Walpole reviews NOvels by richardson, JOyce, lewis
One hundred years ago today … Writing in The Sun and New York Herald, British novelist Hugh Walpole weighed in on narrative fiction by Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce, and Wyndham Lewis, three writers now categorized as modernist literature; Walpole calls them, “three novelists at the present moment who are especially praised for their novelty of technique.”
What he goes on to say is not pretty.
The Sun and New York Herald, 18 July 1920, p. 38. Newspapers.com.
He starts with Richardson’s Pilgrimage:
I am appalled at the thought of other novelists taking to her method, which is simply to allow nothing to be presented to the reader that occurs outside of Miriam’s brain, but to give the reader absolutely everything that occurs inside of it.
Joyce, Walpole states, “carries this method much farther.” Reviewing Ulysses, at the time in-progress and being published only in New York by The Little Review, Walpole writes:
I confess that Mr. Joyce is too clever for me: there are pages of Ulysses that I don’t understand at all, pages that seem to me to be indecent beyond all limits of printed indecency–pages, again, like the funeral and the passages on Shakespeare’s sonnets that are full of beauty and even genius. Nevertheless he drags, I am convinced, the method to absurdity.
On Lewis’s Tarr, Walpole is less generous: “eccentricity in style does not cover muddy technique and incoherent psychology.”
Walpole himself was a prolific and hugely popular novelist; his books were “runaway bestsellers.” A native of New Zealand who had long lived in England, he arrived in New York City in 1919 for the first of what would be several US lecture tours.
Walpole ca. 1920. Bain, George Grantham Private Collection. Bridgeman Images. Art.com.
Walpole made enough of an impression in New York to warrant a short puff in the editorial page of the Tribune, which describes him as “the first living author who succeeded in having a good time in this country and is not ashamed to admit it” (“A Happy Traveler,” New York Tribune 22 July 1920, p. 38). Vanity Fair hired him to write occasional essays on modern literature. Walpole would spend a great deal of time in the US in the 1920s and 30s, occasionally working in Hollywood as a screenwriter (e.g. of 1935’s David Copperfield.)
Walpole was gay and wrote of the search for “the ideal friend.” Acclaimed from a young age and respected throughout his career, his standing and readership has faded. This is sometimes attributed to the “demolition job” that Somerset Maugham did to his career (the Somerset Maugham who keeps coming up in NY1920).
One hundred years later, Richardson, Joyce, and Lewis are certainly better remembered.
WRITTEN BY JONATHAN GOLDMAN, JULY 18, 1920.
TAGS: literature, British, modernism, novels, gay, lgbtq, reviews