Joyce - Rottenness in Literature

Alfred Noyes
Sunday Chronicle 
October 29, 1922

I have picked on Ulysses because it brings to a head all the different questions that have been perplexing literary criticism for some time. There no answer possible in this case. It is simply the foulest book that has ever found its way into print. Yet it has received columns of attention from many of the leading journals, and its author has been proclaimed a slightly mad genius, but still a genius.

The writing is this book is simply bad as writing, and much of it is obscure through sheer disorder of the syntax. But - there is no foulness conceivable to the mind of madman or ape that has not been poured into its imbecile pages.

Yet some of our 'intellectuals', including  one of our leading novelists, have been stating that its author comes within measurable distance of having written the best book in the world.

No word of thought conceivable in Dublin or the New York Bowery is omitted, and the foulest references to real persons in this country, attributing vile diseases to them, amongst other equally disgusting suggestions.

I have recited the case of this book because it is the extreme case of complete reduction of absurdity of what I have I called the "literary Bolshevism of the hour."  It can do little harm, because the police are, on the whole, circumventing our pseudo-intellectuals.

But what concerns all of us, and most urgently demands consideration, is that our Metropolitan criticism should be treating works such as those by Mr. Joyce seriously as a work of genius at the very moment when journal after journal is helping depreciate the value of some of the noblest pages in our literature.

The battle that is being wages over the works of Tennyson, for instance, the assault that has been made on all the Victorian writers - and it is interesting to note that Bolshevik  Russia has recently been declaring that Dickens is more dangerous than Denikin - are indications of the destructive spirit which may lead us on the road to barbarianism.

Ezra Pound on James Joyce

Pound to John Quinn
May 1920

Joyce - pleasing; after the first shell of the cantankerous Irishman, I got the impression of the real man who is the author of Chamber Music, the sensitive. The rest is the genius; the registration of realities on the temperament, the delicate temperament of the early poems. A concentration and absorption passing Yeats - Yeats has taken on anything requiring the condensation of Ulysses. Also, great exhaustion, but more constitution than I expected, and apparently a good recovery from the eye operation.

He is, of course, stubborn as a mule or an Irishman, but I failed to find him at all unreasonable. Thank God, he has been stubborn enough to know his job and stick with it. 

1931 Postscript:  "I respect Joyce's integrity as an author, as he has not taken the easy part.  I never had any respect for his common sense or intelligence, apart from his gifts as a writer" - Pound in the New Review

HG Wells on James Joyce

November 23, 1928

My dear Joyce,

I've been studying you and thinking over you a lot. The outcome is that I don't think I can anything for the propaganda of your work. I've enormous respect for your genius dating from your earliest books and I feel now a great personal liking but you and I are set on absolutely different courses.

Your training has been Catholic, Irish, insurrectionary,  mine such as it was, scientific, constructive and I suppose English...And while you were brought up under the delusion of political suppression, I was brought up under the delusion of political responsibility.  It seems a fine thing for you to defy and break up. To me not in the least.

Now with regard to this literary experimentation of yours [Finnegan's Wake]. Its a considerable thing because you are a very considerable man, and you have crowded in your composition a mighty genius for expression which has escaped discipline. But I don't think it gets anywhere. You have turned your back on the common man, on their elementary needs and their restricted time and their intelligence and you have elaborated. What is the result? Vast riddles.

Your last two works [Ulysses & FW] have been more amusing to write then they ever will be to read. Take me as a common reader. Do I get much pleasure from this work? No. Do I feel I am getting something new and illuminating as I do when I read Amrep's dreadful translation of Pavlov's badly written book on Conditioned Reflexes? No. So I ask: Who the hell is this Joyce who demands so many waking hours of the few thousands I have still to live for a proper appreciation of his quirks and fancies and flashes of rendering?

All this from my point of view. Perhaps you are right and I am all wrong.  Your work is an extraordinary experiment and I would go out of my way  to save it from restrictive interruption. It has its believers and its followers. Let them rejoice in it. To me its a dead end.

My warmest wishes to you Joyce.  I can't follow your banner anymore than you can follow mine. But the world is wide and there is room for both of us to be wrong. - H.G. Wells.

James Joyce

Joyce's word games often have a real interest and the parodies of style, although too often blurred, can be amusing; but they have nothing to do with "Literature", which, to have any value, has to be some presentation of in writing of Milton's new aquist* of true experience.

The striking thing about [Ellman's 'James Joyce'] it is how much more rewarding , in terms of the new aquist of Milton's, the book is than anything Joyce ever wrote. The difference I suppose is simply that when you work through Joyce's complications and obscurities you're a little miffed - a second rate mind has no business to conceal itself that way. It isn't too much and too wise for ordinary expression,  its too little and vapid - the ridiculous or at least exasperating mouse out of the mountain. But Ellman's mind is first rate, his comment on Joyce's sad and silly times is full of instruction; this is not just from books, this is real and human and fine food for thought. - James Cozzens.

* = From Milton's Samson Agonistes: 

 His servants he with new aquist**
Of true experience from this great event
With peace and consolation hath dismissed
And calm of mind, all passion spent.

** = acquisition.