Yeats on Joyce

[Mark Kohut]

Yeats' words on the 700 pages of the "vulgarity of a single Dublin day" is praise from him, my friends. See below.

It was Virginia Woolf, among famous artists, who famously dissed Ulysses in her diary as "vulgar"...for her, that meant BAD. Not art.

The critical acumen Yeats had shown in singling out Joyce at the start of his astonishing career was fully vindicated. Strikingly, he aggressively took up the cause of Ulysses, and of Joyce - making, time and time again, the point that newly independent Ireland now had a great novelist of European stature, to stand with Tolstoy, Balzac, and - carefully chosen - Rabelais. At the Tailteann Games in 1924, and repeatedly through pressure groups such as the Academy of Irish Letters, Yeats pressed Joyce's claims - inviting him back to Ireland, speaking on his work at literary societies, and cautiously investigating the legal position when copies of the book were seized at Dover. (It was Yeats's close friend, the American lawyer and art patron John Quinn, who unsuccessfully defended the Little Review on charges of obscenity after it printed extracts in 1920.) Time and again he recurred to the significance of the publication of Ulysses, and its coinciding with
 the foundation of the Irish Free State - notably in his essay 'Ireland 1921-1931', where he reflected on this conjunction as the beginning of a new phase in Irish history. A year later, in his essay 'Modern Ireland', he used the Christmas dinner scene in A Portrait as the essential expression of the bitterness infusing Irish politics since the death of Parnell - whom Joyce now joined in Yeats's personal pantheon of makers of modern Irish sensibility. 
And, as his correspondence from the summer of 1922 shows, he read the book: finding in it not only the fierce "veracity" praised by Yeats's own father, but also "great beauty, lyric beauty, even in the fashion of my generation" (an aspect of Ulysses sometimes missed by less astute critics). He read it sitting on the flat roof of his tower at Ballylee, until driven inside by horseflies; he praised it to Pound and Eliot; he wrote to Joyce himself, "you will find a great many admirers of your genius in Dublin and altogether a very different city from the city you remember". Joyce did not take the risk of finding out if this were true. 




________________________________
From: Johnny Marr <marrja at gmail.com>
To: Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com>
Cc: Richard Fiero <rfiero at gmail.com>; pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Sunday, July 5, 2009 8:00:43 PM
Subject: Re: Yeats on Joyce

I would call Joyce Catholic on the grounds that he could never escape his religious upbringing. Also bear in mind that much of Yeats' time in the Irish Senate was spent trying to moderate the predominantly Catholic policies and legislation - however much he believed in the church he was raised in Yeats certainly felt it was important to represent them in case they became overlooked and ostracised.  

Joyce was an inveterate trouble maker who (despite the recognition of the fallacies of patriotism in the Cyclops section of Ulysses) had a lingering disregard for English protestantism that you might expect from a man who grew up under British colonial rule. Therefore, whether or not he may have enjoyed Yeats' poetry he would certainly have enjoyed winding up someone from the 'oppressing' class, particularly one with a milder and more snobbish temperament than his own and with an out of touch, far-fetched mysticism. Dismissing the reportage of an ordinary Dubliner's life as mere vulgarity is exactly the kind of haughty and elitist response Joyce would have wanted to hear.


On Sun, Jul 5, 2009 at 8:02 PM, Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com> wrote:

Okay, I'll give you patrician.  Still, I think he was more Irish than
>Anglican.  And both men renounced their respective churches.  It is
>true that we all see the world according to the metaphors most deeply
>ingrained from youth, so you can, yes, on those terms call Yeats
>"Anglican" by the church of his upbringing, but then you must also
>call Joyce "Catholic."  Maybe it doesn't matter, really, a couple of
>Mics blowing foam against malt.
>
>
>On Sun, Jul 5, 2009 at 9:36 AM, Johnny Marr<marrja at gmail.com> wrote:
>> He was a member of the Irish Senate and an on-off sympathiser with the
>> aristocracy, of course he was patrician.
>>
>> On Sun, Jul 5, 2009 at 4:53 PM, Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Um.  It was my impression that Yeats, born in Dublin, was a campaigner
>>> for Irish culture who strongly supported the use of Gaelic in Ireland.
>>>  Joyce poked freely at him for his boyish rejection of Anglican
>>> culture.  Hard to think of him as "patrician," in spite of his later
>>> posture of sagacity.  Joyce, on the other hand, moved away quickly to
>>> Paris, from which vantage he picked at Ireland and the Irish with his
>>> acerbic portrayals of the low-brow Dubliners.  I, of course, have no
>>> great love for either Joyce or Yeats.  Maybe because I was raised
>>> Anglican, maybe because I see them both as peevish, rather excitable
>>> fellows.  Typical Irishmen, just a few pints short of loopy.  Not that
>>> we Americans all that sober-minded.
>>>
>>> On Sun, Jul 5, 2009 at 3:07 AM, Johnny Marr<marrja at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> > I bet Joyce would have liked it even more: a patrician Anglican writer
>>> > complaining about "the vulgarity of a single Dublin day", and who fails
>>> > to
>>> > have picked up on Joyce's less spiritualist but equally firm melding of
>>> > myth
>>> > and fact (and I type this as an acolyte of both WBY and JAAJ).
>>> >
>>> > On Sun, Jul 5, 2009 at 4:36 AM, Richard Fiero <rfiero at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> >>
>>> >> I rather like the following criticism which is attributed by Richard
>>> >> Ellman to Yeats writing in the 1926 A Vision about James Joyce in
>>> >> particular.‘There is hatred of the abstract . . . The intellect turns
>>> >> upon
>>> >> itself. . . . they either eliminate from metaphor the poet’s phantasy
>>> >> and
>>> >> substitute a strangeness discovered by historical or contemporary
>>> >> research
>>> >> or . . . break up the logical processes of thought by flooding them
>>> >> with
>>> >> associated ideas or words that seem to drift into the mind by chance;
>>> >> or . .
>>> >> . a lunatic among his keepers, a man fishing behind the gas works, the
>>> >> vulgarity of a single Dublin day prolonged through 700 pages – and
>>> >> delirium
>>> >> . . . It is as though myth and fact, united until the exhaustion of the
>>> >> Renaissance, have now fallen so far apart that man understands for the
>>> >> first
>>> >> time the rigidity of fact, and calls up, by that very recognition,
>>> >> myth.’
>>> >>
>>> >>
>>> >
>>> >
>>
>>
>



      
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