The Best of Frank O'Connor

by Frank O'Connor

  This, of course, was an exaggerated reaction; in fact, I find it hard to reread Stephen Hero, while I can always read A Portrait of the Artist again, though never in the same way. Less and less do I hear the echoes of my own tormented youth in Cork, and more and more do I find myself admiring the devices of the great master of rhetoric. This is not so much a description of a tormented childhood and youth as a reconstitution of it in another form that excites all the detective instinct in me. I do not know what the total pattern is, but I recognize sections of a total pattern here and there as, when I am out archaeologizing, I can identify portions of some great building from humps and hollows in the ground. First, there is the over-all rhetorical pattern by which the book is divided into three sections – lyric, epic and dramatic. While the character of Stephen is still fluid, his experiences are expressed in lyric form, each ending in a cry; when he finally takes shape as an individual, he speaks in his own particular voice, through his diary.

  Under that is the basic psychological development that accompanies and sustains the artistic one, and this has to be understood in terms of Aristotle’s De Anima. It is not for nothing that young Stephen Dedalus notices the two faucets in the men’s room in the Wicklow Hotel which are hot and cold, or the school badges which are red and white – hot and cold – or the illness which makes him sweat and shiver; for these are the extremes between which the individual lives who is neither hot nor cold. ‘The mean,’ says Aristotle, ‘is capable of judgement, for it becomes in reference to each of the extremes another extreme. And as that which is to perceive white or black must not itself be actually white or black, but both of these potentially … so also in the case of touch, it must not be either hot or cold in itself.’ So, too, when Dante says, ‘A priest would not be a priest if he did not tell his flock what is right and what is wrong,’ and Stephen thinks, ‘It was wrong; it was unfair and cruel,’ we are present at the birth of a mind which alone decides what is right and wrong and differentiates us from the world of sensation. Aristotle adds: ‘Neither is thought, in which right and wrong are determined – i.e. right in the sense of practical judgement, scientific knowledge and true opinion, and wrong in the sense of the opposite of these – thought in this signification is not identical with sensation.’

  I have no illusion that I have said the last word on the matter, nor do I think that Joyce stuck to Aristotle any more closely than he stuck to Homer or Vico – in fact, I should be very much surprised if he had. I should suggest that the reader might follow a pattern leading from ‘heart’ through ‘mind’, ‘soul’, ‘spirit’ and ‘imagination’ to ‘freedom’, and see how it works out for him. One of the best student papers I ever read in America was by a young poet who analysed the book in terms of the rubrics.

  ‘Analysed’ – the very word is like a knell. Why should a work of art have to be subjected to analysis? And where is the Joyce whom Stanislaus knew and who cared deeply about the things Stanislaus and myself and so many others have cared about and who never grew up? My friend V. S. Pritchett has called Joyce ‘a mad grammarian’, and I have said myself that his work is ‘a rhetorician’s dream’, saying little more than Joyce himself said to his brother when he told him he was interested only in style. Joyce believed, as Yeats did not, that ‘words alone are certain good’ and that all that happens to human beings can be expressed fully in language. This, as we say in Ireland, is where the ferryboat left him, because it can’t. Experience, as older people know, is always drifting into a world where language cannot follow, where, as Turgenev says, ‘perhaps only music can follow’. Robert Browning wrote:

  A fancy from a flower-bell, someone’s death,

  A chorus-ending from Euripides, –

  And that’s enough for fifty hopes and fears

  As old and new at once as nature’s self,

  To rap and knock and enter in our soul,

  Take hands and dance there, a fantastic thing,

  Round the ancient idol, on his base again, –

  The grand Perhaps!

  Younger readers will read, careless of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, the pattern of human life and how rhetoric may follow it, and not notice how every word has been brooded upon until nothing can be neglected; and older readers will read, pursuing every hint, in the hope that they may understand their children’s revolt. But this great book is one about which they can both hope to be right, because, as an elderly man, I can still think back on the boy who read it first in a provincial town forty-odd years ago and was comforted by it, and almost wish I were sixteen again.

  From JAMES JOYCE: A POST-MORTEM

  I THINK I almost said ‘Thank God’ when Joyce died. There must have been young men who said ‘Thank God’ when Byron died, and I can think of no other writer, unless perhaps Rousseau, who wielded such an influence; who was so much the pool of Narcissus to his generation, as Cyril Connolly put it. […]

  Joyce’s writing has all the virtues of a disciple of Flaubert; it is exact, appropriate and detached. ‘The streets, shuttered for the repose of Sunday, swarmed with a gaily coloured crowd. Like illumined pearls the lamps shone from the summits of their tall poles upon the living texture below which, changing shape and hue unceasingly, sent up into the warm grey evening air an unchanging, unceasing murmur.’ That is Flaubert, though the echo of the word ‘unceasingly’ is a trick of style which Joyce never tired of and had picked up probably from Pater.

  But if the stories in Dubliners have Flaubert’s virtues, they have also Flaubert’s weaknesses. To be absolutely faithful to what one sees and hears and not to speculate on what may lie behind it, for fear of indulging in one’s own emotionalism, is a creed that produces obvious limitations. Two boys on the lang from school meet a man who talks to them for a few minutes; goes away and returns. What he is – a sexual maniac – what he has done in the meantime, are only suggested by the tone of his speech and the way it alters after his return. Subject value, emotional or intellectual values, do not exist; there is a certain experience to be conveyed; this is where it begins, this is where it ends – now watch me do it! This is a sort of asceticism which the average reader is incapable of, and it produces in his mind a certain feeling of stiffness, of gaucherie as though he were watching someone behave rather too correctly to be quite well-bred. After the murder of John the Baptist in Flaubert’s Herodias his disciples carry away the head. The story ends with the line ‘As it was very heavy they carried it turn and turn about.’ Flaubert intends to show his detachment; his command of himself: this is the point where a lesser writer would have burst out into an emotional passage; but to me the line suggests not self-control but a vague reminiscence of Eliza Doolittle’s drawing room manner; it is a literary crick in the neck. After Mr Hynes in Joyce’s ‘Ivy Day in The Committee Room’ recites his moving little ballad on Parnell’s death, one of the election canvasser turns to a Unionist and asks if it wasn’t fine. ‘Mr Crofton,’ the story ends, ‘said that it was a very fine piece of writing.’

  There is something of the same weakness in all Joyce’s conversation at least to my ear.

  ‘Pope Leo XIII,’ said Mr Cunningham, ‘was one of the lights of the age. His great idea, you know, was the union of the Latin and Greek Churches. That was the aim of his life.’

  ‘I often heard he was one of the most intellectual men in Europe,’ said Mr Power. ‘I mean, apart from his being Pope.’

  ‘So he was,’ said Mr Cunningham, ‘if not the most so. His motto, you know, as Pope, was Lux upon Lux – Light upon Light.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Mr Fogarty eagerly, ‘I think you’re wrong there. It was Lux in Tenebris, I think – Light in Darkness.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Mr MacCoy. ‘Tenebrae.’

  ‘Allow me,’ said Mr Cunningham positively, ‘it was Lux upon Lux. And Pius IX his predecessor’s motto was Crux upon Crux – that is, Cross upon Cross – to show the difference between their two pontificates.’

  That is good, but it is a little too good; it is observed
so carefully – notice the murderous ‘if not the most so’ – that it ceases to give the impression of conversation at all; there is a queer stifling atmosphere about it; it is conversation without spontaneity, without lyric or dramatic impulse; in a word I feel it is not dialogue but mimicry. And it seems to me that Joyce had so trained himself to remain withdrawn from his work, that very often what he gives us for style is a clever imitation of another man’s work, and what passes for conversation is little better than parody. […]

  Almost every serious critic of Joyce has felt and said the same things about Ulysses: that it is the greatest book of our time, and at the same time that it isn’t a great book at all; that it is on the scale of the Divine Comedy but that personally one prefers a few pages of George Moore. It is hard to define that sense of discomfort. For myself – and I am a hero-worshipper – the discomfort comes from a strong sense of artistic failure. For close on the first three hundred pages Ulysses is absolutely beyond comparison in modern literature. It is, what Joyce intended it to be, the whole of life; the complete man in the complete world: in fact it goes as close as makes no difference to being a scientific description of modern life. I cannot imagine whatever its fate as a work of art that it will ever lose its importance as a document.

  In those three hundred pages there are few dull spots and the divagations caused by the arbitrary method of construction are few. It is true the Sirens episode, written in musical form and parodying the rhythms of various types of music, as in ‘Pat is a waiter who waits while you wait. Hee hee hee hee. He waits while you wait. He he. A waiter is he. Hee hee hee hee’ does introduce an element of virtuosity which seems to run counter to the main stream of the book, but the interruption isn’t serious, and it gives the texture, already enormously enriched by Dujardin’s invention of the interior monologue, a new lift. But in the Cyclops episode the attempt to follow the Greek original is, I feel, a serious handicap. Joyce chooses a Gaelic League nationalist of the worst type for his Cyclops, but everything that is said in Cyclops’ cave has to be interpreted again in a Cyclopean style, and so the narrative, which anyhow is little better than an amusing parody, has to be halted to allow of new parodies in a fantastic gigantesque style which is anything but amusing. ‘The catastrophe was terrific and instantaneous in its effect. The observatory of Dunsink registered in all eleven shocks, all of the fifth grade of Mercalli’s scale, and there is no record extant of a similar seismic disturbance in our island since the earthquake of 1534, the year of the rebellion of Silken Thomas.’ That might amuse us for a few moments if we read it in the comic column of the morning newspaper, but it is pretty trashy stuff to find in a book. The Nausikaa episode which follows, in spite of some splendid visual writing (the presiding organ is the eye!) contains a great deal written in the style of the Heartsease novelettes which is equally trashy. ‘A sterling good daughter was Gerty just like a second mother in the house, a ministering angel too with a little heart worth its weight in gold.’ And so on. In the next episode the crucial meeting between Bloom and Dedalus takes place at a gathering of medicals in Holles Street Hospital. The presiding organ is naturally the womb. How is the style to symbolize this? Obviously, by suggesting, in a series of parodies of the whole development of English prose, the embryo becoming man. It is at this point, it seems to me, that Joyce’s crazy and haphazard organization of his material has tied him up in knots. It is as though the self-conscious literary artist were being doubled by a drunken Dublin medico whose superstition makes him avoid the mortar lines on the pavement and whose intellectual level is Gilbert and Sullivan. Joyce’s virtuosity seems to me to belong to a second-rate brain. ‘Beneficent Disseminator of blessings to all Thy creatures,’ says one of the students, ‘how great and universal must be that sweetest of Thy tyrannies which can hold in thrall the free and the bond, the simple swain and the polished coxcomb, the lover in the heyday of reckless passion and the husband of maturer years.’ Even as a parody of Sterne it is bad, but compared with the naturalistic conversation of the early portions it is intolerable.

  Yet it is this chapter which prepares for the crisis of the book, the great scene in the brothel when Bloom sees at last in Stephen the little boy he had lost in death. I feel that the nearer Joyce drew to his climax the more he shirked it, the more he inclined to rely upon virtuosity to see him through. And it is in this chapter, intended by Joyce to be the keystone of the book, that the book falls to pieces; first, because he is following an arbitrary method of construction instead of allowing the material to take organic shape, and second, because that itself is only a symptom: Joyce’s self-consciousness makes him as clumsy as an adolescent before the emotions of the situation. If it had been treated in any of the manners of the first half it would have been tremendous; even in the moments of lucidity there are passages of fine intensity, as when Bloom, half-canned, enters the brothel and imagines for a moment that he is entering his own home where his wife has been entertaining her lover. ‘On the antlered rack of the hall hang a man’s hat and waterproof. Bloom uncovers himself, but seeing them frowns, then smiles, preoccupied.’ But Circe in the Greek story turned men into swine, and Joyce must find his correspondences. Dedalus and Bloom are swamped in a series of hallucinations. Bloom tries and sentences himself for an imaginary crime; becomes emperor of Ireland, changes his sex, and everything he thinks of takes on visible form. It is hard to see what Joyce intended by the hallucinations. Though they have the form of common daydreams they are distorted in the manner of nightmares, and, even then, contain considerable tracts of parody. The only thing one feels is that they couldn’t possibly have taken place in Bloom’s mind. When Stephen’s mother appears, she appears as one of the many nightmare forms; there is nothing to show that this is the climax of the book, and the essential scene in which Bloom calls on the drunken Stephen first as ‘Mr Dedalus’, and then as ‘Stephen’ is crowded into the last two pages and lost. And to make Stephen, tortured by the apparition of his mother, smash the shade of the gas mantel with a cry of ‘Nothung’ (a reference to Siegfried’s splitting of the anvil in the Valkyrie) is simply puerility. The book never recovers from the incompetence of the central episode; the two which follow, the one written in journalese and the other in scientific question and answer, are arid beyond belief; and it is saved from mediocrity only by the magnificent last episode which brings us back with a jolt to the mood of the first chapters, saturated in the poetry of everyday life.

  Finnegans Wake is an extension of Joyce’s problem and his solutions of it. It is haunted by a fundamental Caesarism which will admit no bounds to the human will. Ulysses was intended to be life; this is the universe; universal history, universal language. The conception, which in Joyce is always adventurous, is touched with megalomania. His hero is a Chapelizod publican with a wife, twin sons and a daughter, and he falls asleep and dreams of himself as Dublin, of his sons as North Side and South Side, of his daughter as a cloud and of his wife as the Liffey. He has been flirting with a nursemaid and imagines himself being tried by a court consisting of the Four Evangelists and the Twelve Apostles. There are no characters, merely principles; the men are earth and the women water; they change their shapes and reappear in all the great stories of history and mythology, and the language changes with them. Requiem eternam dona ei Domine, becomes, for the giant, Rockquiem eternuel give Donal aye in dolmeny.

  There are lovely things in the book, and magic in every page of the Anna Livia episode, but the whole thing, now I have had time to study it, seems to me a colossal failure. It gives the impression of being a continuation of the parodistic and hallucinatory portions of Ulysses, and I cannot get over the feeling that the second-rate brain with its utter intellectual poverty, its superstitions and puns and jingle, has got complete control. I feel that more particularly from the style of the rewriting, always a clue to a writer’s mind. It seems to me that every rewriting has added to the pedantry. Even Mr Edmund Wilson, a fine critic and devotee of Finnegans Wake, finds on examining th
e four printed versions of Anna Livia that Joyce should have stopped after the third – the little Faber edition. I don’t know the first draft which appeared in Le Navire d’Argent but of the three I do know I prefer the first. The early ‘Well, that’s the limmat! As El Negro said when he looked in La Plate’ becomes in the Faber edition ‘As El Negro winced when he wonced in La Plate.’ ‘Tell me every tiny bit. I want to know every single thing’ becomes ‘Tell me every tiny teign. I want to know every single ingul.’ ‘It’s a long long way, walking weary!’ is turned into ‘Tez thelon langlo, walking weary,’ and where the improvement is I cannot for the life of me see, but I do see a mind turning in on itself and not caring any longer for the business of communication. I feel it as a sort of disintegration of the material, as though the mind behind had softened from abstraction through pedantry into mere whimsy. […]

  And yet even as I wrote the last words an idea came knocking at my head. The framework of life, the tensions of thought, morality and emotion that hold civilization together, because they are unseen, rot many times as fast as the fabric. The slum landlords of the intellect, the people with a vested interest in antiquated ideas, who make their profit out of old tenements scream at the first cry of danger. They talk of ‘the decline of reticence’ and shut their ears. They are the politicians, the professors and the popular novelists. And yet if civilization is to exist we must destroy everything in literature that seems to be false, that does not apply to the world about us and the men and women we meet. Those who destroy the false standards are the saints and heroes of our time. It is they who within the changing world keep changing those invisible tensions without which life would be impossible.