Ulysses
I have lately wasted my last three free week-ends in writing a long explanatory critical essay on James Joyce's Ulysses this forbidden book that costs $50.
...It is rather in the style of Dean Swift — and also of Petronius Arbiter — & also of Sterne — It is a masterpiece of 800 quarto pages — but 200 of these are too obscure for me to make out a word of — But the rest of it is not obscure at all! Its more unhappy & savage — than what you might call bawdy — but it does say things that no one has ever dared to print before! but just ordinary little human thoughts all the same! (17 March 1923, in a letter to his brother Theodore)
The truth is, though it seems a queer thing for the person to say who once overheard himself, at the trial of the Little Review in New York for publishing Ulysses, described by one spectator to another as 'The English degenerate, John Powys', I have always been of the opinion that certain simple nobilities in personal character are serious rivals, merely as planetary phenomena, to the greatest work of art in the world. (Autobiography)
Joyce's Ulysses, that tragic piece of imaginative realism, has not only been 'released', but has actually become a best-seller, and there is no doubt that to-day America is far ahead of England in its freedom from 'moral' censorship. (Autobiography)
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