“JAMES JOYCE” by Djuna Barnes
Vanity Fair, April 1922
Because he had heard of the suppression of The Little Review on account of Ulysses and of the subsequent trial, he sat down opposite me, who was familiar with the whole story, ordering a white wine. He began to talk at once. “The pity is,” he said, seeming to choose his words for their age rather than their aptness, “the public will demand and find a moral in my book – or worse they may take it in some more serious way, and on the honour of a gentleman, there is not one single serious line in it.”
For a moment there was silence. His hands, peculiarly limp in the introductory shake and peculiarlyl pulpy, running into a thickness that the base gave no hint of, lay, one on the stem of the glass, the other, forgotten, palm out, on the most delightful waistcoat it has ever been my happiness to see. Purple with alternate doe and dog heads. The does, tiny scarlet tongues hanging out over blond lower lips, downed in a light wool, and the dogs no more ferocious or on the scent than any good animal who adheres to his master through the seven cycles of change.
He saw my admiration and he smiled. “Made by the hand of my grandmother for the first hunt of the season” and there was another silence in which he arranged and lit a cigar.
“All great talkers,” he said softly, “have spoken in the language of Sterne, Swift or the Restoration. Even Oscar Wilde. He studied the Restoration through a microscope in the morning and repeated it through a telescope in the evening.”
“And in Ulysses?” I asked.
“They are all there, the great talkers,” he answered, “them and the things they forgot. In Ulysses I have recorded, simultaneously, what a man says, sees, thinks, and what such seeing, thinking, saying does, to what you Freudians call the subconscious, — but as for psychoanalysis,” he broke off, “it’s neither more nor less than blackmail.”
He raised his eyes. There is something unfocused in them, — the same paleness seen in plants long hidden from the sun, — and sometimes a little jeer that goes with a lift and rounding of the upper lip.
