Books
.. EXILE AND CUNNING..
JAMES JOYCE. By
Herbert Gorman. Farrar and Rinehart.
$3.50.
Mr. Gorman possesses exactly the right combination of devotion and
naivete toward his subject to make his book always interesting, and per·
haps, in its way, as valuable, as a biography written by a more detached
and wiser man. For Mr. Gorman documents meticulously (no one
will
ever have to "research" Joyce's addresses in Trieste, Zurich and Paris, for
example), at the same time that he lets through facts which might have
been suppressed by a biographer of a more subtle kind; and from these
facts conclusions may be drawn by men who will not have Gorman's first
hand knowledge of Joyce, but may be gifted with greater powers of infer·
ence. As it is, Gorman's devotion is so sincere that it is often touching;
and he has done such a good job of canvassing certain portions of Joyce's
career, hitherto unexplored, that no one, whatever his insight or powers of
interpretation, could have done better.
The most valuable part of the book, apart from certain dropped sen·
tences which open up whole fields of speculation Gorman evidently has no
notion of, are the chapters (as straight history of period and custom)
which describe Joyce's long battle against the smugness and fright of
British and Irish publishers (and printers) from 1906 to 1914. This early
battle was in some ways more bitter than the later struggles with English
and American censors, after the publication of
Ulysses.
Joyce's cor·
respondence with Grant Richards, explaining the purpose of
Dubliners
(accepted by that firm in 1906, but later dropped) and defending
this
book against the moral indignation of the printers who set it up, is a fine
contribution to the social history of the time. Joyce's remark concerning
the powers taken over by the printers is typical: "In no other civilized
country in Europe, I think, is a printer allowed to open his mouth [in
moral censure]." Joyce's later defeat at the hands of Maunsel and Co.
(Dublin), illuminates the Irish situation, the narrowness and bigotry of
which, in the same years, Yeats was excoriating in the scornful poems
written against the petty bourgeois town-Irish in general. It was this nar·
row-mindedness which finally disabused Yeats of the idea of a "popular"
theatre, and drove him toward the subjects and the forms of his later
style. And it was after Joyce's final defeat at the hands of libel-fearing
Irish publishers, that
Ulysses
took final shape in his mind.
Gorman's account of Joyce's early training, and his family situation,
corroborates much we have already learned from · Joyce's work. It is
brought out with great clearness, in Gorman's account, that Joyce never
received a day's training from other than Jesuit hands. And Joyce's father
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