James Joyce’s “Work in Progress”: Pre-Book Publications of “Finnegans Wake” Fragments by Dirk Van Hulle (review)

Dirk Van Hulle’s new book is a valuable chronicle of where, when, and how Joyce published “Work in Progress” over the many years he was writing what would eventually become Finnegans Wake. This chronicle, steeped in the material circumstances and details of these publications, is very sensibly organized. It is bifurcated between discussion of serial publication of excerpts (both those authorized by Joyce and those not) and discussion of the chapbooks produced by various publishers: Anna Livia Plurabelle, Tales Told of Shem and Shaun, Haveth Childers Everywhere, The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies, and Storiella As She is Syung.¹ Van Hulle introduces each published excerpt with an account of its composition and its place within the larger history of the Wake and examines Joyce’s correspondence with the editors to see what negotiations or disagreements the publication involved. Following this in each instance is a useful survey of the published reviews of and responses to the different iterations and installments of “Work in Progress,” the result of Van Hulle’s having carefully combed through the University at Buffalo’s index of press clippings. A full fifth of the book is composed of appendices, made for handy consultation: chronologies of the publications, locations of these publications within the larger design of the Wake, and textual variants between the publications and the first printing of the Wake.

Even scholars familiar with the numerous bends in the altogether unstraight road of the writing and dissemination in Joyce’s Wake years will discover new twists and previously unseen patterns thanks to Van Hulle’s collation. While it is no real surprise that the plentiful shades of confusion, disgruntlement, and ridicule outnumber the more thoughtful or even cautious responses to “Work in Progress,” there are many expressions to savor and cherish. London’s Daily News, for example, called Joyce’s new writing “jazz English” not without some disquiet (58). A gossipy piece in the Paris Times in 1927 suggested that Joyce, “one of the high priests of modernism,” was “weakening in his faith” (85), and the following year the Boston Transcript scowled at what it called “the latest dribble by Joyce” (87). George Russell, writing not as “A.E.” but as “Y.O.” (call it a vowel movement), offered no certainties about the literary qualities of Tales Told of Shem and Shaun but recommended buying it as “a good investment, in financial terms” (157). Van Hulle reveals just how weird this reception could get. How many Joyceans remember that there was a time when Joyce “considered letting” Samuel Roth publish three excerpts of “Work in Progress” (38)? And who recalls that Anna Livia Plurabelle was reviewed in Vogue (131)? And how perfectly perverse is that?

Van Hulle effectively shows how intertwined the reception of “Work in Progress” was with that of Gertrude Stein, so often were the two writers paired (and, often as not, condemned) as symptoms of the same degenerative literary syndrome, and how similarly intertwined the ever-revised writing of “Work in Progress” was with its reception by Wyndham Lewis. Lewis, who “advised Gertrude Stein to ‘get out of English’” while noting that Joyce was already “half in and half out” (97), provided Joyce with plenty of material: his repeated attacks were never parried but absorbed. Joyce’s habit of assimilating criticism of his work into his new writing—such as when he includes echoes of Oscar Wilde’s ghostly protests against Ulysses, as dutifully recorded by Hester Travers Smith²—is characterized by Van Hulle as “his vaccination technique, incorporating a bit of the harmful matter to strengthen the immune system of his ‘Work in Progress’” (19), a phrase I foresee myself quoting often in future.

We get glimpses of how Joyce’s own thinking about the book is both constant in certain ways and subject to change in many others. The pricing of books (Van...