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

Scott's reading of Joyce's punning on Lewis's title is ingenious, but perhaps overly so. She recognizes the prostitute in Joyce's joke, and this is probably its main point, for Lewis had a taste for streetwalkers (for which taste his health often suffered). Ellmann records the following related anecdote: "As they [Lewis and Joyce] sat at the cafe, Lewis invariably invited the same two local prostitutes to sit with them. The women were given plenty to drink, but otherwise received little attention. Once, when Lewis broke precedent by a lapse of decorum with one of them, Joyce solemnly called him to order, 'Remember you are the author of The Ideal Giant'" (530). Joyce's distortion of Lewis's title, then, is probably meant simply to reflect his history of such lapses.(15) In a similar fashion Joyce rewrote the title of Lewis's violently erotic story "Cantleman's Spring Mate" as both "cattlemen's spring meat" (FW 172.6-7) and "gentlemen's spring modes" (165.24-25). Scott, I think, makes a great deal out of what appears to-be a pair of good old boys teasing one another.(16)

"The Mookse and the Gripes," Scott continues,

seems to end indecisively, with the advocates of space and time (Lewis's space man, the Mookse; Joyce's time man, the Gripes) receding. . . . They are watched by "Nuvoletta," but her coy flirtation . . . fails to distract them from their argumentative sports. "She sighed. There are menner" (FW 157.8-158.5) seems an admission of the hopelessness in gender. The scene continues, however, shifting to the omnipresent, feminine river, embodiment of the natural flow of time - if not the female modernist treacle - that Lewis scorned. (177)

Scott argues that this shift, which introduces Joyce's two washerwomen, "challenges Lewis's position that God is male [N.B.: earlier this was also Joyce's position], since they suggest the cyclical role of the great goddess. It seems particularly damning that the woman who carries off the Mookse, the Lewis character, is described as a powerful black woman, a political entity that counters Lewis's classicism, sexism and racism" (177). What Scott surprisingly does not appear to recognize is that Joyce's "Nuvoletta" is not simply another embodiment of Issy, the sister/daughter figure, but also a caricature of Rebecca West, who, presumably after reading Lewis's attack on Joyce in Time and Western Man, entered the fray by publishing her own attack on Joyce, "The Strange Necessity" (1928), where she observes that "Mr. James Joyce is a great man who is entirely without taste" (3).(17) Thus Nuvoletta's pettish "There are menner" may be read as Joyce's representation of West's disappointment at not being taken seriously by these men of 14.(18) This agonistic scenario comes back later in the "Lessons" chapter, where Lewis (now Kev) has just bashed Joyce (now Dolph) for drawing a picture of their mother's genitalia; Dolph responds, "Thanks eversore-much, Pointcarried! . . . I'm seeing rayingbogeys rings round me" (FW 304.5-9), and then turns to their sister (now Nubilina):