426
PARTISAN REVIEW
course the perfect book about Joyce will never be written by one person;
the best criticism of his work is scattered in a hundred magazines in
several languages. For one thing, no writer enforces such great humility;
and that particular virtue is not popular with the neo-academic group.
Like Mark Scharer in writing about Blake, Mr. Kain makes much ado
about the "social element" in Joyce, although one had supposed that too
self-evident to require much comm.ent. But a more fundamental objec–
tion is the kind of pervasive feebleness, uncertainty, and immaturity,
both of sensibility and judgment, reflected everywhere in the style. Here
is part of his summation of Stephen: "Stephen thus represents the bar–
renness of a skeptical intellectualism. Believing in nothing, lacking any
positive faith in a world that has retained only the shreds and husks of
outworn beliefs, he can contribute nothing to society.... Art for art's
sake soon becomes art for myself." This might have been written by any
of the "social" critics of the thirties. Or, take the closing sentences of the
whole study: "By the very scope of its indictment and the bleakness of
its atmosphere, the novel constitutes a most powerful challenge to com–
mercialism, vulgarity, ignorance, prejudice, and inertia.
Ulysses
is a
modern
Hamlet;
but it is a Hamlet without the last three acts."
From a purely material point of view the
Portable Joyce
is a con–
siderable bargain; and it is a convenience to have so much of Joyce's
work within two boards. Perhaps we would have sacrificed
Exiles
and
even some of the stories of
D-ubliners
for more of
Ulysses.
Moreover,
why the "Nestor" episode from the latter was favored over the much
richer "Proteus" is puzzling, and also the omission of the "Circe" epi–
sode-in the opinion of most critics, the most powerful in the work.
More disturbing than the selections (which are on the whole excellent)
are Mr. Levin's introduction and notes. Although there are some good
observations in the former, it is debilitated throughout by what Mr.
Levin admits is "an ambivalent state of mind." One feels that this critic
would enjoy greater peace of mind if he could decide whether he really
cares very much about literature at all. In the meantime he writes too
often like someone trying to make an honest woman out of modern
literature for the
Atlantic Monthly.
Of Leon Edel's little book it may be said that it·is the kind of thing
rarely done well in English, and almost never in this country-a memoir
which
is
1
also the record of a high moment of personal experience on the
part of the writer, written with great feeling but without sentimentality,
as nearly flawless as this kind of writing can be. Edel, an Americ<,an
officer in Switzerland in 1945, visited Joyce's family, reconstructed with
their help his final flight into exile, the details of his sickness, and his
funeral rites. At his grave outside of Zurich Edel writes, "And here, in
Switzerland, far from the Shannon and the Liffey, under the mountain
snow, lay that once elegant figure, the ironic alchemist of words. It was
