POETS Day! On James Joyce’s Ulysses with a Few Poems Thrown In

It’s POETS Day. That may be hard to remember with all the pretender days clamoring for your attention. It’s Garlic Lover’s Day today. That gets my attention. American Libraries Day too. Ecological Debt Day certainly gets my attention. The people I’m picturing “celebrating” that one don’t look like the people who would share public space with the World Smile Day, also today, celebrants.

I play Metatron for a friend’s pizza place on its Twitter account. I started out with “Free 8” 2-topping to the first person that retweets this – offer ends at 2pm, redeemable today at lunch only.” That gets boring quickly so I started throwing out bad jokes (Q: What did the snail say when he hitched a ride on the turtle’s back? A: Wheeeeeeeee!) and non sequiturs. I tried calling attention to pizza themed celebration days. Good Lord was that a mistake. There’s National Pizza Day (Feb 9), National Pepperoni Pizza Day (Sept 20), and a chorus of others vying for attention. I feel bad for National Sausage Pizza Day (Oct 11). It doesn’t get what I assume is the attention its founders envisioned buried as it is in National Pizza Month. PizzaToday.com put out an article titled “10 Can’t Miss Pizza Holidays,” the sinister unspoken being that there are more than 10 Pizza Holidays.

As a society we need to take a stand. Enough with all these non-official acronym-less holidays. I’m not sure how to get rid of all the chaff, but I do know that there’s a full afternoon to clear your mind and think about necessary calendar decluttering if you’re willing to grab it. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

Give the weekend a few hours from the work side of the ledger. What’s the harm. Nothing gets done on a Friday afternoon. If on Monday you’re asked why no one from the office could get ahold of you, well… you must have accidentally deleted their messages as a part of your National Inbox Zero Day observances.

As always, try starting your weekend with a little verse, and happy National Poetry Day (UK.)

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I’ve been fascinated by James Joyce’s Ulysses ever since, as a teenager, I thumbed through my father’s college copy and a Uriah Heap concert ticket fell out. That was the first serious challenge to the then prevailing theory of my father’s origins which posited he emerged from the womb a fully formed pipe smoking attorney who deemed cable tv an unnecessary waste of money. I’ve still never read the book.

Ulysses is on the edge of intimidating. I loved Dubliners and thought Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was up there with Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise among the best of the Tumult Leads Angry Young Man to Declare Himself in a Cemetery genre; certainly better than Look Homeward Angel. Finnegans Wake is more conversation piece than book. I’ve found the footnote that inspired physicist Murray Gell-Mann to name his proposed elementary particles quarks and oohed and aahed when it was age appropriate to think only I and my friends were possessors of the secret knowledge that the book opens midsentence and the first half of the line can be found in the midsentence ending. It was said by my friend’s older brother, who we had to believe because he got early acceptance to Princeton, that you can start anywhere in the book and read back to that point for the full story. Oooooh. Aaaaah.

Joyce said that his ideal reader suffered from “ideal insomnia.” He wrote Finnegans Wake for that ideal reader who he also mentioned should be fluent in seventeen languages and versed in the obscurities of who knows how many mythologies. Woody Allen wrote a short story where the main characters tries to explain the breadth of his intellect by claiming to have read Finnegans Wake on a Coney Island roller coaster. From the many attempts I’ve made at the book, a simultaneous roller coaster ride wouldn’t have hindered my comprehension a whit.

I tend to think of Dubliners and Portrait as brilliant prose, Finnegans Wake as an indulgence, and Ulysses… I’m not sure yet.

Joyce will be remembered as a novelist, but this is a POETS Day post and needs to at least nod at the fact that he was a well-regarded poet as well. I think he’s okay adjusted for company. The following was his contribution to the Ezra Pound edited collection Des Imagistes. Joyce’s entry is clunky in comparison to the others. The images are sharp, but they follow rather than flow from each other. It’s This. This. This. And also, This. This. This.

I Hear an Army
James Joyce (1882-1941)

I hear an army charging upon the land,
And the thunder of horses plunging; foam about their knees:
Arrogant, in black armour, behind them stand,
Disdaining the rains, with fluttering whips, the Charioteers.

They cry into the night their battle name:
I moan in sleep when I hear afar their whirling laughter.
They cleave the gloom of dreams, a blinding flame,
Clanging, clanging upon the heart as upon an anvil.

They come shaking in triumph their long grey hair:
They come out of the sea and run shouting by the shore.
My heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair?
My love, my love, why have you left me alone?

It’s good, but I don’t think it was chosen for its poetics so much as that Pound had made a project out of the pretty much unknown Joyce – collecting and sending clothes and money to keep him going – and his inclusion in Des Imagistes, published in February 1914, may have aided in building an audience for Dubliners, published four months later, and the serialization of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in The Egoist (it would be released as a novel in 1916.) Pound refers to Joyce as “the prose writer I’m really interested in” in a letter to H.L. Mencken a year after Des Imagistes. Again, Joyce’s poetry is good, but it’s not up to the standards of his prose.

The poem is interesting to me and interesting as part of the collection because images rise to a point about two thirds into the phrase before diminishing. Your voice builds in “They cry into the night their” where it reaches a peak before falling with “battle name.” Again the same in “I moan…afar” and down “Their whirling laughter.” Pound’s “music to the sequence of the musical phrase” rather his rejected “sequence of the metronome?”

Back to Ulysses, I just read the chapter “Consuming Investments: Joyce’s Ulysses” in Lawrence Rainey’s Institutions of Modernism. Rainey’s book considers the attempts to replace the vanishing patronage system by which artists earned their living. He points out the conflict between an aesthetic that valued the speech of the common man and all his Prufrock concerns and an insistence on artistic purity; independence over commercial appeal. The publishing history of Ulysses illustrates one of the unintended results of that conflict.

The novel was serialized in the United States in The Little Review from 1918 – 1921 until the magazine lost an obscenity trail. Parts were published in The Egoist in 1919 in the United Kingdom but the full novel was banned there until 1936. It was finally published in book form by Sylvia Beach, owner of the Paris bookstore Shakespeare and Co., in 1922 due in no small part to maneuverings and introductions made by (surprise) Pound. The story as commonly told is one of bravery and liberté in the face of censorship, but that’s not quite true. The censorship probably furthered the goals of Joyce and Beach.

I’m going to pause and drop in another of his poems. I feel like he gives the adjectives life in this one, like they are animating states given form by the girl rather than descriptors of her aspects.

A Flower Given to My Daughter

Frail the white rose and frail are
Her hands that gave
Whose soul is sere and paler
Than time’s wan wave.

Rosefrail and fair — yet frailest
A wonder wild
In gentle eyes thou veilest,
My blueveined child.

Lists of those who ordered the Beach publication of Ulysses include well known names. You may read that Churchill, the Sitwells, Huxley, and Yeats bought copies. You may read that the list includes William Carlos Williams, Andre Gide, Hart Crane, and Sherwood Anderson. Rainey points out that the more often you come across lists of Beach’s subscribers, as she referred to them, the more you see repetition so that while one may show a Guggenheim you didn’t see in the last, the newcomer is framed by a rotation of Yeats, Churchill, et al. The reason for the repetition is that there weren’t that many names to put out there. Individuals purchasing the limited one thousand copies of that edition were not representative of the buyers. Those luminaries served as advertisements to drive the value of the book on the resale market. The bulk of the purchases were bulk purchases by book sellers or collectors.

Forget the story of Joyce’s great work denied to the reading public by puritanical governments or Ur-Tipper Gores. That happened, but there were very few books in circulation and the magazines that serialized it didn’t have a wide distribution. The rubes weren’t the ones crying foul. Charges of obscenity came from what were assumed to be sophisticated readers, but that aside, when legal avenues for publication presented themselves, they were blocked by author and publisher. They were selling Ulysses as patronage by committee. Buyers bought a share that exclusivity ensured would grow in value and the author got outrageous royalties on these early deluxe or limited editions. Publishers were ready and willing to publish for the masses, but in deference to Joyce and Beach held back until they felt investors were satisfied. In a letter to his aunt, Joyce’s comments about the book were of resale value rather than revues.

The drive was to keep art from being a creature influenced by commerce, but literature posed a problem. A painting or sculpture could be sold to a discerning collector. You could be as artistically free as you pleased provided there was at least one buyer who shared your aesthetic. A novel or poetry collection needs a wider audience. The limited edition seemed like a good idea, and it was by no means a way of earning a living unique to Joyce and Ulysses, but it did the opposite of what was intended, turning the work into a commodity. Volumes were held back unread waiting for the right moment to sell on the secondary market.

So far, my copy of Ulysses is an investment property as well. I bought it a long time ago with every intent to read it but I’m always putting it off in the belief that I’ll be able to more fully appreciate it when I’ve read more… what? Contemporary authors? Commentary on Joyce? I have no idea. It feels like a book you should train for.

At That Hour

At that hour when all things have repose,
O lonely watcher of the skies,
Do you hear the night wind and the sighs
Of harps playing unto Love to unclose
The pale gates of sunrise?

When all things repose, do you alone
Awake to hear the sweet harps play
To Love before him on his way,
And the night wind answering in antiphon
Till night is overgone?

Play on, invisible harps, unto Love,
Whose way in heaven is aglow
At that hour when soft lights come and go,
Soft sweet music in the air above
And in the earth below.