Blasting the bombardier: another look at Lewis, Joyce, and Woolf - Wyndham Lewis, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf

There you have a typical contemporary statement of the position of letters today. Its artificiality is self-evident, if you do no more than consider the words: for Ulysses however else it may have arrived at its destination, was at least not pale. But here, doubtless, Mrs. Woolf is merely confusing the becoming pallor, and certain untidiness of some of her own pretty salon pieces with that of Joyce's masterpiece (indeed that masterpiece is implicated and confused with her own pieces in more ways than one, and more palpably than this, but into that it is not necessary to enter here). (Men 137)

But, as we have seen above, the Enemy does enter into it, does make his charge of plagiarism - which charge critic Scott chooses not to enter into. What Lewis is doing in Men Without Art, then (or at least thinks he is doing), is defending Joyce against what he sees as denigration by Woolf in "Bennett and Brown" and plagiarism by Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway. Scott's analysis not only fails to communicate this, but leaves the reader with the impression that it is Woolf and Joyce who are comrades-in-arms, and Lewis their mutual Enemy.(12) While it is true that Lewis attacked Joyce in Time and Western Man (as Lewis attacked all his fellow "men of 1914," including Pound and Eliot), he also wrote at the beginning of his attack that Ulysses places Joyce "very high in contemporary letters" (75), and would write to The Listener in 1935, "Mr. Wyndham Lewis, speaking in person, desires to say that he regards James Joyce as a great literary artist" (cited in Edwards 128).(19) This expression of admiration (to again use Scott's term) is far stronger than any Woolf ever offered to Joyce, either in public or private. Woolf's final public response to Joyce, in fact, may have been to create the "Milton bogey" for A Room of One's Own (1929), which bogey Woolfian Carolyn Heilbrun has identified as Joyce: "For Woolf, Milton was the bogey, past which women must look. 'He was the first of the masculinists,' she had written in 1918. . . . If Milton was the first of the masculinists, Joyce in 1922 must have seemed the latest" (62). Unlike Scott, Heilbrun sees Joyce as fellow to Lewis, not Woolf. Whereas Scott, the feminist Joycean, sees Joyce as "part woman," Heilbrun, the feminist Woolfian, sees him as all bogeyman.(14)

Again it is the late Joyce, the author of Finnegans Wake, whom Scott thinks the new womanly man; she turns at the end of her analysis, therefore, to that text:

Joyce provided deliberate responses to Lewis's brand of male modernism in Finnegans Wake, as its annotators have consistently recognized. Joyce's critique of gender in Lewis can perhaps be best viewed at the end of the fable of "The Mookse and the Gripes," which rewrites Lewis's Time and Western Man as "Spice and Westend Woman" (FW 292.6). While it still suggests that little girls are made of sugar and spice, and reminds us of the position of a London West End prostitute, this title is also subversive of Lewis's sexism, and makes his sort of blasting appear pseudo-revolutionary. Woman provided an end to the Western patriarchal values which have produced a literature of wasteland and fascism. (177)