if i were to follow well's example laid out in the letter i could just assert my own assumptions as fact and criticise those, but instead i will just try to explain how his words affect me
also, it is important to note that it is difficult to truly know anything about this letter because we are unaware of any prior or subsequent correspondence
> The outcome is that I don’t think I can do anything for the propaganda of your work.
did wells mean for the word propaganda to be a subtle dig? does he mean 'promotion'?
'i don't think i can do anything for'.. who asked him to? did joyce? is wells just asserting that his approval should be important to joyce?
if this letter was unsolicited i'd argue it's more about wells than joyce, and as it stands alone i find it abhorrent
> Your training has been Catholic, Irish, insurrectionary; mine, such as it was, was scientific, constructive and, I suppose, English.
on first glance this sentence had me suddenly wanting to read wells, until i read it again and realised he's 'just making pretty sounds' without any evidence or explicit reasoning which i would think any scientific and constructive mind would consider wholly necessary
this hearkens back to my first notion about a correspondence but why does wells tell joyce what joyce's 'training' is? and then set his own assumed 'training' up as a counterpoint.. and a very appealing one at that
wells continues on in this effort to assign opinion and motivation to joyce and then set himself as the better
> And while you were brought up under the delusion of political suppression I was brought up under the delusion of political responsibility. It seems a fine thing for you to defy and break up. To me not in the least.
this is another confusing message for me
for me 'delusion of political suppression' is a horrible thing to accuse someone of and self assessing a 'delusion of political responsibility' is something endeared to me
but it would seem to me someone who calls their own education one of a 'delusion of political responsibility' then i would assume that person thinks political responsibility is unnecessary but then he goes on to say that to 'defy and break up' is not for him..
so does he adhere to political responsibility even though he recognises it as a delusion? if so it would also seem rather unscientific
and of the notion of being 'constructive' it seems you in your comment also have some loose verbage in the same vein:
> although one wonders how much impact a different path might have had too.
impact? how do you measure that? i mean look at your first sentence wherein you say you've read joyce and hardly wells..
so prior to this letter who has impacted you more? you could argue, 'sure, i've read joyce but it went through me' but you still read joyce those words and ideas have a direct influence on you whether you agree or disagree with their content or construction where as an ignorance of wells means his work only indirectly impacts you
i think it is a silly effort to try to measure impact but since you deride joyce's assumed impact i will defend it
joyce was a major influence on the beat generation who were a group of poets in san francisco in the 1950s whose work went on to shape contemporary civilisation by altering legal definitions of words which catalysed a number of the social movements that followed in the coming years
this criticism and response of one of the beat poet's work plays perfectly with this letter:
> His central criticism is that the Beat embrace of spontaneity is bound up in an anti-intellectual worship of the "primitive" that can easily turn toward mindlessness and violence. Podhoretz asserted that there was a link between the Beats and criminal delinquents. Ginsberg responded in a 1958 interview .. "The bit about anti-intellectualism is a piece of vanity, we had the same education, went to the same school, you know there are 'Intellectuals' and there are intellectuals. Podhoretz is just out of touch with twentieth-century literature, he's writing for the eighteenth-century mind. We have a personal literature now—Proust, Wolfe, Faulkner, Joyce." (o)
is wells 'out of touch'? who cares? but speaking negatively about someone else's work to prop up your own, for me, makes me question the quality of your work more than the one you are deriding