'A Man of Acknowledged Genius'

“To read the book over a long period of time gives one the impression of watching intemperance become addiction, become debauch.” 

Read out of context, you might think Louise Bogan is deriding Naked Lunch, Last Exit to Brooklyn or some other half-forgotten cause célèbre from Grove Press. No, she’s after bigger game: Finnegans Wake. Her review of Joyce’s novel was published in the May 6, 1939, issue of The New Yorker.

 

Before the hooting begins, please understand that Bogan is no crass, sub-literate philistine. She was a poet and first-rate critic who reviewed poetry and other work for the magazine for thirty-eight years, starting in 1931. That was the era when The New Yorker was still readable and at the height of its literary prestige. She acknowledges Joyce’s gifts:

 

“The book’s great beauties, its wonderful passages of wit, its variety, its marks of genius and immense learning, are undeniable. It has another virtue: in the future ‘writers will not need to search for a compromise.’”

 

Bogan is quoting the French critic Albert Thibaudet on the effects Stéphane Mallarmé had on other writers. The comment is appropriate and revealing of Bogan’s understanding of Modernist literary psychology. Like Joyce, Mallarmé was a gifted writer who pushed language and writing to the limits of inexpressibility -- and readers' patience. Those who view literature as a series of progressive advancements, in which each writer is bound by the accomplishments of his most daunting predecessors, will inevitably applaud such avant-garde determinism. Bogan refers to the “malady” which “cripples Finnegans Wake.” 

 

I first dabbled in the Wake while in high school, enjoying its decryption the way I enjoyed crossword puzzles. In a sense, Finnegan Wake’s ideal reader is a nerdily intelligent teenager with access to a good library, or at least a grad student with nothing better to do. I read the novel in increments, over decades, like most of its readers; then in toto, armed with scholarship (in effect, cheat sheets); of late, in increments again. I have no desire to reread all of Joyce’s final novel, one of literary history’s freakish cul-de-sacs, though I dip in occasionally for some of the set pieces, the Anna Livia Plurabelle section in particular.

 

When I finally read Joyce’s novel in its entirety in 1994, I used a heavily annotated copy of the Wake loaned to me by the late Harry Staley, a longtime professor of English at the state University of New York at Albany. It was a Viking hardcover edition held together with masking tape and rubber bands, interlarded with Harry’s supplemental annotations on note cards. The book it most resembled in appearance was my note-swollen copy of Ulysses. I devoted six months to the task of reading the Wake, and it amounted to a guilt-driven chore interrupted by flashes of pleasure. It was an unrelieved labor for small return. Nabokov loved Ulysses but dismissed the Wake as “a cold pudding of a book.”

 

Another good, non-academic writer, Whittaker Chambers, reviewed Finnegans Wake in the May 8, 1939, issue of Time. He described the novel, rightly, as “too difficult for most people to read” and as “the most consciously obscure work that a man of acknowledged genius has produced.” Like Bogan, Chambers is a realist without a lot of literary pretensions, and speaks for many of us when he writes: “Readers who like plain-spoken words may grow impatient, but lovers of words for themselves will find in Finnegans Wake some lyric passages to make them sit up.” Sure, but what about the rest of the 628 pages?

 

[Bogan’s review of Finnegans Wake is collected in A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan (ed. Mary Kinzie, Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2005). You can find Chambers’ review in Ghosts on the Roof: Selected Journalism of Whittaker Chambers 1931-1959; ed. Terry Teachout, Regnery Gateway, 1989).]