...It seems to me that your book '
Dubliners' is becoming almost as important as your
novel.
'Ivy Day in the Committee Rooms' is accurate, just, and
satisfactory. It is
original too. I don't think that this which forms so great a part of
Dublin, of Irish life has been done before by an
artist. To a stranger your
differentiation of character would seem nothing less than
marvellous. And the poem -- the 'turn' in this case -- is entirely
Irish. Aunt Josephine prefers
'A Painful Case' to any of the others but
slight as that story is I think it is too big for the form you use. My sense of
proportion leads me to prefer
'Ivy Day in the Committee Rooms' or
'Counterparts.' People will think
'A Painful Case,' a story of
passionate natures. People who want to be
amused by what they read -- that large class -- will not find many of them to their taste.
'The Boarding-House,' perhaps, though the title is more like the title of a picture. Cosgrave said: 'How
delicate he is on the point!' I find the
intellectual serenity and ease with which you draw out these
burgesses a relief after Turgenev's painful and unhappy
analysis. But what is the meaning of writing one
half of a story about 'Joe and Leo Dillon' and the other half about a
sodomite, named by me for
convenience sake 'the captain of fifty'? To call it
'An Encounter' will hardly link the two parts together. However I would not wish for a good deal that this type were missing in
Dubliners. Do you write out a
rough copy of these stories? Like a
Shakespeare manuscript there is scarcely ever a
correction in them and yet I can hardly imagine that that astonishing
unravelling of the sodomite's mind was written
offhand. The sensation of
terror -- you were afraid he might catch you by the
ankles -- is cleverly put in....
Correspondence Regarding Joyce's "Dubliners":
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