In 1933, George Orwell had managed to borrow a copy of Joyce's Ulysses which was only published in Paris, and was being watched out for eagerly by those custodians of public morality. His Majesty's Inspectors of Customs and Excise. And in December he wrote Brenda Salkeld a huge letter, almost two thousand words, answering her 'What do you think Joyce is after?'. It could have been printed almost as it stood, a highly perceptive and interesting piece of critical writing. The book moved him deeply.
[to
answer your question] one has got to decide what a novel normally
sets out to do. I should say that it sets out first... to display or
create a character, secondly to make a kind of pattern or design
which any good story contains, and, thirdly, if the novelist is up to
it, to produce good writing which can exist almost as it were in
vacuo and independent of subject... I think Ulysses follows this
scheme fairly closely, but the queer and original thing about it is
that instead of taking as his material the conventional and highly
simplified version of life presented in most novels, Joyce attempts
to present life more or less as it is lived. Of course he is not
trying merely to represent life. When Ulysses first
came out one heard it said on every side that it was an attempt to
describe a day in somebody’s life, leaving nothing out, etc. etc.
It is not that. If one thinks, a complete description of a day, or
even of an hour, would be simply an enormous omnium gatherum, quite
formless and probably not at all interesting, and in any case would
not convey the impression of life at all. Art implies selection and
there is as much selection in Ulysses as in Pride and
Prejudice. Only Joyce is attempting to select and represent events
and thoughts as they occur in life and not as they occur in fiction.
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Orwell
shared Joyce’s scorn for those who write novels through reading
other novels. He appreciated the formal structure of Ulysses more
than most (many could not see it at all) and yet ‘quite apart from
the different styles used to represent different manners of thought,
the observation is in places marvellous.’ Some of the passages
‘have haunted me ever since reading them. If you read them aloud
you will see that most of them are essentially verse.’
This Ulysses letter,
while mainly it shows an enthusiast trying to define and convey his
growing absorption in the mechanics and craft of fiction, yet also
shows a potentiality for real critical ability — as came later in
the great essays on Swift, Dickens and Henry Miller.
But Ulysses proved nearly fatal to his own
development as a novelist. Self-consciously and mechanically he
wrote A Clergyman’s Daughter with ‘different
styles used to represent different manners of thought’; and there
are still elements of this, though less gross, in Keep the
Aspidistra Flying. A year later he confided to Brenda:
I managed
to get my copy of Ulysses through safely this time. I rather wish I
had never read it. It gives me an inferiority complex. When I read a
book like that and then come back to my own work, I feel like a
eunuch who has taken a course in voice production ... but if you
listen closely you can hear the good old squeak just the same as
ever.
The
novel he was working on at that time which ‘instead of going
forward goes backward with the most alarming speed’ was A
Clergyman’s Daughter. Joyce stimulated Orwell as a critic but
could have been disastrous to him as a writer, if his documentary
plain style had not already emerged in Down and Out and
was there to fall back upon, even to extend and still further purify.
(Source: Bernard Crick - George Orwell - A Life - Little, Brown and Company, Boston - 1980)
Brilliant
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