Emily-Colored

"Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons steelyringing imperthnthn thnthnthn," wrote James Joyce in Ulysses. What he meant was that two barmaids, a redhead and a blonde, were listening to the clatter of dray horses in a Dublin street. Why, then, didn't he say so?

For some weeks a kindred argument has been raging in the pages of Britain's London Observer. "Great men," wrote Critic Ivor Brown, firing a blanket salvo at all Joycean obscurantists, "are not so silly as to make a practice of wasting their words." Philip Toynbee, the historian's son, rushed to the defense of obscurantism with some obscuration of his own. "To ask why James Joyce didn't write Ulysses less obscurely is a non-question," he declaimed. "It is equivalent to asking why a tree isn't a rock or why a motorcar isn't a horse." Toynbee did admit that some literary motorcars should try to be more like horses. "When Auden writes, 'Gabriel--I didn't mean to let that name out,' or when Miss Sitwell writes of 'Emily-colored hands,' they are clearly cheating," he said.

This, of course, brought Miss Edith Sitwell herself roaring on to the battlefield. "I did not write 'Emily-colored hands,' a hideous phrase," she informed the Observer, "I wrote Emily-colored primulas, which to anyone who has progressed in poetry-reading beyond the White Cliffs of Dover calls to mind the pink cheeks of young country girls."

Unfortunately for the sake of argumentative clarity, Miss Sitwell's denial was published alongside a passionate defense of her phrase by a susceptible reader who roundly denounced Toynbee. "I know quite well what [Emily-colored hands] are like," she wrote, "thin, pale, yellowish and faintly freckled."

Toynbee apologized to Poetess Sitwell: "We are involved in a most complicated failure of communication." But the Observer's next issue quoted a third reader who distinctly remembered "a poem by Miss Sitwell which includes an allusion to 'Emily-colored hands' raising the blinds in a children's bedroom."

"I did not write any poem referring to Emily-colored hands," hissed Miss Sitwell by post the following week. Other contributors meanwhile speculated on Emily as a color. "Mauve," said one. "Yellow," said another. "The only Emily I ever met was an enormous black Madrassi ayah," wrote a Mr. Mclntyre. "I regret his limited social opportunities," answered Miss Sitwell, "but I cannot be held responsible for them." One phase of the argument was at last tied down when a schoolmistress named Josephine Malone reported a mistake in a sixth-form handbook of poetry, in which the editor had fastened Emily-colored hands on to Poetess Sitwell. Last week the battle died with the publication of this conclusive letter:

"May I take this opportunity of assuring you that my hands are not and never will be. . . anything but flesh-colored; nor are my primulas blue-veined or freckled.

Yours faithfully, Emily."

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