MY FRIEND JAMES JOYCE
91
fancy. He wondered if he himself had imagination. As the politi–
cal horizon in Europe grew more threatening, his high Olympian
neutrality asserted itself more and more. In those days I remem–
ber reading to him a German translation from a speech by Radek
in which the Russian attacked
Ulysses,
at the Congress of Kharkov,
as being without a social conscience. "Well," said Joyce, "all the
characters in my hooks belong to the lower middle classes, and
even the working class; and they are all quite poor." He began to
read
Wuthering Heights.
"This woman had pure imagination," he
said. "Kipling had it too, and certainly Yeats." His admiration
for the Irish poet was very great. A recent commentator, asserting
that Joyce lacked reverence for the logos in poetry, inferred that
he had little regard for Yeats. I can assure the gentleman that this
was not true. Joyce often recited Yeats' poems to us from memory.
"No surrealist poet can equal this for imagination," he said. Once
when Yeats spoke over the radio, he invited us to listen in with him.
I read
The Vision
to him, and he was deeply absorbed hy the colos–
sal conception, only regretting that "Yeats did not put all this into
a creative work." At Yeats' death he sent a wreath to his grave at
Antihes, and his emotion, on hearing of the poet's passing, was
moving to witness. He always denied too that he had said to Yeats
that he was too old to he influenced hy him.
Joyce had a passion for the irrational manifestations of life.
Yet there was nothing in common between his attitude and that of
the surrealists and psychoanalysts. Nor did his experiments have
anything to do with those of the German romantics who explored
the mysticism of the individual world. Joyce was an intensely
conscious observer of the unconscious drama. During walks in
Paris, we often talked about dreams. Sometimes I related to him
my own dreams which, during the pre-war years began to take on
a strangely fantastic, almost apocalyptic silhouette. He was always
eager to discuss them, because they interested him as images of the
nocturnal universe. He himself, he said, dreamed relatively little,
but when he did, his dreams were usually related to ideas, personal
and mythic, with which he was occupied in his waking hours. He
was very much attracted hy Dunn's theory of
serialism,
and I read
to him that author's . brilliant
A Theory with Time
which Joyce
regarded highly. He told me one of his dreams, and subsequent
events seemed to confirm Dunn's multi-dimensional conceptions.
