Virginia Woolf, privately dissing James Joyce
"the inferior water" "callow board school boy" -wotta snob!
(Didn't she say similar snobby snipes about D.H. Lawrence?)
More Woolf bitchery about Ulysses
"I should be reading ‘Ulysses,’ and fabricating my case for and against. I have read 200 pages so far—not a third; and have been amused, stimulated, charmed, interested, by the first two or three chapters—to the end of the cemetery scene; and then puzzled, bored, irritated and disillusioned by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples. Tom, great Tom [T.S. Eliot], thinks this is on a par with ‘War and Peace’! An illiterate, underbred book, it seems to me; the book of a self-taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating.”
Got no dog in this race - I have read exactly the same number of pages of Ulysses as of Mrs Dalloway - eight.
The insults are the sincerest form of flattery, I think. There are echoes of Biggie and Tupac, or maybe Jay-Z and Nas. She was clearly rattled.
ReplyDeleteThere Woolf is in 1922, working on her project to expand the possibilities of narrative fiction in English and depict human consciousness in a new and unprecedentedly realistic way. And then along comes this "underbred... board school boy", who is doing it with a thunderous energy that even she can't deny. And even some of her friends, including Eliot, are blown away by it. I don't know if Joyce ever shared his views on her, but something along the lines of "U mad, bro?" would seem appropriate.
She seems deeply conflicted in her feelings. In the last sentence of the second extract, at least three of the adjectives she uses would be seen today as positives.
If she had published that passage, Faber could have taken "'insistent, raw, striking' - Virginia Woolf" and used it on the book jacket.
Too true. Haters gon' hate. Hate as a backhanded compliment - and not even that backhanded, with the isolated phrases you mention.
ReplyDeleteI wonder what, if anything, she said about Ulysses in public. Perhaps she was shrewd enough to know that not saying anything at all is the craftiest move. Pretend not to have even noticed.