The Breakthrough was in fact the break-up. In painting, architecture and

poetry, in which the common man has a certain feeling of awe so he’s

prepared to be bamboozled – they accepted what was offered. But when it came

to prose the English common man knows what prose is, he talks it all the

time himself and he wasn’t going to be taken in. And there were a lot of

Americans, headed by one called Gertrude Stein, who wrote absolute

gibberish. Then they hired a poor dotty Irishman called James Joyce, if

you’ve heard about him – he was thought to be a great influence in my

youth –

EJH— Was he, yes.

EW— and he wrote absolute rot, you know. He began writing quite well and

you can see him going mad as he wrote, and his last books – only fit to be

set for examinations at Cambridge.

EJH— He didn’t always write gibberish, did he?

EW— No, you could watch him going mad sentence by sentence. If you read

Ulysses, it’s perfectly sane for a little bit, and then it goes madder and

madder – but that was before the Americans hired him. And then they hired

him to write Finnegan’s Wake, which is gibberish.

EJH— Mm.

EW— Gertrude Stein happened to be a clever and amusing old gal. She was no

booby to meet, and – I wasn’t one for going to salons very much, in fact I

never went to her house in Paris; one heard about her house in Paris, and

certainly all the most intelligent people did meet there – and then when she

started putting pen to paper – gibberish.

EJH— Mm.

Notes :

a) William Joynson-Hicks (1865-1932, created Viscount Brentford in 1929) was

Home Secretary in the Conservative government of 1924-29. He conducted

vigorous campaigns against what he considered pornography and obscenity, and

also against the Communist party.

b) Cyril Connolly (1903-1974), a friend of Waugh’s, was a critic rather than

a creative writer, despite some desperate attempts to be otherwise. From

1940 to 1950 he was the influential editor of the arts magazine Horizon.

c) Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) and James Joyce were leading figures of the

modernist movement in Literature. Both of them lived mainly in Paris between

the wars. Joyce’s reputation is secure; Stein’s has receded.