1n6xZiV

[ Aetat. 47-50 ] J O Y C E 613enough in its beginnings to be, as she said, her first.Hubbell found hersometimes ardent, sometimes indifferent or even sunk in a profound discontent.He liked the way her expression could change suddenly fromsolemnity and 'break up in a monkeyish grin.' Their attachment mighthave become more serious if Hubbell's estranged wife had not come toParis with a project of reconciliation. He dropped out of Lucia's life, notwithout compunction. 10Lucia's thoughts were, though he scarcely suspectedthe fact, jumbling towards panic. Joyce, vaguely aware of hisdaughter's difficulties, welcomed anything and anyone that seemed tomake her happy.At the beginning of 1929 his eyes were still troubling him; it seemedlikely an operation would be necessary, but until his sight diminishedfarther nothing was to be done. In spite of fatigue and intermittent pain,he struggled to finish a new version of the third watch of Shaun, a chapterthat held him through the month of April. In May there appeared thefirst apologia for Finnegans Wake, entitled with mock-portentousness, atJoyce's suggestion, Our Exagmination round His Factification for Incaminationof Work in Progress. The spelling of Exagmination was toclaim its etymological derivation from ex agmine, a hint that his goatshad been separated from the sheep. (As Joyce wrote Larbaud, i am nowhopelessly with the goats and can only think and write capriciously. Departfrom me ye bleaters, into everlasting sleep which was prepared forAcademicians and their agues!') 11The book had twelve writers, like thetwelve customers of Earwicker's public house, or the twelve apostles ofChrist:* Samuel Beckett, Marcel Brion, Frank Budgen, Stuart Gilbert,Eugene Jolas, Victor Llona, Robert McAlmon,t Thomas McGreevy, ElliotPaul, John Rodker, Robert Sage, and William Carlos Williams; thesewere followed by two 'letters of protest' by G. V. L. Slingsby and VladimirDixon, both hostile and humorously illiterate. Most of the essayshad already been published in transition, and Joyce admitted to Larbaudhe had stood behind 'those twelve Marshals more or less directing themwhat lines of research to follow.' 13Some of the essays were seriouslyintended, and among these the best was by Samuel Beckett, then freshfrom Dublin and lecturing at the Ecole Normale Superieure. Joyce sawto it that one or another of the twelve answered the chief critics of thebook, at that time Sean O'Faolain, Wyndham Lewis, and Rebecca West.The book did not sell well, but Joyce planned to follow this work,which he designated by the symbol O, by X, a book of four long essays(for the Wake's four old men) on the subjects of the treatment of night,mechanics and chemistry, humor, and one other which on May 28 he* Joyce mentioned the book on Work in Progress in Work in Progress: 'Imagine the twelvedeaferended dumbbawls of the whowl abovebeugled to be the contonuation through regenerationof the urutteration of the word in pregross.' (Finnegans Wake, 284).t McAlmon connected Joyce's style and method with glaucoma; Joyce said, 'You may beright, and do you think it has impaired my intellect?' 12