Apart from the unfindable juvenilia Et Tu Healy (possibly called Parnell) this is Joyce's first work. It was published in an 8 page pamphlet shared with his friend and fellow student Francis Sheehy- Skeffington, after his and Joyce's articles were turned down by the college magazine at University College, Dublin. Joyce, with whom he also attended school, considered Skeffington “the cleverest man at University College” beside himself (Ellmann 61). The bit at the end of Joyce's even tempered rant about a 'third minister' is said to be a clear reference to himself. It is also worth noting that Joyce translated the Gerhart Hauptmann play Michael Kramer and that Yeats thought it a poor translation. His poem The Holy Office (1904) continues his attack on the Irish theatre, amongst other things...

No man, said the Nolan, can be a lover of the true or the good unless he abhors the multitude; and the artist, though he may employ the crowd, is very careful to isolate himself. This radical principle of artistic economy applies specially to a time of crisis, and to-day when the highest form of art has been just preserved by desperate sacrifices, it is strange to see the artist making terms with the rabblement. The Irish Literary Theatre is the latest movement of protest against the sterility and falsehood of the modern stage. Half a century ago the note of protest was uttered in Norway, and since then in several countries long and disheartening battles have been fought against the hosts of prejudice and misinterpretation and ridicule. What triumph there has been here and there is due to stubborn conviction, and every movement that has set out heroically has achieved a little. The Irish Literary Theatre gave out that it was the champion of progress, and proclaimed war against commercialism and vulgarity. It had partly made good its word and was expelling the old devil when after the first encounter it surrendered to the popular will. Now your popular devil is more dangerous than your vulgar devil. Bulk and lungs count for something, and he can gild his speech aptly. He has prevailed once more, and the Irish Literary Theatre must now be considered the property of the rabblement of the most belated race in Europe.

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This was just before he died. He was laid up in bed with a broken hip, much to my surprise, because I don’t think I’d been forewarned. Anyway, following the piece he’d contributed in 1985 to my festschrift to mark Grigson’s 80th I was now writing a biography and had written to Spender more than once about his sometimes uneasy relationship with the poet and critic. I’d visited the wonderful Harry Ransom Center in Austin, among other places, and one of the items I’d unearthed had been an excoriating squib written by his one-time friend, which as far as I knew, had never been published. Just as well, really, since had it been, it is unlikely that Spender would have cooperated at all. I’d also discovered that a mutual friend had seen  Grigson put out a cigarette on a photograph of Spender’s face.

W. H. Auden,Stephen Spender & Christopher Isherwood on Fire Island,1947

As I moved towards St John’s Wood that afternoon I asked myself if I could honestly mention these two pieces of evidence of Grigson’s dislike of him –one a fact of which I carried no proof, the other, possibly apocryphal , and even malevolent. As I sighted what I knew must be Spender’s home—a very handsome Regency villa covered with wisteria and sporting wrought ironwork — the nerves began to play up. I was about to meet a man of 89--the last surviving (unless you count Edward Upward ) figures of the Auden generation. Was it wise to open wounds that had never fully healed ? I decided that I could not risk it—not in Spender’s own home. The cigarette butt and the squib would play no part. I would have to tread softly.

The interview went pretty well. Spender was friendly and polite, though hardly enthusiastic about his old friend. I felt as if he was holding back, although his memory might have been poor. Perhaps assuming that I was aware of Grigson’s mixed feelings towards him, he did bring up an example of  his fellow poet’s brutal honesty—a hostile review by Grigson of a book by or about Cecil Day Lewis (I cannot recall which) published when the latter was terminally ill.

Before I left the house I kept my ears pricked for the sound of Edna Everage—Barry Humphries had married Spender’s daughter—but alas, could hear nothing that sounded Australian.

Spender died a month or so later.[RH]

'Badinage' - sent in by an old jotter (who once met Marty Feldman) who notes that even in 1961 the old thought that young people had no conversation... From Michael Innes detective novel Silence Observed about a forger intent upon  forging forgeries of great literary forgeries. Echoes of Major Byron etc., Inspector Appleby, having briefly referred to La Dolce Vita, his interlocutor 'old buffer' Sir Gabriel Gulliver says:

"I tell you I've never spent a winter in Rome."

"You'd find it overrated, I don't doubt. Better just to read about it in a nostalgic way in Edwardian novels. The reality would be disenchanting. I understand there's a great deal of snow, and that the natives have never studied to accommodate their lives to it. Moreover in Winter Rome is full of Romans, just as in Spring London is full of Londoners. And you know how tiresome that is. No capital city is tolerable except when voided of its inhabitants."

Sir Gabriel Gulliver received this with appropriate amusement. Entering the smoking room, he dived into a corner to ring a bell…" Nice of you," he said, "to talk to an old buffer in what you conceive of as his own antique conversational mode. A good many of you youngsters, you know, have no conversation at all…'

Harry & Caresse Crosby

A personal note by Stuart Gilbert published in transition (Paris, June 1930) 6 months after Harry Crosby's suicide. Gilbert was a literary scholar and translator - he assisted in the translation of  Ulysses into French and was also a friend and correspondent of Joyce. This affectionate memoir of Crosby was not (until now)  available on the web.

“Let us suppose, ” Montaigne has written, “ that a plank is fixed between the twin towers of Notre Dame Cathedral, quite wide enough for a man to walk along it; however great may be our philosophical wisdom, however staunch our courage, they will not embolden us to walk that plank as securely as we should, were it resting on the ground.”

The mere thought of that dizzy walk in air between the skyey towers, above Our Lady’s pinnacles, was enough, a later writer tells us, to make some of Montaigne’s readers blanch and sweat with fear. And yet how jauntily you and I parade that selfsame plank when it is laid out on the pavement of normal experience, little plainmen who rarely lift eyes above the shop windows and studiously avert our gaze from the insistence of the sun!

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Extract from The Flurried Years - Violet Hunt's account of her life between 1908 and 1914.

A languid airless summer, rife with Law and Cubism, spent at Selsey with Princess Maleine as sole guest and play-secretary. Her husband flitted backwards and forwards in his car, now recalling her, now giving her a new leave of absence. Joseph Leopold*, playing golf,eating little contraband crabs, writing poems, and helping me with my novel, and taking a car into Chichester on Sundays to attend Mass in his own church, contrived to wile the summer away. He wrote Impressionist ; she painted Futurist; in dress, we two women went a step farther and dressed Vorticist, which was newer than Futurism, than Cubism, than Impressionism, old-fashioned almost by now, but which Joseph Leopold was still practising in his cunning vers libres.

The very clothes we rejoiced to wear made us feel like it ; they coarsened us, I think. Non-representational art makes for hardness, enjoins the cynicism that likes to look upon the crudenesses, the necessaries of life merely — the red of beef, the blue of blouses, the shine of steel knives in a butcher's shop. Better, said Wyndham Lewis, than a dying stag or a virgin in Greek dress picking daisies. But this kind of art died in the war, being relegated chiefly to the camouflaging of ships. A faint echo of it is to be seen in modern jazz.

A CADGER’S MAP OF A BEGGING DISTRICT.
EXPLANATION OF THE HIEROGLYPHICS.

No good; too poor, and know too much.

Stop,—if you have what they want, they will buy. They are pretty “fly” (knowing).

Go in this direction, it is better than the other road. Nothing that way.

Bone (good). Safe for a “cold tatur,” if for nothing else. “Cheese your patter” (don’t talk much) here.

Cooper’d (spoilt) by too many tramps calling there.

Gammy (unfavourable), likely to have you taken up. Mind the dog.

Flummuxed (dangerous), sure of a month in “quod,” prison.

Religious, but tidy on the whole.