A Key to the Ulysses of James Joyce

(no dust jacket) [slight chipping at edges of paper-covered boards, a bit of exposure of boards at tips, uninteresting vintage bookplate on front pastedown]. (map of Dublin) Smith, a once-prominent art and literary critic but now largely forgotten, tries to help the befuddled reader make sense of Joyce's masterpiece, but you get the sense that his heart ain't in it. (His dedication credits -- or blames -- the dedicatee's "sly Machiavellian taunts" as his impetus for writing the book.) Here's an example of his helpful advice, from page 21: "When a man shouts his hatreds as loudly, as frequently, as hysterically as Joyce, the Psychologist begins to suspect that his 'hate' is but a mask for love. So much for that. I have turned aside here for the reason that the issue rises in probably every extended conversation, and in nearly every chapter of 'Ulysses.' Let the reader work it out for himself." (Gee, thanks, teach.) At another juncture he observes that "one detects in the critics of James Joyce either an adolescent and effervescing enthusiasm born of a yearning after the bizarre, or a middle-aged and pecksniffing fear of succumbing to a colossal literary hoax." He isn't completely down on the book, however: he finds its vocabulary "a delight," allows as how it "abounds in hoaxes, rollicking nonsense, and great good humor," and admits that the author -- "this snarling Celt" -- "has not merely added new weapons, but a complete new arsenal to the realistic school of fiction." His final assessment: "Vulgar it is, certainly, -- as vulgar as a bed pan, as vulgar as life itself. But it is revlieved by moods of singular beauty; it swings one from the stinks of the lavatory to the realms of luminous ether. It is everything: realism and romanticism, wisdom and nonsense, scatalogic hideousness and transcendental aspiration. And, finally, alas, there has probably never been a book, since the invention of printing, doomed to exert such a baneful, such a malignant and perverting influence as 'Ulysses.' It is the Demogorgon of literature." Happy Bloomsday to you, too! (The copyright page states that "this first edition consists of nine hundred of sixty copies"; this particular copy is unnumbered.) The author, whose name is usually hyphenated (i.e. Jordan-Smith), was best known (i.e. most notorious) for originating an art movement in the 1920s, "Disumbrationism," that was eventually revealed to be an elaborate hoax, a satire of modernism with the purpose of demonstrating that "most art critics didn't know what they were talking about." (He himself posed as the movement's leading artist, "Pavel Jerdanowitsch," creating amateurish paintings that were praised by critics.) From 1933 to his retirement in 1957 he wrote an art- and literary-criticism column for the Los Angeles Times.

Product Info

Publisher: Pascal Covici, Publisher

Year: 1927

Type: Used

Binding: Hardcover

First Edition

Seller Info

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