FURTHER RECOLLECTIONS OF JOYCE
539
he said with sudden vehemence: "But just think: isn't that a world I
am peculiarly fitted to enter?" As a work of reference for his
Ulysses
he used the Butcher-Lang translation of the
Odyssey.
He joined Pearse's Irish class in Dublin, but said of Pearse that "in
a classroom he was a bore." He told me that he couldn't stand Pearse's
continual mockery of the English language, instancing in particular
Pearse's ridiculing of the English word "thunder." This was probably
the limit, for as all readers of
Finnegans Wake
can testify thunder was
for Joyce a word laden with very big magic. He soon abandoned Irish
in favor of Norwegian which he studied to such purpose that later he
was able to translate James Stephens' poem, "The Wind on Stephen's
Green," into Norwegian (as well as into Latin, Italian, German, and
French). In any case Norwegian was for him an obvious choice as an
alternative, for he regarded his native Dublin as fundamentally a
Scandinavian city.
I have commented elsewhere on Joyce's reactions to the criticisms
of Clutton Brock and H. G. Wells, but his remark when I mentioned
Wyndham Lewis's criticism of
Ulysses
is worth recording: "Allowing
that the whole of what Lewis says about my book is true, is it more
than ten per cent of the truth?"
Joyce rarely referred to the work of his contemporaries. There is,
however, a comment on Proust in a letter written to me in 1920. It
reads: "I observe a furtive attempt to run a certain Marcel Proust of
here against the signatory of this letter. I have read some pages of his.
I cannot see any special talent but I am a bad critic." Joyce's first and,
as far as I am aware, only meeting with Marcel Proust took place shortly
after the end of the First World War at an evening party given by a
wealthy Parisian lady in honor of the Russian ballet, then all the rage
in Paris as elsewhere. The evening wore on and Joyce, having had a
few drinks, was thinking of going home when in walked Marcel Proust
dressed to the nines. Their hostess introduced them, and some of the
guests gathered round to listen to what they thought might be brilliant
conversation. "Our talk," said Joyce, "consisted solely of the word 'No.'
Proust asked me if I knew the due de so-and-so. I said, 'No.' Our hostess
asked Proust if he had read such and such a piece of
Ulysses.
Proust
said, 'No.' And so on. Of course the situation was impossible. Proust's
day was just beginning. Mine was at an end." Poor visibility for
stargazers.
Very soon after I had made his acquaintance in Zurich, Joyce and
I were taking an evening stroll on the Bahnhofstrasse when the con–
versation turned upon the variants of the comic sense possessed by
different nations. Joyce retold me a funny story told him by my friend
