olla putrida finnegans wake

[D. H. Lawrence to M. and A. Huxley]

Kesselmatte, Gsteig b. Gstaad,

(Bern).

15 Aug., 1928.

Dear Maria and Aldous,

. . . I had a copy of Transition, that Paris magazine--the Amer. number. My God, what a clumsy olla putrida James Joyce is! Nothing but old fags and cabbage-stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest, stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness--what old and hard-worked staleness, masquerading as the all-new! Gertrude Stein is more amusing--and some of the Americans quite good. . . .

D. H. L.

-from The Letters of D. H. Lawrence edited by Aldous Huxley (London: William Heniemann, 1956.) p. 742.