Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (39 page)

In following Bloom the reader – like Dedalus – is exhilarated and liberated.
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Bloom has no wish to be anything other than who he is, ‘neither Faust nor Jesus’. Bloom inhabits an amazingly
generous
world, where people allow each other to be as they are, celebrating everyday life and giving a glimpse of what civilisation can evolve into: food, poetry, ritual, love, sex, drink, language. They can be found anywhere, Joyce is saying. They are what peace – inner and out – is.

T. S. Eliot wrote an essay about
Ulysses
in the
Dial
magazine in 1923, in which he confessed that the book for him had ‘the importance of a scientific discovery,’ and indeed part of Joyce’s aim was to advance language, feeling it had dropped behind as science had expanded. He also liked the fact that Joyce had used what he called ‘the mythical method.’
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This, he believed, might be a way forward for literature, replacing the narrative method. But the most revealing difference between
Ulysses,
on the one hand, and
The Waste Land, Jacob’s Room,
and
Henry IV
on the other, is that in the end Stephen Dedalus is redeemed. At the beginning of the book, he is in an intellectual and moral wasteland, bereft of ideas and hope. Bloom, however, shows himself throughout the book as capable of seeing the world through others’ eyes, be it his wife Molly, who he knows intimately, or Dedalus, a relative stranger. This not only makes Bloom profoundly unprejudiced – in an anti-Semitic world – but it is, on Joyce’s part, a wonderfully optimistic message, that connections are possible, that solitude and atomisation, alienation and ennui are not inevitable.

In 1922 Joyce’s Irish colleague W. B. Yeats was named a senator in Ireland. Two years later he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Yeats’s fifty-seven-year career as a poet spanned many different periods, but his political engagement was of a piece with his artistic vision. An 1899 police report described him as ‘more or less of a revolutionary,’ and in 1916 he had published ‘Easter 1916,’ about the botched Irish nationalist uprising. This contained lines that, though they refer to the executed leaders of the uprising, could also serve, in the ending, as an epitaph for the entire century:

Yeats recognised that he had a religious temperament at a time when science had largely destroyed that option. He believed that life was ultimately tragic,
and that it is largely determined by ‘remote … unknowable realities.’
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For him the consensus of life, its very structure, will defeat us, and the search for greatness, the most noble existential cause, must involve a stripping away of the ‘mask’: ‘If mask and self could be unified, one would experience completeness of being.’
⁴⁰
This was not exactly Freudianism but close and, as David Perkins has shown, it led Yeats to a complicated and highly personal system of iconography and symbols in which he pitched antitheses against one another: youth and age, body and soul, passion and wisdom, beast and man, creative violence and order, revelation and civdisation, time and eternity.
⁴¹

Yeats’s career is generally seen in four phases – before 1899, 1899–1914, 1914–28, and after 1928 – but it is his third phase that marks his highest achievement. This period includes
The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), Michael Robartes and the Dancer
(1921),
The Tower
(1928), and the prose work
A Vision
(1925). This latter book sets out Yeats’s occult system of signs and symbols, which were partly the result of his ‘discovery’ that his wife had psychic powers and that spirits ‘spoke through her’ in automatic writing and trances.
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In anyone else such an approach might have been merely embarrassing, but in Yeats the craftsmanship shines through to produce a poetic voice that is clear and distinctive, wholly autonomous, conveying ‘the actual thoughts of a man at a passionate moment of life.’
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Yeats the man is not at all like Bloom, but they are embarked on the same journey:

But, like Bloom, he was really more interested in creating afresh from nature than lamenting what had gone.

Yeats had begun his career trying to put the legends of Ireland to poetic use. He never shared the modernist desire to portray the contemporary urban landscape; instead, as he grew older he recognised the central reality of ‘desire in our solitude,’ the passion of private matters, and that science had nothing worthwhile to say on the matter.
⁴⁴
Greatness, as Bloom realised, lay in being wiser, more courageous, more full of insight, even in little ways, especially in little ways. Amid the wasteland, Yeats saw the poet’s role as raising his game, in order to raise everybody’s. His poetry was very different from Eliot’s, but in this one aim they were united.

Bloom is, of course, a standing reproach for the citizens of the acquisitive society. He is not short of possessions, but he doesn’t have much, or all that he might have, yet that doesn’t bother him in the slightest. His inner life is what counts. Nor does he judge other people by what they have; he just wants to get inside their heads to see how it might be different from his own, to aid his experience of the world.

Four years after
Ulysses,
in 1926, F. Scott Fitzgerald published his novel
The Great Gatsby,
which, though a much more conventional work, addresses the same theme albeit from virtually the opposite direction. Whereas Leopold Bloom is a lower-middle-class Dubliner who triumphs over small-scale adversity by redemptive wit and low-level cunning, the characters in
Gatsby
are either very rich or want to be, and sail through life in such a way that hardly anything touches them, inhabiting an environment that breeds a moral and intellectual emptiness that constitutes its own form of wasteland.

The four main characters in the book are Jay Gatsby, Daisy and Tom Buchanan, and Nick Carraway, the narrator. The action takes place one summer on an island, West Egg, a cross between Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, and Long Island, but within driving distance of Manhattan. Carraway, who has rented the house next to Gatsby by accident, is a relative of Daisy. To begin with, Gatsby, who shared some biographical details with Fitzgerald, the Buchanans, and Carraway lead relatively separate lives; then they are drawn together.
⁴⁵
Gatsby is a mysterious figure. His home is always open for large, raucous, Jazz Age parties, but he himself is an enigmatic loner; no one really knows who he
is, or how he made his money. He is often on the phone, long distance (when long distance was expensive and exotic). Gradually, however, Nick is drawn into Gatsby’s orbit. In parallel with this he learns that Tom Buchanan is having an affair with a Myrtle Wilson whose husband owns a gas station where he often refuels on his way to and from Manhattan. Daisy, the original ‘innocent,’ a 1920s bright young thing, is blissfully unaware of this. The book is barely 170 pages long, and nothing is laboured. There is an early mention of ‘
The Rise of the Colored Empires,
by this man Goddard,’ a reference to Lothrop Stoddard’s eugenic tract
The Rising Tide of Colour.
This provokes a discussion by Tom about race: ‘If we don’t look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved … it’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things…. The idea is that we’re Nordics … and we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilisation – oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?’
⁴⁶
The area where the fatal accident takes place, where Myrtle is killed, is known as the Valley of Ashes, based on Flushing Meallow, a swamp filled with garbage and ash. At other times, ‘breeding’ is a matter of exquisite fascination to the characters. But these points are lightly made, not forced on the reader.

Permeating all is the doubt that surrounds Gatsby. Dark rumours abound about the way he made his fortune – liquor, drugs, gambling. It soon transpires that Gatsby wants an introduction to Daisy and asks Nick, her relative, to arrange a meeting. When he does so, it turns out that Gatsby and Daisy already know each other and were in love before she married Tom. (Fitzgerald was worried that this was the weak point of the book: he had not explained adequately Gatsby’s earlier relations with Daisy.)
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They resume their affair. One afternoon a group of them go in two cars to Manhattan. In the city Tom accuses Gatsby and Daisy of being lovers. At Gatsby’s instigation, Daisy confesses she has never loved Tom. Angered, Tom reveals he has been checking up on Gatsby: he did go to Oxford, as he claimed; he was decorated in the war. Like Nick, the reader warms to Gatsby. We also know by now that his real name is James Gatz, that he comes from a poor background, and that fortune smiled on him as a young man when he was able to do a millionaire a favour. But Tom has amassed evidence that Gatsby is in fact now involved in a number of unwholesome, even illegal schemes: bootlegging and dealing in stolen securities. Before we can digest this, the confrontation breaks up, and the parties drive back to the island in two cars, Gatsby and Daisy in one, the rest in the other. We surmise that the confrontation will continue later. On the way, however, Gatsby’s car kills Myrtle Wilson, Tom’s lover, but doesn’t stop. Tom, Nick, and the others, travelling well behind, arrive to find the police at the scene and Mr Wilson distraught. Mr Wilson has begun to suspect that his wife is being unfaithful but doesn’t know who her lover is. He now suspects Gatsby, deciding his wife was killed to keep her quiet, so he goes to Gatsby’s house, finds him in the pool, shoots him, and then turns the gun on himself. What Wilson doesn’t know, and what Tom never finds out, is that Daisy was driving. This is kept from the police. Daisy, whose carelessness kills Myrtle, gets off scot-free. Tom’s affair, which triggers all this tragedy, is never disclosed. Tom
and Daisy disappear, leaving Carraway to arrange Gatsby’s funeral. By now Gatsby’s shady business deals have been confirmed, and no one attends.
⁴⁸

The last scene in the book takes place in New York, when Nick sees Tom on Fifth Avenue and refuses to shake hands. It is clear from this meeting that Tom still has no idea that Daisy was driving the car, but for Nick this innocence is irrelevant, even dangerous. It is what enchants and disfigures America: Gatsby betrays and is betrayed.
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He feels that even if Tom is unaware that Daisy was driving, their behaviour is so despicable it really makes no difference to his judgement of them. He also has some harsh words to say about Daisy, that she smashed up things, and then ‘retreated back’ into her money. In attacking her, Nick is forsaking the blood link, disallying himself from the ‘Nordics’ who have ‘produced civilisation.’ What Tom and Daisy have left behind, despite their breeding, is catastrophe. The Buchanans – and others like them – sail through life in a moral vacuum, incapable of distinguishing the significant from the trivial, obsessed with the trappings of luxury. Everywhere you turn in
The Great Gatsby
is a wasteland: moral, spiritual, biological, even, in the Valley of Ashes, topographical.

James Joyce and Marcel Proust met in 1922, on 18 May, after the first night of Igor Stravinsky’s
Renard,
at a party for Serge Diaghilev also attended by Pablo Picasso, who had designed the sets. Afterwards Proust gave Joyce a life home in a taxi, and during the journey the drunken Irishman told Proust he had never read a single word he had written. Proust was very offended and took himself off to the Ritz, where he had an agreement that he would always be fed, however late.
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Joyce’s insult was unbecoming. After the delay in publication of other volumes of
A la recherche du temps perdu,
caused by war, Proust had published four tides in fairly rapid succession.
A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs
(which won the Prix Goncourt) was published in 1919,
Le Côté de Guermantes
came out the year after, and both
Le Côté de Guermantes II
and
Sodome et Gomorrhe I
were released in May 1921.
Sodome et Gomorrhe II
was published in May 1922, the very month Proust and Joyce met. Three more volumes –
La Prisonnière, Albertine disparue,
and
Le temps retrouvé —
all came out after Proust died in 1922.