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[Aetat. 38] J O Y C E 4 9 5i have never succeeded in getting out of the door behind him, haveyou? He is very You First. He is very After you!''Oh yes. He is polite, he is polite enough. But he is exceedingly arrogant.Underneath. That is why he is so polite. I should be better pleasedif he were less polite.' 49To be Irish was to be too Irish for Lewis's taste. But Eliot was making in1920 the same criticism of Joyce's politeness that Stanislaus Joyce hadmade in 1903, when he accused him of insincerity. Politeness had becomeone of Joyce's principal social defenses, and one he resorted toconstantly in Paris. Nevertheless, the three men became, after their fashion,friends. Eliot had to continue in a somewhat inferior role becauseJoyce gave almost no indication of having read a line of his verse. Onlyonce did he allow himself to say, 'I was at the Jardin des Plantes todayand paid my respects to your friend the hippopotamus.' 50(In a notebookhe called Eliot 'Bishop of Hippo.') But after reading The Waste Land, heremarked to a friend, i had never realized that Eliot was a poet.' Shereplied, i liked it too but I couldn't understand it,' and Joyce retortedwith the question that Eliot might himself have asked, 'Do you have tounderstand it?' 51He objected to the notes to the poem for the samereason.* Later he parodied The Waste Land in a lettert and then inFinnegans Wake,t and in a notebook he wrote, 'T. S. Eliot ends idea ofpoetry for ladies,' 53 a sentence which suggests that he perceived more--1affinity than he acknowledged. As for Lewis, he was on cordial termswith Joyce until late in the 'twenties, and for several years he, like Eliot,always looked up Joyce in Paris. He smarted a bit, however, at Joyce'sconcentration on Joyce and at what he took for condescension towardsthe work of contemporaries, including himself. 54In between paying and receiving visits, Joyce kept at Circe. The Homericstory delighted him, especially the Circean transformation. 'Thinkof that,' he said, 'swine and yet with men's memories.' There were considerabledifficulties to be resolved in portraying the suppressed desires ofBloom and Stephen in vaudeville form, psychoanalysis turned into a vehicleof comedy. Joyce longed again to discuss his work with Budgen.But Budgen still dallied and delayed, and Joyce mocked him in a letterof late July:* When Max Eastman asked why he did not supply help to the reader, Joyce replied,'You know people never value anything unless they have to steal it. Even an alley catwould rather snake an old bone out of the garbage than come up and eat a nicely preparedchop from your saucer.' 52tP. 572- ,t 'Their orison arises miquewhite as Osman glory, ebbing wasteward, leaves to the soulof light its fading silence (allahlah lahlah lah\). . . .'Xanthos! Xanthos! Xanthos! . . . becoming a bank midland mansioner . . . at LaRoseraie . . . Fyat-Fyat shall be our number ... [A Cooking Egg]. . . . T [Tristram]will be waiting for uns as I sold U. . . . wealthy gentrymen wibfrufrocksfull of fun!' (235-6) . . . 'washes his fleet in annacrwatter; whou missed a porter. . . .' (135)