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124 / A M E S [ 1902-1903 ]March 6, 1903, and stayed for a week to sell out, having failed to get onin Paris. Synge had dealt, desperately too, with editors, and over a longerperiod, and he warned Joyce not to fast too long; his own protracted spellsof hunger had obliged him, he said, to undergo a £30 operation. 56Joycesoon found that Synge was not the silent man Yeats had described tohim; evidently his silence was with the eloquent Yeats alone. He seemedto Joyce a great lump of a man who could not be argued with, 57butsince Joyce was equally doctrinaire they in fact argued a great deal.Sometimes the dispute was over nothing, as when Joyce tried to persuadeSynge to come with him to St. Cloud for the carnival; but Synge wasannoyed and said, 'You want to behave just like a bourgeois going outand sitting in a park on holiday.' 58Synge had by this time begun to prove himself as a dramatist. At Yeats'ssuggestion he had given up his notion of becoming, like Arthur Symons,a critic of French literature, and had gone to the Aran Islands in 1898.Then, and during the summers from 1899 to 1902, he listened to thenuances of Aran speech, and found the material for four plays, includingRiders to the Sea. He had shown this play to Yeats late in 1902, andYeats, when he saw Joyce in January, had aroused his jealousy by praisingSynge's play as quite Greek. During his short stay in Paris, Syngelent Joyce the manuscript of Riders to the Sea. No manuscript was everread with less sympathy. 'I am glad to say,' Joyce wrote to Stanislaus,'that ever since I read it I have been riddling it mentally till it has [not]a sound spot. It is tragic about all the men that are drowned in theislands: but thanks be to God Synge isn't an Aristotelian.' 59This cornerJoyce had for himself, and he proceeded to point out to Synge the play'sAristotelian defects. In particular he objected to its catastrophe, becauseit was brought about by an animal (a pony) rather than by the sea, andto its brevity. It was, he said, a tragic poem, not a drama. He told Syngeto make a lasting argument or make none. Synge protested, 'It's a goodplay, as good as any one-act play can be.' Joyce rejoined that Irelandneeded less small talk and more irrefutable art; 'No one-act play, nodwarf-drama,' he asserted, 'can be a knockdown argument.'* 60Did he really like the play so little? It does not seem so, for already heknew the finalspeeches of Maurya by heart, and a few years later inTrieste he took the trouble to translate the play. But he gave Synge noquarter and went on to expound his esthetic theories; Synge listened andsaid to him ungrudgingly, 'You have a mind like Spinoza's,' a remarkJoyce relayed to his mother with an explanation of who Spinoza was. 61Thus encouraged, Joyce showed Synge a notebook containing Memorabilia,which turned out to be merely solecisms by contemporaries:* In 1909, Joyce continued in the same vein by complaining to Joseph Holloway that thelast act of The Playboy was taken from The Master Builder.