[In the following excerpt, Anspaugh examines Lewis's critical reaction to the writings of Virgina Woolf and James Joyce.]

It has been with considerable shaking in my shoes … that I have taken the cow by the horns in this chapter.

(Wyndham Lewis, Men Without Art 140)

In her essay “Jellyfish and Treacle: Lewis, Joyce, Gender and Modernism,” Bonnie Kime Scott—leader of what she herself terms “the current wave of Joyce feminist criticism” (169)—offers an analysis of two modernisms: a “male modernism,” as she puts it, embodied in the person and works of Wyndham Lewis, and a female modernism, best represented by Virginia Woolf. “I hope to demonstrate,” Scott says,

how Joyce coincides with some of Lewis's definitions early in his career, and how he and Lewis parted company in the 1920s, partially over the issue of the feminine. It is a debate that previously came to us under the masculine designation of Joyce as “the time man.” As we play with new definitions involving gender and modernism, we discover that “the time man,” one of “the men of 1914” [Lewis's term] was at least part woman. (169)

Scott's objective is to set up two poles, the masculine (Lewis) and the feminine (Woolf), and to show how Joyce and his work are closer to the feminine pole than heretofore supposed. In the course of doing so, however, Scott presents a seriously distorted view of the writers involved, their interrelation, and the attitude toward gender offered in their texts. In this essay I will attempt to correct this view, or at the very least offer a counter-view.

If Virginia Woolf is the modernist critics love to love—at least contemporary critics—then Wyndham Lewis is the modernist critics love to hate.¹ Scott clearly participates in this group antipathy. She tells us near the beginning of her essay that she wants to “compare aspects of gender and modernism” in Joyce's Portrait and Lewis's Tarr, both of which were first published in Harriet Shaw Weaver's magazine The Egoist in 1918. Scott prefaces her analysis with the comment “I think it interesting that Miss Weaver could identify with Stephen Dedalus in Joyce's novel, but never took to Tarr in the same way,” and goes on to observe that “it seems typical of Lewis's incapacity for friendship, or his capacity for envy that he tipped off Miss Weaver to Joyce's considerable drinking” (169). Although Scott ostensibly wants to show that Joyce's apologetic letter to Miss Weaver about his drinking serves as “a critique of male camaraderie” (169), it seems to me all too typical of commentary on Lewis that the critic begins with an ad hominem bash, letting the reader know that Lewis was a thoroughly unpleasant person, a classic paranoid, and that we should be on our guard against both him and his works. In short, Scott begins her analysis by blasting the ex-bombardier, by reinforcing the already established view of Lewis as the modernist bogeyman.

As she begins her comparative textual analysis, Scott observes that whereas Joyce's Portrait offers a representation of childhood, Lewis's Tarr “takes up where Joyce's leaves off. Lewis offers no sympathetic evocation of childhood; he had little sympathy for children” (170). A bad sort was Lewis, leaving a number of illegitimate children in his Enemy wake—as Scott is clearly aware.² What is more, although “Lewis was strongly attached to his own mother, and vice versa”—that is, although Lewis was a spoiled mama's boy—“he refuses to grant the mother an important place in his writings” (170). The fact that Joyce could be similarly ungrateful Scott concedes in a quick parenthesis: “(It has been argued by Colin MacCabe that Joyce did the same through much of Dubliners)” (170). So we see that the critic, even after her textual analysis begins, persists in her ad hominem argument—even when it imperils her thesis that Lewis and Joyce were different.

Scott observes that both Tarr and Stephen “conceive of God and power as male, and like Aristotle and Nietzsche, place the female at the bottom of their conceptual hierarchies, with the mud, the vegetables, and the jellyfish” (170). In the course of her analysis of the sexual relationships in Lewis's novel she remarks that

there is some validity to Fredric Jameson's claim that Lewis is more richly dialogic than Joyce … though I would restrict this observation to their early stage of writing or to the strictest sense of dialog. Lewis's is a very restrained and protected dialog, compared with the exchanges eventually performed in Finnegans Wake. Though Tarr has a network of relationships, there is no depth or substance in any of them. (171)

Although granting Jameson's analysis “some validity,” Scott misses Jameson's point: that Lewis's novel is a satire of surfaces, written precisely against the metaphors of “depth” and “substance” that she apparently values.³ Bertha, the first woman with whom Tarr becomes entangled, Scott describes with disapproval as “bourgeois, sentimental, vegetative” (171), a description reminiscent of Joyce's view of Molly Bloom as a “perfectly sane full amoral fertilizable … Weib” (Ellmann 517). Scott, however, never mentions Molly Bloom,⁴ and moves on to the second of Lewis's women: “Tarr encounters an alternate, more masculine woman in Anastasya, a figure Rebecca West described in her review of Tarr as ‘the kitch Cleopatra from Dresden,’ though, in a more serious vein, she also praised Lewis's Russian sensibilities” (172). Again Scott's rhetoric is slippery: she quotes West's passing negative comment on one Lewis character while she notes in passing West's “praise” for Lewis's sensibilities. She might have quoted instead the following from West's review of Tarr: “a beautiful and serious work of art that reminds one of Dostoevsky only because it is too inquisitive about the soul, and because it contains one figure of vast moral significance which is worthy to stand beside Stavrogin. The great achievement of the book, which gives it its momentary and permanent value, is Kreisler, the German artist” (176). The character West so much admired appears in Scott's analysis only as the “fascist” rapist of Bertha (174)—although Scott admits that in his presentation of the rape “Lewis has made a powerful connection, and a statement on the victimization of women as art object” (15).⁵

In regard to the relationship between Tarr and Anastasya, Scott observes that “unlike Stephen, who after Stephen Hero has no serious discussion on gender or art with women, Tarr has substantial dialogs with Anastasya” (172). Scott must concede that in Anastasya Lewis presents us with an intelligent and formidable character, one “‘above the line’ of messy femininity” (173)—a line above which Joyce (at least the early Joyce) does not rise. And yet the critic remains dissatisfied: “Lewis fails to give her a creative role, beyond her efforts to educate Tarr. We find Tarr mentally working her into the cubist-vorticist, machinelike shapes of Lewis's own portraits, the hard factuality of things admired and promoted by Pound in Joyce as well as Lewis” (173). Despite this objection—an objection, it seems to me, more of taste than anything (the critic does not like Lewis's vorticist style⁶)—the effect of Scott's analysis to this point is to convince the reader that the early Lewis is more feminist than the early Joyce (insofar as by “feminist” we understand an attitude of respect toward women as thinking human beings). She attempts to disrupt this effect by offering a short analysis of Stephen Dedalus's view of women. Whereas in Tarr the feminine is depicted as simply the messy “foundation” from which art arises, in Portrait “Stephen discovers a feminine language of mystery and silence that has its own power” (174). According to Scott, Stephen's “bird girl” has “her own liquid language,”

expressed in her action after “suffrance” of his “gaze” for some time, as she bent her eyes “towards the stream, gently stirring the water with her foot hither and thither. The first faint noise of gently moving water broke the silence, low and faint and whispering, faint as the bells of sleep …” …. Stephen's response is orgasmic and ecstatic. He founds his artistic vocation on her appeal, and upon the murky realms Tarr seeks to avoid. “His soul was swooning into some new world, fantastic, dim, uncertain as under sea.” He is in the jellyfish realm. (174)

Although one can agree that Joyce's epiphany is very beautiful and seductive, it does not follow from this that it is admirable from a feminist point of view. One could as easily argue that what is communicated in this passage is not the bird girl's “own liquid language,” but rather a conventional, romantic, male-centered view of the feminine. In other words, rather than seeing Stephen as transported into “the jellyfish realm,” one could see the bird girl as a “sweet young thing,” a forerunner of Gerty MacDowell, the romantic “seaside” girl who brings Leopold Bloom to masturbatory orgasm in the “Nausicaa” chapter of Ulysses.

Scott then turns to Lewis's analysis of Virginia Woolf in Men Without Art (1934), his chapter entitled “Virginia Woolf: ‘Mind’ and ‘Matter’ on the Plane of a Literary Controversy” (131-40). At the end of that chapter Lewis tells his reader that he has just taken the feminist “cow by the horns,” and Scott notes that Lewis is “only too willing to dismiss most of his English colleagues of both sexes to the cultural realm of feminine mediocrity” (175). She goes on to remark that “Lewis resents Woolf's use of Joyce's Ulysses to derive what he considers a ‘feminine’ description of modernism” (176), and then turns to “Satire and Fiction,” where “Lewis attacks Joyce's ‘internal method’ regretting that it has ‘robbed Joyce's work as a whole of linear properties—contour and definition in fact:’”

In contrast to the jelly-fish that floats in the center of the subterranean stream of the “dark” Unconscious, I much prefer, for my part, the shield of the tortoise, or the rigid stylistic articulations of the grasshopper. (Men 99, qtd. in Scott 176)⁷

So Lewis places Joyce in the realm of the jellyfish, which is also, Scott argues, Woolf's realm: “It was the transparent envelope of the jellyfish, the darker, psychological Joyce that had won the admiration of that female definer of modernism, Virginia Woolf” (Scott 176). Thus the critic skillfully matches Joyce with Woolf, depicting both as feminist modernists, co-champions of the jellyfish, in opposition to the misogynistic, tortoise-loving Lewis.

One must pause, however, over Scott's claim that Joyce the stylist had “won the admiration” of Virginia Woolf. In reading Woolf's response to Joyce in essays, letters, and diary entries, one discovers that her admiration for Joyce's style lasted all of a paragraph. That paragraph is in her 1919 essay “Modern Novels,” which was revised and reprinted as “Modern Fiction” in the first Common Reader (1925). There Woolf writes of the “Hades” chapter of Ulysses (which had appeared in the Little Review), “The scene in the cemetery … it is difficult not to acclaim a masterpiece. If we want life itself here, surely, we have it” (155). Woolf proceeds, however, to discuss the ways in which Joyce's text fails:

It fails because of the comparative poverty of the writer's mind, we might say simply and have done with it. But it is possible to press a little further and wonder whether we may not refer to our sense of being in a bright yet narrow room, confined and shut in, rather than enlarged and set free, to some limitation imposed by the method as well as by the mind. Is it the method that inhibits the creative power? Is it due to the method that we feel neither jovial nor magnanimous, but centred in a self which, in spite of its tremor of susceptibility, never embraces or creates what is outside of itself and beyond? (156)

Woolf then retrieves what she had but a moment before bestowed: “This method has the merit of bringing us closer to what we were prepared to call life itself; did not the reading of Ulysses suggest how much of life is excluded or ignored” (156; my emphasis).⁸ Woolf is even more explicit in her complaints about Joyce's style in a letter of 23 April 1918 to Lytton Strachey: “We've been asked to print Mr. Joyce's new novel [“We” being Virginia and Leonard Woolf, managers of Hogarth Press], every printer in London and most in the provinces having refused. First there's a dog that p's—then there's a man that forths, and one can be monotonous even on that subject—moreover, I don't believe that his method, which is highly developed, means much more than cutting out the explanations and putting in the thoughts between dashes. So I don't think we shall do it” (Letters II 234). The Woolfs did not do it, and when the book came out in 1922, Woolf did not change her mind about Joyce's method. On 6 September of that year she writes in her diary: “I finished Ulysses & think it is a mis-fire. Genius it has, I think, but of inferior water. The book is diffuse … it is underbred. … A first rate writer, I mean, respects writing too much to be tricky, startling; doing stunts” (Diary II 199). Finally, in another letter to Strachey, Woolf writes that she will contribute five and sixpence to a fund for T. S. Eliot's upkeep “on the condition he puts publicly to their proper use the first 200 pages of Ulysses. Never did I read such tosh” (Letters II 551). Begging critic Scott's pardon, this does not strike me as admiration.

In blasting Joyce's method, however, Woolf may be protesting too much: the violence of Woolf's rejection may be interpreted as a sign of her anxiety over being influenced by Joyce. This anxiety is most clearly expressed in a diary entry of 26 September 1920:

Somehow Jacob's Room has come to a stop, in the middle of that party too, which I enjoyed so much. [T. S.] Eliot coming on the heel of a long stretch of writing fiction … made me listless; cast shade upon me; & the mind when engaged upon fiction wants all its boldness & self-confidence. He said nothing—but I reflected how what I'm doing is probably being done better by Mr. Joyce. Then I began to wonder what it is that I am doing. … An odd thing, the human mind! so capricious, faithless, infinitely shying at shadows. (Diary II 68-69)

Woolf's metaphor of “casting shade” foreshadows Harold Bloom's metaphor of the anxiety-provoking precursor, who as “Covering Cherub” casts a shadow of influence over the later, belated poet.⁹ With the above entry in mind, we return to Scott's comment that Lewis “resents Woolf's use of Joyce's Ulysses.” Clearly it is Woolf who resents Joyce, fears that he may have both anticipated and bettered her.¹⁰ Scott goes on:

To Lewis, Ulysses is “robustly complete. … It is not the half-work in short ‘pale’ and ‘dishevelled’ of a crippled interregnum.” … He explains, “Mrs. Woolf is merely confusing the becoming pallor and uncertain untidiness of some of her own salon pieces with that of Joyce's masterpiece.” (176)

Scott here ends her paragraph and proceeds to Lewis's attack on Joyce in “Satire and Fiction.” What the critic has done is neatly gloss over the fact that in Men Without Art Lewis, rather than “resenting” Woolf's “use” of Ulysses (as Scott puts it), actually accuses Woolf of plagiarizing from Ulysses in the writing of Mrs. Dalloway. In attacking what he terms the “Bloomsbury technique,” Lewis writes:

In the local exponents of this method there is none of the realistic vigour of Mr. Joyce, though often the incidents in the local “masterpieces” are exact and puerile copies of the scenes in his Dublin drama (cf. The Viceroy's progress through Dublin in Ulysses with the Queen's progress through London in Mrs. Dalloway—the latter is a sort of undergraduate imitation of the former, winding up with a smoke-writing in the sky, a pathetic “crib” of the firework display and the rocket that is the culmination of Mr. Bloom's beach-ecstasy). (139)¹¹

Lewis's main textual target in this chapter is “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1923-1924), where Woolf repeated her earlier complaints about Joyce's method and lumped him in with the other “failures” of her generation: “Ulysses, Queen Victoria, Mr. Prufrock—to give Mrs. Brown some of the names she had made famous lately—is a little pale and dishevelled by the time her rescuers reach her” (211). Lewis perceives this comment as symptomatic of Woolf's (and by extension Bloombury's) dilettante defeatism, to which he reacts with some violence:

There you have a typical contemporary statement of the position of letters today. Its artificiality is self-evident, if you do no more than consider the words: for Ulysses however else it may have arrived at its destination, was at least not pale. But here, doubtless, Mrs. Woolf is merely confusing the becoming pallor, and certain untidiness of some of her own pretty salon pieces with that of Joyce's masterpiece (indeed that masterpiece is implicated and confused with her own pieces in more ways than one, and more palpably than this, but into that it is not necessary to enter here). (Men 137)

But, as we have seen above, the Enemy does enter into it, does make his charge of plagiarism—which charge critic Scott chooses not to enter into. What Lewis is doing in Men Without Art, then (or at least thinks he is doing), is defending Joyce against what he sees as denigration by Woolf in “Bennett and Brown” and plagiarism by Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway. Scott's analysis not only fails to communicate this, but leaves the reader with the impression that it is Woolf and Joyce who are comrades-in-arms, and Lewis their mutual Enemy.¹² While it is true that Lewis attacked Joyce in Time and Western Man (as Lewis attacked all his fellow “men of 1914,” including Pound and Eliot), he also wrote at the beginning of his attack that Ulysses places Joyce “very high in contemporary letters” (75), and would write to The Listener in 1935, “Mr. Wyndham Lewis, speaking in person, desires to say that he regards James Joyce as a great literary artist” (cited in Edwards 128).¹³ This expression of admiration (to again use Scott's term) is far stronger than any Woolf ever offered to Joyce, either in public or private. Woolf's final public response to Joyce, in fact, may have been to create the “Milton bogey” for A Room of One's Own (1929), which bogey Woolfian Carolyn Heilbrun has identified as Joyce: “For Woolf, Milton was the bogey, past which women must look. ‘He was the first of the masculinists,’ she had written in 1918. … If Milton was the first of the masculinists, Joyce in 1922 must have seemed the latest” (62). Unlike Scott, Heilbrun sees Joyce as fellow to Lewis, not Woolf. Whereas Scott, the feminist Joycean, sees Joyce as “part woman,” Heilbrun, the feminist Woolfian, sees him as all bogeyman.¹⁴

Again it is the late Joyce, the author of Finnegans Wake, whom Scott thinks the new womanly man; she turns at the end of her analysis, therefore, to that text:

Joyce provided deliberate responses to Lewis's brand of male modernism in Finnegans Wake, as its annotators have consistently recognized. Joyce's critique of gender in Lewis can perhaps be best viewed at the end of the fable of “The Mookse and the Gripes,” which rewrites Lewis's Time and Western Man as “Spice and Westend Woman” (FW 292.6). While it still suggests that little girls are made of sugar and spice, and reminds us of the position of a London West End prostitute, this title is also subversive of Lewis's sexism, and makes his sort of blasting appear pseudo-revolutionary. Woman provided an end to the Western patriarchal values which have produced a literature of wasteland and fascism. (177)

Scott's reading of Joyce's punning on Lewis's title is ingenious, but perhaps overly so. She recognizes the prostitute in Joyce's joke, and this is probably its main point, for Lewis had a taste for streetwalkers (for which taste his health often suffered). Ellmann records the following related anecdote: “As they [Lewis and Joyce] sat at the café, Lewis invariably invited the same two local prostitutes to sit with them. The women were given plenty to drink, but otherwise received little attention. Once, when Lewis broke precedent by a lapse of decorum with one of them, Joyce solemnly called him to order, ‘Remember you are the author of The Ideal Giant’” (530). Joyce's distortion of Lewis's title, then, is probably meant simply to reflect his history of such lapses.¹⁵ In a similar fashion Joyce rewrote the title of Lewis's violently erotic story “Cantleman's Spring Mate” as both “cattlemen's spring meat” (FW 172.6-7) and “gentlemen's spring modes” (165.24-25). Scott, I think, makes a great deal out of what appears to be a pair of good old boys teasing one another.¹⁶

“The Mookse and the Gripes,” Scott continues,

seems to end indecisively, with the advocates of space and time (Lewis's space man, the Mookse; Joyce's time man, the Gripes) receding. … They are watched by “Nuvoletta,” but her coy flirtation … fails to distract them from their argumentative sports. “She sighed. There are menner” (FW 157.8-158.5) seems an admission of the hopelessness in gender. The scene continues, however, shifting to the omnipresent, feminine river, embodiment of the natural flow of time—if not the female modernist treacle—that Lewis scorned. (177)

Scott argues that this shift, which introduces Joyce's two washerwomen, “challenges Lewis's position that God is male [N.B.: earlier this was also Joyce's position], since they suggest the cyclical role of the great goddess. It seems particularly damning that the woman who carries off the Mookse, the Lewis character, is described as a powerful black woman, a political entity that counters Lewis's classicism, sexism and racism” (177). What Scott surprisingly does not appear to recognize is that Joyce's “Nuvoletta” is not simply another embodiment of Issy, the sister/daughter figure, but also a caricature of Rebecca West, who, presumably after reading Lewis's attack on Joyce in Time and Western Man, entered the fray by publishing her own attack on Joyce, “The Strange Necessity” (1928), where she observes that “Mr. James Joyce is a great man who is entirely without taste” (3).¹⁷ Thus Nuvoletta's pettish “There are menner” may be read as Joyce's representation of West's disappointment at not being taken seriously by these men of ’14.¹⁸ This agonistic scenario comes back later in the “Lessons” chapter, where Lewis (now Kev) has just bashed Joyce (now Dolph) for drawing a picture of their mother's genitalia; Dolph responds, “Thanks eversore-much, Pointcarried! … I'm seeing rayingbogeys rings round me” (FW 304.5-9), and then turns to their sister (now Nubilina):

Tiny Mite, she studiert whas? With her listeningin coiffure, her dream of Endland's daylast and the glorifires of being presainted maid to majesty. And less is the pit for she isn't the lollypops she might easily be if she had for a sample Virginia's air of achievement. That might keep her from throwing delph. (FW 304.19-26).

Here Joyce is making fun of Rebecca West's snobbery (West, although her father was Irish, bore a son to H. G. Wells in 1914, married the English banker Henry Maxwell Andrews in 1930, and became Dame Rebecca in 1959).¹⁹ Especially relevant to my argument is the reference to “Virginia's air of achievement.” In “The Strange Necessity” West hesitates for a moment in her bashing of Joyce to compliment Roger Fry and Virginia Woolf, both “authors … about whom one knows that they know all sorts of things one would like to know” (124). “If only Rebecca West had Virginia Woolf's appearance of genius,” Joyce seems to be mocking, “then perhaps she would not attack me” (“throw delph”—both delftware and Dolph). As for the phrase “air of achievement,” this is probably an echo not of West but of Woolf, who at the beginning of “Modern Fiction” (where, once again, she first praises then bashes Joyce) expresses her envy for those “happier warriors,” the novelists of the past, “whose battle is won and whose achievements wear so serene an air of accomplishment that we can scarcely refrain from whispering that the fight was not so fierce for them as for us” (Common 151; my emphasis). One could not expect Joyce, who set out in Ulysses to parodically destroy all previous literatures (vide the “Oxen of the Sun” chapter), to commiserate with Woolf in her vision of belatedness. In mocking Woolf's “air of achievement,” then, Joyce is one with Lewis, who in Men Without Art agrees with “certain critics” that Woolf is “insignificant” as a novelist (132). Given that Joyce ridicules both West and Woolf in the Wake, I find it difficult to accept Scott's conclusion that “the mature Joyce was willing to yield control to the feminine in writing and in time. One of the ‘men of 1914’ had failed Lewis as a male modernist and challenged him in ‘femaline’ language” (178).

To conclude, I would have no argument with Scott if she were to claim that there are certain affinities between the styles of Woolf and Joyce (as many critics have), or even if she were to claim that Joyce, in the final analysis, manifests more sympathy and understanding for women than does Lewis. Scott's aim in this essay, however, is to “save” Joyce for feminism by destroying Lewis. In the course of her rescue/attack operation, Scott clearly plays fast and loose with the facts, representing Lewis, Joyce, and Woolf as other than they were. This is not critical cricket. The most one can do, I think, is attempt to save Joyce, not for feminism, but from feminism—or, more precisely, from biographically phallacious [sic] feminist readings. Joyce, after all, was a man who approved the definition of woman as “an animal that micturates once a day, defecates once a week, menstruates once a month and parturates once a year” (Ellmann 162). Joyce, after all, was a man who said he did not like intellectual women (Ellmann 647), and who once offered a friend the following test for telling whether a woman is “any good”: “Well, take her to a picture gallery, and explain the pictures to her. If she breaks wind, she's all right” (Ellmann 443). Allowing that Joyce was something of a coprophiliac—enjoyed playing fartsy with his wife²⁰—I think it safe to say that such a statement is not likely to win the sympathy of most feminists.²¹ While it may be a mistake to make Joyce out as the “bogeyman” (what Scott is quite understandably concerned to deny), it is just as much a mistake, I think, to make him out as the “new womanly man.” Joyce, in the final analysis, is merely a man. Ecce homo.

Notes

1. For the whys and wherefores of Lewis's persona non grata status, see Jeffrey Meyers's biography The Enemy; on the advantages that may attach to such status, see “On Not Reading Wyndham Lewis,” prologue to Fredric Jameson's Fables (1-23).

2. Scott cites Meyers's biography, which exposes Lewis's irresponsibility in sexual matters.

3. Jameson comments that “far from dissolving the personality into its external determinations, as Lewis's transformations do, the Joycean phantasmagoria serves to reconfirm the unity of the psyche, and to reinvent that depth-psychological perspective from which … private fantasies spring. … [In Lewis] it is not the unification but rather the dispersal of subjectivity which is aimed at” (57-58).

4. Scott does however devote a chapter to Molly in her 1984 book Joyce and Feminism (156-83).

5. That Scott is primarily interested in West as a feminist is clear from the title of her recent essay “Refiguring the Binary, Breaking the Cycle: Rebecca West as Feminist Modernist.”

6. Frederic Jameson has different tastes:

   To face the sentences of Wyndham Lewis is to find oneself confronted with a principle of immense mechanical energy. Flaubert, Ulysses, are composed; the voices of a James or of a Faulkner develop their resources through some patient blind groping exploration of their personal idiosyncrasies from work to work. The style of Lewis, however, equally unmistakable, blasts through the tissues of his novels like a steam whistle, breaking them to its will. (25)

   Jameson later returns to the Joyce/Lewis opposition: “The sentences of Joyce are composed according to a principle of immanence, God withdrawing from view behind his creation: in Lewis, however, sheer proliferation stands as the sign and ratification of his mechanistic enterprise” (32).

7. Lewis incorporated “Satire and Fiction” into Men Without Art, the passage Scott quotes appearing on pages 98-99. Scott does not note this.

8. Patrick Parrinder also notes this quick shift from praise to blame in Woolf's essay: “As soon as her essay asks this question [about whether Joyce was “spiritual” enough], Woolf's reservations about Joyce's achievement start to appear” (161).

9. That Woolf may indeed play theoretical precursor to Bloom's ephebe—that is, that Bloom may derive much of his theory of anxiety from Woolf—is a possibility that has yet to be given adequate attention by critics. For a reading of Woolf's response to Ulysses in the text of Jacob's Room, see Garvey.

10. Carolyn Heilbrun quotes Woolf's comment “what I'm doing is probably being better done by Mr. Joyce” and observes, “this was not true, but reflects that female diffidence, that lack of confidence which male writers do not experience that has led her critics, and Joyce's admirers, to take her at her word” (60). Regardless of whether or not what Woolf feared was true was in fact true, my point is simply that she feared, and that this fear may have caused her to react with hostility.

11. Lewis would return to this charge in his long-suppressed satire on the London book world. The Roaring Queen (1936; 1973), where he caricatures Woolf as “Rhoda Hyman,” the “Highbrow Queen of Literary London,” who awards herself the prize for “the Year's Cleverest Literary Larceny” (96). The charge has been raised at least twice since. In 1947, William York Tindall wrote that Woolf's “Mrs. Dalloway, her first important work, is indebted primarily to Joyce. His three complementary characters, Bloom, Mrs. Bloom, and Stephen, are matched by her Septimus and Mrs. Dalloway” (304). More recently William D. Jenkins has pointed to even more parallels between Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway, and concludes that Woolf's novel “suggests, at least to this common reader, a Ulysses in little: a very well-bred, perhaps overbred, miniature, not tricky, startling, or obscure” (515). Carolyn Heilbrun dismisses Tindall's observations as “nonsense” (63), and her fellow Woolfian Jean Guiguet does not stoop to mention—neither in his essay on Woolf and Lewis, nor in his essay on Woolf and Joyce—Lewis's charge.

12. Scott also writes “In Time and Western Man (1927) Lewis has begun to challenge Joyce's feminine side. As a ‘time man’ Joyce was falling into the same pigeonhole as Woolf (86-88)” (“Jellyfish” 176). Scott's page reference gives the impression that in Time Lewis associates Joyce with Woolf. In fact Lewis never does this, although he does in places pair Joyce with Gertrude Stein.

13. Lewis writes his early autobiography Blasting and Bombardiering (1937), he tells his readers, in order to defend himself and his fellow “men of 1914” from the debunking kind of biography perpetrated by fiends like Lytton Strachey:

    It is certain as I am lying here in this hammock that no one will take the trouble to go into the private affairs of these contemporaries of mine—examine their old laundry bills, read their boring business letters, and so on—except in order to betray them, and make them look even bigger fools than in fact they are. … Something has to be done about this. So here goes! (14)

14. In her afterword to the 1982 anthology Women in Joyce Heilbrun suggests that perhaps Joyce should be termed “a misogynist, a man who hates women for becoming what he has determined they should be” (cited in Scott Joyce 125-26).

15. Prostitutes also come up in Lewis's recollection of making the acquaintance of Ezra Pound:

    On the first two occasions on which we met I did not speak to him: on the second occasion he addressed a few remarks to me, but I did not reply. I did not consider it necessary to do so, he seemed in fact to be addressing somebody else. I mean that what he said did not appear to be appropriate, or to have any relevance—as a remark addressed to me.

    “This young man could probably tell you!” was I think what he said, with great archness, narrowing his eyes and regarding me with mischievous goodwill.

    There had been some question of the whereabouts of a kidnapped or absconded prostitute. Ezra was already attributing to those he liked proclivities which he was persuaded must accompany the revolutionary intellect. (Blasting 271)

16. Joyce would also retitle Lewis's The Art of Being Ruled as the “art of being rude” (FW 167.3]—which bash Lewis would register in the title of his late autobiography Rude Assignment.

17. I say “surprisingly” because in Joyce and Feminism Scott discusses both West's critique of Joyce and Joyce's response to West in the Wake (121-24).

18. For an analysis of Joyce's response to West elsewhere in the Wake, see Halper.

19. Joyce's “rayingbogeys” recalls his comments, in a letter of 20 September 1928 to Harriet Shaw Weaver, about West's analysis: “About fifty pages of Rebecca West's book were read to me yesterday but I cannot judge until I hear the whole essay. I think that P.P. [Pomes Penyeach] had in her case the intended effect of blowing up some bogey bogus personality and that she is quite delighted with the explosion” (Selected 337; my emphasis).

20. In one of a series of scandalous letters to Nora, Joyce reminisces about a night of love: “You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I fucked them out of you, big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole” (Selected 185).

21. In Joyce and Feminism Scott acknowledges that Joyce made “extremely misogynistic statements,” and remarks, “If a critic has a mind to s/he may collect these aspects of Joyce and present a very dark interpretation indeed” (206).

Works Cited

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