“And who do think the critique anglais qui devait être americain was?” Clive wrote Mary.
The creature immediately thrust an immense card under my nose and on it was the name of your favorite author—James Joyce. His companion, who happily spoke not one word of French, was called McAlmon … and gives himself out as the most intimate friend of the well-known American poet—T. S. Eliot. God, what a couple. Joyce did not seem stupid, but pretentious, underbred and provincial beyond words: and what an accent. McAlmon is an American. They both think nobly of themselves, well of Ezra Pound and poorly of Wyndham Lewis.
Clive spoke in English to “Mr. Mac”—Robert McAlmon, a poet and editor who was an acquaintance of Eliot’s but not an intimate friend by any means—while the “little nuisance” who had brought the two over, “broke in drunkenly on Joyce’s incessant monologue of self-appreciation.” It was not a compliment when Clive described Joyce to Mary as “exactly what a modern genius ought to be”; he looked like “something between an American traveller in flash jewellery and a teacher in a Glasgow socialist Sunday-school.”
It is unlikely that in the more than a year since that evening, Clive had not repeated to Virginia at least some of what he told Mary, given that Joyce had been a recurring topic between them for years. More likely is that he repeated a version of the Joyce story in a letter that does not survive or that he told her about the meeting upon his return to London. In October 1921, in fact, Virginia had written to Roger Fry about an evening’s talk, “Eliot says that Joyce’s novel is the greatest work of the age—Lytton says he doesn’t mean to read it. Clive says—well, Clive says that Mary Hutchinson has a dressmaker who would make me look like other people.” Not long after that, Clive was in Paris again. He had a drink on his way home one night and reported to Mary that the evening had been a success on at least one count: he had avoided Joyce, “who grinned at me from les deux maggots [sic].”
Now that she was reading Ulysses in earnest, Virginia, as if channeling Clive, judged the book by the man and his manners, using an array of adjectives she spewed in her diary that repeated Clive’s to Mary. The book was “underbred,” as Joyce in Paris, in person, had been. Even the appalling provincial accent that had horrified Clive she heard, too, in this book by the pretentious and egotistic “self-taught working man” who had immediately and inelegantly thrust his card upon the refined Clive Bell.
Ulysses had also come up when Clive visited Virginia one afternoon in mid-August. Virginia was “utterly contemptuous” of the book, Clive told Mary, and had asked him, with the same surprise she had had at Tom’s reaction, “Did Mary really admire it?” Clive replied by hedging. Mary “had only read a bit here and there,” he said, or at least was protesting to Mary that he had tried to keep her safe from Virginia’s scorn. But Virginia that afternoon sounded much like Virginia writing in her diary: Ulysses was “feeble, wordy, uneducated stuff, cheap as a preparatory school,” she told Clive. Clive took playful satisfaction in passing on Virginia’s excoriation of the book; but knowing that Mary and Virginia were not always on good terms, he also took pleasure in having a little fun at his opinionated sister-in-law’s expense. Clive suggested Virginia might simply have been reading the book at the wrong time, and reported to Mary that he had “found Virginia down with the monthlies, but brisk and gay enough in the head for all that.”
But neither her monthlies nor her echoing of Clive’s disdain could hide the fact that Joyce and his book were as worrisome a specter as they had been in 1920. She rephrased the question in a new way almost two years later: “When one can have the cooked flesh, why have the raw?” she wrote in her diary. It was a rhetorical question and a statement of purpose. She saw her own method reflected in Ulysses, saw her own work reflected in it as if in a fun house mirror, the method unrecognizable, the “raw” work distorted from what it ought to become, and left unfinished.
“I may revise this later. I do not compromise my critical sagacity. I plant a stick in the ground to mark page 200,” she wrote in her diary in August. The next sentence was about her own work, as if she paused in Ulysses not only from boredom and exhaustion but also so that she could think more deeply about her own aims before continuing work on the short story she had begun writing in the spring. “For my own part, I am laboriously dredging my mind for Mrs Dalloway & bringing up light buckets. I don’t like the feeling I’m writing too quickly. I must press it together.”
As always, the question of what the men were doing sharpened her sense first of inadequacy, and then of her own ambition. She might judge herself superior to the underbred working man she had called Joyce, but then perhaps she wasn’t: if it were a difference not only of class but of education, Joyce had a university degree and it was she herself who was self-taught. At the heart of her anxiety and her anger were questions of literary apprenticeship and approbation, and what it meant to be a woman writing.
The burr, examined, became, as usual, a spur. As was her other fear, that perhaps in too easily finding critical common ground with Clive, she was falling in with the facile way of thinking he made attractive and entertaining but that she at other times recognized was superficial and incomplete. One sentence in her diary about Ulysses and the next about Mrs. Dalloway. In the reading of the one she saw something of the writing of the other.
* * *
By September, as if preparing for Tom’s visit, Virginia had finished Ulysses—read “the last immortal chapter”—“think it is a mis-fire,” she wrote in her diary. Once again, she thought of Joyce’s work and her own in uneasy tandem. Ulysses might be a misfire, but she feared the same was true of Jacob’s Room. Only two months before, she had noted her satisfaction in reading her own writing. Now, correcting the proofs had left her feeling the novel “reads thin & pointless; the words scarcely dint the paper,” even as her fears about it encouraged her to think, or to delude herself, that whatever she would write next would be “something rich, & deep, & fluent, & hard as nails, while bright as diamonds.”
From her hopes about what she would write eventually, she turned to analyzing the particulars of Joyce’s failure. “Genius it has I think; but of the inferior water.” She called it “brackish”—it was not rich and deep, like the work she would next write, but murky, and she phrased it as if to suggest what she had discovered of it was a relief to her and her future hopes. And then she repeated Clive’s words once more, calling it pretentious and also underbred, “not only in the obvious sense, but in the literary sense,” as if on further reading and reflection, making a distinction between man and book was not only impossible but unnecessary. The novel was simply a writer “doing stunts,” and a first-rate writer, which Joyce obviously was not, “respects writing too much to be tricky,” she thought. Joyce was exactly her own age, younger by only a week, and as she had judged herself as a writer at forty all year, now she judged him on the maturity he ought to have. “I’m reminded of some callow board school boy … so self-conscious & egotistical that he loses his head, becomes extravagant, mannered, uproarious, ill at ease, makes kindly people feel sorry for him, & stern ones merely annoyed; & one hopes he’ll grow out of it.” But at Joyce’s age, “this scarcely seems likely.”
Though she thought she might have “scamped the virtue of it more than is fair,” she was confident enough to conclude that the effect of Ulysses was “myriads of tiny bullets” that spattered but were too weak to give that “one deadly wound straight in the face.” That was what reading Tolstoy was like—but she stopped herself, saying “it is entirely absurd to compare him with Tolstoy,” as she was shocked that Tom had done: “And Tom, great Tom, thinks this on a par with War & Peace!” She had, in this last rush, read it as much through his eyes as her own, trying, and failing, to make sense of his ecstatic praise, which had “over stimulated” her and perhaps left her with “my back up on purpose.”
Myriads of tiny bullets. Virginia framed her response to Ulysses differently, but she had had a similar reaction to The Waste Lan
d when she had heard it in June. Her question then had been, What connected it together? She had not been sure and was not sure now of what held the tiny bullets of Ulysses together, either. She was sure only that in Mrs. Dalloway her goal, as she had put it in her diary, must be to press it together.
* * *
On September 7, the day after she had written out her thoughts in her diary, Leonard gave her a review of the novel that had appeared in an American magazine the previous week. It was by Gilbert Seldes, who had been simultaneously rescuing The Waste Land from Scofield Thayer’s purgatory and doing what he could to champion Ulysses to an American readership who could not yet purchase it for themselves. (Seldes’s review appeared in the Nation, its editors, like Seltzer’s lawyer, having more faith in his good judgment than his boss at the Dial did.) Seldes’s review was very intelligent, Virginia thought, and had cleared away some of the obscurity that had defeated her, making the book “much more impressive than I had judged.” But there was “some lasting truth in first impressions” that would not cancel hers, she decided, even though she thought she must read some of the chapters again. (If she ever did so, she does not mention it.) Still, even after reading Seldes’s review she realized that she ought to have been “bowled over” by Ulysses and was not. Her first impression did hold.
When Tom came the last weekend of September, he was as definitive as she had been in her diary, but in the other direction: “The book would be a landmark, because it destroyed the whole of the 19th century.” Perhaps to qualify this a bit for Virginia’s benefit, or his own, he pointed out that this left Joyce himself “with nothing to write another book on. It showed up the futility of all English styles.” Tom said that there was no “great conception” behind Ulysses. Joyce was more interested, Tom argued, in the individual character of Leopold Bloom, what the workings of his mind could reveal of character rather than of human nature. Joyce had done what he had meant to do—“completely.” Joyce’s “new method of giving psychology” had destroyed the nineteenth century, or at least its literary conventions.
But Woolf could not agree. William Thackeray’s Pendennis, she thought, was more illuminating of an individual than Joyce’s approach to Leopold Bloom in Ulysses. Here, again, was the question of how to create character in fiction. Had Joyce really found a new way? It did not seem so to her. “We know so little about the people,” she complained.
The question raised by Thackeray’s Pendennis and by Tom’s contention that Joyce’s Ulysses had destroyed the nineteenth century was a signal to Woolf “how far we now accept the old tradition without thinking.” As she put it in a note to herself, “Its [sic] a very queer convention that makes us believe that people talked or felt or lived as J. A. & Thackeray & Dickens make them—the only thing is that we’re used to it.”
In Jacob’s Room and in “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,” she, too, had begun a new method of giving psychology. But this was not enough if it missed out at a representation of life. Austen and Thackeray and Dickens made readers—made her—believe that people talked and felt and lived as they described them. Joyce had not. And Leonard, at least, did not think she had done enough to represent life in Jacob’s Room. But, she wondered, “What is life? Thats [sic] the question. Something not necessarily leading to a plot.” She must master her intention, as Joyce had. She thought she “could have screwed Jacob up tighter,” as she put it in her diary.
* * *
Morgan was, apparently, of two minds about Joyce, though he was so far from dominating the conversation, or perhaps even joining it, that his comments, if any, go unrecorded by Virginia. He had discovered Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man not long after it first appeared, in 1917, and had been impressed, at least, by Mohammed’s request for a copy of it and his friend’s description of it as “a very remarkable product.” Evidently Forster shared that opinion, and continued to think so, or at least treasured the memory that Mohammed had been so charming when he said it. Years later, in 1930, when he met Bob Buckingham, the police constable who would be his emotional mainstay for the rest of his life, the two men talked about books. Buckingham had been reading Dostoyevsky, he told Forster. Forster, in turn, offered when they met again, as they did a few days later at Forster’s London apartment, to lend him two books: his own A Passage to India and Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist.
Nonetheless, in 1959, on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, Forster was interviewed for television and, as part of the program, was shown writing at his desk. Shortly after the broadcast, V. S. Pritchett asked him what he had been writing when the camera was rolling. One sentence “over and over again until they had got their picture,” Forster replied. “‘James Joyce is a very bad writer.’ I kept on writing it.”
* * *
Virginia was done with Joyce and was ready to sell him for whatever small profit she could—£4 10s, even, she joked to David “Bunny” Garnett, the bookseller from whom she had bought it. She was also going to get back to Proust. She had been bound to Ulysses “like a martyr to a stake.” But it was “far otherwise” with Proust, she wrote to Roger Fry, in her last letter from Monk’s House in October, marking not only her return to Richmond but also to Proust’s happier pages and the “great adventure” he had become for her.
Fry had urged her to read Proust long before. Now he was the confessor to whom she could speak rhapsodically, ecstatically, of “devoting myself” to Proust. She managed a rare combination of religious fanaticism and reason in her response, admitting that there might be faults to be found in Proust—“I suppose”—but that she did not see them and was “in a state of amazement; as if a miracle were being done before my eyes.”
How, at last, has someone solidified what has always escaped—and made it too into this beautiful and perfectly enduring substance? One has to put the book down and gasp. The pleasure becomes physical—like sun and wine and grapes and perfect serenity and intense vitality combined.
“Well, what remains to be written after that?” Virginia asked.
She returned to Richmond and, within a few days, she knew. She wrote in her diary: “Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street has branched into a book; & I adumbrate here a study of insanity & suicide: the world seen by the sane & the insane side by side—something like that.”
She had gleaned from Joyce and Proust different answers to the question hearing Tom read The Waste Land had raised: What connects it together? And in autumn, as in the spring, she would begin the further development.
Chapter 15
DAVID AND FRIEDA ARRIVE IN TAOS
Halfway around the world, five thousand miles from Rodmell, and six thousand feet above sea level, D. H. Lawrence was thinking about Ulysses, too. The same Friday in September that Morgan came to Monk’s House, Lawrence, in Taos for about ten days, wrote to Thomas Seltzer, “Can you send me also a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses. I read it is the last thing in novels: I’d best look at it.”
It had taken more than three weeks to sail from Australia, on the Tahiti, like “a big boarding-house staggering over the sea,” the passage £60 in first class, meaning that they “shall have blewed [sic] all our money on steamships.” On board, Frieda won at whist, and a man could be overheard practicing the saxophone in the music room. The stop at Tahiti itself was disappointing—“dead, dull, modern, French and Chinese”—and practically the only excitement of the trip was on the last leg, when “a Crowd of cinema people” came aboard. They had been in Tahiti to film a melodrama called Lost and Found on a South Sea Island, about a white woman nearly forced to marry a native chieftain before she is rescued, and Lawrence was appalled that the cast and crew of the film, produced by Samuel Goldwyn and directed by Raoul Walsh, who had played John Wilkes Booth in Birth of a Nation (and later discovered John Wayne), were utterly undistinguished, the women only “successful shop-girls” and the men “like any sort … at the sea-side.” All of them were “so common” and “hating one another like poison, several of them drunk all the trip.” They
represented the worst of a louche sexuality that Lawrence saw as the enemy of the higher sensual and spiritual communion men and women might attain (the sex-obsessed Mr. Lawrence’s strictures on who constituted the worthy as rigid as those of any sectarian). Encountering them did not give him any more faith in the America that awaited him. Frieda was as usual more relaxed and also as usual took pleasure in noting her husband’s petty condemnations and the difference between his reputation and the more conflicted reality.
* * *
David and Frieda arrived in San Francisco, “a fine town but a bit dazing,” on September 4. They had been twenty-five days at sea and were, the next day, “still landsick—the floor should go up and down, the room should tremble from the engines … the solid ground almost hurts.”
They were to spend five days there. “San Francisco very pleasant, and not at all overwhelming,” Lawrence wrote after a sunny day’s automobile tour of the city. But within a dozen words of this happy beginning, he had descended into a description of the “terrible” noise of “iron all the while,” the trolleys and cable cars crisscrossing the city into a fearsome metropolis of black and glossy streets marked by steel rails that were “ribbons like the path of death itself.” It was a “sort of never-stop Hades,” the relentless noise and activity day and night of which “breaks my head.”
They stayed four cocooned nights at the Palace Hotel. “Everybody is very nice, everything very comfortable,” he wrote in German to his mother-in-law, the Baroness von Richthofen. “I really hate this mechanical comfort,” he concluded, as wear and tear as ever.
The letter, on the hotel’s elaborate notepaper, spoke of the luxury he described to Frieda’s mother, Anna, and the hotel, at $7 a night, was extremely expensive for a man who had arrived with less than $20 in his pocket. The first words Lawrence wrote in America were a telegram to his agent, ARRIVED PENNILESS TELEGRAPH DRAFT CARE PALACE HOTEL SAN FRANCISCO, and his first order of business to wait for American money from Mountsier.
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