Inspiration

TODAY, whilst walking around the neighbourhood with A (three years old), I was reminded of some beautiful passages from the Welsh short story, 'Snowdrops', by Leslie Norris. In this story, the writer cleverly evokes the wondrous and innocent world of a young boy who is observing the world around him with a sense of wonder. He bites on a bacon sandwich and marvels at the extraordinary, new taste he has discovered. He listens, fascinated, to his friend's corny jokes- 'which rope is the biggest in the world? Europe.' He stares at the snowdrops growing in the school garden, marvelling at their strength in the blustering wind. He takes an interest in his brother playing with his porridge. He feels a great sense of pride when Miss Webster sticks his picture of the proud robin on the classroom wall. He is fascinated with his mother's knitting as he watches the pullover magically grow behind her fingers. But it is the snowdrops above all else that excite him: "He had known all the time that Miss Webster would not forget, and at last she was taking him to see the miraculous flowers." There is tragedy in the story, too, a motorbike accident, and a grieving Miss Webster, which is beyond the boy's comprehension.

It was during the walk this morning to the post office with A that I was reminded of this story. We held hands all the way, and she swung her body away from me from time to time as she likes to do. She even wrapped herself around a pole for the fun of it. She let go of my hand and gambolled excitedly ahead when we got close to our home. I kept walking, pretending I didn't know we were home, and she found this thoroughly amusing. We looked for cats and dogs but didn't see any. We did see some birds above, on a wire, though. A noisy motorbike received her attention. She was thoroughly excited at the prospect of being lifted up so she could place the letters directly into the mailbox. In the post office she enjoyed looking at what was on display, and thought the Christmas stamps were lovely. But best of all she found a live snail on the footpath in our street. She bent down and watched it craning its neck helplessly. She speculated as to where it might, slowly, be going. And she peered intently at the intricate markings on its brown, fragile shell. And touched the shell lightly. I was fascinated by the shell too, but was taught this fascination, by her. There were letters in the letterbox- another great joy.





It brings so much pleasure. Then I heard someone say on the radio that we should be letting asylum seekers on boats in our waters drown, rather than rescuing them.

LAWRENCE AND JOYCE NEVER MET

SADLY, arguably the two greatest writers, and two greatest rivals, of their generation never actually met. It almost happened in 1929. Lawrence and Joyce had a mutual publishing friend named Harry Crosby, an American, who happened to produce spectacular-looking books. His press, The Black Sun press, published Lawrence’s short story ‘Sun’ in a beautiful deluxe edition. Of James Joyce, Crosby published fragments from ‘Finnegan’s Wake.’ Lawrence was in Paris to see Crosby and his wife and to meet up with Aldous Huxley. On April 3 Crosby and his wife left Huxley and Lawrence for a business meeting with Joyce. They invited Joyce to meet Lawrence when the meeting concluded, however Joyce apparently declined. Crosby offered Lawrence a neutral reason for Joyce’s decision. If we are to believe Joyce’s biographer, Richard Ellmann, the real reason was along the lines that he didn’t think Lawrence was worth the effort- ‘This man really writes very badly.’

 HARRY CROSBY

I think what can be assumed is that both men were probably too headstrong and too proud to meet each other, knowing the other person was their greatest rival. Lawrence and Joyce simply mixed in different circles. Joyce had a lot of American support, from the likes of Fitzgerald, Hemngway, Eliot and Pound, not to mention his wealthy backer, Harriet Shaw. Lawrence, on the other hand, with the exception of Mabel Dodge and Amy Lowell, favoured the company of English people like Huxley, Murry and Katherine Mansfield, E M Forster, Richard Aldington and for a limited time Bertrand Russell. Lawrence never liked big cities, so didn’t frequent Paris very often. Joyce spent most of his time there. Moreover, Lawrence had reason to be suspicious of Joyce. He thought he was writing the modern novel with his limited experimentation with form in works like ‘Kangaroo’, but must have been dismayed when he first saw ‘Ulysses’ when it came on the market at about the same time. With Joyce, Modernism took on a whole new meaning.

So Lawrence and Joyce would spend their time attacking each other in letters to friends, even though they never met, and even though they probably didn’t know each other’s work as well as they should. Their temperaments certainly did not suit. Together, like two other artistic geniuses in Van Gogh and Gauguin, they would have had electric and probably destructive arguments.

The barbs include the following- of ‘Ulysses’, Lawrence would comment ‘Ulysses is much more disgusting than Casanova’; of ‘Work in Progress’, ‘too terribly would-be and done- on- purpose, utterly without spontaneity or real life’; and on hearing Joyce reading from ‘Ulysses’ on the gramophone, ‘…a Jesuit preacher who likes the cross upside down.’



Joyce, on his part, would be as equally forthcoming. At the suggestion of a friend that Lawrence should be asked to contribute to a journal they both knew, ‘That man really writes very badly’; another time his English is ‘sloppy’, and that Lawrence’s sex (presumably ‘Lady Chatterley’) was ‘imitation pornography.’



Whilst it is clear to me that Joyce and Lawrence would never have hit it off, I can’t help thinking that Frieda Lawrence and Nora Barnacle would have been a great match. Both were unique and radical thinkers in their day, Nora escaping the confines of a Catholic society and and life in a Dublin convent by eloping with Joyce to Europe, and Frieda, much more experienced, but choosing life with a poor, nomadic author over the stability of a middle-class life with three young loving children and a highly respected husband. They could have also, at the very least, compared notes about life with their respective eccentric genius writers as husbands.

ESCAPING WITH THEIR MUSE

 Joyce lived in exile from Dublin, in France, Italy and Switzerland, from 1904 until his death 36 years later, with very few return trips. Lawrence also lived much of his shorter life in exile. He left England in 1912. He did visit England again after some very bitter experiences during the war, but most of his life was spent, during his so-called ‘savage pilgrimage’, taking in long and short stays in countries like Australia, New Mexico, Italy and France. It’s interesting to compare the departure of the two great writers. Joyce eloped with Nora Barnacle, after meeting in Dublin in early 1904. They left on the 8th of October of that year in somewhat secret circumstances. Leaving for Europe, unmarried, from such a Catholic country, was highly controversial. To prevent Joyce’s father from finding out what they were doing, Nora boarded the ferry to London (and eventually Zurich, via Paris) separately. She sent her mother a postcard with her latest fairly substantial news. She was just 20 years old.

NORA

Frieda Weekley shared with Nora the fact that she also barely knew the man she was about to elope with, in equally controversial circumstances. Lawrence came to visit Ernest Weekley, his German languages tutor, in a well-heeled part of Nottingham to ask advice about finding work as a languages teacher in Germany. This is where he met Weekley’s 33 year old wife Frieda for the first time, and if we are to believe all accounts, there was an immediate mutual fascination. A clandestine affair began until Lawrence insisted that they elope and go to Germany together. Within two months of meeting, on the 3rd of May 1912, Lawrence and Frieda travelled to London separately (Frieda to drop off two of her children with relatives), met at Charing Cross Railway Station, and braved a boat train to Dover, and then on to Ostend, on to Metz. ‘Elopement’ may have been the word that was on Lawrence’s lips, however it is true to say that, despite the romantic alternative, this trip was considered more as a holiday for Frieda. She had every intention of returning home to her middle class existence with her professor husband and children. Lawrence must have been persuasive. It never happened, and as a consequence her life with her young children was seriously compromised.

FRIEDA
So here we have two remarkably unconventional women throwing their lot in with more or less penniless would be writers. A huge step into the unknown, and as in Frieda’s case in particular, much to potentially lose.

THE WRITER’S LIFE

Artistically, Lawrence and Joyce were very different. By the beginning of the 1920’s Lawrence was working on his posthumously published novel, ‘Mr Noon’, in which, apparently influenced by Henry Fielding, Lawrence experimented with the creation of a relationship between the author and the reader. There are innumerable examples of this comic interplay (later to be cultivated by Nabokov in ‘Lolita’), for example in ‘Ah, dear reader, you don’t need me to tell you how to sip love with a spoon…’, and ‘…such as you have taken, gentle reader, you who sit in your comfortable home with this book on your knee’, and even ‘And so, gentle reader-! But why the devil should I always gentle-reader you…’.

‘Kangaroo’ in some ways continued this experimentation with style. Written in NSW at breakneck speed in the middle of 1922 (the first manuscript version only took about 40 days), it included in chapter VIII a long factual article about earthquakes, in a chapter called ‘Bits’ a series of items culled from the Australian newspaper, ‘The Bulletin’, chapter XV begins ‘Chapter follows chapter, and nothing doing’, then a little summary of the action thus far follows.



Lawrence seems to have enjoyed his novel’s little eccentricities. In a letter to a close friend, the Russian émigré, Koteliansky, Lawrence says in regards to his new novel, ‘Kangaroo’, ‘…but such a novel! Even the Ulysseans will spit at it.’ ‘Ulysses’ had just been published, in Paris in 1922, and Lawrence had heard the rumours about how unconventional it was.

Joyce’s experiment was considerably ground breaking, and dwarfed Lawrence’s radicalism by a considerable margin. Joyce’s short stories ‘Dubliners’, which put Dublin on the literary map, was a personal response to his childhood and adolescence growing up in the big Irish capital city. And Dublin never escaped from Joyce’s consciousness, even if Joyce famously physically did. Likewise, ‘Sons and Lovers’ is an autobiographical account (of sorts) of Lawrence’s boyhood and adolescence, his time spent in the more semi-rural Eastwood near Nottingham. And as with Joyce and Dublin, Eastwood and its environs never left Lawrence either. As late as 1928 and 1929 Lawrence was still reminiscing about Nottingham in his novels ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ and ‘The Virgin and the Gypsy.’

However, ‘Ulysses’ was something else again. A clue as to how the two unconventional authors went about things differently can be found in the length of gestation of both novels. ‘Kangaroo’ was written in just six weeks. ‘Ulysses’ would be written over almost a ten year period.



Lawrence, on reading ‘Ulysses’, was in for a shock. ‘Ulysses’ is written in what has become known as a ‘stream-of-consciousness style’, full of experimental prose- puns, parodies, allusions, and symbols abound. Punctuation seems to have been throw out the window, and phrases from Latin, French, German and other languages appear seemingly at random. A number of new invented words appear just to make the text more difficult to read, and there is musical text and one chapter is in the form of a play, another section poetry. The following names appear for the members of a wedding, a precursor to the idea that Fitzgerald used a few years later when he named Gatsby’s party guests:

‘The fashionable international world attended EN MASSE this afternoon at the wedding of the chevalier Jean Wyse de Neaulan, grand high chief ranger of the Irish National Foresters, with Miss Fir Conifer of Pine Valley. Lady Sylvester Elmshade, Mrs Barbara Lovebirch, Mrs Poll Ash, Mrs Holly Hazeleyes, Miss Daphne Bays, Miss Dorothy Canebrake, Mrs Clyde Twelvetrees, Mrs Rowan Greene, Mrs Helen Vinegadding, Miss Virginia Creeper, Miss Gladys Beech, Miss Olive Garth, Miss Blanche Maple, Mrs Maud Mahogany, Miss Myra Myrtle, Miss Priscilla Elderflower, Miss Bee Honeysuckle, Miss Grace Poplar, Miss O Mimosa San, Miss Rachel Cedarfrond, the Misses Lilian and Viola Lilac, Miss Timidity Aspenall, Mrs Kitty Dewey-Mosse, Miss May Hawthorne, Mrs Gloriana Palme, Mrs Liana Forrest, Mrs Arabella Blackwood and Mrs Norma Holyoake of Oakholme Regis graced the ceremony by their presence.’

‘Finnegans Wake’ would take up a lot of Joyce’s creative energy once ‘Ulysses’ was published- many people say too much. Faber published different chapters of ‘Finnegans Wake’ along the way (known then as ‘Work in Progress’), however from ‘Ulysses’ in 1922, until ‘Finnegans Wake’ in 1939, besides poetry, this is all that Joyce published. And he would be dead within a year.


This final novel seems to be based on a whole range of different languages, complete with words and phrases that often contain several layers of meaning. It seems that the melody and rhythm of the words mean more than the actual words themselves, which demands excessively patient reading. Many have found the novel impossible to read- I remember Colm Toibin telling me that apparently a good knowledge of Hungarian helps matters- regardless, there are those then, and since, who claim it to be a masterpiece and well worth the extensive and painstaking time Joyce took to write it. Evidently it helps if you read it aloud. Still, there are not too many readers who would understand all the allusions and literary references, and religious connotations, and various teasing wordplays.

Interestingly both men experienced significant hurdles when it came to publishing their most important work. In Joyce’s case, England or America wouldn’t touch seminal works like ‘Dubliners’ and ‘Ulysses’ for fear of offending. ‘Dubliners’ was first sent to a publisher in 1905. The publisher prevaricated on the grounds that the subject matter might offend, after initially agreeing to publish. Finally, by 1914 the publisher- Richards- finally agreed to risk libel action and publish, by which time Joyce must have had enough. Lawrence had difficulty with ‘The Rainbow’, although contrastingly, his book was initially published and then banned, and ‘Women in Love’, and infamously ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ have long, fascinating histories of banning and censorship. As a result pirated copies of some of these works flourished much to their author’s chagrin. Joyce had to go to Paris to get ‘Ulysses’ published, by Sylvia Beach (Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press declined). Lawrence tried Beach as well for ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, and ended up settling for a Florentine called Orioli.

The best way to represent Joyce’s unique style is to quote from it- here is the first page of ‘Ulysses':



STATELY, PLUMP BUCK MULLIGAN CAME FROM THE STAIRHEAD, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently-behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:
-- Introibo ad altare Dei.
Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called up coarsely:
-- Come up, Kinch. Come up, you fearful jesuit.
Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding country and the awaking mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak.
Buck Mulligan peeped an instant under the mirror and then covered the bowl smartly.
-- Back to barracks, he said sternly.
He added in a preacher's tone:
-- For this, O dearly beloved, is the genuine Christine: body and soul and blood and ouns. Slow music, please. Shut your eyes, gents. One moment. A little trouble about those white corpuscles. Silence, all.
He peered sideways up and gave a long low whistle of call, then paused awhile in rapt attention, his even white teeth glistening here and there with gold points. Chrysostomos. Two strong shrill whistles answered through the calm.
-- Thanks, old chap, he cried briskly. That will do nicely. Switch off the current, will you?


Then there is the first page of ‘Finnegans Wake':

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend


of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to

Howth Castle and Environs.

Sir Tristram, violer d'amores, fr'over the short sea, had passen-

core rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy

isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor

had topsawyer's rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse

to Laurens County's gorgios while they went doublin their mumper

all the time: nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to

tauftauf thuartpeatrick: not yet, though venissoon after, had a

kidscad buttended a bland old isaac: not yet, though all's fair in

vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone nathandjoe. Rot a

peck of pa's malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory

end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface.

The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner-

ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthur-

nuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later

on life down through all christian minstrelsy. The great fall of the

offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan,

erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends

an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes:

and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park

where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since dev-

linsfirst loved livvy.