Chapter 13

An endurance test should always be preceded by training. It requires real endurance to finish “Ulysses.” The best training for it is careful perusal or reperusal of “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” the volume published six or seven years ago which revealed Mr. Joyce's capacity to externalise his consciousness, to set it down in words. It is the story of his own life before he exiled himself from his native land, told with uncommon candour and extraordinary revelations of thought, impulse, and action, many of them of a nature and texture which most persons do not feel free to reveal, or which they do not feel it is decent and proper to confide to the world.

The facts of Mr. Joyce's life with which the reader who seeks to comprehend his writings should be familiar are: He was one of many children of South Ireland Catholic parents. In his early childhood his father had not yet dissipated their small fortune and he was sent to Clongowes Wood, a renowned Jesuit College near Dublin, and remained there until it seemed to his teachers and his parents that he should decide whether or not he had a vocation; that is whether he felt within himself, in his soul, a desire to join the order. Meanwhile he had experienced the profoundly disturbing impulses of pubescence; the incoming waves of genesic potency had swept over him, submerged him, and carried him into a deep trough of sin, from which, however, he was extricated, resuscitated, and purged by confession, penitence, and prayer. But the state of grace would not endure. He lost his faith, and soon his patriotism, and he held those with whom he formerly worshipped up to ridicule, and his country and her aspirations up to contumely. He continued his studies in the Old Royal University of Dublin, notwithstanding the abject poverty of his family. He was reputed to be a poet then, and many of the poems in “Chamber Music” were composed at this period.He had no hesitation in admitting the reputation, even contending for it. “I have written the most perfect lyric since Shakespeare,” he said to Padraic Colum; and to Yeats, “We have met too late; you are too old to be influenced by me.” If belief in his own greatness has ever forsaken him in the years of trial and distress that have elapsed between then and now, no one, save possibly one, has heard of it. Mr. William Hohenzollern in his sanguine moments was never as sure of himself as Mr. James Joyce in his hours of despair.

After graduation he decided to study medicine, and, in fact, he did pursue the study for two or three years, one of them in the medical school of the University of Paris. Eventually he became convinced that medicine was not his vocation, even though funds were available for him to continue his studies, and he decided to take up singing as a profession, “having a phenomenally beautiful tenor voice.” These three novitiates furnished him with all the material he has used in the four volumes that he has published. Matrimony, parentage, ill-health, and a number of other factors put an end to his musical ambitions. He taught for a brief time in Dublin and wrote the stories that are in “Dubliners,” which his countrymen baptised with fire; and began the “Portrait.” But he couldn't tolerate “a place fettered by the reformed conscience, a country in which the symbol of its art was the cracked looking-glass of a servant,” so he betook himself to a country in the last explosive crisis of paretic grandeur. In Trieste he gained his daily bread by teaching Austrians English and Italian, having a mastery of the latter language that would flatter a Padovian professor. The war drove him to the haven of the expatriate, Switzerland, and for four years he taught German, Italian, French, English, to anyone in Zurich who had time, ambition, and money to acquire a new language. Since the Armistice he has lived in Paris, first finishing the book which is hismagnum opusand which he says and believes represents everything that he has to say or will have to say, and he is now enjoying the fameand the infamy which its publication and three editions within two years have brought him.

As a boy Mr. Joyce's cherished hero was Odysseus. He approved of his subterfuge for evading military service; he envied him the companionship of Penelope; and all his latent vengeance was vicariously satisfied by reading of the way in which he revenged himself on Palamedes. The craftiness and resourcefulness of the final artificer of the siege of Troy made him permanently big with envy and admiration. But it was the ten years of his hero's life after he had eaten of the lotus plant, that wholly seduced Mr. Joyce and appeased his emotional soul. As years went by he realised that his own experiences were not unlike those of the slayer of Polyphemus and the favourite of Pallas-Athene, and after careful deliberation and planning he decided to write an Odyssey. In early childhood Mr. Joyce had identified himself with Dædalus, the Athenian architect, sculptor, and magician, and in all his writings he carries on in the name of Stephen Dædalus. Like the original Dædalus, his genius is great, his vanity is greater, and he can brook no rival. Like his prototype, he was exiled from his native land after he had made a great contribution to the world. Like him, he was received kindly in exile, and like him, also, having ingeniously contrived wings for himself and used them successfully, he is now enjoying a period of tranquillity after his sufferings and his labour.

“Ulysses” is the record of the thoughts, antics, vagaries, and actions—more particularly the thoughts—of Stephen Dædalus, an Irishman, of artistic temperament; of Leopold Bloom, an Irish-Hungarian Jew, of scientific temperament and perverted instincts; and of his wife, Marion Tweedy, daughter of an Irish major of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers stationed in Gibraltar, and a Jewish girl. Marion was a concert singer given to coprophilly, especially in her involutional stages, spiritual and physical. Bloom's acquired perversion he attemptedto conceal by canvassing for advertisements forThe Freeman.

Dublin is the scene of action. The events—those that can be mentioned—and their sequence are:

“The preparation for breakfast, intestinal congestion, the bath, the funeral, the advertisement of Alexander Keyes, the unsubstantial lunch, the visit to Museum and National Library, the book-hunt along Bedford Row, Merchants' Arch, Wellington Quay, the music in the Ormond Hotel, the altercation with a truculent troglodyte, in Bernard Kierman's premises, a blank period of time including a car-drive, a visit to a house of mourning, a leave-taking, ... the prolonged delivery of Mrs. Nina Purefoy, the visit to a disorderly house ... and subsequent brawl and chance medley in Beaver Street, nocturnal perambulation to and from the cabman's shelter, Butt Bridge.”

And these are some of the things they thought and talked of:

“Music, literature, Ireland, Dublin, Paris, friendship, woman, prostitution, diet, the influence of gaslight or the light of arc and glowlamps on the growth of adjoining paraheliotropic trees, exposed corporation emergency dustbuckets, the Roman catholic church, ecclesiastical celibacy, the Irish nation, Jesuit education, careers, the study of medicine, the past day, the maleficent influence of the presabbath, Stephen's collapse.”

Mr. Joyce is an alert, keen-witted, educated man who has made it a life-long habit to jot down every thought that he has had, drunk or sober, depressed or exalted, despairing or hopeful, hungry or satiated, in brothel or in sanctuary, and likewise to put down what he has seen or heard others do or say—and rhythm has from infancy been an enchantment of the heart. It is not unlikely that every thought he has had, every experience he has ever encountered, every person he has ever met, one might say everything he has ever read in sacred or profane literature, is to be encountered in the obscuritiesand in the franknesses of “Ulysses.” If personality is the sum total of all one's experiences, all one's thoughts and emotions, inhibitions and liberations, acquisitions and inheritances, then it may truthfully be said that “Ulysses” comes nearer to being the perfect revelation of a personality than any book I know.

He sets down every thought that comes into consciousness. Decency, propriety, pertinency are not considered. He does not seek to give them orderliness, sequence, or conclusiveness. His literary output would seem to substantiate some of Freud's contentions. The majority of writers, practically all, transfer their conscious, deliberate thought to paper. Mr. Joyce transfers the product of his unconscious mind to paper without submitting it to the conscious mind, or if he submits it, it is to receive approval and encouragement, perhaps even praise. He holds with Freud that the unconscious mind represents the real man, the man of Nature, and the conscious mind the artificed man, the man of convention, of expediency, the slave of Mrs. Grundy, the sycophant of the Church, the plastic puppet of Society and State. For him the movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on the hillside. “Peasant's heart” psychologically is the unconscious mind. When a master technician of words and phrases set himself the task of revealing the product of the unconscious mind of a moral monster, a pervert and an invert, an apostate to his race and his religion, the simulacrum of a man who has neither cultural background nor personal self-respect, who can neither be taught by experience nor lessoned by example, as Mr. Joyce did in drawing the picture of Leopold Bloom, he undoubtedly knew full well what he was undertaking, how unacceptable the vile contents of that unconscious mind would be to ninety-nine out of a hundred readers, and how incensed they would be at having the disgusting product thrown in their faces. But that has nothing to do with the question: has thejob been done well; is it a work of art? The answer is in the affirmative.

The proceedings of the council of the gods, with which the book opens, are tame. Stephen Dædalus, the Telemachus of this Odyssey, is seen chafing beneath his sin—refusal to kneel down at the bedside of his dying mother and pray for her—while having anal frescobreakfast in a semi-abandoned turret with his friend Buck Mulligan (now an esteemed physician of Dublin), and a ponderous Saxon from Oxford whose father “made his tin by selling jalap to the Zulus,” who applauds Stephen's sarcasms and witticisms. Stephen has a grouch because Buck Mulligan has referred to him, “O, it's only Dædalus whose mother is beastly dead.” This Stephen construes to be an offense to him, not to his mother. Persecutory ideas are dear to Stephen Dædalus. In his moody brooding this is how he welds words:

“Woodshadows floated silently by through the morning peace from the stairhead seaward where he gazed. Inshore and farther out the mirror of water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying feet. White breast of the dim sea. The twining stresses, two by two. A hand plucking the harp-strings merging their twining chords. Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide.”

Meanwhile his sin pursues him as “the Russian gentleman of a particular kind” pursued Ivan Karamazov when delirium began to overtake him. He recalls his mother, her secrets, her illness, her last appeals. While breakfasting Buck and Stephen plan a glorious drunk to astonish the druidy druids, with the latter's wage of schoolmaster which he will receive that day. Later Buck goes in the sea while Stephen animadverts on Ireland's two masters, the Pope of Rome and the King of England, and recites blasphemous poetry.

Stephen spends the forenoon in school, then takes leave of the pedantic proprietor, who gives him his salary and a paper on foot and mouth disease. Telemachus embarks on his voyage,and the goddess who sails with him communes with him as follows:

“Ineluctable modality of the visible; at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire,maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.”

This is the first specimen of the saltatory, flitting, fugitive, on-the-surface purposeless thought that Stephen produces as he walks Sandymount Strand. From this point the book teems with it and with Bloom's autistic thoughts. It is quite impossible to give a synopsis or summary of them. It must suffice to say that in the fifteen pages Mr. Joyce devotes to the first leg of the voyage that will give him news of Ulysses, an hour's duration, a film picture has been thrown on the screen of his visual cortex for which he writes legends as fast as the machine reels them off. It is Mr. Joyce's life that is thus remembered: his thoughts, ambitions, aspirations, failures, and disappointments; the record of his contacts and their engenderment—what was and what might have been. On casual examination, such record transformed into print looks like gibberish, and is meaningless. So does shorthand. It is full of meaning for anyone who knows how to read it.

The next fifty pages are devoted to displaying the reel of Mr. Leopold Bloom's mind, the workings of his psycho-physical machinery, autonomic and heteronomic, the idle and purposeful thoughts of the most obnoxious wretch of all mankind, as Eolus called the real Ulysses. While he forages for his wife's breakfast, prepares and serves it, his thoughts andreflections are answers to the question “Digman, how camest thou into the realms of darkness?” for no burial honours yet had Irish Elpenor received.

Then follows a picture of Dublin before the revolution, its newspapers, and the men who made them, with comment and characterisation by Stephen Dædalus, interpolations and solicitations by Leopold Bloom. Naturally the reader who knew or knew of William Brayden, Esquire, of Oakland, Sandymount, Mr. J. J. Smolley whose speech reminds of Edmund Burke's writings, or Mr. Myles Crawford whose witticisms are founded on Pietro Aretino, would find this chapter more illuminating, though not more entertaining, than one who had heard of Dublin for the first time in 1914. Nor does it facilitate understanding of the conversation there to know the geography of an isle afloat where lived the son of Hippotas, his six daughters, and six blooming sons.

Bloom continues his apparently purposeless and obviously purposeful thoughts after the Irish Læstrygonians had stoned him, for another fifty pages. Everything he sees and everyone he encounters generate them. They are connected, yet they are disparate. I choose one of the simplest and easiest to quote:

“A procession of whitesmocked men marched slowly towards him along the gutter, scarlet sashes across their boards. Bargains. Like that priest they are this morning: we have sinned, we have suffered. He read the scarlet letters on their five tall white hats: H. E. L. Y. S. Wisdom Hely's. Y lagging behind drew a chunk of bread from under his foreboard, crammed it into his mouth and munched as he walked. Our staple food. Three bob a day, walking along the gutters, street after street. Just keep skin and bone together, bread and skilly. They are not Boyl: no: M'Glade's men. Doesn't bring in any business either. I suggested to him about a transparent show cart with two smart girls sitting inside writing letters, copybooks, envelopes, blotting paper. I bet that would have caught on. Smart girls writing something catch the eye at once. Everyone dying to know what she'swriting. Get twenty of them round you if you stare at nothing. Have a finger in the pie. Women too. Curiosity. Pillar of salt. Wouldn't have it of course because he didn't think of it himself first. Or the inkbottle I suggested with a false stain of black celluloid. His ideas for ads like Plumtree's potted under the obituaries, cold meat department. You can't like 'em. What? Our envelops. Hello! Jones, where are you going? Can't stop, Robinson, I am hastening to purchase the only reliable inkeraserKansell, sold by Hely's Ltd., 85 Dame Street. Well out of that ruck I am. Devil of a job it was collecting accounts of those convents. Tranquilla convent. That was a nice nun there, really sweet face. Wimple suited her small head. Sister? Sister? I am sure she was crossed in love by her eyes. Very hard to bargain with that sort of a woman. I disturbed her at her devotions that morning. But glad to communicate with the outside world. Our great day, she said, Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Sweet name too: caramel. She knew, I think she knew by the way she. If she had married she would have changed. I suppose they really were short of money. Fried everything in the best butter all the same. No lard for them. My heart's broke eating dripping. They like buttering themselves in and out. Molly tasting it, her veil up. Sister? Pat Claffey, the pawn-broker's daughter. It was a nun they say invented barbed wire.”

Man may not think like this, but it is up to the psychologist to prove it. So far as I know he does. Lunatics do, in manic “flights”; and flights of ideas are but accentuations of normal mental activity.

The following is a specimen of what psychologists call “flight of ideas.” To the uninitiated reader it means nothing. To the initiated it is like the writing on the wall.

“Bloom. Flood of warm jimjam lickitup secretness flowed to flow in music out, in desire, dark to lick flow, invading. Tipping her tepping her tapping her topping her. Tup. Pores to dilate dilating. Tup. The joy the feel the warm the. Tup. To pour o'er sluices pouring gushes. Flood, gush, flow, joy-gush, tupthrop. Now! Language of love.”

In the next section Stephen holds forth on ideals and literature and gives the world that which Mr. Joyce gave his fellow students in Dublin to satiety, viz. his views of Shakespeare, and particularly his conception of Hamlet. “Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance,” one of his cronies remarked. Even in those days Mr. Joyce's ideas of grandeur suggested to a student of psychiatry who heard him talk that he had the mental disease with which that symptom is most constantly associated, and to another of his auditors that he had anidée fixe, and that “the moral idea seems lacking, the sense of destiny, of retribution.” They never hurt Mr. Joyce—such views as these. The armour of hisamour proprehas never been pierced; the belief in his destiny has never wavered. The meeting in the National Library twenty years ago gives him opportunity to display philosophic erudition, dialectic skill, and artistic feeling in his talk with the young men and their elders. It would be interesting to know from any of them, or from Mr. T. S. Eliot, if the following is the sort of grist that is brought to the free-verse miller, and can poetry be made from it.

“Yogibogeybox in Dawson chambers.Isis Unveiled.Their Pali book we tried to pawn. Crosslegged under an umbrel umbershoot he thrones an Aztec logos, functioning on astral levels, their oversoul, mahamahatma. The faithful hermetists await the light, ripe for chelaship, ringroundabout him. Louis H. Victory. T. Caulfield Irwin. Lotus ladies tend them i' the eyes, their pineal glands aglow. Filled with his god he thrones, Buddh under plantain. Gulfer of souls, engulfer. He souls, she souls, shoals of souls. Engulfed with wailing creecries, whirled, whirling, they bewail.”

In contrast with this take the following description of the drowned man in Dublin Bay as a specimen of masterly realism:

“Five fathoms out there. Full fathom five thy father lies. At one he said. Found drowned. High water at Dublin Bar.Driving before it a loose drift of rubble, fanshoals of fishes, silly shells. A corpse rising saltwhite from the undertow, bobbing landward, a pace a pace a porpoise. There he is. Hook it quick. Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor. We have him. Easy now. Bag of corpsegas sopping in foul brine.... Dead breaths I living breathe, tread dead dust.... Hauled stark over the gunwale he breathes upward the stench of his green grave, his leprous nosehole snorting to the sun.”

There are so many “specimens” of writing in the volume that it is quite impossible to give examples of them. Frankness compels me to state that he goes out of his way to scoff at God and to besmirch convention, but that's to show he is not afraid, like the man who defied God to kill him at 9.48 p.m.

“The playwright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gave us light first and the sun two days later), the lord of things as they are whom the most Roman of catholics callbio boia, hangman god, is doubtless all in all in all of us, ostler and butcher, and would be bawd and cuckold too but that in the economy of heaven, foretold by Hamlet, there are no more marriages, glorified man, an androgynous angel, being a wife unto himself.”

The Dædalus family and their neighbourhood—their pawn-brokers, shopkeepers, spiritual advisers; the people they despised, those they envied, the Viceroy of Ireland, now come in for consideration. Mr. Dædalus is a sweet-tempered, mealy-mouthed man given to strong drink and high-grade vagrancy who calls his daughters “an insolent pack of little bitches since your poor mother died.” Their appearances and emotional reactions, and their contacts with Stephen and Bloom who are passing the time till they shall begin the orgy which is the high-water mark of the book, are instructive to the student of behaviouristic psychology.

Readers of Dostoievsky rarely fail to note the fact that occurrences of a few hours required hundreds of pages tonarrate. The element of time seems to have been eliminated. It is the same in “Ulysses.” This enormous volume of seven hundred and thirty-two pages is taken up with thoughts of two men during twelve hours of sobriety and six of drunkenness. I do not know the population of Dublin, but whatever it may be, a vast number of these people come into the ken of Dædalus and Bloom during those hours, and into the readers'; for it is through their eyes and their ears that we see and hear what transpires and is said. And so the trusting reader accompanies one or both of them to the beach, and observes them in revery and in repose; or to a café concert, and observes them in ructions and in ruminations. A countryman of Mr. Joyce, Edmund Burke, said “custom reconciles us to everything,” and after we have accompanied these earthly twins, Stephen and Leopold, thus far, we do not baulk at the lying-in hospital or even the red light district, though others more sensitive and less tolerant than myself would surely wish they had deserted the “bark-waggons” when the occupants were invited into the brothel.

The book in reality is a moving picture with picturesque legends, many profane and more vulgar. For a brief time Mr. Joyce was associated with the “movies,” and the form in which “Ulysses” was cast may have been suggested by experiences with the Volta Theatre, as his cinematograph enterprise was called.

Mr. Joyce learned from St. Thomas Aquinas what Socrates learned from his mother: how to bring thoughts into the world; and from his boyhood he had a tenderness for rhythm. It crops out frequently in “Ulysses.”

“In Inisfail the fair there lies a land, the land of holy Michan. There rises a watchtower beheld of men afar. There sleep the mighty dead as in life they slept, warrior and princes of high renown. A pleasant land it is in sooth of murmuring waters, fishful streams where sport the gunnard, the plaice, the roach, the halibut, the gibbed haddock, the grilse, the dab,the brill, the flounder, the mixed coarse fish generally and other denizens of the aqueous kingdom too numerous to be enumerated. In the mild breezes of the west and of the east the lofty trees wave in different directions their first class foliage, the wafty sycamore, the Lebanonian cedar, the exalted planetree, the eugenic eucalyptus and other ornaments of the arboreal world with which that region is thoroughly well supplied. Lovely maidens sit in close proximity to the roots of the lovely trees singing the most lovely songs while they play with all kinds of lovely objects as for example golden ingots, silvery fishes, crans of herrings, drafts of eels, codlings, creels of fingerlings, purple seagems and playful insects. And heroes voyage from afar to woo them, from Eblana to Slievemargy, the peerless princes of unfettered Munster and of Connacht the just and of smooth sleek Leinster and of Cruachan's land and of Armagh the splendid and of the noble district of Boyle, princes, the sons of kings.”

At other times he seems to echo the sonorous phrasing of some forgotten master: Pater or Rabelais, or to paraphrase William Morris or Walt Whitman, or to pilfer from the Reverend William Sunday.

“The figure seated on a large boulder at the foot of a round tower was that of a broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed red-haired freely freckled shaggybearded widemouthed largenosed longheaded deepvoiced barekneed brawnyhanded hairylegged ruddyfaced, sinewyarmed hero. From shoulder to shoulder he measured several ells and his rocklike mountainous knees were covered, as was likewise the rest of his body wherever visible, with a strong growth of tawny prickly hair in hue and toughness similar to the mountain gorse (Ulex Europeus). The widewinged nostrils, from which bristles of the same tawny hue projected, were of such capaciousness that within their cavernous obscurity the fieldlark might easily have lodged her nest. The eyes in which a tear and a smile strove ever for the mastery were of the dimensions of a goodsized cauliflower. A powerful current of warm breath issued at regular intervals from the profound cavity of his mouth while in rhythmic resonance the loud strong hale reverberations of his formidable heart thunderedrumblingly causing the ground, the summit of the lofty tower and the still loftier walls of the cave to vibrate and tremble.”

The chapter from which these quotations are taken, when the friends turn into Barney Kiernan's to slake their thirst, shows Mr. Joyce with loosed tongue—the voluble, witty, philosophic Celt, with an extraordinary faculty of words. If an expert stenographer had taken down the ejaculations as they spurted from the mouth of Tom and Jerry, and the deliberations of Alf and Joe, and the other characters of impulsive energy and vivid desire, then accurately transcribed them, interpolating “says” frequently, they would read like this chapter.

Conspicuous amongst Mr. Joyce's possessions is a gift for facile emotional utterance. The reader feels himself affected by his impulses and swept along by his eloquence. He is scathingly sarcastic about Irish cultural and political aspirations; loathsomely lewd about their morals and habits; merciless in his revelations of their temperamental possessions and infirmities; and arbitrary and unyielding in his belief that their degeneration is beyond redemption. Like the buckets on an endless chain of a dredger, the vials of his wrath are poured time after time upon England and the British Empire “on which the sun never rises,” but they are never emptied. Finally he embodies his sentiment in paraphrase of the Creed.

“They believe in rod, the scourger almighty, creator of hell upon earth and in Jacky Tar, the son of a gun, who was conceived of unholy boast, born of the fighting navy, suffered under rump and dozen, was scarified, flayed and curried, yelled like bloody hell, the third day he arose again from the bed, steered into haven, sitteth on his beamend till further orders whence he shall come to drudge for a living and be paid.”

He recounts his country's former days of fame and fortune, but he doesn't foresee any of the happenings of the past three years.

“Where are our missing twenty millions of Irish should be here today instead of four, our lost tribes? And our potteries and textiles, the finest in the whole world! And our wool that was sold in Rome in the time of Juvenal and our flax and our damask from the looms of Antrim and our Limerick lace, our tanneries and our white flint glass down there by Ballybough and our Huguenot poplin that we have since Jacquand de Lyon and our woven silk and our Foxford tweeds and ivory raised point from the Carmelite convent in New Ross, nothing like it in the whole wide world. Where are the Greek merchants that came through the pillars of Hercules, the Gibraltar now grabbed by the foe of mankind, with gold and Tyrian purple to sell in Wexford at the fair of Carmen? Read Tacitus and Ptolemy, even Giraldus Cambrensis, Wine, peltries, Connemara marble, silver from Tipperary, second to none, our farfamed horses even today, the Irish hobbies, with King Philip of Spain offering to pay customs duties for the right to fish in our waters. What do the yellowjohns of Anglia owe us for our ruined trade and our ruined hearths? And the beds of the Barrow and Shannon they won't deepen with millions of acres of marsh and bog to make us all die of consumption.”

Nowhere is his note-book more evident than in this chapter. Krafft-Ebing, a noted Viennese psychiatrist, said a certain disease was due to civilisation and syphilisation. Mr. Joyce made note of it and uses it. TheSlocumsteamboat disaster in New York, which touched all American hearts twenty years ago; the prurient details of a scandal in “loop” circles of Chicago; a lynching in the South are referred to as casually by Lenehan, Wyseet alwhile consuming their two pints, as if they were family matters.

That the author has succeeded in cutting and holding up to view a slice of life in this chapter and in the succeeding one—Bloom amongst the Nurse-girls—it would be idle to deny. That it is sordid and repulsive need scarcely be said. It has this in common with the writings of all the naturalists.

The author's familiarity with the Dadaists is best seen inhis chapter on the visit to the Lying-in Hospital. Some of it is done in the pseudostyle of the English and Norse Saga; some in the method adopted by d'Annunzio in his composition of “Nocturne.” He wrote thousands and thousands of words on small pieces of paper, then threw them into a basket, and shuffled them thoroughly. With a blank sheet before him and a dripping mucilage brush in one hand, he proceeded to paste them one after another on the sheet. A sample of the result is:

“Universally that person's acumen is esteemed very little perceptive concerning whatsoever matters are being held as most profitably by mortals with sapience endowed to be studied who is ignorant of that which the most in doctrine erudite and certainly by reason of that in them high mind's ornament deserving of veneration constantly maintain when by general consent they affirm that other circumstances being equal by no exterior splendour is the prosperity of a nation more efficaciously asserted than by the measure of how far forward may have progressed the tribute of its solicitude for that proliferent continuance which of evils the original if it be absent when fortunately present constitutes the certain sign of omnipollent nature's incorrupted benefaction.”

Tired of this, he paraphrases the Holy Writ.

“And whiles they spake the door of the castle was opened and there nighed them a mickle noise as of many that sat there at meat. And there came against the place as they stood a young learning knight yclept Dixon. And the traveller Leopold was couth to him sithen it had happed that they had had ado each with other in the house of misericord where this learning knight lay by cause the traveller Leopold came there to be healed for he was sore wounded in his breast by a spear wherewith a horrible and dreadful dragon was smitten him for which he did do make a salve of volatile salt and chrism as much as he might suffice. And he said now that he should go into that castle for to make merry with them that were there.”

When this palls, he apes a satirist like Rabelais, or a mystic like Bunyan. Weary of this, he turns to a treatise on embryology and a volume of obstetrics and strains them through his mind. One day some serious person, a disciple or a benighted admirer, such as M. Valery Larbaud, will go through “Ulysses” to find references to toxicology, Mosaic law, the Kamustra, eugenics, etc., as such persons and scholars have gone through Shakespeare. Until it is done no one will believe the number of subjects he touches is marvellous, and sometimes even the way he does it. For instance this on birth control:

“Murmur, Sirs, is eke oft among lay folk. Both babe and parent now glorify their Maker, the one limbo gloom, the other in purge fire. But, Gramercy, what of those Godpossibled souls that we nightly impossibilise, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost, Very God, Lord and Giver of Life.”

It is worthy of note also that Mr. Joyce defines specifically the sin against the Holy Ghost, which for long has been a stumbling block to priest and physician. He does not agree with the great Scandinavian writer toward whom he looked reverently in his youth. Ella Rentheim says to Borkman, “The Bible speaks of a mysterious sin for which there is no forgiveness. I have never understood what it could be; but now I understand. The great, unpardonable sin is to murder the love-life in a human soul.”

The object of it all is to display the thought and erudition of Stephen Dædalus, “a sensitive nature, smarting under the lashes of an undivined and squalid way of life”; and the emotions, perversions, and ambitions of Leopold Bloom, a devotee of applied science, whose inventions were for the purpose of

“rendering obsolete popguns, elastic airbladders, games of hazard, catapults. They comprised astronomical kaleidoscopes, exhibiting the twelve constellations of the Zodiac fromAries to Pisces, miniature mechanical orreries, arithmetical gelatine lozenges, geometrical to correspond with zoological biscuits, globemap playing balls, historically costumed dolls.”

It is particularly in the next chapter, one of the strangest of literature, that Mr. Joyce displays the apogee of his art. Dædalus and Bloom have passed in review on a mystic stage all their intimates and enemies, all their detractors and sycophants, the scum of Dublin, and the spawn of the devil. Mr. Joyce resurrects Saint Walpurgis, galvanises her into life after twelve centuries' death intimacy with Beelzebub, and substituting a squalid section of Dublin for Brocken, proceeds to depict a festival, the devil being host. The guests in the flesh and of the spirit have still many of their distinctive corporeal possessions, but the reactions of life no longer exist. The chapter is replete with wit, humour, satire, philosophy, learning, knowledge of human frailties, and human indulgences, especially with the brakes of morality off. And alcohol or congenital deficiency takes them off for most of the characters. It reeks of lust and filth, but Mr. Joyce says life does, and the morality he depicts is the only one he knows.

In this chapter is compressed all of the author's experiences, all his determinations and unyieldingness, and most of the incidents that gave a persecutory twist to his mind, made him an exile from his native land, and deprived him of the courage to return. He does not hesitate to bring in the ghost of his mother whom he had been accused of killing because he would not kneel down and pray for her when she was dying, and to question her as to the verity of the accusation. But he does not repent even when she returns from the spiritual world. In fact, the capacity for repentance is left out of Mr. Joyce's make-up. It is as impossible to convince Mr. Joyce that he is wrong about anything on which he has made up his mind as it is to convince a paranoiac of the unreality of his false beliefs, or a jealous woman of the groundlessness of her suspicions.It may be said that this chapter does not represent life, but I venture to say that it represents life with photographic accuracy as Mr. Joyce has seen it and lived it; that every scene has come within his gaze; that every speech has been heard or said; and every sentiment experienced or thrust upon him. It is a mirror held up to life—life which we could sincerely wish and devoutly pray that we were spared; for it is life in which happiness is impossible, save when forgetfulness of its existence is brought about by alcohol, and in which mankind is destitute of virtue, deprived of ideals, deserted by love.

To disclaim it is life that countless men and women know would be untrue, absurd, and libellous. I do not know that Mr. Joyce makes any such claim, but I claim that it is life that he has known.

Mr. Joyce had the good fortune to be born with a quality which the world calls genius. Nature exacts a galling income tax from genius, and as a rule she co-endows it with unamenability to law and order. Genius and reverence are antipodal, Galileo being the exception to the rule. Mr. Joyce has no reverence for organised religion, for conventional morality, for literary style or form. He has no conception of the word obedience, and he bends the knee neither to God nor man. It is interesting and important to have the revelations of such a personality, to have them first hand and not dressed up. Heretofore our only avenues of information concerning them led through asylums for the insane, for it was there that revelations were made without reserve. I have spent much time and money in my endeavour to get such revelations, without great success. Mr. Joyce has made it unnecessary for me to pursue the quest. He has supplied the little and big pieces of material from which the mental mosaic is made.

He had the profound misfortune to lose his faith, and he cannot rid himself of the obsession that the Jesuits did it for him. He is trying to get square by saying disagreeable thingsabout them and holding their teachings up to scorn and obloquy. He was so unfortunate as to be born without a sense of duty, of service, of conformity to the State, to the community, to society; and he is convinced he should tell about it, just as some who have experienced a surgical operation feel that they must relate minutely all its details, particularly at dinner parties and to casual acquaintances.

Not ten men or women out of a hundred can read “Ulysses” through, and of the ten who succeed in doing it for five of them it will be atour de force. I am probably the only person aside from the author that has ever read it twice from beginning to end. I read it as a test of Christian fortitude: to see if I could still love my fellow-man after reading a book that depicts such repugnance of humanity, such abhorence of the human body, and such loathsomeness of the possession that links man with God, the creative endowment. Also the author is a psychologist, and I find his empiric knowledge supplements mine acquired by prolonged and sustained effort.

M. Valery Larbaud, a French critic who hailed “Ulysses” with the reverence with which Boccaccio hailed the Divine Comedy, and who has been giving conferences on “Ulysses” in Paris, says the key to the book is Homer's immortal poem. If M. Larbaud has the key he cannot spring the lock of the door of the dark safe in which “Ulysses” rests, metaphorically, for most readers. At least he has not done so up to this writing.

The key is to be found in the antepenultimate chapter of the book; and it isn't a key, it's a combination, a countryman of Mr. Joyce's might say. Anyone who tries at it long enough will succeed in working it, even if he is not of M. Larbaud's cultivated readers who can fully appreciate such authors as Rabelais, Montaigne, and Descartes.

The symbolism of the book is something that concerns only Mr. Joyce, as nuns do, and other animate and inanimate things of which he has fugitive thoughts and systematised beliefs.

After the Cheu-sinese orgy, Bloom takes Stephen home, andunfortunately they awaken Marion, for she embraces the occasion to purge her mind in soliloquy. Odo of Cluny never said anything of a woman's body in life that is so repulsive as that which Mr. Joyce has said of Marion's mind: a cesspool of forty years' accumulation. Into it has drained the inherited vulgarities of Jew and gentile parent; within it has accumulated the increment of a sordid, dissolute life in two countries, extending over twenty-five years; in it have been compressed the putrid exhalations of studied devotion to sense gratification. Mr. Joyce takes off the lid and opens the sluice-way simultaneously, and the result is that the reader, even though his sensitisation has been fortified by reading the book, is bowled over. As soon as he regains equilibrium he communes with himself to the effect that if the world has many Marions missionaries should be withdrawn from heathen countries and turned into this field where their work will be praised by man and rewarded by God.

Mental hygiene takes on a deeper significance to one who succeeds in reading “Ulysses,” and psychology has a larger ceinture.

Much time has been wasted in conjecturing what Mr. Joyce's message is. In another connection he said, “My ancestors threw off their language and took another. They allowed a handful of foreigners to subject them. Do you fancy I am going to pay in my own life and person debts they made? No honourable and sincere man has given up his life, his youth, and his affections to Ireland from the days of Tone to those of Parnell but the Irish sold him to the enemy or failed him in need or reviled him and left him for another. Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.”

“Ulysses” is in part vendetta. He will ridicule Gaelic renaissance of literature and language; he will traduce the Irish people and vilify their religion; he will scorn their institutions, lampoon their morals, pasquinade their customs; he will stun them with obscene vituperation, wound them with sacrilege andprofanity, immerse them in the vitriolic dripping from the “tank” that he seeks to drive over them; and for what purpose? Revenge. Those dissatisfied with the simile of the fury of a scorned woman should try “Ulysses.”

Mr. Joyce has made a contribution to the science of psychology, and he has done it quite unbeknownst to himself, a fellow-countryman might say. He has shown us the process of the transmuting of thought to words. It isn't epoch making like “relativity,” but it will give him notoriety, possibly immortality.

“A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.” —Stephen Dædalus.

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