John Bayley

Joyce’s prose is ‘beautifully written’, as they used to say. Written, like his poems, in the old style of the Nineties. Paradoxically, it is not composed but spoken. The voice that echoes through it, the voices rather, and the tones, are those of the old artificer, the father of the tribe, Simon Dedalus, John Stanislaus Joyce. Like the violins of Cremona, Dubliners, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake are the products of a joint concern, a family undertaking. Joyce himself was frank about this. As long as he had escaped he could still be in the bosom of the family. As long as he remained in Trieste or Zurich or Paris he was able to take the part of maestro, conducting the chorus of voices in the parlour of the grandest house they had once lived in – 23 Castlewood Avenue, off Belgrave Square, Rathmines – or in the back kitchen of some much more modest establishment. As Richard Ellmann emphasised in his biography, Joyce employed his father till the very end, requiring the particulars of the ‘Star of the Sea’ church when Pappie was at death’s door. In his last remembered words the old man replied to another of his son’s queries: ‘Tell Jim he was born at six in the morning.’ Unknowing, John Stanislaus died the begetter of what was to become the greatest of all enterprises in modern Irish mythology.’‘

On the jacket of Playing the Game is a portrait of the man who played it: a portrait by William Strang (1859-1921), a Late Victorian artist now much undervalued. He did what is by far the best portrait of Hardy, and his special ability seems to have lain in pleasing his subjects and their public by making them look suitably grave and important, even a shade portentous, while at the same time revealing hidden traces of weakness, perhaps of meanness. Newbolt’s is a close little face, the small mouth primly clenched over an aggressively cloven chin, the brows knitted in a frown which seems to tell less of imperial visions than of inner worries and embarrassments. It is the kind of face to whose owner a bank manager might think twice before making a loan. No wonder Newbolt felt uneasy when he went to look at the portrait exhibited at the Tate. ‘Had a good laugh,’ he none the less gamely recorded.

The two most interesting letters in this selection are not by Meredith: a fact suggestive of the Meredithian tendency to evade evidence or embodiment of a personal sort, and disappear into the airier world of ideas about him – his own or those of others. His personality, like that of his creations, is of a gaseous nature. Max Beerbohm once wrote a memorable little sketch of a visit to the Sage of Box Hill, and of hearing Meredith’s voice addressing the air as he approached, and recommencing the conversation as he walked away. In mid-century Meredith dazzled his friends and public, but the bubble eventually burst. Had there ever been anything in his coruscating characters and their sprightly utterance? Even old loyalties turned a bit sceptical. In her Memories of George Meredith one of his fans, Lady Butcher, recalled how he had thrilled her with his first inspiration for One of Our Conquerors, as they walked together on Box Hill.’

Five years ago the formidable chairwoman of the first Russian Booker Prize remarked of one of the entries that she’d never been so disgusted in her life. There was an American judge on the panel, also a woman, who looked surprised. Conditioned as she and I were to the novel in the West, we had scarcely noticed what seemed to us rather quaint attempts by younger Russian novelists – aspirants for the prize – to shock and repel their readers. The new sexual and scatological candour in Russian writing was for us run-of-the-mill stuff, obviously copied from Western colleagues.’

So wrote Yeats of Swift’s Latin epitaph for himself in Dublin Cathedral, and it had been an epitaph well earned. The fashionable aspect of social indignation was to come later. To the heroes of the Irish revolution, twenty years after the American, it was nothing of the kind. In his poem ‘September 1913’ Yeats was convinced that Ireland in his own time had ‘come to sense’, and had nothing to do now ‘but fumble in a greasy till’. Was it’