Kaleidoscopic Recamera

TALES TOLD OF SHEM AND SHAUN-- James Joyce--Black Sun Press (Paris) ($20).

A male Circe, Author James Joyce transforms upstanding, understood words into nightmarish, subconscious semblances; his latest book cannot be read, it. must be puzzled over. In his famed Ulysses, this Jabberwocky manner cropped out only in occasional shoals and semi-submerged reefs; most of it was plain sailing. But Ulysses, describing the events of one Dublin day, was a daybook. Work in Progress, of which Tales Told of Shem and Shaim are three disconnected fragments, describes the thoughts of one Dublin dreamer, is a night-book. He who runs will not be able to read; he will have to slow down to a walk, perhaps stop altogether, look long and wonderingly.

The Story. The three "tales" in this little book are called: The Mookse and the Gripes, The Muddest Thick That Was Ever Heard Dump, The Ondt and the Gracehoper. So far, only Parts I and II of Work in Progress have been printed: in transition, experimentalist quarterly published in Paris. Say those who profess to understand the design of the whole: Hero H. C. Earwicker, onetime postman, hotelkeeper, shopkeeper, now working in Guinness's brewery, is a Dublin citizen, but a native of Norway. He is married, has children; but his past is not blameless. A girl named Anna Livia haunts his slumbers; he has been guilty of various misdeeds, brawls and shortcomings. The story opens with Earwicker just lapsing into drowsy slumber, continues through the night, through sleep that is now restless, now deep, visited by dreams, nightmares, confused recollections of the past day, of the past years. It is a stream of subconsciousness.

The Language. Introducer C. K. Ogden (author of The Meaning of Meaning) compares Joyce's language to Eskimo, which Explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson called the most difficult but most efficient language invented by man. In Eskimo, IGLUPAKULIA means: "The big house which he built for himself and still possesses and which is no longer as good as formerly." Speaking of Joyce's language, says Ogden: "The intensive, compressive, reverberative infixation; the sly, meaty, oneiric logorrhoea, polymathic, polyperverse; even the clangorous calembour, irresponsible and irrepressible, all conjure us to penetrate the night mind of man, that kaleidoscopic recamera of an hypothecated Unconscious, jolted by some logophilous Birth-trauma into chronic serial extension." Example from Joyce: ''The Ondt was a welltall fellow, raumybult and abelboobied, bynear saw altitudinous wee a schelling in kopfers. He was sair sair sullemn and chairmanlooking when he was not making spaces in his psyche, but, laus! when he wore making spaces on his ikey, he ware mouche mothst secred and muravyingly wisechairmanlooking. Now whim the sillybilly of a Gracehoper had jingled through a jungle of love and debts and jangled through a jumble of life in doubts afterworse, wetting with the bim-blebeaks, drikking with nautonects, bilking with durrydunglecks and horing after ladybirdies (ichnehmon diagelegenaitoikon) he fell joust as sieck as a sexton and tantoo pooveroo quant a churchprince, and wheer the midges to wend hemsylph or vosch to sirch for grub for his corapusse or to find a hospes. alick, he wist gnit!"

The Significance. Says Critic Rebecca West: "Most of the words that James Joyce uses are pates de langue gras. Each is a paste of words that have been superimposed one on another and worked into a new word that shall be the lowest common multiple of them all. These words have been chosen out of innumerable languages, living and dead, either because of some association of ideas or of sound." Unfortunately for readers accustomed to simpler fare, they quickly get mental indigestion from this rich and unassimilable food. Joyce should be taken in small quantities, even by crossword puzzle experts. Self-doomed to unpopularity, he is marked as the head of all experimentalist, "stream-of-consciousness" writers. Say his followers: by the influence of his writing on other authors Joyce has affected, will affect, the English language as no other man has done.

The Author. Author James Joyce celebrated his 48th birthday last fortnight in Paris. To him came a congratulatory telegram signed by his great & good friends Author James Stephens, Lord & Lady Astor, Playwright George Bernard Shaw. After the birthday dinner Joyce went to the Opera, heard Tenor John Sullivan sing William Tell. Passionately fond of operagoing, Author Joyce always sits in the front row.

Born in Dublin where his lawyer father still lives, Joyce was educated for the Catholic priesthood at Clongowes Wood College, Belvedere College, Royal University. But Joyce was not the stuff of which priests are made. At nine he wrote a pamphlet against Parnell; at 22 he left Ireland and the Church for good. After exile in Rome, Trieste, Zurich, he settled in Paris; supported life by teaching, directing plays; finished his first great opus, Ulysses. The book was published in Paris (1922) by Bookseller Sylvia Beach, spinster daughter of a Princeton, N. J., Presbyterian divine. Because of its obscene passages it is officially barred from England, from the U. S., but many a copy has been booklegged. A translation of Ulysses appeared last week in French. On its title page: "Translated by August Morel, assisted by Stuart Gilbert, entirely revised by Valery-Larbaud and the author."

Joyce is as little popular with his brother Irish as with his mother Church: once he called his native country "the old sow that eats her farrow." He has been back to Ireland only twice since he left: in 1904 to open Dublin's first cinema; the last time in 1912. In 1904 he married Nora Barnacle, Galway girl; they have two children; Singer George, Dancer Lucia (who last year wrote a play about a girl who fell in love with the Pont Alexandre-Trois, famed Paris bridge).

Rheumatism combined with overwork have reduced Author Joyce to near-blindness : he wears thick spectacles, sometimes a black patch over his left eye. He cannot read without a magnifying glass. When he writes, he wears a white jacket with the arms of the City of Dublin embroidered on the breast pocket; uses a large red pencil. Friends reread his manuscript to him, which he corrects many times. His proofs, too, surfer, even to the fifth or sixth revision. Domestic, shy, Joyce rarely leaves home except for the opera or to dine at the famed Trianon Restaurant. Poor most of his life, he is now subsidized by an anonymous Englishwoman. He dresses neatly, always wears green ties, sports heavy rings on his fingers, carries an ash-plant cane which he twirls and twirls. Timid, he fears dogs and thunderstorms, likes cats; a short "beard covers the scar where a dog bit him 43 years ago. He has very small feet, of which he is proud. Well-known to newspapermen, Author Joyce has never been interviewed. (Author Djuna Barnes "interviewed" him, unbeknownst to himself, published the piece in a recent Vanity Fair.)

With his famed countryman, Poet William Butler Yeats, Joyce does not get along. When as a young man he first met Yeats, then already a famed poet, he spoke arrogantly. Said he: "We have met too late: you are too old to be influenced by me." Poet Yeats afterwards remarked: "I doubt whether that young man has enough chaos in him to create a world."

Work in Progress has been appearing serially in transition for the last two years. Author Joyce, no smoother of the path for his public, gave the transition editors only the first and third sections, one instalment of the second, supplied no key to the whole. The prevailing explanation: to out-smart literary pirates.

Other Joyce books: Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Chamber Music, Exiles (a play).

Critics. The reaction to Ulysses was immediate, decided. Said Critic (onetime U. S. now British) T. S. Eliot: "I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted and from which none of us can escape." Said Critic-Author Virginia Woolf: "Ulysses was a memorable catastrophe--immense in daring, terrific in disaster." Said U. S. Critic Henry Louis Mencken to Author Francis Scott Fitzgerald: "Why, that book is full of smut!" Says Critic Henry Seidel Canby: "Joyce is a pioneer in the technique of the stream-of-consciousness novel, and very influential. His books, however, lack the control of a great artist." Says Editor Ellery Sedgwick (Atlantic Monthly)'. "In Ulysses Joyce made an original contribution to tragic literature, highly stimulating to conscious writers of subconscious fiction." Controversy still rages about whether or not Ulysses is really obscene. Joyce himself does not like dirty stories. A U. S. admirer chucklingly told Editor Jane Heap (of the late great Little Review) he was sending Joyce a choice collection; was advised not to send them, as Joyce would be greatly offended.

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