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.

A Nabokovian Choice of James Joyce

[Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov to Jack Dalton*]

TLS (Xerox), 1p.

Montreux, Switzerland

Dear Mr. Dalton,

In answer to your kind letter of September 21, my husband asks me to say that he thinks ULYSSES by far the greatest English novel of the century but detests FINNEGANS WAKE "whose obscenties when deciphered are not justified by the commonplace myths and silly anecdotes they laboriously mask."

He very much regrets that the amount of work already lined up for the next year or two does not allow him to undertake the writing of an article on this subject.

Sincerely yours,

(Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)

* James Joyce Scholar.

-from Vladimir Nabokov Selected Letters 1940-1977 edited by Dimitri Nabokov and Matthew J. Bruccoli (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 1989) p.350-51.

Dubliners in Question

[Grant Richards to James Joyce]

May 16, 1906.

Dear Mr. Joyce,
I will try to be more categorical. First, though, let me see if I cannot remove a misconception that exists in your mind as to our attitude. My admiration for your book is a thing entirely apart, and necessarily so, from my conviction as to what is wise or not wise for us to publish. Personally I prefer the word 'bloody' in the places in which it occurs to any word you could substitute for it since it is, as you say, the right word; on the other hand a publisher has to be influenced by other considerations. Personally I have no objection to the other stories we have discussed, although I may say that in their present form they would damage their publisher. We are, for various reasons into which I need not go at this distance, peculiarly liable to attack. However, you concede the alteration of the troublesome word in "Grace"; well and good. You concede it in "The Two Gallants"; you concede it in "Ivy Day in the Committee Room"; leave it in "The Boarding House."

In "Counterparts" I have no feeling about the allusion to 'two establishments [']; the other phrase must really come out.

On consideration I should like to leave out altogether "The Encounter."

"The Two Gallants" should certainly be omitted. Perhaps you can omit it with an easier mind since originally it did not form part of your book.

The difficulties between us, therefore, narrow themselves down, since you have come some little way to meet me, and I hope now they will disappear entirely.

Believe me, dear Mr. Joyce,

Sincerely yours,

[Grant Richards]