FURTHER RECOLLECTIONS OF JOYCE
535
"It brings me to this point. You have never heard of a woman
who was the author of a complete philosophic system. No, and I don't
think you ever will."
So that was it. The creator of Molly Bloom and Anna Livia Plura–
belle could never of course be a misogynist. No doubt a recent sojourn
among women who were laying down the law about God and the uni–
verse, or, still worse, attempting to put him right on the matter of
scholastic philosophy, was responsible for the outburst. But what for
me makes the incident particularly worth recording is Joyce's designa–
tion of the demesne of philosophic inquiry as the one impregnable prov–
ince of the mind reserved exclusively for the male. On the occasio:1
of the second blast of the trumpet, I listened to a similar tirade on the
same subject: woman and her urge to rivalize with menfolk in the
things of the mind as well as to dominate them socially.
"But," I said, "as I remember you in other days you always fell
back upon the fact that the woman's body was desirable and provoking,
whatever else was objectionable about her."
This produced an impatient
((Ma chef"
and the further comment:
"Perhaps I did. But now I don't care a damn about their bodies. I am
only interested
in their
clothes."
Thus Stephen's
interest in
the "handful of dyed rags"
survives
his
interest in the "squaw" they were pinned around. And when Joyce said
clothes I took
it
for granted, knowing his bent, that he did not mean
those wondrous garments devised by Dior, Fath, and others for the
social adornment of the female form. I understood him rather to mean
those garments visible only on the clothesline or on privileged private
occasions. Throughout his life Joyce remained faithful to the under–
clothing of ladies of the Victorian era. Readers of
Ulysses
will remember
the important part these articles played
in
that composition whether
gleaming in the gloaming under the navy blue
skirt
of Gerty MacDowell
or "redolent of Apoponax"
in
Molly Bloom's bedroom. They flutter also
through the nightworld pages of
Finnegans Wake.
They were to Joyce
feminine attributes of even greater value than the curves and volumes
of the femal e body
itself
and certainly, as appears from the foregoing,
of more abiding
interest.
Indeed he used,
in
the
Zurich
period, to carry
a miniature pair in his trousers pocket until one sad day, as he sadly
informed me, he lost them. A great number of Joyce's readers and ad–
mirers I am told inhabit the United States of
America,
and no doubt
had he visited that hospitable country he would have been right royally
entertained; and yet I cannot imagine his ever
being
wholly at his ease
in a country where the word "drawers"
is
applied to those cumbersome
