Traveling Joyce

THE PORTABLE JAMES JOYCE (760 pp.) --Introduction and Notes by Harry Levin--Viking ($2).

FABULOUS VOYAGER: JAMES JOYCE'S ULYSSES (299 pp.)--Richard M. Kain--University of Chicago ($4).

Last week travelers could carry, in one trim volume, much of the best work of a prodigious literary traveler--the proud, pawky Irish genius whose explorations often needed a map to follow. This week (he latest map was also provided, in a new book-length study of James Joyce's famous Ulysses.

Years before Joyce died in Zurich (Jan. 13, 1941), he had been recognized as, at least, the greatest living experimenter with the English language; at most, the strongest universal mind since Dante. But his hard writing was hard reading; even with a reputation for dirty passages, Joyce's Ulysses has sold only 110,000 copies in the U.S.

Ulysses--banned in the U.S. until 1933, when a federal court declared that its incidental obscenities did not make it an obscene book--was hard enough. Finnegans Wake (1939), Joyce's 'final work, written in a dream language of outrageous puns and unheard-of syntax, was a great deal harder; it could not be read, in the ordinary sense--it had to be unraveled.

The world Joyce wrote about was, on the surface, the city of Dublin, where he had lived until, at 22, he forsook Ireland for lifelong expatriation on the Continent. His endless evocation of Dublin and the inner life of its people, pathetic, somnambulist, comic and dirty, was as factual as a photograph and as symbolic as a liturgy. Even sympathetic critics sometimes lost patience with him. Wrote Cyril Connolly in 1943:

"I have lately been reading both Joyce and Proust with considerable disappointment; they both seem to me very sick men, giant invalids who, in spite of enormous talent, were crippled by the same disease, elephantiasis of the ego. They both attempted titanic tasks, and both failed for lack of that dull but healthy quality without which no masterpiece can be contrived, a sense of proportion."

Reckless Laughter. The men responsible for these two new books on Joyce do not share Connolly's disappointment. In the introduction to his portable Joyce (containing selections from Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as well as Joyce's short stories, his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, his lyrics and his play, Exiles, all complete), Harvard's Professor Harry Levin wrote: "As we study them closely, we are less intimidated by their idiosyncrasies, and more impressed not only by the qualities they share with the great books of other ages, but by their vital concern for the problems of our own age."

Joyce's characters were rendered as "streams of consciousness," his world as a relativistic universe of "mind" events." In a century that has been wished, by some well-wishers, on the Common Man, Joyce's heroically common Leopold Bloom seemed designed to remind them of the man they are talking about.

This type, whom demagogues affect to love, Joyce really loved and loathed, grieved for, impersonated and laughed himself sick over. With Freudian penetration and unFreudian humor, he understood Bloom's mind as a river of non-sequiturs and fantasies of fear, guilt and desire--a gigantic living ragbag, intermittently aware of his fellows, and at the same time tiny, lonely and abandoned in a vast, fearsome universe.

The Office of Katharsis. Professor Levin argues that Joyce's "imaginative constructions are ... grounded on the rock of his buried religious experience." Strictly speaking, Joyce's religious experience was adolescent. He was barely out of his teens when he renounced Ireland and with it the Roman Catholic Church. Much has been made of his Jesuit education, of how his mind was formed by Catholicism and in particular by St. Thomas Aquinas. It is equally true to say that his mind was formed about as independently as any mind ever was. His mocking The Holy Office, written in 1904 against his Irish enemies and crudely descriptive of his lifelong activity in letters, was still a boyish boast:

That they may dream their dreamy dreams

I carry off their filthy streams . . .

Thus I relieve their timid arses,

Perform my office of Katharsis . . .

Those souls that hate the strength that mine has

Steeled in the school of old Aquinas.

"Wholeness, harmony and radiance" were the ideals of art that Joyce took from Aquinas. "How can these qualities be constructed," asks Professor Levin, "out of the fragments, the discords and the obscure details of modern life?" He gives what he thinks was Joyce's answer: "By proceeding through what William James terms 'the stream of consciousness' to what Jung terms 'the racial unconscious,' beyond individual dreams to collective myth."

Finnegans Wake, a poem of sleep and flux, is also a masterpiece of systematic ambiguity, honoring less the waking mind that made it than the night world of humanity and the mythic "nightmare of history" from which Joyce as a young man said he wished to awake. Critics may wonder if Finnegans Wake is not a huge, jesting and virtuoso footnote to Joyce's simplest and finest poem, Ecce Puer, written soon after his father died and his grandson Stephen was born in 1932:

Of the dark past

A child is born;

With joy and grief

My heart is torn.

Calm in his cradle The living lies.

May love and mercy Unclose his eyes!

Young life is breathed On the glass; The world that was not Comes to pass.

A child is sleeping:

An old man gone.

O, father forsaken,

Forgive your son!

Threadbare Survivors. The newborn child (Stephen Joyce) that Joyce wrote of is now 15, and enrolled at Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass. Baptized a Catholic without his fond grandfather's knowledge, Stephen went to school during the war at Glion, Switzerland. In Zurich last week his father, Giorgio Joyce, and his grandmother, Nora (Joyce's widow), were living in threadbare bleakness, victims of wartime exchange restrictions which still allowed them to receive only -L-75 a year from the Joyce estate in London, to which all royalties on the books are paid.

James Joyce's grave was marked by a black stone in the snowy Fluntern Cemetery above Zurich. Nobody seemed to know what has become of his last unpublished writings. His secretary, Paul Leon, returning to Paris for them in 1940, had been caught by the Nazis and never heard from again. It is possible that Mme. Leon, thought to be in the south of France, has some of the notebooks from which students of Joyce might learn more of his plans for the work which death interrupted. By one account it was to be an epic on the sea; by another, a classic tragedy.

Younger Generation

CHILDREN OF VIENNA (223 pp.)--Rob-erf Neumann--Dutfon ($2.75).

Robert Neumann is one of those novelists who wish to leave the reader's complacency in tatters. At his best, he is brilliantly artful at it. His By the Waters of Babylon (TIME, July i, 1940) remains a classic work of fiction on the lives of European Jews. Children of Vienna, a much slighter story, is addressed, says Vienna-born Author Neumann, "to the men and women of the victorious countries"--especially to any who have failed to imagine life in the rubble "east of the Meridian of Despair."

In the cellar of a bombed-out building in Vienna several children are wintering like rats. The youngest, Tiny, is lying covered with newspapers in a handcart. The shrewdest, Yid, 13, a pickpocket, bends over her. "She is nearly going," he says to seven-year-old Curls. "Look at her belly. I know, from camp. You can die from a shrink belly or you can die from a balloon belly."

"Or you can die from spots."

Yid said: "There are five different sorts of spots. . . . My mother was caught with spots at the parade in Oswiecim. Off she went. Gas."

"My mother," said Curls, "was liberated by the Poles . . . she screamed. They hit me over the head and liberated her. When I came to she was gone."

Their refuge is threatened by an ex-Nazi who is in solid with the Allied Military Government, and by an ex-SS man looking for a girl. The children are joined by Goy, who is 14 and strong, and by Eve, who is 15 and has a friend with her, a girl named Ate. When the SS man comes back drunk, Goy and Yid nearly kill him.

"I used to like films about the Fiihrer," Eve said.

Ate said: "I like them about real love. Soft love, you know. Not rape."

"Rape is so mean, I think," Eve said. "It's just because they don't want to pay."

Strangest visitor to the cellar is a U.S. Army Negro chaplain, the Rev. Hoseah Washington Smith, of Jesus Church, Beulah, Louisiana. At first Yid thinks the chaplain is a sucker who will pay 60 smokes for Eve. But the Rev. Mr. Smith has a package which he says contains "calories."

"Nobody can teach me calories," said the boy. "It is what you die of. ... You can die of 1,100 calories with the British and Americans, or you can die of 900 calories with the French, or you can die of 800 calories in a concentration camp."

Chaplain Smith works a miracle in the cellar. Before his zeal on behalf of the children finally gets him arrested, he even has Yid using phrases like "the Lord permitting."

Children of Vienna is a bitter little tale of conquered Europe's younger generation, its postwar jargon and cynicism and the still unconquered reasons for it.

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