PEOPLE IN PARIS
315
booked for three weeks." Yet outside the salons, gone was the snappy
voice and no one could have been more charming. With his extraordinary
intelligence he was interested in everything. He adored to talk about the
technique of painting, and enjoyed painting himself. I saw a sea-scape of
his once; it was dull and academic.
It
is a curious thing that writers of
the first order love to paint pictures of the third or fourth order (think of
D. H. Lawrence's paintings, they are badly drawn and the colour is
extremely unpleasant).
•
I
I wrote to James Joyce asking him for a few pages for the first num-
ber of
Echanges.
He asked me to come and see him to talk it over. I went
to his apartment-it was the first time I saw him-and was shown into a
small dark room. For a few minutes I thought I was alone, then the tall,
painfully thin figure emerged from a corner of the room. I doubt that he
was able to see me, but he. knew where I was. He came towards me,
frailer than I had ·imagined; his face had that spiritual quality which near
blindness and work of the intensity and concentration, of which he alone
in his generation was capable, stamp with solitary unworldliness. Joyce
got over the fi;st awkwardness between .two people who have not met
before by showing me with great pride a volume of Robert Bridges' poems,
which the then poet laureate had dedicated to H.M. George V., and in
which Bridges had written to Joyce that he (Joyce) had done with words
what
Bri~ges
had always longed to do. I was touched and surprised that
Joyce should have been flattered by Bridges' praise of him, because Bridges
was an incredibly dull poet-which makes his paradoxical interest in the
innovations of other writers so curious. One remembers how he had
encouraged and practically discovered another genius, Gerard Manley
Hopkins; how he had translated and included Rimbaud in his anthology,
The Spirit of Man.
This charming old man was unable to do what he
wished with words, but he had the insight and generosity to discover and
appreciate those who could. Joyce talked to me about Yeats, and about
England and Ireland. They would never understand each other, he said.
The next time I saw Joyce was at a dinner at Adrienne Monnier's flat.
Adrienne had asked a few people to hear Harold Nicholson speak on
James Joyce over the B.B.C. We sat facing the radio-Mr. and Mrs. Joyce,
Leon Paul Fargue, Amy and Walter Smart, Sylvia Beach and myself–
waiting for the talk to begin, when to our horror a voice said, "We regret
to announce that Mr. Harold Nicolson's lecture on Mr. James Joyce will
not take place, the censor has placed James Joyce's work under the cate–
gory of pornography." Joyce turned white, he had particularly looked
forward to hearing this lecture on his work. I shall never forget the tense
atmosphere that followed, we all felt ashamed at the ignorance and nar–
rowness of the persons whose business it is to control our reading. Joyce
was obviously affected by this stupid and humiliating treatment. Fortu–
nately this act of philistinism took place before dinner; our discomfort
was alleviated by an excellent dinner cooked by Adrienne herself, I have
never before or since seen such a large roast chicken. Fargue teased -and
