One of the Greatest Failures in Literature
By David
Kelly
James Joyce in
1915 (Cornell University Library)
Today is James
Joyce’s birthday, and 2009 marks at least two significant Joycean
anniversaries: “Finnegans Wake” was published in 1939 — its author was peeved
when World War II stole some of his thunder — and Richard Ellmann’s great
biography came out in 1959.
Fifty years ago in
The New Yorker, Dwight Macdonald wrote about Ellmann’s book, “Here is the
definitive work, and I hope it will become a model for future scholarly
biographies.” More than two decades later, Anthony Burgess declared it “the
best biography of our century.” Is there a better literary biography from the
20th century, or from the first decade of the 21st? Ellmann’s own life of Wilde
comes close. “James Joyce” won the National Book Award, but somehow did not win
a Pulitzer. Ellmann wound up winning one for “Oscar Wilde,” though
posthumously.
In his review of the
Joyce biography in The New York Times Book Review, Stephen Spender wrote,
“Ellmann seems to accept the view of all good Joyceans that ‘Finnegans Wake’ is
Joyce’s masterpiece and not an immense aberration.” That was never the view of
“all” good Joyceans. Macdonald put it well: “Perhaps ‘Finnegan’ was a blind
alley, but it was his
blind alley.” Similarly, in a review of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lectures on
Literature,” John Simon wrote, “There is … a disparagement, correct to my mind,
of ‘Finnegans Wake’ as ‘one of the greatest failures in literature,’ although
the ambiguity of ‘greatest’ in this context, necessary to my mind, was not
intended by Nabokov.”
Burgess, as good a
Joycean as any, regarded “Ulysses” as the greatest 20th-century novel. Here’s what he said
about “Finnegans Wake”:
The world has
forgiven Joyce for the excesses of “Ulysses,” but it is not yet ready to
forgive him for the dementia of “Finnegans Wake.” Yet it is difficult to see
what other book he could well have written after a fictional ransacking of the
human mind in its waking state. “Ulysses” sometimes touches the borders of
sleep, but it never actually enters its kingdom. “Finnegans Wake” is frankly a
representation of the sleeping brain. It took Joyce 17 years to write between
eye operations and worry about the mental collapse of his daughter, Lucia. He
got little encouragement, even from Ezra Pound, that prince of avant-gardistes;
his wife, Nora, merely said that he ought to write a nice book that ordinary
people could read. But clearly “Finnegans Wake” had to be written, and Joyce
was the only man dedicated or mad enough to write it.
Likewise, Edna
O’Brien wrote about Joyce and the “Wake”: “Madness he knew to be the secret of
genius. … He preferred the word ‘exaltation,’ which can merge into madness. All
great men had that vein in them. The reasonable man, he insisted, achieves
nothing.”
Let’s give the final
word to John Updike, who died last week having left behind a finished
collection of stories and volume of poetry. This is how he ended his review of
Ellmann’s “Selected Letters of James Joyce” (1975):
He rereads
“Finnegans Wake,” “adding commas.” An old friend and amanuensis, Paul Léon,
shows up … fleeing the Germans. He and Joyce together methodically compile the
list of 900 misprints in “Finnegans Wake” that is Joyce’s last literary labor.
In 1906, he wrote his brother, “I have written quite enough and before I do any
more in that line I must see some reason why — I am not a literary Jesus
Christ.” In 1941, he writes his brother, in Italian, a list of people who might
help Stanislaus survive in Hitler’s Europe, and within the month is dead, of a
duodenal ulcer he had been harboring. His desk was clean.
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/one-of-the-greatest-failures-in-literature/
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