Comminding the Fitful
Our Friend James Joyce. By Mary and Padraic Col um. (Gollancz, 16s.) Tins little book consists of memories of Joyce by his own 'What-do-you-Colums,' Padraic and his wife. There is, as the pun might suggest, a pleasant, ,patient vagueness about most of it, with very occa- sional bits of briskness which seem to come from the years they spent in America; and there are no large, respectful insights into Joyce's work. They are sometimes sensible about this but often puzzled, and they have their doubts about the cold, skyward trend of the later writings. Joyce's achievement is regarded as the loving, insistent recreation of the times and details of Dublin life, full of his idiosyncratic learned interests and re- lieved by many tender and poetic touches. The Colums tell us about these interests and bring a breath of annotation to some of the coinages. Slight as it is, their book will 'commind the fit- ful': now'That the flow of talk about Joyce has slackened off the faithful will think them for the reminder. They knew Joyce from his angry, ash- plant days as a student till late on in his exile and they also have something to say about his personal life, stressing his charm, his superstitious foibles, his 'deviations into commerce (he brought the movies to Dublin) and, as well, the more tragic side of his remoteness. The really striking thing in the book is their sense of his 'spurning,' suffer- ing isolation and of the way it drained his work and his friendShips. A remark he made to his wife some time after their daughter had entered a mental home, 'allow me to say I was present at her conception,' must be one of the grimmest asides in modern literature. On the whole, how- ever, it is the pleasures of their friendship and its jokes and stories which have gone into the Colums' book—Joyce meeting Proust,• Marlene Dietrich and the rest, Joyce proffering a slogan for Guin- ness, 'My brandold Dublin lindub, the free, the froh, the frothy freshener.' It seems a long way away from that other recent literary gift to the brewing trade, 'Drink Bowen's Beer. Makes You
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