgins but they didn't seem to like it much. Cliff Richard or Paul McCartney are better options but one has less chance of being born as either of them than winning the big Premium Bond and landing the ITV7 in the same week so we are stuck with it.

Without wanting to sermonize too much on this most Christian of weekends, it's all about forgiveness, isn't it, and we should hope to be forgiven our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.  

More than Fair to Middling

Samuel Beckett's Dream of Fair to middling Women has been an entirely worthwhile experience. It's probably okay to call it a bildunsroman although it might prefer not to be called anything and just be itself as is the wont of many of us.

It doesn't want to be seen as a novel in the sense of Balzac or Jane Austen with their sense of character. That is just one of the things it sets itself against as coherent 'personality' seems to break up in this sensory world. It can't really be said to have a story either but it wouldn't be the first or last novel to not have.

What it can't help but be, though, is Joycean not only as a portrait of an artist as a young man, its myriad literariness and the way in which it is a gentle introduction to the ways and means of Ulysses and the Wake. 

Quite how well it works as a whole will be for professors of Beckett to explain but there are such glorious passages of writing that it serves to revive the jaded spirit that sometimes wonders when the resources of language might become used up like other natural resources of the world.

One of the three women the 'hero', Belacqua, finds himself caught between is the Alba, described as,

Alone, unlonely, unconcerned, moored in the seethe of an element in which she had no movement and from which therefore she was not doomed to filch the daily mite that would guarantee, in a freighting and darkening of her spirit, the declension of that movement.

and we might guess at what's happening two pages later when,

it is now or never the time to sidetrack and couple those two lone birds and give them at least a chance to make a hit and bring it off, would it not be idle on our part to temporize further and hold up the happy event with the gratuitous echolalia and claptrap rhapsodies that are palmed off as passion and the high spots of  creative ecstasy...

 

So, Beckett was not always the absurd minimalist he became more famous for being, reducing theatre and writing to as little as he very meaningfully could. He had once expounded quite beautifully, while equally dismissively, and word is that had Joyce lived a bit longer he would have followed up the Wake with something reduced back to Dubliners-style plain-ness maybe because once one has explored as far as it is possible to go and searched beyond, that is all that remains.  

--

Next up, then, is a choice between the 745 pages of the Ellman Joyce biography or the story of just Ulysses that is only half as much. One can't put them off forever.

Let's Mek It Beckett

 Next off the ranks is Samuel Beckett's Dream of Fair to middling Women, still part of the ongoing JoyceFest because it features a version of Lucia. I didn't feel like taking on another vast volume like Ellman or the biography of Ulysses just yet so I eyed Beckett with some trepidation and began. 

It owes a debt to Joyce and no mistake, published in 1932 when he was 26, it comes before the Wake but he would have been aware of what was being written by his chosen mentor. It's immediately more accessible to the extent that it is comprehensible and I have high hopes of it. As the title might lead one to expect, it carries an erotic charge but its language is the sort of joy that Joyce's much heavier technique outweighs in some ways to its disadvantage,

they kept it going in a kind of way, he doing his poor best to oblige her and she hers to be obliged, in a gehenna of sweats and fiascos and tears and an absence of all douceness.

That is brilliant and it's not the only bit that is.

We may be on a winner here and a visit back upstairs to revisit the likes of Murphy and Molloy after heaven knows how long could extend the queue of books lined up.

--

We call Beckett 'Beckett', of course. We call Hardy 'Hardy', Dickens 'Dickens' and Larkin 'Larkin'. Sam, Thomas and Philip seem inappropriate. So would it be inappropriate to refer to some authors by their first names? It might seem to imply some familiarity, some casual acquaintance or even something patronising. Quite often here in book or music reviews I prefer first names if only to be friendly and not academically austere. It's different in each case. For some reason, I'd never call Paul Muldoon 'Paul' or Ms. Duffy 'Carol Ann' but, perhaps as long term favourites, Gunn is often 'Thom', O'Brien can be 'Sean' and Bishop is 'Elizabeth'. Sylvia is 'Sylvia' because she's famous enough as such, and if Dylan Thomas isn't always 'Dylan' it's in order not to confuse him with Bob.

The matter arises in regard to the essay due soon relating to Rosemary Tonks and Philip Larkin. I can see why it's not treating them on equal terms to call them 'Rosemary' and 'Larkin' but that's what I call them. I'm not 100% okay with calling Rosemary 'Tonks' but the 'house style' and academic propriety perhaps demand that I do so that's what it might have to be. Larkin is the institution that he has become and doesn't invite the informality of 'Philip' but 'Tonks' objectifies someone one has immense sympathy for and sounds too abrupt.

One of my first appearances in print, circa 1975, was in the letters page of the august Listener on that very subject. Linden Huddlestone, teacher of fourth form Eng. Lang., was a fellow subscriber and impressed that Thursday morning but word was, in a school where first names were rarely used before the sixth form, that it found little support in the staff room. Green !!! Good Lord, whatever next ??? He'll be wearing coloured socks and listening to pop music next. But, no, I wasn't. I was mis-spending my youth by taping Shostakovich String Quartets from the radio and reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

-- 

There is much to look forward to on all fronts, not the least of which is the appearance of that essay in print making me feel somehow like a bona fide contributor to Rosemary Studies. Long term there are some absolutely choice artefacts that might become mine that will be fine to have for the want of having before they are assimilated into the library and are taken for granted.

Ahead of those, though, this week's arrival of the Busoni Fantasia Contrappunstica will be the playlist until the arrival of the Brahms Viola Sonatas. Both come from the repertoires of much-admired artistes I've met as collateral benefits of my ideal retirement job as hack concert reviewer. The Busoni is somewhere up in that rarified area of his Bach Chaconne, a wonderful hybrid of the baroque and C19th indulgence. That will last until the arrival of yet more Brahms chamber music, a glorious niche, some of which is due in Portsmouth's Menuhin Room on May 11, at 12.30, and if you can get yourself there you'd be doing yourself a big favour.

Unintermittent and other stories

 Sometimes one word stands out in a sentence, in a paragraph or maybe poem. It's best if it doesn't do it so much that it distracts from  all the others too much but occasionally it works perfectly as part of the whole and one just thinks, wow.

One such word occurs in Stephen Hero when that main character is sitting in his Italian lesson, just before he sees Emma passing, out of the window, and makes his excuses to chase after her,

He followed his Italian lesson mechanically, feeling the unintermittent deadliness of the atmosphere of college in his throat and lungs, 

How well do I recall that feeling, most vividly from 'A' level History but other lessons, too. The negative construction is one of the things that Larkin took from Hardy and some of us lesser mortals have attempted since. It can work very well, the vividness of the thing that isn't there being made even more so by being heard even in its deleted condition. As in 1984, somehow 'doubleplusungood' it is mostly all good things but it is turned bad by the negative element. The 'deadliness' of the college atmosphere could have been descibed as constant but that's not as good as it not being intermittent.

 

It's hard to know how good a book Stephen Hero would be if it hadn't been modified into the Portrait. It would surely be very good but as 'art' it isn't quite as good as the final version. It's similarly hard to say how good second-rate songs by The Beatles, Stephin Merritt, Carole King, the Motown Hit Factory and all are because they are overshadowed by their better siblings but second-rate Beatles would be Tremeloes or Dave Clark Five and there's a term for second-rate Motown - Northern Soul and that is well worth having. If Stephen Hero wasn't the first draft of a James Joyce masterpiece it could have served as a very fine novel by some other inheritor of the tradition of George Moore and Turgenev.

--

While it is customary to preview Cheltenham here, I don't usually review it.

There are always good stories and there are always many of the best horses but with Mr. Henderson's horses not well and either absent or uncompetitive, a few too many odds-on chances in sometimes relatively small fields it hasn't felt completely Cheltenham throughout. It seems churlish to sound a downbeat note but only 46000 there on Wednesday suggests it might not be quite what it once was.

Tuesday could hardly have gone better for me but while it is possible to enjoy sport for its own sake - like a good test match in cricket or that distant memory of Emma Raducanu during lockdown- horse racing is a balance sheet, it's accountancy and it's the stock market. One takes part entirely to what extent one wants to and your plus or minus is your scorecard and your reason to feel good or feel bad alone. 

However, the stone cold solid Galopin Des Champs retains the Gold Cup which precious few have been able to do - the loose horse was my main concern - and so we got in and got out in one piece, possibly the price of a pint to the good. And although I have a small interest in the next two races, that hardly matters. They'd amount to one more pint and eventually one can have seen enough horse flesh for one week.

Stephen Heroic

I waited about 47 years to read this book. I simply didn't get round to it until now. Stephen Hero is less a novel than an inventory of young James Joyce's ideas, mainly on aesthetics. Portrait of the Artist is the work of art that came out of it but this is a different thing. I could see it being heavy going for anyone not interested in Joyce's ideas about writing, poetry and art but luckily that's not me.

Like Stephen Daedalus, the book is a bit too obsessed with itself. Joyce was nothing if not precocious but he's self aware enough to present his alter ego here as such. It's not easy being told you're a bright teenager because at that age one tends to believe it and there are pitfalls involved for anyone who believes their own hype. Joyce is in on the joke, though, and ironic distance is an essential part of his art.

Ever since being lucky enough to have Portrait as an 'A' level set text, Joyce has occupied a special place among prose writers for me and he has lasted the distance. Why, only a couple of weeks ago I was maundering on at a choice literary event about 'Classical' and 'Romantic' but here it is,

The romantic temper...is an insecure, unsatisfied, impatient temper which sees no fit abode here for its ideals and chooses therefore to behold them under insensible figures...

The classical temper on the other hand, ever mindful of limitations, chooses rather to bend upon these present things and so to work upon them and fashion them that the quick intelligence may go beyond them to their meaning which is still unuttered.

Hallelujah. That's not bad for a kid.

And, on taking part in life itself, Stephen replies to his mother's insistence that his father had hoped he would take up a sensible, worthy occupation with,

- No, no, no. But it may not be my ambition. That kind of life I often loathe: I find it ugly and cowardly.

 

We are always likely to prefer those sort of books that we think, or would like to think, we find ourselves reflected back to ourselves in and, even with Stephen's obvious self-regard factored in, there are few characters in literature I'd like to identify with more.

Joyce's essay differentiating the lyric, epic and dramatic is rehearsed  here in among his disdain for nationalism and catholicism and so one can't expect much more than that.

Monitoring the progress of my modest investments at Prestbury Park, Cheltenham, is preventing me from scorching through it in quite such rapid time but one can't do everything at once. I'm glad I caught up with this essential text eventually.

Lucia North North West

Whether it's letters or unauthorized biography, I'm never entirely convinced we have the right to access all areas of anybody else's inner life. Is it really any of our business. I can't help myself, though, so I'm on the lookout for an excuse. Well, I don't eat meat and I didn't vote Leave so I'm not as bad as some people.

Carol Loeb Schloss's account of Lucia Joyce has been a riveting read, though, and Lucia is by now long out of harm's way. I was hoping Lucia was 'misunderstood' rather than 'mad' but from the first hints of her difficulties, which seem to emerge from her giving up on her career in dance, she does deteriorate. I'm not going to be the judge of what 'mad' is and I have as little faith in psychiatry as I have in Economics or History which is not a great deal more than I have in Astrology or Voodoo.

One has to have sympathy for Lucia, the daughter of James whose mind was on other things and Nora whose,

erratic domesticity...thought cleaning the food cupboard with water from a chamberpot was hilarious.

Her childhood was itinerant so she spoke at least four languages, her mother was apparently jealous of her father's affection for her, her brother, Giorgio is 'futile' and unsympathetic and almost inevitably there is a lurking question of whether she suffered abuse. Joyce himself is ultimately the only one who tries to save her, not helped by his difficult relationship with Carl Jung who didn't rate his work, wanted to psychoanalyze him and, like many of his sort, saw fit to impose his ready-made theories onto his patients for his own benefit more than theirs. It would have been a more miraculous story if Lucia could have come through it all okay but she sets fire to things, attacks people, is by turns catatonic and wanting to express herself through movement.

Out of 465 pages of her story here, she is still only 31 by page 355 but 1951-1982, her time in the sanatorium in Northampton, is covered in 10 pages. In 1935, of a photograph of  Lucia in a hammock, Carol Loeb Schloss writes,

it..lets us see a poignant moment in modern history, a moment when modernism could not live with the consequences of its own creation

so perhaps it is fitting that Lucia was the muse that was behind Finnegans Wake, the book that led so many to think that Joyce had lost his mind. 

The latest Joyce reading spell is going to have to take a break after this. A week that included both Rosemary Tonks and Lucia Joyce is making me have my own doubts. Whatever 'sanity' is - and it might just be the ability to put on a brave face- it is a fragile thing and we need to try to hold on to as much of it as we can.

Recent arrivals include a very good copy of Richard Ellman's big account of Joyce and an odd copy of Beckett's Dream of Fair to Middling Women in very reasonable condition but covered in annotations. At school I thought such notes in books might be useful and a previous owner had done the homework for me by highlighting the important bits and adding salient comments but it was never so. I prefer to add in a slip of paper with pages numbers on rather than deface the text. The previous owner of this Beckett found it necessary to highlight the significance of one of the editors, Eoin O'Brien, having a name like 'Owen' and the same as the England One-Day International Cricket captain. The text is then littered with underlinings and inane comments as far as page 91 when they peter out. It doesn't look like he finished it. And I'm confident that he was a 'he'.

It seems very unfair to put Lucia away when there's prats like that about.

Clickety Click

 Click, click, clickety click goes the spend, spend, spend button. It could be worse because books are the best value entertainment there is. All one has to do is read fast enough to keep up with the rate of buying them but one thing you won't be reading here for a while is that intermittent leitmotif that says I'm wondering what to read next. It comes at a time when I've not only booked a holiday ( !!! ) but also bought a new fridge I might not have needed just yet. The power point, it would now appear, is what needs replacing, not the old fridge but in the spirit of Harry Worth and Terry and June one can see the funny side of such a misunderstanding.

The Thom Gunn biography due in summer was already on order but now one finds his old mate, Kleinzahler, has poems due in the autumn. Advance orders for those are laid down like bottles of Pauillac. It isn't strictly necessary to order the re-issues of the Rosemary Tonks novels I broke my own record to achieve in old editions but I certainly am prompted to return to Samuel Beckett after half a lifetime or more for his Dream of Fair to Middling Women in search of Lucia Joyce.

It might have been that half-lifetime ago that I read Richard Ellman's biography of Joyce if I ever did. I don't know. I have others but now, needing to expand the Joyce section of the library, I need to own a copy or else I won't feel Joycean enough.

All these things tie up, however loosely. Rosemary's mad devotion to her religion doesn't compare with Lucia's dignosed 'madness'. Joyce was vehemently not religious, which seems eminently common sense to me and then in today's Times there's a review of Heresy by Catherine Nixey due shortly extending what A.N. Wilson's book on Jesus had in it about what really happened and what a colossal misadventure Christianity was.

The problem will be in which order to read them. It's a good thing a couple of them aren't due here yet.

Friday Evening LitChat

The second half of the Occasional Joyce was as good if not better than the first. Being in chronological order that might be to be expected but it doesn't follow with the novels. It's not as if it should come as a surprise that he's a great essayist but you'd think he would be better known for them, as is George Orwell, and perhaps to the most thoroughgoing Joyceans he is.

His account of the poet Mangan, an early hero or role model, should really be a story in Dubliners,

He had become a mute wasted rag of a man, he ate barely enough to keep body and soul together until, one day he had a sudden bad fall.

and,

no other Irish song is as full as those of Mangan of nobly suffered misfortunes and such irreparable devastations of the soul. 

He makes Daniel Defoe the first 'English' writer on account of Chaucer, Shakespeare and the others before him being European and, whether it's 'realism' or just his tremendous intellect, I for one tend to take his word. I'm sure he's right about Dickens being good at what he does but 'hardly deserving a place among the highest' of writers and I'm glad of the account of Parnell, the political background to the novels never having been clear to me, a self-styled nationalist who brings about his own downfall.

From a Banned Writer to a Banned Singer, from 1932, is fragments suddenly in the playful style of the Wake and one would gladly have more of all the things here.

I'm not sure how the shelves are going to be reorganised to bring Joyce out of the aphabetical classification of novelists to have his own section. Upstairs the likes of McEwan, Swift, Barnes, Murakami and Sebastian Faulks have theirs and downstairs the more elite group of mainly poets like Elizabeth Bishop, Larkin, Edward Thomas, Auden, Gunn, Rosemary Tonks, Dr. Johnson and Shakespeare biographyhave theirs so somebody of one has biographies of their wife and daughter ought to qualify for that status.

A couple of days reading about Lucia has brought me to the brink of whatever it was that went wrong for her. It's not yet obvious why that should have happened unless it's linked to her giving up her dancing career but it's compelling stuff.

--

On Wednesday night I was late for Josh Brown talking about his new book, Unjudging Love: The Enigma of Dylan Thomas'. I've only lived in Portsmouth for 40 years and so can hardly be expected to find my way around yet. Four years in the making is not bad going for something fairly comprehensive but it's possible that devotion to such a figure makes one more sympathetic than is entirely good for one.

In establishing Dylan as a committed socialist, Josh mentioned in passing that the writers of the 30's and 40's were (Auden, Eliot). Well, yes, Auden but not Eliot. South Wales has long been a Labour stronghold so there's no big surprise that Dylan would be. However, don't believe everything you're told at events like these. At the 1997 Larkin Society conference a discussion panel reflected that all the writers were right wing - Lawrence, Eliot, Pound and ultimately Larkin - and turned a blind eye to Auden, Camus, Sartre, Orwell.

I think these terms retain some meaning but as tyrannies rise and, hopefully, fall, it's not obvious it matters what their professed ideologies are or if we allocate them to a wing.

The claim that Dylan was a precursor to rap and hip-hop sounded a bit dubious. I don't dispute that rap is 'poetry' or that it has been the big thing in pop music for a long time now but with a few notable exceptions it has passed me by, 'poetry' is not necessarily a good thing and I don't know how much credit Dylan would want for it. There has been incantatory verse performance with or without Dylan Thomas or Grandmaster Flash and we should be wary of claiming things for our causes that do them not as much credit as we might think.

--

Rather more on my wavelength, a few days before a trip to Soho for An Evening with Rosemary Tonks, I see that three more novels have been re-issued which must mean that The Bloater did okay at the checkout.

It's not something she'd have wanted but once you've published something, that's it, you can't unpublish it. If you think The Bloater and then The Halt During the Chase, Way Out of Berkeley Square and Businessmen as Lovers are savage and unforgiving I hope they'll get round to making Emir and Opium Fogs available too because they burn out of control.

It's not the first time I've been ahead of the wave, prompted by the first book of a revival and - I'd like to think - doing my little bit to help it along. I bought up all the Richard Yates novels well before Revolutionary Road was a film from wherever I could for whatever they cost and in due course, like Rosemary's, they were made available again. A couple of those of Rosemary's were the most I've paid for books and now they will be available for a tenner.

Not to worry. I wanted them then, not now, and there is no correlation between the price of an artefact, whether it be book, painting or recording of music and its worth. We don't concern ourselves with financial investment when it's simply the art that matters.

Re: Joyce

I don't really have a favourite novelist. Maybe it's not necessary to have one. I get by okay without. Over the years here it's been said that Dubliners represents the finest prose fiction in the language and in spite of the recent discovery that The Dead is reckoned 'sentimental' in some high places, it remains so.

The short list of favourite novelists is long enough with George Eliot, Hardy, Julian Barnes, Camus, Murakami, Gide, Balzac, maybe Salinger and more taking up lots of shelf space but as well as the poems being nothing special, unless I've missed something, and Exiles being too heavy on ideas, I don't think I can claim as my favourite novelist anybody responsible for Finnegans Wake. I would feel as if I ought to have enjoyed it more without sherpa books to help me.

But there remains something compelling about Joyce that is unrivalled beyond Shakespeare. Finding that there is still more original Joyce than I knew about has been quite a happy accident. The Occasional, Critical and Political Writing (Oxford) has gathered momentum from the precocious undergraduate essay given the title Subjugation through his devotional tribute to Ibsen, some book reviews and aesthetics before I arrived this morning at Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages which is brilliant.

 

Of 288 pages of text, from 216 onwards are in Italian, from which others have been translated, so it's a smaller book than it looks if one is not a fluent reader of Italian but the footnotes are often of great value.

Ibsen's New Drama shows Joyce so enthralled of his first big literary love that much of it sets out When We Dead Awaken, heavily laden with quotes, for our benefit as if he can't help himself in his enthusiasm. Published in the Fortnightly Review, in 1900 when Joyce was 18, I shared some of his admiration at that age and it must have been far more exciting for him when it was so new.

It is also thrilling to find parallels with one's heroes and their preoccupations such as the extracts on aesthetics taken from Joyce's notebooks. Anybody who spends such a proportion of their time thinking about literature, poetry, art and all such undertakings must wonder what it is all about. 

I think some terms have shifted in nuance in the last 120 years. Joyce writes that,

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic end.

That seems circular to me because I take Aesthetics to mean 'the philosophy of art' whereas for Joyce it is, as the first definition I find on the internet says, a set of principles concerned with the nature and appreciation of beauty. I would contend that not all art is beautiful. Satisfying, yes, if it's any good but we are not all Keats or Botticelli.

Similarly, Joyce's distinction between poetry and literature accords poetry a rarer status than it might have by now. It is a great shame that Joyce and anybody else could only read what had been written up to their time. In Crow, for example, Ted Hughes set out to write something less beautiful.

I'm not completely sold on 'realism', either, because art isn't 'real'. It is at best selective and only represents those 'real' things it selects to serve its purposes. Ibsen, George Moore and Turgenev came before Joyce and told it a bit more like it was but Harold Pinter, Alan Sillitoe and various episodes of Play for Today came after. I'm not sure that any attempt at showing life as it is lived by some are ever quite the point. I did once but I don't now.

But as a critic, Joyce is not easily impressed and gladly, not afraid to say so. He is not impressed by Shakespeare Studied in Eight Plays by Hon A.S. Canning which was clearly not only as vacuous as Prof. Sir Stanley Wells can be nowadays at his most pompous but,

even the pages are wrongly numbered.

The literary life is full of petty rivalries and even vendettas and Joyce is keen to dismiss Borlase and Son by T. Baron Russell, ending with,

the binding of the book is as ugly as one could reasonably expect

but the footnote is invaluable here, explaining that,

This comment appears to be a jibe at Longworth, the editor of the 'Daily Express'...At any rate it was to be Joyce's last book review and the story goes that Longworth threatened to kick Joyce downstairs if he ever came to the newspaper's offices again.

But Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages is the most complete item yet, a concise survey of the cultural history of his homeland, its receptiveness to religion, how it suffered from English and Scandinavian insurgence but provided talent to the rest of Europe. He might not these days have escaped censure for his narrow view of 'Nipponese dwarfs' but, having been drenched in Catholicism throughout his upbringing, he considers a future in which Ireland may or may not be able to throw off its backwardness and,

proclaim aloud the end of the coherent absurdity that is Catholicism, and the beginning of the incoherent absurdity that is Protestantism.

This, from a set of three lectures given in 1907 in Trieste, comes during the writing of Dubliners which was first submitted in 1905 but not published in its fuller form until 1916.

I'm sure there's plenty more to come before the arrival of Stephen Hero but already here and looking sumptuous is Lucia Joyce, To Dance in the Wake by Carol Loeb Shloss.

One could feel uneasy about the biography of someone who spent her last 30 years in a mental health institution and it might well be flippant to ask what else one could expect of the daughter of the author, and muse behind, the Wake. We are intrusive, and prurient, but perhaps sometimes those that live on the outskirts of sanity or beyond them bring back things from such places that our more ordinary lives don't allow us to appreciate.