RUSSELL was now well known for his undiscriminating adoption of young hopefuls, and WBY had learnt to be wary about swans who invariably turned out to be geese.
But both he and Gregory rapidly saw that this was something different, and the attention they paid the twenty year old student was remarkable. So, in its way, was the lack of attention he paid them.
Joyce had already make his mark with a clear sighted attack on the Irish Literary Theatre in "The Day of the Rabblement", but he passionately admired WBY's literary achievement he could recite The Adoration of the Magi off by heart and the mesmeric beauty of certain poems (notably Who Goes with Fergus? from The Countess Cathleen) remained canonical for him. After a glamorous but slightly scandalous career at the Royal University, he was following a haphazard course as a medical student. In October Russell told him that WBY would be in Dublin the following month and would like to meet him (he had already dined at the Nassau Hotel on 4 November with Gregory and John Butler Yeats). There was accordingly a rendezvous outside the National Library, followed by an awkward encounter in an O'Connell Street cafe. It was an intense occasion, much recapitulated and mythologised Richard Ellman has compared it to the meeting between Goethe and Heine, a symbolic conjunction in the history of world literature. More immediately apparent was the mutual suspicion between an established Irish Protestant aesthete and a Jesuit educated Catholic Dubliner with a preternaturally mordant eye for social pretensions. Soon afterwards WBY wrote (but never published) a slightly fictionalised account of their meeting. "He asked me Why did I make speeches? Why did I concern myself with politics? Why had I given certain of my stories and poems a historical setting? . . . all these things were a sign that the iron was getting cold." Joyce's own affiliations and energies were strange to him WBY realised that he was dealing with a new force, something that could not be predicted. His version betrays the wistful tone of a man nearing 40, confronted by the ruthlessness of youthful genius. "Presently he got up to go, and, as he was going out, he said, I am 20. How old are you? I told him, but I am afraid I said I was a year younger than I am. He said with a sigh, I thought as much. I have met you too late. You are too old." Joyce in later years denied this, but at a stage of life when good manners meant more to him than they did in 1902. Their disagreement was inevitable. One of the points WBY recalled making to Joyce involved a defence of folklore against the "sterility" of urban culture, Great Memory against individual consciousness. Joyce's lofty and laconic reply ranked enough for WBY to repeat it more than once. "Generalisations aren't made by poets they are made by men of letters. They are no use.
Still, he showed WBY some of his "Epiphanies" and verses, which intrigued the older poet. After their meeting WBY sent Joyce an important letter from London in it he subtly reproved Joyce for condemning WBY's "treacherous instinct for adaptability" in his critique of the Irish Literary Theatre, asserted his own authority as an established literary figure with a base in England, and hinted at his autobiography.
Yeats would, he said do anything he count for Joyce promising to introduce him to other writers starting out like himself on the grounds that "one always learns one's business from one's fellow workers".
WBY lived up to this Joyce was not the only apprentice writer who received thoughtful letters of advice from him at this time. Nor did his help stop there. On 2 December, fore warned by Gregory, he met Joyce off the Irish Mail at six in the morning, gave him breakfast, brought him to the review editors of the Academy and the Speaker, and finally to Arthur Symons's flat. Joyce went on to Paris that evening, to stay at WBY's old haunt the Hotel Corneille, armed with the address of Maud Gonne (which he did not follow up, a loss to literary history). WBY sent him several long letters, showing that he milked what contacts he could on Joyce's behalf, and entertained the young man again en route back to Dublin on 23 December. But Joyce's failure to approach Gonne was emblematic. His interests, his paths, his art would all diverge from WBY's, despite his half resentful admiration of the early poetry. At the end of his life Joyce admitted that he lacked "pure imagination", which WBY pre eminently possessed "no surrealist poet can equal it".
BUT in 1902 he was, as be would famously put it, flying by the nets of an enveloping national culture, just as WBY was trying to fashion such a phenomenon. Proof that WBY was jolted by the opinions of this merciless young prodigy lies in the preface he wrote for his essays Ideas of Good and Evil, but suppressed. He related his initial worries about the "reckless opinions" of the essays, and his anticipation of being thought a "disturber who carries in his hand the irresponsible torch of vain youth". And then he met Joyce, whose relentless questioning "exasperated and puzzled him", who told him his work was "deteriorating", and that he was, in the end, "too old". Approaching 40, this rang like a knell.
A year later, reissuing his stories The Tables of the Law, he added a note to the preface. "I do not think I should have reprinted them had I not met a young man in Ireland the other day who liked them very much and nothing else at all that I have written.
Years later when Joyce had become immersed in publication difficulties first with. Dubliners, then A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man Yeats encouraged Ezra Pound to take an interest in the work and Portrait began serial publication in the Egoist magazine. As Foster writes Yeats was not alone in recognising a masterpiece.
Copyright (c) R.F. Foster 1997