Nothing substantive to report here, but since this photo has been making the meme-rounds it seems an apropos follow-up to my pit bull post.  I haven’t the slightest idea how to photo shop, but there are so many interesting possibilities here I feel I should learn.

A couple of weekends ago I attended a multi-day meeting of a bar association.  Said meeting kicked off, as so many do, with a cocktail party.  (Note to self: is there an etymological reason why we call a group of lawyers a “bar”?  Investigate this further.)

The party was to be held at an off-site location, and I shared a ride there with a group of other lawyers.  None of us knew each other from Adam, so we tread lightly around the usual conversational topics: the weather (chilly); the way to the party (as the crow flies); Jimmy Buffett (don’t ask).  Then, like a small bomb dropped during vespers, someone brought up politics.  There was some fairly awkward discussion along these lines for about a minute and a half.  Then one of us, with the best of intentions, I’m sure, suggested we change the subject.

“Let’s talk about puppies,” she said. 

Oy.

You would think puppies would make for fairly uncontroversial conversation.  And, almost anywhere else, at any other time, you would be correct.

Just not here, in Maryland.  And not now.

The reason for this impugning of ordinarily adorable canines is that our highest court, the Court of Appeals, recently issued a decision in a dog bite case.  A dog bite case is exactly what you think it is: somebody’s dog bites somebody else and litigation ensues.

Traditionally, these cases were decided under a negligence standard.  In legal terms, “negligence” is doing something – or not doing something – that a reasonable person would do – or wouldn’t do.  In doggie litigation terms, applying a negligence standard means that, practically speaking, if you own a dog, you get one “free bite” before someone can hold you liable in tort.  In other words, your dog had to have bitten someone before a court could hold that you’d been somehow negligent in letting your dog bite somebody else.   Otherwise, the thinking goes, you’d have no reason to believe your dog might hurt somebody.

That’s how negligence works.  There is another standard, however: the strict liability standard.  “Strict liability” also means exactly what it sounds like: if something goes wrong, you’re on the hook, whether you did something wrong or not.  This is not as draconian as you might think, though, because under the law strict liability only applies in certain circumstances.  If you, say, dynamite a hole into the Earth, or play around with uranium in your basement, you will be held strictly liable for any injury you cause, even if you are just as careful as can be.  Why is this?  Because, the law says, some activities are just so dangerous that if you are going to do them, you are going to have to accept the risks that go with them.

There is, in some states and in Maryland in particular, a defense to tort liability called “assumption of the risk.”  It means that in certain cases, a plaintiff won’t be permitted to recover for an injury he or she sustains because he or she voluntarily decided to do something, knowing that there was a risk of injury.  If that injury then follows, they’re stuck with it.  So if you decide to become a professional boxer, you won’t be able to sue the guy who punches you in the ring and breaks your jaw.  Any reasonable person entering a boxing match knows, or should know, that he might wind up with a broken jaw.

Strict liability is the converse of the assumption of the risk doctrine.  Strict liability is the means by which claimants who get hurt can hold others responsible, regardless, just because those who engage in certain activities should understand the risks associated with those activities and should be prepared to make good if somebody gets hurt.  This standard has now been applied, in Maryland, to owners of the American Staffordshire Terrier.  You might know this breed of dog better by its nickname: the pit bull. 

(No, the other kind of pit bull.  And no, that’s not the graphic photo either.)

Hence the awkward puppy dog conversation.  There is a definite segment of the population – with lawyers among them – who are really, really mad about this case.  Let’s see, what were the themes that dominated the fairly heated spewing of invective in our little car on the way to our little cocktail party?  You can guess, really.  Lots of talk about how the decision is unfair to this particular breed of dog coupled with what we law folk call ad hominem and everybody else calls trash talk.

I tend to agree that the decision is imperfect, but in a limited sense only.  Here’s the thing: pit bulls – and I know that’s not the correct breed name for this dog, but it’s the name we all use in discourse, so let’s be honest and not get bogged down in semantics – were bred, historically, for two things: fighting and small prey hunting.  Yes, it is sad, but true, that these dogs have been genetically abused by humans for centuries.  They have been selectively bred for genes that will make them powerful biters and aggressive fighters.  And they are terriers.  I own a terrier, albeit a Wheaten Terrier, whose most serious injuries inflicted have been, to date, oodles of dog goo following major face-licking episodes.  But terriers are really smart.  And they are really stubborn.  They were bred to be that way, because they were bred to hunt small vermin on farms, and only a dog who could think for itself could be trusted to decide whether to pursue a rat down any particular hole.  They don’t wait for instructions.

When you pair a certain stubbornness with intelligence and brute strength, you have the makings of a potential disaster.  Which is why a 2000 study by the Centers for Disease Control concluded that roughly half of all dog-related fatalities involved either a pit bull or a Rottweiler.

So here’s where I believe, in my own humble opinion, the weakness in this recent decision lies.  The Court of Appeals decided that pit bulls, and their owners (and potentially, landlords who lease to owners of pit bulls) should be held to a strict liability standard, as if there is something unique to pit bulls that is not to be found in other breeds of dog.  But certainly, many other kinds of dogs are dangerous in the same ways: mastiffs; Rotties; German Shepherds (there’s a reason they’ve become synonymous with military and police dogs); Dobermans; Huskies and Malamutes; Chows.  If you want to know which dogs are responsible for the most bites, seriously, ask an insurance company.  They’re the ones keeping the statistics, because they’re paying the claims.

But the common law – which is judge-made law, rather than law issued by the legislature – develops in increments.  Judges, despite what many would have you believe about the “activist” judiciary, are generally loathe to go too far beyond the facts presented by any particular case.  They hesitate because, as all of us know, just when you think you know how something works, along comes an exception.  Judges don’t want to lay down rules only to have an exception appear and make them seem shortsighted, or worse, get them reversed.  So what we have seen, in this particular case, is a decision by the Court of Appeals that pit bulls are dangerous dogs, and that the people who own them must be held responsible for them.  This doesn’t mean that other dogs won’t or shouldn’t be treated similarly.  Additional court decisions may be forthcoming which will address that.   But as of right now, the Court hasn’t heard those cases yet.  I think when they do – and rest assured, the plaintiff’s bar is right now searching for the right Rottweiler case, the right Doberman case, and so on – I suspect, and I even hope, that the Court will expand the reach of the decision to other dogs with similar characteristics.

Do I think we are on a slippery slope, one on which eventually all dogs will be considered potentially dangerous?  No.  Have you ever seen a Yorkie?  (Honestly, I’d rather be bitten by a pit bull.  I firmly believe that dogs should be dog-sized.)  The fact that a toy breed might be prone to biting doesn’t make it dangerous if, realistically, the dog is too small to cause much harm.  Nor is size the determining factor, although it is certainly one factor.  The point is, when the Court of Appeals decided to apply strict liability to pit bulls, it made a policy determination based upon the breed’s history, size, temperament, and jaw strength.  Like it or not, a pit bull is more likely to bite than a Bichon, and when it does, its jaw clamps down like a vise.  There are anecdotes about pit bulls who simply WOULD NOT LET GO.  So if you are going to voluntarily own such a dog, great, good for you: but be prepared to pay the medical bills if your dog bites somebody.  That’s all this decision does.  It holds you responsible for your decision to own a dog that can cause an enormous amount of hurt when it bites.  And yes, before you can be held responsible, some proof that you knew or should have known that your dog was a pit bull, or part pit bull, is necessary.  Just like, before you could be held liable for vaporising your neighborhood, some proof that you knew you were playing with ammonium nitrate would be necessary.  Courts deal with fact issues like these every day.  We can handle them.

I’ve seen a lot of people posting cute little photos of pit bulls since this decision came out, with snarky captions like, “Look how scary we are!” or “I Love My Pit Bull!”  That’s nice.  And I love dogs too.  But this was a person:

Does the picture bother you?  I’m sorry.  I suspect he wasn’t real happy about it either.  And if you are going to choose to own a dog as powerful as a pit bull, you’d better be prepared to pay for his stitches and God knows what else he’s going to wind up needing, because that is how responsibility works in society.  Deal with that.

This was, of course, the 1924 National Democratic Convention.  Were you thinking something else?  Mr. Businessman was in fact William Gibbs McAdoo, a railroad tycoon and lawyer from Tennessee.  After founding the law firm that became Cahill, Gordon & Reindell, McAdoo shifted his focus to politics and Woodrow Wilson appointed him Secretary of the Treasury in 1913.  He was instrumental in avoiding financial disaster with the outbreak of World War I, when the United States was heavily indebted to Europe.  McAdoo took the unprecedented step of closing the New York Stock Exchange for four months, preventing a mass sell-off and going a long way towards transforming the United States from debtor-nation to world power.

McAdoo came to the Convention, however, with the vocal and violent support of the Ku Klux Klan, which had been steadily gaining in power and influence corresponding largely with the rise of socialism.  His nomination was opposed by Al Smith, the Catholic former governor of New York who not only criticized the Klan but also supported the repeal of Prohibition.  (Smith also took aim at the media, famously calling William Randolph Hearst “[a] man as low and mean as I can picture” in a speech given in 1919).  The Klan rioted; an attempt was made by some members of the party to condemn the organization; and the Convention came to be known as the “Klanbake” for the resulting turmoil.

Smith and McAdoo practically cancelled each other out, but it took one hundred ballots before they finally capitulated.  The Democratic nominee who finally emerged from the wreckage was John W. Davis of West Virginia.  Davis came from Southern anti-abolitionist stock, and perhaps this history made him acceptable to the KKK-affiliated faction of the party.  As Wilson’s Solicitor General, however, he had argued in favor of voting rights for African Americans in Gwinn v. United States.  In Gwinn, the Supreme Court struck down so-called “grandfather clause” exceptions to voting literacy requirements which allowed otherwise illiterate whites to vote so long as their grandfathers would have been eligible.  Gwinn cost Davis the South, and his conservatism cost him liberal-leaning Democratic votes.

The incumbent Republican, Calvin Coolidge, won the 1924 presidential election by one of the largest margins ever, and his second term was marked by the growth and prosperity of the Jazz Age.  But he hesitated to turn the presidency over to his vice-president and successor, Herbert Hoover, because he complained that Hoover consistently gave him bad advice.  The stock market crashed a little more than seven months after Hoover’s inauguration.

One of the more interesting characters to emerge from the fracas of the brokered 1924 Democratic Convention was Lena Springs of Lancaster, South Carolina.  Springs became a Democratic National Committeewoman in 1922, only three years after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote. By all accounts she was a beautiful woman with dark hair and blue eyes.  She was also the Chair of the English Department at Queen’s College (now University) in Charlotte, North Carolina.  When she was nominated, Springs promised that she would not take the nomination “lightly,” even though she did not expect to be nominated.  Will Rogers congratulated her on the nomination, and said he wished that she had been nominated for President.  After her husband died in 1931, Springs retired to an apartment at the Plaza Hotel in New York City.  She died in 1942.  A woman would not win the vice-presidential nomination of a major political party until 1984, when Walter Mondale selected Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate.

Vincent Van Gogh, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George Gordon, Lord Byron.  Jean Rhys.

You see where I’m going with this.

It is a shame that chemistry is taught the way it is.   I never got  it until I read a book called The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness,  Love and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements, by Sam  Kean.  Truth be told, the book would have benefited from more judicious editing.  Kean rambles (a lot) and loses the thread of the story in detours and blind alleys.  He writes  the way you might expect an absent-minded professor  to think, which is only charming  for so long, and which is inexplicable because Kean is a writer, not a professor.

That said, he made  me love the periodic table for what it could tell me about people.

Lithium (Li) sits near the top and to the left of the table, just below hydrogen (H) and to the left of beryllium (Be).  That it is an element means that is not the product of carefully managed chemical reactions in a pharmaceutical lab.  It’s been here just as long as we have (longer, in fact).  In the 1960′s it was approved to treat manic depression.

People who are not bipolar generally take their cues from sunlight. They wake up when the sun comes up and go to sleep when it does down.  Sunlight triggers the release of neurostimulants which allow us to feel energetic, focused, creative.

The problem for people with manic depression is that, for them, the sun  doesn’t go down.  Their brains simply do not run on the sun’s schedule, and so the stimulants keep going and going until eventually the brain and the body literally shut down and depression kicks in.

Now get this:  the body’s inner clock works because every morning certain proteins attach to strands of DNA found deep inside neurons in the brain.  When it gets dark the proteins decay and  fall off, and in a healthy brain this shuts off the flow of stimulants.   The proteins in a bipolar brain don’t die.  They cling to their spots and the brain’s engine revs up higher and higher.  Lithium literally breaks the bonds between these proteins and their DNA so the engine can rest.

In Touched with Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison argues that many of the “doomed geniuses” like Byron and Van Gogh suffered from  manic depression.  Jamison’s insights are uniquely poignant, as she is not only a Johns Hopkins-trained psychologist but also a person with bipolar disorder.  Jamison deals carefully with the problem of treatment because, for creative  people,  medication can feel like a choice between their art and their sanity.

The poet Robert Lowell, who was a diagnosed manic-depressive, began taking Lithium about halfway into his career.  He had made his name as a “mad poet,” nicknamed “Cal” for either Caliban in The Tempest or Caligula.  The poet who wrote lines like this:

Pity the planet, all joy gone
from this sweet volcanic cone;
peace to our children when they fall
in small war on the heels of small
war—until the end of time
to police the earth, a ghost
orbiting forever lost
in our monotonous sublime.

From “Waking Early Sunday Morning,”
Near the Ocean (1967)

also once stood in the center of a busy highway, arms outstretched, believing he could stop traffic like Jesus.   Lithium changed that, but Lowell’s  poetry suffered.  He turned almost exclusively to sonnets which, for a writer of Lowell’s caliber, were not that good; he at one point cannibalized other people’s private letters in his work; and one of  his friends remarked that Lowell had become vacant, like a caged animal.   Lowell won a Pulitzer in 1974,  and he has almost certainly ascended to the American canon regardless of how well his “confessional” style of poetry is faring at any given moment.  But for many  readers of his work, it is the earlier, the “mad” writing that earned him his place there.

The whole glorious Downton affair began with the sinking of the Titanic and the drowning death of Lord Grantham’s heir, Patrick Crawley.  It seems, however, that Patrick has returned.  At least, a badly burned soldier with the well-scrubbed accent of a British actor playing an American has arrived at Downton.  And he claims to be Patrick.  He knows things only Patrick would know, etc.  This all causes trouble for Matthew, the heir presumptive by reason of Patrick’s death, who is now in a wheelchair and is no good for anybody (except, you see, that at the very end of the episode, he hints that HE’S REGAINING THE FEELING IN HIS LEGS AND THERE IS STILL HOPE FOR HIM AND MARY!)

I promise you that my pathetic obsession with Edwardian and interwar England is not the point of this post.  I consider, instead, the problem of the apparent heir.

Patrick’s entry onto the Downton stage ties in nicely with the anniversary of Anastasia Tschaikovsky’s 1928 arrival in New York.  Anastasia, who eventually also called herself Anna Andersen, claimed to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia, daughter of Nicholas II. She was beautiful, she told an enthralling story, and she seemed to know things only a Romanov would know.  Who can forget the scene in the movie Anastasia when Ingrid Bergman’s nervous cough wins her the arms of the Dowager Empress?   Nevertheless, mitochondrial DNA testing would eventually prove conclusively that “Anastasia” was not a Romanov.

The history of England- and therefore, of the common law – is the history of probate.  Whatever Boudica might have preferred, the Anglo-Saxons went with male primogeniture.  The need for a male heir gave us separation of church and state, thanks to Henry VIII.   And the need of lesser born sons to make their own riches gave us, among  other things, capitalism, academia and the New World.  Those grand ideas aside, imagine your family in the position of the Crawleys or their literary cousins, the Bennets:  dependent upon the birth of a male heir, and failing that, upon the generosity of distant relatives.  Failing both, poverty, homelessness and ruin.

Our rules of evidence are in large part descended from the sanctity of primogeniture.   Holographic wills are disfavored (if accepted at all).  A document cannot be received as evidence until it has been authenticated.  A child born to a married woman is presumed to be her husband’s.  Hearsay is generally unreliable.

Now imagine yourself again a Crawley or a Bennet, except that a stranger has appeared, claiming to be the long lost son of your second cousin.  You may be delighted: this means you’ve defeated the entail!  Unless this person is not who he claims to be.   That possibility is worrisome enough that,  like the Crawleys, you turn the matter over to your solicitors for further investigation.

I do feel terrible for Lady Edith, though.  Here’s hoping they bring back the BBC Waking the Dead guy to marry her.

I personally fall somewhere in between.  Emily Dickinson and T. S. Eliot (yes, technically a Missourian; he adopted his droll RP in mid-life) were better, more important poets.  Matthew Arnold and Hart Crane have probably been more influential.  And the Beats were certainly cooler.

But for getting poetry into the hearts and minds of  people who don’t generally read poetry, you can’t beat Robert Frost.

Frost was, if anything, a master propagandist.  He came to represent the quintessential New Englander:  reserved, witty, dripping with common sense and the sort of bootstrapping hardy Americanism also exploited by Norman Rockwell.   His poems generally rhymed and were tailor-made for school room recitations.  And he recited “The Gift Outright” from memory at Kennedy’s inauguration, even though the sun’s glare that day prevented him from reading the poem he had specially composed for the occasion.

But anyone so well-loved in this country will inevitably be deconstructed, and whole books have been devoted to undermining the image Frost so carefully cultivated.  Various biographers have portrayed him as a cruel philanderer, an uninvolved,  un-loving  father, and,  according to Jeffrey Myers, a “mean old bastard.”  The cult of hatred for Robert Frost is, in literary circles, about as popular as his cult of personality is outside them.

Frost wrote prolifically, and although a great deal of his work was published, not all of it  is worth reading.   Fame can work against a writer; some things should not be rushed to print.   But poems like “Home  Burial“  and “After Apple  Picking” are sublime.  In my humble opinion, anyway.

In any event, if there is a poet to associate with Christmas, and particularly a New England, Currier and Ives sort of Christmas, it’s Frost.  Read carefully, though, these poems are not as greeting-card cheery as they initially  appear.  Enough has been written about the dark, suicide-y side of “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening.”  For this Monday Morning Hearsay instead, a  poem about the deceptiveness of worth.

Christmas Trees

(A Christmas Circular Letter)

The city had withdrawn into itself
And left at last the country to the country;
When between whirls of snow not come to lie
And whirls of foliage not yet laid, there drove
A stranger to our yard, who looked the city,
Yet did in country fashion in that there
He sat and waited till he drew us out
A-buttoning coats to ask him who he was.
He proved to be the city come again
To look for something it had left behind
And could not do without and keep its Christmas.
He asked if I would sell my Christmas trees;
My woods—the young fir balsams like a place
Where houses all are churches and have spires.
I hadn’t thought of them as Christmas Trees.
I doubt if I was tempted for a moment
To sell them off their feet to go in cars
And leave the slope behind the house all bare,
Where the sun shines now no warmer than the moon.
I’d hate to have them know it if I was.
Yet more I’d hate to hold my trees except
As others hold theirs or refuse for them,
Beyond the time of profitable growth,
The trial by market everything must come to.
I dallied so much with the thought of selling.
Then whether from mistaken courtesy
And fear of seeming short of speech, or whether
From hope of hearing good of what was mine, I said,
“There aren’t enough to be worth while.”

 

“I could soon tell how many they would cut,
You let me look them over.”

“You could look.
But don’t expect I’m going to let you have them.”
Pasture they spring in, some in clumps too close
That lop each other of boughs, but not a few
Quite solitary and having equal boughs
All round and round. The latter he nodded “Yes” to,
Or paused to say beneath some lovelier one,
With a buyer’s moderation, “That would do.”
I thought so too, but wasn’t there to say so.
We climbed the pasture on the south, crossed over,
And came down on the north.

 

                                                 He said, “A thousand.”

“A thousand Christmas trees!—at what apiece?”

He felt some need of softening that to me:
“A thousand trees would come to thirty dollars.”

Then I was certain I had never meant
To let him have them. Never show surprise!
But thirty dollars seemed so small beside
The extent of pasture I should strip, three cents
(For that was all they figured out apiece),
Three cents so small beside the dollar friends
I should be writing to within the hour
Would pay in cities for good trees like those,
Regular vestry-trees whole Sunday Schools
Could hang enough on to pick off enough.
A thousand Christmas trees I didn’t know I had!
Worth three cents more to give away than sell,
As may be shown by a simple calculation.
Too bad I couldn’t lay one in a letter.
I can’t help wishing I could send you one,
In wishing you herewith a Merry Christmas.

 

 

Robert Frost, “Christmas Trees,” from The Poetry of Robert Frost (Edward Connery Lathem,  ed.) Henry Holt & Co.  (1969)

The novel was serialized in the United States beginning in 1922 but, as the story goes, some woman, somewhere, read what we suppose was the Nausicaa scene and complained to a state’s attorney in New York. This attorney, like any good small-minded politician, prosecuted the publishers of the small Chicago-based literary magazine in which the episode had appeared. The court considered only the installment which had appeared in that particular month, with that particular scene (and if you are unfamiliar with the novel, think Judge Reinhold and Phoebe Cates and you’ll be right on board), and called it the work of a “disordered mind.” The publishers were convicted and fined, and the threat of prosecution dissuaded others who might otherwise have released the completed novel.

United States v. One Book Called Ulysses was a classic First Amendment test case.  Bennett Cerf, co-founder of Random House and eventual game show gadfly, wanted to publish the novel but was afraid to make the capital expenditures necessary to print the book without knowing whether it could be legally sold.  He devised a plan to “noisily” import the French edition of the book so it could be seized at the Port of New York.  It almost didn’t work. The customs inspector initially refused to seize the books because, he claimed, “everyone” brought them in. But the inspector relented, and the case made its way to the federal court in Manhattan.

Woolsey was the son of a carpetbagger, one William W. Woolsey, who purchased a plantation in South Carolina in 1870. Judge’s Woolsey’s maternal grandfather was an Ohio Supreme Court judge, and his uncle was Daniel Coit Gilman of Johns Hopkins University. When William Woolsey became a Confederate sympathizer,  Judge Woolsey’s mother left him and moved with her son to Englewood, New Jersey (home of Woolsey’s contemporary, Upton Sinclair).   Woolsey attended Phillips Academy, Yale, and Columbia Law School, where he co-founded the Law Review.   After entering private practice, he was a regular at Delmonico’s where, in 1906, Harry Thaw shot Stanford White.

In 1929, Woolsey was appointed to the District Court for the Southern District of New York by President Herbert Hoover. By all accounts he was an exceptional and hard-working jurist.   (According to lore, he took the Ulysses case because he had just ended a 100 day fraud trial and wanted to read the book while he “rested”).   His opinion in the Ulysses case,which appears at 5 F. Supp. 182 (S.D.N.Y. 1933), was affirmed in an opinion authored by the Honorable Augustus Hand.   Sadly, although Learned Hand was a member of the Second Circuit at the time, he remains outside the reach of my little Six Degrees of Separation game here.

Cerf ensured Judge Woolsey’s celebrity by including a copy of the opinion in every copy of Ulysses sold in the United States. Fitting, since Woolsey’s opinion is as much literary critique as legal analysis:

Ulysses is not an easy book to read or to understand. But there has been much written about it, and in order properly to approach the consideration of it it is advisable to read a number of other books which have now become its satellites. The study of Ulysses is, therefore, a heavy task.

The reputation of Ulysses in the literary world, however, warranted my taking such time as was necessary to enable me to satisfy myself as to the intent with which the book was written, for, of course, in any case where a book is claimed to be obscene it must first be determined, whether the intent with which it was written was what is called, according to the usual phrase, pornographic, that is, written for the purpose of exploiting obscenity.

If the conclusion is that the book is pornographic, that is the end of the inquiry and forfeiture must follow.

But in Ulysses, in spite of its unusual frankness, I do not detect anywhere the leer of the sensualist. I hold, therefore, that it is not pornographic.

In writing Ulysses, Joyce sought to make a serious experiment in a new, if not wholly novel, literary genre. He takes persons of the lower middle class living in Dublin in 1904 and seeks, not only to describe what they did on a certain day early in June of that year as they went about the city bent on their usual occupation, but also to tell what many of them thought about the while.

Joyce has attempted— it seems to me, with astonishing success— to show how the screen of consciousness with its ever-shifting kaleidoscopic impressions carries, as it were on a plastic palimpsest, not only what is in the focus of each man’s observation of the actual things about him, but also in a penumbral zone residua of past impressions, some recent and some drawn up by association from the domain of the subconscious. He shows how each of these impressions affect the life and behavior of the character which he is describing.

What he seeks to get is not unlike the result of a double or, if that is possible, a multiple exposure on a cinema film, which would give a clear foreground with a background visible but somewhat blurred and out of focus in varying degrees.

To convey by words an effect which obviously lends itself more appropriately to a graphic technique, accounts, it seems to me, for much of the obscurity which meets a reader of Ulysses. And it also explains another aspect of the book, which I have further to consider, namely, Joyce’s sincerity and his honest effort to show exactly how the minds of his characters operate.

If Joyce did not attempt to be honest in developing the technique which he has adopted in Ulysses, the result would be psychologically misleading and thus unfaithful to his chosen technique. Such an attitude would be artistically inexcusable.

It is because Joyce has been loyal to his technique and has not funked its necessary implications, but has honestly attempted to tell fully what his characters think about, that he has been the subject of so many attacks and that his purpose has been so often misunderstood and misrepresented. For his attempt sincerely and honestly to realize his objective has required him incidentally to use certain words which are generally considered dirty words and has led at times to what many think is a too poignant preoccupation with sex in the thoughts of his characters.

The words which are criticized as dirty are old Saxon words known to almost all men and, I venture, to many women, and are such words as would be naturally and habitually used, I believe, by the types of folk whose life, physical and mental, Joyce is seeking to describe. In respect of the recurrent emergence of the theme of sex in the minds of his characters, it must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season spring.