BOOKS

Never a very good writer

Philip Hensher

ULYSSES Ulysses is 75 years old. this year. It's not a bad opportunity to consider the curious fact that it has passed into the canon of indisputably great books without ever really leaving the realm of the professional reader, never really amassing any kind of support among ordinary novel-readers. It is easier to imagine someone picking up Sordello for pleasure than Ulysses, and, despite its intricacy and its undeniable fas- cination, it seems to me that even its enthu- siasts are less • warm in their admiration than the devotees of Thomas Mann, or Proust, say. Proust obsessives happily play at 20-questions with each other (Who was Mme Timoleon d'Amoncourt? How many children does the Duchesse de Guermantes have?); Ulysses' admirers tend, rather, to dwell on theoretical questions about the feminine discourse and textuality, or what- ever the boring jargon is. Few great books contain so much terrible writing as Ulysses, and none, I think, has so many pages which cannot be read and never have been read. The strange thing about Joyce is that, in many ways, he was never a very good writer; he was always someone with a terrifically sleazy Celtic Twilight line. In Ulysses he found a way to indulge the fabulously banal, gloaming manner of his poems at great length, while simultaneously laying a claim to serious- ness; he would do it ironically:

And yet — and yet! That strained look on her face! A gnawing sorrow is there all the time. Her very soul is in her eyes...

The chapter about Gerty Macdowell on the beach is the most consistent excursion into a debased poetic manner, but the book is full of such pastiches, trips into horrid lit- erary styles, done with such gusto that one suspects this was how Joyce really wanted to write.

And there are much-admired passages in Ulysses where Joyce goes with full serious- ness into the whole ridiculous overdone twilit manner. I used to think that the passage in the 'Wandering Rocks' chapter which ended with Stephen exclaiming 'Mis- ery! Misery!' was meant as a joke; now I'm not so sure. And there are certainly pas- sages which are constantly being held up as examples of what Joyce could do which are not a million miles from Gerty Macdowell and her women's-magazine fantasies:

Woodshadows floated silently by through the morning peace from the stairhead seaward where he gazed. Inshore and farther out the mirror of water whitened, spurned by light- shod hurrying feet. White breast of the dim sea.

Or even that line about the night sky, so beloved of sentimental Joyceans, when Stephen and Bloom are standing in Bloom's garden:

The heaventree of stars hung with humid night-blue fruit.

I mean, is fruit humid? What are the fruit? In what way does the sky look like a tree?

On the other hand, it must be said that some of Joyce's most spectacular coups come from the moments when this overblown style grows dizzy and starts to crack. The Gerty Macdowell chapter is cer- tainly one of the most successful in the book; the way the Mariolatry yields to Gerty's uncharitable and lustful thoughts and then to a woozy, but genuine poetry as she reveals herself to Bloom is bizarrely enchanting. The most beautiful passages in I suspect you're resting on my laurels!' the book — even the splendid couple of pages at the end of the penultimate chapter where Bloom falls asleep — come from this shameful taste for purple adjectives, this constant evocation of the misty and the twilit. And it would be wrong not to acknowledge that Joyce's most consistently enjoyable and entertaining book, Finnegans Wake, comes in a very direct line from the same obsessive vagueness, the same blur- ring of outlines.

Really, Ulysses is the work of someone acutely aware of his own limitations, and someone determined that those limitations should be exploited to powerful effect. He knew very well, for instance, that there were certain classes of society he had no chance whatever portraying convincingly; the viceroy comes into the book, but is seen entirely from the outside; the richly enjoy- able few pages about the Very Reverend John Conmee remain a vicious caricature. Despite the psychological sophistication of the book, and Joyce's most trumpeted technical innovation, the stream of consciousness, which gives the appearance, at least, of going deeper into his characters' minds than had been done before, the book's characterisation, on the whole, is not particularly brilliant. Stephen is convincing, but he is a bore and has bored Joyce long before the end of the book. Bloom is quite hard to believe in; his internal debates about whether black clothes reflect or refract the heat, his strange sudden fastidiousness, Lenehan's excuse-making remark that 'there's a touch of the artist about old Bloom' suggest, in the end, yet another aesthete, Stephen in a bowler hat. As for Molly Bloom's mono- logue, which male critics of an older gener- ation used routinely to hail as an unmatched portrait of the female con- sciousness, it now seems a terribly creaky bit of work, too evidently what a man would like a woman to think. For me, the best piece of characterisation in the book is Stephen's father; his every appearance is waited for with pleasure, and he is missed when he disappears.

Do not under any circumstances buy this edition of Ulysses. I think it may be a joke, though rather an expensive one. The edito- rial principles on which it is based are as follows. There is a manuscript of Ulysses, which would have been edited, in 1922, to a publishing house's specifications. There is a first edition of Ulysses, which has been edited, but which is full of large and small mistakes. Neither will quite do, so let us edit Ulysses ourselves. Let us rewrite it.

Here is one example, a passage from the `Eumaeus' chapter. This is how the first edition goes:

The queer suddenly things he popped out with attracted the elder man who was several years the other's senior or like his father ... Literally astounded at this piece of intelli- gence Bloom, reflected. Though they didn't see eye to eye in everything, a certain analogy there somehow was, as if both their minds were travelling, so to speak, in the one train of thought.

And this is what the wretched editor, Danis Rose, has made of it;

The queer things he suddenly popped out with, rather like his father, attracted the elder man ... Literally astounded at this piece of intelligence, Bloom reflected. Though they didn't see eye to eye in every- thing, a certain analogy there somehow was, as if both their minds (though one was sever- al years the other's senior) were travelling, so to speak, in the one train of thought.

Personally, I think that it is an absolute disgrace to rewrite Joyce in this way with- out a scrap of justification, and publish the result as Ulysses. Joyce's syntax is not always easy, but it is clear that he didn't always want it to be easy; sometimes he wanted it to be expressively distorted. Rose's idiotic edition rests on the extraor- dinary assumption that the original editor, coming across something clear and trans- parent, would of his own accord transform it into something eccentric and wilful. Common sense quickly tells us that it is much more likely that, coming across something garbled, he will try to make sense out of it and destroy the intention.

It's an odd book; it's led to nothing very much, except the works of Mr Adam Thor- pe, and, despite its awe-inspiring complexi- ty, it doesn't seem to grow in the mind. Until last week, I hadn't read it for 16 years; picking it up again, I found it very much the same book — apart from Rose's rewritings — I thought it then. I still found it unfunny in the extreme; the best chap- ters were still the ones between 'Wander- ing Rocks' and `Nausicaa'; I still thought that the formal inventions, like the history- of-English prose chapter and the whole Odyssey structure, got in the way of some quite brilliant bits of realism. The mind still shrinks from the idea of passages in a novel which are not only unreadable — like long bits of the 'Oxen of the Sun' chapter — but were never meant to be read. There aren't many great books which would stay the same in this odd way, and Ulysses, in a way, is dazzling but dead, put together with extreme self-consciousness and failing to grow in the subconscious. You can justify its greatness with ease, but Nostromo or Our Mutual Friend or even The Apes of God go deeper, offer more pleasure, and say, somehow, more.