Joyce/Conversations - Revision history

Unknown user: /* Part V */

2022-05-24T23:26:27Z

Part V

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	and closed the conversation, so that I realized that I would never get a direct answer on this subject from him.		and closed the conversation, so that I realized that I would never get a direct answer on this subject from him.

	Indeed, one of his marked characteristics was his avoidance of giving a direct opinion about anyone or about anything, and I attributed some of his reticence to his early life in the provincial atmosphere of Dublin, where everything one said was echoed back and forth with considerable distortion among one's associates, until in the end it could assume the fantastic proportions of a Celtic myth, so that one was inclined to ~~dis believe~~ all one heard.		Indeed, one of his marked characteristics was his avoidance of giving a direct opinion about anyone or about anything, and I attributed some of his reticence to his early life in the provincial atmosphere of Dublin, where everything one said was echoed back and forth with considerable distortion among one's associates, until in the end it could assume the fantastic proportions of a Celtic myth, so that one was inclined to disbelieve all one heard.

	- p. 49		- p. 49

Unknown user: /* Part V */

2022-05-24T23:25:11Z

Part V

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	{{Quote\|		{{Quote\|
	Indeed, I remember one evening meeting an Irish painter who had turned into a bitter anti Catholic, and sitting in Joyce's room he had scoffed at what he had called this Italian conspiracy in which one of their number was appointed to represent God on earth. He had ridiculed the idea of man's creating God and enclosing Him in a tabernacle under lock and key to give Him only to those who were of the same sect as themselves. He had also attacked Confession as taking away God's power of forgiveness, and many other Roman Catholic practices, the details of which I have forgotten. Joyce was said to be anti-Catholic and I waited for him to express his opinion, but he retained his characteristic silence, his thin lips tightly compressed, uttering no word of approval or disapproval in the argument that raged between us.		Indeed, I remember one evening meeting an Irish painter who had turned into a bitter anti-Catholic, and sitting in Joyce's room he had scoffed at what he had called this Italian conspiracy in which one of their number was appointed to represent God on earth. He had ridiculed the idea of man's creating God and enclosing Him in a tabernacle under lock and key to give Him only to those who were of the same sect as themselves. He had also attacked Confession as taking away God's power of forgiveness, and many other Roman Catholic practices, the details of which I have forgotten. Joyce was said to be anti-Catholic and I waited for him to express his opinion, but he retained his characteristic silence, his thin lips tightly compressed, uttering no word of approval or disapproval in the argument that raged between us.

	- p. 49		- p. 49

Unknown user: /* Part III */

2022-05-24T23:24:46Z

Part III

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	-But you don't know anything about them. You don't know who they are, or what they are, I protested. Why did you give them your permission ?		-But you don't know anything about them. You don't know who they are, or what they are, I protested. Why did you give them your permission ?

	-Quite a number of people come to me and ask for my ~~per mission~~ to translate Ulysses, he remarked, and I always give it to them.		-Quite a number of people come to me and ask for my permission to translate Ulysses, he remarked, and I always give it to them.

	-Always ! I repeated, dumbfounded.		-Always! I repeated, dumbfounded.

	-Yes, he replied with a smile, because I know that none of them will ever do it.		-Yes, he replied with a smile, because I know that none of them will ever do it.

Unknown user: /* Quotes */

2022-03-10T08:29:20Z

Quotes

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	=Quotes=		=Quotes=

			==Preface==

			{{Quote\|
			“Joyce, having been pleased to discover that ''Riders to the Sea'' disappointed his criteria for great classical tragedy, subsequently embarked on a marvellous parody of Synge’s style in the Scylla and Charybdis episode of Ulysses:

			“It’s what I’m telling you, Mr Honey, it’s queer and sick we were, Haines and myself, the time himself brought it in. ’Twas murmur we did for a gallus potion would rouse a friar, I’m thinking, and he limp with leching. And we one hour and two hours and three hours in Connery’s sitting civil waiting for pints apiece. And we to be there, mavrone, and you to be unbeknownst sending us your conglomerations the way we to have our tongues out a yard long like the drouthy clerics do be fainting for a pussful.”
			}}

	==Part II==		==Part II==

Unknown user: /* Part XV */

2022-03-10T08:17:05Z

Part XV

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			-You do not agree with Aquinas then, that the act of copulation is the death of the soul?

			-I suppose in the Christian sense every material contact is death to the soul, but since I am not a religious man I am not too certain what the word "soul" means. It can have so many meanings that I cannot decide which is the true one.

			Joyce shrugged his shoulders, and turning away, picking up his glass, drank from it without answering, indicating, it seemed to me, that in his opinion it was useless to discuss such abstract matters, a waste of time even.

			- p. 108
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			{{Quote\|
			On the whole Joyce was a very reasonable man, and it was only about three things that he was quite fanatical : the first was the merit of Ibsen ; the second, strangely enough, ·the merit of Carmen; the third was the relative merits of restaurants, for a bad meal could sour his temper.

			- p. 108
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			{{Quote\|
			So much of my life in Paris had been bound up with him and Mrs Joyce, both of whom had given me a steady friendship as close as if I had been a member of the family. It had not ended, but had lessened as so many friendships lessen when distance puts its cold hand between them, damped as they are by circumstances and time, and by differences of personality. A personality can fuse with another personality for a time, but when that time is over we gradually re-enter the solitude of ourselves. Then all that remains is the memory of the fire which once warmed us both, and it is fragments of that memory which I have tried to reconstruct in this short book.

			- p. 111
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	=Flags=		=Flags=

Unknown user: /* Part XV */

2022-03-10T08:01:01Z

Part XV

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	==Part XV==		==Part XV==

			{{Quote\|
			-Take Hemingway. He seems on the way to the top because he is original. But his originality is a venal one, and what he writes about smells in life, and in time it will smell in literature too: stories about alcoholics and nymphomaniacs and people who live in a waste land of violence and who have no emotional depth. I admit to his merit, of course, that he is very much of our time. But in my opinion he is too much of our time, in fact his writing is now more the work of a journalist than that of a literary man.

			-He has reduced the veil between literature and life, said Joyce, which is what every writer strives to do. Have you read "A Clean Well Lighted Place"?

			-Yes, I said, and it is one of his best, and I wish that they were all up to that standard.

			-It is masterly, replied Joyce, in a glow of enthusiasm. Indeed, I think it is one of the best short stories ever written; there is bite there.

			-p. 107
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Unknown user: /* Part XIV */

2022-03-10T07:53:49Z

Part XIV

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	- p. 103		- p. 103
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			{{Quote\|
			In fact, he had a contempt for the multiple artistic activities of Paris. Either he did not understand them, or it was his bourgeois caution, a prejudice one might say, against anything new and fashionable which he looked on as a "racket", a novelty which would subside as quickly as it had arisen.

			- p. 103-104
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			==Part XV==

Unknown user: /* Part XIV */

2022-03-10T07:51:04Z

Part XIV

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			But in general he was not interested in modern art which was the rage in Paris. Picasso, Matisse, Braque, were names which never seemed to occupy his mind. I was, as it happens,
			more interested in painting than in literature and as a critic on the New York Herald I was constantly in touch with the art of the day. Ofren as we passed an art gallery in the rue de Seine, of which there are a great number, I stopped in front of them and asked his opinion of the latest Picasso, or Braque, but he would stare blankly at them, his face registering no interest or emotion, and would ask, after a time:

			-How much are they worth ?

			- p. 103
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Unknown user: /* Part XIV */

2022-03-10T07:49:48Z

Part XIV

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	- p. 100		- p. 100
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			{{Quote\|
			-But does tradition ever die? I asked him. What is art but the same formula used over and over again in a different way ?

			-Browning of the many words, replied Joyce, whose characters, no matter who they are, all talk like intellectuals : a mind that creeps along repeating itself endlessly until eventually he is lost in the maze of words. But did you ever hear anyone talk like Browning's characters? Or if you did, didn't you feel you were going crazy, or getting drunk? The Waste Land is the expression of our time in which we are trying to lift off the accumulated weight of the ages which was stifling original thought: formulas which may have meant something in the past but which mean nothing today. Eliot searches for images of emotion rather than for an ordered sequence, and in this he is related to all the other modern poets.

			- p. 101
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			-Lawn Tennyson, he said, repeating the quip in Ulysses, the rectory prude, a poet deficient in intellect.

			- p. 102
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			{{Quote\|
			And Donne's love poems are more intricate, deeper than any others I know. To me he is very English, far more so than Tennyson, for the English mind, in spite of all that has been said about it, is intricate, and with Donne you enter a maze of thought and feeling. A poem of his is an adventure in which you do not know where you will end, which is what a piece of writing should be. In life you don't know where an experience will lead, and a work of literature should be the same. It is that which gives it the excitement. Donne is Shakespearian in his richness, and in comparison the famous French love poets sound trivial.

			- p. 102
			}}

Unknown user: /* Part XIII */

2022-03-10T07:46:29Z

Part XIII

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	- p. 97		- p. 97
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			==Part XIV==

			{{Quote\|
			I met Joyce by chance one evening in the Champs Elysees and we sat down for a drink in ' Le Beri ', with its scarlet canopy and the straw-coloured chairs spread out over the pavement. It was getting on towards six and the cars were racing up towards the Arc de Triomphe. The sky was pale over the roofs of the houses opposite and in front of us the boule vard trees were shimmering in that dark enamelled green which is a combination of artificial light and daylight. As we sat there on the terrace drinking our cinzano Joyce repeated some lines from The Waste Lewd, which had evidently caught his fancy :

			O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag -

			It's so elegant

			So intelligent

			'What shall I do now? What shall I do? '

			'I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street

			'With my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow?

			'What shall we ever do?'

			- p. 100
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