“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, May 28, 1922, London Sunday Express; and New York Times

Two very different reviews of the new novel Ulysses by James Joyce, 40, appear on opposite sides of the pond today:

Ulysses by James Joyce

I say deliberately that it is the most infamously obscene book in ancient or modern literature…All the secret sewers of vice are canalized in its flood of unimaginable thoughts, images and pornographic words. And its unclean lunacies are larded with appalling and revolting blasphemies directed against the Christian religion and against the name of Christ—blasphemies hitherto associated with the most degraded orgies of Satanism and the Black Mass…[Ulysses] is already the Bible of beings who are exiles and outcasts in this and every other civilized country…Our critics are apologizing for his anarchy…[by throwing readers] to the hyenas and werewolves of literature…We must make our choice between the devil’s disciples and the disciples of God, between Satanism and Christianity, between the sanctions of morality and the anarchy of art. The artists must be treated like any lesser criminal who tries to break the Christian code. For this is a battle that must be fought out to a clean finish:  We cannot trust the soul of Europe to the guardianship of the police and the post office.”

—“Beauty and the Beast,” James Douglas, editor, London Sunday Express

Ulysses is the most important contribution that has been made to fictional literature in the 20^th century. It will immortalize its author with the same certainty that Gargantua and Pantagruel immortalized Rabelais, and The Brothers Karamazof [sic] Dostoyevsky. It is likely that no one writing English today could parallel Mr. Joyce’s feat…His literary output would seem to substantiate some of Freud’s contentions…He holds with Freud that the unconscious mind represents the real man…I have learned more psychology and psychiatry from it than I did in 10 years at the Neurological Institute. There are other angles at which Ulysses can be viewed profitably, but they are not many…[The protagonist Leopold Bloom is] a moral monster, a pervert and an invert, an apostate to his race and his religion, the simulacrum of a man who has neither cultural background nor personal self-respect…[Ulysses will be written about and praised in 100 years, but] not 10 men or women out of a hundred can read Ulysses through.”

                                    —“James Joyce’s Amazing Chronicle,” Joseph Collins, New York Times

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I and II covering 1920 and 1921 are available as signed copies at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA, and also in print and e-book formats on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

Next month I will be talking about the Stein family salons in Paris before and after The Great War at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in Carnegie-Mellon University.

To watch my presentation for the PICT Classical Theatre about the Founding of the Abbey Theatre, click here.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”:  Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.