The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical EditionVol. 6: The War Years, 1940-1946

A Message to the Fish

Horizon, 3 (March 1941) 173-75

On January 14, having read the obituary notice of James Joyce which had appeared in The Timesof that morning, I addressed to the Editor of that paper the following letter: ²

Sir, – I hope that you will permit me to submit one or two cautious qualifications to your interesting obituary notice of my friend Mr. James Joyce. That Joyce failed to appreciate “the eternal and serene beauty of nature” can, I think, be disputed by reference to several passages in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulyssesand Finnegans Wake; but being separated from my books, I cannot quote chapter and verse. As for his inability to appreciate “the higher sides of human character,” this stricture would, perhaps, be more applicable to Jonathan Swift, and I should ask the reader, before accepting such a judgement, to consider “The Dead,” in Dubliners– one of the finest short stories in the language. ³

What I chiefly question, however, is the importance at this date of the opinions of men older than Joyce, holding the views of an older literary generation, such as Edmund Gosse, Arnold Bennett, or AE. ⁴ To some of Joyce’s younger contemporaries, like myself, Ulyssesstill seems the most considerable work of imagination in English in our time, comparable in importance (though in little else) with the work of Marcel Proust. I do not believe that posterity will be able to controvert this judgement, though it may be able to demonstrate the relative insignificance of the literary achievement of the whole period.

Your obedient servant, etc.

As this letter was not published, I wrote a fortnight later to say that I presumed myself free to publish it elsewhere, and received a polite note from the Obituaries Department returning the letter, and expressing regret that restrictions of space had made publication impossible.

It was not a well-written letter, partly because I was ill with influenza when I wrote it. But its oddity is rather more due to the fact that I wished to write something that The Timeswould print, and I entertained the hope 159that it might get by as an “Appreciation.” ⁵ Had I not been hampered by illness and a sense (however imperfect) of the possible, I might have written in somewhat the following vein:

Sir, – I have read with stupefaction your obituary notice on the greatest man of letters of my generation. It is usual, I believe, for editors of newspapers to have ready obituary notices of all notable men and women. This practice is wholly to be commended; but the notices should be written by the right persons in the beginning, and should then be kept up to date. The impression given by your notice of Mr. Joyce is that it was written by someone considerably older than he – someone who by now must be well over fifty-nine. That it was in some sense brought up to date I must believe, since, being an obituary, it mentions the date and place of Joyce’s death; but this does not cover the requirements. I am not alluding to oversights such as the failure to mention that Work in Progresswas eventually completed and published under the title of Finnegans Wake: I refer to the inclusion of trivialities about the man, and the failure to show any understanding of the significance of his work in its time. ⁶

I am quite aware that at the present time considerations of space are of first importance. For this reason I venture to point out how you might have saved space. Whatever the various distinction of Sir Edmund Gosse, Arnold Bennett and AE in other fields, none of them could lay claim to any authority as a critic; and phrases taken from what they said about Joyce many years ago could well have been spared. So could the estimate of your obituary writer. The first business of an obituary writer is to give the important facts about the life of the deceased...