1. In conversation, Eliot did express private doubts about some aspects of Ulysses . Richard Ellmann quotes Virginia Woolf's description in her diary of Eliot as "rapt, enthusiastic" about Ulysses in a discussion they had just after its publication. "Yet," Ellmann continues, ''the book gave no new insight into human nature such as War and Peace did, Eliot granted, and added, 'Bloom tells one nothing. Indeed, this new method of giving the psychology proves to my mind that it doesn't work. It doesn't tell as much as some casual glance from outside often does'" ( James Joyce 528).

1. Cowley's remark deserves some qualification. Some distinguished work was produced by writers who, however briefly, aligned themselves with the Party. Richard Wright's Native Son and Henry Roth's Call It Sleep are two examples.

2. The passage reads in full: "[Joyce's] whole world lies between a cupboardful of medieval books, a brothel and a pothouse. For him, the national revolutionary movement of the Irish petty bourgeoisie does not exist; and consequently, the picture which he presents, despite its ostensible impartiality, is untrue."

3. In "What the Revolutionary Movement Can Do For a Writer" (90), Cowley cites Joyce's Portrait as exemplary of a host of books whose concern is the conflict between the individual and society. Cowley criticized the tendency to concentrate on the artist's consciousness and neglect "society, the outer world."

1. While Joyce dismissed Lawrence's work as "propaganda," Lawrence reportedly complained to his wife that the last part of Ulysses was "the dirtiest, most obscene thing ever written.... It is filthy "(quoted in Ellmann, James Joyce 628). Pound had misgivings about Finnegans Wake during its serial publication in the 1930s, though he maintained respect for Joyce. In an essay published in 1933, Pound complained that

I can not see that Mr. Joyce's later work concerns more than a few specialists, and I can not see in it either a comprehension of, or a very great preoccupation with, the present, which may indicate an obtuseness on my part, or may indicate that Mr. Joyce's present and my present are very different one from the other, and, further, that I can not believe in a passive acceptance. (Read, Pound/Joyce 251)

2. Edmund Wilson's "Archibald MacLeish and 'the Word,'" a rejoinder to MacLeish's essay, is an example of just such an effective rebuttal.

3. MacLeish's omission of Joyce in his general indictment of the modernists may owe to his early personal acquaintance with Joyce in the 1920s, when MacLeish himself was an expatriate and an aspiring poet. He expressed both fondness and admiration for Joyce in his correspondence, first in a fawning, half-articulate letter to the older author written several days after hearing him read from Work in Progress (in Paris, 1927); and second, in a 1954 letter to Richard Ellmann, in which he expressed some of the awe he seemed always to have felt for Joyce. Though the letters (excerpts printed below) were written before and after the period of MacLeish's political activism, they may indicate why he refrained from criticizing Joyce during that period.

Dear Mr. Joyce:

Faithfully yours,
Archibald MacLeish

[To Richard Ellmann:]

... But then I never found Joyce warm. I liked him. The little beard. The thick lenses. Like a very professional doctor—not a practicing one but a man about a hospital, rarely seen. I liked his shyness and his stiffness and the sense of something vivid and maybe dangerous under it. I don't know what "greatness" in a man is though I think I know that it is in a man's work. But a great man ! ... But in Joyce you felt a hard, strong actuality that, if not greatness, was at least something you were always conscious of.
( James Joyce 598)

4. Wilson confided in a 1957 letter to Brooks that he had been "brooding on Eliot since our conversation" and had concluded that Eliot was both "scoundrel and actor":

The shrewd Yankee operator who always remains discreet but gets away with murder is balanced by the Yankee idealist who—in literature, the only thing about which he feels intensely—is able to stand by his convictions and, on occasion, without sticking his neck out (as Lewis and Pound habitually did), to show a firm courage. In his tiresome performances as the humble great man, he is more and more betraying his vanity: he talks about his own work in far too many of this last collection of essays. He is absurd in his pretensions to pontificate.... But I know that you regard him as a more sinister figure. ( Letters 549)

1. Farrell seemed to have a particularly contentious relationship with Eastman, whom he accused in "Literature and Ideology" of having paved the way for Brooks et al. with his attacks on the modernists in "The Cult of Unintelligibility." Eastman, a lapsed Marxist as well as a lapsed Stalinist, responded by urging Farrell to break from "the nearsighted cranks and cross patchers, the wounded veterans of an exploded theology" and build "a new radical movement ... based on a straightout recognition that Marxism is unscientific and complete collectivism a failure'' ("Values and Facts" 207).

2. Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope , 56. Here is the context of Howe's reference to Wilson:

At the age of sixteen I was lent a copy of Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle by a YPSL friend in the Bronx. This was probably the first book of literary criticism I read through from start to finish, even though I had only a skimpy acquaintance with the writers Wilson discussed. Something about Wilson's moral

gravity moved me. It always would, though in 1936 I could not yet know I had encountered one of the figures I would come to regard as an intellectual model.

1. Ransom, "Reconstructed But Unregenerate," 14. Ransom used the term to contrast Southern with English aristocracy and with Graeco-Roman civilization. Here is the context of his reference: "Southern society was not an institution of very showy elegance, for the so-called aristocrats were mostly home-made and countrified. Aristocracy is not the word which defines this social organization so well as squirearchy, which I borrow from a recent article by Mr. William Frierson in the Sewanee Review ."

2. See Van Wyck Brooks, The Opinions of Oliver Allston (1941), 199, 255-26, 228-29, 231; Macdonald, "Kulturbolschewismus Is Here"; Tate and Ransom, "On the Brooks-MacLeish Thesis," 38-47.

3. Joyce is quoted by Jacques Benoit-Mechin in an interview conducted by Richard Ellmann in 1956 ( James Joyce 535).

1. Eliot noted in After Strange Gods (1933) that the chances for the reestablishment of a native culture were better in the South. "You are further from New York City," he told his audience at the University of Virginia; "you have been less industrialized and less invaded by foreign races; and you have more opulent soil."

Kenner studied with Brooks at Yale and wrote admiringly of John Crowe Ransom in "The Pedagogue as Critic."

2. Pound's comment appeared in an essay entitled, "James Joyce et Pecuchet," Mercure de France , 106 (June, 1922), pp. 307-20. A partial translation appears in Deming, ed., James Joyce: The Critical Heritage , 1:263-67.

Here is the context of Pound's remark: "Joyce uses a scaffold taken from Homer, and the remains of a medieval allegorical culture; it matters little, it is a question of cooking, which does not restrict the action, nor inconvenience it, nor harm the realism, nor the contemporaneity of the action. It is a means of regulating the form" (264).

3. In Joyce's Voices , Kenner would further develop the argument that for Joyce's Irish, reality was constituted of words, and words were of an ever-changing configuration and meaning. There could be no certainties, no absolute meanings in a world so dominated by Pyrrhonism.

4. Kenner referred to Lewis's "An Analysis of the Mind of James Joyce" (1927) as "the most brilliant misreading in modern criticism" ( Dublin's Joyce 262).

5. It is interesting that Kenner—unlike Eliot and Allen Tate, to name only two examples—responds unsympathetically, even harshly to Gabriel Conroy of "The Dead." Kenner sees no transformation in Gabriel's character at the end of the story, no communal longing, and no possibility for redemption.

6. Both Kevin Sullivan and William T. Noon assert that Kenner errs in reading too much irony into Joyce.