George Orwell and Ulysses

(For the centenary year of the publication of Ulysses by James Joyce)

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Some men bring flowers or chocolates. Some men write sonnets. The young George Orwell, writing to two young women in 1932-33, tried beguiling them with discussions of James Joyce’s Ulysses. It may not have worked with Eleanor Jaques or Brenda Salkeld as an amorous tactic, but the letters shed a fascinating light on Orwell’s views about the twentieth-century novelist he admired above all others.

Two literary works published in 1922, Joyce’s Ulysses and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, became immediate classics of what we now call modernism. But both were controversial in their time, and were greeted with incomprehension or disgust by many readers and writers of the pre-war generations. They were accused of flying in the face of literary tradition and good manners, though the structure of Joyce’s novel follows that of Homer’s Odyssey, and Eliot’s poem is highly learned, and references a whole library of European writing from Petronius and Dante to Shakespeare and Verlaine. To the young Orwell and his contemporaries, Eliot and Joyce meant modernity, and an escape from the boring and discredited literary models that had been swept away, like so much else, by the First World War. The two authors were the shibboleths of Orwell’s generation: if you thought of yourself as a modern writer, you revered Ulysses and The Waste Land.

In October 1928, in his first professionally published writing, ‘Censorship in England’, E. A. Blair mentions that in England Ulysses had been suppressed after publication. He blamed this on the prudery of the puritanical middle class in England. There is no proof that he had read the book at this time, but it was freely available in Paris. In November 1932 Orwell had started discussing Joyce with Eleanor Jaques, and reported that ‘The friend who was going to lend me Ulysses has at last got his copy back, & I shall go up to town one day to collect it’. He was taking Joyce seriously. In February 1933 he had read Charles Duff’s James Joyce for the Plain Reader – ‘weak trash’, he warned Eleanor.

‘Have you read Ulysses yet?’, he asked Brenda Salkeld, the following month: it was on the list of Best Books he had sent her, possibly at her suggestion. By December, she had got hold of a copy for herself. ‘What do you think Joyce is after?’, she asked cautiously, and Orwell – who could claim some expertise, as a published author, who had finished Burmese Days and was working on A Clergyman’s Daughter – was happy to oblige. ‘The fact is Joyce interests me so much that I can’t stop talking about him once I start.’

The whole of this letter (to Brenda Salkeld, ?10 December 1933) is a tutorial on Joyce. What does a novel set out to do? Orwell asks, and answers his own question. A novel has to do three things. First, to display or create character. Second, to create a kind of pattern or design. And third, to produce ‘good writing’. In Ulysses, he finds the characterization of the main figures outstanding – Stephen Dedalus the young artist, and Leopold Bloom the middle-aged advertising canvasser, self-portraits (Orwell thinks) of the young and the middle-aged Joyce. ‘I think the interest of Bloom is that he is an ordinary uncultivated man described from within by someone who can also stand outside him and see him from another angle.’

Writers lend each other courage. It’s more than possible that Joyce’s portrait of Leopold Bloom helped to inspire Orwell’s comic masterpiece, George Bowling, the ‘ordinary uncultivated man’ who is the unlikely hero of Coming Up for Air. Meanwhile Stephen Dedalus, the moth-eaten poet of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, is definitely an ancestor of Gordon Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, a self-pitying failure, grubby, selfish, and often ridiculous, yet strangely admirable in his high principles and artistic integrity.

Ulysses (1936, US Edition)

As for creating a pattern or design, the second desideratum of a novel, Orwell admired the literary bravura with which Joyce had based his chapters on incidents from Homer’s tale of Odysseus, but he could never quite work out why he had done it. He was still worrying about this question in 1944. Was it the aim of Ulysses to denigrate the present by comparing it with the past? Otherwise ‘it is difficult to see why this tale of Dublin in 1904 should be so laboriously stretched on to the framework of the Odyssey’. (Review of James Joyce by Harry Levin, March 1944) It is probably just as well Orwell was not tempted to imitate this aspect of Joyce’s novel. ‘I rather wish I had not read it,’ he had written to Brenda Salkeld ten years earlier. ‘It gives me an inferiority complex.’

Besides its explorations of the inner life of its characters, Orwell admired Ulysses as a work of realism, beneath all the modernist flourish, with something to say about twentieth-century existence, ‘the squalor, even the meaninglessness of modern life after the triumph of the machine and the collapse of religious belief’. He argued that Joyce, Eliot, and the other modernists were able to do this sort of thing because, unlike the very English novelist John Galsworthy for example, they were not provincial. ‘They broke the cultural circle in which England had existed for something like a century. They re-established contact with Europe, and they brought back the sense of history and the possibility of tragedy.’ (‘The Rediscovery of Europe’, March 1942: the date is obviously significant). All criticism has a dimension of autobiography, and this is an interesting comment from the author who had served in the Empire, lived in Paris, and fought in Spain, returning to the complacent and dozy little island described at the end of Homage to Catalonia.

And ‘good writing’? Ulysses is increasingly experimental, with dense (Dedalus) and lyrical (Molly Bloom) passages of what was coming to be called stream-of-consciousness, pastiches of all the styles of English prose, and extended episodes of hilarious cinematic surrealism. Most of this was beyond Orwell’s powers, with the famous exception of the Trafalgar Square chapter in A Clergyman’s Daughter, a partially successful homage to the Nighttown episode in Ulysses. In any case, Orwell increasingly came to value a plain style, as recommended in his much misunderstood remark, in ‘Why I Write’, about good prose being like a window-pane. He often says that Joyce was above all an artist, primarily interested in aesthetic values. Indeed this exclusive primacy of the artistic, at the expense of the political motive of writing, becomes the basis, in ‘Inside the Whale’, of Orwell’s criticism of the great modernists of the 1920s. (It’s quite wrong-headed, in my opinion. Ulysses is full of politics. But the politics are Irish, and Orwell had never shown much interest in Ireland.)

Apart from the experiment in A Clergyman’s Daughter, there is another unremarked literary trope Orwell uses, in both fictional and non-fictional prose, for which he could have found a model in Joyce. This is the rhetorical catalogue or comic list. I don’t know if this is a matter of influence, or just a shared taste for the ridiculous, but neither Joyce nor Orwell can resist a list. Ulysses is full of them. Here is Joyce in Chapter 12 (Cyclops), having fun with the names of saints.

… S. Alfred and S. Joseph and S. Denis and S. Cornelius and S. Leopold and S. Bernard and S. Terence and S. Edward and S. Owen Caniculus and S. Anonymous and S. Eponymous and S. Pseudonymous and S. Homonymous and S. Paronymous and S. Synonymous and S. Laurence O’Toole and S. James of Dingle and Compostella….

(This is an extract from a list that goes on for two pages.) Orwell’s lists tend to be less riotous, more satirical – ‘every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, “Nature Cure” quack, pacifist, and feminist in England’, and the like. But in Coming Up for Air, he lets his hair down. George Bowling, trying to go on holiday, imagines an army of spoilsports pursuing him, led by his wife Hilda.

And Sir Herbert Crum and the higher-ups of the Flying Salamander in their Rolls-Royces and Hispano-Suizas. And all the chaps at the office, and all the poor down-trodden pen-pushers from Ellesmere Road and from all such other roads, some of them wheeling prams and mowing-machines and concrete garden-rollers, some of them chugging along in little Austin Sevens. And all the soul-savers and Nosey Parkers, the people whom you’ve never seen but who rule your destiny all the same, the Home Secretary, Scotland Yard, the Temperance League, the Bank of England, Lord Beaverbrook, Hitler and Stalin on a tandem bicycle, the bench of Bishops, Mussolini, the Pope—they were all of them after me.

I feel sure Joyce would have drunk to that.

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Douglass Kerr is the author of Orwell and Empire (Oxford University Press, 2022)

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