TH

IV

SHOPPING IN LONDON

HE first big adventure in William Bodney's life was a trip up to London to buy shoes. The shoes which he had been wearing in Suffix, we learn from the Town Clerk's record, were "good enough", but "good enough" was never a thing to satisfy William Bodney. The fashion at the time was to wear shoes only to parties and coronations, but Bodney was never one to stick to the fashion.

So bright and early on the morning of April 9, 1855, the young man set out for the city, full of the vigor of living. Did he go by coach or by foot? We do not know. On the coach records of April 9, there is a passenger listed as "Enoch Reese", but this was probably not William Bodney. There is no reason why he should have traveled under the name of "Enoch Reese". But whether he went by coach or over the road, we do know that he must have passed through Weeming-on-Downs, as there was no way of getting to London from Suffix without passing through Weeming-on-Downs. And as Bodney went through this little town, probably bright in the sunlight of the early April morning, is it not possible that he stopped at the pump in the square to wet his wrists against the long, hot journey ahead? It is not only possible. It is more than likely. And, stopping at the pump, did he know that in the third house on the left as you leave the pump London-wards, was Mary Wassermann? Or, did Mary Wassermann know that Bodney was just outside her door? The speculation is futile, for Mary Wassermann moved from Weeming-on-Downs the next week and was never heard from again. But I anticipate.

Of Bodney's stay in London we

know but little. We know that he reached London, for he sent a postcard to his mother from there saying that he had arrived "safe and sound". We know that he left London, because he died fifteen years later in Suffix. What happened in between we can only conjecture at, but we may be sure that he was very sensitive to whatever beauty there may have been in London at that time. In the sonnet On Looking Into a Stereoscope for the First Time, written when he had grown into full manhood, we find reference to this visit to the city:

And, with its regicidal note in tune,
Brings succor to the waiting stream.

If this isn't a reference to the London trip, what is it a reference to?

V

PROGRESS AND REGRESS

E have seen Bodney standing on

W the threshold of the Great Expe

rience. How did he meet it? Very well indeed.

For the first time we find him definitely determined to create. "I am definitely determined to create", he wrote to the Tax Collector of Suffix (Author's Collection). And with the spring of 1860 came, in succession, To Some Ladies Who Have Been Very Nice To Me, Ode to Hester, Rumpty: A Fragment, and To Arthur Hosstetter MacMonigal. Later in the same year came I wonder when, if I should go, there'd be.

It is in I wonder when, if I should go, there'd be that Bodney for the first time strikes the intimate note.

I sometimes think that open fires are best, Before drab autumn swings its postern shut...

"Open fires" is a delightful thought, carrying with it the picture of a large house, situated on a hill with poplars, the sun sinking charmingly behind the town in the distance and, inside, the big hall, hung with banners, red and gold, and a long table ladened with rich food, nuts, raisins, salt (plenty of salt, for Bodney was a great hand to put salt on his food and undoubtedly had salt in mind), and over all the presence of the king and his knights, tall, vigorous blond knights swearing allegiance to their lord. Or perhaps in the phrase Bodney had in mind, a small room with nobody in it. Who can tell? At any rate, we have the words "open fires" and we are able to reconstruct what went on in the poet's mind if we have a liking for that sort of thing. And, although he does not say so in so many words, there is little doubt but that in using "fires" in conjunction with the word "open" he meant Lillian Walf and what was to come later.

VI

MIRAGE

ROM I wonder when, if I should go, there'd be to On Meeting Roger H. Claflin for the Second Time is a far cry -and a merry one. On Meeting Roger H. Claflin for the Second Time is heptasyllabic and, not only that, but trochaic. Here, after years of suffering and disillusion, after discovering false friends and vain loves, we find Bodney resorting to the trochee. His letter to his sister at the time shows the state of mind the young poet was in (Rast Collection):

work is spondaic. But I guess there just comes a time in everyone's life when the spondee falls away of its own accord and the trochee takes its place. It is Nature's way. Ah, Nature! How I love Nature! I love the birds and the flowers and Beauty of all kinds. I don't see how anyone can hate Beauty, it is so beautiful. . Well, there goes the bell, so I must close now and employ a spondee.

Seven days later Bodney met Lillian Walf.

VII

FINIS ORIGINE PENDET

E do not know whether it was at

Wfour o'clock or a quarter past

four on October 17, 1874, that Henry Ryan said to Bodney: "Bodney, I want that you should meet my friend Miss Walf. . . . Miss Walf, Mr. Bodney." The British War Office has no record of the exact hour and Mr. Ryan was blotto at the time and so does not remember. However, it was in or around four o'clock.

Lillian Walf was three years older than Bodney, but had the mind of a child of eight. This she retained all her life. Commentators have referred to her as feeble minded, but she was not feeble minded. Her mind was vigorous. It was the mind of a vigorous child of eight. The fact that she was actually in her thirties has no bearing on the question that I can see. Writing to Remsen three years after her marriage to Bodney, Lillian says:

We have a canary which sings something terrible all day. I think I'll shoot it Tuesday.

If that is the product of a feeble mind, then who of us can lay claim to a sound mentality?

The wedding of Bodney to Lillian Walf took place quietly except for the banging of the church radiator. The parson, Rev. Dr. Padderson, estimated

that the temperature of the room was about 78° at the time, too hot for comfort. However, the young couple were soon on their way to Bayswater where they settled down and lived a most uneventful life from then on. Bodney must have been quite happy in his new existence, for he gave up writing poetry and took to collecting pewter. We have no record of his ever writing anything after his marriage, except a sonnet for the yearbook of the Bayswater School for Girls. This sonnet (On

YLVIA BEACH'S bookshop is in Rue de l'Odéon in Paris, on the right hand side, about halfway between the Boulevard St.-Germain and the Théâtre de l'Odéon. It is a bookish neighborhood. French bookstores are numerous in that part of the old Latin Quarter, two or three of the leading French book publishers have their head offices in that vicinity, and the bookstalls under the arcades of the old theatre are as celebrated as those on the quays of the Seine themselves.

Her business self Sylvia Beach chooses to call "Shakespeare and Company", and a portrait of the bald bard appears on the shop sign hanging in front of No. 12, Rue de l'Odéon. It says something for her own personality that she has never succeeded in giving her trade name much currency. People in Paris know the place as "Sylvia Beach's Bookshop". The young intellectuals, who have the family spirit and call each other by their first names anyhow, shorten it still further to "Sylvia's Bookshop".

It happens that this bookshop disputes with a Parisian café the honor of being the chief focus of American culture in France, if not in Europe. The café is the Café du Dôme at the corner of the Boulevard Montparnasse and the Boulevard Raspail. The Dôme is The Dôme is primarily an artists' rendezvous- it is the American centre of the new Latin Quarter but a good many writing people gather there too. They, however, are not intellectuals. They write for as much money as they can

get and not for the select few who matter. The young intellectuals themselves seldom appear at the Dôme. They revolve around the bookshop in the Rue de l'Odéon. It is their headquarters and the place where one must go, if one is a stranger, to get in touch with them.

runs.

Miss Beach herself is a comely young woman with poise, a quiet and attractive manner, a businesslike bobbed head, and a frequent cigarette. And of course she is intellectual. Long ago she despaired or so she strikes one of getting the message across to the less understanding, and thus arrived at a forbearing but unhoping and somewhat weary tolerance of the Philistine. It is an inviting establishment she On chilly days there is an open fire before which one can sit in a comfortable chair and toast his shins while examining books for purchase or borrowing. The shop has a book renting department as well as new-book shelves. Pinned up over and around the fireplace are numerous photographs of intellectuals young and old autographed to Sylvia, and on the round table are piled for sale current copies of such New York and London reviews as the truly literate regard as significant.

But affording a sanctuary for young intellectuals, renting books, and selling books and magazines are not the only business activities of Shakespeare and Company. They are publishers, and mighty well known publishers. Their fame is considerable in France, and even wider in England and the United

States. However, although it has made such a stir in the world, Sylvia's publishing nest has thus far hatched only a single egg but that egg happened to be an eagle's egg, a veritable roc's egg, for it was James Joyce's novel "Ulysses".

So many men whose names carry authority in the world of letters have proclaimed "Ulysses" to be a work of genius, so many college professors and professional critics have contributed articles and even whole books to the growing Joyce bibliography, that it would be presumption in a mere scribbler to set up a contrary opinion, even if he were sure he held one. Its greatest admirers, however, will not deny that "Ulysses" is the most obscene book in the English language, or the most obscene one with pretensions to being literature.

It is more obscene than Mr. Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"; and that book was suppressed in England not by official censorship but by printers who threatened to strike rather than set its phrases into type. "Ulysses" is so obscene that an average reader, even one trying to discover the beauties which critics have pointed out and he can discover some of them, if he looks for them has a hard time hurdling the indecencies which Mr. Joyce continually throws into the path. Yet, though shocking, "Ulysses" is not lewd. There is no sly, suggestive look in Mr. Joyce's eye as he writes. He has invented a new method in fiction his worshipers say a revolutionary method - and that method is to paint characters almost entirely in the thoughts that flash through their heads. As a man thinketh so is he; and there is no gainsaying the essential effectiveness of the method. Mr. Joyce, however, writes mainly about obscure people who live on the spiritual

level of the sewers thinking sewer thoughts couched in sewer language. The author sets down all these thoughts with the same fidelity with which he records thoughts about meadow flowers and Shakespeare and the political state of Ireland. There is no fact in the spiritual, sensual, and vegetative life of a man or a woman that Mr. Joyce avoids when human thoughts lead in that direction. It is realism carried to the end a question of taste but nevertheless there is something inexorable about it, as if the author were the moving finger of fate writing the human record in the eternal book.

To American readers who follow the trends in literature there is nothing new in these statements; for, since the suppression of "The Little Review" in America in 1920 when it was publishing serial instalments of "Ulysses", much has been written about this book and its author. The point of the novel's obscenity is again made here merely because of its bearing upon the merchandising of the editions of "Ulysses". It is Sylvia Beach's attitude that in publishing "Ulysses" she has performed a service to humanity, in that she thus rescued the masterpiece from an oblivion to which the timidity of other publishers would have consigned it. She publishes "Ulysses" at the retail price in Paris of sixty francs.

Sixty francs is a large price for a book in Paris. To a Frenchman it is almost prohibitive. For six or seven francs the Frenchman can buy a book that will be a distinguished job of printing. It will be on thick, durable paper with beautiful margins, adorned with artistic woodcuts and chapter initials in color. To be sure, it will have a paper cover, for French books are almost invariably bound in paper. This is an admirable custom. It makes of bookbinding an honored and extensive