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PARTISAN REVIEW
example, to tell stories about me to third persons (certainly not to my
discredit: indeed they were designed to make me out a bigger man than
I am) and then he would tell me what he had told them and laugh
gleefully, expecting me to join in the merriment. One of these stories
was that I was a painter well known in court circles and that I had
received an important commission from King George V himself.
If
I
shared his merriment in any degree it was not without a mild fear that
the story might get round, and then I should have to suffer the embar–
rassment that always lies in wait for the pretender.
Somewhat in the same vein, though quite harmlessly, he always
spoke to me and about me as
if
I were a Cornishman, and that for the
fifty per cent insufficient reason that my mother was a Cornishwoman.
I told him often enough that my father was a native of County Surrey
and that I was born and brought up in that County, and further that
I had spent only a few months of my life in the delectable Duchy. But
it made no difference. I was stiIl a Cornishman. He would begin sen–
tences with such openings as, "Your countryman, King Mark. . . ."
Or, "As a Cornishman you'll. ..." It was as
if
he wanted to rope me
in to some select Celtic confederacy in which I certainly did not belong
to be-as a Cornishman might say. But as Joyce himself said in one of
his dictations to Leon, "We did not sing either 'The Wearing of the
Green' or 'And Shall Trelawney Die?' in honor of our respective Irish
and Cornish forbears." True, we didn't. But that may be explicable in
the words of Calverly:
We never sing the old songs now.
It is not that we think them low,
But because we don't remember how
They go.
Joyce always held that the English never reaIly hated the Germans,
even in wartime, but looked on them as belonging to the same family,
cousins perhaps, who were doing pretty well for themselves, maybe a
bit too weIl, on the mainland of Europe.
Joyce associated a good deal with such Greeks as were available
in wartime Zurich, for he thought they all had a streak of Ulysses in
them. Although he knew some Greek he was not a Greek scholar by
high academic standards. By chance one day I stumbled on the fact
that this was a sore point with him. I told him that I left school and
went to work in my thirteenth year, but that the only thing I regretted
about my lack of schooling was that I was never able to learn Greek.
He thereupon regretted his insufficient knowledge of that language but,
as
if
to underline the difference in our two cases (or so I interpreted it)
I
